The City of Dreaming Books

by Moers, Walter

  I now got to know several Booklings apart from Al, Wami and Dancelot, and I made a special point of consorting with those whose work I found of abiding interest.

  Perla la Gadeon, for example, turned out to be a sociable if sometimes moody individual. He taught me all manner of things about poetic craftsmanship and even more about the composition of horrific short stories. Hornac de Bloaze had the epic stamina you need in order to write vast novels and the strong constitution without which no one can assimilate the vast quantities of coffee required to keep you awake for long periods at a stretch. He initiated me into the mental technique with which he kept the plots and characters of dozens of novels in his head without going mad.

  Rasco Elwid was a witty raconteur who always kept me hugely entertained. He was simply incapable of saying anything commonplace or banal, and each of his utterances was a polished aphorism or brilliant aperçu. I hardly dared open my mouth in his company because anything I had to say seemed so stupid and boring.

  I developed a special relationship with Dancelot, whose occasional recitations from the work of my authorial godfather not only moved me but made me feel I was back home. For his part, he sought my company in order to pump me about Lindworm Castle and details of my godfather’s life. To distinguish between the two of them, I secretly took to calling them Dancelot One (my godfather) and Dancelot Two (the Bookling). Having now come to terms with the regrettable certainty that he could not expect any more publications from Dancelot One, Dancelot Two wanted at least to learn as much about him as possible - even about the episode in which my godfather had believed himself to be a cupboard full of dirty spectacles. For Dancelot Two’s benefit I recited the little poem that had come into my hands. He absorbed it like a sponge and would declaim it at the drop of a hat:For ever shut and made of wood,

  that’s what I am. My head’s no good

  now that it by a stone was struck.

  Old spectacles besmirched with muck

  repose within me by the score.

  I’m just a cupboard, nothing more.

  One morning I told Dancelot Two about the manuscript I was still carrying on my person but had almost forgotten in the last few eventful weeks.

  ‘My authorial godfather was so impressed by this, he gave up writing,’ I said, handing him the manuscript. ‘I think you ought to read it.’

  ‘It might be better if I didn’t,’ said Dancelot Two. ‘If it’s really responsible for the fact that I’ve only got one book to memorise, I’m bound to take a poor view of it.’

  ‘At least take a look.’

  With a sigh, Dancelot Two reluctantly started reading. I watched his every sign of emotion. Within seconds I had ceased to exist for him. His single eye scanned the text at a gallop, his breathing quickened, his lips mouthed the words. Then he began to read aloud. At some stage he started to laugh, softly at first, then ever more heartily until he was bellowing with hysterical mirth and pounding his knee with his fist.

  When he had calmed down a little his eye filled with tears and he fell to sobbing gently. At length, having come to the end of the manuscript, he stared into space for minutes on end.

  ‘Well,’ I asked, breaking the silence, ‘what do you think of it?’

  ‘It’s awesome. Now I understand why your godfather gave up writing. It’s the finest thing I’ve ever read.’

  ‘Any idea who could have written it?’

  ‘No. If I’d ever read anything by someone capable of writing like that, I would remember it.’

  ‘Dancelot sent the author to Bookholm.’

  ‘Then he never got there. If he’d reached the city he would now be famous. He’d be the greatest author in Zamonia.’

  ‘My sentiments entirely. For all that, the letter in which my godfather urged him to come here found its way into your Chamber of Marvels.’

  ‘I realise that. I know the letter by heart. It’s a thorough mystery.’

  ‘One I’ll probably never solve,’ I said with a sigh. ‘May I have the manuscript back?’

  Dancelot Two clasped it to his chest.

  ‘May I memorise it first?’ he entreated.

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘Then please give me a day’s grace. I couldn’t possibly read it again right away.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Because I’d go pop, I’m afraid.’ Dancelot Two smiled. ‘I’ve never felt so full after reading anything.’

  The Apprentice Bookling

  I subsequently showed the manuscript to several other Booklings with very similar results. They were all fascinated by it, but none of them had any idea who the author could be. Many wanted to learn the text by heart because - being less overtaxed by their authors than Al, for instance - they were interested in absorbing other literature as well.

  I began to like the Booklings in the same way as I liked my own kind in Lindworm Castle. I may even have liked them a little better because of the touching way in which they made me the focus of their existence. They sought my company because they regarded me as a genuine author, or even as someone far more interesting: an author in the making. Being acquainted with plenty of accomplished writers, they saw in me an opportunity to help to mould an artist’s character and exert a personal influence on his development. I had suddenly acquired hundreds of little one-eyed authorial godfathers, all unselfishly devoted to my welfare. Like my former teacher, Dancelot One, they tirelessly offered me advice about my future work - advice as varied as the Booklings themselves:Never write a novel from the perspective of a door handle!

  Foreign words are foreign to most readers.

  Never put more words in a sentence than genuinely belong in it.

  If a full stop is a wall, a colon is a door.

  If you write something while drunk, read it through sober before

  you submit it to a publisher.

  Never write with anything but quicksilver; it guarantees narrative

  flow.

  Footnotes are like books on the bottom shelf. No one likes looking at

  them because they have to bend down.

  A single sentence should never contain more than a million ants

  unless it’s in a scientific work on ants.

  Sonnets are best written on deckle-edged paper, novellas on vellum.

  Take a deep breath after every third sentence.

  It’s best to write horror stories with a wet flannel round your neck.

  If one of your sentences puts you in mind of an elephant trying to

  pick up a coconut with its trunk, better give it some more thought.

  Stealing from one author is plagiarism; from many authors, research.

  Big books are big because the author didn’t have the time to express

  himself succinctly.

  Even though I hadn’t really become a Bookling, I’d at least become an apprentice Bookling. I was subjected to an incessant barrage of well-meant advice and technical tips. Although I tried to make a note of them all, I retained only the most obvious. It often happened that two pieces of advice were mutually contradictory, and I frequently became the centre of an altercation between two or more Booklings who exchanged volleys of quotations like arrows.

  I had become the gnomes’ new raison d’être, a living, breathing vindication of all their activities, especially their cult of learning texts by heart. I was their chance to unload all that was pent up inside them. In me, so they believed, their texts would finally fall on fertile soil, destined one day to yield a bumper crop in the shape of novels, poems and anything else I committed to paper. I imbued the Booklings’ anonymous existence with a meaning for which they may always have yearned.

  A typical day in the Booklings’ domain went roughly like this. In the morning, when I emerged, yawning, from my sleeping quarters, a Bookling would promptly latch on to me and put my brain into gear with a few inspiring lines of verse: ‘Grey dawn, dost thou portend my final breath? The trombophones will soon announce my death . . .’

  At bre
akfast, which I now prepared myself, several of the little Cyclopses would keep me company, reading in turn from their letters: ‘My dear Gofid Letterkerl, many thanks for the dedicated copy of Zanilla and the Murch. How daring of you to make a Murch the protagonist of a tragic novel! I was greatly moved, especially by the passage where your lovesick hero murches for days on end before throwing himself into Demon’s Gulch. Your bold initiative will probably launch a whole genre of Zamonian literature teeming with Murches - in fact, I myself am already toying with the idea of writing a Murch novel. With renewed thanks and best regards, Ertrob Limus.’

  After breakfast I usually went off to the Leather Grotto, where I liked to clamber around on the book machine, pick out a book or two and browse for a bit. I was usually joined by Al, who spent a lot of time in the machine’s vicinity because he had made it his job to fathom its secrets. He believed he had detected certain patterns in its movements and was now tinkering with an extremely complicated mathematical table designed to elucidate every last mystery in the catacombs.

  As soon as I left the Leather Grotto I would again be pounced on by several Booklings who accompanied me on my walks through the tunnels and showered me with erudite essays or aphorisms. These they declaimed with a self-important air as they strutted along beside, behind or ahead of me. We must have been a strange sight, rather like a family of ducks that communicated, not by quacking at each other, but by loudly reciting maxims and bons mots:‘Reading is an intelligent way of not having to think.’

  ‘The light at the end of the tunnel is often no more than a dying jellyfish.’

  ‘Writing is a desperate attempt to extract some dignity - and a modi cum of money - from solitude.’

  I also enjoyed watching the Booklings at work in their book hospital. This taught me a bit about the manufacture and restoration of books, as well as printing and the chemical processing of a wide range of papers. Most of the books fortunate enough to be admitted to the hospital emerged from it looking as good as new. The one-eyed gnomes knew all the tricks of the trade when it came to repairing damaged paper or leather, and even when stumped they reprinted and rebound their patients more handsomely and sumptuously than before.

  My afternoons were devoted to fiction. Hornac de Bloaze, Asdrel Chickens and other Booklings with a rich repertoire of narrative prose recited their novels to me. A single step would transport me from Zamonian Baroque to modern times. If I heaved a sigh, a dozen worried Booklings would tug at my cloak and enquire how I was. I had never before been treated with such solicitude.

  In the evenings we met in the Leather Grotto to exchange ideas. Seated round the fireplaces there, the Booklings chatted and laughed, recited and argued about literature. This was where they relaxed after their daily exertions. They showed me rare books, maps of the catacombs and finds from the Chamber of Marvels, told me all about forgotten authors I’d never heard of and recounted horrific anecdotes about the Bookhunters in the same way as the Bookhunters recounted horrific anecdotes about them.

  Usually exhausted by the end of the day, I would flop down on my couch and fall asleep at once. And dream. Of books, naturally.

  Zack hitti zopp

  ‘Did I actually eat a book?’ I asked Al one day when we were once more standing on the book machine together, watching the shelves glide past. ‘Under hypnosis that time, I mean?’

  ‘You turned up your nose at the cover,’ Al replied with a grin. ‘But real bookworms do that too. You had the right idea, biologically speaking.’

  This finally solved a question that had been preying on my mind for quite a while. Another one occurred to me: ‘Where do Booklings come from?’

  Al hesitated. ‘We don’t exactly know. We surmise that we develop inside books like chickens in eggs - in very old, brittle volumes of indecipherable runes slumbering deep down in the catacombs. Sooner or later a book of that kind cracks open like an egg and a Bookling as small as a salamander hatches out. Then it finds its way to the Leather Grotto. By instinct, probably.’

  ‘Is that really so?’

  ‘A few new Booklings turn up in the Leather Grotto every year. Either that, or we discover them somewhere nearby. They’re still tiny, little bigger than a thumb, unable to speak and without a memory. Then we give them some books to eat - we read automatically, you know, it’s probably innate - and they learn to talk in no time. That’s why the Bookling community continues to grow. Very slowly, but grow it does. Hey, watch: that shelf is just about to slide back and disappear into the machine, like to bet?’

  A moment later the rusty machine’s entrails emitted a series of loud clicks and the shelf behaved precisely as Al had predicted. He grinned contentedly and made a mysterious mark on his mathematical table.

  ‘But you could have come from somewhere else, couldn’t you?’ I said. ‘You don’t know for sure.’

  ‘True, we may also have sprung from the stinking rubbish in Unholm or the laboratories of evil and demented Bookemists, but hatching out of old books is the story we like best.’

  By now I had learnt not to dispute the pseudo-scientific theories with which Al explained all manner of things, nor did I cast doubt on his outmoded belief in the Orm, it only involved me in endless arguments. Besides, I myself found the idea that Booklings hatched out of books very appealing, so I left it at that.

  I had stopped keeping a tally of the days I’d spent among the Booklings. Mathematics had never been my strong point and there weren’t any days down there, let alone clocks. I don’t think I’m boasting, dear readers, when I say that I’d learnt quite a lot in the interim. The very fact that I listened to the Booklings with unflagging attention had greatly expanded my vocabulary, and I was now acquainted with vast numbers of novels and short stories, poems and stage plays, essays and letters. I could spout aphorisms until everyone round me dozed off, and my familiarity with descriptions of landscapes was so extensive that I could have equipped a whole continent with them. Characters, plots, cliffhangers, twists in the tail, gradual build-ups, dramatic climaxes - the Booklings had imparted more literary material and techniques than I could have acquired by reading for a lifetime. They were all stored away in my brain like the props of a well-equipped theatre. I now knew how good dialogue should sound, how to lend the opening pages of a book a momentum that would instantly carry the reader along, and how a novel of epic dimensions could systematically send its thousand characters to their inexorable doom. I had heard so many poems that I sometimes unwittingly spoke in rhyme and my vocabulary was at least as extensive as Aleisha Wimpersleake’s.

  The Booklings were no literary snobs, fortunately. Far from confining themselves to the classics, they also memorised a lot of so-called light fiction. One of them knew the entire Prince Sangfroid series by heart, another had learnt all my favourite Count Elfensenf novels and could recite them to order. I was now familiar with every cheap literary device, every banal cliché, every escapist flight of fancy that ought, in my opinion, to form part of every author’s repertoire. The Booklings had provided me with all I needed to become a decent writer. The only trouble was, I still hadn’t committed a single sentence to paper.

  I may have conveyed the impression that life with the Booklings was a bed of roses, but alas, it wasn’t quite as idyllic as that. Fond though I was of the little Cyclopses, many of them were more than capable of getting on my nerves. It was a regrettable fact that I didn’t share the literary tastes of each and every one, and that some of the Booklings had devoted themselves to authors I found positively insufferable. I tried to avoid those individuals whenever possible. The more tactful among them accepted this and troubled me no further, but there were a few insensitive specimens who mercilessly strove to foist their stuff on me and those cussed little fellows sometimes made my life a misery.

  Foremost among them was Dolerich Hirnfiedler, who had never got over the fact that I’d unmasked him on the strength of a single exclamation (‘O!’). He had been taunted by his fellow Booklings ever since, and a number
of ‘O!’ jokes were circulating in the Leather Grotto. To pay me back he dogged my footsteps with a persistence comparable only to that which Rongkong Koma had displayed when hunting Colophonius Regenschein. One day I rounded a bend in a tunnel, all unsuspecting, to find Dolerich barring my path. His single eye blazed as he addressed me in a hoarse bellow:‘O greet thy father from me if thou wilt!

  I know him well, and my name, too, he knows.

  Friend of his friends am I. That he was here

  I knew not, since we did not meet till now,

  and I was long in ignorance of it!’

  I almost had a heart attack, not only then but on other occasions as well - for instance when he crept up behind me while I was seated in an armchair in the Leather Grotto, drowsily reading in peace, and bellowed some Oedipus in my ear with all his might:‘O Light! This last time do I see thee now!

  They say I am of wrongful parentage;

  that I illicit intercourse enjoy

  and slew him whom I had no right to kill.’

  Not vengeful like Dolerich, just plain crazy, was a Bookling who had devoted his life to the works of Lugo Blah. Lugo Blah was a prominent exponent of Zamonian Gagaism, and the deliberate insanity of that literary genre had rubbed off on his Bookling namesake a trifle too effectively for my taste. I’d always found Zamonian Gagaism suspect because I had a hunch that its primary aim was not so much concentrated creative endeavour as the consumption of hallucinogenic mushrooms and strong liquor. At their functions and readings the Gagaists liked to dress up as sausages or brass instruments, play music on Oxenfrogs and spray their audiences with saliva. I always found it suspicious when writers got together in groups because it was obvious that they did so, not with any serious work in mind, but for social reasons.