She knew when it had become irreversible. She remembered precisely when it had happened. It was the spring, four years ago, shortly after she’d learned of Dror’s death. She’d read of it in an article so brief it was barely an article, just two paragraphs in a newspaper she’d found on the Internet while searching for Dror’s name—something she’d still been in the habit of doing from time to time, at her computer on the small wooden desk in her bedroom.
The news report, which had been published three months earlier, referred to Dror as a “businessman” and this almost made her laugh aloud, before she read further.
Dror, the report said, had died when his car accidentally went off the road somewhere outside Moscow.
At first she’d not believed that Dror could die without her knowledge. She, who had no patience for theories of the paranormal, could not comprehend that the world could be emptied of Dror’s face, his body and hands and eyes, without her sensing it. Yet there were the words.
It hadn’t been an accident—of that she felt certain. If Dror’s car had veered to its destruction, it was because he’d been run off the road while doing something covert, something he or his superiors hoped would save lives.
His body, the report said, had been released by the Russians in exchange for something. Later, she wouldn’t be able to recall what. In the weeks to come, drifting off to sleep or waking in the middle of the night, she became confused, even, about which one of them had died. She’d be stricken in half-sleep by the image of Dror pausing somewhere amid his work or even at a meal with his vibrant family to recall Helen with a pang of sorrow—and the desire to spare him that grief rose in her like dark well water until she woke, drowning—and sat awake in her nightdress, disoriented, turning the pages of her volume of Shakespeare’s sonnets.
Nay, if you read this line, remember not
The hand that writ it, for I love you so
That I in your sweet thoughts would be forgot
If thinking on me then should make you woe.
She’d readily have sacrificed her place in Dror’s heart—erased all memory of herself—if it would have eased him. But Dror had never forgotten her. Of that she was certain.
That spring was when she’d first felt the drag on her foot. It had started with the lightness of a touch, slight but insistent—as though someone who loved her with a great and abiding gentleness had rested two fingers on the top curve of her right foot as if to say, Are you certain?
She’d had to lift the foot consciously, the light press of the fingers giving way without protest: a loving presence that did not overrule her.
Then the whole foot grew reluctant. She’d stand up out of bed to find its weight grown heavier each morning. But though it dragged, she insisted on walking forward, and always it submitted to her will.
The doctors used words like radiculopathy and idiopathic—terms that sounded like jeers until she registered their meaning: not that her symptoms were ridiculous or idiotic, but rather that the doctors couldn’t pinpoint their origin. Still, she knew that because her doctors couldn’t explain her symptoms they disbelieved her, not directly but faintly, with a patronizing politeness she felt was worse than mockery. Only a year later, after she’d grown pale and stiff and had mastered the art of masking both pain and tremors before her colleagues, had the diagnosis been pronounced. She’d received it wordlessly, to the discomfort of Dr. Hammond, who seemed unnerved by her failure to ask questions. But she’d asked nothing then. Just as she’d asked nothing of Dr. Hammond yesterday, rebutting his lecture with silence.
It was Friday now, and almost noon. She sat at her desk, Aaron’s transcription in her hands. The echo of yesterday’s argument still rang in her mind. She couldn’t reconstruct the channels through which Aaron—or perhaps she?—had arrived at the subject of Dror. All she could retrieve was the feeling of it: like something rising up inside her and spilling—unstoppable because she didn’t want to stop it.
She told herself to focus. She’d nearly finished fighting her way through a dozen student papers from her Early Modern History course; she needed to clear her desk and her mind for the documents, which she expected would consume all her remaining force. In truth, attempting to work her way through the documents quickly enough to fend off Wilton and his team was hopeless. Aaron Levy would presumably announce his resignation in an e-mail today—that was the style of his generation, to communicate via the safety of pixels on a screen. Or perhaps he’d simply fail to show up to the rare manuscripts room, leaving the obvious unspoken. She couldn’t say at the moment whether she was sorry to see him go. But it was clear his departure would be a significant blow to her work, possibly a fatal one.
Fretfully she raised the transcription to the light, the better to read the faint print.
The words that leave my hand are my life.
I’ve brought forth no other life in my days, and believe I shall not.
In the dim light of her office, she was seized by an irrational premonition. She half rose from her desk to shake it. The transcription in her hands frightened her. She eyed it charily, as though the faint words on the page might have the power to overturn not only the received wisdom of seventeenth-century scholars, but what she thought she knew about her own life.
A loud knock.
She took up her cane, attempted to steady herself. Then, obedient as a girl, opened the door.
“Good morning,” Jonathan Martin said.
“Good morning.” Her voice sounded thin.
Despite not being particularly tall, Jonathan Martin occupied Helen’s doorframe with a tall man’s authority. Beneath his thick, graying hair, his face was lined but notably healthy-looking—how was it that Martin always looked sun-tinged, as though he’d just returned from vacationing in some warmer clime? He stood before her: fashionable rimless glasses, thick gold wedding band, the line of his shirt straight where it was tucked in beneath his open jacket—no trace of the paunch one would expect in a man his age.
His smile made her flinch.
“I thought I’d let you know that Brian Wilton and his group begin in the rare manuscripts room today. I trust their access to the documents won’t interfere with yours.”
“Do you?” she said.
“Of course I do,” he replied. “Adding Wilton’s energies to the mix is all for the good of the work.”
She stood as tall as she could. “Don’t you for-the-good-of-the-work me.”
“I’m a bit surprised at your possessiveness,” Martin replied mildly. “The more people studying these documents, the better, don’t you think?”
Of course she didn’t think, and neither would Martin or any other ambitious academic in her shoes. But she held her tongue. Jonathan Martin was a master at his game. He knew that whatever her reputation—and her staunch defense of departmental requirements, her insistence on diversifying the list of acceptable qualifying languages, and a half dozen other hard-fought battles over the years had indeed earned her a fierce reputation—Helen Watt did not make scenes. She might frost an opponent with disdain, yes, but she could be relied on not to shout into the wind. Martin had her boxed, and evidently he’d come personally to deliver his message in order to enjoy it. Helen, it seemed, had rankled him over the years more than she’d known. Under other circumstances she’d have considered this a compliment.
Martin was watching her from behind those rimless lenses. “You’ll be retiring this year, won’t you?” he said. “And we all know these documents will take more than a few months to study.”
“I can still work after I retire,” she said evenly. “I can translate and publish without being on the university’s dole. All I require is ongoing library access.”
Martin smiled again, at a dimmer wattage—his setting for compassion. “It’s not practical, Helen. You’re a practical woman.”
It stung, as of course he’d intended it to sting: the use of her name, the implied intimacy with her qualities, and—after two and a half decades in whi
ch she couldn’t recall Martin referring to her as anything but a “scholar” or “colleague”—the reference to her as a woman. All intended to erode the pilings on which she stood.
She watched Martin walk down the hall and, with a dapper knock, disappear into Penelope’s office.
The rare manuscripts room was already inhabited, as she’d expected, by Wilton and his three postgraduates. They were bent over the center table together, two on each side. There was one woman, mousy with pale pink lipstick on her thin lips, and two young men—and of course Wilton himself, barely older than his students. How long had it been since her path had crossed Wilton’s? Perhaps two years—had it been that long since Helen had stopped attending faculty meetings? She noted immediately that all three of the men, including Wilton, had gorgeous hair. Wilton’s was a dark glossy brown and proceeded in ripples from the crown of his head, whorling down to brush his ears. Where did a historian get such hair? Luxuriant without being effeminate. His two male acolytes sported more modest coifs, but it was clear neither was indifferent to style. Only the girl looked wilted enough to be a true work of nature.
Until this moment she’d had nothing against Wilton, except perhaps that he was a type. As a postgraduate he’d laughed heartily and with apparent sincerity at his mentors’ jokes, concurred wittily with the majority at such meetings as postgraduates attended, and volunteered his labors more regularly than any of his cohort. Despite this, he’d been well-liked among his fellow students. Once she’d been sitting on a bench near the entrance to the department, catching her breath unseen before venturing the walk to her car, when Wilton had clasped the shoulders of two other male students not twenty yards from where she sat (so invisible was she) and, jerking his head in the direction of the portly middle-aged secretary who had just passed en route to the car park, muttered something about being able to tell a battle-axe by the number of hooks on her brassiere. “There’s not a female in the History Department,” he’d intoned, “with fewer than three hooks. Our tragedy is not to be in Romance languages. Did you see Castleman’s latest protégé at the holiday party? A silk blouse and straps made of dental floss.”
The others had chortled and Wilton had been in the midst of clapping one on the back when he’d seen Helen on her bench, looking directly at him.
He’d had the decency, she recalled, to color. But she was certain the incident didn’t stay with him long. Such men didn’t concern themselves greatly with remorse. Aaron, she thought, would fit right in. In fact, if he had any sense he’d join their group.
Steeling herself, she stepped past Wilton’s lavishly tressed crew, resolving not to crane her neck in a transparent attempt to learn which documents they were reading. Yet even with her eyes fixed forward, it was a simple thing to tally the magnitude of her defeat. Pencils scratched audibly from Wilton’s table—formerly her table. Four pencils jotting notes; four brown cushions. Wilton’s team was translating four documents at once. She could not possibly succeed on her own in ferreting out Aleph’s story before Wilton’s team did.
She didn’t bother telling herself it shouldn’t matter who was first. It mattered deeply. She wanted to ball her stiff hands and turn all their hair-gelled heads with a harsh cry: This is mine.
She’d stopped walking. Without intending to, she’d turned back, a few paces beyond the end of their table, to face them.
All three postgraduate students were looking at her blankly. Wilton glanced up, offered a vague nod, and had almost returned to his work when he recognized her and froze. After a delay of a millisecond, he offered a pained smile.
He lifted a hand, then—what was he doing?—and offered a casual salute, no doubt meant to appear jovially competitive. Hail, fellow, well met, and may the best scholar win. It was a sporting gesture: nothing personal, of course, but naturally he wouldn’t wish to hear her theories about the documents until he’d established his own . . . after which, it need not be said, he’d be able to claim full credit for them, for there would have been no collaboration.
She let his gesture bounce off the stiff planes of her own face, and fall.
He smiled again, more briefly this time, and with an uncertain tug at one cuff of his blazer returned his eyes to his work.
Helen crossed to the librarian’s desk, where she took a pencil stub and paper slip, wrote the number of the document she wished to view, and passed the slip over the desk to Patricia Starling-Haight.
Patricia glanced at the number. “That’s in use,” she said.
Helen felt her lips part drily with surprise. A few hours in the library, and already Wilton had arrived at the document it had taken two weeks for her and Aaron to reach. She would not have thought her obsolescence would be so swift.
She waited to speak until she was sure she’d mastered her voice. “I’ll take the next document in the catalogue, then.”
Patricia didn’t move. “Why don’t you ask him if you can see the one you want?”
Helen raised her chin. What was the point of all her strict upbringing if she couldn’t at least muster imperious dignity where the situation called for it? “He,” she said, “is not my ally in this matter.”
Patricia’s lips tightened into a small ring of mirth. She lowered her spectacles and stared at Helen. Helen could not recall the last time someone had laughed in her face.
“I was under the impression that he was your sole ally. Frankly it was good to see you had one.”
From across the desk, Helen looked into Patricia’s face. She had been looking into Patricia’s round, staunch face from across this desk, she realized, for two decades. Only now did it occur to her, with an absurd shock, that for all that time Patricia had been looking back.
“Professor Martin,” said Helen in lower tones, “has made his decisions regarding access to the documents. I am laboring alone.”
“A pity,” Patricia said. But there was no pity on Patricia’s face—and Helen recognized, as though looking in a mirror, another woman who didn’t waste useless sentiment on herself or others. In place of pity, though, something else animated Patricia’s expression: honest interest. Even the possibility, however faint, of a tough camaraderie. It occurred to Helen for the first time that Patricia was close to her own age, and that Patricia’s orderly desk held no photographs of children or grandchildren.
“I’ve always thought you were one of the only non-egoists in this place,” Patricia said, her blue eyes steady. “Perhaps the sole faculty member who cares more for the past than for his own selfish present.”
Helen found her voice. “Well, that’s—”
But Patricia wasn’t finished. “I tolerated his ill breeding in part because I believed him accountable to you.” On her pursed lips, the merest hint of a wicked smile. “Shall I confiscate his smuggled pencils now?” she said. “Or shall we start with the mobile phone in his bag? Or the utility knife our American Boy Scout insists on carrying on his person, or perhaps the pens he’s hiding in his pockets?”
Helen turned. At a small table tucked between two projecting bookcases near the wall sat Aaron, his familiar lean form bent over a thickly inked document on a brown velvet cushion. His wooly dark head was bowed, and he was biting at the end of a pencil. Even from behind, his anxiousness was clear.
She was stunned by the relief she felt at his presence.
He raised his head, and for the first time, his face was free of ego, of hostility, of anything other than quiet, humbled uncertainty. They looked at each other. After a moment he tilted his head. It was his apology.
A laugh escaped her, a bark of reprieve.
His old cocky grin lit his face. He turned back to the document without a word.
Helen turned back to Patricia, conscious of the warmth on her own cheeks. “It seems,” she said, “that I misunderstood to whom you were referring.”
“It seems,” Patricia said, with an admirably impassive expression, “that you did.”
Leaving Patricia at her desk, Helen went to the table where A
aron sat. She read over his shoulder. The Portuguese letter was right side up on the cushion, the Hebrew inverted.
“What do you have?” she said, lowering herself into the chair beside him.
“I’m rechecking my translation now,” he said in low tones. “Making some minor changes. But you need to see something else.” Beside him was a second cushion with another document; he slid it toward her. “I got Library Patricia’s unprecedented permission to have two documents out at once, don’t ask me how.” He raised a finger to his lips as though to swear Helen to silence. “I think she has a crush on me.”
“I very much doubt that,” said Helen.
How had they gone from ashen-faced anger to this strange new comfort? She wasn’t sure what had happened, or even whether it was a good thing. But she knew she did not, at this moment, want to be sitting alone at this table.
“I asked to hold on to the cross-written letter,” Aaron said, “because I didn’t want to risk returning it and having them get to it before you could see it.”
“You mean Wilton’s group?” Helen said, intending to sound unconcerned.
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