Suspended Sentences by Patrick Modiano

all alone next to him, and he looked even smaller on that huge red leather seat. I turned around before going into the courtyard of the Jeanne d’Arc school. Roger Vincent waved at me. He was smiling.

Jean D. didn’t have an American convertible, but he had a fat wristwatch on whose face we could read the seconds, minutes, hours, days, months, and years. He explained the complicated mechanism of that watch with its many buttons. He was much more at ease with us than Roger Vincent. And younger.
    He wore a suede windbreaker, sporty turtleneck sweaters, and shoes with crepe soles. He, too, was tall and thin. Dark hair and a face with regular features. When his brown eyes rested on us, they were lit by a mix of mischief and sadness. His eyes were always widening, as if everything astonished him. I envied him his haircut: a long brush cut, whereas in my case, every two weeks the barber gave me a crew cut so short that the hairs pinched when I ran my hand over my scalp and above my ears. But there was nothing I could say. The barber simply picked up his clippers without asking my opinion.
    Jean D. came to the house more often than the others. Annie always brought him in her 4CV. He had lunch with us and always sat next to Annie, at the large dining room table. Mathilde called him “my little Jean,” and she didn’t show the same reserve with him as she did with the other visitors. He called Little Hélène “Linou”—the same as Mathilde did. He always said, “How’s it going, Linou?”—and he called me “Patoche,” like Annie.
    He lent my brother and me his watch. We were able to wear it, taking turns, for a whole week. The leather strap was too big, so he made another hole in it to keep it tight around our wrists. I wore that watch to the Jeanne d’Arc school and showed it off to the schoolmateshuddled around me in the playground that day. Maybe the principal noticed that huge watch on my wrist, and saw me from her window getting out of Roger Vincent’s American car … Then she thought that was quite enough of that and that my place was not at the Jeanne d’Arc school.
    “What sort of books do you read?” Jean D. asked me one day.
    They were all having coffee in the living room after lunch: Annie, Mathilde, Little Hélène, and Snow White. It was a Thursday. We were waiting for Frede, who was supposed to arrive with her nephew. We had decided, my brother and I, to venture into the great hall of the chateau that afternoon, as we’d already done with my father. The presence of Frede’s nephew at our sides would bolster our courage.
    “Patoche reads a ton,” answered Annie. “Isn’t that so, Snow White?”
    “He reads way too much for his age,” said Snow White.
    My brother and I had dipped a lump of sugar into Annie’s coffee cup and crunched it, as our ceremony required. Afterward, when they’d finished their coffee, Mathilde would read their future in the empty cups—“in the dregs,” as she said.
    “So what do you read?” asked Jean D.
    I told him adventure stories: Jules Verne, The Last of the Mohicans … but I preferred The Three Musketeers because of the fleur de lys on Milady’s shoulder.
    “You should read pulps,” said Jean D.
    “Jean, you’re crazy,” said Annie, laughing. “Patoche is way too young for pulps …”
    “He’s got plenty of time ahead of him to read pulps,” said Little Hélène.
    Apparently, neither Mathilde nor Snow White knew what “pulps” were. They kept silent.
    A few days later, he returned to the house in Annie’s 4CV. It was raining that late afternoon, and Jean D. was wearing a fur-lined coatcalled a “Canadienne.” My brother and I were listening to the radio, both seated at the dining room table, and when we saw him come in with Annie, we got up to greet him.
    “Here,” said Jean D., “I brought you a pulp …”
    He took a black-and-yellow-covered book from the pocket of his jacket and handed it to me.
    “Pay no attention, Patoche,” said