“You know how to read?”
It was a newspaper clipping with a photo. I read the headline: TRAPEZE ARTIST HÉLÈNE TOCH IN SERIOUS ACCIDENT. MUSTAPHA AMAR AT HER BEDSIDE. She took back the clipping and returned it to her wallet.
“Accidents can happen very suddenly in life … I used to be like you — clueless … I was very trusting.”
She seemed to have second thoughts about talking to me in such an adult way.
“Come on, let’s go have a snack. We’ll get something at the pastry shop …”
All along Rue du Docteur-Dordaine, I hung back a bit to watch her walk. She had a slight limp. It had never occurred to me before then that she hadn’t always limped. So, accidents could happen in life. That revelation troubled me deeply.
The afternoon when I’d gone to Paris alone in Annie’s 4CV and she had given me the crocodile cigarette case, we had eventually found our way through the small streets, now demolished, of the seventeenth arrondissement. We followed the quays along the Seine, as usual. We stopped for a moment on the riverbank near Neuilly and the Ile de Puteaux. From the top of the wooden stairs that led to the light-colored pontoons, we gazed over the floating houses and barges converted into apartments.
“We’re going to have to move soon, Patoche … And this is where I want to live …”
She had already mentioned this to us, several times. We were a bit worried at the prospect of leaving the house and our town. But to live on one of those barges … Day after day, we waited to set off on this new adventure.
“We’ll make a room for the two of you. With portholes … We’ll have a big living room and a bar …”
She was musing aloud. We got back into the 4CV. After the Saint-Cloud tunnel, on the highway, she turned toward me. She looked at me with eyes that shone even brighter than usual.
“You know what you should do? Every evening, you should write down what you did that day. I’ll buy you a special notebook …”
It was a good idea. I stuck my hand in my pocket to reassure myself I still had the cigarette case.
Certain objects disappear from your life at the first lapse in attention, but that cigarette case has remained. I knew it would always be within reach, in a nightstand drawer, on a shelf in a clothes closet, at the back of a desk, in the inner pocket of a jacket. I was so sure of it, of its presence, that I usually forgot all about it. Except when I was feeling down. Then I would ponder it from every angle. It was the only object that bore witness to a period of my life I couldn’t talk to anyone about, and whose very reality I sometimes doubted.
Still, I almost lost it one day. I was in one of those schools where I bided my time until the age of seventeen. My cigarette case caught the eye of two twin brothers from the upper bourgeoisie. They had loads of cousins in the other grades, and their father bore the title “top marksman in France.” If they all banded against me, I wouldn’t stand a chance.
The only way to escape them was to get myself expelled as fast as possible. I ran away one morning, and I took the opportunity to visit Chantilly, Mortefontaine, Ermenonville, and the Abbey of Chaalis. I returned to school at dinnertime. The principal announced my expulsion but he couldn’t reach my parents. My father had left for Colombia some time before, to check out a silver mine a friend had told him about; my mother was on tour near La Chaux-de-Fonds. They quarantined me in a room in the nurse’s station until someone could come collect me. I wasn’t allowed to go to class or take my meals in the dining hall with my schoolmates. This kind of diplomatic immunity kept me safe from the two brothers, their cousins, and the top marksman in France. Every night before going to sleep, I verified the presence under my pillow of the crocodile cigarette case.
The object drew attention to itself one more time, a few years later. I had ended up taking Annie’s advice to write in a notebook, every day: I had just finished my first novel. I was sitting at the bar of a café on Avenue de Wagram. Next to me stood a man of about sixty with black hair, wearing glasses with very slender frames, whose appearance was as immaculate as his hands. For several minutes I’d been watching him, wondering what he did in life.
He had asked the waiter for a pack of cigarettes, but they didn’t sell any in that café. I offered my crocodile-skin case.
“Much obliged, Monsieur.”
He extracted a cigarette. His gaze remained fixed on the crocodile case.
“May I?”
He plucked it from my hand and turned it over and over, knitting his brow.
“I used to have the same one.”
He handed it back and looked at me more closely.
“They stole our entire stock of this item. Afterward we stopped carrying it. You have here a very rare collector’s item …”
He smiled. He had managed a fine leather goods shop on the Champs-Elysées, but was now retired.
“They weren’t satisfied with just those cases. They emptied the entire store.”
He leaned his face closer to mine, still smiling.
“You needn’t think I suspect you in the slightest … You would have been too young at the time.”
“Was it that long ago?” I asked.
“A good fifteen years.”
“And were they ever caught?”
“Not all of them. Those people had done things much more serious than breaking and entering.”
Things much more serious. I already knew those words. The trapeze artist Hélène Toch in a SERIOUS ACCIDENT. And later, the young man with large blue eyes had told me: SOMETHING VERY SERIOUS.
Outside, on Avenue de Wagram, I walked with a curious euphoria in my heart. It was the first time in a long while that I felt Annie’s presence. She was walking behind me that evening. Roger Vincent and Little Hélène must also have been somewhere in the city. In the final account, they had never left me.
Snow White disappeared for good without giving notice. At lunch, Mathilde said:
“She left because she couldn’t stand looking after you, blissful idiot!”
Annie shrugged her shoulders and winked at me.
“That’s a stupid thing to say, Mom! She left because she had to go back to her family.”
Mathilde squinted and gave her daughter a nasty look.
“You don’t talk to your mother that way in front of the children!”
Annie pretended not to listen. She smiled at us.
“Did you hear me?” Mathilde said to her daughter. “You’ll come to a bad end, just like Blissful Idiot here!”
Annie shrugged again.
“Take it easy, Thilda,” said Little Hélène.
Mathilde looked at me and pointed to the bun on the back of her head.
“You know what that means, don’t you? Now that Snow White is gone, I’ll be looking after you, blissful idiot!”
Annie walked me to school. She had put her hand on my shoulder, as usual.
“Don’t pay any attention to what Mom says … She’s old. Old people talk nonsense.”
We had arrived early. We waited in front of the iron gate to the playground.
“You and your brother are going to sleep for a night or two in the house across the street … you know, the white one. We’re having some people come live at our house for a few days …”
She must have noticed my worried look.
“And anyway, I’ll be staying with you … You’ll see, it’ll be fun.”
In class, I couldn’t concentrate on the lesson. My mind was elsewhere. Snow White had gone, and now we were going to live in the house across the street.