In the days that followed, Van and Oscar were constantly brought up to date on the latest developments in the controversy. The media is an echo chamber, or even a recording studio. Magazines and radio stations were asking the same questions, over and over: is it a legitimate practice to sell only great novels? And how should one go about it? Who knows what literary value is? Who is behind The Good Novel? Who is financing it?
And then the controversy receded. One piece of news replaces another. The fourteen members of the IOC Evaluation Commission were in Paris, in order to study the city’s candidacy to organize the Olympic Games in the summer of 2012—all forecasts agreed that Paris had the best chance of all the candidate cities. Public debt in France had now passed 65 percent of the GDP: the media had suddenly noticed this. The cost of oil was nearing $57 a barrel, which was unprecedented. Russia was condemned by the European Court of Human Rights for its crimes in Chechnya. As for the crimes committed by the Sudanese state in Darfur, they would be dealt with by the International Criminal Court.
The Good Novel, like any cultural innovation in France, had survived the ordeal having gone through the typically French ideology wringer, as violent and conventional as it was approximate and inconsequential, and one might have logically concluded that the matter was closed and the bookstore would be left alone to go on its merry way. But on March 17, a Thursday, Le Poing published three pages entitled: “Great Literature and Little Deals,” with a subtitle: “Our investigation into the star bookstore at the Odéon.”
Henri Doultremont showed the article to Francesca the very same day. She had been getting ready to go out, at around ten, when a driver from Cinéor called her from his car: There’s an envelope for you. Francesca found the weekly magazine in the envelope, and stapled to the cover was Henri’s card, on which he had written: pp. 52-53-54.
“The fair-eyed bookseller, the fine man of letters with his air of a moonstruck Pierrot denying, hand on heart, the accusations leveled against The Good Novel, is no angel.
“Ivan Georg cannot see why anyone might find fault with the superb bookstore that opened six months ago with, as its motto, Here we only sell great novels, which elicited a substantial tide of interest and sympathy before raising a number of questions. No, he has never made a mystery of his identity. Yes, you can read everything about the rules which govern the store’s selection on their Web site. No, their high standards do not reflect any cultural elitism, it is the honor of the bookstore (see Le Ponte, February 21). Moreover, Mr. Georg has moral support, from none other than Audrey Doudou, which is no small accomplishment, but also from the historian Armand Delvaux, professor at the Collège de France (Le Bigaro, February 21), not to mention hundreds of sycophants and anonymous readers, but also teachers, writers, and intellectuals of varying degrees of notoriety who have lent their support to The Good Novel on the bookstore’s Internet forum.
“This defense seems altogether vague, and protestations of virtue are quite general. Ivan Georg will tell anyone prepared to listen (and film him at the same time) about his passion for literature and his disinterested intentions; he will say nothing about himself. He does not say a thing about how he came to be at the head of an establishment which clearly will not turn a profit yet has considerable funds behind it; not a word about his background, if any, in books, not a word about his past. This shadowy zone seemed worthy of further exploration; rightly so, as it proved.
“The fact that a bookstore that places labels of quality on its novels is run by a man who has very little education is not alarming in and of itself. It is a well-known fact that the selection of books has nothing to do with Mr. Georg but is made by a committee of experts, and he is only too eager to vaunt their competence while fiercely hiding their names.
“No, that Mr. Georg himself is not an authority in literary matters is not particularly alarming. What is, however, is the life as an adventurer he led before he landed at the controls of The Good Novel . . .”
Francesca was skimming. She wished she could toss out the magazine and never open it again. Yet she had to find out what to expect, how and where the next blows were going to be dealt. She read every other word, but the argument was clear. There were three charges against Van, in three paragraphs: “The teacher removed from his students,” “Bookseller and tough guy?,” “Prison.”
Investigators had found pupils’ parents who remembered the troubles Mr. Georg had had, twenty-five years ago, with his superiors. It didn’t last long, they said. “Before long, he was no longer around.” Had someone filed complaints? “At the time, it wasn’t as frequent as it is today.” “But anyway, the school district must have known what it was doing.”
Comments were couched in the interrogative. “Could it be that . . .” “How can we not surmise that . . .” Bastards, thought Francesca, furious. Cowards. They were protecting themselves against a lawsuit. A lawyer must have read their text.
In the paragraph about the years during which Georg had been a bookseller, moving from town to town, Francesca recognized everything Van had told her. But the story was no longer the same. A rather odd story, don’t you think, about a little employee who spent only a few months in each town . . . was he just a subordinate, or was he up to something fishy? Small businessmen obliged to sell for peanuts businesses that immediately afterwards turned out to be flourishing . . . And to conclude—Francesca was reading quickly—there was the quarrel between the principal and his agent. And his crime. The police archives were perfectly clear on that matter. One night in 1990, Georg had smashed through the door of a bookstore in Briançon with a car before making off with valuable merchandise and vanishing into thin air. “I did not press charges,” declared his erstwhile employer, the publisher Béraut. “I was disgusted.” That, too, seemed strange to the investigators, the man’s reticence to elucidate.
Thirdly, the most troubling incident. A few years later, there was our man in prison in Ankara. Evidence is lacking in this case, there are no archives. But at the prison at Ulucanlar, the guards remember there were numerous charges: drug trafficking, shady dealings in antiquities, fake papers . . .
The phone rang. Francesca’s eyes were full of tears. She walked over to the phone saying hello out loud, to steady her voice. It was Van.
“Oh, Ivan,” she said simply.
“What’s wrong? Is something the matter?”
His tone was that of someone who knows nothing.
“Van,” said Francesca, “can you come to my place? We have to talk.”
He was there within a quarter of an hour. When she saw him, Francesca knew that he hadn’t read the article.
“This time, they’ve really struck hard,” she said, showing him the magazine.
“Against you?” asked Van.
“Against you, me, all of us. You haven’t seen Le Poing?”
“Are they at it again?”
“Here.”
She went to heat up some coffee, leaving Ivan to read unwatched. When she came back into the little sitting room, with a tray in her hands, he was standing, looking out the window. He turned around.
“That’s the worst they can do,” he said. “Pure slander, but each time there is an element of truth.”
“Don’t tell me any more,” interrupted Francesca.
But, on the contrary, Ivan wanted her to know exactly where the truth left off and slander began.
It was true that he had belonged to a movement of libertarian teachers, he said, who had been inspired by sacred texts such as A. S. Neill’s Summerhill, as had a good number of teachers in the 1970s. It is true that he had been barred from the roster of National Education teachers. “I think I told you this. But it’s not true that it was about morals. It was political, and I’d asked for it. I didn’t apply one quarter of the regulations or decrees. I changed the programs. I gave the inspector a hard time.”
And as for the dirty work he performed for B., from one town to the next? “If you recall, I was reviving dying bookstores. It’s true that we bought them up for a song.” It was true that Ivan had never spent more than six months in one town. It was true that his relations with his boss had soured—“He fired me, without a penny”—and that one night, in Briançon, Van used the company car as a battering ram to get his hands on a stock of valuable books. “Oddly enough,” said Van, “those shit-stirrers didn’t turn up anything about my subsequent activity as a comic-book seller. And yet there’s a gold mine of facts that would have been really easy to travesty, with any amount of little nuances and insinuations.”
“And finally, Turkey,” he said. “And there I must apologize to you. I kept quite a few things from you.”
It was true that he had been in prison. For nearly a year, he explained. In terrible conditions. “I don’t like to remember it.” He must have been trafficking something, anything. “I had spent all my savings, and I planned to go home when I had nothing left. No need to tell you they pinched it all from me in the can.” And why had they put him in prison? “The most ordinary thing in the world,” said Van, “and the most pathetic. I’m not proud.” He had cannabis in his pockets. Truth be told, for years he’d always had some on him.
It had been Francesca’s turn to look outside, while he was talking.
“What shall we do?” she asked. “Personally, in a case like this, I think we should get a lawyer.”
“That’s not my style,” said Van. “The less I see of anything resembling a lawyer or a policeman, the better I feel. It’s an old flyweight leftie knee-jerk reaction. In this case, I’m afraid a lawsuit might simply reinforce the gossip.”
“And I feel just the opposite,” said Francesca. “Getting a lawyer and going to court has always seemed the simplest solution to me, and a perfectly ordinary thing. My grandfather was often slandered during his public life, and he never let an uncalled-for adjective go by him. Henri always has one or two lawsuits in progress. He usually wins, you know.”
“I don’t really believe in justice, in the case in point,” said Van. “Don’t you see, vague allegations, about matters that are fifteen or twenty years old. Some of them in Turkey . . . The investigation would get lost in the sand.”
He sounded bitter.
“Maybe you think I’m trying to hide things that are even worse than what those cretins invented.”
“Please don’t think that, Van. If you are my friend, please banish that idea from your mind.”
Ivan needed a few hours to think. He went back to The Good Novel and forced himself to go back to work. But the words of support from customers, many of whom had come on purpose to speak to him, hurt him as much as they helped. He went upstairs to the office and closed the door.
He found an e-mail from Anis, sent at noon. She told him that she had read the article in Le Poing, and had left him a letter in his mailbox on the rue de l’Agent-Bailly. She had immediately noticed something unusual about the street, it seemed more animated than usual. Passersby were reading fliers on the walls, and she knew what must be going on. The three pages from Le Poing had been glued thirty times over on the walls, at eye level, on either side of the street. There is nothing left, said Anis. It didn’t take me long, I tore everything down. That’s how I know exactly how many copies of the article had been stuck up.
Where are you? wrote Ivan in response. She did not reply.
He had made his decision. He would respond to the slander via Internet. That seemed the simplest and quickest way. He spent an hour and a half drawing up, chronologically, the exact details of the facts that had been distorted by the pseudo-investigators at Le Poing.
Name: Ivan Georg
Date of Birth: September 5, 1959
Place of Birth: Asnières
1977-1980: First year undergraduate degree in English at Nanterre and first year of Chinese at the National Institute of Oriental Languages and Civilizations.
1981-1982: Ecole Normale.
1982: First year as substitute at elementary school.
Van left no blanks in the sort of resumé he was drawing up.
1984: Barred from teaching by National Education.
1985-1986: Employee, Emerson Trust, Virginia, USA. Tour guide, accompanying tours inspired by the life and works of great American authors.
1987-1992: Salaried employee at Béraut Publishing. Sales representative in books.
1988: Bookseller in Strasbourg (salaried employee of Béraut Publishing).
1989: Bookseller in Vichy and Marseilles (salaried employee of Béraut Publishing).
1990: Bookseller in Vendôme and Rennes (salaried employee of Béraut Publishing).
1991: Bookseller in Charleville-Mezières, and in Vizille (salaried employee of Béraut Publishing).
1992: Dismissed by Béraut without motive; no severance pay. Appropriated, in kind, one half of the indemnity owing.
November, 1992: Settled in Pantin as secondhand bookseller (specialized in comic books).
1996: Left for Asia, road trip.
He hid nothing.
2000-2001: Detained eleven months in the prison of Ulucanlar, Ankara, for possession of thirty grams of cannabis. Charges were not brought formally; no legal assistance, no trial.
September, 2001-January, 2004: Employee in a newsagent’s/bookstore in Méribel.
February, 2004: Salaried employee of The Good Novel.
August 31, 2004: Opening of The Good Novel bookstore.
Van passed his draft on to Francesca, and at five o’clock in the afternoon the chronology was online in The Good Novel’s newsletter, without any form of commentary other than a two-line introduction: We will respond to slander with the facts. Signed, The booksellers.
On his way home that night, Ivan turned into his little rue de l’Agent-Bailly with, for the first time, the painful impression that he was being watched. There was no one around at that hour, other than a man walking his dog, and Ivan refused to look at him because he knew that if he did, it would not be without harboring some suspicions. Little Anis had done a good job. Van felt a rush of gratitude. There were no more posters on the walls, and you would have had to been as alert as he was in order to detect here and there a scrap of glued paper.
He felt relieved to be home. I must be frightened then, he was thinking, when he noticed that on either side of the door to his building, the pages from Le Poing had been posted, three on either side. Without thinking, he ripped them off. They had been poorly stuck with scotch tape.
So they had been here at least twice. Or someone had come back. Or that someone did not leave the street, saw Anis tearing the posters down, let her do it and leave, and went to get two more issues of Le Poing to finish his little job.
Van couldn’t sleep. Could it be that the two series of posters had been independent of each other? Could two people who did not know each other have had the same idea of sticking the slanderous article up at the rue de l’Agent-Bailly, one of them focusing on repetition, and the other on precision?
He jumped out of bed and threw his parka over his shoulders while he was opening the door and hurtling barefoot down the stairs. Anis had mentioned a letter in the e-mail she had sent him. Ten times that afternoon Van had wondered whether, yes or no, she had eventually dropped it off.
Yes, because signs of friendship are more welcome than ever on a day like today. No, because her message had been written before she discovered the posters in the street, and it was no longer suitable.
It was yes. Van tore open the envelope as he headed back up the stairs.
Anis had written only one line, between quotes: “What is essential is constantly threatened by what is insignificant.” René Char.
How like a young woman, thought Van. How earnest. He had hoped for something like, I hold you in my arms.
But was it really so different, what Anis had written? Did Char’s lovely sentence not mean: I am with you, in other words, I am close to you, in other words, I am kissing your eyelids?
No, Ivan eventually conceded. She meant, You are right, these slanders against you only confirm as much. Hang in there. Not: I dream of being in your arms. No.