Читать книгу TheodoraLand - Malcolm James Thomson - Страница 4

One

SATURDAY 26 MAY 2012

There wasn’t what anyone would call a crowd. It wasn’t what anyone would call an event. It was the Whitsun weekend and many of Munich’s inhabitants were out of town.

I lingered at a table under a parasol, sheltered from the sun (promising a decent summer to come) outside the café on Dreifaltigkeitsplatz, Trinity Place, in the heart of the Bavarian capital. The small square is dominated by the large, popular and quite expensive restaurant Brasserie Stadtschreiber on one side. The inevitable church is at one end, a new shopping precinct at the other. Between them, across from the café, is the colonnaded frontage of what once had been a monastery. There in shadow of the arcade, was Manduvel Bookshop. Until yesterday it was the place where I worked.

And today it would close its doors forever. The premises had to be vacated completely by the end of June, emptied of fixtures and fittings and the inventory of books.

Yes, Bookshop, not Buchhandlung. The specialization in English language books had been a recent development, an experiment. It was an attempt to maintain a Manduvel presence in the premises where the bookselling family had opened a business in 1893. But now there was a normal Manduvel branch, the thirty-seventh in Germany, in the nearby urban mall. Maybe there was not that much demand for English books in Munich.

“Hi, Thea!”

I couldn’t tell him that I would prefer to be alone with my thoughts. Dirk Seehof and his fiancée, Bea Schell, were probably my closest friends. And I had, after all, had a brief affair with him the previous summer. At least he called me Thea and not Dora. At Manduvel old Herr Lessinger called me Theodora sometimes. The others spoke of Dora even if I was addressed by them in front of customers as Frau Lange. Dora sounds dumb and I am not dumb. Nor am I Dora The Explorer except when it comes to sex.

“A sad day, Dirk.”

For him it would be, too. Addicted to British and American thrillers, he had long been a Bookshop regular. He repeatedly complained that his own life as a free-lance web journalist lacked any of the thrills and perils faced by the protagonists described in the pages of paperback crime and mystery fiction.

Neither Dirk nor I were to know that this deficit would soon be remedied.

“Pity there are no demonstrators... nobody with a loud-hailer crying ‘Save our Bookshop’. No story for you, I guess.”

Dirk shrugged and took a long draught of his beer.

In spite of the holiday Trinity Place was quite busy this Saturday. But few passing along the colonnade spared a glance for the display windows still full of books, still promoting best-sellers written in English as if on Monday business as usual would continue. One window was devoted to the antiquarian section of the shop where old, rare and valuable books gathered dust in an a cluttered alcove. They were from time to time examined by those who approached them with the utmost reverence but in most cases without the means to make any purchase. Although Herr Lessinger was the manager of the branch as a whole, it was the ancient volumes which had kept him working for Manduvel long beyond retirement age. His instructions had been that until the very last minute the shop should be operational and welcoming.

“You didn’t want to work on the very last day?” Dirk asked.

“I’ve never worked Saturdays, Dirk.”

There had been two Saturdays and the week in between that we had spent in bed. We had not so much surprised or shocked one another. It had been more about satisfying a kind of mutual curiosity. Just ten days, about a year ago. Been there, done that, got the teeshirt.

My teeshirt today was meant to be ironic. ‘So many books, so little time!’ in bold italics. Sammy Cohen was the Manduvel Bookshop exemplar of gender diversity. He had reminded me of the Miquel Brown song in which it had been about men, not books. He assured me that the track remained a popular dance anthem for the queer community.

No, I am not gay. I had thought I might be for about three months until Dorthe went back to Copenhagen. I had been younger then, just turned twenty-one, finished with university and starting my three year training at Manduvel. A Chamber of Commerce certificate states that I am now a Gelernte Buchhandelskauffrau. That’s one of those pseudo-qualifications our German society is addicted to. Theodora Lange is now officially authorized to sell books!

Where, or indeed whether, I might be selling books in future was a question still open. Sure, I could move to another Manduvel branch, but none has the atmosphere of the little Bookshop on Dreifaltigkeitsplatz. There will be no other branch which will make room for the antiquarian collection. We had been told that branded e-book readers are the shiny future. Spoken word recordings on memory sticks would be the next big thing. I wasn’t sure.

Herr Lessinger had said that the remaining rare books were to go to an Austrian dealer for a fraction of what they are worth. And so I didn’t have any serious twinges of conscience on account of the three volumes I was keeping quite safe in my flat.

When the explosion happened I was on my way out of Trinity Place and already on the receiving end of judgmental glances. In Munich one is supposed to be seen at the wheel of a BMW manufactured locally. Or another German premium marque. If female, then driving an open convertible or a monstrous SUV is very okay. It is also tolerable to be astride an expensive all-terrain bicycle when one wears to good advantage (as I was frequently told I did) cut-off denim shorts. Equally acceptable is to be the young adult piloting a high-tech push-chair with a trophy baby inside, who could be a future Porsche driver. Less well viewed is a wild young woman carving through city traffic on a skateboard (Plan B deck, Element wheels, Tensor trucks and Reds bearings) which I had bought from a place in Cologne. They build Fords in Cologne, too, although for a Bavarian they do not count as German cars.

The sudden blast from the colonnades distracted me and caused me to smash into a Mini driven by a lady-who-shops. Her expressions of indignation meant that it was a few minutes before I could get back to Trinity Place, an elbow bruised once again, my board under my arm.. I arrived at the same time as the first emergency vehicles.

Dirk did file a story, claiming implicitly to have been an eye-witness to the incident. It was assumed that due to the impending closure of the business a defect in the gas powered central heating system had been neglected. Ninety percent of Dirk’s observations were in truth provided by me. He had left a good hour before everything went bang. Why did I linger? As always I had something to read with me. Today it was the latest issue of the cooler-than-thou bi-monthly Monocle magazine (it weighed about a kilo). The publisher had named Munich the most liveable city in the world a couple of years earlier and so I had become a subscriber. The day was very warm, the café chairs outside the see-and-be-seen Brasserie Stadtschreiber were welcoming and I reckoned that I looked quite good.

A very pompous francophile (who didn’t last a full weekend) had once claimed that I could best be described as jolie laide. Quirky, then, no beauty but also not horrible looking. He had asserted that my comportment was tolerant of gymnophoria (the sensation that someone is mentally undressing you) if not conducive to apodyopsis (admiration by one inclined or provoked to imagine me naked). I tended to prefer shorter words.

“Good legs! Great arse!”

That was a verdict I was okay with. Skateboard riding is good exercise. So is roller skating. Or racing on inline blades. I have even been known to resort to a Razor kick scooter. Mercury had wings on his heels. I simply like having wheels underfoot, self-propelled rather than motorized.

So, yes, Dirk got his information from me. Why did I call him? One reason is that I feel comfortable with the notion that those with whom I have shared intimacies, even if the episode was short, should remain somehow part of my life. I still enjoy infrequent, only half-serious but nevertheless lurid and stimulating online chat sessions with Dorthe Larsen. Some might find it odd that Dirk Seehof and Bea Schell and I remained good friends after I had borrowed Bea’s fiancé last summer. Part of the reason is that I am a very good cook.

Dirk’s article would appear buried deep on the website of the least read Munich daily newspaper and would not, to my regret, include my characterization of Elsa, the woman who was the day’s sole fatality.

“Frau Elsa Brundt was the assistant manager of Manduvel Bookshop, with the charm of a traffic warden, the sincerity of an estate agent, the human kindness of a robot and the personal odour of a basket of laundry long overdue for washing.”

My descriptions of the other colleagues were kinder. Jane Gallagher and Jock Bain were Brits, although to be precise Jane hailed from Ireland where her name could be given as ó Gallchobhair which meant ‘lover of foreigners’. Which might explain Jock, who tended towards outspoken Scottish nationalist politics. They were low-budget preppy types, recently graduated students in Germanistik. They chose for some reason to deny that they were co-habiting. Neither were injured. Jane reacted to the emergency by making lots of tea, the British response to anything short of the Apocalypse. Jock got in everybody’s way as he recorded video on his iPhone.

Frau Peine, a quiet, sad woman in her mid-fifties, suffered what might be a broken hip when the blast of the explosion toppled her off the step-ladder she had been using. On the stretcher she was cursing her misfortune in perfect English (all Bookshop staff were bi-lingual) but Frau Peine was using turns of phrase which might have been expected of a foul-mouthed sailor. That was a surprise. Jock got the audio.

Herr Stemm, our notorious hypochondriac, at long last had ailments which were not imaginary, a fractured wrist and nasty burns on his scalp. Middle-aged and a proponent of Prussian virtues, he was also a vain man. His bouffant toupée had gone up in flames. Jock got a close-up of the charred remnant.

Frau Hopkins, whose English was far from perfect in spite of being married to a Welshman, was carried off unconscious to an ambulance. She was the sympathetic, motherly type although without any children of her own.

Dear Sammy Cohen seemed more concerned at the loss of an earring rather than the earlobe to which it had been attached. Jock almost fainted when he identified the small lump of detached flesh.

One of the passers-by injured by flying glass was, it transpired, a bishop. Clerics have a minatory ubiquity in Munich. As do visitors from the rich states of the Arabian Gulf. Three dark ladies laden with shopping bags from expensive boutiques needed attention to their wounds, insisting on waiting in some discomfort for the arrival of female paramedics. That Dirk also mentioned in his piece.

What I didn’t like was his pathetic attempt to add further human interest to his report. He implied that Herr Lessinger had died of a broken heart, felled by the enormity of the Bookshop’s impending closure. The old man had in truth passed away three days before in a clinic on the other side of town. His demise followed months of illness and he was sad only that he would not be able to visit his grand-children in Florida. Ludwig-Viktor Lessinger was otherwise sanguine with regard to the inevitable outcome of the affliction he preferred to call consumption.

I quite enjoyed the fact that Dirk had used my snarky reference to the fact that the shelves at the far end of the Bookshop housing all the bodice ripper, vampire and zombie titles (genres I had scrupulously avoided even when I had belonged to the target age group) had survived the explosion and the conflagration that ensued unscathed.