“It’s open!”
A man’s voice. Slightly muffled, husky even, tinged with an indefinable accent. At the far end of the room, a long shape unfurled. As she pushed open the door, Juliette saw a mountain of boxes, the top ones placed slightly askew, which began to wobble. “Watch out!” she yelled. Too late: the boxes crashed to the floor, sending up a cloud of dust. Juliette began to choke, and covered her mouth and nose with her hand. She heard a curse, which she didn’t understand, and glimpsed movement—the man had fallen to his knees. She saw he was dark-haired, dressed in black, quite thin, and was rubbing his eyes.
“I don’t believe it! I’d sorted them all out … Will you help me?”
His tone, this time, was imperious. At a loss for words, Juliette nodded and moved toward the light, where the voice had come from. The man was alone. He waved his arms around, his too-short sleeves revealing bony wrists, and, now that the dust had settled a little, she could see his profile: clean, almost sharp, his nose as straight as that of a Greek god, or of the warriors on the Knossos frescoes. She’d spent two weeks on Crete the previous summer and she had often seen them since, in her dreams, brandishing javelins and running headlong into the assault, their long, almond-shaped eyes filled with visions of glory and immortality.
“Of course,” she mumbled, not certain whether he’d heard her.
He gathered up the scattered books, flailing around like a clumsy swimmer. The books were thigh high, lying higgledy-piggledy, the covers sliding over one another, fanning out, some books fallen open. All of a sudden, she thought she heard the hum of a chickadee flying out of a bush.
When she was directly in front of him, he looked up and voiced his dismay with childlike simplicity.
“I can’t remember how I’d sorted these. By subject and by country, perhaps. Or by genre.” He added, as if in apology: “I’m very absentminded. My daughter’s always scolding me. She says a bird flew off with my brain a long time ago.”
“Little Zaide?” asked Juliette, already crouching down, her hands moving among the pages. “Is she your daughter?”
Before Juliette was spread an almost complete set of Zola’s novels: The Fortune of the Rougons, The Kill, The Sin of Abbé Mouret, A Love Story, Pot Luck, Nana, The Masterpiece … She gathered them up and made a neat pile on the floor, beside the sea of scattered books.
“Have you met her?”
“Yes, she’s the one who invited me in.”
“I should tell her to be more careful.”
“Do I look so dangerous?”
Above the pile of Zolas, a man’s face with a pencil mustache was arrogantly staring at her. She deciphered the title: Bel Ami.
“Maupassant,” she said. “And here’s Daudet. Naturalist novels. Maybe you’d tried to classify them by literary genre…”
He wasn’t listening.
“No, you don’t look dangerous,” he admitted after a moment’s thought. “Are you a bookseller? Or a teacher? Librarian, maybe?”
“No, nothing like that, I … I work in property. But my grandfather was a bookseller. I used to love his shop when I was little. I loved helping him. I adored the smell of books…”
The smell of books … it would hit her even before she walked into the bookshop, the moment she caught sight of the narrow window where her grandfather only ever displayed one volume at a time, usually an open art book on a stand, and each day he would turn one page. People stopped, she recalled, to look at the picture of the day: a little Jacob van Ruisdael, a portrait by Jean-Baptiste Greuze, a seascape by Nicolas Ozanne …
For the little girl, and later adolescent, the shop was the palace out of the One Thousand and One Nights, her refuge on wet Wednesday afternoons, which she spent arranging the new arrivals on the shelves or reading in the stockroom. A passionate book lover, always on the lookout for rare editions, her grandfather bought entire collections of secondhand books, most of which were piled up in tall crates to the right of the door. Rummaging through these treasures, Juliette had discovered not only the classics of children’s literature, but also works by authors who’d gone out of fashion: Charles Morgan, Daphne du Maurier, Barbey d’Aurevilly, and a whole host of English female novelists, including Rosamond Lehmann. She devoured Agatha Christie novels like sweets …
The voice of the man in black brought her abruptly back to the present.
“Here, take these here. Now I remember I didn’t know where to put them. I suppose that means they’re ready to leave.”
Juliette instinctively opened her hands to take the pile of books he was holding out to her, then echoed, surprised: “Ready to leave?”
“Yes. That’s why you’re here, isn’t it? You want to be a passeur? Ordinarily I should have asked you some questions first. I’d made a list, over there”—he pointed vaguely at the desk strewn with papers and articles cut out of newspapers—“but I can never find it when I need it. I can offer you a cup of coffee, though.”
“I … no, thank you, I have to—”
“But I still need to explain to you how we operate … we, I mean they, because I … well, it’s a bit complicated. I don’t go out.” He got up, deftly using his hands for support, stepped over the boxes, and made his way to the back of the room where, on a little table, stood a sort of metal contraption, as well as cups and a tin with the old-fashioned inscription: BISCUITS LEFÈVRE-UTILE.
“It’s a percolator of my own invention,” he said with his back to Juliette. “It works on the principle of the pellet stove … do you see what I mean?”
“Not really,” mumbled Juliette, who felt most definitely she was being drawn into the realm of the absurd.
She was late. Very late now. Chloe must already have called her cell phone—switched off—to find out whether she was ill. Monsieur Bernard would have walked into his glass-walled office—on the left as you entered the agency—removed his coat and hung it in the cupboard, checking that the shoulders were perfectly level on the hanger with its cedarwood disc to keep the moths away. He would have switched on his personal coffee maker, placed two sugar lumps in his Limoges porcelain cup rimmed with two thin bands of gold, the sole vestige of his mother’s coffee service, he’d once told her. A charming woman but a scatterbrain, she’d broken all the others, even throwing one at his father’s head when she’d found out he was having an affair with his secretary—a classic scenario. The telephone would have already rung a couple of times, Chloe taking the calls. What time was it? Juliette glanced anxiously at the window, then inhaled the aroma of coffee and forgot her guilt. The man was energetically turning the handle of a wooden coffee grinder. He hummed, as if he’d forgotten she was there. She felt, rather than heard, the tune swirl around her fleetingly before fading away.
“My name’s Soliman,” he said, turning to face her. “What’s yours?”