The thirteenth tale Read Free Page A

and he knows the world’s great
collections. If you were to watch him at the auctions or book fairs that he
attends frequently, you would notice how often he is approached by quietly
spoken, quietly dressed individuals, who draw him aside for a quiet word. Their
eyes are anything but quiet. Does he know of… they ask him, and Has he ever
heard whether… A book will be mentioned. Father answers vaguely. It doesn’t do
to build up hope. These things usually lead nowhere. But on the other hand, if
he were to hear anything… And if he doesn’t already have it, he makes a note of
the person’s address in a little green notebook. Then nothing happens for quite
some time. But later—a few months or many months, there is no knowing—at
another auction or book fair, seeing a certain other person, he will inquire,
very tentatively, whether… and again the book is mentioned. More often than
not, it ends there. But sometimes, following the conversations, there may be an
exchange of letters. Father spends a great deal of time composing letters. In
French, German, Italian, even occasionally Latin. Nine times out of ten the
answer is a courteous two-line refusal. But sometimes—half a dozen times a
year—the reply is the prelude to a journey. A journey in which Father collects
a book here, and delivers it there. He is rarely gone for more than forty-eight
hours. Six times a year. This is our livelihood.
     
    The shop itself makes next to no money. It is a place to write
and receive letters. A place to while away the hours waiting for the next
international bookfair. In the opinion of our bank manager, it is an
indulgence, one that my father’s success entitles him to. Yet in reality— my
father’s reality and mine; I don’t pretend reality is the same for everyone—the
shop is the very heart of the affair. It is a repository of books, a place of
safety for all the volumes, once so lovingly written, that at present no one
seems to want. And it is a place to read.
     
    A is for Austen, B is for Bronte, C is for Charles and D is for
Dickens. I learned my alphabet in this shop. My father walking along the
shelves, me in his arms, explaining alphabetization at the same time as he
taught me to spell. I learned to write there, too: copying out names and titles
onto index cards that are still there in our filing box, thirty years later.
The shop was both my home and my job. It was a better school for me than school
ever was, and afterward it was my own private university. It was my life.
     
    My father never put a book into my hands and never forbade a
look. Instead, he let me roam and graze, making my own more and less
appropriate selections. I read gory tales of historic heroism that
nineteenth-century parents thought were suitable for children, and gothic host
stories that were surely not; I read accounts of arduous travel through
treacherous lands undertaken by spinsters in crinolines, and I ;ad handbooks on
decorum and etiquette intended for young ladies of good family; I read books
with pictures and books without; books in English, books in French, books in
languages I didn’t understand, here I could make up stories in my head on the
basis of a handful of guessed-at words. Books. Books. And books.
     
    At school I kept all this shop reading to myself. The bits of
archaic French I knew from old grammars found their way into my essays, but my
teachers took them for spelling mistakes, though they were never able to eradicate
them. Sometimes a history lesson would touch upon me of the deep but random
seams of knowledge I had accumulated by my haphazard reading in the shop.
Charlemagne? I would think. What, my Charlemagne? From the shop? At these times
I stayed mum, dumbstruck by the momentary collision of two worlds that were
otherwise so entirely apart.
     
    In between reading, I helped my father in his work. At nine I
was allowed to wrap books in brown paper and address them to