Читать книгу Dora Bruder - Patrick Modiano - Страница 9

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FROM DAY TO DAY. WITH THE PASSAGE OF TIME, I FIND, perspectives become blurred, one winter merging into another. That of 1965 and that of 1942.

In 1965,1 knew nothing of Dora Bruder. But now, thirty years on, it seems to me that those long waits in the cafés at the Ornano crossroads, those unvarying itineraries—the Rue du Mont-Cenis took me back to some hotel on the Butte Montmartre: the Roma or the Alsina or the Terrass, Rue Caulaincourt—and the fleeting impressions I have retained: snatches of conversation heard on a spring evening, beneath the trees in the Square Clignancourt, and again, in winter, on the way down to Simplon and the Boulevard Ornano, all that was not simply due to chance. Perhaps, though not yet fully aware of it, I was following the traces of Dora Bruder and her parents. Already, below the surface, they were there.

I’m trying to search for clues, going far, far back in time. When I was about twelve, on those visits to the Clignancourt flea markets with my mother, on the right, at the top of one of those aisles bordered by stalls, the Marché Malik, or the Vernaison, there was a young Polish Jew who sold suitcases . . . Luxury suitcases, in leather or crocodile skin, cardboard suitcases, traveling bags, cabin trunks labeled with the names of transatlantic companies—all heaped one on top of the other. His was an open-air stall. He was never without a cigarette dangling from the corner of his lips and, one afternoon, he had offered me one.

Occasionally, I would go to one of the cinemas on the Boulevard Ornano. To the Clignancourt Palace at the top of the boulevard, next to the Verse Toujours. Or to the Ornano 43.

Later, I discovered that the Ornano 43 was a very old cinema. It had been rebuilt in the thirties, giving it the air of an ocean liner. I returned to the area in May 1996. A shop had replaced the cinema. You cross the Rue Hermel and find yourself outside 41 Boulevard Ornano, the address given in the notice about the search for Dora Bruder.

A five-story building, late nineteenth century. Together with number 39, it forms a single block, enclosed by the boulevard, the top of the Rue Hermel, and the Rue Simplon, which runs along the back of both buildings. These are matching. A plaque on number 39 gives the name of the architect, a man named Pierrefeu, and the date of construction: 1881. The same must be true of number 41.

Before the war, and up to the beginning of the fifties, number 41 had been a hotel, as had number 39, calling itself the Hôtel Lion d’Or. Number 39 also had a café-restaurant before the war, owned by a man named Gazal. I haven’t found out the name of the hotel at number 41. Listed under this address, in the early fifties, is the Société Ornano and Studios Ornano: Montmartre 12–54. Also, both then and before the war, a café with a proprietor by the name of Marchal. This café no longer exists. Would it have been to the right or the left of the porte cochère?

This opens onto a longish corridor. At the far end, a staircase leads off to the right.