The Library of Forgotten Books

by Rjurik Davidson

  “Well, we can’t always know what’s going to happen,” I said.

  “Petit Pierre certainly didn’t.”

  I didn’t say anything. I couldn’t risk reaching for my stiletto, so my fingers clamped around my fork.

  “He still didn’t know what was going to happen when I wrapped him in that net. He was going to betray you, you know.”

  I leaped upon him and he fell backwards. My arm was back, and then it plunged forward, fork in hand at Le Flic’s face. He batted towards me like a bug on its back, legs flapping as the fork drove into his left cheek, and through it. There was no scream, just the unexpected hardness of bone. I was wrenched backwards, onto my feet, pulled by an unexpected and powerful force. Marcel’s arms were wrapped around me so I couldn’t move. Le Flic stood up, the fork protruding from his cheek like a hat hanger on the wall. He didn’t cry: he was no little boy. He pulled at it, but it was lodged too strongly. With two hands he reached up again, this time emitting a deep groan, and he pulled and pulled and it silently came loose with a rush of blood.

  Marcel had dragged me from the place. He whispered in my ear, “Hit me.”

  I swivelled my elbow at head height and connected with him. He went down. I ran.

  Not knowing where to hide, I made my way to the Hotel du Lac, to wait in the foyer for Elena or for the gendarmes. Eventually the receptionist asked me, “Would you like me to see if she’s in, sir?”

  I looked at him: how did he know about me?

  He called, spoke a few words and said, “She’s upstairs. Room 403.”

  I made my way through those opulent halls. To my astonishment, a projector was set up in her living room, and on it a black and white film showed a young man and a woman in a Parisian apartment.

  “How many boys have you slept with?” asked the woman onscreen.

  The young man added up things on his hand and then gave up.

  “You have a projector,” I said to Elena.

  “Don’t you love film?” she said.

  We watched the film and she put on another, and I felt as if I had never seen a movie before. I saw jump-cuts and camera angles. I saw the images as consciously created and I was doubly fascinated by them. I forgot about the following day, my birthday, and the disastrous path I was on. I forgot about the surprise Guy and Matthieu had organised. The future lay before me like a blank slate, a road in the night. I couldn’t tell where the next turn would be.

  I fell asleep on the couch, seeing visions of young men smoking cigarettes and having long discussions about how to live. I was, in a strange way, happy.

  Elena and I had a breakfast of croissants, orange juice and coffee. The table cloths were white, les garçons were polite, the sun was out. I was twenty-seven years old.

  Guy and Matthieu were waiting in the foyer, and we followed them along the gentle slope from the Hotel down between the cliffs, and then through the little houses to the wharf.

  When we reached the end of one of the piers Guy turned to me and said, “Here we are!”

  “Ah, the surprise,” I said.

  Gently rocking in the water beside the pier was the yacht, The Tomorrow, her lines sleek, her paint gleaming white and blue.

  “Oh no,” said Guy. “This isn’t the surprise.”

  We cast off and Matthieu, something of a sailor, steered us out to sea, the boat slapping against the choppy waves, spray flying out into the air ahead of us. Eventually we turned to starboard, out beyond the rocky headlands. The wind felt good on my face.

  As we came close to the Sparkling Grotto, Guy ducked into the cabin and came up with a filled canvas bag. He looked at me, smiled and said, “It’s a secret.”

  We lowered our sails next to one of the smaller wooden rowboats moored close to the grotto and Matthieu dropped anchor.

  “Come on,” said Guy. “Matthieu and Elena will stay with the boat.”

  I looked at the rowboat, at the grotto mouth, so small and dark in the cliff-face, the water rising and falling like the bottom lip on a gaping mouth. Events had lined themselves up, one leading to another. Guy and Matthieu both knew what was within the grotto. I could not fight the two of them.

  “I’ll come too,” said Elena.

  Guy shrugged.

  “You’d better–” I began.

  “I’ve always wanted to see the grotto,” she said definitively.

  Matthieu stayed with the yacht, and the three of us climbed into the rowboat, Guy’s canvas bag hitting the wooden planks with a thud. He took the oars and rowed us towards the mouth. As we came close, the waves lifted us up and dropped us down. At the right moment, just as the wave was receding, he rowed us forward and I grabbed onto the rocky roof of the cave mouth and pushed off.

  Brilliant flashes of light surrounded us, fractured and multicoloured, as if we were bathed in a kaleidoscope. The walls of the grotto were hard to make out as light and colour bounced off them. Some seemed close, others far away. Above us little holes in the cliff wall allowed the sun to shine into the grotto and the crystalline rocks caught the light and sparkled like little stars in the night. Elena gasped.

  “Well hello,” said Le Flic, standing in a boat, a great fishing net in his hands. “Happy birthday.”

  It had been inevitable, from the moment I had insulted him, to the moment I had driven the fork into his cheek; like links in a chain the events had led me here, as I knew they would.

  “Just spare Elena,” I said. To protect her, I stood up in the dinghy which, rising and falling on the waves, floated closer to Le Flic’s, now perhaps twenty feet away.

  Guy unzipped the bag and pulled out an old French rifle.

  “It’s a pity you brought her,” said Le Flic.

  Guy turned to me and said, “Emanuel, I offer you your birthday present. What would you like to do with him?” He turned with his gun and pointed it at Le Flic, whose face collapsed in on itself.

  “Guy, we agreed. This man is going nowhere. I’m a gendarme!”

  Guy grinned. “And I’m crazy.”

  There was silence and I knew what had to happen. Le Flic had to die. But I could not give the order.

  “Please. Don’t...I won’t...” Le Flic’s eyes seemed flat and empty, as if he were dead already.

  Our boats drifted closer together.

  Le Flic threw the net. A shot went off. I heard a cry as the net flew towards me. It came from Elena. She threw herself in front of me, and the boat rocked wildly. The net struck her and she toppled further forward. “No,” I cried and reached out, but it was too late. There was a splash and a shower of crystalline water and she was gone. In front of me, Le Flic fell to his knees and looked down at himself in incomprehension. He placed a hand against his bloody chest and looked up towards us.

  I dived into the water. Rays of light cut through it at many angles. Beneath me I saw a blob of colour and I dived deeper, kicking my legs ferociously. Pressure built in my ears. I lost a sense of up and down. I reached the net in which Elena was caught. Her mouth was not opening and closing, like that of a beached fish. Instead she lay there passively, staring at me as if she had always known this would happen. I reached into my boot and took my stiletto. It was made for stabbing, not cutting. I tried to cut anyway. The rope was thick. After a moment I threw the stiletto away.

  Elena looked at me, her hair drifting around her like a mermaid’s and I let out a cry under the water. She shook her head, as if to say, “It’s all right. Leave me.” Air escaped from her mouth.

  I found the edge of the net and, calming myself, slowly unwrapped it. Patience was the key. One turn, two turns. She held onto the net with her fingers, as if she didn’t want to be saved. As if she wanted to die there in the grotto. I prised them free. I pulled again at the net and it came away. I wrapped my arm beneath her waist and we rose through the water like sea creatures, bursting through the water’s surface as if we were bursting through the very future itself.

  Guy had already dragged the body of Le Flic into our boat and he
helped us aboard. Guy dived to the grotto’s floor and used his characteristic strength to drag up the net.

  We took Le Flic far out into the Mediterranean and there we wrapped him in his net and threw him overboard. As I looked out over the turquoise sea with its little white caps I said, “Can we go to one of the islands? I don’t feel like going back yet.” Each of us wanted to pretend that nothing had happened, that we were just tourists like so many others. We wanted to escape the past.

  We set off out into the glorious sun towards the islands which sat on the water like little promises. We dropped anchor at a little rocky beach and I stripped naked and plunged into the water.

  “Come,” I said to Elena. She shook her head.

  “Come on!”

  She emitted a little laugh. It was the first time I’d really seen her smile and her face was radiant. She looked again to be a young woman with all the world and all time before her.

  I swam back up to the boat and said, “Help me up.”

  She reached down and I grabbed her hand and pulled. She didn’t even teeter but lurched forward with a little cry and plunged into the water. She laughed again. “You bastard.”

  Guy jumped in carefully and had Matthieu pass him his hat which he dutifully placed on his head, and the three of us swam for a while until Guy hopped back into the boat. Elena and I swam to the little beach where she said, “You’ve ruined my dress.”

  “Take it off.”

  “I’m not going to take it off!”

  We lay for a while in the sun and then walked along the stony beach, up over the outcrop and down into the next little inlet away out of sight of the boat. Her dress, drying in patches but still wet in others, clung to her body, and her hair hung lank and damp. She turned back to me and smiled and there was no makeup on her face. I could see her freckles and she seemed young and alive.

  She looked back at me. “What?”

  I stopped walking along the rocks. She stopped also and looked at me puzzled. I reached forward, took her arm clumsily, stepped close to her, almost toppled over one of the rocks.

  “What, Emanuel?” she said.

  I pulled her close and kissed her, and she kissed me back, powerfully. I felt the warmth of her body and the dampness of her dress and I lifted her and she wrapped her legs around my hips and laughed freely as I tottered over the rocks up the beach. We came to a sandy flat area and I lowered her down and she pulled me in, and the sunlight was burning on my back and she was beneath me burning like a little sun herself. She pulled me closer and her skirt was up her legs and my pants were down and I was inside her and all I could think of was how much I loved her. How much I needed her.

  We returned to the beach and lay in the sun on the rocks until mid-afternoon when we climbed back aboard The Tomorrow and headed back to the town.

  Standing on the pier I said to Guy and Matthieu, “It’s over. I don’t have the heart for it anymore.” I looked at Elena, who stared out into the distance. “Perhaps I’ll head south, back to my home town.”

  Guy put his hand on my shoulder and said, “Of course.”

  Matthieu, calmly and quietly as was his way, said, “Do that, Emanuel. Make your future for yourself. We will go on.”

  The two of them turned, one quiet and unassuming, the other dressed in cowboy hat and boots and talking at the top of his voice, “There was this one time, close to Cannes, where I rode a motorbike with a German. I’d taken him out for an adventure, you know, and when we were far along the coast...”

  Elena and I walked back up to the Hotel du Lac and we stood on the balcony looking over the faraway sea. She stood serenely, an image from a poster. As if illuminated by carefully placed lights on a set, the sinking sun caught her at an angle, one side of her brilliant, the other fading into softness. I stood there, looking at her as the sun sank to the west and her two sides slowly merged into one.

  In the morning she stood again on the balcony. I leaned against the railing next to her and we looked out together over the sea.

  “You should go and collect your things,” she said. “The train leaves at eleven.”

  “I’m not coming,” I said.

  “What?”

  “Elena, you’re not for me. Sometimes things just don’t...fit. We’ve changed. There are things I want to learn. The world is larger than I thought. You know, for us to know where we’re going, the forces acting on us, we have to understand it. And I barely understand it at all.”

  She faced back towards the sea and said, “I’m going to be terribly busy in Paris.” She added, softly, “I suppose you’re right.”

  She packed up all her things and we were chauffeured to the train station. Elena and I stood on the platform with the passengers rushing around us, like two islands in the raging sea, watching each other but separated forever by a great expanse of water. Eventually she said, “I am going to make a career for myself.”

  “You will,” I said. “And I will see you on the screen, lighting it up like a little...sun.”

  “Goodbye,” she said.

  “Goodbye.”

  She held me and there was no distance between us, and as she walked away, she was more beautiful than ever, and yet she was no longer the image from posters or magazines. She was simply Elena. I watched her climb onto the train and then waited until it passed out of the station, diminished in the distance, finally turned a corner and was gone.

  I headed one more time to the Cinema, this time alone. There I saw a final image of myself. The camera snaked its way over a mass of young people, running through the boulevards of Paris. Though I had never been there, I recognised it as the Quartier Latin, where intellectuals and students mingled in cafés near the Sorbonne University. There were barricades there, and riot police, and there I stood, recording some demonstration with a little camera while close to me a young man scrawled graffiti on a nearby wall: “Beneath the pavement lies the beach.” Beside the graffiti were political posters. One claimed, “1968—the time of change!”

  Finally, when summer wound down, the cool north-westerlies bringing clouds and light rain, the town squares began to empty out. The fat German tourists and avant-garde Swedish filmmakers headed home. And one day the Cinema packed up its projectors and reels, loaded them onto dirty trucks, and headed away, leaving us only with our memories.

  Int. Morgue. Night.

  Lo let the night be solitary, let no joyful cry be heard in it.

  Let them curse it who curse the day who are ready to awake

  the Leviathan. (Book of Job 3:8)

  At first everything is black, but something is visible, emerging from the darkness, the world coming into being, like a sunken ship emerging from the depths. It’s a morgue, dank and dark, the tiles on the floor and walls grimy. We look from on high and everything has a far-away feel, even the bodies lying on their trays, arms and legs lolling from under the sheets. There are a few smudges of red on the floor, droplets of black next to one of the bodies. In between the cracked wall-tiles run rivulets of water, wearing away at everything before running down rusted grates in the floors.

  Faulkner stands by one of the beds; his weathered face, having seen too many Australian summers, is turned down and away. Though he’s pushing middle-age, he’s crying like a child. The smooth-skinned orderly, just emerging into adulthood, holds up the sheet. He looks bored, as if he doesn’t have time for this crap, and he’d rather be anywhere else, just not near this so-called tough private eye who sobs and occasionally wipes his face with his arm.

  Faulkner isn’t in the best of states. No, not the best of states at all, which is understandable given that Lucy is there on the slab, her cute little face like a china doll. That’s what he calls her: his little china doll. All those years of wandering and he’d found this girl, finally, and now she was dead. He was supposed to be a PI—quick on his heels, fast on the draw, one step ahead. Wild-eyed Shorty Cheng had come to him and said, “Faulkner...Faulkner...It’s Lucy.”

  Faulkner pushes the
thought from his mind. He has to concentrate. The killer was either a freak or a pro: cigarette burns run along her arms, her neck red from strangulation. But her face is delicate and beautiful and doll-like: a button nose, high cheek-bones, freckles flicked across her face like confetti. The orderly lets the sheet fall. It drifts down slowly, as if it is held up by a gust of air.

  Faulkner climbs the stairs out of the morgue, onto the streets of a Melbourne we don’t know, a massive metropolis of eight million, its buildings rammed up against each other with little streets and alleyways in between. The buildings seem constructed in a ramshackle over-the-top extravagance, as if a child has piled blocks upon blocks, disregarding their size. Balconies hang over the streets, all iron lace-work. The stained-glass windows of churches glow an almost unnatural red and blue. It’s 1951, a hundred years after the great boom driven by the settlement of rich lands along the coasts of Australia’s great inland sea, where the Inneminkan Metropolis rises in futuristic spires over long white beaches. It’s a hundred years since the influx of immigrants from China and Malaya, Burma and French Indochina, an influx which has made Australia the great power of the south.

  The lights of Chinatown reflect on the wet pavement as Faulkner wanders along the sidewalk, moving in between groups of people. Hawkers stand outside dumpling houses: “Shrimp dumplings, prawn dumplings. Steamed, fried.” The alleyways, lined with red Chinese banners, seem to lean in towards each other with cubist intent. A ragged line of emu-driven rickshaws—all red, blue and gold—rushes past him, the birds’ necks jutting forward and back as they run, their feet scrabbling on the cobblestones.

  Behind Faulkner a suited man strikes another: “Bloody commie nips.”

  A group of Chinese Australians moves towards the fight and the white man runs a few steps away, turns back and yells: “You can’t take us over you know. We’ll never give in.”