Nikolski Read Free

for example, that Esperanto translation of
Dharma Bums.
(Answer: In behind the pipes of the washroom sink.)
    The work is not as simple as it may appear; the S. W. Gam Bookshop is one of those places in the universe where humans long ago relinquished any control over matter. Every shelf holds three layers of books, and the floorboards would vanish altogether under the dozens of cardboard boxes, but for the narrow, serpentine paths designed to let customers move about. The slightest cranny is put to use: under the percolator, between the furniture and the walls, inside the toilet tank, under the staircase, even the dusty closeness of the attic. Our classification system is strewn with microclimates, invisible boundaries, strata, refuse dumps, messy hellholes, broad plains with no visible landmarks—a complex cartography that depends essentially on visual memory, a faculty without which one won’t last very long in this trade.
    But it takes more than a good pair of eyes and a few ounces of memory to work here. It’s crucial to developa particular perception of time. The thing is—what’s the best way of putting this?—that different avatars of our bookshop coexist simultaneously in a multitude of discrete times, separated by very thin ellipses.
    This warrants some explanation.
    Each book that enters here can meet its next reader at any moment in the history of the shop, in the future as well as the past. Whenever Mme Dubeau sorts a new shipment of books, she repeatedly consults her version of the
Encylopaedia Britannica
—some thirty notebooks where she records all special requests made by clients since February 1971—to see whether, ten years before, someone may have been looking for a title among the freshly arrived books.
    From time to time she grabs the telephone with a triumphant smile.
    “Mr. Tremblay? This is Andrée Dubeau at the S. W. Gam Bookshop. I have some good news. We’ve just received
The History of Whaling in Fairbanks in the Eighteenth Century!”
    At the other end, Mr. Tremblay represses a shiver. Here he is, abruptly transported back to the pristine icebergs that haunted his nights throughout the heat wave of 1987.
    “I’ll be right over,” he mumbles feverishly, as if he’d been reminded of an important appointment.
    Mme Dubeau crosses out the request and closes the
Britannica.
Mission accomplished.
    I can’t leaf through those thick notebooks without trembling a little. There is no other occupation that provides as accurate a measure of the passage of time—a number of the clients recorded in those pages are long dead. Some aren’t the least bit interested in the books anymore; others have moved to Asia without leaving a forwarding address—and many will never find the book they so coveted.
    I wonder if there may not somewhere be a
Britannica
of our desires, a comprehensive repertory of the slightest dream, the least aspiration, where nothing would be lost or created, but where the ceaseless transformation of all things would operate in both directions, like an elevator connecting the various storeys of our existence.
    Our bookshop is, in sum, a universe entirely made up of and governed by books—and it seemed quite natural for me to dissolve myself in it completely, to devote my life to the thousands of lives duly stacked on hundreds of shelves.
    I have sometimes been accused of lacking ambition. But might I simply be ailing from a minor magnetic anomaly?

    Here we are, nearly at the end of the prologue.
    It took me two weeks to fill the thirty bags that the garbage collectors pitched into their truck this morning.One thousand eight hundred litres of ultraplastic— thirty years of living. I’ve kept only the strict minimum: a few boxes of souvenirs, some furniture, my personal effects. The bungalow is up for sale and a couple of buyers seem interested. The transaction should be finalized within a week.
    By then I’ll already be somewhere else, in my new apartment in Little Italy, just