When the man in the green hat pushed open the office door, Juliette sneezed. So as to create a clearer path for visitors, she’d just moved the entire Human Comedy by Balzac onto a shelf that looked robust enough to house it—once she’d removed the series of noir fiction, which migrated to the mantelpiece. The hearth was already blocked by a pile of travel books, including the very curious Travels of Ali Bey in Morocco, Tripoli, Cyprus, Egypt, Arabia, Syria and Turkey, Between the Years 1803 and 1807 published in 1816. The cloud of dust looked almost solid, and the man removed one of his gloves to push it aside, as he would have done a curtain dividing the room.
“Good day, mademoiselle,” he said in a fluting voice, which contrasted with his portliness and almost stern expression.
He froze, frowning.
“Where is Soliman?”
He looked surprised and slightly annoyed. Juliette straightened up and rubbed her hands on her jeans. Which was pointless. She was covered in dust from head to toe.
“He’s gone away for a while,” she replied cautiously.
“Away.”
He didn’t echo the word in disbelief; no, he simply repeated it, chewed it, like a strange and exotic food. He did this several times, then swept the room with his gaze and, having spotted an empty chair, made his way over to it and dusted it carefully before sitting down, pinching the crease in his trousers to ensure that they fell straight. That done, he looked up and gazed amiably at Juliette.
“Soliman never goes away.”
He stated this as if it were a fact.
“I … he…”
Embarrassed, Juliette started twisting the end of her sleeve. She was wearing a long, very tatty, red sweater. She’d extracted it from the pile that morning because she was in need of comfort. It had been raining nonstop since Soliman had left; Zaide had a cold and was crotchety; in the courtyard a pipe had broken, releasing a persistent smell of rotten eggs. When she’d looked at herself in the little mirror next to the shower, the red sweater had made her feel a bit warmer. But right now, it couldn’t protect her from her own shyness.
She surreptitiously pinched the flesh of her arm.
The man in the green hat. The man from the Métro, the insect book, the rustling paper. There, in the office, among the often short-lived towers of book spines and fore edges, multicolored or varying shades of ivory ranging from off-white to mustard yellow. In flesh and blood.
It was as if a character from a novel had slipped out of his book to speak to her.
“He had some difficulties … he needed to sort out,” she managed to say. “Out of town. I’m minding the shop. Temporarily, of course.”
Oh God, was she going to keep yammering on? She stopped talking, her cheeks burning, and became absorbed in contemplating the worn but comfortable sneakers she kept for major clear-up days. To be honest, that was her day-to-day life since she’d been living there, or mostly. She felt surrounded, watched, almost under attack from all these books—where had they come from, anyway? What apparently inexhaustible source supplied the towers, columns, piles, and boxes that seemed to multiply each day? She found some in front of the high iron gate every time she put her nose outside; stumbled over bulging shopping bags that had sometimes burst open, overflowing baskets, stacks tied with string, a wide elastic band, and even, once or twice, a red ribbon that gave these anonymous donations an old-fashioned and rather quixotic aura.
Quixotic, yes. Everything here was quixotic, almost too much so. It was all too much; she wouldn’t be able to stand it much longer. She needed a less rarefied atmosphere, less filled with knowledge and stories and plots and subtle dialogues, all of which she explained in a rush, beginning to sob, to the man in the green hat who, disconcerted, removed his hat, tapped her awkwardly on the shoulder, and ended up putting his arms around her and cradling her like a child.
“It’s all right, it’s all right,” he repeated like a mantra.
“No,” sniffed Juliette. “I’m rubbish. Soliman trusted me, and I can’t do anything. Not even tidy up … all this.”
“Tidy up?”
He began to laugh. A strange, rusty sort of laugh. Perhaps he hadn’t laughed for a long time, thought Juliette, as she rummaged in her pockets for a tissue. She wiped her eyes, blew her nose vigorously, and straightened up.
“I’m so sorry.”
“Why?”
“Um … because … we don’t know one another. You must think I’m a real drama queen.”
A smile spread over the man’s broad face. A smile that also crinkled his eyes, whose shiny irises almost disappeared into his eyelids with their pale, delicate skin covered in tiny red speckles.
“You’re wrong, young lady. First of all, I don’t think you’re a drama queen, as you muddleheadedly say. I don’t hold it against you, by the way; we are never aware of what we convey when we describe our symptoms or ailments. And secondly, because there won’t be a third point, we know one another very well. Much better, in fact, than you yourself think. You know,” he added, “you’re not the only person who looks to see what people are reading on the Métro.”