Paris Nocturne by Patrick Modiano Read Free Book Online

after, I could no longer hear his voice. Again, the sound of a piece of furniture being knocked over or someone falling down the stairs. Then the dial tone, as if the phone had been hung up. It was already eight o’clock at night and I didn’t have the energy to call the Hôtel Palym back. I was really disappointed. I had hoped to hear Hélène Navachine’svoice. What could have become of her, after all this time? The last time I saw her in a dream, it was interrupted before she had time to give me her address and phone number.
    *
    The same winter that I heard the faraway voice of Guy Roussotte, I had an unfortunate experience. Strive as you might for over thirty years to make your life clearer and more harmonious than it was earlier on, there’s always the risk that an incident will suddenly drag you backwards. It was in December. For about a week, whenever I went out or returned home, I noticed a woman standing motionless a few metres from the door of my apartment building or on the pavement opposite. She was never there before six o’clock in the evening. A tall woman, dressed in a sheepskin coat, wearing a wide-brimmed hat and carrying a brown shoulder bag. She kept watching me as she stood there in silence. She looked menacing. From which forgotten childhood nightmare could this woman have emerged? And why now? I leaned out the window. She was waiting on the pavement, as though she was standing guard over the front of the building. But I hadn’t switched on the light in my room soshe couldn’t possibly have seen me. With the big shoulder bag, hat and boots, she looked as though she had once been the canteen cook for an army that had disappeared long ago, but had left many corpses behind. I was afraid that from then on, and until the end of my life, she would be standing guard wherever I lived and that it would be pointless moving house. She would find my new address every time.
    One night, I came home later than usual and she was still there, motionless. I was about to push open the door of the building when she walked slowly towards me. An old woman. She stared at me harshly as if to make me ashamed of something or remind me of an error I might have made. I held her gaze in silence. I ended up wondering what I might be guilty of. I crossed my arms and said in a calm voice, articulating each syllable, that I would like to know what she wanted from me.
    She raised her chin and from her mouth came a torrent of insults. She called me by my first name and addressed me with the familiar
tu
. Were we somehow related? Perhaps I had known her long ago. The wide-brimmed hat accentuated the hardness of her face and, in the yellow light of the streetlamp, she looked like a very old German poseur by the name of Leni Riefenstahl. Life and emotions had leftno trace on this mummy’s face, yes, the mummy of a nasty capricious little girl from eighty years ago. She kept staring at me with her raptor eyes and I didn’t look away. I gave her a big smile. It felt like she was about to bite and infect me with her venom, but beneath this aggression there was something false, like the lifeless performance of a bad actress. Again, she heaped insults on me. She was leaning against the door of the building to block my way. I kept smiling at her and realised that it was making her increasingly exasperated. But I wasn’t scared of her. Gone were the childhood terrors, in the dark, of a witch or death opening the bedroom door. ‘Could you lower your voice a little, madame?’ I said, in a courteous tone that surprised even me. She, too, seemed taken aback by the calmness of my voice. ‘Excuse me, but I’m no longer used to voices as loud as yours.’ I saw her features contract and her eyes dilate in a split second. She stuck out her chin defiantly—a very heavy, prominent chin.
    I smiled at her. Then she threw herself on me. With one hand she gripped my shoulder and with the other