Paris Nocturne by Patrick Modiano

stayed about ten metres behind me and then gradually it came closer. By the time we reachedthe railings of the Galliera Gardens, we were walking side by side. I don’t know where I’d read—perhaps in a footnote in
The Wonders of the Heavens
—that at certain hours of the night, you can slip into a parallel world: an empty apartment where the light wasn’t switched off, even a small dead-end street. It’s where you find objects lost long ago: a lucky charm, a letter, an umbrella, a key, and cats, dogs and horses that were lost over the course of your life. I thought that dog was the one from Rue du Docteur-Kurzenne.
    It wore a red leather collar with a metal tag and, when I bent down, I saw a phone number engraved on it. With a collar, you’d think twice about taking it to the pound. As for me, I still kept an old, out-of-date passport in the inside pocket of my sheepskin jacket. I had fudged the date of birth to make myself older, and so it looked like I was twenty-one. For the past few nights, however, I no longer feared police checks. Reading
The Wonders of the Heavens
had lifted my spirits. From then on, I considered things from high above.
    The dog walked in front of me. At first, it looked around to check that I was following, and then it walked at a steady pace, certain I would follow. I walked at the same slow pace as the dog. Nothing interrupted the silence. Grass seemed to be growing in between the cobblestones. Time had ceased.It must have been what Bouvière called the ‘eternal return’. The façades of buildings, the trees, the glimmer of the streetlamps took on an intensity that I had never seen in them before.
    The dog hesitated for a moment when I turned onto the Trocadéro esplanade. It seemed to want to continue straight ahead. It ended up following me. I paused for a while to look at the gardens below, the big pool where the water appeared phosphorescent and, beyond the Seine, the apartment buildings along the quays and around the Champ-de-Mars.
    I thought of my father. I imagined him over there, in a room somewhere, or in a café, just before closing time, sitting alone under the neon lights, looking through his files. Perhaps there was still a chance I would find him. After all, time had been abolished, given that this dog had emerged from the depths of the past, from Rue du Docteur-Kurzenne. I watched the dog move away from me, as though it would soon have to leave me or it might miss another engagement. I followed. It walked alongside the façade of the Musée de l’Homme and started down Rue Vineuse. I’d never been down this road. If the dog was leading me there, it wasn’t by chance. I had the feeling of both arriving at my destination and returning to familiar ground. But there was no lightfrom the windows and I walked along in half-darkness. I moved closer to the dog so I wouldn’t lose sight of it. Silence surrounded us. I could hear the sound of my footsteps. The road turned almost at a right angle and I thought it would come out near La Closerie de Passy where, at that hour, the parrot in its cage would be repeating,
Sea-green Fiat, sea-green Fiat
, for no reason, while the manager and her friends played cards. After the angle in the road, an unlit sign. A restaurant or, rather, a bar, closed. It was Sunday. What an odd place for a bar: the pale wooden shopfront and sign would have been better suited to the Champs-Élysées or Pigalle.
    I stopped for a moment and tried to decipher the sign above the entrance: Vol de Nuit. Then I looked ahead for the dog. I couldn’t see it. I hurried to catch up. But there was no trace of it. I ran and came out at the crossroads on Boulevard Delessert. The streetlamps were so bright they made me squint. No dog to be seen, not on the pavement that ran downhill, not on the other side of the boulevard, not opposite me near the little metro station and the steps that led down to the Seine. The