Twelve Collections and the Teashop Page 7

  “I’m afraid I’ll have to put it on you again. Discretion is very important in this business. You do understand, don’t you?”

  “Of course,” I agreed from underneath the hood.

  “You can take it off in about fifteen minutes. and you won’t be handcuffed anymore. You will be completely free once again. Please don’t reproach me too much for anything unpleasant you may have experienced. Unfortunately it could not be helped.”

  “Reproach you for what? It wasn’t the least bit unpleasant. Quite the contrary.”

  When I took off the hood fifteen minutes later, squinting wasn’t enough. I had to close my eyes, blinded by the bright sunlight. As soon as I opened them again, however, I knew at once that something wasn’t right. I should have been overjoyed at getting my freedom back without paying anything. But all I felt was a deep sense of hopelessness.

  12. COLLECTIONS

  MR. POKORNI COLLECTED COLLECTIONS. He’d been doing this his whole life. He had neither the time nor the patience to put them together himself, so he got them ready-made. He was rich enough to pay however much it took if he found a collection to his liking. In spite of this, suspicions were raised periodically regarding how he’d come by some of his collections. Rumors were spread that he stole them, that he used blackmail, and that he would not shrink from murder just to get what he wanted. Once an investigation was conducted into the origin of one of the collections, but nothing illegal was ever proven. He was very secretive about his collections. He did not deny that he had a rich collection of collections, but he refused to give out any details. In the normal course of things they would have remained outside the public eye, if it weren’t for yours truly, the omniscient storyteller, from whom nothing can be hidden. Or almost nothing, as it turns out.

  Given my privileged position as omniscient storyteller, the first thing to disclose is where Mr. Pokorni kept his collections. In view of his wealth and the value of the collections, one might expect him to have kept them in a special room, perhaps an armor-plated underground chamber protected by all-powerful electronic devices and guards who were armed to the teeth.

  Nothing, however, could be farther from the truth. Mr. Pokorni kept his collections in a small side room. It had previously been storage space for things that were rarely used. Then these things were thrown out and two gray metal shelves were installed on the walls, facing each other to the left and right of the door. The shelves stretched the whole length of the walls, from floor to ceiling, and each one had twelve partitions.

  The small room would have had normal illumination if one of the collections hadn’t needed purple lighting, as a result of which the bare light bulb hanging from a long wire was purple. The uninitiated will probably be most surprised by the fact that the collection storage room was not locked. all those with access to Mr. Pokorni’s house could enter it without a second thought. This rarely happened, though, and even the owner went there infrequently. The most habitual visitors were the servants who went in to dust the collections every Wednesday morning, although there was hardly anything to dust.

  At first glance it might seem that Mr. Pokorni had put his collections on the shelves at random. They did indeed look disorganized, as though put there only temporarily until a better place was found for them. This, however, was a mere illusion. Their owner knew exactly where each of the collections was located, although he might have had trouble explaining the criteria he’d used to place them there. luckily, he didn’t have to answer to anyone for his actions.

  At the risk of an oversimplified explanation of this division, offered by your omniscient storyteller, and one that Mr. Pokorni might not agree with, it might be said that the left-hand shelves contained tangible collections while the right-hand shelves held collections with less substance.

  A complete list of the collections naturally cannot be given here, because otherwise this story would turn into a catalogue, which would not be advisable. It is useful nevertheless to mention the most important ones, in order to add charm to the story. For example, one whole section on the left side was covered with cardboard boxes containing silver-plated cigarette cases filled with someone’s nail clippings. There was also a notebook with the autographs of people who’d had the misfortune to die not long after they had signed it. Then there was an album to which an ardent collector had been adding pictures of himself for decades. Another interesting specimen was a notebook with words written in it that someone had found particularly beautiful. There was a remarkable collection of plastic folders containing newspaper clippings on scientific topics, and there was a computer hard disk filled with neatly filed emails.

  While the left side featured a confusion of sizes and forms, the opposite side possessed a sort of uniformity, although here as well, had anyone been so inclined, quite a lot could have been done to improve the order, particularly the disposition of colors. The right side resembled a pharmacy, since it contained nothing but vials. They were all round with glass stoppers, and the only thing that differentiated them was their hue, resulting in a multicolored dissonance.

  There was no way of telling what each little bottle contained. Mr. Pokorni had not put labels on them or denoted their contents in any other way, because this was unnecessary. He knew exactly what was in the bottles he’d collected. If it weren’t for your omniscient storyteller, all this would have remained an absolute secret, but here is a chance to shed at least a bit of light on it.

  The purple vials that required lighting of the same color and were the most numerous contained days of the pasts of people with a sweet tooth. The dark green ones were filled to the brim with a special type of dream. The bright yellow ones were the repository of the airy material that last stories are made of. The black ones, quite appropriately, received deaths, while the colorless ones, seemingly quite ordinary, were the home of hopes.

  Who knows how long this collection of collections would have languished in the storeroom had the shelves been able to receive an infinite number of new collections. But even though they were large, they were not without limit and so one Thursday morning the inevitable happened. Mr. Pokorni came with a new collection and he had no place to put it. He tried to make room by shifting around the older collections, but to no avail.

  This, of course, was not a serious problem, particularly not for someone as wealthy as Mr. Pokorni. He had several solutions at his disposal. The simplest would have been to put a new shelf on the third wall facing the door, currently unused. If this had not been to his liking for some reason, he could have moved the collections to a larger room. He certainly had plenty of them. He could even have set aside one whole house for his collections.

  But he did not resort to any of these possibilities. When it became clear that there was no room for the new collection on either of the shelves, Mr. Pokorni put it on the floor and left the room. He soon returned with a large wicker basket. What follows is not recommended reading for overly sensitive or highly strung individuals.

  As though these were worthless old things and not priceless objects, Mr. Pokorni started on the left-hand shelves and put the collections into the basket. He threw them in without the slightest concern that they might be damaged. Periodic sounds of breakage did nothing to slow him down or deter him. When he had filled the basket, he took it to the lighted fireplace in the large drawing room. He emptied its contents onto the floor then went back to the storeroom. after bringing four more baskets full, he drew a large leather armchair up to the fireplace, sat in it and got down to work.

  It took hours to burn the tangible collections. Mr. Pokorni would wait patiently for one collection to burn completely before he threw a new one into the flames. Whatever wouldn’t burn was returned to the basket to be thrown into the garbage. as he watched the flames engulf objects that others had lovingly collected for years, his face showed not the slightest emotion. It was as expressionless as if he were doing a daily chore.

  When the time came for the right-hand shelves, he had to be more caref
ul. He didn’t throw the vials into the basket but placed them in an orderly fashion, making sure they didn’t break. Instead of taking the basket to the fireplace, he took it to a large terrace overlooking lush gardens of evergreens. He brought five full baskets of bottles and placed them around a deckchair covered in purple canvas.

  Dusk had already settled when he sat in the deckchair and started to open the vials. He paid no attention to the order in which he did this and was soon swathed in a mixture of floral fragrances. Days, as one might suspect, smelled of violets, dreams smelled of lilacs, stories of roses, death, contrary to all expectations, smelled of gardenias, and hopes of hyacinths. There was a multitude of other fragrances as well, heavy and light, penetrating and barely perceptible. They swirled around Mr. Pokorni invisibly for some time and then scattered about the gardens, making them briefly more fragrant than usual.

  After the insubstantial contents had been released from the last bottle and the multitude of glass containers like so many empty shells had been taken to the garbage dump, one might pause to wonder why Mr. Pokorni had acted this way. This question,

  unfortunately, must remain unanswered. even your omniscient storyteller is not powerful enough to peer into the head of this rich collector. Perhaps this is for the best. What would be the point in finding out why he destroyed the collections? It certainly would not bring them back.

  THE TEASHOP

  MISS GRETA WAS DELIGHTED to see a teashop across the street from the entrance to the railway station. The train she’d arrived on had been a quarter of an hour late, but the train she was meant to take for the rest of her trip had left on time. The next possible train wouldn’t leave for around two-and-a-half hours. She could have spent that time reading in the waiting room, but that didn’t seem very appealing. She’d never liked waiting rooms, and then what would she have to read on the train? About eighty pages were left in her book, just enough to shorten the last part of the journey. It would certainly be much nicer in the teashop. And in any case it was time for her afternoon tea. She stood at the main entrance to the station for a few moments, uncertain about what to do with her suitcase. Although it was heavy, she had only to cross a small square to reach the teashop. Even so, there was no reason to lug it along, particularly since the drizzling rain was now getting harder. She turned this way and that until she found a sign that directed her to the left luggage window. The short, oldish man behind the counter had an extremely red nose, typical of people inclined to tipple, but he didn’t smell of alcohol. He lifted the bulky suitcase effortlessly with one hand and gave her a baggage check.

  Miss Greta opened a large umbrella with alternating triangles in two shades of brown that matched her coat, shoes and handbag. She waited for two cars to pass so they wouldn’t spray her and then headed across the square with swift little steps. Even though she chose carefully where to step, it was inevitable that she got splashed. When she reached the arched roof covering the entrance to the teashop, she turned around and shook out her umbrella, returning a flurry of drops to the rain.

  Standing in the doorway, she looked around the long room. The waiter at the counter on the right, a heavyset man in his early forties with bushy sideburns and a pencil-thin moustache, was wearing a white short-sleeved shirt and a green vest. The slender cashier with bright red hair and oversized glasses, writing something down at the cash register, was also dressed lightly, in a white blouse and the same green vest.

  There weren’t many customers. The elderly man sitting in the corner to the left of the door was reading a newspaper. He raised his eyes briefly when Miss Greta entered, then went back to his reading. A young couple was sitting next to the large window. They were leaning over the table towards each other, their noses almost touching, talking in low voices. At the back of the room was a woman in a navy blue suit wearing a hat of the same color.

  Her elbows were on the edge of the table and her head was resting in her hands as she looked at the steaming cup in front of her, lost in thought.

  Miss Greta headed for an empty table away from the window. She didn’t like to expose herself to the gaze of passers-by. She took off her coat, hung it on the coat rack, and put her umbrella in the brass stand underneath it. When she sat in one of the heavy armchairs covered in green plush, she seemed to be sucked into it.

  She didn’t have to open the long, thin menu with a cover of the same green. In the afternoon she always drank chamomile tea. Suddenly, though, she decided to make an exception. The circumstances were unusual and there were so few deviations from daily routine in her life. She shouldn’t have been there at all, but since chance had brought her to the teashop, why not make good use of it? An impish desire filled her to do something reckless in a place where no one knew her. She would order the tea that seemed the most unusual.

  The menu had four densely-filled pages. She’d never heard of most of the teas and had tried only a few, even though she’d been drinking this hot beverage in the morning and afternoon regularly since childhood. reading through the splendid selection, she wondered with a tinge of sorrow why she limited herself to the humdrum. This had once seemed a virtue, but now she could not remember why. She shouldn’t be inhibited, at least as far as tea was concerned. now was the chance to make up a little for what she’d missed, albeit belatedly.

  Along with the names of the teas was a description of their beneficial effects. Some astonished her, others brought a smile to her lips, and yet others made her blush slightly. She didn’t even know there was tea made of cabbage (a “salutary digestive”),spinach (“relieves the pain of spondylosis”) and carrots (“helps fight anemia”). nettle tea was thought to improve one’s memory and moss tea purportedly calmed tense nerves, while papyrus tea rekindled the flames of desire.

  The fourth page offered teas that were preposterous. Had circumstances been otherwise, the level-headedness that made Miss Greta proud would have forced her to frown at what she read. Just now, however, it did not seem to be tasteless frivolity. What difference did it make if they were preposterous when they sounded so nice? She could have asked what the teas were really made of, but decided not to because that would only dispel the magic.

  Tea made of wind chased away apathy, tea made of clouds brought a yearning to fly, moonshine tea inspired lightheartedness, spring tea made you feel young again, tea made of night led to sinful thoughts, tea made of silence filled you with tranquility, tea made of mist brought great joy, snow tea offered hope. She could have chosen any one of these teas. The best thing would actually be a mixture of them all. She was deficient in everything they promised.

  But in the end she didn’t order any of them. She chose the last one on the menu—tea made of stories. This was partially influenced by the brief recommendation next to it: “You need this.” The decisive element, however, was that she adored stories. She read them every day, as ritualistically as she drank tea. Whenever she was in low spirits, she would scold herself for living a better and fuller life in the world of stories than in the real world, but this dismal conclusion never dissuaded her from reading, and as soon as she got caught up in a story her depression disappeared the same moment. Since she was already determined to try the most unusual tea, this was the right choice.

  She closed the menu and put it on the table. That was a signal for the waiter to approach.

  “Good day,” he said with a smile. “May I take your order?”

  “Good day,” she replied with a fleeting smile. “Tea made of stories, please.”

  She didn’t say it very loud, overcome by an embarrassment she would not have felt had she asked for an ordinary tea. Even so, in the silence of the teashop her soft words seemed to reach everyone’s ears. The cashier stopped writing and turned towards her table. The man next to the entrance looked at her over the top of his newspaper. The young couple with eyes only for each other turned their heads in unison towards her. Even the lady in the navy blue suit stopped staring at the cup on the table and looked at her with interest.


  Miss Greta blushed and lowered her head. She felt like she’d been caught committing a crime. She alone was to blame for this predicament. Had she ordered chamomile tea, as she should have, no one would have batted an eyelid. It served her right for having no self-control. Tea made of stories, indeed. What must they think of her?

  She was rescued from this discomfort by the waiter. He bowed, his smile broadening.

  “Of course, ma’am. right away.”

  She didn’t raise her head when the waiter left to make her tea. She stared for some time at the folded hands in her lap, almost physically feeling the inquisitive and scornful looks. But when she finally mustered the courage to glance quickly around the teashop, she noted with relief that the others had ceased to be interested in her. They had all returned to what they’d been doing before.

  Several minutes later the waiter put before her a white cup in the shape of an inverted bell, its handle resembling a mouse’s ear. The tea was the same green color as the vests of the teashop staff. She smiled at the waiter, thanking him with a nod of the head.

  Instead of leaving, he stood there next to her table. Embarrassment filled her once again. She didn’t know why he was still there or how she should react. In the end she concluded that the best thing would be to act as though he was nowhere near her. She would start to drink the tea. That was why she’d ordered it, right? What else could she do, in any case?

  She brought the cup to her lips and blew a little on the steaming green liquid. She tasted it cautiously, anxious about the heat and the unknown taste. The tea was mild with a suggestion of

  bitterness. She had the feeling she’d tasted it before, but was unable to identify it. It seemed to be a mixture of almonds, dogwood and something else that escaped her. She put the cup back on the saucer.

  “Is it to your liking?” asked the waiter.