The Palimpsest
パリンプセスト
Among the Verekin holdings is a single sheet of that has been written upon twice, and scraped clean once between the writings.
Such a sheet is called a , from the Greek for "scraped again", and it keeps its secrets in layers, as guilt does.
The upper text is a dull inventory of household expenses; it was clearly meant to be seen, and just as clearly meant to distract.
Beneath it, coaxed into visibility by a lamp held at a low angle, an earlier script rises like a bruise under skin.
The under-writing is a confession, though whose confession it is has been carefully, one might say professionally, obscured.
Note how it is phrased: not "I killed him," but "it was decided that he should not continue"; not "I lied," but "an account was allowed to stand."
Wherever an might have been named, a passive construction has been slid into its place, and the doer has been quietly ushered out of his own sentence.
Mistakes were made, the says; by whom? The grammar declines to answer.
This is the oldest trick in the confessional repertoire: to admit the deed while erasing the hand that did it.
The scraping, too, tells a story, if one reads the scars rather than the words.
The knife did not move at random; the deepest erasures fall precisely on the pronouns.
Someone had gone through the earlier confession and removed, letter by letter, every "I", every "my", every trace of a self willing to own what had been done.
What survives is a deed without a doer, a crime that seems to have committed itself.
And yet the eraser was careless in one respect, as the guilty always are in one respect.
In the phrase "the body was moved before it had been found", a tense has been left standing that gives the game away.
For a thing to be moved before it had been found, the mover must have known where it lay before anyone was permitted to look.
The betrays what the passive labours to conceal: , and therefore intention, and therefore a person.
I do not say the person is named; I say the person is implied, folded into the fault-lines of the grammar like a fingerprint pressed into wax.
The upper text, the innocent of candles and coal, was added, I am now certain, to keep the sheet in daily use.
A document that is handled is a document that is trusted; nobody scrapes a page he means to hide, for hiding attracts the very it fears.
So the confession was not destroyed but overwritten, buried beneath the ordinary, protected by its own dullness.
This, I have come to think, is the archive's governing principle.
Nothing here has been deleted; everything has merely been written over, and the truth persists as a pressure beneath the surface, deforming whatever is laid on top of it.
Read enough of these pages against the light and you begin to see that they are all palimpsests, that a single confession underlies them all, scraped and rewritten in a hundred careful hands.
The expenses in the upper text, incidentally, do not balance.
A sum has been spent that is never accounted for, on a date that corresponds, I have checked, and rechecked, unwilling to believe it, to the week of Verekin's death.
What was purchased? The , faithful to the method of the whole, does not say; it records only that a payment was made and a matter thereby closed.
Matters, in this house, are always being closed by unnamed hands, and always, beneath the closing, something goes on bleeding through.
I have returned the to its shelf, upper side out, as I found it.
Let the next reader hold it to the lamp, if he dares; the confession will still be there, waiting, having been waiting, patient as all buried things are patient.