The Department of Rare Books and Special Collections(96)
“You didn’t have any trouble getting the loans?” she asked.
“Not at all. Not after they heard that the missing books had been found in our stacks.”
“Good. I’m glad.”
She had come to Francis to talk about Vivek. To talk about Miriam. To talk about their role in preserving her memory, now that there were so few of them left who remembered her at all. Instead she handed Francis books, and he wrote their details in his tidy handwriting, with a mechanical pencil, in the paper registry. When they had unpacked it all, they rolled the two book trucks up to the exhibition area on the library’s top floor. The display cases were empty and unlocked, an abandoned museum. The most recent exhibition, featuring the manuscripts and hand-drawn illustrations of a Nobel Prize–winning poet and playwright, had been emptied out to make way for the A. A. Milne exhibition that was coming next.
Francis was giddy among the open display cases. He handed Liesl volumes and took photos of how the pairings looked together and made copious notes in his little notebook with his mechanical pencil. It would be months before these works were mounted. There was research to be done, a catalog to write, a poster to design, invitations and press releases to be distributed. Now, at the beginning of this work, Francis was steeped in the pleasure of it. He was not exhausted by it, not spoiled by it. Standing now as he did, surrounded by books and empty display cases, he could tell himself with all sincerity that the best was yet to come. She envied his folly.
Excusing herself, she disappeared back into the bowels of the library. Her work was waiting for her, but she ignored it. She went to the bindery. There, the library’s conservator was wearing a navy smock and working to bring life back to a 1498 collection of Aristotle’s writing. She gently uncreased a sheet of paper with a polished whalebone tool the shape of a tongue depressor.
The bindery looked halfway between an apothecary shop and Gutenberg’s workroom, and it was stacked high with books to be washed, books to be bound, books to be boxed, books to be repaired. The conservator never looked up at Liesl. Of her, too, Liesl was envious. For years she had slipped on her own smock and stood over books in this very room, looking over the conservator’s shoulder, apportioning resources to the preservation of some objects and giving up on others, deciding how the lives of the most vital of the books could be saved, how they could be kept intact for the next generation of readers and scholars. On that day she wasn’t moved to put on her smock. She could only watch.
She tiptoed out into the church-quiet workroom. There were mostly empty desks or desks that were only occupied by books. The room had an electric hum, reminding Liesl that things would be discovered here. Dan was the only one who was seated, and he didn’t look up to acknowledge Liesl. He was used to her recent lurking. And he was immersed in the project that kept his hands busy in the in-between minutes.
Headphones plugged into his Discman, Dan was lovingly cataloging a leaflet from the library of the country’s foremost Communist. There were 25,000 items that had come to the library in moldy boxes, and Dan wanted to touch every single one, wanted to preserve it, wanted to make sure that the socialists of the future could find it.
She came behind him and watched him work. He had a clear plastic ruler, like something Hannah might have used in primary school, and he measured the leaflet and noted the results on a scrap of paper by his side. Satisfied, he moved to counting pages, and again like a schoolchild, confident that he was all alone, he muttered the numbers under his breath as he counted. The next part was best. He knew it, and she did. He leaned back in his chair, and she caught the edge of his grin as he considered what he should title the thing that had come into their collection with no title. The pamphlet hadn’t been printed so it could be an artifact in a library. It was made to provide union information for seamstresses. And here Dan was, deciding what it would be called in their shared history.
Liesl left the sanctuary of the workroom. If Dan had seen her come, or saw her go, he didn’t indicate. The large reading room, stripped for the day of cocktail glasses and canapés, was hosting a group of undergraduates.
Max and his full suit were leading them through a collection of sacred texts. The fifteen or so undergraduates had all adopted the same posture: hands clasped behind their backs, leaning forward at the waist but not too far, afraid to breathe too heavily in the direction of the precious things laid out on low tables.
The objects on display consisted of a handful of Max’s favorite volumes: bibles, hymnals, a thousand-year-old copy of the Gospels in Greek that Liesl recognized immediately. It made her smile, that book, its cover pockmarked where rats had gnawed at the leather over the centuries. It was no secret why Max chose that book for teaching.
He invited one of the students, a shy-looking one with brown hair falling into his eyes, to touch the book, to pick it up. The whole room held its breath as the lucky boy lifted the book by the tips of his fingers. One of the students asked about gloves—they always asked about gloves—and Max dispelled the myth, telling the boy, the class, that the book was safer when the holder had full use of his senses. Max invited the boy to lift the book, to feel it, to run his fingers over it and get to know it. When the boy lifted the book to his nose, and they always did—it was human nature to smell it—Max told him the thing about the rats.
He shot his arms forward, disgusted by the idea of centuries-old rats, and then he almost dropped the book and was horrified that he almost dropped the book, so he grasped it tighter, inviting bubonic plague, and then the whole group of undergraduates laughed and unclasped their hands from behind their backs and began to really see the treasures that Max had selected so lovingly.