A Letter to a Stranger

She went to the library on Monday.

She had not been back to the central branch since August — she had been, for reasons that were now obvious and had then merely felt like superstition, avoiding it — and the building greeted her with the small institutional indifference she had always liked about it. The woman at the returns desk did not look up. The radiator in the second-floor reading room still made the noise it made, which was the noise of a building patiently disagreeing with its own heating system. The fiction stacks smelled of paper and floor polish and, faintly, of the lunch somebody had eaten at the desk in 1994 and never entirely apologised for. Iyla walked the M shelf with her hands behind her back, a habit she had picked up from Mr. Behr and which kept her, he had once told her, from grabbing.

She found it on the lower shelf, third from the left, with its broken-in spine and the small white sticker she had put a fingernail under, twelve years ago, and then thought better of removing. Middlemarch. The library's copy. The one she had carried around the summer she was nineteen and given back, eventually, with most of a conversation written into it in pencil because she had not, at nineteen, been able to afford her own and had decided that the library's was, in a sense, communal property and that she was merely contributing.

She took it to a carrel by the window. She did not open it at once. She put her hand flat on the cover, the way a person puts a hand on a door before knocking, and she noticed that she was doing it, and she let herself do it anyway.

Then she opened the book.

Her old hand was still there. She had forgotten how much of it there was. She had forgotten, also, how nineteen she had been — the underlinings were emphatic in the way of a person who has not yet learned that emphasis is a budget, and the notes in the margin were full of the small bright certainties of a reader who had not yet been wrong about anything she could remember. She winced once, on page forty, at a note that read Casaubon = every man my mother ever liked, which had been, at nineteen, both funnier and truer than she had had any right to know.

She turned the page.

On page forty-one, underneath her own he wants a mirror, not a wife — in the slightly forward-leaning hand she had used between seventeen and twenty-two and then quietly outgrown — somebody had written, in pencil, in a small upright hand she did not recognise: and she wants a window. they marry the wrong furniture.

Iyla sat very still.

She read it again. She read her own line again. She read the answer again. She put her finger on the answer, lightly, the way a person touches a wet painting to check, and the pencil did not smudge — it had been there long enough to settle into the paper, which meant somebody had written it some time ago, and the book had since been borrowed and returned and shelved and stood here through at least one winter with this sentence inside it, waiting.

It was not Tomas's hand. Tomas's hand she now knew the way a person knows a relative's handwriting on a Christmas card — upright, near-black, the as closed, the t-crosses long and a little impatient. This hand was upright too, but the as were open at the top, and the t-crosses were short, and the writer had used a softer pencil than Tomas ever used, a 2B maybe, which had left the letters slightly furred at the edges. It was not Saroya's hand either. Saroya wrote, when she wrote at all, in the kind of careful italic that suggested someone had once been taught to and had never quite forgiven the teacher. This was a hand that had taught itself.

Iyla turned the page.

There was another one. On page forty-three, under her old Dorothea thinks she is choosing and is being chosen, the same pencil had written: aren't we all. the trick is to notice which. On page forty-seven, under her Lydgate is going to be ruined by his own taste in fabric — which she had been, at nineteen, very pleased with and which she now thought was, irritatingly, correct — the hand had written only yes. Just that. The small economical yes of a reader who had been waiting for the sentence and was glad of it.

She turned more pages. The answers thinned out after the first hundred, which was, she thought, the honest signature of a real reader — somebody who had started in earnest and then got tired in the middle, the way everybody got tired in the middle of Middlemarch, and had picked up again toward the end, where there were three more notes, the last of them on the second-to-last page, in the same soft pencil: thank you for the company. — a stranger, august.

Iyla put her hand over her mouth, which was a thing she did not usually do, and discovered that she was smiling behind it.

She sat with the book open in front of her and let herself notice, with the small accuracy she had been practising, what the smile was made of. It was relief, first, because the system worked — the redirect she had written into the margins on Sunday had not, as she had half-feared, sealed her off from everybody, only from the people who had been coming through the door without knocking. It was vindication, second, because she had built the thing for a reason and the thing had, in its first week, done the reason. And it was, third and most of it, a feeling she had not had a name for at nineteen and now did: the feeling of having said something into a room and discovered, years later, that somebody had been in the room and had answered.

She thought about who it might be. She thought about it for perhaps thirty seconds, with the small clean attention she gave to problems she actually wanted to solve, and then she set the question aside, because the question was not the point. The point was that there was somebody. The point was that the somebody was not Tomas and was not Saroya and was not anyone the Society had, as far as she could tell, sent — the Society did not write thank you for the company and did not sign itself a stranger, and the Society did not, in Iyla's by now reasonable experience, use soft pencils. The point was that the door she had built worked both ways, and that somebody had, four months ago, in August, walked up to it from the other side and knocked.

She took out her own pencil. She turned to the last page, where the stranger had signed off, and found a clean half-inch of margin under — a stranger, august. She thought for a moment about what to write. She did not want to be clever. She had been, at nineteen, clever in the margins, and the cleverness had been, she now saw, partly a way of not being seen.

She wrote, in the small hand she used now: the company was mutual. I am only just finding your half. — a reader, october.

She looked at it. She did not underline anything. She closed the book.

She took it to the desk. The woman at the desk did not look up, and stamped the card, and slid the book back across the counter. Iyla put it in her bag and walked out into the grey bright Monday afternoon with the book against her hip and the small ordinary fact, settling into her as she walked, that the correspondence had started and was going to go on, and that she did not, for once in her life, need to know yet who was on the other end of it to be glad of the letter.