There was an awkward moment of silence between them until Yemko harrumphed a little and said, “Excuse my rudeness. Won’t you sit down and join me?” He made a sort of lolloping motion sideways and cleared a gap at one end of the complaining sofa but, when Tibo looked at the scant sliver of bare cushion which Yemko had managed to expose, he thought back to their chat in the gallery and said, “Thanks. I think I’ll stand.”
Yemko smiled at him forgivingly and said, “I remember that day at the exhibition, when I told you about my letter to Judge Gustav.”
“Honestly, there’s no need to go on about it—I do understand.”
“No, no,” said the lawyer, “I have accepted your absolution. I was going to talk of other things. I remember we spoke of the ancient poets now all unread.” He gestured round the walls at shelves stacked floor to ceiling. “Have you come to refresh your memory, Krovic? I do, from time to time. I’m afraid I abuse poor Mrs. Knutson’s hospitality awfully.”
“We do supply several Public Libraries in Dot, you know. They really are quite good.”
Yemko was unable to suppress a shudder and he made the sort of face you see on a mâitre d’ when somebody orders red wine to go with fish. “I’m sure any library with which you concern yourself is nothing short of lovely,” he said. “I prefer not to use them. I prefer not to use anything with ‘Public’ at the front of it. There always seems to be the implied threat that one might bump into one’s customers.”
“I bump into my customers all the time,” said Mayor Krovic.
“But only most of your customers are criminals and lowlifes—all of mine are.”
Tibo sat down on a wing of the sofa and crossed his arms. He asked, “Did you never consider buying books of your own—books you could read in your home safe from the gaze of the hated customer?”
“Well, it seems an awful waste when all I could ever want is right here. I have enjoyed that same volume of Catullus for … well, for a very long time now and I have a kind of theological objection to buying books—seems unfair to take them away. I often wonder what the booksellers buy that is one half so precious as the goods they sell.”
“Vintners,” said Tibo. “It’s vintners.”
Yemko rolled forward a little in a suspicion of a bow. It was a physical acknowledgement of a worthy opponent, his way of noting, “You got it—well done.” A gigantic yawn rippled through him and threatened to dislocate his jaw and he said, “Anyway, you still haven’t told me—are you here to bone up on Diana and poor Acteon? You’ll find them over there.” He gestured to a tall, thin column of shelves by the window. “Ovid. Metamorphoses—the only thing he wrote that’s worth a damn but then which of us can light a candle that will burn for two thousand years? Which of us will be remembered a fortnight after we have gone?”
“There’s old man Knutson,” said Tibo. “He is remembered.”
“I don’t recall him.”
“And I doubt if he would mind. But Mrs. Knutson remembers and it’s been more than a fortnight.”
Yemko looked as if he was having trouble staying awake. The tented pages of the Daily Dottian were an increasingly tempting retreat. “Forgive me, Krovic, but that’s just a silly sentiment, not a lasting memorial. Mrs. Knutson will soon be swept away in Time’s all-effacing stream and those of us who remember her will quickly follow. A few short heartbeats from now there will be nobody who remembers that the bookseller Knutson was ever even a memory for someone else.”
“Love’s like that. It’s personal. If you love, a mausoleum is of no consequence.”
Yemko looked at him from watery blue eyes for quite a long time and then he said, “Oh, dear. Oh, my dear, dear Krovic. This is worse than I thought.” He opened his newspaper, spread it over his face and settled down to sleep again. The interview was clearly at an end.
Tibo rose to his feet and crossed to the other side of the room where he looked through shelf after shelf of Homer for a while. There were some beautiful books there, austere leather-bound editions, books lurid with flamboyant tooling, books in floppy paper covers, books that might have been bought by the yard to spend decades unopened on grimly respectable shelves. But he found the right one—the one he wanted to buy for Agathe. This was a book that had been loved but not too much, used but not too harshly. It rejoiced in soft suede covers the colour of red wine, the colour of a libation. It would sit nicely next to a bowl of olives in a sunny room. Tibo lifted it to his nose and drank in the smell of a hot beach, sand and rosemary. It filled his hand with the weight of a sword and the pull of an angry tide. This was the book.
Quietly, careful of waking Yemko, he turned to go but, from behind, from the sofa, he heard, half whispered, “Give me a thousand kisses, then a hundred—another thousand, a hundred to follow—still another thousand and a hundred more. And when we’ve squandered all those thousands, tear up the bill and never count—lest any think our kisses ill and grudge how many.”
“Your friend Catullus?” Tibo asked.
“Catullus,” Yemko agreed. “Have a care, Krovic. Some think kisses very ill indeed and, sometimes, the bill is terribly hard to pay.”
There was nothing else to say. Tibo left.
Before long, after a final, fond, embarrassing yelled exchange with Mrs. Knutson—“Come again, Mayor Krovic. Always a pleasure to see you here, Mayor Krovic!”—Tibo was back in the alley with Agathe’s book in his hand.
Mrs. Knutson was so warm, so enthusiastic, so proud of him and yet, as the shop bell rang out behind him, Tibo found himself muttering, “She has no idea if I take sugar—not a clue.” Still shaking his head gently, Good Mayor Krovic followed the alley down to Commerz Plaz.
His first instinct was to go to Braun’s for those suits he had promised himself but, after a little thought, he decided on Kupfer and Kemanezic instead. More expensive, possibly, a smaller place with a smaller stock but the sort of place where there would be only a few other customers, the sort of place where he could expect to try on a suit without a crowd of well-built matrons emerging from the tea room to stand, idly brushing cake crumbs from their bosoms for half an hour as they looked on, giving unspoken advice and fashion hints in nods and smiles and conspiratorial sucks of the teeth—the sort of place which, if not exactly private, was still something less than a freak show. And that mattered to Tibo.
Walking down to Commerz Plaz he shifted Agathe’s book from hand to hand, letting the air waft over the damp and wrinkled marks his palms had made in the parcel. The fear of buying clothes had never left Tibo Krovic—the same tension he had felt as a boy, when he watched his mother scrabbling for the last few pennies for a pair of trousers or sighing all evening at the thought of next day’s trip to the shoe shop, was still with him. The guilt was terrifying. It burned him and, even now, the prospect of stepping into a tailor’s shop left him dry-mouthed and wet-palmed. Mayor Krovic would gladly have squandered his last penny on Agathe Stopak for the joy of seeing her smile, he couldn’t pass the stinking accordion man down in City Square without dropping a coin in his greasy hat but he recoiled from the hedonistic indulgence of a new shirt and the thought of two new suits was beginning to feel like Babylonian excess. But, like everything else in his life—until these past few days—the trip to Kupfer and Kemanezic was planned and thought out.
It was part of a system, the design for living, which Tibo had invented for himself as a way of getting through life, if he but knew it, without living at all. And, now that he had set the plan in action, he could not change it or step back from it. Tibo Krovic was as firmly committed to buying two new suits from Kupfer and Kemanezic as the No. 17 tram was committed to running along Cathedral Avenue.
And, just as the No. 17 tram would have slammed to a halt if it found Mrs. Agathe Stopak in its path, so Tibo turned the corner into Albrecht Street and stopped. She was there.
Agathe had come into town early and killed time pressing her nose against the front window of the Fur and Feathers pet shop, swapping kisses with the pupp
ies in sawdust-filled boxes on the other side of the glass. Agathe envied them. She envied their innocence, their lack of wanting, their contentment, their undefeated urge to love. To be a puppy must be a wonderful thing, she thought—just to wait there for the first person who wanted you and to go off with them and love them. Life was more complicated for ladies in Dot—even if they wanted nothing more than a puppy did. She pressed her fingers against the glass a little sadly and walked on.
When Tibo found her, she was looking in the window of the Ko-Operatif Shoe Shop and looking at her feet and looking back up at the window and Tibo wanted to rush up to her and grab her by the hand and drag her through the door and buy everything. He wanted to buy every shoe in the shop. He wanted to sit her down on one of those red leather benches in there and open his chequebook and summon a shop girl and say, “Ladies’ size five and a half. We’ll take one of each! No! Two of each. That is, a pair of each!” He wanted to say, “Agathe, this is a pair of fur-lined boots and you can wear them every day of the winter and never come to work with cold toes again. And this is a pair of high-heeled slippers, all covered in spangles and you can wear them when we go dancing. And look at these! And these! And the handbags to match.”
He said, “Hello, Agathe.”
She looked up, pleased and surprised and delighted to see him and she took a step forward to greet him, her hand half raised, stopped herself and said, “Oh, Tibo. Hello!” And her hand carried on, upwards to brush her lips.
“Buying shoes?” he asked, stupidly.
“No, not really.” She pointed through the glass at a pair of winter boots. “I was just wondering about those. The snow will be here soon. What do you think?”
“Go mad,” said Tibo. “Treat yourself.”
“Maybe I will, after pay day, but it seems a dreadful extravagance. I’ve got a perfectly good pair of galoshes, after all, but …”
“But your toes get cold,” Tibo said.
“Oh, they do, they do. Don’t yours? And when my feet are cold it takes me forever to warm up again.”
Suddenly Tibo found the courage to say, “You could always warm your feet on me.”
But Agathe kept talking. She said, “You know, I bet there isn’t a single shop in Dalmatia that sells galoshes or winter boots. No demand. In Dalmatia everybody has warm toes. Sorry, what were you going to say?”
Tibo smiled and said, “Nothing.”
The traffic went by in Albrecht Street, packed trams rattled past, a few cars and an old grey lorry, loaded up with barrels of butcher’s waste, bony meaty bits sticking out, on its way to the fertiliser factory and, high above all that, way up at roof height where the flats are small and cheap and the window-sill marigolds are covered in soot, little birds flew by, like black dots against the sky, singing. Nobody heard them. And, at the corner of the alley where a bright gold dandelion had sent up yellow star bursts and paper-white pom-poms, one after another, all summer long like a month’s slow firework display, a cat with blue eyes went past. Nobody saw it. But later, in memory, Tibo found them all engraved there, the sulphur bright flowers and the well-bred cat with its ribbon and its bell that only passing birdsong drowned out.
“Why are you here?” Agathe asked.
It sounded like a catechism and the answer should have been, “To know you and enjoy you forever.” But Tibo said, “I came in to buy myself a suit.”
“Oh, yes, I remember. Can I come?” she asked, in just the way she would ask if he wanted another cup of coffee. “Can I come?” to see this intimate humiliation, like a trip to the doctor, like being a spectator while he had his ears syringed or his corns shaved.
“Can I come?”
“Yes, of course,” Tibo said, “of course.” And he offered her his arm.
UPFER AND KEMANEZIC WAS ONLY two shops away—a glazed door with a brown linen blind and a single broad window with a moustachioed mannequin who had stood in the same spot, impassive as a sentry, never altering his pose or his coiffure since he took up his post these fifty years since, not when the summer sun beat through the glass all day and threatened to melt his wax moustache, not in the winter when he was forced to endure the humiliation of facing Albrecht Street as he modelled the latest heavyweight combinations. He stood solid and steady through it all, the embodiment of the kind of service a Kupfer and Kemanezic customer could expect.
“Imperturbable,” Tibo murmured to himself as he passed under the mannequin’s gaze and opened the shop door for Agathe. “Imperturbable,” a pleasant word—not so nice as “elbow” perhaps, but with a similar clarety roll-in-the-mouth flavour and, now, a kind of a spell about it.
Agathe looked up at him with a question.
“Nothing,” Tibo said. “Sorry. Just … Nothing.”
Inside, the shop was endless—a long canyon of soberly patterned carpet stretching away between towering walls of wooden shelves and drawers marked “socks blue” or “socks black” and numbered according to size and, far away at the other end, Tibo and Agathe saw themselves walking towards themselves, side by side, in a rank of mirrors. It was a suddenly startling image, disturbingly bridal. A man and a woman like that, so close, nervously comfortable, self-consciously at ease. They glanced at one another in the reflection and quickly turned away as if they had been caught in something furtive.
“Sir, Madam.” It was Kemanezic himself, splendid in a gleaming white shirt with a scarlet handkerchief blazing from his breast pocket and a tiny pansy, almost hidden against the midnight blue of his lapel. And then, with a sudden recognition, he herded a tiny gilded chair towards Agathe and commanded her into it with a tiny nudge on the back of her leg. “Ah, Mayor Krovic. A delight to welcome you to Kupfer and Kemanezic. How can we be of service?”
“A suit, I thought.” Tibo’s voice sounded pipey and reedish.
“Sir.” And like a magician producing a live snake, Kemanezic was suddenly holding his tape measure. It lashed and whipped round Tibo, marking off the size of his chest, his shoulders, the length of his arms, his waist and—“Would Madam care to look through this book of swatches?”—his inside leg.
Kemanezic conjured a tiny leather-bound pad from his inside pocket and made a few quick notes. “I think I have that, Mayor Krovic. If you would care to choose the cloth and come back in a fortnight, we can be ready for the fitting.”
Tibo was defeated. “Yes,” he said, “of course. In a fortnight.” And, after quickly selecting two different materials from the swatch book, he turned towards the door.
“But, in the meantime, the mayor will be needing something to tide him over,” Agathe said. “Something off the peg. You do have something. In this blue, I think.” She held out the sample book, folded open at a soft herringbone cloth.
“Off the peg?” Kemanezic hesitated. “I’ll check, Mrs. Krovic.” And he retreated.
They were alone in the shop then, Tibo and Agathe, and he looked at her gratefully and said, “Thanks.”
Agathe gave a sympathetic smile.
“I didn’t know what to say,” said Tibo.
“And he was relying on that. You mustn’t let people boss you around.”
“I’m all right with the Chief of Police or the Town Clerk—it’s just,” his voice faded to a shuddering whisper, “tailors.”
Agathe looked down at her toes. “Did you notice?”
“Yes. He called you ‘Mrs. Krovic’—I noticed.”
“We should put him right.”
“We should, really,” Tibo agreed but there was something boyish and reluctant and just-five-minutes-more-ish in his voice.
They looked at each other, trying to hold back giggles, until Mr. Kemanezic returned, leading a milky-faced boy who staggered under armfuls of suits and calling them back to a fragile solemnity.
Mr. Kemanezic flicked back the curtains of a cubicle so the rings rattled. “If you would care to try these, Mayor Krovic.”
Kemanezic had the gift—you find it in mothers, really good teachers and villainous butlers in Inspe
ktor Voythek movies—of making the simplest, friendliest request sound like a bloodcurdling threat. He could put an arm-twisting compulsion into a breath and he said, “If you would care to try these, Mayor Krovic,” the way prison governors walk on to death row and say, “It’s time now, son.”
Tibo looked nervously at Agathe but she shooed him on with a slight flap of the hand.
The curtains rattled on their pole again and Tibo was alone in a tiny wooden room. There was a dim lamp in a ground-glass shade overhead, a mirror screwed to the left-hand wall, two coat hooks side by side on the right-hand wall and a small brown bent-wood chair jammed in the corner. He sat down and undid his shoes, stood up and prised them off, toe to heel. He took off his jacket and hung it on a coat hook, undid his trousers, held them carefully by the cuffs, gripping them under his chin until the creases were properly lined up and hung them on the back of the chair. They slid off with a sigh and concertinaed on the floor. Tibo picked them up and laid them across the seat. They stayed.
He looked in the mirror glumly. Black socks, white legs, shirt tails hanging down. “I look like a turkey,” he whispered to himself and he bubbled his cheeks out. He wondered how any woman, let alone the pink and plump and “Tahiti”-fragrant Mrs. Agathe Stopak, could ever look at him and want him. “But you wouldn’t normally start with the trousers,” he told himself. “You’d start at the top and work down.” But that left the socks. Tibo imagined himself standing naked in just his black socks and he moaned, “Oh, Walpurnia!”
“Everything all right in there, sir?” said Kemanezic.
The curtain gave a suspicion of a twitch but Tibo’s fist shot out to grip a bunched and decisive knot of fabric. “Fine!” he barked. “Thank you. I’ll just be a moment.” He released the curtain warily. It made no sign of suddenly flying open.
After a moment’s watchfulness, Tibo tugged a pair of trousers from the first of the hangers provided by Mr. Kemanezic. Sensible blue cloth, deep pockets, half-lined to the knees, adjustable straps at the sides with black buttons to keep them in place. These were trousers. And they fit. He slipped his shoes back on. They actually fit! Tibo was admiring himself in the mirror when CHIIIIIIING! the curtain whipped back and there was Mr. Kemanezic, knuckles white as he gripped the ends of the tape measure that hung from his neck. “Is everything all right, Mayor Krovic? If I might be permitted to assist.”
The Good Mayor: A Novel Page 16