So You Don't Get Lost in the Neighborhood by Patrick Modiano

a palimpsest in which all the various writings were jumbled together and superimposed, and moved about like bacilli seen through a microscope. He put this down to weariness, and he closed his eyes.
    When he opened them again, he came across the photocopy of the passage in
Le Noir de l’été
in which the name of Guy Torstel was mentioned. Apart from the episode of the Photomaton shop—an episode he had stolen from real life—he had not the slightest memory of his first book. The only one he retained was that of the first twenty pages which he had later suppressed. In his mind’s eye, they were to have been the beginning of the book before he abandoned it. He had visualised a title for this first chapter: “Return to Saint-Leu-la-Forêt”. Were these twenty pages still hibernating in a cardboard box or an old suitcase? Or had he torn them up? He no longer knew.
    Before writing them, he had wanted to travel for one last time, after fifteen years, to Saint-Leu-la-Forêt. It was not so much a pilgrimage, but rather a visit that would help him write the beginning of the book. And he had not mentioned this “return to Saint-Leu-la-Forêt” to Annie Astrand a few months later, on the evening he had seen her again after the book had been published. He was frightened that she might shrug and say to him: “But what a strange idea, Jean dear, to go back there . . .”
    So, one afternoon, a few days after having met Torstel at the racecourse, he had taken a bus to Porte d’Asnieres. The suburb had already changed a good deal at that time. Was it the same route that Annie Astrand had taken when she came back by car from Paris? The bus passed under the railway track near Ermont station. And yet he now wondered whether he had not dreamt this journey, which had taken place over forty years ago. It was probably the fact that he had made it a chapter of his novel that induced such confusion in him. He had walked up Saint-Leu’s main street and crossed the square with the fountain . . . A yellow mist hovered and he wondered whether it did not come from the forest. On rue de l’Ermitage, he was sure that the majority of the houses had not yet been built in Annie Astrand’s time and that in their place there had been trees, on either side, the canopies of which formed an archway. Was he really in Saint-Leu? He thought he recognised the part of the house that gave onto the street and the large porch beneath which Annie often parked her car. But, further along, the surrounding wall had vanished and a long, concrete building replaced it.
    Opposite, protected by a metal gate, was a single-storey house with a bow window and a frontage covered in ivy. A copper plate on the gate: “DR LOUIS VOUSTRAAT” . He remembered that after school one morning Annie had taken him to this doctor, and that one evening the doctor himself had come to the house to see him in his bedroom because he was ill.
    He hesitated for a moment, there, in the middle of the street, then he made up his mind. He pushed open the gate which gave onto a small garden and he walked up the stone steps. He rang the bell, and waited. Through the half-open door, he saw a tall man, his white hair cut short, with blue eyes. He did not recognise him.
    â€œDoctor Voustraat?”
    The man gave a start of surprise, as though Daragane had just roused him from his slumber.
    â€œThere is no surgery today.”
    â€œI merely wanted to talk to you.”
    â€œWhat about, monsieur?”
    Nothing suspicious about this question. His tone was friendly and there was something reassuring about his voice.
    â€œI’m writing a book about Saint-Leu-la-Forêt . . . I wanted to ask you a few questions.”
    Daragane felt so nervous that he thought he might have spoken this sentence with a stutter. The man gazed at him with a smile.
    â€œCome in, monsieur.”
    He led him into a drawing room where a fire