"Do you want to read what Alcan wrote?" the curator had asked. "It is public knowledge, and, at the same time, secret knowledge. It is open to all, but, by the same token, it is only open to some. Did you never wonder about Alcan's tower over there?"

 

I do not remember the day I first started reading the book. I do not even know if the curator's offer had come after I had taken that book down for myself. Many years passed in the library, as I turned its pages.

 

*

 

"You must come away from here," he said simply. He spoke softly; he did not want to disturb my reading. Nevertheless, he had come for no other purpose than to bring that reading to an end.

Seeing his robes, I was afraid to oppose him, knowing neither his station nor his position within it. I tried to ask with humility, "Please, why must I go away?"

"Because those are the rules," he said simply. "And I did not say you must go away; I said you must come away, with me."

This gave me heart, since, I reasoned, if it were some particular rule that I had broken, I might yet find ways to work around it. As a student, long ago, my deviousness had known no bounds, and I discovered in the inflexibility of many systems the seeds of their own destruction. The crisp, isolated memory of those days came back now, sudden and complete, like heartbreak at a grave. As if he could read my mind the man added gently: "You have broken none of the rules. But now you must come." Doubtless this was said to assuage my anxieties; but as swiftly as my spirits had risen, they sank back down again. In a sweat, I was recalling everything I had read with heightened lucidity, cherishing the revelations, imprinting them as firmly upon my mind as it seemed possible to do.

"If you had not stopped reading, you would not have understood," he said - again, as if he had read my thoughts, and were trying to offer me consolation.

"But if I had read everything, then I would have understood everything."

"You would only have understood everything when you had finished reading," he said gently, as if this were something I had overlooked, but he was too polite to make its significance explicit. Somehow I had the impression he did not believe it was within my power to complete that book.

"Must I really come with you, now?" I said, a sudden dread overtaking me. I realised that his robes were more than the simple uniform of an official; they were ceremonial, and already I suspected that he alone was empowered to wear them, that he was the solitary keeper of an office more sinister than closing up a library and expelling its readers.

"You are an old man," was his only comment. "You have read enough."

Now a different part of me – a part I did not acknowledge - was obediently following him among the dark bookcases; he closed the great volume firmly with a weary smile, as if the futility of reading that book amused him, but nevertheless he half wished he were credulous enough to want to read it for himself.