The Reading Room

She had walked through the green door, in the end, on a Tuesday rather than a Sunday, because she had decided — over the weekend, in the bath, with the coin on the rim of the sink because she had begun to dislike the sight of it on the kitchen table — that if she was going to do this she would do it on a day of her own choosing, and she would arrive in the morning rather than the afternoon, when the building's patient theatre of tea and chairs would not yet be set. Saroya had not protested. Saroya had written back the same evening with a time and a sentence — Tomas will be in; he keeps the early hours — and had not, Iyla noticed, attempted any of the small social repairs a less practised person would have attempted, no delighted, of course, however suits you, only the time and the man's name, as though Iyla's decision to come on her own terms had been so plainly the correct decision that congratulating her on it would have been condescension. This was, Iyla was beginning to understand, how Saroya managed people: by refusing, with great precision, to flatter them at the precise moments they expected flattery, so that the flattery, when it eventually came, would land like weather.

Tomas met her in the hall and took her, without ceremony, through a door she had not, on her first visit, registered as a door — it had been, she now saw, simply a stretch of panelling with a brass plate so small and so unpolished that the eye, in the act of being a guest, had agreed with the room not to notice it — and they went down three steps into a corridor lit by the kind of low brown bulbs that pretended to be older than the wiring, and then through another door, and into the Reading Room.

It was not, at first, what she had expected, because she had expected something stagy — a rotunda, perhaps, a ladder on a rail, a globe — and what she got was a long low room shaped like the inside of a barge, with shelves running the length of both walls and ending, at the far end, in a narrow window of mottled glass through which the morning came in already brown. The shelves were not, she saw with an immediate and slightly unsettled pleasure, full of books. They were full of books, certainly, but they were also full of boxes — flat archival boxes the colour of porridge, with white labels typewritten in a font that had not been manufactured since about 1974 — and of objects, small objects in glass-fronted cases set into the shelving at intervals, each case lit from above by its own small lamp on its own small switch. She did not, at this distance, look at the objects. She had a strong feeling that the objects were the point of the room and that looking at them straight on, in her first ten minutes, would be a kind of rudeness.

There were three people in the Reading Room when she came in. The first she saw was a boy at the nearer table, sitting alone with a hardback cookbook open in front of him and a pear in his left hand, and he had reached, without taking his eyes from the page, a state of negotiation with the pear that Iyla recognised at once as the state of a person who had decided, half an hour ago, that he would eat the pear in a minute, and who had now been about to eat the pear for the entire intervening half hour, and who would, in another half hour, still be holding it. The pear had been bitten once. The bite was browning. He did not seem to know this, or, more accurately, he had achieved the kind of concentration in which the browning of a pear was information the world had not yet bothered to deliver to him. Tomas walked her past him without introduction, and she understood that the not-introducing was deliberate; that this room arranged its meetings the way it arranged its lighting, one small switch at a time.

"Kettle," Tomas said, when they had gone two more paces, as though naming a piece of weather they had just walked through. "He reads only cookbooks. We've stopped trying to talk him out of it." He did not turn. He did not slow. He had given her the name the way one slips a card under a door, and she had received it, and the transaction was finished.

The second person was a woman at the far table, much further down the room, and Iyla saw her only in profile and only for the seconds Tomas allowed her, because Tomas did not stop walking and did not direct her gaze. The woman was standing — not sitting — at a tall sloped desk like a lectern, with a wooden drawer pulled halfway out beside her and a stack of small cards in her left hand, and she was running the side of her thumb along the top edge of one card the way a person smooths a crease they cannot quite forgive. She did not look up. She had heard them come in; Iyla could tell from the small set of her shoulders that she had heard them come in and had decided not to turn, and the deciding had been done with such economy that it became, in the room, a fact about the room. Tomas did not name her. Iyla, with a feeling she could not yet place but recognised as the cousin of the feeling she had had when she first saw her own marginalia in a stranger's hand, did not ask. They passed. She felt the woman's not-looking on the back of her neck for three more paces and then it was gone, replaced by the smell of old paper warmed by the bulbs.

The third person was at the small table set into the alcove on the right, and this one Tomas did stop at. He was older than Kettle and younger than Tomas — somewhere, Iyla guessed, in his forties, with the kind of jaw that had been shaved that morning and not the morning before — and he was reading what looked, at first glance, like an ordinary novel, except that he was reading it with the index finger of his right hand laid flat along the line he was on, not pointing at the line but resting on it, as if the line were a wire he was keeping closed by the small pressure of one finger. He did not lift the finger when Tomas stopped. He moved his eyes up, slowly, and they were the eyes of a person who had been somewhere else a moment ago and was now arranging, with no great hurry, to be here.

"Maro," Tomas said. "This is Iyla."

"I know," Maro said, and the eyes went back to the page, and the finger had not moved, and Iyla understood, with a small pleasure she had not known she was waiting for, that the finger was what held him here. The finger was his version of the older woman repeating Mara's name. He travelled, then; or he was about to; or he had been; and the finger was the anchor he had set himself, and Tomas had brought her past at a moment when he was, in some sense she could feel without being able to see, partly elsewhere, and the courtesy of saying hello had been managed by the smallest portion of him that could be spared. She liked him, immediately, with a liking she did not feel obligated to examine, the way one likes a person who is, transparently, in the middle of their own work.

Tomas walked her the length of the room then, slowly, naming things — the periodicals, the accessions ledger, the cabinet of pressed flowers, the case of buttons, the case of keys, the case of small written objects, do not touch the glass, the oil from your hand will be on it for years — and at the far end, past the mottled window, in the shadow where the two walls did not quite meet at the angle the rest of the room had agreed on, there was a door. It was a low door, narrower than the others, painted the same brown as the panelling so that you would, walking quickly, have taken it for more wall; and set into it at eye-height was a small enamel plate, oval, white, on which a single letter had been painted in black, by hand, a long time ago. C.

She stopped. She had not meant to stop. She stopped the way the body sometimes stops before the mind has filed the reason, the way one stops on a path because the bird has stopped singing and the silence has a shape. Tomas, who had walked another two paces, came back the two paces without comment and stood beside her, not in front of the door but next to her, looking at it as she was looking at it, as though it were a view they had agreed to share.

"What's behind it?" she said.

"Don't ask," he said. He did not say it kindly and he did not say it unkindly. He said it the way one says mind the step, as a piece of information whose tone was not the point. He said it once. He did not elaborate. He did not soften it with a smile and he did not harden it with a look. He let it sit, between them, for the small breath it needed to sit, and then he turned and walked back up the room, and after a moment, because there was nothing else to do with the moment, she followed him.

Halfway back along the shelves she glanced sideways, because she could not help it, and saw that the woman at the far lectern had, in the interval, turned her head a fraction — not toward Iyla, not quite, but toward the door marked C — and was looking at it with an expression Iyla could not read at this distance but which had, even at this distance, the quality of an opinion long held. The woman did not catch Iyla looking. Or — and Iyla would think about this later, in the bath, with the coin again on the rim of the sink — she caught it and chose, with the same economy with which she had earlier chosen not to turn, to allow Iyla to believe she had not. They passed Kettle on the way out. He had, at last, taken the second bite of the pear. He did not look up.

"You'll come back Thursday," Tomas said, in the corridor, not as a question.

"I'll come back Thursday," Iyla said, and discovered, climbing the three steps back into the hall, that she had already, somewhere between the door marked C and the boy with the pear, begun keeping, in a small back room of her attention, a list — of what she would and would not ask, of whom she would and would not trust, of the cases she had not yet been allowed near, and of the one door, at the far end of a long brown room, that a kind man had told her, flatly and once, not to ask about, which was, of course, the door she now intended, by some route and on some afternoon not yet chosen, to open.