I could imagine each of my colleagues passing through the airport in the Republic of K. as temporary visitors who would eventually make their way to somewhere else, conveyed from arrival to departure, the glass partitions of empty concourses, escalators that will continue to run into the middle of future nights. On the day that both sides of my extended family gathered at the airport tables, a temporary visitor to that country might have looked down from the continually moving steps as he was transported into a higher dimension of the structure and witnessed a scene that is remembered by no one else in my family who is alive, and which will be deleted through my work at the Centre de Recherche. In the scene, my grandmother from one side of the family asks my grandfather on the other side of the family, the author of our plans to leave the Republic of K., why he decided to disturb our lives. I don’t remember the particulars of his answer, though it involved some aspect of the collapsing economy, the freedom afforded by education, erziehung zur freiheit—even, improbably, the International Monetary Fund. What I could recover from this forgotten scene was not my grandfather’s answer but the question that incited the answer, I mean the timing of the question that incited the answer, delayed until the last moment. Minutes later, my parents, brother and I slipped behind the paper screen that blocked the view into the international security area, as a printed character disappears when a page is lifted and turned, bleached fibers tearing against the motion of the hand, the vaulting lines of steel that would remind someone, under different circumstances, of those great cathedrals of Europe, burned and rebuilt with international capital, as my brother and I take off our sneakers to board the airplane that will disappear into the atmosphere.
With a hand on the elastic railing of the rising escalator, the visitor looks down into the food court. He sees, through the layers of glass, the entirety of my life in that moment. The years are ground up in the unseen gears of the escalator and recombined into a passing impression that barely registers in his memory (I’ve been to the old airport and the new airport, the new airport is nice…). Outside the window he sees the edges of Gwanghado, where the French had arrived to the Peninsula on their punitive campaign, the pillaged documents attesting to my universal human heritage conveyed, through a pathway as unattractively tangled as my own, to the Bibliothèque Nationale, where the secular values of the Republic remain stored. In their peculiar practice of politics, my colleagues spoke of their split identities between the French and the English languages, a split that ran through the foundations of the faculty of law, which spoke to us in long flowing emails that would lurch suddenly into the French language partway through a paragraph or even a single sentence, tracing the airflow behind a jet’s passing wake or the air-conditioned chambers preserving the Jikji in the Manuscrits Orientaux division, a relatively unpopular section of the Bibliothèque Nationale which by that very fact was all the more essential, setting the stage for the discovery of the document by a librarian who was a foreigner in Paris the same way I was a foreigner in Montreal. In 1989, the French president had promised the return of the universal human heritage on the condition that French rail technology be sent to the Republic of K. in a second chance at transforming the infrastructure of the Peninsula in Victor Collin de Plancy’s vision (the portico installed at the Saint Antoine entrance of the metro Square-Victoria was, like O.’s distorted perception of me, a gift that originated in Paris). There never was a French railway in the Republic of K., but the universal human heritage remains in the archive, preserving the Frenchness that O. saw everywhere except for the places associated with me. The railway, she once said to me, remains an obsession of mine, recalling the journeys by train that she had taken across Europe, her national identity card proving European status and the steel interconnections below expanding the world in which I did not exist to more distant zones of the continent: fields of lavender blurring into olive groves and crumbling sections of Roman masonry, the lost cargo of the Mediterranean sea.
Drago
Michael Melgaard
I got a job at a used bookstore on Yonge. It was one of the last ones in town that had a back-room porn section. The front of the shop sold old paperbacks, the till was at the back in front of a shelf that separated the porn room from the rest of the store. The porn section just sold DVDs and took up twice the space as the books. It wasn’t much of a bookstore.
Greg ran the shop. When I’d dropped off a resume, he told me his guy had just quit and asked me if I was comfortable selling porn. When I guessed I was, he had me start a trial shift right then. He showed me how to use the till, how the porn DVDs were filed—the cases in the back were all empty, the discs kept behind the till in numbered binders—and what to pay for used books (a dollar for paperbacks, two if they were any good). When I asked what I should do if someone brought in a rare first edition, Greg said, “You’re not going to have to worry about that.”
He watched me ring through a couple of customers and buy a bag of paperbacks before he said, “OK, you got the job. I’m going to get some food and catch a movie. I’ll come back at the end of the shift and show you how to cash out.”
On his way out, he added, “Oh, and there’s this guy who comes in named Drago. Big guy with an accent. He’s a friend of the owners. He gets 75 percent off whatever he buys.” I nodded. “And do what he says, okay?” I was still thinking about what I should do if someone brought in a first edition of The Great Gatsby, so that didn’t register as a strange thing for Greg to have said.
Drago didn’t show up until a few shifts later. I was filing porn discs into the binders when a big guy in track pants and a long, soft leather jacket came in. He said, “You’re new?”
I told him I was.
He said, “I’m Drago. I get a deal.” He leaned over the counter and looked behind me. I leaned back. “The other guy knows me,” he said. I thought he was maybe looking for a note behind the till that said Drago gets a deal.
I said, “He told me.”
“Good. Good.” He leaned back to his side of the counter and said, “I’m Drago.” We shook hands. He squeezed mine hard and pulled me toward him at the same time. He looked me steadily in the eye. He said, “You.”
I said, “Nice to meet you.”
And he said, “You.”
“Oh, I’m Matt.”
He let go of my hand and nodded. He said, “Matt.” and went into the back. He had to tilt his body sideways to get through the entrance.
Ten minutes later he came out with a stack of DVDs. He said, “I get a deal, the other guy knows.”
“Greg told me.”
I rang it up, hit the discount button, the total came up. He said, “I don’t pay tax.” He leaned over the counter to see my side of the register display. I couldn’t figure out how to take tax off. I pressed some buttons. He said, “No, no. No tax. The other guy knows.”
I voided the sale and started over. The tax got added on and Drago said, “No tax. I don’t pay tax.” He was right over the counter. I voided everything and put the numbers into a calculator I found under the desk. I told him the total. He pulled a roll of bills out of his jacket pocket and paid. I handed him his change and after he left I rang up the sale on the register with the tax and wrote a note that explained why the till was a few dollars short. I put the note in the till and at the end of the night taped it to the deposit bag.