Read Online The Little Man From Archangel by Georges Simenon - Free Book Online

go to bed at eight in the evening so as to be up at three next morning.
    Tomorrow, Friday, there was no market. Every other day, four days in the week to be precise, the space beneath the tiled roof stood empty and served as a parking place for cars and a playground for children.
    For the last two or three weeks, the children were to be seen charging about on roller skates which made a screeching sound for miles around, then, as if they had been given the word, they changed their game and took up skittles, spinning-tops or yo-yos. It followed a rhythm, like the seasons, only more mysterious, for it was impossible to tell where the decision came from and the vendor at the bazaar in the Rue Haute was taken by surprise every time.
    'I want a kite, please.'
    He would sell ten, twenty, in the space of two days, order others and then only sell one for the rest of the year.
    Taking his keys from his pocket reminded Jonas of the steel strongbox and Gina's departure. He encountered the smell of the house again, and the atmosphere was stale, now that the sun no longer fell on its front. He took out the two book-boxes, mounted on legs with castors, then stood in the middle of the shop, not knowing what to do with himself.
    Yet he had spent many years like this, alone, and had never suffered from it. Had not even noticed that there was something missing.
    What did he do in the old days, at this time? He sometimes would read, behind the counter. He had read a great deal, not only novels, but works on the most varied subjects, sometimes the most unexpected ones, ranging from political economy to the report of an archaeological excavation. Everything interested him. He would pick out at random a book on mechanics, for example, thinking only to glance over a couple of pages, and then read it from cover to cover. He had read in this way, from the first page to the last, The History of the Consulate and the Empire, as he had read, before selling them to a lawyer, twenty-one odd volumes of nineteenth-century trials.
    He particularly liked works on geography, ones following a region from its geological formation right up to its economic and cultural expansion.
    His stamps acted as reference marks. The names of countries, sovereigns and dictators, did not evoke in his mind a brightly coloured map or photographs, but a delicate vignette enclosed in a transparent packet.
    It was in this way, rather than through literature, that he came to know Russia, where he had been born forty years before.
    His parents were living in Archangel at the time, right at the top of the map, on the White Sea, where five sisters and a brother had been born before him.
    Of the entire family he was the only one not to know Russia, which he had left at the age of one. Maybe this was why at school he had begun to collect stamps. He must have been thirteen when one of his classmates had shown him his album.
    'Look!' he had said to him. 'There's a picture of your country.'
    It was, he could remember, all the better now that he possessed the stamp along with many other Russian ones, a 1905 blue and pink with a picture of the Kremlin.
    'I've got some other ones, you know, but they're portraits.'
    The stamps, issued in 1913 for the third centenary of the Romanovs, depicted Peter I, Alexander II, Alexis Michaelovitch, Paul I.
    Later he was to make a complete collection of them, including the Winter Palace and the wooden palace of the Boyar Romanovs.
    His elder sister Alyosha, who was sixteen when he was born, would now be fifty-six—if she were still alive. Nastasia would be fifty-four and Daniel, his only brother, who died in infancy, would have been just fifty.
    The other three sisters, Stephanie, Sonia and Doussia, were forty- eight, forty-five and forty-two and, because he was the nearest to her in age, also because of her name, it was of Doussia that he thought most often.
    He had never seen their faces. He didn't know anything about them, whether they were dead or alive,