The Department of Rare Books and Special Collections(63)

“I’m ready. I’m going in,” she said as she abruptly let go of his arm, losing her slouch and taking the stairs two at a time, waving at John but not looking back at him, not even once, before she pushed her way through the heavy door for her first day at work at the new rare books library.





15


The first time Liesl saw the Peshawar laid out on the slab, she realized that she knew little, so very little, about the lives of her books. Just that morning a student had been asking her a question like she was some sort of expert—she bloviated on the printing device of Immanuel Benveniste—but the feeling that she was an impostor crept over her shoulders and wrapped itself around her neck.

Liesl followed Rhonda to her workstation: a laptop and a can of Diet Coke on a stainless-steel table.

That morning Liesl had walked through the little Jewish cemetery hidden behind a courtyard in her neighborhood. She’d paid respect at the end of the lives of many Jewish friends, laid a stone on top of a grave to weigh the spirit down and keep it longer in this world as custom dictated. No one had been buried there in at least a hundred years, and from the street, passersby could see only a tall stone wall topped with threatening wire and a permanently locked blue door. There were few loved ones left to leave stones on these graves. If you knew how to wrap your way through the courtyard, there was an entrance into the garden of headstones.

Vivek had decided that there would be no service for Miriam, religious or otherwise. It was what Miriam would have wanted, he said, and Liesl agreed, but for her own sake, not for Miriam’s, she wished that she had been given a venue to mourn, a grave on which to rest her hand. She had left a small rock on one of the headstones here. She hoped it would be clear to the spirits, whatever or wherever they were, that it was Miriam’s soul that Liesl wanted to keep in this world for just a bit longer.

“We’re taking good care of your book,” Rhonda said, bringing Liesl to the table with the manuscript.

“I don’t doubt it,” Liesl said.

“Don’t lie. You doubt it a little.”

There would have to be some disassembly before the testing could be done. The bindings were from the twentieth century, and the manuscript leaves inside the bindings had begun to disintegrate. The mica covers that had been used as sleeves for each manuscript page had caused the destruction of something that had survived in the dirt for over a thousand years, but the same mica was now the only thing holding each leaf together. If they tried to remove the pages from the binding, they would disintegrate into dust. Someone—a graduate student? An artist?—had been assigned the task of taking the book apart. The threads had been delicately removed with tweezers and a steady hand, the glue had been melted with a solvent, and the leaves lay spread out in the order that they had been bound, one next to the other, so that this area of the lab looked like it hosted an art exhibition and the pages of figures and equations were works on display. The order of the pages had been determined by the scholar who wrote the seminal work on the Peshawar, who had made those famous photographs. By keeping the pages in order, the lab was preserving the work of a twentieth-century scholar, not an eighth-century one, but they did it all the same, showing respect for every hand that had ever touched the book.

“We’ll be sampling from three separate pages,” Rhonda said. “But only slivers.”

How would they decide on the sacrifices? Liesl looked at the laid-out leaves and thought about how she might determine which of them should have a piece removed.

Have you completed your lab notes? read a sign posted on the wall above the table.

“We’ll be losing three pages then?” Liesl asked.

“No, of course not,” Rhonda said.

The lab door swung open, and a young woman walked in and nodded hello. She pulled a computer from her backpack and began to work at one of the bare tables.

“But you’re removing samples from them,” Liesl asked.

“Slivers, small slivers,” Rhonda said.

“So we won’t be able to tell there’s anything missing?”

Having overheard, the young woman looked up from her computer. She walked over and introduced herself, and Liesl felt embarrassed for having interrupted her work. She was the manager in charge of the lab. She talked about the nature of the sampling, and Liesl didn’t listen as she was busy trying to calculate the girl’s age.

There was something about choosing samples from three pages that had slightly different coloration. The girl’s straight black hair was pulled back into a ponytail, and though the frames of her glasses obscured her eyes a little, it didn’t look like they hid any lines or sagging. She had worn a backpack. Not a briefcase. Not a purse. A backpack. A full professor. It was maroon with oversized gold zippers. Once the pages had been sorted by color, the girl explained, they had looked for pages where they thought they could remove a good-sized sliver while doing the least harm to the rest of the material.

Liesl nodded, made an effort to look convinced, but grieved for those pages and the tiny pieces of them that would be taken forever.

Others began to filter into the lab. No one wore a lab coat. Liesl wasn’t sure if they were supposed to. She never wore white gloves when handling books, and everyone assumed librarians did that, so maybe lab coats were one of those things. More for TV than for life.

She didn’t want to ask; it seemed like such a stupid question, the way the questions about the gloves always did. The girl asked if Liesl wanted to see the machine, and Rhonda looked delighted, as did the rest of the staff who were now in the lab. Liesl cared nothing for machines, but they all looked so pleased to show her that of course she agreed. She was led to another room, and there it was, the monstrosity of a thing. White cylinders of various sizes were linked together by silver pipes, but from every surface sprung wires and tubes. It was a science experiment that had been dreamed up by an eleven-year-old boy in his bedroom. They were looking at her, Rhonda and the rest of them, waiting to hear that she was impressed. She tried to think of something nice to say about the thing.