Little Jewel by Patrick Modiano Read Free Book Online Page A

war—and we were always afraid of coming across his skeleton. I didn’t know what Kraut meant. Frédérique, the woman who knew my mother, and who had taken me into her home, wasn’t there the day I asked her friend, the brunette with the boxer’s face, what it meant. Perhaps she thought I was frightened by the word and wanted to reassure me. She smiled and told me that it was a name people used for the Germans,but that it wasn’t really a rude word. ‘And your mother was called the Kraut…It was a joke.’
    Frédérique wasn’t very happy that the brunette had told me this, but she didn’t elaborate. She was my mother’s friend—they must have known each other when my mother was ‘a dancer’. Frédérique Chatillon was her full name. Her women friends were always at the house in Fossombronne-la-Forêt, even when she wasn’t there: Rose-Marie, Jeannette, Madeleine-Louis, others whose names I’ve forgotten, and the brunette who had also known my mother when she was ‘a dancer’ and who didn’t like her.
    â€˜Does she live alone?’ I asked the concierge.
    â€˜For a long time, there was a man who used to visit her. He worked with horses somewhere around here. He looked North African.’
    â€˜Doesn’t he come anymore?’
    â€˜Not for a while.’
    Because of all my questions, she was starting to look at me somewhat suspiciously. I was tempted to tell her everything. My mother went to Paris when she was young. She was a dancer. They called her the Kraut. They called me Little Jewel. It was too long and complicated to explain right there, outside, in the courtyard of this apartment block.
    â€˜The problem is that she owes me two hundred francs…’
    I always carried my money on me, in a little canvas pouch tied around my waist. I fossicked in the pouch. I still had a hundred-franc note, a fifty-franc note and some change. I held out the two notes and told her I would come back with the rest.
    â€˜Thank you very much.’
    She slipped them into one of the pockets of her dressing-gown. Her wariness had vanished all of a sudden. I could have asked her any old question about Death Cheater.
    â€˜About the rent…I’ll let you know when you come back.’
    I hadn’t really planned on coming back. What more would I learn? And what was the point?
    â€˜They’ve cut off her electricity a few times. And each time, I’m glad for her sake, because she uses an electric blanket—it’s dangerous.’
    I imagined her plugging the cord of her electric blanket into a socket. She’d always liked those sorts of devices, which seem so cutting edge for a while and then become obsolete, or else end up as everyday items. I remembered that, back in more prosperous times for her, when we livedin the big apartment near the Bois de Boulogne, someone brought her a box covered in green leather, which allowed us to listen to the radio. Later, I worked out that it must have been one of the first transistor radios.
    â€˜You should warn her not to use an electric blanket.’
    Well, sorry, it was not as simple as that. Had she ever, in her whole life, heeded good advice? And, anyway, it was too late.
    â€˜You don’t happen to know the name of the man who came to visit her?’
    The concierge had kept a letter from him, which he sent three months ago with payment for the rent. Through the half-open door, I saw her rummaging among papers in a big box.
    â€˜I can’t find it…Anyhow, I don’t think that man will come by again.’
    He was probably the one she was calling in the evenings from the phone box. After twelve years, by some miracle, there was still someone she could count on. But she had ended up scaring him away, too. Already, back when I was called Little Jewel, she could spend whole days in her room, cut off from the world, seeing no one, not even me, and, after a