by Nina George
‘Don’t play with those grubby kids?’
‘Oh no, she was never elitist. She said that far too many women are the accomplices of cruel, indifferent men. They lie for these men. They lie to their own children. Because their fathers treated them exactly the same way. These women always retain some hope that love is hiding behind the cruelty, so that the anguish doesn’t drive them mad. Truth is, though, Max, there’s no love there.’
Max wiped a tear from the corner of his eye.
‘Some fathers cannot love their children. They find them annoying. Or uninteresting. Or unsettling. They’re irritated by their children because they’ve turned out differently than they had expected. They’re irritated because the children were the wife’s wish to patch up the marriage when there was nothing left to patch up, her means of forcing a loving marriage where there was no love. And such fathers take it out on the children. Whatever they do, their fathers will be nasty and mean to them.’
‘Please stop.’
‘And the children, the delicate, little, yearning children,’ Perdu continued more softly, because he was terribly moved by Max’s inner turmoil, ‘do everything they can to be loved. Everything. They think that it must somehow be their fault that their father cannot love them. But Max,’ and here Perdu lifted Jordan’s chin, ‘it has nothing to do with them. You already discovered that in your wonderful novel. We cannot decide to love. We cannot compel anyone to love us. There’s no secret recipe, only love itself. And we are at its mercy – there’s nothing we can do.’
Max was crying now, sobbing uncontrollably, and he sank to his knees and put his arms around Monsieur Perdu’s legs.
‘Now, now,’ the latter murmured. ‘It’s okay. Want to have a go at steering?’
Max dug his fingers into his trouser legs. ‘No! I want to smoke! I want to get drunk! I want to find myself at last! I want to write! I want to decide who loves me and who doesn’t. I want to determine whether love hurts, I want to kiss women, I want—’
‘Yes, Max. Shh. It’s okay. We’ll tie up; we’ll get ourselves something to smoke and drink; and the other stuff with women – we’ll see about that other stuff.’
Perdu pulled the young man to his feet. Max leaned against him and soaked his ironed shirt with tears and saliva.
‘It makes you sick!’ he sobbed.
‘You’re right, it does. But please be sick into the water, Monsieur, and not on the deck; otherwise you’ll have to mop it clean again.’
Max Jordan’s sobs were interspersed with laughter. He cried and laughed as Perdu held him in his arms.
A tremor ran through the book barge and the rear deck hit the bank with a loud thump, throwing the men first against the piano and then to the floor. Books rained down from the shelves.
Max gave a ‘hmpf’ as a fat volume fell on his stomach.
‘Take ’our knee out o’ my ’outh,’ Perdu requested.
Then he looked out the window, and he didn’t like what he saw.
‘We’re drifting downstream!’
18
Perdu steered the barge, which the current had pushed sideways, valiantly away from the bank. Unfortunately, Lulu’s stern swung out as he did this, leaving the long barge jammed across the river like a cork in a bottle, and in the crossfire of honking ships whose channel it was blocking. A British narrow boat, one of the two-metre-wide but very long houseboats, narrowly avoided crashing into Lulu’s midriff.
‘Landlubbers! Guttersnipes! Slime eels!’ the British shouted over from their dark-green houseboat.
‘Monarchists! Atheists! Crust cutters!’ Max called back in a voice that was shrill from crying and blew his nose a few times to give his words extra force.
When Perdu had turned the Literary Apothecary around far enough so that they were no longer stuck across the river but facing in the right direction, they heard applause. It came from three women in striped tops on a rented houseboat.
‘Ahoy, you book paramedics. Doing some crazy cruising there!’
Perdu pulled on the lever that controlled the horn and greeted the ladies’ boat with three blasts. The women waved as they nonchalantly overtook the book barge.
‘Follow those ladies, mon capitaine. Then we have to turn right at Saint-Mammès. Or starboard, as they say,’ Max commented. He hid his eyes, red from crying, behind Madame Bomme’s glittery sunglasses. ‘When we get there, we’ll find a branch of my bank and do some shopping. The mice are so hungry they’re hanging themselves in your alphabetical cupboard.’
‘Today’s Sunday.’
‘Oh. Well, expect more mouse suicides in that case.’
They tacitly agreed to act as though that moment of desperation had never taken place.
The more the day tended towards night, the greater the number of chattering birds that winged their way across the sky – grey geese, ducks and oystercatchers heading for their roosts on the sandbanks and the riverside. Perdu was fascinated by the thousand varieties of green he saw. All of this had been hiding all this time, and so close to Paris?
The men were approaching Saint-Mammès.
‘Good grief,’ murmured Perdu. ‘There’s a lot going on here.’
Boats of all sizes sporting pennants in dozens of national colours were packed side by side into the marina. Innumerable people were having meals on their boats – and without exception they were all staring at the big book barge.
Perdu was tempted to open up the throttle.
Max Jordan studied the map. ‘You can travel in all directions from here: north to Scandinavia, south to the Mediterranean, east and up to Germany.’ He looked over at the marina.
‘It’s like reversing into a parking space outside the only café in town at the height of summer with everyone watching – even the queen of the ball, her rich fiancé and his gang.’
‘Thanks, that makes me feel a lot more relaxed.’
Perdu steered Lulu gradually towards the harbour at the lowest possible speed.
All he needed was a space, a very big space.
And he found it. Right at the end of the harbour, where only one boat was moored. A dark-green British narrow boat.
He succeeded at the second attempt, and they only briefly bumped against the English boat, relatively gently.
An angry man stormed out of the cabin brandishing a half-empty wine glass. The other half of the wine had landed on his dressing gown. Along with the potatoes. And the sauce.
‘What the devil have we done to make you keep attacking us like this?’ he shouted.
‘Sorry,’ called Perdu. ‘We … um … you don’t like reading by any chance?’
Max took the book of knots out onto the landing stage. There he tried to tie up the boat with stern lines and a forward spring around the mooring posts, as explained by the book’s illustrations. He took a long time over it and refused any assistance.
In the meantime, Perdu picked out a handful of novels in English and offered them to the Briton. He flicked through them and gave Perdu a brisk handshake.
‘What did you give him?’ whispered Max.
‘Some literary relaxation from the library of moderately intense emotions,’ Perdu murmured back. ‘Nothing cools anger like a nice splatter book, where the blood almost spurts off the page.’
As Perdu and Jordan walked along the pontoon towards the harbour office, they felt like boys who had kissed a girl for the first time and had come through it with their lives intact and an unbelievable thrill.
The harbourmaster, a man with leathery skin like an iguana’s, showed them where the charging points, the fresh water supply and the waste tank were. He also demanded fifteen euros as an advance on the mooring fee. There was no option: Perdu had to smash the little porcelain kitten he kept on his register for tips; the odd coin had found its way through the slit between its ears.
‘Your son can go ahead and empty your toilet tank – it’s free of charge.’
Perdu let out a deep sigh. ‘Sure. My … son particularly likes doi
ng the toilet.’
Jordan threw him a less-than-friendly look.
Jean looked after Max as he set off with the harbourmaster to connect the pipes to the waste tank. What a spring there was in young Jordan’s step! He had all his hair – and he could presumably eat vast quantities without worrying about his tummy or his hips. But did he realise that he still had a whole lifetime ahead of him to commit some monumental mistakes?
Oh no, I wouldn’t want to be twenty-one again, thought Jean – or only with the same knowledge he had today.
Oh, dammit. Nobody would ever wise up if they hadn’t at some stage been young and stupid.
Yet the more he thought about all the things he no longer possessed compared with Jordan, the more fretful he became. It was as if the years had trickled through his fingers like water – the older he got, the quicker it went. And before he knew it, he’d need tablets for high blood pressure and a flat on the ground floor.
Jean had to think of Vijaya, his childhood friend. His life had been very similar to Perdu’s – until he lost his love and the other found it.
In the summer month when Manon had left Perdu, Vijaya had found his future wife, Kiraii, in a car accident; he had driven around the Place de la Concorde for hours at walking pace, not daring to cross the lanes thick with traffic to exit the roundabout. Kiraii was a worldly wise, warmhearted and determined woman with firm ideas of how she wanted to live. Vijaya had found it easy to step into her life. The short space of time from 9 a.m. to 6 p.m. sufficed for his own plans: he remained a director of scientific research, specialising in the structure and reactivity of human cells and their sensory receptors. He wanted to know why a person felt love when he or she ate something specific, why smells conjured up long-buried childhood memories, why one grew fearful of feelings, what made one feel disgust for slime and spiders, and how the body’s cells behaved when a human was human.
‘So you’re searching for the soul,’ Perdu had said during one of their nocturnal phone calls at the time.
‘No, sir. I’m searching for the mechanism. It’s all about action and reaction. Aging, fear and sex all govern your ability to feel. You drink a coffee, and I can explain why you like the taste. You fall in love, and I’ll tell you why your brain acts like an obsessional neurotic’s,’ Vijaya had explained to Perdu.
Kiraii had proposed to the shy biologist, and Perdu’s friend had mumbled yes, stunned to the core by his luck. He must surely have thought of his sensory receptors, spinning like disco balls. He moved to America with the pregnant Kiraii, and sent Perdu regular photos of his twin sons – first as prints, then as email attachments. They were sporty, candid-looking young men who smiled at the camera with a hint of mischief, and they resembled their mother, Kiraii. They were Max’s age.
How differently Vijaya had spent these twenty years!
Max, writer, earmuff wearer and future interpreter of dreams. My decreed ‘son.’ Am I so old I look like a father? And … what would be so bad about that?
Here, in the middle of the river marina, Monsieur Perdu felt an enormous longing for a family, for someone who would remember him with fondness, for a chance to go back to the moment he’d decided not to read the letter.
And you denied Manon exactly the thing you long for: you refused to remember her, to speak her name, to think of her every day with affection and love. Instead you banished her. Shame on you, Jean Perdu. Shame on you for choosing fear.
‘Fear transforms your body like an inept sculptor does a perfect block of stone,’ Perdu heard Vijaya’s voice say inside him. ‘It’s just that you’re chipped away at from within, and no one sees how many splinters and layers have been taken off you. You become ever thinner and more brittle inside, until even the slightest emotion bowls you over. One hug, and you think you’re going to shatter and be lost.’
If Jordan ever needed a piece of fatherly advice, Perdu would tell him: ‘Never listen to fear! Fear makes you stupid.’
19
‘What now?’ asked Max Jordan after they had done some reconnaissance.
Both the little food shop at the marina and the crêperie at the neighbouring campsite had refused to accept books as currency. Their suppliers worked; they didn’t read.
‘White beans with heart and chicken,’ Perdu said.
‘Oh no. I’d have to have a lobotomy to enjoy white beans.’
Max let his eyes wander over the marina. Everywhere people were sitting out on deck, eating, drinking and engaging in lively conversation.
‘We’ll have to crash someone’s party,’ he decided. ‘I’ll wangle us an invitation. Maybe that nice British gent?’
‘Certainly not. That’s sponging. That’s …’
But Max was already on his way towards one particular houseboat.
‘Ahoy, ladies!’ he called. ‘Our food supplies unfortunately fell in the water, and the catfish ate them. You couldn’t spare a lump of cheese for two lonely travellers, could you?’
Perdu was so ashamed he wished the ground would open up and swallow him. You couldn’t go around chatting up women like that! Especially when you needed help. It wasn’t … right.
‘Jordan,’ he hissed and grabbed the young man by the sleeve of his blue shirt. ‘Please, I don’t like this. We shouldn’t disturb the ladies.’
Max gave him the kind of look people had always given Jean and Vijaya when they were young. The two of them had been as happy among books as two apples on a tree, but around people, and women and girls in particular, the teenagers were shy to the point of being tongue-tied. Parties were a torment – and talking to girls equivalent to hara-kiri.
‘Look, Monsieur Perdu. We want some dinner and we’ll pay them back with our amusing company and some harmless flirting.’
With a grin, he studied Perdu’s face. ‘Remember what that is? Or is it buried in a book where it can’t bother you?’
Jean didn’t answer. It seemed inconceivable to young men that women could drive you to despair. Growing older and gaining deeper knowledge of women only made things worse. The flaws a woman could find in a man were many. She would start with the state of your shoes and work her way up to your inattentive ears – and it didn’t stop there.
The things he had heard as he sat in on the clinic he ran for parents! Women would giggle with their friends for years about a man who didn’t say hello the right way or wore the wrong trousers; they would mock his teeth and his hair and his marriage proposal.
‘I think white beans are delicious,’ said Perdu.
‘Oh, come off it. When did you last go on a date?’
‘Nineteen ninety-two.’ Or the day before yesterday, but Perdu didn’t know whether dinner with Catherine qualified as a ‘date’. Or more. Or less.
‘Nineteen ninety-two? The year I was born. That’s incredible.’ Jordan thought for a second. ‘Okay. I promise it won’t be a date. We’re going to dinner with some intelligent women. All you need is to have a couple of compliments and some topics that will appeal to women up your sleeve. That shouldn’t be too hard for a bookseller like you. Throw in the odd literary reference.’
‘All right, fine,’ said Perdu. He straddled the low fence, hurried into a nearby field and dashed back with an armful of summer flowers.
‘Here’s a different kind of reference.’
The three women in Breton jerseys were Anke, Corinna and Ida, all Germans in their mid-forties who loved books. Their French was sketchy and they were travelling the waterways ‘to forget’, as Corinna put it.
‘Really? Forget what? Not men, by any chance?’ asked Max.
‘Not all men. One particular man,’ said Ida. Her mouth, framed in her freckled face like a twenties film star’s, opened in laughter, but only for a couple of heartbeats. Under her ginger curls her eyes brimmed with both sorrow and hope.
Anke was stirring a Provençal risotto. The aroma of mushrooms filled the small galley as the men sat out on Baloo’s afterdeck with Ida and Corinna, drinking red wine from a three-litre box an
d a bottle of mineral-tasting local Auxerrois.
Jean admitted that he understood German, every book-seller’s first language. So they conversed in a merry mishmash; he answered in French and asked them questions in a colourful combination of sounds that bore at least some relation to German.
It was as if he had passed through a gate of fear and had realised to his surprise that behind it lay not a gaping chasm, but other doors, bright hallways and inviting rooms. He tilted his head back and what he saw above him moved him deeply: the sky. It was unencumbered by houses, telegraph poles and lights, and scattered with dense clusters of sparkling stars of every size and intensity. The lights were so profuse that it looked as if a meteor shower had rained down on the roof of the heavens. It was a sight no Parisian could ever witness without leaving the city.
