A Book In A Pocket
For the next two years, Karim did not — directly — work with the library.
His mother kept her promise. She stepped back. The barn-library was run, very quietly, by Iris and Mr Vogel and a small handful of others. The inspectors came to the town in May. They went through Karim's mother's house. They did not find anything. The basement was a basement again — Karim's mother had put a workbench in it, and a half-finished bookshelf, and a stack of legitimate certified-archive print-outs which she was working through *for personal study*. The inspectors had been polite. They had left after twenty minutes.
Karim's mother did not, that year, leave the house much. She spent a lot of time in the kitchen drinking tea. She started teaching Karim how to make bread. He learned. They made bread together every Saturday for a year.
Karim went to university the following autumn, in a city far from his hometown.
In his first month at university, in a quiet pub with a friend he was beginning to trust, his friend leaned across the table and said — in a voice low enough that nobody else could hear — *I have a book on me. Want to borrow it?*
Karim looked at his friend.
He smiled.
He said: "Yes. I would. Do you have anything by Anna Akhmatova? My mother used to read her to me when I was small."
His friend reached into the inside pocket of his coat. He took out a small worn volume. He passed it