I’d been carefully counting down the railway stations ever since we left the last town. The third stop along was the one I was bound for.
I’d also noted the technique for opening the doors, craning over to watch as one of the more experienced commuters reached his destination. It was really quite simple: pressing a green button halfway down the entrance portico.
Three other people got off at the same time I did: a young couple and an older man. I followed them over the raised bridge from the platform.
After that things became a bit more confusing. The young people drifted off towards the carpark to one side of the station; the older gentleman started to walk slowly up the hill. The point was that they were moving in entirely opposite directions.
I had a vague recollection of having been advised to turn left as I exited the station. That would take me up the hill, past the astroturf playground, and into a belt of trees. And yet, turning right offered only the prospect of a distant, busy road. Could that be the right way?
I wasn’t sure. But that ‘turning left’ seemed decisive. In any case, moving up the hill towards those trees would surely offer some vantage point from which I could survey the suburb as a whole. It seemed a bit strange that there were no signs to offer me advice. How could the town centre be so opaque to view?
The only realistic prospect, in the absence of further information, seemed to be to follow that older gentleman as he wheezed his way up the somewhat precipitous path. And it did have the advantage of matching the one indication of direction I’d previously been given.
Ten minutes later I was beginning to regret my choice. It had proved rather difficult to follow the man, as my natural pace was so much faster than his. The top of the path had come out on a bland suburban street, without any further signs or directions. I decided, somewhat arbitrarily, to head towards the sea. Surely the shopping centre must be near, must be over the next rise?
But the road went on, and on, snaking around the hill until it became a path heading into a wooded reserve. Finally, when I saw a sign announcing that this ‘clifftop path’ was recommended only for seasoned walkers, as it would take approximately three hours to reach the next town, I reluctantly concluded that I was lost.
Retracing my steps seemed the only option.
A young man was walking his dog in the opposite direction on the far side of the field I had paused in temporarily. I thought of walking over to him to ask him for advice, but something in his attitude seemed a little menacing.
The dog, too, was big and black and disconcertingly aggressive. As I turned my back on them to walk back, I noticed that the youth was about to throw a stick for it to catch.
The next thing I knew, I was struck from behind! The dog had jumped up at me, biting – playfully perhaps – at my buttocks. I turned and glared. The young man called it back and moved rapidly on, having spoken no word in the course of the transaction. Had he, in fact, encouraged it?
I glared at him, but foresaw no profit in urging him to keep so vicious and thoughtless a beast on a leash in future. He would probably deny the facts, blame them on my somehow ‘inciting’ the dog by turning to flee from it.
Perhaps it is true that my anxieties show at their worst on occasions such as this. I might have printed out a map in advance if I had foreseen the complete trackless wilderness that was this small town. I might have asked for help if anyone had shown the slightest interest. As it was, I was left to my own devices, and my own – never particularly strong – sense of direction.
I walked back all the long way to the station. I must have already consumed almost an hour in this fruitless quest, only to end up where I had started from – with only the negative information that this, at least, was one direction to avoid.
The road to the station carpark went, however, in two directions. Uphill, it culminated in a concrete lip with a roar of traffic beyond it. Downhill, it went under the railway tracks, through a small tunnel, snaking off invisibly on the other side.
I’d seen a woman heading in that direction as I walked down the hill, but – so far – no one moving uphill, towards the traffic roar.
Having spent so much time going up and around the hills of this place already, I decided, again, to follow the line of least resistance and pursue the one person who did seem to know where she was going.
On the other side of the tunnel, the road slanted swiftly upwards. At any moment I expected to break through into the sunshine, see the dairy and bookshop – landmarks familiar to me from a previous roadtrip – manifest themselves.
But no, nothing. The hill led to more streets, the familiar winding wasteland of suburbia: suspicious eyes looking out from behind curtains: ‘A pedestrian, here!’ Familiar, so familiar.
Until I began to see. It was not that this street looked so much like the others I’d already tramped down, it was that it was the same street, with the same houses, the same signs, the same cars. The road must have taken a loop under the tunnel and somehow joined up with itself!
And, sure enough, with the help of my two previous traverses of this street, I eventually found it again: the path down past the playground equipment, that oh so familiar descent to the station.
I’d tried going left: twice, in fact – up the hillpath and through the tunnel. There remained one more direction to go in: towards the lip of the road.
Puffing, panting, my shirt drenched with sweat, I started to climb.
I mentioned having been here before, to this godforsaken outer suburb of a complex conurbation.
It was a few months ago, when I’d been invited to spend Christmas out of town. I don’t drive myself, but was lucky enough to cadge a lift with some friends. On the way, we stopped off at a small bookshop / book exchange on the High Street, just past a roundabout, which we’d been told had some interesting treasures inside.
That proved to be quite true. Among the books I bought there were two very interesting ones:
- Meric Casaubon. A True & Faithful Relation of What Passed for Many Years Between Dr. John Dee and Some Spirits. 1659. Kila, MT: Kessinger Publishing LLC, n.d.
- Maurice Maeterlinck. The Unknown Guest. 1914. Trans. Alexander Teixeira de Mattos. London: Methuen & Co., Ltd., 1914.
It wasn’t so much the quality of the books available there that intrigued me, though. It was the arrangement of the shop itself.
We’d noticed at once – how could you not? – the complexity of the system of aisles one was forced to navigate in order to examine the stock. All of them seemed to come to dead-ends, requiring one to go back to the centre in order to set out again.
That was in the front room. In the back room, the proud owner sat at a single large table in the middle of the room, with his more particular treasures displayed on the shelves all around him. These were mostly books of an occult nature: ghosts, second sight, the paranormal generally.
As you can see from the two titles listed above, this is a class of literature of great interest to me too, so I could see he was impressed by my choice of books to buy.
I did ask him why the shop was arranged in this complex way, and he muttered something to the effect that it was to discourage school kids from stealing his stock, but I couldn’t help feeling that there was more to it than that.
As is generally the case, the others had long since got tired of hanging around whilst I hunted for dusty old treasures, and were waiting for me outside, so I had to leave at this point. I would have liked to talk with him longer, though. I could see that he had some stories to tell, and possibly even some secrets to impart.
Was there something in the arrangement of those shelves which satisfied some obscure sense of order in his personality: some intended alignment with the invisible forces of the earth?
It put me a little in mind of Franz Kafka's short story ‘The Burrow’. Written six months before his death, and published only posthumously, it describes a large badger-like animal who has built a most marvellous underground structure which he is constantly engaged in improving.
Gradually he becomes aware of little piles of loose dirt, betokening the presence of some alien invader, which he tidies as best he can, but which continue to appear, threatening to undermine all the – illusory – grandeur of the dwelling he's built for himself. It's the rift within the lute, the maggot in his brain, the ideé fixe which will end up by destroying him.
I remember once, in a university class on the Old English epic Beowulf, suggesting that the dragon whose horde is invaded by the hero Beowulf towards the end of the poem might feel similarly about his own treasure chamber – that he might feel a deep sense of repulsion at the mere fact that an intruder has succeeded in invading his sanctuary.
I remember one of my classmates laughing at this: ‘I don't think he feels like the creature in Kafka.’
'Why not?' I riposted. Why shouldn't he feel like that? The poet gives few clues to his inner psyche – that’s not to say that he doesn’t have one, though.
This shop was the same kind of burrow, a bit like the underground bunkers I used to fantasise about living in as a child – places where no-one could get at me, no fire or disaster reach me, like the cloister in G. M. Hopkins’ poem ‘A Nun Takes the Veil’:
And I have asked to be
Where no storms come,
Where the green swell is in the havens dumb,
And out of the swing of the sea. [1]
•
A few weeks ago someone stole one of my books.
They did it in quite an ingenious way. I had placed it in a bookcase arranged with double rows of books on each shelf. The idea is that a quick scan of the books in front will enable you to guess what's concealed behind.
In this case, there were two Penguin paperbacks by Nobel-prize winning German writer Elias Canetti – Crowds and Power and Auto da Fé – in the front row, and a group of his other books (including his four-volume autobiography) hidden behind.
What the thief did was to move one of the books from the back row to fill the gap in the front row, and thus conceal the fact that anything was missing from that shelf at all.
There's a certain irony in the fact that they chose that particular book to run off with. Auto da Fé is a novel about an obsessive scholar, Dr Peter Kien, who lives entirely in, and for, his library of rare books.
When I say he lives in his library, I mean just that. He moves his little portable bed and washstand from room to room, depending on what he happens to be working on at the time.
The original German title of the book, Die Blendung, translates literally as 'the blinding.' Canetti’s English translator, the well-known writer C. V. Wedgwood, chose to change this to Auto da Fé ['Act of Faith'] – the name for the mass burnings of heretics conducted by the Spanish Inquisition, presumably because she thought that this might better convey the book's claustrophobic sense of entrapment and sacrifice.
The book my thief chose to move forward was a hardback edition of one of Canetti's last works: Party in the Blitz (2003). Once again, there's a certain irony in that, as Auto da Fé concludes with the protagonist's self-immolation on a heap of his own books: they've been stolen and sold on by his unscrupulous housekeeper-turned-wife and her louche accomplices, but then recovered and brought back to him by his rather saintly brother.
I imagine I'll succeed in finding another copy of Canetti's novel to fill the gap. That isn't really the point.
Any collector of anything has to face the paradox that the more things you have, the less control you have over each part of your collection. While you're gleefully filling gaps in your holdings of some particular author, the most precious volume of all may just have disappeared into somebody's pocket.
Nor do we all have similar ethical standards in such matters. I know plenty of people who regard it as quite unnecessary to return books they've borrowed, and in fact react most indignantly to anyone who tries to recover their own property. They seem to envisage some wondrous freemasonry of books, passing from hand to hand like lightning rods: albeit with the slight, disquieting, detail that it's generally someone else providing the raw material.
And certainly getting too obsessed with ownership can become a bit excessive. At one point, to combat my own tendencies in that direction, I formulated a theory that the only books which would available to one in the afterlife would be those which had been given away. I accordingly began a programme of donations which would guarantee my own future reading pleasure – on the offchance I don't end up in the burning place instead, that is.
The burning place. Elias Canetti's novel is certainly not meant as an endorsement of bibliomaniacs such as his Peter Kien – on the contrary, in fact –but his success in portraying one would certainly seem to show certain tendencies in that direction on his own part.
Perhaps the thief meant to do me a favour by running off with the book. Perhaps they thought it would be unhealthy for me to brood too much over the dark material included in it. And it's probably true that it will be a long time before I feel it necessary to read it again – though Canetti's autobiography, in particular, is a delight.
At present (a little like Kafka’s creature), I'm engaged in a large-scale project to map every one of the books in my flat, and – in the process – add protective covers to all the vulnerable hardbacks. I've also decided to write my name in each and every one of them, rather than reserving that for the more interesting acquisitions.
From now on, too, there will be a small sign on the shelves in the guest room:
- Feel free to read the books, but please be careful of them if you do.
- Don't take anything away without asking. That will be regarded as theft.
So if that bookthief was sending me a message about the perils of getting too attached to my collection, I'm afraid that I've chosen to ignore it.
•
I don’t know how many times I walked up and down that high street before I realised that the bookshop was right in front of me.
I was, I suppose, a little flustered by the sheer difficulty of finding my way there from the station, but I looked in each window repeatedly and saw nothing whatever there. I’d begun to question my memory of just which suburb it was located in when I finally saw it.
Third time is the charm. Just as the third road I took led me out of the vicinity of the station and straight to this shopping centre, so my third traverse of the precinct resulted in my realisation that this was indeed the same shop.
It seemed somehow meant, somehow in keeping with fate, that I should enter at just that moment, to find that same man, the owner, soaked through with petrol, with a lighted flame in his hand.
Notes:
[1] Gerard Manley Hopkins, ‘Heaven-Haven’. Poems. Ed. Robert Bridges. 1918. Second Edition With an Appendix of Additional Notes, and a Critical Introduction by Charles Williams. 1930. The Oxford Bookshelf. 1937 (London: Oxford University Press, 1941), 8.
Maurice A. Lee & Aaron Penn, ed.: Food, Migration, and Diversity (2021)[15/11/19-27/1/20]
[2704 words]
[Published in Food, Migration, and Diversity: The Many Flavors of the Short Story. Ed. Maurice A. Lee & Aaron Penn. USA: Lee and Penn Publishing, 2021. 525-31.]
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