The Little Paris Bookshop

by Nina George

  Dear Victoria, my daughter, my beauty. It was so easy to sacrifice myself for you. That’s life: laugh about it, you’ll be loved, forever.

  As for the rest, daughter, about my life in Paris, read this and be cautious with your judgement.

  (Manon has blanks. I write only what she whispers now. She winces when a door opens somewhere. She is still waiting for him, the man from Paris. She is still hoping.)

  Why didn’t Jean come?

  Too much pain?

  Yes. Too much pain.

  Pain makes a man stupid. And a stupid man is more easily afraid.

  The cancer of life, that’s what my raven had.

  (My daughter is disintegrating before my eyes. I write and try not to weep. She asks whether she will live through the night. I lie to her and say yes. She says I’m lying, like Luc.

  She briefly dozes off. Luc takes the baby. Manon wakes up.)

  He received the letter, says good old Madame Rosalette. She’ll watch out for him, as much as she can, as much as he lets her. I tell her: Proud! Stupid! Pain!

  And she adds that he has smashed his furniture and gone numb. Numb to everything. He’s almost dead, she says.

  That makes two of us.

  (Here my daughter laughs.)

  Maman has secretly written some words she shouldn’t have.

  Won’t show me.

  We’re still jockeying for position, even on the home straight.

  So what? What else are we supposed to do? Wait silently in our Sunday best for the reaper to swing?

  (She laughs again and coughs. Outside, the snow has turned the Atlas cedars the colour of a burial shroud. Dear God, you are everything I hate, because you are taking my daughter before her time and leaving me to grieve with her child. Is that your idea of how things ought to be? Replacing dead cats with kittens, dead daughters with granddaughters?)

  Shouldn’t we carry on living the same way until the last, because that is what vexes death the most – to see us drinking life to the final draft?

  (Here, my daughter coughs, and twenty minutes pass before she next speaks. She gropes for words.

  Sugar, she says, but it’s not the right one. She gets annoyed.

  Tango, she whispers.

  Friends’ windows, she shouts.

  I know what she means: French windows.)

  Jean. Luc. Both. The two of you.

  In the end. I’m only going next door.

  To the end of the corridor, into my favourite room.

  And from there, out into the garden. And there I will become light and go wherever I want.

  I sit out there sometimes in the evening, and look at the house we lived in together.

  I see you, Luc, my beloved husband, roaming through some rooms, and I see you, Jean, in the others.

  You’re searching for me.

  I’m no longer in the sealed rooms, of course.

  Look at me! Out here.

  Raise your eyes, I’m here!

  Think of me and call my name!

  None of this is any less real because I am gone.

  Death doesn’t matter.

  It makes no difference to life.

  We will always remain what we were to one another.

  Manon’s signature was ghostly and feeble. More than twenty years later Jean Perdu bent over the scrawled letters and kissed them.

  44

  On the third day, without any warning, the mistral stopped. That was how it always went. It had tugged at the curtains, rearranged the strewn plastic bags into new patterns, made dogs bark and brought people to tears.

  Now it was gone, having taken with it the dust, the spent heat and the fatigue. The countryside had also cast out the tourists, who were too fast, too frantic and too eager to invade the local towns. The Luberon swung back into its accustomed rhythm, one determined purely by the cycles of nature. Flowering, sowing, mating, waiting, being patient, harvesting and doing the right thing at the right time, without hesitation.

  The warmth returned, but it was the mellow, genial warmth of autumn that rejoiced at the thought of evening thunderstorms and the cool of morning, which had been sorely lacking during the searing summer months, leaving the land thirsty.

  The higher Jean Perdu climbed up the steep, rutted sandstone path, the quieter it became. The crickets, the cicadas and the faint lament of the wind were his only company as he scaled the massive hill on which Bonnieux’s church sat. He was carrying Manon’s diary and an open but loosely recorked bottle of Luc’s wine.

  His gait was the one the steep, uneven path demanded, stooped like a penitent, with small steps, aches creeping up his calves and along his legs, back and head. Passing the church, whose steps vaguely resembled a stone ladder, and the cedars, he reached the top.

  The view made him dizzy. The landscape lay fanned out far, far below. The day was bright after the mistral had bled the sky of its colour, and the horizon was virtually white where Jean imagined Avignon to be. He saw sand-coloured houses, scattered like dice on the green and red and yellow patchwork, as in an old painting. Long rows of vines, ripe and juicy, lined up like soldiers. Huge, faded squares of lavender. Green, brown and saffron-coloured fields, and among them the swaying, waving green of trees. The countryside was so beautiful, the view so majestic; anyone with a soul could not fail to be subjugated by it.

  This Calvary, with its thick walls, solid tombs and stone crosses, seemed to be the bottom-most step to heaven. God must be secretly sitting here, gazing out from this bright summit; only he and the dead were granted the enjoyment of this solemn, sweeping panorama.

  Head bowed and heart pounding, Jean crossed the coarse gravel to the iron gate.

  The enclosure was long and narrow. It was laid out on two terraces, each with two rows of graves. Weathered ochre shrines to the dead and grey-black marble tombs on the top terrace, the same on the lower level. Gravestones the height of doors and the width of beds, many crowned with defiant crosses. Mostly family graves, deep deathly homes with room for centuries of grief.

  Cropped, slender cypresses stood among the graves, casting no shadow. Everything here was naked and bare; there was no shelter anywhere.

  Slowly, still breathless, Perdu paced along the first row and read the names. Porcelain flowers and stylised stone books stood on the large graves, polished and adorned with photos or short verses. Some were decorated with small figurines depicting the hobby of the deceased. One man, Bruno, in a hunting outfit, an Irish setter at his side. Another grave had a hand of playing cards on it. The next featured the outline of an island, Gomera, obviously the dead person’s favourite spot. Stone dressers with photos, cards and well-fastened trinkets on them. Bonnieux’s living sent the dead on their way with a host of tidings.

  The decorations reminded Perdu of Clara Violette. She would cover her Pleyel grand piano with knick-knacks, and he had to clear them away before her balcony concerts.

  Perdu suddenly realised that he missed the residents of 27 Rue Montagnard. Was it possible that all those years he had been surrounded by friends, but had never truly appreciated it?

  In the middle of the second row, with a view of the valley, Jean found Manon. She lay next to her father, Arnoul Morello.

  At least she’s not alone in there.

  He sank to his knees, rested his cheek on the stone and placed his arms around the sides, as though he were trying to embrace the sarcophagus.

  The marble was cool despite the sun glinting off it.

  The crickets chirped.

  The wind moaned.

  Perdu waited to feel something. To feel her. But all his senses could discern was the sweat running down his back, the blood beating painfully in his ears, and the sharp gravel under his knees.

  He opened his eyes again and stared at her name – Manon Basset (née Morello) – at the dates – 1967–1992 – and at her framed black-and-white photo.

  But nothing happened.

  She isn’t here.

  A gust of wind ruffled a cypress.r />
  She isn’t here!

  He got to his feet, baffled and disappointed.

  ‘Where are you?’ he whispered into the wind.

  The family grave was piled high with porcelain flowers, cat figurines and a sculpture of an open book. Some of the sculptures held photos, lots of pictures of Manon that Perdu had never seen before.

  Her wedding photos, with writing below: ‘With love and no regrets, Luc.’

  Another, showing Manon holding her cat, read: ‘The door out onto the terrace is always open – Maman.’

  A third: ‘I came because you went – Victoria.’

  Jean reached out carefully to touch the sculpture that looked like an open book, and read the inscription. ‘Death doesn’t matter. We will always remain what we were to one another.’

  Jean read the lines again, this time out loud. They were the words Manon had spoken in Buoux as they searched for their star among the dark mountains.

  He ran his hand over the grave.

  But she isn’t here.

  Manon wasn’t in there, shut away in stone, surrounded by earth and dismal solitude. Not for one instant had she descended into the crypt to her abandoned body.

  ‘Where are you?’ he asked once more.

  He went over to the stone parapet and looked out at the broad, sumptuous Calavon valley below. Everything was so tiny. It was as though he were one of the circling buzzards. He sniffed the air. Breathed in every molecule, then out again. He felt the warmth and heard the wind playing in the Atlas cedars. He could even make out Manon’s vineyard.

  Next to one of the cypresses, near the hoses for watering the flowers, a broad flight of steps led to the upper terrace. Jean sat down on them, removed the cork from the bottle of Manon XV white wine, and poured some into the glass he had brought. He took a tentative sip. He smelled the wine; it had a cheering aroma. The Manon tasted of honey and pale fruit, of a tender sigh before sliding into sleep. A vibrant, contradictory wine, a wine brimming with love.

  Fantastic work, Luc.

  He set the glass down beside him on the stone steps and opened Manon’s diary. He had dipped into it repeatedly over the previous days and nights while Max, Catherine and Victoria had been working in the vines. Some passages he knew by heart; others had surprised him. Some things had hurt him, and much of what was written had filled him with gratitude. He had had no idea of how much he had meant to Manon. He used to long for it to be so, but only now that he had made peace with himself and was newly in love did he learn the truth. And it healed old wounds.

  Now, though, he searched for an entry she had written during her wait.

  I have already lived long enough, Manon had written in late autumn, on an autumn day like today. I have lived and loved, I have had the best of this world. Why cry over the ending? Why cling to what remains? The advantage of dying is that you stop being afraid of it. There is a sense of peacefulness too.

  He leafed forward through the pages. Now came the entries that broke his heart with compassion. The ones where she spoke of the fear that flooded through her body in waves, the nights when Manon would wake up in the silent darkness and hear death creeping closer. The night too, when she was heavily pregnant and had run into Luc’s room, where he held her until morning, forcing himself not to cry.

  And then did, in the shower, where he thought she couldn’t hear him.

  She had heard, of course.

  Again and again, Manon expressed her disbelief at Luc’s strength. He had fed and washed her, had watched her dwindling away, with the exception of her pregnant tummy.

  Perdu drank another glass before he went on reading.

  My child is feeding on me. It takes my healthy flesh. My tummy is rosy, plump and alive. There must be a litter of tiny cats in there, it’s that frisky. The rest of me is a thousand years older: grey and putrid and brittle like one of those crispbreads northerners are always eating. My girl will eat buttery, shiny, golden croissants. She will be victorious – victorious over death. We shall thumb our noses at it, this child and I. I would like to call her Victoria.

  How Manon loved her unborn baby! How she nourished it with the love that burned so exceptionally brightly within her.

  No wonder Victoria is so strong, he thought. Manon gave herself entirely to her.

  He flicked back to that August night when Manon had decided to leave him.

  You are lying there now like a dancer doing a pirouette. One leg stretched out, the other pulled up. One arm above your head, the other almost braced against your side.

  You always looked at me as though I were unique. In five years, not once did you look at me with anger or indifference. How did you manage it?

  Castor is staring at me. We two-legged creatures must seem very strange to cats.

  I feel crushed by the eternity that awaits me.

  Sometimes – but it is a truly evil thought – just sometimes I wished there were someone I love who would go before me. To show me that I can make it too.

  Sometimes I thought that you had to go before me so I could do it too, certain that you are waiting for me …

  Adieu, Jean Perdu.

  I envy you for all the years you still have left to live.

  I shall go into my last room and from there into the garden. Yes, that is how it will be. I shall stride through tall, inviting French windows and straight into the sunset. And then … then I shall become light, and then I can be everywhere.

  That would be my nature; I would be there always, every evening.

  Jean Perdu poured himself another glass of wine.

  The sun was slowly sinking. Its pinkish light settled over the land, painting the houses gold, and making his wine glass and the windows of the farms down below glitter like diamonds.

  Then it happened: the air began to glow.

  Like billions of dissipating droplets, sparkling and dancing, a veil of light descended on the valley, the mountains and him; the light seemed to be laughing. Never in his whole life, never before, had Jean Perdu seen such a sunset.

  He took another sip as the clouds revealed themselves in a multitude of colours, from cherry and raspberry to peach and honeydew. Then, at last, Jean Perdu understood.

  She is here.

  There!

  Manon’s soul, Manon’s energy, Manon’s whole disembodied essence filled the land and the wind; yes, she was everywhere and in everything; she sparkled and manifested herself to him in every form she had taken on …

  … because everything is within us. And nothing dies away.

  Jean Perdu laughed, but his heart ached so much that he fell silent and turned his attention inwards, where his laughter danced on.

  You’re right, Manon.

  It is all still there. The times we spent together are immortal, imperishable, and life never stops.

  The death of our loved ones is merely a threshold between an ending and a new beginning.

  Jean breathed deeply in and slowly out again.

  He would invite Catherine to explore this next stage, this next life, with him – the new, bright days after a long, dark night that had commenced twenty-one years earlier.

  ‘Good-bye, Manon Morello, good-bye,’ whispered Jean Perdu. ‘It was wonderful to have known you.’

  The sun sank behind the hills of the Vaucluse, and the sky glowed with molten fire.

  Only when the colours had paled and the world had turned to shadow did Perdu drain his glass of Manon to the last drop.

  Epilogue

  It was the second time they had eaten the thirteen desserts together on Christmas Eve, laying three extra places for the dead, for the living and for good fortune in the year to come. Three seats were always left empty at the long table in Luc Basset’s house.

  They had listened to the ‘Ritual of the Ashes’, the Occitan prayer of the dead, which Victoria read to them beside the open fire in the kitchen. She had asked to read it on this anniversary, for her mother’s sake and for hers: it was a message from the dead woman to her bel
oved.

  ‘Am the bark that carries you to me,’ Vic began in her clear voice. ‘Am salt on your numbed lips, am the aroma and the essence of every food … Am startled dawn and garrulous sundown. Am a dauntless island, fleeing the sea. Am what you find and what slowly releases me. Am the positive boundary of your solitude.’

  At these final words Vic started to cry. So did Jean and Catherine, who were holding hands; and Joaquin Albert Perdu and Lirabelle Bernier, occasionally known as Perdu, who were testing out a truce as lovers and companions in Bonnieux. Austere northerners, whom little moved to tears otherwise – certainly not words.

  They had grown very fond of Max, their so-called adopted grandson, and of the Basset family, to whom their lives were bound by love, death and grief. For a few days around Christmas, this unusual mix of emotions brought Perdu’s parents together – in bed, at the table and for a shared car journey. Throughout the rest of the year Jean continued to be treated over the telephone to his mother’s moaning about her ex-husband – ‘that social dyslexic’ – and to his father’s jocular complaints about the professor.