A Trip to the Bookstore

Ever since finishing the Janet Malcolm book on Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas a few days ago, I'd thought about going to the English language bookstore in Prenzlauer Berg to find something new to read. I decided to go on Tuesday, when the weather was nice, but only made it to Friedrichshain, where I had a quarter liter of red wine which caused a drowsiness that couldn't imagine being anywhere but home in bed. After waking up, I dragged myself to the chair from where I managed to pick up from the coffee table Buddenbrooks, open it, and put it back down again, just as Janet Malcolm had written she repeatedly picked up Making of Americans, opened it, and put it back down again, until she finally went to the kitchen and chopped it up with a knife into six or seven managable pieces, which I had done incidentally with my case books in order to carry to and from law school everyday. After putting down Buddenbrooks, I realized that it wasn't so much that I wanted just to read but that I wanted to read in English and something that was well-written. Reading good writing effects in me a special calm that I associate with the Logos which was in the beginning and was with God and which was God.

Online I googled "Janet Malcolm" and found an article she had written on J.D. Salinger which made me want to reread Franny and Zooey, a copy of which I found at the bookstore yesterday, as well as Nine Stories, high on a shelf that I had to climb a ladder to reach. Up on the ladder I unexpectedly experienced vertigo and then, holding the two books in my right hand and onto the side of the ladder with my left, suddenly had to sneeze. Afraid that a sneeze would propel me off the ladder, I confidently tried to sniff it away, but it came and with even more gusto than usual, as if in rebellion. My great-grandmother once supposedly said, hearing me sneeze as a small toddler, that I would be a great person one day.

Fortunately, the woman tending the bookstore was being distracted by an energetic customer who was not only asking about certain books but expressing her disbelief that they were not more readily accessible and then went so far as to describe her dissertation. She had an accent I originally thought was Slavic but then realized was only just Italian, and she was no longer young. The woman tending the bookstore responded to each of the Italian woman's statements with an "AH ha," which expressed professionally insincere interest but resulted in encouraging further details anyway. The Italian woman reminded me of a Russian language instructor at college who was brilliant and enchanting but whose large restless eyes made me wonder whether she was actually a witch. Her long black hair always looked as if she had just come in from a long walk on the windy Irish coast.

By the time I was back on the ground, an English woman walked in. The woman tending the bookstore asked, "how are you," and the English woman said "unemployed." She had the kind of solid core and legs that allowed her to walk briskly but with unfortunately short steps. Thus she walked back and forth along the length of the small front room of the bookstore, picking up books, glancing at them, and putting them down again, like a stout Chinese mother of five shopping for vegetables at the local market. All the while, she was chatting with the woman tending the bookstore, making short, quick pronouncements that were not obviously bitter but undeniably damp. I imagined being in conversation with her and having every single remark deflated with a sharp retort. J.D. Salinger, I imagined her saying, what else would you expect from an American. Then I imagined myself thinking, with Janet Malcolm standing behind me, small but steady, that she was ignorant. My irritation slipped into a denouncement of the entire English people, and the complicity of the woman tending the bookstore made me increasingly suspicious of her as well. Eventually, however, by the time I noticed a copy of Malcolm's Two Lives, the book whose wake rocked me toward the store in the first place, I was ok. The English woman was sitting outside in the sun reading.