Patrick Modiano: Out of the Dark

'Go pack your bags,’ he told us. ‘And remember, don’t pay the bill.'

I can scarcely remember any other details of that time of my life. I've almost forgotten my parents' faces.

I don’t remember if I ever thought about the future in those days. I imagine I lived in the present, making vague plans to run away, as I do today, and hoping to see them soon, him and Jacqueline, in the Café Dante.

But Jacqueline is the one playing. Her arms and shoulders scarcely move as the machine rattles and flashes.

As I went along I too had forgotten nearly everything about my life, and each time whole stretches of it had fallen to dust I’d felt a pleasant sensation of lightness.

But surely she hadn’t forgotten those days…. Unless her present life had erased them, in the same way that the blinding beam from a spotlight throws everything outside its path into the deepest shadows.

Every morning I went and wrote near Holland Park, and I was no longer in London but in front of Gare du Nord and walking along the Boulevard de Magenta. Today, thirty years later, in Paris, I am trying to escape from this month of July 1994 to that other summer, when the breeze gently caressed the boughs of the tree in Holland Park. The contrast of shadow and sun was the strongest I have ever seen.