Dora Bruder. Patrick Modiano

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      EIGHT YEARS AGO, IN AN OLD COPY OF PARIS-SOIR DATED 31 December 1941, a heading on page 3 caught my eye: “From Day to Day.”¹ Below this, I read:

      PARIS

      Missing, a young girl, Dora Bruder, age 15, height 1 m 55, oval-shaped face, gray-brown eyes, gray sports jacket, maroon pullover, navy blue skirt and hat, brown gym shoes. Address all information to M. and Mme Bruder, 41 Boulevard Ornano, Paris.

      I had long been familiar with that area of the Boulevard Ornano. As a child, I would accompany my mother to the Saint-Ouen flea markets. We would get off the bus either at the Porte de Clignancourt or, occasionally, outside the 18th arrondissement town hall. It was always a Saturday or Sunday afternoon.

      In winter, on the tree-shaded sidewalk outside Clignancourt barracks, the fat photographer with round spectacles and a lumpy nose would set up his tripod camera among the stream of passers-by, offering “souvenir photos.” In summer, he stationed himself on the boardwalk at Deauville, outside the Bar du Soleil. There, he found plenty of customers. But at the Porte de Clignancourt, the passers-by showed little inclination to be photographed. His overcoat was shabby and he had a hole in one shoe.

      I remember the Boulevard Ornano and the Boulevard Barbès, deserted, one sunny afternoon in May 1958. There were groups of riot police at each crossroads, because of the situation in Algeria.

      I was in this neighborhood in the winter of 1965. I had a girlfriend who lived in the Rue Championnet. Ornano 49–20.

      Already, by that time, the Sunday stream of passers-by-outside the barracks must have swept away the fat photographer, but I never went back to check. What had they been used for, those barracks?² I had been told that they housed colonial troops.

      January 1965. Dusk came around six o’clock to the crossroads of the Boulevard Ornano and the Rue Championnet. I merged into that twilight, into those streets, I was nonexistent.

      The last café at the top of the Boulevard Ornano, on the right, was called the Verse Toujours.³ There was another, on the left, at the corner of the Boulevard Ney, with a jukebox. The Ornano-Championnet crossroads had a pharmacy and two cafés, the older of which was on the corner of the Rue Duhesme.

      The time I’ve spent, waiting in those cafés . . . First thing in the morning, when it was still dark. Early in the evening, as night fell. Later on, at closing time . . .

      On Sunday evening, an old black sports car—a Jaguar, I think—was parked outside the nursery school on the Rue Championnet. It had a plaque at the rear: Disabled Ex-Serviceman. The presence of such a car in this neighborhood surprised me. I tried to imagine what its owner might look like.

      After nine o’clock at night, the boulevard is deserted. I can still see lights at the mouth of Simplon métro station and, almost opposite, in the foyer of the Cinéma Ornano 43. I’ve never really noticed the building beside the cinema, number 41, even though I’ve been passing it for months, for years. From 1965 to 1968. Address all information to M. and Mme Bruder, 41 Boulevard Ornano, Paris.

      1. “D’hier à aujord’hui.”

      2. During the Occupation of Paris, Clignancourt barracks housed French volunteers in the Waffen SS. See David Pryce-Jones, Parus ub the Third Reich, Collins, 1981.

      3. “Keep pouring, nonstop.”

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      FROM DAY TO DAY. WITH THE PASSAGE OF TIME, I FIND, perspectives become blurred, one winter merging into another. That of 1965 and that of 1942.

      In 1965,1 knew nothing of Dora Bruder. But now, thirty years on, it seems to me that those long waits in the cafés at the Ornano crossroads, those unvarying itineraries—the Rue du Mont-Cenis took me back to some hotel on the Butte Montmartre: the Roma or the Alsina or the Terrass, Rue Caulaincourt—and the fleeting impressions I have retained: snatches of conversation heard on a spring evening, beneath the trees in the Square Clignancourt, and again, in winter, on the way down to Simplon and the Boulevard Ornano, all that was not simply due to chance. Perhaps, though not yet fully aware of it, I was following the traces of Dora Bruder and her parents. Already, below the surface, they were there.

      I’m trying to search for clues, going far, far back in time. When I was about twelve, on those visits to the Clignancourt flea markets with my mother, on the right, at the top of one of those aisles bordered by stalls, the Marché Malik, or the Vernaison, there was a young Polish Jew who sold suitcases . . . Luxury suitcases, in leather or crocodile skin, cardboard suitcases, traveling bags, cabin trunks labeled with the names of transatlantic companies—all heaped one on top of the other. His was an open-air stall. He