The Labyrinth of Dreaming Books (18 page)

Not far away was an establishment that seemed familiar to me as soon as I crossed the threshold. Of course, it was the nameless little coffee bar in which I’d eaten my first (and hitherto last) slice of beebread!
¹
This was where I’d met the scheming literary agent Claudio Harpstick, who had artfully put me in touch with Pfistomel Smyke and was largely responsible for my abduction into the catacombs of Bookholm.

I took an involuntary step backwards, then changed my mind and went inside. The smell of food was too tempting and my hunger too overpowering. Besides, it was only a snack bar like any other, even if it had been the place where my troubles began. Time seemed to have stood still there. The décor was just as it had been two centuries ago: bare brick walls, shelves filled with cheap books one could read while eating at the scrubbed wooden tables. There was also the same old
counter
surmounted by a big blackboard inscribed with the chef’s specials in coloured chalk. They still served the same simple, typically Bookholmian food and drink as they had in days of yore:
Reader’s Espresso
and
Balono de Zacher Biscuits
,
Prince Sang froid Pie
and
Mantho Snam Spaghetti
. Oh yes, and
Bee-Bread
, of course. It was a touching sight. I’d have taken a bet that even the chalk inscriptions hadn’t altered in two hundred years.

I fear that all my good resolutions about a sensible diet had been left behind in the Fumoir, together with my wits, because I now threw over the traces. I devoured three bowls of Mantho Snam Spaghetti, two Prince Sangfroid Pies, some thyme-flavoured toast with melted Midgard cheese and four assorted slices of cake, each named after a different author and all topped with whipped cream. This time I passed on the bee-bread for reasons you, my sympathetic friends, will doubtless understand. Having bought myself a big bag of Balono de Zacher biscuits for later on, I emerged into the street once more. The night, my revitalised self decided, was still young. Besides, I was thirsty again.

1
See
The City of Dreaming Books
, p. 72 ff. (Tr.)

A Reunion with Kibitzer

WHEN I AWOKE
the next morning I didn’t, for a dismayingly long time, know where I was. Nor did I know
who
I was.

Then both things came back to me: I was Optimus Yarnspinner and I was in my hotel room in Bookholm. In the first instance I was right, in the second utterly wrong. This certainly wasn’t
my
hotel room.

I noticed that because of three things: first, the wallpaper; second, the four suitcases beside the bed (I’ve never owned a suitcase in my life); and third, the Frogling standing beside the window, who was quaking with fear and staring at me round the curtain.

‘Please go away!’ he said in a hoarse voice. ‘Just go!’

To cut a very embarrassing story short, I’d spent the night not only in the wrong hotel room but in the wrong hotel as well. In my inebriated condition I had simply staggered into the nearest one, marched into some room or other, barricaded the door behind me with a wardrobe, flopped down on the bed and fallen into a swoonlike sleep.

The Frogling, whose room this was, had been so startled and intimidated by my behaviour that he hadn’t even tried to remove the wardrobe or cry for help. He had simply waited for me to wake up. He didn’t want to hear any explanations or excuses for my uncivilised conduct; he just asked me to leave. So I did him that favour, having seldom felt so ashamed in my life. My hotel was three streets further on.

As I was laboriously and remorsefully piecing together last night’s mosaic of incidents, a thoroughly ridiculous book title –
A Desire for Warm Glaciers
– kept going through my head. What I could still remember quite well was that, immediately after my orgy of gluttony, I had lurched into a nearby wine bar to keep my promise to myself, which was to drink something other than hallucinogenic Bookwine. I sampled – rather over-liberally – some grape juice from the Bookholm area. From that point onward my powers of recall developed fine cracks at first and then lacunae of steadily increasing size. I could still remember having a fierce argument with a gigantic Turniphead, but I’d forgotten what it was about. Then we came to blows and I had to change locations. I discovered a basement dive situated in a seedy side street and patronised exclusively by famous authors of whom I’d never heard. The last thing I recalled was that the wine there, although not particularly good, was sensationally cheap and served in rusty little buckets. Then my thread of recollection snapped.

Suffering from fierce self-reproach and an even fiercer headache, I returned to my hotel, where I had a wash, settled my bill and set off with my modest baggage, intending to find some better and more central accommodation during the day. In the course of a long walk that took me to the city centre, I endeavoured to clear my head and straighten myself out. When you’re approaching your three-hundredth birthday, as I was, you have to admit it takes longer to recover from such a binge. I was through with intoxicants of all kinds – that I solemnly swore to myself while walking! The only kind of intoxication to which I still aspired was an Ormic trance.

The Bookholmers had always been fond of self-confident and inventive forms of advertising. For their own trades, for books, for publishing houses, for artistic projects, for readings and poetry evenings, for cultural functions of all kinds, for cures for writer’s block, for delicious cakes and hot coffee. Painted hoardings, posters, the sides of buildings, fliers stuck to lamp-posts, banners suspended
across
streets, stentorian-voiced barkers reading aloud from books, importunate touts attired in printed galleys – even ‘walking books’ on legs – were among the city’s omnipresent features. But the propensity for barefaced selling of all kinds of things had inexorably increased during my absence. I found this far more noticeable on my midday stroll than I had the previous day.

My thick head precluded me from deciding whether or not I liked this: whether I found it amusing, intrusive, ingenious, embarrassing, original, or simply brash. It certainly added to the city’s entertainment value. When in Bookholm, I had always felt as if I were roaming through the pages of an illustrated book in which the pictures moved. But where one sign had hung in the old days, three were now hanging, and where a wall had borne one poster, it now bore ten. If I looked up while walking along a street, the sky was filled with promises in the form of billboards advertising cheap or expensive books, hot coffee or pastries fresh from the oven, the best eyeglasses in the city, or a refreshing neck massage administered by muscular Peat Midgets.

Many of them I could decipher with ease, for instance advertisements for alternative book manufacture using hempen paper or Bibliognostic health check-ups, an Ugglian publisher or a dwarfs’ printworks. Others meant nothing to me. I was lucky if I could even identify the languages on many of the billboards by referring to the script, but what they were advertising I couldn’t say. Ovidios and the Wolperting had emphasised what a tolerant and cosmopolitan city Bookholm had become since the overthrow of Bookemism. I now realised how far that process had gone. Ornian cuneiform, Demonistic ligatures, Dullsgardian hieroglyphs, Midgardian knot writing or archaistic Troll runes – I could usually only guess at the products or services they offered. Sometimes the addition of drawings, coats of arms or symbols were an aid to deciphering them. But what did a gold death’s head with snakes wriggling out of its eye sockets signify? What about a seashell with a spider sitting on a pearl?
What
could one buy in a shop whose sign displayed a fully bandaged chicken? No thanks, I didn’t want to know that, so I kept to the middle of the street and left it to my imagination to visualise what these shops actually sold.

The district in which I had now been for some time was quite familiar to me because it had largely escaped the fire and I’d formerly roamed around there. I was surrounded by a reassuringly nostalgic maze of old half-timbered buildings, some of which housed the most delightful antique shops. Not snobbish luxury establishments selling prohibitively expensive items from the
Golden List
. No, what still predominated here was the traditional spirit of old Bookholm. I at last saw shop windows displaying the kind of books for which the true bibliophile came here. After only a short spell of window-gazing I discovered rare first editions like
The Third Side of the Coin
by Elmura Voddnik,
Gingivitis Salad
by Tomok Zebulon,
Pain in My Wooden Leg
by Hugobart Cramella and
No Coffin for Mother
by Count Petroso di Gadusti – Zamonian literary jewels such as one would seek in vain elsewhere. Here, however, they occupied their due place: right at the front of the display but affordably priced. In the next window I was overjoyed to see collected editions of Orphetu Harnschauer, Clas Reischdenk and Avegeus Luftbart, together with the long, character-rich novels of Asdrel Chickens, which one can reread again and again. The trenchantly satirical novels of Slainco Brafesair, six hundred years old but still ultra-modern, in the long-out-of-print woodcut edition. The gigantic tome by Marvin de Lescetuge with illustrations by the immortal Oved Usegart! All the fairy tales by Nartinan Schneidhasser in the much sought-after India-paper edition, signed! A quarto edition, bound in blue bamboo-worm silk, of Abradauch Sellerie’s brilliant essay on Perla la Gadeon. All Doylan Cone’s
Hermes Olshlock
novels in the legendary collected edition complete with magnifying glass. The collected letters of Volkodir Vanabim – uncensored! A volume of the best humorous sketches by the great Rubert Jashem! The complete first editions of Eglu Wicktid! The youthful reminiscences of
Abradauch
Sellerie, unabridged! The unsurpassable jungle tales of Plairdy Kurding with watercolour illustrations. Eri Elfengold’s amusing and informative cultural history, which renders it unnecessary to read a whole library of books. The tension-laden novellas by Trebor Sulio Vessenton, which still fill me with unadulterated envy. And
Cronosso Urbein
by Felino Deeda – the first really good novel in Zamonian literary history! All these in a single shop window and at prices reasonable enough to bring tears to one’s eyes. This was Bookholm at its best!

Well, pleasing though this was, it wasn’t my real reason for lingering so stubbornly in this district. For the moment, the acquisition of antiquarian books came very low on my list of priorities. The true reason, dear friends, was that I was in the vicinity of
Colophonius Regenschein Lane
, where Dr Ahmed ben Kibitzer kept his small antiquarian bookshop specialising in Nightingalistics. But going there wasn’t quite as simple as it sounds, dear friends. Oh no! It was an extremely tricky undertaking, a regular suicide mission. Clearing the air with Ovidios had been a piece of cake compared to the settlement of accounts that faced me now. Why? Because Kibitzer and I had been at loggerheads for a hundred years or more. A hundred years! Can you imagine it?

I briefly considered disappearing. Perhaps I hadn’t found the lane after all. Modern Bookholm was the very devil – nothing was the way it used to be! Yes, that was the answer!

Nonsense, the lane was just round the corner. Whom was I kidding? Myself? No, I had to go there or I wouldn’t have a moment’s peace. I tossed three peppermint pastilles into my mouth to offset my hangover breath and resolutely headed for Regenschein Lane. It was now or never! Into battle!

Shortly before reaching Kibitzer’s shop I came to a halt once more. What on earth would I say to him and in what tone of voice? How to start? A prey to indecision, I paced up and down the lane, repeatedly casting fearful glances at the shop out of the corner of my eye. It
looked
exactly as I remembered it: the darkest and most inconspicuous shop in the street, with candlelight fitfully flickering inside. To me the entrance looked like the gate of hell with a three-brained monster lurking inside, ready to devour me. By the Orm, was I nervous! I sucked a fourth pastille.