The Geographer's Library

The Geographer’ s Library
afghan thrown over her chair. “Well, he was Estonian. I guess I just told
you that. He used to talk about Tallinn a lot, but also about the countryside
and the islands. He had this book of photographs of one of the islands—
Saaremaa, I think it was called—that he loved to show me. I think he had
some family, but I don’t know who, or where they lived. Last summer,
though, he went back to Estonia for three weeks.” She walked over to her
bookshelves and pulled down a garnet-colored bottle. “He brought this back
for me.” vana tallinn, the label said. I opened it and sniffed; it smelled like
caramel and licorice and looked syrupy, like sherry that had been boiled for a
while. Hannah poured a slug into my tea; it tasted sweet, and though it had
no burn, I could feel the warmth down my chest as I swallowed.
“What about work? I know he was a professor, but . . .”
“I think he was sort of retired. I know he didn’t teach that much. He
didn’t teach around here, I know that.”
“He taught at Wickenden College.”
“So you have done a little homework. Well done. He wrote a lot; he has
notebooks full of his writings, but I don’t think he had much of his writing
published. Every so often he’d pull some obscure magazine off the shelf and
show me his name. It could have been the same magazine over and over, for
all I know. No books, though, I don’t think. You should go out to Wickenden
and ask them, though, if you want to know about his work.”
“I already did. I graduated from there,” I said stupidly, boastfully. I really
just wanted to tell her something about myself, lay it in front of her and see
whether she picked it up.
“Did you? I wanted to go there. Didn’t get in,” she said, knocking on the
side of her head. “Not enough brains.”
“Just tell me which admissions officer to shoot.”
She laughed. “What do you think of this?” she asked, pointing to the
speakers.
“I like it,” I said dopily, unable to come up with something smarter. It
sounded like music. Pretty music. “What instrument do you play?”
“Piano, a little violin, a little cello, nothing else,” she said, putting her head
in her hands and shaking her head. “It’s my music-teacher badge of shame.
I’m a fraud, I know.” She smiled ruefully.
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