The hunting sketches had scared her. Ophelia wondered whether that was really what she had come to find here, in the archives. A draft blew between her ankles, lightly raising her dress. This breeze came from the entrance to the stairway that led down to the second basement. Ophelia stared for a moment at the passage barred with a chain on which swung a warning sign: “PUBLIC ACCESS PROHIBITED.”
There was always a draft lingering in the archive rooms, but Ophelia couldn’t resist interpreting this one as an invitation. The second basement was calling for her presence, now.
She tugged on her great-uncle’s coat, as he was lost in his reports, perched on his library steps. “Would you allow me to go down?”
“You know very well that I’m not normally authorized to do that,” the great-uncle muttered, with a bristling of his moustache. “It’s Artemis’s private collection—only archivists have access to it. She honors us with her trust; we must not abuse it.”
“I’m not intending to read with bare hands, rest assured,” Ophelia promised, showing him her gloves. “And I’m not requesting your permission as your great-niece, I’m requesting it as curator of the family museum.”
“Yes, yes, that old chestnut,” he sighed. “It’s partly my fault. Too much of me has rubbed off on you.”
Ophelia unhooked the chain and went down the stairs, but the safety lamps didn’t come on. “Light, please,” she requested, plunged in darkness. She had to repeat the request several times. The Archives building disapproved of this latest bending of the rules. Finally, and reluctantly, it turned the lamps on; Ophelia had to put up with their flickering light.
Her great-uncle’s voice reverberated from wall to wall, down to the second basement: “Only touch with your eyes, yes! I’m as wary of your clumsiness as of the smallpox!”
With her hands deep in her pockets, Ophelia advanced through the rib-vaulted room. She passed beneath a pediment on which the archivists’ motto was carved: Artemis, we are the respectful keepers of your memory. There were Reliquaries, well protected under their glass cloches, as far as the eye could see.
If Ophelia sometimes seemed like an awkward adolescent, with her long untamed locks, her clumsy movements, and her shyness hiding behind her glasses, she became a different person when in the presence of history. Her cousins all loved pretty tearooms, strolls along the river, trips to the zoo and ballrooms. For Ophelia, the second basement of the Archives was the most fascinating place in the world. That’s where, safe and sound under those protective cloches, the shared heritage of the whole family was jealously preserved. Where the documents of the very first generation of the ark resided. Where all the repercussions of year zero had ended up. Where Ophelia got closest to the Rupture.
The Rupture was her professional obsession. She dreamt sometimes that she was running after a skyline that was forever eluding her. Night after night, she went further and further, but it was a world without end, without a crack, round and smooth as an apple; that first world whose objects she collected in her museum: sewing machines, internal combustion engines, cylinder presses, metronomes . . . Ophelia wasn’t remotely drawn to boys of her own age, but she could spend hours in the company of a barometer from the old world.
She took stock in front of an ancient parchment under protective glass. It was the founding text of the ark, the one that had linked Artemis and her descendants to Anima. The next Reliquary contained the first draft of their judicial arsenal. On it could already be found the laws that had endowed mothers and matriarchs with a decisive power over the whole community. Under the cloche of a third Reliquary, a manuscript book of statutes continued with the fundamental duties of Artemis toward her descendants: ensuring that everyone got enough to eat, had a roof over their head, received an education, learnt to put their power to good use. Written in capital letters, a clause specified that she must neither abandon her family nor leave her ark. Had Artemis imposed this line of conduct upon herself, so as not to become lax with the passing of the centuries?
Ophelia wandered like this, from Reliquary to Reliquary. The more she delved into the past, the more she felt a great calm descend upon her. She briefly lost sight of the future. She forgot that she was being betrothed against her will; she forgot the look of those hunters; she forgot that she would soon be sent to live far away from all that was dear to her.
Usually, the Reliquaries contained handwritten documents of great value, such as mappings of the new world or the birth certificate of Artemis’s first child, the eldest of all the Animists. However, some of them contained the banal artifacts of everyday life: hair scissors that clicked in the air; a crude pair of spectacles that changed hue; a little storybook whose pages turned themselves. They weren’t from the same era, but Artemis wanted them to be part of her collection in a symbolic capacity. Symbolic of what? Even she could no longer remember.
Ophelia’s steps led her instinctively towards a particular cloche, on which she respectfully laid her hand. Beneath it a register was starting to disintegrate, its ink faded by time. It was a record of the men and women who had rallied to the family spirit to create a new society. It was in fact but an impersonal list of names and numbers, but not insignificant ones: those of the survivors of the Rupture. These people had witnessed the end of the old world.
It was at this moment that Ophelia understood, with a little twinge in her chest, the nature of the call that had drawn her to her great-uncle’s archives, deep in the second basement, in front of this old register. It wasn’t the simple need to gather information; it was returning to one’s roots. Her distant ancestors had witnessed the breaking up of their world. But had they just lain down and died, for all that? No, they had invented a different life for themselves.
Ophelia tucked the locks of hair flopping over her forehead behind her ears, to uncover her face. The glasses on her nose grew clearer, shedding the grayness that had been building up for hours. She was experiencing her very own Rupture. She still felt sick with fear, but she knew now what she still had to do. She had to take up the challenge.
On her shoulders, the scarf started to move. “You’re waking up at last?” Ophelia teased it. The scarf rolled sluggishly along her coat, changed position, retightened its loops around her neck, and stopped still. A very old scarf, it spent all its time sleeping.
“We’re going back up,” Ophelia told it. “I’ve found what I was looking for.”
Just as she was about to turn back, she came across the most dusty, most enigmatic, and most disturbing Reliquary in Artemis’s whole collection. She couldn’t leave without bidding it farewell. She turned a handle and the two panels of the protective dome slid apart. She laid her gloved palm on the binding of a book, the Book, and was overcome by the same frustration she’d felt the first time she’d made contact with it like this. She couldn’t read a trace of any emotion, any thought, any intent. Of any origin whatsoever. And it wasn’t just due to her gloves, whose special weave acted as a barrier between her gifts as a reader and the world of objects. No, Ophelia had already touched the Book once with bare hands, like other readers before her, but, quite simply, it refused to reveal itself.