The Department of Rare Books and Special Collections: fourteen men and Liesl Weiss in a shiny new building attached to the humanities and social sciences library tasked with developing a collection that would bring the British Library to a curtsy. Liesl was on the sidewalk out front, terrified to go in.
“It was a mistake,” she said.
She’d been changing her mind for the twenty-six blocks they’d been walking—twice while waiting at a crosswalk, once while John had stopped to tie his shoe, and every time they’d passed a baby carriage.
A tweed jacket with elbow patches got out of a taxi in front of where they were standing. The wearer flicked a cigarette past the curb and took the library steps two at a time.
“That’s him,” Liesl said.
“He’s very tall,” John said.
They’d done the mental math the whole way there, adding to one column and subtracting from another while they passed all those baby carriages: a full-time salary, health insurance, leadership opportunities, the challenge of doing something brand new, her lack of knowledge of rare books, being the only woman, the challenge of doing something brand new. And then finally, as Christopher Wolfe dashed past them up the stairs, an argument with potential.
“It’s not forever.” John held her arm and took a step toward the stairs. “Just until the baby.”
“Don’t say that too loud,” Liesl said.
“No one’s listening. And it’s not as though you’re knocked up now. But you have an out. If it’s not where you think you should be.”
“That’s it, is it? You want me barefoot and pregnant. I should have known.”
“My secret plan. There’s a check for the blue canvases coming. We could be okay.”
“The two of us, maybe. But if we had to buy diapers?”
“And then there were three, and then there were three, how sweet it would be…” John stopped singing and read her face. “Do you want it to be forever?”
“Forever? I don’t know. But it’s a good opportunity, working for a man like that. Getting in at the ground floor. Might get to lead the whole thing one day instead of being a glorified secretary somewhere else.”
John smiled. “My wife, the library director.”
“It’s silly,” she said, straightening her shoulders, experiencing a small rush of excitement. She pictured herself haggling with book dealers, filling the shelves with volumes on horticulture, imagined the treasures she might bring to the university. John continued to hold her as they stared up at the building, but Liesl had forgotten all about him, lost in her imaginings. The picture of a rare books collection built of something more than just old bibles. John studied his wife’s determined face so he could sketch it later, and when he was sure he’d memorized it, leaned over to kiss her smooth cheek.
“I’m ready. I’m going in,” she said as she abruptly let go of his arm, losing her slouch and taking the stairs two at a time, waving at John but not looking back at him, not even once, before she pushed her way through the heavy door for her first day at work at the new rare books library.
15
The first time Liesl saw the Peshawar laid out on the slab, she realized that she knew little, so very little, about the lives of her books. Just that morning a student had been asking her a question like she was some sort of expert—she bloviated on the printing device of Immanuel Benveniste—but the feeling that she was an impostor crept over her shoulders and wrapped itself around her neck.
Liesl followed Rhonda to her workstation: a laptop and a can of Diet Coke on a stainless-steel table.
That morning Liesl had walked through the little Jewish cemetery hidden behind a courtyard in her neighborhood. She’d paid respect at the end of the lives of many Jewish friends, laid a stone on top of a grave to weigh the spirit down and keep it longer in this world as custom dictated. No one had been buried there in at least a hundred years, and from the street, passersby could see only a tall stone wall topped with threatening wire and a permanently locked blue door. There were few loved ones left to leave stones on these graves. If you knew how to wrap your way through the courtyard, there was an entrance into the garden of headstones.
Vivek had decided that there would be no service for Miriam, religious or otherwise. It was what Miriam would have wanted, he said, and Liesl agreed, but for her own sake, not for Miriam’s, she wished that she had been given a venue to mourn, a grave on which to rest her hand. She had left a small rock on one of the headstones here. She hoped it would be clear to the spirits, whatever or wherever they were, that it was Miriam’s soul that Liesl wanted to keep in this world for just a bit longer.
“We’re taking good care of your book,” Rhonda said, bringing Liesl to the table with the manuscript.
“I don’t doubt it,” Liesl said.
“Don’t lie. You doubt it a little.”
There would have to be some disassembly before the testing could be done. The bindings were from the twentieth century, and the manuscript leaves inside the bindings had begun to disintegrate. The mica covers that had been used as sleeves for each manuscript page had caused the destruction of something that had survived in the dirt for over a thousand years, but the same mica was now the only thing holding each leaf together. If they tried to remove the pages from the binding, they would disintegrate into dust. Someone—a graduate student? An artist?—had been assigned the task of taking the book apart. The threads had been delicately removed with tweezers and a steady hand, the glue had been melted with a solvent, and the leaves lay spread out in the order that they had been bound, one next to the other, so that this area of the lab looked like it hosted an art exhibition and the pages of figures and equations were works on display. The order of the pages had been determined by the scholar who wrote the seminal work on the Peshawar, who had made those famous photographs. By keeping the pages in order, the lab was preserving the work of a twentieth-century scholar, not an eighth-century one, but they did it all the same, showing respect for every hand that had ever touched the book.
“We’ll be sampling from three separate pages,” Rhonda said. “But only slivers.”
How would they decide on the sacrifices? Liesl looked at the laid-out leaves and thought about how she might determine which of them should have a piece removed.
Have you completed your lab notes? read a sign posted on the wall above the table.
“We’ll be losing three pages then?” Liesl asked.
“No, of course not,” Rhonda said.
The lab door swung open, and a young woman walked in and nodded hello. She pulled a computer from her backpack and began to work at one of the bare tables.
“But you’re removing samples from them,” Liesl asked.
“Slivers, small slivers,” Rhonda said.
“So we won’t be able to tell there’s anything missing?”
Having overheard, the young woman looked up from her computer. She walked over and introduced herself, and Liesl felt embarrassed for having interrupted her work. She was the manager in charge of the lab. She talked about the nature of the sampling, and Liesl didn’t listen as she was busy trying to calculate the girl’s age.
There was something about choosing samples from three pages that had slightly different coloration. The girl’s straight black hair was pulled back into a ponytail, and though the frames of her glasses obscured her eyes a little, it didn’t look like they hid any lines or sagging. She had worn a backpack. Not a briefcase. Not a purse. A backpack. A full professor. It was maroon with oversized gold zippers. Once the pages had been sorted by color, the girl explained, they had looked for pages where they thought they could remove a good-sized sliver while doing the least harm to the rest of the material.