by Robert Boucheron

The ferry left at dawn and plowed through choppy seas. I stood by the rail on deck, chilled by spray and tense with adventure. Experienced travelers sat on benches in the warm, well-lighted cabin. Sensible people, they read newspapers, sipped from bottles, and ate from wrappers food they had the foresight to bring. There was no buffet on board.

A town came into view, a mass of tile roofs packed together and topped with a filigree of chimneys and antennas. Salt marsh lay all around, tall grasses and mudflats, without a single tree. The ferry made straight for a stone embankment, where the town abruptly rose up.

From rocking on waves, I disembarked on solid ground that seemed to heave underfoot. The granite pavement was wet, and the awning dripped. Day after day of warmth and sun had lulled me into complacency. Summer was over. Even in summer the Baltic can be cool and damp, the guidebook warned.

An American college student, I was wandering through Europe in a ragged loop that began in Paris. In those days, you came and went through the airport at Orly. My luggage was a backpack, and all it held was a change of clothes. I had no itinerary, no hotel reservation. I had a stock of travelers’ checks, depleted by now, and a ticket for a return flight. On the last day before heading home, it was still too early to search for a place to spend the night. I set off on foot with no idea where I would end up.

Who is more confident than a young man of twenty? And who is more foolish? I wanted to see places I had read about in books and studied on maps. I counted on years of high-school French, Italian musical terms, and scraps of German verse to see me through. Latin was no longer the lingua franca, but surely of some use. I found that Europeans spoke a peculiar English. We entertained each other with mistakes in grammar and mangled idioms.

The historic city was a dim maze, a place of shadows, brick and stone walls in a black patina of soot. Church steeples visible from the water were hidden by overhangs. Streets were narrow and twisted. They shut off all but the near view. The plan dated back centuries, to a legendary past when the city was hardly more than a village, a mercantile post at the edge of the world.

I sauntered along a busy main street and got in the way of pedestrians. They took me for a tramp or, worse, a tourist. Americans were good in principle but a nuisance in person. An alley opened abruptly, dark and deserted. A gutter ran down the middle. With few doors and windows and no other access, the alley was blind. With no thought for danger, I plunged in.

A sign stuck out from a gray wall on a wrought-iron bracket: “Rare Books and Prints,” or so I interpreted. Under the sign a recess was carved, a Gothic arch. In the arch was a door made of oak and bound by iron straps. It gave the impression of a castle portcullis. Stone steps were hollow from feet that passed when the place was thick with traffic. I mounted the steps and pulled the iron handle with all my strength. The door groaned on its hinges as it swung.

I paused in the gloomy interior. In the center of the space stood a trestle table. The top was covered by large sheets of paper: prints, maps, and engravings with tattered edges. Folios were piled below. Shelves crept up the walls to a timber ceiling. The shelves were crammed. They might collapse at any moment and loose an avalanche of books. Between heaps of books on the floor, waist-high, a narrow passage led inward.

Through another arch was a cavern as choked as the one I entered. A third was visible beyond. I glimpsed a certain organization. The front room sheltered Literature: works of the imagination, fiction and essays. The next dealt with History and Politics. The books were old, their cost beyond anything I could afford.

In the middle, bent over a shaded lamp, a man with a grizzled beard shuffled papers on a desk. He wore a long black coat and a black skullcap. I did not see him until I was almost at his elbow. He sized me up at a glance.

“What are you looking for, if I may ask?” His English was precise and his voice firm.

“Nothing in particular. I saw your shop from the street and was curious.”

“Curiosity is all to the good. It leads down many a path worth taking. But watch your step, young man, and be careful where you swing that hump.”

I took the hint and slipped the backpack from my shoulders.

“The shop has three floors, nine rooms in all. Nine, you must know, is the number of the Muses. The winding stair is narrow, impossible for two to pass. At the moment, no one else is here. Take as long as you like. The shop is open till nightfall.”

The dim pile of stone was as still as a tomb, filled with the buried treasure of civilization. Here and there I recognized an author or a title. Bound in dark leather and stamped in gold, the spines evoked august professors in academic gowns, bearded men in stiff collars and frock coats, and learned women in jewels and silk dresses. Here and there a single name blazed in capital letters. Who dared question the authority on the subject? Other names swelled with aristocratic particles, or trailed off in abbreviations.

I plucked a book at random from a shelf, let it fall open, and read a sentence or two. I replaced it and sampled another. The foreign languages and difficult subjects made my head swim. Inside the bookshop, sheltered from wind and water, the tension in my muscles relaxed. Hunger and fatigue began to press, but I refused to give in.

I ascended a spiral stair. The second floor was better lit and devoted to Music, Drama, and Dance, their history, theory, and great works. A survey and another upward turn. The third floor was airy, arranged for Poetry, Art, and Science. I had seen the nine rooms, the storehouse of Clio, Euterpe, Thalia, and their worldly sisters.

A ladder in the middle gave access to yet another floor. The man in the long black coat with the beard and skullcap had not mentioned this. The ladder led to a more exalted realm. To invite the browser up, it bore a sign: Metaphysics.

I dropped my backpack at the foot of the ladder and climbed hand over hand through the open hatch. This level was spacious, open to the rafters, and lit by little dormers like so many stars. An alcove was furnished with an armchair and a lamp with a parchment shade. The bookshelves bore labels for departments of higher knowledge, such as Alchemy, Black Magic, Cosmology, Dreams, Esoterica, and more. How wonderful to be in the metaphysical attic!

Craning my neck, I gazed at a wealth of arcane lore. Here if anywhere, you could learn the secret of the cosmos, the meaning of life, or a magic spell to guarantee success. From Dreams, which encompassed Trances and Visions, I pulled a volume titled Somniorum Clavis, or “The Key to Dreams,” by Sapiens Vetulus, surely a pseudonym, as the name means “old philosopher” or “wise old man.”

My feet were like lead, and my legs might buckle at any moment. The armchair beckoned. I sat with the heavy book in my lap and opened to the beginning. In clear Roman type, in the pure Latin of Cicero, I read:

Here you hold the key to unlock the meaning of all dreams whatsoever dreamed by man and woman in this world of sorrow. It has long been known that the skilled interpreter may foretell the future by sifting dreams. Sleep reveals the soul, and dream-figures enter our bodies from heaven, like angels who bear the word of god. Be warned, however. Truth is sweet in the mouth of the teller, bitter in the ear of one who will not hear.

My eyelids drooped, my head fell forward, and my heartbeat slowed. The book weighed in my lap. I was trapped in some dark place that resembled a booth, narrow and tight. I must exit or die, and the only way out was a hole at my feet. The hole was too small for my body to squeeze through, yet the need was pressing. I bent double, stuck my head in the hole, and pushed.

The dream ends here. The thread of my story also breaks at this point. How I left the shop, what else I saw that September day, and where I stayed in the old port city, these details have fled. I would like to go back and shake that sleepy young man. I have questions only he can answer. What is certain is that I flew from Paris to Boston, graduated from college, trained as an architect, and moved to New York, where I lived and worked.

Some architects labor for social justice. We are often bookish. But to earn our bread, we solve problems of functional use, strength of materials, sunlight, rainwater, forces of wind and gravity, the movement of goods, and the circulation of people. We analyze, we draw, and we calculate. On behalf of clients, we deal with large sums of money. Unlike attorneys, little of that money sticks to our hands.

Fifty years after the dream of birth, I woke as from an enchantment. Did I visit Lübeck, Rostock, or Visby, members of the Hanseatic League? I would like to think it was Königsberg in East Prussia, the home of Immanuel Kant. The Seven Bridges of Königsberg were a famous mathematical problem solved by Leonhard Euler. But Königsberg was destroyed in World War II, and East Prussia was wiped from the map, long before my European jaunt.

 Apparently, I visited the city in the poem by Theodor Storm, the gray city by the sea. Here is my translation:

By the gray shore, by the gray sea,
The city stands alone.
On roofs the fog weighs heavily,
And through the stillness roars the sea
Upon a single tone.

No forest laughs, no thrushes trill
Without a break in May.
By night the wild goose with its shrill
Autumnal cry flies where it will.
The salt marsh grasses sway.

And yet my whole heart hangs on you,
Gray city by the sea.
The magic spell of youth anew
Smiles evermore on you, on you,
Gray city by the sea.