For days on end, Taras Pavlovsky pored over the markings and symbols, an arrangement of tiny black dots and strokes that Slavic monks had set on paper hundreds of years before. It was musical notation, a guide to the chants the monks had sung every day to glorify God.
To most people, the markings were indecipherable. Few had ever figured out a translation. Why go to the trouble?
But what others saw as a pointless dive into obscurity, Pavlovsky saw as a fascinating quest. He was a musician himself—the bandura, a lute-like folk instrument, was his favorite—and after college, he had taken a job as a choir director, later a cantor, at a Ukrainian Orthodox church in New Jersey, a cathedral with icons illuminated by the light filtering through its leaded-glass windows. He loved the dissonance of the music from the old country. It was when he was getting his master’s degree in musicology at Rutgers University that he found his passion for digging into the past, like an academic Indiana Jones, uncovering secrets and artifacts once thought to be unknowable, undiscoverable. Those marks made by the monks. Slowly the pattern emerged. Not just notes but an entire story. The work became his master’s thesis. A triumph. For Pavlovsky, nothing equaled the thrill of the hunt.
There was little of that in Pavlovsky’s career eighteen years later, in 2005, as dean of the library at the College of New Jersey. He stared at his calendar—another day of meetings, calls, and reports. He definitely needed to review the details for the approaching grand opening of the new library building. So much to do, but he couldn’t help but feel there was something missing in his life. He longed to lose himself in history, teasing out the answer to a question at once enigmatic and fascinating. But he was an administrator now. No time for an adventure into the past.
Pavlovsky reached into the in-box on his desk and pulled out a memo from Pat Beaber, the head reference librarian. It was attached to a faded news clipping from the school newspaper in 1939. The article announced that eight stained-glass windows had been transplanted from the old campus (once known as the Normal School, the state’s first teacher training academy) and installed in the library.
Pavlovsky knew every inch of the library. There wasn’t a pane of stained glass in it. What had happened to those windows?
A tingle ran down Pavlovsky’s spine. It wasn’t deciphering Slavonic chant notation, but it had all the ingredients. History. A puzzle to be solved. How amazing would it be to uncover even one of the school’s windows, lost to time? It would be perfect to hang in the new library.
Pavlovsky and Beaber sifted through old editions of the school newspaper, microfilm, and dusty yearbooks. They discovered that the windows had been gifts to the college from the earliest graduating classes. They searched every nook of the school and interviewed nearly a dozen retired employees. The last time anyone remembered seeing the windows was in the 1960s. They’d been taken down during a renovation project.
Somebody recalled seeing one in an antique shop in Pennsylvania. Another person said they’d seen a stained-glass window in a New Jersey bar. Both were dead ends.
The new library opened, and the campus magazine ran an article about Pavlovsky’s search. Everyone at the library knew how badly he wanted to find those windows. Finally, though, he and Beaber threw in the towel. They hadn’t recovered the windows, but at least they’d recovered their memory. A replica of one, based on an old photo that Beaber had found, was commissioned for the new building.
Pavlovsky hated giving up. But it had always been a long shot. Stained glass is fragile, and the wrong kind of care can destroy the pigment. Most likely, he figured, they had been thrown away. Beaber retired, and the dedicated sleuths went their separate ways. Nine years passed, but Pavlovsky couldn’t forget the windows. He’d walk past the replica and wonder, Are they out there somewhere waiting for me?
Twelve miles away, in Bordentown, New Jersey, the door to a musty basement creaked open. George Costantini flipped the light switch and trudged down the stairs. He’d put off this job as long as he could. It was early 2014, about a year since his father, a retired General Motors employee, had died at the age of ninety-six, leaving behind this room piled high with dusty antiques from a lifetime of collecting. Where to even start?
Costantini’s hand brushed against a makeshift package—plastic foam wrapped tightly between pieces of plywood. He cut through the duct tape holding it together. The overhead light reflected off a stained-glass image, a woman with wings holding a swan. He opened the package beside it to find what seemed to be her twin, a goddess holding an owl, a star shining down on her. Costantini had no way of knowing they were replicas of frescoes by the Italian Renaissance artist Raphael titled “Hours of the Day and Night.”
He had a faint memory of his father bringing the windows home back in the seventies and hanging them in the sunroom. Where had his dad said they’d come from?
Costantini needed someone who could point him in the right direction. A college a couple of towns over had a big library. Maybe someone there would know something about the windows. It was a long shot, he knew, but he emailed the reference desk anyway.
Pavlovsky stared in astonishment at the email that had been forwarded to him. He dialed the number and arranged to go to Costantini’s to see the windows for himself. Once there he recognized them immediately. Costantini was happy to return them.
Pavlovsky had known they were out there, buried, meaningless to all but someone with a well-trained eye and a single-minded focus, like the mysterious marks of the medieval monks. He’d felt it in his bones, that hunger for discovery that had lain dormant for years. But even he couldn’t have predicted this—the treasures he’d been searching for all those years were perfectly preserved. Ready to be displayed once more in a place of honor in the college library. Almost as if they were waiting for him, and only him.