Next Perdu served an Englishman who asked him, ‘I recently saw a book with a green-and-white jacket. Has it been translated?’ Perdu figured out that it was a classic that had been published seventeen years back. He sold the man a collection of poetry instead. Afterwards, he helped the deliveryman transfer the crates of books he had ordered from the handcart onto the boat, and then gathered a few recent children’s books for the somewhat frantic teacher from the primary school on the other bank of the Seine.
Perdu wiped the nose of a little girl, who was absorbed with Northern Lights. For the girl’s overworked mother, he wrote out a tax refund certificate for the thirty-volume encyclopedia she was buying in installments.
She gestured towards her daughter. ‘This strange child of mine wants to have read the entire thing before she turns twenty-one. Okay, I said, she can have the enclyco … encloped … oh, all these reference books, but she won’t be getting any more birthday presents. And nothing for Christmas either.’
Perdu acknowledged the seven-year-old girl with a nod. The child nodded earnestly back.
‘Do you think that’s normal?’ the mother asked anxiously. ‘At her age?’
‘I think she’s brave, clever and right.’
‘As long as she doesn’t turn out too smart for men.’
‘For the stupid ones, she will, Madame. But who wants them anyway? A stupid man is every woman’s downfall.’
The mother looked up from her agitated, reddened hands in surprise.
‘Why didn’t anyone ever tell me that?’ she asked with the flicker of a smile.
‘Do you know what?’ said Perdu. ‘Pick a book you’d like to give your daughter for her birthday anyway. It’s discount day at the Apothecary: buy an encyclopedia and we’ll throw in a novel.’
The woman accepted his fib without blinking and sighed. ‘But my mother’s waiting for us outside. My mother says she wants to move into a retirement home and that I should stop taking care of her. But I can’t. Could you?’
‘I’ll look after your mother. You look for a present, all right?’
The woman did as he said with a grateful smile.
Perdu brought a glass of water to the girl’s grandmother out on the embankment. She didn’t dare venture across the gangway.
Perdu was familiar with such distrust from elderly people; he had many customers over seventy whom he gave advice to on dry land, on the very same wrought-iron bench where the old lady was now sitting. The further life advanced, the more protective the elderly were of their good days: nothing should imperil the time they had left. That was why they no longer went on trips; why they felled the old trees outside their houses so they didn’t come crashing down onto their roofs; and why they no longer inched their way across a river on a five-millimetre-thick steel gangway. Perdu also brought the grandmother a magazine-sized book catalogue, with which she fanned herself against the summer heat. The elderly lady patted the seat beside her invitingly.
She reminded Perdu of his mother, Lirabelle. Maybe it was her eyes. They looked alert and intelligent. So he sat down. The Seine was sparkling, and the sky arched blue and summery overhead. The roaring and beeping of traffic drifted down from the Place de la Concorde; there was not a moment of silence. The city would empty a bit after 14 July, when the Parisians set off to claim the coastline and the mountains for the duration of the summer holidays. Yet even then the city would be loud and voracious.
‘Do you do this too sometimes?’ the grandmother suddenly asked. ‘Check on old photos to see whether the faces of the deceased show any inkling that they will soon die?’
Monsieur Perdu shook his head. ‘No.’
With trembling fingers dotted with liver spots, the lady opened the locket on her necklace.
‘This is my husband. Taken two weeks before he collapsed. And then, all of a sudden, there you are, a young woman in an empty room.’
She ran her index finger over her husband’s picture and tapped him gently on the nose.
‘How relaxed he looks. As if all his plans could come true. We look into a camera and think it will all carry on and on, but then: bonjour, eternal rest.’
She paused. ‘I for one don’t let anyone take photos of me any more,’ she said. She turned her face to the sun. ‘Do you have a book about dying?’
‘Many, in fact,’ said Perdu. ‘About growing old, about contracting an incurable disease, about dying slowly, quickly, alone somewhere on the floor of a hospital ward.’
‘I’ve often wondered why people don’t write more books about living. Anyone can die. But living?’
‘You’re right, Madame. There is so much to say about living. Living with books, living with children, living for beginners.’
‘Write one then.’