This was the most curious room yet. Two enormous gilded mirrors reflected our entrance, one over each of the two beds in the room. The walls were papered in red felt, but most of the wall space was occupied by five large wooden bookcases. Three hung precariously over the main bed, looking ready to avalanche books onto whoever slept there. In the back corner, a small doorway led to an even smaller kitchen, where among uneven stacks of cans and a drifting pile of old newspapers there was a hot plate with a pot of soup atop it. The centerpiece of this strange room was a sturdy wooden desk in front of yet another window that looked over to Notre Dame. There was a wooden swivel chair rolled up to the desk, and George pulled it out for himself.
“I’m preparing for the accountant,” he said as he motioned me to sit on the bed. “My papers are a bit of a mess today.”
This was a gross understatement. There was only the slimmest corner on which I could sit, because the bed, like the floor, the chairs, the shelves, and most every other available surface in the room, was covered with papers—bills, invoices, letters, receipts, account ledgers, and book catalogs, all of them either crumpled or coffee-stained, and sometimes both. Most distressing was the desk itself, where the same clutter of papers was joined by discarded dinner plates, empty glasses, full glasses, bowls of loose change, and a jar with what looked like a slice of lemon meringue pie squished to the bottom. George surveyed the room and raised his hands with slow exasperation. “Things aren’t as clean as they used to be. I can’t seem to keep up anymore.”
I had to agree that things appeared somewhat out of control, but I assured him the tumble and disorder held a touch of romance. To my mind, it was miraculous he was keeping the bookstore running at all. He was eighty-six years old that winter. My own experiences with folks of such an advanced age were limited to my grandparents, and they’d all died before reaching eighty-six and certainly none could have operated a bookstore in his or her later years. Not only had George kept Shakespeare and Company running; he’d created a living museum of books and a hostel for needy writers.
“You think so?” George said with a modest smile, as if never realizing the extent of his accomplishments. “I like to tell people I run a socialist utopia that masquerades as a bookstore, but sometimes I don’t know.”
There was a sudden blur of black and a cat scampered onto the desk, knocking a half-full glass of cola onto a pile of invoices. George took a swat at it, but the cat only looked at him with indifferent eyes and then leapt across to the second bed, toppling a box of publishing catalogs to the floor. George cackled with laughter and told the cat it was her fault the office was such a mess.
This was my formal introduction to Kitty, the same cat who had greeted me from the windowsill the day of the tea party. George had named her after the imaginary friend of Anne Frank, whose diary was one of his favorite books, and she seemed to be queen of the bookstore castle. Seeing Kitty bent on destruction, George went into the kitchen and returned with a plate of tinned food to pacify her. With the cat occupied, he settled back in his chair and got down to business.
“Did you bring your biography?”
The biography. This was one of the grand bookstore traditions. During the heated days of Paris in the 1960s, when the students rose up, and the Communists carried an uncomfortable amount of influence, at least in the opinion of the French authorities, George became the subject of political scrutiny. It shouldn’t have come as too much of a surprise, as he was a member of both the American and French Communist parties and had been letting political radicals and social undesirables sleep in his store for years. But it made life decidedly inconvenient.
As a means of pressure, the police forced George to follow the bylaws governing hotels, and thereby account for everybody who slept in his store. This was an imaginative stretch, since George never accepted payment and considered all his guests friends, but he was required to take down the passport number, date of birth, and other vital information of every person who stayed at Shakespeare and Company. Unlike the tourist hotels, however, George was required to file a report on a daily basis, and not at the main police prefecture across the Seine, either, but at an obscure station a ninety-minute walk from the store.
Yet George forged on. First, he bought a bicycle to facilitate making the journey to file the daily police report. Then he twisted the process into a creative exercise for his guests. Instead of simply noting down dry personal information, he asked people to write a short account of their lives and how they had come to the bookstore. The custom continued long after the police harassment stopped, and George now has an archive of sociological wonders: tens of thousands of biographies written between the 1960s and today, a vast survey of the great drifters of the past forty years. The task of putting one’s life in words was a chance at confession for many, and among the overflowing file boxes there are stories of love and death, incest and addiction, dreams and disappointments, all with a thumb-sized photograph attached.
When I’d asked to stay at Shakespeare and Company, George had told me of that tradition, and I was imbued with a sense of the gravity of the assignment. For the first time in recent memory, I was actually nervous about writing.
Working at a newspaper, the art of language becomes obscured by the daily ritual of flushing out a thousand words of copy in less time than it takes to eat a proper lunch. I became a cheap magician who knew that with a bit of dexterity and practice one could conjure up drama. Tragic accidents, grisly deaths, devastated mothers—the hyperbole of daily crime reporting turned writing into a Lego exercise requiring blocks of strong adjectives and simple nouns.
But with both the store’s literary history and the desire to impress my new landlord weighing upon me, I seized up. I’d spent the previous night in the hotel room starting my biography a dozen times, only to curse my words as trite and heave them into a crumpled pile. I knew George wanted a sense of my life and my family, so at around four in the morning, with a bottle of cheap Côtes du Rhone for inspiration, I decided to tell of a painful rift with my father.
One of my mentors at the newspaper was a man by the name of Woloschuk. An investigative journalist of national renown, he was a few years older than I. Among the feathers his cap sported were a best-selling book about the feud that nearly destroyed the world’s largest french fry empire, a story exposing a museum’s prized collection of Fabergé eggs as fakes, and the identification of the Canadian soldier who seduced a fifteen-year-old English girl during World War II and thus unwittingly fathered Eric Clapton.
Shortly after I started at the newspaper as a junior crime reporter, Woloschuk was hired on as a star investigative reporter. By chance, his desk was next to mine, and what began as casual cross-cubicle conversation developed into deep friendship when he recruited me for a dubious assignment. When he’d moved to the city, he’d been duped into taking an overpriced apartment and now he was skipping out on the lease. It was my job to help liberate his furniture in the dead of night so he could avoid the landlord and take a cheaper apartment in my building.
His confidence thus earned, Woloschuk took me under his wing. He was the one who taught me the things you don’t learn in journalism school: how to develop off-the-record sources, how to flatter on-the-record sources with well-placed adjectives, how to talk to police so they treat you as one of them.
Woloschuk was also the first to make me fully aware of the internal politics and social hierarchies that rule daily newspapers, and he was the one person who tried to get me to take my job a little less seriously. He’d force me to eat lunch away from my desk, he’d make frequent references to the fate of the horse in Animal Farm, and, on the thrilling occasion when I was asked by the editor of the automobile section to test a brand-new Lincoln Continental, he convinced me it was a good idea to drive to a barren stretch of highway and speed it along at 140 miles per hour. At Woloschuk’s request, we became informal partners, teaming up on investigations, driving the city to meet off-the-record sources, spending hours si
tting in coffee shops and airing out story ideas.
A few weeks before I received the threat, Woloschuk got a tip from a police source concerning a renowned heart surgeon who was also director of an internationally respected heart institute, inventor of an artificial heart, and a standing member of the Canadian Senate. According to the source, this doctor had been arrested for picking up a prostitute on one of the city’s filthiest strolls. Because of his reputation, instead of being publicly charged, he was funneled into john school, a program that instructs men on the disease and desperation of street prostitution. This program was supposed to protect the individual’s privacy, but Woloschuk’s sources were good and some officer obviously wanted the esteemed doctor to take an embarrassing fall.
The newspaper wanted the story badly, so we hit the streets to track down the facts. Our evidence gathered, we went to the hospital where the doctor performed heart transplants to confront him with what we knew. The doctor stuttered and denied everything. When we pressed harder and insisted it would be easier if he told his side of the story, he picked up the phone and told us he was going to call hospital security if we didn’t leave immediately.
Woloschuk and I were frustrated we hadn’t gotten the doctor’s personal confirmation, but we were soon staggered further. After we left the hospital, the doctor contacted one of the country’s leading public-relations firms and, on their advice, scheduled a press conference for that afternoon. Then, with his wife and children sitting beside him as he faced a brimming room of reporters and television cameras, he confessed. Begging his family’s forgiveness, he concluded by saying that as a result of his indiscretion and the badgering of newspaper reporters, he was resigning as head of the National Heart Institute.
If he had held his ground or resigned from his political post, the country might have shrugged it off as another example of the eminent corruptibility of the human spirit. By stepping down from a position where he saved lives on a daily basis, the battle of public opinion was won. Across the country, talk radio denounced media tactics. Politicians and pundits begged the doctor to return to his post, and even our own newspaper turned its back on us. The editors said Woloschuk and I had acted on our own initiative, and the paper started a petition asking the doctor to go back to work. The argument that it was a health risk for a surgeon to visit a street prostitute and hence a legitimate public story fell on deaf ears.
The worst part of this affair was that even my father questioned me. He is an internal man, not prone to voicing his complaints or disappointments. When it came to my work, he’d never commented on its unscrupulous aspects. I’d once covered a story about a fatal car accident that touched the teaching community at his high school. A colleague told him it was a fair job of reporting and that the family had appreciated what I’d written. This left him with the impression I was a compassionate and perhaps even ethical reporter, and this was enough for him. When my involvement in the doctor’s scandal came to light at a family dinner, my father shook his head and quietly wondered how his son could have done such a thing.
When George was done reading my account of this incident in my biography, he nodded and placed it on his cluttered desk. “You need more stories,” he said with a dismissive wave. “You need to make it longer.”
He smiled, though. And then he reached into his pocket for a ring of keys. Putting them in my hand, he made sure my fingers closed over them.
“Finish your biography here. Stay as long as you need to.”
In the kitchen, the pot was now steaming, and George got up to fetch two bowls of pepper soup and a baguette. After pouring us hot milky coffee and stirring our cups with his pencil, he sat down and looked me in the eye.
“You know,” he said, “I don’t normally ask writers to do anything other than make their beds in the morning, but you … I think you’re different.”
Then, as we ate our soup, he explained the first great task that would be asked of me at the Shakespeare and Company bookstore. It involved the unusual case of an old poet and an unpleasant eviction.
8.
Two months before I’d had a high-profile job with an enviable salary, a sleek black German sedan on lease, an apartment in a fashionable downtown neighborhood, and a collection of not-so-inexpensive shirts and jackets hanging in the closet. Now, there were a few hundred dollars in my pocket, no job or prospect thereof, some clothes jammed into an old handbag, and a bed in a tattered bookstore to call home. All things considered, I couldn’t have been happier.
After George wished me a pleasant first night at Shakespeare and Company, I crossed back to the bookstore library. The young man was still at the desk typing, though now in a far less flamboyant manner. When he saw me, he leaned back in his chair and gave me an appraising look.
“So,” he frowned. “You’re a writer.”
“A journalist actually. Some would say that doesn’t qualify.”
The dose of self-deprecation worked. The man’s jaw muscles relaxed and he rose from his chair with a grin.
“Ha! I like that,” he said, grasping my hand in an overly firm shake. “I’m Kurt. That’s with a K, like Kurt Vonnegut.”
With a flourish of his arm, this Kurt with a K stepped out from behind his typewriter and announced he would give me the official Shakespeare and Company tour. Once he was standing, I saw he was taller than I, a good few inches over six feet, and wore a heavy gray overcoat.
“The store’s not heated,” he said, catching me looking at his coat. “Get used to the cold.”
To start, Kurt pointed to the books around us. This, he said, was the library. Nothing on this floor was for sale, only for reading at the store. There were more than ten thousand volumes in all, from Shakespeare’s plays to presidential biographies, from nineteenth-century treatises on tropical birds to the most recent Julian Barnes novel. “Can you believe it?” Kurt asked. “How many businesses devote half their space to things that don’t make money?”
Next, I was taken back out to the staircase and led up several steps to a landing. There was a wooden door, which I’d previously presumed gave onto a closet, but Kurt swung it open to reveal a stained porcelain hole in the floor with grooved footholds on each side. Though the air was foul, Kurt made me lean in to see a rickety faucet and a plastic bucket for flushing. This was the Shakespeare and Company toilet. George had even installed bookshelves here. With mild dismay, I noticed the pages of the books on the lower shelves were moist. I told myself it was humidity.
“That’s for us. There’s a good one upstairs in the apartment, and a bathtub, too, but those are saved for important guests and established writers,” he said with some envy in his voice. “We don’t get up there much.”
Once back inside the library, he pointed to the pair of narrow beds covered with red velvet that ran along one wall of the front room. These were two of the thirteen official beds at what George liked to call “the Tumbleweed Hotel”: one in the antiquarian room, two in the main part of the bookstore downstairs, six in the library, and four more upstairs in the third-floor apartment. Besides these beds, there were another half a dozen corners and cracks that could quickly be converted into sleeping spaces. According to Kurt, during the height of summer as many as twenty people stayed in the bookstore at one time. Winters were generally quieter, as the gray Paris rains discouraged the drifters who otherwise flocked to Shakespeare and Company. At the moment, there were just six people living at the store, including myself.
“You’re lucky,” Kurt insisted. “I got here at the end of December and the place was so packed for New Year’s, I had to sleep on the floor for two nights.”
Taking me to the narrow passage connecting the front and back rooms, Kurt opened another door. This time, it was in fact a closet, and an unsteady heap of knapsacks was piled beneath shirts hanging from a makeshift clothes rod. Kurt shoved my bag into this pile and leaned into the door to stop the contents from tumbling out.
“That’s our storage space. Don’t keep anything to
o valuable in there.” Then, with a half smile, he added, “Strange things go missing here.”
We moved past the cubbyhole, which, I was told, had been installed for a writer who’d dared to complain about the lack of actual writing space at the bookstore, and then into the room with the bunk bed and children’s books. Kurt stopped beside the mirror with the letters and photographs taped to it. They had been sent from couples who had fallen in love at the bookstore. Myth had it that more than sixty people had met their future wives or husbands at Shakespeare and Company; Kurt said that considering what an aphrodisiac the store was, he guessed the number might actually be higher.
Passing through the next doorway, we entered the room where I’d previously stumbled upon the two men making soup. Kurt laughed at my description, saying the men were from Argentina and lived their own unique Nietzschean philosophy. They apparently tried to make every minute of their life as fulfilling as possible, in the belief that it might go on forever. “They were always sharing their food, their clothes, their wine, whatever,” said Kurt. “Deep down, I think they’re crazy.”
The pair had left that morning, so the room now stood empty and I could choose my bed. I sat on the larger of the two and tried to get a feel for my new quarters. This was known as the fiction room, and for good reason. The shelves were filled with hardcover novels, and in an instant I recognized at least twenty books that someone at some time had insisted I read. Faulkner, Capote, Hesse, Camus, Richler—it was a comprehensive collection of the century’s great works.
For furniture, there was a mirrored cabinet, as well as a wooden table with political magazines organized neatly on top. The second bed in the room was a feat of carpentry, tucked between two bookcases and measuring no more than five feet in length. Clearly, one of the Argentinians must have been either very short or very flexible. There was also a window in the room, but it shed sparse light, as it was obstructed with shelves of books. I could just make out thin lines of the fading day in the spaces where the books didn’t come evenly together. It made the room slightly claustrophobic, but the air felt good, like the municipal library near my parents’ home.
Time Was Soft There Page 5