Chapter 15: Humidification

Humidification was the introduction of controlled moisture into a dry, cockled, distorted document. The paper had dried unevenly — perhaps from water damage, perhaps from decades of fluctuating humidity, perhaps from the stress of being folded and unfolded and refolded — and the fibers had contracted at different rates in different areas, causing the sheet to buckle, to warp, to curl, to resist lying flat. The distortion was both aesthetic and structural — a cockled document could not be safely handled, could not be properly photographed, could not be housed flat in a folder without mechanical stress.

The treatment was simple. Ruth placed the cockled document in a humidity chamber — at the Library, this was a purpose-built enclosure with a humidifier and a hygrometer; at home, it was a plastic bin with a damp towel draped over a wire rack — and left it for several hours, sometimes overnight. The moisture in the air penetrated the paper fibers slowly, evenly, softening them, relaxing the contracted areas, allowing the sheet to flatten under its own weight. Then Ruth removed the document from the chamber and placed it between sheets of blotter under a pressing board, and the paper dried flat, the distortions gone, the document restored to a state that approximated its original planarity.

The key was slowness. Too much moisture too quickly would saturate the paper, would cause the inks to bleed, would risk mold growth, would create more damage than the cockle itself. The moisture had to be introduced gradually — a controlled, patient, incremental increase that gave the fibers time to absorb the water at their own rate, to respond at their own pace, to unfold in their own time.

Ruth thought about humidification on the Saturday she brought the translations to her father.

She had printed them — all twenty-three that Dr. Azikiwe had completed so far, covering the period from 1970 to 1987 — and she had placed them in a manila folder and she had driven to Silver Spring and she had sat in the living room with her father and she had given him the folder and he had opened it and looked at the first page and he had not spoken for a long time.

He read the 1970 letter. The birth letter. His eyes moved across the English text — the translation of words his wife had written to him in Igbo fifty-six years ago, words he might have read in the original, or might not have, or might have read once and forgotten, the way a letter read decades ago became a memory of a letter rather than the letter itself, the content softened and blurred by time the way an image softened and blurred behind foxed glass.

"She said this," David said.

"According to the translator, yes."

"This is what love is. Not a feeling. A grip."

"Yes."

David held the paper in his hands — the printout, the translation, the English rendering of his wife's Igbo — and Ruth watched his hands and saw them tremble. Not the tremor of age, though he was eighty-one and his hands did sometimes tremble. This was a different tremor. This was the tremor of a material that had been dry for too long encountering moisture, the fibers swelling, the contracted areas releasing, the distortions of years beginning, slowly, to unfold.

He read the second letter. The third. The fourth. Ruth sat in the armchair by the window and watched him read and did not speak and did not move and did not do anything except be present, the way she was present when a document was in the humidity chamber — not intervening, not adjusting, just monitoring, just being in the room with the thing that was softening.

After an hour David set the folder on the side table and took off his reading glasses and pressed his fingertips against his closed eyes.

"She wrote about the loneliness," he said.

"Yes."

"She never told me she was lonely."

"She wrote it to Chidinma. Not to you."

"I know. But I should have — I should have known. I should have seen it. I was her husband. I was in the house."

"You were traveling."

"Yes. The postings. Lagos, Abuja, New York, Geneva. Always traveling. And she was in Silver Spring with you, and she was lonely, and she wrote about it to her sister instead of telling me, and I did not know."

His voice was steady but thin, the way old paper was thin — the material still functional, still capable of carrying weight, but reduced, worn, the fibers depleted by decades of use.

"Papa," Ruth said. "She didn't write to Chidinma instead of telling you. She wrote to Chidinma in addition to living with you. The letters aren't complaints. They're not accusations. They're — observations. She was observing her own life, recording it, the way a scientist records data. She was lonely, and she noted it, and she continued living."

"Is that what the translator said."

"No. That's what I see in the letters. That's how I read them."

David looked at her. His eyes were red at the rims, the moisture present now, the dew point reached.

"You read them like a conservator," he said.

"I read them like a daughter."

"Is there a difference."

Ruth thought about this. She thought about the twenty-four years she had spent reading documents — not the words but the paper, not the content but the condition, the material rather than the message. She thought about how the translations had forced her to read differently, to attend to the content as well as the condition, to hear the words as well as see the paper, to experience the letters as both documents and messages, both objects and communications, both paper and language.

"There used to be a difference," she said. "There's less of one now."

David picked up the folder again. He turned to the letter about Ruth's first words — the mixture of Igbo and English, the bilingual child's speech.

"She wrote this," he said.

"Yes."

"She was afraid you would lose the Igbo."

"I did lose it."

"You are finding it again."

"I'm trying. It's slow."

"Everything that matters is slow," David said, and the sentence had the quality of something he had said before, many times, in many contexts — a personal maxim, a principle of his diplomatic career, a piece of wisdom that he had carried so long it had become structural, a chain line in the paper of his character, invisible until you held it up to the light.

They sat together in the living room for the rest of the afternoon. David read the translations, one by one, slowly, the way Ruth read condition reports, attending to every detail. Sometimes he stopped and looked up and said something — a memory that the letter triggered, a detail that the translation missed or misrepresented, a correction that only he could provide.

"She says here that the garden center was on Colesville Road. It was on Georgia Avenue. The one on Colesville Road was the hardware store."

"She says here that you learned to ride a bicycle when you were six. You were five. I remember because it was the summer of 1975 and we had just moved to the house and the sidewalk in front was newly paved and you rode up and down on it for hours."

"She says here that the hibiscus died in the winter of 1983. They did not die. They lost their leaves. They came back in the spring. She always said they died, every winter, and every spring she was surprised when they came back. She never believed in the resilience of her own plants."

These corrections — small, precise, the adjustments of a witness to a record — accumulated over the afternoon, and Ruth received them the way she received all information about the documents in her care: carefully, attentively, with the understanding that every detail mattered, that the small corrections were as important as the large ones, that the difference between Colesville Road and Georgia Avenue was the difference between an accurate record and an inaccurate one, and that accuracy, in conservation as in memory, was not pedantry but care.

At five o'clock David set down the folder. He had read thirteen of the twenty-three translations. He was tired. The reading had cost him something — Ruth could see it in the lines around his eyes, in the slight stoop of his usually straight shoulders, in the way his hands rested on the arms of the sofa, open, palms up, as though he had set down something heavy.

"I will read the rest next week," he said.

"There's no hurry."

"There is always a hurry when you are eighty-one," he said, and it was not self-pity but fact, the same kind of fact that Ruth dealt in — the pH is 4.2, the paper is acidic, the cellulose is degrading, the time is limited.

Ruth drove home.

On Monday she began her Igbo lessons with Dr. Azikiwe.

The lessons took place in the linguist's office at Howard, on Monday and Thursday afternoons, for one hour each. Ruth sat across the desk from Nneka and opened a letter — a different letter each session, chosen by Nneka for its linguistic features, its vocabulary, its grammatical structures — and Nneka pointed to a word and said it and Ruth repeated it and the word entered her mouth and she felt it there, felt the shape of it, the tonal rise or fall, the particular configuration of tongue and teeth and breath that the Igbo consonant clusters required.

The language was difficult. Ruth had expected it to be difficult and it was. The tonal system — the three tones, high and mid and low, that determined meaning — was the hardest part. The same syllable spoken at a high pitch meant something different from the same syllable spoken at a low pitch, and Ruth's ear, trained for twenty-four years to detect the subtle differences in paper color and texture and condition, struggled to detect the subtle differences in pitch that determined whether she was saying akwụ (egg) or àkwụ́ (palm fruit) or ákwụ̀ (to fall).

But her ear was not untrained. It had been trained, in childhood, by the sound of her mother's voice speaking Igbo, and the training was still there, dormant, the way the roots of a perennial plant were dormant through the winter — alive but inactive, the cellular machinery intact but suspended, waiting for the signal to resume growth.

The signal was coming. Slowly, incrementally, through the repetition of sounds and the practice of tones and the patient instruction of a woman who understood that she was not teaching a foreign language but reteaching a first language, not introducing new material but excavating old material, not building from scratch but restoring from remnants.

Nneka was a good teacher. She was patient without being patronizing, rigorous without being harsh. She understood that Ruth's relationship to Igbo was complicated — not the simple distance of a foreigner but the guilty distance of a native who had lost the language, the daughter who had answered in English when her mother spoke in Igbo — and she treated that complication with the same care that Ruth treated a complicated document, assessing the condition, identifying the damage, proposing the treatment, proceeding with patience and skill.

"You have the sounds in your body," Nneka said during the third lesson. "You produce the tones correctly when you are not thinking about them. It is when you think that you falter. The language is in your ear, not in your mind. We need to move it from the ear to the mind, from the passive to the active, from recognition to production."

"How."

"By reading. By reading your mother's letters. By learning the words in context, in the sentences where your mother placed them, in the patterns of her particular idiom. You will learn your mother's Igbo first. You will learn to read her handwriting, her vocabulary, her syntax. And from there you will expand. But the foundation will be her language. Her voice."

Ruth thought about this — learning language from a specific voice, the way a conservator learned paper from specific documents. She had not learned conservation in the abstract. She had learned it by handling documents, by treating real papers with real damage, by developing her skills on actual objects rather than theoretical ones. The documents had taught her. The paper had taught her. The ink and the foxing and the tears and the fold lines had taught her what textbooks could not — the feel of it, the tactile knowledge, the body's understanding of how a microspatula moved through wheat starch paste, how a bone folder pressed Japanese tissue onto a torn edge, how a sheet of paper felt when it was strong and how it felt when it was weak.

She would learn Igbo the same way. Not from a textbook but from a text. Not from grammar rules but from her mother's grammar, her mother's sentences, her mother's way of putting words together to describe the world. She would learn the language the way she learned paper — by touching it, by handling it, by spending time with it, by paying the kind of attention that only practice could develop.

The weeks passed. Ruth divided her time between the Library and her home and Howard University, the three points of a triangle that defined her life in these months — the professional work, the personal work, the educational work, each one informing the others, each one part of the larger treatment that she was performing on herself, on her family, on the legacy of letters that her mother had left behind.

At the Library, the Grayson collection treatment progressed. She had treated forty-seven of the sixty-three items, the most damaged letters stabilized and mended and housed in their acid-free folders, the less damaged ones deacidified and flattened and ready for exhibition. Miriam was pleased with the work. The curator was pleased with the results. The letters were beautiful — not in the aesthetic sense, not in the way that a painting or a photograph was beautiful, but in the conservator's sense, the sense in which beauty meant stability, meant survival, meant the successful transition from a state of active deterioration to a state of enduring preservation.

At home, the Okafor letters were nearly finished. Ruth had treated all forty-one — deacidification, phytate stabilization, mending, lining for the three most damaged. She had resized the papers that needed resizing. She had flattened the cockled sheets in her improvised humidity chamber. She had placed each letter in its acid-free folder, each folder in the Hollinger box, each letter documented in a notebook she kept on the kitchen shelf — a personal treatment log, less formal than the Library's database but equally thorough, recording the condition, the treatment, the materials used, the outcome.

At Howard, the Igbo lessons continued. Ruth could now read simple sentences. She could recognize the shapes of the letters — the Latin alphabet, familiar from English, but used differently, with additional letters and diacritical marks that indicated tone and nasalization. She could sound out words. She could parse simple constructions — subject, verb, object — and she could, in some cases, understand the meaning without consulting the translation, the Igbo yielding its content directly to her, the way transmitted light yielded the paper's internal structure, the way raking light yielded the surface topography, each mode of seeing revealing a different layer of the document.

She was learning to see her mother's letters in a new mode. The mode in which the words were not opaque marks on paper but transparent carriers of meaning, the language becoming accessible, the text opening up, the document revealing its content to a reader who had been, for fifty-six years, unable to read it.

The humidification was working. The dry, cockled, distorted relationship between Ruth and her mother's language was softening, flattening, relaxing into a shape that approximated its original form — the form it had had in the first years of Ruth's life, when Igbo was not a foreign language but the first language, the sound of home, the mother tongue.

Ruth knew that the humidification was not complete. She knew that she would never be fluent. She would never read Igbo with the ease of a native reader, with the speed and intuition of Dr. Azikiwe, with the deep understanding of the tonal and cultural nuances that only a childhood immersion could provide. She would always read her mother's letters slowly, haltingly, with effort, the way a treated document was always different from an untreated one — stronger, yes, but bearing the evidence of its treatment, the tissue and paste visible, the intervention apparent.

But she was reading. She was beginning to read. And the beginning was enough. The beginning was everything.

On the last Thursday in May, Ruth sat in Nneka's office and opened the 1982 letter — the letter her mother had written to herself, the letter about carrying two languages — and she read the first line aloud in Igbo.

Her pronunciation was imperfect. Her tones wavered. She stumbled on the consonant clusters and paused too long between words. But the words came out of her mouth in the language her mother had written them in, and the sound of them in the small office was the sound of something returning, the way water returned to a dry riverbed after rain, not all at once but slowly, thinly, the first trickle finding the old channels, the channels that had been carved by decades of flow and that had been dry for decades more and that were still there, still present in the landscape, waiting for the water to come back.

Nneka listened without interrupting. When Ruth reached the end of the first paragraph and stopped, the linguist nodded.

"Again," she said.

Ruth read it again.

"Your tones on obi are reversed," Nneka said. "High-low, not low-high. Óbì. Heart. Try again."

"Óbì."

"Yes. Again."

"Óbì."

"Good. Continue."

Ruth continued. She read the second paragraph, then the third. The words were coming faster now, the mouth remembering what the mind had not yet learned, the body's knowledge of the language preceding the intellect's understanding of it, the sounds emerging from a place deeper than conscious thought, from the place where her mother's voice had been stored for fifty-six years, the basement archive of the self, the deep vault where the earliest documents were kept.

She read for fifteen minutes. She understood perhaps a third of what she read. The rest was sound — beautiful, tonal, musical sound that she recognized without comprehending, the way she recognized the pattern of foxing on a sheet of paper without knowing whether it was fungal or chemical, the recognition preceding the understanding, the seeing preceding the knowing.

When she stopped, Nneka was smiling.

"Your mother would be pleased," she said.

Ruth did not know if this was true. She did not know what her mother would feel, hearing her daughter read Igbo at the age of fifty-six, haltingly, imperfectly, the tones wavering, the fluency absent but the effort present, the language returning to the mouth that had lost it. She did not know if her mother would be pleased or grieved or both — pleased that the daughter was trying, grieved that it had taken so long, both feelings present at once, the way both theories of foxing were present at once, the biological and the chemical, the fungal and the metallic, neither one fully explaining the phenomenon, both contributing to the visible result.

She thought her mother would understand. She thought her mother, who had written about the paper that endured the ink by absorbing it, by letting it change her without destroying her, would understand that the daughter who had lost the language was now absorbing it again, letting it change her, letting it soak into her fibers the way the calcium hydroxide solution soaked into paper during deacidification — slowly, thoroughly, the neutralization proceeding from the surface to the interior, the damage being addressed, the treatment taking effect.

Ruth drove home from Howard University in the May evening, the windows down, the warm air carrying the scent of cut grass and flowering trees, the long golden light of late spring stretching across the streets of Washington, and she felt something she had not felt in years, something she had not felt since before her mother's death, something that she could only describe, using the vocabulary that was most natural to her, as a change in pH — a shift from acidic to alkaline, from the harmful range to the safe range, from the state of active deterioration to the state of stability.

She was not healed. The damage was not undone. The losses were not recovered. But the treatment was working. The humidity was softening the cockled, distorted shape of her grief. The acids were being neutralized. The alkaline reserve was building. The paper — her paper, the paper of her life — was becoming flexible again, capable of lying flat, capable of being handled, capable of being read.

Ruth parked. She climbed the stairs. She made tea.

She sat at the kitchen table and opened the Hollinger box and took out the 1982 letter — the letter to Adaeze from Adaeze, the letter she had just read aloud in Nneka's office — and she held it in her gloved hands and she read the first line again, silently, in Igbo, the words forming in her mind without passing through her mouth, the language becoming internal, private, the daughter's silent reading of her mother's private words.

Adaeze nke m.

My Adaeze.

My self.

Ruth placed the letter back in the box. She closed the box. She put it in the closet.

The treatment was reaching its midpoint. Half the translations were complete. All forty-one letters had been physically treated. The Igbo lessons were underway. The Grayson collection at the Library was nearly finished. The work — both works, the professional and the personal, the paid and the unpaid, the institutional and the intimate — was proceeding, was progressing, was moving toward completion with the steady, unhurried rhythm of a treatment that could not be rushed, that required its own time, its own pace, its own gradual, patient, cell-by-cell transformation.

The humidification was working.

The paper was softening.

The distortions were beginning to ease.