老太太那本，多未能通者伏于阁下

Thirteenth of March, nine in the morning. The old Ai house is two hundred metres north of the six greenhouses — four rooms of mud brick, a hand pump in the yard. The greenhouses are new. The house is old.

Reyhan, seventy, very small, dark skirt, a square scarf over her head. She has no Chinese at all, not one word. She poured tea first — brick tea boiled with salt and milk — and then sat on the edge of the kang with her hands on her knees. Aishanjiang said a few things. She went into the back room and dragged out a sack. A white woven fertiliser sack, full, bulging. She pulled it to the edge of the kang and did not open it. She says: that's all of it.

I had expected a book. Dark green board covers, or blue, like Chang's thirty-one. This is not a book. Aishanjiang untied the neck and took out a handful. Paper. Different sizes, different colours. The backs of wall calendars. Cigarette packets opened out and flattened. A piece cut off a cement sack. A wad torn out of a schoolchild's exercise book. Every sheet covered edge to edge. I turned one over: the back was a calendar from the nineteen-nineties with a red Santana printed on it.

My first move was to sort them, and I got it wrong. I tipped the lot out over half the kang and sorted by material — calendar, cigarette packet, cement sack, exercise book. Four heaps, and wrong: there are several kinds of calendar, of different weights, and several brands of cigarette. So I pushed the four apart and stopped sorting, and asked her to do it.

She did not look at the writing. She felt the paper — thickness, corners — and set each sheet down, murmuring as she went. Two hours and some. She got up once for water. At half past eleven there were nineteen stacks on the kang, the tallest two fingers thick, the shortest seven or eight sheets. Are the nineteen stacks nineteen years? A head shake, and a longish answer: she says, they are nineteen kinds of paper.

Ban Zhao came at noon while the mother cooked and Aishanjiang was outside on a call — fifty or so, plain deep robes of the Han cut, hair very neatly done with nothing extra in it, a roll of bamboo slips in her hand, not paper. She bent and touched the top sheet with the back of her hand. Sorted correctly. I said I hadn't sorted them. I know. And: Ban Zhao.

On the book: my elder brother wrote the History of the Han for more than twenty years. He did not finish the Eight Tables and the Treatise on Astronomy. Why not? He died in prison. Flat, no pause. The Emperor commanded me to the library of the Eastern Pavilion to complete it. Could you? The tables I could. A table is a grid. What goes in the boxes, he had already filled in several hundred boxes' worth. I filled in after him. And then, and I looked down at the nineteen stacks: the hard part was not carrying on writing. The hard part was that when the book was done, nobody could read it.

Finished and unreadable? When the History first came out, many could not get through it. Why? Archaic characters. Allusions. And: and one thing more — my brother's own order. Why this matter went in this chapter and that matter in that one. He never wrote it down. Setting the slips on the kang: he thought it was obvious.

Then Ma Rong. A man of my own commandery. Later a great scholar with thousands of students. He was young then. How did he learn it? 伏于阁下 — he knelt below the pavilion, and I was above, and I read it to him line by line. For how long? A long time. One book, one line at a time. But the book was finished, wasn't it? It was finished. Not a character was missing. And then, four times into the book: a book finished is half of it. The other half is somebody willing to kneel below the pavilion for three years and listen.

I said this case is harder: the author of that heap is gone. So is my brother. You could read his hand. And I pointed at the back room: this woman cannot read. She did not answer at once; she turned and looked at the back room too. Then: what did she use, just now, to make those nineteen stacks? She felt the paper. Then that is reading. And: reading does not require letters. And, and I stood up: a person who can read reads the content. A person who cannot read reads the order. And: content out of order can still be checked. Order lost, and the content is finished. — M.

Memo to file. Kucha, 13 March 2031. The Ai father's record, in a fertiliser sack.

1. It is not a book. It is thirty-nine years of loose paper — calendar backs, flattened cigarette packets, a piece of cement sack, torn-out exercise-book leaves — kept complete in one sack by a woman who cannot read a word of it.

2. She is the index, and the index is not in the sack. — My sort (by material) produced four wrong heaps. — Hers produced nineteen, by touch: nineteen kinds of paper. — And then, in forty minutes, she dated them — not by reading, by provenance. This stack is cut from fertiliser sacks; we used that brand those years, and that brand existed 1993–96. This is the back of the Santana calendar; my brother gave us that in 1998 and we used it two years because you could write on the back. This is the exercise book, from when Aishanjiang was in primary school. This is cement sack, the year we built the third house. — Earliest 1991, latest 2029. Thirty-nine years, with two blank years — "those two years he went to Ürümqi to work." The archive is complete and the finding aid is a seventy-year-old woman's memory of packaging.*

3. What is actually on the sheets, and it is not weather. Each sheet is one month: 31 cells, four lines to a cell. — Line 1: the date. — Line 2: written the night before — what tomorrow would be. — Line 3: written the next morning — what it actually was. — Line 4: how many vents he opened that day. Thirty-nine years of forecast paired with outcome, scored daily, by a man nobody asked and nobody read. This is the object I have been looking for since Chang's thirty-one notebooks, and I did not know it was the object until I saw it. Chang recorded outcomes. This man recorded his own prediction and then marked himself against it. And he marked the hits: a very small circle at the end of line 3, ballpoint, drawn lightly.

4. Three sheets, three Julys, counted by hand. — July 1996: 19 circles. — July 2010: 24. — July 2020: 11. Read cold, that series says: he got better into middle age and then fell apart. It is a career-decline curve and it is completely wrong. I asked whether something happened around 2020. Reyhan pointed at her own eyes. "His eyes went in 2018." And then, slowly: "He couldn't see the clouds at night any more." The instrument failed, not the judgement. And nothing in thirty-nine years of paper says so. The correction is one sentence, held by a woman of seventy who cannot read the record it corrects.

5. The general form, and I think it is the thing Volume Four is going to be about. In Volume Three I wrote that a record nobody reads is half a tally. That was incomplete. Here the record is complete, the author is dead, and it is still only half — and the missing half is not another document. It is a living person, and she is not the author. Chang's string needed a sentence said out loud by an outsider. This needs a woman to point at her own eyes. In both cases the missing half was never written down because to the people concerned it was not information.

6. What I did not do. I did not offer to buy it, take it, or digitise it today. I have ¥62,000 and four months. What I did was write down the nineteen stacks and their years, photograph each stack, and record who said what about it. Standing plan, unfunded: the reading of Yiming's forty-year book by Ailì this winter; and, if there is a next year, the ordering of this sack while Reyhan is alive. The second is more urgent than the first and I have no money for either.

7. The last sheet. She pulled one out of the top stack as I was leaving — November 2029, half a sheet, cells filled to the eleventh and then stopping — and held it out. I said it belonged with her. She pushed it further forward. "She says: you take it." Cell eleven: line 1 has a date. Line 2 has writing. Line 3 is empty. He wrote the forecast and did not live to write the outcome. Aishanjiang read line 2, handed the sheet back before he said anything, and then said four characters and went out to start the car. 明天有风 — there will be wind tomorrow.

"A book finished is half of it."
Her brother had spent more than twenty years on the history and left it incomplete — the Eight Tables and the astronomical treatise unwritten — because he died in prison. She was ordered to the imperial library to finish it, and she was matter-of-fact about how possible that was. The tables I could do. A table is a grid. What goes in the boxes, he had already filled in several hundred boxes' worth. I filled in after him.
The grid is the transmissible part. The trouble lay elsewhere. The hard part was not carrying on writing. The hard part was that when the book was done, nobody could read it.
Finished, with not a character missing, and unreadable: archaic script, unglossed allusion, and one thing more that no amount of completeness could supply — my brother's own order. Why this matter went in this chapter and that matter in that one. He never wrote it down. And the reason he never wrote it down is the reason nobody ever writes it down. He thought it was obvious.
What repaired it was not an edition or a commentary but a posture. A young man of the same commandery — later a great scholar with thousands of students of his own — knelt below the pavilion, and she was above, and read it to him line by line, for a long time, one book, one line at a time.
The other half is somebody willing to kneel below the pavilion for three years and listen.
Told that a comparable case was harder, because the author of the record in question was dead and the only surviving person connected to it was illiterate, she asked a question instead of conceding. The illiterate woman had just sorted thirty-nine years of loose paper into nineteen correct stacks. What did she use to do that?
Touch. The weight and edge of the paper; which brand of fertiliser sack was current in which years; which calendar a brother had given them and when.
Then that is reading. Reading does not require letters.
And then the distinction that makes the whole thing work: a person who can read reads the content. A person who cannot read reads the order. And: content out of order can still be checked. Order lost, and the content is finished.