Page 6 of The Bookshop of Forbidden Books

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 Anaïs 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.”