Work Text:
By day, the corridor outside Harold Lachkovics’s office sounded like any other: the distant clatter of typewriter keys, murmured conversations drifting from open doors, the occasional rolling thunder of a cart laden with books. By evening, all of that thinned to a hush, so that when you stood outside his door you could hear only the building itself breathing—pipes ticking, radiators sighing, the faint, far-off thud of a stairwell door closing.
And behind his door, his office waited like a brain turned inside out.
The plaque beside the frame—HAROLD M. LACHKOVICS, ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR—was unremarkable. The office beyond it was anything but. It didn’t feel like a single room so much as a compact ecosystem of paper, ink, and memory, each surface drafted into service.
The first impression was of shelves: floor-to-ceiling bookcases lining two walls, their adjustable metal brackets set with the precision of someone who’d measured not just height but reach. The shelves were filled, but not crammed. Hardcovers in sober academic bindings stood shoulder to shoulder with slim, faded paperbacks from the fifties and sixties, and with clothbound volumes salvaged from libraries on the brink of “modernization.” The spines were a landscape of serif fonts and subdued colors: maroon, navy, olive, sun-faded tan.
He had sorted them in a logic that revealed itself gradually. On the leftmost wall: monographs and survey texts, arranged roughly by region and period. Eastern Europe, Central Europe, the Levant, North Africa. Within those clusters, sub-groupings: prewar, wartime, postwar. The top shelf of one section carried a neat line of titles in German, another in Hungarian, another in Yiddish—each row anchored at the end by a slim, handwritten card in his blocky script labeling the category.
Below, the lower shelves were given over to testimonies and memoirs. Many bore call numbers at the base of their spines, carefully penciled out, then written over in ink when he’d committed them to his own system. Folders with printed transcripts nestled beside them, labeled with names—some famous, most obscure—on manila tabs. A narrow strip of colored tape at the bottom of each folder denoted language: blue for English, green for Hebrew, red for German, yellow for Hungarian. No key hung anywhere; he had carried it in his head for so long he no longer noticed he was translating it.
The opposite wall was less about published knowledge and more about what he was building himself. Here were the binders.
Dozens of them, identical in size and brand, lined up in exacting rows: black vinyl, white spine inserts, each marked with a typed label protected under a film of transparent tape. Inside those binders, each page was slipped into a plastic sleeve—hole-punched pages offended him; they felt like wounds. The system was rigorous but intimate, the product of years of late nights and early mornings.
One row of binders bore headings like: CAMPS: BY REGION – PRIMARY; CAMPS: BY REGION – SECONDARY; DISPLACED PERSONS CAMPS; POSTWAR TRIALS – EUROPE; POSTWAR TRIALS – MIDDLE EAST. Another row was more granular: HUNGARY: 1944–45; HUNGARY: JEWISH COMMUNITY ORGS; HUNGARY: RESTITUTION CASES.
And then there was the row—placed at eye level, as if he wanted to meet it every time he turned—that used no country names. Its labels were thematic, almost painfully so:
CHILD SURVIVORS
HIDDEN CHILDREN
RESCUERS – CLERGY
RESCUERS – LAYPEOPLE
COLLABORATION CASES
MIXED MARRIAGES
ORAL HISTORIES – WOMEN
ORAL HISTORIES – MEN
“GRAY ZONE” TESTIMONIES
The quotation marks on that last label had been added by hand, later, his pen digging into the plastic a little harder than necessary.
Every binder had its own index page, tucked into the front sleeve, compiled in his uneven typewriter font and corrected in the margins with fountain pen ink when new materials arrived. Page numbers were not just numbers but coordinates; 47–52 might be underlined because they linked to another binder entirely, which, if opened, would have cross-references back. In the bottom right corner of many pages, tiny pencil triangles pointed outward, like quiet arrows toward the next thing you’d need.
Opposite the shelves, his desk dominated the room, a block of dark wood that had seen better decades. It had belonged to a retiring professor who’d claimed it had been in the department since before the war; Harold had adopted it the way one adopts an elderly but serviceable dog. The surface bore the faint ghost of old coffee rings and a few deep scratches that the varnish could never fully cover, but the present clutter was controlled, almost geometric.
At the far left corner, a beige computer sat humming softly—a campus-issue machine with a convex screen and a stack of floppy disks in a plastic holder beside it. He used it grudgingly, mostly for correspondence and draft chapters. Next to it, flush with the edge of the desk, was a steel in-and-out tray: in the top, student essays and blue book exams stacked squared, edges aligned; in the bottom, returned assignments with his precise comments in the margins, paper-clipped.
Front and center lay his current project: a spread of documents arranged in a half-moon, each weighted at the corner with a different object so the radiator’s breath wouldn’t send them sliding. A smooth river stone from Tel Aviv. A heavy brass paperweight in the shape of a lion of Judah. A chipped ceramic ashtray he didn’t use for ashes at all, just the solidity. Each object had its own history, and he knew them all, but here they served a simple purpose: keep the paper still while he traced connections.
The documents themselves were marked with his careful system of symbols: asterisks for cross-reference, circled numbers for sequence, arrows linking events across time. Languages metastasized across the pages—English sentences interrupted by Hebrew quotes, German terms underlined, Hungarian phrases translated in the margins in smaller handwriting. Every now and then, when something struck him in particular, he’d press harder with his pen, leaving a faint ridge on the paper you could feel with your fingertip.
To the right of the main spread, his telephone rested on a narrow notepad, the pad thick with overlapping phone numbers and dates. When someone called, he could, if he wished, flip backward through weeks and months of pencil marks and be reminded of who had last phoned, at what hour, and why. Names of survivors, scholars, archivists, bureaucrats, rabbis, second-generation children calling on behalf of aging parents. Each entry was shorthand— “R. Weiss – tape #7” or “Y. Cohen – re: daughter’s visit”—but to him they were entire stories compressed into three lines.
Just beyond the phone, a small cassette recorder kept its own vigil. A neat row of plastic cases beside it, each labeled with date, location, and an initial: B.J., H.K., E.L. — the people who had sat in the chair opposite his and told him, in halting words, what they’d lived through. The cassettes were stored, long-term, in a locked cabinet against the far wall, but the ones he was currently working through stayed near his elbow, where his hand could find them without even looking.
Those cabinets—two of them, gray metal, their paint slightly chipped at the edges—held the quiet core of the room. Each drawer bore a typed label, slipped into the little rectangular slot on the front and backed with artisanal care: TRANSCRIPTS – A–D; TRANSCRIPTS – E–K; TRANSCRIPTS – L–R; TRANSCRIPTS – S–Z. Below those, a row labeled CORRESPONDENCE, another marked RESTRICTED. Only one drawer had no label at all. That one he kept locked not just against intrusion, but against his own impulse to drown in it on difficult days. Inside were letters that had never led to published work or conference presentations, fragments of stories too raw or unfinished, photocopies of documents that had burned themselves into his brain. His private archive of what he could not yet carry into the world.
Beside the cabinets, under the window, a two-drawer card catalog stood like a stubby relic from a library that had been modernized out of existence. Its wooden front gleamed where his hands had worn the finish smooth over the years. The drawers slid open with a faint, satisfying rasp, revealing thousands of index cards written in his restless script. Each card carried a name or an incident, a theme, a date, cross-listed in two or three different ways, needles waiting in their own carefully arranged haystack.
One drawer held entries like: “wagon incident, Lvov – see also: child witness, false memory,” while another card somewhere else might read: “false memory (children) – see Lvov, wagon incident.” If a thought woke him at three in the morning—some thread that might connect a testimony from Budapest with a document from Warsaw—he knew exactly which drawer he’d be pulling open the next day.
Pinned above the card catalog, slightly to the left of the window, was the map.
It was large enough that he’d had to negotiate with building maintenance to hang it, the corners fastened with thumbtacks that had gone in reluctantly, protesting the old plaster. It showed Central and Eastern Europe before and after various redrawn borders, printed in muted colors, with tiny towns named in tiny fonts. His own annotations—arrows, circles, underlines—clustered thickly over certain regions, thin elsewhere. Red ink traced deportation routes; blue ink starred places where his own family had once lived; green ink marked sites of postwar tribunals.
Here and there, small sticky tags protruded from the map’s edge: a square of yellow paper with a question mark, a pink one with a single date, a faded blue one with the word “check” scrawled on it months ago and never fully erased from his mind.
The radiator beneath the window rattled gently, warmth smearing the chill that crept through the single-pane glass. On the sill, three objects rested in a line: a smooth wooden dreidel, its letters worn from handling; a gray stone from the banks of the Danube; and a tiny, pot-bellied ceramic cat somebody’s child had made him years ago in a class art project. The cat’s glaze had run, giving it a perpetually startled expression. He claimed it kept watch over the room when he wasn’t looking.
The office chair behind his desk was the only thing that didn’t look carefully chosen. It creaked when he leaned back, its faux-leather seat cracked along one seam, a folded towel placed discreetly over the worst of it. But its height was set just so, calibrated to align his elbow level with the desk when he wrote. That, he would not change.
On the wall directly opposite his chair, at eye level, were two framed pieces.
One was a black-and-white photograph of a group of men and women sitting around a table in a cramped room, smoke drifting up in ghostly veils. They were younger versions of professors whose names now filled bibliographies and syllabi, laughing, leaning forward, arguing. A younger Harold appeared at the far edge, half-turned away from the camera, as if already listening to something just outside the frame.
The other frame held something that always made visitors fall quiet: a single, yellowed document, carefully matted and protected behind glass. A page torn from a ledger in a small-town registry office, lines written in an elegant, sloping hand, listing names, dates, and a word in German that appeared over and over in the margin: Ausgangspunkt. Place of departure. He’d found it while combing through provincial archives on a fellowship, and the mundanity of it—that bureaucratic, almost polite pointing toward oblivion—had shaken him more than he admitted. He kept it there as a reminder that history was often recorded in neat, indifferent columns.
Yet for all the solemnity of his materials, the room was not cold. It bore the imprint of someone who lived here, in the way academics often did: half in their apartment, half in their office.
On a narrow shelf above the desk, among the books, a small cluster of personal items made their own little shrine. A postcard of Jerusalem at dusk, the Western Wall tiny in the foreground; a black-and-white photograph of an older couple in 1930s clothing—his parents—standing stiffly in front of a shopfront; a Polaroid of a department picnic, a much younger Harold squinting at the camera with a watermelon slice in his hand; a child’s drawing of a stick figure labeled “Prof Lakvics” in uncertain bubble letters, gifted by a faculty friend’s son who had once come to “help” in the office.
Everything had its place, even the things that, at first glance, looked like evidence of chaos. A stack of journals on the floor beside the bookcase was aligned, their spines all facing outward, the top issue flipped open and folded over at an article he was midway through. A jacket hung on the back of the door, its pockets always containing the same things: his keys, a small notebook, a folded schedule, a worn handkerchief.
Meticulous didn’t mean sterile. It meant that nothing in the room was accidental.
If you sat in the student chair opposite his desk—a sagging armchair he’d scavenged from a hallway years ago and convinced maintenance to let him keep—you could see the way his systems intersected. How his hand would reach automatically for the card catalog when a student asked, voice quavering, if anyone had ever written about Hungarian-Jewish resistance or about children who didn’t remember their original names. How he would open a drawer, pull a file, retrieve a binder, flip to the exact page—one smooth motion, the choreography of long practice.
The office was an archive, yes, but not an inert one. It was a research hub in the literal sense: a node in a web of inquiries stretching far beyond the campus. Letters arrived here from Vienna, from Montreal, from Tel Aviv, from Buenos Aires—envelopes with foreign stamps and careful handwriting, often containing a single photocopied document and a plea: I hope this will be useful. My grandfather always said—
He logged them all, noted them on index cards, filed them in folders whose edges wore his fingerprints into the very fibers. Then he built the bridges between them: speculative at first, then stronger, eventually sturdy enough to bear the weight of an argument, a chapter, a book.
Sitting at his desk in the evenings, he often moved through the room as if through a map of his own mind. He’d stand to retrieve a binder, flip it open to confirm a date, cross the room to the cabinets, slide out a drawer, pluck a file without looking, return to the desk, all with the absentminded assurance of someone walking from kitchen sink to fridge to stove at home.
And underneath the practical thoroughness was something else: a stubborn, almost defiant tenderness. He stored the testimonies with care not because a publisher demanded it, but because the people who had spoken into his recorder, or written shakily in their letters, deserved not to be mislaid. He had, over the years, developed a near-reverence for correctly spelled names, for accurate dates, for getting a minor border town’s prewar population right. To him, these were not trivia. They were fragments of a shattered mosaic, each placed in the exact spot where it might help reconstruct a face.
Tonight, as the light outside dimmed and the building emptied, the office seemed to settle deeper into itself. The hum of the computer was a low, domestic sound. The lamplight, angled away from the window to avoid glare on the map, cast a warm circle over the desk, leaving the corners of the room in gentle shadow. Dust motes drifted lazily in the air, caught and released by the beam of the desk lamp as if time itself were visible.
On one corner of the desk, near the stone from the Danube, a small, folded blanket rested—soft, pale, incongruous amid the rigid corners and sharp lines of folders and books. It had been placed there deliberately, like everything else, in anticipation of something small and new that would soon be carried in among the papers and maps and histories he tended.
Harold’s office was, in every way that mattered, ready.
By the time the winter light had faded to a watercolor smear beyond the window, his office was the only one still lit on the corridor.
Books towered on every surface — shelves bowing under the weight of histories and testimonies, a small pile of student papers abandoned in a slump near the edge of his desk. On the wall behind him, a map of Hungary, its borders annotated in Harold’s small, precise handwriting, glowed faintly in the lamplight.
Harold Lachkovics sat in his worn swivel chair, but he wasn’t looking at the map, or the books, or the papers. His attention was locked on the small, warm weight in his arms.
“Nu, Yoninah,” he whispered, his voice frayed with exhaustion and something softer. “neshama sheli… my little dove.”
She was barely a few months old, a soft bundle in a pale cotton onesie, sleeves folded over her hands so she wouldn’t scratch her own cheeks. A single tuft of dark baby hair stuck up in the back like a stubborn question mark. Her head fit neatly in the curve of his palm, her face turned inward against his shirt, breath puffing in tiny, damp bursts that warmed the linen.
He shifted her carefully, so that her body lay along his forearm, cradled close against his chest. Her fist rose, caught the fabric of his tie, and clenched — more reflex than intention — but he chuckled anyway as the tie bunched under her grip.
“Chazak,” he murmured. “Strong already, eh?”
The office hummed with campus sounds: distant footsteps in the hallway, the muffled slam of a door, the persistent tick of the wall clock above the filing cabinet. Outside, snow was starting to fall, smearing the streetlights into muted halos.
He rocked his chair gently, the squeak of the old mechanism almost a lullaby of its own.
“Hayta pa’am yoninah ktana,” he began softly, letting the Hebrew roll out like something both remembered and newly made. “Once, there was a little dove…”
Her eyes fluttered under their lids, as if chasing shapes in the dark.
“She lived in a small town,” he went on, switching easily into English and back, the way he always had when he was thinking. “עיר קטנה, near a very big forest. In the winter, the nights were long — so long the people forgot where the morning lived.”
He glanced down at her face.
“You see this, motek? You have come into the world in winter,” he told her. “But we don’t stay there.”
His free hand traced a little circle on her back, soothing and rhythmic.
“In this town,” Harold continued, “there were many big birds. Strong ones. They said, ‘We will find the morning. We will fly high, and fast.’”
He deepened his voice in mock grandeur, even though his only audience was half-asleep and drooling onto his shirt.
“They flew and flew, but the night was too heavy. הַחֹשֶׁךְ כָּבֵד — the darkness weighed them down. They got tired. They went home.”
Her fingers flexed, releasing his tie for a moment, then catching hold again.
“But the little dove,” he lowered his voice, “the very smallest, like you, Yoninah…”
He kissed her forehead, just at the soft spot, and lingered there.
“She said, ‘I will go. I’m small. I do not need so much light, just a little. Maybe I can carry it.’”
He could feel the curve of her skull beneath his lips, the fragile architecture of someone whose entire life was still a promise.
“She flew low,” he said, just above a whisper. “Not high in the sky where the wind is cruel, but close to the trees, where it’s quieter. And whenever she found even a tiny bit of light — a candle in a window, a spark in a fireplace, the shine on a puddle of ice — she gathered it up in her wings.”
He turned his head toward the window. Outside, the snowflakes drifted down like slow-falling ash, but in here the desk lamp drew a small circle of warmth around them.
“Every little spark,” Harold murmured, “she tucked under her feathers. Even when the other birds laughed and said, ‘What can you do with so little? This is nothing.’”
He smiled, a private, crooked thing.
“Little plus little plus little,” he told the baby in his arms, “one day becomes a great light. אור גדול.”
His hand moved from her back to her tiny hand, thumb dwarfing her curled fingers.
“Finally, when her wings were heavy with all the tiny lights,” he continued, “the little dove flew to the edge of the world. To the place where the sky is stitched together.”
His voice slowed. He’d had a long day in the archives, close reading testimonies that left a residue behind his eyes. He had argued at a faculty meeting. He had answered letters that would never feel like enough. All of it fell away here, in this small, lamplit island of time bounded by shelves and the slow breath of his daughter.
“She shook her wings,” he whispered. “And all the little lights flew up and up, and became…?”
He paused deliberately, as though waiting for her to answer. Yoninah’s mouth twitched around the edge of a yawn, her forehead furrowing in her sleep.
“…the morning,” he supplied. “שַׁחַר. A new day, made from every tiny courage.”
He let the words drift away, the Hebrew syllables soft and rounded: “בוקר טוב, עולם קטן — good morning, little world.”
For a moment he simply held her there, listening to the uneven rhythm of her breathing, the occasional squeaky sigh that made his chest tighten with a tenderness he hadn’t known he could still feel.
He thought — fleetingly, guiltily — of how tired his body felt these days, the strange hollowness in his chest, the way stairs seemed steeper than they used to be. Of the drafts of his latest manuscript stacked in careful piles, the letters from colleagues abroad, the looming conferences he wasn’t sure he’d have the strength to attend.
Then her fingers flexed again and brushed against his throat, grounding him in the immediate, undeniable now.
“Yoninah,” he said, switching to English fully, as if the weight of what he felt needed the language he’d argued in, lectured in, loved in. “You will not remember this. But I will. I will carry it for you.”
There was a soft knock at the door.
“Professor Lachkovics?” A tentative voice, one of the graduate students — Daniel, perhaps. “I’m sorry, I didn’t realize you were still here.”
Harold adjusted the baby in his arms, instinctively shielding her from the sudden draft as the door cracked open.
“It’s all right,” he said gently. “Come in for a moment.”
The young man stepped just inside, eyes widening at the sight of the tiny bundle against the notoriously serious professor’s chest.
“Oh,” he said, awkward and suddenly boyish. “I… I didn’t mean to interrupt.”
“You’re not interrupting,” Harold replied. “You are witnessing.”
He nodded toward the desk.
“There is a camera there. Would you do me a favor?”
The grad student blinked, then spotted the small point-and-shoot lying half-buried under a stack of articles. He picked it up gingerly.
“How do I—?”
“Just point and press,” Harold said, smiling faintly. “Like capturing evidence.”
That made Daniel laugh, the tension breaking. He moved back a step or two, angling himself so that the bookshelves and window frame were in view behind Harold. The overhead light was too harsh, so Harold reached forward with his free hand and snapped off the fluorescents, leaving only the desk lamp and the faint glow from outside.
The office softened instantly: wood and paper and shadow.
“That’s better,” he murmured.
He shifted Yoninah so her cheek rested fully against his chest, one tiny hand spread on his shirt. Her lashes lay dark against her skin, mouth slack with the heavy sleep of very small children. His arms formed a secure circle around her, elbows tucked in; his shoulders, habitually tense, had finally dropped.
“Ready?” Daniel asked.
Harold looked up, not at the camera itself but toward the person behind it. His smile was small, almost shy, but unmistakably full. You could see, in that moment, the scholar and survivor and father converge into something simple: a man who loved his child.
“Ken,” he said. “Yes.”
The shutter clicked. A bright, brief flare of light; then the office returned to its quiet, lamp-lit calm.
“Thank you,” Harold said.
“Anytime, Professor,” came the soft reply. “She’s… she’s beautiful.”
Harold looked down again, thumb stroking the curve of her tiny hand.
“She is,” he agreed, as if stating a fact from a footnote. “Very small. But she will carry more light than she knows.”
The grad student slipped out, closing the door with exaggerated care.
For a while longer, Harold simply sat in the dusky office, rocking his chair in slow arcs, humming under his breath — not a lullaby exactly, more like a nigun, a wordless melody that rose and fell in a minor key. His voice blended with the tick of the clock, the radiator’s occasional sigh.
“Laila tov, Yoninah,” he whispered eventually, pressing one last kiss to her temple. “Sleep. I will hold the night for you.”
The moment folded in on itself: lamplight on paper, snow beyond the window, a map of an old country on the wall, a man and his last child suspended in a small pocket of borrowed time.
The film in the camera wound on.
—
Decades later, in a small bedroom with walls washed in the dim amber of a streetlamp outside, a nightstand waited in the quiet.
On it stood a picture frame — simple, silvered metal, the kind that had once been shiny but now bore the soft scuffs and tiny nicks of long, ordinary use. The glass over the photograph was scratched in one corner, a faint diagonal line like a pale comet across a dark sky. A thin crescent of dust had gathered along the inner lip of the frame, interrupted only where fingers had periodically lifted it, wiped it away, put it back.
Inside the frame, the moment from the office had been pinned forever: the worn swivel chair, the books risen behind like a paper forest, the rectangle of the window with its blurred suggestion of snow beyond. The desk lamp’s light pooled over one side of Harold’s face, leaving the other half in gentle shadow, his features sharpened yet softened by time and film grain.
The baby in his arms was small enough that his hands seemed enormous by comparison, one wide palm cradling the back of her head, the other supporting the curve of her body. Her face was turned inward, visible only in profile — a puffed cheek pressed against his shirt, a barely open mouth. One fist was bunched in his tie, tugging the fabric off-center.
In the photograph, his eyes met the camera: steady, dark, ringed with fatigue. The smile was minute, barely there, but it tugged unmistakably at the corner of his mouth. There was something in it — pride, relief, a quiet astonishment — that the camera had caught by accident, like light reflected in glass.
The office around them was captured in mid-mess: mounds of paper, the Hungarian map slightly askew, a coffee mug half-visible at the edge of the frame. The lamplight turned the air between objects into a faint haze, as if the room itself were exhaling.
The edges of the photograph had begun to soften, the white border yellowing just a little. In the lower margin, written in cramped blue ink, was a date and two words, the handwriting unmistakably careful:
משרד, 1987
Yoninah.
The ink had bled slightly into the paper over the years.
Beside the frame, on the nightstand’s surface, lay the small, mundane constellation of the present: a dog-eared paperback resting face-down, its spine loosened from rereading; a ceramic mug with a faint ring of coffee dried on the inside, the ghost of kosher milk etched along the curve; a single hair tie; a receipt folded into a narrow strip and used as a bookmark. A lamp with a warm, low-watt bulb cast a soft halo across them all, turning the wood’s scratches into pale lines and the dust motes into drifting stars.
The photograph stood at the center of it, angled slightly toward the pillow, as if the man within it were still keeping watch.
The bedroom was quiet: no voices, no movement, only the faint whoosh of cars passing on the street below and the distant hum of a city that never truly slept. Shadows from the window frame slanted across the wall and over the nightstand, partially veiling the picture, then sliding away as the hours shifted.
Behind the glass, Harold’s captured gaze did not change. His arms were forever folded around the newborn, forever mid-rock in that old chair. The baby’s tiny hand was forever knotted in his tie, holding on.
The lamplight glinted off the frame’s edge, limning the outline in soft gold. For anyone standing by the bed, the first thing the eye would find in the room’s subdued glow was that small, enduring scene: a man and his daughter, suspended in a winter office in 1987, surviving now as paper and light atop a nightstand in 2025.
The city outside turned and turned. The nightstand waited. The photograph quietly caught the lamp’s glow, and in the stillness of the room, the little dove in Harold’s arms seemed almost, just almost, to be breathing.