Chasing Sylvia Beach (16 page)

She went back to her notebook.

And what about the beauty products aisle, where you spend a full two hours trying to discover yourself as a woman in the thirties? You’re struck by the parsimony of it all, no fifty shampoos for all types of hair, colored, dry, flyaway, dandruffy. And deodorant? Forget it. Now you understand—it’s the soap that does the job, sturdy lumps of lye. Where’s the lavender French milled soap? No, it’s serious here, no plastic push-up pumps of white chalk to swivel under your pits. No real hope of preventing a stink, because stink you do, your armpits a constant dank dampness signaling your distress in every situation. You swish feebly at the water basin, standing in your ivory slip, the water trickling down your side, the gesture of the raised arm, the view out the window past the heavy gray shutters, a collection of walls, buildings angled to keep you from a long view. If you hold this, hold this pose, hold it long enough, you can pause between time and not be that girl from the future or that ill-fitted girl from the past; you can become a model out of time, an essential part of a painting, girl at bath, trickling girl, girl outside herself.

For a second, you’re perfect, until the trickle chills you and you grab the scratchy hand towel and scour your side dry. This is preferred to the shower/bath you tried to take down the hall, the communal bathing room ringed with the dirt of many men and few women—because what kind of woman, really, takes up residence in a hotel in 1937? You’re a woman of dubious morals, and there are no concessions in the bathroom: no tiny unwrapped bars of soap or plush stacks of towels, no, not even a bath mat, just an enormous porcelain tub with a mallet of a shower head, heavy silver coils, large holes spitting out lukewarm water.

Lily didn’t want to stop writing. She wanted to put black on white all this lunacy. Maybe she could make a story of it someday. She recorded everything, pulling in the sounds of the waiters calling out to each other, the clack of plates and clink of glasses, the faint whoosh of the espresso machine inside the café. When she relaxed her focus, only the din of voices, devoid of meaning, flowed around her. French sounded like a river, rushing and certain, always in a hurry to get somewhere important. Parisian conversation was heavy with emphasis, couples overriding each other’s statements, voices rising, smacking against each other like water against rocks.

She breathed in the aroma of bread baking next door at the boulangerie, a hefty, yeasty smell. Hemingway could be around the corner, writing. Her pen flew and she hummed along with the rhythm of the ink on the page.

THE NEXT DAY, Sylvia put Lily to work at the shipping desk, showing her the labels, packing string, and paper. A stack of books sat nearby, ready to be packaged. Lily perched on the stool at the tiny table, feeling like a third grader prepared for an arts and crafts project. She picked up the first book, a heavy tome. Turning it over, she read the title on the spine—
Moby Dick
. She pulled a sheet of manila paper off the rack and wrapped the book. Writing out the label, she wondered about a person who would willingly read this monster of a book. She had never forgotten the shame of being caught cheating on the
Moby Dick
quiz in her honors class. It marred her grade and squelched her confidence.

As she wrapped the next book, she eavesdropped on Sylvia discussing printing fliers for the Exposition. Lily slipped back into her own memories, lulled into a daze by Sylvia’s steady murmur. At Capitol Books, orders could be placed online. Lily communicated with people all around the world, finding the books they wanted and shipping them off. The store survived because of this service, where other secondhand bookstores had closed. The additional work from the Internet was almost more rewarding than the regular customers who frequented the store.

She unscrewed the cap on the glue pot, a squat bottle with a fancy blue label. The bristles of the brush, viscous with glue, were splayed in several directions. Oh, the joy of self-adhesive labels, self-adhesive stamps, and all the other little conveniences that made life easy. Sylvia again picked up the phone, her finger in the holes of the dial, circling again and again. Lily thought of caller ID, touch-tone phones, cell phones, and all the gadgets that saved time and money. Things moved much more slowly here and held their value. The postage scale seemed antique, as if Sylvia had been using it for decades. In Lily’s era, if something stopped working, it was thrown out and replaced immediately. Here, you could spend a week’s wages on a dinner in a restaurant. It was all so absurd, compared with the difficulties of the Depression and coming war. Lily wanted her easy life back home as much as she had wanted to inhabit Sylvia’s Paris. Sighing, she set the book on the copper balance, adding a few small weights to the other side. Thinking about the conveniences of home wasn’t helping, so she concentrated on calculating the postage. Sylvia was talking about the magazines she would feature in her booth at the Expo. She needed extra copies of
Life and Letters Today from England.
It didn’t sound like things were going well; her brusque voice rose as the conversation went on, something about having to pay for extra shipping.

When she had wrapped the final book, Lily announced that she was done. Sylvia mumbled “Uh-huh” but did not turn around. She was bent over the desk, writing. Lily stood and stretched. After a few minutes, Sylvia spoke without looking up.

“You can go to the post office now. My bicycle is out back.” Lily retrieved the bike from the courtyard. Lily looked around the shop for a basket or bag to carry the parcels in. Sylvia held up a leather strap.

“Surely you still use these in the States,” Sylvia said.

Lily shrugged. “Mine isn’t like that.”

Sylvia harrumphed and showed her how to gather the books with a frayed leather strap, cinching the ends together and fastening the buckle. She gave a sharp tug and handed the bundle to Lily. At her desk, she pulled a metal lock box out of the bottom drawer, handed Lily a ten-franc note, and gave her directions to the post office near Les Halles. Then she walked Lily out to the front sidewalk where she helped strap the books to the bike’s rack. The bike was a black one-speed, the kind that braked by reversing the pedals. Lily climbed on while Sylvia watched.

“You’ll be okay?”

“I hope so,” Lily said. They both laughed. Lily shifted the bike back and forth between her legs, the skirt of her dress draped over the bar. She pushed off and cruised down the sidewalk. Picking up speed, she dropped onto the street. She rang the bell, scaring a cat slinking along the gutter. After a few tours around the bumpy, small streets nearby, she felt confident enough to pedal toward the post office. There were more bikes than autos. The breeze caressed her face as she rode north, heading toward the Seine, trying to remember Sylvia’s directions. She knew Les Halles was on the Right Bank, near Pompidou Center, which was built in the 1970s. Lily used a bike exclusively in Denver, a city that made cycling easy with its flat surfaces and quiet side streets. On her bookseller salary, owning a car wasn’t an option. Riding in Paris on a simple errand, she felt the possibility that she could fit in here. Coasting along, she wondered what Paul was doing at that moment. If she were stuck here, would they do things like ride bikes together in the Bois de Boulogne? She had done nothing to find a place to stay. Hopefully she could crash again in his room tonight since he said he didn’t mind.

She pedaled easily toward the Seine, feeling Paris’s rhythm. People didn’t hurry so much. When Lily moved at her twenty-first-century pace, it appeared she was operating in emergency mode. As she slowed down and integrated into this era, bits of home fell away. It was oddly difficult to remember what her father or Daniel looked like. Were they worried about her since she hadn’t emailed as promised? With the immediacy of Paris around her, Denver was a lifetime away, one that may be lost to her.

Lily stopped with a group of people waiting for traffic before crossing onto the Pont Neuf, a lump in her throat. If she didn’t find her way back to 2010, she would be here when Sylvia made history by shutting down the shop. She could help carry things upstairs, taking the portraits off the wall, holding the ladder while Sylvia removed the Shakespeare and Company sign from its post outside. She was used to carrying books, and could haul boxes to Sylvia’s rooms to hide them from the Nazis. Warning Sylvia would be wrong, but she would be with her when things got bad. She would be a friend.

Traffic eased to a stop and Lily pushed away from the curb, moving slowly with the crowd over the bridge. It was a beautiful day, and the air seemed to wrap Lily in an invitation to stay. She was smiling, relaxing even, when she saw a familiar woman coming toward her. It was the woman from the reading—Louise, wearing a cloche hat and a smart cream-colored jacket with elaborate black trim. She moved with purpose, a clutch tucked under one arm. Lily’s heart thumped; she stopped her bike, interrupting the flow of pedestrian traffic.

“Louise!” she called out. The woman continued on. “Please!” Lily shouted, causing several people to cast annoyed looks in her direction.

Louise turned and watched as Lily approached. She spoke calmly. “Finally, you made up your mind to come to me.”

Lily was speechless. A confusion of thoughts tumbled in her head. “You’re the woman from the plane! Are you the reason I’m here?”

“Let’s discuss this calmly.”

Louise led her past the statue of Henri IV to an empty bastion. She invited Lily to sit on the curved stone bench but Lily remained standing, her impatience seething inside her. She leaned her bike against the bridge’s railing.

“So? Tell me. Who are you? Why am I here?”

Placidly, Louise observed a boat passing under the bridge. Turning to Lily, she smiled.

“Patience, my dear. This is all you need to know: we know all about you—Paul, your new job at Shakespeare and Company, Capitol Books, Claire, your hope to be a writer, and so on, and so on.” With that, she extracted a cigarette case from her purse, opened it, and offered it to Lily.

Lily shook her head violently. This woman knew her mother? She knew that Lily wanted to write? How?

“What? You’ve been spying on me? What do you want from me?”

Louise lit her cigarette and replaced her lighter and cigarette case. Exhaling, she spoke calmly.

“Listen carefully. You are exactly where we want you to be.”

Lily guffawed. “Where you want me to be? I don’t care what you want! I want to go back home. I want to go back to my life. I want to go back to 2010!”

“You have no choice, dear Lily Heller. Your only ticket back to your life will be acquired by following our instructions. You have no alternative.”

Lily threw up her arms and shouted, demanding to know who Louise was. A mother crossing the bridge with her child pulled the girl away from Louise and Lily, muttering something in French. Lily didn’t care what anyone thought—she needed answers.

“In such a rush to go back to your boredom.” Louise tilted her head dismissively. “Well, you can’t go home yet.” Louise paused, eyeing Lily, who tightened her mouth in an effort to keep the tears back.

Even as Lily insisted, she also felt a pull away from her known, safe life. She realized she was demanding a thing she was no longer certain about—going back to Denver.

Louise flicked her cigarette into the river. “Go ahead and cry. But nothing will change this.”

Lily stared out over the Seine, watching the white speck float down and away on the current. After a second of gazing at the water, she pulled back with a start and faced Louise.

“You mean you brought me here and I’ve been here, what—a week—without your help? Where were you when that guy mugged me? Where were you when I was trying to pawn my ring?” The thought that she might not have needed to sell her ring enraged Lily. Hot tears sprang to her eyes.

“Please, Lily, trust us. We were watching you the whole time.”

“Trust you! You were watching me and never helped me. What is this? You kidnapped me and now you’re blackmailing me to do—to do what? What do I have to do to get home?”

“You have no choice but to trust us. I understand that you’re upset—”

“I don’t want your understanding. I want answers. Go on! Say what you want from me. Maybe I will accept, maybe I will throw you into the Seine.”

Louise smiled. “Well, you have put yourself in a perfect position to help us, and you don’t want to blow it.”

“What? What is it?”

“There’s a very rare book that we need to get our hands on. And we know it is at this moment at Shakespeare and Company.”

“A book? You only want a book? Just buy it!”

“It’s more complicated than that. Only you can bring this book. And this book is your key, too. You will understand later.”

Lily shook her head, trying to comprehend it. After a minute she asked about the book.

Louise leaned in and spoke quietly. “Its called
Yggdrasil: The Secret Power of Nordic Mythology.
We’re very eager to make sure it doesn’t fall into the wrong hands.”

“Yig-dra-sil?”

“It’s an English translation of an ancient Nordic book. But it’s useless to tell you more about it now.”

“Wait—how do you spell that? What was the title again?”

Louise smirked and repeated the title that Lily tried to commit to memory. She had to write it down to remember it. She asked whose wrong hands they were saving the book from. Louise glanced at the pedestrians passing along the bridge and spoke in a whisper.

“Our German friends, of course. What’s in that book could provide a significant advantage to Hitler during the next world war. We don’t want that. We need you to get it for us.”

“Why me? And how did I get here . . . in ’37?”

But Louise shook her head. “Enough of your questions. You know all you need right now. Just get that book and you’ll have your answers afterward.”

“But . . .”

Louise rose. “No more chat. You have your instructions.” With that, she moved away, heading across the bridge toward the Left Bank.

“Hey, wait! How am I supposed to contact you?”

But Louise just called over her shoulder. “We’ve got our eye on you. We’ll contact you when the time comes.”

Louise vanished among the other pedestrians. Lily grabbed her bike to follow, but a wave of people blocked her way. By the time she got her bike rolling, Louise was gone. A car honked and startled Lily. She pulled over. What was that title?
Gidril?
She couldn’t remember. A flash of panic tore through her—her only salvation was a book whose title she couldn’t recall. Things were becoming more and more bizarre. One minute she was an aimless bookseller, the next she was helping her heroine Sylvia in another era, and now, she was in charge of saving a very important book from evildoers. “German friends,” Louise had said. Was she allied with the Nazis?