Dora Bruder by Patrick Modiano Read Free Book Online Page B

objection to my being taken away in a Black Maria.
Sitting there, opposite me, impassive, with an air of faint
disgust, he ignored me as if I had the plague, and, knowing that
I could expect no sympathy from him, I dreaded our arrival
at the police station. And I felt the injustice of this all the more
since I had embarked on a book—my first—in which, putting
myself in his shoes, I relived his feelings of distress during the
Occupation. A few years earlier, among his books, I had come
across certain anti-Semitic works from the forties, books that
he must have bought at the time in an effort to understand
what it was that these writers had against him. And I can well
imagine his surprise at the portrayal of this imaginary,
phantasmagoric monster with clawlike hands and hooked nose
whose shadow flitted across the walls, this creature corrupted
by every vice, responsible for every evil, guilty of every crime.
As for me, I wanted my first book to be a riposte to all those
who, by insulting my father, had wounded me. And, on the
terrain of French prose, to silence them once and for all. I can
see now that my plan was childishly naive: most of the authors
had disappeared, executed by firing squad, exiled, far gone in
senility, or dead of old age. Yes, alas, I was too late.
    The Black Maria drew up in the Rue de l’Abbaye outside
Saint-Germain police station. Our guards led us into the
superintendent’s office. Crisply, my father explained to him that
I was a “hooligan” who had been “giving trouble” since I was
sixteen years old. The superintendent declared—addressing
me in the tone you use to a delinquent—that he would keep
me in, “if there’s a next time.” I had the distinct impression
that if the superintendent had carried out his threat and sent
me to the Dépôt, my father wouldn’t have lifted a finger to
help me.
    My father and I left the police station together. I asked him
if it was really necessary to call the emergency service and
“charge” me in front of our guards. He didn’t answer. I bore
him no grudge. Since we lived in the same building, we set
off home side by side, in silence. I was tempted to remind him
of that night in February 1942 when he too had been taken
away in a Black Maria, to ask him whether he had been
thinking of that, just now. But perhaps it meant less to him than it
did to me.
    On the way back, we didn’t exchange a single word, not
even when we parted on the stairs. I was to see him once or
twice in August of the following year, on an occasion when
he hid my call-up papers as a ruse to have me carted off by
force to the Reuilly army barracks. I never saw him again
after that.
    Â 
    1. “Les Trentes Glorieuses,” the postwar boom in France.

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    W HAT DID DORA BRUDER DO FIRST, I WONDER, AS soon as she had made her escape on 14 December 1941.
Perhaps she had decided not to return to the boarding school
the instant she had arrived at the gate, and had spent the
evening wandering the streets till curfew.
    Streets that still had countrified names: Les Meuniers, La
Bèche-aux-Loups, Le Sentier des Merisiers. But at the top of
the little tree-shaded street that ran alongside the perimeter
wall of the Saint-Coeur-de-Marie there was a freight depot,
and further on, if you take the Avenue Daumesnil, the Gare
de Lyon. The railway lines to this station pass within a few
hundred meters of the school where Dora Bruder had been
shut up. This peaceful quarter, seemingly remote from Paris,
with its convents, its hidden cemeteries and quiet avenues, is
also a point of departure.
    I don’t know if the proximity of the Gare de Lyon
encouraged Dora to run away. Whether from her dormitory in
the silence of the blackout, she could hear the rumble of
freight cars or the sound of trains leaving the Gare de Lyon
for the Free Zone  .  .  .  She was doubtless familiar with those
two