The beginning is a little star
Remus looked at the title again. Réparer les vivants. The upper right corner of the front cover was a little messed up as if someone had tried to see if there was something between the layers of thin paper. He turned the book around to be met with crossed out words and a star drawn on the lower left in blue ink on the creamy colour. Maylis de Kerangal was the author. Some words left for Remus to read on the back cover were “heart”, “death” and “personal”, which sold it to him almost immediately. A sucker for tragic love stories - shit - he must have sounded like an arrogant douche, but he thought love was somehow not interesting enough to even think about, if it didn't get him feeling a little blue. The price was three euros. He could pay that much, even if that meant he would have to eat broccoli and bread for dinner a few days in a row. He let out a breath, it was warm inside the small shop, mask slipped off his nose, he placed it back on.
“Trois euros, s'il vous plaît,” the old cashier said in a voice that sounded like a scrape on glass. Remus placed a lot of small coins on the table and looked around. The man sighed, but didn't count them, just put them all in a metal box on a chair beside him. Blue eyes surrounded by a thousand wrinkles were smiling.
“Merci, bonne journée,” said Remus and exited the bookshop as the small bell on the door jingled and he went to the nearest metro station Raspail to catch the line four.
The book wasn’t large, just a pocket edition with small shrift and yellow-ish pages. He flipped through it. Some sentences were underlined in the same blue ink as the star on the back. Some of the underlined passages had scribbles around them, others had more distinguishable writings.
He looked up from the book. The train had stopped. Lights flickered a little and then they were out, leaving a spooky grey-ish blue cast over everything. There was a young woman on the opposite row of the train looking around. Their eyes met. Remus could tell she was nervous. He couldn’t have known that it was her very first time on the metro, nor that she was clutching a white napkin in her clammy hands, putting all hope in it like a talisman.
She had brown curly hair down to her shoulders. No makeup, black boots that looked like leather, brown scarf with a green flower pattern and a black surgical mask hiding most of her face. She reached in the pocket of her coat, looked at her phone and put it back inside. Glanced around the train. Placed one leg over the other, then the other way around. Looked at her phone again. Glanced around.
It reminded Remus of what it was like arriving at Charles de Gaulle airport, feeling the difference of air as soon as he walked out the automatic doors onto the street with his heavy suitcase full of tweed trousers, handmade wool jumpers made by his mom and plain cotton t-shirts. And books. Mostly bilingual editions of some classic works including Romeo and Juliet and the completed poems of Yesenin, and a few notebooks, some stained with spilled coffee, some brand new - still with price tags of not more than two pounds attached. He had taken a few steps looking at the busy street in front of him. Cars - some with red number plates - had flown by him as he took his phone out of the pocket of the jean jacket he was wearing. He was quite proud - still in fact is - to be wearing it because of the painting that was adorning the back - a red stylised lion fighting a green serpent. Remus’ best friend had given it to him as a present for his nineteenth birthday two years ago. Remembering the red headed girl with her sneaky remarks and a talent of making him smile by the daily “take your meds, love!”, was in that moment raising a feeling of ‘why, oh why am I here’.
The train started moving, light came back on, the girl had glossy eyes Remus could now see them wide open and relieved. She exited at Chatelet and with one look back at the cart, disappeared in the crowd going in the direction of line seven.
Remus remembered the first apartment he had near avenue de Flandre in the arrondissement nineteen. The restaurant “Aux trois arbres” on the corner of his street and the small bakery where he bought baguettes that he tried to eat in a hurry, because in a few hours they were already resembling rocks, not by looks of course, once he had had a baguette on a shelf in his kitchen corner for a month and it still looked as it had when he had bought it, only it was now more of a weapon than something to eat, because with a bread that hard, you could knock someone out with not a lot of force.
There was also a kebab place, where two Turkish men had asked him where he was from, and when he had said ‘England’, they looked at each other and then back at Remus with a question ‘London?’ to which he replied ‘no, but I went to university in London’. Then they smiled and started talking about how they had come to Paris with their parents when they were little and opened a kebab shop after finishing high school and a rather quick course in business management.
“Pardon, monsieur,” said a small man with a long beard squeezing past him in the metro cart to get out at his stop. French was relatively easy to understand now, at least compared to when he had just arrived, skipping lessons in his first bachelors program to sneak into the dorm of his - then - girlfriend, when he was still in London. Now he could watch old French movies without subtitles, he still missed the meaning of some poetic bullshit, but more than not he could say he was fluent.
He heard ‘Simplon' being announced on the speakers and a few seconds later he was already standing on the platform and going to his exit, where the busy street with markets was waiting for him to cross it.
When Remus entered the apartment, his two flatmates were making dinner, well, one of them was sitting on the kitchen counter smoking a cigarette and the other standing near the microwave and counting seconds. As soon as Remus was done with untying his boots, and they were safely stored in the dresser by the front door, there was a little ding that indicated that curry was ready.
“How can you eat that, Peete?”
“What do you expect me to do? Throw it out?” Peter squeaked and put the bowl of not-really-deliciously smelling curry on the table. He took a spoonful, put it in his mouth and sighed blissfully, “Haven’t eaten since this morning, I’m fucking starving, mate!”
Marlene slid off the counter throwing the end of her cigarette in the ashtray on the windowsill. There was a slight breeze from the open window and she shivered, grabbed the thick sweater that lay beside her on the countertop and struggled a bit to put it over her head. With a grunt she managed to pull it down.
“Don’t you have your own?” Remus asked with a slight smile. He had gotten his mom to knit Marlene her own wool sweater - pale blue with sheep that looked like big white clouds.
Marlene smiled sheepishly, “Yours is bigger.” Then she added more quietly, “and yours doesn’t have a Caesar sauce stain on it..”
“Will do laundry soon, don’t worry, Marls.” She put her hands behind her back and smiled widely looking like a big child. Remus laughed.
Remus sat down at the small wooden table, the bench creaked under his weight. He put his tote bag on the floor. It sagged and revealed the book he had bought earlier. Remus took it out of the bag and opened the first page to reveal a paragraph written with a pen on the yellowish page.
First book I’ve read in a while. I’m not really interested in medicine, more in the psychological aspect of things. Still can’t cope with loss, so reading about people who have hope for the future might help.
Peter had finished eating his leftovers and was now washing his dish in the sink. Ceramics clanged with metal, water splashed on the countertop. Remus looked around the narrow kitchen. The poisonous green colour of the cupboards and the painted oranges on white walls which were starting to peel off, because the paint was old and in a layer too thick to withstand time. At the wooden floorboards that had a walked-in path lighter than the rest of them, where the three flatmates and people before them had walked the most along the counters and around the table with three plastic chairs. Dark blue curtains that hung from a pole - they were the same in each room - never changed, never even washed during the six months they had been living there.
He looked back at the book. With his thin fingers he flipped a few pages to the actual start of the novel and read the first chapter. Sentences - no paragraphs - were so long and detailed that he sometimes needed to read them a second time to get the intended meaning. It was structured beautifully. Every word had intention and every sentence certainly had affected the previous reader as Remus could see the underlined phrases. He was starting to suspect that it wasn’t at all a book about love. At least not in the way he had expected when he picked it up at the shop.
“What have you got there?” Marlene poked her head around the corner.
“Oh,” Remus could see real interest in her eyes and it made him a little giddy. Talking about literature wasn’t always his favourite pastime, because, yes, he loved to explain his point of view on stories he had read, to talk about all the different aspects of story-writing itself, thoughts that go into the small details, but he despised discussions. He knew it was probably egoistical and close-minded, but others rarely understood what was actually written. Marlene didn’t like to read, so she just listened to Remus ramble without interfering. “I was walking around the neighbourhood, you know, the one my first uni was at, and found a little shop. These are my last three euros,” he said, holding the untidy book up for Marlene to see.
“Mm, if you need money-“
“You know I do, but I can’t take it from you,” Remus shook his head. He didn’t want to talk about that subject again. “I sent my CV to a couple of publishing houses yesterday.”
Marlene had a worried look. “Okay, no money talk, but you have to eat, sweetie,” and she took out a zukini, a can of beans, some eggs and cheese from the fridge.
They had met at a bar. It had been a rough day at university for Remus. He still remembered the workload: essays; notes he had to type out in his organising app for later he would have to send them out to everyone else in the course. It was his special deal with the French professor - a chance to be published. A false hope as it turned out. Marlene had worn a burgundy sweater dress, sitting at a table alone, sipping on a glass of Chardonnay.
Remus noticed her almost immediately. Wavy blond hair, smokey eyeshadow, black nail polish. She had come to his table with her glass in one hand and an ashtray in the other. An intoxicating smell followed her. They kissed for the first time a couple of days after, slept together a week later, she had asked him to move in with her and Peter after a month of them being together.
They were happy, still are in fact. She was one of Remus’ best friends and he was so grateful for having met her. Weirdly they almost always were together at night - talking, studying, kissing, being intimate. Whatever they did together was easy. She had a way of communicating with Remus that no one else had. She just listened, made him playlists, took him to art galleries or just out of the house, which was quite a challenge sometimes.
They weren’t together as lovers, no. They were attracted to each other, they had everything there is someone needs to start a romantic relationship, but they didn’t want to. Neither of them had expressed the want to be exclusive. Sex had stopped around two months ago, kissing was long gone too. Remus remembered it only at times when he heard the front door open and shut with a loud cling in early mornings. He knew it wasn’t Peter, that much was obvious to all. If Marlene saw a light from Remus’ room she poked her head in and said a ‘good morning’ in a cheery voice with smeared mascara and lipstick stains on her neck. Remus usually just smiled and went back to work.