“You can’t imagine how painful this travel was. . One year in the world for me was like ten thousand lives lived for other men. I can now easily draw a map of every city in the world. I can recount house numbers, the arrangement of flowers in the windowsill. . the shape and make of door knockers, mailboxes, linden trees, sewer grates, traffic lights. I can never forget any of it. . It’s torture, torture. . I can’t convey the torture. But it was worth it, this pain of remembering. It was worth it for the books. You see, people took up my cause with great enthusiasm. Each of them thought that they, and they alone, were saving my library — and they were right, but what they did not realize is that there were thousands like them, each believing they were making the world whole again. And so: the books came. They came by the crateful. . by the boatful. So many books. . fourteen thousand boatloads. As the country collapsed, my library grew and grew. Suddenly the problem became not where would I get the books but where would I put them. I had to build another pentagon. And another. My team of docents grew. I don’t know how word spread, but they came from all over the country. You will meet them. . soon. I trained them in the arts of classification, and it became their enormous task to organize all of these books.”
“How many books are we talking about?”
“The larger the library, the more uncertain the collection. . This is the third law of accumulation, as stated by Jarmuch Hovengär. Even I do not know exactly the number of books we have. Of course, we also started to amass many copies of the same book; we had over four hundred copies of Anna Karenina alone. We had thousands of Bibles, all editions, all translations. We continued to accept donations, but I also had to become more selective. At a certain point, I already had most books. So I started to fill out the edges of the collection. I made contacts with liaisons working in different countries, in different languages, and they would ask me what I wanted and I would simply say, ‘Get me one of every book.’ People like it when you tell them this. It turns them into bloodhounds. . They would send me the most spectacularly rare books for free, to the middle of Africa! For many of them it became a religion.”
“What did people think of it here?” Radar asked.
Funes nodded, as if he knew such a question was coming. “As big as Congo is, there is only one river to the ocean. Stories started about the library, about what kind of place it was — perhaps my docents were the ones spreading these stories. It does not matter. People started to make pilgrimages. First only a couple, but then they came in streams. They came if they were sick. They thought the books held powers. . They would go inside the stacks and pray. I claimed no power, of course. I was happy for my docents to show them the books and the catalog. As long as they didn’t harm the collection. Many who came to the library claimed they had been cured. Of what I cannot be sure. I did not lead them to this conclusion, but then, I did not dissuade them from believing in it, either.
“And then came the wars. For many years, the river was impassable. . It was too dangerous, even for me, the Tatayababuku, as they now called me. Kisangani was in very bad shape. Many people died. There was fighting all around. I heard gunshots every night and the collection lay stagnant — only a few books trickled in here and there, through clandestine channels. But the library was never harmed. Even the rebels knew that they could not touch what lay inside. And after the war ended, the local people began to give me books.”
“Why? You didn’t need books.”
“I don’t claim to know the African mind. I have played along, but I have never deceived anyone. The library is part of this country’s history now. It’s a part of the world’s history. And I can tell you, I was the first to get back on the river after the war was finished. Even when the UN would not run their boats, I was there. The people knew who I was. They saw my crates. And my crates gave them hope.”
“So how big is the library now?” said Radar.
“Neither I nor anyone could say for sure. What I can say is that it is by far the largest private collection of books in the world. Over the years, we’ve built sixty-one interlinked pentagons. Each pentagon holds one hundred twenty thousand books, give or take. We’ve carved out the space from the jungle and still we don’t have room. . We must always build more. Three hundred and fifty docents are under my employ — they tend the collections, fight the collections. Knowledge is transient. We battle the insects, the humidity. . The books themselves are always expanding. They can never be happy with the space they have.”
“Do any scholars come to use your library?” asked Lars.
“If they came, we would not turn them away. Our location is not the most accessible, I admit, but a library must be open to all who wish to use it. I’m not foolish enough to believe it’s simply about preservation. It is also about use. A library dies without use.”
Fig. 5.8. “La Bibliothèque du Fleuve Congo”
From Radmanovic, R. (2013), I Am Radar, p. 705
“You’re already dead,” whispered Horeb.
“I’m sorry?” said Funes with a smile.
“I said, ‘What of the African authors?’” said Horeb. “Are they in your library too?”
“Of course,” said Funes. “Pentagon forty-eight, sections fourteen and fifteen are devoted to African literature.”
“Two sections only?”
“This is not my doing; I’m only the vessel, not the contents,” he said. “But I don’t find it a coincidence that this is the same continent that housed the great library of Alexandria, the closest we have ever come, until now, to a universal library. This continent is where knowledge was born and where it shall die.”
Radar got up, went into the container, and came out bearing a book. He handed it to Funes.
“For your library,” he said.
Funes studied the book carefully. He examined it as a doctor examines a patient, touching the cover, the spine, the tips of its pages.
“I’ve never seen this before,” he said. “It’s quite unusual to find a book I’ve never seen. Per Røed-Larsen. Who is he?”
Radar gestured at Lars. “His stepbrother.”
Lars shook his head. “I have no stepbrother,” he said.
“An author who doesn’t exist?” said Funes.
“Why do you need the author when you already have the book?” said Lars.
12
On the eighth morning, Radar awoke, shivering, entangled in the lingering tendrils of dream panic. In the dream, he had been seated at the dining room table with his parents. They were all very thirsty — none of them had had anything to drink for days and days. The only way to get water was from a small bird, which they passed around and squeezed, pressing their thumbs into the soft tuft of its belly. If you squeezed hard enough, a single drop of liquid would come out of the bird’s beak. It was barely enough to wet the tongue. Radar was caught between the desperation of his own thirst and not wanting to watch his parents die of dehydration. When it came to him, he squeezed the bird and nothing came out, not even a drop. He squeezed harder and harder, until he began to feel bones breaking. .
He sat up in his cot. He was thirsty. His joints ached. Like Funes, he had inherited a body sensitive to changes in weather. Perhaps a storm was coming. Or perhaps this was the first sign of malaria. Or sleeping sickness. Or any of the hundred maladies, known and unknown, that he might catch out here.