The woman on the title page

I gave up on the hardware more than a year ago and went at the paper instead, the move I make in every project and never notice at the time.

The manuals exist. Somebody scanned them page by page, slightly crooked, with the shadow of a hand where a binding would not lie flat. The archive that keeps them belongs to people who love an American machine. The Soviet one was built to speak the same BASIC without being a copy of it, so the enthusiasts of the one became the memory of the other.

On the title page of one of them, Moscow, 1987, under the title and the machine's name: an author. L. N. Markelova. A surname and two initials, set in the same small type as the rest.

I know what a paragraph like this usually does next, so here is what I have. A name, a year, and a book about how to operate a machine. I do not know where she worked or how old she was, and I will not build her a life to carry my argument. Inventing her would be doing to her what was already done to her.

The argument stands without a life attached. Look at who gets which document. The design has a chief constructor, a bureau in Leningrad, a plant in Kursk. Those names sit in the histories and on the plaques. The operating manual, the book that tells you what to do at seven in the morning when the thing will not come up, is by a woman. Hers is the only woman's name I have found on a title page so far. She wrote the part that was used daily, and that job is never the part anybody remembers.

My grandmother was one of two women who ran one of these in an accounting office on the Kamchatka coast. She is in no record I will ever find. Markelova is in exactly one, and only because a title page has a line for it.

I wrote the name on an index card, the way my father does with anything he means to keep, and put it in the box on my desk. That is where essays start with me: the women were at the machines, the men are on the plaques, and the record is not neutral about which of the two it keeps.