I arrived with a map my father had copied for me. On the first evening it led me to a kitchen, and from there to a small room with a bed. He had even marked the step outside the kitchen, which was lower than the others. I might have fallen if I hadn’t known.
The building was very large. People went away for months and came back with drawings of staircases, courtyards and atriums, rooms opening onto other rooms. Sometimes they couldn’t find their way back to the places they had drawn. There were always more doors leading to more rooms, and it was easy to lose track of where you’d already been.
Of course I made corrections to my map. A corridor was deeper than indicated. A passage had three doors instead of two. I wrote these things down carefully. When there was no space left I numbered the note and continued on the back. Diligently, patiently, the map grew through additions and addenda, errata and extensions.
///
The woman in the next room had arrived without a map. In the evenings she drew the places she had been. Her sheets were mostly empty, with little clusters of rooms joined by passages, scrawled in pen, sometimes pencil.
Once I asked her about a long corridor drawn lightly in faint grey graphite lines between two jet-black clusters.
“I think they meet”, she said. “I haven’t been through yet. Do you want to come?” That part of my map was filled in by my father. Not interesting, I told her.
The next evening it was gone. She had rubbed so hard that the paper had become thin.
“Stairs”, she explained. “I was on the wrong floor.” She laughed a little self-deprecatingly. “Spent a few hours being lost today. Oh well. Now I know.”
I showed her my map. She spent a long time looking at the rooms around the kitchen and asked if she could copy them. She had trouble finding her way back there sometimes, particularly when she was hungry and the day had been long.
For a while we went out together. I knew most of the rooms near ours, and she liked being shown around. She noticed little things that I had missed, and I put some of them in my notes.
///
The two long corridors ran along opposite sides of the building, according to my own notes and my father’s ink. To get from one to the other you went down the stairs, through the hall, and up again. I explained this to her when we first went to the other side. “It’s annoying, but sometimes this place doesn’t make sense.”
A few days later she came out of a door beside my room. I asked where she had been.
“The other corridor”, she said.
I waited for her to explain, but she just pointed at the door.
“You came through there?”
She nodded, and held it open for me. Inside was a narrow room with shelves along both walls. There was another door at the far end. We went through it, and there were the stairs at the end of the other corridor.
She looked quite pleased with herself.
“It’s a room”, I said.
“I know.”
“You said there was a corridor.”
“I said I came from the other corridor.”
I didn’t think it was worth arguing about. We went back through the room and she sat down to draw it. I made a note of its doors and the shelves. The room was too long to fit where the door appeared on my map, so I drew it separately and marked where it could be entered from either side.
She leaned over to look.
“Why is it down there?”
“Because there isn’t any room up here.”
“But that’s where it is.”
I showed her the numbers beside the doors. She followed them with her finger, then went back to drawing on her own sheet, liberally rubbing out various pencilled-in lines.
///
After that she kept finding ways through. Once she took me from a room at the end of one corridor to a room halfway along the other, without going down any stairs. She wanted to show me how the windows lined up when you looked back.
I had notes about those rooms already. I brought them along, but she kept going to the window while I was trying to explain.
“Come here for a moment”, she said.
“I’ve been there.”
“I mean here, where I’m standing.”
It was difficult to talk to her like this. I got up and looked. There were the windows, just as she had said. I added a line to the note about the room.
“Now look at your drawing”, she said.
I looked at it. There were several sheets by then. I had spent a long time getting the rooms right, and they were right, you just had to line up the notes with the map. The cupboards were where I had put them. The doors opened the way I had described in the third sheet. I could have found my way around some of those rooms with my eyes closed.
She pulled two of the sheets towards her and put them beside each other.
“This window”, she began.
“You can’t just put those together. There are notes.”
She looked up at me. Then she turned one of the sheets over and started to read. I sat down again, this time with a sigh.
I had been patient when she got the staircase wrong. I hadn’t kept bringing it up. She had barely drawn a few rooms, and already she seemed to think that everything needed to be done again.
“I think I’ll go and have another look”, she said finally.
She put the paper down and got up. I still had my finger on the place I had been trying to show her. I waited until she came back, but by then she wanted to tell me something else.