Dora Bruder by Patrick Modiano Page A

I forget if there is
open ground. You pass the entrance to the old Picpus métro
station. Did she ever emerge from there? In comparison with
the Avenue de Saint-Mandé, the Avenue de Picpus, on the
right, is cold and desolate. Treeless, I seem to remember. But
the solitude of returning, on those Sunday evenings.
    Â 
    The Boulevard Mortier is a hill. It slopes southward. On my
way there, that Sunday of 28 April 1996, I took the following
route: Rue des Archives, Rue de Bretagne, Rue des
Filles-du-Calvaire. Then the hill of the Rue Oberkampf, where Hena
had lived.
    To the right, the Rue des Pyrénées, offering a vista of trees.
Rue de Ménilmontant. The apartment blocks at number 140
lay deserted in the glare of the sun. For the last part of the Rue
Saint-Fargeau, I seemed to be traversing an abandoned village.
    Plane trees line the Boulevard Mortier. At the top, just
before you reach the Porte des Lilas, the old Tourelles barracks
are still there.
    On that particular Sunday, the boulevard was empty, lost
in a silence so deep that I could hear the rustling of the plane
trees. The buildings of the former barracks are hidden behind
a high perimeter wall. I followed it. Affixed to it was a sign
that read:
MILITARY ZONE
    FILMING OR PHOTOGRAPHY PROHIBITED
    I told myself that nobody remembers anything anymore.
Behind the wall there lay a no-man’s-land, a zone of emptiness
and oblivion. Unlike the boarding school in the Rue de
Picpus, the twin blocks of Tourelles barracks had not been pulled
down, but they might as well have been.
    And yet, from time to time, beneath this thick layer of
amnesia, you can certainly sense something, an echo, distant,
muted, but of what, precisely, it is impossible to say. Like
finding yourself on the edge of a magnetic field, with no
pendulum to pick up the radiation. Out of suspicion and a guilty
conscience they had put up the sign, “Military zone. Filming
or photography forbidden.”

.................
    I N A DIFFERENT PART OF PARIS, WHEN I WAS TWENTY, I remember having the same sensation of emptiness as I had
had when confronted by the Tourelles wall, without knowing
the reason why.
    I had a girlfriend who lived in various borrowed flats and
country houses. I regularly took advantage of this to relieve
their libraries of art books and numbered editions, which I
then sold. One day, when we were by ourselves in a flat on the
Rue du Regard, I stole an antique music box and also, after
rifling the closets, several very smart suits, a few shirts, and
about ten pairs of handmade shoes. I searched the yellow
pages for a secondhand dealer to whom I could resell these
items and found one in the Rue des Jardins-Saint-Paul.
    This street leads up from the Quai des Célestins on the
Seine and intersects the Rue de Charlemagne near the school
where, the year before, I had gone through the ordeal of my baccalauréat. One of the last buildings on the right just before
the Rue de Charlemagne had a rusting iron curtain at street
level, half raised. I pushed my way into a junkshop piled high
with furniture, clothes, ironwork, automobile parts. The
forty-year-old man who greeted me was most obliging,
offering to come and collect the “goods” in a few days’ time.
    Having taken my leave of him, I walked down the Rue des
Jardins-Saint-Paul toward the Seine. All the buildings on the
lefthand side of the street had been pulled down not long
before. As had the other buildings behind them. In their place,
nothing but a wasteland, itself surrounded by half-demolished
walls. On these walls, open to the sky, you could still make
out the patterned paper of what was once a bedroom, the trace
of a chimney. You would have said that the district had been
hit by a bomb, and the vista of the Seine at the bottom of the
street only increased the impression of emptiness.
    On the following Sunday, by appointment, the secondhand
dealer came to my girlfriend’s father’s place on the