Penn, in Posture

Iyla came back on Thursday, and on Thursday she came back at a quarter past eight in the morning, because she had decided over Wednesday — in the bath again, the bath having become, against her wishes, the room in which she did her thinking — that if Tuesday's arrival had been a small act of self-respect then Thursday's would be a slightly larger one, and that arriving before the building had finished pretending to be asleep would be the most efficient way of seeing what the building did when it thought no one was watching. Saroya had not been told. Tomas had said Thursday and Tomas had not specified the hour, and Iyla had decided to read the absence of an hour as a permission rather than as an oversight, on the principle, which she was developing rapidly and without consultation, that the Society's silences were where the Society's habits lived.

The green door was unlocked. This surprised her less than it should have. She let herself in and stood in the hall for a moment, listening; the building had the particular hush of a place where someone had recently been and was not now, the hush of a kettle that had boiled twenty minutes ago. She went down the three steps. She went along the corridor. She had not been told she could and she had not been told she could not, and she had made a small private rule, in the bath, that until she was told a thing was forbidden she would treat the absence of the telling as a fact about the Society's confidence in her, and behave accordingly.

She did not go into the Reading Room. She had meant to. She had her hand on the door when she heard, on the other side of it, the small dry sound of a wooden drawer being slid out a half inch and then a half inch back, with the patience of a person who had done it some thousands of times, and she took her hand off the handle and went, on an impulse she did not interrogate, down the corridor instead — past the Reading Room door, past a coat hook with no coat on it, past a print of a bridge she had not, on Tuesday, registered as a print — and turned the corner.

The woman from the lectern was there. She was standing at a wall of card-catalogue drawers Iyla had not, on Tuesday, known existed, set into the corridor's left-hand wall the way fuse boxes were set into the walls of ordinary buildings, painted the same brown as the panelling so that the eye, again, had been invited to forgive them. One drawer was open. The woman had a single card in her left hand, held at the corner between thumb and forefinger, and she was running the pad of her right thumb along its top edge in a slow, careful stroke, end to end, again and end to end, again, with the absorbed attention of a person ironing the smallest possible shirt.

She did not look up. She had heard Iyla come round the corner — Iyla was sure of this, because the small set of her shoulders had registered it the way it had registered Tomas on Tuesday — and she was permitting Iyla to watch her, for a measured number of seconds, in the way a person who is very good at her work permits an apprentice to watch her be very good at her work; and then, when the seconds were up, she slid the card, with one motion, back into its place in the drawer.

It was, Iyla saw, going in under the letter B.

It was — Iyla saw a fraction later, because she had moved a half-step closer without deciding to — a card on which a passage of text had been transcribed, in the small upright near-black hand she now knew by sight, above a notation in a paler ink: Bulgakov, M. — Master and Margarita — p. 218 — annot. circa 2013 — class: door. The transcribed passage was three lines long. Iyla recognised the three lines before she had finished reading them, because she had written them, in the margin of a library book, on a Tuesday afternoon in February, when she was nineteen.

"You're early," the woman said, without turning, and slid the drawer closed with the heel of her hand. The drawer closed with the soft particular click of a thing made when things were made well.

"I'm Iyla," Iyla said.

"I know who you are," the woman said. "I file you." She turned, then, and Iyla saw her properly for the first time: a woman of perhaps forty, narrow-faced, with hair pinned back so cleanly it looked as though it had been pinned back by someone else, and an expression that was not unfriendly but had decided, some years ago, not to spend itself on first meetings. "Penn," she said. "I won't shake your hand. I've just had ink on it." She showed the hand briefly — there was no ink on it that Iyla could see — and put it back at her side.

"That was mine," Iyla said. It came out as a statement and not as a question, and she was glad of that, because the question would have given Penn somewhere to put a small kindness, and Iyla did not, this morning, want to be on the receiving end of a small kindness from a person who had just slid her nineteen-year-old self back into a drawer with the heel of her hand.

"Yes," Penn said. "Tomas catalogues. I file. He decides where a thing belongs and I put it there. It's a division of labour we worked out a long time ago." She looked at Iyla for the first time with what Iyla read as actual attention — a brief, appraising look, neither warm nor cold, of the kind a person gives a parcel they have been told to expect and which has, on arrival, turned out to be slightly heavier than billed. "He told me you'd come back Thursday. He didn't say at a quarter past eight."

"He didn't say not."

"No," Penn said, and a small thing happened at the corner of her mouth that might, in a less disciplined face, have been a smile. "He didn't, did he." She did not, Iyla noticed, move from in front of the drawer. She had positioned herself so that her body was, in the small economy of the corridor, between Iyla and the wall of cards, and she had done this without seeming to have done it, the way a good waiter clears a glass without seeming to have cleared it. The drawer was closed. There was, in any practical sense, nothing to be in front of. Penn was in front of it anyway.

"How many of those are mine?" Iyla said.

"In this drawer, eleven," Penn said, without hesitation, without looking at the drawer. "In the room behind you, four hundred and six. There are two more in transcription. We had a card miscatalogued under D for years — door — and I moved it last spring." She said this the way a person says they repainted the kitchen. She did not say it to impress Iyla. She did not say it to wound Iyla. She said it because Iyla had asked, and Penn was, Iyla was beginning to see, a person who answered questions she had been asked, and not questions she had not.

"Why under B now?"

"Because Tomas changed his mind about what the passage was for. He used to think it was a door. He thinks now it's a boundary. It's a small difference and an important one." She paused. She seemed to consider, for one beat, whether to elaborate, and to decide, with the same economy with which she had decided on Tuesday not to turn, that she would. "A door wants you to go through it. A boundary wants you to know which side you're on. The passage you wrote, at nineteen, was — he thinks now — about which side you were on. He may be right. I'm not sure he is. But he catalogues, and I file."

"You don't agree with him."

"I haven't said that," Penn said, and the corner-of-the-mouth thing happened again and went away. "I've said he catalogues and I file. Those are two different sentences. I would not be very good at my work if I refiled every card I privately disagreed with. The room would be — " she gestured, faintly, with the inkless hand — "less itself."

Iyla looked at the wall of drawers. There were, she counted quickly, fifty-four of them, in six columns of nine, each with a small brass frame holding a small typed label. She did not read the labels. She had a feeling, similar to the one she had had on Tuesday about the cases under their small lamps, that reading the labels straight on, in this first conversation, would be a rudeness Penn would forgive but not forget.

"You've been doing this a long time," she said.

"Nineteen years," Penn said. "I started at twenty-two. Tomas was already — Tomas. The room was smaller then. We had the south wall built out in 2009. The cards were in shoeboxes when I came." She said shoeboxes with the small, fond contempt of a person describing the bad practice of an institution she loved. "You can imagine. Or you can't. Either way, it's better now."

"And you file everyone."

"I file everyone we have," Penn said. "I file the living and the dead. I file the ones who joined and the ones who refused and the ones who have not yet, today, decided. I file you. I'll go on filing you. It isn't" — and here she paused, and Iyla had the impression of a woman selecting, from a shelf of available words, the one she trusted least to be misused — "it isn't about you, exactly. It's about the room. The room has to know what it has. If the room doesn't know what it has, then the room is just a room. And I think you'll agree" — she met Iyla's eye, briefly, and the look in her face was not unkind but it had, in it, the long settled fact of a loyalty older than the morning — "that this should not be just a room."

It was the first sentence Penn had said that sounded like a sentence she had said before. Iyla heard it land. She heard it land the way she had heard Saroya's patina land, on the second visit, in the café — with the small click of a thing that had been polished by use. Penn had a phrase for what she did, and the phrase was the room has to know what it has, and the phrase had been earned, somewhere, over nineteen years of shoeboxes and south walls and Tomases changing their minds about doors and boundaries, and the phrase was the small bright object she carried, in her mouth, to set down on the table when a younger woman asked her, in a corridor at a quarter past eight, why she did what she did.

"Right," Iyla said, because it was the only word the moment was going to accept.

"Yes," Penn said. She turned, very slightly, back toward the drawer, in the small unmistakable way a person closes a conversation by indicating which of the two of them has a next thing to do. "There's tea in the Reading Room when Kettle remembers. He doesn't always remember. Go in. He likes you. He hasn't said so. He won't. But he didn't take a second bite of the pear until Tomas had walked you past, and he hasn't done that for anyone in two years." She did not look up to see whether this had landed. She had said it and it was, in her economy, said. "Thursday is a quiet day. Use it."

Iyla went. At the corner she looked back, once, because she could not help it, and saw that Penn had opened the drawer again and taken out a different card — not, Iyla thought, one of hers; the angle of the hand on the corner was different — and was running her thumb along its top edge, end to end, again and end to end, with the same patient attention, smoothing a crease the card did not have. She did this, Iyla understood, as a person prays, or as a person tunes an instrument before a room they intend to play in for the rest of their life: not because the card required it, but because the hand required the card, and the room required the hand, and Penn had, a long time ago, in a smaller version of this corridor, made a decision about whose hand she was going to be.

Iyla filed that, too, in the small back room of her attention that was now keeping the list, and went down the corridor to find Kettle and his pear.