The Librarian of Auschwitz(81)
She talks to Dita about a young man called Edmond Dantès, whose name she pronounces the French way, with very open and striking vowels, thereby instantly granting him a literary pedigree. She says that Edmond is an honest, strapping, young man, who’s sailing back to Marseilles in command of the Pharaon, and looking forward to seeing his father and his Catalan fiancée.
“He had to take command of the ship after the death of the captain at sea. The captain’s dying wish was that Edmond take a letter on his behalf to an address in Paris. Life is treating Edmond well at that stage: The ship owner wants to make him captain, and his fiancée, the lovely Mercédès, loves him madly. They’re going to get married right away. But a cousin of Mercédès, who is also wooing her and is an officer on the ship, is angry because he hasn’t been named the new captain. He denounces Dantès for treason, and the dead captain’s letter incriminates him. It’s terrible. So on his wedding day, Dantès plummets from the heights of happiness to the depths of despair when he’s arrested during the wedding ceremony and taken as a prisoner to the horrific penal island of If.”
“Where’s that?”
“It’s a small island facing the port of Marseilles. There he’ll spend many years locked up in a cell. But Dantès finds a companion in misfortune in a nearby cell, the Abbé Faria. He’s an abbot whom all consider mad because he constantly shouts at the warders that if they release him, he’ll share a fabulous treasure with them. The abbot has spent years patiently digging a tunnel with tools he himself has made, but he has miscalculated the direction the tunnel should take and, instead of exiting outside the prison wall, he turns up in Dantès’s cell. Thanks to the tunnel, about which the warders know nothing, the two cells are now connected, and the two men keep each other company and ease the burden of their imprisonment.”
Dita listens carefully. She identifies with Edmond Dantès, an innocent man whom malice has caused to be most unjustly imprisoned, just as has happened to herself and her family.
“What’s Dantès like?”
“Strong and handsome, very handsome. And above all else, he is kindhearted, good, and generous.”
“And what happens to him? Does he get the liberty he deserves so much?”
“He and Faria plan their escape. They spend years digging a tunnel, and in the meantime, Abbé Faria becomes Dantès’s mentor, almost like his father, teaching him history, philosophy, and many other subjects during their hours of imprisonment. But when the tunnel is almost complete, Abbé Faria dies. Their plan falls apart. Just as Dantès thinks freedom is centimeters away, his friend’s death wrecks everything.”
As if her own misfortune weren’t enough for her to worry about, Dita now purses her lips and laments poor Dantès’s bad luck. Markéta smiles.
“Dantès is a very resourceful and brave man. After the warders have ascertained that the abbot is dead and have left his cell, Dantès goes through the secret tunnel to Faria’s cell, transfers the body of his good friend into his own cell, and lays him down on the bunk. Then he returns to Faria’s cell and sews himself inside the dead abbot’s body bag. When the people charged with burying the body arrive, they take away Dantès, whose plan is to get out of the bag and escape the moment he’s left unattended in the morgue.”
“Good plan!”
“Not so good. What he doesn’t know is that there is no morgue in the sinister If prison, or burials, because the bodies of the prisoners are thrown into the sea. They throw Dantès, still inside the sack, into the sea from a great height, and so when they discover they’ve been tricked, they assume that Dantès will have drowned anyway.”
“And does he die?” asks Dita anxiously.
“No, there’s still a long way to go in the novel. He manages to escape from the bag and, although he’s exhausted, he successfully swims to shore. But do you know the best part? Abbé Faria wasn’t mad; he really had found treasure. Edmond Dantès goes in search of it, and the riches he finds enable him to adopt a new identity: He becomes the Count of Monte Cristo.”
“And does he spend his life living happily ever after?” asks Dita na?vely.
Markéta gives her that look of utter amazement and slight reproach.
“No! How can he go on as if nothing had happened? He does what he has to do. He takes revenge on all those people who betrayed him.”
“And is he successful?”
Markéta nods so enthusiastically that there’s no question that Dantès ruthlessly exacts revenge. She summarizes the astute and intricate schemes whereby Dantès, now the Count of Monte Cristo, imposes devastating punishment on the people who ruined his life. It’s a complex and Machiavellian plan from which there is no escape, even for Mercédès, who when she thought Dantès was dead, finally married her cousin, unaware of his trickery. He shows her no mercy, either. He gets close to all of them, gains their confidence in his role as the rich and worldly count, and then crushes them.”
When Markéta finishes her story of the relentless revenge of the Count of Monte Cristo, the two of them fall silent. Dita gets up to go, but before she does so, she turns to the teacher and says, “Markéta … you’ve told the story so well it’s almost as if I’d read it. Would you like to be one of our ‘living’ books? That way we’d have The Wonderful Adventures of Nils Holgersson, the stories of the American Indians, the history of the Jews, and now The Count of Monte Cristo.”