A Traveler at the Gates of Wisdom

by John Boyne

  * * *

  • • •

  Since my return to Moscow after so many years away, I had reestablished my bookbinding business, setting up a small workshop on a bohemian street near Ostankino. I had built an excellent reputation as a young man, of course, but knew that I would have to work hard to rebuild it after spending ten years in a Siberian gulag. To do this, I began by investing in a series of large medical textbooks, each containing seven or eight hundred pages, and removing the covers before creating different forms of binding, all of which I could display in the window of my shop. I used leather on some, bamboo on others, the hides of animals on others again. I attended various literary salons, introducing myself to publishers and writers and, soon, readers came my way, usually elderly bibliophiles who thought nothing of spending a small fortune to give their collections an appearance of elegant uniformity.

  For several days, I had noticed a young man wandering up and down the street outside wearing a long trench coat with a hat pulled low over his ears. One morning, he stepped inside, the small bell over the door ringing to alert me to a new customer. We eyed each other warily and he examined some of the books that I had on display, picking them up and running his fingers along the spines. I was crafting a leather-bound copy of William Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar at the time for a gentleman who brought me a different play every month and, although Shakespeare generally left me cold, I sometimes glanced through them and had found this play to be particularly engaging, having spent the previous afternoon reading it and feeling the most curious chills in the fourth act when Caesar’s ghost appeared to Brutus before the Battle of Philippi.

  “Excuse me, Master Bookbinder,” said the young man, stepping toward the counter now, his eyes darting back and forth nervously. “May I ask whether you work here alone?”

  “I do,” I said.

  “I suppose a man who works with books has a certain…artistic side to him,” he said.

  “I’d like to think so,” I replied. “Although, of course, I don’t write the books myself, you understand. I simply bind them. Still, as you can see from some of my efforts, I try to maintain a certain creative—”

  “Yes, yes,” he said, dismissing all of this. “I have a book that I’d like you to take a look at. But first, I suppose my question to you is this: Are you a trustworthy man? Does what takes place between these walls have the same secrecy that one might expect from a doctor’s surgery?”

  I had experienced moments like this before, where a person arrived in possession of something that the Party might find questionable. I asked no questions, other than for a description of the binding the customer requested, and simply got on with my work. I had never, as yet, had cause to report anyone and knew that it was unlikely that I ever would, no matter what they gave me.

  “I keep a very private business here,” I told him, nodding patiently. “If I did not, then I would lose all my clients within the week. I give you my word that you can trust me with whatever you have.”

  He breathed heavily through his nose and seemed to make a decision, for a few moments later he opened his satchel and removed a wallet, a notebook and a key to his flat before extracting a sheaf of five or six hundred loose pages.

  “This book is very sensitive,” he said. “As you can see from the title page.”

  I took the manuscript off him and was not surprised to see that this was a book that was forbidden in the Soviet Union. It had been smuggled out of the country a few years earlier to Italy, where it had been published in translation, and then the Americans had taken it up, where it had proved an enormous success, much to the fury of the Politburo.

  “Doctor Zhivago,” I said. “Where did you get this? I’ve never held a copy in my hands before.”

  “It was a gift,” he said. “From the author. I want it bound, that’s all.”

  “You were a friend of Boris Leonidovich?” I asked, impressed, for despite attending many literary events in the city since my return, I had seen the novelist only once in person, a few months before he died, and even then he was surrounded by so many people that it was impossible for me to speak to him.

  “Not a friend as such,” the young man replied. “But I knew him a little. My friends and I, we do our best to smuggle volumes of high art in and out of the country. Please tell me that I can trust you,” he added, beseeching me with his eyes and tone, and I nodded quickly.

  “You have nothing to fear,” I insisted. “I will guard this with my life.”

  “Thank you. It will be the first anniversary of Boris Leonidovich’s death in six weeks’ time and we plan on leaving fifty copies of the novel in prominent places around the city to mark the anniversary.”

  “Fifty?” I asked, holding up the sheaf of pages. “But you’ve only given me—”

  “There will be more to come. Every few days I will bring you more. Can you produce fifty by the end of May?”

  I considered it. I had other jobs on, of course, but it was possible, if I did not use a binding that was too ornate. Indeed, I would have to use materials that I had never employed before or they could be easily tracked back to my workshop.

  “For such a large quantity, in such a short timeframe, they will need to be very simple,” I said. “A clean binding. Nothing fancy.”

  “That’s all we need. But with the author’s name and title embossed on both the cover and the spine. We want there to be no hiding what this book is and who wrote it.”

  “How will you do this without getting caught?” I asked.

  “We’ll distribute them at night. There’s enough of us to take three or four each and leave them in the appropriate places. By the following morning, the city will awaken to the news that literature is available once again in the Soviet Union. And perhaps others will then imitate our endeavors. The more editions that are out there, the better.”

  “All right,” I said, putting the pages under the counter. “I’ll do as you ask. Fifty copies. And I wish you luck. If you’re discovered, however, you know what the punishment will be, don’t you?”

  “I know,” he said, smiling at me. “But it seems a small price to pay for something so precious, does it not?”

  * * *

  • • •

  As it was a Tuesday, I knew that Radomir would be returning home with his girlfriend, Zhenya, who was every bit as uncommunicative as him, but they had a standing appointment on this day every week, when they would retire to his bedroom for precisely one hour, during which time I took a walk, regardless of the weather. Upon getting back, they would have emerged from their tryst, a little red in the face, before shaking hands and saying their goodbyes. It was not, I thought, the great romance of the ages.

  When they arrived that evening, however, there was something different in their attitudes. Instead of being sullen and uncommunicative, they both seemed excited, and when I asked what had happened, Radomir looked at me as if he could scarcely believe that I didn’t know.

  “Haven’t you heard the news?” he asked.

  “What news?”

  “You weren’t watching television?”

  I glanced over to the set in the corner of the room and shook my head. I had spent all afternoon reading Doctor Zhivago and promising myself that, from the next day, I would have to stop turning the pages and start binding if I was to get all fifty copies completed on time.

  “Your son is a genius,” said Zhenya, and for a moment, I thought there was something approaching a smile on her face. “He will soon be a national hero.”

  “No,” he protested. “Not me alone. The entire group will be. We will remain nameless, which is only proper.”

  “What’s happened?” I asked, for I felt buoyed by such unexpected enthusiasm on their part.

  “Today,” said Radomir, placing both hands on my upper arms and looking me directly in the eyes. “Russia won the S
pace Race!”

  “How?” I asked.

  “We put a man in space. Yuri Alekseyevich Gagarin. His spacecraft completed an entire orbit of the planet and he has come back down to Earth safely.”

  I stared from one to the other in amazement. I could scarcely imagine that such a thing had proved possible.

  “And you were a part of this?” I asked.

  “A small part,” he said.

  “A big part,” said Zhenya. “Your son is one of the finest mathematical brains in the space program. He may receive an honor from Chairman Khrushchev yet! Can you believe it?”

  I walked over and switched on the television news and, sure enough, everything they were saying was true. The presenter was talking about how the USSR had changed the world today and how the Americans, despite their hollow congratulations, would be humiliated by what we had done. A picture came up on the screen of a smiling young man in uniform.

  “That’s him,” said Radomir. “That’s Yuri Alekseyevich.”

  “Extraordinary,” I said. “I’m very proud of you.”

  “Thank you, Father,” said Radomir, bowing a little, and for once I saw something approaching emotion in his eyes. He rarely gave in to such feelings and it pleased me to see that he was not made entirely of stone.

  Lying in bed later, I looked up at my ceiling and wondered how it must have felt to have been on the Vostok, the vessel that had taken our brave cosmonaut around the planet. The fear, the excitement, the ability to see the world as no man had ever seen it before. It was a thrilling notion. And yet, when I fell asleep, I did not dream of other planets and alien creatures, but of Doctor Zhivago and his Lara. My son might have contributed something incredible to the advancement of human enterprise but still, in my small way, I could wake the next morning and feel that I was helping to advance ideas and culture, which had always been my passion.

  After all, I still had forty-nine more books to bind.

  UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

  A.D. 2016

  RAYMOND WAS LATE coming home from work, which meant that I was left on my own with his girlfriend, Zoe, who was sitting on the sofa, stuffing Doritos into her mouth and intently watching the television. I’d hoped that she would remain in her own apartment so I could watch the returns in peace, even though I didn’t think that the evening would last very long. It seemed pretty obvious that the result would be confirmed by nine o’clock at the latest and that would be the end of that. This long national nightmare, this carnival of intolerance and bigotry, this celebration of rank stupidity over intellect that had played out across our country over the previous eighteen months would finally be brought to an end and Donald J. Trump would be dispatched back to that gaudy monument to bad taste that he’d constructed on Fifth Avenue, where he could blind himself with his grotesque golden pillars and leave the rest of us in peace.

  I didn’t know whether she was deliberately trying to annoy me or not, but Zoe was wearing a T-shirt with an image of her favorite troglodyte grinning while making the thumbs-up gesture, along with her MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN hat. I wanted to whip it off her head and set fire to it.

  We watched a rerun of some news from earlier in the day when Trump had gone to vote and told reporters that things were looking good, looking very good, and it was difficult not to laugh at his delusions. I assumed he didn’t really believe he was going to win—there was more chance of me being elected President of the United States, and I wasn’t even on the ticket—but that he was simply sticking with his braggadocio until the end. Then the cameras switched to a videotape of Hillary voting in upstate New York.

  “Lock her up,” muttered Zoe through a mouthful of chips. I glanced across at her and wondered whether she even realized that she had said that or whether it had become some sort of Pavlovian response to seeing the former First Lady on television.

  “What was that?” I asked her, eager to test my theory.

  “What was what?” she replied, not even turning to look at me.

  “I thought you said something.”

  She shook her head and seemed genuinely mystified. “No,” she said.

  I picked up the remote and rewound the live television pictures by a minute. “What are you doing?” she asked me.

  “Sorry,” I said. “I missed something. I just want to see that again.”

  Trump bragging, Clinton voting.

  “Lock her up,” said Zoe.

  I pressed the stop button on the remote and let it return to regular time.

  “You’ve got four years of fury ahead of you,” I said. “Four years of watching Hillary make the laws, appoint the judges, clean up the environment. How will you cope, do you think? Do you think your head might just explode in anger?”

  “I’ll cope perfectly fine,” she replied. “Because it’s not going to happen. Mr. Trump is going to win.”

  “I know you want him to win,” I said with a sigh. “But come on, be realistic. He hasn’t a chance.”

  “Mr. Trump is going to win,” she repeated. “And when he does, he’ll kick all the Muslims out, build a wall so the Mexican rapists can’t attack women, and make America great again.”

  “That’s all it’s going to take?” I asked.

  “Well, it’ll be a start.”

  I said nothing. I had long since stopped trying to figure out how my otherwise sensible son could be attracted to this miserable creature who’d somehow entered our lives and seemed determined to stay there. It was simply more than I could comprehend.

  The doorbell rang and I buzzed my brother and his wife in. Joe was beaming and carrying two six-packs of beer under his arms, one of which he placed on top of the copy of Doctor Zhivago that I was reading, which made me wince. He was holding his own MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN hat in his hands because his head was too big for it, and his wife, Unwin, was waving the Stars and Stripes while grinning from ear to ear.

  “You people,” I muttered, shaking my head.

  “How’s our guy doing?” asked Joe, looking across at Zoe, and, as ever, she refused to take her eyes away from the screen when she answered.

  “Great,” she said. “He’s going to win.”

  “Of course he is,” said Unwin. “God is on his side. Jesus Christ Himself put Donald Trump on this Earth to sort out our problems. It’s His will that he be elected president.”

  I rolled my eyes. “You can’t honestly believe that?” I asked.

  “I do believe it,” she replied. “Just like I believe that climate change is an invention of the liberal left and that Saddam Hussein organized the attacks on the World Trade Center. I know you refuse to accept the truth, but that’s because you’ve been brainwashed by the mainstream media and by the elite. Trust me, in a few hours’ time, Mr. Trump will be our president-elect.”

  “You’ve seen the polls?” I asked.

  “Polls mean nothing. People are ashamed to admit that they’re voting for him.”

  “And do you ever wonder why that is?”

  Joe smiled and wrapped me in a bear hug. “We’re not going to fall out over this, Brother,” he said. “We’ve got through almost two years without arguing over the greatest man ever to stand for election in our country and we have only a few hours to go. Then it’ll all be history.”

  “Thank God for that,” I said, turning around as I heard a key in the door, and Raymond stepped inside. He marched past us all and stared at the television without saying a word before turning around and looking at us, one after the other.

  “Father,” he said. “Uncle Joe. Aunt Unwin. Zoe.”

  “Hello,” we replied in unison. Raymond always made a point of greeting everyone in the room individually. It was one of his many quirks.

  “I forgot the election was on,” he said.

  “You forgot?” I asked. “How on earth could you forget? It’s all anyone’s been tal
king about for months. Sit down, okay? And Joe, hand me one of those beers. I want a drink in my hand when our country does the right thing and elects the most qualified candidate in the history of the United States to the highest office in the land. Instead of, you know, an illiterate racist.”

  “You say that like it’s a bad thing,” muttered Unwin.

  “Sorry, I was busy at work,” said Raymond.

  “But you voted, yes?” I asked. “You didn’t forget that, I hope?”

  “I voted early,” he said. “Last week.”

  “Good,” I replied.

  “Why aren’t we watching Fox News?” asked Raymond.

  “He refuses to turn it on,” said Zoe, nodding over at me.

  “Because it’s an oxymoron,” I said. “Like koala bears. Or the Pont Neuf in Paris.”

  “What’s wrong with the Pont Neuf?”

  “It’s actually the oldest bridge in the city.”

  “That’s not true.”

  “It is.”

  “That’s just liberal bias.”

  I stared at her. “How on earth—?” I asked, but before I could finish my sentence, Zoe interrupted.

  “You voted for Mr. Trump, right?” she asked, turning to Raymond.

  “Of course I did.”

  “You did what?” I asked.

  “I voted for Mr. Trump.”

  I stared at him. I hadn’t had many conversations with my son about the presidential election because his mind just wasn’t in that particular game. Still, I assumed that he had a brain in that head of his somewhere. He was a rocket scientist, for Christ’s sake. How dumb could he be?

  “But why?” I asked. “Why would you do something like that?”

  “I voted for Trump,” said Zoe belligerently.

  “And me,” said Joe.

  “And me,” said Unwin.

  “I know you all did,” I said, throwing my hands in the air. “Because you’re all morons. But him? He’s my son! I expect better from him.”