The Man Who Wanted to Smell Books

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by Elspeth Davie


  ‘I am waiting to see my doctor! No, not any doctor. My own doctor! Even if I have to wait all night!’

  ‘Will you help me?’ says the girl, moving across to the reading man. ‘She doesn’t seem to know what’s happened, though I tried to tell her. Perhaps you can help. I’m sure you understand.’

  ‘Yes, I understand all right, but I can’t help,’ says the man. ‘Of course I’d like to help. But I can never get this death business into my head straight off. I don’t just mean the doctor’s death. Any death. It’s stupid, isn’t it? At my age. Utterly stupid and childish. But do you mind if I sit here for a while longer till I get the hang of it? Then I’ll certainly try to persuade the old girl to leave with me. Do you mind?’

  ‘No, I don’t mind at all,’ says the girl, ‘and I’ll sit myself for a bit. There’s not all that hurry.’ The three of them sit silently and apart with only the sound of needles clicking and the surreptitious turning of the pages of a book. After a while the girl goes through a door leading to a cupboard and comes out five minutes later with a tray, a pot of tea, three cups and saucers, sugar, milk, three biscuits on a plate. She pours the tea and hands it round.

  Opposite, the lonely TV watchers, peering from dark rooms through flurries of snow, can scarcely believe their eyes. Oh, the luck of some people! This easy get-together, the comfortable tea-talk and the friendly warmth on a freezing night. How they have missed all this, not just this night but every night! Yes, every night of their lives this very thing has managed to go past them without their knowing it.

  The man with the book makes the first move. He goes across to the old woman and takes her ball of wool between his hands. ‘What’s this you’re knitting?’ he asks.

  ‘A scarf for my third grandchild,’ she replies. ‘Two years old next month.’

  The man presses the soft, scarlet ball against his cheek and stares at her. ‘Will you let me take you home in my car?’ he says. ‘I’m going to take the young lady home too. So you’ll be perfectly safe,’ he adds.

  ‘Yes, I’ll go,’ she replies. ‘Though I’d always feel perfectly safe here, of course, even if I was the last one left. As a matter of fact I always feel safe when I’m waiting to see the doctor, though I do happen to know there are certain folk who feel they’ve never been nearer danger or even death when they set foot inside this waiting room. But there’s really no need for that, is there?’

  ‘None at all,’ says the man. ‘Come along now before it gets worse out there.’ He takes her one arm, the girl takes the other, and they leave the room.

  The snow is driving down so thickly against the windows that, fortunately, no watcher from the opposite side can now see this desolate, vacant room, its empty chairs arranged as in some séance which – deserted by all its members – still hopefully awaits the return of one punctual and devoted spirit.

  The Man Who Wanted to Smell Books

  THIS WAS THE time when every book in the world had been put on tape, when long ago every catalogue in every library could be read from hundreds of flickering screens which quickly settled down into a steady blue and green twilight shade, or at times a purple, violet and pink the colour of rainbows. The library which had once been a murky, mysterious place was fun at last. It was a place of games, movement and excitement. The change not only made the whole thing as colourful as a film show – it was also a tremendous help to everyone. No reader had to get his hands dirty searching along dusty shelves. There was no need to question and pester the librarian from morning till night. All twisting stairs and dank corners where intruders could lurk unseen had been demolished. Gone also were those dark cellars where people had eaten their sandwiches, made love, written their own books, meditated, slept and even occasionally died. Nowadays it was no longer necessary to lug awkward holdalls, briefcases and carrier bags. The heavy books were gone. The age of the Easy Reader was in. So also of the Happy Librarian.

  Naturally there must always be someone who wants to spoil everything, who begins to look backwards instead of forwards. His head is forever twisted the wrong way round like the odd man out in a well-drilled regiment. Such persons have to be brought to heel in one way or another. For those with happy memories, or any memories at all, for that matter, are enemies of progress. Such a man was Charlie Syson who – while standing in an immaculate and streamlined library, strung with glittering tubes and wires, shining boxes and rainbow-coloured screens – remarked that he wanted to smell books again. He politely voiced this wish to a young girl standing by a table. She looked frightened at first, then agitated, then, as he hung about, moved nearer to her colleague and replied:

  ‘I’m sorry, but you’ve come to the wrong place. You will never smell a book again here. I doubt if you’ll smell one in any decent library now. All that sort of thing was done away with years ago. I’ve heard them talked about, of course – those smelly books. I believe you had to wash your hands after touching them in case you caught something. Most of them had those dark grey, brown and black covers so you could never really tell what was inside. Oh yes, my grandparents remember them. Sometimes they used to prop them up at mealtimes against a milk jug, poor old souls. Hygiene was scarcely thought of in those days. So I’m sorry, I can’t help you about smelling books. But we still do have talks about them from time to time in this library, though people aren’t very interested in the subject, I’m afraid. So there are always lots of tickets left over for these meetings if you care to apply for them.’

  ‘But it wasn’t only the smell,’ said Syson, going back to his opening bid. ‘I liked to feel them too. Some of them were rough, hard, even lumpy on the outside. Others were plump, padded and soft. And there was something thrilling too about the difference between the outside and the inside. The pages were either thick and grainy or smooth and silky. They could be yellow-brown or pale brown, pure white or creamy-white.’ The two librarians exchanged a glance and looked around to see whether the head of the place was near. They realized whom they were speaking to now. They were speaking to the Sensual Reader and, what was worse, an elderly sensualist at that. ‘But it’s true,’ said the man. ‘You couldn’t tell what they were really like. Well, what is anything really like – man, woman or book? Yes, they were often black, brown and grey, but even that dingy disguise appealed to me, if only for the surprise when you opened them up. I liked to stroke my fingers down the centre of a book before I started to read. It is best with two fingers – the third and the index, for example. Though naturally you can do it any way you want.’

  ‘Nobody does that sort of thing in here,’ said the first girl quickly. ‘We deal with corners, edges, and flat, clean surfaces. And everything is absolutely open and above board. You are perfectly free to look around if you care to.’

  ‘Thanks, but I can see everything at a glance,’ said the old reader. ‘That’s the amazing thing – this seeing everything at a glance, yet actually seeing nothing at all, nothing but flashes and reflections, moving lights and blinking coloured dots. It’s mesmerizing. It’s a brilliant idea!’ He was thoughtful for a moment and went on: ‘But don’t think I was remembering only the old black and brown books. Not at all. When I knew it, this library occasionally got the brand new books as well. They were so new that when you opened them for the first time they gave a strange creak, a cry of pain – or perhaps it was pleasure – at being discovered by an ardent reader. In this way I established a kind of relationship with the writer.’ Their visitor looked about him. ‘Obviously you are very far from your writers in here, and a great deal better too, I daresay – uneasy, touchy creatures that they are! Vain, shy, irritable, inarticulate, unpredictable and uncompanionable. Yes indeed. How much better to file them away in boxes and on screens.’

  ‘Oh I see you know a good deal about writers,’ said one of the girls more cordially. ‘What was your own job then?’

  ‘I’ve been an addict of print as long as I can remember. I was a compositor in the old days. I suppose that gave me a head start. Naturally I
miss the books. I miss the shelves. Even half-empty shelves were moving to me – those where the books stood alone and apart after the others had gone, like separated friends communicating only through empty space.’

  ‘And I was told there were others,’ said the librarian, ‘so tightly packed you could hardly draw one out without breaking a finger joint.’

  ‘Yes, and I liked to give those grimy old books an occasional airing,’ the visitor replied. ‘Those ancient histories of dentistry, yellowing like old teeth, the musty clerical biographies and the volumes of hell-fire sermons, surveys of streets and houses long since demolished. How close yet isolated they were!’

  One of the girls whom Syson had first approached stepped forward now.

  ‘You don’t find the screens rather exciting?’ she asked. He looked around him. It was true the eerie screens seemed related to the space and movement of a universe rather than to a city library. The man had to admit that this was their attraction. The flickering green and white lines against an unearthly blue were like no known writing. With this script one was meant to speak and write to dead friends, consult oracles or angels, make one’s pact with the devil or with God, as well as learning languages, taking advice from the doctor and dictating the details of the funeral. These screens had the mesmeric quality of all glass, thick and thin – the glass of telescopes, microscopes and crystals. The magic of hieroglyphics was here, and of undiscovered numbers and letters. Perhaps, the old reader thought, the whole world would soon become a gigantic screen on which one might decipher stories and histories of the cosmos – a huge white blank like those monstrous drive-in TV screens on which limousines, skyscrapers and gigantic, mouthing faces loom out suddenly from a lonely American background of forests, mountains and prairies.

  But the girl was speaking again. ‘Don’t think we don’t understand you. As I said, most of us had parents and grandparents who were great readers in their time. I personally had grandparents who had a load of books they carted from place to place, lugged reverently from house to house. No, I haven’t smelled one myself but I have an old photo of my grandmother holding a book very close to her face. No doubt she was doing just that: Or was she hiding?’

  ‘Yes, yes,’ the visitor admitted, ‘it was possible to hide the face or even the whole head in a book. For complete privacy one simply shifted the book sideways or up and down. Every reader knew the trick, and no-one held it against the other. Not many places around here to hide, are there?’

  The girl looked rather uneasily around the place. She was slim, but it was true there were few places to hide face or body. Here all things had been arranged in space as economically as possible. Most objects were sharply rectangular. Amongst them were flat containers holding hundreds of flat slides and round containers holding stacks of thin, round discs.

  ‘I’ve no need to hide,’ said the girl. ‘And anyway I still can’t understand what you have against cleanness, against neatness. The world’s getting smaller every day, more crowded, and the time shorter. Think of the new space created here, the extra time. Can’t you understand the miracle of the new techniques?’

  ‘Talking about miracles,’ said Charlie Syson, ‘have you ever been round a paper-mill?’

  ‘Never,’ said the girl, closing her lips about the word as if paper was not and never had been a concern of her profession.

  ‘Luckily,’ said her visitor, ‘I once had a friend who worked in such a mill when he was young. And very thankful I am I saw it before all those places disappeared for ever. This was one of the last to go. I saw the paper being made – the best paper, I’m talking about, not the fibrous newspaper stuff, the woody end of the trade. No, this was the best. I’ve seen the rags come down in lorryloads from factories and shops. White cuts and strips from shirts, blouses, sheets and tablecloths, some coloureds amongst them, all sorted into piles. Then every snip had to be beaten, pulped with water, pressed and squeezed dry.’

  ‘And then?’ said the girl.

  ‘Beaten again,’ said the man. ‘Beaten. Then squeezed again, squeezed and squeezed dry.’

  The girl sat down on the one chair near the counter. She murmured that she had been standing for a long time in the hot library, and that paper, as compared with light, colour and speed, was not something she could ever become excited about.

  ‘I simply wanted you to feel how people laboured over the centuries to make this finer and finer paper,’ said Syson, ‘how they polished and refined it till it had the gloss of ivory or silk. They were proud of the stuff. Paper had always a royal history. It was a fit present for a king, emperor or pope. It was in monastery libraries, in palaces, even in ancient tombs. I myself when I left this paper-mill, was given a wad of fresh-cut paper, fit for a king.’

  ‘What kind was it?’ the girl asked.

  ‘Writing paper. A great packet of the first-class stuff.’

  ‘So you write endless letters?’

  ‘None at all if I can help it. A postcard’s all I’ve ever managed for years.’

  ‘There, you see!’ she exclaimed. ‘All this praise for paper. Yet you’ve no use for it yourself.’

  ‘Certainly not for letters. But it’s not writing I’m talking about. It’s reading. And by the way, what did you do with all the books? You must have been in the pulping business yourself. Or maybe you burned them.’

  ‘A mixture of both,’ the girl replied. ‘But please don’t imagine that we haven’t saved a few. Of course we have. And people are perfectly welcome to look at them whenever they wish to.’

  ‘You mean you can take me to them right now?’ said the reader.

  ‘Just wait for a moment. I’ll come back in five minutes and take you down.’

  Syson wandered about for a while, hands in pockets, in case he should disturb the zigzagging script on the screens. Yet he knew nothing could be disturbed here. The pattern was set, frenzied yet rigid. It was he himself who was madly disturbed by the brilliant predictability of the place, the cleanness, the smoothness, the demented mathematical order of every machine. Once in a while he raised his eyes to the window and saw – almost with disbelief – a cloud go past, expanding, dissolving, saw a bird, a leaf fly up, wayward and restless on the wind. The girl came back five minutes later. ‘I’m ready now,’ she said, ‘if you’d like to come down to the basement where we keep some of the old books.’

  The old reader went slowly down with her. Now he almost dreaded to see the old loves of his youth. Indeed, he dreaded to see how much they might have changed, how he might have changed himself. The girl herself seemed nervous, talking in a whisper as if careful not to awaken some dangerous creature from its lair. She opened the door a crack and he looked in, sweating a little in the warm, burial atmosphere of the place. He was aware he was peering into a Tutankhamen’s tomb of buried books. ‘You can smell them now, if that’s what you want,’ said the girl over her shoulder as she went in. She bent down to a shelf where there were some large volumes. Syson lifted the heaviest in both hands and studied its hard, dark grey cover with the black lettering.

  ‘Do you know what this is?’ he asked.

  ‘No, as a matter of fact I’ve never known,’ she replied.

  ‘Never wanted to know either. Is it an art treasure?’ She opened it up gingerly. ‘It doesn’t look like one, does it? No colour, and the writing’s nothing special, neither the writing nor the paper.’

  ‘It’s ordinary print and paper,’ said the visitor. ‘And it’s a book on insects – every insect in the world from A to Z.’

  ‘Oh, what a disappointment for you!’ cried the girl with genuine pity.

  ‘No,’ said Syson. ‘It’s a privilege to hold one of the surviving books – and very well preserved it is too, no mark or tear.’

  ‘Just how it managed to survive, I’ve no idea,’ said the girl. ‘I daresay the cover was stronger than most, or maybe it’s the dry atmosphere down here. All the same, I’m still sorry the first thing you laid hands on should be a book on insects, of a
ll things.’

  ‘What better thing to find,’ said the reader. ‘Aren’t insects themselves the great survivors?’

  ‘We haven’t much time to worry about survival here,’ said the girl. ‘And the smallest flea could hardly survive upstairs. There’s not a speck of dust to hide behind. But tell me about your insects.’

  ‘To put it plainly,’ her visitor replied, ‘if we blow ourselves off the planet along with every living creature, those wiry insects will keep going. Perhaps a few to start with, then more and more as time goes on, till they take over the entire globe – a buzzing, hissing, crawling globe.’

  ‘Could we go up soon?’ said the girl. ‘It’s stuffy down here and there isn’t a lot more to see.’

  ‘No more treasures?’ Syson asked.

  ‘Very few. Some old pens, I believe. A typewriter, a curious reading-lamp that can bend its head any way you want, a magnifying glass, an ancient pair of spectacles, some rather sinister little bottles of white poison – the kind of thing the ancient scribes tipped their arrows with – Tipp-Ex it was called.’

  Syson drew out a few other books. There was a small pencil-written diary of some early polar expedition. He pressed the thin book against his chest until the warmth of his body penetrated the pages. Through the cover he felt his heart knocking against his hand. ‘Feel that,’ he said to the girl. ‘No book was made simply from sheets of paper. There’s blood and a beating heart in there.’

  She laid her hand cautiously on the cover, saying again, ‘Could we go up now?’

  Upstairs the other girl at the counter was waiting. ‘Has the gentleman seen what he wanted to see?’ she asked. ‘Did he look at the books? Did he have time to study the old writing-desk with the ink stains, the revolving desk-chair, the bookcases with the shelves? If you’re making a private museum,’ she said to the reader, ‘we’d be very pleased to consider selling them.’

 

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