The Library Book

This is an original story, written for this site. It is fiction, not a teaching or a traditional account. Helen, Marcus, Dickyi, the Eastgate Branch Library and its city are invented. The Seven-Line Prayer is real, and what is said about it, and about how libraries protect their readers' privacy, comes from the sources listed below.

The returns cart

The Eastgate Branch Library opens at ten, but Helen Marsh is there by half past eight, because the book drop fills up overnight and somebody has to empty it.

She is fifty-seven and has worked at Eastgate for twenty-two years. It is a low brick building from the 1950s, between a laundromat and a bus stop, with a children's corner, eleven public computers and a radiator that knocks all winter.

On a grey Monday at the end of September, she wheeled the overnight returns to the desk and began checking them in, one beep at a time. Near the bottom was a thick paperback about walking the trails of Nepal, its spine cracked white in three places.

When she opened the cover to check it for damage, a card slid out from somewhere in the middle and landed face up on the desk.

The card

It was an ordinary lined index card, gone soft as cloth at the corners. It had been folded in half and unfolded so many times that the crease had nearly worn through.

Across it, in blue ink, ran seven short lines in a script Helen could not read: rounded letters hanging from a level line along the top, with small dots between them. Someone who wrote well had written them slowly. Below, in pencil, in a different and less certain hand, someone had added two words in English: Guru Rinpoche.

Librarians find a great deal in returned books. Helen had found bus transfers, grocery lists, pressed maple leaves, a boarding pass to Phoenix, a wedding photograph and, once, a twenty-dollar bill folded into a bookmark. Most of it went into the lost-property drawer, and most of it stayed there.

This was different. Nobody carries a card until it goes soft by accident. Someone had looked at it every day.

The only name on it

There was no way to look up who had returned the book. Like many libraries, Eastgate's system lets go of the link between a reader and a book once the book comes back. Librarians in the United States are urged to keep no history of who borrowed what. Helen believed in that rule. She had once argued for it, rather warmly, at a staff meeting.

So the card carried a name, and it was not its owner's.

At lunch she typed the two pencilled words into the staff computer. Guru Rinpoche means “Precious Teacher”. It is what Tibetans call Padmasambhava, the teacher remembered for bringing the Buddha's teaching to Tibet in the eighth century, and a founding figure of the Nyingma, the oldest school of Tibetan Buddhism.

She found a page of prayers to him, and then one with seven short lines in Tibetan. She held the card beside the screen and went through it shape by shape, the way she had once matched catalogue cards. The dots between the syllables fell in the same places. It was the Seven-Line Prayer.

The page explained that it was first revealed in the thirteenth century by a master called Guru Chökyi Wangchuk, and that it has become the most famous and widely chanted prayer to Guru Rinpoche, the one most commonly used in the Nyingma tradition.

Found in a book

Helen did what she would have done with a wallet. She put the card in an envelope in the desk drawer and taped a small notice to the counter: Found in a returned book, a handwritten card. Please ask at the desk.

Marcus, who was twenty-three and shelved books four afternoons a week, read the notice and said, “Nobody ever comes back for anything.” He was usually right.

A week went by, then another. People asked about the printer, tax forms and the bathroom key. Nobody asked about a card.

Tuesday evening

On Tuesday evenings the meeting room at the back hosts an English conversation circle: a dozen people from a dozen countries around two pushed-together tables, talking about weather and buses and their children. One of the regulars was Dickyi, a Tibetan woman in her sixties who worked mornings in a hospital laundry and came, she said, to stop her English from going rusty.

When the others had gone, Helen asked her to look at the card.

Dickyi read it once without moving her lips, and once with them. “Yes,” she said. “This is the Seven-Line Prayer.” The ink, she thought, was written by someone older, someone who had learned Tibetan handwriting as a child; you could tell by how even it was. The pencil was somebody else. “Somebody learning,” she said. “Or somebody who wanted to remember who it is for.”

She gave Helen the sense of it, not the words. The first lines say where Guru Rinpoche came from, that he was born in a lotus, and what he attained. The fourth line gives his name, the Lotus-Born, and says that it is renowned. Then the prayer pictures the dakinis, female figures of wisdom, gathered round him, wishes to follow in his footsteps, and asks him to come and bless.

Dickyi did not know whose card it was. She said she would ask around. The next Tuesday she reported that she had asked two people, and nobody was missing anything. “Many people write it down,” she said. “Many people lose it.”

Someone

Helen found she was thinking about the owner more than was sensible. Leaving work in the rain, she looked at the people under the bus shelter and wondered which of them had kept seven lines of Tibetan in a travel book.

She made up lives for them, and then made herself stop. Someone homesick for mountains they had left. Someone saving up to go. A grandchild given the card by a grandmother. She did not know, and she was not going to. What she knew was smaller: someone had carried a prayer every day, and now did not have it.

It struck her as strange to have been handed a name in pencil, the name of a teacher remembered for more than twelve hundred years, and not the name of the person who had needed it.

Back on the shelf

In the third week she did the only thing a librarian can think of when a thing has no address. She put it back where it had been found.

The card had fallen from about two-thirds of the way through the book, where the colour photographs of high valleys were. She slipped it back between those pages, unfolded, and carried the book to the travel shelves in the 915s, where the books about Asia live. If its reader came looking, that was where they would look.

“You know they might never borrow it again,” said Marcus.

“I know,” said Helen.

Once

That evening, after the last reader had gone and Marcus had left with his headphones on, Helen switched the lights off row by row until only the lamp on the desk was lit. She found the page again, the one with the Tibetan sounded out in Roman letters and an English translation beside it, and read the prayer once, aloud, quietly, in the empty library.

She was not sure whom she was saying it for. For the person with the card, she supposed, wherever they were, without it. She stumbled over the sounds. At the fourth line she said the name slowly, because it was the only name in the whole business she had.

Nothing happened. The radiator knocked. She locked up and went for her bus.

Checked out

Two weeks later, shelving in the 915s, Marcus noticed a gap. The travel book was out.

While a book is out, the system still knows who has it, and Helen could have looked. She did not. It was not her business, and she found she did not want to know.

It came back through the book drop in November, on the first morning of snow. She opened it at the colour photographs. The card was not there.

Perhaps its owner had found it and taken it home. Perhaps someone else had thrown it away, or was using it as a bookmark in another book altogether. There was no way to tell, and Helen let it stay that way. She left the notice on the counter for one more week, just in case.

Before ten

She still does not know the name of the person who carried the card. She has never met them, or if she has, at the desk among a hundred others, neither of them knew it.

Some mornings, before she unlocks the front door at ten, she says the prayer once, standing by the returns cart. Not every morning. She has not decided what it is for. It has not quieted the radiator or mended the printer, and nobody promised her it would. But it is one name she knows, said for someone whose name she does not.