“What is this all about?” the wife asked.
“The history of mathematics,” Liesl whispered to her as the lights went down and Rhonda took the podium.
Rhonda, most recognizable to Liesl by the halo of curls or colorful hair wrap that usually surrounded her head, had had her hair straightened into a businesswoman’s bob. She wore a gray sheath dress and heels. Rhonda had heard “donor event” and had understood exactly what the evening was all about. Liesl was saddened by that.
“Good evening,” Rhonda said. “Thank you for having me.”
Even in her disguise, Rhonda was the type of academic, the type of person, that the crowd respected in theory but rarely interacted with in practice. Certainly most of the people in the room had read Toni Morrison in college, and if they didn’t invite people of color to these donor events, they would swear it had nothing to do with racism and then remind you of the time in college they read that Toni Morrison novel. Percy Pickens was smirking at the stage. Sipping at a red wine and smirking.
“The Peshawar,” Rhonda began, “was discovered buried in a farmer’s field over one hundred years ago.” Percy was still smirking, but others in the room began to lean forward as Rhonda introduced the threads of the story she would tell that night. Stories of pages and pages of sums in the manuscript that suggested a complex understanding of mathematics that shaped the current world.
“But you don’t care about math,” Rhonda said. “Not really.” So her focus shifted and she began to tell them the story of the life of the book as they knew it, for these were book people.
“The Peshawar, the way it was discovered, reaffirms our values, our commitment to exploration, to hold that sense of awe against the indifference that can creep in, to ensure future generations of discovery. And I say to you tonight, we have more to discover. Discoveries like the seventy leaves of birch bark dug up in a field by a farmer plowing around the remnants of a ruined palace and then having the wherewithal to preserve, rather than discard, the soil-stained pages that kept him from his work. Discoveries like the police inspector who, upon hearing what his tenant farmer had dug up, made arrangements to deliver the leaves to the Lahore Museum.”
Liesl clasped her hands and listened. The air stank of wine and self-importance. The thousand-dollar suits, the collections of letters that followed every name, the important men and the second wives, she was immune to all of it as Rhonda spoke and Liesl listened.
Rhonda leaned forward across the podium and told them about the loose leaves, ink on birch bark, that the library had bought after an aggressive auction in the early twentieth century.
“Discoveries like that of the faculty member from this very university, someone just like so many of you. Upon reading the 1886 Proceedings of the Seventh Oriental Conference, he sought out the Peshawar from across two seas, began the work of bringing the leaves to our library.”
Liesl knew enough about these minds, about these important men, to know they would like that bit. They who had their graduate students teach all their classes, they who played golf with the editors of the academic presses to ensure their lethargic manuscripts were accepted for publication, they who fancied themselves explorers, every last one of them.
“And the story,” Rhonda said, “isn’t only the story of the Peshawar itself.”
The room full of suits and hair spray leaned further forward as she told them about the heroic efforts of a 1927 researcher, a mathematician who had studied the manuscript, decided upon the order of the seventy leaves, decided to photograph the book and make the photographs available for study.
“It was in 1927 that George Kaye, not a young man but still a protégé of the renowned Indologist Dr. R. Hoernlé, took over the manuscript and the work of his mentor in the wake of Hoernlé’s death. Kaye didn’t grieve. Kaye worked. He didn’t know it, but he was approaching the end of his own life, and would die only two years after making his landmark study, his important photographs, available to the world.”
Her speech took a mournful turn when she told them what had happened to the book after that. That the birch pages had been sealed in mica and bound into a handsome album. That the mica, the very thing that was meant to preserve the pages, was the thing that was destroying them. The pages were deteriorating. The pages could not be removed from the mica without crumbling. The pages were darkening and, one day very soon, would be illegible. Rhonda likened it to human history that had been written with a stick in the sand, and now, over a thousand years after it was written, someone was pouring buckets of water over it. As the suits looked stricken, Rhonda readopted her hopeful tone. The researcher, the hero of her story, reappeared. Through his work, the contents of the manuscript were forever preserved. There were facsimiles on the market that had been made to look like the real thing, but more importantly, there were photographs of the pages that were available to all researchers. The contents of the Peshawar, the secrets of mathematical history, would be preserved, even if the book was not.