The Marseille Ledger

The register had split at the fourth gathering. Cheap registers always went there first, where some clerk in a hurry had pressed the book flat to write across the gutter and broken the thread without knowing it, and after that every opening pulled the break a little wider until the leaves hung by their paste.

Ruth slid the paring knife under the back board and lifted it away from the text block. The old glue came up in flakes the colour of barley sugar. She laid the board face down on the blotter, turned the book on its spine, and began to cut the threads one station at a time, counting them under her breath out of habit. Twelve gatherings on five tapes.

Above her head, at the level of the pavement, the barred window of the registry showed the city from the ankle down. A pair of wooden soles went past, clacking on the flags, then a man’s boots with the nails worn to silver, then the bare brown legs of a boy under a sack heavy enough to make him lean. She had worked in this basement for a year and knew the boulevard Paul-Peytral by its shoes. Leather had gone from the city before bread had. Most people walked on wood now, and wood told you who was coming long before you saw a face.

“Mademoiselle Daumas.” Monsieur Achard’s voice came from the far end of the room, from behind the wall of green buckram spines that was his whole world. “The inspector will want the forty-threes this morning. Not the forty-twos. He was quite clear.”

“They’re on the second shelf,” said Ruth. “In order.”

“In order of issue?”

“Of issue, Monsieur.”

He made a small sound of relief, as if she had pulled a splinter out of him, and went back to his volumes. Achard was past sixty and had kept the registry of identity cards since before the war, since before there had been any reason to fear it. He handled the registers as other men handled money. When a volume came back from Ruth’s bench he would open it at the middle and listen to the spine, and if it made no sound he would nod and carry it away without a word.

At the typewriter under the window, Mademoiselle Coste was copying a list of names into triplicate with two fingers and a great deal of noise. She was young, wore her hair rolled high at the front, and had a sweetheart who worked as a clerk at the Kommandantur and brought her real coffee in a paper twist on Saturdays. She lent the coffee to no one. Once, in a storm, she had lent Ruth an umbrella.

Ruth lifted the fourth gathering free and laid it open on the board.

The fold had torn along half its length. She had mended a hundred folds like it since the Préfecture first hired her, and she mended this one without hurry. A strip of paper cut to the width of her little finger, pasted along the fold and rubbed down with the bone folder until it took the shape of the fold and became part of it. She cut her guard strips from the best paper she had, prewar stock with a long fibre, because a repair made from wartime paper would need repairing again in five years and she did not intend to be in this basement in five years. When she held the gathering to the light from the window the guard showed as a faint pale band, and in one corner of it a piece of the watermark, the tip of a mast and the curve of a sail.

The gathering held forty entries to a page in the upright hand of the clerk who had kept the register through February and March of 1943. Numbers, names, dates of birth, places of birth, the date each card was issued. In the middle of the third leaf there was an entry that the clerk had not written.

Faure, Édouard Jean. Né le 4 mars 1906 à Nîmes, Gard. Représentant de commerce.

Ruth had written it on Friday, on a leaf she had cut and ruled to match, in an iron-gall ink she had aged with a little tea until it had the brown edge of fourteen months. She had copied the clerk’s capital F from nineteen other F’s in the same volume. The leaf went into the gathering on a guard like every other repair on the bench, and when the book was sewn it would sit among its neighbours and look as old as they did. By the end of the week a card would be issued under that number, and anyone who came down to this basement to check it would find the entry waiting.

A paper was only as good as the register behind it. Her father had said that about leases and deeds, long before either of them had needed to know it about people.

She threaded the needle with linen from the reel on her bench, drew it through the cake of beeswax twice, and began to sew the gathering back onto its tapes.

❦

Inspecteur principal Rigaud came down the stairs at a quarter past ten.

She heard him before she saw him, because he was one of the few people in Marseille whose shoes still had leather soles, and he walked without scuffing, heel and toe, heel and toe, a man who had been taught to walk by someone who cared about it. He stopped at the foot of the stairs and took off his gloves. They were grey cotton, a clerk’s gloves, and he folded them together and put them in the pocket of his jacket before he touched anything in the room.

Ruth looked at his hands before she looked at his face. It was a habit older than the war. Hands told you what a person did all day, whether they had ever been cold, whether they bit their nails, whether they wrote. Rigaud’s were small and very clean, with the nails pared straight across, and on the second finger of the right hand there was a callus where a pen had rested for thirty years. A clerk’s hand, and a good clerk’s.

Then his face. Small and neat, like the rest of him, a bald crown with a fringe of grey kept short above the ears, a moustache trimmed square, and a pince-nez on a black ribbon that he did not put on until he needed it. He was in his fifties, and looked like a man who had been promoted once for being right and never again for being liked.

“Monsieur Achard.” A nod down the room. “Mademoiselle.” A second nod, to Coste, who stopped typing. Then he turned to the bench. “And Mademoiselle Daumas, who makes our old books new.”

“Inspecteur.”

“Please, go on. I am only here to read.”

Achard had the forty-threes on the reading table before Rigaud reached it. There were nine of them, the whole of the year’s issue, bound in the same green buckram with the same black labels, and four of the nine had been through Ruth’s hands since the autumn. Rigaud sat, fixed the pince-nez on his nose, and opened the first volume at the beginning, as though it were a novel and he meant to find out how it ended.

Ruth went on sewing. In, along, out. The needle went through the fold at the kettle station and came back through the next gathering down and she caught the loop and drew it tight. Each stitch made a small dry sound in the paper. She did not look at the reading table. The window above her showed a woman’s cracked patent shoes going past, then nothing, then a bicycle wheel.

He read for an hour and did not skim. Every few minutes he turned a page, and every so often he stopped and laid one finger on an entry and held it there, and then he took a small notebook from his breast pocket and wrote a line in it in violet ink. Once he asked Achard for the file of application forms for February 1943, and Achard fetched the box himself, and Rigaud took out three forms and laid them beside the register and compared them line by line and put them back.

At a quarter past eleven he closed the fourth volume and came over to the bench.

“May I?”

She had just finished the fourth gathering. The needle was still in her fingers. “Of course, Inspecteur.”

He lifted the section by its edges, bare-handed, and held it up to the window. The light from the pavement came through the paper and lit the clerk’s entries from behind, the faint grid of the ruling, the pale band of the new guard along the fold. He turned it slowly one way and then the other. Ruth watched his hands and did not watch the third leaf.

“You have a steady needle,” he said.

“It’s my trade.”

“And you learned it in Lille.”

“In Lille, and after.”

“How do you choose your thread? This is linen, I think.” He touched the kettle stitch with the nail of his little finger. “Not cotton.”

“Unbleached linen, number eighteen, waxed,” said Ruth. “The Préfecture’s binder used it in 1938. I took the old thread from the first volume I repaired and matched it. A repair should look like the book it’s in.”

“Why?”

“Because a clerk who opens the register shouldn’t have to think about the binding. He should think about the entry he came for.”

Rigaud lowered the gathering and looked at her properly for the first time. His eyes were pale brown behind the lenses, and patient. “That is a very good answer,” he said. “I have spent my life among people who want their work to be noticed. It is restful to meet someone who wants the opposite.”

He laid the gathering back on the board exactly where he had found it, squared its edges with two fingers, and took off the pince-nez.

“You will hear of a new procedure,” he said, in the tone of a man mentioning the weather. “The rue Paradis have asked us to confirm the particulars of everyone who handles state papers. Ourselves included. So I am writing to the mairies of our birthplaces. Monsieur Achard’s, Mademoiselle Coste’s, my own. It is routine. You should not worry if a letter comes asking you to call about it.”

“I won’t worry,” said Ruth.

“No,” said Rigaud. “I don’t think you are someone who worries.” He put on his gloves at the foot of the stairs, finger by finger, and went up into the light.

Mademoiselle Coste began to type again, faster than before. Achard gathered the forty-threes against his chest. Ruth drew the thread through the beeswax, cut it, and threaded the needle for the fifth gathering, and her hands did all of it without her. Her card said Lille. Renée Daumas, relieuse, born the eleventh of March 1911 in Lille, Nord. A replacement card, issued in April 1943 for one lost in the January evacuation, with its entry in the register she had repaired herself. The mairie of Lille had its own registers, and in them there was no Renée Daumas born on that day or any other.

She finished the register by four. When the last gathering was on its tapes she glued the spine, lined it with mull, and laid in the new boards, and before she pasted down the back endpaper she took a small brass tool from her bag and pressed it once into the inside of the back board, cold, without gold, hard enough to leave a shape in the cloth that a thumb could feel and an eye would never find. Then she pasted the endpaper down over it and rubbed it flat and put the book in the press.

“Finished?” said Achard, hopefully.

“Tomorrow morning, when it’s dry.”

❦

She walked home the long way, by the quay.

It was a warm evening with no wind, and the whole of the Vieux-Port smelled of tar and diesel and weed. Fishermen were mending nets on the quai des Belges. A German launch lay at the fish market steps with a sailor asleep across its stern, his cap over his face. At the mouth of the harbour the transporter bridge stood against the sky like the frame of a door with nothing in it, and above everything, on its rock, the basilica caught the last sun on the gilded Virgin at its top, so that for a few minutes the statue seemed to burn.

On the far side of the water, where the old quarter had stood, there was nothing.

The Germans had given its people a morning to leave, in January of last year, and then they had spent the whole of February blowing it up, street by street, until fourteen hectares north of the port were a field of stone with the Hôtel de Ville standing in it alone. Grass grew in the rubble now. Children went over it with sacks for firewood. From the south quay you could see the church of Saint-Laurent at the harbour mouth, which they had spared, and the angle of the Hôtel de Ville, which they had spared, and between the two a slope of broken walls where the rue de la Loge had run down to the water, and where her father’s bindery had stood for nineteen years.

She did not stop, but turned up from the quay into the rue Sainte.

The arch of her courtyard had been a carriage entrance once, and the door in it still had its iron studs. Inside, the fig tree was in full leaf and the concierge’s cat was asleep on the well cover. Ruth let herself into the workshop, bolted the door behind her, and drew the blackout before she lit the lamp.

The room was eight paces by six, with a standing press in one corner, a sewing frame under the window and a bench along the wall with the tools laid out on it in the order she used them. Bone folders. Paring knives. The plough for trimming edges. Brass finishing tools in a wooden rack, each in its own hole. Pots of paste and glue. On the shelf above the bench stood six registers from the Préfecture waiting for their turn, and between the fifth and the sixth, where no one would look at it twice, a seventh book bound in dark green buckram with brown leather corners and a red label on the spine that said, in worn gold, GRAND LIVRE 1937, AVARIES COMMUNES.

It had come back to her on Friday for its spring gathering. Louis Mercier had carried it up from the office in his fisherman’s bag, as he always did, and set it on her bench and asked after her press, which he admired. The new gathering was half sewn, to be finished tomorrow night. She looked at the book for a while from across the room and did not take it down.