Little Jewel Read Online Free PDF Page A

didn’t need to travel. All he needed was to turn on the green light.
    â€˜If you like, I could teach you Persian of the plains…’
    He said it jokingly, but the sentence resonated because of the word ‘plains’. I knew I would be leaving Paris soon and had no real reason to feel trapped by anything. All sorts of horizons stretched out before me into the distance, plains as far as the eye could see, sloping down to the ocean. Onelast time, I wanted to assemble a few meagre memories, find some vestiges of my childhood, just like the traveller who keeps an out-of-date identity card in his pocket until the end. There wasn’t much to gather together before leaving.
    It was nine o’clock in the evening. I told him I had to go home. He said that, next time, if it suited me, he would invite me for dinner. And he would give me a lesson in Persian of the plains.
    He walked with me to the metro. I didn’t recognise the Porte d’Orléans, and yet, until I was sixteen, it was where I used to arrive every time I came to Paris. Back then, the bus I took from Fossombronne-la-Forêt stopped in front of La Rotonde café.
    He was still speaking to me about Persian of the plains. It was like Finnish, he said. It was also a pleasant language to listen to. You could hear the rustle of wind in the grasses and the murmur of waterfalls.

IN THE BEGINNING, I was aware of a funny smell on the stairs. It came from the red carpet, which must have been decomposing. You could already see the wooden steps coming through in a few spots. So many people had climbed up and down these stairs, back when this building was a hotel…The staircase was steep and led directly from the covered entrance on the street. I knew my mother had lived in this hotel: the address was on my birth certificate. One day, when I was looking through the classifieds to find a room to rent, I was surprised to come across the address under the heading STUDIO RENTALS .
    I turned up at the appointed time. A man of about fifty with a ruddy complexion was waiting for me on the pavement. He took me up to the first floor and showed mea bedroom with a little bathroom. He insisted I pay three months’ rent in cash. Fortunately, I still had enough money on me. He took me to a café, on the corner of Boulevard de Clichy, to fill in and sign the papers. He explained to me that the hotel had been closed down and that the rooms had become studios.
    â€˜My mother lived in this hotel…’
    I heard myself say the sentence slowly and was startled. What had got into me?
    â€˜Oh, really?’ he said distractedly. ‘Your mother?’ He was of an age to have known her. I asked if he had been in charge of the hotel in the past. No. He had bought it last year with some business partners and they had done various renovations.
    â€˜You know,’ he said, ‘it wasn’t such a glamorous hotel.’
    On my first night there, I imagined that perhaps my mother had lived in the room I was in. Things had suddenly fallen into place on the evening I was looking for a room to rent, when I saw the address in the newspaper: 11 Rue Coustou. For a little while before then, I would open the old biscuit tin, flick through the diary and address book, look at the photos…But I confess that I had never previously opened the tin, or else, if I did open it, I never had the urge to focus on what seemed to be nothing more than old scrapsof paper. Ever since I was a child, I’d kept this tin with me; like Tola Soungouroff’s painting, it had always been part of the furniture and accompanied me everywhere. I even stored some cheap jewellery in there, the sort of trinkets you keep for ages and don’t pay much attention to. And, if you happen to lose them, you realise that you were never aware of certain details about them. So I didn’t remember what the frame of Soungouroff’s painting looked like. And if I had lost the biscuit