The Labyrinth of Dreaming Books (5 page)

I could already smell the city. Of course, that was the smell that had occasioned my nightmare! The incessant wind had carried it across the plain and up into the birchwood. I had even dreamed the words in which I’d described that unmistakable smell in my book:
As if you’ve stirred up a cloud of unadulterated book dust and blown the detritus from millions of mouldering volumes straight into your face
. Was there anything more alluring?

The city seemed not only near enough to smell but near enough to touch. However, I knew from my first visit to Bookholm that it would take me at least one more day’s march to get there.

I drank the rest of the water in my flask at a single gulp. Unwise though this may sound, it was meant to encourage me to stride along as fast as possible all day long, for there would be nothing more to drink until I reached my destination. I was a few years older this time; if I wanted to cover the distance in the same time as before, I needed to provide myself with an incentive.

I shall spare you a tedious description of this uneventful trek, dear readers. Suffice it to say that I reached the outskirts of Bookholm just
as
exhausted, footsore, hungry and parched as I had been on the previous occasion. However, the prospect of obtaining something to drink there had accelerated my pace, particularly in the last few hours, with the result that I reached my destination by late afternoon.

Even from a distance I was able to marvel at the way the city had grown. It had expanded in one or two places (like me) and had also gained height. Hours before I reached the outskirts I could detect a hum like that of a gigantic beehive. It grew louder and more heterogeneous with every step I took. I could make out the hammering and sawing from carpenters’ shops, the tolling of bells, the neighing of horses and the never-ending clatter of printing presses. And vibrating beneath it all was the unmistakable acoustic substratum, the hubbub characteristic of any major city, which is produced by thousands of intermingled voices and resembles the ceaseless murmur of an audience or a sluggish stream.

The buildings, of which there were two or even three times as many, were on a more generous vertical scale. Few had boasted more than two floors in the old days, whereas I could now see from afar that some had three, four, or even five storeys. Tall, slender minarets of sheet iron, chimneys as tall as trees, stone towers – none of these would have been tolerated in the Bookholm of old. No longer was this a romantic little place frequented by a surfeit of tourists, nor the antiquarian township of my nostalgic recollection, but an entirely new place with different inhabitants, visitors and destinies. I came to a crossroads where my route intersected with others. From there I proceeded down numerous little streets along which hundreds of people were streaming into the city. I now realised that, if I actually ventured into Bookholm, mine would be no sentimental journey into the past but a foray into an unforeseeable and unplanned phase of my existence. Involuntarily, I stopped short.

Was this another fit of
excitrepidation
? It was foolish to persuade myself that I could still turn back. Impossible! I was hungry, thirsty and utterly exhausted, so I would have to enter the city at least once to refresh myself and rest. I couldn’t avoid spending at least one night there. In any
case
, why was I hesitating? I hadn’t tramped this far, only to turn on my heel. Nonsense! What was making me hesitate? Was it instinct? The memory of all I’d been through after crossing the city’s magic frontier once before? Undoubtedly. But it was mainly fear of the certainty that time was irrecoverable. Anyone who has entered a building he hasn’t seen since his childhood or adolescence – his birthplace, school, or something of the kind – will understand that. It’s a painful, melancholy experience that seems to bring you nearer the grave. On such occasions, however, things usually appear much smaller than you remember, don’t they? In Bookholm, by contrast, dear friends, my memories could do more than stand the test of time: the city had actually increased in size.

‘In or out?’ demanded a shrill, disagreeable voice. Jolted out of my reverie, I looked round in surprise and saw that I was obstructing one of the many approaches to Bookholm, a narrow alleyway. People were squeezing past me, all intent on gaining access to the city. The voice belonged to an importunate, unpleasant-looking dwarf carrying a hawker’s tray of minuscule books. I was clearly in his way.

‘Oh …’ I said without moving.

‘Well, shift yourself, Fatso!’ snarled the uncouth gnome. ‘This isn’t the provincial dump you come from, this is Bookholm! Time is money here and money rules the book world! Shift your fat …’

While he was saying this, various things happened that owed more to my reflexes than to mature consideration. The gnome pushed rudely past me and prepared to storm the city ahead of us with his ridiculous tray, impatient to embark on business transactions that brooked no delay. However, my brain had not only absorbed and analysed the word ‘Fatso’ in a fraction of a second but devised a suitable response, which was to trip the disrespectful little creature up. He naturally hadn’t known that nobody called me that without at once paying the penalty. My sense of humour deserts me on such occasions.

By the time the dwarf uttered the word ‘fat’ he was already in free fall. He measured his puny length on the ground and the quaint contents of his tray – nothing but books no bigger than matchboxes – went cascading across the dusty alleyway.

‘In or out?’ I said haughtily. ‘What a question! In, of course!’ And I stepped over the humiliated dwarf, treading on him with the full force of my fighting weight. Yes, dear friends, I’ll even trample on a dwarf if I have to! I swaggered on down the lane without looking back, heedless of the fact that my first crossing of the city limits had coincidentally made me my first bitter enemy in Bookholm.

Noting Without Notes

THE DARKMAN OF
Bookholm
had left his work undone but made a thorough job of it. That was my rather self-contradictory verdict on the city after surveying the first few streets, which were known as the
Borderlanes
. That legendary figure celebrated in folksongs and fairy tales, the wandering colossus made of blazing straw and pitch whom the more superstitious of the townsfolk still liked to hold responsible for the last conflagration, had allegedly tramped from district to district and set fire to one roof after another before burning up in the inferno himself. That was how I myself might have explained the catastrophe to a child of pre-school age, for the truth was considerably more frightening than that gruesome myth.

It wasn’t true that I saw nothing I remembered. Over a third of the city had been spared from the flames and even some of the extremely combustible old buildings, with their bone-dry thatched roofs and half-timbering, had survived. The
Darkman
, who according to legend possessed neither brain nor heart, had performed his task in a correspondingly random manner: he had burned down half a street here but spared a whole district there, devastated the south as far as the city limits but scarcely touched the north, torched a huge municipal library but left the tiny antiquarian bookshop just beside it standing. The
Darkman
had raged and run riot as randomly as skin diseases spread or streams of lava ravage a mountainside. To the clangour of ‘brazen bells’, as it says in the poem by Perla la Gadeon, he had incinerated everything and everyone unfortunate enough to stand in his path, regardless of status or value, beauty or function.

This could be appreciated only by someone like me, who had known the Bookholm of old. To any newcomer, Bookholm was simply an exciting city filled with architectural antitheses, a curious conglomeration of old and new styles in which Early Zamonian, Dark Age and modern influences of all kinds were closely commingled to an extent found nowhere else. Quite apart from its literary and antiquarian attractions, Bookholm approximated to my personal ideal of a city more closely than ever before. Baroque diversity, creative designs so frivolous as to border on the insane, extravagant ornamentation, lopsided nooks and crannies, omnipresent historical allusions – those were the things that could delight my eye when I surveyed a city, and they were here in superabundance. Nowhere else were Zamonia’s past and present crowded together in so small a space.

Even in the
Borderlanes
that enclosed the city I saw buildings composed of the most diverse minerals, metals and other materials; of red, yellow and black brick, of quarried marble, of pebble-dash, of rusty iron, of tin and gleaming brass, of sandstone and soapstone, of basalt, of granite and crushed lava, of shell, slate or fossilised fungi, even of transparent glass or amber brick, of plain mud or shards of china. Every conceivable material had been used, though wood was now extremely rare. Timber I saw on the old buildings, as before, but it had been almost eliminated from modern Bookholmian architecture – one of the consequences of the fearsome inferno. For that very reason I found it all the more surprising how many of the buildings now consisted
of books
. I saw books used for walls and roof tiles, piled up into supporting columns and flights of steps, built into window seats and even serving as paving stones. Books as a building material were omnipresent in the new Bookholm, although they must have been at least as combustible as timber. How did a house built of age-old volumes fare when it rained? Didn’t the paper swell? Didn’t the cardboard covers disintegrate sooner or later? Were the books impregnated and hardened in some way, rendered fireproof and
waterproof
? Well, I had neither the time nor the leisure to go into that now. The day was drawing to a close, so I deferred the solution of this mystery and hurried restlessly onwards.

I wanted to see everything at once, as if the city might once more go up in flames or sink into the ground at any moment.
Walk
,
pause
,
look
– that had always been my proven motto when travelling and in Bookholm it applied in the fullest measure. Wherever I walked or paused, there was something large or small to marvel at.

I will now, dear brothers and sisters, let you into a secret and reveal a literary technique which I call
noting without notes
. It could also, to put it rather more academically, be termed
Yarnspinnerish mental painting
. It works like this: whenever, while travelling, I get into situations in which incidents or sights threaten to overwhelm me and the normal author would automatically fish out his notebook in order to record as much about them as possible in writing, I quite deliberately refrain from making any notes or sketches. This compels my memory to perform an astonishing feat: my brain paints one
mental painting
after another. I discovered that I possessed this ability a considerable time ago, namely, when I began to write
The City of Dreaming Books
. I had no notes at my disposal because the dramatic events in Bookholm and the catacombs had given me absolutely no opportunity to make any. When I started to write, however, my mind’s eye conjured up images and scenes so vivid and detailed that I might have been experiencing them all over again.

Anyone who has seen a panoramic painting – a view of a famous city or landscape reproduced with the utmost possible accuracy by a talented artist – will have some inkling of what I mean. One sector of my brain can be likened to a miniature museum in which products of
Yarnspinnerish mental painting
are displayed. They are details of landscapes and cityscapes so accurate and realistic that they are in no way inferior to the masterpieces of
Florinthian Canalism
.
¹
Indeed, they even surpass them in one vital respect: moving objects do not remain still as they would in a painting on canvas, but are just as much in
motion
as the scenes that etched themselves into my retinas. I see passers-by walking past, light dancing on water, wind stirring the leaves in the trees, smoke rising, flags fluttering … How can this be? I don’t know, dear friends. I can only construe it as a side effect of the Orm. It’s a gift that I myself find rather uncanny, for sometimes, when my mind’s eye contemplates the products of
Yarnspinnerish mental painting
, I feel as if I’m seeing only the surface of a gift beneath which much more may lurk – indeed, even a dark secret of some kind. It’s as if I’m looking into a magic mirror that reflects a perfect likeness of my world in order to disguise the fact that a mysterious world of its own lies hidden behind it.

But now, dear friends, I shall conduct you around this imaginary museum and give you an exclusive guided tour through some of the mental pictures of Bookholm that my feverish brain produced on my first reconnaissance, for I could not, with the best will in the world, make any notes.

Mental Picture No. 1 The Borderlanes

The first curiosity that struck me in the new Bookholm was its
Gigabooks
. These monstrous replicas of ancient tomes were erected a century ago at every entrance to the city – one of the architectural luxuries it could afford thanks to its new-found wealth, I later discovered. Designed and painted by various artists, these colossal books in stone or metal leant against the walls of buildings or lay on
the
pavement, immediately suggesting to visitors that they were entering a city in which special importance was attached to the printed word and bound paper.