The Little Paris Bookshop (10 page)

‘I’m hungry,’ said Max.

‘Have we got enough fresh water?’ asked Max.

‘I want to have a go at steering!’ demanded Max.

‘Haven’t we got any fishing rods on board?’ grizzled Max.

‘I feel somehow castrated without a telephone and credit cards. Don’t you?’ sighed Max.

‘No. You can clean the boat,’ replied Perdu. ‘It’s meditation in motion.’

‘Cleaning? Really? Look, here come some more Swedish sailors,’ said the writer. ‘They always cruise down the middle of the river as though they invented it. The English are different; they give the impression of being the only ones who belong here and everyone else should really be applauding them and waving little flags on the banks. You know, Napoléon’s plans to invade their island still rankle with them.’

He lowered the binoculars. ‘Have we got a national ensign on our rear?’

‘Stern, Max. A ship’s back side is called the stern.’

The further they had ploughed their way up the winding Seine, the more excited Max had grown – and the calmer Jean Perdu had become.

The river wound its way in stately loops through woods and parks. The banks were lined with grand, rambling grounds surrounding houses that hinted at old money and family secrets.

‘Have a look in the trunk near the tools for an ensign and a French
tricolore
pennant,’ Perdu instructed Jordan. ‘And dig out the pegs and the mallet, because we’ll need them to moor if we don’t find a harbour.’

‘Oh, I see. And how am I supposed to know how to moor?’

‘Um, it’s explained in a book about houseboat holidays.’

‘Fishing too?’

‘That’s in the section marked “Survival in the Provinces for City Dwellers”.’

‘And where’s the cleaning bucket? In a book as well?’ Max gave a little grunt of laughter and pushed his earmuffs back over his ears.

Perdu saw a group of canoeists ahead and gave a warning blast of the ship’s horn. The sound was deep and loud, and it coursed through his chest and stomach – directly under his belly button, and from there deeper still.

‘Oh,’ whispered Monsieur Perdu.

He tugged on the horn lever again.

Only a man could invent that.
 

The blast and its vibrations brought back the feeling of Catherine’s skin beneath his fingers. How her skin had enveloped the deltoid muscles on top of the shoulder. Soft, warm and smooth. And round. For a moment the memory of Catherine made Jean feel dizzy.

Caressing women, steering ships, running away.
 

Billions of cells seemed to wake up inside him, blink sleepily, stretch and say: ‘Hey! We’ve missed this. More, please. And step on it!’

Starboard to the right, port to the left, channel marked by coloured buoys: his hands still knew, and navigated between them. And women are the smart ones, because they didn’t oppose feeling and thinking, and loved without limits – yes, he knew that in his gut.

And watch out for the eddies coming up to a lock.

Watch out for women who always want to be weak. They won’t let a man get away with any weakness.

But the skipper has the last word.

Or his wife.
 

Finding new moorings? Parking this thing was about as easy as silencing your night-time thoughts. Nah! This evening he would simply head towards a particularly long and indulgent quay, manoeuvre the rudder gently, if he could find it, and then? Maybe he should aim for an embankment instead.

Or just keep on going until the end of my life.
 

A group of women peered at him from a carefully tended garden on the bank. One of them waved. Very occasionally a working barge or a Flemish cargo vessel, one of
Lulu
’s ancient forebears, would come towards them, its phlegmatic captain relaxing with his feet up and steering the large, smooth-turning wheel with one thumb.

 

 

Then all of a sudden civilization ceased. After Melun they plunged into the green of summer.

How good it smelled! So pure, so fresh and so clean.

Yet there was something else that was completely unlike Paris. Something very specific was missing, something Perdu had grown so accustomed to that its absence gave him slight dizziness and caused a humming in his ears.

Immense relief swept through him when he realised what it was. There was no rush of cars, no roar of the metro, no buzz of air conditioners. None of the whirr and grumble of millions of machines and transmissions and lifts and escalators. There were no sounds of reversing lorries, trains braking or heels on gravel and stone. None of the bass-driven music from the yobs two houses down, the crackle of skateboards, the chatter of scooters.

It was a Sunday quietness of the kind Perdu had first experienced this ripely and fully when his father and mother had taken him to see relatives in Brittany. There, somewhere between Pont-Aven and Kerdruc, the silence had struck him as the essence of life, hiding itself away from city dwellers at the end of the world in Finistère. Paris had seemed to him like a giant machine that droned and boomed away to produce a world of illusion. It put people to sleep with laboratory-made scents that imitated nature, and lulled them with sounds, artificial light and fake oxygen – as in E. M. Forster’s books, which he had loved as a boy. When Forster’s literary ‘machine’ breaks down one day, people who have so far only communicated via their screens die from the sudden silence, the pure sunlight and the intensity of their own, unfiltered sensations. They die from an overload of life.

That was exactly how Jean Perdu felt now, overrun by hyperintensive perceptions he had never experienced in the city. How his lungs hurt when he took a deep breath! How his ears popped in the unfamiliar liberty of peace. How his eyes were restored by the sight of living shapes. The fragrance of the river, the silken air, the vaulted open space above his head.

He had last experienced such tranquillity and freedom when Manon and he had ridden through the Camargue late one pastel-blue summer. Even so, the days had been as glowing and hot as a stove plate. Already by night, though, the stalks in the meadows and the woods by the swampy lakes sipped dew. The air was steeped in the aromas of autumn and the salt from the salt pans. It smelled of the campfires of the Roma and the Sinti, who lived in summer sites tucked away among bull pastures, flamingo colonies and old forgotten orchards.

Jean and Manon rode on two lean, sure-footed white horses to the deserted beaches among isolated lakes and along small, winding roads that petered out in the woods. Only these horses, native to the Camargue and able to eat with their muzzles underwater, could find their way in the endless, waterlogged emptiness.

Such desolate vastness, such distant quietness.

‘Do you remember, Jean? You and me. Adam and Eve at the end of the world?’

How laughter-filled Manon’s voice could be. Laughter-filled, melting chocolate.

Yes, it was as though they had discovered an alien world at the end of their own, which for the last two thousand years had remained unbeset by man and his mania for transforming the countryside into cities, streets and supermarkets.

Not a single tall tree, no hills, no houses. Only sky, and beneath that one’s own skull as the sole boundary. They saw wild horses passing in herds. Herons and wild geese angled for fish, and snakes pursued green lizards. They sensed all the prayers of thousands of walkers, which the Rhône had carried down from its source under the glacier into this vast delta, and which now flitted about between the broom, the willows and scrubby trees.

The mornings were so fresh and innocent that they rendered him speechless with gratitude to be alive. Every day he had swum in the Mediterranean by the light of the setting sun; he had run, naked and howling, up and down the fine, white sand beaches; and had felt at one with himself and with this natural emptiness – so full of strength.

Manon had been full of genuine admiration for how he had swum and grasped for fish and caught some. They had begun to cast off civilization. Jean let his beard grow, and Manon’s hair dangled over her breasts as she rode naked on her good-natured, sensible mount with its small ears. They were both baked brown as chestnuts, and Jean enjoyed the sweet-and-sour tang on her skin when they made love in the evenings in the still-warm sand beside the crackling driftwood fire. He tasted the salt of the sea, the salt of her sweat, the salt of the delta meadows, where river and sea flowed together like lovers.

When he approached the black fuzz between her thighs, Jean was met by the hypnotic aroma of femininity and life. Manon smelled of the mare she was riding so tightly and masterfully – it was the aroma of freedom. She bore the scent of a mixture of oriental spices and the sweetness of flowers and honey; she smelled of woman!

She had whispered and sighed his name unremittingly; she had wrapped the letters in a stream of breath wreathed in lust.

‘Jean! Jean!’

In those nights he had been more of a man than ever before. She had opened up completely for him, pressed herself against him, his mouth, his being, his cock. And in her open eyes, which held his gaze, there was always the reflection of the moon – first a crescent, then a semicircle and finally a full, red disc.

They had spent half a lunar journey in the Camargue; they had gone wild, turned into Adam and Eve in the hut of reeds. They were refugees and explorers, and he had never asked whom Manon had had to deceive in order to dream their dreams there at the end of the earth among the bulls, flamingos and horses.

At night only her breathing had saturated the absolute silence beneath the starry sky. Manon’s sweet, regular, deep breathing.

She was the world breathing.
 

It was only when Monsieur Perdu had let go of this image of Manon sleeping and breathing at the wild, foreign, southern frontier – let go as slowly as one might release a paper boat onto water – that he noticed he had been staring ahead with wide-open eyes the whole time – and that he could remember his lover without breaking down.

‘Oh, will you please take those earmuffs off, Jordan. Listen to how quiet it is.’

‘Shh! Not so loud! And don’t call me Jordan – it’d be better if I gave myself a code name.’

‘Oh yes. What?’

‘I am now Jean, Jean Perdu.’

‘With all due respect:
I
am Jean Perdu.’

‘Yeah, brilliant, wasn’t it? Shouldn’t we be on first-name terms?’

‘No, we shouldn’t.’

Jordan pushed his earmuffs back, then sniffed.

‘It smells of fish spawn here.’

‘Can you smell it with your ears?’

‘What happens if I fall into the fish spawn and get eaten up by a horde of underdeveloped catfish?’

‘Monsieur Jordan, most people only fall overboard if they try to pee over the railing when drunk. Use the toilet and you’ll survive. And anyway, catfish don’t eat people.’

‘Oh yeah? Where does it say that? In another book? You know as well as I do that what people write in books is only the truth they’ve discovered at their desks. I mean, the earth used to be a disc that hung around in space like a forgotten dining-hall tray.’ Max Jordan stretched, and his stomach rumbled loudly and reproachfully. ‘We should get something to eat.’

‘In the fridge you’ll find—’

‘Mainly cat food. Heart and chicken – no thanks.’

‘Don’t forget the tin of white beans.’ They really needed to go shopping quickly, but how? Perdu barely had any cash in the register, and Jordan’s cards were floating in the Seine. Nevertheless, the water in the tanks would be sufficient for the toilet, the sink and the shower. He also had two crates of mineral water left. They wouldn’t make it all the way down south on that, though.

Monsieur Perdu sighed. A few minutes ago he’d been feeling like a buccaneer; now he was a rookie.

‘I’m an excavator!’ Jordan said triumphantly, as he emerged soon afterwards from
Lulu
’s book-filled belly into the wheelhouse with a pile of volumes and a long cardboard tube under his arm. ‘What we have here is a navigation test book containing every traffic sign a bored European bureaucrat can dream up.’ He slammed the book down by the wheel. ‘There’s a book of knots too. I’ll take that one. And look at this: a rear … sorry … stern pennant as well as – wait for it! – an ensign!’

He proudly held up the cardboard tube and slid a large rolled-up flag out of it.

It was a black-and-gold bird with outspread wings. On closer viewing, one could see a stylised book with the spine forming the bird’s body and the cover and pages, its wings. The paper bird had an eagle’s head and wore an eye patch like a pirate’s. It was sewed onto oxblood-red fabric.

‘So? Is this our flag or what?’

Jean Perdu felt a powerful pang to the left of his breastbone. He doubled over.

‘What’s up now?’ asked Max Jordan in alarm. ‘Are you having a heart attack? If you are, please don’t tell me to look up in a book how to insert a catheter!’

Perdu had to laugh despite himself.

‘It’s all right,’ he panted. ‘It’s only … surprise. Give me a second.’

Jean tried to swallow his way through the pain.

He stroked the filigree threads, the fabric and the book bird’s beak – and then its single eye.

Manon had backstitched this flag for the book barge’s inauguration at the same time as she had been working on her Provençal bridal quilt. Her fingers and eyes had glided across the fabric – this fabric.

Manon. Is this the only thing I have left of you?
 

 

 

‘Why are you marrying this wine man?’

‘His name is Luc and he’s my best friend.’

‘Vijaya’s my best friend, but that doesn’t mean I want to marry him.’

‘I love Luc and it’ll be wonderful to be married to him. He lets me be who I am in everything, no strings attached.’

‘You could marry
me,
and that’d be wonderful too.’

Manon had lowered her sewing; the bird’s eye was only half filled in.

‘I was already part of Luc’s life plan before you even knew we’d be on the same train.’

‘And you don’t want him to suffer a change of plan.’

‘No, Jean. No.
I
don’t want to suffer. I’d miss Luc. His lack of demands. I want him. I want you. I want the north and the south. I want life with all it involves. I’ve opted against the “or” and for the “and”. Luc allows me every “and”. Could you do that if we were man and wife? If there was someone else, a second Jean, a Luc or two or …’

‘I’d prefer to have you all to myself.’

‘Oh, Jean. What I want is selfish, I know. I can only ask you to stay with me. I need you so I can survive.’

‘Your whole life long, Manon?’

‘My whole life long, Jean.’

‘That’ll do me.’

As if to seal the pact, she had stuck the needle into the skin of her thumb and soaked the material behind the bird’s eye.

 

 

Maybe it was only sex, though.

That had been his fear: that he only meant sex to her.

Yet it was never ‘only sex’ when they slept together. It was the conquest of the world. It was a fervent prayer. They recognised themselves for what they were – their souls, their bodies, their yearning for life, their fear of death. It was a celebration of life.

Now Perdu could breathe more deeply again.

‘Yes, that’s our flag, Jordan. It’s perfect. Raise it in the bow where everyone can see it. Up front. And the
tricolore
here in the stern. And hurry up.’

While Max leaned towards the stern to find out which of the cables slapping in the wind was the one for raising the national flag, and then traipsed through the bookshop to the bow, Perdu felt the heat rising behind his eyes. Yet he knew he mustn’t cry.

Max attached the ensign and pulled it higher and higher.

With every tug, Perdu’s heart clenched more and more tightly.

The ensign was now fluttering proudly in their slipstream. The book bird was flying.

Forgive me, Manon. Forgive me.
 

I was young, stupid and vain.
 

‘Uh-oh. The cops are coming!’ shouted Max Jordan.