Free Suspended Sentences by Patrick Modiano

coating that remains so vivid in my memory? Rue du Docteur-Dordaine looked like a village street, especially at the far end: a nuns’ convent, then a farm where we went to get milk, and beyond that, the chateau. If you walked down the street on the right-hand sidewalk, you went past the post office; across the street, on the left, you could make out behind a fence the nursery of the florist whose son sat next to me in class. A little farther on, on the same side as the post office,the wall of the Jeanne d’Arc school, tucked away behind the leaves of the plane trees.
    Opposite our house was a gently sloping avenue. It was bordered on the right by the Protestant temple and by a small wooded area, in the thickets of which we’d found a German soldier’s helmet; on the left, by a long, white house with pediments, which had a large garden and a weeping willow. Farther down, adjacent to the garden, was the Robin des Bois inn.
    At the bottom of the avenue, and perpendicular to it, was the main road. Toward the right, the perpetually deserted square in front of the train station, where we learned how to ride bikes. In the other direction, you skirted the town park. On the left-hand sidewalk was a kind of concrete mall that housed, all in a row, the news dealer’s, the movie theater, and the drugstore. The druggist’s son was one of my schoolmates and, one night, his father hanged himself from a rope that he’d attached to the mall balcony. It seems people hang themselves in summer. In the other seasons, they prefer drowning in rivers. That’s what the mayor had told the news dealer.
    After that, an empty lot where they held the market every Friday. Sometimes the big top of a traveling circus set up there, or the stalls of a fairground.
    You then came to the town hall and the grade crossing. After passing over the latter, you followed the high road that went up to the church square and the monument to the dead. For one Christmas Mass, my brother and I had been choirboys in that church.

There were only women in the house where the two of us lived.
    Little Hélène was a brunette of about forty, with a wide forehead and prominent cheekbones. Her very short stature made her seem more like us. She had a slight limp from an accident on the job. She had been a circus rider, then an acrobat, and that gave her a certain cachet in our eyes. The circus—as my brother and I had discovered one afternoon at the Médrano—was a world we wanted to join. She told us she’d stopped plying her trade a long time ago and she showed us a photo album with pictures of her in her rider’s and acrobat’s costumes, and pages from music hall programs that mentioned her name: Hélène Toch. I often asked her to lend me the album so I could look through it in bed, before going to sleep.
    They formed a curious trio: she, Annie, and Annie’s mother, Mathilde F. Annie had short blond hair, a straight nose, a soft, delicate face, and light-colored eyes. But there was a toughness about her that clashed with the softness of her face, perhaps due to the old brown leather jacket—a man’s jacket—that she wore over very tight black trousers during the day. In the evening, she often wore a light blue dress cinched at the waist by a wide black belt, and I liked her better that way.
    Annie’s mother didn’t look anything like her. Was she really her mother? Annie called her Mathilde. Gray hair in a bun. A hard face. Always dressed in dark clothes. I was scared of her. To me she looked old, and yet she really wasn’t: Annie was twenty-six at the time and her mother about fifty. I remember the cameos she pinned to her blouse. She had a southern accent that I later heard in natives of Nîmes.Annie didn’t sound like that herself; like my brother and me, she had a Paris accent.
    Whenever Mathilde talked to me, she called me “blissful idiot.” One morning as I was coming down from my room for breakfast, she’d said as usual:
    “Good morning, blissful