Today, though, it was apparent that Helen was the enemy.
At an echoing noise, Helen started. A tall spectacled student entering the rare manuscripts room had let the door bang behind him. He stood frozen a few paces past the door, half-turned, his hand extended as though to grab back the sound: an animal caught in the headlights of Patricia Starling-Haight’s glare. With a bemused shake of her head, Helen returned to the book on the cushion before her. The date of the edition was 1658; the original Hebrew had been translated into Portuguese by one Simion de Herrera. Contented are they who dwell in Thy house . . . Contented are they who follow the Lord . . . The cover was stiff, concave, bound in dark red leather. Gilt edged the pages. Other than brown shadows where the front and back pages had lain in contact with the leather covers, the paper was healthy. Ink damage was moderate, each page bearing only a faint brown burn-through of the text on its opposite side: a ghostly echo of the verse from the page just turned, as though the words had not been left behind but rang softly through all else that might be said.
Once more, she forced her eyes to focus on the lines before her. It was not that the text was difficult. The poems were mainly alphabetic acrostics, many familiar to her, though she hadn’t read these particular translations. Yet Helen couldn’t shed the sense of something awry. She found it difficult to articulate the problem precisely. The logistical arrangements for her work were as smooth as could be hoped: thus far, she had every reason to believe she and Aaron would have exclusive access to the documents for the rest of the term. But there was something about reading these documents singly, catalogued by number rather than by the logic of their arrangement on the shelves under the staircase, that felt wrong. To Helen, the arrangement of the documents in the stairwell had seemed deliberate, as though the unknown hand that had placed them there had intended the order as a message in itself. Now that message had been eradicated. Here in the rare manuscripts room she felt as though she were peering through a narrow aperture at a picture whose larger contours she couldn’t see. It reminded her of the way people Aaron’s age read the news, framed on a computer screen with only a few lines visible—a pressured, stymied vision of things, instead of the daily grasp of the broad sheaf of newsprint that was an adult’s true contact with the world.
“Fifteen minutes to closing,” Patricia Starling-Haight said, startlingly close to Helen.
“Page, please,” Helen countered.
Looking somewhat mollified, Patricia positioned herself beside the book, lifted the string weights, turned a page, and resettled the weights. This was Helen’s self-imposed rule: she’d avoided touching rare documents for years, ever since her tremor reached a level where she feared it could do damage. With a nod of approval, Patricia Starling-Haight retreated.
Aaron was approaching the table. He’d left the room without a word to Helen forty minutes prior. Now he returned as though unexplained forty-minute breaks were one of those inalienable American rights. He pulled up his chair a few vacant seats away from Helen and slid his own cushion into place, a handwritten letter centered on it.
“Fifteen minutes to closing,” Helen said to him.
From his pocket he withdrew a pen, held it just under the table, and clicked it with a mischievous grin that made it clear he was impressing himself. This was Aaron’s way in the rare manuscripts room. He sucked hard candies when the Patricias’ backs were turned. Earlier that afternoon, just after the librarian walked past, he’d actually lifted a document himself and moved it from its cushion to one that evidently pleased him better.
Let the Patricias make a meal of him. Helen returned her gaze to the left-hand page of poetry and made another note in her spiral-bound notebook. Her scrawl was ranging wide this afternoon—she could write only on every second line and was consuming pages like a schoolgirl. She gripped the pencil stub more tightly. It was maddening to her, how sluggishly she was thinking today. It wasn’t the levodopa; she’d stopped taking that weeks ago against Dr. Hammond’s advice, and had no regrets—the medicine had left long, dark spaces between her thoughts, each thought an island in a sea of nothing, the islands few and far between. The feeling had not been unpleasant, and that was the problem. Waking in the middle of the night to an inky peace that stretched on and on with no break, she’d become frantic. She could not recognize her own mind. The quiet in her head was the silence of defeat. She’d spent the night shivering in her thin nightdress, terrified. Unable to lie down lest she lose what remained of herself as she slept, her hands climbing at her throat, her temples. She’d told a skeptical Hammond she’d rather keep her tremor.
Yet now her mind felt almost equally blank. What was wrong with her today? She’d have stood and paced the room to rouse herself, would the Patricias not have descended upon her for conduct threatening to paper fibers. The cruelest of ironies came to her: now that the papers had found her, it would be too late—because she lacked the stamina. Because in recent weeks she’d stopped fighting the fatigue—she elected to go without some small trifle she’d left in the next room, rather than stand up with her cane to fetch it; to let the toner cartridge on her printer gradually drain, rather than drive herself to the store to purchase a replacement. She was too infirm—she tested the thought for the first time—to put together the pieces of this puzzle. To do the documents justice.
Aaron’s mobile phone rang, loud.
“Christ,” muttered Helen. Both Patricias converged from opposite sides of the room in a silent ballet: rare-manuscript Valkyries, simultaneously pointing to the sign on the wall that forbade mobile phones.
Aaron eyed his phone’s display, then switched it off and pocketed it with a sheepish shrug to the Patricias, as though he’d forgotten he had it on him.
The Patricias glared and withdrew.
Helen rose carefully from her chair and walked over to Aaron, who still looked amused. She peered at the manuscript in front of him: a list of books pertaining to Passover observance. “That wasn’t written by Aleph,” she said.
Aaron nodded. “Probably it’s written by her replacement. I expect she stopped writing.”
“No,” Helen said, more firmly than she intended. “Aleph might have lost her scribing position, but she wouldn’t have stopped writing.”
Aaron looked up. It was clear he was going to take the contradiction personally. “How do you know?”
“You saw the Spinoza reference, didn’t you?” She struggled for the words to articulate her meaning: if a woman had risked as much as was necessary to write three words by a banned philosopher on a rabbi’s letter in 1658, she wouldn’t stop there. “She simply isn’t going to stop writing.”
Aaron looked unconvinced. Helen knew her own reasoning was absurd—even self-interested. A thousand things might have stopped Aleph from writing, and it was the height of folly for Helen to impose her own wishes on a female scribe.