Time Was Soft There

by Jeremy Mercer

  I was convinced it would be an easy enough task. If George was right in saying that forty thousand people had slept at his store, this alone was a formidable army. Add to this the countless visitors who fell in love with the shop each day and George’s list of famous friends, and it seemed we surely had the resources required to fight the hotel baron and secure the future of Shakespeare and Company. All we needed was the proper plan.

  As I lay in bed that night, I was sure my journalism background could help. All reporters know how much the public loves a good tragedy, and if the plight is pathetic enough, the response can be enormous. On one occasion in my city, a man punished his dog for pooping in the house by tying the animal to the back of his truck and dragging it around the block at high speed. The pads of the dog’s paws were abraded by the pavement, and when our paper ran photographs of the animal’s bandaged legs, there were hundreds of offers to adopt. Similarly, when a Christmas Eve fire claimed all the presents for a family supported by a single mom, the fund-raising drive organized by my paper to help the family was such a success that one of the woman’s neighbors faked a fire the next Christmas in hopes of netting the same windfall.

  The morning after my talk with George, I was so preoccupied by a fantasy involving a random encounter with Oprah Winfrey and an international television campaign to designate Shakespeare and Company a French national monument that I went to unlock the antiquarian room without thinking. It was the most nonchalant of gestures, so it was with great alarm that I looked up and saw Kurt barreling toward me with intense hurt spreading across his face.

  “Where did you get the keys?” he demanded.

  With all that had happened during my two days at the bookstore, I’d forgotten Kurt’s lust for the ring of keys. I mumbled an awkward explanation, but still his cheeks flamed.

  “I don’t get it,” Kurt said as he turned away. “Doesn’t George like me?”

  We finished opening the store in an uncomfortable silence. When the work was done, Kurt declared he was going for coffee. Sensing a chance to mend our fragile friendship, I decided to momentarily postpone the Oprah plan and offered to treat.

  Only a hundred feet or so from the bookstore, on the other side of the city park with the second-oldest tree in Paris, is a blissful spot known as Café Panis. Its waiters are stiff-backed and nattily tuxedoed, couples sit side by side at the neat row of tables out front, the menu is chalked onto the dining room blackboard at the beginning of each day. In brief, it adheres to all the grand traditions of a French café.

  Partly because of this ambience but largely due to its inviting proximity, the café had been embraced by the inhabitants of Shakespeare and Company. When chores were done, the residents crossed the park for their morning coffees and then repeated the trajectory several times throughout the day. Rare was the occasion when there wasn’t at least one of George’s denizens propped at the Panis bar with a book in hand or pen at work.

  In its own way, Panis had also embraced the misfits of the bookstore. The café offers a magnificent view of Notre Dame and, as a result, is buffeted by anonymous waves of tourists. Each day the hordes arrived with their cameras and guidebooks, asking the same questions about the menu, making the same jokes about the exorbitant price of a glass of cola. Faced with these nameless masses, the waiters at Panis understandably became attached to their regular customers.

  For convenience’s sake, these regulars could be divided into two groups. The first was composed of the sidewalk artists who worked out front of Notre Dame and on the stone walkways of the Seine. They were mostly embittered middle-aged men who’d arrived in Paris dreaming of masterpieces but now drew jiffy charcoal sketches of lovers and children for fifty francs apiece. They were generally a scowling lot: When it rained, they filled the café and complained of the weather; when it didn’t rain, they filled the café and complained of the stinginess of the tourists; and on those sunny occasions when their sketches did sell well, they filled the café, got boisterously drunk, and started insulting the waiters.

  Perhaps it was no great surprise, then, that the waiters unanimously preferred the second group. While the Shakespeare and Company residents were usually unshowered and apt to loiter for hours over a single cup of coffee, they were at least happy to be there. When Kurt strode in that morning, it was clear he was a particular darling. A busboy carrying a tray of omelettes saluted as he passed, while a waiter with an immaculately shaven head glided to the door to greet us.

  “Monsieur Kurt! How are you today?”

  Kurt struck a young Hemingway pose and made an offhand comment about the trials of writing, which was received with a sympathetic nod. At the bar, the counterman reached across to shake his hand while I was welcomed as “Monsieur Kurt’s friend.” Even an aging German Shepherd rose creakily to his feet so he could come and have his ears scratched by Kurt.

  “That’s Amos,” he explained as the café dog settled contentedly at his feet.

  Cheered by this grand welcome, Kurt was inspired to tutor me on café life. The fundamental rule was to sit at the bar in order to escape the two-tier pricing system of French restaurants. If you took a table in a café, you could expect to pay fifteen or twenty francs for a basic café express. The grand cafés like the Deux Magots or the Café de Flore charged as much as twenty-five francs just for the right to sit and drink a short cup of coffee. But if you stood at the bar, you generally paid half the menu price. At Café Panis, the coffee that cost fifteen francs in the dining room was just five and a half francs at the counter.

  With these prices so attractive, the second lesson was to hawk for stools. Panis had four high stools facing its bar, where you could sit comfortably with your coffee. If you couldn’t nab one, you were left leaning, which greatly diminished the joy of spending hours in the café. These stools were the subject of a constant struggle between the bookstore crowd and the street artists, and one had to be fast to secure a seat and remain determined to keep it.

  But by far the most important thing I learned that day was the location of the downstairs bathroom. It was clean and spacious, with two shiny porcelain urinals and a separate room with an extremely comfortable toilet. There was also a large-basined sink with spigots for hot and cold water, a broad mirror, soap, towels, and even a hot-air hand dryer. During the midmorning lull, it was relatively easy to make a quick scrub of your genitals and armpits, wash your face, shave, and dry up before another customer disturbed you. Considering the state of Shakespeare’s common toilet and the lack of shower facilities, Café Panis was the place for morning ablutions.

  As if this wasn’t enough, the bald waiter, who was introduced as Nico, even gave us croissants that were left over from that morning’s breakfast service. “They would have been put in the garbage,” he assured me when I began to thank him a little too profusely.

  We lingered for a pleasant hour and made ample use of the toilets, until the lunch crowds forced us to abandon our stools. Kurt had already shown a certain resiliency when it came to bookstore disappointments, and after our long coffee, he proved it again.

  “George knows I’m the wild one,” he commented as we returned to the bookstore. “I obviously can’t be trusted with the keys. That’s all right. Who needs the responsibility?”

  All day, I tried to catch George’s attention. Oprah, media campaigns, fund-raising drives, heritage status, and a thousand other helpful ideas spun in my head. But every time I approached, he kept waving me off, saying he had other things to do, behaving as if we’d never even discussed the problem the day before.

  Confused and frustrated, I waited until Luke started work and then went to take a place in the worn green metal chair by the front desk. As I sat, Luke was in the midst of selling a book on the history of Ethiopian jazz. The customer was a Cuban musician who was in Paris for a week of gigs and it so happened that Luke had a special interest in Cuba at that time. He’d traveled through enough of the Third World to have questions about the way wealth was distributed acr
oss the planet. Now, working for George, who’d actually walked from Havana to Santiago after Castro’s revolution, he was subjected to almost daily lectures on the glories of Cuban socialism. Suspicious by nature, Luke wasn’t ready to believe anything, but he did think it might be worthwhile to spend a month or two in the country.

  “Just to see for myself,” he explained. “I just think there’s got to be something better than this.”

  After a long discourse that wove between the cultural wonders of Havana and the general ambivalence toward Castro’s government, the musician left and I was able release my angst.

  “Uh, Luke …”

  “What’s bothering you, old fellow?”

  Barely pausing to breathe, I told him everything. The French businessman, the luxury hotel … It was all too bizarre to be true.

  “Actually, that sounds about right” was Luke’s nonchalant reaction.

  “Everyone around here asks the same question: ‘What’s going to happen when George is gone?’”

  From what Luke had gathered during his time at the store, not only was there nothing in place to protect the bookstore but George was also refusing to take any practical measures for the future. Luke said the plans were at best highly optimistic and at worst entirely ludicrous. One of the more bizarre plots to date had been a halfhearted attempt to donate Shakespeare and Company to the billionaire philanthropist George Soros.

  George had long admired Soros’s social crusading and, along with the likes of Noam Chomsky and Rigoberto Menchu, his photograph was on the wall of honor at the back of the store. Though the two had never spoken of such an arrangement—in fact, had never even met—George was confident that Soros would have such affinity for the bookstore’s cause that he would protect the property from the clutches of the hotel baron.

  A year or so before, George had put together an impressive dossier and then sent an official offer to the Soros Foundation. “He has money and imagination (two things needed to build an institution here) and that is a combination that most people lack,” wrote George at the time. But before there was any response, more practical voices prevailed and he was persuaded against giving away everything he’d worked for to a complete stranger.

  “You see, from a normal perspective it looks like an easy enough problem to solve,” Luke finished. “But people forget we’re dealing with George. He’s not exactly your normal chap.”

  17.

  Shakespeare and Company prides itself on being a socialist utopia, but it can’t escape the pressures of a capitalist world. Along with the hotel baron who menaced the bookstore proper, all the residents suffered financial hardships and we wondered how we would survive the gray Paris winter.

  Of the group, it was Simon who was pressed the hardest. Aside from George, nobody else living at the bookstore was more than thirty-five years old. For the younger residents, though poor and desperate, we could always rationalize our misery as youthful adventure. In our hearts, we knew we could return to the real world and find gainful employment if needed.

  Simon, however, had recently celebrated his fifty-sixth birthday and thus was of an age where financial hardship becomes distinctly more disconcerting. Watching the poet unravel each night in the antiquarian room, it was hard to believe he could ever find stable ground. Simon himself was so depressed by his condition that he’d recently asked friends traveling to India to give offerings at a Hindu temple on the Ganges so his soul wouldn’t be resurrected and he wouldn’t have to suffer through life again.

  After my discussion with George, I told Simon that there was no longer the danger of an immediate eviction, but this proved to be only the briefest of respites. The poet still had no money, still had no place to go, still faced the very real prospect of losing the only home he knew.

  A job would have been the easiest answer, but Simon hadn’t done any regular work for almost a decade. There were occasional menu translations for tourist restaurants and minor editing duties for a friend who worked at a pharmaceutical company, but this barely kept him in food and plentiful habit. The poet also knew that even under the best of circumstances, employers were reluctant to hire someone his age, and Simon was hardly in any best circumstance. Between the years of alcoholism and the years of living in a communal bookstore, the poet had become something of a Steppenwolf, someone who could never truly blend into society again.

  All this was reflected in Simon’s rather fanciful plans for his future. When seeking sources of money to leave Shakespeare and Company, his first idea was to sell a book of his poetry. An Irish publisher, Salmon Press, was interested in one of his manuscripts and Simon entertained notions of an advance.

  “I might get a check by the spring,” he said with hopeful eyes.

  But we both knew this was the longest of shots with the lowest of rewards. Contemporary poetry was rarely a big seller, so even if the book were to be published, it wouldn’t earn Simon more than a few thousand francs. This would be barely sufficient for a week at the old Hotel des Medicis up rue St. Jacques, let alone enough to start a new life.

  A more realistic ambition was translation. Simon had built himself a minor literary reputation during his years at the bookstore and had recently translated a Céline play, The Church, for a California publishing house. His goal now was to win the contract for a novel by Claude Simon, the French Nobel laureate and one of the founders of le nou-veau roman. Simon had already translated short stories by the author, and this project was worth 28,000 francs, close to four thousand dollars, a kingly sum at the bookstore.

  “Maybe then I could get an apartment and finally be able to sleep without the paralyzing fear that the old man will descend from above like the Dark Angel and expel me from my humble abode,” Simon pronounced one night as we shut down the antiquarian room.

  As for the rest of Shakespeare and Company’s impoverished residents, most of us didn’t even have the right to employment in France. Ablimit had a special nonworking visa, while Kurt and I were beneficiaries of the automatic three-month tourist visa available to North Americans, but this forbade living permanently at one address, let alone finding a job. Thanks to the new European Union labor laws, the Italian woman could technically find work, but she had no interest in staying in Paris and was already planning a return to Bologna.

  Ablimit was the most industrious, giving covert Mandarin lessons in the upstairs library. But this barely covered his daily meals at the student cafeteria and a monthly spin at the local laundry. Kurt had been reduced to living off his credit card, and after the binge at Polly Magoo’s, I was in no better shape.

  Thankfully, there were seams to this financial bind. Long ago, George had installed the wishing well in the main room of the bookstore to create a haphazard fund for the needy. The well was replenished each day by whimsical tourists and there was an open invitation to the neighborhood’s homeless to scrape out a few coins for bread or bottle. The bookstore residents also made ample use of the fund, and if you didn’t mind scraping among dirty coins, you could always gather enough centimes for a baguette and a round of Brie.

  And if the well ran dry, Kurt and I once decided, we could always go cap in hand. We’d discovered there was a team of three Roma girls working the crowds in front of Notre Dame. They carried a plasticized multilingual card proclaiming them Bosnian refugees and used an infant child as a mercy prop. The baby was strapped into a harness and passed between the girls throughout their long begging shifts in front of the cathedral. One morning, Kurt and I watched them count out a cascade of five- and ten-franc pieces while they sat on the benches in front of Shakespeare and Company. Seeing their bounty, we were sure we could handle a few hours with our hands outstretched.

  It was one of those jokes that wasn’t really. I only had a few hundred francs left, and even if I kept the most modest of budgets, my money wouldn’t last much longer than another week. Something had to be done.

  My first work in Paris came courtesy of one of the store regulars. Nick was an accomplished
street hustler and could often be seen skulking around the quarter. He kept a ponytail of brown hair and frequented Shakespeare and Company between the hours of four and eight, which happened to be the hours when Sophie, the lovely British actress, worked the desk. I first made his acquaintance when I found him sitting moon-ingly in the green chair, trying to induce Sophie to join him for a movie.

  Nick had been raised in Yugoslavia with an Albanian father and a Serbian mother, and when things started going bad in the Balkans, they went particularly badly for him. He’d been a Goth as a teenager, the type who favored dark trench coats, dyed black hair and, for special occasions, painted fingernails. In October of 1991, after an all-night party at a Belgrade club, he arrived home in full Goth regalia and found four soldiers waiting for him in the lobby of his building. Like that, he was in the army.

  Having already undergone his year of mandatory basic training, Nick was deemed ready for action as soon as they cut his hair and tur-pentined his nails. A few days after stumbling home from that club, he found himself creeping across a field with a dozen other young soldiers so they could attack a Croatian-held village. Unfortunately, a machine gunner was stationed on a hill to protect the village from just this type of assault. Nick remembers the gunner breaking into an expression of utter amazement when he looked up from his newspaper and saw the soldiers crossing the field in broad daylight while a large gun was trained on them. The next thing Nick knew, the boy beside him exploded into blood and three other soldiers fell screaming to the ground. The remnants of the unit ran back to their side of the field while the enraged captain spat and swore revenge the next day.

  Nick thought that maybe this type of soldiering wasn’t for him, so he approached the commander to see if there was any other work available. The next morning, he found himself standing on a football field with another soldier who’d dared to complain. They’d been given a special assignment. The field had been sabotaged with a special sort of land mine that detonated when touched by metal. Nick and his partner were given plastic forks, the type found at fast-food restaurants, and were told to cross the field on their hands and knees while poking the ground gently to locate the mines.