The Geographer's Library

The Geographer’ s Library
The monastery, however, offered far more comfortable digs—fires, soft
couches, well-insulated rooms, a warm kitchen—than the history department,
which was stuffed into a nineteenth-century Queen Anne house that
hadn’t seen a fresh coat of paint in decades and whose walls, in the howling
midwinter (and even now, in early December), were the merest formality.
At the main desk, one secretary was talking to another about either
her disobedient husband, son, or dog—“. . . and he goes right there on the
floor, so I told him, I said, ‘Angelo, you’re gonna clean that up, and you’re
not going out tonight until you do,’ so he says...”—when I knocked on
the open door.
“Help you?” she asked.
“I hope so. My name’s Paul, and I’m a reporter for the Lincoln Carrier in
Lincoln, Connecticut. I was wondering if the department had a sort of biography,
or any sort of biographical information, for Professor Pühapäev.”
She craned her neck and looked over at the mailboxes. “Pühapäev hasn’t
been in yet today. Couple of days, actually, it looks like. You can ask him
when he gets here, or you can leave a message and I’ll put it in his box.”
I looked around me, a little panicky. How could nobody in the department
know? But then it was clear: he lived alone and two hours away,
probably had few close friends here, and kept irregular hours. The perfect
person to go missing or drift away. The perfect person to realize our most
knee-buckling fear, the one that saves uncountable marriages and holds families
together with the unconquerable mixture of love and terror: the perfect
person to die alone, unmissed and unnoticed.
“I’m sorry to tell you this, but Professor Pühapäev died the night before
last. He lived in my town. I’m just looking for some information about him so
I can write an obituary.”
She blanched and looked down. The other secretaries stopped typing. It
was like a western when the stranger walks into the bar and everything stops.
The secretary crossed herself. “Died? How? What happened?”
“I don’t know yet, actually. He lived alone, and they only just found him.
I’m just up here looking for some background stuff about him, something so
I can write an obit. Do you by any chance know how old he was?”
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