Then I thought of Leitner. I sent him an email saying what I wanted. I told him the online price, adding that I wouldn’t be able to pay that much. He’d be asking at least the same, I thought, and I liked the idea of putting him in a tight spot.
Why?
Good question, Jürgen. I don’t know.
Leitner’s answer came straight back. “No problem. Monday? Where?”
It was as if he’d just been waiting for my request. I was startled, but of course I couldn’t go back on the deal now. I suggested a coffee shop near my apartment, early in the morning so that the whole thing would look like a meeting between two acquaintances before work.
He was waiting for me, with a black coffee in front of him, the paper bag beside him and in it, of course, the gear he had brought me.
“Not so simple, was it?” I said.
“It depends what you mean by simple,” he replied, pushing the bag over the table.
I risked glancing inside. It was indeed the hard version of Polansky’s Dating Miss Universe. The bill was with it. He was asking only a fraction of the online price.
“How did you manage that?” I asked.
“The other one’s on the house,” said Leitner, instead of answering me.
Sure enough, there was more gear in the bag. The School for Fools, by a manufacturer called Sokolov.
The name meant nothing to me. And how on earth did Leitner know that I spoke Russian?
Directly after that meeting, when we said not another word about business, I went home, drew the curtains over the window and inhaled The School for Fools from beginning to end. I still think of it as one of the best trips I ever had in my life. A wild, anarchic experience that transferred me to a deeply Russian frame of mind, a trip full of symbols and signs and fine irony.
And how uncanny, for heaven’s sake, was Leitner? A man who knew his customer’s habits so well after a single meeting—where do you find that kind of thing these days? Spoiling the customer by giving him presents, keeping his interest going with little surprises. I could see through the method, but I thought: this is great—I like presents and surprises.
I was already giving Leitner my next order. “Something like Sokolov, but from the USA?”
This time the answer was some while in coming. Just as I feared that my wish had been presumptuous or too vague, Leitner sent me a list of substances from ten manufacturers, one from each, with no further comments. It began with a name I knew: Barry Hannah. The following names, too, were familiar to me. I had something by every one of them in the room where I keep my supplies. But I didn’t know the particular substances enumerated by Leitner. It was as if, with the contents of my shelves before his eyes, he had been completing my collection.
Under the list he wrote, “Where and when?”
Once again we met early at the coffee shop. Once again he had brought the stuff in a paper bag, and once again the price was almost too good. I had ordered the first three on the list, sight unseen. Number four was Leitner’s last free gift. Now that I’d fallen for him, he didn’t need to make me any more presents.
That morning he left quite soon. Looking through the window, I watched him go: jeans, shirt and a backpack, an inconspicuous man holding his phone, speaking briefly into it, putting it away again, and then he had disappeared from my field of vision.
* * *
Exactly a year has passed since our first meeting. I’ve never been in his shop again. Instead, I enjoy the exclusive attentions of a personal dealer who has the nerve to persuade me not to buy substances if he isn’t sure of their effect. When I asked him for Purity, his answer was to send me a link to a YouTube video over seven minutes long, showing an old propeller aircraft failing to take off.
I thought I’d like to tell you about my dealer.
I’m not new here now, and I am still distrustful. I don’t know anything about him. True, Leitner did once tell me he’s married and has two children, but then next time he sold me a substance that immersed me in images of an unhappy marriage, as if to say: it doesn’t matter who I am, only the substance counts.
Once I asked what his own fix is. He looked genuinely surprised that I wanted to know. He spoke hesitantly, as if afraid it would lose some of its effect if he described it to me. It was strange stuff. Strange to me. It included Danielewski. I got hold of that myself, tried the first pages and put it aside, disturbed.
I’m still waiting for him to put a foot wrong. Week after week we meet early in the morning, week after week I’m not disappointed: McCarthy, Ruff, Saunders. Ahrens, Benn, Atwood.
I ask you, is there anything better than a dealer who can get you to consume more and more of his stuff?
Yes, how about spring?
Thanks, Johanna, that’s true.
Life is too short for bad trips. As they say. My dealer would never say that. My dealer hates platitudes. His answer is: “When and where?”
In a paper bag: language, courage, magic. A bit of Cheever, a touch of Claire Keegan, and the first volume of Game of Thrones.
In spring I’m going to retreat into privacy and consume them all one after another. What better habit could I have?
Translated from the German by Anthea Bell
All that Offers a Happy Ending Is a Fairy Tale
YIYUN LI
This is a fairy tale about a bookshop, and to tell the story I have to start long before the bookshop came into my life. In the beginning I did not know there was such a thing as a bookshop. I knew books, and bookshelves. Our family and families around all had bookshelves—they were the same size, dark brown, issued, along with other furniture, by the research institute where my father worked as a nuclear physicist. We had been assigned two bookshelves, one claimed by my grandfather, who shared a bedroom with my sister and me and whose books were stitched bound, their pages yellow and flimsy—these he had accumulated throughout his scholarly and editorial career, though I understand now it would be more accurate to say that these books had been rescued from a downward journey from an editor and scholar to an almost-enemy of the state. (He and his two sons had fought against the Communist army in the civil war.) On the other bookshelf were books from my parents’ youths. There were Russian textbooks and treasures—one of them, I was told, was Lermontov’s A Hero of Our Time, which my parents used as a photo album with many finger-sized, black and white pictures of people from before they were married and had children. There were my father’s textbooks from university on classical mechanics and quantum physics. There were a handful of books that I had read and reread during elementary school: revolutionary novels (The Golden Road, The Tale of Red Flag, The Bright Sunny Day), Gorky’s autobiography, The Gadfly by Ethel Voynich. (The last of these I could almost memorize in parts; there were a few illustrations, exotic but pretty, of Catholic priests, dark confessionals and a young man butterfly-hunting in an Italian valley; there was a picture of Voynich herself, her Irish face equally foreign.)
Other families had books, too, mostly the same ones, though in second grade a friend discovered a copy of Arabian Nights on her parents’ bookshelf. It was the first children’s book—or so I believed it to be—that I had encountered, and I convinced the friend to lend it to me. Three days, she had me promise, and I devoured the book in three days, thrilled by the threat of impending execution but also confused by the abundance of cucumbers and naked people.
In the beginning it did not occur to me to ask from where the books had come onto people’s bookshelves. Of course I’d seen new books, in a department store near us, though it would be more accurate to call it a general store. Everything was kept behind counters, and one had to ask a shop assistant—the most impatient people you would ever meet, if you grew up in Beijing in the 1970s and 1980s and knew the shop assistants as I did—to see a pair of shoes, a roll of fabric, a blouse, or a water kettle. On Sundays, which was the only weekend day, the store was packed. When I read in fiction now about a crowded bar—“three or four deep”—I see the tiny department
store. It was a battle to get the attention of a shop assistant, and a lost battle if you dared to ask to see alternatives.
The book department was not as crowded, and sometimes my parents left me there while they pushed through the crowds to fill the shopping list. It was a hopeless affair to watch the books from a distance, as they were either in the glass cases or on the shelves behind the counter. I did not have money. The books, I understood without being yelled at, were to be paid for before being touched.
One had to look elsewhere for reading material. We lived on the ground floor of an apartment block, and twice a day the postman delivered mail into a green, wooden box, which did not have a lock, next to our door. Newspapers, on subscription, arrived daily. Postcards, drably coloured and issued by the postal service, came regularly—it was cheaper to send a postcard than a letter. Because I was a perpetual loiterer by the mailbox, and because I could retreat at the first sign of danger, I read the newspapers and postcards when they came in. I read envelopes too, memorizing the senders’ names and addresses and making up words for what would be in the letters. A letter had to have a good reason for being written. My grandmother—my father’s mother—wrote once a year. Unusually for her generation of village women, she could write beautifully, though her husband, a poor peasant from the mountain, was completely illiterate—one of those people who would have to press a red-inked thumb on any official paper rather than signing his name. Of course I read my grandmother’s letters, too; I knew where my father kept them in a neat stack. It always started with this old-fashioned greeting: Ling-Zhi, mine son, seeing this letter is as seeing mine face. Ling-Zhi was my father’s milk-name, used by my grandmother only. That he had a mother was a renewed surprise when I reread her letters. She spoke of her pigs and her chickens in the letters, and of my father’s younger siblings, some of whom he had barely known because he had left home at ten to seek an education. He was the first one in his village to go to a university, and it was said that his mother could only afford a pair of socks, so the villagers had pooled the money to buy a suitcase. He had travelled from southern China to the north with a pair of socks in an empty suitcase.
If you were like me, you would know the obsession of the compulsive reader: every street sign; every bottle label; the newspaper wrapping the fish and dripping liquid; the soles of new shoes; decades-old slogans printed on abandoned houses; the daily expenses my father recorded in a notebook. On a bus you would memorize the serial number and manufacturing date of the seat in front of you. In the hallway of the paediatrics department you would sneak to the registration desk and look at the names and ages printed on the medical records of all those coughing children. In third grade when I had measles and was quarantined for three weeks at home, I finished the Complete Manual of Barefoot Medics. It was published in 1969, a thick volume of eight hundred pages, with almost all the diseases possible or beyond imagination, with gruesome descriptions and even more gruesome illustrations. When you have measles you are not supposed to read or watch television (we didn’t have a set, in any case) or open the curtain to see the daylight: the eyes of a measles-afflicted child are easily destroyed if care is not taken. This last fact I both read in the barefoot medics’ manual and understood through my own experience: my parents had taped a piece of fabric onto the bookshelf to keep all books unavailable, but they had left the medical manual at large, which was constantly used as a guide to my recovery. I lost my good eyesight after the measles; it’s one thing that’s been all the way downhill since then.
No, I was not the Sleeping Beauty. I would never close my eyes if a book were within reach.
The profession I fantasized about was not a bookshop owner as you might imagine (even if I’d discovered what a bookshop was), or the shop assistant behind the book counter. Not every Cinderella wants to go to the ball. Rather, my dream was to become a postwoman. Once my grandfather and I walked past the district post office in the afternoon. After a beep, the gate opened and more than a hundred postmen and postwomen rode their green bicycles out, all bells clanging, all mailbags on their crossbars plump. I didn’t know how to ride a bike then—I was a bookish child with an awkward ten-year-old body—and it had become clear to me that to learn to ride a bicycle was imperative to my happiness: imagine all the postcards and newspapers and envelopes that I could find in my mailbag.
Soon after I started middle school I was an expert on a bicycle, and I could manoeuvre the route to school: the streets were narrow and buses were wide and horse-drawn flatbeds were slow, and sometimes men would catch up and ride next to you, whispering lewd messages into your ear. But, all things considered, life was spectacularly good: upon entering middle school I was chosen to be a librarian’s assistant. I had not set foot in a library until then, and two roomfuls of books on tall shelves almost promised the happily-ever-after. Twice a week another student assistant and I stayed until five thirty, giving out books through a window to the many hands who fought to give us paper slips with Dewey numbers written on them (each student was allowed to put down five numbers at a time and was allowed to check out one book). After closing, we shelved the books, cleaned out the slips left on the floor, and then were allowed our privilege: we could check out two books.
Within a few months, I had finished all the books on the literature shelves (the 800s, as I began to think of them). They were of uneven quality, good only for the undiscriminating palate of a hungry mind. But the fact that one could have access to so many books—that was enough to celebrate about growing up.
The only trouble I had with my middle school education then was English. A majority of my classmates came from a cluster of government and military agencies nearby: the Chinese Military Academy, the headquarters of Military Intelligence, the Ministry of National Security and an army hospital. Children like me, who came from a more civilian and common background, would have a hard time understanding their upbringing: having household staff; parents travelling abroad on journalistic missions (spies, really, I was told); buses to deliver them to school and pick them up after; free English lessons long before they had entered middle school. The first week of middle school I cried every night: I couldn’t memorize half of the ABC song, I had trouble telling the difference between “I” and “l”, and if words shared common letters and appeared in the same lesson I became hopelessly confused. Words that tripped me in each other’s disguise: ruler and rubber; pain and gain (“no pain, no gain”); four and five; ear and year.
You need an English–Chinese dictionary, the librarian—seeing that I tried to write out every English lesson ten times every day—told me. I didn’t even know there was something called an English–Chinese dictionary. My only access to English then was in our textbook, which, other than letters and words, had sentences like “Long live the Chinese Communist Party” and “A friend in need is a friend indeed”.
Where does one find a dictionary, I asked her, and she told me about this bookshop called the Foreign Language Bookshop. Her directions were so detailed and precise that I had little trouble finding the place: near a railway junction, in an alley, behind a food market, and flanked by a shoe-repair stall and a stand selling fresh tofu. All librarians, I sometimes think, are fairy godmothers in disguise.
The entrance to the bookshop, not wider than our apartment door, led to a narrow and long space. There were shelves of dictionaries and textbooks—English, German, French, Japanese, Russian, Spanish, Italian, and some others. It was the first bookshop that I walked into, and I was overwhelmed and overjoyed that here, as in the library, I could take any book I wanted off a shelf. There were books published by the Foreign Language Press, and they all had oil paintings as covers, which was foreign to me. A Tale of Two Cities, The Mill on the Floss, The Woman in White, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer—these were the few books I remember, their Chinese titles printed on the cover too. I opened a book randomly; the text was entirely in English. I understood why my grandmother called her husband “bright-eyed and
unseeing”—this must be how my illiterate grandfather felt when he saw any written words. However, I did recognize all the “I”s standing alone, while an “l” never appeared by itself. Even that encouraged me. Imagine: some day I’d be able to read these words and sentences!
At the end of the shelves there was an entrance into a second room, with a heavy cotton curtain separating the two sections of the bookshop. Next to the curtain, written in many languages, was a warning: Foreign Visitors Not Allowed.
If you knew (and know) China as I’ve known it, you would see the oddity and humour in that sign. When we grew up we called all foreigners “international friends”, and to make them feel welcome and special was a political priority. In college, my best friend, when courted by a Korean student whom she did not want to see, was chased down the hallway by the dorm auntie; “an international friend” was waiting at the building entrance, she told my friend, and her refusal to meet the man would leave an unseemly “international reflection” on our school. Chances are, if you are a foreigner in China you are as close to royalty as you will ever be (unless you are a genuine prince or princess); it’s still a land of fairy tales if you know where to look.
In any case, a place that did not allow foreigners to enter was one I must see, and enter I did. Curiouser and curiouser! The room beyond the curtain, a square not much bigger than the bedroom my sister and I shared with our grandfather, was full of books that didn’t look like books. There were no shelves, and everything sat in high piles. One had to pick one’s way carefully to avoid causing an avalanche. A man sitting at a desk by the entrance looked at me and returned to his paperwork. There were not many people in this room, and I must not have looked like someone who could afford or understand the treasures in this room.
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