The Curator's Confession
学芸員の告白
I have been asked to set down, plainly and without , the circumstances under which the late Mr. Verekin came to die within these walls.
That, at least, is how I would prefer to begin, though I confess the word "plainly" already troubles me, for nothing here has ever been plain.
For nineteen years I served as of his library, cataloguing volumes that no living scholar had requested and, I sometimes suspect, that no one but he had ever read.
He collected not books so much as the silences between them, the marginal, the defaced, the deliberately mislabelled.
When he died, of natural causes, the physician assured me, though I had reasons to doubt even that, I was left alone with the shelves and my conscience.
It was on the third evening of my inventory that I found the diary.
It lay behind a false panel, bound in a calf so dark it seemed less a colour than an absence of one.
I should say, in fairness, that I did not immediately open it; or rather, I have persuaded myself that I hesitated, which is not quite the same thing.
When at last I read the first page, I felt the floor of my certainty give way beneath me.
The hand was mine.
Not merely similar to mine, you understand, but mine, the same cramped ascenders, the same reluctance to close an "o", the same nervous full stops pressed hard enough to pierce the page.
Had I written it, I would surely have remembered; and yet the entries described days I could not recall having lived.
One passage, dated a decade before I entered his service, recorded a conversation between Verekin and myself that could not, by any ordinary of time, have occurred.
I told myself that a of uncommon skill had imitated me, but a who knew thoughts I had never spoken aloud?
If the diary had merely lied, I could have dismissed it; what unsettled me was how often, and how intimately, it told the truth.
There were things in it I had done and confessed to no one: a small theft, a larger , a letter I had burned unsent.
Reading on, I began to suspect that the diary was not recording my life but prescribing it, that I had been living, all these years, inside its sentences.
This is, I am aware, the reasoning of a mind, and I set it down precisely so that you may judge my reliability for yourselves.
I have always prided myself on accuracy; it is, after all, the curator's single virtue.
But accuracy, I have learned, is a story we tell about the past, and stories have authors, and authors have motives.
Had Verekin lived one week longer, he would have completed the final entry himself, and I would never have needed to.
That sentence, I notice, assumes that I completed it, a thing I do not remember doing and cannot prove I did not.
The last page of the diary is written in a fresher ink, and describes the discovery of the diary by a , alone, on the third evening of his inventory.
It describes, in short, this very confession, down to the now visible in my hand.
Whoever wrote it knew that I would read it; knew, perhaps, that I would deny having written it; anticipated even this denial and folded it into the record.
I have resolved, therefore, to say only what I can defend: that Mr. Verekin is dead, that I was present, and that I am not certain of anything further.
If I have concealed something, I have concealed it from myself as thoroughly as from you, and that, surely, must count as a kind of innocence.
Tomorrow I shall place this account in the archive, on the shelf reserved for documents whose authorship is in dispute.
There is only one such shelf, and it is fuller than a single honest man could ever have filled.
I would tell you my name, but I find, on reflection, that I no longer trust the hand that would sign it.