Dora Bruder by Patrick Modiano Read Free Book Online Page A

women.
    Once the search was over, cash and jewelry were piled
anyhow into boxes that were bound with string and
sealed before being loaded into M. Schweblin’s car.
    This process was a farce, given that the sealing tongs
were in the hands of the policemen, who were free to
help themselves to banknotes and jewels. In fact, these
men would openly produce a valuable ring from their
pockets, saying “Hey, that’s not bad!,” or a fistful of
1,000- or 500-franc notes, saying “Hey, I forgot this.”
Bedding in the huts was also searched: mattresses,
eiderdowns, and bolsters were torn apart. Of all the
many searches performed by the Jewish Affairs police,
not a single trace remains. 5
    The search team always consisted of the same seven men.
Plus one woman. Their names are unknown. They were young
at the time, so some must still be alive today. But their faces
would be unrecognizable.
    Schweblin disappeared in 1943. The Germans disposed of
him themselves. Yet when my father was telling me about
being taken to this man’s office, he said that he was positive that
he had recognized him at the Porte Maillot, one Sunday after
the war.
    Â 
    1. The Police aux Questions Juives (PQJ), established November 1941.
    2. Brigade des mineurs.
    3. The French phrase is panier à salade , a colloquial term for the police van with
an open wire cage that resembles a salad-washing basket.
    4. A holding center in the Prefecture of Police.
    5. Extract from an official report drawn up in November 1943 by a manager from
Pithiviers Tax Office.

.................
    B LACK MARIAS REMAINED MUCH THE SAME TILL THE early sixties. The only time I ever found myself in one it
was with my father, and I wouldn’t mention it now had not
this episode taken on a symbolic character in my eyes.
    The circumstances were banal in the extreme. I was
eighteen years old, still a minor. My parents, though separated,
still lived in the same block, my father with a woman who had
yellow hair the color of straw and was very high-strung, a sort
of imitation Mylène Demongeot. And I with my mother. That
day, on the landing, a quarrel had broken out between my
parents about the very modest sum that my father had been
ordered to pay for my support following a series of judicial
proceedings: High Court of the Seine. 1st Auxiliary Chamber,
Court of Appeals Notification of Judgment. My mother wished
me to ring at his door and demand this money, which he
hadn’t paid. It was, alas, all we had to live on. Grumbling, I
did as I was told. I rang my father’s bell meaning to ask him
nicely, even to apologize for bothering him. He slammed the
door in my face; I could hear the pseudo Mylène Demongeot
on the telephone to the police emergency service, screaming
something about “a hooligan making trouble.”
    They came for me at my mother’s about ten minutes later,
and my father and I climbed into the waiting Black Maria. We
sat facing one another, on wooden benches, each flanked by
two policemen. I thought to myself that if it was the first time
in my life that something like this had happened to me, my
father had been through it all before, on that February night
twenty years ago when the Jewish Affairs police had taken him
away in a Black Maria much like this one. And I wondered
if, at that moment, he was thinking the same thing. But he
avoided my gaze, pretending not to see me.
    I remember every minute of that drive. The embankments
along the Seine. The Rue des Saint-Pères. The Boulevard
Saint-Germain. The stop at the lights opposite the terrace of
the Café des Deux-Magots. I peered enviously through the
barred windows at the drinkers sitting on the terrace in the
sun. Luckily, I had little to worry about: we were in that
anodyne, innocuous period later known as the “Thirty Glorious
Years.” 1
    Yet I was surprised that, after all he had been through
during the Occupation, my father should have offered not the
slightest