Time Was Soft There

by Jeremy Mercer

  We were already nervous as we waited for the decision on the apartment, and things became more tense due to an inexplicable series of thefts. The stolen items were mostly letters and diaries, but also the occasional alarm clock, stick of deodorant, and even a train ticket. One young art student from the University of North Carolina had her travel journal taken from beside her bed and was so unnerved, she left the store the next day.

  Kurt had warned me of this when I arrived: Strange things went missing at the bookstore. Certain items, such as cameras or wallets, could be attributed to the usual thieves. If they didn’t find money in the books downstairs, they’d come up to the library and rifle under beds and in the closet. But articles of clothing and writers’ notebooks?

  When I returned to the store one afternoon and found two of my shirts missing, I cursed the instability of Shakespeare and Company life and started toward Panis for a consoling coffee. I must have been visibly distressed by the loss of the better part of my wardrobe, because one of the homeless men stopped to inquire after my well-being.

  This man’s name was Richard and he was cleanly dressed and had dark hair. Though in his fifties, he showed only a few of the life bruises that usually marked the people of the street. There were stories of him having fought in Vietnam for the French and withdrawing from society shortly thereafter, but whatever the case, he spoke five languages fluently and a smattering of others.

  Richard was philosophical about his situation. There were enough shelters in Paris that he could have a bed each night if he wanted, and every so often a woman fell in love with him and attempted to move him into her apartment. But he’d decided he was meant for the street, his addiction to alcohol and his years of rough traveling making it impossible to live a confined life.

  His days were spent sipping beer in front of the park beside Shakespeare and Company, sometimes in the company of other men and always with a scraggly black dog. One could gauge his mood by the strength of beer he drank. The stores of Paris sold a standard selection of six varieties of half-liter cans of beer. There was the green Heineken for the well-to-do drinker, a 4.5 percent alcohol Kronenbourg for moderate drinkers of limited means, a 5.9 percent beer called 1664, which we at the bookstore favored, and then three levels of high-alcohol beer: a red can with 8 percent alcohol, a black can with 10 percent, and a special dark green can with 12 percent. Richard was drinking a red can that day, which meant he was fairly well disposed to the world.

  “They stole my shirts,” I explained to him. “All I have left is this dirty one I’m wearing.”

  Richard nodded sympathetically and admitted that many of the men who slept on the street knew the bookstore was a jackpot of left-about money and travelers’ knapsacks. Promising to keep an eye out for my shirts, he dug into his pocket, withdrew a scrap of paper, and wrote down several addresses.

  “This church will give you clothes for free,” he said.

  Then, looking down at my feet, he jotted down the number of the closest Emmaus, a nationwide chain of charity shops founded by the Abbé Pierre and operated exclusively by homeless men trying to take a step back into society.

  “They always have good shoes,” he told me.

  I was greatly cheered by his decency, and Richard became a regular conversation stop. He drifted from an extremely clean and well-spoken state to the mumbling depths of an alcohol binge and back again. Sadly, a month later, I found him with bandages over his hands and legs. He and a friend had been sleeping in a doorway a few blocks south of the bookstore one night when someone set their sleeping bags on fire.

  As May arrived and the weather grew warm, Paris was changing before our eyes. More sun, more blooming flowers, more Disney-clean, more busloads of tourists. At the bookstore, there was a temptation to begrudge this cosmetic transformation, to deride these waves of spring sightseers as mere transients who didn’t know the real Paris like we at the bookstore did.

  This, of course, was youthful folly, but Kurt and I soon learned there were concrete disadvantages to the surge in moneyed tourists. Watching the hordes of people traipse up and down rue St. Jacques with their expensive cameras and guidebooks, Tuee the Sandwich Queen decided she could squeeze a few more francs out of these moneyed customers. Woe of woes, the price for two sandwiches and a can of soda went up from twenty francs to twenty-four. Kurt and I immediately arranged a bookstore-wide boycott and wondered what had become of the Paris we knew and loved.

  33.

  George’s first steps toward communism came after seeing the ravages of the Great Depression. In his opinion, there had to be a better way, a system where the world’s wealth wasn’t concentrated in the hands of a precious few and where people were more than just cogs in an economic system that forced them to work and buy, buy and work.

  At Boston University, George discovered the great socialist writers and then, while working in Panama, he saw firsthand the exploitation, environmental devastation, and corruption associated with modern business. It was at this time that he announced his belief in communism to his family, an announcement that wasn’t particularly well received.

  “Are [Communists] not people who have never succeeded anywhere, the flotsam and jetsam of society?” Grace wrote to her son. “There is one trait in human nature that Karl Marx does not take account of and that is the lust for power.”

  George was undeterred. After World War II, when the geopolitical games between Russia and the United States turned communism into a dirty word, George was horrified. For him, communism was the great social experiment that was bound to come, the simple doctrine of “the stronger the community, the stronger the individual.” George thought that, unlike capitalism, which measured its success by looking at the most privileged members of society, a system should be judged by how its least fortunate individuals fared.

  “Look at the poor people, look at the single mothers, look at the prisoners,” he said. “These are the yardsticks of a civilization.”

  Living with George at Shakespeare and Company and reading the Noam Chomsky essays he showered upon me, it was easy to believe all he told me, to see the flaws of modern existence. But at the bookstore, I was also faced with the direct drawbacks to communism. Nadia had repugnant stories of growing up under Ceauescu, and Ablimit never missed an opportunity to deride the Chinese government.

  Considering all I had been through at the bookstore—negotiating Esteban’s hostility, peacefully settling the Simon situation, listening to George’s dreams about his daughter, recovering from the falling-out over Scott—I now felt entirely comfortable with George. I was ready not just to listen to his ideas but to challenge them. So one day, I asked the obvious question: If Communism was so good, why were there so many bad stories from their regimes?

  George sat up in his seat and his eyes became alert. Pushing back the papers on his desk, he stood up and closed the door so we wouldn’t be disturbed.

  The first thing George did was to explain that there had never been a true communism in the world. Stalin was a violent fraud and Castro’s once-beautiful idealism had become corrupted by his love for power. What were needed were more governments to experiment with Marxism and socialism, to experiment with a system where money and resources were directed to education and families, not to designing yet another multibladed razor or creating weapons of greater mass destruction. But few modern leaders had the courage to try because the global business community would raise the interest rates on a given country’s national debt and shut the country down with a hammer blow to its economy.

  “Think of the rich oil companies, the wealthy dynasties like the Bushes, the cowboy entrepreneurs like Bill Gates. Why would they want to change the rules of the game? They’re winning and they don’t care that everyone else is losing,” George explained. “With all this entrenched power fighting ideas like communism, it’s no wonder the ideas get a bad name.”

  According to George, while stories about Ceauescu’s human rights abuses and the leaky boatfuls of refugees f
rom Cuba were rampant, members of the world media, who earned their money from a capital-based economy, weren’t particularly eager to spread stories of Communist successes.

  “Take Cuba,” said George. “Under Castro’s communism, Cuba enjoys the highest rate of literacy in South and Central America, has twice as many doctors for every one thousand people as in the United States, and unlike the United States, provides paid maternity leave for mothers and free health care for everyone. In fact,” George added with an emphatic thump on his desk, “the average man in Cuba lives longer than the average man in America.”

  “Sure, Cuba’s hospitals and schools have fallen behind in recent years but that’s because the economy has been devastated by the American-led embargo,” said George. “Cuba’s not perfect, but the country’s got a lot of things that work and a lot of things that work better than they do in America.”

  Not satisfied, George launched into the tale of the Indian state of West Bengal. Here, the economy had grown at twice the national average, schools and hospitals were ahead of the rest of the country, and the quality of life was among the best in all of India. “The Communists have done this,” roared George. “The Communists!”

  George explained that in the 1970s, the Communists broke up the land monopolies and redistributed property so poor families could run farms and own homes. With state administration and Marxist ideals, the economy has been so healthy and the people so happy that the Communists have won six straight elections. “Do you read about that in the Herald Tribune ?” George demanded. “Of course not! It’s all American propaganda.”

  “Communism just means thinking about the community first,” said George, who believes a group of people are stronger together than alone and that it’s worth it to sacrifice the riches a single person can amass in order to provide a higher quality of life for the general population. Although the world hasn’t found utopia yet, George is convinced we have to keep looking.

  “Look around you. Look at how rich the planet is, but look how a few people in Europe, North America, and Japan end up working all the time and enjoying all the benefits, while rest of the world is poor and hungry and without clean water,” finished George. “Is that right? Most people out there aren’t even asking the question. At least I believe a fairer world is possible.”

  After brooding for days, I decided it was time for a serious talk with Nadia. With due propriety, I invited her for a walk along the Seine. I explained I loved her, I believed in her art, I thought she was a great woman. But I told her I wasn’t sure I could handle this sort of open relationship, and maybe we didn’t make the most perfect couple, and perhaps we weren’t destined to die entwined in each other’s arms at the age of 102.

  I went on like this for a good ten minutes, with plenty of banal apologies and sweeping conclusions about nature of love, until Nadia finally pulled me to a stop.

  “Why are you getting all serious like this?” she demanded. “All I wanted was to have a little fun in Paris. What did you think? I wanted to get married?”

  Nadia left the bookstore shortly after that humiliating walk. By luck, she’d met a photographer who was leaving for a lengthy assignment in Milan. He’d offered her the free use of his apartment, and in early May she moved out of the store with little fanfare, anxious for quiet and peace and a shower of her own.

  While it was the worst of times for me, George was enjoying the best. Eve’s visits to the store were practically daily now, and Luke and I noted a corresponding change in George’s appearance. Gone were the stained jackets and mismatched socks. Now he wore sleek suits, along with shirts he’d actually had dry-cleaned.

  One morning, George and I went to a church rummage sale on avenue Georges V, which was a ritzy part of town off the Champs-Elysées. This was part of his regular hunt for cheap used books, and I was honored to be appointed the official bag carrier. On this trip, George was also hoping to find some pretty secondhand dresses that he might offer to Eve when she came to the store for dinner that night.

  “She told me she feels like crying when it comes time to leave the bookstore,” he said as we walked up to the Hôtel de Ville metro station. “See, comrade? Once in a while, things work out around here.”

  It was a good thing George was feeling so hearty, as we had quite a day ahead of us. On the metro, there were two young boys, no more than seven or eight years old, working the train and trying to steal from tourists. They noticed George’s shirt pocket was wadded with francs and they lunged for the bills. Together, George and I were able to ward them off and force them out the metro doors before they could get any money. Then when we got to what I thought would be the friendly confines of the church, we were instead met with scorn. George had a reputation of frequenting the rummage sales and buying up the best books. The priests at this church were offended he would sometimes resell their books at a profit, and they actually tried to hide items from him. At one point, George and a priest got into a tugging match over a hardcover copy of Anna Karenina and the priest began cursing at George in a salty mix of English and French.

  “I thought you were supposed to be kind and loving?” I snapped as I helped George pull the book out of the priest’s hands.

  George only laughed the encounter off and continued on his way. Nothing could faze him as he went humming off into the clothes racks in search of flowery skirts for Eve.

  This fresh verve of George’s was given a further boost by the return of a familiar face. Tom Pancake was back in town, drawn from Egypt by his love for Gayle. He’d moved into the New Zealand embassy again and had visited the bookstore shortly after his plane had landed.

  Along with his stories of Cairo and a fresh tattoo on his right arm, Tom bore a tremendous gift for George. Among his many attributes, Tom possessed a most divine sartorial eye: He always dressed in sharp suits and vintage shirts and had an admirable wardrobe for a traveling man. Among his collection was an exquisite pinstriped seersucker suit from the 1930s. It was one size too small for Tom, so he offered it to George.

  The next afternoon, I found George in his apartment, preparing for Eve’s daily visit. He was wearing the suit Tom had given him and was sitting at the front table with a mirror and a candle. This was George’s method of trimming his hair, one he saved for special occasions. He would put the flame to his head, light his hair on fire, and then bat out the flames once the hair burned down to the desired length. It stank the air to no end but was amazingly effective. With a fresh trim and Tom’s seersucker suit, George looked absolutely dapper.

  Sitting me down for a glass of beer, George reviewed all the encouraging things that had passed between him and Eve in recent weeks: how she loved the bookstore, how she adored the poem he’d written for her, how they laughed, how they read together on the couch.

  “I know people will say I’m crazy when they find out how much I love that little girl, but I can’t help it,” George said.

  I understood. New love is the greatest drug of all, and he’d been in the Shakespeare and Company vortex for so long, he couldn’t kick the habit. During his fifty years at the bookstore, there had been endless affirmation from women who arrived and fell head over heels for George and the romantic world he’d created. Such a constant rush of love can be dangerously addictive, and George still yearned for it, even at eighty-six years of age.

  Considering all of this, I was about to assure him of his sanity, but then he did something that made me reconsider my assessment. George reached into his pocket and pulled out a ring.

  “I’m going to ask Eve to marry me.”

  34.

  The only thing that surprised me more was that Eve didn’t say no.

  This came to light a pleasant spring afternoon when George declared we would have a group lunch in front of the bookstore. It was a warm May day and he’d set up a long table with a dozen chairs and stools outside the door of the antiquarian room so we could feast in the open air.

  Almost everyone was there: Kurt, Ablimit, Marushkah
, Gayle, Tom, Scoot, Sophie, Simon. The guest of honor was Eve, who sat proudly at George’s side, though it didn’t seem anybody realized the meal was a tribute to her. A free dinner had been offered and the hungry hordes had descended without question.

  George served chicken and rice stew, a dozen baguettes, big pots of potato salad, yogurt jars of homemade strawberry ice cream, and plenty of the cheap high-alcohol beer. As we ate, customers continued to flood in and out of the store, many stopping to take pictures of this impromptu party. We sat like this for hours, the afternoon warmth dimming into a chill dusk. No stool or chair was empty for long as friends came and went, and George even pulled the occasional stranger down to share in our bounty. It was toward the end of the meal, when George and Eve started holding hands, that I noticed she was wearing the ring.

  When the meal was done and I was carrying chairs back up to the third-floor apartment, I found Eve alone in the kitchen, washing the dishes. As I helped dry, I asked her what the ring on her finger meant and she was surprisingly happy to have somebody to tell about her growing intimacy with George.

  She did, in fact, love him. He was the type of man she’d always dreamt off—kind, mischievous, romantic. Granted, she’d never thought her dream man would be quite so old, but she was gradually coming to terms with their age difference.

  “Besides, he’s still an attractive man,” she insisted.

  I had to agree. George was definitely the sexiest eighty-six-year-old man I had ever met. When I said this, Eve started giggling.

  “You know we’ve kissed, don’t you?” she said.

  “You’ve kissed George? On the lips?”

  She blushed. “Sometimes, just before we go to bed … .”

  “You sleep in the same bed with George?”

  “Oh, I wasn’t naked or anything. I was wearing my bottoms.” Eve blushed redder and giggled more. “He’s such a sweet man.”