Read Online The Librarian by Mikhail Elizarov - Free Book Online Page A

undesirable reading room twice for the council to take an immediate decision to disband it. For situations like this several programmes of social rehabilitation were developed. It was considered a great stroke of luck if the readers were all registered with the nearest library, without being broken up—and the concept of —near” was distinctly relative: quite often people had to travel more than a hundred kilometres to a Book. Membership dues and the cost of travel together took a heavy toll on readers’ pockets
    More often a different, tragic scenario was played out. Local or regional libraries refused to take all the strangers at once, arguing that they were already overfull. Preference was given to applicants who earned at least a minimally acceptable wage, out of which membership dues were then deducted. The readers with low incomes were scattered to any libraries where there were vacancies. We can imagine what an assignment to Irkutsk or Krasnoyarsk meant for someone who lived in Omsk. Many refused to make the move and joined the queues of “victims”. As a rule these broken people went to seed, becoming vicious and violent. It was from their numbers that the council formed its brigades of torch-bearers. These mercenaries willingly carried out even the very vilest of missions since, after all, the reward for the job was a Book.
    Readers who rejected this situation could only accept the challenge and face up to an enemy who outnumbered them many times over. It is obvious how these battles ended, when twenty brave defenders of a reading room fought against hundreds of choice warriors sent by the council…
    During these troubled times I became a librarian. My reading room owned a Book of Memory and was frequented by seventeen readers.

THE BOOK OF MEMORY
    I MYSELF DID NOT read the Book of Memory until a month after I took up the job, and I must confess that I have not reread it often. The “memory” induced has always been the same, and it sometimes seemed to me that it might be worn out by repetition, like a pair of trousers.
    Actually the sensation experienced cannot really be called memory or recall. Dream, vision, hallucination—these words also fail to capture the essence of the complex condition in which the Book immersed me. Its gift of deception to me personally was an entirely invented childhood, full of warm emotion and joy, and I immediately believed in it, because the sense of living this vision was so total: in comparison, real memories were mere bloodless silhouettes. In fact this three-dimensional phantom was experienced more brilliantly and intensely than any life and consisted only of little crystals of happiness and tender sadness, shimmering with the bright light of one event after another.
    The “memory” had a musical lining, woven out of many melodies and voices. I caught echoes of ‘The Beautiful Distance’ and ‘The Winged Swing’, a polar-bear mother sang her lullaby to little Umka, a troubadour lauded a “ray of golden sunlight” in a velvety baritone, a touching little girl’s voice asked a deer to whisk her away to magical deerland, “where pine trees sweep up to the sky, where what never was is real”. And following those pine trees, my heart tore itself out of my breast and flew away, like a bird released out of warm hands.
    To the accompaniment of this pot-pourri filled with rapturous tears, I saw New Year round dances, fun and frolics, presents, sleigh rides, a puppy with dangling ears yelping clamorously, thawed patches in spring, little streams, May Day holidays with banners and streamers, the unbelievable height of a flight on my father’s shoulders, a vast expanse of smoky dandelions sprawling in front of me, cotton-wool clouds drifting across the sky, a picturesque little lake, pierced through with reeds, trembling in the wind, silvery small fry darting through the warm, shallow water, grasshoppers chirring in grass tinted yellow by the sunlight, purple dragonflies