The first time Yael notices it she is seven years old, trying to describe something to her grandmother. Not a thing she can point to. More like a quality she is looking at through the thing, or a relation between two things that has no name. She reaches for the word and finds nothing. She assumes she is too young. She will grow into the language for it.
She is thirty-eight before she stops assuming this.
By then she has learned nine languages, married and separated, spent fifteen years compiling a dictionary of untranslatable words: words that exist in one language but have no equivalent in others. She chose the work because she believed, without quite examining the belief, that the word she had been reaching for might exist somewhere. In Finnish, perhaps, or in a dead Anatolian dialect. She had found hundreds of words that fit spaces she hadn't known were empty. None of them fit this one.
Then, in the third year of a project she had expected to finish in eighteen months, she finds something close.
Not her word. A word that knows her word is missing.
It is in a seventh-century manuscript from a monastery in the hills above what is now Thessaloniki: a lexicon of ecclesiastical terms, the word filed between two words meaning "absence" and "silence." The definition reads, in rough translation: the thing that was here and is not, for which no account can be made.
Yael reads it three times. Then she sits back and looks at the wall.
She makes a note and moves on. Three weeks later she finds it again.
Not the same word. A different language, a different century. A Sanskrit fragment, fifth century, possibly earlier. The translation is imprecise but the meaning is the same: what was removed, and left no memory of itself. The word appears once in the fragment and is not glossed. Whoever wrote it appeared to believe its meaning was self-evident.
She begins searching.
By the end of that year she has found eleven instances: three in dead languages, four in languages still spoken but only in diminished forms, two in languages whose parent lines had no surviving speakers, one in a language with no known relatives. The words are phonetically unrelated. They share no etymology. But their meanings, rendered into English, circle the same absence:
The thing that was.
What is no longer, having never been found to be gone.
The space where the unnamed lived.
The object of mourning for which no mourner was prepared.
None of the texts elaborate on these words. They appear as if their meanings require no elaboration, as if whoever wrote them expected the reader to nod in recognition. Yael finds this stranger than the words themselves. You do not leave a word undefined in a lexicon unless you believe everyone already knows what it means.
She starts asking colleagues. She is not ready to call it a finding, so she asks not about the words but about the sensation itself. Have you ever, she asks, reached for a thought that wasn't there? Not a forgotten thought. A thought that should exist, the way a species should exist, but doesn't. A concept with no object. A category with no members.
Most of them don't understand what she's asking.
One does. A colleague she knows only slightly, a philologist who works with liturgical texts. He is quiet for a long time after she asks. Then he says: I thought that was just me.
They compare notes. His go back further than hers.
The word appears in a Sumerian tablet, partial, the left side lost. What remains translates, his notes say, as: the grief for what cannot be named because the name would require the thing to still exist.
There are others. He has been collecting them for years without knowing why.
They sit in his office with the evidence spread across the desk. Outside, the sky is the color it always is in that hour: a blue that does not know it is watched. Yael picks up one of the photographs. The word in the Thessaloniki manuscript is neat and unhurried, written in the hand of someone recording a known fact.
She says: do you think it was always gone, or do you think it was here once?
He considers this carefully. He has the expression of someone who has been waiting a long time for the right question.
He says: I think there is no way to know. But the words suggest it was here. People don't make words for absences they have no memory of. They make words for things they've lost.
Yael thinks: but these words are in languages that never met each other.
She says: what do you think it was?
He is quiet for a long time. Outside the window, a student crosses the courtyard without looking up. A pigeon lands, looks around, leaves.
He says the word. Not the Sanskrit word, not the Sumerian word. The word he has arrived at over years of sitting with the edges of the absence. He says it once, quietly, in the direction of the desk.
Yael waits for the meaning to arrive.
It doesn't.
She has been waiting thirty-one years for the same thing.
The word moves through the air of his office and then it is gone, and what remains is the room: the photographs, the lamp, the smell of old paper, the blue sky outside growing darker, and the particular quality of a silence that is not empty.