“Are they all first editions?” he asked.
“First editions or manuscript copies. First editions are fine for our purposes, though. Manuscripts are merely a bonus.”
“I should like to look, if you don’t mind,” said Mr. Berger. “I won’t touch any more of them. I’d just like to see them.”
“Later, perhaps,” said the gent. “You still haven’t told me why you’re here.”
Mr. Berger swallowed hard. He had not spoken aloud of his encounters since the unfortunate conversation with Inspector Carswell on that first night.
“Well,” he said, “I saw a woman commit suicide in front of a train, and then sometime later I saw her try to do the same thing again, but I stopped her. I thought she might have come in here. In fact, I’m almost certain that she did.”
“That is unusual,” said the gent.
“That’s what I thought,” said Mr. Berger.
“And do you have any idea of this woman’s identity?”
“Not exactly,” said Mr. Berger.
“Would you care to speculate?”
“It will seem odd.”
“No doubt.”
“You may think me mad.”
“My dear fellow, we hardly know each other. I wouldn’t dare to make such a judgment until we were better acquainted.”
Which seemed fair enough to Mr. Berger. He had come this far; he might as well finish the journey.
“It did strike me that she might be Anna Karenina.” At the last minute, Mr. Berger hedged his bets. “Or a ghost, although she did appear remarkably solid for a spirit.”
“She wasn’t a ghost,” said the gent.
“No, I didn’t really believe so. There was the issue of her substantiality. I suppose you’ll tell me now that she wasn’t Anna Karenina either.”
The old gent tugged at his moustache again. His face betrayed his thoughts as he carried on an internal debate with himself.
Finally, he said, “No, in all conscience I could not deny that she is Anna Karenina.”
Mr. Berger leaned in closer and lowered his voice significantly. “Is she a loony? You know…someone who thinks that she’s Anna Karenina?”
“No. You’re the one who thinks that she’s Anna Karenina, but she knows that she’s Anna Karenina.”
“What?” said Mr. Berger, somewhat thrown by the reply. “So you mean she is Anna Karenina? But Anna Karenina is simply a character in a book by Tolstoy. She isn’t real.”
“But you just told me that she was.”
“No, I told you that the woman I saw seemed real.”
“And that you thought she might be Anna Karenina.”
“Yes, but you see, it’s all very well saying that to oneself or even presenting it as a possibility, but one does so in the hope that a more rational explanation might present itself.”
“But there isn’t a more rational explanation, is there?”
“There might be,” said Mr. Berger. “I just can’t think of one at present.”
Mr. Berger was starting to feel light-headed.
“Would you like a cup of tea?” said the old gent.
“Yes,” said Mr. Berger, “I rather think I would.”
CHAPTER
TEN
They sat in the gentleman’s living room, drinking tea from china cups and eating some fruitcake that he kept in a tin. A fire had been lit, and a lamp burned in a corner. The walls were decorated with oils and watercolors, all of them very fine and very old. The style of a number of them was familiar to Mr. Berger. He wouldn’t have liked to swear upon it, but he was fairly sure that there was at least one Turner, a Constable, and two Romneys — a portrait and a landscape — among their number.
The old gentleman had introduced himself as Mr. Gedeon, and he had been the librarian at the Caxton for more than forty years. His job, he informed Mr. Berger, was “to maintain and, as required, increase the collection; to perform restorative work on the volumes where necessary; and, of course, to look after the characters.”
It was this last phrase that made Mr. Berger choke slightly on his tea.
“The characters?” he said.
“The characters,” confirmed Mr. Gedeon.
“What characters?”
“The characters from the novels.”
“You mean they’re alive?”
Mr. Berger was beginning to wonder not only about his own sanity but that of Mr. Gedeon as well. He felt as though he had wandered into some strange bibliophilic nightmare. He kept hoping that he would wake up at home with a headache to find that he had been inhaling gum from one of his own volumes.
“You saw one of them,” said Mr. Gedeon.
“Well, I saw someone,” said Mr. Berger. “I mean, I’ve seen chaps dressed up as Napoleon at parties, but I didn’t go home thinking I’d met Napoleon.”
“We don’t have Napoleon,” said Mr. Gedeon.
“No?”
“No. Only fictional characters here. It gets a little complicated with Shakespeare, I must admit. That’s caused us some problems. The rules aren’t hard and fast. If they were, this whole business would run a lot more smoothly. But then, literature isn’t a matter of rules, is it? Think how dull it would be if it was, eh?”
Mr. Berger peered into his teacup, as though expecting the arrangement of the leaves to reveal the truth of things. When they did not, he put the cup down, clasped his hands, and resigned himself to whatever was to come.
“All right,” he said. “Tell me about the characters…”
It was, said Mr. Gedeon, all to do with the public. At some point certain characters became so familiar to readers — and, indeed, to many nonreaders — that they reached a state of existence independent of the page.
“Take Oliver Twist, for example,” said Mr. Gedeon. “More people know of Oliver Twist than have ever read the work to which he gave his name. The same is true for Romeo and Juliet, and Robinson Crusoe, and Don Quixote. Mention their names to the even averagely educated man or woman on the street and, regardless of whether they’ve ever encountered a word of the texts in question, they’ll be able to tell you that Romeo and Juliet were doomed lovers, that Robinson Crusoe was marooned on an island, and Don Quixote was involved in some business with windmills. Similarly, they’ll tell you that Macbeth got above himself, that Ebenezer Scrooge came right in the end, and that D’Artagnan, Athos, Aramis, and Porthos were the names of the musketeers.
“Admittedly, there’s a limit to the number of those who achieve that kind of familiarity. They end up here as a matter of course. But you’d be surprised by how many people can tell you something of Tristram Shandy or Tom Jones or Jay Gatsby. I’m not sure where the point of crossover is, to be perfectly honest. All I know is that at some point a character becomes sufficiently famous to pop into existence, and when they do so they materialize in or near Caxton Private Lending Library & Book Depository. They always have, ever since the original Mr. Caxton set up the first depository shortly before his death in 1492. According to the history of the library, he did so when some of Chaucer’s pilgrims turned up on his doorstep in 1477.”
“Some of them?” said Mr. Berger. “Not all?”
“Nobody remembers all of them,” said Mr. Gedeon. “Caxton found the Miller, the Reeve, the Knight, the Second Nun, and the Wife of Bath all arguing in his yard. Once he became convinced that they were not actors or lunatics, he realized that he had to find somewhere to keep them. He didn’t want to be accused of sorcery or any other such nonsense, and he had his enemies: where there are books, there will always be haters of books alongside the lovers of them.