Nikolski (16 page)

I unfold the top map. It is a stereographic projection of the Caribbean titled
Migrations of the Garifunas.
The Garifunas? Never heard of them. They are apparently great voyagers, judging from the complex network of routes that start in South America and South Africa, converge on St. Vincent and the Grenadines, head off again toward Jamaica and finally scatter throughout Central America in a multitude of detours, loops and dead ends.

I hear the girl moving back across the bookstore, betrayed by the creaking floorboards. I emerge from the Abyss, holding my map of the Garifunas.

“Find everything you were looking for?”

She shakes her head with an ambivalent little smile on her lips. People underestimate the X-ray vision of booksellers. I detect a C++ programming handbook hidden under her old raincoat, in the crook of her arm, where it’s warm. Lucky book.

I prepare to dive back into the Abyss with my map of the Garifunas when a second brave customer bursts out of the storm and crosses paths with my thief in the doorway. She shakes out her umbrella and looks around. After a moment’s hesitation, she throws her umbrella against the Mickey Spillane bookcase and steps firmly in my direction. Her face is somehow familiar, but she is not a regular of the bookshop. A former classmate? Some obscure TV weather reporter? An anonymous resident of the neighbourhood?

She greets me with a little nod and slaps what was once a book on the counter.

“I’m looking for an intact copy of this book.”

She has an odd Spanish accent, a voice that means business. Where
have
I seen her? I wipe my hands on my thighs, pick up the book and leaf through it. The back and the cover have been brutally torn away, along with a handful of pages. There is no way to ascertain the title or the author’s name, crucial information gone adrift together with the flyleaf. I lay the book down on the counter.

“What’s it about?”

“Treasures. Pirates.”

“Well, have a look in the Tales of Travel and Adventure section. At the back, on your right, near the washroom. Follow the sound of the leaking faucet.”

She heads to the back of the bookstore. I absently study the migratory map of the Garifunas, but am in fact preoccupied by this girl’s face. Cashier at the local convenience store? Distant acquaintance once met at a dinner? Fleeting passenger on the No. 55 bus? A bookseller must remember so many things and, as old Borges would say, one unavoidably ends up confusing what one has read, seen and experienced.

The girl’s search does not last very long. After ten minutes or so, she walks back to the cash register.

“Find what you were looking for?”

“Even better.”

She deposits half a dozen books on the counter, mostly rare books impossible to find in an ordinary bookstore. I dig up a pencil stub and add up the price. The girl hesitantly examines me out of the corner of her eye.

“What’s that object around your neck?” she finally inquires.

“A Nikolski compass.”

She does not press the point, and looks off in the direction of the Mickey Spillane section. I scribble the total amount of the sale on a bill and hand her the copy.

“That will be $119 all told. Or in round numbers, $110.”

I reach under the counter and fish out a large yellow bag from a shoe store. Many clients are surprised that we use recycled bags, but Mme Dubeau maintains that second-hand books must not be wrapped in new plastic.

The girl takes out her wallet and pays without batting an eyelash. She picks up the bag and her umbrella, says goodbye and steps back out into the storm. For a few more seconds, I try to think where I might have seen her before. At the local café? At the Jean-Talon market? On the front porch of an evangelical church? I shrug my shoulders, and am about to go back to the Abyss when I spot her old book with no cover lying abandoned on the counter.

I grab the book and rush out to the sidewalk, search all around, my eyes squinting against the rain. The girl
has vanished. I wipe away the water streaming down my neck and run back inside.

Alone with the book, I set about examining it in detail. It seems to be older than it looked at first blush. I open it to the exact middle and read the first sentence that I come upon:

Pirate stories. Such an odd idea, when you think of it. Why would an author want to devote himself to such a tired old topic? It was surely written by someone like me: a bookworm who never risked getting his slippers wet in the wide world, but preferred to live the buccaneer’s life of roaming and adventure vicariously. I give the book a thorough inspection but can find absolutely no trace of the author’s name. Nothing but an old, dismembered text, written by a faceless man.

Then I notice a curious detail: the typeface on the first and last pages is inconsistent. On closer examination I see that the typography and the width of the margins are also different. There are imperfections in the seams, variations of colour and texture in the paper. And then in a flash I realize the truth. The book is actually composed of a set of fascicles taken from several books and roughly cut and bound together.

By following the strange pagination, I easily manage to identify the fragments of three works, appearing in the following order:

Pages 27 to 54: a very old monograph on treasure islands;

Pages 71 to 102: a vaguely historical treatise on the pirates of the Caribbean;

Pages 37 to 62: a biography of Alexander Selkirk, castaway on a desert island.

This enigmatic book assembles, under the anonymity of a single binding—or what’s left of it—three destinies once scattered over various libraries, or even over various garbage dumps. Which leaves outstanding the question as to what sort of twisted mind could have conceived of such an amalgamation, and to what end.

For now, I wonder if the girl will come back looking for her three-headed book. If she neglects to, we could naturally consider it ours and put it up for sale. But it would be impossible to sell this curiosity. In its present state it would be worth no more than fifty cents, and one can’t surrender books for fifty cents. It would be irresponsible.

I look at the book with budding affection. I wrap it carefully and store it away in my backpack.

THE AWAKENING IS SO RUDE
that I sit up in my bed with a jolt. I turn on the lamp and rub my eyes vigorously. A teapot, the Three-Headed Book and the Nikolski compass come into view on the night table. The alarm clock says 2:07 a.m.

I finally remember where I saw the stranger in the bookstore.

The story goes back to August 1992. I was keenly following the events of the Oka Crisis, especially since the Warriors of the Kahnawake Reservation had barricaded the Mercier Bridge, less than ten minutes from my hometown. From time to time, I would see a former neighbour busy insulting the police or the Indians, or both at once.

I had caught sight of the girl in the background of several news reports, mingling inconspicuously with the journalists in the Kanesatake pine grove. She was young, pretty, dressed in a khaki shirt and a pair of jeans. She did not wear a bulletproof vest, but a press
card hung from her neck. I spotted her because of her black hair, which was long and straight, her olive-coloured skin, and her eyes, which, in spite of the distance, I pictured as slightly almond-shaped. She looked to be Native, and I was repeatedly surprised to see her among the journalists and the police rather than on the side of the insurgents. The Aboriginals must surely have been everywhere on both sides of the barricades— as advisers, negotiators, human rights observers—but, oddly, this girl seemed out of her element to me.

Sitting in my bed, I shuffle through these distant images, trying to connect them with the unknown girl’s visit to our bookstore. Was it a coincidence, or is there an invisible link between the internal politics of Kanesatake and the battered old book full of pirate stories?

And that is exactly the trouble with inexplicable events. You inevitably end up interpreting them in terms of predestination, or magic realism, or government plots.

I glance at the Nikolski compass and gently tap the plastic three times with my knuckles, the way one would hit the glass of a barometer. The globe oscillates and obstinately returns to 34° W. Never one degree off. Go figure.

I switch off the light and try to go back to sleep.

THE SUN WON’T BE COMING UP
for another twenty minutes or so in this forsaken corner of the northern hemisphere. Glittering at the bottom of the bay is the cluster of electric bulbs of Tête-à-la-Baleine. The red and green navigation lights of a cod-fishing boat work their way up the channel, sail past the Îles Mermettes lighthouse and disappear behind Providence Island.

Noah shivers as he watches the ghostly bulk of an iceberg drifting offshore. Eight hundred nautical miles downriver from Montreal the month of May is anything but springlike, and he wonders if this rocky, frozen island actually represents an improvement over Section V at the library.

He adjusts his tuque and walks back up to the excavation site.

Despite its rather ambitious name, all the
site
consists of is four old yellow nylon tents standing in a random arrangement, a sifter suspended between three trimmed spruce trees, several dozen plastic containers
of various sizes, and a latrine knocked together out of an old military tarpaulin and a theodolite tripod, all of it overlooked by the compact mass of the Bunker. And directly to the rear, where the main dig is located, Howard and Edward are beavering away.

When they aren’t fighting over the coffee Thermos, these two characters are busy unearthing an ancient Inuit gravesite—a circle of stones in the centre of which a gnawed skeleton is heaped up in a vaguely fetal position. The bones emerge from the humus a millimetre at a time, to the beat of countless tiny brush strokes. A thousand years earlier, an old nomad lay down in this circle of stone to finally put an end to his migrations. His soul and his carbon-14 were carried off by the wind, but his bones have not moved since then.

Noah walks quietly around the Bunker and heads toward the second dig, which is his personal assignment. This site is a kind of prehistoric campground, and the challenge is to reconstruct the campers’ identities and their way of living on the basis of small scraps of refuse strewn over the landscape. The task is exquisitely complex because, while it is easy to track sedentary populations by following the greasy fingerprints they have smeared all over history, the distant presence of nomads must be construed from next to nothing: a seal-bone hook corroded by the acidity of the ground, traces of charcoal, shells dispersed among the cobbles.

Stevenson Island has seen quite a lot of traffic over the centuries. If you scratch the surface carefully, you discover the stubborn vestiges of fishermen of the Maritime Archaic, Dorset seal hunters, bearded Scandinavians, Thule Inuit, Basque whalers, Naskapis and shipwrecked French mariners—not to mention a small group of archaeologists who haven’t showered in two weeks and who get excited over the slightest shard of flint.