Nowhere by Thomas Berger Page A

there is something wrong with going to the library?”
    He rolled the vein-webbed whites of his eyes. “Far be it from me to reflect on your tastes, sir, but you are an unrepresentative tourist. You have no apparent interest in sex, you are never drunk, loud, or abusive, and you’ve had only that one slight brush with the law, which I hasten to say was entirely the result of a misapprehension of mine.”
    “You mean that most visitors to your country act badly?”
    He made his oiliest smile. “And why not? It’s what we’re here for.”
    I frowned. “Be that as it may, tell me how to get to the public library.”
    “Number Four, the Street of Words. The boy outside knows the way.”
    Though I didn’t understand whom he meant, I went to the street. At the curb was a kind of rickshaw with a husky fair-haired young chap between the traces. He wore running shorts and a singlet in gold-trimmed blue.
    “Please to tal me how to go, sair,” said he.
    I gave him the address and asked whether he had a sister.
    “Many and brothers as well.” His ingenuous broad face shone with good feeling. “You require dem for sex?”
    “No thank you. Is one of the sisters named Olga?”
    “Sure.”
    “Would she work for the Sebastiani airline?”
    “Sure.”
    Wondering whether he might simply agree with anything asked of him, I climbed into the rickshaw’s seat. He picked up the twin shafts and, swinging the vehicle around, headed uphill at a smart pace. Soon this became a trot: he was stronger than the engine of the ancient Minx I had driven when I was an impoverished young English instructor at State. Having reached the summit, we began to roll downhill at a greater rate of speed than the superannuated Beetle, for which I traded the Minx, could have attained under similar conditions. Such was our progress up and down several steep elevations.
    Finally the young man, who was not even breathing heavily from his labor, turned into a little street narrow as an alley, lined with quaint little houses, some leaning at an angle, all decorated in Central European gingerbread, with miniature, one-man balconies attached here and there to the upper stories, and tiny shuttered windows like those in cuckoo clocks. He pulled me in front of the fourth house and lowered the traces, putting my seat at a downward angle from which it was simple to slide out. Despite the downhill speeds, I had felt secure in his hands, and the vehicle did offer a comfortable ride. At such a moment Saint Sebastian had much to recommend to a veteran of the choice of transportation evils available in New York City.
    I walked to the somewhat undersized front door of the house and knocked thereupon. In a moment it was opened by a slight, short man with very dark, intense, yet benign eyes.
    “I’m sorry to trouble you,” I said, “but can this possibly be the public library?”
    “Indeed.” He bowed and beckoned me to come in.
    It was a strange library, however, judging from the entrance hall and then the front parlor of the house, which was furnished in a slightly shabby, old-fashioned bourgeois style, fringes on the lamps, tables with curved legs, and antimacassars on the ponderous overstuffed chairs. The only books in view occupied the four shelves of a relatively narrow cabinet with glass doors.
    The volumes in this cabinet were of a uniform binding in dark green. I bent and read the dim gold lettering on the spine of the first: “ Encyclopaedia Sebastiana, Volume I, A—Austria.”
    I asked the librarian, “May I?”
    “Certainly.”
    I opened the uppermost of the glass doors and removed Volume I, opened it at random, saw the heading “Airplane,” and began to read.
AIRPLANE. The swiftest means of covering great distances in the shortest time. Its advantages over the bus, the train, and the various private vehicles are, in addition to speed, cleanliness, availability of toilets, and, strange as it might seem, according to statistics, safety; but it should be