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  “The duplicate.”

  This time, he handed me a huge fountain pen with a gold cap.

  “Have you read it over? No mistakes?” he asked.

  “None,” I answered.

  “None,” Koromindé echoed.

  I took the pen and slowly, in a large, jagged hand, at the bottom of the two pages, I wrote my first and last names.

  Then it was Koromindé’s turn. He removed his tinted glasses. A bandage held his right eyelid open, making him look like a lost boxer. He signed, his handwriting even shakier than mine: Jean Koromindé.

  “Are you a friend of the family?” asked the man with the mustache.

  “A friend of the grandfather’s.”

  One day, in twenty years’ time, if she was curious enough to look up this registration—but why would she?—Zénaïde, seeing this signature, would wonder who this Jean Koromindé could have been.

  “There, all’s well that ends well,” the man with the mustache said kindly.

  He looked at me with eyes that were gentle, almost paternal, and that even seemed slightly teary. He held out a timid hand and we each shook it in turn. And I then understood why he wore that mustache. Without it, his features would have collapsed and he would surely have lost the authority required of a civil functionary.

  He opened a door.

  “You can exit by this stairway,” he said in a conspiratorial voice, as if he were showing us a secret passage. “Good-bye, gentlemen. And best of luck. Best of luck . . .”

  On the town hall’s front steps, we felt funny. There—we had seen to an important formality, and it had gone smoothly. Night was falling. We had to get the Régence running again. We found a mechanic who determined that the car needed a serious repair. Koromindé would come pick it up the next day. We decided to head back to Paris on foot.

  We took Avenue du Roule. Koromindé, no longer dragging his leg behind him, walked with a lively step. I couldn’t help thinking about the large register book open on the desk. So that’s what a civil status register looked like. We must have been thinking the same thing, as Koromindé said:

  “Did you see that? It’s a funny thing, a civil status register, don’t you think?”

  And what about him? Had he been registered at some hall of records? What was his original nationality? Belgian? German? Baltic? Russian, probably. And my father, before he called himself “Jaspaard” and appended “de Jonghe” to his name? And my mother? And all the others? And myself? Somewhere there must have existed registers with yellowed pages, where our names and dates of birth, and the names of our parents, were written in India ink, in an ornate hand. But where could these registers be found?

  Koromindé was whistling next to me. His coat pocket was distended by the magazine he had been reading in the car, whose title I could see in red letters: a popular electronics periodical. Once more, I was tempted to ask him what my father and mother had been doing in Megève in February 1944. But did he even know? After thirty years, memories . . . We had reached the end of Avenue du Roule. It was dark and the dead leaves, coated in mud by the rain, stuck to our heels. Now and again, Koromindé scraped the soles of his shoes on the curb. I watched for passing cars, looking for a free taxi. But no, all in all, might as well keep walking.

  We entered Avenue de la Porte-des-Ternes, in that neighborhood they had disemboweled to build the Périphérique. A no-man’s-land between Maillot and Champerret, devastated, unrecognizable, as if after a bombardment.

  “One time I came here with your father,” Koromindé said.

  “Is that so?”

  Yes, my father had driven with him around here. He was looking for a garage mechanic who could get a replacement part for his Ford. He didn’t remember the exact address, and for some time he and Koromindé had crisscrossed the neighborhood, which was now completely demolished. Streets lined with trees whose branches formed a vault. On each side, garages and sheds that looked abandoned. And the sweetish odor of gasoline. Finally, they had stopped in front of an establishment, a supplier of “American parts.” Avenue de la Porte-de-Villiers looked like a strip mall in a tiny southwestern town, with its four rows of plane trees. They had sat on a bench and waited for the mechanic to finish the repairs. A German shepherd was stretched out on the sidewalk, asleep. Children chased one another around the middle of the empty avenue, amid dapples of sunlight. It was a Saturday afternoon in August, right after the war. They kept silent. Apparently my father was in a melancholy mood. As for Koromindé, he understood that the time of their youth had ended.

  We arrived at Avenue des Ternes and Koromindé started limping again. I took his arm. The streetlamps turned on along Boulevard Gouvion-Saint-Cyr. It was the hour of long lines of cars, jostling crowds, but none of that penetrated the nursery. I again saw the branch calmly swaying against the window.

  We had just participated in the beginning of something. That little girl would in some way be our delegate to the future. And on her very first try, she had obtained the mysterious possession that had always eluded us: a civil status.

  II

  At what point in my life did I meet Henri Marignan? Oh, I couldn’t have been twenty at the time. I think of him often. Sometimes he seems to have been one of my father’s multiple incarnations. I don’t know what became of him. Our first meeting? It occurred at the back of a narrow, coral-red bar on Boulevard des Capucines, the Hole in the Wall. We were the last patrons. Marignan, sitting at a table next to mine, ordered a “rice whiskey,” and after taking a sip he said to the bartender:

  “It doesn’t taste like it did in China.”

  So I asked him point-blank:

  “Do you know China?”

  We chatted until four in the morning. About China, naturally, where Marignan had lived for a while before the war. He could still sketch a detailed map of Shanghai on a napkin, and that evening he did one for me. I wanted to know what chances a Westerner had, these days, of entering that enigmatic country and exploring it freely. He hesitated slightly, then pronounced in a solemn voice:

  “I believe it’s possible.”

  He stared at me steadily.

  “Would you like to try it with me?”

  “Of course,” I said.

  From that moment on, we saw each other daily.

  Marignan was over sixty, but looked twenty years younger. Tall, with square shoulders, he wore his hair in a brush-cut. There was no trace of puffiness in his face. The smooth line of his eyebrows, nose, and chin impressed me. Sometimes an expression of helplessness shot through his blue eyes. He always wore double-breasted suits and evidently had a predilection for shoes with very elastic crepe soles that gave him a supple gait.

  After a while, I learned who I was dealing with. The information didn’t come from him, since he spoke of his past only when asked a direct question.

  At twenty-six, he had been sent to Shanghai by a news agency. He started a daily paper that was published in two editions, French and Chinese. He was sought after as an adviser to the Ministry of Communications under Chiang Kai-shek, and there were rumors that Madame Chiang had succumbed to the charms of Henri Marignan. He had remained in China for seven years.

  Back in France, he had published a memoir, Lost Shanghai, of which I can recite entire pages by heart. In it, he depicts the China of the thirties, with its proliferation of real and fake generals, its bankers, its funeral processions that roam the streets while playing “Viens Poupoule,” its thirteen-year-old chanteuses with their shrill voices and pink stockings embroidered with huge yellow butterflies, its stink of opium and rot, and the humid night air that coats shoes and clothing in fungus. The book renders a vibrant and nostalgic homage to Shanghai, the city of his youth. In the years that followed, spurred on by his love of intrigue, he frequented both the Communist International Brigades and the fascist Cagoule. From 1940 to 1945, he undertook mysterious “missions” between Paris, Vichy, and Lisbon. He dropped out of sight, officially speaking, in Berlin, in April 1945. That was Henri Ma
rignan.

  I would go see him on Avenue de New York, at number 52, I think, one of the last buildings before the Trocadéro gardens. The apartment belonged to a certain Geneviève Catelain, a refined, vaporous blonde, whose eyes gave off glints of emerald. Sitting with him on the living room sofa, she would say to him when I entered:

  “Here’s Monsieur Modiano, your accomplice.”

  More than once, he arranged to see me on Avenue de New York at around 10 p.m., and each time, there were others in the living room, as if for a celebration or cocktail party. Geneviève Catelain flitted from group to group; Marignan kept to himself. As soon as he saw me, he came forward, stiff-chested and with a bounding step.

  “Let’s go get some air,” he would say.

  We wandered aimlessly through Paris. One evening, he showed me the Chinese quarter around the Gare de Lyon, near Avenue Daumesnil. The Arabs had supplanted the Chinese, but there still remained, in Passage Gatbois, a hotel with a sign saying Red Dragon. A “Chinese” restaurant occupied the ground floor. We went upstairs. A large room with walls covered in quilted burgundy velvet, some of it in tatters. A single bulb lit the three dirty windows and gray parquet floor. Some slats were missing. In a corner were piled-up chairs, a trunk, and an old sideboard. The place served as a junk room.

  “It’s falling apart,” Marignan sighed.

  He explained that during the Occupation, it was the only opium den in Paris. He had gone there one evening with the actress Luisa Ferida.

  Sometimes we would make a detour to the Pagode on Rue de Babylone, or stop in front of that large Chinese house on Rue de Courcelles, on which a plaque stated that it had been built in 1928 by a certain Fernand Bloch. We wandered through the galleries of the Guimet and Cernuschi museums and went for walks in Boulogne, in the Asian gardens of Albert Kahn. Marignan was lost in thought.

  I walked him back to Avenue de New York and tried to find out what bound him to the enigmatic Geneviève Catelain.

  “A very, very old romance,” he confided one evening. “From back when I still officially existed and wasn’t the ghost I am today. You know I died in ’45, right?”

  How had he managed to survive and not be recognized? He said that people’s looks change after age forty, and that he had earned a little money writing children’s stories under the pseudonym Uncle Ronnie. He wrote them in English, and “Uncle Ronnie’s Stories” sold in Great Britain and even the United States. He also did a little art dealing on the side.

  But the plan of leaving for China preoccupied him. In the middle of the street, he would suddenly ask:

  “Do you think you’ll be able to stand the climate?”

  Or:

  “Are you prepared to spend a year there?”

  Or:

  “Have you been vaccinated for diphtheria, Patrick?”

  Finally, he let me in on his plan. For the past several years, he had been clipping newspaper and magazine photos of Premier Chou En-lai and his entourage, taken at diplomatic banquets or welcoming ceremonies for foreign dignitaries. He had repeatedly watched the newsreels from when the American president visited China. Standing to the left of Chou En-lai, so close that their shoulders touched, was always the same smiling man. And that man was someone Marignan was certain he had known back in Shanghai.

  His words came faster and faster, and he looked totally absorbed, as if trying to recapture the contours of a lost world. On Avenue Joffre, in the French Concession, there’s a restaurant called Kachenko. Tables covered with sky-blue tablecloths, each holding a small lamp with a green shade. The French consul often goes there. And also Kenneth Cummings, the richest stockbroker in Shanghai. You walk down a few steps to the dance floor. During dinner, the band plays soft music. The musicians are all European, except for the pianist, who’s Chinese and doesn’t look more than eighteen. It was that pianist—Marignan would have staked his life on it—that we now saw next to Chou En-lai. Back then, he went by the name of Roger Fu-seng. He spoke fluent French because he’d been schooled by Jesuits. Marignan considered him his best friend. Roger Fu worked for the newspaper and wrote articles in Chinese, or else served as translator. He played in the band at the Kachenko until midnight, and Marignan would go see him every evening. Fu was twenty-five and a stunning boy. He liked to hang out. Nights at the Casanova on Avenue Edward VII and at the Ritz on Rue Chu-Pao-San, among the Chinese taxi girls and the White Russians from Harbin . . . Roger Fu-seng always ended up sitting at the piano and plunking out a tune by Cole Porter. For Marignan, Fu was the Shanghai of that time.

  He had to get back in touch with him, come what may, now that he had become a familiar of Chou En-lai. Marignan had been thinking about it for years, but each time, the difficulty of the enterprise had made him give up. He was glad to have met a “youngster” like me who could spur him on. And indeed, I’m used to listening to people, to sharing their dreams and encouraging them in their grand plans.

  Several weeks passed and Marignan kept making phone calls in the cafés where we would meet. He never said anything to me, and when I dared ask, he invariably answered:

  “We’ll find the ‘angle.’”

  One afternoon, he asked me to come see him on Avenue de New York. He opened the door to the apartment and pulled me into the living room. We found ourselves alone in the middle of that vast white room whose four French windows looked out on the Seine. There were more vases of flowers than usual. Bouquets of orchids, roses, and irises, and in back, a small orange tree.

  He offered me one of the gold-tipped cigarettes that Geneviève Catelain smoked and laid out the situation. As he saw it, there was only one path to reestablishing contact with Roger Fu-seng: the embassy of the People’s Republic of China in Paris. He just had to meet a member of the embassy—however minor—and confide in him candidly. Marignan felt that his relatively good command of the Chinese language would work in our favor. Now, it was very difficult to gain access to the diplomatic personnel on Avenue George-V. Surely there were ties between France and China, trade associations, some sort of Franco-Chinese exchange group. But how did one penetrate such circles? And so, he had thought of George Wo-heu, a subtle, slinky young man who had worked at the Shanghai Commerce and Savings Bank when they were young and obtained funds for him from various backers with which to start his newspaper. Wo-heu had settled in Paris some thirty years ago and was now a diamond merchant.

  We waited for him to arrive.

  He glided toward us, rolling on invisible skates. Marignan introduced us and Wo-heu favored me with a smile that split his face up to his temples. Though short and plump, he seemed quite supple. He had a moonlike countenance and brushed-back silver hair. His dark gray pinstripe suit was perfectly tailored. He sat on the sofa, rubbing together hands with varnished nails.

  “So, Toto?” he shot at Marignan.

  The latter cleared his throat.

  “What’s new, Toto?” His voice was melodious.

  Without further ado, Marignan told him we were planning a trip to China and that we had to make contact as soon as possible with the embassy of the People’s Republic of China. Would he have an “in”?

  He burst out in a laugh that split his face almost to the forehead.

  “And that’s why you asked me here?”

  He pulled a cigarette from a leather case, which he closed with a nervous motion. He settled back into the sofa. There before us, smooth and chubby, he looked like he’d just stepped out of a scented bath. Moreover, he smelled of Penhaligon’s.

  He suddenly became serious. He knit his brow.

  “Well, actually, yes, I do know people at the Chinese embassy, Toto. Only . . . only . . .” And he suspended his sentence, as if to keep us waiting. “Only, it’s going to be very difficult to talk to them about you . . .”

  I was surprised Marignan didn’t bring up Roger Fu-seng, but he must have had his reasons.

  “I’d only need to see some kind of undersecretary,” Marignan said.

  Wo-heu didn’t inhale and p
ushed the smoke out in a single breath. Each time, a compact cloud masked his face.

  “Naturally,” he said. “Only, the People’s Republic of China bears no relation to the China we used to know. You understand, my dear Toto?”

  “Yes . . .” said Marignan.

  “I have connections with a commercial attaché,” Wo-heu said, looking toward the windows and the rear of the room, as if tracing the path of a butterfly. “But why do you want to go back there?”

  Marignan didn’t answer.

  “You won’t recognize any of it, dear Toto.”

  Shadows slowly invaded the room. Marignan didn’t turn on the lights. The two of them had fallen silent. George Wo-heu closed his eyes. Marignan had a wrinkle that cut across his right cheek. The sound of a door opening and closing. A pastel silhouette. Geneviève Catelain.

  “Why are you in the dark?” she asked.

  Wo-heu leapt up and kissed her hand.

  “George Wo. What a lovely surprise . . .”

  We walked Wo to a taxi stand on Avenue d’Iéna.

  “I’ll call you,” he said to us. “Be patient. Be very patient.”

  Marignan and I felt as if we had taken a crucial step forward.

  We waited for George Wo-heu’s phone calls on Avenue de New York, in Marignan’s room. You reached it by climbing a small stairway that angled off from the apartment’s vestibule. On the nightstand was a photo of Geneviève Catelain at twenty, face smooth and eyes brighter than usual. She was wearing an aviator’s helmet from which escaped one lock of blond hair. Marignan told me she used to break world records in “ridiculous old rattletraps.” I was in love with her.

  George Wo-heu called in the evenings, anywhere from seven to ten. To allay our anxiety and impatience, Marignan dictated his notes to me, while consulting an old Shanghai phone book.

  C. T. WANG, 90 Rue Amiral-Courbet, 09-12-14

  BETH-EL JEWISH SYNAGOGUE, 24 Foochow Road

  D. HARDIVILLIERS, 2 Bubbling Well Road, 07-09-01

  VENUS, 3 Szechuen Road, 10-41-62