The Museum of Literary Souls (A Short Story) (2 page)

The police did much the same as Mr. Berger had done, only with greater numbers
and at greater expense in man-hours and overtime payments. They searched the
bushes and the track, and enquiries were made in Glossom in case any female
residents had gone missing. The driver of the train was contacted, and the
train was kept on the platform at Plymouth for an hour while its engine and
carriages were examined for any sign of human remains.

Finally, Mr. Berger, who had remained seated on his stile
throughout, was interviewed for a second time by the inspector from Moreham.
His name was Carswell, and his manner when he confronted Mr. Berger was colder
than it had originally been. A light rain had begun to fall shortly after the
search for a body had commenced, and Carswell and his men were now damp and
weary. Mr. Berger was also wet and found that he had developed a slight but
constant shiver. He suspected that he might be in shock. He had never witnessed
the death of another person before. It had affected him deeply.

Now Inspector Carswell stood before him, his hat jammed on
his head, and his hands thrust deep in the pockets of his coat. His men were
packing up, and a pair of dogs that had been brought in to help with the search
were being led back to the van in which they had arrived. The townspeople who
had gathered to watch were also drifting away, but not without final curious
glances at the figure of Mr. Berger.

“Let’s go through it again, shall we?” said Carswell, and
Mr. Berger told his story one last time. The details remained the same. He was
certain of what he had witnessed.

“I have to tell you,” said Carswell when Mr. Berger had
finished speaking, “that the driver of the train saw nothing and was unaware of
any impact. As you can imagine, he was quite shocked to hear that a woman had
been reported as throwing herself under his wheels. He aided in the examination
of the train himself. It turns out that he has some unfortunate experience of
such matters. Before he was promoted to driver, he was a fireman on an engine
that struck a man near Coleford Junction. He told us that the driver saw the
man on the rails but couldn’t brake in time. The engine made a terrible mess of
the poor fellow, he said. There was no mistaking what had happened. He seems to
think that if he had somehow hit a woman without knowing, we’d have no trouble
finding her remains.”

Carswell lit a cigarette. He offered one to Mr. Berger, who
declined. He preferred his pipe, even though it had long since gone out.

“Do you live alone, sir?” asked Carswell.

“Yes, I do.”

“From what I understand, you moved to Glossom fairly
recently.”

“That’s correct. My mother died, and she left me her
cottage.”

“And you say that you’re a writer?”

“Trying to be a writer. I’ve started to wonder if I’m really
destined to be any good at it, to be honest.”

“Solitary business, writing, or so I would imagine.”

“It does tend to be, yes.”

“You’re not married?”

“No.”

“Girlfriend?”

“No,” said Mr. Berger, then he added, “not at the moment.”

He didn’t want Inspector Carswell to think that there might
be anything odd or unsavory about his bachelor existence.

“Ah.”

Carswell drew deeply on his cigarette.

“Do you miss her?”

“Miss who?”

“Your mother.”

Mr. Berger considered it an odd question to ask but answered
nonetheless.

“Of course,” he said. “I would visit her when I could, and
we spoke on the telephone once a week.”

Carswell nodded, as if this explained a lot.

“Must be strange, coming to a new town and living in the
house in which your mother died. She passed away at home, didn’t she?”

Mr. Berger thought that Inspector Carswell seemed to know a
lot about his mother. Clearly he had not just been asking about a missing woman
during his time in Glossom.

“Yes, she did,” he replied. “Forgive me, Inspector, but what
has this got to do with the death of this young woman?”

Carswell took the cigarette from his mouth and examined the
burning tip, as though some answer might be found in the ash.

“I’m beginning to wonder if you might not have been mistaken
in what you saw,” he said.

“Mistaken? How can one be mistaken about a suicide?”

“There is no body, sir. There’s no blood, no clothing,
nothing. We haven’t even been able to find the red bag that you mentioned.
There’s no sign that anything untoward happened on the track at all. So…”

Carswell took one last drag on his cigarette, then dropped
it on the dirt and ground it out forcefully with the heel of his shoe.

“Let’s just say that you were mistaken and leave it at that,
shall we? Perhaps you might like to find some other way to occupy your evenings
now that winter is setting in. Join the bridge club, or take up singing in the
choir. You might even find a young lady to walk out with. What I’m saying is
you’ve had a traumatic time of it, and it would be good for you not to spend so
much time alone. That way you’ll avoid making mistakes of this nature again.
You do understand me, don’t you, sir?”

The implication was clear. Being mistaken was not a crime,
but wasting police time was. Mr. Berger climbed down from the stile.

“I know what I saw, Inspector,” he said, but it was all that
he could do to keep the doubt from creeping into his voice, and his mind was
troubled as he took the path back to his little cottage.

It should come as no surprise to learn that Mr. Berger slept little that night.
Over and over he replayed the scene of the woman’s demise, and although he had
neither witnessed nor heard the impact, still he saw and heard it in the
silence of the bedroom. To calm himself he had taken a large glass of his late
mother’s brandy upon his arrival home, but he was not used to spirits, and the
alcohol sat ill with him. He grew delirious in his bed, and so often did the
woman’s death play out before him that he began to believe that this evening
was not the first time he had been present at her passing. A peculiar sense of déjà
vu overcame him, one that he was entirely unable to shrug off. Sometimes when
he was ill or feverish, a tune or song would lodge itself in his mind. So
entrenched would its hooks become that it would keep him from sleep, and he
would be unable to exorcise it until the sickness had passed. Now he was having
the same experience with his vision of the woman’s death, and its repetitive
nature was leading him to believe that he had already been familiar with the
scene before he was present at it.

At last, thankfully, weariness overcame him and he was able
to rest, but when he woke the next morning that nagging feeling of familiarity
remained. He put on his coat and returned to the scene of the previous
evening’s excitement. He walked the rough trail, hoping to find something that
the police might have missed, a sign that he had not been the victim of an
overactive imagination—a scrap of black cloth, the heel of a shoe, or the red
bag—but there was nothing.

It was the red bag that bothered him most of all. The red
bag was the thing. With his mind unfogged by alcohol—although in truth his head
still swam slightly in the aftermath—he grew more and more certain that the
suicide of the young woman reminded him of a scene in a book; no, not just
a
scene but perhaps
the
most famous scene of locomotive-based
self-immolation in literature. He gave up on his physical search and decided to
embark on a more literary one.

He had long ago unpacked his books, although he had not yet
found shelves for them all, his mother’s love of reading not matching his own
and thus leading to her preference for large swaths of bare wall that she had
seen fit to adorn only with cheap reproductions of sea views. There was still
more room for his volumes than there had been in his own lodgings, due in no
small part to the fact that the cottage had more floor space than his flat, and
all a true bibliophile needs for his storage purposes is a horizontal plane. He
found his copy of
Anna Karenina
sandwiched in a pile on the dining room
floor between
War and Peace
and
Master and Man and Other Parables and
Tales
, the latter in a nice Everyman’s Library edition from 1946, about
which he had forgotten and which almost led him to set aside
Anna Karenina
in favor of an hour or so in its company. Good sense quickly prevailed,
although not before he had set
Master and Man
on the dining table for
further examination at a more convenient time. There it joined a dozen
similarly blessed volumes, all of which had been waiting for days or weeks for
their hour to come at last.

He sat in an armchair and opened
Anna Karenina
(Limited Editions Club, Cambridge, 1951, signed by Barnett Freedman, unearthed
at a jumble sale in Gloucester and acquired for such a low price that Mr.
Berger had later made a donation to charity in order to salve his conscience).
He flipped through the pages until he found Chapter XXXI, which began with the
words “A bell sounded…” From there he read on quickly but carefully,
traveling with Anna past Piotr in his livery and top boots, past the saucy
conductor and the woman deformed, past the dirty hunchback muzhik, until
finally he came to this passage:

She was going to throw herself under the first car as its
center came opposite where she stood. Her little red traveling-bag caused her
to lose the moment; she could not detach it from her arm. She awaited the
second. A feeling like that she had experienced once, just before taking a dive
in the river, came over her, and she made the sign of the cross. This familiar
gesture called back to her soul a whole series of memories of her youth and
childhood; and suddenly the darkness which hid everything from her was torn
asunder. Life, with its elusive joys, glowed for an instant before her. But she
did not take her eyes from the car; and when the center, between the two
wheels, appeared, she threw away her red bag, drawing her head between her
shoulders, and, with outstretched hands, threw herself on her knees under the
car. For a second she was horror-struck at what she was doing.
“Where am I? What am I doing? Why?”
She tried to get up, to draw back; but something
monstrous, inflexible, struck her head, and threw her on her back.
“Lord, forgive me all!” she murmured, feeling the
struggle to be in vain.
A little muzhik was working on the railroad, mumbling in
his beard.
And the candle by which she had read the book that was
filled with fears, with deceptions, with anguish, and with evil, flared up with
greater brightness than she had ever known, revealing to her all that before
was in darkness, then flickered, grew faint, and went out forever.

Mr. Berger read the passage twice, then leaned back in his
chair and closed his eyes. It was all there right down to the detail of the
little red bag, the bag that the woman on the tracks had cast aside before the
express had hit her, just as Anna had thrown away her bag before she was
struck. The woman’s gestures in her final moments had also been similar to
Anna’s: she too had drawn her head between her shoulders and stretched out her
arms, as though the death to come was to take the form of crucifixion rather
than iron and wheels. Why, even Mr. Berger’s own memory of the incident had
been couched in similar phrases.

“My God,” said Mr. Berger to the listening books, “perhaps
the inspector was right and I have been spending too much time alone with only
novels for company. There can be no other excuse for a man believing that he
has seen the climactic scene of
Anna Karenina
reenacted on the
Exeter-to-Plymouth railway.”

He placed the volume on the arm of the chair and went to the
kitchen. He was briefly tempted to reach for the brandy again, but no
particular good had come of their previous shared moments, and so he opted for
the routine of making a big pot of tea. When all was in place, he took a seat
at the kitchen table and drank cup after cup until he had drained the pot dry.
For once he did not read, nor did he distract himself with the
Times
crossword, still left untried at this late stage of the morning. He simply
stared at the clouds and listened to birdsong and wondered if he was not, after
all, going gently insane.

Mr. Berger did not read anything else that day. His two
examinations of Chapter XXXI of
Anna Karenina
remained his sole contact
with the world of literature. He could not recall a day when he had read less.
He lived for books. They had consumed every spare moment since the revelation
in childhood that he could tackle a novel alone without his mother having to
read it to him. He recalled his first halting encounters with the Biggles
stories of W. E. Johns, remembering how he had struggled through the longer
words by breaking them up into their individual syllables so that one difficult
word became two easier ones. Ever since then books had been his constant
companions. He had, perhaps, sacrificed real friendships to these simulacra,
because there were days when he had avoided his chums after school or ignored
their knocking on his front door when his parents’ house was otherwise empty,
taking an alternative route home or staying away from the windows so that he
could be sure that no football game or exploration of orchards would get in the
way of finishing the story that had gripped him.

In a way, books had also been partly responsible for his
fatal tentativeness with the girl from accounts. She seemed to read a little—he
had seen her with a Georgette Heyer novel and the occasional “book in brown”
from the twopenny library—but he had the sense that it was not a passion with
her. What if she insisted that they spend hours at the theater or the ballet or
shopping simply because it meant that they would be “doing things together”?
That was, after all, what couples did, wasn’t it? But reading was a solitary
pursuit. Oh, one could read in the same room as someone else or beside them in
bed at night, but that rather presumed that an agreement had been reached about
such matters and the couple in question consisted of a pair of like-minded
souls. It would be a disaster to find oneself embroiled with the sort of person
who read two pages of a novel and then began humming, or tapping her fingers to
attract attention, or, God help us, started fiddling with the dial on the
radio. The next thing one knew, she’d be making “observations” on the text in
hand, and once that happened there would be no peace forever after.

But as he sat alone in the kitchen of his deceased mother’s
house, it struck Mr. Berger that he had never troubled himself to find out the
views of the girl in accounts on the subject of books or, indeed, ballet. Deep
inside he had been reluctant to disturb his ordered lifestyle, a world in which
he rarely had to make a more difficult decision than selecting the next book to
read. He had lived his life at one remove from the world around him, and now he
was paying the price in madness.