Page 2 of The Bookshop of Forbidden Books

His evenings were devoted to the hunt, as he combed through novels like an explorer searching for the Holy Grail. The quest began the moment he took his seat on the train. Once home, he cooked, read at the kitchen table, read in the living room, then read in bed. Even on Saturdays, when he always ate out, he dined with a book. Mitch wasn’t lonely. He simply had friends in fiction – and he loved them with all his heart.

Oddly enough, HB 1467 did not make it illegal to publish banned books, or even, strictly speaking, to read them. It simply prohibited bookshops from selling them and libraries from making them available to borrow. The lawmaker had found a way to enforce censorship – for it certainly was that – without ever actually using the term.

* * *

When Mitch first heard about the plans for HB 1467, he’d thought it was a farce, just another empty campaign promise. There was no way such an abstruse, unintelligible bill had been thought up by one man. It would have taken multiple unhinged minds to come up with something so utterly Machiavellian. The governor, who proudly took credit for the bill, claimed he was simply carrying out God’s will by restoring moral order to society.

At first glance, the sole purpose of the law was to ban books that could be detrimental to ‘social harmony’. But the more Mitch studied its clauses the clearer it became to him that it was the first stage of something far more dangerous and enduring.

Just a few months earlier, the governor had been slipping in the polls. His entire campaign had been built on fear, pushing the so-called ‘great replacement theory’: the idea that hordes of foreigners were stealthily invading the country, steadily waging war on the nation from within. But the data told a different story. Immigrants made up only ten percent of the population, a figure unchanged in two decades. Most of them worked in industry, commerce or public services – hospitals, schools and so on – and lived in various neighbourhoods across the capital and its suburbs. Mitch himself lived in a modest building mostly inhabited by another category of people: seasonal workers who came and went with the harvests.

But lately immigration agents had been showing more zeal than ever, enforcing a zero-tolerance policy, and the same was happening in the countryside, where farmers could no longer find the labour needed to bring in their crops. Fruit was rotting on the vine, while supermarket shelves were looking increasingly bare.

As the end of the governor’s first term approached – most of the foreign workers having decided to offer their services in less hostile places – the governor, undeterred but sorely lacking in scapegoats, dug his heels in and shifted his attacks to ‘foreigners abroad’. The figures there spoke for themselves, he claimed – the new narrative blamed unfair competition from neighbouring countries, and the government started cutting off every information feed it couldn’t control, starting with social media.

With the election only a year away, they urgently needed a new enemy to focus people’s ire. That was when the governor’s spokesperson – a former TV pundit known for spitting venom across every studio that would have him – stepped into the spotlight. According to him, the future could only be found in the past, an impossible argument to refute when everyone, conveniently, agreed that things had been ‘better before’. It didn’t take long to find a new culprit: books. Certain books were corrupting young people, putting unsuitable thoughts into their heads, inappropriate desires, pointless misgivings. They had to go and the government had to act quickly to protect the young and their parents from the poison that was contaminating them.

A few weeks later the governor signed HB 1467 into law. A list of 1,400 banned titles was sent out to every bookseller and librarian in the country. Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey, Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray, Balzac’s Père Goriot, Proust’s Sodom and Gomorrah, James Baldwin’s Giovanni’s Room, and Alice Walker’s The Color Purple were all to be removed from shelves immediately. Then came a second list: titles accused of dividing society by dredging up guilt over a past no longer ‘ours’. Books about slavery, racism, patriarchy, authoritarianism. The entire body of Toni Morrison’s work, Anne Frank’s diary, and hundreds of others. Mitch was despairing.

* * *

Although that crisp autumn day had started out so well, everything began to unravel when a public safety inspector walked into the bookshop. Outside, the city was, as usual, abuzz with the drone of traffic, with sirens wailing in the distance, and men shouting in the street. But inside, the inspector, dressed in a charcoal-grey suit, moved silently through the aisles, inspecting the tables and shelves, and pausing now and then to push up his thick round-framed glasses, which kept sliding down the bridge of his nose. With hunched shoulders and a solemn expression that somehow managed to look quietly self-satisfied, he picked up Anne Frank’s diary, from a display table and, with a tone of condescending politeness, handed Mitch a formal warning. He added that he’d be returning soon to make sure no banned books remained on the shelves. If he found any, he’d have no choice but to issue an order for administrative closure: eight days, the standard penalty for a second offense.

The inspector left without another word, and Mitch, blood boiling, yanked the metal shutter down behind him. A dark cloud had ruined his day, which was no longer orderly and predictable the way he liked. He needed some time to collect his thoughts.

Instead of opening up the shop again later, he spent the afternoon contemplating his shelves. And when night came, he didn’t catch his usual train home.

Mitch had made a decision that would change the course of his life: he would resist the absurd. Armed with a pickaxe, a shovel, and a bucket, he opened the coal hatch and climbed down into the cellar.

The antique dealer who had sold Mitch the shop had confided to him that the cellar might contain a secret room, sealed behind a brick wall. According to local legend, a merchant had used it to stash jewellery and artworks of questionable origin back in the early 1900s.

“Stolen goods, in other words,” Mitch had concluded.

“In other words,” the antique dealer echoed. “But it’s probably just a legend. And even if it’s true, it would’ve happened over a century ago. I’ve never dabbled in that kind of shady business myself,” he added solemnly, hand on heart.

“Why did he brick up the room?”

“A tip-off.” The dealer leaned in. “An unhappy customer must have talked, the police were about to raid the place. They say the merchant spent the night hiding his most valuable pieces, then sealed the room up himself to erase all traces.”

“But if he’d already emptied it out, why bother to seal it at all?”

“He didn’t have time to get rid of the furniture he used to store the goods. Shelves, trunks and, from what I’ve heard, a safe too heavy to move without drawing attention. It was smarter to just make everything just disappear, and his past along with it.”

Mitch, who’d never lacked imagination, suspected this tale wasn’t quite as old as the antique dealer claimed.

“And who told you all this?” he asked, amused.

“The fellow I bought this place from, ages ago,” the antique dealer replied, turning his attention back to signing the deed of sale. “Now that it’s yours, seems only right for me to pass the story on to you.”

They’d left the matter there.

Whenever a fuse blew and Mitch had to go down to the cellar, he sometimes lingered by the wall in question, wondering if there really was a secret room behind the bricks. But the shop always kept him so busy that he’d never had time to investigate further.

Until today.

If the story really had no foundation, it occurred to Mitch, just as he was raising the pickaxe, then the wall he was about to demolish could be load-bearing. Putting down the axe, he went back upstairs to get the flashlight he kept under the counter, then returned to the cellar.

The bare bulbs strung along the ceiling didn’t provide much light. Aiming the beam of his flashlight at the mortar in the brick wall, Mitch examined it carefully. It didn’t take a construction expert to see that the wall had been built by someone who knew what he was doing – or had gone to great lengths to make sure that the structure didn’t show any sign of being hastily put together. The mortar lines were even and smoothly finished, but it looked newer than the wall opposite.