Pierre watched the passing landscape through the window. Did he know Paris? If this was his first time, he would surely keep a memory of this ride through town. But would he remember the people who were with him? We arrived at Place de la Concorde, and I turned around to face him. All the bright streetlights were apparently making an impression. She, too, was silent. It must have been a long separation, since she couldn’t find anything to say to him.

  The taxi stopped in front of the cluster of buildings on Place de la Porte-de-Champerret. She’d moved in only a short time before, and that was why she’d had Pierre come to Paris.

  “I hope you like your room.”

  He didn’t answer. He raised his eyes to take in the building façades.

  That was the most uncertain period of my life. I was nothing. Day after day, it felt like I was drifting in the streets and that there was no difference between me and those sidewalks, those lights, to the point of becoming invisible. And yet I had the example of someone who practiced a difficult art—“very, very difficult,” as Kniaseff repeated in his Russian accent, an accent so light that it sounded British or Viennese. And I do believe that the example the ballerina set, without my fully realizing it, incited me to gradually change my behavior and shed the uncertainty and nothingness that filled me.

  Sometime before I met her, I was looking to rent a room, and I remember walking one late afternoon into a real estate agency on Place de la Madeleine, having spotted their business sign. It was 7:30 and the man who opened the door for me said it was too late to see clients.

  He nonetheless led me through the deserted rooms to his office. He asked me how much rent I could afford. Three hundred francs. “That’s not very much,” he said, sucking pensively on the tip of his ballpoint pen. Given his lack of enthusiasm, I was about to leave, when he added: “I might have something for you.” And he told me about a man who rented out rooms in the neighborhood. “I’ll give you his phone number. You can say I told you to call.”

  I called this Serge Verzini and he agreed to meet me in front of a building in one of those streets near the Madeleine church. The room was under the eaves and tiny, at the far end of a long corridor dotted with doors, each with a number on a small enamel plate. Mine was number 23. Then he took me to a bar on Rue Godot-de-Mauroy to “sign the contract,” a bar with light-colored wood that he owned. I had wondered what he did for a living, when he’d shown me the room. But here, sitting facing each other on leather armchairs, it occurred to me that his black, slicked-back hair, the rather brutal features of his face, and the elegance of his clothes corresponded to the décor of our surroundings.

  He explained that he owned every room along the corridor, rooms once inhabited by the building staff. But there hadn’t been any staff for years.

  “Are you a student?” he asked.

  “No. I write song lyrics.”

  Once upon a time he had managed a cabaret in which singers performed. Today he owned a more modest establishment in the 17th arrondissement, the Magic Box. On Saturday nights, they had a “dinner theater,” but on the other evenings, it was frequented by a classical dancer and her circle of friends.

  “You should come. You’ll probably see some fellow songwriters.”

  Why was he being so nice to me? Perhaps he had a thing for young people … There were no customers there that afternoon. The slow hour? Unless no one patronized the establishment anymore, and he, Serge Verzini, sat there all day, alone in his leather armchair.

  “If you have any problems with your room, call me.”

  He hadn’t made me sign a rental agreement. He had simply given me his address, or rather the address of the bar, so that at the start of each month I could send him a check for three hundred francs.

  Sometime later, I ran into him at around nine in the evening as I was coming out of the building where my room was, on Rue Chauveau-Lagarde.

  “So, everything okay with your room?”

  I didn’t dare tell him the radiator was broken. And winter was coming.

  “Are you free this evening? I’ll take you to the Magic Box.”

  I tried to find an excuse. But without asking, he opened the passenger door of his car and motioned for me to get in. He remained silent during the entire ride, which seemed very long. Finally, he turned onto a narrow street, just before Boulevard Pereire.

  “Here we are … ”

  A restaurant dining room poorly lit by diminutive table lamps. A bar at the entrance. A platform in back that might have served as a stage. Stuffed armchairs against the wall, near the bar. He pulled me toward a table in the restaurant where two young people were sitting.

  He gestured for me to take a seat and he also sat down, next to me. He seemed to know these two people well.

  “A friend who works in songs,” he said, introducing me to the girl.

  “Oh really? In songs?”

  She looked at me with what appeared to be an ironic smile.

  “And she is a great dancer, you know,” Verzini told me.

  Then he got up, leaving me alone with them, and went to join two men sitting in the armchairs near the bar. I have only a disjointed memory of that evening, as if it had unfolded on a staccato rhythm, faster and faster. Who was the man at the table with the ballerina that evening? It could not have been Hovine, whom I met later, or Jean-Pierre Bonnefoux, who studied with her under Kniaseff at Studio Wacker. We exit the restaurant, and the man with her, whose face has been erased forever, leaves us on the sidewalk. I am alone with her. She tells me she needs to walk and that her building isn’t far away. I offer to accompany her.

  We follow Boulevard Pereire, then Avenue de Villiers. The air is warm, almost like in summer, and yet I seem to recall it was in the month of November. And I’m certain that the trees hadn’t yet shed their leaves.

  There were many other such strolls. Leaving Studio Wacker, she said she needed to walk. I waited for her class to finish, sitting at the back of the studio so as not to disturb anyone, in the recess of a window overlooking Rue de Douai.

  She had introduced me to Kniaseff as a “songwriter,” and he had said with a suspicious air: “Why? Are you trying to get her to sing?” Then he had eventually gotten used to my presence. In the evenings, we returned on foot from Studio Wacker to the apartment at Porte de Champerret. Sometimes, Kniaseff left the studio with us and followed the same route along Boulevard des Batignolles. We kept silent. We left him at Carrefour Villiers, and I had the feeling he was going to keep walking aimlessly for quite a while.

  “Do you live near here?” I’d asked him.

  “Oh, no! A long way … a long way from here,” he said in a sad voice.

  We felt bad about leaving him on his own.

  Last night, I tried to draw up a list of the people who formed a small group around her. First, a few dancers from Studio Wacker, whose names I still recall: Jean-Pierre Bonnefoux, Félix Blaska, Marpessa Dawn, Lebercher, Jeannette Lauret, Michel Panaiev, Nicole Jade …

  We met them in the studio cafeteria and, after class, at the Bastos, on the boulevard near the Gaumont Palace.

  Sometimes they came to the apartment at Porte de Champerret. And then there were others who visited the apartment more often. Hovine, of course, but also Youra, whose first name is all I remember. He took photos of the productions and wrote articles about ballet for theater programs and a specialized magazine. He was often in the company of a certain Lionel Roc, a former student at the Châtelet dance academy and an impresario. And a tall, athletic brown-haired fellow, Tiouls, a member of the Winter Circus crew. And Peggy Sage, a former dancer who worked in a beauty parlor. And a few faces and silhouettes to which I couldn’t affix a name.

  And how did Serge Verzini fit into all of this? One day when I was alone with Hovine, he intimated that he and the ballerina knew Verzini because the latter had been close to little Pierre’s father. That had all been a long time ago, in Saint-Leu-la-Forêt. And though he could tell that I wanted to know more, he shrugged and fell silent. So did I. It wasn’t in my nature to insist. After all, the ballerina, during our long walks, would surely end up confiding in me.

  I had noticed a curious detail about the Magic Box clientele. There was the group around the ballerina, a few of whose names I’ve just given. And then, when Verzini was present, several individuals formed another “group” around him, which had nothing to do with the ballerina’s, and whose members spoke among themselves in low voices, as if they didn’t want their conversations to be overheard. The Magic Box seemed to be their rallying point. Men, most of them around Verzini’s age and with the same dubious sartorial elegance. Occasionally two or three women in furs. And a rather worrisome kind of life-of-the-party type, who went from table to table, with a loud voice, very hard features, and close-cropped hair. He must have been Verzini’s business partner and the organizer of the Saturday “dinner theater.” His name has suddenly jumped back into my memory, and I honestly wonder why: Olaf Barrou.

  Much later, the hazards of my life brought me other details about Verzini and certain patrons of the Magic Box, and even about little Pierre’s father. Perhaps I’ll come back to this in due course. For the moment, I’d rather not stray down sideroads, but instead follow a very straight path that might let me see more clearly. You have to tread carefully to outwit disorder and the traps of memory.

  And so, I remember a large auditorium in the basement of the Rex cinema where she rehearsed with a few other dancers led by a former member of the Marquis de Cuevas’s company. The ballet was called Train of Roses, one of her favorites. All her efforts to make herself lighter, all that work to “soften the elbows,” as Kniaseff said, and give her arms almost immaterial fluidity and fragility … Perhaps she would end up flying away, passing through the walls and ceilings and emerging into the fresh air of the boulevard.

  The rehearsals in the basement of the Rex lasted about ten days. And every evening there was the return on foot to Porte de Champerret. The walk took longer than the one from Studio Wacker.

  At first, I had a hard time keeping up with her, but eventually I got used to her pace. And little by little the feeling of emptiness, of profound stagnation that took hold of me at certain times of day, melted away. It was if she was pulling me along and helping me rise to the surface.

  Another walk in Paris that we took together was even longer than the one from the Rex cinema to Porte de Champerret. For the past thirty years, I’ve searched in vain for the name of that Turk, a great lover of ballet, who every year threw a party for the French and foreign dancers in a minuscule apartment, and I’ve never been able to determine whether it was on one of the quays of the Bassin de la Villette or along the Ourcq canal. And to this day, no one has been able to tell me, such that I am now the sole remaining witness.

  In two adjacent rooms and by candlelight, as if for a birthday, the guests crowded in, among whom I recognized several faces: Nureyev, Margot Fonteyn, Babilée, Bonnefoux, Yvette Chauviré, Jorge Donn, Béjart, and Sonia Petrovna, a young woman whom Kniaseff told us was French but who had adopted a Russian name to dance at the Paris Opéra. Against the walls were sofas on which they took turns sitting. The host, a small, dark, pudgy man with a mustache and black suit, went from one to the other, silent and with an eternal smile. I was always near a window and I couldn’t help looking at the landscape through the glass: that basin or canal bordered by low buildings and warehouses where a barge was moored.

  Leaving at around one in the morning, we could still hear the din of conversations upstairs in the apartment. All around us, along the basin or the canal, was silence. The quays were bathed in a white light. It might happen that, in a dream, you cross through a neighborhood of Paris that seems so distant that, on awakening, you have trouble locating it precisely on a map. And you finally understand that this neighborhood belonged to another city—Rome, London, Vienna, Antwerp—and that, for the space of a night, it had become part of Paris, around the Bois de Boulogne or the Parc Montsouris. Or somewhere else.

  Alone, I would have gotten lost. But I trusted her. It was she who guided me.

  Try as you might to stay out of reach and feel safe, you can’t always avoid ghosts.

  The first time she’d been in the presence of that ghost, she was still renting the room on Rue Coustou. That morning, the dance class had been held a bit later than usual, at 10 o’clock. She was walking on the median of the boulevard and recognized him when they were still at a certain distance from one another. She was about to move over to the sidewalk running along Rue Jules-Ferry, to avoid him, but she decided instead to keep walking straight. When she arrived near him, she was overcome by a kind of vertigo and she looked him in the eye.

  His own eyes were blank and expressionless. She turned and watched him walk away with even steps, as if nothing had happened.

  But several days later, in the afternoon, she was walking along the same route to Studio Wacker. He was sitting, alone, at the terrace of the Bastos, just behind the window. She felt the same sense of vertigo.

  She stood frozen, staring at him from the sidewalk. Her eyes met his, which were absent, like the first time. Mechanically, he looked away to watch the café entrance or the clock on the wall. Perhaps he was expecting someone. She hadn’t seen him in ages, and at the time she’d worn her hair differently. Probably he hadn’t recognized her.

  She was relieved to enter Studio Wacker, as if she had crossed the border into neutral territory. Here, she was in no danger. She stood for a moment in the shadows of the ground floor, amid the dozen haphazardly placed pianos. Kniaseff was waiting for her at the studio door.

  “You’re pale as a sheet … Is anything wrong?”

  Just hearing his voice made her feel reassured. And as she did her habitual exercises, she regained her calm. The person she’d just seen in the café terrace was only a double. Or simply a harmless nobody, judging by his lifeless gaze.

  But the third time she ran into him, she lost her composure. It was a few yards from her building. He was standing immobile on the facing sidewalk, in front of the large garage. She kept walking so he wouldn’t see her enter her building. She turned onto Rue des Abesses. He didn’t follow her. It was after dark. She decided to wait awhile in the nearby church, the one called Saint-Jean-des-Briques.

  She was sitting at the back of the nave. Gradually she regained a sense of calm and the same feeling as at Studio Wacker when she did her exercises: the feeling of reclaiming mastery over her body. What did she have to fear? She stood up, left the church, and retraced her steps. She was walking so fast that it felt as if her feet weren’t touching the ground. Again she saw him, immobile in front of the garage, like a mummy that had been abandoned, upright, in its sarcophagus. She pushed open the door of her building. She half expected him to catch up to her in the stairway. But no.

  She looked out her bedroom window. Down below, still that shadow, that black stain against the white wall of the garage.

  The next day, as she was leaving Studio Wacker, he was there on the opposite sidewalk. He came toward her, a crooked smile on his face.

  “Do you remember me …?”

  Without answering, she tried to move forward, but he blocked her path.

  “Saint-Leu-la-Forêt … It’s been a long time. Do you remember me?”

  She had forgotten his name. He no longer had the spectral appearance of the previous days, the lifeless gaze. It was as if he had been roused into motion one final time before vanishing forever. He gripped her by the shoulders to hold her in place, and the viscous contact nearly made her gag. After eight years, how had he learned that she lived in this area? Who had given him her address and the address of Studio Wacker? She broke loose by elbowing him, a sudden, violent movement he hadn’t expected, and she left him behind. Now she was walking on the median of the boulevard.

  Saint-Leu-la-Forêt … It was as if the name belonged to another life. She would ask Hovine what that revenant was called. Perhaps he had spotted her simply by ill chance and been following her through the neighborhood for a long time. Hovine certainly remembered that period in Saint-Leu-la-Forêt. As for her, dance had made her forget all of it.

  But she didn’t ask Hovine a thing. She ended up convincing herself it was just a dream, the kind that leaves its stench behind the next day, and even the following days, to the point where it blends with your daily life and you can no longer separate dream from reality. She only hoped the dream wouldn’t recur. The best thing would be to change her address.

  I had noticed several times, as we were leaving Studio Wacker and on the boulevard near the Bastos, that she would glance behind or around her, as if making sure no one was following. I asked why she looked so worried. She answered in a flippant voice that she was afraid of seeing “ghosts from the past.” So who were these ghosts? She gave me a half-smile. Perhaps that day she felt like confiding in someone. It all went back to her childhood and adolescence in Saint-Leu-la-Forêt. There, a woman had given her dance lessons when she was a child, until the age of fourteen. And that woman was the one who’d suggested she apply to Studio Wacker in Paris and had written her a letter of recommendation for Boris Kniaseff. That was when she had begun taking the train from Saint-Leu-la-Forêt to the Gare du Nord in the morning, and in the evening from the Gare du Nord back to Saint-Leu-la-Forêt. She had met little Pierre’s father in Saint-Leu. He was a friend of Serge Verzini’s, who had a house in that small town. They had even lived in that house for a while. And little Pierre’s father? She didn’t know what had become of him. Anyway, she no longer thought about it. And Verzini didn’t know, either. The people who came to his house weren’t always very “reputable.” Including little Pierre’s father. But Verzini was a fairly nice man and he had helped her out when she decided to live in Paris.

 

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