The Girl Who Reads on the Métro Read online

  “I really must go,” she said, more to convince herself than for his benefit.

  “But you’ll come back.”

  It wasn’t a question. He held out the parcel of books, which he’d fastened with a canvas strap. Like in the past, she thought, when children carried schoolbooks—rigid, heavy bundles that dug into their backs as they walked. She wasn’t surprised; she couldn’t imagine him using a plastic bag.

  “Yes. I’ll come back.”

  Wedging the books under her arm, she turned her back to him and made her way over to the door. Her hand on the knob, she stopped.

  “Do you ever read love stories?” she asked without turning around.

  “This will surprise you,” he answered. “Yes, sometimes.”

  “What happens on page 247?”

  There was a pause. He appeared to be thinking about her question. Or perhaps dredging up a memory. Then he said: “On page 247, all seems lost. It’s the best moment, you know.”

  6

  Standing in the crowded compartment the next morning, Juliette felt the canvas bag she was wearing over her shoulder digging into her, just between her ribs and her left hip. The books with their sharp corners were trying to get inside her, she said to herself, each jostling to be the first; captive little creatures which, this morning, were almost hostile.

  She knew why. On returning home the previous day, she’d phoned the agency to say she didn’t feel well—no, no, nothing serious, must be something she’d eaten, she’d be fine after a day’s rest—and had stuffed the books unceremoniously into a big shopping bag and zipped it shut, then plonked the bag by the front door, with her umbrella on top of it because rain had been forecast. Then she’d switched on the TV, turned up the volume, and eaten frozen lasagne heated up in the microwave while she watched a documentary on gannets, then another about a has-been rock star. She needed the noises of the world as a buffer between her and the book depot, between her and the time she’d just spent in that tiny room—no, not tiny but cramped, that office where the remaining empty space seemed to have been carved out from the inside by each book arranged on a shelf or stacked between the legs of a table, against an armchair or on the shelves of an old refrigerator with its door open.

  What she had brought back from that room, she’d removed from her sight, from her senses, if not from her memory; her mouth full of the almost sweet taste of industrial lasagne, her eardrums ringing with music, exclamations, birdcalls, secrets, analyses, chatter, she regained her footing in the familiar, the everyday, the not-too-bad, the almost bearable—in other words, life—the only life she knew.

  And now, the books seemed to bear her a grudge for having ignored them. That was nonsense.

  “Hey,” complained the man next to her, a short, pudgy man in a camouflage parka, “your bag’s rock hard. What the hell have you got in there?”

  Looking at the top of his shiny, balding head, she replied automatically: “Books.”

  “At your age? I don’t believe it. Not that I’m against books, but you’d do better to—”

  Juliette didn’t hear the rest of his sentence because the train shuddered to a halt, the doors opened, and the belligerent man, swept along by the tide of bodies, was already out of sight. A tall, slim woman with a creased raincoat took his place. She did not complain, even though for the entire duration of the journey she bounced against the books, which seemed to have arranged themselves to stab her as hard as possible at the slightest contact. Juliette felt bad for her and pressed herself against the juddering partition, but the woman’s face, which she glimpsed in profile, did not betray the slightest annoyance; only a heavy weariness, like a thick shell, encrusted and hardened by time.

  At last, she reached her station, wove her way through the stream of commuters going up and down the stairs, stumbled as she stepped onto the pavement, made a beeline for the agency, the sea of property ads—white rectangles with a bright orange border—and ran to the door.

  She was the first in, so she was able to dump the bag under her jacket in the metal cupboard where the staff kept their personal belongings. Then she slammed the door with needless force and sat down at her desk, where a pile of incomplete files was waiting for her, plus a Post-it note covered in Chloe’s untidy scrawl:

  U feeling better? Doing a viewing now, then on to that awful flat in Rue G. XXX!

  “That awful flat in Rue G” meant a very, very long viewing. The fifty-square-meter apartment was almost entirely taken up by a passageway and a disproportionately spacious bathroom containing a claw-foot bathtub eaten away by rust. Chloe had made this her personal challenge. A few days earlier, Juliette had listened to her drawing up her battle plan, enumerating enthusiastically the benefits of such a bathtub bang in the middle of Paris.

  “If it’s a couple, it’ll enhance their sex life. They simply have to imagine themselves in it, with loads of foam and perfumed oil for foot massages.”

  “What about the rust, and the cracked linoleum? I don’t find that very glamorous,” Juliette had objected.

  “I’m going to take my grandmother’s antique Chinese rug over there—it’s in the basement, my mother won’t even notice it’s gone—and a potted plant. They’ll think they’re in a conservatory, you see, like in that book you lent me. It’s a pain, and it’s very long—I couldn’t get to the end of it—but there was that cool thing, full of flowers, with wicker chairs…”

  Yes, Juliette knew exactly what she meant. The book was Zola’s The Kill, which Chloe had returned to her, saying: “They make so much fuss about nothing!” But she had apparently enjoyed the seduction scene in the conservatory, when Renée Saccard gives herself to her young stepson amid the heady fragrances of the rare blooms, boasting of her husband’s fortune and good taste.

  “You should have come to the home-staging training event,” Chloe chastised her. “It was amazing. You’ve got to put life into the properties—the life people crave. You want them to say, as they walk in, ‘If I live here, I’ll be stronger, more successful, more popular. I’ll get that promotion I’ve been after for two years and that I haven’t dared ask for because I’m scared of having the door slammed in my face. I’ll earn five hundred euros a month more. I’ll ask out that girl in the advertising department and she’ll say yes.’”

  “You’re selling them an illusion…”

  “No, a dream. And I help them imagine themselves in a better future,” concluded Chloe solemnly.

  * * *

  The phone rang. It was Chloe: “Bring me a book. You’ve got loads in your desk drawer. I’ve seen them,” she said accusingly.

  “What kind of book?” asked Juliette, slightly disconcerted. “And why do—?”

  “Any book. It’s for the little table I’m going to put next to the bathtub. It’ll hide the rust. I’m also going to put a vintage lamp with a bead fringe on it. Apparently, some girls love reading in the bath. You immediately feel the ambience.”

  “I thought you wanted to suggest erotic games in the bath?”

  “Her guy isn’t always there. And anyway, it’s good to chill occasionally.”

  “If you say so,” replied Juliette, amused. Chloe was into one-night stands, bemoaned every weekend spent without a lover as if it were a tragedy, and would certainly never have thought of inviting Proust or Faulkner to join her in a bubble bath.

  “I’ll see what I can do,” she said before hanging up.

  * * *

  Chloe had been right: Juliette’s bottom desk drawer, the deepest, which made it impractical for keeping files in order, was stuffed with paperbacks, the vestiges of four years of commuting, books between whose pages she had slipped bookmarks—cinema tickets or dry-cleaning receipts, a pizzeria flyer, concert programs, or pages torn from a notebook on which she’d scribbled shopping lists or telephone numbers.

  When she yanked the metal handle, the heavy drawer slid along its runners with a grating sound then jammed, and half a dozen books tumbled to the floor. Juliette retrieved t
hem and sat up to place them next to her keyboard. No point rummaging through the drawer; the first title that came to hand would do.

  “Title” being the key word here, as that was all Chloe would read.

  The title. Yes, it was important. Would people read Lorette Nobécourt’s novel about psoriasis, The Itching, in the bath? Her skin still remembered that book: just holding it caused a furtive prickling, starting from her left shoulder blade and making its way up to her neck, and there she was scratching, even clawing herself. No, that wasn’t a good idea. And yet, once she’d started reading it, she couldn’t put it down. But then the bathwater was likely to go cold. What was needed was gentleness, something comforting, enveloping. And mysterious. Short stories? Maupassant’s “The Horla,” the unfinished journal of a descent into madness leading to suicide? Juliette pictured the reader, up to her neck in foam, looking up, gazing anxiously through the half-open door into the dark passage … From the shadows, her childhood ghosts and fears so carefully repressed over the years would appear with their attendant anxieties … The young woman would sit up, panic-stricken, clamber out of the bath, skid on the soap like Lady Cora Crawley in Downton Abbey, possibly breaking her neck as she fell …

  No.

  She also discarded with regret the first volume of Proust’s In Search of Lost Time, several thrillers with tattered covers, an essay on work-related suffering, a biography of Stalin (why had she bought that?), a French–Spanish conversation handbook, two fat Russian novels in ten-point, single-spaced type (unreadable), and sighed. Selecting the right book wasn’t so straightforward after all.

  She’d have to empty the drawer. There was bound to be something suitable in there. An inoffensive book, incapable of triggering even the slightest disaster.

  Unless …

  With the palm of her hand, Juliette swept the books haphazardly into the tomblike drawer, then closed it. It was sad, she could feel it, but for now she didn’t want to dwell on this vague and unpleasant emotion.

  She had a mission to carry out.

  She stood up, walked around the desk, and opened the cupboard.

  The bag was still there. Why had she fleetingly thought it might have vanished? She leaned over, picked it up, and instinctively hugged it to her.

  The corner of a book poked her between the ribs.

  This is the one, she thought, with a certainty she had never felt before.

  7

  It was the first, her first as a book passeur, thought Juliette, feeling the chosen book through the thick fabric of her bag—but had she chosen it? She was already breaking the rules: she didn’t even know the title of the book, didn’t know whose hand would pick it up and turn it over, perhaps to read the back-cover blurb; she had neither followed nor observed her target, hadn’t planned the moment when they’d meet, or matched the book and its reader with the care that Soliman had insisted was essential.

  A female reader. It would be a woman, no question. Men don’t read in the bath. Besides, men don’t take baths; they’re always in a hurry, and the only way to get them to sit still is to plonk them down on a sofa in front of the Champions League semifinal.

  At least that was what Juliette had gleaned from the behavior of her previous three boyfriends.

  “I know,” she said out loud. “I’m making generalizations. That’s why I screw up every time.”

  She was making generalizations again. But she had to admit that she tended to jump to hasty conclusions, usually optimistic, from the smallest detail that she found attractive: this one’s little steel-rimmed spectacles, that one’s arms held out, hands cupped to hold a puppy or a baby, and the third one’s lock of hair that kept tumbling across his forehead and obscuring his intense blue gaze. In those tiny details, she thought she read intelligence, kindness, humor, dependability, or a power of imagination that she believed she herself lacked.

  She plunged her hand into the bag with a frown, still talking to herself: Joseph had broad shoulders beneath the chunky knit sweaters he liked to wear, but his strength was limited to his ability to crush a walnut in his fist; Emmanuel felt sorry for the birds that flew into high-voltage cables but didn’t call when she had the flu; Romain couldn’t bear being teased even gently, and when they ate out he split the bill down to the last cent.

  She had been in love—or thought she had, which boiled down to the same thing—with each of them. For the past six months, she’d been single. She had also thought she wouldn’t be able to cope, and was surprised now at how much she was enjoying her freedom—the freedom that had so frightened her before.

  “They can all get lost,” she grumbled, closing her fingers around the chosen book—no, the book that had in fact forced itself on her.

  The book was fat, dense; it fitted nicely into her hand. That was a plus. Juliette slowly retreated, her eyes glued to the near-black cover, with a glimpse, on the spine, of the hazy ruins of an English manor house.

  Daphne du Maurier. Rebecca.

  * * *

  “They’ve put in an offer!”

  Chloe flung her bag onto her desk, turned to Juliette, and pointed a mock accusing finger at her. “The girl made a beeline for your book. Luckily, because she was looking a bit pissed off. I won’t bore you with what she said about the living room, or the kitchen. But then, suddenly…”

  She mimed wonderment, raising her eyebrows, her eyes wide and her mouth making an O.

  “You get the picture. She goes into the bathroom—I must say I pulled out all the stops: soft lighting, the plant, a white bath sheet draped over the back of the chaise longue, you couldn’t see the rust or the damp patches or anything. He started saying that it was mad, all the wasted space, but she wasn’t even listening to him. She went over to the bath and then”—Chloe was jumping up and down, her fists clenched, and went on excitedly—“I’ve never seen anything like it! She picks up the book, begins to leaf through it, and says: ‘Oh, Rebecca, my mother used to love that old film with … now who was it? Grace Kelly? No, Joan Fontaine.’ And she starts reading. She can’t put it down. I didn’t even dare breathe. He says: ‘I think we’ve seen enough,’ and she goes: ‘We could have a walk-in wardrobe,’ and smiles. And I promise you, she asks me: ‘Is this your book? Can I keep it?’ And she plops herself in front of the mirror, a gorgeous baroque mirror I found in a thrift store last weekend, she fusses with her hair, like this”—Chloe mimed the girl’s movements, and Juliette saw her eyelashes flutter, her face soften, become transformed, haunted by a sadness that was unlike her, that seemed to have been plastered over her laughing features like a Japanese Noh or a carnival mask—“and she turned to him and said in a strange voice: ‘We’ll be happy here … you’ll see.’”

  * * *

  The estate agency closed at 6:30 P.M. At midnight, Juliette was still sitting on the wooden floorboards, which had long since lost their varnish and were worn down to wide, putty-colored stripes. Refurbishing this office, where clients never came—the girls had a Perspex table in the shop, which they took turns sitting at during the day, smiling affably under the glare of the recessed lighting—had been utterly out of the question since the New Year’s party three years earlier, when Monsieur Bernard had knocked over a bottle of premium dry cider in the narrow passage leading to the window. The sparkling liquid had run into the cracks in the floor, leaving a yellowish aureole. It was on that stain, long since dried out, that Juliette was sitting cross-legged, the books arranged in a fan around her.

  Seventeen books. She’d counted them. Held them, sized them up, flicked through them. She’d inhaled the smell of their folds, peeked at the odd sentence, words as appetizing as sweets, or sharp as blades: With this he leapt up and made a bed for Odysseus nearer the fire, throwing sheep and goatskins over it. Then Odysseus lay down again, and the swineherd covered him with a big thick blanket, that he kept there for a dry covering after a fierce storm … My face was a meadow grazed by a herd of buffalo … He looked at the fire of logs, with its one flame pirouetting on
the top in a dying dance after the breakfast-cooking and boiling … It is discovered. What? Eternity. In the whirling light of sun become sea … Yes, thought Rudy, ambitious men with powerful legs planted firmly on the ground, without the least gracious bending of the knee … Dinner jacket, vast dusks, the thirst for time, a meager moonlight, verbiage, dell, light …

  So many words. So many stories, characters, landscapes, laughter, tears, sudden decisions, hopes, and fears.

  But for whom?

  8

  Juliette was back on the same street, with the rusty gate striped with old blue paint and the sky enclosed by high walls, and she was surprised. It would have felt perfectly natural if the road had vanished and she’d found herself facing a blank wall, or if she’d searched in vain for the book depot, only to discover it had been replaced by a pharmacy or a supermarket with fluorescent yellow or green boards advertising the week’s special offers.

  No. She placed the flat of her left hand on the cold metal. The nameplate, too, was still there. And the bookstop, allowing a smoky draft to escape through the double door. She turned around and stared at the facades across the street. Why was she suddenly worried about being watched? Was she afraid that someone might see her going in and judge her? In this sleepy neighborhood, people probably watched their neighbors’ comings and goings with suspicion. And this place was bound to arouse their curiosity, if not more. Juliette didn’t know what she was afraid of. But she felt the stirrings of a vague anxiety. Giving books to strangers—strangers you handpicked and spied on—who would devote time to that? Devote all their time, even? What did the father and little Zaide live on? Did he sometimes go out to work despite what he’d said? The thought brought no image to mind, and Juliette couldn’t imagine Soliman behind a bank window or at an architecture firm, even less in a classroom or at a supermarket checkout. Or did he stay shut away, far removed from day and night, in that book-lined room with the lights on all day long? He might very well work there, designing websites, doing translations, writing freelance articles or catalog copy, for example. But she couldn’t picture him in any of those roles. The fact was that she couldn’t see him as a real person, an ordinary person with material needs and a social life; nor could she see him as a father.