The Girl Who Reads on the Métro Read online

  This one smelled of the street—a mixture of rust and smoke, of guano and burnt tires. But also, surprisingly, of mint. Stalks fell out of the fold, dropped soundlessly to the ground, and the fragrance became even more intense.

  “Zaide!”

  The voice shouted again, a galloping sound; Juliette felt a warm little body bang into her.

  “Excuse me.”

  The voice, surprisingly deep for a child, sounded shocked. Juliette looked down and met a pair of brown eyes, so dark that the dilated pupils seemed to fill the irises.

  “This is my house,” said the little girl.

  “May I come in?” Juliette whispered.

  “Of course.”

  Awkwardly, Juliette stepped sideways and the heavy door began to close. The little girl pushed it with both hands.

  “That’s why Papa always leaves a book there,” she explained patiently. “The handle’s too stiff for me.”

  “But why a book?”

  The question burst out like a criticism. Juliette felt herself blush, which hadn’t happened to her for a long time—especially not in front of a ten-year-old pip-squeak.

  Zaide—what a pretty name—shrugged.

  “Oh, them! He says they’re ‘cuckoos.’ That’s funny, isn’t it? Like the birds. They’ve got the same pages repeated three or four times, they haven’t been made right, you see? You can’t read them. Well, not really. Show me that one.”

  The girl leaned forward, closed her eyes, and sniffed.

  “I tried to read it. It’s a stupid story, about a girl who meets a boy. She hates him and then she loves him, but then he hates her and … I was so bored that I put mint leaves in it so that at least it would smell nice.”

  “That’s a lovely idea,” said Juliette softly.

  “Do you want to come in? Are you one of the passeurs? I’ve never seen you before.”

  Passeurs? Juliette shook her head. The word evoked images from a black-and-white film: hazy shapes bent double running through tunnels or crawling under barbed wire as the passeurs smuggled Jews out of the German-occupied zone to safety, young women on bicycles carrying Resistance pamphlets in their saddlebags and smiling with feigned innocence at a German soldier wearing a gray-green salad bowl helmet. Images seen hundreds of times at the cinema or on TV, so familiar that you sometimes forgot the horrors they represented.

  “So, do you want to be one?” Zaide went on. “It’s easy. Come on, let’s go and see my father.”

  Once again, Juliette shook her head. Then her gaze left the little girl’s face and lighted on the doorplate with the mysterious but simple wording. BOOKS UNLIMITED. Such a curious name. Books know neither limits nor borders, except sometimes of the language in which they’re written—so why…?

  She could feel her mind wandering, even though she was aware that the clock was ticking and she had to leave, get away from this street and return as soon as possible to the neon lighting of her office at the back of the agency, the musty odor of property files and client files, Chloe’s nonstop chatter and Monsieur Bernard’s cough, loose or dry depending on the season, the fourth viewing for a retired couple who couldn’t make up their minds between a house in suburban Milly-la-Forêt or a one-bedroom apartment near Porte d’Italie.

  “Come on,” Zaide urged her again.

  She took Juliette’s hand and pulled her into the courtyard, then carefully put the book back to prop open the door.

  “That’s the office, over there across the courtyard, with the glass door. Just knock. I’m going upstairs.”

  “Don’t you go to school?” asked Juliette instinctively.

  “There’s a case of chicken pox in my class,” replied the girl self-importantly. “We’ve all been sent home; I’ve even got a note for my father. Don’t you believe me?”

  Her little round face had creased into a worried frown. The tip of her tongue peeked out from between her lips, as pink and smooth as a marzipan flower.

  Of course Juliette believed her.

  “That’s okay then. It’s just you’re all so suspicious,” Zaide concluded with a shrug.

  She spun around and again her braids bounced on her shoulders. Her hair was dark brown, with a honey sheen when the sun caught it; each of her braids was as thick as her delicate wrist.

  While she raced up the steps of a metal staircase that led to a long gallery running the length of the first floor of the building—probably a former factory—Juliette made her way hesitantly toward the glass door. She didn’t know exactly why she’d followed the little girl and was now obeying her order—thinking about it, was it an order? Or a piece of advice? In any case, this was utter madness: she was already late, she knew it without needing to look at her watch. A fine drizzle was now falling and gently stinging her face, prompting her to seek warmth, a temporary shelter. After all, she had nothing urgent to do that morning … she could always say her washing machine was on the blink. It had been acting up for months. She had even talked at length to Monsieur Bernard about it, and he’d insisted on explaining to her the merits of the different brands. He maintained that the German ones were the best, so much more reliable, he claimed, and even offered to go with her the following Saturday to a store he knew: the manager was a distant cousin, a trustworthy man who would advise her well.

  The glazed door sparkled, reflecting a section of sky—and in the depths of the room, a light was on.

  Juliette raised her hand and knocked.

  4

  “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 loo
k 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?”

  5

  “My father used to love Mozart,” he said after a while when they were drinking, slowly, a thick, black, almost syrupy coffee. “He named my sister and me after characters in the opera Zaide. My daughter is also called Zaide.”

  “What about your mother? Was she okay with that?”

  Juliette, aware of her blunder, turned red and put her cup down.

  “I’m sorry. Sometimes I say whatever comes into my head. It’s none of my business.”

  “There’s no harm done,” he replied with the ghost of a smile that softened his sharp features. “My mother died very young. But for a long time, she hadn’t really been with us. Absent … in a way.”

  Without offering any further explanation, he let his gaze wander over the boxes piled up against the partitions, neatly stacked, almost nested—a second wall, insulating the little room from the light and noise outside.

  “Have you heard of the principle of releasing books into the wild?” he went on after a few moments’ silence. “An American, Ron Hornbaker, created, or rather developed, the concept of BookCrossing in 2001. Turn the whole world into a library … a lovely idea, don’t you think? You leave a book in a public place—a station, park bench, cinema—someone picks it up, reads it, then releases it elsewhere a few days or weeks later.”

  He pressed his hands together under his chin, forming an almost perfect triangle.

  “What was needed was a way of tracking the books that had been ‘released,’ following their journey and allowing readers to share their impressions. Hence the BookCrossing website, where each book is registered. It is given an ID which must be included on a label on the cover, with the website URL. Anyone picking up a book can register the date and place where they found it, add an opinion or a review—”

  “Is that what you do?” interrupted Juliette.

  “Not exactly.”

  He stood up and went over to the piles of books reconstructed by Juliette as best she could. He took a book from each one.

  “Here, we have a fairly random assortment of potential reading. Tolstoy’s War and Peace. The Sorrow of Angels by Jón Kalman Stefánsson. Suite Française by Irène Némirovsky. Winter’s End by Jean-Claude Mourlevat. Nothing Holds Back the Night by Delphine de Vigan. Lancelot, the Knight of the Cart by Chrétien de Troyes. The next passeur who comes into this room will have the responsibility of passing on all these books.”

  “Responsibility?” asked Juliette.

  “They won’t release them into the wild or leave them on a train. In other words, they won’t leave it to chance for the books to find their readers.”

  “But how—?”

  “The passeur has to choose a reader. Someone they will have watched, even followed, until they are able to intuit the book that person needs. Make no mistake, it’s a very demanding task. You don’t allocate a book as a challenge, on a whim, to upset or provoke. My best passeurs have a tremendous capacity for empathy: they feel, in their very bones, the frustrations and resentments that build up deep in a body which, at first glance, looks no different from any other body. Actually, I should say my best passeur, singular, because the other one left us very recently.”

  He put the books down and turned around to pick up, delicately, between two fingers, a photo enlarged to A4 format.

  “I wanted to put this on the wall of this office. But she wouldn’t have liked that. She was a self-effacing woman, quiet, secretive even. I never found out exactly where she came from. She just appeared one day, like you. Nor do I know why she decided to end her life.”

  Juliette felt a lump in her throat. The walls of books seemed to be closing in on her, compact and menacing.

  “You
mean she—?”

  “Yes. She committed suicide two days ago.”

  He nudged the photo across the table toward Juliette. It was a black-and-white shot, slightly grainy, the details blurred by the distance and the poor quality of the print; but she immediately recognized the woman with the thickset body, bundled up in a winter coat, in three-quarter view.

  It was the woman with the cookery book who rode Line 6 of the Métro, the one who often looked out with a mysterious, expectant smile.

  “I’m so sorry … how stupid of me!”

  After the fourth or fifth time that Soliman repeated these words, he brought Juliette a box of tissues, another cup of coffee, and a plate—not very clean—onto which he tipped the contents of the tin of biscuits.

  “Did you know her?”

  “Yes,” she managed to reply. “Well, no. She took the same Métro line as I did in the morning. It’s true I didn’t see her yesterday or the day before. I should have guessed … I should have done something for her…”

  He moved behind her and clumsily rubbed her shoulders. Surprisingly, she found his rough, firm hands comforting.

  “No, you shouldn’t have. You couldn’t have done anything. Look, I’m sorry, very sorry…”

  Juliette began to laugh nervously.

  “Stop saying that.”

  She straightened up, blinking back her tears. The little room seemed to have shrunk even more, as if the walls of books had taken a step forward into the room. Which was impossible, of course. As impossible as the curve she seemed to see above her head: Were the books in the top row really leaning toward her, their hard backs ready to whisper words of comfort?

  Juliette shook her head and stood up, brushing the cookie crumbs from her skirt. They’d been soggy, with a strange taste—too much cinnamon, probably. Soliman hadn’t eaten any. The clouds of steam still rising from the percolator—which at regular intervals made a slight clicking sound—formed a veil in front of his face, blurring his features. She had stared at him covertly, looking away when his eyes met hers. When he’d come over and stood behind her, she’d felt relieved. It seemed to her that she had never seen such black eyebrows, such sad eyes, despite the permanent smile that softened the hard outline of his mouth. It was a face that made her think at the same time of storms, of victory and decline. How old could he be?