Chapter 12: Deacidification

She bought a shallow plastic tray at the hardware store on Georgia Avenue, the kind used for mixing paint or for catching the drip from potted plants, and she filled it with deionized water and added calcium hydroxide from the brown bottle on her counter, stirring with a glass rod until the powder dissolved and the solution reached a concentration of 0.15 percent, and she checked the pH — 10.2, strongly alkaline, the base that would neutralize the acids — and she set the tray on the kitchen table and placed a sheet of polyester web on the surface of the solution and took the first letter from the Hollinger box.

The 1972 letter. Written on air mail paper — the thin, lightweight paper with the blue and red striped border that was designed to be mailed internationally, to be carried by air across oceans, and that was therefore as thin as possible, to reduce weight, to reduce cost, to allow the maximum number of words for the minimum postage. The air mail paper was fragile — thinner than onionskin, more susceptible to handling damage, to tearing, to the particular brittleness that came from decades of acid accumulation in fibers that were already sparse, already minimal, already pushed to the limit of what paper could be and still be paper.

Ruth laid the letter on the polyester web. She had cut the web to size, slightly larger than the letter, so that it extended beyond the edges on all sides, providing a frame of support that would allow her to lift the letter from the bath without touching the paper itself, the way a stretcher allowed paramedics to move a patient without stressing the injured body.

She lowered the web and the letter into the calcium hydroxide solution.

The paper entered the water and darkened, the way all paper darkened when wet, the fibers absorbing the liquid, swelling, becoming translucent. The air mail paper was so thin that it became almost invisible in the solution, the blue and red stripes of the border ghostly beneath the surface, the Igbo text fading as the paper became transparent, the words seeming to dissolve into the water the way sugar dissolved, the way salt dissolved, the way anything soluble dissolved when immersed in a medium that could receive it.

Ruth knew the words were not dissolving. The iron gall ink in this letter had been stabilized with calcium phytate the previous week, and the ink was not water-soluble in any case — the iron gall complex, once formed, was resistant to water, which was one of the reasons it had been the preferred ink for a thousand years. The words were safe. The words would survive the bath. What would not survive was the acid — the sulfuric acid and the acetic acid and the various organic acids that had accumulated in the paper over fifty-four years, the acids that were breaking the cellulose chains, weakening the fibers, making the paper brittle and brown and fragile.

She set her timer for twenty minutes and sat at the table and watched the letter soak.

There was something meditative about watching a document in a wash bath. The stillness of the water, the slow diffusion of the acids from the paper into the solution, the gradual lightening of the paper's color as the water-soluble degradation products were leached away. Ruth had watched this process thousands of times and it still held her attention, still felt meaningful, the visible evidence of chemistry working, of harm being drawn out, of a document being cleaned from the inside.

She thought about the letter that was soaking — the 1972 letter, addressed to Chidinma, the translation of which she had read the previous evening. Her mother had written about language. About the experience of living in English, of conducting her daily life in a language that was not the language she dreamed in, the language she counted in, the language she prayed in. She described the feeling as a kind of doubled existence — the English self who went to the grocery store and spoke to neighbors and helped Ruth with her homework and attended embassy functions, and the Igbo self who lived beneath the English self like a palimpsest, like an earlier text partially erased but still present, still legible if you knew how to read it.

In English I am competent, her mother had written, according to Dr. Azikiwe's translation. In English I can do everything. I can explain and argue and negotiate and charm. In English I am David's wife and Ruth's mother and a woman who lives in Silver Spring, Maryland. But in Igbo I am something else. In Igbo I am the girl who grew up in Onitsha, who swam in the Niger, who sat in her grandmother's kitchen and listened to stories about the tortoise and the elephant. In Igbo I am the teacher who stood in front of a class of girls and told them that mathematics was a language too, a language that described the world without lying about it. In Igbo I am Adaeze. In English I am Ada.

Ruth thought about the two names — Adaeze, the Igbo name, meaning "first daughter of the king," and Ada, the shortened, anglicized version that her mother had used in America, the name that fit more easily in American mouths, that did not require explanation, that did not carry the weight of Igbo naming conventions, the history and the aspiration embedded in the full name.

She had called her mother Ada. Everyone in Silver Spring had called her Ada. Only in the letters — only in the Igbo letters to the Igbo recipients — was she Adaeze, the full name, the name that carried the full weight of who she was and where she came from.

The timer went off. Ruth transferred the letter to the second tray — the magnesium bicarbonate bath — and set the timer again. She placed the next letter on the polyester web and lowered it into the calcium hydroxide solution. Letter by letter, the deacidification proceeded, the rhythm steady, the process the same for each document — wash, transfer, wash, dry. The kitchen table became a conservation bench, the shallow trays of alkaline solution glowing in the morning light from the north-facing window, the letters entering the baths one at a time and emerging lighter, cleaner, more flexible, the acids neutralized, the alkaline reserve deposited, the paper given a future.

She worked through the morning, treating seven letters. The onionskin letters were the most nerve-wracking — so thin, so fragile, so close to the threshold of disintegration that Ruth held her breath each time she lowered one into the bath, watching the paper darken and soften, praying — not literally, but with the focused, desperate attention that was her version of prayer — that the fibers would hold, that the paper would survive the immersion, that the treatment would not destroy the thing it was meant to save.

They held. Every letter survived the bath. The onionskin paper, which had seemed so fragile in its dry state, showed unexpected resilience when wet — the fibers, swollen with water, recovered some of their original flexibility, the paper becoming pliant and soft, almost textile-like, the way paper had been before the acids made it brittle, the way paper was when it was new, when it left the papermaker's hands, when it was ready to receive whatever words the writer chose to place on it.

Ruth laid each treated letter on clean blotter paper, covered it with a second sheet of blotter, pressed it gently with a board and weight, and set it aside to dry. The kitchen table filled with drying letters, each one flattening under its weight, each one returning from its liquid state to its solid state, from its vulnerable, open, permeable condition to its stable, dry, protected condition, the way a person returned from grief to equilibrium, from openness to composure, from the raw state of feeling to the managed state of daily life.

At noon she stopped. She removed her gloves and ate lunch and looked at the kitchen table covered with drying letters and felt a satisfaction that was deeper than professional pride, that was closer to the feeling she had when she planted the hibiscus with her father — the satisfaction of doing something physical, something real, something that involved her hands and her knowledge and her attention and that produced a tangible result: paper that was lighter, stronger, more flexible, more likely to last.

In the afternoon she read more of Dr. Azikiwe's translations while the letters dried.

Her mother's voice was becoming familiar. Across the letters, across the years, across the varying papers and inks, a consistent sensibility emerged — precise, observant, capable of both tenderness and rigor, the voice of a woman who had been trained as a teacher and who brought a teacher's habits of thought to everything she wrote: the careful exposition, the illustrative example, the rhetorical question that was not really a question but an invitation to think.

In a letter to Chidinma from 1976, her mother wrote about memory:

Do you remember the cloth seller at the Onitsha market, the one with the stall near the river gate, the one who always had the best indigo. I dreamed about her last night. I dreamed I was standing at her stall and she was unrolling a bolt of cloth and the cloth was covered in writing — not printed, written, in someone's handwriting, and I tried to read it but I could not because the writing was in a language I did not recognize, and I woke up and I thought: that is what memory is. A cloth covered in writing you cannot read. You know it says something. You know it was written by someone who knew what it said. But you cannot read it, and the more time passes the more the writing fades, and eventually the cloth is blank again, and you are left holding a piece of fabric that means something but says nothing.

Ruth read this passage three times. She thought about how her mother's metaphor for memory was, almost exactly, a description of what had happened to the letters themselves — documents covered in writing that the intended reader could not read, the meaning present but inaccessible, the fading not of the ink but of the connection between the words and the reader, the gap that was not physical but linguistic, not a matter of chemistry but of knowledge, of the particular knowledge that Ruth did not have and that Dr. Azikiwe did.

She thought about how her mother had compared memory to a cloth and how she, Ruth, compared everything to paper, and how both comparisons were acts of translation — the rendering of an abstract experience in the terms of a material practice, the mind reaching for the metaphor that was closest to hand, the teacher reaching for the cloth and the conservator reaching for the paper and both of them saying the same thing: that meaning was fragile, that it needed a medium, that the medium deteriorated, that the deterioration could be slowed but not stopped, and that the only defense against total loss was attention, care, the deliberate act of preservation.

The letters dried. Ruth checked them one by one, testing the pH with indicator strips. The results were consistent: all above 7.5, most between 8.0 and 8.5. The acids had been neutralized. The magnesium bicarbonate reserve had been deposited. The papers were stable.

She placed each letter back in its acid-free folder, handling them with the care she had always given to Library documents, but with something additional — an awareness, beneath the professional attention, of what these papers were. Not just substrates for ink. Not just carriers of language. But artifacts of her mother's daily practice, objects her mother had touched, had held, had chosen, had sat with at a desk in Silver Spring or Lagos, writing by lamplight, the pen scratching in the particular rhythm of Igbo, the words flowing in the tonal, agglutinative patterns of a language that carried, as her mother had written, the history of its own changes.

Each letter was a moment. Each letter was a Saturday evening or a Tuesday afternoon or a Thursday morning when Adaeze Okafor had sat down and chosen to write — not to speak, not to call, not to send a telegram, but to write, to put ink on paper, to create a physical object that could be held and read and reread and stored and found and lost and found again. The choice to write was itself a form of preservation. Her mother had understood this. She had chosen the medium that lasted — not the spoken word, which evaporated; not the phone call, which existed only in the moment of speaking; but the letter, the material letter, the paper and ink that persisted, that endured, that could survive the writer by decades, by centuries, if properly cared for.

Ruth returned the Hollinger box to the closet. She cleaned her kitchen — rinsed the trays, poured the solutions down the drain with plenty of water, washed the beakers, dried the tools, wiped the table. The kitchen returned to its normal state, a kitchen again rather than a lab, the evidence of the treatment removed, the domestic space restored.

But the kitchen remembered. The way paper remembered every environment it had passed through — every temperature, every humidity level, every contact with another material — the kitchen now carried, in Ruth's mind if not in its physical state, the memory of what had happened there: the trays of alkaline solution, the letters entering the bath, the acids dissolving, the paper lightening, the treatment that a conservator had performed on her own mother's letters in her own kitchen on a Saturday morning in April.

Ruth made tea. She sat at the clean table. She drank the tea and looked out the window at the evening light on Georgia Avenue, the long shadows of the buildings stretching across the street, the trees in full leaf now, the dogwoods past, the oaks and maples and elms wearing their summer green, the city settling into the long evenings of late April.

She thought about deacidification. The removal of acid. The neutralization of the harmful compound. The restoration of the paper's pH to a safe, alkaline range. She thought about how the treatment did not restore the paper to its original condition — the damage that the acid had already caused was irreversible, the cellulose chains already broken, the strength already lost — but prevented further damage, stabilized the current state, established a baseline from which the paper could endure.

She thought about how grief worked the same way. The loss was irreversible. Her mother was dead. The years of not reading the letters could not be recovered. The Igbo she had not learned could not be retroactively learned. The conversations she had not had with her mother about the letters, about the writing, about the Igbo, about Obiageli, about the cloth seller in the Onitsha market — those conversations would never happen.

But the further damage could be prevented. The acids of guilt and neglect could be neutralized. The current state could be stabilized. An alkaline reserve could be deposited — a store of understanding, of translated words, of treated papers, of the slow accumulation of knowledge about who her mother had been and what she had thought and felt — that would buffer against future harm, that would protect against the ongoing degradation that grief, unattended, inflicted on the grieving.

Ruth finished her tea. She washed the cup. She went to bed.

The letters rested in the Hollinger box, deacidified, stabilized, their pH above 7.5, their alkaline reserve in place. They were still damaged — the foxing was still present, the tears still needed mending, the papers still bore the evidence of fifty years of aging and four years of neglect — but the active destruction had been halted, the acids neutralized, the iron chelated, the chemistry of decay interrupted by the chemistry of treatment.

The treatment continued.

Tomorrow Ruth would return to the Library and continue treating the Grayson letters. She would mend tears and flatten cockled sheets and remove adhesive residue and deacidify wood-pulp papers and document each treatment in her reports. And in the evenings and on the weekends she would continue treating her mother's letters — the mending still to come, the resizing still to come, the final examination still to come.

And she would read the translations. One by one, letter by letter, year by year, from 1970 to 2000, the words of a woman who had known that her daughter would lose the Igbo and who had kept writing in Igbo anyway, the seeds in the dry soil, waiting for the rain that was now, finally, falling.

The deacidification was complete.

The neutralization had begun.