It was Tuesday, after all. Cloudy.
He woke up before dawn, rested against the windowsill and smoke a cigarette listening to old jazz vinyls. Saint-Dié had shadows and smoke, and sometimes he wondered if he'd really left the island.
He cracked his back, made coffee. He wouldn't go back to sleep now. It was three in the morning, and the cold floor cracked under the bass chords. He ran a hand through his hair, though of cutting it, thought again, gave up. The music calmed him, and the tone of the beats woke him, because music didn't have to make sense.
It was a new day, just like all others.
He spent a few hours, that could have been a few days, among music, coffee and cigarettes. But it was still Tuesday, and the circles under his eyes made them seem lighter. At eight-thirty, he put on a white shirt and the worn red Converses, took his keys and left.
The Arts college was already familiar to him this week. The carnations, the lights, the dark bricks. It was quite odd to walk around there, because it wasn't France, it couldn't be.
He shook his head. Thinking of the past never did him good.
Drawing. Room M. The door was unlocked, the windows open. Monsieur Remus was sitting upon his desk, an old book across his legs and the bare feet dangling out the top. Smell of coffee.
"Dosteyevsky?"
"Nabokov. Good guess."
Russian literature goes along well with the Arts Teacher position, but he still looked far too young and youthful for either.
"I do not know about your story, Monsieur Remus, but I think it can't have been much better than mine."
He had expressive eyes, possibly the only feature in his physiognomy that didn't measure emotions. And they laughed, but they weren't happy.
"I do not know of your story either, Monsieur Sirius, but I do know you definitely have one. Maybe we can compare then, someday."
Today's group worked on facial expressions. Luckily, Sirius could summon whichever emotions in whichever situation, even if he was not sure he had any of them. Maybe yes. Probably not.
"Do you like coffee?"
He was quite interesting. He looked young, but he seemed to have more history than if he was a thousand years old.
"Quite a bit."
It was drizzling on the street now, but it was still warmer than a Londoner summer. The small café, in an ordinary corner of Saint-Dié, played songs from artists he didn't know, but neither did he feel the need to.
He didn't find out much about the young artist that afternoon. He only knew that he was from Nice, that he liked rain and that he had seven ridges on the skin of the roof of his mouth.
It was an almost ordinary Tuesday, but the Wednesday that followed had prospects of being extraordinary.
