The Two Bookshops
Arthur Mandal
He found no real pleasure in driving. He didn’t understand people who did. His job involved a lot of it. Driving to random parts of the country, to get people to sign bills, invoices, agreements, counterfoils. The twenty-first century knew most of these things could be done digitally but it made him drive there anyway, just to spite him. Sometimes Bennett got so angry about this he was unable to sleep.
He tried to pretend driving was more exciting than it was: you’re sitting behind a series of continuous, muffled explosions, hurtling in a steel box down a long strip of asphalt, etc. But it was no use: the grumbling vibration of the ground beneath him, the obstinate stasis of the horizon, the relative immobility of the road behind him in the rearview mirror, steadily put him to sleep.
It all started when, for about a month, he had to drive repeatedly to a small provincial town about an hour north of the city. At first, he didn’t notice the bookshops – one on either side of the road, each about half a mile away from the other. With the first one he had pulled in, thinking it was a convenience store, and had pulled out back onto the road again without stopping. The inconvenience of the moment stayed with him, irked him, like a missed joke, and the following day, when he drove past the place again, he pulled in for a closer look.
The bookstore was a bland, single-story building, with a shop window full of books irrationally turned on their sides, their covers hidden so that all that greeted the outsider’s gaze was a sheaf of old, yellowing pages. Bennett tried the door and found it locked. Through the window he could glimpse a desk inside, more shelves, and on the floor several piles of books, as though some mysterious act of stocktaking had been suddenly interrupted. Bennett tried the front door again, as though the lock might have had a change of mind in the meantime, and through the window espied a set of scribbled messages on the desk. He wondered how long the shop had been closed — he guessed well over a year.
That evening he told his wife all about the bookshop.
“So you found a bookshop and it was closed,” she said.
“But it was in the middle of nowhere,” said Bennett.
“Do you think this is a sign of something?” she asked.
Her name was Christine. Bennett called her Chris, only giving the full pronunciation of her name when they argued and he got mad. Their marriage had been teetering on the edge of divorce – like a cartoon character on the tip of a cliff – for nearly three years now. Sometimes they argued and incredible bursts of love and feeling sprang up between them. Sometimes they ate breakfasts in silence.
“What do you mean, a sign?”
“Is this some kind of metaphor?”
“You have always overestimated my intelligence,” said Bennett.
The next day, on the way back, he drove past another bookshop, half a mile down the road from the first. The second bookshop sat between a café and a pizza franchise. It had stands full of books outside, and even small tables where people could sit down and read a title before buying it. There was music playing somewhere inside the bookstore. Bennett walked around inside, strolling with the swagger of somebody thinking of buying the place. The store was not crowded. The people there all seemed to come from different backgrounds and share a common but undisclosed source of contentment.
“Have you been open here long?” Bennett asked the cashier.
“About a year.”
“Business going well?”
“It’s going pretty well,” said the cashier, nodding as though he had just asked the question to himself. The cashier smiled at him and Bennett looked at his young, fresh face. He had no interest in the future of the bookshop – whether it lived or died, languished or thrived. Bennett wondered who the owner was.
The next day was a Saturday. On weekends, Bennett went with his wife to a shopping outlet in the west of the city. It was a ritual which had started out as a joke, then over time grew so serious that both of them forgot the original absurdity of the idea. He sometimes wondered if this was true for all rituals. In the retail outlet, whose center was designed to look like a chance waterfall you had stumbled across in the middle of the jungle, Bennett watched the children of another family play with one another while Christine sorted out a problem with their utilities supplier.
“Maybe they’re connected somehow,” he said when she got back. “Maybe the old store is where the new store sprang from.”
“Are you still thinking about those bookshops?” asked Christine.
“Maybe it was the original franchise,” said Bennett. “Or perhaps they’re two brothers. Who argued, and split up to run rival bookstores.”
“Maybe you should find another obsession,” said Christine. She didn’t add Try me, but he knew that was what she meant.
He thought about the two bookshops late at night, while his wife slept. The following week, Bennett pulled up in front of the old bookstore with a toolbox next to him in the passenger seat, all ready to pry open the door and enact a break-in. To his surprise all the shutters on the windows were up and the front door half-open. A radio station was playing inside. He switched the engine of his car off, listened to the distant, muffled music, and then walked up to the door to push it open. There was nobody inside.
“Hello?” he shouted.
A turquoise transistor radio, battered and scratched from who-knew-what kind of use, sat on the ground next to a socket. Bennett switched the music off and looked around. The bookshop’s shelves were half-empty, as though the stock was in the middle of being moved somewhere else. A cold cup of coffee stood on the desk, next to a huge, glossy book filled with images of Thirties’ Vienna. Leopoldstrasse, Stefansdom, children playing around a water tap in Mariahilf. Most of the books in the shop were old, with stained, yellowing pages full of scribbles and notations from an eager, now-absent readership. In the bookstore he was surprised to find a number of books from his own past: a biography of Johann Sebastian Bach, heavily over-written; an anthology of Japanese poetry, bought by someone called Robert for a woman who went by the name of Jill; a detective novel written in French and an illustrated treasury of nursery rhymes with all the eyes scratched out.
He spent ten minutes in the bookstore, waiting, but nobody came back.
In the evening, he told his wife all about his second visit. They looked for both bookshops online but could find nothing. The possibility that he had made it all up seemed to amuse her, and it was interesting to observe her skillfully display but never articulate the doubt all evening. He watched her cook – they alternated, tomorrow he would do a less ambitious pasta – and select spices from the rack like the books he had plucked from the bookshop that day.
On the tv the news was all about the war. They drank wine and moaned at the screen and brought things for one another from the kitchen island, directing each other with snippets of language for napkins, knives, salt. Now they had been at war with the other country for almost a week, they watched the tv comedy of the country they were dropping bombs on, wanting to react but unsure when to laugh.
Two days later he was driving to the town again. Bennett was in a hurry, so he had no time to visit the first bookshop, but on the way back he stopped at the second one. The store looked even livelier than it had before: youth were chattering like sparrows on the forecourt. Bennett wandered inside and was surprised to see a line of people snaking away from the cashier. He looked out of boredom for something to buy – something to legitimize his stop, to visibly show he was there for a purpose – but the moral obligation felt so absurd that he gave it up.
He was about to leave when he spotted a newer, slightly different edition of the Japanese poems he had seen in the other store. He pulled it out warily, as though defusing the timer of an unexploded bomb, and for no rational reason flipped and smelled the pages. One bay down, he found the book on Vienna. It was not quite the same book – a different, glossier cover, and the selection of photos were not quite identical, but similar enough to be disturbing. Instinctively, he went to the fiction section and found the English translation of the detective novel he had spotted. In the music section, a fresh new biography of Bach – same format, different edition, different cover, no scribbles. His mind spun as he tried to assess the likelihood of the situation mathematically.
“I don’t see the mystery,” said Christine.
“Isn’t it a little bit odd?” asked Bennett.
Neither of them were looking at one another as they talked. They were watching a Laurel and Hardy film, about two men who were trying to get a piano up a flight of steps. Bennett realized it was strange to speak like this, but the predicament in the film was so engrossing he couldn’t help himself.
“You’ve had things like this happen to you before,” said Christine.
“Never quite like this,” he said.
“You thought you saw your mother in that gardening place, what was it called?”
“But that woman was i-denti-cal,” said Bennett. “Even you said that.”
“There was a song you said you kept hearing,” said Christine, her face still turned towards the screen.
Now the piano, which had almost reached the top of the stairs, rolled back down to the bottom again. Bennett felt deflated with the people in the film – for a moment his wife, the bookshops, even the war receded.
“You always say things so easily,” he said.
“But it’s true,” said Christine, turning to look at him. “These things always seem to find you.”
He visited the bookshops one last time the following week. They were not on his way now – Bennett had to make up an excuse for driving half-way across the city to reach them. When he arrived at the first one the door was locked once more, as it had been the first time, but when he walked around the back of the building a tiny back room let him through into the front of what was a shuttered shop. The transistor radio was gone, as was the book on Vienna on top of the desk. A smell of pine disinfectant filled the air, and as Bennett walked around, he realized that almost half the books had gone. The stock that was left behind was shabbier than ever – old paperbacks falling apart like children’s puzzles, enormous dusty dictionaries and concordances with a single, pristine layer of dirt along the top, stacks of yellowing magazines along the bottom shelves – magazines for women, comics, forgotten literary journals with titles so pretentious he could barely pronounce them. None of the books he had found last time were there. It didn’t faze him, for he had learnt to accept it all, to welcome the strangeness of life. Only the absence of any owner was mysterious – no workers, no volunteers, nobody in the back office, packing things into boxes or arguing on the phone. A singular bookshop without any human activity – not even somebody to read the product.
The second bookshop was quiet, but somehow different from before – it took Bennett nearly a minute to understand what.
“You’ve repainted everything,” he told the cashier.
“Do you like it?”
“It’s nice,” he said. “I don’t know why, but it is.”
“Pastels are always nice,” said the cashier. “They calm you down.”
Bennett spent almost half an hour in the bookshop, because he knew he was unlikely to be driving back that way again. A sense of finale overshadowed his thoughts as he looked for the books that had unsettled him from the previous week. They were all still there, as fresh and glossy as ever, unsold. He went to the children’s section and made an extra effort to find the treasury of nursery rhymes. It sat there right in the middle of the shelves, on a white plastic stand, a shiny new edition with none of the eyes scratched out, placed in the center of the display as though to make a point. Bennett felt the cool, smooth touch of the vinyl cover in his hands, and smelled the sticky newness of the freshly-printed pages. He tried to think why this book in particular had stayed in his head, and for a moment almost felt he remembered.
They divorced a year later. It was all amicably done – without spectacle, no arguments, no histrionics from either party. He went to live in an adjacent town for three years, doing a series of jobs he neither loved nor hated, before returning with a woman he’d met on a commuter train one lazy Saturday morning. They had a child and raised him there, in that city he had driven back and forth across so many times.
The first week they moved back he tried to find the two bookshops, but nothing remained of either of them. He spent an hour driving up and down the same stretch of road, convinced he had missed one point or another on some map or screen, but all Bennett came across was row after row of urban housing – apartments, townhouses, countless rows of little glass boxes with people inside them watering plants or stroking cats or playing computer games. The closest bookshop was over a mile away, a polished, silent franchise with an interior café that sold watered-down, decaffeinated coffee. For an entire afternoon Bennett walked from block to block along the road, peering like a foreigner at street signs and shop fronts, but neither of the two bookshops showed any trace that they had ever existed.
