Suspended Sentences by Patrick Modiano Read Free Book Online Page B

Spring or summer. Well. Date unknown.” I had asked Jansen what year the photo was taken, but he’d only shrugged.
    The house jutted out on the right and the shutters to one of the ground floor windows were open. I pressed my forehead against the glass. The sun’s rays projected a dappled light onto the back wall. A painting was hanging there: Mme de Meyendorff’s portrait. In a cornerof the room, a mahogany desk behind which I could make out a leather armchair. Two similar armchairs near the window. Bookshelves on the right-hand wall, above a green velvet couch.
    I wanted to break into that room, where bit by bit the dust of time had settled. Jansen must have sat on those armchairs often and I could imagine him, on some late afternoon, reading a book from the library. He had come here with Colette Laurent. And, later, it was no doubt in this office that Mme de Meyendorff had called upon the dead.
    Next door, on the lawn, the blonde had gone back to work, and I heard the peaceful, reassuring hum of the motor.

I never went back to Fossombrone. And today, fifteen years later, I suppose Le Moulin has been sold and the Meyendorffs are finishing out their days somewhere in America. I haven’t had any recent news of the other people Jansen had invited to his “farewell party.” One afternoon in May 1974 I ran across Jacques Besse on Boulevard Bonne-Nouvelle, near the Théâtre du Gymnase. I’d held out my hand, but he hadn’t noticed and had walked away stiffly, without recognizing me, his eyes vacant, wearing a dark gray turtleneck and several days’ beard.
    One night a few months ago, very late, I had turned on the television, which was showing an English detective program adapted from Leslie Charteris’s The Saint , and I was surprised to see Eugène Deckers. The scene had been filmed in London in the 1960s, possibly the same year and same week that Deckers had come to the “farewell party.” There, onscreen, he was crossing a hotel corridor, and I thought it really strange that one could pass from a world in which everything ended to another, freed from the laws of gravity, in which you were suspended for all eternity: from that evening on Rue Froidevaux, of which nothing remained except the fading echoes in my memory, to those several seconds captured on film, in which Deckers would cross a hotel corridor until the end of time.
    That night, I had dreamed I was in Jansen’s studio, sitting on the sofa as in the past. I was looking at the photos on the wall, and suddenly I was struck by the resemblance between Colette Laurent and my girlfriend at the time, with whom I’d first met Jansen—someone else of whom I’d long had no news. I convinced myself that she andColette Laurent were one and the same person. The distance of years had confused matters. They both had chestnut hair and gray eyes. And the same first name.
    I left the studio. It was already dark out and that surprised me. I remembered that it was October or November. I walked toward Denfert-Rochereau. I was supposed to meet up with Colette and a few others in a house near the Parc Montsouris. We got together there every Sunday evening. And, in my dream, I was certain I’d find among the guests that evening Jacques Besse, Eugène Deckers, and Dr. and Mme. de Meyendorff.
    Rue Froidevaux seemed to go on forever, as if the distances stretched to infinity. I was afraid of arriving late. Would they wait for me? The sidewalk was matted with dead leaves and I skirted the wall and the grassy embankment of the Montsouris reservoir, behind which I pictured the still water. A thought stuck with me, vague at first, then becoming clearer: my name was Francis Jansen.

The day before Jansen left Paris, I had arrived at the studio at noon to put away the photos in the suitcases. I had no reason to expect his sudden departure. He’d told me he wasn’t going anywhere until the end of July. A few days earlier, I’d given him the second copies of the notebook and the