The Pigeon by Patrick Suskind

     Jonathan Noel, bank security guard, has spent 30 years protecting himself from people and events. But an encounter with a glaring pigeon upsets his ordered life and flings him into a state of fear and insecurity. From the author of the international bestselling Perfume.

The Pigeon by Patrick Suskind

Extract

 

     At the time the pigeon affair overtook him, unhinging his life from one day to the next, Jonathan Noel, already past fifty, could look back over a good twenty-year period of total uneventfulness and would never have expected anything of importance could ever overtake him again - other than death some day. And that was perfectly all right with him. For he was not fond of events, and hated outright those that rattled his inner equilibrium and made a muddle of the external arrangements of life.

     The majority of such events lay, thank God, far back in the dim, remote years of his childhood and youth, which he no longer had any desire whatever to recall, and when he did, then only with the greatest aversion. On a summer afternoon, in July 1942, in or near Charenton, as he was returning home from fishing - there had been a thunderstorm that day with heavy rain, after a long heat wave - on the way home he had taken off his shoes, had walked along the warm, wet asphalt with bare feet and splashed through the puddles, an indescribable delight . . . he had come home from fishing, then, and had run into the kitchen, expecting to find his mother there cooking, and his mother was nowhere to be seen, all that was to be seen was her apron, hanging over the back of the chair. His mother was gone, his father said, she had had to go away for a long time on a trip. They had taken her away, said the neighbours, they had taken her first to the Velodrome d'Hiver and then out to the camp at Drancy, from there it was off to the east, and no one ever came back from there. And Jonathan comprehended nothing of this event, it had totally confused him, and then a few days later his father had vanished as well, and Jonathan and his younger sister suddenly found themselves in a train heading south, and the next thing were being led across a meadow by total strangers and then tugged through a stretch of woods and once more put on a train heading to the south, far away, farther than they could ever comprehend, and an uncle, whom they had never seen before, picked them up in Cavaillon and brought them to his farm near the village of Puget in the valley of the Durance and kept them hidden there until the end of the war. Then he put them to work in his vegetable fields.

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