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Books-not-on-shelf

Text: Books-not-on-shelf

from d., 18.02.09

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Come with me.  I will take you to a secret place.  Shhhhh., don’t tell the others where we are going.  Be respectful and quiet, as if you are in a library .... maybe it is a library; a special type of library.

Follow me down this long corridor.  Through this door.  Around the spare bed and squeeze here, between the bed and the cupboard .... NO, not that cupboard, there are only cast-off clothes in there - clothes we may possibly need again one day.  THIS cupboard, with the broken handle, the one in the dark corner.  Can you fit in here, beside me?  There isn’t much room.

Are you sitting comfortably, cross-legged on the floor, or, like me with one leg tucked under you?  

Ready?

TADAHHH – As I open the door... can you see..... SUITCASES.  Older-style suitcases. These are not as old as the brown cardboard ones in another cupboard which contain old curtains; these cases are beige or light blue with rounded corners and plastic handles ..... the suitcases that were fashionable just before those large suit-bags, which were fashionable just before the first wheelie-cases.

Why, you must wonder, have I made all this fuss about suitcases?  Well, see for yourself.  Quietly, respectfully, carefully.  Go on, open one....

PHEEWW the smell of naphthalene.  Sit back, let it pass, deep breath.

Now look.

Books.  In a suitcase. And all these other cases stacked up to the overhead shelf in this cupboard also contain books. 
Why, indeed are these books here?  You have walked the length and breadth of this rather rambling, idiosyncratic house and you must have noticed that we do not have any necessity to hide books in cupboards  You have seen the purpose-built bookshelves along the walls of some of the corridors; the collection of precious children’s books still on the shelves in the old bedrooms; the encyclopaedias of the 1960s that we brought into the marriage from our own childhoods; the eclectic ‘utilitarian’ collections openly displayed on shelves in two separate studies, and the partly-read books on the coffee tables and in racks under the coffee tables in more than one room.  You have probably also peeked into the bedroom and seen books sprawled within easy reach of the pillows.  I won’t tell you what is in the sets of bedside drawers.

So, you must be asking yourself again, why are there books hidden away in the suitcases?

These suitcases, with the books, accompanied my daughter (when she was a teenager) on the train home from a visit interstate.  She and a friend had been helping her great-uncle Arthur to organise one of his infrequent clean-ups.  Each of these books is carefully chosen from the myriads that would have inhabited his small flat.  He was an aficionado of book auctions, and sometimes, in order to obtain the one book he really wanted, he had to bid for a whole box of books. He did not mind, but every now and then he needed to make more space, and on these occasions he needed help to choose which books to keep because (like the rest of us) he hated throwing any away.  

His flat had limited cupboard space, but books were neatly arranged in every nook and cranny – even more crammed than in this house. His head was likewise filled with literature.  He retained accurately-remembered quotations from the classics to the contemporary; from poetry to plays; from the famous authors to the forgotten ones.  But even though he had all this knowledge, if we asked him any literary question, then we knew we were in for some strenuous mental exercise.  Whether we asked for help to complete a half-forgotten quotation, his opinion of something we had recently read, or the definition of an esoteric word (since we knew he had access to the twenty volumes of the Oxford Dictionary), he would never answer us directly.  Sometimes he would even tell an outrageous and obviously untrue story, accompanied by his enigmatic little laugh.  Of course, he was ensuring that we found out the ‘truth’ for ourselves, anticipating a more animated discussion later.

He had been my literary mentor and Muse all my life – many of the books on the open shelves in the house are those he gave me at appropriate times during my ‘growing up’.  He was mentor to my children as well.  The daughter who brought these books here some years ago is the family member with a mind most like his; a memory like his; a voracious literary appetite similar to his, and the only one following the same profession as he.  She and he would talk for hours on the phone, almost weekly.  Just before he died, he opened his eyes to see her.  She was the last person he spoke to. 

These particularly precious books are not hiding. As you have observed, they have no need to hide.  I am just their custodian.  One day, perhaps when she has a more permanent place of her own, my daughter will lovingly sort through them and recall the unique memory of Uncle Arthur that is attached to each book.  I hope she shares some of those memories with me.  

Maybe, if you visit again on just the right day, she will share some of them with you, too.

In the meantime, perhaps we had better just shake some more naphthalene flakes into each of the cases, close the cupboard, and tip-toe back out to the light to join the others.

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