September 29. How many people it is cannot be counted.
At ten past nine I opened the handover ledger.
There are four fields. Date, the one handing over, the one receiving, and the number of articles handed over.
It says one line is one handover.
I counted the lines.
Fourteen.
At half past nine I counted the dates.
Eleven lines have a date.
Three do not.
The first page is one of the three.
I read the eleven dated lines backwards.
The oldest is March of seventy-eight.
The month in the header of the transcripts. The month the four entries were registered on the list.
There is no field in the ledger for entering that the month is the same.
At ten to ten I counted the receiving field.
Nine lines have a name.
Five are blank.
At ten I read the field for the number of articles backwards.
On the line of March seventy-eight it says four.
For eleven lines below it, four.
On the line of the autumn of ninety-seven, four as well. The box was not in this room for those twenty years. On each line the one handing over and the one receiving change. It came down to this room only from the line of the autumn of ninety-seven.
After that it becomes five, and six, and seven.
What the three that were added are is not entered in the field. Only the number is entered.
At ten past ten I counted the field for the one handing over.
Eight lines are filled.
Six are blank.
At twenty past ten I matched the chain.
For it to continue, the one receiving must be the same as the one handing over on the next line.
Five places are the same.
Eight places are broken.
At twenty to eleven I laid the four numbers out.
Fourteen lines. Nine names. Five junctions.
Nowhere is it entered which number is the number of people.
At the front of the ledger there is a procedure for counting. It is a procedure for counting articles.
There is no procedure for counting people.
At twenty past eleven I read the nine names.
The lowest is my name.
The field above it is blank.
Above that there are three characters. In the receiving field.
The date is the autumn of ninety-seven.
It says Kim Dogyeong.
At one I looked at the broken places one by one.
Below a broken place the entries continue.
There is no one handing over and yet a number of articles is entered.
The one who received counted what they received.
Who continued it is known only from the writing on that line.
At ten past one I looked at whether I could enter the one handing over on my own line.
There is no procedure in the ledger for a retrospective entry.
There is no line saying to fill a blank afterwards and none saying not to.
What may be entered is a name. There is no name to enter.
I know the name of the one before me. The register of serving staff has no entry for that name.
There is no procedure for entering in the ledger a name that is not in the register.
At twenty past one I decided to count the hands.
I looked at the strokes of the fourteen lines one by one.
I gathered the same hands together.
Eleven hands.
At two I looked at the four numbers again.
Fourteen and nine and five and eleven.
All four are numbers that were counted.
The number of people may be among them and may not.
There is no field in the ledger for counting hands.
At twenty past two I looked at the final consonants.
Among the eleven hands I counted those that join the final consonants on.
Four.
My hand is among the four.
The oldest of them is the one line on the first page.
At twenty to three I opened the first page again.
One line, with no date.
It says it passes to whoever next reads this line.
The same line as the first line of the combined volume.
The set was combined last year. This ledger is older than that.
Nowhere is it entered which was copied from which.
At three I opened the box.
Seven articles. Seven marks. Day five hundred and eighty-three.
The sixth field is thirteen thousand one hundred and thirty-three. The set's row was opened a hundred and seventy-one times yesterday, the imprint route a hundred and eighteen, the compiler route twenty-six.
The right-hand material is eight hundred and fifty-five pages. The date of the added page is the twenty-eighth of the tenth month of ninety-nine. The third line of page five hundred and thirty-nine has been blank two hundred and seventy-five days. The original of the fifth bundle is a hundred and seventy-seven pages and has not grown for six hundred and fifty-three days.
At half past three I took the reply out again.
In the field for the period in post I had entered that it is under confirmation.
From what I counted today the period cannot be entered.
If the number of people is not settled, the period of one person is not settled.
There is no address to send it to either. I put it away as it was.
At four I looked at my own line.
The date is the second of January.
My name is in the receiving field.
The field for the one handing over is blank.
My line is a broken place too.
At twenty past four I looked at the next line.
There is none. My line is the last.
Below the line it is blank.
At half past four I closed the ledger.
Having closed it I wrote the counted numbers down again. Fourteen. Nine. Five. Eleven.
All four are this room's numbers. The number of people is not among them.
At twenty to five I opened the list of entering parties.
Two rows have a name.
One is the one before me. One is those three characters.
My row has no name.
If a name goes into my row it becomes three.