The Little Paris Bookshop

by Nina George

  ‘Tomorrow. Promise me you’ll have something to eat and drink before you carry on crying.’

  He didn’t know why he was taking such liberties. It must be something to do with the door between them.

  The glass misted up with her breath.

  ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Yes.’

  When the hall light flared on again, the oval shrank back.

  Monsieur Perdu laid his hand briefly on the glass where her face had been a second before.

  And if she needs anything else, a chest of drawers or a potato peeler, I’ll buy it and claim I had it already.

  He went into his empty flat and pushed the bolt across. The door leading into the room behind the bookcase was still open. The longer Monsieur Perdu looked in there, the more it seemed as though the summer of 1992 were rising up out of the floor. The cat jumped down from the sofa on soft, velvet paws and stretched. The sunlight caressed a bare back, the back turned and became—. She smiled at Monsieur Perdu, rose from her reading position and walked towards him naked, with a book in her hand.

  ‘Are you finally ready?’ asked—.

  Monsieur Perdu slammed the door.

  No.

  3

  ‘No,’ Monsieur Perdu said again the following morning. ‘I’d rather not sell you this book.’

  Gently he pried Night from the lady’s hand. Of the many novels on his book barge – the vessel moored on the Seine that he had named Literary Apothecary – she had inexplicably chosen the notorious bestseller by Maximilian ‘Max’ Jordan, the earmuff wearer from the third floor in Rue Montagnard.

  The customer looked at the bookseller, taken aback.

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Max Jordan doesn’t suit you.’

  ‘Max Jordan doesn’t suit me?’

  ‘That’s right. He’s not your type.’

  ‘My type. Okay. Excuse me, but maybe I should point out to you that I’ve come to your book barge for a book. Not a husband, mon cher Monsieur.’

  ‘With all due respect, what you read is more important in the long term than the man you marry, ma chère Madame.’

  She looked at him through eyes like slits.

  ‘Give me the book, take my money, and we can both pretend it’s a nice day.’

  ‘It is a nice day, and tomorrow is the start of summer, but you’re not going to get this book. Not from me. May I suggest a few others?’

  ‘Right, and flog me some old classic you’re too lazy to throw overboard where it can poison the fish?’ She spoke softly to begin with, but her volume kept increasing.

  ‘Books aren’t eggs, you know. Simply because a book has aged a bit doesn’t mean it’s gone bad.’ There was now an edge to Monsieur Perdu’s voice too. ‘What is wrong with old? Age isn’t a disease. We all grow old, even books. But are you, is anyone, worth less, or less important, because they’ve been around for longer?’

  ‘It’s absurd how you’re twisting everything, all because you don’t want me to have that stupid Night book.’

  The customer – or rather noncustomer – tossed her purse into her luxury shoulder bag and tugged at the zip, which got stuck.

  Perdu felt something welling up inside him, a wild feeling, anger, tension – only it had nothing to do with this woman. He couldn’t hold his tongue, though. He hurried after her as she strode angrily through the belly of the book barge and called out to her in the half-light between the long bookshelves: ‘It’s your choice, Madame! You can leave and spit on me. Or you can spare yourself thousands of hours of torture starting right now.’

  ‘Thanks, that’s exactly what I’m doing.’

  ‘Surrender to the treasures of books instead of entering into pointless relationships with men, who neglect you anyway, or going on crazy diets because you’re not thin enough for one man and not stupid enough for the next.’

  She stood stock-still by the large bay window that looked out over the Seine, and glared at Perdu. ‘How dare you!’

  ‘Books keep stupidity at bay. And vain hopes. And vain men. They undress you with love, strength and knowledge. It’s love from within. Make your choice: book or …’

  Before he could finish his sentence, a Parisian pleasure boat ploughed past with a group of Chinese women standing by the railing under umbrellas. They began clicking away with their cameras when they caught sight of Paris’s famous floating Literary Apothecary. The pleasure boat drove brown-green dunes of water against the bank, and the book barge reeled.

  The customer teetered on her smart high heels, but instead of offering her his hand, Perdu handed her The Elegance of the Hedgehog.

  She made an instinctive grab for the novel and clung to it.

  Perdu held on to the book as he spoke to the stranger in a soothing, tender and calm voice.

  ‘You need your own room. Not too bright, with a kitten to keep you company. And this book, which you will please read slowly, so you can take the occasional break. You’ll do a lot of thinking and probably a bit of crying. For yourself. For the years. But you’ll feel better afterwards. You’ll know that now you don’t have to die, even if that’s how it feels because the guy didn’t treat you well. And you will like yourself again and won’t find yourself ugly or naïve.’

  Only after delivering these instructions did he let go.

  The customer stared at him. He knew from her shocked look that he had hit the target and got through to her. Pretty much a bull’s-eye.

  Then she dropped the book.

  ‘You’re completely nuts,’ she whispered before spinning on her heel and tottering off, head down, through the boat’s book-filled belly and out onto the embankment.

  Monsieur Perdu picked up the Hedgehog. The book’s spine had been damaged by the fall. He would have to offer Muriel Barbery’s novel for a euro or two to one of the bouquinistes on the embankment with their boxes of books for people to rummage through.

  Then he gazed after the customer. How she fought her way through the strolling crowds. How her shoulders shook in her suit.

  She was crying. She was weeping like someone who knows that this small drama is not going to break her, but is nonetheless deeply hurt by the injustice of the here and now. She had already suffered one cruel, deep blow. Wasn’t that enough? Did this nasty bookseller really need to rub salt in her wound?

  Monsieur Perdu suspected that on her personal idiot scale of one to ten, she ranked him – the paper tiger idiot on his stupid Literary Apothecary – about a twelve.

  He agreed with her. His outburst and his high-handed tone must somehow be related to the previous night and to the room. He was usually more sanguine.

  He was generally unperturbed by his customers’ wishes, insults or peculiarities. He divided them into three categories. The first category comprised those for whom books were the only breath of fresh air in their claustrophobic daily lives. His favourite customers. They were confident he would tell them what they needed. Or they confided their vulnerabilities to him, for example: ‘No novels with mountains, lifts or views in them, please – I’m scared of heights.’ Some of them sang Monsieur Perdu children’s tunes, or rather growled them: ‘Mm-hmm, mmh, dadada – know that one?’ in the hope that the great bookseller would remember for them and give them a book featuring the melodies of their childhood. And most of the time he did know a book to match the songs. There had been a time when he sang a lot.

  The second category of customers came aboard Lulu, the original name of his book barge in the Port des Champs-Élysées, because they had been lured there by the name of the bookshop: la pharmacie littéraire, the Literary Apothecary.

  They came to buy wacky postcards (‘Reading kills prejudice’ or ‘People who read don’t lie – at least not at the same time’) or miniature books in brown medicine bottles, or to take photos.

  Yet these people were downright entertaining compared with the third kind, who thought they were kings but, unfortunately, lacked the manners of royalty. Without saying ‘Bonjour’ or so much as looking at him as they
handled every book with fingers greasy from the chips they’d been eating, they asked Perdu in a reproachful tone: ‘Don’t you have any plasters with poems on them? Or crime-series toilet paper? Why don’t you stock inflatable travel pillows? Now that would be a useful thing for a book pharmacy to have.’

  Perdu’s mother, Lirabelle Bernier, formerly Perdu, had urged him to sell rubbing alcohol and compression stockings – women of a certain age got heavy legged when they sat reading.

  Some days he sold more stockings than literature.

  He sighed.

  Why was such an emotionally vulnerable woman so eager to read Night?

  All right, it wouldn’t have done her any harm.

  Well, not much.

  The newspaper Le Monde had feted the novel and Max Jordan as ‘the new voice of rebellious youth’. The women’s magazines had worked themselves into a frenzy over the ‘boy with the hungry heart’ and had printed photo portraits of the author bigger than the book’s cover. Max Jordan always looked somewhat bemused in these pictures.

  Bemused and bruised, thought Perdu.

  Jordan’s debut novel was full of men who, out of fear for their individuality, responded to love with nothing but hatred and cynical indifference. One critic had celebrated Night as the ‘manifesto of a new masculinity.’

  Perdu thought it was something a bit less pretentious. It was a rather desperate attempt by a young man who was in love for the first time to take stock of his inner life. The young man cannot understand how he can lose all self-control and start loving and then, just as mystifyingly, stop again. How unsettling it is for him to be unable to decide whom he loves and who loves him, where it begins and where it ends, and all the terribly unpredictable things in between.

  Love, the dictator whom men find so terrifying. No wonder that men, being men, generally greet this tyrant by running away. Millions of women read the book to find out why men were so cruel to them. Why they changed the locks, dumped them by text, slept with their best friends. All to thumb their nose at the great dictator: See, you’re not going to get me. No, not me.

  But was the book really of any comfort to these women?

  Night had been translated into twenty-nine languages. They’d even sold it to Belgium, as Rosalette the concierge had been keen to note. As a Frenchwoman born and raised, she liked to point out that you could never know with the Belgians.

  Max Jordan had moved into 27 Rue Montagnard seven weeks ago, opposite the Goldenbergs on the third floor. He hadn’t yet been tracked down by any of the fans who pursued him with love letters, phone calls and lifelong pledges. There was even a Night Wikiforum, where they swapped their news and views about his ex-girlfriends (unknown, the big question being: was Jordan a virgin?), his eccentric habits (wearing earmuffs) and his possible addresses (Paris, Antibes, London).

  Perdu had seen his fair share of Night addicts in the Literary Apothecary. They’d come aboard wearing earmuffs and beseeching Monsieur Perdu to arrange a reading by their idol. When Perdu suggested this to his neighbour, the twenty-one-year-old had gone deathly pale. Stage fright, Perdu reckoned.

  To him, Jordan was a young man on the run, a child who had been proclaimed a man of letters against his will – and surely, for many, a whistle-blower on men’s emotional turmoil. There were even hate forums on the Web where anonymous posters ripped Jordan’s novel apart, made fun of it and advised the author to do what the despairing character in his novel does when he realises that he’ll never be able to master love: he throws himself from a Corsican cliff top into the sea below.

  The most fascinating things about Night were the author’s descriptions of male frailties: he wrote about the inner life of men more honestly than any man had done before. He trampled on every one of literature’s idealised and familiar images of men: the image of the ‘he-man’, the ‘emotional dwarf’, the ‘demented old man’ and the ‘lone wolf’. A feminist magazine had given its review of Jordan’s debut novel the appropriately mellow headline MEN ARE HUMAN TOO.

  Jordan’s daring impressed Perdu. Yet the novel still struck him as a kind of gazpacho that kept sloshing over the edge of the soup bowl. Its author was just as emotionally defenceless and unprotected: he was the positive print of Perdu’s negative.

  Perdu wondered how it must feel to experience things so intensely and yet survive.

  4

  Next Perdu served an Englishman who asked him, ‘I recently saw a book with a green-and-white jacket. Has it been translated?’ Perdu figured out that it was a classic that had been published seventeen years back. He sold the man a collection of poetry instead. Afterwards, he helped the deliveryman transfer the crates of books he had ordered from the handcart onto the boat, and then gathered a few recent children’s books for the somewhat frantic teacher from the primary school on the other bank of the Seine.

  Perdu wiped the nose of a little girl, who was absorbed with Northern Lights. For the girl’s overworked mother, he wrote out a tax refund certificate for the thirty-volume encyclopedia she was buying in installments.

  She gestured towards her daughter. ‘This strange child of mine wants to have read the entire thing before she turns twenty-one. Okay, I said, she can have the enclyco … encloped … oh, all these reference books, but she won’t be getting any more birthday presents. And nothing for Christmas either.’

  Perdu acknowledged the seven-year-old girl with a nod. The child nodded earnestly back.

  ‘Do you think that’s normal?’ the mother asked anxiously. ‘At her age?’

  ‘I think she’s brave, clever and right.’

  ‘As long as she doesn’t turn out too smart for men.’

  ‘For the stupid ones, she will, Madame. But who wants them anyway? A stupid man is every woman’s downfall.’

  The mother looked up from her agitated, reddened hands in surprise.

  ‘Why didn’t anyone ever tell me that?’ she asked with the flicker of a smile.

  ‘Do you know what?’ said Perdu. ‘Pick a book you’d like to give your daughter for her birthday anyway. It’s discount day at the Apothecary: buy an encyclopedia and we’ll throw in a novel.’

  The woman accepted his fib without blinking and sighed. ‘But my mother’s waiting for us outside. My mother says she wants to move into a retirement home and that I should stop taking care of her. But I can’t. Could you?’

  ‘I’ll look after your mother. You look for a present, all right?’

  The woman did as he said with a grateful smile.

  Perdu brought a glass of water to the girl’s grandmother out on the embankment. She didn’t dare venture across the gangway.

  Perdu was familiar with such distrust from elderly people; he had many customers over seventy whom he gave advice to on dry land, on the very same wrought-iron bench where the old lady was now sitting. The further life advanced, the more protective the elderly were of their good days: nothing should imperil the time they had left. That was why they no longer went on trips; why they felled the old trees outside their houses so they didn’t come crashing down onto their roofs; and why they no longer inched their way across a river on a five-millimetre-thick steel gangway. Perdu also brought the grandmother a magazine-sized book catalogue, with which she fanned herself against the summer heat. The elderly lady patted the seat beside her invitingly.

  She reminded Perdu of his mother, Lirabelle. Maybe it was her eyes. They looked alert and intelligent. So he sat down. The Seine was sparkling, and the sky arched blue and summery overhead. The roaring and beeping of traffic drifted down from the Place de la Concorde; there was not a moment of silence. The city would empty a bit after 14 July, when the Parisians set off to claim the coastline and the mountains for the duration of the summer holidays. Yet even then the city would be loud and voracious.

  ‘Do you do this too sometimes?’ the grandmother suddenly asked. ‘Check on old photos to see whether the faces of the deceased show any inkling that they will soon die?’

  Monsieur Perdu shook hi
s head. ‘No.’

  With trembling fingers dotted with liver spots, the lady opened the locket on her necklace.

  ‘This is my husband. Taken two weeks before he collapsed. And then, all of a sudden, there you are, a young woman in an empty room.’

  She ran her index finger over her husband’s picture and tapped him gently on the nose.

  ‘How relaxed he looks. As if all his plans could come true. We look into a camera and think it will all carry on and on, but then: bonjour, eternal rest.’

  She paused. ‘I for one don’t let anyone take photos of me any more,’ she said. She turned her face to the sun. ‘Do you have a book about dying?’

  ‘Many, in fact,’ said Perdu. ‘About growing old, about contracting an incurable disease, about dying slowly, quickly, alone somewhere on the floor of a hospital ward.’