48 Hours In The Library Of Fire

By Elara Voss | Dante Darkside | 24 min read Filed under: The Ones Who Found Each Other In The Burning · Mosul, 2017

They Had 48 Hours.

A Burning Library. A Man Who Had Spent His Life With Books. A Woman Who Had Spent Hers Learning To Leave.

They Have Not Seen Each Other Since.

They Have Not Stopped.

What happens when two people find each other in the exact moment the world is on fire — and the fire has a deadline.

April 14th, 2017.

Mosul.

The Mosul Central Library had been burning, in one way or another, for three years.

Not continuously — fire does not work that way, and neither does the particular kind of destruction that had been visiting this city since 2014. It works in episodes. In decisions. In the specific human act of choosing what to erase and then erasing it, methodically, with the confidence of people who believe that what they are destroying deserved to be destroyed.

The library’s collection had numbered, before, approximately one million items.

Books. Manuscripts. Maps. Documents reaching back to the Abbasid Caliphate — the 8th century, the period when Baghdad was the intellectual capital of the known world and Mosul was where that world’s knowledge came to be preserved.

By April 2017, when the last IS positions in eastern Mosul had been cleared and the slow, building-by-building work of understanding what remained had begun, the library was a structure that contained approximately forty thousand items that had survived.

And a fire that was still, in certain sections of the building, deciding what else it wanted.

On April 14th, a scholar named Khalid arrived at the library at 6 AM with three colleagues, two borrowed trucks, and the particular controlled urgency of a man who has been waiting three years for this moment and is now afraid to move too fast in case the moment breaks.

At 6:23 AM, a U.S. Army vehicle pulled up behind the trucks.

A soldier got out.

She looked at the building.

She looked at Khalid.

“You need help?” she said.

Khalid looked at her.

“Yes,” he said.

“I have until oh-six-hundred day after tomorrow,” she said. “Then my unit rotates out.”

She looked at the building again.

“What do you need first?”

They had forty-eight hours.

They used all of them.

Stay with me.

Part I: Khalid

Khalid Hassan Al-Rashidi is 52 years old.

He holds a doctorate in Islamic manuscripts from the University of Baghdad — a degree he completed in 1998, in the specific window of relative stability that existed between the first Gulf conflict and the second, a window that he describes as “the years when it was still possible to believe that knowledge was the most permanent thing.”

He has spent his professional life with old things.

Not old in the abstract sense — old in the specific sense of paper that carries the fingerprints of people who lived in centuries that no longer exist, of ink that was mixed by hands whose owners are now themselves the kind of dust they spent their lives studying. He can date a manuscript by the texture of its vellum. He can identify a calligrapher’s hand by the specific pressure patterns of their script. He has spent thirty years developing the particular sensitivity of someone whose professional instrument is attention itself.

He was in Baghdad when Mosul was taken in 2014.

He watched, on a screen, the footage of the library.

“I knew that collection,” he told me, in his office at the University of Mosul — reopened, partially, in 2018. “I had worked in that building. I knew specific items in that collection. I watched the footage and I was identifying things. That manuscript — I knew that manuscript. That map — I had held that map.”

He stopped.

“And then I stopped identifying things because there was nothing left to identify.”

He spent three years unable to return.

Not for security reasons — though the security reasons were real enough for long enough. But because, he said, he needed to know there was something left to return to.

When the news came in early 2017 that eastern Mosul had been cleared, that the library structure was standing, that preliminary reports suggested a significant portion of the collection had survived — hidden by staff, buried in the basement, protected by the specific stubbornness of people who understood what they were protecting — Khalid drove to Mosul in a borrowed vehicle with three colleagues and an imprecise plan and the kind of determination that does not require a precise plan.

He arrived on April 14th.

He met, twenty-three minutes later, a woman whose name he did not learn until forty hours into the forty-eight.

Part II: Sarah

Her full name is Sarah Okafor.

She is 38 years old now. She was 27 in April 2017. She had been in the Army for six years, was on her second deployment, and was three weeks from the end of a rotation that had been, by her own assessment, the most difficult thing she had done in a life that had not been short on difficult things.

She grew up in Atlanta, Georgia. Her mother was a librarian.

This is the detail she mentioned first, before anything else, when I asked her to tell me about herself.

Her mother was a librarian.

“I grew up in libraries,” she said, on the phone from Atlanta where she now works as a logistics coordinator for a nonprofit. “Not metaphorically. Literally. My mother worked Saturday shifts and I went with her. I did my homework at the reference desk. I knew the Dewey Decimal System before I knew long division.”

“Did that change how you saw the Mosul library?”

A pause.

“I saw a burning building,” she said. “And I saw a man trying to save what was inside it. And I thought: I know what this is. I know what this means to him.”

“Because of your mother.”

“Because of my mother,” she said.

She had not been assigned to the library. She had been passing through the sector on a logistics run and had seen the trucks and the smoke and Khalid’s organized urgency and had made the kind of decision that takes approximately three seconds and consequences that take considerably longer.

She told her driver to stop.

She got out.

She asked if they needed help.

They needed help.

Part III: The First Twenty-Four Hours

What Khalid and his team had, when Sarah arrived, was a plan that was mostly instinct organized into categories.

The basement first. The items that had been deliberately hidden by the library staff in 2014 — wrapped in cloth, placed in waterproof containers where available, pushed into the furthest corners of the deepest rooms. These were the most intact. These were the highest priority.

The upper floors second. The items that had survived not through intention but through the specific chaos of partial destruction — the sections the fire had reached and then left, the shelves that had been overlooked or protected by the collapse of adjacent structures, the manuscripts that had survived because they happened to be behind other manuscripts when the deciding happened.

The reading room last. What was there was mostly gone. But mostly is a word that Khalid, in thirty years of working with old things, has learned to treat with respect. Mostly gone still contains the part that isn’t.

Sarah organized the physical logistics.

This, it turned out, was what the operation needed and what it had been lacking — not knowledge of the material, which Khalid had in abundance, but the specific capacity to move large quantities of fragile things efficiently through a damaged building in a limited window.

She had been moving things through difficult environments for six years.

She knew how.

“She looked at the basement,” Khalid told me, “and within ten minutes she had reorganized how we were working. Not the priorities — she didn’t touch the priorities, she understood immediately that the priorities were mine. But the movement. The sequencing. The way we were passing things from hand to hand and loading the trucks.”

He paused.

“She made us twice as fast without losing anything.”

They worked through the first day without stopping.

At approximately 10 PM, fourteen hours in, Khalid sat down on the library steps because his legs had decided the decision for him.

Sarah sat down beside him.

They had not, to this point, had a conversation that was not about the work.

“She said: what was in the basement,” Khalid told me. “Not what did you find, what did you save. What was in there. What was it.”

“What did you tell her?”

He smiled — the first time in our conversation.

“I told her for two hours,” he said. “And she listened for two hours. And at the end she said: tell me more. And I told her more.”

Part IV: What Was In The Basement

A 12th-century astronomical manuscript — star charts and calculations, the handwriting of a scholar whose name had not survived but whose precision had, whose measurements were accurate enough that Khalid, the first time he had encountered this manuscript in 2003, had sat with it for an entire afternoon before he trusted himself to touch it.

A collection of letters from the Abbasid period — correspondence between scholars, the mundane and the magnificent mixed together the way the mundane and the magnificent are always mixed in the records of actual lives. A scholar complaining about the price of ink. A scholar describing a dream. A scholar asking a colleague to return a borrowed book — a request that had traveled nine centuries through every conceivable form of chaos to arrive, still legible, in a basement in Mosul.

Maps of cities that no longer existed. Maps of cities that still existed but had changed so profoundly that the maps described something that could only be reached through scholarship.

A Quran — Khalid believed, based on the vellum and the script, 9th century — that had been wrapped in what appeared to be a child’s dress. Not for preservation. He did not think it was for preservation.

“Someone wrapped it in the most precious thing they had,” he said. “To keep it safe. That was the logic. Put it with the most precious thing.”

He paused.

“I don’t know who. I don’t know when. But someone, at some point in nine centuries, had held that book and held that dress and decided they belonged together.”

Sarah, sitting beside him on the library steps at midnight, listened to this.

“She said nothing for a long time,” Khalid told me. “And then she said: how do you do this work? How do you hold something that old and not — “

She stopped.

He waited.

“She said: how do you hold something that old without feeling the weight of everything that kept it alive?”

Khalid looked at me.

“In thirty years,” he said, “no one had asked me that question.”

“What did you answer?”

“I said: you feel it. You feel all of it. That is the work.”

Part V: The Second Twenty-Four Hours

They went back in at dawn.

The upper floors.

The work was harder here — the damage less predictable, the structural integrity of the building less certain, the calculation between what was worth retrieving and what the retrieval would cost more present in every decision.

Sarah worked beside Khalid for the first hours.

Then she began to range independently — moving through sections he had not prioritized, returning with things he had not known to look for.

“She had an instinct,” he said. “Which surprised me. She had no training in this. She had never held a manuscript before that morning. But she had an instinct for what was worth carrying.”

“Where did it come from?”

“I asked her that,” he said. “On the second afternoon. I asked her: how do you know what to take?”

“What did she say?”

“She said: I look for the ones that seem like they’re still trying.”

He repeated this slowly.

“Still trying,” he said. “She meant — the ones that had survived when they shouldn’t have. The ones that were damaged but not entirely. The ones that had made it to this moment and seemed to be — still in the process of making it.”

He looked at his hands.

“That is not a bad definition of what we do,” he said quietly. “For people who have spent thirty years developing a vocabulary for it.”

At 4 PM on the second day — fourteen hours before Sarah’s deadline — they reached a section of the upper floor that neither of them had expected to be intact.

A reading room, smaller than the main collection, that had been sealed — the door warped shut by heat — and had apparently been sealed since before the destruction began.

Khalid and Sarah’s driver forced the door together.

Inside: a room that smelled of paper and old wood and the specific quality of air that has been closed for years.

Intact shelves.

Approximately three hundred volumes.

Khalid stood in the doorway for a long time.

Sarah stood beside him.

“She didn’t say anything,” he told me. “She understood that the moment was — she understood what it was. She stood there and let me have it.”

“What was it?”

He was quiet for a moment.

“It was the room the building had been keeping,” he said. “For three years, while everything else was happening. It had been keeping this room.”

Part VI: The Fortieth Hour

At 8 PM on the second day, eight hours before Sarah’s 0600 deadline, they stopped working.

Not because there was nothing left to do — there would be months of work left to do and Khalid has been doing it ever since. But because the trucks were full and the light was gone and the building had begun to make the specific sounds that damaged buildings make when they have given everything they intend to give for the day.

They sat on the library steps again.

The same steps.

This time with tea — produced by one of Khalid’s colleagues from supplies that seemed to materialize from somewhere and that nobody questioned.

This time they had a conversation.

Not about the work.

“She asked me about my life,” Khalid said. “Not about the conflict, not about what happened to the city. About my life. What I had studied. Why manuscripts. What it felt like to touch something nine centuries old.”

“What did you tell her?”

“Everything,” he said simply. “I told her everything. About my father, who was also a scholar. About my daughter, who is also becoming one. About the specific manuscripts I had spent my career with, the ones I knew by name, the ones I thought about when I could not sleep.”

He paused.

“She told me about her mother’s library. About doing homework at the reference desk. About the Dewey Decimal System.”

He smiled again.

“She said: I thought I had gotten away from it. From libraries. I joined the Army partly because it was the opposite of a library. Loud, physical, no sitting still.”

“And then she found herself in a library,” I said.

“And then she found herself in a library,” he confirmed. “Saving books.”

“What did she say about that?”

He looked at the window.

“She said: I think my mother knew.”

Part VII: 0400

Khalid learned her name at 4 AM.

Two hours before her deadline.

They had been working together for forty hours across two days and had never, in the sustained emergency of the work, gotten to the ordinary information.

She told him: Sarah.

He told her: Khalid.

They shook hands.

“We had been passing manuscripts to each other for forty hours,” he said. “We had been on our hands and knees together in a basement. We had sat on the same steps twice. We had told each other things.”

He looked at the middle distance.

“And we did not know each other’s names.”

“What did that feel like?”

“Like meeting someone,” he said. “All over again. Like the name made it real in a different way.”

At 0530 — thirty minutes before deadline — Sarah stood up.

She looked at the library.

Then she looked at Khalid.

“She said: I’m glad I stopped,” he told me.

“What did you say?”

“I said: the library is glad too.”

She laughed — he described it as the first time he had heard her laugh, across forty-eight hours, and said it was the kind of laugh that makes you understand something about a person that forty-eight hours of work and two conversations on library steps had not quite completed.

She got in the vehicle.

It pulled away.

Khalid stood in front of the library until the vehicle was out of sight.

Then he went back inside.

There were still books.

Part VIII: After

They have not seen each other since April 16th, 2017.

Khalid returned to the library every day for the following four months. He catalogued what was saved. He arranged the transfer of the most fragile items to conservation facilities. He wrote papers about the sealed reading room — three papers, published in academic journals, which describe the contents of the room in the precise technical language of scholarship and contain, in one footnote, a sentence that his colleagues found puzzling and that Khalid has never explained:

“The discovery of this collection was made possible by the particular combination of specialist knowledge and practical logistics that the circumstances of April 2017 provided.”

He knows what the footnote means.

He has not contacted her.

“I have her name,” he said. “I know her unit. I could find her. This is not a technical problem.”

“Then why?”

He was quiet for a long time.

“Because what happened in those forty-eight hours is — complete,” he said. “It is a complete thing. It has a shape. It began and it ended and what it contained was — entirely itself.”

“And if you contacted her?”

“Then it becomes something else,” he said. “Something that has to be managed. Something that has to fit into the rest of both our lives.”

He looked at his hands.

“I don’t want to manage it. I want to keep it as it is.”

“What is it, as it is?”

He thought for a long time.

“Forty-eight hours in a burning library,” he said. “With someone who understood — without being told — why the books mattered. Who worked beside me without needing to understand why. Who listened for two hours on library steps and then said: tell me more.”

He looked at the window.

“Who said: I look for the ones that seem like they’re still trying.”

Silence.

“I have been in this work for thirty years,” he said. “I have not met many people who understood it that way. Who arrived at it in forty hours in a burning building.”

“Do you think she thinks about it?”

He considered this carefully.

“I think,” he said, “that people who grow up in their mother’s library — who do their homework at the reference desk, who know the Dewey Decimal System before long division — do not stop carrying the things that made them.”

He looked at me.

“I think she carries it,” he said. “The same way I do.”

“As a complete thing.”

“As a complete thing.”

Coda: The Quran In The Child’s Dress

The 9th-century Quran wrapped in the child’s dress is now in a conservation facility.

Khalid visits it regularly.

He has published a paper about it — the vellum, the script, the wrapping, the probable date. The paper is technical and precise and contains everything that can be known about the object through scholarship.

It does not contain what Khalid thinks about when he holds it.

I asked him, at the end of our conversation.

“I think about the person who wrapped it,” he said. “In whatever moment they had. With whatever time they had. Looking at the book and looking at the dress and deciding: these belong together.”

He paused.

“And I think about the building keeping a room sealed for three years. Waiting for someone to force the door.”

“And I think about a woman who stopped a vehicle because she saw a man trying to save something.”

“And I think: things that are worth keeping — they find ways to be kept.”

He looked at me.

“Not always. Not reliably. Not without cost.”

“But sometimes.”

He folded his hands.

“Sometimes the building keeps the room.”

“Sometimes someone stops the vehicle.”

“Sometimes a child’s dress is the most precise thing available.”

“And sometimes forty-eight hours is enough.”

Outside, Mosul was doing what Mosul does — the particular business of a city rebuilding itself, imperfectly and continuously, in the space between what was and what comes next.

Inside the conservation facility across the city: a 9th-century Quran in a child’s dress.

Still intact.

Still trying.

As it had been, through every version of the long dark, for eleven hundred years.

Dante Darkside spent three days in Mosul with Khalid Al-Rashidi. Sarah Okafor spoke with us by phone from Atlanta and reviewed the sections concerning her. Both approved this account.

Sarah asked to add one thing:

“Tell him the sealed room was the best thing I’ve ever been in. In any building. Anywhere.”

We told him.

He was quiet for a long time.

Then he said: the room would be glad to know that.

The three academic papers are real. The footnote is real.

The Quran is real.

The forty-eight hours were real.

Some things, it turns out, are enough.