Librarian

So, here's a story I heard in the corridors of my hometown university quite recently (I stopped by to pick up an accreditation certificate for the HR department at work). The story is told from the perspective of a young, good-natured professor. I remembered him as a graduate student back in my student days. We met in the hallway and started chatting.

"About 15 years ago, I was getting my higher education at one of the universities in my hometown. I came to Moscow later, after defending my dissertation. We had a favorite professor—a kind-hearted man, an old man with a beard and a shabby jacket. And so, after class, our kind and intelligent man gave us another reading list to review and, so to speak, to consolidate the useful information we'd received in the lecture. This time, not a lot, about 10-12 books. With a sly smile and a cunning squint, he said, "Whoever finds all the books and at least holds them in their hands, I'll automatically give them a credit, but only if I'm sure they were searched for and found!" Grandpa must have been in more than one war, so he was instilling in us the skills of partisans, since we were certain to find one book due to its indescribable rarity. And without it, there was no chance of passing the test.

We scoured every library, found all the materials, copied some sources to confirm the discovery of the trophy, but we just couldn't find that one treasured one. The internet wasn't yet widely used by recent schoolchildren, and not all libraries had it, and the teacher's assignment was clearly stated: "Find it and hold it in your hands!"

We decided to visit the Lenin Library—every city in our vast Motherland has a central library under the auspices of the great proletarian. We went there and set out on our search. We'd raised a stink among the librarians; old ladies were trotting, crawling along dusty shelves, sneezing, and silently cursing our automatic grades. The result—a complete zero! Already in despair, we sat down on the marble steps of the mighty structure, glaring angrily at the portraits of the classics, when suddenly an old lady, an ordinary-looking librarian, slid past: a gray bun on her head, a gray floor-length skirt, and prehistoric glasses with silver frames. She looked at us pitifully, smiled, and took the card with the title of the treasured book from my hand. We'd given up on believing anything, thinking she'd just look for it, since she's so self-assured. We waited for half an hour, an hour, an hour and a half, and still she wasn't there. The library would close in an hour, and we were still in the dark.

 We decided to contact another librarian and asked her to check the storage room to see if our "bunch" had gotten sick or if it was lying around somewhere, buried under 12 volumes of the Soviet Encyclopedia. Imagine our surprise when the librarian returned with the worn, dusty book we'd been coveting for a week.

"Here," she said, "I found it on the windowsill next to your card. Go ahead and study it, we're closing soon."

When we asked about the "bunch" in glasses, the woman merely shrugged and said she didn't know who we were talking about. "Such a person doesn't work at their institution," she said. With trembling hands, we quickly made a few notes in our notebooks and handed back the treasured book.

 Of course, we passed the test, and the kind grandfather, surprised by our agility, told us that in his youth, only one librarian could find this book - but the granny with the bun on her head had not worked in the old Lenin Library for about 30 years."