Dora Bruder by Patrick Modiano Page B

Boulevard
Kellermann, near the Porte de Gentilly, where I was to hand
over the “goods.” He loaded music box, suits, shirts, and shoes
on to his van, giving me seven hundred old francs for the lot.
    He suggested going for a drink. We stopped at one of two
cafés opposite Charlety stadium.
    He asked me what I did for a living. I didn’t quite know
what to say. In the end, I told him that I had dropped out of
school. I questioned him in return. The junkshop in the Rue
de Jardins-Saint-Paul belonged to his cousin, who was also his
business partner. He himself had another, near the flea
market at the Porte de Clignancourt. It turned out that he came
from a local family of Polish Jews.
    I was the one who brought up the subject of the war and
the Occupation. He was eighteen at the time. He remembered
that, one Saturday, the police had made a swoop on the
Saint-Ouen flea market to round up the Jews, and he had escaped
by a miracle. What had shocked him most was that one of the
police inspectors had been a woman.
    I told him about the wasteland stretching to the foot of the
apartment blocks on the Boulevard Ney that I had noticed on
the Saturdays when my mother took me to the flea markets.
That was the place where he and his family had lived. Rue
Élisabeth-Rolland. He was surprised that I should make a
note of its name. A district known as the Plain. Completely
demolished after the war, it was now a playing field.
    Talking to him, I thought of my father, whom I hadn’t seen
for a long time. When he was nineteen, my age, before he lost
himself in dreams of high finance, my father had lived by
wheeling and dealing at the gates of Paris: he smuggled drums
of gasoline for resale to garage owners, liquor, and various
other goods. All without paying excise tax.
    As we parted, he said in a friendly way that if I had any more
items for him, I could contact him at the Rue des
Jardins-Saint-Paul. And he gave me an extra hundred francs, no
doubt touched by my air of being a guileless, likeable young
chap.
    I’ve forgotten his face. I remember nothing about him,
apart from his name. He could easily have met Dora Bruder,
around the Porte de Clignancourt, around the Plain. They
were the same age and lived in the same neighborhood.
Perhaps he knew the full story of the times she spent on the
run  .  .  .  The fact is, there are flukes, encounters, coincidences,
and we shall never take advantage of them  .  .  .  I was thinking
of that, this autumn, when I went back to explore the area
around the Rue des Jardins-Saint-Paul. The junkshop with its
iron curtain was no more, and the buildings nearby had been
restored. Once again, I had a sense of emptiness. And I
understood why. After the war, most buildings in the area had
been pulled down, methodically, in accordance with a
government plan. Due for demolition, this zone had even been
allotted a name and number: Block 16. I have found some
photographs. One shows the Rue des Jardins-Saint-Paul with
the houses on the lefthand side still standing. Another, the
half-demolished buildings beside Saint-Gervais church and
around the Hôtel de Sens. Another, a wasteland along the
banks of the Seine, with people crossing it between two now
useless sidewalks: all that remains of the Rue des
Nonnains-d’Hyères. And here, on this wasteland, they have put up row
upon row of houses, altering the course of an old street in the
process.
    The facades are rectangular, the windows square, the
concrete the color of amnesia. The street lamps throw out a cold
light. Here and there, a decorative touch, some artificial
flowers: a bench, a square, some trees. They have not been
content with putting up a sign like that on the wall of Tourelles
barracks: “No filming or photography.” They have obliterated
everything in order to build a sort of Swiss village in order
that nobody, ever again, would question its neutrality.
    The patches of