Out of the Dark Read online

  Out of the Dark

  © Éditions Gallimard, 1996. Translation and introduction © 1998 by the University of Nebraska Press. All rights reserved.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publicadon Data Modiano, Patrick, 1945—[Du plus loin de l’oubli. English] Out of the dark = Du plus loin de l’oubli / Patrick Modiano; translated by Jordan Stump, p. cm.

  ISBN-10: 0-8032-3196-2 (hardcover: alk. paper).–ISBN 0-8032-8229-X (pbk.: alk. paper) I. Stump, Jordan, 1959–

  ISBN: 978-0-8032-8432-6 (electronic: epub)

  ISBN: 978-0-8032-8433-3 (electronic: mobi)

  II. Title.

  PQ2673.03D8313 1998

  843’.914—dc21

  98-13100 CIP

  The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.

  Translator’s Introduction

  I find it difficult to preface this novel without alluding to a very different age – nearly thirty years before the publication of Out of the Dark in France – and to a year that looms large in the French imagination: 1968. This was a year of many changes in France. A massive springtime uprising among students and workers paralyzed the nation, shaking many of its most solidly established institutions (notably the university system) to their foundations and ushering in a newly visible and newly powerful youth culture, a culture of contestation and anti-traditionalism that would dramatically change the look and feel of the country. Charles de Gaulle, who had dominated French politics since the early days of World War II, would not survive the blow to his credibility and reputation dealt by his intransigence toward the young revolutionaries; he would resign early the following year. De Gaulle was not alone: many of the great icons of twentieth-century France were finding themselves forced to make way for something new. Jean-Paul Sartre was openly mocked by the insurgent students when he tried to join one of their rallies. The daring of the New Novelists, the avantgarde of the decade before, was beginning to seem less daring than the work of the so-called New New Novelists, who were blending a purely literary discourse with a new critical and theoretical awareness influenced by structuralism semiotics. And the purely theoretical discourse of those disciplines – and most particularly of deconstruction and post-structuralism – was beginning to imprint itself on the public imagination, allowing a rigorous and implacable questioning of language, truth, and the ideologies behind them. Existentialism and humanism were rapidly losing ground to a far more radical way of thinking, whose influence is still with us today. In many ways, 1968 was a moment when the shape of the century changed.

  It was also in 1968 that Éditions Gallimard published Patrick Modiano’s first novel, La Place de l’Étoile, which brought its twenty-three-year-old author immediate critical and public acclaim. La Place de l’Étoile is not fully a product of its time: it is not exactly rebellious or transgressive in the way that many texts by young writers were at that time, and it does not incorporate the latest advances in structuralist or poststructuralist theory. Its gaze is turned not toward a bright revolutionary future but toward a rather faded past, and toward a subject that might have seemed strangely anachronistic to the forward-looking reader of the late sixties: the place of the Jew in France. The novel’s protagonist, a presumably young man with the unlikely name of Raphael Schlemilovitch, haunts the holy places of Frenchness, from seaside resorts to Alpine meadows, contaminating them with his very presence, not unlike a character in a novel by the virulently anti-Semitic Céline, of whose writing La Place de l’Étoile provides a devastating pastiche. This harsh, funny, profoundly ironic novel offers no hopeful visions for the future; rather, dredging up old hostilities that France would prefer to forget, it casts the Jew as a continual outsider, a pariah, an object of acute terror and loathing. The nation’s past, it would seem, could not be done away with quite so easily as some would wish.

  Today La Place de l’Étoile seems as thoroughly singular a novel as ever, standing well apart from its contemporaries. Indeed, both in style and in subject, it is a deeply personal book, whose themes of persecution and exclusion have their roots in Modiano’s own family background. His father was a Jew of Alexandrian extraction, his mother an aspiring actress from Belgium; the couple met and fell in love in the uneasy Paris of the early forties. Modiano was born in 1945, and his childhood was profoundly marked by memories of the Occupation, the Deportation, and the atmosphere of menace and clandestinity that had haunted the years just before his birth. Even if Modiano himself did not live through that dark time, he nevertheless ‘remembers’ it, both as a historical event and as a way of life, a free-floating and pervasive presence. It is this presence, this unfading past, that forms the backdrop for all his novels, obsessively returning, though never in the same form – only as a palpable but indefinable ambience whose source is never made clear, and that cannot simply be traced to one chronological moment. In other words, Modiano does not write ‘historical’ novels, even if they are all profoundly shaped by a certain history, a history of marginalization and effacement. Time and again, his central characters are caught up in an atmosphere of exclusion, imminent danger, uncertain or concealed identities; time and again they find themselves in milieux that are about to be wiped out by the approaching shadows: quaintly glamorous resorts, elegant clubs, places of innocent pleasure for movie stars or up-and-coming champions in tennis or skiing. The story is always the same, and yet the great preoccupation of Modiano’s writing cannot be defined by one event, even if it is always a question of the same phenomenon: nothing less (and nothing more precise) than the obliteration of a past.

  So insistently does this story recur that Modiano is often said to be ‘forever writing the same book.’ This is not exactly true: each novel has a perfectly distinct (if sometimes bewildering) plot, perfectly defined (if sometimes ambiguous) characters, a particular (if sometimes permeable) setting in time and space. Still, there is a very strong phenomenon of repetition at work in Modiano’s writing, both within each novel and from one to another. It is not only the same tale of loss that repeats itself in his books; again and again, we find ourselves before the same colors (blue in particular), the same sounds (a voice half covered by some sort of noise), the same settings (empty rooms, deserted streets), even the same gestures (an arm raised in greeting or farewell, a forehead pressed against a windowpane). In themselves, these repetitions create a haunting and unforgettable atmosphere, instantly recognizable to any reader familiar with Modiano’s work; set against the overwhelming sense of loss and disappearance that is the novels’ other most visible element, they make of our reading a deeply disorienting experience, sad and strange. Everything disappears, his books seem to tell us, and also – in small but omnipresent echoes – everything somehow stays. This presence of an obliterated past is meant neither to comfort us nor to terrify us: it is there to remind us endlessly of that loss, I think, so that the loss is not itself lost, so that it remains sharp, insistent, present, so that we are continually called to a life that has long since disappeared.

  This is the story told by Out of the Dark, Modiano’s fourteenth novel, which appeared in 1996. Its setting is not the Occupation but the early sixties; nevertheless, the oppressive, menacing atmosphere of that earlier time seems to have lingered long after its disappearance. The young narrator, like his friends or even his older self, appears to be on the run from something (but what?), living a strangely worried life whose uncertain joys seem always about to be wiped out; like his friends or even his older self, he has a vaguely marginal air about him, even if we can’t quite see why he should or what makes him so. We are far from the dark days of the past, then, but strangely close as well.

  At the same time, however, Out of the Dark is a
sadly funny and touching love story and a personal reminiscence that may well seem oddly familiar to many readers. This is perhaps the most extraordinary of Modiano’s feats as a writer: however private his work seems, however inseparable from a personal past, it always speaks to us of something we feel we know, as if these were our own faded memories, our own shapeless uncertainties and apprehensions, our own loose ends. The potency of his strikingly simple, enigmatic, and profoundly moving prose is no secret in France, where Modiano is a perennial best-seller and a household name, still enjoying the same critical acclaim and public success that greeted his first novel. Outside of academic circles, however, most readers in the United States have yet to discover him; they have a great surprise in store.

  *

  Modiano is never easy to translate; the apparent simplicity and neutrality of his style conceals a wealth of subtle difficulties for the translator, and I wish to thank here several people who helped me through those difficulties. The French title of this book, Du plus loin de l’oubli, poses a particularly thorny problem, since the English language has no real equivalent for oubli, nor even a simple way of saying du plus loin. The phrase, taken from a French translation of a poem by the German writer Stefan George, is literally equivalent to ‘from the furthest point of forgottenness,’ and I have found no way to express this idea with the eloquent simplicity of the original. I would like to extend my most grateful thanks to Eleanor Hardin for coming up with the current title, and for all the invaluable help she has given me with this translation; thanks, too, to Warren Motte and Tom Vosteen for their sympathetic reading and insightful suggestions.

  Out of the Dark

  For Peter Handke

  Table of Contents

  Front Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Translator’s Introduction

  Dedication

  Table of Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Back Cover

  Du plus loin de l’oubli…

  Stefan George

  Chapter 1

  She was a woman of average height; he, Gérard Van Bever, was slightly shorter. The night of our first meeting, that winter thirty years ago, I had gone with them to a hotel on the Quai de la Tournelle and found myself in their room. Two beds, one near the door, the other beneath the window. The window didn’t face the quai, and as I remember it was set into a gable.

  Nothing in the room was out of place. The beds were made. No suitcases. No clothes. Only a large alarm dock, sitting on one of the nightstands. And despite that alarm clock, it seemed as though they were living here in secret, trying to leave no sign of their presence. We had spent only a brief moment in the room that first night, just long enough to drop off some art books I was tired of carrying, which I hadn’t managed to sell to a secondhand book dealer on the Place Saint-Michel.

  And it was on the Place Saint-Michel that they had first spoken to me, late that afternoon, as all around us the crowds streamed down the steps to the métro or up the boulevard in the opposite direction. They had asked me where they might find a post office nearby. I was afraid my directions might be too vague for them to follow, since I’ve never been able to describe the shortest route between two points. I had decided it would be best to show them to the Odéon post office myself. On the way there, she had stopped in a café-tabac and bought three stamps. As she stuck them to the envelope, I had time to read the address: Majorca.

  She had slipped the letter into one of the mailboxes without checking to see whether it was the one marked AIR MAIL – FOREIGN. We had turned back toward the Place Saint-Michel and the quais. She was concerned to see me carrying the books, since ‘they were probably heavy.’ She had said sharply to Gérard Van Bever:

  ‘You could help him.’

  He had smiled at me and taken one of the books – the largest – under his arm.

  In their room on the Quai de la Tournelle, I had set the books at the foot of the nightstand, the one with the alarm clock. I couldn’t hear it ticking. The hands pointed to three o’clock. A spot on the pillowcase. Bending down to set the books on the floor, I had noticed a smell of ether coming from the pillow and the bed. Her arm had brushed against me, and she had switched on the bedside lamp.

  We had dined in a café on the quai, next door to their hotel. We had ordered only the main dish of that night’s special. Van Bever had paid the check. I had no money with me that night, and Van Bever thought he was five francs short. He had searched through the pockets of his overcoat and his jacket and finally found five francs in change. She said nothing and watched him absently, smoking a cigarette. She had given us her dish to share and had eaten only a few bites from Van Bever’s plate.

  She had turned to me and said in her slightly gravelly voice:

  ‘Next time we’ll go to a real restaurant….’

  Later, we had both waited by the front door of the hotel while Van Bever went up to the room for my books. I broke the silence by asking if they had lived here long and if they came from the provinces or from abroad. No, they were from around Paris. They’d been living here for two months. That was all she had told me that night. And her first name: Jacqueline.

  Van Bever had come down and given me my books. He had asked if I would try to sell them again the next day, and if I made much money this way. They had suggested we meet again. It was difficult for them to give me a precise time, but they could often be found in a café on the corner of the Rue Dante.

  I go back there sometimes in my dreams. The other night, a February sunset blinded me as I walked up the Rue Dante. After all these years, it hadn’t changed.

  I stood at the glassed-in terrace and looked in at the bar, the pinball machine, and the handful of tables, set up as if around a dance floor.

  As I crossed the street, the tall apartment building opposite on the Boulevard Saint-Germain cast its shadow over me. But behind me the sidewalk was still lit by the sun.

  When I awoke, the time in my life when I had known Jacqueline appeared to me with the same contrast of shadow and light. Pale wintertime streets, and the sun filtering through the slats of the shutters.

  Chapter 2

  Gérard Van Bever wore a herringbone overcoat that was too large for him. I can see him standing at the pinball machine in the café on the Rue Dante. But Jacqueline is the one playing. Her arms and shoulders scarcely move as the machine rattles and flashes. Van Bever’s overcoat was voluminous and came down past his knees. He stood very straight, with his collar turned up and his hands in his pockets. Jacqueline wore a gray cable-knit turdeneck and a brown jacket made of soft leather.

  The first time I found them at the Café Dante, Jacqueline turned to me, smiled, and went back to her pinball game. I sat down at a table. Her arms and her upper body looked delicate next to the huge machine, whose jolts and shudders threatened to toss her backward at any moment. She was struggling to stay upright, like someone in danger of falling overboard. She came to join me at the table, and Van Bever took his turn at the machine.

  At first I was surprised by how much time they spent playing that game. I often interrupted their match; if I hadn’t come, it would have gone on indefinitely.

  In the afternoon the café was almost empty, but after six o’clock the customers were shoulder to shoulder at the bar and at the tables. I couldn’t immediately make out Van Bever and Jacqueline through the roar of conversations, the rat
tling of the pinball machine, and all the customers squeezed in together. I caught sight of Van Bever’s herringbone overcoat first, and then of Jacqueline. I had already come here several times and not found them, and each time I had waited and waited, sitting at a table. I thought I would never see them again, that they had disappeared into the crowds and the noise. And then one day, in the early afternoon, at the far end of the deserted café, they were there, standing side by side at the pinball machine.

  I can scarcely remember any other details of that time of my life. I’ve almost forgotten my parents’ faces. I had stayed on a while longer in their apartment, and then I had given up on my studies and begun selling old books for money.

  Not long after meeting Jacqueline and Van Bever, I rented a room in a hotel near theirs, the Hôtel de Lima. I had altered the birth date on my passport to make myself one year older and no longer a minor.

  The week before I moved into the Hôtel de Lima I had no place to sleep, so they had left me the key to their room while they were out of town at one of the casinos they often went to.

  They had fallen into this habit before we met, at the Enghien casino and two or three others in small resort towns in Normandy. Then they had settled on Dieppe, Forges-les-Eaux, and Bagnolles-de-l’Orne. They always left on Saturday and came back on Monday with the money they had won, which was never more than a thousand francs. Van Bever had come up with a martingale ‘around the neutral five,’ as he said, but it was only profitable if he limited himself to small bets.

  I never went with them to the casinos. I waited for them until Monday, never leaving the neighborhood. And then, after a while, Van Bever began going only to ‘Forges’ – as he called it – because it was closer than Bagnolles-de-l’Orne, while Jacqueline stayed in Paris.

  The smell of ether was always hanging in their room when I spent the night alone there. The blue bottle sat on the shelf above the sink. There were clothes in the closet: a man’s jacket, a pair of trousers, a bra, and one of the gray turtle-neck sweaters that Jacqueline wore.