The Black Notebook by Patrick Modiano

it to the others. The others were Aghamouri and his crowd: Duwelz, Marciano, Chastagnier . . . I asked her if Aghamouri knew she’d lived in the apartment on Avenue Félix-Faure. No, he had no idea. She hadn’t met him until afterward, at the Cité Universitaire. And he also had no knowledge of that country house she’d just mentioned to me. A country house about sixty miles from Paris, she had said. No, neither Aghamouri nor anyone else had ever gone with her to the post office where she picked up her mail. “So, I’m the only one who knows your secrets?” I said. We walked down the endless corridor of the Montparnasse metro station and were the only people on the moving walkway. She took my arm and leaned her head on my shoulder. “I hope you know how to keep a secret.” We walked along the boulevard as far as the Dôme, then veered off and skirted the walls of the cemetery. She was trying to buy time to keep from running into Aghamouri and the others in the hotel lobby. It was especially Aghamouri she wanted to avoid. I was about to ask her why she felt accountable to him, but on second thought it seemed pointless. I believe that already, back then, I had understood that no one ever answers questions. “We’ll have to wait for them to turn out the lights in the lobby before we go in,” I said in a vaguely casual tone. “Like before, to get into the apartment . . . But the night porter might see us.”
    The closer we came to the hotel, the more I sensed her apprehension. Let there be no one in the lobby, I thought. Her anxiety was catching. I could already hear Paul Chastagnier saying in his metallic voice, “So what are you lugging around in that bag?” She paused when we reached the street the hotel was on. It was nearly eleven o’clock. “Shall we wait a little longer?” she said. We sat on a bench on the median strip along Boulevard Edgar-Quinet. I had set the carrier bag down next to me. “It was really stupid to leave that light on in the living room,” she said. I was surprised that she was attaching so much importance to it. But now, after all these years, I understand the sadness that had suddenly clouded her features. I, too, experience a strange sensation at the thought of those lamps we forgot to turn off in places to which we never returned . . . It wasn’t our fault. Each time, we had to leave fast, on tiptoe. I’m sure we left a light on in the country house, too. And what if I were solely responsible for that negligence or oversight? Today I’m convinced that it was neither oversight nor negligence, but that at the moment of leaving it was I who lit a lamp, deliberately. Out of superstition, perhaps, to ward off a curse, and more than anything, so that a trace of us would remain, a signal that we weren’t really gone and that someday we’d return.
    â€œThey’re all in the lobby,” she whispered in my ear. She had decided as we neared the hotel to go on ahead and peek through the window to see whether the coast was clear. She didn’t want the carrier bag to draw attention to us. I was troubled by the bag, too, as if it were the proof that we’d just committed an evil deed, and today that trouble amazes me. Why that constant feeling of uncertainty and guilt? Guilt over what, exactly? I peered through the window in turn. They were all sitting in armchairs in the lobby, Aghamouri on the armrest of the one where Marciano was seated, the others—Paul Chastagnier, Duwelz, and the man they simply called “Georges”—occupying one chair each: worn brown leather armchairs. It was as if they were holding a council of war. Yes, guilt over what? I wonder. Moreover, they weren’t exactly the kind of people to lecture us on morals. I took Dannie’s arm and pulled her into the hotel. It was Georges who saw us first, the man whose face clashed with his stocky,