Alexander Chee - Edinburgh

I’m not. I’m not angry. I stand up and walk down the stairs to the foyer. See, I say, heading to the main room. See how happy I am?

There’s no call for sarcasm. She crosses an arm over her stomach and props up her elbow, her drink resting up near her face.

Hey Nora, come in here. Aphias, come here. My dad comes from around the corner. His face flushed, he takes my mom by the hand. C’mon.

On the television was some footage from the Spirit of Christmas Concert, taken from two years before. The chorus had sung with an adult choir, the Portland Symphony, and a few guest stars from the Biddeford Opera production of Carmen. My father had seen my face on the screen and looked for it again. You were right there, he said, indicating the corner of the screen in which my face had appeared. Right there.

3

Endless January into endless February. Sunny days hit the snow and make me hate light, cold that snaps my nose numb and then burns me once I’m inside. I spend the days reading.

I had been doing an English paper on the pantoum, a literary form, originally Sri Lankan, that came to Italy in pages wrapped in silks. The same silks that perhaps had arrived with the infected fleas of the Plague. I think of the elegant horses, stung as they ride, carrying the death of nations.

I take a break from studying and find my grandfather leading through the paper in the gray winter light shading the kitchen. It’s the afternoon, just before dinner. He favors our kitchen as a place to hide from my grandmother. She favors her kitchen as a place to hide from him. Anyung haseo, I say, sitting down. I’ve been practicing some Korean, because it makes my grandparents smile.

He chuckles, almost to tears. Pretty good, round-eyes, he says. He learned a lot of his English from G.I.s, and says things like this, or, I take leak. But he’s salty in his own right. He didn’t learn English from them by accident. He sets the paper down. How’s my smart grandson?

Good, I say. And I pick up the paper to look at the classifieds, because I’ve decided I want to work a job and have some extra money. And so I see this:

Wanted: student researcher, for book project. Please be energetic, bright, a fast learner, and extremely quiet, with an interest in history, in particular the 14th century in Europe. Please call Edward Speck, at…

When I call the number listed, the man I speak to is good-natured and reserved, and tells me to come by to see him. He gives me an address in South Portland, nearby, in a part I don’t ever go to, though not for any particular reason I can think of, and the next afternoon I drive over and find myself ringing the doorbell of a large brownstone house that looks out of place, surrounded as it is by new houses. As if this house had been here for a very long time, alone, and suddenly been joined by neighbors just beyond the boxwood shoulders of its lawns.

Edward Speck is a tiny man. His white hair drifts above a cheerful face. He lets me into the house on this afternoon looking like he’s decided, seeing me through the door, to hire me. He tells a brief history of himself (study at Oxford, Ph.D. from Columbia) and that he lives here because it was his grandmother’s house and he had always wanted it. The furniture was all hers and is original. He asks me no questions. I’ve added nothing, he says.

I admire in particular, in the mudroom, a bench attached to a mirror and hung down the sides with bronze fixtures resembling moose antlers.

I’m only here, he says, for the cold months. We sit in the parlor, on matching giant leather club chairs. His has an enormous hassock in front of it. A Persian rug, the color of several wines, muffles us.

Why’s that, I ask.

Because cold air concentrates oxygen powerfully. It’s wonderful for the brain. And also, no one likes to be here in this time of year, so no one visits me, and I am left alone.

I see. And, I do.

We agree on payment (he decides for more than I’d thought) and he outlines some responsibilities: opening and filing all his mail for him to go through, returning books placed to the right of the desk to his library, returning books placed by the door to either the Portland library or the library of the university (check inside flyleaf). Occasionally, he says, I will ask you to look things up for me, and then photocopy what you find, along with related articles, or to take out the book. You won’t have to do any writing or household work, although sometimes I may ask to be driven. I will need you for ten to twelve hours a week.

He stands. Now, for the tour.

The ceilings of the dark house accommodate people much taller than him or I. The library I remember and envy. When I first enter it, I realize I would work without pay to be able to come here. For some genius thought to make a room like this: three stories tall, shelves on all sides, brass ledges to them connected by ladders made of iron. And all the books shelved and stored behind glass doors crisscrossed with iron. Windows edge only at the top, so that light glows into the room instead of falling, and then the ceiling with a fresco of a dark city, a mountain in the center of it.

What is that city, I ask.

Edinburgh, he replies.

The mountain? I say.

Arthur’s Seat, he says. A hill.

On my way out, he looks at me and asks, What is your parentage?

I am used to the question. I know the look: people searching my features for matches, finding few that correspond. It is confusing to some people to look at me. Watching me takes longer than most.

Half Korean, I say, and half Scottish-English.

You look like a Russian, he says. A young Cossack, really.

I think of Mongolia. Lady Tammamo. A little Mongolian too, I say.

An ancient race. He pauses, lit from within inside his doorway. Excellent, he says. We’ll see you soon. And oh, by the way, call me Speck, please. Everyone does. And with that he closes his giant door.

4

The librarians laugh as I carry my piles of books out of the library. My mother is incredulous as I bring them in from the car.

I don’t pretend I understand, my mother says, surveying the piles of books in my room. But if this is what you want.

It’s really interesting, I say. It created a great deal of what we know as culture today.

Uh huh, she says. I can’t wait until you and your father go over this one.

This is just something I want to do, Ma, I say, And she pulls the door shut, saying, Come down for dinner in an hour. One hour.

I look over the books before closing the door to go downstairs. A job, I understand now, is a purpose. I feel a sense of mission. My hours with Speck leave me feeling protected. I walk through the quiet house attending to my duties. Under his instructions, I am to speak with him when I arrive, after school at four, and when I leave, at six. At no other time, unless, of course, he comes to find me. But these restrictions leave me feeling free inside the silence, which, inside his house, is as thick as the drapes that protect his dark house from the light that would bleach the color from the chairs and yellow all the books. Even in their pristine cases. The relief of nothing to say. I’d always prized silence for being the absence of other noises. In this house I come to see how one can prize silence for being articulate, as well.

5

Public high school seems to me to be a barbarian ritual of four years that leaves me with no ability to mark its beginning or end except through shame and occasional violence, from which I hide in a series of classes for the precollegiate, and the thirty of us who fall into this category come by senior year to seem a race apart from the hundred others in the class. One girl in the year ahead is ridiculed for having her picture taken with her baby, for the yearbook. The father had died. I look at the picture and they seem to me unbearably beautiful. Her hair carefully folded back by a curling iron, his baby hair tied atop his head with a ribbon. She had always been, I recalled, a fiercely silent girl, pretty and small. Now she seems a giant. I see her in the school, nonchalant. Widowed, a mother, a high school senior. Our lives, I decide, watching her, are tiny beside hers.