The Little Paris Bookshop

by Nina George

  And there was the Milky Way. Perdu had first glimpsed this smeary veil of stars as a boy, bundled up warmly in a jacket and blanket in a buttercup meadow near the Brittany coast. He had stared up into the blue-black night sky for hours while his parents tried once more to save their marriage at a Breton fest-noz party in Pont-Aven. Every time there was a shooting star, Jean Perdu made a wish that Lirabelle Bernier and Joaquin Perdu might again laugh with each other rather than at each other, that they would dance a gavotte to the sound of the bagpipes, the violin and the bandoneon instead of standing stony-faced, arms crossed, on the edge of the dance floor.

  Young Jean had gazed out into the depths of space, watching in raptures as the heavens continued to turn. He had felt safe, ensconced in the heart of that endless summer night. For those few hours Jean Perdu had grasped life’s secrets and purposes. He had been at peace with himself, everything in its rightful place. He had known that nothing ever ends, that everything in life flows into everything else and that he could do no wrong.

  As a man, he had only once felt as intensely: with Manon.

  Manon and he had sought out the stars, venturing further and further from the cities into the darkest corner of Provence. In the mountains around Sault they discovered remote farmsteads that were hidden away in stone sinkholes and rocky ravines bristling with thyme bushes. Only there did the summer night sky display itself in full clarity and depth.

  ‘Did you know we’re all children of the stars?’ Manon had asked, her warm lips snug to his ear so as not to break the mountain silence.

  ‘When the stars imploded billions of years ago, iron and silver, gold and carbon came raining down. And the iron from that stardust is in us today – in our mitochondria. Mothers pass on the stars and their iron to their children. Who knows, Jean, you and I might be made of the dust from one and the same star, and maybe we recognised each other by its light. We were searching for each other. We are star seekers.’

  He had looked up and wondered if they could see the light of the dead star that lived on inside them.

  Manon and he had chosen one twinkling celestial dot – a star that was still shining, although it had conceivably disappeared long ago.

  ‘Death means nothing, Jean. We’ll forever be what we once were for each other.’

  The celestial pearls were reflected in the Yonne River. Dancing on the river, each star rocked alone, making gentle contact only when the waves met and, for the briefest instant, two dots of light came together.

  Jean could no longer find their star.

  When Perdu glanced at Ida and noticed that she was watching him, they were not man and woman but two travellers, each on a specific quest.

  Perdu saw Ida’s pain flickering in her eyes, saw that the red-haired woman was struggling to embrace a new future that felt even now like a second choice. She had been abandoned, or had left before she was rejected. The presence of the person who had been her pole star, and for whom she’d presumably forsworn many things, lingered over her smile like a veil.

  All of us preserve time. We preserve the old versions of the people who have left us. And under our skin, under the layer of wrinkles and experience and laughter, we, too, are old versions of ourselves. Directly below the surface, we are our former selves: the former child, the former lover, the former daughter.

  Ida was not looking for comfort on these rivers; she was looking for herself, for her place in this new, unfamiliar, second-class future. On her own.

  ‘And you?’ her face asked. ‘And you, stranger?’

  Perdu knew only that he wanted to reach Manon to ask her forgiveness for his vain and foolish act.

  Then Ida suddenly said quietly, ‘I really didn’t want to be free. I didn’t want to have to build a new life; I was fine as I was. Maybe I didn’t love my husband the way people love in books. But it wasn’t bad. Not bad is good enough. It is enough to stay. Not to cheat. Not to have any regrets. No, I don’t regret the small love of my life.’

  Anke and Corinna gazed tenderly at their friend, and Corinna asked, ‘Is that an answer to my question yesterday about why you hadn’t left him long ago if he wasn’t your big love?’

  Small love. Big love. Wasn’t it terrible that love came in several sizes?

  When Jean looked at Ida, who had no regrets about her previous life, he hesitated, but went ahead and asked: ‘And … what did he think of your time together?’

  ‘Our small love wasn’t enough for him after twenty-five years. He’s found his big love now. She’s seventeen years younger than me and very flexible: she can polish her toenails holding the brush in her mouth.’

  Corinna and Anke snorted with laughter, and Ida joined in.

  Later they had a game of cards. At midnight a radio station started to play swing: the Benny Goodman Sextet’s cheerful ‘Bei Mir Bist Du Schoen,’ dreamy ‘Cape Cod’ and then Louis Armstrong’s melancholy ‘We Have All the Time in the World’.

  Max Jordan danced with Ida – or at least shuffled his feet – and Corinna and Anke danced with each other. Jean stuck to his chair.

  The last time he had heard these songs Manon was still alive.

  What a terrible thought: ‘She was still alive.’

  When Ida noticed Perdu battling for composure, she whispered something to Max and stepped away from him.

  ‘Come on,’ she said to Jean, opening her arms to him. He was glad he did not to have to confront these familiar tunes, and the many memories they evoked, on his own.

  He remained bewildered that Manon was gone, while the songs, the books and life itself simply carried on.

  How could they?

  How could it all just … carry on?

  How afraid he was of death – and life. Of all the days without Manon that lay ahead.

  Every song conjured up images of Manon walking and lying and reading, dancing by herself, dancing for him. He saw her sleeping and dreaming and stealing his favourite cheese from his plate.

  ‘Is that why you wanted to spend the rest of your life without music? Oh, Jean! You loved music so much. You sang for me when I was scared of falling asleep and missing out on time with you. You composed songs on my fingers and toes and nose. You’re musical to the core, Jean – how could you kill yourself like this?’

  Yes, how could he. Practice, that’s how.

  Jean felt the wind’s caress and heard the women’s laughter. He was slightly tipsy – and overwhelmed with silent gratitude to Ida for holding him.

  Manon loved me. And together we watched the stars above.

  20

  He dreamed he was awake.

  He was on the book barge, but everything around him kept changing. The wheel shattered, the windows misted up, the rudders failed. The air was thick, as though he were wading through rice pudding. And Perdu again lost his way in the maze of watery tunnels. The boat creaked and ripped apart.

  Manon was standing by his side.

  ‘But you’re dead,’ he groaned.

  ‘Am I really?’ she asked. ‘What a shame.’

  The ship broke up, and he plunged into the water.

  ‘Manon!’ he screamed. She watched as he fought against the current, against a whirlpool that had formed in the black water. She watched him. She didn’t reach out to him, just watched him drown.

  He sank and sank.

  But he didn’t wake up.

  Very deliberately, he breathed in and out – and in and out again.

  I can breathe underwater!

  Then he touched the bottom.

  At that moment Monsieur Perdu woke up. He was lying on his side, and opening his eyes he saw a halo of light dancing over Lindgren’s red-and-white fur. The cat was lounging next to his feet. She got up, stretched and then, purring, meandered up to Jean’s face and tickled him with her whiskers. ‘So?’ her expression seemed to say. ‘What did I tell you?’ Her purring was as soft as the distant hum of a boat engine.

  He remembered waking with this same anxious amazement once as a boy, the first t
ime he had dreamed of flying. He had jumped off a rooftop and sailed with outspread arms into a castle courtyard. And he had found out that if he wanted to fly, he first had to jump.

  He climbed out on deck. Mist drifted, as white as cobwebs, over the river, and steam rose from the nearby meadows. The light was still young, the day had just been born. He revelled in the sight of so much sky and in the huge variety of colours around him. The white mist, grey outlines, subtle pinks and milky orange.

  A sleepy silence lay over the craft in the marina. Over on the Baloo all was quiet.

  Jean Perdu crept down to check on Max. The author had bedded down among the books on one of the reading couches in the section that Perdu had christened How to Become a Real Person. One book was by the divorce therapist Sophie Marcelline, a colleague of his regular Friday customer, the therapist Eric Lanson. Sophie’s advice on relationship troubles was a month’s mourning for every year the couple had been together, and two months for each year of friendship when friends fell out. And for those who left us for good – the dead – ‘a lifetime, because our love for our dearly departed goes on forever. We miss them until the very last day of our lives.’

  Beside the sleeping Max, who was curled up like a little boy, knees tucked into his chest, mouth pursed into a surprised pout, lay Sanary’s Southern Lights. Perdu picked up the slim volume. Max had underlined certain sentences in pencil and jotted some questions in the margins; he had read the book as a book ought to be read.

  Reading – an endless journey; a long, indeed never-ending journey that made one more temperate as well as more loving and kind. Max had set out on that journey. With each book he would absorb more of the world, things and people.

  Perdu began leafing through the book. He had loved this particular passage too: ‘Love is a house. Everything in a house should be used – nothing mothballed or “spared”. Only if we fully inhabit a house, shunning no room and no door, are we truly alive. Arguing and touching each other tenderly are both important; so are holding each other tight and pushing the other away. We must use absolutely every one of love’s rooms. If not, ghosts and rumours will thrive. Neglected rooms and houses can become treacherous and foul …’

  Does love resent my refusal to open the door to that room and … do what exactly? What should I do? Build a shrine to Manon? Bid her farewell? What? Tell me, what am I meant to do?

  Jean Perdu replaced the book next to the sleeping Max. After a while, he pushed the hair from the young man’s brow.

  Then he quietly picked out a few books. Using them as currency didn’t come easily to him, for he knew their true worth. A bookseller never forgets that books are a very recent means of expression in the broad sweep of history, capable of changing the world and toppling tyrants.

  Whenever Monsieur Perdu looked at a book, he did not see it purely in terms of a story, retail price and an essential balm for the soul; he saw freedom on wings of paper.

  A little later he borrowed a bike from Anke, Ida and Corinna and rode out to the nearest village along winding, empty, narrow roads, past fields, paddocks and pastures.

  At the boulangerie on the church square a cheerful, ruddy-cheeked baker’s daughter was taking baguettes and croissants out of the oven.

  She looked happy to be where she was: in a small bakery that saw boaters in summer and farmers, winemakers, tradesmen, butchers and city dropouts from Burgundy, the Ardennes and the Champagne region the rest of the year. Now and then a dance at the mill, harvest festivals, cooking contests and local history societies; a spot of cleaning and laundry for the artists who lived in converted sheds and stables dotted around the area – this was life in the peace of the countryside beneath glittering stars and red summer moons.

  Could that be sufficient for a fulfilling existence?

  Perdu took a deep breath when he stepped into the old-fashioned shop. He had no choice but to make his customary offer.

  ‘Bonjour, Mademoiselle. Excuse me for asking, but do you like reading?’ After some haggling, she ‘sold’ him a newspaper, stamps and a few postcards of the marina at Saint-Mammès, as well as some baguettes and croissants, in exchange for a single book: The Enchanted April, about four English ladies who run away to an Italian paradise.

  ‘That covers my costs,’ she innocently assured him. Then she opened the book, held it to her nose and took a long sniff of the pages. Her face reappeared, glowing with contentment.

  ‘It smells of crêpes, I think.’ She stowed the book away in her apron pocket. ‘My father says that reading makes you impudent.’ She smiled apologetically.

  Jean sat down by the church fountain and tore into a warm croissant. How it steamed, how fragrant was its soft, golden inside. He ate slowly and watched the village awaken.

  Reading makes you impudent. Oh yes, unknown father, so it does.

  Perdu wrote a few cautious lines to Catherine. Fully aware that Madame Rosalette would read the card anyway, he decided that he might as well address it to everyone.

  Dear Catherine, dear Mme. Rosalette (New hairstyle? Wonderful! Mocha?), my esteemed Mme Bomme and all at number 27,

  Until further notice, please order your books from Voltaire et plus. I haven’t abandoned or forgotten you, but there are a few incomplete chapters I need to read first … and finish. I’m off to tame my ghosts. JP

  Was that too sparse, not flashy enough?

  His thoughts raced over the fields and the river to Paris, to Catherine’s laughter and her moans of pleasure. He felt a sudden flood of emotion. He was struggling to identify the source of this surge of longing to be touched, of this yearning for physical contact, nakedness and warmth under shared covers; a longing for friendship, for a home and a place where he could stay and be fulfilled. Did it come from Manon? Or Catherine? He was ashamed when he allowed them to intermingle in his mind. And yet: it had done him so much good to be with Catherine. Should he stop himself? Was that wrong?

  I wanted never to need anyone again. I’m such a coward.

  Monsieur Perdu cycled back, flanked by buzzards and larks that hung high in the air and hovered on the breeze over the wheat fields. He felt the wind through his shirt.

  He felt he was returning to the barge a different man from the one who had set out an hour earlier.

  He hung on the handlebars of Ida’s bike a bag containing warm croissants, a bunch of freshly picked red poppies and three copies of Night, in which Max had written lengthy dedications before going to bed.

  Then he made coffee in the pot in his galley, fed the cats, checked the humidity in the bookshop (satisfactory) and the oil level (near critical), and prepared Lulu for cast-off.

  As the book barge slid out onto the pristine river, Perdu saw Ida appear on the aft deck of the Baloo. He waved until he had rounded a bend. He wished with all his heart that Ida would one day find a big love to make up for losing her small one.

  He calmly steered the ship into the morning light. The coolness in the air gave way to the silky warmth of summer.

  ‘Did you know that Bram Stoker dreamed up his Dracula?’ Jean Perdu asked an hour later, full of cheer, as Max reached gratefully for a mug.

  ‘Dreamed of Dracula? Where are we – in Transylvania?’

  ‘On the Canal du Loing heading towards the Canal de Briare. We’re following the Bourbonnais route you chose, which will take us to the Mediterranean.’ Perdu sipped his coffee. ‘All because of some crab salad. Stoker had eaten some rotten crab and contracted food poisoning. Between bouts of sickness he had his first dreams about the lord of the vampires. They marked the end of his creative slump.’

  ‘Really? Well, I didn’t dream up a bestseller,’ mumbled Max, dunking his croissant in his coffee, making sure not to let a single crumb escape. ‘I wanted to read my book, but the letters kept sliding off the page.’ Then he perked up. ‘Do you think an attack of indigestion would help me come up with a story?’

  ‘Who knows?’

  ‘Don Quixote started out as a nightmare before it became a cla
ssic. Did you dream of anything useful?’

  ‘That I could breathe underwater.’

  ‘Wow. You know what that means?’

  ‘That I can breathe underwater in my dreams.’

  Max curled his top lip into an Elvis smile, then said solemnly, ‘No. It means you’re no longer choked by your emotions. Especially not down there.’

  ‘“Down there”? Where’s that from? The 1905 Good Housewives calendar?’