Nikolski (2 page)

It was at this point that I came upon a large packet of diaries—fifteen softcover notebooks filled with tele graphic prose. My hopes were rekindled. Maybe these diaries would allow me to put together the pieces of the puzzle?

I arranged the notebooks chronologically. The first one began on June 12, 1966.

My mother headed off to Vancouver when she was nineteen, feeling that a proper break with one’s family should be gauged in kilometres, and that her own falling-out deserved to be measured in continents. She ran away one June 25, at dawn, in the company of a hippie named Dauphin. The two confederates shared the cost of gas, shifts at the wheel, and long drags on thin joints rolled as tight as toothpicks. When not driving, my mother wrote in her notebook. Her script, very neat and orderly at the outset, quickly started to furl and unfurl, tracing the eddies and whorls of THC.

At the beginning of the second notebook, she had woken up alone on Water Street, barely able to stutter a few halting phrases in English. Notepad in hand, she went about communicating through ideograms, by turns sketching and gesturing. In a park, she made the acquaintance of a group of arts students who were busy crafting delicate origami manta rays out of psychedelic paper. They invited her to share their overcrowded apartment, their cushion-filled living room and a bed already occupied by two other girls. Every night at about two a.m., the three of them squeezed in under the sheets and smoked hand-rolled cigarettes while they discussed Buddhism.

My mother swore she would never return to the East Coast.

Whereas her first weeks in Vancouver were recounted with a wealth of detail, the rest of her journey grew more and more elliptical as the demands of nomadic life evidently supplanted those of narration. She never stayed anywhere more than four months, but would all of a sudden take off to Victoria, then Prince Rupert, San Francisco, Seattle, Juneau and a thousand other places she did not always bother to identify clearly. She scraped by thanks to various paltry expedients: hawking poems by Richard Brautigan to passersby, selling postcards to tourists, juggling, cleaning motel rooms, shoplifting in supermarkets.

Her escapade went on like this for five years. Then, in June 1970, we showed up at the Vancouver central station with two huge duffel bags just about bursting at the seams. My mother bought a train ticket to Montreal, and we crossed the continent in reverse, she curled up in her seat, me nestled in the depths of her uterus, an imperceptible comma in an as yet unwritten novel.

When she got back home, she briefly made up with my grandparents—a strategic truce aimed at securing the endorsement she needed from them to buy a house. In short order, she purchased a bungalow in Saint-Isidore Junction, a stone’s throw from Châteauguay, in what was to become the southern periphery of Montreal, but which at the time still retained something of the countryside, with its ancestral houses, its fallow land and its impressive population of porcupines.

Now saddled with a mortgage, she had to take work in Châteauguay—at a travel agency. Paradoxically, this job put an end to her youthful roving, and to her diaries too.

The last diary ended on an undated page,
circa
1971. I closed it, deep in thought. Of all the omissions that punctuated my mother’s prose, the most important was Jonas Doucet.

Nothing was left of that transient sire but a stack of postcards scribbled with indecipherable handwriting, the final one dating back to 1975. I had often tried to crack the secret of those cards, but there was no way to make sense of their hieroglyphics. Even the postmarks were more revealing, as they limned out a path that began in southern Alaska, went up to the Yukon, then back down again toward Anchorage, and ended in the Aleutians—more precisely, on the American military base where my father had found employment.

Under the pile of postcards was a small, crumpled box and a letter from the U.S. Air Force.

I learned nothing new from the letter. The box, on the other hand, illuminated a forgotten pit in my memory. Now totally flat, it had once contained a compass that Jonas had sent me for my birthday. That compass came back to me in astounding detail. How could I have forgotten it? It was the only tangible proof of my father’s existence, and had been the pole star of my childhood, the glorious instrument with which I’d
crossed a thousand imaginary oceans! Which mountain of debris was it buried under now?

I combed the bungalow from top to bottom in a reckless frenzy, emptying drawers and cupboards, searching behind the sideboards and under the rugs, crawling into the darkest recesses.

It was three in the morning before I tracked it down, stuck between an aquarium-sized deep-sea diver and an apple-green garbage truck, at the bottom of a cardboard box perched on two rafters in the attic.

The years had not improved the appearance of the poor compass, a five-dollar gizmo most likely found near the cash register of an Anchorage hardware dealer. Luckily, its lengthy proximity to metallic toys had not demagnetized its needle, which persisted in pointing (what seemed to be) north.

Strictly speaking, it was a miniature mariner’s compass, composed of a transparent plastic sphere filled with a clear liquid in which there floated a second, magnetized and graded sphere. The inclusion of one sphere inside another, as in a tiny matryoshka, guaranteed a gyroscopic stability that could withstand the worst storms: no matter how strong the waves might be, the compass would lose neither its bearings nor the horizon.

I fell asleep in the attic with my head sunk in a cumulus of candy-pink insulation, the compass resting on my forehead.

Superficially, that old compass seems perfectly unremarkable, just like any other compass. But on closer examination one realizes that it doesn’t point exactly north.

Some individuals claim to be aware at all times of precisely where north is located. However, like most people, I need a marker. When I’m sitting behind the bookstore counter, for example, I know magnetic north is located 4,238 kilometres away, in a beeline that runs through the Mickey Spillane shelf and goes to Ellef Ringnes Island, a pebble lost in the immense Queen Elizabeth archipelago.

But, instead of pointing toward the Mickey Spillane shelf, my compass lines up 1.5 metres to the left, right in the middle of the exit door.

It is true, of course, that the planet’s magnetic field is subject to local distortions, and that north can appear to be a little out of place. There are several possible reasons for this anomaly: an iron ore deposit in the cellar, the upstairs neighbour’s bathroom plumbing, the wreck of a transatlantic liner buried under the pavement of St-Laurent Boulevard. Unfortunately, none of these theories is borne out by the facts, because my compass points to the left of north no matter where I happen to use it. This raises two troublesome questions:

• What is the cause of this magnetic anomaly?
  

• Where (the hell) is the compass pointing to?
  

Common sense would suggest that my imagination constitutes the main local anomaly of the magnetic field, and that I’d be better off tidying up rather than daydreaming. But anomalies are like obsessions: all resistance is futile.

I vaguely recalled my geography courses: magnetic declination, the Tropic of Cancer, the pole star. It was time to put this buried knowledge to use. Equipped with a pile of geography books and an assortment of maps of various scales, I set out to determine exactly where my compass was pointing.

After some painstaking calculations, I arrived at a declination of 34° W. Following that bearing, one crossed the Island of Montreal, Abitibi and Temiskaming, then Ontario, the Prairies, British Columbia, the Prince of Wales archipelago, the southern tip of Alaska, a bit of the North Pacific, and the Aleutian Islands, where one finally landed on Umnak Island—more specifically, on Nikolski, a minuscule village inhabited by thirty-six people, five thousand sheep and an indeterminate number of dogs.

One could therefore deduce that the compass pointed toward Nikolski, an answer that struck me as rather satisfactory, even though it had the disadvantage of clouding the issue instead of elucidating it.

Nothing is perfect.

From time to time a customer will ask me what that weird amulet is around my neck.

“It’s a Nikolski compass,” I reply.

The customer, not understanding, smiles and politely changes the subject. He asks, for instance, where he might find books by Mickey Spillane.

As you may have guessed, I don’t work in a geographical institute or a store that deals in globes.

In point of fact, S. W. Gam Inc. is a business entirely devoted to the acquisition, presentation and retailing of the previously owned book. In other words, a secondhand bookshop. Mme Dubeau, my esteemed employer, hired me in the fall of my fourteenth year. At the time, I earned a measly $2.50 an hour, a wage that I graciously accepted so that I might survey all these books from on high with no further obligation than to read.

I’ve been working here for four years now, a span that appears a good deal longer to me than it is in reality. During that time, I dropped out of school, my mother died and my few childhood friends vanished. One of them took off to Central America at the wheel of an old Chrysler and has not been seen since. A second one is studying marine biology in a Norwegian university. There’s been no news of him. The others have simply disappeared, swallowed up by the course of events.

As for me, I’m still parked behind the bookstore counter, where, however, I get to enjoy a spectacular view of St-Laurent Boulevard.

My job is more like a calling than a normal career. The silence is conducive to meditation, the wages are
consistent with a vow of poverty and, as for my work tools, they’re in keeping with a sort of monastic minimalism. No hi-tech electronic cash register; all the calculations are done manually—old-fashioned sums scratched on whatever scrap of paper is to hand. No computerized inventory, either; I’m the computer, and I have to recall on demand the last place I glimpsed, for example, that Esperanto translation of
Dharma Bums.
(Answer: In behind the pipes of the washroom sink.)

The work is not as simple as it may appear; the S. W. Gam Bookshop is one of those places in the universe where humans long ago relinquished any control over matter. Every shelf holds three layers of books, and the floorboards would vanish altogether under the dozens of cardboard boxes, but for the narrow, serpentine paths designed to let customers move about. The slightest cranny is put to use: under the percolator, between the furniture and the walls, inside the toilet tank, under the staircase, even the dusty closeness of the attic. Our classification system is strewn with microclimates, invisible boundaries, strata, refuse dumps, messy hellholes, broad plains with no visible landmarks—a complex cartography that depends essentially on visual memory, a faculty without which one won’t last very long in this trade.

But it takes more than a good pair of eyes and a few ounces of memory to work here. It’s crucial to develop
a particular perception of time. The thing is—what’s the best way of putting this?—that different avatars of our bookshop coexist simultaneously in a multitude of discrete times, separated by very thin ellipses.

This warrants some explanation.

Each book that enters here can meet its next reader at any moment in the history of the shop, in the future as well as the past. Whenever Mme Dubeau sorts a new shipment of books, she repeatedly consults her version of the
Encylopaedia Britannica
—some thirty notebooks where she records all special requests made by clients since February 1971—to see whether, ten years before, someone may have been looking for a title among the freshly arrived books.

From time to time she grabs the telephone with a triumphant smile.

“Mr. Tremblay? This is Andrée Dubeau at the S. W. Gam Bookshop. I have some good news. We’ve just received
The History of Whaling in Fairbanks in the Eighteenth Century!”

At the other end, Mr. Tremblay represses a shiver. Here he is, abruptly transported back to the pristine icebergs that haunted his nights throughout the heat wave of 1987.

“I’ll be right over,” he mumbles feverishly, as if he’d been reminded of an important appointment.

Mme Dubeau crosses out the request and closes the
Britannica.
Mission accomplished.

I can’t leaf through those thick notebooks without trembling a little. There is no other occupation that provides as accurate a measure of the passage of time—a number of the clients recorded in those pages are long dead. Some aren’t the least bit interested in the books anymore; others have moved to Asia without leaving a forwarding address—and many will never find the book they so coveted.

I wonder if there may not somewhere be a
Britannica
of our desires, a comprehensive repertory of the slightest dream, the least aspiration, where nothing would be lost or created, but where the ceaseless transformation of all things would operate in both directions, like an elevator connecting the various storeys of our existence.

Our bookshop is, in sum, a universe entirely made up of and governed by books—and it seemed quite natural for me to dissolve myself in it completely, to devote my life to the thousands of lives duly stacked on hundreds of shelves.

I have sometimes been accused of lacking ambition. But might I simply be ailing from a minor magnetic anomaly?