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smallgeneration · 5 years

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Anneli Knight first appeared in the sunlit second floor window of the Shakespeare & Company bookshop. It was my first day in Paris, and she leaned out over the flowerbox and waved at me like we already knew each other, and for a heartbeat I truly felt like we did.

I'd been talking to Joe, a man I recognized from my youth hostel who happened to be selling his artwork on the street outside the bookstore. Joe was the oldest person in the hostel by about a foot and a half of white beard, and he'd been traveling from Canada to Paris since the 70s to draw intricate street scenes and sell his work in front of Shakespeare & Company. He looked like a hippie Walt Whitman in a floppy hat and a faded Key West t-shirt, the only one I ever saw him wear.

"Hello, Joe!" Anneli called from the window.

"Hey, Anneli! Come down and meet a friend of mine.”

"I'll be right there!"

She shut the window, which was painted with a portrait of Virginia Woolf reading a book, and in a moment she was emerging from the ancient blue door that led to the apartments above the bookshop. I still remember what she was wearing. Red pants and a delicate black button-up with a pretty gold pin holding the collar together. The most beautiful array of freckles and eyes that smiled right at you.

Barely two minutes after Joe introduced us as fellow gap year travelers, Anneli pronounced us kindred spirits. We were both eighteen years old, trying to call ourselves writers and artists, but feeling too young and too small to name ourselves after our dreams.

Anneli had left the farm outside of London where she’d grown up and was currently living at Shakespeare & Co as a tumbleweed. That’s what the employees called the young travellers taken in by the bookshop and given a free place to stay, read, and write in exchange for a few hours of work a day. I'd come to Paris specifically to take part in the shop's age-old tradition, to join the list of tumbleweeds that included Ernest Hemingway and Allen Ginsberg, but there was just one problem.

"Please don't tell anyone I told you this, but the shop is having a bit of trouble with bedbugs," Anneli whispered.

She pointed out the bites on her arms and neck, and told me to talk to the bookstore managers about whether or not I could move in after they fumigated the tumbleweed living quarters. I told her I would come back every day until they let me in, bedbugs or not, and she beamed and hugged me tightly.

"That's the spirit!"

Anneli gave me a long list of cafes, shops, and museums I should visit in the meantime.

"I'm only one of two tumbleweeds at the moment, and we get a bit lonely sometimes. We should have a late-night picnic soon and split a bottle of wine."

I agreed, and told her I was starving, and she recommended a place around the corner that sold cheap but delicious sandwiches.

"And they've got meringues piled in the window the size of your head, in every flavor and color you can imagine!"

She explained that she had to get back to a piece she was writing, and made me promise to meet her here again tomorrow to discuss me becoming a tumbleweed. Joe had wandered off to work on a drawing, and I was overwhelmed with the happiness of making a friend in a foreign country, a true kindred spirit.

We hugged and said goodbye multiple times, as she kept remembering places she wanted to show me, stories to tell me, and cafes to recommend. She disappeared through the big blue door, back into the bookstore of my dreams, leaving me breathless with joy and anticipation and the sense that I was exactly where I was supposed to be.

Postponing college was never my plan. Everything leading up to my graduation from high school had been only a series of tedious stepping stones on my way to what I considered The Rest of My Life; college in a big city, jobs and internships in the movie industry, and making it as a director by the time I was thirty. I had everything planned out, with no room for scenic routes of indecision or wandering. But when I was accepted into my dream school only to find that its tuition had been raised too much for me to attend, I had to rethink the plans I’d been making since I was eleven. I knew I had to get away from home, away from boarding school, away from everything I thought I knew about myself. I needed time to breathe and think, and a space far away from my plans where I could reevaluate who I was, with no agenda.

So I ended up with a one-way ticket to Europe, my entire life savings, and a single backpack, with no idea what I was doing. I’d read that Shakespeare and Company, the hundred-year-old bookstore that first published James Joyce and was a regular haunt of many of my favorite writers, let young travelers sleep among the bookshelves for free. They didn’t take reservations, and they gave no guarantees. All I had to do was show up in person and ask if there was room. It was the only plan I allowed myself to make.

I ate my sandwich and meringue lunch on a park bench in front of Notre Dame, the crumbs calling on a flock of pigeons to poke around my feet. It was a beautiful and warm September day, but the excitement inspired by meeting Joe and Anneli grew heavy and cold and tinged with a sudden feeling of distrust. I felt like a living cliche. A lost American would-be artist who travels to Paris for inspiration is the set-up for a story that’s been lived many times before. Watching the tourists take selfies with the statues, I licked my fingers clean of the sugar dust left by the meringue and opened my notebook, but couldn’t bring myself to write anything down. What was the point? It had all been written, hadn’t it?

The sunshine feels different here, and the sky is a slightly brighter shade of blue.

I cringed at the thought, and stuffed my notebook down into my bag with the rest of the unfinished sandwich I was saving for dinner.

I tried to walk around the city but ended up being drawn back to the bookstore. I was afraid that straying too far would make it disappear, that if I was gone for too long I’d return to find that Joe and Anneli had been figments of my imagination, just stories I’d told myself to live up to the cliche. I’d been in Paris for one day, and it was all feeling too good to be true.

Back on the cobbled sidewalk in front of Shakespeare & Co., Joe was drinking coffee and hanging his art on the iron fence of the small park that separated the bookshop from the busy street. He waved to me as I passed by, and asked me to join him after I explored the shop for a while.

Inside, I climbed the thin wooden stairs to the second floor and wandered through the quiet bookshelves. I picked up the newly-published history of the Shakespeare and Company bookshop and settled into a chair in the back to read. Flipping through the pages, I read about the shop’s humble beginnings and descriptions of the lost generation of expatriate authors and artists who flocked to its doorstep, the lost generation who found themselves in great works like A Moveable Feast, Ulysses, and The Great Gatsby.

I came upon a chapter of journal entries by past tumbleweeds from the sixties and seventies. In it were photographs of young hippies and intellectuals shelving books and drinking wine over their typewriters, fellow runaways and gap-year travellers smiling up from the faded polaroids and blurry snapshots. They looked like Anneli, like versions of myself in a past life I was desperately trying to reincarnate.

I turned a page and froze. It was a photograph of Allen Ginsberg tucked into a small bed surrounded by walls of books. Closing my finger between the pages to save my place, I stood up from the chair and walked into the bookstore’s adjacent room, where the stairs let out into a narrow hallway lined by bookshelves that led to a raised platform covered in pillows against the back wall. I opened the book again and held it up, matching the angle of the photo to the scene before me.

I closed the book and sat down on the platform, which was essentially a bench, just long and wide enough for a person to sleep on. How many writers, famous or otherwise, had slept here, dreaming my dreams and hoping for the same inspiration I hoped to find within these book-lined walls?

I reshelved the book and wandered outside. The sun was starting to set and the golden glow of Paris in the early evening made everything look like an oversaturated movie. I sat down next to Joe, who was still sipping his coffee as he watched the people come and go.

We chatted about the day, the beautiful weather and the crowds of tourists who seemed to only care about getting a selfie in front of the shop’s signature portrait of the Bard above the door.

“Why do you think people keep coming here?” I asked. “Being a tumbleweed seems like the perfect situation for any young aspiring writer, but aren’t they all just trying to be the next Hemingway or something?”

“Oh, I don’t know,” Joe sighed in his strong Canadian accent. “I think there’s a kind of magic in this place, whether it’s a part of the bookshop itself or just made up of all the stories of folks that come through here. Certain people are drawn to it, I guess.”

“It just seems like a magnet for cliches.”

“Maybe. But stories have to start somewhere, even before they become cliches.” Joe laughed. “Wasn’t Romeo and Juliet a cliche, even before that guy wrote it?”

He pointed at the bookshop sign where Shakespeare stared vacantly over our heads into the Paris skyline.

“Doesn’t mean it wasn’t a great story,” he said, sipping the last of his coffee.

I spent the next day at Shakespeare & Co., reading books and talking to the shop manager, a tall Parisian man who looked like he just walked off the set of A bout de souffle, about my hopes of becoming a tumbleweed. He never mentioned the bedbugs, but he made it clear that it was unlikely they would have a place for me in the next two weeks.

My heart sank. I knew that with my small budget I wouldn’t be able to afford two more weeks at the youth hostel where Joe and I had eaten breakfast together that morning.

As the day went on, I continued reading biographies of past tumbleweeds and flipping through photographs for familiar faces of my favorite writers. I found a portrait of Ginsberg hanging above the second floor window that looked out over the cobbled sidewalk where Joe sat and talked to customers and passers-by.

I still couldn’t bring myself to write anything in my notebook. Even ‘Paris is too good to be true’ felt trite and obvious, too defeating to put those words on paper.

I felt a tap on my shoulder and looked up from the empty page.

“Are you staying for the reading event tonight?” Anneli asked, grinning and itching a bug bite on her neck.

I smiled. Of course I was.

The event was a small celebration of a newly published book by a past tumbleweed who now worked full-time in the shop. Anneli read an excerpt and served wine to the twenty or so guests who sat on pillows on the floor as the author answered questions posed by his readers and other bookshop employees. When she wasn’t fulfilling her tumbleweed duties of refilling glasses and leading guests to their seats, Anneli sat next to me, occasionally squeezing my hand and smiling at me as she did when we first met.

After the questions finished and the wine was gone, the event ended, and I helped Anneli restore the pillows to their rightful place on the empty tumbleweed beds.

“Don’t go anywhere,” she said, picking up a tray of empty glasses and heading for the basement. “I’m getting a bottle of wine and a box of crackers for our picnic.”

It was almost chilly outside by the river, but the wine kept us warm and everyone was laughing. There were three of us besides me and Anneli; Jess, the second tumbleweed and native of New Zealand, and two other shop employees I’d been introduced to on the walk from the bookshop to our picnic spot on the stone quai, where our feet dangled over the water and we let crumbs fall into is dirty, glittering swirls.

“Does this ever get old?” I asked, gesturing to the golden towers of Notre Dame that loomed over us.

“Never!” Anneli exclaimed.

Everyone agreed, and chimed a haphazard toast to Paris.

“Sometimes I do feel a bit ridiculous,” she said, taking a swig from the bottle of wine. “I actually wrote a poem on a typewriter today, and it was awful.” She hiccupped and laughed. “I feel so cliche.”

“Everyone does,” said one of the booksellers, smiling as he lit his cigarette. “I mean, just look at us.”

“And isn’t that kind of wonderful?” Jess asked. “I know we’ll never be the next Scott and Zeldas, but we’re here! We get to make up our own stories right where they lived theirs!”

I felt a sudden surge of warm butterflies in my stomach. Maybe it was the wine. Maybe it was the exhilaration of a new friendship, and the feeling that I wasn’t alone. But it all felt like I was living a miracle. The magic that Joe was talking about became real in that moment, as cliche as it sounds. Maybe there’s a certain kind of power inherent in the stories that repeat themselves over history. Perhaps star-crossed lovers and self-searching travelers exist as a fundamental story in human nature. Repeat these stories enough, and they become legends.

Meeting Joe and Anneli really was a miracle, the first fallen dominoes in a series of stories that spread from the streets of Paris to the countryside of England, and back again to Shakespeare & Company, where it all began.

#stories

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