“And the story,” Rhonda said, “isn’t only the story of the Peshawar itself.”
The room full of suits and hair spray leaned further forward as she told them about the heroic efforts of a 1927 researcher, a mathematician who had studied the manuscript, decided upon the order of the seventy leaves, decided to photograph the book and make the photographs available for study.
“It was in 1927 that George Kaye, not a young man but still a protégé of the renowned Indologist Dr. R. Hoernlé, took over the manuscript and the work of his mentor in the wake of Hoernlé’s death. Kaye didn’t grieve. Kaye worked. He didn’t know it, but he was approaching the end of his own life, and would die only two years after making his landmark study, his important photographs, available to the world.”
Her speech took a mournful turn when she told them what had happened to the book after that. That the birch pages had been sealed in mica and bound into a handsome album. That the mica, the very thing that was meant to preserve the pages, was the thing that was destroying them. The pages were deteriorating. The pages could not be removed from the mica without crumbling. The pages were darkening and, one day very soon, would be illegible. Rhonda likened it to human history that had been written with a stick in the sand, and now, over a thousand years after it was written, someone was pouring buckets of water over it. As the suits looked stricken, Rhonda readopted her hopeful tone. The researcher, the hero of her story, reappeared. Through his work, the contents of the manuscript were forever preserved. There were facsimiles on the market that had been made to look like the real thing, but more importantly, there were photographs of the pages that were available to all researchers. The contents of the Peshawar, the secrets of mathematical history, would be preserved, even if the book was not.
Rhonda rounded the curve into the vital part of the donor event: flattery.
“Tonight, if you feel the same sense of awe I do, have the same appetite for discovery as I do, the same gratitude to those who came before us as I do—if you are prepared to do what you must, then I have no doubt that this library, this university, will continue to be a leader in the preservation and discovery of our shared history. It is true that we in this room will be among the last to share a space with the Peshawar, this delicate object. We will be among the last to see it in person. But we will keep this library’s promise, and as the light goes out on this artifact, on this piece of history that we have worked together to preserve, the sun will rise on the new histories that we will unearth together.”
They liked that. Liesl saw them sit up straighter, saw them make eye contact with one another and give slight nods. Of course they should have access to this disintegrating object that was off-limits to the rest of the world. Given enough champagne, they might toss the fragments of birch bark up into the air and dance in the shards of human history like they were confetti. Rhonda continued.
She told the group that because the contents of the book were well preserved, but not the book itself, that the study of the book and not the contents was the next matter of great importance.
Liesl looked Rhonda in the eyes, and Rhonda gave her a little smile. Liesl should have been expecting the turn, but she’d gotten lost, as captivated as the rest of them by Rhonda’s storytelling even as she was able to see exactly the ways in which Rhonda was working on the crowd. As it turned out, Rhonda had been expecting payment for her time that evening. She finished her story by revealing the book’s greatest mystery: when it had actually been written. If the university was to claim evidence of the first use of zero in mathematics, should they not be able to say when a hand had written that character? There were nods throughout the room. Of course they should. Rhonda leaned all the way over the podium and asked the group if they should go on this journey of discovery together. If they wanted to tell the world for certain about the importance of the Peshawar by telling the world for certain when it was written. She had hypnotized them. There was no answer they could have given but yes.
The suits were generous with their applause. She had won them over. At the cocktail reception after the talk, they were fruit flies on a particularly juicy slice of pineapple. They wanted to know all about her research. They wanted to know all about her background. Liesl wanted to thank her but found Rhonda cornered by Percy, who had now decided that she warranted his attention, and two other suits who both had campus buildings named after them and were taking Rhonda’s temperature as someone who might add a different flavor of prestige to their portfolios.
“Baltimore,” Rhonda said as Liesl joined the group.
“I’ve been there,” said Percy Pickens. “Rough town.”
Rhonda smiled. She had met many Percies.
“Some parts.”
“Your parts?”
Liesl frowned at Percy, he oblivious and flagging a server for a top-up of wine.
“My parents worked in government.”
“What sort of work?”
“State Department.”
Liesl found herself inching toward Rhonda. The group, the suits, the weight of their questions, all designed to make Rhonda a bit smaller, and Liesl imagined that by standing next to her, if they were really shoulder to shoulder, she could make Rhonda bigger than these men.
“They pushed you into maths?” Percy said. “Sensible choice.”
Nodding from the suits.
“Not at all. I didn’t fancy the subject much when I was in grade school.”
“Tell me, Rhonda, what did you fancy?”
Rhonda took a glass of wine from the server who had come to wait on Percy. Smiled. Said thank you. And then returned to Percy’s questioning in her own time.
“I was sure my mother was a spy, so I studied languages so I could be a spy too.”
“Language?”
“Non-Roman alphabets,” she said. “Eventually a teacher explained to me that my talent for those translated to figures.”
He asked her to name the languages. Nodded when she said Greek. Frowned when she said Arabic. Changed the subject when she said Hindi.
“And then I became a librarian.”
“A librarian? But you’re at the university in the sciences.”
“But I was a librarian first.”
“All right,” he said, nodding at the suits. “I can understand your popularity a bit more now that I know your story.”
“Can you?” she asked, pausing for a long sip of cool wine. “How’s that?”
“The history of math… It’s all a bit fussy.”
“The field of astrophysics might disagree,” Rhonda said sweetly.
“Less useful than your Latin and your Greek.”
“So you say.” Rhonda gave Liesl, who was now right next to her, a playful nudge with her shoulder.
“So I say,” he said. “It’s for industry. It doesn’t need public support in the same way.”
Rhonda and Percy had an audience for their conversation. Rhonda turned to them, an orator facing her audience.
“I can only presume Mr. Pickens did poorly in math at school and has held a grudge against it ever since,” Rhonda said. Liesl dropped her head and bit her tongue to keep from laughing. How silly she had been to think Rhonda needed her help. Rhonda who was already so much bigger than these men.
“Latin and Greek and the bible. They underpin all of arts and humanities. They shape our understanding of ourselves,” said Percy.
“Well,” she said. “Mathematics underpins all of the sciences and technology that runs our lives.”