The Crooked Room (Part 1)

I first found cause to visit M. Bouchard’s geometry shop in the spring of ‘68. The cherry-blossoms on Rue de Rivoli were heavy with April rain and passers-by with big Italian umbrellas hurried past me, splashing in the puddles. The shop was nothing much to look at, sandwiched between a glass merchant and a jewellery store, a few doors up from the archway leading into St-Paul. The front was dilapidated and had no sign; the sort of place you wouldn’t enter without needing something in particular. But Mme Herat’s instructions had been very clear.

In the window, up against the glass was propped a blackboard reading:

When I peered inside, all I could make out was a wall hung heavy with prints and photographs of what might have been abstract art or real depictions of geometric forms - I wasn’t sure. It was lit with an electric lamp which cast shadows on all the shop around it, hiding from view shelves heavy with some sort of neatly arranged fruits.

The bell clinked as I entered. “Hello? Monsieur Bouchard?” I called.

“Be with you,” came the reply from the darkened depths of the shop.

I trailed a finger along a shelf-top, light with dust. All around me were nameless stone forms. What I'd taken for fruits were in fact stone orbs of fantastic quality, carved all over with beautiful and strange angles. One was faceted like a star; another criss-crossed with intersecting planes like the steps of some arcane ruined temple. Some were big as my head and some were barely the size of the amethyst in my mother's wedding ring. The craftsmanship was unequalled. Each was quite unique and triggered in me a feeling I couldn't put a finger on, of being transported to a new and alien plane of existence where all was unsettling, but somehow at the same time comforting and familiar like an echo of a childhood memory, as though I'd seen them before.

“Well, what is it?”

M Bouchard had emerged and was looking at me expectantly. He turned out to be a middle-aged man with close-cropped hair and a sad face, the kind of man you saw in busy cafeterias sitting alone drinking cheap wine. (You must understand that at the time of my first visit to his shop I was young and fancied myself some sort of poet. I've shaken the habit now, but the urge remains.) He was wiping his hands on a dirty cloth, the kind you'd use for dishes but covered all over in black smudges which defied identification.

He raised an eyebrow and I realised I was staring.

I stammered, “Monsieur, here, Monsieur.”

I fumbled in the pockets of the raincoat I'd borrowed from Georg and found the slip of paper from Mme Herat. Bouchard unfolded it and read it with raised eyebrows. I already knew what it said:

Bouchard picked his glasses off and sighed. “Well, let’s come take a look, then.”

Part 2