The Black Notebook Read Online Free PDF Page B

don’t think that guy can get inside, do you?” She shook her head. She sat on the edge of the bed, arms folded. Her face expressed boredom more than fear; she was there, motionless, head lowered. And I kept thinking this fellow would wait in the living room and it would be hard to slip out of the house without him seeing us. But I kept my wits about me. I had often found myself in this kind of situation, avoiding people I knew because I no longer felt like talking to them. I would cross the street when I saw them coming, or duck into a doorway and wait for them to pass by. Once I even crawled out of a window to escape from someone who had shown up unexpectedly. I knew many buildings with double exits, a list of which figured in my black notebook.
    The buzzing at the door ceased. The dog stopped barking. From the window, I saw the man head back to the car parked next to the front steps. A tallish, dark-haired man wearing a fur-lined coat. He leaned toward the lowered window and spoke with the person behind the wheel, whose face I couldn’t see. Then he climbed into the car, and it rolled away down the path.
    When evening fell, she told me it would be better not to turn on the lights. She drew the curtains in the living room and the room where we took our meals. We lit our way by candlelight. “Do you think they’ll be back?” I asked. She shrugged. She told me they were surely friends of the owner’s. She preferred not to see them, otherwise she’d have them “on her back.” Now and then, that sort of colloquialism intruded on her refined speech. There in the twilight, with the curtains drawn, it occurred to me that we were guilty of breaking and entering. And it seemed almost normal, so accustomed was I to living without the slightest sense of legitimacy, a sense reserved for those who have had good, honest parents and belong to a well-defined social milieu. In the candlelight, we spoke in whispers so as not to be heard from outside, and she saw nothing odd about our situation, either. Without knowing much about her, I was sure we were from the same world and had things in common. But I would have been hard-pressed to say what things.
    For two or three nights, we didn’t use the electricity. Without exactly saying so, she made me understand that she wasn’t really “supposed” to be in that house. She had simply kept a key from the previous year. And she hadn’t notified the owner that she planned to spend time here. She would have to arrange it with the caretaker, who tended the grounds and whom we would surely run into any day now. No, the house wasn’t abandoned, as I had assumed. The days went by. The caretaker came one morning, and our presence didn’t seem to surprise him. A short, gray-haired man who wore corduroy trousers and a hunting jacket. She offered no explanations and he asked no questions. He even told us that if we needed anything, he could go get it for us. Several times he took us, with the dog, to do the shopping in Châteauneuf-en-Thymerais. Or else, closer to home, in Maillebois and Dampierre-sur-Blévy. Those names lay dormant in my memory, but they hadn’t been erased. And last night, a buried memory resurfaced. A few days before we left for Feuilleuse, I had accompanied her to the building on Avenue Victor-Hugo. This time she asked me not to wait for her behind the building, opposite the entrance on Rue Léonard-de-Vinci, but in a café a bit farther down the street, on the square. She didn’t know what time she would be out. I waited for her for about an hour. When she joined me, she was very pale. She ordered a Cointreau and downed it in one gulp, to give herself what she called a “shot in the arm.” And she paid for our drinks with a 500-franc note that she pulled from a wad of cash secured by a red paper strip. She hadn’t had that wad when we came by metro, because that afternoon we had had just