The Little Paris Bookshop

by Nina George

  Perdu let slip a ‘Ha!’ and stood up a little straighter.

  Jordan twiddled the knobs of the radio until he had found VNF Seine’s navigation radio, which controlled the river traffic. ‘A repeat announcement for the two comedians who smoked out Champs-Élysées harbour. Greetings from the harbourmaster. Starboard is the side where your thumb’s on the left.’

  ‘Do they mean us?’ asked Jordan.

  ‘Who cares,’ said Monsieur Perdu dismissively.

  They gave each other a wry grin.

  ‘What did you want to be when you were a boy, Monsieur … um … Jordan?’

  ‘A boy? You mean, like, yesterday?’ Max laughed cockily, before falling into a deep silence.

  ‘I wanted to be a man my father would take seriously. And an interpreter of dreams, which more or less ruled out the former,’ he said eventually.

  Perdu cleared his throat. ‘Chart a course to Avignon for us, Monsieur. Find a nice canal route to the south, one that will maybe bring us … significant dreams.’ Perdu gestured towards a stack of charts. The maps showed a dense network of navigable blue channels, canals, marinas and locks.

  Jordan gave him a questioning glance, and Monsieur Perdu opened the throttle. Eyes firmly on the water, he said: ‘Sanary says that you have to travel south by water to find answers to your dreams. He says too that you find yourself again there, but only if you get lost on the way – completely lost. Through love. Through longing. Through fear. Down south they listen to the sea in order to understand that laughing and crying sound the same, and that the soul sometimes needs to cry to be happy.’

  A bird awoke inside his chest, and it cautiously spread its wings, amazed to find that it was still alive. It wanted out. It wanted to burst from his chest, taking his heart with it, and soar up into the sky.

  ‘I’m coming,’ muttered Jean Perdu. ‘I’m coming, Manon.’

  MANON’S TRAVEL DIARY

  On My Way Into Life, Between Avignon and Lyons

  30 July 1986

  It was a miracle that they didn’t all climb aboard with me. It was irritating enough that they (my parents, Aunt ‘women-don’t-need-men’ Julia, my cousins ‘I’m-too-fat’ Daphne and ‘I’m-always-so-tired’ Nicolette) came down to our house from their thyme-scented hills and accompanied me to Avignon to see me actually get on the fast train from Marseilles to Paris. I suspected them all of merely wanting to go to a proper town and visit the cinema again and buy themselves a few Prince records.

  Luc didn’t come with me. He was worried I wouldn’t go if he was at the station. And he’s right: I can tell at a distance how he is simply from the way he stands or sits and holds his shoulders and head. He is a southern Frenchman to his marrow; his soul is fire and wine, he’s never cold-blooded, he can’t do anything without feeling, he’s never indifferent. People say that most people in Paris are indifferent to most things.

  I’m standing at the window of the express train and feel both young and grown-up at once. It’s the first time I’m truly bidding farewell to the land of my birth. Indeed, I’m seeing it for the first time as I move away from it, mile by mile. The light-drenched sky, the calls of the cicadas from the hundred-year-old trees, the winds wrestling over every almond leaf. The heat like a fever. The golden quivering and sparkling of the air when the sun goes down and turns the steep mountains and their perching villages shades of pink and honey. And the land keeps on giving – it will not stop growing for our benefit. It forces rosemary and thyme through the stones, the cherries almost burst out of their skins, and the swollen lime seeds smell like girls’ laughter when the harvest boys come to them in the shade of the plane trees. The rivers gleam like fine turquoise threads winding through the craggy rocks, and to the south sparkles a sea of such piercing blue, as blue as the speckles on the skin of black olives when one has made love under one of those trees. The land constantly presses on us humans, comes mercilessly close. Thorns. Rocks. Scent. Papa says that Provence created humans from the trees and the bright rocks and springs, and called them Frenchmen. They are woody and malleable, stony and strong; they speak from deep within their strata and boil over as fast as a pan of water on the stove.

  I can already feel the heat subsiding, the sky sinking lower and losing its cobalt streaks. I see the contours of the land growing softer and weaker the further north we go. The cold, cynical north! Can you feel love?

  Maman is naturally afraid that something might happen to me in Paris. She isn’t so much thinking that I might be torn to pieces by one of the Lebanese Revolutionary Faction bombs that have gone off in the Galeries Lafayette and on the Champs-Élysées; a man, more like. Or, perish the thought, a woman. One of those Saint-Germain intellectuals, who have everything in their heads and not a feeling to speak of, and who could give me a taste for life in a draughty artists’ household, where it is, as always, the women who end up rinsing the creative gentlemen’s paintbrushes.

  I think that Maman is worried that I might discover something far away from Bonnieux and its Atlas cedars, Vermentino vines and pinky twilights that might jeopardise my future life. I heard her weeping with despair out in the summer kitchen last night; she’s afraid for me.

  People say that Parisians are fiercely competitive about everything, and men charm women with their coldness. Every woman wants to net herself a man and turn his icy defences into passion. Every woman, especially women from the south. That’s what Daphne says, and I think she’s crazy. Diets obviously make you hallucinate.

  Papa is ever the self-controlled Provençal. What can city people offer you? is what he says. I love him when he has one of his five-minute fits of humanism and sees Provence as the cradle of French national culture. He mumbles his Occitan expressions and thinks it’s wonderful that every last olive farmer and unwashed tomato grower has been speaking the language of artists, philosophers, musicians and young people for four hundred years. Unlike Parisians, who think only their educated classes deserve to be creative and cosmopolitan. Oh, Papa! Plato with a field spade, and so intolerant towards the intolerant.

  I’ll miss the spiciness of his breath and the warmth of his embrace. And his voice – rolling thunder on the horizon.

  I know that I’ll miss the mountains and the mistral that sweeps and washes the vineyards … I’ve brought a little bag of soil and a bunch of herbs with me. Along with a nectarine stone I’ve sucked clean, and a pebble that I can put under my tongue when I thirst for the springs of home, like Pagnol.

  Will I miss Luc? He was always there; I’ve never missed him before. I’ll enjoy pining for him. I don’t know the pull that Cousin I’m-too-fat Daphne spoke of, meaningfully omitting words: ‘It’s as if a man stuck his anchor into your breast, your stomach, between your legs; and when he’s not there, the chains pull and tug.’ It sounded horrible, and yet she was grinning as she said it.

  How might it feel to want a man like that? And do I sink the same barbs into him, or do men find it easier to forget? Did Daphne read that in one of her awful novels?

  I know all about men, but nothing about man. What is a man like when he’s with a woman? Does he know at twenty how he wants to love her at sixty, because he knows exactly how he’s going to think and act and live career-wise at sixty?

  I’ll come back in a year’s time, and Luc and I will get married, like the birds. And then we’ll make wine and children, year after year. I’m free this year and in the future too. Luc won’t ask questions if I come home late from time to time, and if, in the years that follow, I go off to Paris or somewhere else on my own. That was his gift to me when we got engaged: a free marriage. That’s how he is.

  Papa wouldn’t understand him – freedom from faithfulness, for love’s sake? ‘Rain isn’t enough for all the land either,’ he would say; love is the rain, man is the land. And what are we women? ‘You cultivate the man and he flourishes in your hands; that’s the power of women.’

  I don’t yet know whether I want Luc’s gift of rain. It’s big; maybe I’m too smal
l for it.

  And do I want to reciprocate? Luc said he didn’t insist on that, nor was it a condition.

  I am the daughter of a tall, strong tree. My timber forms a ship, but it is anchorless, flagless. I set sail for the shade and the light; I drink the wind and forget all ports. To hell with freedom, gifted or seized; if in doubt, always endure alone.

  Oh, and I should mention one last thing before my inner Marianne rips off her tunic again and roars more words of freedom. I did indeed get to know the man who saw me crying and writing my travel diary. In the train compartment. He saw my tears, and I hid them and the babyish ‘I-want-it-back’ feeling that overcomes me as soon as I leave my little valley behind …

  He asked whether I was badly homesick.

  ‘It could be lovesickness, couldn’t it?’ I asked him.

  ‘Homesickness is lovesickness, only worse.’

  He’s tall for a Frenchman. A bookseller. His teeth are white and his smile friendly; his eyes are green – the green of herbs. They’re almost the same colour as the cedar outside my bedroom in Bonnieux. Grape-red mouth, hair as thick and strong as sprigs of rosemary.

  His name’s Jean. He’s in the process of converting a Flemish working barge; he wants to plant books on it, he says, ‘paper boats for the soul’. He explained that he wants to make it into an apothecary, a pharmacie littéraire, to treat all the emotions for which no other remedy exists.

  Homesickness, for example. In his opinion there are various kinds: a desire for shelter, family nostalgia, a fear of separation or a yearning for love.

  ‘The yearning to have something good to love soon: a place, a person, a particular bed.’

  He says it in such a way that it doesn’t sound silly; it sounds logical.

  Jean promised to give me books that would alleviate my homesickness. He said it as though he were talking about a half-magical, yet nonetheless official form of medicine.

  He seems like a white raven, clever and strong and floating above reality. He is like some great proud bird watching over the world.

  No, I wasn’t precise enough. He didn’t promise to give me books – he says he cannot stand promises. He suggested it. ‘I can help you. If you want to cry some more or stop, or laugh so you cry less; I will help you.’

  I feel like kissing him to see whether he can do more than talk and know things; whether he can feel and believe as well.

  And how high it can fly, this white raven that sees everything inside me.

  15

  ‘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 ho
w 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.