The Little Paris Bookshop (11 page)

The patrol boat was closing in on them. Perdu eased back the throttle as the manoeuvrable motorboat came alongside and tied up to Lulu’s cleats.

‘Do you think they’ll put us in a cell together?’ asked Max.

‘I’ll have to apply for witness protection,’ said Max.

‘Maybe my publisher sent them?’ fretted Max.

‘You really should go and clean the windows or practise a few knots,’ muttered Perdu.

A dashing policeman in a pair of aviator sunglasses jumped on board and clambered swiftly up to the wheelhouse.

‘
Bonjour, Messieurs.
Seine River Office, Champagne district. I’m Brigadier Levec,’ he reeled off. It was clear from his voice that he loved his title.

Perdu was almost counting on this Brigadier Levec reporting him for having dropped out of his own life without permission.

‘Unfortunately, you haven’t affixed your French Waterways Authority disc in a visible position. And please show me the mandatory life jackets. Thank you.’

‘I’ll go and clean the windows,’ said Jordan.

A quarter of an hour, a warning and a notification of a fine later, Monsieur Perdu had emptied out the cash register money and the change from his pocket onto the table for a disc to be allowed to navigate on French inland waters, a set of fluorescent life jackets, which were compulsory when passing through the locks on the Rhône, and a certified copy of the FWA guidelines. There wasn’t enough.

‘So,’ said Brigadier Levec. ‘What are we going to do now?’

Was that a satisfied glint in his eye?

‘Would you … um … do you by any chance like reading?’ asked Perdu, noticing that he was mumbling with embarrassment.

‘Of course. I don’t approve of the silly habit of lumping men who read together with weaklings and effeminate men,’ the river policeman answered, as he made to tickle Kafka, who trotted away, tail in the air.

‘Then may I offer you a book … or several to make up the balance?’

‘Hmm. I’d take them for the life jackets. But what do we do about the fine? And how do you mean to pay the mooring fees? I’m not sure that marina owners are … bookworms.’ Brigadier Levec had a think. ‘Follow the Dutch. They have a nose for a free lunch and will know where you can moor without charge.’

As they walked through
Lulu
’s belly and along the bookshelves so that Levec could choose his balance of payment, the brigadier turned to Max, who was polishing the window by the reading chair and avoiding looking directly at the policeman: ‘Hey, aren’t you that famous writer?’

‘Me? No. Definitely not. I’m … er,’ Jordan cast a quick glance at Perdu, ‘his son and a completely normal sports sock salesman.’

Perdu stared at him. Had Jordan just gone and got himself adopted?

Levec picked up
Night
from a pile. The policeman scrutinised Max’s picture on the cover.

‘Sure?’

‘Okay, maybe I am.’

Levec raised his shoulders in understanding.

‘Course you are. You must have lots of female fans.’

Max fiddled with his earmuffs, which he was wearing around his neck. ‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘Maybe.’

‘Well, my ex-fiancée loved your book. She was always going on about it. Sorry – I mean of course the book by that guy you look like. Perhaps you could write his name in here for me?’

Max nodded.

‘For Frédéric,’ Levec dictated, ‘with great affection.’

Max gritted his teeth and wrote what he’d been asked to.

‘Wonderful,’ said Levec and beamed at Perdu. ‘Is your son going to pay the fine too?’

Jean Perdu nodded. ‘Of course. He’s a good boy.’

After Max had pulled out his pockets to reveal a few notes of small denomination and some coins, they were both broke. With a sigh Levec took some recent publications – ‘For my colleagues’ – and a recipe book,
Cooking for the Single Man
.

‘Wait a minute,’ said Perdu, then, after a quick search, handed him Romain Gary’s autobiography from the Love for Dummies section.

‘What’s this for?’

‘You mean what’s it
against,
dear Brigadier,’ Perdu corrected him gently. ‘It’s against the disappointment of knowing that no woman will ever love us as much as the one who gave birth to us.’

Levec blushed and quickly ducked out of the book barge.

‘Thank you,’ whispered Max.

As the policemen cast off, Perdu was more convinced than ever that novels about dropouts and river adventurers left out such minor inconveniences as tax discs and life jacket fines.

‘Do you think he’ll keep it a secret that I’m here?’ asked Jordan as the police boat headed off.

‘Please, Jordan. What is so terrible about talking to a few fans or the press?’

‘They might ask what I’m working on.’

‘So what? Tell them the truth. Tell them that you’re thinking it over, you’re taking your time, you’re digging for a story and that you’ll let them know when you’ve found one.’

Jordan looked as though he’d never considered this.

‘I rang my father the day before yesterday. He doesn’t read much, you know, only sports papers. I told him about the translations, the royalties and the fact that I’ve sold nearly half a million books. I told him I could help him because his pension isn’t so great. Do you know what my father asked?’

Monsieur Perdu waited.

‘If I was finally going to get a proper job. And he’d heard that I’d written a perverted story. Half the neighbourhood was casting aspersions on him under their breath. Did I have any idea of the harm I’d done him with my crazy ideas.’

Max looked tremendously hurt and lost.

Monsieur Perdu felt an unaccustomed urge to hold him close. When he went ahead and did just that, it took him two attempts before he worked out where to put his arms. He pulled Max Jordan cautiously against his shoulder. They stood there stiffly, leaning towards each other, their knees slightly bent.

Then Perdu whispered into Jordan’s ear: ‘Your father is a small-hearted ignoramus.’

Max flinched, but Perdu held him in an iron grip. He spoke quietly, as though he were confiding a secret in the young man: ‘He deserves to imagine people gossiping about him. Instead, they’re probably talking about you, and they’re wondering how someone like your father can have such an amazing, magnificent son – maybe his greatest achievement.’

Max swallowed hard.

His voice was reedy as he whispered back, ‘My mother said he didn’t mean it; he just couldn’t express his love. Every time he swore at me and beat me, he was showing his great love for me.’

Now Perdu seized his young companion by the shoulders, looked him in the eye and said more emphatically, ‘Monsieur Jordan. Max. Your mother lied because she wanted to console you, but it’s ridiculous to interpret abuse as love. Do you know what my mother used to say?’

‘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!’

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 doing 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.’