Crossings
Page 1
About Crossings
I didn’t write this book. I stole it . . .
A Parisian bookbinder stumbles across a manuscript containing three stories, each as unlikely as the other.
The first, ‘The Education of a Monster’, is a letter penned by the poet Charles Baudelaire to an illiterate girl. The second, ‘City of Ghosts’, is a noir romance set in Paris in 1940 as the Germans are invading. The third, ‘Tales of the Albatross’, is the strangest of the three: the autobiography of a deathless enchantress. Together, they tell the tale of two lost souls peregrinating through time.
An unforgettable tour de force, Crossings is a novel in three parts, designed to be read in two different directions, spanning a hundred and fifty years and seven lifetimes.
‘A magnificent, intricate machine of a book that is a sheer delight to read. With vivid characters and a brilliant premise, it is a puzzle, a love story and an adventure. Wildly imaginative and quite unlike anything I have ever read before.’ Chris Womersley
‘Audacious, ambitious and spellbinding, Crossings isn’t just a complex literary thriller, an intriguing puzzle, or a thoroughly enjoyable romantic alternative history of Paris and the Pacific islands, but all of these things at once.’ Jane Rawson
Alex Landragin is a second-generation bookbinder who lives in Paris.
To the Baroness
If you set out in this world, better be born seven times.
Attila József
CONTENTS
Cover
About Crossings
Author Bio
Dedication
Crossings cover page
Epigraph
Contents
Preface
Note to the Reader
THE EDUCATION OF A MONSTER
A Disgraceful Episode
A Touching Reunion
A Suitable Candidate
An Unsuitable Candidate
CITY OF GHOSTS
The Cemetery
The Apartment
The Auction House
The Palace of Justice
The Baudelaire Society
The Shéhérazade
The Hotel Room
TALES OF THE ALBATROSS
Alula
Pierre Joubert
Jean-François Feuille
Jeanne Duval
Édmonde de Bressy
Hippolyte Balthazar
Madeleine Blanc
Acknowledgements
Copyright page
Preface
I DIDN’T WRITE this book. I stole it.
Several summers ago, I received a call in my workshop on Rue des Bernardins from the noted bibliophile and book collector Beattie Ellingham. She wished to have me bind a loose-leaf manuscript that she described as the pride of her collection. There were no constraints of time or money, she said, but there was a condition, to which I agreed: I was not to read its contents. The manuscript was, in her estimation, priceless and I was to bind it accordingly. We agreed that it would be bound in what is called the Cosway style, in doublure, framed with pearls, using materials that she would provide.
I’d known Beattie Ellingham all my life. She was one of the Philadelphia Ellinghams. She’d married into the Belgian aristocracy but, having been widowed early, reverted to her maiden name and never remarried. She divided her time between her apartment on the Boulevard Haussmann and her estate in Belgium. Privately and as a term of affection, my wife and I referred to her as the Baroness, although there was in fact nothing remotely pompous or ceremonial about her. The Baroness was my oldest and most loyal client, as she had been for my father before I inherited the bindery. In the course of a long collector’s life, she’d assembled one of the finest private libraries in existence of material pertaining to Charles Baudelaire. She was more than a collector; even the word bibliophile did not quite do her justice. She was an obsessive. She lavished on her books the same doting affection other members of her class reserve for horses and wine. She accorded as much importance to a book’s binding as to its contents. To her, bookbinding was an art, and a bookbinder an artist almost the equal of the writer. A well-crafted, bespoke binding, she liked to say, is the finest compliment a book can be paid. Whenever I undertook one of her commissions, the Baroness would visit my studio, keeping an interested eye on proceedings without interfering. For her, it was a pleasure to witness a rare book given a second lease of life in an equally rare binding. And as her collection was intended only for her private pleasure, and her fortune inexhaustible, she liked to indulge her whims to the fullest extent of the law, and even, on occasion, beyond it. Previously, I’d bound a rare Arabic edition of Le Spleen de Paris in leather made from the skin of a black panther, and an illustrated underground edition of the banned poems of Les Fleur du mal in alligator skin with inlays of water python.
Three days after her call, the manuscript was delivered by a young fellow on a scooter. He didn’t remove his helmet, which muffled his voice and obscured his face. He handed me a package containing the manuscript and the leather with which to bind it. I immediately placed it in a safety deposit box I keep above the workshop.
There are many decisions to be made when binding a book, over and above the choice of binding material. The inlays, onlays, gilding, embossing, stitching, stamping, endpapers, ex libris, boards, frontispiece, edges, headband, glue, joints, marbling, slipcase, the title page – all these were choices about which the Baroness, for all the trust she invested in me, liked to be consulted before any work could begin. That evening, I opened the package to inspect it. Seven lustrous pearls tumbled out of their black velvet purse. The enclosed leather was dyed coral-red. The ivory miniature was not, as is traditionally the case with Cosway-style binding, a portrait, but a stylised illustration in black ink of an open eye. Finally, I took in hand the manuscript itself. Even when specifically instructed not to read it, the most scrupulous bookbinder cannot help but accidentally glimpse certain words or phrases. In this case, the handwritten title leapt out at me: Crossings. Underneath the title was a long jumble of figures, also handwritten, seemingly without any bearing on the manuscript. It consisted of what appeared to be three separate documents, all written by hand in French, although one of them was significantly older than the other two and written in a different hand. The manuscript appeared to have had an eventful existence: many of the pages were creased, folded over or mottled with damp, and the paper itself was yellowing and pungent with the chocolatey, nutty aroma that old paper exhales as it decays.
It took me a week to call the Baroness, a little longer than usual, and when I finally did so a man’s voice I didn’t recognise answered the telephone and informed me she’d very recently passed away, peacefully, in her sleep. When I enquired about the funeral, I was told it had taken place only the day before, at her Belgian estate. The news so surprised me that I forgot to ask what to do about the manuscript.
The book-collecting fraternity is a small circle, and news travels fast. Two days later, as I was walking by the river along the Quai de la Tournelle, I ran into Morgane Rambouillet, a riverside bouquiniste who specialises in nineteenth-century romances and who I knew had counted the Baroness among her regulars. She was beside herself with excitement. According to Rambouillet, the Baroness had not died in her sleep at all. She had been murdered, and moreover her body had been found with its eyeballs missing. I shuddered when I heard this, remembering the illustrated ivory miniature that had arrived with the manuscript a week and a half earlier. I hurried home to investigate the matter online. The obituary in Le Monde repeated the version of events I’d been given over the telephone – a peaceful, somnolent death – while Le Figaro’s obituary glossed over the circumstances of death altogether. The only mention of the Baroness’s grisly demise was in
a short report in the Belgian newspaper, L’Echo, published the day after the incident. To an untrained eye, it seemed as if the details surrounding the Baroness’s death had been hushed up.
For days afterward, my wife and I discussed the matter. What haunted me, no less than the murder of one of the last grandes dames of Paris, was the fate of those two grey agate wonders, remarked upon by all those who’d known her – her eyes. My father had told me that, in her youth, though not especially pretty, Beattie Ellingham had passed as a great beauty thanks to those eyes. They were the wellspring of her charm, perhaps even the key to her destiny. Her marriage to the Baron de Croÿ had turned out unhappily, but her eyes never lost their sparkling, feline quality.
My wife, always more practical than I, considered it perfectly understandable that I’d been lied to on the telephone. ‘They have to think of the family’s reputation,’ she said. ‘They’re not going to tell every random stranger who happens to call that she was mutilated and murdered.’ We concluded that the Baroness must have been mixed up in some shady book business. Rare books can bring out the worst in people. Naturally, this led us to the same thought, one almost too awful to contemplate: could the murder of the Baroness be connected somehow with the manuscript now lying in my safety deposit box?
I waited, over the following weeks, for instructions from the estate – whether to go ahead with the commission or to return it to its new owner, whoever that might be. But I never heard from anyone. If I didn’t volunteer the information that it was in my safekeeping, it was not entirely out of self-interest, but also from dread. Obviously, I didn’t wish to visit upon my own family the fate that had befallen the Baroness. There was only one person in the world, other than my wife, who might know where it was: the man who’d delivered it – and I hadn’t so much as seen his face. I wasn’t even sure it had been a man. Given the value of the package, I was confident the estate would eventually contact me, and so I left the manuscript unbound.
Several months passed before I finally accepted the possibility that no one would be coming in search of it. It had, by accident, fallen into my lap. I decided the Baroness’s request no longer applied. Now that it belonged to me, even if provisionally, I was free to read it. In one fevered sitting, on a winter’s night so cold ice was forming on the Seine, I read all three of the manuscript’s stories in the order in which I’d found them. The first of them, ‘The Education of a Monster’, appears to be a short story written by Charles Baudelaire, although no other record of such a story exists anywhere other than a brief note in the poet’s journal. The handwriting, however, seems authentic, even if the story itself does not, for reasons that will become clear to the reader. The second story, ‘City of Ghosts’, is a kind of noir thriller set in Paris in 1940, seemingly narrated by Walter Benjamin, in which ‘The Education of a Monster’ plays a pivotal role. The third story, ‘Tales of the Albatross’, is the strangest of the three: it seems to be the autobiography of a kind of deathless enchantress.
And so, having read the story, working alone in a soft dawn light, I set about binding it. In the end, I chose a conventional, nondescript binding, using a horse leather the French call ‘skin of sorrow’, in cardinal red. I had no doubt in my mind that it was valuable, perhaps even priceless, as the Baroness had contended. But the circumstances in which it had come to me suggested the manuscript should not draw undue attention to itself.
Once it was bound, my wife also read it. Upon seeing the jumble of figures scrawled on the first page, however, she immediately guessed that they were in fact an alternative page sequence, which we dubbed the Baroness sequence. She, too, read the manuscript, but following this alternative sequence. Having finished it, she urged me to re-read it the same way. To my astonishment, I encountered an altogether different book, not so much a collection of stories as a single novel – and no ordinary novel either. But the book was already bound and, given its antiquity and fragility, we decided that Crossings should remain in the order in which I’d received it – the state in which you also find it, dear reader. You will have to choose for yourself whether you wish to read it as a collection of loosely connected stories or as a single novel.
The circumstances of the death of the writer Walter Benjamin (born in Berlin, Germany, in 1892; died in Portbou, Spain, in 1940) are well known. Having fled Paris in mid-June – possibly the same day German troops occupied the city – Benjamin spent two months in Lourdes, a pilgrimage town in the Pyrenees, before making his way to Marseille to try to secure a passage to America. When this failed, he returned to the Pyrenees in mid-September, joining a small group of Jewish Germans hoping to make an illegal border crossing into Spain.
Reaching the fishing village of Portbou on 26 September, the group was initially refused entry into the country. Benjamin, his heart failing and knowing he was wanted by the Nazis, was told he would be forcibly returned to France the next day. That night, in a hotel room, he swallowed a lethal dose of morphine. The following day, the others in his group were inexplicably granted entry into Spain after all.
After the war, rumours began to circulate of a manuscript Benjamin was carrying with him at the time of his death that had subsequently vanished. According to a witness who made the border crossing with him, Benjamin had been carrying a leather satchel (his only luggage) over the mountain. When asked what was in it, he’d replied that it contained a manuscript he valued more highly than his own life. As Benjamin’s post-war reputation grew, so did speculation about the manuscript and its contents.
I cannot, in good conscience, claim that this book is the lost manuscript of Walter Benjamin. Its provenance is too uncertain, its contents too fantastic. But it purports to be just that – and nothing in it that is verifiable contradicts the claim. Let us proceed on the assumption that it is, in fact, what it appears to be. It cannot be described as anything other than a novel. We know Benjamin was a literary scholar, and that he even anonymously co-wrote a detective novel. We know that his French was impeccable, and certainly up to the task. All the same, to publish the manuscript under his name would be unconscionable. And so, for lack of another name – perhaps also, if I am honest, out of a booklover’s vanity – I decided to publish it under my own name, with the caveat that takes the form of this preface. Strictly speaking, I am but the adopted parent of this foundling – still, there are no genetic tests for manuscripts. If the ethics of my decision are suspect, I am confident I at least stand on solid legal ground. As it is now more than seventy years since Benjamin’s passing, the book (if it is indeed authentic) is, under French law, beyond the reach of the Benjamin estate.
I am convinced the Baroness never intended to publish her manuscript: she wanted it bound for her own private pleasure. While the story of how Crossings came to be published – and why, and its history – must be reserved for another occasion, publishing it was not a decision taken lightly. For reasons of provenance alone, I don’t expect its publication to be uncontroversial, at least in the remoter corners of academia or bibliophilia. Having come to know it intimately, I believe there are at least seven ways Crossings may be interpreted: as an imagined story – an anonymous work, therefore, of fiction; as an elaborate joke, prank or puzzle inexplicably fabricated by Benjamin himself; as a hoax or forgery concocted by an unknown third party; as the delusions of a man in declining health and under overwhelming psychic pressure; as a complex and subterranean allegory or fable; as some kind of enigmatic code to an unknown recipient; or as thinly veiled memoir. I am by now too close to this tale to have a dispassionate view. I must have entertained each of these possibilities at least once, and some of them several times, and still I am undecided.
NOTE TO THE READER
As related in the preface, this book can be read in two ways: conventionally (that is, from first page to last) or by following the Baroness sequence. Those reading the Baroness sequence will find, at the end of each section, a page number in curly brackets (such as that below this note) indicating which page to turn
to next. Readers of the Baroness sequence will thus begin the novel on page 150. For reference, the Baroness sequence’s pagination order is outlined below. Readers who decide to read the novel in the conventional manner need only turn the page.
Baroness sequence pagination:
150–39–157–53–1–175–71–11–206–23–87–225–31–256–103–306–124–349–141–154
{150}
The Education of a Monster
A Disgraceful Episode
AS I WRITE THESE words, it occurs to me that I have never known a tale to be so beyond belief as that which I am about to relate to you, dear girl. Yet nothing I have written has ever been so true. Paradox, all is paradox. Perhaps I have taken leave of my senses once and for all. You see, as a youth, I contracted the pox, no doubt from Jeanne Duval. This scourge is known, in old age, to drive its victims to madness, so that they know not the difference between the real and the unreal. I live in the permanent shadow of my impending lunacy. But as you will learn, it is not the only way in which Jeanne haunts me still. Indeed, if I am writing to you at all, it is because of Jeanne.
We are not strangers, you and I. I am the gentleman you met this afternoon in the Church of Saint-Loup, accompanied by Madame Édmonde. Your name is Mathilde. You are a sullen, bovine sixteen-year-old girl. Despite the assurances of the nuns who discharged you into Madame Édmonde’s care, you can barely read. Admittedly, you recognise the letters of the alphabet, but that can hardly be called reading. You can scribble your name, but that can hardly be called writing. Still, I trust that Madame Édmonde knows what she is doing. I have no choice.
As you know, I am a poet. I am forty-three years old, though I appear much older, due to many years of deprivation. Success, at least of the worldly variety, has hitherto eluded me, despite the excellence of my verse. In April last year, in poor health and low spirits, I left Paris, where I had lived almost all my life, determined to see out the rest of my days in Brussels as an exile. I had somehow convinced myself that I had better prospects here. I was following in the footsteps of my publisher and dear friend Auguste Poulet-Malassis, who had left Paris hoping to make some money by publishing pornography – the Belgian censor is less prudish than his French counterpart – and smuggling it into France. I arrived filled with an élan I had not known since my youth.