Flashback Hotel

by Ivan Vladislavic

  The Burning Man, the second book on the pile, had also been purchased at Vanguard Booksellers. There was an inscription in the front cover: To my dear Helena, With love, From Julius P. Lofsky. It was dated September 1952. According to the blurb, this novel told the story of Johannes van der Kemp, “a soldier, a scholar, a philosopher, a mystic, a rake, a gentleman in sackcloth.” Van der Kemp, it said, had come to South Africa to preach the Word of God to the heathen, but had failed miserably: “…he was one of the first causes of South Africa’s difficulties today, in that he was the leader of those missionaries whom the Boers, when they trekked northwards from the Cape, accused of bringing the hatred and odium of the natives upon their heads. Nevertheless, like Spinoza, he was ‘God-intoxicated,’ and also intoxicated with sex. Thus his tempestuous life makes an admirable subject for Mrs Millin’s art; once again she shows herself a mistress of her scene and subject.”

  Next was The Pocket Book of Poems and Songs for the Open Air, which came to me at third hand. It had belonged first to N. Morris, who had acquired it new in 1933. Twenty-three years later it had fallen into Helena’s possession, and she had added her name below Morris’s. (I have since added my own bookplate and the year 1990 below these.) I brushed the husk of a fishmoth as delicately veined and pretty as a pressed flower from page 286 with the nail of my little finger, and read the second verse of “As I Walked Forth,” which was marred only slightly by a faded bloodstain. (I wonder whether one ought to refer to the vital fluid of an insect as “blood?” I suspect that it is not “blood” so much as “haemolymph.”)

  Poems and Songs for the Open Air was part of Jonathan Cape’s Travellers’ Library; it was number 97 in that series, according to the numerical index published with the text. It was a self-proclaimed Pocket Book. But it was clear at a glance that it would not fit my pockets. I tried it in my shirt pocket anyway, but it was much too big. I tried it in the rear pocket of my trousers, but it would not fit there either. Among my jackets I found an old-fashioned blazer with an inner pocket that was large enough. It must be true that pockets have been getting smaller over the years. Disappearing altogether in some cases.

  At the bottom of the pile was the Pirandello parallel text. I paged for the passage about Teresina, but before I arrived there the breeze dropped and the curtain settled. I found myself in my own breakfast nook again, hot and bothered, with the pungent scent of crushed geraniums on my hands.

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  As a rule I avoid bookshops. Books en masse repel me. I dislike crowds of people too, even relatively small gatherings of strangers in which everyone speaks at once. I find intolerable the babble that assaults my ears as I enter a bookshop. Especially the less discriminating sort of second-hand dealer, the so-called “book exchange,” full of shabbily dressed, ill-proportioned, abused bundles of pages with their shameless hearts burbling away on their sleeves.

  I only have to approach such a place to feel enfeebled and upset. There is a buzz in the air, a shrill of pages rubbing against one another. Hemmed in by those abrasive strata I cannot hear myself think. Dullness envelopes me like a dust-cloud. I have to focus: I must find a crooked seam and mine it to an uncertain conclusion, up and down, up and down, prying out the occasional nugget. It is undoubtedly true, as Augustine Birrell says, that the best books are necessarily second-hand – but what trials one has to endure to acquire them!

  So it was nearly two full months after the Black Sash Fête before I ventured again into a purchasing situation, and then only because it was necessary to obtain some reading matter for the Christmas holidays. The shop I chose was Yeoville Books of 28 Rockey Street, because the South African literature shelves are close to the door. A sensible arrangement, I think, which allows a decent amount of air to waft in from outside. Sometimes I am able to satisfy my needs there: but if I am compelled to go on, I treat this part of the shop as a decompression chamber in which I accustom myself to the arid, book-moted air that awaits me in the interior. If my will or my lungs fail me, I can quickly retire to the street, where there is a large supply of air, tainted by exhaust fumes but nonetheless quite breathable.

  Prepared though I was, my Christmas shopping expedition nearly ended in disaster. I had hardly set foot in the shop when I was overcome by the contentious racket of the book mob. My sense of self – I believe it was that – rushed to the backs of my hands and pulsed like a rash of quotations. The layers of books on all sides drew themselves up into verso and recto of a colossal tome, and tilted to swat me like an insect. I reeled about in the doorway with my eyes screwed shut, until I bumped up against the laminated gondola of new acquisitions and clasped it. As I crouched there, trying to remember what had brought me to this pass, I heard a small voice muttering my name. Opening my eyes, I found them focused on a book in the South African fiction section: Harry Bloom’s Episode. It was calling me. The spine showed a black man, a riotous person of some kind, brandishing a blazing torch, and, in its flames, the title and the name of the author spelt out in white bones. I stumbled to the shelf and seized the book in my left hand. It was surprisingly cool to the touch and I pressed it gratefully to my burning forehead. The noise in the shop faded away momentarily, and in the hush I became aware that a woman in a pink tracksuit, the sort of garment that has no pockets whatsoever, was looking at me compassionately. I turned my attention to the books again, fumbled at the shelf to comfort the aching gap where Bloom’s Episode had stood a moment ago, and found that a copy of Cold Stone Jug had somehow appeared in my right hand. I remembered that I was looking for that too. I pressed the two books together in a crude sort of cross, as if the stone in the title of the one could somehow extinguish the fire on the spine of the other, reeled to the till, threw some money down on the counter and fled.

  I paused on a bench in Yeoville Park to regain my composure. And there I discovered that my new purchases had also come from Helena Shein’s library.

  But somehow the coincidence was less interesting to me now that it had become more pronounced. When I got home, I put the books aside and reached for The Cricket on the Hearth instead. I always read one of the Christmas Books over the festive season. I must make it clear, I suppose, that my own library does not have the same disconcerting effect on me as the bookshops. On the contrary, I feel at home among these familiar few. “The man who has a library of his own collection,” says Augustine Birrell, “is able to contemplate himself objectively, and is justified in believing in his own existence.” I agree with this statement, and I have no doubt that it applies with equal force to women. (Birrell and I differ, however, on the question of numbers. He hesitates to call a collection of two thousand books a “library,” whereas I suspect that two hundred books might more than deserve the title.)

  In my own modest library there is silence. The books speak only when they’re spoken to. In their silent company, I believe that I exist. Harry Bloom’s Episode had been bought at the Methodist Book Depot, corner Pritchard and Kruis Streets, Johannesburg, and inscribed in May 1956. You’ll recall that on Naught for your Comfort the projected publication date for Episode was April 1956. So the book appeared on schedule, and Helena acquired it immediately.

  Between pages 234 and 235 I found a fragile notice from the Automobile Association to a Miss H. Shein of PO Box 4134, Johannesburg, reminding her that her annual subscription to the value of £1 11s 6d was due on 1 July 1956. It was signed by J.H.C. Porter, Area Secretary. I myself have never been a member of the Automobile Association.

  On page 235 was a reference to Father Huddleston, Nelson Mandela and Mulvi Cachalia, which I couldn’t help but notice.

  Bosman’s Cold Stone Jug had been purchased at the Pickwick Bookshop, 45 Kerk Street. Quite against the odds, or so I thought at the time, there was a card tucked into this book too, which showed that it had been a gift. On one side of the card was a guarantee: “Mr Pickwick cordially invites you to call in and exchange this gift, in its prese
nt clean and new condition, if for any reason you are not satisfied with it.” Alongside the guarantee was a drawing of Mr Pickwick. On the other side of the card was the following message: With my very best Wishes for a Happy New Year, from Muriel.

  I turned the card over on the flyleaf and studied Mr Pickwick. Then my eye was drawn to the logo of the distributor – the Central News Agency – on the flap of the dust-jacket: two naked black men playing bows. Mr Pickwick, with his hat concealed behind his coat-tails in his left hand and his chin propped in his right, gazed at these men through his little round spectacles across a field of yellowed paper. They looked in the other direction.

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  Incidentally, my bookplate is based on a woodcut by Dürer: St Jerome in his cell.

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  Although Helena Shein’s books were doing their utmost to attract my attention, I might still have turned a deaf ear to the call. But a fortnight later, as I paused on the threshold of The Booknook, 42 Bedford Road, and raised my knuckles to the glass door, meaning to summon the female proprietor out onto the pavement for an emergency consultation about my New Year reading, a voice hailed me from inside. It was a clear, hollowed-out voice, like the tone struck from an empty goblet, but it had an oversweet edge to it like sugar crystals on the rim. It was quite detestable: my immediate impulse was to fly. But at that moment the door swung open all by itself and a shaft of light that seemed to be refracted through the top of my head slid from the doorway to a far shelf and rested on a tatty hardback. My name rang out again (I don’t think it’s necessary to go into detail here, except to say that my Christian name was used in a way I found overly familiar). Screwing up my courage I tumbled headlong down the shaft and plucked the book from the shelf. It turned out to be Barbara Cartland’s A Ghost in Monte Carlo. I bought it, a little shamefacedly; indeed, I threw in a copy of Cry, the Beloved Country which happened to come to hand, simply to raise the tone of the purchase, and scurried home.

  An examination of A Ghost in Monte Carlo left me with two questions. The first was a question of quality: What was Cartland, a writer of romances, doing in Helena Shein’s library, rubbing shoulders with the likes of Huddleston, an archbishop and patron of the Anti-Apartheid Movement, and Bloom, a lawyer and serious novelist? I am not a snob, you see, but I am a stickler for standards. At that point I was reminded of Birrell’s comment that it is better to collect a library than to inherit one – “Each volume then, however lightly a stranger’s eye may roam from shelf to shelf, has its own individuality, a history of its own” – and felt rebuked. How could I know what had moved Helena to keep the book (I say “keep,” rather than “buy,” for reasons that will soon become clear).

  The second was a question of morality. This copy of A Ghost in Monte Carlo was the property of the Johannesburg Public Library. The slip pasted to the flyleaf, with its teetering stacks of rubber-stamped dates, said so clearly. Ever since the book had been published in 1951,until it had last been date-stamped on 5 March 1956, scarcely a week had passed during which someone had not taken it out. But despite this popularity, despite the letters JPL stamped all over the title-page, despite the attached printed notice that the book had to be returned to the library within 14 days and that there was a fine of sixpence for every week it was overdue, Helena Shein had kept it. She had written her name on it. She had even dated it March 1956, a little superfluously under the circumstances. I had been forming an impression of Helena Shein, and she did not strike me as the kind of person who would steal from a public library. Yet I held the evidence in my hands. I think it was precisely this uncomfortable sense of ambiguity that caused me to become enamoured of Helena Shein and her books.

  I did a quick calculation. The book was 1 815 weeks overdue. Allowing for inflation and an unfavourable exchange rate, Helena owed the JPL twenty-seven thousand rand.

  JPL? It rang a bell somewhere…and at last I caught the echo: Julius P. Lofsky.

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  “All Monte Carlo was talking! The winter of 1874 was the gayest, most profitable and most brilliant season since the opening of the Casino. Yet among the Royalty, aristocrats and millionaires from every country, two women caused a sensation.

  One was elderly, her handsome face malignant and secretive; the other was exquisitely lovely with huge dark eyes in strange contrast to the shining gold of her hair.

  Registered at the hotel as Mademoiselle Fantôme, everything she wore was grey, including a fabulous necklace of grey pearls. But only one person learned that ‘the Ghost,’ as she was called, had come straight to Monte Carlo from a convent.

  In that glittering, sparkling throng three men played desperate and decisive roles in her life – the sinister Rajah of Jehangar, the debonair Prince Nikolai of Russia and Sir Robert Stanford from England.

  It is a story of good and evil. How Mademoiselle Fantôme walks to the very brink of the abyss of evil, how she is saved and finds happiness through her own intrinsic purity is told in this thrilling, exciting, unusual forty-second novel from the pen of Barbara Cartland.”

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  My fall was all the more precipitate for having been resisted so long. I went to sleep that night with A Ghost in Monte Carlo under my pillow and Helena Shein on the tip of my tongue. When I awoke the next morning they were both still there. I rose in a daze, dressed in serviceable flannels, walking shoes and the blazer with the large inner pocket, and went out to look for Helena Shein’s books. I began to collect them for no other reason than that they had once belonged to her.

  In the beginning, they were few and far between. It took me two weeks to find the first dozen. But the more I found, the more I wanted. Conversely, the more I wanted, the more I found. In the end, they were everywhere. Sometimes the chorus of demanding voices as I strode through the doorway of a second-hand dealer was almost harder to bear than the unintelligible muttering of days gone by. It seemed as if every second book called out to me, as if every penny dreadful wanted to make my acquaintance. (For “penny” read “twelve rand ninety-five.”)

  I was obliged to overcome my aversion to crowds. I had to harden my heart by plunging it repeatedly in the raucous air. I learned to circulate among the shelves, brushing a spine here and there with my fingertips, like a personality at a cocktail party. How are you? So glad you could make it. There’s someone I want you to meet…now where’s she hiding? There you are!

  My question still resounded: What holds this library together?

  As Helena’s books piled up, patterns that promised to reveal everything kept emerging and then fading away before my eyes. Take Ilya Ehrenburg’s The Fall of Paris and Alexei Tolstoy’s Road to Calvary, for example, found at flea markets on opposite ends of the city. Note how the titles echo one another. Note how both carry the War Economy Standard certification, inscribed on the same open book and guarded by the same little lion. Both books were published by Hutchinson & Co. Both had won the Stalin Prize. Both were purchased at the People’s Book Shop, Africa House, 45, Kerk Street, Johannesburg. Have you noticed that people don’t use that comma any more? I mean the comma after the number. Have you noticed that the People’s Book Shop and Pickwick Bookshop have the same address?

  The Fall of Paris was translated from the Russian by Gerard Shelley. But Road to Calvary was translated from the Russian by Edith Bone.

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  Mistral, who was the only English girl in the convent, arrives at the home of her Aunt Emilie in Paris. Emilie announces that they will be going to Monte Carlo. She summons Madame Guibout, the couturière, to measure Mistral for “travelling gowns, morning costumes, Ball dresses, robes de style, manteaux, dolmans, paletots and casaques.” Madame Guibout’s assistants come bearing “satins, velvets, cashmeres, failles, muslins, foulards, alpacas, poplins, rolls and patterns in every texture and colour.”
r />   * * *

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  Some people lounge about in the book they’re reading as if it were a bed in a cheap hotel, dropping cigarette ash and biscuit crumbs between the sheets. Someone has slept here before, you think, tucking in the crumpled flap of a dust-jacket and brushing away a strand of blonde hair. There are initials carved in the margins, NBs and asterisks, obscene propositions, faint praise and futile rejoinders.

  Helena was a light traveller, the kind for whom a single photograph lodged in a crack of the dressing-table mirror must stand for home. She had passed through with a quick eye and clean hands. There were no annotations, no underlinings. But there were signs of her everywhere, mementoes pressed flat between the leaves: letters, cuttings, invoices, receipts, playing-cards, ticket stubs, banknotes. She had scattered so many papers behind her that I began to feel she was leading me on.

  And I followed her: to the tearoom at Anstey’s for tea and scones, and then to Sportswear on the first floor, where she purchased a swimsuit, a Mary Nash original, in seagoing cotton, shell pattern, with shirred front panel, “Butterfly” bra and tuck-away straps, for only 69/6. To the Colosseum to see James Stewart and Doris Day in The Man Who Knew Too Much. (She was alone: Julius P. Lofsky was out of town.) To the Belfast for a poplin blouse marked down to 19/6. I even crept up to the window of her room, with the eight of hearts in my left hand, and watched as a pale woman dressed in flickering shadows sat down in a chair turned away from me, took up a book from the armrest and tried to find her place.

  All these scattered signs were added proof that her books had been read. The pages fell open smoothly, the spines didn’t creak, there were no uncut sections. On the contrary, the rough edges of pages 129 to 160 of The Lying Days suggested that they had been slit open with the sharp edge of a ruler. It was among these pages that I found the following letter, typewritten in red ink on paper the colour of nicotine.