Page 18 of The Bookshop of Forbidden Books

Verner drained his glass. “He’s bluffing,” he decided, dabbing foam from his lips. “He doesn’t know a thing – other than that a meeting took place, which, last I checked, isn’t illegal. I don’t think you have any real reason to worry. What does Mathilde think?”

“I haven’t told her.”

“I see,” said Verner dryly, baffling Mitch, who didn’t see at all. “She was wonderful the other night, you know. Really impressive. She and Madame Ateltow made one hell of a team, didn’t they? It was quite something.” He paused. “Is everything alright between you two?”

“I think so,” Mitch answered, though he wasn’t entirely sure.

Verner let him pick up the tab and stood. He was looking forward to playing his guitar at the bookshop again.

* * *

Mathilde and Mitch saw each other two or three times a week. After the meetings, which were growing ever more popular, they’d end up at her place. Mitch always slipped out in the morning while she was still asleep, or pretending to be. There were no more intimate dinners, no more nights at the jazz club or romantic moments snatched in the secret cellar.

Ever since she was a teenager, Mathilde had had a taste for unpredictable men. Men with a vision. Men who were intense, passionate, obsessive – often about anything but her. This penchant had led her to date loser after loser: a divorced car enthusiast who’d known more about engines than he did about the woman he’d spent six years married to; a musician who couldn’t hold his liquor; and, during her brief attempt at embracing a healthy lifestyle, a perfectly chiselled yoga instructor who only ever used his body to meditate.

There were a lot of things Mathilde liked about Mitch. He wasn’t like the other men she’d dated. He never bored her, and his humour and kindness had turned life into an unexpectedly smooth journey lately. Oddly enough, he reminded her of the books she praised to her audience, the kind you grow attached to after only a few pages and can’t wait to pick up again at the end of the day.

She’d known from the start that whatever they had wasn’t going to last. Which of course only made her cling to him more tightly whenever they found themselves in bed together.

* * *

One morning, six weeks after the first meeting of the club – there had been a dozen gatherings so far – the police stormed the shop. Mitch was handcuffed on the spot. The arresting officer read him his rights, informing him that anything he said from that moment on could be held against him.

Seated in a chair as ordered, Mitch watched as the officers tore his store apart. They took an obvious pleasure in their work: clearing shelves, throwing books to the floor, flipping tables, ripping apart cardboard boxes in the back room. Mitch didn’t even flinch. The search concluded without any of them uncovering the secret room. Their visit to the cellar – which they’d reached via the old coal chute – hadn’t revealed anything inflammatory. Just a few outdated schoolbooks printed before the national curriculum reform, lying on the shelves of a forgotten cabinet. Not one of them guessed that simply pressing on the back panel of that very cabinet would have revealed the real crime scene. Three hours of destruction, and all they had to show for it were two banned books, unearthed in the storeroom: Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray, and The Origin of Others, an essay by Toni Morrison that had been a huge hit with the hundred and fifty students present at the club’s third meeting. Mitch would never forget that night; the atmosphere had been electric and the debates so passionate that Mathilde had had to climb onto the bar to restore calm, and Madame Ateltow had lost her voice. Later, Verner had lit the place up with a fiery flamenco set – the audience had demanded three encores. An incredible evening, the first spark of the very rebellion Mitch had hoped for so deeply.

They loaded him into the back of a police van, and during the ride to the station all he could think about was putting his bookshop back in order. If he had to spend the night in jail, he thought, he’d start cleaning first thing in the morning.

But he never got the chance.

The prosecutor who took on the case, a certain Monsieur Salinas, saw the case as a potential springboard for his career. He fast-tracked the investigation, and, within just two weeks of the arrest, the trial began. Fortunately for Mitch, there was no evidence that he had ever held any subversive meetings, so the only charges that could be brought against him were for the unlawful sale of a couple of books.

* * *

The jury was far from impressed when the defence argued that the books were loaned out, not sold; on the contrary, they considered this evidence not only of aggravating circumstances but premeditation and malice aforethought, clear intent to mock the law by finding a way around it. And thus, clear intent to mock the values that upheld society, as Prosecutor Salinas put it. The defendant hadn’t just promoted transgressive literature, but obscene material. Wasn’t it true that scandalous titles including those of Margaret Atwood had been among the banned books seized from his home?

No, the defence objected, there had been no Atwood books found.

But they were on an inventory list, the prosecution countered. This bookseller, rather than fulfilling his duty – which, much like that of a teacher, was to contribute to the public’s education and well-being – believed himself above the law, and had deliberately acted to promote anarchy.

With pompous authority, Salinas then accused Mitch of dealing pornographic literature to minors – a blatant lie that spoke volumes about the prosecutor’s own perversity.

Salinas handed out a dozen books to the jurors (only two of which had actually come from Mitch’s shop) and claimed that the defendant had deliberately targeted vulnerable young readers in order to expose them to traumatizing content. The accusation was as unfounded as it was insulting.

Waving around a copy of Ray Bradbury’s novel Fahrenheit 451 as if it were the the Bible of the Antichrist himself, Salinas called on the court to make an example of this offender, who had already been fined by a public safety officer for similar offenses.

Following his trial, which lasted a mere four hours, Mitch found there was little that could shock him anymore. Not the prosecutor’s lies and manipulations; not the jurors’ passivity and quiet nods of approval; not the surreal absurdity of this whole parody of justice. He was simply relieved that the police hadn’t managed to find the entrance to his secret bookshop, and that his collection was safe – and that the list of books he’d assigned the students was tucked away in a drawer behind the speakeasy’s bar. None of the young people would be dragged into this, and that gave him some peace of mind. Only one thing rattled him: Mathilde, Madame Ateltow and Verner were nowhere to be found. Not one of them came to his trial. But he was far too worn out to hold it against them.

The jurors didn’t even bother to retire for deliberation. The verdict was handed down, and the gavel fell.

Mitch was sentenced to five years in prison.

Chapter 9

The Beast Within

Mitch spent the first few weeks of his incarceration in disbelief over what had happened to him: he would be spending the next five years of his life in prison for dealing books. He could understand being given such a stiff sentence for dealing arms or drugs or some other dangerous thing, but how could anyone be this afraid of words?

It made even less sense in those first moments of consciousness just after he woke up. Lying there with his eyes closed, he was still just a bookseller. He’d think about restocking pencils, pens and reams of paper; taking inventory; checking which orders had been delivered, calling customers to let them know their books were ready for pickup; rearranging the window display; tidying up; paying overdue bills. But the moment his eyes opened to face the walls of his cell, the books, the pens and pencils, the paper, the customers – all of it slipped through the bars and was gone.