Free Suspended Sentences by Patrick Modiano Page B

all together in the room that served as dining room, which was separated from the living room by the entrance hall. Snow White was sitting at the end of the table, my brother to her right, and I to her left. Annie was next to me, Little Hélène opposite, and Mathilde at the other end of the table. One evening, because the electricity was out, the room was lit by an oil lamp set on the mantelpiece, which left areas of shadow around us.
    The others called her Snow White, like us, and sometimes “my lamb.” They used the familiar tu with her. And soon a certain intimacy grew among them, since Snow White also addressed them familiarly.
    I suppose they had rented the house. Unless Little Hélène owned it, as the village merchants seemed to know her. Or maybe the house belonged to Frede. I remember that Frede received a lot of mail at Rue du Docteur-Dordaine. I was the one who fetched the letters from the box, every morning before school.

Almost every day, Annie went to Paris in her tan Peugeot 4CV. She would come home very late, and sometimes she stayed out until the next day. Often Little Hélène went with her. Mathilde never left the house, except to do the shopping. She’d buy a magazine called Noir et Blanc , old copies of which lay around the dining room. I’d leaf through them on Thursday afternoons, when it was raining and we were listening to a children’s program on the radio. Mathilde ripped Noir et Blanc out of my hands.
    “That’s not for you, blissful idiot! You’re not old enough …”
    Snow White waited for me when class got out, with my brother, who was still too little to start school. Annie had enrolled me in the Jeanne d’Arc school, at the very end of Rue du Docteur-Dordaine. The principal had asked if she was my mother and she’d said yes.
    We were both sitting outside the principal’s office. Annie was wearing her old leather jacket and a pair of faded blue denim pants that a friend of hers who sometimes came to the house—Zina Rachevsky—had brought her back from America: blue jeans. You didn’t see them very often in France at the time. The principal looked at us suspiciously:
    “Your son will have to wear a gray smock in class,” she said. “Like all his other little schoolmates.”
    On the way back, all along Rue du Docteur-Dordaine, Annie walked next to me with her hand on my shoulder.
    “I told her I was your mother because it was too complicated to explain the situation. That okay with you, Patoche?”
    As for me, I was wondering about that gray smock I’d have to wear, like all my other little schoolmates.
    I didn’t remain a pupil at the Jeanne d’Arc school for long. The schoolyard was black because it was paved with coal slag. And that black went perfectly with the bark and leaves of the plane trees.
    One morning, during recess, the principal came up to me and said:
    “I wish to see your mother. Tell her to come this afternoon, as soon as class resumes.”
    As always, she spoke to me in cutting tones. She didn’t like me. What had I ever done to her?
    When I left school at lunchtime, Snow White and my brother were waiting.
    “ You’re making a face,” said Snow White. “Something the matter?”
    I asked if Annie was home. My one fear was that she hadn’t come back from Paris the night before.
    As luck would have it, she had come home, but very late. She was still asleep in her room at the end of the hall, the one whose windows opened onto the garden.
    “Go wake her up,” said Little Hélène, after I’d related that the school principal wanted to see my mother.
    I knocked on the door to her room. She didn’t answer. The mysterious sentence we’d heard from Frede’s nephew crossed my mind: “Annie cried all night long at Carroll’s.” Yes, she was still asleep at noon because she’d spent all night crying at Carroll’s.
    I turned the knob and pushed the door open, slowly. It was light in the room. Annie hadn’t drawn the curtains. She was stretched out on