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years, but time no longer mattered. I was under the illusion that there could still be a departure gate for me. The last few passengers were making their way to gate 624, where a man in a dark uniform was standing guard. He asked sharply: ‘Do you have your ticket?’
    â€˜I’m looking for someone…There was an announcement just a moment ago…Jacqueline Beausergent…’
    The last passengers had disappeared. He shrugged his shoulders. ‘She must have boarded long ago, sir.’
    â€˜Are you sure? Jacqueline Beausergent…’ I repeated.
    He was blocking the way. ‘You can see very well there’s no one left, sir.’

EVERYTHING ABOUT THE period before the accident is confused in my memory. Days merged into one another in a haze. I was waiting for the voltage to increase to see more clearly. When I think back to it now, only Hélène Navachine’s silhouette emerges from the fog. I remember she had a beauty spot on her left shoulder. She told me she was going to London for a few days because she’d been offered a job there and she was going to find out if it was really what she wanted.
    I went with her the evening she caught the train at Gare du Nord. She sent me a postcard telling me that she would soon be coming back to Paris. But she never came back. Three years ago, I received a telephone call. A woman’s voice said, ‘Hello, I’m calling from the Hôtel Palym…Thereis someone here who would like to speak to you, sir…’ The Hôtel Palym was almost opposite her place, in the little street from which you could see the Gare de Lyon clock. We’d taken a room there once under the names Yvette Dintillac and Patrick de Tourane. ‘Are you still on the line, sir?’ The woman said. ‘I’m putting you through…’ I was sure it would be her. Once again, we would be meeting between piano lessons and the students would play Hummel’s
Bolero
until the end of time. As Dr Bouvière liked to say, life is an eternal return. There was static on the line and it sounded like the murmur of wind through leaves. I waited, gripping the handset to avoid making the slightest movement that might break the thread stretching back through the years. ‘Putting you through, sir…’ I thought I heard the sound of furniture being knocked over or someone falling down the stairs.
    â€˜Hello…Hello…Can you hear me?’ A man’s voice. I was disappointed. Still the interference on the line. ‘I was a friend of your father’s…Can you hear me?’ I kept saying yes, but he was the one who couldn’t hear me. ‘Guy Roussotte… My name is Guy Roussotte…Perhaps your father mentioned me…Your father and I worked together at the Bureau Otto… Can you hear me?’ He seemed to be asking the question for form’s sake without really caring if I could hear him or not.‘Guy Roussotte…Your father and I had an office together…’ It was as if he was calling from one of those bars on the Champs-Élysées fifty years ago when the clamour of conversation revolved around black-market dealings, women and horses. His voice was becoming increasingly muffled and only fragments of sentences reached me: ‘Your father… Bureau Otto…meet…a few days at the Hôtel Palym… where I could reach him…Just tell him: Guy Roussotte… the Bureau Otto…from Guy Roussotte…a phone call… Can you hear me?…’
    How did he get my phone number? I wasn’t in the phone book. I imagined this ghost calling from a room at the Hôtel Palym, perhaps the same room that Yvette Dintillac and Patrick de Tourane stayed in one night long ago. What a strange coincidence…The voice was now too faint, and the sentences too disjointed. I wondered if it was my father he wanted to see, believing him still of this world, or if it was me. Soon