The Good Mayor (21 page)

“Very good, Mayor Krovic. Take your time. A customer like you, Mayor Krovic, is always welcome at Knutson’s—from a boy and now look. Look!”

Further back in the shop, heads were beginning to appear from between the alleys of shelves—the heads of less-favoured customers who looked over their scholarly spectacles or took them off altogether and allowed them to dangle, testily, from thin gold chains in the physical embodiment of a “Tsk!”

“And it is always a pleasure to be here,” Tibo said in soft, hushing tones. He patted her hand, noticed the thick knuckles, the blue veins showing through pale, soft paper-thin skin. “I’ll just have a look round.”

“Yes, Mayor Krovic, that’s what to do. You just have a look round. You’ll always find something at Knutson’s.”

Tibo hid himself amongst the shelves, nodding apologetic greetings to the other customers as he passed—“Sorry,” “Sorry,” “Good morning,” “Excuse me”—and navigating, as confidently as if he had been in the Town Hall, past Modern First Editions, past Drama, past Poetry, past Theology and Religion, a vast section as empty and unexplored as the Amazon where—all unknown to Tibo—generations of impatient lovers had blasphemously embraced and on, beyond Travel, Exploration and Ethnography to Classics.

“Good morning, Mayor Krovic.” Yemko Guillaume filled the derelict leather sofa at the end of the aisle as a walrus fills an Arctic sandbank. His knees were forced apart by the sag of his huge belly, his arms were crucified along the back rail and his head lolled under that morning’s
Daily Dottian
which peaked like the roof of a pagoda over his nose.

He pinched the paper between sausage fingers and lifted it clear. “It is Mayor Krovic, isn’t it? I heard you announced.”

“Hello, Guillaume. We keep running into one another.”

“Alas, no longer in the courts. I heard what happened. I am genuinely sorry.”

“No hard feelings on my side. You did entirely the right thing.”

“But not, sadly, the ‘good’ thing,” said Yemko, “not what you would have done. I regret it very much.”

There was an awkward moment of silence between them until Yemko harrumphed a little and said, “Excuse my rudeness. Won’t you sit down and join me?” He made a sort of lolloping motion sideways and cleared a gap at one end of the complaining sofa but, when Tibo looked at the scant sliver of bare cushion which Yemko had managed to expose, he thought back to their chat in the gallery and said, “Thanks. I think I’ll stand.”

Yemko smiled at him forgivingly and said, “I remember that day at the exhibition, when I told you about my letter to Judge Gustav.”

“Honestly, there’s no need to go on about it—I do understand.”

“No, no,” said the lawyer, “I have accepted your absolution. I was going to talk of other things. I remember we spoke of the ancient poets now all unread.” He gestured round the walls at shelves stacked floor to ceiling. “Have you come to refresh your memory, Krovic? I do, from time to time. I’m afraid I abuse poor Mrs. Knutson’s hospitality awfully.”

“We do supply several Public Libraries in Dot, you know. They really are quite good.”

Yemko was unable to suppress a shudder and he made the sort of face you see on a mâitre d’ when somebody orders red wine to go with fish. “I’m sure any library with which you concern yourself is nothing short of lovely,” he said. “I prefer not to use them. I prefer not to use anything with ‘Public’ at the front of it. There always seems to be the implied threat that one might bump into one’s customers.”

“I bump into my customers all the time,” said Mayor Krovic.

“But only
most
of your customers are criminals and lowlifes—
all
of mine are.”

Tibo sat down on a wing of the sofa and crossed his arms. He asked, “Did you never consider buying books of your own—books you could read in your home safe from the gaze of the hated customer?”

“Well, it seems an awful waste when all I could ever want is right here. I have enjoyed that same volume of Catullus for … well, for a very long time now and I have a kind of theological objection to buying books—seems unfair to take them away. I often wonder what the booksellers buy that is one half so precious as the goods they sell.”

“Vintners,” said Tibo. “It’s vintners.”

Yemko rolled forward a little in a suspicion of a bow. It was a physical acknowledgement of a worthy opponent, his way of noting, “You got it—well done.” A gigantic yawn rippled through him and threatened to dislocate his jaw and he said, “Anyway, you still haven’t told me—are you here to bone up on Diana and poor
Acteon? You’ll find them over there.” He gestured to a tall, thin column of shelves by the window. “Ovid.
Metamorphoses
—the only thing he wrote that’s worth a damn but then which of us can light a candle that will burn for two thousand years? Which of us will be remembered a fortnight after we have gone?”

“There’s old man Knutson,” said Tibo. “He is remembered.”

“I don’t recall him.”

“And I doubt if he would mind. But Mrs. Knutson remembers and it’s been more than a fortnight.”

Yemko looked as if he was having trouble staying awake. The tented pages of the
Daily Dottian
were an increasingly tempting retreat. “Forgive me, Krovic, but that’s just a silly sentiment, not a lasting memorial. Mrs. Knutson will soon be swept away in Time’s all-effacing stream and those of us who remember her will quickly follow. A few short heartbeats from now there will be nobody who remembers that the bookseller Knutson was ever even a memory for someone else.”

“Love’s like that. It’s personal. If you love, a mausoleum is of no consequence.”

Yemko looked at him from watery blue eyes for quite a long time and then he said, “Oh, dear. Oh, my dear, dear Krovic. This is worse than I thought.” He opened his newspaper, spread it over his face and settled down to sleep again. The interview was clearly at an end.

Tibo rose to his feet and crossed to the other side of the room where he looked through shelf after shelf of Homer for a while. There were some beautiful books there, austere leather-bound editions, books lurid with flamboyant tooling, books in floppy paper covers, books that might have been bought by the yard to spend decades unopened on grimly respectable shelves. But he found the right one—the one he wanted to buy for Agathe. This was a book that had been loved but not too much, used but not too harshly. It rejoiced in soft suede covers the colour of red wine, the colour of a libation. It would sit nicely next to a bowl of olives in a sunny room. Tibo lifted it to his nose and drank in the smell of a hot beach, sand and rosemary. It filled his hand with the weight of a sword and the pull of an angry tide. This was the book.

Quietly, careful of waking Yemko, he turned to go but, from behind, from the sofa, he heard, half whispered, “Give me a thousand kisses, then a hundred—another thousand, a hundred to follow—still another thousand and a hundred more. And when we’ve squandered all those thousands, tear up the bill and never count—lest any think our kisses ill and grudge how many.”

“Your friend Catullus?” Tibo asked.

“Catullus,” Yemko agreed. “Have a care, Krovic. Some think kisses very ill indeed and, sometimes, the bill is terribly hard to pay.”

There was nothing else to say. Tibo left.

Before long, after a final, fond, embarrassing yelled exchange with Mrs. Knutson—“Come again, Mayor Krovic. Always a pleasure to see you here, Mayor Krovic!”—Tibo was back in the alley with Agathe’s book in his hand.

Mrs. Knutson was so warm, so enthusiastic, so proud of him and yet, as the shop bell rang out behind him, Tibo found himself muttering, “She has no idea if I take sugar—not a clue.” Still shaking his head gently, Good Mayor Krovic followed the alley down to Commerz Plaz.

His first instinct was to go to Braun’s for those suits he had promised himself but, after a little thought, he decided on Kupfer and Kemanezic instead. More expensive, possibly, a smaller place with a smaller stock but the sort of place where there would be only a few other customers, the sort of place where he could expect to try on a suit without a crowd of well-built matrons emerging from the tea room to stand, idly brushing cake crumbs from their bosoms for half an hour as they looked on, giving unspoken advice and fashion hints in nods and smiles and conspiratorial sucks of the teeth—the sort of place which, if not exactly private, was still something less than a freak show. And that mattered to Tibo.

Walking down to Commerz Plaz he shifted Agathe’s book from hand to hand, letting the air waft over the damp and wrinkled marks his palms had made in the parcel. The fear of buying clothes had never left Tibo Krovic—the same tension he had felt as a boy, when he watched his mother scrabbling for the last few
pennies for a pair of trousers or sighing all evening at the thought of next day’s trip to the shoe shop, was still with him. The guilt was terrifying. It burned him and, even now, the prospect of stepping into a tailor’s shop left him dry-mouthed and wet-palmed. Mayor Krovic would gladly have squandered his last penny on Agathe Stopak for the joy of seeing her smile, he couldn’t pass the stinking accordion man down in City Square without dropping a coin in his greasy hat but he recoiled from the hedonistic indulgence of a new shirt and the thought of
two
new suits was beginning to feel like Babylonian excess. But, like everything else in his life—until these past few days—the trip to Kupfer and Kemanezic was planned and thought out.

It was part of a system, the design for living, which Tibo had invented for himself as a way of getting through life, if he but knew it, without living at all. And, now that he had set the plan in action, he could not change it or step back from it. Tibo Krovic was as firmly committed to buying two new suits from Kupfer and Kemanezic as the No. 17 tram was committed to running along Cathedral Avenue.

And, just as the No. 17 tram would have slammed to a halt if it found Mrs. Agathe Stopak in its path, so Tibo turned the corner into Albrecht Street and stopped. She was there.

Agathe had come into town early and killed time pressing her nose against the front window of the Fur and Feathers pet shop, swapping kisses with the puppies in sawdust-filled boxes on the other side of the glass. Agathe envied them. She envied their innocence, their lack of wanting, their contentment, their undefeated urge to love. To be a puppy must be a wonderful thing, she thought—just to wait there for the first person who wanted you and to go off with them and love them. Life was more complicated for ladies in Dot—even if they wanted nothing more than a puppy did. She pressed her fingers against the glass a little sadly and walked on.

When Tibo found her, she was looking in the window of the Ko-Operatif Shoe Shop and looking at her feet and looking back up at the window and Tibo wanted to rush up to her and grab her
by the hand and drag her through the door and buy everything. He wanted to buy every shoe in the shop. He wanted to sit her down on one of those red leather benches in there and open his chequebook and summon a shop girl and say, “Ladies’ size five and a half. We’ll take one of each! No! Two of each. That is, a pair of each!” He wanted to say, “Agathe, this is a pair of fur-lined boots and you can wear them every day of the winter and never come to work with cold toes again. And this is a pair of high-heeled slippers, all covered in spangles and you can wear them when we go dancing. And look at these! And these! And the handbags to match.”

He said, “Hello, Agathe.”

She looked up, pleased and surprised and delighted to see him and she took a step forward to greet him, her hand half raised, stopped herself and said, “Oh, Tibo. Hello!” And her hand carried on, upwards to brush her lips.

“Buying shoes?” he asked, stupidly.

“No, not really.” She pointed through the glass at a pair of winter boots. “I was just wondering about those. The snow will be here soon. What do you think?”

“Go mad,” said Tibo. “Treat yourself.”

“Maybe I will, after pay day, but it seems a dreadful extravagance. I’ve got a perfectly good pair of galoshes, after all, but …”

“But your toes get cold,” Tibo said.

“Oh, they do, they do. Don’t yours? And when my feet are cold it takes me forever to warm up again.”

Suddenly Tibo found the courage to say, “You could always warm your feet on me.”

But Agathe kept talking. She said, “You know, I bet there isn’t a single shop in Dalmatia that sells galoshes or winter boots. No demand. In Dalmatia everybody has warm toes. Sorry, what were you going to say?”

Tibo smiled and said, “Nothing.”

The traffic went by in Albrecht Street, packed trams rattled past, a few cars and an old grey lorry, loaded up with barrels of butcher’s waste, bony meaty bits sticking out, on its way to the fertiliser factory and, high above all that, way up at roof height where
the flats are small and cheap and the window-sill marigolds are covered in soot, little birds flew by, like black dots against the sky, singing. Nobody heard them. And, at the corner of the alley where a bright gold dandelion had sent up yellow star bursts and paper-white pom-poms, one after another, all summer long like a month’s slow firework display, a cat with blue eyes went past. Nobody saw it. But later, in memory, Tibo found them all engraved there, the sulphur bright flowers and the well-bred cat with its ribbon and its bell that only passing birdsong drowned out.

“Why are you here?” Agathe asked.

It sounded like a catechism and the answer should have been, “To know you and enjoy you forever.” But Tibo said, “I came in to buy myself a suit.”

“Oh, yes, I remember. Can I come?” she asked, in just the way she would ask if he wanted another cup of coffee. “Can I come?” to see this intimate humiliation, like a trip to the doctor, like being a spectator while he had his ears syringed or his corns shaved.

“Can I come?”

“Yes, of course,” Tibo said, “of course.” And he offered her his arm.