Thomas Mofolo — Chapter 3: An erased marginal note in a late-century ledger — Novella Movement 1

In the year that the diocesan library received its four hundred and seventh ledger, and in the season when the keepers of records still numbered three and not one, there arrived at the reading room a scholar named Ntsu, a man who walked the corridors of dead paper the way other men walk pastures, slowly, and with an appetite that no feeding could satisfy.

And he had come, as he told the porter, only to look upon the marginalia of the dead, for it was in the margins and not in the text that the truth of an age concealed itself, folded like a blade in cloth. Also he had come because the keeper of that particular room, a man called Lehlohonolo, had written to him in a hand too eager for an honest servant, promising sight of an entry that no other scholar had been permitted to see, and it was upon this promise that Ntsu had fixed his waiting.

That waiting did not stretch long, for before the third week of Ntsu's residence in that reading room had closed upon itself, Lehlohonolo came to him at dusk, and he came, as was his custom, with a lamp turned low and with his voice sweetened as a man sweetens milk that has already begun to sour. And he said that the entry could be shown, but that showing was not a small thing, for the diocese had lately set above the door a small black eye of glass and wire, a device the bishop's clerks called a watcher, and it recorded the coming and going of every hand that touched the four hundred and seventh ledger, and it slept never, neither by day nor by night.

This is the first thing that Lehlohonolo asked, and it was reasonable in itself: that Ntsu should come after the ringing of the ninth bell, when the watcher's eye, so he said, was turned toward the courtyard and not toward the shelves. This is the second thing, and it also seemed reasonable: that he should bring three candles of tallow and not of wax, for wax candles left too clean a light and drew the eye of the watcher, while tallow smoked and clouded the glass. And this is the third thing, the heaviest of the three, though he named it lightly, as a man names a debt he does not intend to be questioned upon: that Ntsu should leave with him, before the reading, a sum of silver equal to two months of a curate's stipend, to be called, in Lehlohonolo's own words, a fee for the risk of his hands and not for the sight of the page.

Ntsu asked him then, and his questions were short, as questions ought to be between a man who suspects and a man who dissembles.

"Whose entry is it?"

"A canon's, long dead."

"Why was it never catalogued with the others?"

"Because the bishop of that year ordered it struck out, and struck out it was, in ink over ink, so that only a scholar's eye, patient as thine, could raise the ghost of the first hand beneath the second."

"And why dost thou risk the watcher's eye to show me a thing already dead and already silenced?"

To this Lehlohonolo made a long answer, and it was in the making of it that he incriminated himself beyond any power of retraction, for he spoke of his stipend, which was small, and of his daughters, who were three, and of a debt owed to a trader of Maseru for cloth already delivered and not yet paid for, and he wound about these griefs a garment of piety, saying that knowledge belonged to all men and that he was only the poor gate through which it must pass, and that the silver was nothing beside the good that would be done. But his true wish, which he did not speak, was smaller and meaner than all his words: he wished only to be the man who had shown the scholar Ntsu the one thing no other scholar had seen, and to be remembered in some future preface, however briefly, however wrongly.

And Ntsu, having heard him, made one binding speech, and it was this: that he would come after the ninth bell, and would bring the silver, and would look upon the page once and no more, and that if the watcher's eye caught them both, the shame would fall upon Lehlohonolo alone, for the scholar's business in that room was lawful and the keeper's was not; and he said further that Lehlohonolo might yet withdraw, and lose nothing but a night's trouble, and this offer he made once, and did not repeat it.

They went in together after the ninth bell, and the tallow smoked as promised, and the watcher's small eye, whether turned to the courtyard or not, made no sound and gave no sign. Lehlohonolo laid open the four hundred and seventh ledger upon the reading table, and turned the leaves with a haste that trembled the flame, until he came to the page where the ink lay thick upon ink, layer upon layer, like scar upon old scar. And there, beneath the smoke and the candlelight, was nothing that could be read, for whoever had struck out the canon's note in that distant year had struck it out with such thoroughness, and with such patient malice, that not even the ghost of a letter remained to be raised. The page held only a blackness shaped like writing, and no more.

Lehlohonolo wept then, not for the canon dead a century, but for the silver he had taken and could not return, and for the sum owed at Maseru, and for the daughters who would eat all the same whether the page had spoken or had not. And in the morning the porter found the small watcher's eye had recorded only two shapes bent over a table in poor light, and no bishop, no clerk, no court of the diocese ever asked what had passed between them, for the shame of a small theft in a dim room did not reach so far as episcopal ears.

Ntsu closed the ledger himself, gently, as a man closes the eyes of the dead, and he did not ask for his silver again. The note was gone; the shame remained.