Forty-Seventeen by Frank Moorhouse Page A

the seat of government – should both be named Lewis. He asked one and she said that Cottle’s Dictionary of Surnames said that Lewis meant ‘great battle’.
    â€˜Why do you ask?’
    He shook his head, the message was there but could not be shared.
    This Lewis dropped in the airmail Guardian to him to read and he read that the Moscow InternationalBook Fair had refused to allow the book White Nights by Israel’s Prime Minister Mr Begin to enter the Soviet Union. The book was an account of Begin’s persecution and torment in a Soviet labour camp.
    In the next airmail Guardian he read of a recent screening of Bresson’s Four Nights which was based on Dostoyevsky’s story White Nights and he further read that Visconti also had made a film called White Nights based on the Dostoyevsky story.
    Hepatitis had drained his energy so that clipping even the tissue-thin pages of the airmail Guardian took a long time, but he clipped the two reports and would, from time to time, study them for messages.
    The clippings yielded nothing, but the word ‘guardian’ addressed itself to him and he felt comforted by it.
    There was, he intuited, an airmail or air-male or heir-male Force of Destruction coming in from around Jonestown and an heir-male Guardian. There was a battle going on for his psyche. He being, of course, the male heir. His suicidal grandfather was mixed up in it somewhere.
    As soon as he was well enough he went to the National University library and found all Dostoyevsky’s work there except White Nights.
    He stood there in the gloomy aisles of books sweating from a nervous impotence, having confirmed, once again, that desperate feeling he always had in libraries that what he wanted would not be there, or that he was looking in the wrong place.
    â€˜What does it mean that the book White Nights by Dostoyevsky is not in the library?’ he asked a helpful, new-breed librarian in jeans.
    â€˜It could be out on loan.’
    He wanted a different category of answer to his questions. But that was asking too much even from a new-breed librarian.
    â€˜But all his other books are there in multiple copies.’
    â€˜Maybe it is at the binder – that would be another possibility.’
    â€˜That all the copies of White Nights wore out at the same time? Could you check to see who has all the copies of White Nights ?’
    â€˜That would be confidential. Would you like it to be public knowledge that you, say, borrowed a book on menopause, hypothetically – if you were a woman?’
    He did not wish to be drawn into hypothetical discussion – in another gender – on menopause.
    â€˜It’s odd, that’s all,’ he said, a touch of peevishness in his voice, ‘that you have multiple copies of all of Dostoyevsky’s work but that all the copies of that title alone are missing.’
    She shrugged, and began to fidget nervously with her confidential cards, moving surreptitiously towards the security button.
    â€˜Never mind,’ he said.
    â€˜You’re welcome.’
    He had never been welcome, not for one day on this planet had he ever felt welcome.
    Outside the library, he thought, I am becominggrumpy, I am now forty and I am becoming grumpy.
    He recovered and returned to his own city where he told Belle about the White Nights and about the books missing from the library and the rest.
    â€˜That’s odd,’ she said, humouring him.
    â€˜Don’t humour me,’ he said, grumpily, ‘I think it bears some attention.’
    â€˜I cannot explain the White Nights thing,’ she said, watching him, he thought, closely, ‘but I have two copies of Dostoyevsky’s White Nights . I don’t want you to make anything of it.’
    â€˜Why two copies of Dostoyevsky’s White Nights ?’
    â€˜I cannot explain why I have two copies and I do not want you to make a thing of it.’
    She brought him a copy of the