I summoned my courage and nodded. “Of course! I shall see to our rooms.” Sten looked relieved and hurried back into the wagon, but I saw him kiss the tips of his slender fingers as he went, and his lips moved rapidly as if in prayer.
The reins struck the backs of the horses. I turned to the Bainishman beside me, squared my shoulders, and said: “Good afternoon.”
His gold eyes widened. “Good afternoon! What!” He reached out his hand, smiling, and enveloped mine inside it. “Good afternoon to you, telmaro!” He leaned in closer, searching my face for any sign of comprehension. “Do you speak Olondrian? Are you the apkanat?”
I laughed and answered him clumsily enough, but with delight: “I am a merchant from the Tea Islands. My father—he used—he was coming—”
“Yes, yes!” said the gentleman. “But come in out of the sun.” He ushered me toward the hotel along a pathway of pink slate. “So you are the son of the bald gentleman! Yes, I expect him every year! I hope no misfortune…” He trailed off as we went up the stairs to the porch.
“He is dead,” I said.
“Ah!” The gentleman’s brow was creased with such a look of pain that I was sorry I had not spoken with more delicacy. “That is dreadful, dreadful! And he no older than myself! But forgive me—I am called Yedov of Bain.” He put his hand on his heart and bowed, showing me the round patch of pink skin at the top of his skull; when he had risen I bowed also, saying: “Jevick of Tyom.” At this he gave a rich, merry laugh. “Marvelous! Such an education! Ah, but your father was shrewd! Come, step inside.”
He clasped the brass ring on the door and pushed it open, leading me into a vast, cool room, empty but for a vase of white roses on a table. His leather slippers smacked on the tiles, and the tails of his light-green morning coat fluttered as he passed through this hall and into the gloomy corridor beyond. The entire hotel possessed, like its owner, an odor of cedar, old carpets, and heliotrope. Somnolent parlors yawned on either side of the passage, each with a high, marmoreal fireplace gleaming in the shadows and shapeless pieces of furniture pushed against the walls. At length we came through a set of peaked double doors onto a veranda flooded with sun, and I stood blinking in the robust sea light of Bain. “I’m here,” I murmured in the tongue of the north, gripping the ornate curves of the balustrade. The iron was cold on my palms, unyielding, foreign, delightful.
My host offered me a chair—a long, low object covered with a green silk shawl—and hurried off to fetch me “a drop of the country.” I reclined on the chair, breathing in the scent of the garden, the perfume of exhausted pansies mingled with the odors of dust and ancient plaster. The sky was deep blue, the balconies like necklaces. I lowered my gaze: the arm of my chair with its cover of pear-green cloth seemed to pulse in the tireless light. There was my hand, narrow, dark, languid. In Olondria. When my host returned with the wine, I had drifted into a blissful sleep.
I awoke rumpled and sweaty and sat up, evening light on my face, thinking of books. It was the kebma hour, named for the bread that is eaten at dusk: across the garden I could see lights in the windows, and in one overgrown yard a woman’s voice called insistently: “Valeth, come in.” I started up, turned, and went into the hotel, knocking against furniture in the gloom until a light in the corridor led me to my host. He sat at a table laden with food, his face and oiled hair shining in the rays of a splendid table lamp in a netting of pink crystal.
“Come in, come in,” he cried, beaming and standing up so swiftly he bumped the table, provoking a gentle clatter of glass. “I didn’t like to wake you, but I’m glad you’ve arrived at last. I don’t mind telling you that our conversation has been strained!”
With a wave of his hand he indicated his sole dinner companion: my steward, Sten. Colorless, doleful, looking shrunken beside the tall Bainishman, Sten sat before a plate heaped with an array of foreign delicacies, rose-colored claws and forbidding blobs of aspic.
“Sten,” I said, trying not to laugh.
“Ekawi,” he returned in a mournful tone. “The gentleman insisted I sit. I felt I could not refuse.”
“No, no, you did right. Listen, Sten, I need money, Olondrian money. Just give me half of what you’ve got in the purse.”
The Bainishman, still standing, resting both hands on the table, glanced from me to Sten and back again with a look of indulgent good humor, but when he saw Sten pull out the purse and count a number of bright triangular coins into my hand, his brows contracted in dismay.
“What! What’s this? What do you want with money? You don’t need money in my house,” he exclaimed, either forgetting that his house was a hotel, or overcome with native hospitality to the extent that he intended not to charge me for the meal.
“I’m sorry. I can’t stay.”
“But where are you going? I have sefdalima, real sefdalima from the country, either with or without anchovies! Come, telmaro, I beg you, you haven’t eaten!” And at last, in despair, as I opened a door: “Not that way! The other door, if you want the street…”
“Thank you,” I called out over my shoulder, hurrying down the passage, my pockets jingling. I soon came out into the antechamber with the white roses. Then all I had to do was open the door, and there it was: sea air, long cypress shadows, the racket of carriage wheels, Bain.
I ran down the front steps of the hotel and into the light of the evening, dazed as a moth released from a dark bedroom. Strangers jostled me, merchants in short cloaks with well-fed, shaven cheeks, students in colorful jackets and the tasseled shirts of scribes. The glad spirit of the kebma hour was awakening under the trees: the cafés were crowded with diners laughing through clouds of cigar smoke, tearing the flat, oily loaves of kebma, rinsing their fingers in brass bowls, clapping their hands to call the waiters. I darted across the street, dancing to keep away from the carriages, and pressed my face to a window where books lay blanketed in dust. There they were, just as I had imagined, open, within easy reach. I pushed the door, setting off a soft bell, and entered the shop.
Then it was like those tales in which there are sudden transformations: “He found himself in a field, and felt that it was a very vast country.” It was like the story in which Efaldar awakes in the City of Zim: “There were walls of amethyst round him, and his couch was upon a dais.” In the shop there was a dim, ruddy light and little space to move, for the shelves rose everywhere, filled with books with their names written on the spines: The Merchant of Veim. Lyrics Written While Traveling on the Canals. The Secrets of Mandrake Root and the Benefits Derived Therefrom. I ran my fingers over the books, slid them from the shelves, opened them, turned the pages, breathing in line after line of mysterious words, steeped in voluptuous freedom like Isvalha among the nymphs of the well, a knot in my throat with the taste of unswallowed tears. There were so many books. There were more than my master had carried in his sea chest. The shop seemed impossible, otherworldly, a cave of wonders; yet it was not even a true bookshop like the ones I would discover later, lining both sides of the Street of Poplars. It was one of those little shops, tucked into various corners of Bain, which sell portraits of popular writers and tobacco as well as books, whose main profits come from the newspapers, whose volumes are poorly bound, and which always seem to be failing, yet are as perennial as the flowers. It is unlikely that anyone before or since has experienced, in that humble establishment, a storm of emotion as powerful as mine. I collected stack after stack of books, seizing, rejecting, replacing, giddy with that sweet exhalation: the breath of parchments.