The Moon Girl

Начало книги

“What do you make of this book, Kevin?” François Brissot asked me one evening in the National Archives of Niger. He handed me a book bound in black leather, dusted clean. I opened it slowly, in the middle, but it still crackled. The pages were brittle and crumbling around the edges. It was evidently a journal, written in black ink, the last half of the book’s pages blank. I tried to read some of the words in the dim light. We hadn’t yet turned on the one light bulb Brissot allows us after dark—the electricity costs the archives too much, and he has to conserve. Though I sat by a window, the sun had nearly set and the light was almost gone. It was difficult to read.

“It’s in English,” I said finally, having made out a few words.

Brissot laughed and walked off. Of course the book was in English. Brissot hands me everything written in English. I go there to help him recatalog the holdings of his archives, as he thinks of them, left in chaos after the Nigerian withdrawal from Niamey at the end of the Water War. “I am too old to find patience for your English,” Brissot had once told me. He reads English, but slowly. Since English is my first language, I can quickly tell what a document is, who had written it and why, and mark it for future filing. I never expected to make it through the archive’s English-language holdings that summer. Brissot does not expect to finish sorting out the mess the Nigerians had left him in what remains of his life.

Читать дальше →