Monday, January 16, 2017

The City of Stationers

(While I was in Brno on a reading tour of the Czech Republic, Slovakia, and Poland back in 2014, I passed my time in the evenings writing the opening of a story called 'The City of Stationers'. Then, as is my wont, I forgot all about it. Or rather, on the trip itself, I was distracted by visiting Wrocław (Breslau) into digging out the works of Marek Krajewski, and his marvellously perverse detective, Eberhard Mock, and so read and read, but wrote no more.

I looked at the draft again about a year later, and puzzled about whether I had or had not done a scene I half-remember writing about secret message being passed in a fruit and vegetable market, then put it away again.

Until a conversation on Twitter about another 'lost' manuscript, this time a genuinely misplaced, hand-written novella called Virtual Sideboard, written late at night while drinking cheap three year old whisky on a package holiday to Lanzarote while my wife and infant daughter slept the sleep of the sun-wearied holidaymaker next door. (Ah, the glamour!) 

This piece, a most likely dreadful series of recursive riffs about the contents of my grandmother's old sideboard as the springboard for memories and fantasies, struck me and me alone as being inspired by - if only in the sense of being a pale imitation of - the works of Bruno Schulz. But when a fellow Tweeter remarked on the Schulz-like nature of the ongoing conversation, I was suddenly reminded instead of 'The City of Stationers'.

Of course, when I looked up Schulz's hometown of Drohobycz (Drohobyczka on Google Maps), I found it further from Łodz than I'd imagined, and nearer to Košice, which I'd visited by rail with a splendid retired actress on the Slovakian stretch of the tour, both of us speaking in garbled French for want of a common tongue as we reclined in the dining car, drank wine, and watched the occasional lake sweep past.

And so the City re-presented itself, neither Moravia nor Silesia, and certainly not Bohemia, but somehow invested with their narrow streets and sudden spires and tightly coiling rivers, as though it could somehow lead to the Street of Crocodiles, as though one could climb into the dusty neglected old sideboard in the asbestos-ridden garage by my mother's house, remove a panel at the back, and unfold oneself painfully into its stationery-obsessed streets, reproduced below. Perhaps I'll post another section next week...

- And so, I must add, while I was rummaging through my blogs to post it here, I happened upon an untitled piece from Dec 2010 which happened to be about Schulz and which I had not lost, just completely forgotten having written, and so link to here.)


1
It was then that I arrived in a city where the only shops were stationers. These were all narrow-entranced little spaces, invariably stone-arched, with a complex iconography of disproportionately large grotesque heads and pine cones.

Their signs were painted onto curved enamelled metal in a language thick with diacritics but stingy with vowels. The windows often had blinds half rolled down or were hung with thick layers of old orange plastic in an attempt to protect the products laid out on display.

Staplers and geometry sets were popular, with various types of exercise book, usually soberly numbered according to a gradated scale for lineation and weight of paper, but now and then with a gaudy spread of children's cartoon characters - though not from the usual stables of recent movies or famous studios. These were unknown figures that nonetheless sparked some vague recognition.

Pencil sharpeners featured strongly - metal, wall-attached, electric, or more adventurously shaped plastic examples: disguised as golf balls, cigarette lighters, cars (usually vintage); or presented as the mouths or anuses of what were presumably figures from politics, showbusiness, sport (all of these were also unfamiliar, but possessed of that same aura of recognisability: you knew the type).

Bottles of ink of various grades and colours were stacked in pyramids or stood proudly on sheets of paper (often printed on the premises), extolling their virtues - such density, such lustre; so quick to dry, so permanent! Various anthropomorphised cephalopods, themselves executed in swift strokes, or set in impressionistic, billowing clouds, queued to endorse their favourite brands with that interest cows seem to take in cheese and butter, according to the ad-men.

Giant nibs rotated slowly; glowing cases of fountain pens, their inner dynamics revealed by cross section like the anatomies of fossil, somehow chitinous fish, commanded the eye.

Inside, you knew, would be the tiered rows of pencils, graded by the darkness of their graphite, and smelling of the woodwork class; the full range of ballpoint pens, ranked by colour and thickness of stroke - though not produced by the company elsewhere famed for their invention.

Rainbows of felt-tips, watercolour pillules, brushes in their hoggish and equine herds, oil paint tubes; paper of all thicknesses and sizes from the kite tail flourishes of origami squares to the deckle-edged sails of what felt like unevenly bleached rhinocerous hide; rulers and slide rules, wooden, transparent and opaque as femurs; sporadically, as if reluctantly, calculators and their batteries; compasses like wingless insects.

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