Time Was Soft There

by Jeremy Mercer

  Luke was an avid reader and possessed such a critical eye that he was constantly asked to review the short stories written by residents of the bookstore. Seeing firsthand how easy it was to record a little bit of bookstore history, Luke imagined starting a publishing company that would record all of the stories and autobiographies written at the bookstore.

  If he went through with this, Luke wouldn’t become the first rogue publisher at Shakespeare and Company. There had been Trocchi with Merlin and Fanchette with Two Cities and George with his myriad of efforts. More recently, there’d been Karl Orend, the night manager before Luke. During his years at the bookstore desk, he’d founded Alyscamps Press and published a range of translations and poetry.

  “I don’t think it’d be difficult to get started. I even have the name for it,” Luke said, pointing across the river.

  “You’re going to call it Notre Dame?” I asked.

  Luke only rolled his eyes. In front of the cathedral was a metal disk that marked the starting point for all the distances measured in France. If you passed Lyon and saw a road sign declaring it was 459 kilometers to Paris, it meant it was 459 kilometers to this exact little spot in front of the cathedral. Hence, this disk was called Kilometer Zero, and where Luke and I were sitting at the bookstore desk was actually in Kilometer Zero of France.

  “Kilometer Zero,” I agreed, “is a pretty fine name.”

  It was now March. I had been at the bookstore more than a month, but it felt like time had barely passed. Without the normal barometer of a workday or a fixed schedule, life had become fluid. It was hard to keep track of the hours and days at the bookstore, everything came and went in pleasurable waves of evenings and mornings and afternoons.

  In the criminal world, there is a term, hard time, which refers to difficult prison sentences in maximum-security facilities or under some form of protective custody. This is for the dangerous convicts, the murderers, the sex offenders. Hard time goes slowly and painfully and leaves a man bitter when eventually he does get released into the world.

  At the opposite end of the spectrum were the medium- and minimum-security facilities, which were designed to rehabilitate offenders. Here there were libraries and weight-training rooms, high school–equivalency classes and floor-hockey tournaments. One institution I visited had a farm inside the barbed wire where the inmates worked the fields and provided fruit, vegetables, and eggs for the prison. Another prison had a baseball team that toured the region, playing in a community beer league. This was known as soft time, time that went easily, time that was a pleasure to do.

  Time at Shakespeare and Company was as soft as anything I’d ever felt.

  27.

  Since I’d been at Shakespeare and Company, there’d been a regular flow of people sleeping at the bookstore: the married Italian woman who’d left with nary a word; an ecowarrior from Canada who spent a week trying to convince George to convert to fair-trade shopping; a young trumpet player from Idaho who practiced beneath the bridges of the Seine each day of his stay; a Jesus freak from Oklahoma on her way to Lourdes after discovering God while watching her boyfriend do bong hits and play Game Boy; a young socialist who submitted a biography that began with this sentence: “When my father was twelve, his father gave him a copy of the Bible; when I was twelve, my father gave me a copy of the Communist Manifesto.”

  This all made the bookstore feel like a running sleepover party with revolving bedmates, but it also distorted one’s normal sense of human relations. I’d wake up to see a stranger getting dressed in front of me, and I learned to think nothing of it. I’d return to the bookstore after a coffee at Panis to find a new body drooling on my pillow, and I would just offer him another blanket. Often, I’d just learned somebody’s name by the time they’d moved on, another destination beckoning or the bookstore’s accommodations simply too despairing.

  There were, however, two arrivals of note during this time. The first was a young man named Scott, an aspiring writer from Boston with dark hair and a boundless sense of humor. He was traveling through Europe courtesy of a Watson Fellowship, and George was so impressed with his research that he was offered an indefinite stay at the bookstore.

  Scott’s project was to trace the paths of Walter Benjamin, the philosopher who’d come through Paris after being hounded out of Nazi Germany. He was hoping to write a book that juxtaposed their two lives, a young man following a philosopher’s faded footsteps and reflecting on the contemporary value of his wisdom. He’d already spent months researching in Berlin and was now on the trail of Benjamin’s Paris. Scott’s trip would climax in the spring, when he traveled to the remote mountain pass in the south of France where the philosopher had taken his life after Nazi agents had discovered him crossing the Pyrenees into Spain.

  Early in his stay at Shakespeare and Company, it became clear Scott was somewhat obsessed with his subject. Not only was he a running faucet of Benjamin anecdotes, not only did he convince George to order Introducing Walter Benjamin; Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, volume 1, 1913–1926; Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, volume 2, 1927–1934; and Walter Benjamin: The Colour of Experience, but Scott even thought the philosopher was suitable material for romance. Though he had a girlfriend teaching English in Japan, the terms of their separation were blurry and it seemed heavy flirtation was allowed. If ever a potentially amorous situations arose, Scott inevitably brought out the Benjamin.

  When a striking Danish woman came to the store for a weekend’s stay among the books, Scott was particularly smitten. He even had the luck to find himself sitting alone with this woman on his bed late one night. But in this most intimate of settings, his only thought was to read to her from Illuminations.

  “I think she was a bit confused,” he admitted afterward.

  The other new resident was my old friend Dave. During my time at the bookstore, we’d been exchanging letters and he wanted to see Shakespeare and Company for himself. One March day, he appeared on the shop’s doorstep with his knapsack and George graciously welcomed him.

  Dave was especially curious about the bookstore because he, too, had thoughts of writing fiction. There is a cliché about journalists being frustrated novelists, and perhaps there is some truth to it, because Dave was convinced he could leave business reporting behind and become another Bret Easton Ellis.

  “Why not?” he said. “You have to dream, don’t you?”

  He’d come to the right place, then. Dave adapted quickly to the life, reading his quota of a book a day, sharing breakfasts of muesli and fruit with Nadia and me, telling stories under the bridge by the Seine when we gathered there at night with our bottles of wine. To Dave’s credit, he didn’t even complain when George asked him to do the foulest chore of all, the twice-yearly washing of the stairway bathroom with bleach.

  “Paying the dues, I guess,” he said, as he flaked stale urine from the wall.

  Dave’s presence was a mirror for me and we were both surprised at how much I’d changed since that January morning in front of Sacré Coeur. Thinner, clothes frayed and on the dirty side, a skittish eye from lack of sleep. But happier, he said. Better.

  With no warning at all, a red Citroën van stopped in front of the store one morning and a ruddy-faced man began flinging cardboard boxes of books onto the esplanade. There was quickly a pyramid taller than the average basketball player and still the boxes kept coming. The whole while, a spunky black dog with a shock of white fur on her chest raced between the van and the boxes with joy.

  This was John, the traveling book salesman. He lived in the south of England and had connections that allowed him to buy bargain books in bulk. All the big English publishers had tens of thousands of unsold books returned to them from bookstores each month. Instead of going to the cost of sorting and refiling them in their warehouses, the publishers put these boxes of returns onto pallets and auctioned them off. John would buy the books sight unseen for as little as a few pennies a pound. Opening them was a constant surprise. Sometimes ther
e would be hundreds of celebrity weight-loss books; other times, there’d be copies of a popular novel like Alex Garland’s The Beach, which had an overly ambitious mass-market run. But mostly, there’d be a strange collection of art books and history texts and first novels, whatever had been scheduled for pulping the day after the auction.

  With these books loaded into his red Citroën, John hit the road with his trusty dog Gwen. He drove a circuit from Barcelona to Nice to Paris to home, visiting English-language bookstores, setting up tables at school book fairs, and always stopping at Shakespeare and Company on the way home so he could sell a few thousand books and drink a few bottles of Chinese beer.

  George tore into the boxes like a castaway on a coconut. The wares came in three price ranges—five, ten, and twenty-five francs—and he would rip open a box and hold books aloft so John could spit out the appropriate price. The ones George wanted would be hurled into piles on the bench, with John scurrying to keep a running tally of the purchase. All the bookstore helpers—Kurt, Nadia, Ablimit, Scott, Dave, and I—ferried the books inside, racing to get them onto the shelves before the inevitable rain started.

  A man standing at the cash register could only gape in amazement. “It’s like they’re throwing garbage pails of books in here,” he said.

  Hearing this, George chuckled. “But look at all those boys and girls working together like that,” he replied. “It’s amazing to see everybody pitching in around the bookstore.”

  The next step in this venture was the frantic search for money. John’s bill usually came to more than ten thousand francs, so George would be forced to dig into his various stashes around the store. He’d long had a habit of shoving bundles of francs between books or hiding them under his pillow, and he would furiously seek them out while John waited downstairs. Once, he found his favorite hiding place had been colonized by mice. They had shredded stacks of two-hundred-franc notes to make a nest worth more than three thousand dollars.

  “At least it’s not the books.” George shrugged. “One time, the mice ate through my collection of Les temps modernes.”

  After the money was found and the accounts settled, the table was set for all who had helped. There were pots of vegetable stew and fresh baguettes and the omnipresent beer. George would offer the discount bottles for the helpers and keep the prized Tsingtao for John and himself. After years of experience, the bookseller had learned to refuse a refill often enough to minimize his hazards on the road back to England.

  Every day there were surprises like this at Shakespeare and Company. If it wasn’t John the Bookseller, it was an English woman who’d stayed at the store in the 1960s or a Hungarian journalist hoping to conduct a radio interview with George.

  All these distractions meant that what should have been a very attainable goal—finishing George’s booklet before Easter—was turning into a colossal feat. Whenever we gained a smidgen of momentum, there would be a knock at the door and somebody asking to stay for a few days, or tourists wanting to have their picture taken with George, or some magnificent sight out of the office window that we absolutely had to stop and appreciate. One afternoon when I was coaxing George to finish his essay, he glanced out the window and saw a father and his three children leaving the bookstore. They wore matching rain slickers and were trotting off toward Café Panis.

  “It looks like a family of ducks, with the children trailing behind their father like that.” George sighed. “That’s one of the most beautiful things I’ve ever seen at the bookstore.”

  As he stared after them, I thought of his own daughter and the long years that had passed since they had lived together. Ever since I’d learned about Sylvia, I had noticed tributes to her throughout the bookstore. Her photograph was on the cover of his collection of biographies, another book George had published was credited to her, there were dozens of pictures chronicling her upbringing at the store. Could it be, despite the literary institution he had created, the thousands of lives he had changed, the celebrity Shakespeare and Company had brought him, that George regretted his decisions and longed for the simple joys of family life? Just as I was wondering if I should raise the delicate question, George dismissed me for the afternoon and returned his gaze to where the man and his children had been.

  Getting anything accomplished was made more difficult by George’s substantial fear that the store was being infiltrated by American agents. There was a standing rule that we could never work on the booklet with the office door open, and Luke and I were forbidden to discuss the project with anyone. There were spies about, George told us, spies who were all too eager to sabotage his efforts. If this had come from anyone else, it would have sounded simply mad. George, however, had seen more than a few undercover agents in his day, and once bitten, he was thrice shy.

  As a declared Communist after World War II, George says he was marked as a potential troublemaker and the U.S. government tried to block his visa for Europe. Things got worse when he opened the bookstore and began preaching against the American military economy and the fictions of the Cold War. According to George, during the 1960s, CIA agents routinely visited the shop, listening in on lectures, making reports on his running protest against the Vietnam War. George even guesses that it was American influence that caused his bookstore to be shut down in the 1960s. The French authorities forbade Shakespeare and Company to sell books, on the pretense that George hadn’t filled out the correct paperwork as a foreigner operating a business in France. George’s answer was to bully his way through, running a Marxist lecture series at the store, keeping the library open, housing radicals of all descriptions, writing an open letter to André Malraux, who was then the French minister of culture, asking him to expedite the paperwork. Finally, after persevering for more than a year, he conquered the bureaucratic mazes of French administration and secured the proper business license.

  Having seen George’s files from the 1960s, I could fully imagine him being the target of CIA investigators in those paranoid days. But now?

  “Are you naïve?” George demanded, and went on to name a woman who had long frequented Shakespeare and Company. She was routinely about the store, attending the tea party, telling people how much she respected and admired George. I thought she was a nice woman, as she occasionally bought me a coffee at Panis, but George only shook his head.

  “Where do you think she gets her money from?” he chided. “The American government! She’s CIA!”

  But what slowed down work more than anything else was Eve. One morning, I found George penciling away at a paper on the office desk. I’d hoped it was the final draft of his booklet essay, but when I peeked over his shoulder, he tried to shoo me away. He was so obviously flustered, I pressed on, and finally George admitted he’d fallen in love with Eve.

  “Love?”

  “I didn’t start it. She did!” George insisted. “She was always looking at me with her pretty smile. It just happened.”

  When I pointed out that Eve was just twenty years old, sixty-six years his junior, George scoffed. He wasn’t interested in a sexual relationship, he said; he was too old for that now. He just wanted a loving companion. His grandfather had had a young nurse at the end of his life and George believed it was dignified to spend one’s final years with a charming young woman at one’s side. Then, pulling out the piece of paper, he announced he’d written something special. It was called “Evelina.”

  I wish I was a pretty girl like you

  Flowers in her hair and miniskirt askew

  I would use my smiles like artillery

  To make victims of men like me

  I would sing and sigh

  I would laugh and cry

  I would let you see every part of me

  From my dimples to my anatomy

  But if you said I loved you I would say goodbye

  And find some other man to mystify

  When George asked with hopeful eyes whether I thought she would like it, I assured him she would be thrilled. I knew Eve basked
in George’s affections and adored Shakespeare and Company. Maybe something could work out. I couldn’t be blamed for my optimism. I had Nadia. I believed in love. I believed in bookstore miracles. Anything could happen.

  28.

  One Saturday, Kurt was sent to Ed’s for groceries and one of the items on the shopping list was sugar for the upcoming tea party. When Kurt returned, it was with a box of sugar cubes, and George was frothing mad.

  “It costs thirteen centimes more when you buy it cubed instead of powdered,” George yelled. “You imbecile! Don’t you know anything?”

  Yet for a man who could lose his temper for the want of thirteen centimes, he often lost thousands of francs through sheer negligence. Along with the mice who ate through small fortunes, George forgot bills between the pages of books, or had bundles of money slip through the holes in his pocket, or saw the cash register emptied by thieves after he’d wandered away from the desk and left the drawer hanging open.

  When George and I were eating together one night in the upstairs apartment, he took off his jacket and several bundles of one-hundred-franc notes tumbled from an inside pocket. Alarmed to see such a concentration of money, I hurried to collect them, but George only laughed and jammed what was close to a thousand dollars’ worth of francs underneath the foam cushion of the couch.

  “If you get too attached to these sorts of bagatelles, it’ll ruin your life,” he declared.

  There was an especially curious incident when George and I were looking for old photographs to use in the booklet. As we rummaged through a file box, George discovered an old wallet of his with fourteen hundred francs inside. He handed it to me, and, thinking I was meant to hold it only while he continued his search, I attempted to give it back to him once he was done. Waving his hand at me, he said to return it later. I assumed he meant that afternoon, but when I tried again, he looked at me as if I were a fool. I’m not sure George realized how broke I was, though I guess the ludicrous story-selling business was a good indication, but it seemed he wanted to help me.