Codex

by Lev Grossman

  She looked around nervously as if the book might be lurking in a dark corner, ready to jump out at her.

  “All right,” she said, settling herself with an effort. “Tell me your theory.”

  Edward was enjoying his big moment. He paced, his footsteps echoing in the large, empty space.

  “You once told me that some of what we know about Gervase comes from documents that were reused in the bindings of other books. Books that were disbound to recover the original papers.”

  “Yes,” she said slowly, “that is true. Although such cases are relatively rare.”

  “Well, what if the same thing happened to the codex? What if somebody used it to make the binding of another book?”

  “Why would anyone want to do that?” Margaret looked scornful, a professional scolding the bumblings of an amateur. “The procedure you’re talking about was for waste paper. The codex would have been written on parchment. There’s a big difference. Parchment is essentially very fine leather—it was expensive, and it has very different physical properties from—”

  “But listen.” Edward cut her off. “Just listen. What if they did it as a way of hiding the codex?”

  She took an instant to process this notion.

  “Well,” she said more slowly, “it would entail some damage to the original pages. The paste causes discoloration, in addition to any holes that would have had to be cut. And why would anybody bother?”

  “Forget about that for a second. Let’s just assume that they did.”

  Margaret stood up, with her characteristic unlimbering motion, so that she could pace as well.

  “There’s far too much parchment in a book to be concealed even in a very thick binding. You could fit eight or ten leaves at the most.”

  “Right. I thought of that. So you break up the codex, split the pages up and scatter them, disperse them throughout a whole series of volumes.”

  “Okay.” She stopped and folded her long, slender arms. “All right. Suppose such a procedure has been carried out on the codex. Now we’re looking for any number of books instead of just one. We’re worse off than when we started.”

  “Exactly.” Edward walked over to the old suitcase. “Margaret. What if you were right all along. What if the codex was in the twelfth box after all?”

  He let his voice trail off; the thought finished itself. He could see his words starting to sink in. Margaret walked over to one of the bookshelves and put her small, pale hand up to touch the row of worn, motley spines, softly, as if she were caressing the weathered scales of a sleeping dragon. She bent to look more closely at their yellowing gray labels. A pink stickie stuck to the shelf gave up the ghost and fluttered gracefully to the floor. She ignored it.

  “Damn it,” she said, but softly, without heat. “Those call numbers. I knew they were strange. I knew it.” She studied them in the dim light. “It’s so obvious,” she whispered. “They put the codex into the books in the twelfth box and gave the twelfth box to the Chenoweth, knowing it would get lost. These numbers and letters aren’t call numbers, they stand for signatures. And these words must be catchwords!” She looked up at Edward. “If it’s really in here, these are the collations, right on the spine. These aren’t call numbers, they’re the instructions for reassembling the codex.”

  Their eyes met, and Edward felt goosebumps rising on his arms. He’d thought he was right, but now the thought was becoming reality, and suddenly there was a third and slightly supernatural presence in the room with them: The codex was here, the ghost of a book, disemboweled and dispersed but waiting to be brought back to life. Bracing herself, Margaret pulled out a massive tome from the Urre shelf—an odd volume left over from the diaspora of some forgotten encyclopedia—and carried it over to the work table. She laid it flat with a resounding whoomp.

  “All right,” she said. She opened it and began studying the inside cover. She ran her fingers along the edges, feeling their texture and thickness. “These boards are pasteboard, not wood. If they’re here the pages of the codex are part of the cover, under the leather.”

  She took a steel penknife out of her bag and with a single confident gesture made a long, straight slit along the hinge of the inside endpaper. She put down the knife and worked her fingertips inside. Holding the rest of the book down by leaning on it with her forearm, she roughly jerked the slit open with her other hand. Fine dry dust flew out.

  She held the wound up to the lamp and peered inside. A long moment passed, then she looked up at Edward.

  “We’re going to need some cash,” she said.

  IT TOOK BOTH OF THEM working for half an hour to get all the books down to the sidewalk and into a taxi. In the end they had to rummage through the Wents’ apartment for old shopping bags to hide them in. Evidently the process of removing the Wents’ possessions had been going on for some time, because the doorman saw nothing suspicious in what they were doing. He even called them a cab.

  Margaret wouldn’t risk putting the books in the trunk, at the mercy of rattling tire irons and oozing motor oil, so they had to stack them up in the back seat and then wedge themselves in afterward. The soft springs of the old upholstery twanged and sagged under their weight. Margaret was squeezed up against one door in the back, and Edward had to sit in the front seat next to the driver, crushed under a stack of books that reached up to the ripped vinyl roof.

  They took Third Avenue downtown to where it turned into Bowery, then Canal Street across to the Manhattan bridge. Every tiny bump in the roadway transmitted itself with the precision of a seismometer up through the car’s clapped-out, overloaded suspension and directly into Edward’s ass, but he didn’t care. For weeks the codex had been an abstract thing, mystical and vaporous; now he closed his eyes and felt the solid, reassuring weight of the books in his lap and pictured their taxi soaring across the bridge in a long, dramatic helicopter shot, the viewpoint pulling up and away, the end of the movie, cue the theme song, roll credits. This is it, he thought. It’s finally over. Weymarshe was just around the corner. On cue the cabby started singing along loudly and unselfconsciously with the radio in a Near Eastern accent: Wings’ “Another Day” segueing seamlessly into “Band on the Run” and then Thomas Dolby’s “She Blinded Me With Science,” doing the keyboard part for good measure. As they crossed the bridge the metal mesh embedded in the asphalt whined musically under their tires.

  All of downtown Brooklyn seemed to be under construction. Traffic inched along through a tortuous morass of jersey barriers and gravel pits and sawhorses with orange lights on them blinking at each other out of sync. Traffic stopped dead for five solid minutes while Edward, paralyzed under the weight of the books, was forced to stare out the window at a restaurant called “For Goodness Steak!” It was dark by the time the taxi pulled up in front of Margaret’s building, on a narrow street of identical brownstones. She unloaded the back seat while he paid off the driver, and together they ferried the books upstairs, walking quickly, legs bent, steadying the teetering stacks under their chins.

  He’d seen her building once from the outside, but he’d never seen the interior, and he had lazily imagined it as a kind of scholarly bolthole, a one-room cloister paneled in dark wood, with a reading table upholstered in green baize. Instead she led him up three flights of stairs—two folded-up strollers haunted the gloomy stairwell like a mated pair of giant spiders—and into a dark, undecorated, and disorderly studio on the fourth floor of what must have once been a comfortable bourgeois residence before it was carved up into separate rentable apartments. The walls were white and the ceilings were low. Everything was slightly undersized: The fridge was half as big as a regular one, and the futon-bed wasn’t much bigger than a child’s cot. Makeshift bookshelves, unstable edifices of pine planks and cinder blocks, reached up to the ceiling.

  The only full-sized piece of furniture in the apartment was a colossal wooden desk pushed up against the front windows. It must have weighed half a ton; it looked like it came from the office of the
president of a midwestern bank. Margaret swept the papers off it onto the bed and started rummaging through a closet for supplies, which she rapidly assembled in a neat line along the desktop: rolls of white tape, big shiny metal alligator clips, soft paintbrushes, knitting needles, a jar of paste, assorted spatulas, scraps of exotic-looking paper, sheets of stiff clear plastic, and a small, thin black case that opened to reveal a shiny surgical scalpel snug in a velvet nest.

  Edward was ready to begin the unveiling, or excavation, or reassembly, whatever the appropriate term was for the project they were about to commence, but Margaret sent him out to the nearest bodega for Diet Coke and Q-tips. He went without protest, but as he wandered the dirty, urine-smelling aisles, full of off-brand paper towels and expired cookies and bins of nameless Caribbean roots, he wondered if he should try to contact the Duchess and tell her what was going on. On his way back he stopped at a payphone and tried the number of the Wents’ apartment. Nobody answered—which made sense, since he’d just been there and it was empty. Feeling stupid, he left a terse message for Laura to call his cell phone and hung up.

  When he got back Margaret was bent over the first of the books, a handsome edition of Tennyson’s Idylls of the King with illustrations by Gustave Doré, which lay like a surgical patient in a pool of light from a halogen lamp. She showed it no mercy. With a few economical strokes she sliced the spine and the covers free of the block of pages inside.

  “I’m violating the first law of preservation,” she said in a low voice.

  “Which is?”

  “Never perform any operation on a book that you cannot reverse.”

  She carefully set the stack of freed pages to one side and concentrated on the covers.

  “I’ll never tell,” Edward said.

  He stowed the Diet Coke away in her miniature fridge. The only other contents were a box of baking soda and a Tupperware container of what looked like cottage cheese. When he was done he sat gingerly on the bed, which was neatly made and covered in a lumpy, well-worn quilt, possibly handmade.

  “At some point in the Middle Ages people decided it was too expensive to keep making book covers out of wood,” Margaret said, “so they started using pasteboard instead, which is glued-together sheets of paper covered with leather. They were also switching from parchment to paper for the pages—paper doesn’t warp the way parchment does, so they didn’t need those heavy wooden covers anymore to keep the pages flat.”

  She sliced the front and back covers away and set aside the now disembodied spine, first making a note of what was written on it. Edward winced, but Margaret had the scholar’s callousness for the physical well-being of books—she’d seen so much bibliocide that nothing shocked her.

  “It’s astonishing, when you think about it,” she went on. “They couldn’t have cared less what paper they used. They weren’t interested in preserving history. They just cut up whatever books nobody was reading at the time. Sometimes they used works of literature that were hundreds of years old, books that we would have kept under glass in a museum even then, let alone now. They were so strange.”

  She frowned and shook her head, as if she took the perplexing behavior of earlier eras personally.

  “We forget that not every age was as obsessed with who owns what as ours is. In Gervase’s time an author was concerned only with the truth: He was its steward, its temporary curator, not its owner. They had no conception of plagiarism. If one man copied something somebody else wrote, it wasn’t a crime, it was a service to mankind. And he regarded his own writings the same way.”

  While he was out Margaret had prepared a batch of clear solvents in a stainless steel mixing bowl. Working quickly and carefully, she used a sponge to brush the clear liquid around the edges of the pasteboard covers—now just two empty blank panels—then applied a thick layer of mushy white paste over it, which she let sit for a minute. When the pasteboard was good and saturated she scraped off the paste and set about separating the edges of the endpaper from the pasteboard with the narrow edge of a kitchen spatula. She went around all four sides, then she lifted the endpaper away and hurriedly blotted the damp parts with the paper scraps.

  When she took away the blotting paper, Edward and Margaret were looking at the first page of the codex.

  HE’D BEEN SEARCHING for it for so long that he’d stopped thinking of the codex as an actual physical thing, something that could be seen and touched and handled and read. When he thought of it at all he’d imagined the codex as something out of a Scooby Doo cartoon, a mystical volume floating unsupported in midair, illuminated from within by a ghostly green glow, serenaded by celestial choirs, its pages turning themselves as if by an unseen hand. But there it was: It lay in front of him on Margaret’s desk, as limp and bedraggled and apologetic as a newborn baby.

  He hadn’t expected it to be so beautiful.

  The page itself wasn’t especially large, not much bigger than the standard 8½″ by 11″ of a sheet of white Xerox paper, but it was infinitely more fragrant: A sweet, damp, musty odor billowed up when Margaret uncovered it. She had warned him that it might be damaged, and it was, a half-inch-wide strip running along three of its edges was stained a deep, burnt brown, but the rest of the page was a smooth, mottled cream color. The Tennyson had been a big book, so whoever had hidden the page there hadn’t had to fold it to fit it in. The page bore two dense columns of handwritten text, perfectly centered both vertically and laterally and neatly squared off as if they’d been justified in a word processor. They were surrounded by wide, spacious margins and written in ink that might once have been black but which had faded to a rich mahogany. Scattered at random across the page, a letter here and a sigil there was picked out in deep red or smooth, metallic gold.

  The writing was a dense script that looked like nothing so much as a tangled hedge of thorny black branches, or the wrought-iron curls of a fire escape. It was almost completely illegible; only when he stared at a single word did one or two of the pointy squiggles slowly resolve themselves into recognizable letters. What did it mean? He stared at the text, and it shimmered on the very edge of making sense, promising everything but divulging nothing, the symbol of a symbol. It was like the chess problems that he’d solved so ridiculously easily when he was seven, and which he now stared at in the newspaper with impotent incomprehension. For some reason he wanted to know what it said so badly his eyes burned, but the codex resisted him—it was like the frost of meaning, pure significance, condensed and collected and frozen on paper into this black tracery, the darkness of it so bright it was blinding.

  Halfway down the left-hand column, the scribe had turned a big Y into a miniature tableau: A miserable hunchbacked peasant was lugging a dry tree branch over his shoulder through a snowy landscape. He was bent double under his burden, as if the weight of what it meant was too sorrowful to bear.

  “IT LOOKS VERY genuine,” Margaret said clinically.

  Edward snapped back to reality. He wondered how long he’d been standing there gazing at it. She handled the page casually, but he thought he could see her fingers trembling.

  “Exceptionally fine vellum,” she added. “We’d need a microscope to know for sure, but it looks like unborn calfskin.”

  “Unborn—?”

  “Vellum made from the skin of a fetal cow. It was highly prized.”

  Working carefully, soaking and blotting, teasing and tugging, she loosened and removed a second page from the same binding, and then a third. If she felt any of the electric anticipation Edward did, her methodical, unhurried pace betrayed none of it. By nine o’clock Margaret had finished with the Tennyson: It had disgorged six sheets of parchment in all, withered and stained but intact. They lay drying on paper towels laid out on her bed. In one or two places the ink had eaten all the way through the page—iron-gall ink could be highly corrosive when imperfectly mixed, Margaret explained. As she spread them out Edward saw that the pages were actually double-sized sheets, each one folded in half and covered with writ
ing on both sides, making a total of four pages in all, with holes running up the middle where they had once been sewn into the binding.

  Four cans of Diet Coke lay scattered around her chair. There was nothing else to sit on in the apartment, and the futon was taken, so Edward sat on the cracked linoleum kitchen floor with his back against the humming fridge and his feet braced against the opposite wall, watching her. Unable either to leave or to help in any way, he hovered uselessly. Margaret’s apartment provided few distractions. The one good-sized window over the bed looked out on the rear end of a diner, where Mexican kitchen hands emptied tubs of dishwater and listened to mariachi music. Margaret’s shoulders and arms worked as she sliced and tore and blotted the old pages. Her hair was pulled back into a stubby ponytail held together by a pink rubber band, from which a few floating strays had escaped.

  “I’m going to go get us some dinner,” he said, after a while.

  “There’s a Chinese place around the corner on Vanderbilt. Wah Garden.”

  Edward heaved himself up.

  “What do you want?”

  “Number 19, chicken with garlic sauce. And steamed dumplings. And maybe you could pick up some more Diet Coke.”

  At midnight Edward realized he’d fallen asleep sitting up with his head canted backward and his mouth wide open. The Chinese food was gone, the empty white cardboard containers lined up neatly on the counter in the kitchen area. A tall glass full of something cloudy and vaguely lime-colored stood on Margaret’s desk.

  Margaret worked with precisely the same level of energy and concentration as when she’d started six hours earlier. The stack of intact books on her left was shorter now, and the pile of gutted, dismantled books to her right was taller. He watched her work, oblivious to him, and wondered how many nights she’d ground away like this, one after the other, until nothing was left but the dawn, with nobody there to watch over her the way he was watching over her now. She was driven forward by sheer will, impelled by some inner engine the workings of which he could only guess at. It occurred to him that for Margaret, this—this sustained, obsessive, masochistic act of labor—was what passed for happiness. He was looking for a way to escape from work, but work was all Margaret had. He wondered if it was all she wanted.