by Lily Graham
‘You can’t be serious?’ she’d exclaimed, appalled about his opinion on Proust and not the tea (which was the reason for the kettle in her room, he had explained). ‘The man’s a genius. Some people think that he’s had one of the greatest impacts on modern literature to date.’
‘Pfft. Nothing more than a pretentious snob. Some good quotes, yes, but mostly self-indulgent waffle, when it takes three thousand pages to say what could have been said in three hundred. His editors should be shot.’
Valerie’s mouth fell open. Proust was, well, Proust. It was like calling Shakespeare unlyrical, unpoetic, a blip. She narrowed her eyes. ‘So it’s the style of Hemingway, then, that you prefer. All short punchy sentences?’
He looked apoplectic. ‘An American? Look, the day the French start taking lessons in style from the Americans is the day all of France should decide, en masse, to go the way of the dodo, and with haste…’
Valerie’s eyes popped. ‘Well, unlike the dodo, the French are still here precisely because the Americans helped save Paris during the war.’
He sighed. ‘I never said they weren’t good soldiers. Or brave. But it is begging belief to say they know anything about style.’
‘In literature or fashion?’
‘Both.’
Valerie put her hands on her hips. ‘Fitzgerald, Melville, Faulkner, for heaven’s sake?’
‘Pah.’
Then he looked at her and raised a finger, like a small white flag. ‘Wait. Okay… I’ll give you… Dickinson.’
‘Dickinson?’
‘Emily Dickinson. She made love to the dash. Made you want to use it more yourself. Now that is style. Actually, I have a volume somewhere – let’s put it in the good section, eh? Celebrate the Americans who helped free Paris.’ He was only being slightly mocking.
The good section was called simply ‘Pas Mal’, not bad. These were the acceptable books one could buy. There weren’t many.
The ceasefire lasted about ten minutes, when she discovered that Bram Stoker – inventor of Dracula – was a ‘conspiracy theorist’ and that Sir Arthur Conan Doyle was a fool, who played golf.
‘What has that got to do with it?’ she cried, exasperated.
He looked at her incredulously. ‘Everything. No man can have poetry in his soul and play golf.’
This, Valerie privately thought, was a bit rich, considering no one in their right mind would ever accuse Dupont of having poetry in his soul. But she said anyway, ‘He created Sherlock Holmes! He didn’t need poetry.’
He looked at her. ‘We all need a little poetry in our souls, or else, like Sherlock, we may as well snort cocaine up our nostrils to escape life.’
Monsieur Dupont’s tirades certainly made the day go fast.
When she wasn’t being subjected to his tirades, she spent her time walking along the streets of their arrondissement, stopping to watch the ducks on the Seine, and the march of schoolchildren from the École Élémentaire Levant on the corner of their street, where promptly at four p.m. they all trundled up to the baker’s with their mothers and nannies for their goûter – a sweet tea-time snack to tide them over before dinner. So different from Valerie’s youth, when four p.m. had often meant that she had a jacket potato to look forward to for her tea after a cold trudge in the snow.
There were boutiques, and cafes, and pavement stalls where people sold all manner of things, from art to jewellery and vinyl records, the street a village in itself.
At Le Bistro Étoilé next door, with its red and gold chairs that spilled over onto the cobbled pavements, she would watch as people sat in the hazy French sunshine of the afternoon, wrapped up in coats and scarves in the cold weather, sipping a citron pressé or a café noir while nibbling on a croissant – the only way a respectable Parisian had coffee, Monsieur Dupont had informed her, the first time he saw her adding milk to hers and had called her a peasant. She found that she rather liked the coffee black, just as she enjoyed exploring the streets of Paris on her afternoons off.
‘I think he likes you,’ said Madame Joubert, as Valerie’s first week came to a close. ‘I haven’t seen him this happy in years.’
Valerie stared at the woman in shock. ‘I think you are mistaken, Madame. I am fairly positive that he hates me.’
Madame Joubert laughed a throaty chuckle, tossing back her mane of red curls, as she added a deep pink calla lily to the flower arrangement she was working on. The shop was painted a rich, dark turquoise, and was bursting with blooms of all sizes, shapes and textures in galvanised steel buckets. Valerie was sitting across from Madame Joubert on a small wooden bench, sipping an aperitif that she had insisted on pouring for her when she’d strolled in with the start of a headache. Dupont’s voice was still ringing in her ears, and she needed somewhere she could go to be away for ten minutes, before she attacked the old man with his own stapler.
‘Don’t be ridiculous. He looks like a young man again, chérie. There’s a spring in his step. His eyes twinkle.’
Valerie snorted. ‘That’s allergies – and rheumatoid arthritis.’
Madame Joubert roared with laughter. ‘That too – but still, it’s good to see him so happy.’
When Valerie went back to the shop that evening, with a bulging bag from the fish market, she hoped that what Madame Joubert had said was true, and that he really was happy that she was there. She put the fish in the fridge, then tidied up the store, one of the few chores he actually allowed her to do – which was waging war on the years of accumulated dust – and thought about the week so far. They certainly had spoken a lot, but not about anything besides books, and food, and Paris. She hadn’t been able to get him to speak about the war – even when she had brought up the Americans. When she’d asked about it he’d grunted and changed the subject. She hadn’t pressed him too much, even though he had promised her in his letter that he would speak about what it was like running a bookshop during the Occupation. Perhaps he just needed more time.
A grunt had also been how he’d told her that he’d found her performance acceptable, and that he wasn’t in fact going to be sending her home on the next train. ‘I’m used to you getting the croissants in the morning now.’
Which was about as much praise as she could hope for, she supposed.
Chapter Six
The cat was a mangy thing, just skin and bone and sinew, with bald patches in its once glossy black-and-white fur and a missing tail, which had been lost in a valiant fight with an orange alley cat some seven years before. The cat belonged, if it belonged anywhere, to the Gribouiller bookshop on Rue des Oiseaux, and to M’sieur Dupont, though he denied such a thing, mais bien sûr.
‘Pah, that bag of old bones. What do I want him here for, eh, fleas?’
But still, there was fresh milk for the cat every morning, and when he thought Valerie wasn’t looking, she caught him feeding it from his hand.
When he saw that she’d seen, he sniffed, saying that he didn’t want to have the burden of carting the beast’s body away if it died.
The bookshop cat didn’t have an official name. If it did, it was Le chat de M’sieur Dupont, and later just Dupont, so sometimes you couldn’t be sure if the neighbours were talking about the cat or the man. Valerie learned soon enough, though, that if it was with any degree of affection, it was almost certainly the cat.
The cat was circling now around a new delivery of books, which had been hastily dropped into the corner, rubbing his tail-less bottom on the edge of the box.
‘’E is so sweet,’ said Madame Hever, one of Dupont’s brave and fearless customers, who didn’t mind that she was called a philistine for reading anything but Dickens, and began scratching the cat under its chin. He began at once to purr.
‘Non, he is a pest,’ said Dupont in denial, yet managing to acknowledge his virtue by adding, ‘but at least he keeps the rats away.’
This was a lie, so Valerie knew, but she spared the cat (and the man) the shame of pointing it out, and got back to counting the stock.<
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She moved to take the empty box away, which was when she saw the hole in the wall. It looked almost like a bullet wound.
Her fingers touched the hole, making a small confetti of plaster rain down on the wooden floor.
‘It does need a paint,’ sniffed Dupont, shuffling over, ‘but at least try not to make it worse.’
‘It looks like a bullet hole,’ said Valerie, straightening up with a frown.
He shrugged. ‘That’s because it is.’
Her eyes widened. ‘What? How?’
He looked at her as though she were stupid. ‘We are in the centre of Paris – there was a war, people used bullets.’
‘In here?’
He shrugged again. ‘Oui.’
At her look of surprise, he sighed as he explained: ‘That, chérie, was the work of a singular Nazi, who thought that the best way to deal with a book by Balzac was by putting a bullet through it. Charmant.’
It was Madame Joubert who provided more information about the bullet hole, when she brought in another box that had been delivered to the flower shop by mistake, and Valerie told her what Dupont had said.
Madame Joubert nodded, her mouth pursing in displeasure. ‘Ah oui, I remember that day, how could I forget,’ she said, her kohl-rimmed eyes unusually sombre, as Valerie came forward quickly to take the box from her. She put it in the corner of the shop next to the small red bistro set that she had turned into her own desk, complete with a spot for the cat and the telephone.
‘It was that first week too – just after the fall of Paris – when they were really throwing their weight around, the Nazis. The one who did that,’ she said, pointing at the wall, ‘was a young man, with a small afterthought of a moustache, as if it was drawn in pencil. He couldn’t have been out of shorts for long. I’d come into the shop to help Mireille – that was Dupont’s daughter…’ Her eyes grew sad, and she paused and touched her chest, just as Valerie’s own heart began to thud at the mention of her mother’s name.
‘And in came these young men, dressed in brown, telling Dupont which books he now could and could not sell. Which went as well as you can imagine… When Dupont protested at the banning of one of the authors – I forget which –’
‘Balzac, that’s what Vincent said,’ supplied Valerie.
‘Oui,’ said Madame Joubert. ‘Balzac. Bang, he shot the cover. There’s not much to argue against a boy and a gun.’
‘Why didn’t M’sieur Dupont close the shop?’ asked Valerie.
‘He was stubborn. Stubborn then. Stubborn now. Besides, I don’t think there was anywhere he could go. His father was long gone, and his mother had died the year before. There was a cousin of some kind, but I believe she had already gone to England… I’m not sure.’
Valerie’s heart started to pound as she realised that Madame Joubert must, of course, be referring to Amélie.
‘So, they were stuck here in Paris, and Mireille wouldn’t leave her father, even though he wanted to send her to the countryside which is where most of the people who could afford to fled. Though it wasn’t that much better there, in the end.’
Valerie shook her head. ‘It must have been terrifying seeing the Nazis descend on Paris like that.’
‘It was. I will never forget it. We believed, like a lot of the French, that the Maginot Line would hold – then suddenly we were told by the government that we were fortunate, they had arranged an armistice – a ceasefire, though of course we all knew what that really was: surrender. We listened on the radio as they told us that now we must put down our weapons and stop fighting. There wasn’t a soul alive in Paris who believed this was anything but defeat.’
Dupont walked in then, followed by the small mangy cat, the old man’s face twisted in anger, even now. ‘No, it was betrayal. They did nothing less than leave us like lambs for the wolves.’
Madame Joubert nodded. ‘That too.’
Chapter Seven
‘We watched as they marched into town, German soldiers marching past the Arc de Triomphe, with their tanks and cars – there were so many of them, an entire army of men in brown. I’ll never forget that day…’ said Madame Joubert.
Dupont looked down, his brow furrowed. ‘Mireille’s birthday,’ he said softly.
The air grew tense, and Valerie held her breath; it was the first time he’d mentioned his daughter to her.
Madame Joubert’s face was grave as she nodded. ‘The fourteenth of June. She’d just turned nineteen. Not much younger than you are now, I suppose,’ she said, looking at Valerie. ‘You look a bit like her, you know?’
Valerie’s heart stopped beating for a moment. Dupont frowned and spared her a glance; there was a small incline of his white head. He sighed. ‘It wasn’t the kind of present anyone could ever want – a city of Nazis.’ His face was as dark as thunder. He shook his head, then turned and left the shop, his shoulders seemingly more stooped than ever.
Valerie made to go after him. But Madame Joubert placed a hand on her shoulder, stopping her. ‘Leave him, chérie, it’ll do no good to follow him. He’s battling old ghosts now.’
Valerie went with Madame Joubert to the flower shop, where she made her a cup of tea, placing it before her on the wooden bench. The shop was closed, and the early morning air sneaked in beneath the wooden doors and windows, stirring the exposed skin on Valerie’s neck and face, making her shiver. She took a sip of the sweet tea and smiled. English Breakfast. Madame Joubert must have bought it especially. The older woman sat down across from her and resumed her work, showing Valerie how to trim a stem and place it into the waiting foam. Valerie breathed in the heady scent of the flowers, and began stripping the bottom leaves off a hothouse rose.
Between them the weight of Dupont’s departure earlier was heavy with unanswered questions. ‘It’s still real for him, isn’t it? Even now,’ said Valerie, her gaze not taking in the colourful blooms of the shop, but looking outward, through the window and seemingly into the past. ‘The war, I mean.’
She didn’t have to say who she meant. Madame Joubert knew to whom she was referring. Her fingers shook slightly as she placed a lilac-hued hydrangea in the green foam, alongside a blush pink rose.
‘Yes. For all of us, it’s still real. That day when they came – it’s hard to capture what we all felt – essentially we felt abandoned. Most people were fleeing in the streets, taking everything they could carry, going to friends or family in the countryside. Even our government had abandoned us – so it seemed when they moved to Vichy, leaving the city to the Germans… and the few French officials they approved of – the ones who had handed us over so easily. Overnight we were no longer citizens, but spectators, watching as the invaders took over everything. Imposing their rules, taking our homes, our food… rationing what had once belonged to us. Overnight, Dupont went from running a small business to being told by a bunch of snot-nosed boys how to live.’
As Madame Joubert spoke, she was swept back twenty years…
The boy who had shot the novel by Balzac came to the store frequently afterwards. Came to see the pretty blonde girl with the shocked blue eyes, and the full mouth.
Came to see how the nerve twitched in the old man’s jaw, how his pale blue eyes blazed, and how hard it was for him not to take the boy by the scruff of his neck and throw him out of his shop. He enjoyed watching the old man’s slow loss of power.
The boy wasn’t the only Nazi soldier who came into the shop. There were many more over the course of the month following the fall of Paris.
When the last one had left for the day, Mireille closed the blind, even though it was only six o’clock and the sun was still shinning. She wanted to block out the day, turn the world dark to reflect her mood. She poured herself a glass of wine and took a sip. When the liquid spilled, she realised that she’d been shaking again without noticing.
Her father came and put a hand on her shoulder. It was knotted and tense, but she stilled at his touch. She looked up and saw that his face was worried, grave.
‘It’s not too late: you can go to the country still. My cousin, Amélie, she could help you.’
Mireille shook her head. ‘I won’t leave you, Papa.’
He gritted his teeth, took the cigarette he’d been keeping behind his ear, and put it between his teeth with a slight grunt. ‘I don’t want you to have to face this,’ he said, pointing at the door, at the world outside, the world gone mad.
She looked at him, her blue eyes softening. ‘No one wants to face this, Papa. No one. But we’ll do it together, like everything else.’
She took another sip, then took a weary seat in the big armchair by the window, moving aside Tomas, the cat, and putting him on her lap. The wine was at last beginning to work.
‘You know what most of these men… these Nazis buy from the shop?’
He frowned, flicked his ash into the ashtray on his desk. ‘Let me guess: adventure stories. Something with bullets and bravado,’ he said, pointing at the space in the wall where the half-grown blond idiot had shot the book.
She shook her head and scratched behind the cat’s ears. He purred, lifting an orange tabby head to look at Dupont.
‘Guidebooks to the city. It’s like… to them they’re on holiday.’
He blinked. He thought there wasn’t much that could shock him now – not since the city was occupied – but that did.
‘They’re on holiday – and we’re going through hell.’
‘Yes.’
Chapter Eight
Valerie was tired. It felt as if the past few weeks had all hit her at once. The mattress in her small iron bed seemed to be made up of corkscrews instead of springs, each one finding ways to enact some revenge against her body, and no amount of turning made a difference. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d had a full night’s sleep.