He fell silent and then hammered home his point. 'You can be a Lector, Jon.'
Jon stared at Iversen. The smile on the old man's lips was gone and his expression was filled with a solemnity that seemed quite unsuited to the otherwise jovial man. Jon threw out his arms towards the bookshelves surrounding them. 'But I told you I didn't feel a thing.'
'In most people the ability is latent,' said Iversen. 'Some never discover it, others are born with an active talent, while still others can become activated by chance. But most demonstrate some form of talent in that direction, either through their choice of profession or in the way they perform their job.' He gave Jon a searching look. 'What about you, Jon? Have you ever experienced situations where your reading aloud has influenced or spellbound people?'
Even though Jon had the feeling he was affecting people when he presented his closing arguments, he had never noticed anything special about this. No channels or energy or charges of any kind – it was merely a reading technique, nothing more.
'Maybe I'm better at reading aloud than most people,' Jon admitted. 'But that doesn't necessarily mean anything.'
'You're right. A person can have a talent for reading aloud without being a Lector.'
Jon crossed his arms. 'Luca was a Lector?'
Iversen nodded. 'The best.'
'And the friends of Libri di Luca… Are they Lectors?'
'Most of them, yes.'
Jon pictured the congregation in the chapel and tried to imagine them as a silent crowd of conspirators instead of the motley group that he had perceived. He shook his head.
'There's one thing that I don't understand,' he said. 'If it's all about being able to read… what is a dyslexic doing here?'
'Katherina?' said Iversen with a smile. 'She's a whole different story.'
5
Katherina sat down on the top step to the balcony and drew her legs up so that she could rest her chin on her knees. From here she had a view of the whole shop and, more importantly, the front door. Even though it was now a week since Luca's death, she still expected the door to open and the diminutive Italian to step into the bookshop with a contented look on his face, as if he were coming home instead of starting a work-day. For the past couple of years she'd had that feeling too when she pushed open the door and heard the bells welcoming her inside. The sound of those bells put her in a different frame of mind, a state of calm and peace, and she imagined the same had been true for Luca.
But now all that was going to change.
Her gaze fell on the section of railing that had been replaced. The carpenter, who was a friend of Iversen's, had done his best to match the tone of the wood with the old railing, but it was still obvious that repairs had recently been made. It would take a couple of years before the difference was no longer discernible.
Katherina couldn't hear the voices of Iversen and Luca's son from the basement any more, and she surmised they had withdrawn to the library. She'd heard about the son for the first time after Luca's death, and it was news that took her completely by surprise. After ten years in the bookshop and, she thought, a close friendship with both Iversen and Luca, the news had suddenly made her feel like an outsider. Iversen claimed that Luca had had his reasons for keeping the information secret – even Iversen didn't know what all the reasons were – but it had apparently had something to do with his wife's death.
At the funeral Katherina had had a chance to study the son closely. He looked like his father, though he was significantly taller than Luca had been. The facial features were the same, the dark eyes, thick eyebrows and almost black hair, all of which confirmed her assumption that Luca must have been an attractive man in his younger days.
Katherina was not the only one who was surprised to learn that Luca had a son. When Iversen presented the situation to the Bibliophile Society, the news was evidently as much of a shock to many of them as it was to her. The meeting had lasted a long time, and afterwards the only thing Iversen was willing to reveal was that they had decided to include the son. Katherina gathered this went against Iversen's own wishes, but she hadn't delved any more deeply into it.
Downstairs he was most likely in the process of discussing the whole matter. It was no easy task to explain how everything fitted together to an outsider, but Iversen was the best person to do it. She wondered which explanation he would use this time. Probably the one about the channel. A bit too technical for her taste. Katherina had been forced to come up with her own explanation until years later she finally found others who suffered from the same affliction – or gift, depending on how you looked at it, or rather at what moment you happened to ask her.
Iversen had a different perspective on these abilities because he was a transmitter. Katherina was a receiver. Two sides of the same coin, he would probably tell Jon, but for Katherina there was a significant difference that could not be explained by either reversing polarities or flipping coins. As Iversen was in the process of explaining, there were two types of Lectors: transmitters like himself, who could influence those who listened to a reading and were thus able to affect the listeners' perceptions of and attitudes towards the text.
The other type were receivers, like Katherina.
The first time she became aware of this, she was barely conscious. She had been in a car accident and was badly injured, as were her parents. For several days she lay under anaesthesia in a big hospital bed with her small, fragile body broken in pieces and held together with screws and plaster. It was in this state that she experienced someone reading aloud to her. Through the drug-induced fog she heard a clear voice telling a story about an unusually passive man who let his life go by without taking any real part in it or having any opinions about what was happening around him. Even though she was anaesthetized, she was still conscious enough to feel surprised. Partly she wondered who the calm voice belonged to, and partly she was amazed by the strange story, which she didn't understand at all. It wasn't funny or sweet or exciting, but the compelling force of the voice held her attention and led her through the tale.
When she was finally brought out of the anaesthesia, she had other things to think about. Her parents were in very bad shape and unable to visit her. She also had her own injuries, which only slowly began to heal under the thick layers of bandages – a subject that was off-limits for the relatives who visited her with teary eyes and quavering voices.
As she regained consciousness, she started hearing voices. Not the same voice that had read to her, but various voices that seemed almost to merge together, voices that tormented her during the day and kept her awake at night. Sometimes the voices were accompanied by glimpses of images, impressions that forced themselves on her, demanding her attention, only to vanish as suddenly as they had appeared. One day she asked the nurse if she could hear the rest of the story. She was longing for the sound of the calm voice that had kept her company when she was under anaesthesia. The nurse stared at her in surprise. No one had read anything to her. It was true that she had shared the room with an elderly man while she was unconscious, but he couldn't have been the one who read to her. He'd had his vocal cords removed because he had cancer of the throat.
Her family were very indulgent. They knew that being separated from her parents was naturally very hard on the girl, and the voices she claimed were tormenting her must be a delayed reaction to the trauma. Her mother's condition improved, and she was able to visit Katherina, but her father was still on a respirator, and it wasn't certain whether he would survive. Everyone treated Katherina with the greatest care and understanding, but as time passed and she was discharged from the hospital along with her mother, those around her began to think that her mind must have suffered permanent damage after all.