Free Pedigree by Patrick Modiano Page B

judging from an old diary, my mother and I didn’t have a cent. She forced me to go ring at my father’s door and demand some money. I climbed the stairs with a leaden heart. I’d intended not to ring, but my mother was glaring up at me from the landing, eyes and chin tragic, foaming at the mouth. I rang. He slammed the door in my face. I rang again. The ersatz Mylène Demongeot screamed that she was going to call the police. I went back down to the third floor. The police came for me. My father was with them. They made both of us climb into the Black Maria parked in front of the building, under the dumbfounded eyes of the concierge. We sat on the bench, side by side. He didn’t say a word to me. This was the first time in my life I found myself in a police van, and as it happened, it was with my father. He had already been through this before, in February1942 and in the winter of 1943, when he’d been picked up by the French inspectors of the Jewish Affairs police.
    The Black Maria followed Rue des Saints-Pères, then Boulevard Saint-Germain. It stopped at a red light in front of the Deux Magots. We arrived at the police station on Rue de l’Abbaye. My father pressed charges with the superintendent. He called me a “hooligan” and said I’d come up to his place to “make trouble.” The superintendent declared that the “next time” he’d keep me there. I could tell my father would have been perfectly content to leave me at that police station once and for all. We returned together to the Quai de Conti. I asked why he’d let the ersatz Mylène Demongeot call the police and why he’d pressed charges. He said nothing.
    That same year, 1965—or perhaps 1964—my father demolished the inner staircase connecting the two floors, and the apartments were separated for good. When I opened the door and stood in the small room filled with rubble, I found some of our childhood books, along withpostcards addressed to my brother that had remained on the fourth floor, there among the debris, torn in pieces. May and June. Still in Montmartre. It was nice out. I was at a café on Rue des Abbesses, in the springtime.
    July. Night train, standing in the corridor. Vienna. I spend a few nights in a seedy hotel near the Westbahnhof. Then I hole up in a room behind the Karlskirche. I meet all sorts of people at the Café Hawelka. One evening, I celebrate my twentieth birthday with them.
    We sunbathed in the gardens of Potzleinsdorf, and also in a little shack in a working-class allotment near Heiligenstadt. The Café Rabe, a gloomy beer hall near the Graben, was always empty and you could listen to songs by Piaf. And still that slight giddiness mixed with lethargy, in the summer streets, as if after a sleepless night.
    Sometimes we went up to the Czech and Hungarian borders. A large field. Watchtowers. If you walked in the field, they would fire at you.
    I left Vienna at the beginning of September.
Sag’ beim Abschied leise “Servus,”
as the song goes.A passage by our Joseph Roth calls to mind the city I haven’t seen in forty years. Will I ever see it again? “You had to grab these shy, fleeting evenings before they disappeared, and what I liked best was to catch them in the parks, the Volksgarten or the Prater, and then to savor the last sweetest lingering of them in a café, where they seeped in, gentle and mild, like a fragrance …”
    Night train in second class, at the Westbahnhof, Vienna to Geneva. I arrived in Geneva at the end of the afternoon. I caught the bus for Annecy. In Annecy, night had fallen. It was pouring. I was broke. I went into the Hôtel d’Angleterre on Rue Royale, with no idea how I’d pay for a room. I no longer recognized Annecy, which that evening was a ghost town in the rain. They had demolished the old hotel and derelict buildings near the station. The next day, I ran across some friends. Many had