Trafika Europe 11 - Swiss Delights

Short Fiction

between piles of books. One of them gave me a warning glance, as if to say “I’ve got my eye on you, kid!” I took a seat at the back of the room, laid my paper and pen on the table, and looked around: I didn’t know anybody, but recognized the bald head of a famous writer seated off in a corner. I’d seen him on TV before. The librarian—a calm hulk, dull and lifeless and yet, at least in my estimation, capable of unleashing terrible outbursts—leaned through a little glass door and called out my full name. I didn’t get up right away, after all, he might’ve been calling someone else who happened to have my same name. He said it a second time, I got up and, cursing my Adidas that squeaked with each step as if sticking to the floor, went to pick up Lewis Carroll’s Collected Works. What, then, might this picture of a London library in 1940, left partially destroyed yet in a certain sense untouched by the blitz, even mean? After reading a poem she finds in the Looking-glass House, Alice remarks, “Somehow it seems to fill my head with ideas—only I don’t exactly know what they are!”

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