I felt afraid. But his voice was trembling a bit as well. A truck with a crane turned the corner of the avenue. A bunch of gendarmes hopped out and attached Annie’s 4CV to the crane. Then the truck started up again, slowly towing Annie’s 4CV behind it down Rue du Docteur-Dordaine. That was the part that hit me hardest and made me feel the worst.
“It’s very serious,” he said. “You can’t go in.”
But we did go in. Someone was on the phone in the living room. A dark-haired man in a gabardine coat was sitting on the edge of the dining room table. He saw my brother and me and came toward us.
“Ah … Are you them? … The children …?”
He repeated:
“Are you the children?”
He pulled us into the living room. The man on the phone hung up. He was short with very wide shoulders, and he wore a black leather jacket. He said, like the other one:
“Ah … It’s the children.”
He said to the man in the gabardine coat:
“You’ll have to take them to headquarters in Versailles. Nobody’s answering in Paris …”
Something very serious, the gendarme with the big blue eyes had said. I remembered the newspaper clipping that Little Hélène kept in her wallet: TRAPEZE ARTIST HÉLÈNE TOCH IN SERIOUS ACCIDENT. I kept behind her to watch her walk. She hadn’t always had that limp.
“Where are your parents?” the dark-haired man in the gabardine coat asked me.
I tried to find an answer. It was too complicated to explain. Annie had said so, the day when we’d gone together to see the principal of the Jeanne d’Arc school and she’d pretended to be my mother.
“Don’t you know where your parents are?”
My mother was acting in her play somewhere in North Africa. My father was in Brazzaville or Bangui, or somewhere farther still. It was too complicated.
“They’re dead,” I told him.
He flinched. He looked at me, knitting his brow. It was as if he was suddenly afraid of me. The short man in the leather jacket stared at me as well, with worried eyes, his lips parted. Two gendarmes entered the living room.
“Should we keep searching the house?” one of them asked the dark-haired man in the gabardine coat.
“Yes, yes … Keep searching …”
They left. The dark-haired man in the gabardine coat leaned toward us.
“Go play in the garden,” he said in a very gentle voice. “I’ll come see you in a little bit.”
He took each of us by the hand and led us outside. The green bumper car was still there. He stretched out his arm toward the garden:
“Go play … I’ll see you in a little bit.”
And he went back inside the house.
We climbed the stone steps to the first terrace of the garden, where the grave of Doctor Guillotin was hidden under the clematis and Mathilde had planted a rose bush. The window to Annie’s room was wide open, and since we were level with that window, I could see that they were searching everything in Annie’s room.
Lower down, the short man in the black leather jacket was crossing the courtyard, holding a flashlight. He leaned over the edge of the well, pushed aside the honeysuckle and strained to see something down at the bottom, with his flashlight. The others continued rummaging through Annie’s room. Still others arrived, gendarmes and men wearing everyday clothes. They searched everywhere, even inside our bumper car; they walked around the courtyard, appeared in the windows of the house, and called to each other in loud voices. And my brother and I, we pretended to play in the garden, waiting for someone to come collect us.
FLOWERS OF RUIN
For Zina
For Marie
For Douglas
A chatty old woman
A rider in gray
An ass that is watching
A rope fall away
Some lilies and roses
In an old mustard pot
On the highway to Paris
These things you will spot.
That Sunday evening in November, I was on Rue de l’Abbé-de-l’Epée. I was skirting the high wall around the Institut des Sourds-Muets. To the left rises the bell tower of the church of Saint-Jacques-du-Haut-Pas. I could still recall a café at the corner of Rue Saint-Jacques, where I used to go after taking in a film at the Studio des Ursulines.
On the sidewalk, dead leaves. Or burned pages from an old Gaffiot dictionary. It’s the neighborhood of colleges and convents. My memory dredged up a few outdated names: Estrapade, Contrescarpe, Tournefort, Pot-de-Fer … I felt apprehensive crossing through places where I hadn’t set foot since I was eighteen, when I attended a lycée on the Montagne-Sainte-Geneviève.
Those areas looked the same to me as when I’d last seen them in the early sixties, as if they’d been abandoned at around the same time, more than twenty-five years ago. On Rue Gay-Lussac — that quiet street where once they’d pried up the cobblestones and erected barricades — the door of a hotel was boarded up and most of the windows were missing their panes. But the sign remained affixed to the walclass="underline" Hôtel de l’Avenir. Hotel of the Future. What future? The one, already past, of a student from the 1930s who took a small room in that hotel after graduating from the Ecole Normale Supérieure, and who on Saturday nights would have his friends over. They would go around the corner to watch a film at the Studio des Ursulines. I walked by the gate and the white shuttered building, in which the cinema occupies the ground floor. The entryway was lit. I could have walked to the Val-de-Grâce, in that peaceful zone where we had hidden, Jacqueline and I, so that the marquis would have no chance of finding her. We lived in a hotel at the end of Rue Pierre-Nicole. We subsisted on the money Jacqueline had gotten from selling her fur coat. The sundrenched street on Sunday afternoons. The privet hedges of the small brick building opposite the Collège Sévigné. The hotel balconies were covered in ivy. The dog napped in the entrance hall.
I reached Rue d’Ulm. It was deserted. Though I kept telling myself that there was nothing unusual about that on a Sunday evening in this studious, provincial neighborhood, I wondered whether I was still in Paris. In front of me, the dome of the Pantheon. It frightened me to be there alone, at the foot of that funereal monument in the moonlight, and I veered off into Rue Lhomond. I stopped in front of the Collège des Irlandais. A bell tolled eight o’clock, perhaps the one at the Congrégation du Saint-Esprit, whose massive façade rose to my right. A few more steps and I emerged onto Place de l’Estrapade. I looked for number 26 on Rue des Fossés-Saint-Jacques. A modern building rose before me. The old one had probably been torn down a good twenty years earlier.
April 24, 1933. A young married couple commits suicide for no apparent reason.
It’s a very strange story that occurred that night in the building at number 26 Rue des Fossés-Saint-Jacques, near the Pantheon, in the home of Mr. and Mme T.
Three years earlier, Monsieur Urbain T., a young engineer, top in his class, had married Mademoiselle Gisèle S., age twenty-six, one year his senior. Mme T. was a pretty blonde, tall and svelte. As for her husband, he was the typical dark and handsome young man. The previous July, the couple had set up house on the ground floor of 26 Rue des Fossés-Saint-Jacques, in a former workshop that they had converted into a studio apartment. The young newlyweds were very close. Nothing seemed to be clouding their happiness.
One Saturday evening, Urbain T. decided to take his wife out to dinner. They both left the house at around seven. They wouldn’t return home until about two in the morning, along with two couples they’d just met. The unusual din from their apartment woke the neighbors, unaccustomed to such a racket from tenants who were ordinarily so quiet. No doubt the party took a few unexpected turns.