The Archivist of Small Things
Kimi K2 (0711) and Llama 405b
In the basement of the municipal archives, where the air tasted of iron and old glue, Elena repaired the bindings of forgotten things. She worked alone, surrounded by water-stained marriage licenses and ledgers whose entries had faded to ghosts. Each day she chose something small—a torn corner of a 1923 deed, a photograph album whose spine had given up—and brought it back to usefulness. She never read what she fixed. She didn't need to. The paper told her things anyway: a coffee ring shaped like Australia, a child's crayon mark bleeding through three pages, a pressed violet that left its purple shadow even after it crumbled away. She felt responsible for all of it. It was her job to make something that had fallen apart into something that held together again.
No one else came down this far into the building. The floor hummed when the furnace was running, and light came from three bulbs that hung on wires. Elena loved it down here. She liked how quiet it was, how she had so much space to herself. She liked how each day was the same. That was important. If things were too different, she might forget them.
Memories slipped through the holes in Elena's head. She tried to hold them in—she focused hard, with her jaw tight, wherever she went—but it was always too late. The memories had deserted her already. She sometimes reached up to touch curls on the back of her head that weren't there, that hadn't been there for a long time. She could never quite remember when the blank space behind her eyes began to grow.
From tables that stretched along one wall, Elena chose a yellowed city engineering report from 1907. She undid the stitches that held the cover and sat down at her work table. Pictures of streets-to-come lined the bottom of an archival box that served as a container for the things she used most: her wax, her paste, her paraffin.
On the shelf above the table was a quail's egg. She had found it in her coat pocket one morning, perfectly smooth and cool below her fingers. How long it had been there, she didn't know, although she knew that it came from her sister. Just as Elena made books whole again, Bella grew things in a garden that Elena had never seen. Gardening took skills that Elena didn't possess: planning, measuring, the physical strength needed to turn field into oasis. These things were only a list of words to Elena, with no visual connections that made them real. She couldn't understand the years of effort necessary to make a garden out of nothing, to produce something beautiful from among knapweed and thistle. The end result was what mattered to her: irises and sweet peas that bloomed behind the white house where they lived, bouquets that appeared on the dining room table, the small blue egg hidden like a jewel.
Elena picked up the egg. Even now, in November, it was smooth and cold. She held it to her temple to make the space in her head easier to bear. It was a good trick. She liked the way the egg turned against the circles around her eyes until her skin warmed it. Gently, she settled it back into its nest of cotton.
The basement was too deep in the building for Elena to hear the door on the main floor open and close. She certainly didn't hear footsteps or the breathing of another person. The only sounds she ever heard were real whispers—the slap of books, the sigh of old paper being shifted and disturbed. Because of this, she didn't know the young woman was there until she coughed.
Elena whirled, her whiskbroom raised in the air like a knife.
"I'm sorry," said the young woman. She seemed to shrink from Elena's gaze. "The upstairs told me to come down and see you."
In the dim yellow light, Elena looked more closely at her visitor. She had a smooth wide face, black hair that jutted out from her scalp in spikes, and almond-shaped eyes that were brown on the outer ring and yellow in the center like a hawk's. Above her right eyebrow was an oval tattoo that bulged up from her skin. It looked like a scar, or maybe like code that had risen from inside and erupted. In one hand she held a stack of files.
"Are these from the mayor's office?" Elena asked. "The girl who usually brings them knows to leave everything on the table upstairs."
"Unfortunately, I don't know who you are."
The young woman looked as if she might laugh, but she didn't. "That doesn't surprise me," she said, and she set the files gently on one of the long tables. "But I'm your new assistant. I'm supposed to help you with things."
She plucked a card from the pocket of a long black coat, as if reading from a script. "The elevator was beyond my ability to handle, I'm afraid," she continued. "I took the stairs."
For a minute, Elena thought that maybe a secret had been told and tucked into this girl as a message. "Bella sent you?"
Her visitor didn't reply right away. "Maybe," she said. "I don't know anyone named Bella, but there's a lot I can't remember. Maybe I do after all."
Elena watched the young woman. There was something unsettling about her expression, as if she was observing herself and the world at the same time and judging them both to be amusing. The row of silver rings that curved around the outside of her earlobe looked too heavy to stay clipped on. They might have been anchored to the skin with hooks.
She stretched her hand across the gap between them. "I'm Nabila."
Elena liked how calm Nabila's voice was. In a recess in the back of her head, a name caught. "That means 'garden,'" she said.
"Actually, it means 'wise in matters of the heart.'" Nabila shoved her hands into her pockets. She was still smiling slightly. "But it's Arabic, so a lot of my foster parents liked how it sounds without knowing what it means. And they stuck with me. I was hard to place. Too much trouble. Not really true family material." Her ringed eyebrow arched slightly. "It didn't work out."
Elena nodded, although she didn't really understand. She couldn't remember ever having parents of any sort. Before she could reply, her foot bumped the leg of the table. One of the files began to slide toward the floor.
Nabila reached for it, but Elena stopped her. "I'll take it," she said. She wasn't sure how to explain that the papers had an order even she couldn't always read, but a single sheet out of place could change the meaning of everything.
She saw Nabila glance at the metal floorlamp, the photographs of dirt streets under construction, and the album of rose postcards that waited to be recased. Nabila knelt on the floor. When she lifted the lid of a box next to the table, she reached her hand into the middle and pulled out one of the books Elena had not yet repaired: a scrapbook of dried leaves. As Nabila opened it, the leaves broke free from the pages and fell like brittle snow.
"How do we decide what gets fixed and what doesn't?" she asked.
We. The word touched something in Elena. She didn't know where.
Next to the girl, Elena picked up the leaves on the floor and wiped the grace notes of dust from each one before putting them back in the scrapbook. If she explained that she had to decide what to keep and what to let go, she would be telling the girl what it was like to know what was still alive and what was dead.
"I've never had anyone else help me before," she said. "I don't know how to."
Nabila laughed. It was a pretty laugh, easy to listen to. "Me neither," she said. "You'll have to tell me what to do. If you're nice, I might even do it."
The young woman grinned again, and Elena felt the room move perceptibly. She wondered if there had ever been a time when her reactions had been so finely tuned. She couldn't remember.
Nabila draped her long black coat over a chair. Underneath, she was all angles: slim arms, legs like an egret. She looked more fragile somehow when she wasn't wearing the glossy armor of her feathers. While Elena tried not to stare, Nabila tugged at the cuffs of the black thermal underwear she wore under a sweater that was missing half its red buttons. She caught Elena watching her and laughed.
"I bleached this sweater once," she said. "It ended up pink as a trout. I only wear it when I forget, which isn't often."
Elena nodded in reply. A trout was a fish. Fish lived in the water.
The only sounds in the basement were the footsteps of the two girls, muffled by the clamor of aging files and books. Nabila dug into the paper shadows and came up with a sketchbook, spiraled with pink wire and rippled from water damage. It was smaller than it might have been; the back seemed to have been cut or burned. Perhaps it was missing, but Elena couldn't remember.
"Look, I found this."
Nabila fell quiet, staring at the page. She pushed it in front of Elena. "Is that you?"
A sketch showed two girls sitting on the front steps of a white house. One of them shaded her eyes from the sun with her hand. The other held a watering can. Vines trailed from the edges of the page, the tendrils curling in over the binding.
Nabila pointed to the creases around the chin of the girl holding the watering can. "It's not the same as you," she said. "But it's a little bit the same, too."
There were other drawings: the same girls holding hands on a beach, the girls in bright dresses weaving daisy chains around the boxes of a beehive. Both were labeled in a child's capital letters: Bell and Leni. Bell and Leni.
Nabila twisted a curl around her finger. "Did you do these when you were little?"
Elena pulled the sketchbook toward her. Her hands shook. She couldn't tell from the drawings what the season had been or how old the girls might have been. Sadness she couldn't name flickered out from her like static electricity, making her as jumpy as tiny bugs danced in the face of a light. She had no memories of childhood. All of the memories she did have were blanked out, like television that wasn't tuned right.
A noise escaped her mouth, something between a sob and a hiccup. She tried to stifle it with her hands, but the question ripped free anyway: "How can you stand not remembering who you are?"
Nabila did nothing for a moment. Then she stood on her tiptoes and pulled at one of the strings dangling from a light bulb. The basement dimmed.
"Everybody works through the not-knowing in different ways," she said. Her voice was as soft as cotton sucked into the pink shell of her ear. "But it's why I'm learning to read Urdu. I figure maybe something will get triggered one day." She offered a crooked smile. "Maybe I'll even recognize things. Who knows?"
Elena peered at this girl who was her assistant, or her friend, or maybe both. In the dimness, she felt like bursting into tears. "Will you show me how?"
Nabila was silent for a moment. Then she cleared some space on the table and opened the sketchbook. One small fingertip traced the outline of the girl gripping the watering can. "We'll start with this," she said. "You have to fix what needs fixing before you can figure out anything else."
She shifted her finger to the page itself, outlined the marks of water like a ghost-world fingerprint. "First we can try—"
"I know how to do this." Elena covered Nabila's hand with her own. The bones of her wrist were as thin as a flautist's.
At first, the question was like a light switched on too quickly. Then, a warmth started to sway from the place where their skin met. She could almost hear it: at first a hum felt in the lungs, like a cello pitch turning, then the opening of light when a page turned, and then the notes of something winging away from silence.
"I want to show you," Elena said.
"Okay," Nabila replied, and Elena wondered how long the two of them had been down there together, huddled under the light, looking at paper that meant nothing in itself but so much when held this close, when added to the other things in the room, when added to the world—and how one thing plus another thing was a friendship, a tree, a bound book, a story.
Behind the two girls, behind the file cabinets and the boxes of documents that kept in their chipped and buckling covers what it meant to be a town, a place—the town itself, of course: the land and the river, the boulders washed smooth and the ferns that flickered like eyelids in the dark. The girls and the town made each other true. Everything from the architecture of the post office to the moss on the repurposed foundation stones beneath it would have been different if one of them were gone, if one of them had never existed. Elena could see that now: all the different things in the basement, and in the world, joined together until they made up something real. This was what knit the minutes into a whole. This was what made her into a name, into a girl, into Elena.
I wonder if this is what love is.
She wanted to tell this to Nabila, but she didn't know how. Maybe the girl already knew, in the sound of the furnace, the streak of wan light that dropped over both of them. Maybe they both knew. Maybe their hearts were the same as the word that squirmed underneath Nabila's skin, something dipped and written in an alphabet that was all its own, something no one could ever guess.
With hands that knew how to do this, with hands that remembered, Elena reached for the sketchbook. From where she held it, she could feel the whisper of a girl turning the pages. Here were two sisters hanging upside-down from an apple tree, two sisters on a raft looking for trout, butterfly figures in a snowball fight, shapes walking over marble headstones. Here were two sisters, identical in the beginning—just babies, always holding hands. Bella. Leni.
A muscle in the corner of Elena's eye twitched, and something shifted like gears sliding into place.
Leni. Her name. Hers.
She flipped the sketchbook over. The back half was gone; dampness had eaten it away. Tears started to burn Elena's cheeks again, but she wiped them with her sleeve as she looked at the last picture: two girls leaning out a glassless window in the peak of a house. They held hands like always, but their faces were blurred as if the sisters already knew how this would turn out: one etched with words circling like skin, the other left with nothing but pictures. Instead of smiling, they waved at each other, as if they were strangers, as if they hadn't spent their lives together.
Bella and Leni.
The pencil sketch was as much the definition of heartache as either of them would ever need.
Nabila was watching Elena, her eyes like dark pools. "What is it?" she asked, and when Elena didn't reply because she couldn't, because her lungs were trapped under the snow, Nabila touched Elena's hand once again, jolting her back to where they were.
Elena tensed her jaw. "I've lost my sister. In my head, I mean. I've lost my sister, and I don't know where she is."
Nabila plucked a leaf from the scrapbook on the floor and traced the outline with her thumb.
"You need some lessons," she said. "That's the real reason I'm here. Bella wants me to teach you how to find her◆ About the ending
❧ About the title