John Irving - Avenue of Mysteries

Everyone was most sympathetic, including the young bookseller; his English was a struggle, but he’d read everything Juan Diego had written (in Lithuanian) and he couldn’t stop talking to his favorite author.

“Lithuania is a birth-again country — we are your newborn readers!” he cried. (Daiva, the translator, explained what the young bookseller meant: since the Soviets had left, people were free to read more books — especially foreign novels.)

“We have awakened to find someone like you preexisted us!” the young man exclaimed, wringing his hands. Juan Diego was very moved.

At one point, Daiva and Rasa must have gone to the women’s room — or they just needed a break from the enthusiastic young bookseller. His first name was not so easy. (It was something like Gintaras, or maybe it was Arvydas.)

Juan Diego was looking at a bulletin board in the bookstore. There were photographs of women with what looked like lists of authors’ names next to them. There were numbers that looked like the women’s phone numbers, too. Were these women in a book club? Juan Diego recognized many of the authors’ names, his own among them. They were all fiction writers. Of course it was a book club, Juan Diego thought — no men were pictured.

“These women — they read novels. They’re in a book club?” Juan Diego asked the hovering bookseller.

The young man looked stricken — he may not have understood, or he didn’t know the English for what he wanted to say.

“All despairing readers — seeking to meet other readers for a coffee or a beer!” Gintaras or Arvydas shouted; surely the despairing word was not what he’d meant.

“Do you mean a date ?” Juan Diego had asked. It was the most touching thing: women who wanted to meet men to talk about the books they’d read! He’d never heard of such a thing. “A kind of dating service?” Imagine matchmaking on the basis of what novels you liked! Juan Diego thought. But would these poor women find any men who read novels? (Juan Diego didn’t think so.)

“Mail-order brides!” the young bookseller said dismissively; with a gesture toward the bulletin board, he expressed how these women were beneath his consideration.

Juan Diego’s publisher and translator were back at his side, but not before Juan Diego looked longingly at one of the women’s photographs — it was someone who’d put Juan Diego’s name at the top of her list. She was pretty, but not too pretty; she looked a little unhappy. There were dark circles under her haunting eyes; her hair looked somewhat neglected. There was no one in her life to talk to about the wonderful novels she’d read. Her first name was Odeta; her last name must have been fifteen letters long.

“Mail-order brides?” Juan Diego asked Gintaras or Arvydas. “Surely they can’t be—”

“Pathetic ladies with no lifes, coupling with characters in novels instead of meeting real mens!” the bookseller shouted.

That was it — the spark of a new novel. Mail-order brides advertising themselves by the novels they’d read — in a bookstore, of all places! The idea was born with a title: One Chance to Leave Lithuania. Oh, no, Juan Diego thought. (This was what he always thought when he thought of a new novel — it always struck him, at first, as a terrible idea.)

And, naturally, it was all a mistake — just a language confusion. Gintaras or Arvydas couldn’t express himself in English. Juan Diego’s publisher and translator were laughing as they explained the bookseller’s error.

“It’s just a bunch of readers — all women,” Daiva told Juan Diego.

“They meet one another, other women, for coffee or beer, just to talk about the novelists they like,” Rasa explained.

“Kind of an impromptu book club,” Daiva told him.

“There are no mail-order brides in Lithuania,” Rasa stated.

“There must be some mail-order brides,” Juan Diego suggested.

The next morning, at his unpronounceable hotel, the Stikliai, Juan Diego was introduced to a policewoman from Interpol in Vilnius; Daiva and Rasa had found her and brought her to the hotel. “There are no mail-order brides in Lithuania,” the policewoman told him. She didn’t stay to have a coffee; Juan Diego didn’t catch her name. The policewoman’s grittiness could not be disguised by her hair, which was dyed a surfer-blond color, tinged with sunset-orange streaks. No amount or hue of dye could conceal what she was: not a good-time girl but a no-nonsense cop. No novels about mail-order brides in Lithuania, please; that was the stern policewoman’s message. Yet One Chance to Leave Lithuania had endured.

“What about adoption?” Juan Diego had asked Daiva and Rasa. “What about orphanages or adoption agencies — there must be state services for adoptions, maybe state services for children’s rights? What about women who want or need to put their children up for adoption? Lithuania is a Catholic country, isn’t it?”

Daiva, the translator of many of his novels, understood Juan Diego very well. “Women who put their children up for adoption don’t advertise themselves in a bookstore, ” she said, smiling at him.

“That was just the start of something,” he explained. “Novels begin somewhere; novels undergo revision.” He’d not forgotten Odeta’s face on the bookstore bulletin board, but One Chance to Leave Lithuania was a different novel now. The woman who was putting up a child for adoption was also a reader; she was seeking to meet other readers. She didn’t just love novels and the characters in them for themselves; she sought to leave her life in the past behind, her child included. She wasn’t thinking about meeting a man.

But whose one chance to leave Lithuania was it? Hers, or her child’s? Things can go wrong during the adoption process, Juan Diego knew — not only in novels.

AS FOR JEANETTE WINTERSON’S The Passion, Juan Diego loved that novel; he’d read it two or three times — he kept returning to it. It wasn’t about an order of lesbian nuns. It was about history and magic, including Napoleon’s eating habits and a girl with webbed feet — she was a cross-dresser, too. It was a novel about unfulfilled love and sadness. It was not uplifting enough for Clark French to have written it.

And Juan Diego had highlighted a favorite sentence in the middle of The Passion: “Religion is somewhere between fear and sex.” That sentence would have provoked poor Clark.

It was almost five in the afternoon on New Year’s Eve in Bohol when Juan Diego limped out of the ramshackle airport and into the mayhem of Tagbilaran City, which struck him as a squalid metropolis of motorcycles and mopeds. There were so many difficult names for places in the Philippines, Juan Diego couldn’t keep them straight — the islands had names, and the cities, not to mention the names of the neighborhoods in the cities. It was confusing. And in Tagbilaran City, there were also plenty of the now-familiar religious jeepneys, but these were intermixed with homemade vehicles that resembled rebuilt lawnmowers or supercharged golf carts; there were lots of bicycles, too, not to mention the masses of people on foot.

Clark French had manfully lifted Juan Diego’s enormous bag above his head — out of consideration for the women and small children who didn’t come up to his chest. That orange albatross was a woman-and-child crusher; it could roll right over them. Yet Clark didn’t hesitate to knife like a running back through the men in the mob — the smaller brown bodies got out of his way, or Clark muscled through them. Clark was a bull.

Dr. Josefa Quintana knew how to follow her husband through a crowd. She kept one of her small hands flat against Clark’s broad back; with the other, she held tightly to Juan Diego. “Don’t worry — we have a driver, somewhere,” she told him. “Clark, notwithstanding his opinion to the contrary, doesn’t have to do everything. ” Juan Diego was charmed by her; she was genuine, and she struck him as both the brains and the common sense in the family. Clark was the instinctual one — both an asset and a liability.