It was rare for someone who didn’t live here to wander into this neighbourhood. The buildings were no more than five storeys high, and each fa?ade was painted a different pastel shade.
A baker, a wine merchant and the Algerian tobacconist lined the street further down Rue Montagnard. The other buildings contained flats, medical practices and offices, all the way to the roundabout. And there was the realm of Ti Breizh, a Breton bistro with a red awning whose savoury pancakes were soft and tasty.
Monsieur Perdu set down for the waiter Thierry an ebook reader that a hectic publishing salesman had left behind. For avid readers like Thierry, who would have his nose in a novel even between orders, and had a crooked back from hauling books around (‘I can only breathe if I read, Perdu’), these devices were the invention of the century; for booksellers, one more nail in their coffin.
Thierry offered Perdu a glass of lambig, Breton apple brandy.
‘Not today,’ Perdu declined. That’s what he said every time. Perdu didn’t drink alcohol. Not any more.
That was because whenever he drank, each sip opened a little further the breach in the dam, against which a foaming lake of thoughts and emotions was pressing. He knew; back then he had tried drinking. Those were the days of smashed furniture.
Today, however, he had a special reason for refusing Thierry’s offer: he wanted to deliver the ‘books for crying’ to Madame Catherine, the former Mme Le P., as quickly as possible.
The green-and-white awning of Joshua Goldenberg’s corner shop protruded next to Ti Breizh. Goldenberg stepped out in front of Perdu when he saw him coming.
‘Say, Monsieur Perdu,’ Goldenberg began, somewhat embarrassed.
Oh no, he’s not going to ask for some soft porn now, is he?
‘It’s to do with Brigitte. I think my little girl is, um, turning into a woman. That causes, er, certain problems, you know what I mean? Do you have a book for that?’
Luckily, this wasn’t going to be a man-to-man talk about one-handed reading material. One more father in despair over his daughter’s puberty and wondering how he could tackle the sex-education stuff before she met the wrong man.
‘Come along to the parents’ clinic.’
‘I’m not sure. Maybe my wife should …’
‘Okay then, both of you come. First Wednesday of the month, eight o’clock. The two of you could go out to dinner afterwards.’
‘Me? With my wife? Why?’
‘It’d probably make her happy.’
Monsieur Perdu walked off before Goldenberg could back out.
He will anyway.
Of course, there would only be mothers at the clinic when it came down to it – and they wouldn’t be discussing their sexually maturing offspring. Most of them were actually looking for sex-education manuals that could teach their husbands some basic female anatomy.
Perdu tapped in the code and opened the front door. He was less than a metre inside when Madame Rosalette came barrelling out of the concierge’s flat with her pug under her arm. Edith the pug clung on sullenly beneath Rosalette’s ample bosom.
‘Monsieur Perdu, you’re back at last!’
‘New hair colour, Madame?’ he asked as he pressed the button to call the lift.
Her hand, red from doing household chores, flew to her bouffant hairstyle. ‘Spanish Rosé. A tiny shade darker than Sherry Brut, but more elegant, I think. How observant you are! But I do have something to confess, Monsieur.’
She fluttered her eyelashes. The pug panted in time.
‘If it’s a secret, I promise I’ll forget it immediately, Madame.’
Rosalette had a chronological streak. She enjoyed registering her fellow citizens’ neuroses, intimacies and habits, plotting them on a scale of decency, and knowledgeably passing on her opinions to others. She was generous in that regard.
‘You’re so naughty! And it’s really none of my business if Madame Gulliver is happy with these young men. No, no. It is … there was … well … a book.’
Perdu pressed the lift button again.
‘And you bought this book from another bookseller? Forgiven, Madame Rosalette, you’re forgiven.’
‘No. Worse. Dug it out of a crate of books in Montmartre for all of fifty cents. But you said yourself that if a book’s over twenty years old, I should pay no more than a few cents for it and rescue it from destruction.’
‘Right, I did say that.’
What’s wrong with this treacherous lift?
Now Rosalette leaned forward, and her coffee-and-cognac breath mingled with that of her dog.
‘Well, I’d rather I hadn’t. That awful cockroach story! The mother chasing her own son away with a broom. Horrible. I was cleaning obsessively for days. Is that typical of this Monsieur Kafka?’
‘You’ve summed it up well, Madame. Some people have to study it for decades to get the meaning.’
Madame Rosalette flashed him a blank but contented smile.
‘Oh yes, the lift is out of order. It’s stuck between the Goldenbergs’ and Madame Gulliver’s again.’