Odile Varga

Dictated by Quire, a fold, to Nell Tallow, apprentice printer, for the guild's book of members' lives. Quire cannot hold a pen. Nell's own remarks are in brackets.

Is she writing? Is it writing? Good. Start with the facts. Odile likes the facts first, and then she likes them checked.

(Nell: he has asked me four times whether I'm writing.)

Filed under V

• Name. Odile Varga.
• Born. 1151, in Pell Lane, which is not on Kessel Street, which she says is the only mistake she has ever made.
• Age. Sixty-three.
• Office. Archivist of the Binders' Guild, from 1185 to 1211.
• Present occupation. Retired.

"Retired" is the word she uses, and the guild uses it too. I have looked it up. It means she stopped being paid. It does not mean she stopped.

How she found me

She folded me from card 4,113 of the archive's old subject index, which had been filed under the wrong letter for thirty years. She needed a deed that nobody could find, and she was tired of looking, so she folded something whose whole purpose was the looking.

I found the deed in a quarter of an hour. It was under D, for deed, which is the wrong place, because it was a lease.

She says she did not fold me to keep. I say she folded me with meaning, and the meaning was finding, and she is still finding things, so I am still for something. She has never once argued with that, which for Odile is the same as agreeing.

I am cream, with a red-ink tip on my tail where she checked me off. I am about the size of a teacup. I live on her shoulder, or in her cardigan pocket when it rains, or under the blotter.

What she looks like

Grey hair in a loose bun with a pencil through it, which she forgets is there and then looks for. Round tortoiseshell spectacles. Freckles. A long mustard cardigan over a dark green dress, every day, so that she can be found across a room.

She walks with a cane. Its handle is a brass bookbinder's bone, the kind you use for pressing a crease flat. She uses it for pressing creases flat and for pointing at people.

(Nell: mostly for pointing at people.)

What she is like

I cannot lie, so I have to tell you that she is not always nice. She is always kind. Those are filed in different drawers, and people mix them up.

She is kind to folds. She will sit for an hour on a cold step beside a frightened envelope, saying nothing, until it decides to open. She is impatient with people. She will not wait for a constable to finish a sentence if she already knows how it ends, and she usually does.

She is sharp, and patient, and dry. Dry means that she says funny things without changing her face, and people only laugh on the way home.

How she solves things

The watch does not investigate crimes against folds. The watch says folds are the guild's business. The guild says investigation is the watch's business. So the folds come to Odile, because she listens.

She looks at the paper first, then at the god, then at the people, in that order. People can lie. Paper creases, and a crease cannot lie any more than I can. A god that has been frightened will stay folded shut, so she waits.

She reads creases like handwriting. Every folder's hand is different, and after twenty-six years as archivist, and twelve as a clerk before that, she knows most of the hands on this street by sight. She says this is not a gift, only a great deal of filing.

The barricades

In 1173, when she was twenty-two, she carried messages over the barricades during the Ink Riots, forty-one of them. I was not folded yet. She does not talk about it much. When she does, she talks about the last letter.

Things I hide under the blotter from

The coal man. Thunder. Nell's sneezes. Damp. The Master folder, when he calls, which is not often. He is very polite to her, and his gloves are very white. I do not like gloves, because you cannot see the hand inside them. Odile says that is prejudice. I have filed it under prejudice, provisionally.

The part she will cross out

She is lonelier than she says, and less lonely than she was.

(Nell: he said that very fast and then went under the blotter.)

Can I stop now? I would like to stop now.

(Nell: he stopped.)