Ballerina, p.1
Ballerina, page 1
ENGLISH TRANSLATIONS OF WORKS
BY PATRICK MODIANO
From Yale University Press
After the Circus
Ballerina
Family Record
Invisible Ink
Little Jewel
Paris Nocturne
Pedigree: A Memoir
Scene of the Crime
Sleep of Memory
Such Fine Boys
Sundays in August
Suspended Sentences: Three Novellas (Afterimage, Suspended Sentences, and Flowers of Ruin)
Also Available
The Black Notebook
Catherine Certitude
Dora Bruder
Honeymoon
In the Café of Lost Youth
Lacombe Lucien
Missing Person
The Occupation Trilogy (The Night Watch, Ring Roads, and La Place de l’Etoile)
Out of the Dark
So You Don’t Get Lost in the Neighborhood
28 Paradises (with Dominique Zehrfuss)
Villa Triste
Young Once
PATRICK MODIANO
Ballerina
Translated from the French by
Mark Polizzotti
Yale UNIVERSITY PRESS | NEW HAVEN AND LONDON
The Margellos World Republic of Letters is dedicated to making literary works from around the globe available in English through translation. It brings to the English-speaking world the work of leading poets, novelists, essayists, philosophers, and playwrights from Europe, Latin America, Africa, Asia, and the Middle East to stimulate international discourse and creative exchange.
English translation copyright © 2025 by Mark Polizzotti.
Originally published as La danseuse © Éditions Gallimard, Paris, 2023.
All rights reserved. This book may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, including illustrations, in any form (beyond that copying permitted by Sections 107 and 108 of the US Copyright Law and except by reviewers for the public press), without written permission from the publishers.
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Printed in the United States of America.
Library of Congress Control Number: 2024939336 ISBN 978-0-300-27819-4 (paperback : alk. paper)
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Brown? No. More like chestnut, with very dark eyes. She’s the only one of whom a photo might still exist. The faces of the others, except for little Pierre, have been obscured by time. Besides, people took far fewer pictures then than they do now.
And yet certain details remain relatively present. I’d have to list them. But it would be hard to put them in chronological order. Time, which has blurred faces, has also erased reference points. All that remains are a few puzzle pieces, forever disconnected.
One evening in November or December, I had come to fetch a child named Pierre in a building in the northwest of Paris, to bring him home. I’ve forgotten the street name. A massive entrance and one of those elevators with glass-paneled swing doors, so slow and silent that you wondered whether it would come shuddering to a halt between floors. In a large room that must have been the salon, a dozen or so children were gathered. On a coffee table, remains of a birthday feast. The well-heeled woman who had opened the door led me to the back of the room, where Pierre was playing cards with a small blond boy that the woman called Ronnie.
“Your friend has to go home, Ronnie … You have to say goodbye now, Ronnie … ”
And the two of us found ourselves out on the landing.
Outside it was dark. I had taken his hand. Yes, all the children in that apartment were classmates of his from the Dieterlen School, which was in that neighborhood; I sometimes went to pick him up at the end of the afternoon. Ronnie, the little blond boy who was playing cards with him and whose birthday they had celebrated, was his best friend. It would soon be the Christmas holidays, and he was hoping that during them we might take him and Ronnie to the movies.
And so a moment of the past gets encrusted in memory, like a flicker of light reaching you from a star that was thought long dead. Pierre. Birthday feast. Ronnie. Of course he’d go to the movies over Christmas break. I even thought I could take him if his mother was too busy. Walking side by side that evening, we mostly kept silent, but the route was much shorter than the one we sometimes took from school in the afternoon.
We had passed through the gate of the large brick apartment complex at Porte de Champerret. We climbed the cement stairs to the third floor. Hovine opened up, as if he was expecting us. This apartment was quite different from the one we’d just been in. Four rooms off a single hallway. To the left of the entrance, the kitchen with a shower. The windows looked out on the courtyard.
“The ballerina isn’t coming home this evening,” Hovine said. “She’s rehearsing Train of Roses … ”
The ballerina was Pierre’s mother. We had given her that nickname. And Train of Roses, a ballet she often performed.
Pierre had sat in the leather armchair and was reading a picture book.
“I’ll go do the shopping for dinner,” Hovine said.
If someone were to show me today two mug shots of his face—front and profile—could I possibly recognize him?
He was of average height. Curly black hair. Light-colored eyes. From what I gathered, he and the ballerina had known each other since childhood.
We were in the first room after the kitchen, the one that served as living room, where the ballerina’s friends occasionally got together on the large sofa and the leather armchair where Pierre was now sitting. The next room that opened onto the hallway was the ballerina’s bedroom, and Pierre, her son, had the room in the back.
But I don’t have a clear memory of the color of the walls. I think they were dark, and today it seems to me that I never saw that apartment in daylight. The light was dim, as if the bulbs in the lamps and the living room chandelier didn’t have sufficient wattage.
Hovine put on his usual coat, in herringbone twill. The door slammed shut behind him. The walls must have been rather thin, since you could always hear footsteps and voices on the stairs.
Pierre was still reading his picture book, open on his knees. I followed the hallway and entered the ballerina’s room. What time would she be back? Late at night, no doubt. If Hovine had to go out after dinner, I would be the one to babysit Pierre, and maybe the next morning I’d be taking him to the Dieterlen School. No point in turning on the lamp in that room: enough light came in from the windows of the building opposite. I often gazed at those windows, and after a while I recognized the silhouettes passing behind the glass.
Back in the living room, I saw that Pierre’s book had slid to the floor. He had dozed off, his forehead pressed against the arm of the chair.
Over the past few days, then, images began coming back to me, in snatches, from a long-distant period of my life. Before this, they had been covered by a layer of ice. Still, at certain moments I had the vague premonition that this wouldn’t last. It was fated that sooner or later the ice would melt and those images would float upward, like cadavers rising to the surface of the Seine. And why should this happen now, in a city so changed that it no longer contained any memories for me? A foreign city. It looked like a huge amusement park or the duty-free shops in an airport. A lot of people in the streets, more than I’d ever seen. The passersby walked in groups of a dozen or so, dragging their rolling suitcases, and most of them wore backpacks. Where did these hundreds of thousands of tourists come from? It made you wonder whether they were now the only ones populating the streets of Paris. I was waiting for the red light to cross Boulevard Raspail and saw a man standing on the opposite sidewalk. I immediately recognized Verzini. And I felt a sharp malaise, like finding myself in front of someone I’d thought long dead.
Maybe it was just a bad dream. Or I was mistaken. Still, I recognized his mass of hair, as thick as ever, no longer black but white as snow, and his face with its heavy features.
I waited for him to cross the boulevard. When he was next to me, at the curb, I turned to him.
“Aren’t you Serge Verzini?”
He glanced at me with the same eyes as back then, penetrating and cold.
“No. You’re mistaken.”
Still that deep voice, which sounded a bit raspy.
He stood there, giving me the once-over.
“Do we really know each other?”
I hesitated in answering. I’d have to give him names, a precise year. But everything got mixed up in my head. I felt like ditching him on the spot, but I finally said:
“Yes, we knew each other once, in the depths of time.”
He knit his brow and his eyes grew colder.
“What do you mean by that, ‘the depths of time’?”
He was suddenly on the defensive.
“Pardon me … I thought you were Serge Verzini.”
I had adopted a casual tone, and I even shrugged.
He appeared to think it over for a few seconds. Then:
“Would you like to get a drink, over there?”
And he pointed to the café at the corner of the boulevard and Rue du Cherche-Midi.
We were sitting a t a table facing each other, alone in the room, which surprised me. For some time now, the cafés and restaurants of Paris had been packed. At most of them, there were even lines to get in.
Silence between us. He looked uncomfortable. It was up to me to speak first.
“Do you still run the Magic Box?”
A restaurant where, on Saturdays, they used to host a “dinner theater.” Peculiar routines, performed one after the other in quick succession by players who were themselves just as peculiar. But we mainly went there during the week and we kept our own company. The establishment was located in a narrow side street, not far from Porte de Champerret, where the ballerina and Pierre lived. But all of that belonged to such a distant past …
He had smiled slightly. And his eyes had softened. I even think he was looking at me now with a certain compassion.
“The Magic Box? No, that doesn’t ring any bells. But I did know, in the depths of time, as you say, someone named Serge Verzini. Maybe you met the two of us together and got us confused.”
The waiter brought us grenadines. He took a long swallow and slowly set the glass back on the table.
“I don’t remember much about Verzini. Apart from his name.”
I studied his face. It looked less brutal than back when I’d known him. His cheeks had grown sallower, his nose thinner, his eyes appeared smaller and sunken more deeply in their sockets, his forehead taller beneath his white hair.
“Forgive me,” he said, “but I have no recollection of you.”
“Then maybe you remember the girl we used to call the ballerina and her son, little Pierre?”
“No, can’t say I do.”
I had the feeling he was evading my questions. I wanted to run other names by him and push back on his resistance, but nearly a half-century had gone by and that was plenty of time for him to forget everything. And even to become someone else in a city where you could no longer find your former bearings.
Through the window, I saw the habitual groups of tourists pass by, as they had for the last few months, packs on backs and rolling their suitcases. Most were wearing shorts, T-shirts, and baseball caps. None of them came into the café where we were, as if this place still belonged to another era that preserved it from that crowd. On both sides of the boulevard, they all headed toward Sèvres-Babylone, in tight ranks.
He had laid his hand flat on the table, and on his index finger I saw a signet ring, its stone engraved with the initials SV, exactly like the one Verzini used to wear when I knew him.
I finally said to him, pointing to the ring:
“Still the same initials?”
“You certainly don’t miss much.”
He shrugged. Then he pulled from his inside jacket pocket a small leather-bound address book and tore out a page. On it, he wrote something with the address book’s pencil.
“If you’d like to get together again, here’s my address, mobile number, and also my land line.”
He handed me the page, on which was written:
Mobile: (06) 580-015-283
Land line: OPEra-81-60
9 Rue Godot-de-Mauroy (9th arr.)
“Best to call on the land line.”
Outside, we were jostled by the flood of tourists. They advanced in compact clusters and blocked our path.
“Maybe someday we’ll pick up the conversation,” he said. “It’s all so far in the past. But I’ll try my best to remember … ”
He just had time to wave goodbye before being carried off and getting lost in that fleeing army that cluttered up the boulevard.
Sometimes, in dreams, one rediscovers the light of those years, as it was at certain specific times of day.
The ballerina would arrive at the Gare du Nord at 7:45 in the morning. Then the metro to Place de Clichy. The building housing Studio Wacker was run down. On the ground floor, a dozen or so used pianos, placed haphazardly as if in a warehouse. On the upper floors, a kind of dining hall with a bar and the dance studios. She studied under Boris Kniaseff, a Russian who was considered one of the great teachers … A particular smell of old wood, lavender, and sweat. She rubbed elbows with dancers of all types: Opéra headliners and music hall hoofers, Jean-Pierre Bonnefoux, Marpessa Dawn, and others whose names I’ve forgotten.
When her lessons were in the afternoon, she finished at about 7 p.m. Why is Studio Wacker associated with the months of autumn and the beginning of winter, early in the morning when it was still dark and at the end of the afternoon when night had already fallen?
At those hours, it felt like you were melting into the city. You walked and you were but a mote of dust amid the other dust in the streets. Soon she no longer needed to take the evening train at the Gare du Nord, to go back to a distant suburb. The room she rented on Rue Coustou was right near Studio Wacker. You only had to skirt the façade of the Lycée Jules-Ferry and follow the boulevard up to Place Blanche. Even in early winter, there was a certain softness in the air. And when it was cold, the lights of the boulevard were even brighter and more welcoming. Just before Christmas, they set up fairground stalls on the median strip. And those dance terms that recur in my memory, without my being able to say today precisely what they meant. The diagonal. The variation. The déboulé. The floor barre. I still find myself reciting them in a murmur. Also, learning to “soften the elbows” to give an impression of fragility. Yes, soften the elbows. Dance, Kniaseff used to say, is a discipline that enables you to survive. One evening, he was sitting with her at the bar in Studio Wacker, in the muted light. They were alone, class having ended long before. He told her that this discipline gives real meaning to life and keeps you from drifting. He himself … She was amazed that he should confide in her, he who was normally so reserved, observing a kind of military rigidity. Do you know why the Russians have excelled in this discipline better than anyone? Because many of them have had to struggle against their internal chaos, their violence, and the melancholy that comes over them periodically. And he burst out laughing, as she listened to him with mouth agape. “You are my favorite pupil, and you mustn’t be afraid of suffering and bleeding into your dance slippers. You understand?” It was the first time he’d really spoken to her. During the lessons, she had so little self-confidence that she never would have imagined him paying any particular attention to her. It’s true that she often found herself with dancers who were older than she, more seasoned. And that evening, he had told her she was his “favorite pupil.” And he had even added, alluding to one of his former students: “If you keep it up, you’ll be as good as Chauviré … ”
They had parted company at the entrance to the studio building, and she had stood there, immobile, following him with her eyes until he disappeared down Boulevard des Batignolles in his old anorak, his beret pulled down to his eyebrows. Watching him from behind, it seemed to her that Kniaseff was so light his feet barely touched the ground. That’s what dance is, he frequently told his students. So much work to give the illusion that you lift effortlessly several feet off the ground … She walked beneath the trees of the median, in a state of exhilaration. She repeated to herself the words he’d said to her: “You are my favorite pupil.” Climbing up to her room, she hadn’t even felt the stairs.
I never really learned how she’d gotten to know Hovine. She had told me he was a childhood friend, from when she lived in Saint-Leu-la-Forêt. I met Hovine for the first time the evening when the three of us went to pick up Pierre at the Gare d’Austerlitz.
Up until then, I hadn’t known she had a son. We were almost half an hour early. Pierre was traveling on his own and she was afraid he’d get lost. We sat on a bench in the station waiting room, as near as possible to the track where his train was due to arrive.
When the train entered the station, we posted ourselves at the entrance to the platforms. She searched anxiously in the flow of passengers, not seeing Pierre amid the crush of people. After a while, the crowd thinned out and only a few scattered individuals remained. We walked back up the platform. It was Hovine who spotted Pierre climbing down from one of the last cars, as if he’d been afraid, until then, of getting lost in the swarm.
She seemed intimidated by her son. He, too, was clearly feeling some reserve toward her. They stood facing one another, as if observing each other, before she leaned down and planted a clumsy kiss on his cheek. I wondered how long it had been since she’d seen him last. I never got an answer. Most often, with her, things remained vague. On the lapel of Pierre’s coat, I noticed a label on which someone had simply written his first name, as they used to do for children evacuated by train during the war. Hovine carried his valise, a small valise made of tin. There weren’t too many people at the taxi stand. She slid in with Hovine and Pierre on the back seat and I sat in front.
