Four Marks on a Book That Is Not For Sale

A customer picked up the Petőfi from the shelf behind the register last month — not the shelf where I sell things, the narrow one above my own head where I keep four books I will not part with — and asked how much, and I said it wasn't for sale, and he asked why keep an unsellable book in a bookshop. I did not answer him well. I am trying to answer it here instead, through the book, because the book has four marks on it, and the second one has a scene attached to it that I have never told anyone in full, not even the way I am about to tell it now.

**The first mark** is a burn, a brown scorched crescent eating into the top corner of the cover, thumbnail-sized. On the night of the fourth of November 1956, when the tanks came back into Budapest, something was burning on our street, and an ember came through the broken kitchen window and landed on a stack of books on the table. My grandmother beat it out with a wet dishcloth before it could do more than scorch the top one — this one, the one she'd been reading that week.

**The second mark** is a name, inked out on the flyleaf, four thick strokes over what was once a signature. Held to strong light it still says, underneath: Ferenc. My grandmother told me the rest only once, in her kitchen, in 1998, three years before she died, and I am going to set it down exactly as she gave it to me.

He returned the book on a Tuesday in late October, she said, two days after the students had read Petőfi at the Bem statue, and he stood in her doorway with it held flat against his chest like something he didn't want to hand over. He looked older than three weeks earlier, she said, though it had only been three weeks. "Keep it closed for a while," he told her, and when she asked why, he said, "Because open books get read, and read things get repeated, and repeated things get remembered by the wrong people," and she laughed at him, she said, because it sounded like something from a novel, and he did not laugh back. He asked if he could sit for five minutes, just five, and she made tea neither of them drank, and at the door, leaving, he turned around once and said her name — not the book's, hers — as though he were checking it still worked, still meant something ordinary. Then he went down the stairs two at a time, the way young men do when they want you to believe they aren't in a hurry.

She never saw him again. In December, when the building committee began asking apartments to produce lists of borrowed and lent books — a private library was a paper trail, and a paper trail could place a name at a statue on a specific day — she sat at that same table, on an evening she described to me as unusually quiet, no radio, her husband already asleep, and took the pen she used for shopping lists and blacked out Ferenc's name in four strokes, pressing hard enough that the nib nearly went through the page. She told me she expected, the whole time she was doing it, to hear a knock at the door, and that when one actually came, twenty minutes later, three sharp knocks, she sat perfectly still with the pen in her hand before she understood it was only Mrs. Deák from the third floor, wanting to borrow sugar. She gave her the sugar. She did not mention the book.

**The third mark** is wear, not ink — a softness at page 34, where the book now falls open on its own if you hold it upright and let go. Page 34 is "Nemzeti dal." She read it aloud once a year, the twenty-third of March, alone, door closed, from 1957 until 1989, and stopped only when it was no longer dangerous to be heard doing it.

**The fourth mark** is a scraped rectangle inside the cover, where a lending-circle stamp from a factory reading room in Angyalföld — "reorganized" in 1957, which meant seized and mostly burned — has been removed with a blade, in thin strips, over most of an evening, so the page beneath wouldn't tear.

I did not tell the customer any of this. I told him it wasn't for sale, and after he left I stood behind the register with the book in my hands for a while, thinking about a doorway in October 1956 and a name that stopped meaning anything ordinary three weeks after it was said aloud one last time. Then I found the pricing pencil and wrote, small, in the margin at page 34, today's date. I put the book back on the narrow shelf and told the next customer we didn't have a second copy, which was, for the first time in this shop's history, entirely true.

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