Chapter 5 Mathilde
Mathilde
She was a twenty-five-year-old pharmacology student.
She complained that her studies left her with hardly any free time, but that she couldn’t live without reading.
Mitch had never been able to tell whether she was playing a part.
There was something theatrical about her: tall and lean, with a flat chest, squared shoulders, tiny waist, a pixie-cut, bangs that skimmed the tops of her sparkling black eyes.
Mathilde sighed a lot. She was constantly ranting about the cost of living and how students couldn’t even afford to buy books.
Every time she returned a book she’d managed to read without breaking the spine, Mitch took it back with good grace and gave her another.
She loved mysteries and feminist literature and adored Ana?s Nin, whose Diary she’d bought in seven volumes and never returned a single one.
Nin had led her to Henry Miller. Delta of Venus had been on the first list of banned books, and Mitch thought Mathilde would probably love to get her hands on a copy.
Whether she’d be able to resist bragging about it remained to be seen.
Regardless, it would be a good way to test her discretion before revealing the secret room to her.
She always came to the shop on Wednesdays after class, just as Mitch was about to close, lingering to share her thoughts on what she’d read.
She was far more animated about the books she hated than the ones she liked, and she spoke in the satisfied tones of a person who loves the sound of their own voice.
Mitch didn’t mind her company. While she talked, he’d tidy up the tables or go over the day’s receipts.
Occasionally he’d nod or murmur a few words here and there as if they were having a conversation.
That evening, she was asking him – or perhaps herself – about the relationship between Arthur Miller and Marilyn Monroe. Could you really marry a woman you hardly knew? How could a man so brilliant be so cruel as to call his marriage a “rookie mistake,” and his wife “a smashed vase”?
Mitch, never very confident in his own social skills, believed he simply wasn’t the kind of man who inspired brilliance in others. Could you love Miller’s work and ignore his faults?
Boredom had an immediate effect on Mitch: his thoughts would fragment, his mind drifting to unfinished tasks, flitting distractedly from one idea to the next.
That night, for instance, while Mathilde chattered on, he suddenly remembered an unpaid electricity bill.
That, in turn, reminded him of the staircase under the trapdoor in the back room – he’d been meaning to reinforce it.
He’d even bought some reclaimed planks from the carpenter on Moines Street.
“Oh yeah, that was a good deal…” he muttered to himself.
“What was a good deal?” Mathilde piped up.
Mitch started, caught off guard. “Uh… the planks,” he stammered, absentmindedly spinning a pencil between his fingers.
She stared at him dubiously.
“I have something for you,” he went on, undaunted. “But only if you can keep a secret. If you don’t think you can do that, there’ll be no judgment from me. A lot of people have trouble with them, you see. Sometimes secrets are stronger than the person keeping them.”
That was all it took to pique Mathilde’s curiosity. She leaned across the counter, so close to Mitch that he wondered if she’d misunderstood what kind of secret he meant.
“What is it?” she whispered.
“A book.” Mitch kept his tone even.
She leaned even closer. She could just as easily have been going in for a kiss, and Mitch was suddenly worried that the book he was about to give her would only encourage further misunderstanding.
“What’s so mysterious about this book?”
“Nothing! Except that it was written by one of your favourite authors,” he said quickly, anxious to move their dynamic back onto safer ground.
“Great. So why is it a secret, then?”
“Because I have absolutely no right to sell it to you.”
Moved by the trust he was placing in her, the privileged status she was being given, Mathilde flung her arms around Mitch’s neck and kissed him soundly on the lips.
“Gosh, I don’t know what came over me,” she mumbled a moment later, pulling away.
As a gentleman, and a man for whom women remained an unfathomable mystery, Mitch kept quiet. He asked her to wait, and slipped into the back room and down the trapdoor into the basement. Heart pounding, he returned moments later with Delta of Venus and laid it on the counter.
“Oh, wow,” Mathilde murmured when she saw the cover.
“I didn’t choose the title,” Mitch said, cheeks flaming.
“But you did choose to sell it to me.”
“I’m leasing it to you.”
Mathilde rolled her eyes. “Relax. It was a kiss, not a marriage proposal.”
“Mathilde, listen—”
“Ah, I see we’re on first-name terms now.”
“Mademoiselle.”
“Bit late, isn’t it? I think we’re past that point. And my answer is yes.”
“Yes to the book?”
“Yes to the drink. You owe me an explanation.”
“But – I didn’t do anything – you’re the one who—”
“Oh, come on.” As though he were the one being unreasonable. “That whole mysterious act of yours – don’t tell me it was all to hand me a book.”
“Well, yes – I mean, no – I wanted to talk to you about—”
She stared at him as he continued to babble, fascinated – and somewhat pleased – by his discomfort.
“Okay, so you have secrets to tell me. But I’m hungry, so let’s go get some dinner. On you, I assume, since I’m the customer. Right?”
“Right.” Mitch sighed, grabbing his keys from beneath the counter. He took his jacket from its hook and moved toward the switch that operated the shop’s metal shutter.
Mathilde was delighted by anything even the slightest bit out of the ordinary. This included leaving via the bookshop’s back courtyard, which to her felt like using the stage door at a theatre. Mitch punched the alarm code into the keypad near the back door and stepped aside to let her go first.
The dim light in the courtyard lent a sinister quality to the place, which might have been why Mathilde took Mitch’s arm – though she continued to cling to it as they walked up the bright, pedestrian-filled avenue.
She guided him down one side street, then another, bypassing the train station and stopping at a hole-in-the-wall place Mitch would never have considered going into.
The restaurant’s décor turned out to be as eclectic as the Middle Eastern pop mix crackling out of an old speaker hung from the ceiling.
Orange Formica tables were bolted to the walls.
Behind a counter of questionable cleanliness, two women were busy at work: one slicing kebab meat from a greasy electric rotisserie, the other stuffing pitas.
Mathilde must have been a regular customer, since the woman with the knife greeted her warmly and the other gave Mitch a quick once-over before winking at Mathilde and returning to her pitas.
“This will be perfect.” Mathilde beamed, perching on a lime-green stool at one of the orange tables.
Mitch took a seat on the stool across from her, this one canary yellow.
“Don’t worry. No one will hear us here.”
Mitch glanced up at the speaker above his head. “I don’t doubt it.”
Mathilde slid off her stool and went to the counter, returning with two glasses full of a steaming, cloudy beverage.
“Assam and cardamom tea. One hundred percent organic.”
Mitch had serious doubts, but Mathilde brought her glass to her lips, motioning for him to drink. It wasn’t just tea; there was quite a lot of alcohol in it, too. But it was surprisingly drinkable.
The two owners were a couple, Mathilde explained. They’d fled Iran, where homosexuality was punishable by hanging. They’d travelled a long way for their freedom. Now their place was a haven for outsiders, and they often fed the homeless people in the area.
“They’ve had terrible luck, though.” She sighed.
“Why?” Mitch asked, already imagining a suspicious number of food poisonings.
“Why?” she echoed incredulously. “Why do you think? This country was a different place when they first came here. Now… well, we might not be a police state yet, but the way things are going… gay people are constantly being harassed, even at the university. What the hell’s happened to make people so intolerant and hateful? ”
“People close to power took over the media, for one thing. TV, radio, the Lighthouse. All that propaganda soaked into people’s minds.”
“Then they never had minds to begin with,” Mathilde said bitterly. “Just hay for brains.”
“Which leads us to the very thing I wanted to talk to you about.”
“Weren’t you just denying you had any secrets to share?” Mathilde teased. She licked her fingers and looked at Mitch, as hungry for him as she had been for her kebab.
He shook his head – he was not on the menu, thank you very much.
“That’s rare,” she said coolly. “Classy. Almost beautiful.”
Mitch turned to scan the room. “What is?” he asked.
“Not trying to sleep with me on the first night.”
“Mathilde, I have no intention of sleeping with you.”
“My grandmother used to say, ‘Never spit in a vase, you might have to drink from it someday.’”
Mitch stared at her. “What on earth made your grandmother say that?”
“Oh, probably seeing me spit in a vase. So, are you seeing anyone?”
“Mathilde. Can I please talk to you about this book? Yes or no.”
“Yes or no would work just fine for my question too.”
“No!”
“In that case, tell me – what’s the big mystery with this book? I’m sure it’s riveting.” Mathilde bit her lip seductively as she said it. Mitch couldn’t tell if she was being sarcastic.
“At first,” he said, “I really believed it would just be a passing thing. You know, a moment of insanity. That reason would reassert itself soon enough.”
“Is that a quote from the book?”
“See,” he went on, unfazed, “when the government banned abortion, I thought women would take to the streets.”
“We did.”
“Not enough of you.”
“And where were you when the police came to pepper-spray us?”
“At home,” Mitch admitted.
“Oh, okay, then. I was afraid for a moment you were about to lecture me.”
“On the contrary. And that’s exactly why we’re here together tonight.”
“So far, the only thing I can see bringing us together is this amazing food. Your point, I’m not seeing at all.”
“When they changed the school curriculum to comply with government rhetoric, the students occupied high schools and universities. Once again, the police came to beat them and drive them out, and I stayed at home. Then they arrested the dissenters, the journalists who refused to follow suit, attorneys protesting the appointment of—”
“Of loyalist puppets. Let’s call it like it is. Let me guess – you didn’t do anything then, either?”
“I signed petitions.”
“Eases the conscience, but doesn’t actually accomplish anything.”
“Agreed.”
“And you decided I was the right person to unload your guilty conscience onto?”
“You don’t strike me as the right person for that sort of thing, Mathilde.”
“I’ll take that as a compliment.”
“Have you, by any chance, heard of House Bill 1467?”
“No, but something tells me I’m about to.”
“I’m the one in the line of fire now. They’ve banned more than a thousand books. The list grows every day.”
“Ah, now we’re getting somewhere. So you’ve decided to resist, and the best thing you could come up with was slipping me a copy of Delta of Venus? Look, I don’t think you’ll be getting a medal for bravery, but I’ve always wanted to read it, so…”
Mitch didn’t answer, but Mathilde’s childish teasing had finally taken effect: he found her unexpectedly charming. She saw things the same way he did. She shared his contempt for the regime. He decided he could trust her.
“It’s… a little more ambitious than that,” he said. “I’m going to open a secret bookshop.”
Mathilde looked at him with growing admiration.
She swallowed slowly, her breathing quickening.
She usually didn’t trust her own fits of emotion, but when Mitch told her about the secret room he’d discovered and the work he’d put in to restore it, and when he mentioned, among other things, the sofa he’d reupholstered, all of a sudden the only thing she wanted was to see it, now.
Because, for Mathilde, the raison d’être of literature boiled down to one thing: love.
Mitch had a lazy tendency to assume that things – whatever they were – would never go any further. Once again, he was wrong.