I was always an obedient child. I think it was in my nature. It was true that I had come up with a plan to break the rules when, on that night some years ago now, my friends and I had taken to the streets at a time of curfew. I had paid the price for that. I knew Gen had too. From that time onwards, I had lost any appetite for breaking the rules. I became adept at keeping myself to myself. My loneliness was not something that was hateful or upsetting to me – rather, paradoxically, it was comforting, a warm blanket of isolation which I could wrap around myself; something which protected me from the external world. Something which protected me from other people – and their violence.
And yet. It was the book I had borrowed from the old man. It was that book – Larsson’s Norse Myths – which tempted me to break the rules for a second time in my life. I had come to love that book. I loved the way it looked – the glorious but faint images of clouds and mountains that graced its cover – and I loved how it felt as I ran my fingers across its brittle leather backbone. But beyond the antique delicacy of the design were the words themselves. In school and at home, I read whatever I could. I read some of the scientific journals my father collected; there were bits and pieces which were interesting, but most of them were beyond me. I’d also read a couple of my mother’s novels – stories of paupers who became princes during the eighth-century Tang Dynasty. At school, we read accounts of peasants and workers whose sacrifices had helped protect the greatness of the Chinese state. I devoured those things, in the same way a starving man might eat the leaves from a bush, drawing every meagre particle of nutrition from a dried and withered source. But I hadn’t loved what I read. Not in the way I loved those myths.
It wasn’t just the conflict and the characters, called into being by the type of colourful imagination for which the sky quite literally was the limit. There were also moments which made me smile. The image of the greatest of warrior gods, Thor, having to dress up as a woman under the pretence of marrying one of the most grotesque and terrible giants – as a means to retrieve the magical hammer which had been stolen from him – had me laughing out loud. And when the end of the gods’ world finally came, when the father of the gods, Odin, was killed by the great wolf Fenrir, and when Thor, the giant-slayer, managed to kill the serpent that had wrapped its coils around the world, but was himself vanquished by the giant snake’s final poisonous breaths, I cried. I cried, not only at the death of these immortal characters who had taken me on such a weird and wonderful journey, but also because the book had reached its end and I wondered, in that indelibly childlike way, if I would ever come across something as wonderful again.
Of course, I did what all young people do. I began once more. I opened the book at the start and read it again. I read that book over and over. And that was the reason why I wanted to break the rules and keep the book. It would have been easy. But at the same time, I didn’t want to break the trust the old man had placed in me. The night before I returned the book, I clutched it to me under the covers, its cool leather merging with the warmth of my sheets and my body. Nevertheless, the following day, I brought it with me in my schoolbag, and, after my lessons, I made my way to the old man’s shop.
It was a temperate evening, the icy clasp of winter beginning to unfurl before the first pinpricks of spring. I made my way down the same narrow street at dusk and pushed through the small door, hearing the bell tinkle in the muffled quiet. The old man was there again. I walked straight in, and sat down in front of him, at the same desk outlined with that glowing golden haze.
He looked up at me, blinking. He smiled a toothless grin, his eyes appearing aquamarine in the soft light, but they were strangely vacant, and as happy as he seemed to have a visitor, I had the impression he had no memory of who I was.
I took out the book. I pushed it towards him. My fingers flexed and hesitated the moment I slid it across the desk. Even then, it was as though the book somehow belonged to me, as though I was giving up something of myself. And yet, with that in mind, I felt incredibly noble. I could have kept the book – but I had chosen to do the right thing. I realised that I was a moral person, a very good person. And that felt good.
The old man patted the book with his hand.
‘Very good, thank you very much. And see you again!’
He smiled out at me vacantly. As I realised I was being dismissed, my stomach lurched. I felt a moment of anger – didn’t he understand that I had been true? That I had acted morally by returning his book, a book I loved, when I could just as easily have never come back?
I think even then I understood the fallacy in such logic. But it didn’t stop me from feeling indignant. I muttered something, the type of platitude one delivers before leaving. And then I noticed his fingers. They were tapping rhythmically on another book. The book had on its cover a single eye. A human eye. I remember because it was wide and streaked with veins, and once I had seen it, it seemed to be focused on me. I’d never seen a book cover like it.
I paused momentarily.
‘Sir, what’s that book?’
‘What book?’
I gestured at the book underneath his fingertips.
‘That one there.’
‘This one here?’
‘Yes.’
All at once those strange and dreamy eyes seemed to clarify. It was as though he was looking at me for the first time.
‘That’s 1984.’
‘1984? Like the date? But that hasn’t happened yet.’
‘Indeed. And yet the book was written over thirty years ago.’
‘But that doesn’t make sense!’
The old man frowned. He took the book I had returned. He stroked the front cover. He spoke almost to himself.
‘Larsson’s Norse Myths. Oh how I loved these. So colourful, and very dramatic, don’t you agree?’
I was almost boiling over in frustration.
‘But sir, that 1984 book?’
He frowned, lines developing out of lines.
‘That, my young friend, is not a book for you.’
‘And why not?’
The words had sprung from my mouth before I had the chance to regulate them.
But he wasn’t offended. His eyes shone with amusement before dulling into a more severe and fretful gaze.
‘Because that book takes people to the type of world where they really don’t want to be. It opens their eyes to things they really don’t want to see. No, no, that book is definitely not one for someone like you, because …’
In that moment he coughed softly, a dry cough, and then a little more. He put his hand to his throat.
‘Forgive me, I am old, I must …’
He coughed once more. Composed himself.
‘Forgive me, I must fetch a glass of water.’
He pressed his hands on the desk, and raised his crooked body. He shuffled off towards the back room.
I watched him leave.
But as soon as his back was turned, I reached out for the book. For 1984. I grabbed it, stuffed it into my jacket, and exited the store as quickly and quietly as I could.
Years later, I replay that scene. The old bookseller, who to me seemed so doddery, so confused. I imagine him walking away, his back turned. I imagine him hearing the slight rustle as I grabbed Orwell’s novel, and made my thief’s escape. And I imagine him smiling.
Three and a half years after that moment, I would glimpse my first erect penis.
I would touch it. Lying in bed, under the covers, my hand being guided downwards by another – to another’s body, the most intimate and private part of their body. And I would experience that same sensation, the same illicit spark of feeling I had when I secreted that book in my jacket and left the bookshop. A sudden charge of excitement combined with a feeling of disgust – not about the book or the penis – but about myself and the activity I was engaging in. The feeling I was doing something that I had quite clearly set in motion, and yet something that made me wonder about myself.
That was the type of guilt I brought to bear when I first opened Orwell’s dystopian novel, closeted in my room, using the meagre light I had. While the gods and monsters of Norse mythology were utterly compelling, they had also conveyed a certain type of innocence. The wisdom of Odin, the quiet, blinded god, perhaps resonated with the silence of my own father. Thor’s hammer blows raining down somehow merged into the enduring power of my grandmother, who I knew would do anything to protect me. Even my brother – with his carefree and childish chatter – had a counterpart in the playful, petulant and sometimes ridiculous figure of Loki, god of mischief.
But 1984 was a different type of story entirely. It held my attention, I felt a grim sense of fascination. I had never before read anything that might be described as science fiction, let alone a book like this, with its dark and cynical power. I started off slowly – the greyness of the world in which Winston Smith lived was unpleasant – but as I read more, the novel began to assert itself and I was sucked into Winston Smith’s strange and solitary existence. I read it in my room at night, under my bedclothes, using the weak light of a small torch. I read it voraciously as only a child can do; hungry to get to the end, and at the same time dreading finishing the book and being exiled back into my own reality. Its ending slammed into me like artillery. Before 1984, most of the books I had read had happy endings. At school, the peasants or workers who suffered hardship in the stories we read were rewarded for their heroic sacrifices. Even in Norse Myths, the conclusion was, ultimately, a positive one in which a new world emerged to be populated once more.
But the ending of 1984, which saw the soft-spoken and brave Winston Smith reduced to dull-eyed obedience to the regime that had persecuted him, was so shocking I found it hard to sleep. The desolation of the ending, the hopelessness of it, left a bitter taste; I turned it over and over in my thoughts. The book itself became an accusation. I was wracked with guilt because I had stolen it. And its pages represented a loss of innocence: the notion that even if you work hard and your behaviour is moral – as was the case with Winston Smith – you don’t necessarily meet with a happy ending. The horror of what had happened to the hero, the way in which he had been lobotomised, robbed of his identity, was an image I couldn’t banish. I kept thinking about Winston and wishing this hadn’t happened to him. I hid the book under my mattress, hoping that if I could no longer see it, I would be able to forget about it, and yet I felt that eye on its front cover burning into me with its accusatory gaze.
Eventually it was too much. I knew what I had to do. I tucked the book into my jacket and headed back to the bookshop. I went early in the morning, before school. It was cold and bright. I wasn’t even sure if the shop would be open. But when I pushed on the door I was greeted by that same mouldering warmth, the same stagnant yet comforting smell of leather and paper. The old man raised his head when I came in, his eyes shining with expectation, and I knew he was happy to see me. I’d turned fourteen some months before, and yet, despite my newly found maturity, I at once burst into tears.
He beckoned me to his desk, and watched me quietly as I sobbed.
‘Why are you so sad today?’ he asked, as if that day of all days was no reason for someone to be sad.
I still didn’t trust myself to speak. So I slid the book towards him across the desk. I nodded at it. Finally I managed mournfully:
‘I stole it. I am … a thief.’
‘Well,’ he said gently, ‘you brought it back too. That must mean that you are a … non-thief also.’
I thought about the way Orwell had played with words. And smiled through my tears.
‘Besides,’ he added, ‘books are meant to be stolen.’
‘What do you mean?’ I asked. It seemed a very odd thing for a bookseller to say.
The old man looked at me.
‘It is my belief that we, every one of us who ever reads a book, steals a small piece of it. We take something from it, and what we take becomes part of ourselves. The only question, therefore, is – what did you take from it?’
His gaze was on me, gentle, curious and – so it seemed to me back then – very wise. I wanted to say something perceptive, something to convince him of my intelligence and maturity. But those mild eyes drew a different truth from me.
‘I thought it was very compelling, sir. I read it, all of it, in two nights. But …’
‘But?’
‘I … I hated the ending.’
I threw my hands up in a gesture of helplessness. And then I began to babble.
‘It just seemed so hopeless and what happened to Winston was so unfair. I couldn’t stop thinking about it. Do you … do you think that there are actually places like that in the world? Like Oceania?’
The old man looked at me, a quiet pathos touching his eyes. He said nothing for a few moments, and then breathed a single word:
‘Perhaps.’
‘Perhaps.’ Perhaps the old bookseller had wanted to fill my adolescent life with the wonder books can bring. Or perhaps he wanted me to make the connection between the society in which I lived and the world Orwell evoked. It was odd that my younger self failed to make the link, given that I had seen first-hand the way the Chinese state had deified in death its most prominent and authoritarian leader, and I too had experienced at a tender age something of the way the state authorities dealt with would-be dissenters.
But the truth was that I saw very little of my own reality in the pages of 1984 at that time. Even in the context of everything that had happened, I felt my life to be – for the most part – a free and untrammelled one. I had my family. I had my grandmother. I knew the area where I grew up like the back of my hand. I knew my neighbours and felt well liked by most of them. And I had books too. I did not feel repressed by the state. As with the memory wall, it seemed then that the most authoritarian elements of my society belonged to a past that I was too young to have known.
But when I pushed Orwell’s book towards the old man, and when he reached out to take possession of it once more, I felt a stabbing sense of loss. And it was in that moment I understood. Why the travails of the quiet, unassuming main character had moved me so greatly. Why the ending – Winston’s reduction to helpless conformity – had felt so unbearable.
He had reminded me of my own father.