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It’s almost as easy to think of reasons why books should be banned as it is to think of reasons why they should not be.

Health and Safety in the Workplace , by Vyene Custodian

Anne

“Papers!”

The demand froze Anne mid-step. Kerrol, though he barely had clothes, must have papers. He couldn’t have moved around the country without them. But whatever was written on them would surely prove insufficient on Amberg’s most prestigious high street. If there was one thing policemen seemed to dislike more than crime it was things that they disapproved of but that weren’t actually crimes. Neither Kerrol nor Yute fitted in any box that an officer of the law would find acceptable. Kerrol they would label as a vagrant or worse. And Yute…she had no idea what they would make of Yute.

Yute turned with a smile. Kerrol rotated to face the policeman more slowly, pensive.

“Your papers.” The policeman extended his hand, jerking it forward like a threat.

“Certainly.” Yute maintained his smile, rummaging in the inner pocket of his jacket. He drew forth a yellowing square of notepaper.

The policeman took it with a frown, turning to shield it from the breeze as he unfolded it. His frown deepened, furrows corrugating a broad forehead. He glanced back and forth between Yute and the paper, as if comparing him to his photograph. Hints of alarm began to claim his face. He straightened suddenly and brought his heels together as if he were a soldier on parade. “Thank you, sir!”

Yute took back what still looked to Anne like a page from a notebook, free of any writing and certainly not bearing official stamps or a recent photograph. “Thank you, Officer.” He refolded the paper and returned it to his pocket before joining Kerrol and Anne. “This is our next stop, I presume.” He gestured at Madame Orlova’s windows, all set in beautifully carved frames amid a polished wooden shopfront.

Without waiting for an answer Yute passed by and went in. Kerrol, following close on his heels and nearly forgetting to duck, muttered, “Do I have papers too?”

“I’m sure you do,” Yute replied. “Disguise, translation, these are all the gifts of our means of arrival. If you know what you’re doing, they can be adjusted for maximum advantage. Temporary gifts, I must stress, hence the need to press on.”

Anne followed the pair in, shutting the door behind them, sealing out November. As magical as she had once found her grandfather’s shop, it was Madame Orlova’s bookshop that Anne would aspire to if she were ever to go into the business in her own right. The place smelled of old leather, and comfort, and care. Its bookcases were not the shelves of a business, but of a rich man’s private library, the oak ornamented at the corners and heights with flights of a carpenter’s fancy, spires on this one, gargoyles on that, carvings that might on a larger scale wait atop some Gothic cathedral grinning at the weather, or nestle in the vaults, beyond the laity’s curiosity, a reward shared only with the angels or masons daring such elevation to carry out repairs.

The tomes that weighed upon such shelves were themselves works of art, leather-bound, embossed in geometric patterns, the titles, authors, the numbers of the volumes all inlaid with gold foil. The works of polymaths like Goethe, philosophers like Kant, flights of fancy from the Brothers Grimm, anything and everything of quality from the last few centuries.

Ahead of her, Yute and Kerrol both drew in deep breaths, as if the air outside had been too thin for them and they had returned to the atmosphere of their native land. A rumble of approval ran through Kerrol’s chest. Yute stood, turning, looking for something.

“She’s at the back,” Anne said. It seemed crazy to her, but Madame Orlova kept her counter back out of sight of the door. With the value of her stock so much greater than that they shelved at Hoffman’s, the old lady still relied on mere honesty to keep her from being robbed blind.

Anne followed Yute towards the back of the store, watching him with fresh eyes. His papers had set that policeman back on his heels. The reaction, the instant respect, or fear, did nothing to instil confidence in Anne.

Madame Orlova never failed to make new customers stop and stare. Many years previously, nature had taken a very different path with the infant Ingrid Orlova. Where others had followed the broad path trodden by their peers and predecessors, the baby Ingrid had grown in strange ways, leaving the familiar trail far behind her. No doctor that her family’s wealth could summon was able to coax her back to the agreed route. Her head sat crooked on a hunchbacked body, the skull too large for her frame, too misshapen not to draw the eye with its strangeness. She resembled, the children said, some creature of myth, a hobgoblin, an ogre perhaps, a troll even. A kindly one, but still a monster for all that.

Her family had hidden her away, ashamed. Locked her away, if the rumour was true. But one by one the years had claimed them. The father first, then the mother, two brothers, two sisters. All of them certain to outlive the sickly and deformed child who had never made it past the school gates. And yet there they were, lining up beneath impressive tombstones in God’s Acre, whilst Ingrid inched ever closer to inheriting it all.

And in the end, she outlasted her entire family. With the Orlov fortune in her name and nobody left to object to her freedom, she left the institute they had incarcerated her in and moved into the family mansion. She set up her shop before the World War had come, weathered the winds of conflict, and had run it ever since, not requiring that she profit from the enterprise, but unwilling to hide the face that God had given her. Requiring only that if you wanted to see it you would have to come into her shop, not merely gawk in through the windows.

Even as Anne took Yute to Madame Orlova’s desk she wondered if she weren’t leading a snake into the old woman’s nest. Yute held some sort of authority, and it was authority that had been tightening a vice on the Jews ever since Anne could remember. The chancellor was, if anything, a still greater enemy of Madame Orlova. If she weren’t too old to bear children, the authorities would already have let some butcher operate to ensure she never did. To hear Hitler talk, you would think that any day he might just order that the disabled and the mentally ill be shot.

It was madness, of course, but when that man began to rant on the wireless…Anne could almost see the spittle fly, and in those moments, he seemed capable of anything.

Anne found herself before the lady in question. “Madame—”

“Whatever it is, there’s more of it here,” Yute said to himself, hardly looking at the woman before him.

“More of what?” Kerrol asked.

Anne had been watching them both. Everyone reacted when they first saw Madame Orlova. She always thought that no other heartbeat would ever tell you more about a person than the one in which they laid eyes upon the old lady. Yute and Kerrol didn’t even seem to notice her deformity. It wasn’t a matter of self-control. That might be imposed in the next heartbeat out of a sense of decency. But in the first moment, the honest moment, there was always a mix of horror, sympathy, disgust, compassion…a host of emotions, the mix varying from person to person. Yute and Kerrol paid no more attention to the woman’s unique appearance than they would to an unfamiliar flower or previously unseen breed of dog.

“More of what?” Madame Orlova echoed Kerrol.

“More…” Yute raised a white hand, rubbing his thumb across his fingertips as if judging the quality of a piece of invisible silk. “…magic.”

The old woman smiled. “You’re very kind to say so.” She got up from her chair and came out from behind her desk. “I can see you are strangers to town. Please feel free to look around. Let me know if I can help you.” She turned to peer up at Anne. “How is your grandfather, dear? Is he keeping well? Safe?”

“Safe” was the real question here. With so many immediate problems crowding into their lives, hardly anyone not inside the circles that had been so clearly drawn had time to consider the lesser issues of health and wealth.

“He’s well, thank you, madame.” Anne nodded her head, resisting the urge to curtsey. She had always curtseyed when she was a little girl—only to Madame Orlova though—she wasn’t sure why. Perhaps it had started as a joke between them. But she was older now and certainly not any kind of princess. It felt these days as if half the town would spit if she came near them.

Anne stood with the old woman and watched the two men wander among the shelves. Kerrol was always visible and seemed more interested in the shop itself and the street outside than in the books. Yute, often lost behind the shelving, walked slowly, looking as if he might be in a mystic’s trance, or listening to the finest music, swept along by the currents of an orchestra in full spate. He trailed white fingers across the spines, and when he paid attention to a book it was as if his hands had alerted him to its importance rather than his eyes.

Yute paused, turned, a compass needle drawn by some new pole. He removed three books, two more, setting them atop the opposite shelf. Anne glanced at Madame Orlova. The old woman’s cautious bemusement had vanished, she stood transfixed, gnarled hands trembling at her sides. Yute reached in, fiddled as if with an obstruction, something slid aside. He withdrew a slim volume, a drab item with paper covers, bound like a collection of articles rather than a proper book.

“Helen Keller? Is this author known to you?”

Anne went cold. Was Yute, despite all appearances, a government inspector?

“I…I didn’t know that was there,” Madame Orlova stammered. Anne had never known the woman anything but confident and calm. It hurt to hear the fear in her voice.

“Please,” Yute said. “Just tell me what you know.”

It didn’t sound like accusation or interrogation. It was possible he genuinely didn’t know. A random person on the street was unlikely to have heard of the woman, after all. Anne swallowed. “She lost her sight and hearing as a baby and grew up blind and deaf. They say she would rage and attack anyone who touched her.”

Yute’s face softened in sympathy. Anne resisted the urge to trust him, although it was very late in the day for such sensible caution. Had Yute and Kerrol been working with the young policeman, the whole thing a ruse to gain her confidence? Interrogators often pretended to be sympathetic at the start—her grandfather had told her that.

Kerrol loomed at Yute’s shoulder. “Anger would be a natural reaction to the frustration of such imprisonment.” His blue gaze shifted from Anne to Madame Orlova. “The world is cruel.”

“A silent world, and a dark one,” Yute said. He raised the book higher. “And yet…”

“And yet a teacher found her, and she learned how to communicate without words.” Anne had been amazed by the story when she read about the woman, but now, retelling it to strangers, it struck her with more force quite how astonishing it was. “She learned to read and to write in Braille, a language of touch.”

“And such a wonder is hidden away?” Yute tilted his head as if puzzled.

“Banned…” Anne studied her shoes. “Some of it. She wrote against war.”

Yute looked up from the cover. “Socialism?”

“That too.” Anne met his gaze, feeling suddenly fierce. “Are you going to burn it?”

White eyebrows lifted in amazement. “Burn?”

“You can’t tell me you don’t know that’s what’s happening!” Anne found that she was shouting but suddenly she was past caring. “Who are you? You haven’t dropped into Amberg from the sky! How can you wander around like you know nothing? And what he”—she flapped an arm at Kerrol—“did to those men…How is that possible?”

“I’m a librarian,” Yute said, voice calm. “I don’t burn or ban books. Were I ever to let personal distaste overwhelm me, the most I would do is unfavourably shelve the offending volume. And even that I would consider a failing of character.” He stepped aside and gestured to Kerrol. “My companion has lived within a library for his entire life with the exception of the last few weeks. Setting fire to books would be a suicidal habit for him to possess.”

“How…” Strength returned to Madame Orlova’s voice. “How did you find that book? Is it what you were looking for?”

“It isn’t.” Yute shook his head. “It’s one of the more important works in your shop, but it’s not the reason we came.” He turned to Anne. “Forgive me. Kerrol and I have travelled a great distance and any offence we give derives from our ignorance rather than our intent. Something called us here. I am trying to understand why.”

“Maybe some tea would help?” Madame Orlova turned away and shuffled towards the door behind her desk. “Come. The samovar is hot. Or schnapps. I have schnapps if you prefer.”