She did so, fumbling, keeping her eyes fixed on Patricia. It was impossible to speak her gratitude as Patricia pocketed the keys. But Patricia Starling-Haight only glanced at her watch, and Helen saw that the librarian was going to do her the dignity of not allowing Helen’s predicament to make a ripple in her impatience.
The doors opened into a space as brightly lit as heaven—so bright Helen nearly fell back. But Patricia ushered her forward. The conservation lab was spacious and clean—the sort of stark, white-on-white workroom where technicians might assemble a spacecraft. Patricia Starling-Haight steered Helen toward a table in the far corner where Patricia Smith perched on a stool, tweezers in hand—her spare frame bent over a tray beneath the glare of a goose-necked lamp, her red-brown hair tied back as severely as ever. The tray, Helen saw, contained small fragments of paper. Beside it on the table, arrayed like a surgeon’s tools, were labeled dropper-bottles and a variety of needles and fine threads; on a nearby table was a glass chamber that reminded Helen of old fairy-tale-book pictures of Snow White’s coffin: a well-lit transparent bubble.
From Helen’s elbow, Patricia Starling-Haight said, “Jonathan Martin is expecting Professor Watt at two o’clock for an exit interview.”
Patricia Smith, confused, glanced up at the clock; then at Helen.
Patricia Starling-Haight continued, slowing her words for emphasis. “I have always believed that one deals with such men only, and always, with one’s dignity intact.”
The two Patricias looked at each other. Then Patricia Smith nudged restlessly at the goose-necked lamp and, with barely a glance at Helen, gestured her toward a stool. “Professor Watt,” she said. “Make yourself comfortable.” To Patricia Starling-Haight she said only, “I’ll mind the rare manuscripts room for you.”
Patricia Starling-Haight called the lift and was gone.
Patricia Smith turned back to her table. She tugged close a soup-bowl-sized magnifying glass mounted on its own goose-necked stand. Peering through it, she tweezed nearly invisible fibers from a fragment of paper with precise flicks of her latex-gloved hands.
Minutes passed. The nut bar had restored Helen enough that she was increasingly conscious of the cold press of her damp stockings. As she sat watching Patricia work, her relief silted away, replaced by the beginnings of shame.
Without warning, Patricia Smith pushed back from her table. “Water?” she said, her blue eyes naked and blinking.
Helen nodded.
Patricia disappeared into a narrow hall, then returned with a glass. As Helen gulped the water, Patricia Smith resumed her work—a show of unconcern that Helen knew was meant to offer privacy as she struggled fruitlessly to quell the waving of the glass. By the time Helen had finished drinking, the front of her blouse was soaked.
Patricia Smith, standing now, poured a clear chemical from a large white bottle into a second tray, then, with tweezers, dropped several of the fragments in. A taut, disciplined woman whose labor was the stuff of sorcery: to undo the wreckage of neglect and time.
After a moment Patricia rose, shed her gloves, and disappeared into the lift.
For a long time, Helen sat in the silent laboratory. All around her, on shelves and tables, on metal trays and in glass chambers, lay a silent company of paper: centuries old, leaf after leaf, torn or faded or brittle. Pages inked by long-dead hands. Pages damaged by time and worse. But they—the pages—would live again.
And Helen would die.
These fragments I have shored against my ruins.
The wet front of her blouse clung to her chest.
She’d spent the last of her energies trying to redeem Ester Velasquez’s fate—believing fervently in some hidden truth that would upend the story of another woman’s life. But all the while, it seemed, she’d failed to look for the same in her own.
Memory, spiraling down and down until bedrock. She sat among shards. Once she’d felt the terror of love in her body. Once she’d loved Dror amid his losses, and fled him. She’d spent the decades barricading herself from life, setting the conditions for love so high no one else could ever meet them. Few, in fact, had made any effort. It was a simple thing, in the end, to hide in plain sight. The world did not prevent you from becoming what you were determined to become.
For far too long, she’d failed to understand this.
She’d loved only one man. Year after year, studying the news in her quiet flat, she’d reached for him in the spaces between every article about Israel, felt for his presence in the most mundane details. And, sipping tea as she turned the pages of newsprint, she’d understood she’d been saved from it all: from the murderous traps Dror had warned against, from the bruising bewilderment she’d have felt with such a man, from his protectiveness—so fierce it terrified her. And she’d understood too that she was damned.
All too willingly had she let herself be fooled by Dror’s severity. She’d told herself: my world and his are opposite and cannot coexist. But she was older now—and, looking back at that young man, she saw that all his warnings about the harshness of his history had been nothing but his fear that she’d step blithely into his world, then later feel its confines and flee. Of course he’d needed Helen to be certain: he’d loved her. And he’d understood, better than she, what love required.
Over the decades, she’d imagined him unchanged. Perhaps graying, perhaps sun-weathered, even stooped—but with his fist still raised, his anger intact, his heart still brimming with his dead. She saw now that she’d held to this image for her own comfort. She’d placed the portrait of Masada on her mantle to remind her of a man who hadn’t existed—a rigid man she could justify having left.
To imagine that he might have softened was unbearable. But she’d been wrong. There were men who put ideology above gentleness. Dror—who had followed her from his quarters, who had called her name despite the stares—had never been one of them.
The thought of herself as a mother in Israel—carrying bright plastic baskets at the market, calling for a child amid holiday bonfires in a smoky valley—was a torture she now forced herself to. Sounds and smells and colors assaulted her senses: the hush of palm fronds in a breeze. The brash laughter of university colleagues she might have taught alongside in Jerusalem or Tel Aviv. Cucumbers and tomatoes in the bins of the market vendors, guava and hyssop and cumin, and the sharp whistles of parents as distant singing rippled and bonfires burned like fuses across the darkened valley. And the sound of the bus drivers’ radios and the report of the bomb squad exploding something in the distance, and the sound of telephones ringing and ringing as women checked on husbands and daughters and sons. And the sound of her own voice, her own accented Hebrew, laboring to protect all that she could never fully protect—arguing, chuckling, weeping, soothing. Living.
And Dror’s eyes, dark and bright, were even now fastened on her. Asking her to stay even as she slipped from him. Raising panic in her chest.
How fearsome a thing was love. She’d wasted her life fleeing it.
The fluorescent light vibrated quietly, flickering against Helen’s eyelids like a summons. She opened her eyes and slowly, carefully, stood. There, a few paces from where she’d been sitting, encased in its humidity chamber, was a document. Even as she took her first step toward it, she knew what it was.
The lift dinged and opened, and Patricia Smith emerged. “Oh,” she said, seeing Helen at the glass case—and it was the first time Helen had heard pleasure in her voice. “The ivy letter. I managed to remove the seal without so much as a hairline crack.” She gestured proudly toward a separate teacup-sized case on a side table, where a small circle of intricately patterned brown wax lay on a square of white cloth. “Would you like to see? The integrity of the wax is quite remarkable.”
Helen met her eyes and didn’t answer. Then she completed her final swaying steps toward the large case where the rose letter lay.