The Book of Longings(86)

She didn’t respond, her countenance didn’t change, but I could tell she was listening.

“Search for an adoption transaction,” she said. “Look for anything that might help us.”





iv.


The next morning when Thaddeus’s eyelids thickened and his chin dropped to his chest, I slipped into Haran’s study and searched for the key that unlocked the cabinet at the back of the scriptorium. I came upon it easily, poorly hidden in an alabaster jar on his desk.

When I opened the cabinet, the doors screeched like lyre strings plucked wrongly, and I froze as Thaddeus roused a bit, then settled back to sleep. Hundreds of scrolls were stacked tightly into compartments, row after row, their round ends staring at me like a wall of unblinking eyes.

I guessed—correctly, it would turn out—that I’d discovered his personal archives. Were they arranged by subject, year, language, alphabet, or some mysterious means known only to Haran? With a glance at Thaddeus, I slid out three scrolls from the top left compartment and closed the cabinet without locking it. The first one was a certification in Latin of Haran’s Roman citizenship. The second implored a man named Andromachos to return Haran’s black female donkey that had been stolen from his stable. The third was his will, leaving all of his properties and wealth to his oldest son.

Each morning thereafter, I retrieved the key and removed a handful of scrolls. Thaddeus’s naps typically lasted slightly less than an hour, but fearing he might wake precipitously, I allowed myself only half that time to read, making certain to mark the outside of each document I’d completed with a small dot of ink. Long manuscripts of philosophy were mixed with letters, invitations, commemorations, and horoscopes. Nothing, it seemed, was left unrecorded. If a wee beetle ate a single leaf off a papyrus plant in his field, he wrote a lament that required the sacrifice of three plants. My progress was slow. At the end of two months, I’d read through only half the documents.

“Did you find anything of interest today?” Yaltha asked one afternoon when I returned to our rooms. Always the same question. Of all the emotions, hope was the most mysterious. It grew like the blue lotus, snaking up from muddy hearts, beautiful while it lasted.

I shook my head. Always the same answer.

“Beginning tomorrow I’ll go with you to the scriptorium,” she said. “Together, we can go through the scrolls much faster.”

This surprised, pleased, and troubled me. “What if Thaddeus wakes and finds you poring over Haran’s documents? It’s one thing for him to find me with an unauthorized scroll—I can claim I have it by mistake, that it was misplaced. But you—he could go straight to Haran.”

“Thaddeus won’t be a concern.”

“Why not?”

“Because we will serve him one of my special drinks.”



* * *



? ? ?

I ARRIVED IN THE SCRIPTORIUM the following morning with cakes and beer, a drink the Egyptians consumed at all hours as if it were water or wine.

I set a cup before Thaddeus. “We deserve refreshment, don’t you think?”

He tilted his head, uncertain. “I don’t know if Haran would—”

“I’m sure he won’t mind, but if so, I’ll tell him it was I who arranged it. You’ve been kind to me, and I wish to repay you, that’s all.”

He smiled then and lifted his cup, and I felt a paroxysm of guilt. He had been kind, always treating my mistakes with patience and showing me how to repair errors by cleaning dribbles of ink with a bitter fermented liquid. I suspected he knew that I pilfered papyrus for my own purposes, yet he said nothing. And how did I repay him? I deceived him with a draft Yaltha had concocted with the aid of Pamphile and a sedative distilled from the lotus flower.

His oblivion was quick and miraculous. I dumped out the beer in my own cup through the window in Haran’s study, and when my aunt appeared, I already had the cabinet unlocked. We unraveled scroll after scroll, securing them with reading spools, and read side by side at my desk. Yaltha was an uncommonly noisy reader. She made constant vibrating sounds, hmms, ooos, and acks, suggesting she’d stumbled upon some stupefaction or frustration.

We read through a dozen or so scrolls, unable to find any mention of Chaya. Yaltha left at the close of an hour—that was all the time we thought we could risk. Thaddeus, however, went on sleeping. I began to stare at his inert form to be sure he was breathing. His breaths seemed shallow and too far apart, and I was vastly relieved when he woke, bleary, yawning, his hair splashed up on one side of his head. He and I both pretended, as usual, not to notice that he’d been indisposed.

Later, finding Yaltha back in our rooms, I said, “You and Pamphile must restrain yourselves when dousing his drink. Half the measure will do.”

“Do you think him suspicious of the beer?”

“No, I think him well rested.”





v.


On a spring day, midway through the month the Egyptians called Phamenoth, Yaltha and I were sitting beside the pond, she reading Homer’s Odyssey, which was copied onto a thick codex, one of the more precious texts in Haran’s library. I’d brought it to her with Thaddeus’s permission, hoping it would fill her afternoons and distract her mind from Chaya.

Our clandestine hours in the scriptorium had lasted through the fall and winter. After the first month, Yaltha limited her visits to once a week in order to ward off any suspicions Thaddeus might have—there was only so much beer we could bring him. Our efforts had also been slowed when Haran suffered a stomach ailment and did not leave the house for several weeks. Nevertheless, we’d recently finished perusing every scroll in the locked chest. We knew more about Haran’s personal dealings than we cared to. Thaddeus was fat with beer. And we’d discovered nothing that suggested Chaya had ever existed.