The Little Paris Bookshop

by Nina George

  Incidentally, you really can scream with your heart; but it’s incredibly painful.

  And speaking of pain, it makes the world smaller. Now I see only you and me and Luc, and that which has grown between the three of us. Each of us has played our part. Now I’ll try to rescue what can be rescued. I don’t want to brood on punishment; misfortune comes equally to all.

  When will I give up?

  Only afterwards, I hope.

  I still want to see whether my salvage bid succeeds.

  The doctors have offered me ibuprofen and opiates, which they say affect only the brain, interrupting the electronic signals running through the lymph glands between my armpits, my lungs and my head.

  Some days that means I no longer dream in pictures; on others I detect aromas that remind me of the past – way back in the past, when I wore knee socks. Or else things smell very different: faeces like flowers, wine like burning tyres. A kiss like death.

  But I want to be completely sure for the child, so I do without. Sometimes the pain is so bad that I lose my words and cannot reach you. Then I lie to you. I write down the sentences I mean to say to you and read them out loud. When the pain comes, I am incapable of capturing the letters inside my head. A mush of letters, overcooked letters: alphabet soup.

  On occasion, it hurt me that you let yourself be lied to; on occasion, I was livid with you for even walking into my life. But never enough to make me hate you.

  Jean, I don’t know what to do. I don’t know whether to wake you up and beg you to help me. Whether to tear out these pages – or copy them and post them to you. Then. Or never. I’m writing so that I can think more clearly.

  Whichever way, I’m losing the ability to speak about anything else.

  More than ever I use my body to talk to you. This weary, sick, southern wood, with one last tender green shoot sprouting from it; it can voice the most basic desires at least.

  Love me.

  Hold me.

  Stroke me.

  Panic flowering, Papa used to say. Great trees blossom one final time before they die, pumping all their sap into their last remaining cancer-free shoot.

  Not long ago you said how beautiful I am.

  I’m on the cusp of my panic flowering.

  One night recently Vijaya rang from New York. You were still on the barge, selling the latest edition of Southern Lights. You would love everyone to read that small, strange, beautiful book. You said once that it didn’t lie. No sophistication, no embellishments. Only truth.

  Vijaya has new bosses: two oddball cellular scientists. They think it is the body, rather than the brain, that determines a person’s soul and character. They say it is the billions of other cells. What happens to them happens to the soul.

  Pain, for example, he said: it reverses the polarity of the cells. It starts after only three days: arousal cells become pain cells, sensory cells become fear cells, coordination cells become pin-cushions. Eventually tenderness only causes hurt; every breeze, every musical vibration, every approaching shadow triggers fear. And pain feeds hungrily on every movement and every muscle, breeding millions of new pain receptors. Your insides are completely transformed and replaced, but it is invisible from the outside.

  By the end you want no one ever to touch you again, Vijaya says. You grow lonely.

  Pain is a cancer of the soul, says your oldest friend. He says it like a scientist; he doesn’t consider the nausea such words will trigger in non-scientists. He is foretelling everything that will happen to me.

  Pain makes the body dull and your mind with it, as your Vijaya knows. You forget; you can no longer think logically, only in panic. And all your healthy thoughts fall into the furrows the pain gouges into your brain. All your hopes. Eventually you too fall in and are gone, your entire self swallowed up by pain and panic.

  When will I die?

  In purely statistical terms, it’s certain that I will.

  I was planning to eat the traditional thirteen Christmas desserts. Maman is in charge of the biscuits and the mousse, Papa will contribute the four fruit delicacies, Luc will polish the finest nuts. Three tablecloths, three candelabras, three hunks of broken bread: one piece for the living sitting at the table, one for the happiness to come, and one for the poor and the dead to share. I’m scared that I’ll be fighting for crumbs with the down and out by then.

  Luc has implored me to undergo the therapy.

  Quite apart from the fact that the odds are as lousy as betting on a horse, a part of me would die anyway; a gravestone would have to be ordered anyway, Mass read and the handkerchiefs ironed.

  Will I feel the gravestone’s weight?

  Papa understands. When I told him why I don’t want chemo, he went to the barn and wept. I was fairly convinced he was going to hack off one of his arms.

  Maman: petrified. She looks like a petrified olive tree; her chin is gnarled and hard, her eyes are like two chips of bark. She wonders what she has done wrong, why she was unable to turn her first deathly premonition into a bad dream, or into motherly love, which worries her more than the worries merit.

  ‘I knew that death was waiting in Paris, that godforsaken city.’ But she can’t bring herself to blame me. Ultimately she blames herself. Being hard on herself enables her to carry on and to prepare my last room according to my exact wishes.

  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.

  34

  The travellers spent a heady evening together. Salvo served pot after pot of mussels, Max played the piano, and they took turns dancing with Samy out on deck.

  Later the four of them enjoyed the view of Avignon and the Saint Bénézet Bridge, which had been immortalised in song. July showed itself in all its splendour; even after sundown, the air was a velvety 28 degrees.

  Shortly before midnight Jean raised his glass.

  ‘Thank you,’ he said. ‘For friendship. For truth. And for this unbelievably delicious meal.’

  They all raised their glasses. Their clinking sounded like a bell tolling for the end of their journey together.

  Despite this, Samy said with glowing cheeks: ‘By the way, I’m happy now,’ and half an hour later: ‘I still am’; and another two hours later … well, she probably said it in many other ways that did not require words, but neither Max nor Jean heard her. Deciding not to cramp Samy and Salvo’s style, the two men left the couple on Lulu for the first of what, hopefully, would be many thousands of nights and ambled through the nearest gate into the old part of Avignon.

  The narrow streets were thronged with aimless wanderers. The summer heat had naturally postponed activity till the late hours. Max and Jean bought ice cream on the square in front of the magnificent city hall, and watched buskers juggle with fire, perform acrobatic dances and amuse their audiences in the cafés and bistros with their slapstick comedy. This city didn’t appeal to Jean; it seemed to him like a hypocritical whore, living off her past
papal glories.

  Max caught the rapidly melting ice cream on his tongue. With his mouth half full, he said in a deliberately casual tone: ‘I’m going to write children’s books. I’ve got a couple of ideas.’

  Jean glanced at him out of the corner of his eye.

  So this is Max’s moment, he thought. This is the moment he starts to become the man he will one day be.

  ‘May I hear them?’ he requested, rousing himself from his affectionate astonishment at being allowed to share in this instant.

  ‘Whew, I thought you were never going to ask.’

  Max pulled his notebook from his back pocket and read aloud: ‘The old master magician was wondering when a brave girl might finally come along and dig him up from the garden where he had lain forgotten under the strawberries for a century and a half …’

  Max gazed at Perdu dreamily.

  ‘Or the story of the little cow?’

  ‘Little cow?’

  ‘Yeah, the holy cow that always has to take the blame. I imagine that even the holy cow used to be a young calf once, before people started saying, “Holy cow, what did you say you want to be? A writer?”’ Max grinned. ‘And another one about Claire, a girl who swaps bodies with her kitty cat. Then there’s …’

  The future hero of children’s bedtimes, Jean mused as he listened to Max’s marvellous storylines.

  ‘… and the one where little Bruno complains to the guardians of heaven about the family they lumbered him with …’

  As Max continued, Jean savoured a sensation that was like delicate flowers unfolding inside his heart. He was so fond of this young man! His quirks, his eyes, his laughter.

  ‘… and when people’s shadows go back to straighten their owners’ childhoods out a bit …’

  Wonderful, thought Jean. I’ll send my shadow back in time to straighten my life out. How tempting. How sadly impossible.

  They arrived back at the barge in the dead of the night, an hour before dawn came stealing across the sky.

  While Max took himself off to his corner, noted down a few thoughts and then fell asleep, Jean Perdu paced slowly around his book barge, which was swaying gently in the current. The cats pattered along beside him, their eyes trained closely on the tall man; they sensed impending farewells.

  Again and again Jean’s fingers met thin air as he ran them along the rows of books, caressing their spines. He knew precisely where each book had stood before it had been sold, the same way we know the houses and fields on the streets where we grew up – and continue to see them, long after they have made way for a motorway or a shopping centre.

  He had always felt that books created a force field around him. He had discovered the whole world on his barge – every emotion and place and era. He had never had to travel; his conversations with books had been sufficient … until finally he prized them more highly than people. They were less threatening.

  He sat down in the armchair on the low dais and gazed out at the water through the wide window. The two cats leaped onto his lap.

  ‘Now you won’t be able to stand up,’ said their bodies, growing heavier and warmer. ‘Now you have to stay.’

  So this had been his life. Eighty feet by fifteen. He had started building it all when he was Max’s age: the barge, the collection for his ‘soul pharmacy’, his reputation, this anchor chain. Day after day he had forged and tempered it, link by link – and shackled himself with it.

  But it somehow no longer felt right. Were his life a photo album, the random snaps would have all been alike; they would always show him on this boat, with a book in his hand, his hair alone growing more silvery and thinner. At the back would be a picture of him with a searching, pleading look on his wrinkled old face.

  No, he didn’t want to end up like that, wondering if it was all over. There was only one solution, a radical one that shattered his chains.

  He had to leave the barge. Leave it for good.

  The thought made him feel nauseated … but then, as he took a few deep breaths and imagined life without Lulu, relieved.

  His guilty conscience stirred immediately. Rid himself of the Literary Apothecary, as if she were a troublesome lover?

  ‘She’s no trouble,’ mumbled Perdu.

  The cats purred under his stroking hands.

  ‘What am I going to do with the three of you?’ he said dolefully.

  Somewhere nearby Samy was singing in her sleep. And a picture formed in his mind: maybe he didn’t have to leave the barge an orphan, or search high and low for a buyer.

  ‘Would Cuneo feel at home here?’ he asked the cats on his lap. They nuzzled his hand.

  It was said that their purring could patch a pail of broken bones back together and revive a fossilised soul; yet when their work was done, cats would go their own way without a backwards glance. They loved without reticence, no strings attached – but no promises either.

  Hesse’s Stages came to Perdu’s mind. Most people were familiar with the first line, of course: ‘In all beginnings dwells a magic force …’ but very few people knew the ending: ‘For guarding us and helping us to live.’ And hardly anyone realised that Hesse wasn’t talking about new beginnings.

  He meant a readiness to bid farewell.

  Farewell to old habits.

  Farewell to illusions.

  Farewell to a long-expired life, in which one was nothing but a husk, rustled by the occasional sigh.

  35

  The day greeted Jean and Max for their late breakfast with 34-degree heat – and a surprise from Samy, who had already been out shopping with Cuneo and had bought them all prepaid mobile phones.

  Perdu studied the one she pushed across the table to him between the croissants and cups of coffee with scepticism. He needed his reading glasses to make out the numbers.

  ‘These things have been around for twenty years; you can trust them,’ Max mocked him.

  ‘I’ve saved our numbers for you,’ Samy instructed Jean. ‘And I want you to ring us. Even if you’re fine or don’t know how to poach an egg. Or if you’re bored and tempted to jump out of a window to feel real again.’

  Jean was touched by Samy’s earnestness. ‘Thank you,’ he said awkwardly.

  He was overawed by her open, fearless affection. Was this why people liked friendship so much? Tiny Samy almost vanished in his embrace.

  ‘I, um … I’d like to give you something,’ Perdu rejoined. Sheepishly he pushed the keys to the barge over to Cuneo.

  ‘My esteemed world’s worst liar and greatest cook west of Italy, I must travel without my boat from now on. Therefore and herewith, I give Lulu into your hands. Always keep a corner free for cats and for writers in search of a story. Do you accept? You don’t have to, but if you do, I’d be delighted to know you are looking after my boat. On a permanent loan, so to speak, so …’

  ‘No! It’s your job, your office, your soul surgery, your getaway and your home. You are the book barge, you stupid nerd. You can’t give something like this away to strangers, however much they’d love to take it!’ yelled Samy.

  They all stared at Samantha in bewilderment.

  ‘Sorry,’ she mumbled. ‘I … eh … I mean what I said. It’s not on. Swap a mobile phone for a book barge? No way! How distressing!’ She let out a stifled giggle.

  ‘This inability to lie seems a real gift in life,’ Max remarked. ‘And by the way, before anyone asks me: No, I don’t need a boat, but I would be grateful for a lift in your car, Jean.’

  Cuneo had tears in his eyes.

  ‘Alas, alas,’ was all he could say. ‘Alas, Capitano. Alas, everything. I’m … cazzo … and all the rest.’

  They discussed at length the pros and cons of the matter. The more Cuneo and Samy appeared to hesitate, the harder Jean argued his case. Max kept his counsel, except once when he asked: ‘Don’t they call this hara-kiri or something?’

  Perdu ignored him. He felt that it had to be done, but it took him half the morning to convince Samy and Cuneo.

 
; Solemnly and visibly moved, the Italian said at last: ‘Fine, Capitano. We’ll look after your boat until you want it back. It doesn’t matter when: the day after tomorrow, in a year or thirty years from now. And cats and writers will always be welcome.’

  They sealed the pact with an emotional group hug. Samy let go of Jean last and stared at him fondly.

  ‘My favourite reader,’ she said with a smile. ‘I couldn’t have dreamed of anyone better.’

  Max and Jean packed their belongings in Max’s kit bag and a few large shopping bags, and stepped ashore. Other than his clothes, all Perdu took with him were the first pages of his book: The Great Encyclopedia of Small Emotions.

  Perdu felt nothing at all as Cuneo started the engine and steered Lulu expertly out into midstream. He could hear and see Max beside him, but it seemed as though Max were drifting away too, like the book barge. Max waved with both arms, shouting ‘Ciao’ and ‘Salut’; Perdu, by contrast, could not even muster the energy to raise his hand.

  He gazed after his book barge until it had vanished around a bend in the river. He stared after it when it was long gone, waiting for the numbness to subside so he could feel again. When he was finally ready to turn around, he found Max sitting quietly on a bench, waiting for him.