Chapter 18: Recto and Verso

Every document had two sides. The recto — the front, the face, the side that bore the primary text, the side that was seen first, read first, examined first. And the verso — the back, the reverse, the side that was usually blank or that bore secondary text, annotations, addresses, the marks that accumulated on the surface that was not the surface of primary attention.

The conservator examined both. Always. The condition of the verso told you things the recto could not — how the document had been stored, what it had been in contact with, whether there were repairs on the other side, whether the ink had bled through, whether the paper was thinner than it appeared from the front. The verso was the hidden side, the side that faced the wall when the document was framed, the side that faced the table when the document was read, the side that was present but not presented, that existed but was not displayed.

Ruth thought about recto and verso on the Saturday she brought the final translations to her father.

She drove to Silver Spring in the late June heat, the car's air conditioning working against the ninety-degree afternoon, the portfolio case on the passenger seat containing the last batch of translations — the letters from 1987 to 2000, including the letter to Ruth. She had printed a copy of the letter for her father. She had debated whether to share it — it was addressed to her, it was private, it was her mother's words to her — but she had decided that her father should read it, because her father was part of the story, because the letter mentioned him, because the marriage between David and Adaeze was one of the letter's subjects, and because David had been patient for four years and had earned, through his patience and his planting of hibiscus and his corrections about Colesville Road and Georgia Avenue, the right to read his wife's final written words.

The hibiscus were blooming. Ruth saw them from the flagstone path — three plants in the flower bed, each bearing large, open flowers, the petals a deep red that was almost the color of the laterite soil in Onitsha, almost the color of the earth that Ruth had thrown on her mother's coffin, almost the color of iron oxide, which was the color of rust, which was the color of foxing, which was the color of deterioration made visible on paper.

The flowers were beautiful. They were the hardy variety — not her mother's tropical hibiscus but the Maryland-adapted version, the substitute, the compromise that David had planted because he understood that some adaptation was necessary, that the original could not always survive transplantation, that sometimes the thing you planted was not the thing you remembered but a version of it, a relative, a descendant that carried some of the original's characteristics while accommodating the demands of new soil.

David was on the porch, sitting in a wicker chair, drinking tea. He wore a short-sleeved shirt and pressed trousers, his concession to the heat, his shoulders straight, his white hair bright against his dark skin in the afternoon sun.

"The hibiscus are blooming," Ruth said.

"Since last week. Three flowers so far. There will be more."

She sat in the other wicker chair. He poured her tea from the pot on the small table between them. They sat on the porch and looked at the garden and drank tea, and the silence between them was different from the silence that had existed before — before the translations, before the letters, before the planting of the hibiscus. The old silence had been a silence of avoidance, of the unspoken, of the things that sat between them like stones in a river. This silence was a silence of comfort, of two people who had spoken and were now resting, who had opened a conversation that had been closed for decades and who were allowing it to breathe, to settle, to find its own rhythm.

"I brought the rest of the translations," Ruth said.

"Good."

"And there is one — one letter — that I want you to read first. Before the others."

She took the portfolio case and removed the printout of the 2000 letter's translation and handed it to her father.

David put on his reading glasses. He looked at the first line.

"Ada nke m," he said, reading the Igbo salutation that Dr. Azikiwe had preserved at the top of the translation. His pronunciation was perfect — the tones precise, the syllables weighted correctly, the words emerging from his mouth with the ease of a language he had spoken for sixty years, the language he and Adaeze had shared, the private language, the language of the nights when she wrote and he listened.

He read the letter.

Ruth watched him read. She watched his face the way she watched a document under treatment — with sustained, detailed attention, noting the changes, the micro-expressions, the small movements of the eyes and mouth and brow that indicated the reader's internal response to the text. She saw him reach the passage about English and Igbo — English is for what is useful, Igbo is for what is true — and she saw his jaw tighten, the smallest contraction of the masseter muscle, the involuntary response of a man who was hearing something he recognized, something he had always known but had never heard articulated.

She saw him reach the passage about the letters as seeds. She saw his eyes pause, reread, continue.

She saw him reach the final paragraph — I want the language to be housed in you — and she saw him remove his reading glasses and press his fingertips against his closed eyes and she saw the tremor in his hands, the same tremor she had seen when he read the first translations, the tremor that was not age but feeling, the material response to an emotional immersion.

He was quiet for a long time. The porch was warm. The hibiscus nodded in a faint breeze. A mockingbird sang from the magnolia tree, running through its repertoire of borrowed songs, each one a copy of another bird's call, the mockingbird's identity defined by its ability to reproduce the voices of others, to carry other songs in its own throat.

"She planned this," David said.

"Yes."

"She told me — before she left for Lagos the last time — she told me that she had arranged for the letters to go to you. She said, 'Ruth will know what to do with them.' I thought she meant the paper. The conservation. The physical preservation. I did not understand that she meant the language."

"I don't think she meant just one thing."

"No. She never meant just one thing. That was — that was the difficulty of being married to her. And the richness. She spoke on two levels always. The surface and the — what do you call it. The layer beneath."

"The verso."

David looked at her. "Yes. The verso. Every conversation had a recto and a verso, the thing she was saying and the thing she was not saying, and the thing she was not saying was usually the more important thing, and I learned, over fifty years, to read the verso, to hear what she was not saying, to understand the conversation that was happening beneath the conversation."

"What was on the verso of your marriage."

David set down the translation. He picked up his tea and drank and set the cup back on the saucer with the same precise placement Ruth had noted in every visit, the diplomat's care, the deliberate choreography of objects.

"The verso of our marriage," he said, "was that she was lonely and I was absent and we both knew it and neither of us said it, and the not-saying became the thing itself, became the subject that we were always not-discussing, and the silence around that subject became structural, became part of the architecture of the marriage, the way the walls of a house become part of the architecture — you stop seeing them, you stop thinking about them, they are just there, they are the medium you move through."

"She wrote about it to Chidinma."

"Yes. She wrote what she could not say. That is what the Igbo was for. The Igbo was the verso. The English was the recto. We lived our marriage in English — in the English of Washington, of diplomacy, of daily life, of grocery lists and school schedules and embassy dinners — and she lived her interior life in Igbo, in letters to her sisters and her friends, in the language that carried what English could not carry, the things that were true rather than useful."

Ruth thought about recto and verso. She thought about the two sides of every document, the two sides of every marriage, the two sides of every person — the presented side and the hidden side, the public face and the private face, the language you spoke and the language you wrote in when you needed to say what was true.

"Papa," she said. "Did you and Mama ever talk about the loneliness. In English or in Igbo."

"Once. Near the end. After her diagnosis — the stroke risk, the blood pressure, the doctor in Lagos who told her to slow down. She came home from that visit and she sat at the kitchen table and she said to me, in English: 'I have been lonely in this house for thirty years.' And I said: 'I know.' And she said: 'You knew.' And I said: 'Yes.' And she said: 'Then why did you not say anything.' And I said — and this is the thing I am most ashamed of, Ruth — I said: 'Because I did not know how to say it in English.'"

Ruth looked at her father.

"I meant," David said, "that the words existed. The English words. Lonely. Alone. Missing. Homesick. The words existed. But they did not — they did not do the thing that needed to be done. They did not carry the weight. I could say 'I know you are lonely' but the sentence in English was — flat. Informational. It described the condition without entering it. In Igbo I could have said — in Igbo there are words that — but I did not say it in Igbo either, because by then the Igbo between us had become the language of the verso, the language of what we did not say out loud, the language we kept in reserve for the conversations we were not having."

"What would you have said in Igbo."

David was quiet. The mockingbird sang. The hibiscus bloomed.

"I would have said: A na m ahụ gị n'anya, ọ bụ ezie na anọghị m. I love you even though I am not here."

The sentence hung in the air between them, the Igbo words sounding on the porch of the house in Silver Spring where Adaeze Okafor had grown hibiscus and written letters and been lonely for thirty years, and Ruth heard the words and understood them — not fully, not with the fluency of a native speaker, but enough, the meaning arriving through the tones and the familiar roots, ihunanya — love — and anọghị m — I am not here — and the sentence assembling itself in her mind the way a document assembled itself under treatment, the fragments coming together, the pieces aligning, the mend closing the tear.

"You should have said it," Ruth said.

"Yes."

"But you said it now."

"Yes. To you. Not to her."

"She would have heard it."

David looked at the hibiscus. "You believe that."

"I believe that the letters are here. I believe that the words are on the paper. I believe that the words are in me now — her words, in her language, translated and read and studied and learned, word by word, letter by letter. I believe that the words are alive in me the way the words are alive in the paper — not the original condition, not the original form, but treated, stabilized, carried forward. I believe that what she left is here. And if what she left is here, then in some sense she is here. Not alive. But present. The way a watermark is present in paper — invisible unless you hold it up to the light."

David looked at her. His eyes were wet. He did not wipe them. He let the moisture sit, the way Ruth let the foxing sit on her mother's letters — not because it was acceptable but because it was evidence, because it told a story, because removing it would erase something that mattered.

"You talk like a conservator," he said.

"I am a conservator."

"You talk like your mother."

The sentence was the kindest thing he had ever said to her, and Ruth received it the way she received a document that she had been searching for — with the quiet recognition that the thing she was holding was real, was significant, was worth the effort of the search.

They sat on the porch for another hour. David read the remaining translations — the letters from 1987 to 1999 — and Ruth sat beside him and looked at the garden, at the hibiscus, at the lawn that was mowed but not loved, at the flower bed where three red flowers bloomed in the June heat, and she thought about recto and verso and the two sides of everything — documents, marriages, languages, lives — and she thought about how the conservator's job was to examine both sides, to look at the front and the back, to read the text and the subtext, to see what was presented and what was hidden, and to treat both with equal care, equal attention, equal respect.

The recto of her mother's life: a teacher in Lagos, a diplomat's wife in Silver Spring, a woman who spoke English fluently and kept a garden and raised a daughter and attended embassy functions and died in her sleep.

The verso of her mother's life: a woman who wrote in Igbo to the people she loved about the things she could not say in English, who was lonely for thirty years in a house in Maryland, who planted tropical flowers in temperate soil, who wrote a letter to a friend named Obiageli and might never have sent it, who wrote a letter to herself on her forty-first birthday, who wrote a letter to her daughter in a language the daughter could not read and trusted that the daughter would find her way back to the language.

Both sides were true. Both sides were the document. The conservator's job was not to choose between them but to preserve both, to examine both, to understand the document as a whole, recto and verso, front and back, the presented and the hidden, the English and the Igbo, the useful and the true.

Ruth drove home in the evening light. The streets of Silver Spring were busy with Saturday traffic, families heading to restaurants, children riding bicycles on the sidewalks, the city alive with the long June evening.

She parked at her apartment. She climbed the stairs. She stood in the kitchen and looked at the table where she had treated the letters and read the translations and learned to read Igbo, the table that had been her workbench and her classroom and her confessional, the surface that had held the trays of alkaline solution and the drying letters and the printed translations and the brown bottle of calcium phytate, the table that knew more about her than any other object in her apartment.

She sat down. She did not make tea. She sat in the silence of the apartment and she thought about her parents — about the marriage she had grown up inside, the house she had lived in, the conversations she had overheard and the conversations she had not, the recto she had seen and the verso she had missed, the English she had understood and the Igbo she had not.

She thought about her father saying a na m ahụ gị n'anya, ọ bụ ezie na anọghị m — I love you even though I am not here — and she thought about how the sentence was both a confession and a description, both an apology and a fact, and she thought about how marriage was like a document: it deteriorated over time, it was acted upon by forces both internal and external, it needed treatment, it needed attention, it needed the particular care of someone who understood its condition and who was willing to do the work of stabilization.

Her parents' marriage had not been perfect. It had been foxed — marked by the brown spots of loneliness and absence and silence, the visible deterioration of a relationship that had been stored in imperfect conditions for too long. But it had survived. It had endured. The paper had held. The words had remained legible. The document — the marriage, the family, the structure of love and obligation and habit and language that Adaeze and David had built over fifty years — had survived its foxing, had come through its deterioration, had lasted long enough for the next generation to examine it, to understand it, to treat it with the care it deserved.

Ruth sat in the silence and she thought about this and she felt something settle in her — not a resolution, not a conclusion, but a stabilization, a leveling, the paper of her understanding lying flat at last after years of cockle and distortion, the treatment taking effect, the fibers relaxing, the document finding its equilibrium.

She made tea. She drank it. She went to bed.

The letters rested in the closet. The translations rested in the folder on the kitchen counter. The Igbo rested in her mind, growing, slowly, the roots reaching down, the leaves reaching up, the language establishing itself in the soil of her attention, the seeds her mother had planted beginning to bloom.