Mitch Silver - The Bookworm

Blunt carefully shut the matchbox with the beetle in it and put the gluepot away. “Well, that’s where I have you at a disadvantage, old man. I already know German.”

Bells were going off in Lara’s brain; unconscious connections were being made. Hadn’t she read something, somewhere in the Chronologies, about a book; last year or the year before? Could it have been a Bible? She knew the way her mind worked; if whatever was lodged in her cerebrum was important enough, her subconscious would bring it to the surface—sooner, she hoped, rather than later.

Lara was making a note to herself about it when she noticed her iPad telling her she had email. She touched the Mail.ru icon on the screen and typed in her user ID and password. Russians were the world’s greatest generators of electronic spam, offering cheap watches and pharmaceuticals, sex aids (or just plain sex), and phony “phishing” messages from financial institutions, requesting personal information to “update our files.” Often, spam was all Lara received in a day. But today she had— tseluyu! —thirty-four new messages in her Inbox. One, from her department chairman, had nine Reply All responses from her fellow teachers. She started with the original.

“Dear Colleague, Superintendent Nazimova tells me a member of our professional staff has agreed to appear on various TV networks and be compensated for said appearance. As you know, University rules forbid such compensation during the academic year, and only the entire Faculty Senate can grant a waiver from the rule. Therefore, I solicit the Faculty’s opinion: should we hold a meeting on the matter, with a vote to follow, of the History Department tomorrow in the Faculty Dining Room at 10:00? Please reply soonest.”

Lara quickly scrolled through her follow-up emails. They amounted to her colleagues trying to guess which teacher it was and what to do about the “waiver,” Nazimova’s way of trying to turn Lara’s friends against her. Some of those friends solicited Lara’s own opinion of the matter. When she hadn’t answered, several more implored her to make her whereabouts known.

The woman took money to make Lara appear on Gerasimov’s program, and then she reported the deal as some kind of honor violation on Lara’s part.

She knew only too well how a Department meeting would go. The Modernists, her friends, would be all up in arms over Nazimova trying to keep her off an obviously educational program. The Tsarists, sitting by the coffeemaker to get the freshest brew, would submit to the administration’s intrusion, as if by divine right. The acolytes of the “Greats,” Peter and Catherine, would talk and smirk among themselves at the three tables at the far end of the room. And all fifty-eight of them would have to have something to say, whether or not they actually had an opinion. All over a done deal. As the hypocritical Superintendant had said, in the new Russia, money talks. And talks. And talks.

“ Suka ! Samka ! Bitch!” The bilingual anger came out involuntarily. Good thing the Listening Room was soundproof.

Lara, still shaking, got up and, leaving her iPad behind her, stepped beyond the glass doors and began to navigate the perimeter of the Arkhiv. It took four complete trips around the vast building this time before Lara could compose herself enough to head back to the Listening Room, four trips before she could settle down enough to do any work.

Pushing on the thick glass door, she was startled to see a man, enormously big and muscled with closely cropped hair, seated now before the middle of the three Dictaphone machines. He had his huge head in his left hand, poring over some papers at the edge of the communal worktable, looming over the tablet computer that held her notes. The man was practically staring down into the bag of wax cylinders Lara had left on the floor. He was beefier than any academic Lara had ever seen.

She made a little noise so he would look up, and she smiled a greeting. After a moment he arranged his face into a corresponding smile and shifted his work so Lara would have room to sit down. She retook her seat and, placing the iPad in her lap, hurriedly put the headphones on, isolating herself as best she could from the one who had invaded her space.

We come to Dictaphone recording number five, Robert old man. Or should I say, “Meacham for the Defence,” as the tabloids have it? I realize I’ve mentioned the quatrains, but have failed to describe all the fun I had in writing them. So, here goes.

While there is no surviving example of a prophecy or anything else in Nostradamus’s own hand, there are one or two pages of printer’s proofs of his books with handwritten notes in the margins—possibly the seer’s—that have come down through the centuries. Anthony was to write out his translation of whatever doggerel I gave him, in a manner consistent with those notes, on the flyleaf of the Bible we’d selected… as long as I limited myself to twelve lines in all.

So, what to write? And how to write it? First, a confession: if I absorbed any history whatsoever in all my schooling, it was purely by accident. I found myself poring over books in the public library any child in the sixth form would consider beneath him. In fact, I got the fish eye from one such urchin when he saw me lapping up Wells’s Outline of History .

Next, I hit upon the idea of reading aloud (no, not in the library) from the little book young Kennedy gave me. When I believed myself to be ‘at speed,’ I would babble out some of my own words and phrases, like “the people of the Rhine” and “in the name of St. George,” in a similarly singsong manner until I had something suitable, sort of the way I came up with “Mad Dogs and Englishmen.”

I determined early on that, if I had only three quatrains to work with, the first would seemingly foretell the rise of Hitler; the second would describe, rather murkily, actual events leading up to the war, so the Germans would know this Nostradamus fellow was ‘spot on’; and the third would predict, in a kind of easily-broken code, Hitler’s defeat of Stalin.

I threw in the birthplaces of both Il Duce and the Führer, and the exact count of river crossings from Berlin to Moscow, if the man needed a roadmap. My best bit was a quick mention of the German warrior-king Barbarossa, the Holy Roman Emperor who was leading the Third Crusade in the East when he died in 1190… someone I’d never heard of until I read about him the day before.

Then Noël Coward stopped and coughed a loud hacking cough, perfectly captured—like his sneeze—on the wax cylinder. He said, “Nigel, dear lamb, pass me that glass of water, would you like a good fellow?”

Lara took her headphones off and rubbed her ears to get the blood circulating before putting them back on. She could clearly hear the long-dead playwright drinking the long-gone water. Looking around, she noticed her fellow Listening Room occupant had put away the papers he was studying and was, instead, writing with a pencil on a pad in front of him.

He must have sensed she was looking at him because he turned and looked her way. A generic one-day Arkhiv guest pass dangled from a chain that barely made it around his thick neck. Lara smiled hello at the man and tapped her headphones, signifying that she had a lot of work to do and was returning to it.

The man smiled back and held up his work. Lara looked at the pad and was startled to see he’d drawn the beginning of a game of Hangman, just the scaffold.

Noël Coward started clearing his throat on her recording and she turned back to her work, wondering why anyone would travel out to the edge of nowhere just to play a pencil-and-paper game. And why there was no cylinder in his machine.