April 3. Nine in the morning. The officer from headquarters came down to confirm the transfer complete.
He was the man the head archivist had said, yesterday, would come today. His shoes came down the stairs, ringing the archive ceiling one bay at a time, and he was not the one who had carried off the five bundles before. In his hands were a single transfer-confirmation sheet and a small case holding a seal. The five bundles had already gone up, so what he came to confirm was the remaining sixth. The sheet read, in print, the whole of the material with no receiver, and beside it the transfer-completion date was set as April 8. It was the date the preservation log had entered ahead of time. The date I had come to know by putting my finger to the log, headquarters carried down in print. The date the log wrote and the date the document stamped were one and the same. Somewhere the same date was being written twice, and which of the two came first I could not tell.
Pointing to the sixth bundle, I said it was the last one. The officer lifted it, weighed its thickness in his hand, and said it was thicker than he'd expected. I did not say it had grown a page thicker than yesterday. Even said, the thickness he saw and the thickness I saw would not be the same. He set it down again and asked whether I could finish the preservation and transfer it by April 8. I could not bring myself to say it couldn't be finished. That it couldn't be finished was a thing you could say only to someone who had seen the bundle grow.
I answered that I would finish. Once I had, I saw what I'd just promised. To finish the preservation meant, by April 8, to index the last page of the sixth bundle, bind it, and box it. But the bundle grew a page each time the preserving hand touched it, so the more I preserved in order to finish, the farther the finish receded. To finish I had to preserve; preserve and it grew; grow and it could not be finished. The promise to finish was a promise to finish, within a deadline, a thing that could not be finished.
The officer asked for the receiver's signature on the confirmation sheet — the signature of the one who had agreed to receive the material with no receiver. I took up the pen and wrote my name in the signature box. One character for the surname, two for the given name. When I looked at it, the middle character had split into two syllables. In the parted place of my name stood one empty cell, the same shape as the blank receiver cell. Even a signature on an official document fell under the librarian's law. Wherever there was a place to write, it split in the instant of writing.
The officer did not notice the split signature. He pressed a seal over it, confirming the signature checked. As the seal came down, the split middle character seemed to close back into one syllable, then split again beneath the seal. The seal only covered the split; it did not close it. My name, made into an official document, was — for having become one — written more firmly in its place, and for being written more firmly, split more deeply.
After the officer had gone, a single copy of the confirmation sheet was left on the desk. The sound of him closing the seal case and climbing the stairs faded, ringing the same bays in reverse as on the way down. The order to preserve had been left behind as paper. The preservation the head archivist had pointed to by word of mouth on my first day was now stamped paper. Preservation was no longer something I could choose or stop. Stop and it was dereliction of duty; dereliction was disobeying the confirmation sheet; disobeying the sheet was disobeying the seal. Yesterday, stopping had been the proof that there was no door; today, stopping had become a breach. To there being no place to stop was added, now, that this was a place where I must not stop.
But not stopping changed nothing about the not finishing. The sheet said to finish the preservation; and since finishing was itself the making-grow, the sheet was also an order to make it grow. Both roads were blocked. Stop and I disobeyed the seal; don't stop and I made it grow. On the one door was written dereliction of duty, on the other, spreading. Out whichever door, it opened onto a closing seat. As Do-gyeong was herself whether she moved or not, I spread whether I finished or not, and closed whether I did not finish. Only, her two roads were roads Do-gyeong had chosen, while my two were roads the seal had chosen.
The order to preserve, the more it was a stamped official document, made me preserve more and made more grow. The law was not in my hand alone. It was in the head archivist's mouth, in headquarters' letters, in the seal on the confirmation sheet. The more the company ordered preservation, the more the law spread. The hand that ordered preservation and the hand that made it spread had become, by a single seal, one hand. The name of duty was another name for spreading. The company ordered preservation to keep the material safe, but that order to keep made the material grow. Keeping and making-grow were, under the one name of duty, the same work.
Then what makes it grow? At first I supposed my hand did — my hand measuring, writing, moving. Yesterday I had tried stopping that hand, and the growing had not stopped. Stop the hand and it grew; let a letter come and it grew; let a seal press down and it grew. What made it grow was not my one hand but the work of preservation itself. By whoever's doing, by hand or by seal, wherever the work of preserving was, it grew. The surveyor had said the measuring hand makes the depth; but after he died and his shaft was buried, so long as a hand preserved his log, the depth grew. What made the depth was not the measuring hand but the measuring work, and even when the measuring hand stopped, the work passed to another hand. The search for a hand to stop had been vain from the start, then. What was to be stopped was not a hand but a work, and the work was larger than the hand. The hand dies, but the work goes on to the next hand, and all the while it goes on, it grows.
I slid the copy of the confirmation sheet in among the pages of the preservation log. Since tucking it in was itself preservation, the moment I did, the log grew a page thicker. Preserving the order to preserve added a page to the ordered preservation. The paper that said finish by April 8 pushed April 8 one place farther off. As I drew my hand from where I'd tucked it, I saw clearly for the first time that what made it grow was neither hand nor seal but the act of preserving itself. Do-gyeong had changed a seat by the act of answering, but answering was a finger pressing once. My preserving was not even a press — it was only being beside the material, measuring and writing and tucking beside it. Being beside it made it grow. The act made it grow. And that the act could not be given up was, today, made final by a seal. Five days remained until April 8, and for five days, to finish a thing that could not be finished, I would have to keep doing, without stop, the work that made it grow.