The Museum of Literary Souls (A Short Story) Read Free Page A

into his voice, and his mind was
troubled as he took the path back to his little cottage.

CHAPTER
FOUR
    It should come as no surprise to learn that Mr. Berger slept little that night.
Over and over he replayed the scene of the woman’s demise, and although he had
neither witnessed nor heard the impact, still he saw and heard it in the
silence of the bedroom. To calm himself he had taken a large glass of his late
mother’s brandy upon his arrival home, but he was not used to spirits, and the
alcohol sat ill with him. He grew delirious in his bed, and so often did the
woman’s death play out before him that he began to believe that this evening
was not the first time he had been present at her passing. A peculiar sense of déjà
vu overcame him, one that he was entirely unable to shrug off. Sometimes when
he was ill or feverish, a tune or song would lodge itself in his mind. So
entrenched would its hooks become that it would keep him from sleep, and he
would be unable to exorcise it until the sickness had passed. Now he was having
the same experience with his vision of the woman’s death, and its repetitive
nature was leading him to believe that he had already been familiar with the
scene before he was present at it.
    At last, thankfully, weariness overcame him and he was able
to rest, but when he woke the next morning that nagging feeling of familiarity
remained. He put on his coat and returned to the scene of the previous
evening’s excitement. He walked the rough trail, hoping to find something that
the police might have missed, a sign that he had not been the victim of an
overactive imagination—a scrap of black cloth, the heel of a shoe, or the red
bag—but there was nothing.
    It was the red bag that bothered him most of all. The red
bag was the thing. With his mind unfogged by alcohol—although in truth his head
still swam slightly in the aftermath—he grew more and more certain that the
suicide of the young woman reminded him of a scene in a book; no, not just a scene but perhaps the most famous scene of locomotive-based
self-immolation in literature. He gave up on his physical search and decided to
embark on a more literary one.
    He had long ago unpacked his books, although he had not yet
found shelves for them all, his mother’s love of reading not matching his own
and thus leading to her preference for large swaths of bare wall that she had
seen fit to adorn only with cheap reproductions of sea views. There was still
more room for his volumes than there had been in his own lodgings, due in no
small part to the fact that the cottage had more floor space than his flat, and
all a true bibliophile needs for his storage purposes is a horizontal plane. He
found his copy of Anna Karenina sandwiched in a pile on the dining room
floor between War and Peace and Master and Man and Other Parables and
Tales , the latter in a nice Everyman’s Library edition from 1946, about
which he had forgotten and which almost led him to set aside Anna Karenina in favor of an hour or so in its company. Good sense quickly prevailed,
although not before he had set Master and Man on the dining table for
further examination at a more convenient time. There it joined a dozen
similarly blessed volumes, all of which had been waiting for days or weeks for
their hour to come at last.
    He sat in an armchair and opened Anna Karenina (Limited Editions Club, Cambridge, 1951, signed by Barnett Freedman, unearthed
at a jumble sale in Gloucester and acquired for such a low price that Mr.
Berger had later made a donation to charity in order to salve his conscience).
He flipped through the pages until he found Chapter XXXI, which began with the
words “A bell sounded…” From there he read on quickly but carefully,
traveling with Anna past Piotr in his livery and top boots, past the saucy
conductor and the woman deformed, past the dirty hunchback muzhik, until
finally he came to this passage:
She was going to throw herself under the first car as