The Absolute Book

by Elizabeth Knox

  He told her that six weeks ago he’d been snowshoeing in the hills above St John’s. He’d had to get out of town because there was a dead whale trapped in the ice and, with the melt, it was spreading its stink, so that the shorefront cafés, which normally opened their outdoor seating in April—with heaters, and fleece blankets on offer—had kept their patios closed as if it were still midwinter.

  And then he told her how St John’s was a bit depressed. Fisheries were declining. ‘Low catches coming in now as a matter of course.’

  Taryn thought of the photograph doing the rounds on Facebook, of a starving polar bear balanced on a pillar of melting sea ice, like a statue on a plinth, a memorial to itself. She thought of Shift, who might know the names of the gods of all the rivers, or at least all those in the south of England and Wales. Then she thought of a scene in Hayao Miyazaki’s Spirited Away, a film she loved, where a river deity arrives at the heroine’s bathhouse. Shuffling and reeking, it floods the tub and scrubbed timber rooms with oily mud, broken bicycles and supermarket trolleys. All the rotten flotsam that coats the shores of rivers everywhere. Did rivers still have gods, hidden deep in their silt, like frogs hibernating in a dried lakebed?

  The novelist had a hand on Taryn’s arm. He was smiling at her with a particular sparkling warmth. Taryn was irritated. She’d wanted to ask questions about a recurring character in his dense, social, nuanced novels—and he was hitting on her. She said, ‘I must refresh my glass,’ and moved away.

  She couldn’t go on like this. The hostility she often felt towards the men who showed interest in her must not continue to go unexamined. She was a policed border, when she should be an innocent meadow. Nothing bad had ever happened to her. Not anything that counted. She’d experienced the usual low-grade sexual harassment, but no sexual assault.

  But of course it was all about Beatrice.

  Taryn was ten the summer that Battle made Beatrice miserable with his naked admiration. Battle started out as a blight on their holiday, then he became extravagantly crazy. He hurt Beatrice and himself, then vanished from their lives. Battle’s breakdown was never discussed or explained. But as far as the child Taryn could see, male desire was dangerous—as it sometimes was in cop shows. Eight years later Webber followed Bea, ran her down and bundled her into the car boot in which she died. After that Taryn had difficulty seeing any male interest that was directed her way as appealing. Ignace’s admiration of Carol was sweet, and other men with crushes on her friends were inoffensive. But no one was to look at her that way. Or lay a hand on her, or try to squire her. Those she’d bewitched, like Alan or the Muleskinner—she had to turn herself off to do so. Turn off the dread and suspicion, fury and hatred, and with those emotions herself, and her own desire.

  The crowd had thinned. Taryn’s father spotted her again and gestured at her to stay. He excused himself from some well-dressed patrons—people with an oddly self-effacing air that Taryn was already identifying as a national characteristic. Was it self-effacing, or diffident? Taryn tried to remember what her father’s memoir had said about this—something sharp but funny. He’d got away with it, whatever it was, because here he was, throwing his light about, as fluid as she was frozen. Her father, who was always cheating on her mother, Addy, the loneliest person Taryn had ever known.

  Taryn’s mother had read all the Moomin books to her. There was the part in Moominpapa at Sea, where Moominmamma takes to spending her days in a room near the top of the lighthouse, painting a garden on its curved white-washed walls. Day after day Moominmamma makes more lilac and rose bushes, until she’s able to grab hold of the trunk of an apple tree, and disappear into her garden. Reading that section, Taryn’s mother had started to cry. Taryn put her hand on the page so that her mother couldn’t close the book. Close it and put it away. Moominmamma missed the garden in Moominvalley. It was sad. But Taryn’s mother had a garden, a nice one, with standard rose bushes, and a clematis-covered pergola. What business did her mother have comparing herself to a Moomin in a lighthouse on an island?

  Taryn remembered how she had kept the book open, but had cried too, not because she understood her mother’s sadness, but because she was angry at being made to witness it.

  Basil Cornick put his arm around his daughter and failed to notice how subdued she was. He launched into a story. A bit of news.

  ‘It seems that Peter has overlooked my remarks about my misery acting with a green screen. Though he has to have his dig. He called me up on Skype . . .’ Basil was now talking through chuckles—he was one of those rare people who could speak clearly whilst laughing. ‘And there’s his voice coming out of an animatronic bird! A genius thing. There’s a project he’s working on that he says he knows I’ll like. The film is going to be full of animatronic animals. Which means less green screen. And the animals will have operators capable of responding to a performance, reacting to an actor. Anyway, he’s arranged an audition in Wellington in three days’ time. Just to see how I like it, he says.’

  Taryn was happy to hear her father’s tell-all memoir hadn’t alienated his powerful friends. But, she said, didn’t Basil’s TV series have two seasons left to run?

  ‘Darling, you must be the only person on the planet in any doubt about how much more of it there is.’ Basil kissed her cheek. Then he explained. ‘This thing is still in development. I’m keen to see what I can deduce about it from the audition. Peter says I can expect pages tomorrow. They’ll be rough, he says, and I’m not to take too much from them about the story’s eventual shape. If it looks like a kids’ movie in one scene, another will be all terse and gritty. He described it as “a film grounded in the mythical, with flights of nuanced observation about the world we know”. I love it that he reversed the usual order of those things, so the mythical is grounding, and the everyday provides the “flights”. He says his watchwords for the project are “elegance, intrigue, feeling, grandeur and wonder”. Anyway, he insists I’m the man for the job. How nice it is to be the man for the job.’

  Taryn’s father, in his good humour, grabbed dessert from a passing tray, for him and her, tiny cups of crème brûlée with bamboo spoons. Apparently it was so nice to be wanted that tonight no one needed to be careful of their figure.

  ‘Mind you,’ Basil sucked his spoon to achieve the right beat of pause. ‘It’s very hush-hush. Peter prefers I not mention it to anyone. He said, “Don’t even mention it to me,” with a big animatronic wink.’ Basil winked in a mechanical way, then guffawed.

  ‘Do you want me to keep it secret?’

  ‘Well, darling, you don’t really know anyone, do you?’

  Taryn laughed.

  ‘My library-haunting daughter. How convenient it is that film world gossip can stop with you.’ Basil grinned at her in his smugly loving way. Then, ‘And you? Have you made time to visit your grandmother?’

  Ruth Cornick had intended to come to the festival. She’d wanted to see both Taryn and Basil on stage. She’d told Taryn that she’d enjoyed her former son-in-law’s book, and thought his ‘A Few Remarks in Passing’ chapter, which dealt with the death of his daughter and trial of her killer, was tasteful, well-judged and moving. Ruth and Basil had had their differences, but she’d been looking forward to seeing him as well as her only remaining granddaughter. But five weeks before the festival Ruth had broken her ankle doing the Routeburn Track—at eighty.

  ‘Grandma’s still in her moon boot,’ Taryn said. ‘The great aunties and Mum’s cousins are a diligent support crew. She’s healing quickly. The doctors are astonished, she says.’

  ‘Modestly,’ said Basil.

  ‘Yes. She’s always talking about this or that “old lady”, as if she wasn’t one.’

  ‘That’s how she’s survived. Always future-focussed,’ Basil said.

  ‘I’m not,’ Taryn said.

  Her father drew her close. ‘So—you get to sit at Ruth’s feet for a few days?’

  ‘I was going to spend the time going over Grandad’s papers. But Grand
ma got one of the cousins to scan them onto a flash drive. I’ll print it all at my hotel in Sydney to read on the plane home.’

  ‘Is your interest general, or is there something you’re looking for?’

  ‘A scroll box. The Firestarter.’

  Basil shook his head. ‘It doesn’t ring any bells.’

  ‘I’m pretty sure it was what Jason Battle was looking for when he set fire to the library. I used to think he must have meant to destroy it. But I’ve done a little more research—in my own screeds of scanned documents—and apparently legend has it the thing is non-flammable. It’s like a rock in a field of tall grass. If you can’t locate the rock you set fire to the field.’ This was Taryn’s latest insight about the Firestarter, one she was keen to communicate to Shift. Hell setting fires to locate the Firestarter was very different from their wanting to destroy it.

  ‘Wasn’t Battle going on about a Torah?’

  ‘He was doing that too.’

  ‘I’ve never heard mention of this Firestarter.’

  ‘It’s slippery,’ Taryn said. ‘Grandad was a man who tended to call a spade a spade, but when I go through his papers, believe me, I’ll be looking for mentions of shovels, trowels and scoops as well.’

  She had fed her father a line. He assumed an expression both gleeful and haughty, and performed Oscar Wilde’s Gwendolen. ‘I am glad to say that I have never seen a spade. It is obvious that our social spheres have been widely different.’

  Taryn’s solo session was on her second full day on the ground. It was at 11:30, which people told her was a good time. Not too early, nor in the metabolic slump following lunch.

  Taryn planned to leave her hotel at 8:30 and go to someone else’s session before hers, in order to have something in her head other than how little she knew about her own subject. Her book felt like all she could call on—the sum of her knowledge only an inch of topsoil over clay. She’d just have to have faith in the occasion, and her chair.

  All my figurative language has turned to nature, she thought as she waited, tapping her key card on the black granite countertop of the hotel reception. Polar bears. Topsoil.

  ‘Good morning, ma’am,’ said the woman at the reception desk. ‘What can I do for you today?’

  Taryn adjusted yesterday’s message. If her friend Mr Shift came asking after her, could they please give him this ticket to her session. ‘Also this one, to Basil Cornick’s, at four. Tell Mr Shift I expect to be at the Aotea Centre all day.’

  The receptionist slipped the tickets into an envelope and filed it away.

  Taryn walked down the hill to Queen Street. The road was steep and slippery. Fallen leaves were rotting on the pavement. She had gone from spring to autumn, and today that seemed stranger than the transition from the Horse Road to Hyde Park, because it was spring in both those places, as it should be.

  In the green room Taryn’s chair went over the outline of proceedings they’d decided in their emails and their short conversation at the opening night party. In fact there’d been only one email Taryn had answered, late, and she’d agreed to everything he suggested. But at least this way he was still interested in how she’d answer his questions, since she hadn’t already run her answers nervously past him. She did ask him if they might push the whole subject of Nazi book-burning to the end of the discussion—since it inevitably came up in questions from the floor. Then she said, ‘And how about we allow only a little time for those?’

  ‘Why?’

  The sound technician’s knuckles were warm on Taryn’s neck as he adjusted the wire of the microphone looped over her ear. Its little flesh-coloured bud bumped her mouth. He pulled it away, his fingers brushing her lips.

  ‘I don’t want that,’ she said, in rather too definite a way. Then, by way of explanation, she asked her chair if he had been in the first session this morning. ‘In the big auditorium? The Irish poet?’

  Her chair pulled a face. ‘He was unlucky. It was his chair’s fault. You have to be ready to cut those people off.’

  Taryn nodded.

  ‘You have to be ready to say, “Is a question in there somewhere?”’

  The Irish poet had at one point said he believed poetry ‘must effect some change in the way we see the world. Some shift, slight or seismic’. And so of course the first question—and almost the only one, since it occupied so much time, with all its qualifiers and personal testimony—was something like, ‘Why don’t you write about the big subjects? You say you’re not sure what the big subjects are, and what the little subjects are, but that there are little subjects you could write about for the rest of your life. Like saffron. You mentioned saffron.’

  ‘Maybe saffron,’ said the poet, patient. ‘Maybe I could do that. I love those books about salt, or coffee, or cod.’ The poet didn’t say why he loved those books, because many in the audience had read at least one of those books and knew what he meant. Salt, or coffee, cod or saffron could be a microcosm of whole histories, each food having within it cultures of labour and trade, slavery and colonisation, innovation, emigration, fashion and money. Portuguese fishermen setting out across the Atlantic for the Grand Banks after cod were a hologram of the whole human story of epic adventures made of the need to put food on the table.

  The excitable young man didn’t get it. For him there were only the big subjects, as signs and safety wardens.

  Taryn’s chair said, ‘I winced when he asked how the poet could possibly say he could write about saffron for the rest of his life. But I loved how the poet gently interjected, “Saffron—for example.”’

  ‘But then the guy said he read feminist poetry, and poetry by people of colour, and trans people. Poetry with politics in it. How he made a point of doing that. And then he said, “I haven’t read your books and I might find they’re full of beautiful poetry, but where is it coming from?”’

  Taryn’s chair said, ‘I was sitting about two rows away from him on the aisle. He was trembling. It was a confrontation for him. He was fighting the good fight. But look, Taryn, I’m not going to let you be bushwhacked. I’ll be the brute who says, “Excuse me, is there a question in your question?”’

  The technician had finished. He gave Taryn’s shoulder a gentle squeeze.

  She rushed off for a last-minute pee and had to balance the box bit of the microphone on the barrel of the loo-paper holder. In another stall one of the Slam poets was limbering up, more Mandarin teacher than opera singer. ‘Me mi mo mou meou me,’ she moaned.

  They stood at the sink together. Taryn refreshed her lipstick while the performance poet rubbed Vaseline in her nostrils.

  ‘What’s that for?’ Taryn asked.

  ‘I sometimes cry. No one minds water coming out of my eyes, but my nose, not so much.’

  Her nostrils drip-proofed, the performance poet exited the bathroom, already under full sail.

  Taryn gazed at herself and, for the first time since her mother was dying, attempted a prayer. ‘Let everything I know about sacked, ruined, robbed and burnt libraries be available to me, in good order, like a well-catalogued library—Raven of Knowledge, Raven of Memory—if you will, at least for the next hour.’

  With Taryn’s prayer came a sharp explosion of happiness. Her leaden sense of obligation turned to foam, and fizzed away.

  Taryn’s reading went well, and the conversation component of her session. She had a good-sized audience, some of them having come as a way of browsing a book they hadn’t read.

  Taryn told her audience about Hulagu Khan—and stole the Australian journalist’s internet metaphor. She talked about the predations of one faith against another, and books as a casualty of that. About the deliberate or collateral destruction of libraries in preindustrial conflicts, dwelling on what happened to the library on Iona after the failure of William Wallace’s rebellion. She spoke of the two noble libraries bought for forty shillings during the reign of Henry VIII and used as toilet paper—and duly inventoried as a supply that lasted ten years. She told of the librarie
s of Buda and Pest burned by Suleiman the Magnificent. As an example of collateral destruction she mentioned the library destroyed by Thomas Fairfax’s army during the English Civil War. (And flushed, remembering how the Firestarter had passed through that calamity unscathed.) She acknowledged the ruin of the libraries of Strasbourg, Louvain, the Molsheim Charterhouse in Paris. ‘And many more,’ she said, ‘and many more.’

  She gave bare numbers for the casualties of aerial bombing in World War Two—books, with a correlation to buildings and human lives. Beauvais, forty-two thousand books; Tours, two hundred thousand; Douai, one hundred and ten thousand; Chartres, twenty-three thousand books and two thousand manuscripts—some of these, only carbonised by heat, had been preserved and, thanks to modern methods, would one day be transcribed again. Italy, two million books, thirty-nine thousand manuscripts. Great Britain during the Blitz, twenty million books. Germany: ten million in public collections, and the rest, twenty-seven cities’ worth of books.

  She talked about books as collectables, of great price and, by contrast, people’s cherished personal libraries of ‘little or no resale value’, as all estate agents know. Lastly, so that the subject could be managed, Taryn’s chair asked her to speak about Nazi book-burnings.

  ‘First there was a list of books containing “inaccurate information”—or, if you will, “fake news”.’

  Laughter.

  ‘These were banned,’ she said. ‘If a book is deemed a bad character and sent packing it cannot, like a homeless person, go walking the roads looking for succour or pity. You don’t have to feed books but, whereas a hungry person can survive a night out in wet weather, a book will not. An unhoused book is doomed.’