Grandfather's Handwriting, Aisle Three

My grandfather annotated books the way other men smoked: constantly, unapologetically, in a cramped forward-leaning hand with Greek letters mixed in when he was being private. He died when I was nineteen. His library was sold off in a house clearance I was too far away to stop, which I have quietly grieved ever since.

Fifteen years later I was killing an afternoon in a secondhand bookshop in Ljubljana — a city he never visited, in a country he never visited, two borders from anywhere he lived. Aisle three, spines of dead novels, and I pulled out a 1938 edition of a sea adventure I had never heard of, because the cloth was a nice green.

The margins leaned forward at me. Cramped. Annotated. A theta in the corner of page 12, his private mark for 'doubtful'. My whole scalp lifted before my reason caught up, and I stood there flicking pages with shaking hands while his voice reconstructed itself out of ink: arguments with the author about knots, a shopping list on the flyleaf — and on the title page, his name, his army rank, and a date and port I knew from family stories.

It was not a book from his cleared library. The date put it in his hands during the war, four decades before the library I knew. He had signed it aboard a ship, read it, argued with it, and lost it or traded it somewhere in Europe, and it had spent eighty years walking to a shelf I would idle past on a Tuesday.

The bookseller, hearing me make some sort of noise, came over; when I showed him the name and my ID he refused payment entirely, on the grounds — he said this with total seriousness — that 'it was never our book. It was in transit.'

It sits beside my desk now. Delivery complete.