“Here I was thinking it’s your diary,” Amir said, looking over his shoulder and letting the smoke escape his nostrils like a calm dragon. It irked me to see people smoke, but he had insisted that smoke breaks were part of his contract.
“What do you mean?” I asked. His translation notebook was closed with a pencil to serve as a bookmark. The other book, the one I’d given him, was weighed down with a glass paperweight. On its pages, the flowing Arabic script looked like it had been written with particular care and strenuous attention.
He shrugged and smiled. “I thought at first, maybe it’s your diary, from when you were young. But it’s a girl’s diary.”
I clasped my hands together and considered bolting out of the room.
“Would you like some tea?” I asked instead.
“No, sorry,” Amir said, shaking his head and putting out his cigarette. “This is plenty for me.”
“Good, then I’ll leave you to it,” I said and made a little bow.
“Was she close to you? Rashida? She sounds like a fascinating girl.”
I clenched my fist. “No, I don’t know anyone by that name,” I said quickly. “I don’t even speak… Pashto, or what have you.”
“Urdu,” he smiled again, this time more politely than anything. “The diary isn’t in Pashto, it’s in Urdu. I told you so when I started my work.”
“Right,” I nodded. “Please, just translate it and then put the book aside. We can discuss your bill after that. Take as much time as you need, it’s not a problem. Just don’t tell me anything about the diary.”
Amir sat down on the office chair and leaned back, surviving a creak and sighing deeply.
“What’s special about this one?” he asked. “I mean, as opposed to all the rest?”
His eyes wandered over the other diaries that were stacked in the shelves that covered the room’s walls. They’d been written in short notebooks and long notebooks, some were printed, some were in files. All of them were diaries, written privately by someone at some point, for no one’s consumption but their own.
“I’m sorry,” Amir said. “I couldn’t resist. I thought you might be a big reader, but these are all diaries and they belong to so many different people. Very unusual collection of books.”
I clasped my hands again. If I left now, would he really care? I was going to pay him regardless.
“I don’t read them,” I finally said. “I’m sorry for not being clear to you sooner. You see, I have a project online, and people send me their diaries from everywhere. People with no faces, no names, no return addresses… I just collect their diaries and store them here. I don’t read them.”
“You don’t read them?” Amir flicked his chin with his smooth, silver pen. “What do you do with them, then?”
“I just keep them, okay?” I looked at the door. It was inviting. “There’s history in them. History that’s valuable, but no one needs to read it. It’s a history of emotions and thoughts and beliefs, of opinions and feelings and all those little ugly things that make us who we are.”
Amir nodded, curtly and understandingly. “Not a history of wars and bloodshed and kings who just wanted more and more. It’s the _real_ kind of history, isn’t it? What’s in these diaries.”
“I can’t read all of them, there’s far too many, so I don’t read any of them. It’s not fair. Why should I choose whose privacy to invade?”
Amir’s eyes examined the floor. He then returned to work on his translation of Rashida’s the diary.
“I think some history is better than no history,” he said as he worked. “We don’t have time for all the history in the world. No one does, no one ever will. But we can decide what we read and what informs us.”
I shook my head and twisted the knob of the door. “No,” I said. “If you can only read someone’s history and not another’s… it’s an injustice. Maybe you don’t think it’s a big deal, maybe even they don’t think it’s a big deal. But it’s an injustice, and I will not commit it.”
I opened the door and left Amir to his translation.
germansingergirl
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2087
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