Family Record Read online

  Family Record

  ENGLISH TRANSLATIONS OF WORKS BY PATRICK MODIANO

  From Yale University Press

  After the Circus

  Family Record

  Little Jewel

  Paris Nocturne

  Pedigree: A Memoir

  Sleep of Memory

  Such Fine Boys

  Sundays in August

  Suspended Sentences: Three Novellas (Afterimage, Suspended Sentences, and Flowers of Ruin)

  Also available

  The Black Notebook

  Catherine Certitude

  Dora Bruder

  Honeymoon

  In the Café of Lost Youth

  Lacombe, Lucien

  Missing Person

  The Occupation Trilogy (The Night Watch, Ring Roads, and La Place de l’Etoile)

  Out of the Dark

  So You Don’t Get Lost in the Neighborhood

  Villa Triste

  Young Once

  Family Record

  PATRICK MODIANO

  TRANSLATED FROM THE FRENCH

  BY MARK POLIZZOTTI

  The Margellos World Republic of Letters is dedicated to making literary works from around the globe available in English through translation. It brings to the English-speaking world the work of leading poets, novelists, essayists, philosophers, and playwrights from Europe, Latin America, Africa, Asia, and the Middle East to stimulate international discourse and creative exchange.

  English translation copyright © 2019 by Mark Polizzotti.

  Originally published as Livret de famille. © Editions GALLIMARD, Paris, 1977.

  A portion of this translation previously appeared in Harper’s, August 2017.

  All rights reserved.

  This book may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, including illustrations, in any form (beyond that copying permitted by Sections 107 and 108 of the U.S. Copyright Law and except by reviewers for the public press), without written permission from the publishers.

  Yale University Press books may be purchased in quantity for educational, business, or promotional use. For information, please e-mail [email protected] (U.S. office) or [email protected] (U.K. office).

  Set in Electra and Nobel types by Tseng Information Systems, Inc.

  Printed in the United States of America.

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2018967876

  ISBN 978-0-300-23831-0 (paper : alk. paper)

  A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

  This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper).

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  For Rudy,

  For Josée and Henri Bozo

  To live is to persist in finishing a memory.

  —René Char

  Family Record

  I

  I was watching my daughter through the glass. She was asleep, resting on her left cheek, mouth hanging open. She was barely two days old and you couldn’t see the movement of her breathing.

  I pressed my forehead against the pane. Only a few inches separated me from her cradle and I wouldn’t have wondered had it floated into the air, weightless. The branch of a plane tree caressed the window with the regularity of a fan blade. My daughter was the only inhabitant of that white and powder-blue room called the Caroline Herrick Nursery. The nurse had pushed the cradle close to the pane so I could see her.

  She wasn’t moving. An expression of beatitude floated on her tiny face. The branch kept swaying silently. My nose flattened against the glass, leaving a spot of fog.

  When the nurse returned, I bolted upright. It was nearly five o’clock and I didn’t have a second to lose if I wanted to make it to town hall before the Office of Records closed.

  I rushed down the hospital stairs, leafing through a small book with a red leather cover: our “Family Record Book.” The title evoked the same respect I feel for all official documents, diplomas, notarized transactions, genealogical charts, zoning ordinances, archival papers, pedigrees . . . On the first two pages was a copy of my marriage certificate, with my full name and that of my wife. We had left blank the lines for “son of,” to avoid the morass of my civil status. The fact is, I don’t know where I was born or what names my parents were using at the time. A navy-blue piece of paper, folded in four, was stapled to this family record: my parents’ marriage certificate. My father appears under an assumed name because the wedding had taken place during the Occupation. It said:

  FRENCH STATE

  Haute-Savoie Department

  Megève, Office of the Mayor

  On 24 February Nineteen Hundred Forty-four, at five-thirty p.m.

  The following persons publicly appeared before us in the Town Hall:

  Guy Jaspaard de Jonghe, and

  Maria Luisa C.

  The intended spouses have each declared that they wish to live as man and wife and we have pronounced by the powers vested in us that they are hereby united by the bonds of matrimony.

  What were my father and mother doing in Megève in February 1944? I would know soon enough—I thought. And what about this “de Jonghe” that my father had appended to his initial borrowed name? De Jonghe. That’s him all over.

  I noticed Koromindé’s car parked on the street about a dozen yards from the hospital entrance. He was behind the wheel, engrossed in a magazine. He raised his eyes and smiled at me.

  I had met him the night before in a restaurant with vaguely Basque décor. It was located near Porte de Bagatelle, one of those places you find yourself in when something important has happened, a place you would never go under normal circumstances. My daughter was born at 9 p.m. I had seen her before she was taken into the nursery, kissed her sleeping mother. Outside, I had wandered aimlessly down the empty streets of Neuilly, beneath the autumn rain. Midnight. I was the last diner in this restaurant, where a man I could see only from behind stood leaning against the bar. The telephone rang and the bartender answered. He turned to the man:

  “Monsieur Koromindé, it’s for you.”

  Koromindé . . . The name of one of my father’s friends in his youth, who often came to the house when I was little. He took the phone and I recognized his deep, gentle voice, the way he rolled his r’s. He hung up. I stood and walked over to him.

  “Are you Jean Koromindé?”

  “I am.”

  He stared at me in surprise. I introduced myself. He let out an exclamation. Then, with a sad smile:

  “You’ve grown . . .”

  “Yes,” I answered, hunching over as if in apology. I told him the news that I was a father, as of several hours ago. He seemed moved and bought me a drink to celebrate the birth of my child.

  “Becoming a father is something, isn’t it?”

  “Yes.”

  We left the restaurant together. It was called the Esperia.

  Koromindé offered to drive me home and opened the passenger door of an old black Régence. During the ride, we talked about my father. It had been twenty years since he’d last seen him. It had been ten since I’d had any word from him. Neither of us knew what had become of him. Koromindé remembered an evening in 1942 when he and my father had dinner together, at the Esperia, in fact . . . And it was there, in that very same restaurant, on an evening thirty years later, that he learned about the birth of “the little girl.”

  “How time flies.”

  His eyes were misting up.

  “And that little girl of yours, do I get to meet her?”

  That’s when I offered to have him drive me to the town hall the next day, when I would register my daughter. He was thrilled. We agreed to meet in front of the hospital at five o’clock sharp.

  In daylight, his car looked even more dilapidated than the night be
fore. He stuffed the magazine he’d been reading into a jacket pocket and opened the door for me. He was wearing shades with heavy frames and bluish lenses.

  “We don’t have much time,” I said. “The Office of Records closes at five-thirty.”

  He looked at his watch:

  “Not to worry.”

  He drove slowly, serenely.

  “Do you think I’ve changed a lot in twenty years?”

  I closed my eyes to recapture the image I had of him at that time: an energetic blond who constantly ran his index finger over his mustache, spoke in short, staccato sentences, and laughed a great deal. Always dressed in light-colored suits. That was how he hovered over my memories of childhood.

  “I’ve aged, haven’t I?”

  He had. His face had narrowed and his skin had acquired a grayish cast. He had lost his beautiful blond hair.

  “Not really,” I said.

  He worked the stick shift and turned the steering wheel with generous, lazy movements. As he veered onto an avenue perpendicular to the one the hospital was on, he made too wide a turn and the Régence hit the curb. He shrugged.

  “I wonder if your father still looks like Rhett Butler . . . you know . . . Gone with the Wind.”

  “So do I.”

  “I’m his oldest friend . . . We’ve known each other since we were ten, back in Cité d’Hauteville . . .”

  He drove down the middle of the avenue and scraped against a truck. Then he turned on the radio with a mechanical gesture. Someone was talking about the economic situation, which according to him was growing worse and worse. He predicted a crash as dire as the one in 1929. I thought about the blue-and-white room in which my daughter was asleep and the swaying plane branch that caressed the window.

  Koromindé stopped at a red light. He was lost in thought. The lights changed three times and he didn’t move. He remained expressionless behind his tinted glasses. Finally, he asked:

  “So does your daughter look like him?”

  What could I say? Maybe he knew what my father and mother had been doing in Megève in February 1944 and how they had celebrated their peculiar wedding. I didn’t want to ask him quite yet, for fear of distracting him even more and causing an accident.

  We followed Boulevard d’Inkermann at parade speed. He pointed out a sand-colored building on the right with porthole windows and large semicircular balconies.

  “Your father lived there for a month . . . on the top floor . . .”

  He might even have celebrated his twenty-fifth birthday there, but Koromindé wasn’t sure: all the buildings where my father had lived, he said, had the same basic façade. That’s how it was. He hadn’t forgotten that late afternoon in the summer of ’37 and the terrace that the last rays of sunlight bathed in rosy orange. My father, it seemed, greeted his guests bare-chested, in a bathrobe. In the middle of the sidewalk, he had set up an old sofa and some lawn chairs.

  “And I served the drinks.”

  Crossing Boulevard Bineau, he ran a red light and narrowly missed another car, but he didn’t care. He turned left onto Rue Borghese. Where did Rue Borghese lead? I looked at my watch. Five twenty-one. The Office of Records was about to close. I was seized by panic. What if they refused to register my daughter? I opened the glove compartment, thinking I might find a street map of Paris and environs.

  “Are you sure this is the right way?” I asked Koromindé.

  “I don’t think it is.”

  He started to make a U-turn—but no, better to keep going straight. We returned to Boulevard Victor-Hugo, then Boulevard d’Inkermann. Now Koromindé had the pedal floored. Beads of sweat were running down his temples. He too looked at his watch. He murmured, in a toneless voice:

  “I swear to you, my boy, we’ll make it in time.”

  He ran another red light. I shut my eyes. He sped faster and gave short, sharp honks on the horn. The old Régence was shaking. We arrived at Avenue du Roule. In front of the church, the car stalled.

  We left the Régence and speed-walked toward the town hall, two hundred yards farther down the avenue. Koromindé was limping slightly and I was in front. I started to run. Koromindé did too, but his left leg dragged and soon I was well ahead of him. I turned around: he was waving his arm in distress, but I kept running faster and faster. Koromindé, discouraged, slowed down. He mopped his brow and temples with a navy-blue handkerchief. Bounding up the steps of the town hall, I gestured at him frantically. He managed to join me, so out of breath that he couldn’t make a sound. I grabbed him by the wrist and we crossed the foyer, where a sign said “Office of Records—2nd floor, left.” Koromindé was deathly pale. I thought he was about to go into cardiac arrest and I propped him up as we climbed the stairs. I pushed open the door to the Office of Records with my shoulder, while my two hands supported Koromindé. He stumbled and his weight dragged me down with him. We slipped and fell backward in the middle of the room, and the registry employees gaped at us from behind the bars of their counter.

  I got up first and headed for the counter, clearing my throat. Koromindé collapsed onto a bench in the back of the room.

  There were three of them: two women in blouses, fifties, harsh, nervous, bobbed slate-colored hair, who looked like twins; and a tall man with a thick waxed mustache.

  “Can I help you?” one of the women said.

  Her tone was at once intimidated and threatening.

  “I’m here for a birth registration.”

  “You sure took your time,” the other woman said, without warmth.

  The man squinted at me. Our sudden appearance had made a rather poor impression.

  “Tell them we very truthfully regret this delay,” Koromindé whispered from the back of the room.

  You could tell from that “very truthfully” that French was not his native tongue. He limped up to me. One of the women slid a sheet of paper toward us under the bars of her window and said in a perfidious voice:

  “Fill out the form.”

  I patted my pockets in search of a pen, then turned toward Koromindé. He handed me a pencil.

  “No pencil,” hissed the fellow in the mustache.

  The three of them stood behind the bars, watching us in silence.

  “You wouldn’t have a pen . . . by any chance?” I asked.

  Mr. Mustache looked stupefied. The twin sisters folded their arms over their chests.

  “Please, sir, a pen,” Koromindé repeated in a plaintive voice.

  The man with the mustache pushed a green ballpoint through the bars. Koromindé thanked him. The twins kept their arms folded in disapproval.

  Koromindé handed me the ballpoint and I began filling out the form, using the information in the Family Record Book to guide me. I wanted my daughter to be named Zénaïde, perhaps in memory of Zénaïde Rachevski, a stunning woman who had captivated me as a child. Koromindé was looking over my shoulder to oversee what I was writing.

  When I had finished, Koromindé took the sheet and read it, knitting his brow. Then he handed it to one of the twins.

  “This isn’t on the list of French names,” she said, stabbing her finger on “Zénaïde,” which I had spelled out in huge capitals.

  “And what of it, madam?” asked Koromindé, in an altered voice.

  “You cannot give a child this name.”

  The other twin had bent her head near her sister’s and their foreheads met. I was crushed.

  “So what can we do?” asked Koromindé.

  She picked up the phone and dialed a two-digit number.

  She asked if the first name “Zénaïde” was “on the list.” The answer was: NO.

  “You cannot give a child this name.”

  I swayed on my feet, my throat tightening.

  The man with the mustache approached in turn and picked up the form.

  “But of course we can, miss,” Koromindé whispered, as if giving away a secret. “We can give the child this name.”

  And he raised his hand, very slowly, like a benedic
tion.

  “It was his godmother’s name.”

  The man with the mustache bent forward and leaned his ramlike forehead against the bars.

  “In that case, gentlemen, it is a special situation, and an entirely different matter.”

  He had an unctuous voice that did not at all match his bearing.

  “Certain names are handed down in families, and however peculiar they might be, we have no quarrel with them. None whatsoever.”

  He molded his sentences and every word that emerged from his mouth was coated in Vaseline.

  “Let us go with Zénaïde!”

  “Thank you, sir, thank you!”

  He made a sign of exasperation in the direction of the twin sisters and executed a pirouette before disappearing, like a dancer. We heard someone typing in the rear office. Koromindé and I weren’t quite sure whether we should wait. The two twins sorted through a stack of papers, talking in very low murmurs.

  “A lot of births today, ladies? Business good?” Koromindé asked, as if trying to ingratiate himself.

  No reply. I lit a cigarette, offered the pack to Koromindé, then to the two women.

  “Would you like a cigarette?”

  But they pretended not to hear me.

  Finally, the man with the mustache stuck his head through the opening of a side door and said:

  “This way, please.”

  We found ourselves on the other side of the barred windows, where the two sisters and the man with the mustache officiated. The latter signaled for us to go into the rear office. The twins kept churning mechanically through their stacks of paperwork.

  A small corner office, its two windows looking out onto the street. Empty walls, the color of a Havana cigar. A dark wooden desk with many drawers, on top of which lay an open register.

  “Gentlemen, if you would please read and sign.”

  The text, typed without a single error, specified that a child of female sex, named Zénaïde, was born at nine o’clock on the evening of October 22 of that year . . . A dozen lines for which an entire page of the register had been reserved. And the same information on the following page.