Indelible

by Adelia Saunders

  Tobias thought Lina had an eye and he took her to a used camera shop. You’d never know it from the cracked leather strap, but Tobias said the one he got her was the best of the old-time cameras, and for a while Lina walked around taking photographs of street musicians and cracks in the sidewalk, recording the shutter speed and aperture in a little book.

  Tobias said that when photography was first invented people believed that each picture peeled off a thin layer of reality. Like a bit of skin removed each time—too many pictures taken of a person, and that person would disappear from life and start existing only in the photographs. So Lina began taking a whole series of portraits of Tobias Kronen—Tobias Kronen eating toast, Tobias Kronen about to cross the street, Tobias Kronen packing his bags, and finally Tobias Kronen at the airport waving good-bye, because apparently she hadn’t taken enough to keep him. Lina had the photos blown up big and hung them around the apartment for a couple of days until Magdalena made her take them down. But before she did, Magdalena bought a magnifying glass and when Lina was out she went over each photograph with it, looking for the string of Swedish words that stretched across Tobias Kronen’s forehead and down his arms. But in the photographs the words on Tobias Kronen disappeared, leaving his skin as blank as the faces on billboards or the pictures of people in a magazine.

  One morning Lina came home with a story about how she’d woken to find a blue-eyed boy—who, the night before, had dropped a pearl into her wine glass and then pushed her into the men’s room to do lines of cocaine off the top of the urinal while the pearl dissolved—wrapped up in string. For the first time she thought she really might die right there in that hotel room, she told Magdalena, because the string was more like a flat black cord, the kind that people are strangled with. Especially people who cannot find their clothes in time to run for the door before the person who has wrapped the cord around himself finishes rocking and chanting with his eyes closed.

  The story was not so different from other stories Lina told on other mornings in their kitchen, Magdalena in her pajamas, Lina in whatever she’d been wearing the night before, Magdalena doing the dishes and Lina eating the corners off Magdalena’s toast or cracking a raw egg into her coffee.

  By that time Lina had quit her job at the bar, though somehow she still came up with her share of the rent, and she had the whole night’s story to tell now that Magdalena was working two shifts and almost never went out. Sometimes Magdalena listened and sometimes she didn’t, scrubbing at a bit of potato burned onto a pan, though she knew it wouldn’t come off without soaking.

  Really a boy, Lina was saying that morning. Exactly her age, his own table at such and such club, took her to one place then another, and so on—Lina was drizzling gin over the yolk floating in her coffee, then rummaging through the fridge for the cream—he was so beautiful, women put their phone numbers into his hand as they walked by, he had done something important for such and such company and they made him a such and such—Lina reached with her fingers into the jar of pickled banana peppers that had been in the fridge since Manny the Argentinean footballer, while Magdalena scraped the potato off the pan with her thumbnail.

  At the exact moment Lina had decided to leave her clothes and run for the door of the hotel room just as she was, the boy opened his eyes. He looked at her through the web of black cords he’d made over his face, and asked her to please stay for breakfast. There was a knock at the door, and someone brought in coffee and a platter of star fruit.

  The boy’s name was Dov Kitrosser, and he was the ninth of ten children born to a family of Orthodox Jews who had left Spain for Russia at the time of the Inquisition, and Russia for England at the time of the pogroms. His grandfather had sold figs beside a newsstand in Piccadilly Circus, and from there he founded Britain’s largest fresh fruit dynasty, which supplied London’s finest restaurants with champagne grapes, golden watermelons, and raspberries that came packed on cushions of honeysuckle.

  According to Lina, Dov Kitrosser had started grafting cherry sprigs onto the branches of his mother’s rose bushes almost before he could walk, and by the age of twenty he’d made a name for himself as a botanical engineer, one of the sharpest minds in the field of genetic modification, which, he told Lina as he spritzed a blood orange over the star fruit, would one day feed the world on dryland rice and virus-resistant potatoes. The genes of plants could be combined and remixed to do incredible things. Look, he said, opening a little box attached to the black cords that he’d draped over the back of a chair. Inside was a glass globe the size of a walnut, and in it the world’s tiniest apple tree was heavy with pinpoints of fruit.

  Lina always talked like this, some of it possible and most of it not, her eyes unnaturally bright, fingers picking at the edges of her dress. But the name reminded Magdalena of something, and the next time Lina took a shower, Magdalena said she had to use the mirror to do her makeup. She put her glasses on and turned for a tissue just as Lina reached for a towel. Dov Kitrosser. Like everything else on Lina, she’d seen those words a hundred times before, but they came with no explanation; she hadn’t even been sure they were a name. None of the others, not even Tobias Kronen with his cameras, had found their way onto Lina’s skin, but Dov somehow was stuck there, the last few letters of his name disappearing into the shadow under her breast.

  Still, Magdalena didn’t think too much about it, and she’d forgotten all about Dov Kitrosser when several days later a crate of pomegranates was delivered to their flat. Even when he became a fixture in Lina’s morning storytelling and the long skirt Magdalena wore to work started disappearing—because all of Dov Kitrosser’s sisters wore them below the knee—Magdalena still thought that he would pass. Then one day Lina said that she was leaving. She had found a girl named Roxie to take her room, so the rent would still get paid, and she separated her socks from Magdalena’s. Dov Kitrosser came in a car to take her things, leaving Magdalena scouring the enamel off the stove to cover the sound of their footsteps fading on the stairs.

  But Lina didn’t take the camera with its cracked leather strap that Tobias Kronen had given her; Magdalena found it under her umbrella the next time it rained. Magdalena’s glasses had gotten broken when Roxie sat on her purse, and so Magdalena began taking the camera with her when she went out, adjusting a lever on the viewfinder to bring street signs into focus when she needed to. The image through the camera was so sharp that the first few times a face wandered into the frame she clicked the shutter release almost by accident, she was so startled by the crispness of the words across a forehead that suddenly bobbed up to block her view. But when the first roll was finished and she had the film developed, the words were gone, and Magdalena looked through the series of anonymous faces, wondering how anyone decided who was or was not beautiful—to her the lack of words alone made each one perfect.

  Lina had been gone for less than a week when Magdalena left the house one morning late for work. She was looking up the street through the camera to see if the bus was coming, when the space in the viewfinder was taken up by Lina getting out of a cab. Magdalena was just about to call out and tell her to hurry over before the bus came if she wanted to use Magdalena’s keys to get into their apartment, but she saw that there was someone else in the back seat. He handed Lina a laundry basket full of clothes, and she held his hand till she was all the way out and standing on the curb. Then she let go and the taxi pulled away. The man inside waved but Lina didn’t wave back, she just stood in the middle of the street watching it until it turned the corner, with little streaks of makeup running down her face.

  It had been years since Magdalena had seen Lina cry, and for a moment she stood watching with the camera to her face. Lina always seemed so capable, like a master puppeteer who, though she might have loved or needed men for certain things, never forgot that they were dolls on strings, and if they danced it was because she made them do it.

  Magdalena put the camera away and took out her phone to tell her manager that she’d be late, and
she started toward the Lina-size shape that was now waiting in front of their building. Usually Lina’s stories of endings came days or weeks after they had happened, but this one she told before they’d even made it up the stairs.

  She and Dov had gotten married, a crazy thing, done hastily in the middle of the night when they’d both taken too much of something—Lina wasn’t even sure of what—and in the morning Dov regretted everything. He went into convulsions of prayer and by the time he’d calmed down, Lina was so relieved he hadn’t torn himself to pieces that she agreed when he said they ought to be apart for a little while, to get their heads straight. So Lina found herself back at the flat, a married woman, leaning against the buzzer with her things in a laundry basket at her feet.

  By the time they got up to the fifth floor, Lina wasn’t crying anymore. She had a plan, and she hung her head over the sink and made Magdalena cut off all her hair. To make things right, she said. It was part of a ceremony that should have happened on her wedding night. Her hair fell in long blonde sheets into the breakfast dishes. Magdalena pressed the scissors flush against her skin, and as she cut she saw that certain words at Lina’s hairline were in fact the beginnings of whole sentences that continued up across her scalp. Lina had more writing under her hair than anywhere else on her body. Some of it Magdalena recognized as history, the stories of things that had happened before Lina was even born. One string of words was in English; others were written in alphabets Magdalena couldn’t understand. She had no choice but to look at them. In this state she wouldn’t think of letting Lina use the scissors herself. Lina made her get a razor and clear away even the roots, so that no stray hair would float in the ritual bath that was supposed to precede her conversion. “What are you talking about?” Magdalena asked.

  “Dov’s cousin is a rabbi, I’m going to him,” Lina said.

  “Why?” Magdalena said.

  “I’m going to convert,” Lina said. “Dov will change his mind if I’m Jewish.” And because Magdalena realized she might be right about that, she didn’t tell Lina that she didn’t need the rabbi. There had been a whispered conversation years ago, when Ruta was drunk and she came to Magdalena’s mother’s apartment late one night when Magdalena was supposed to be asleep, about names being changed during the war. But Ruta said a lot of things.

  Magdalena made a lather with the dish soap and pressed the razor close. And now she saw that Lina wore her ancestors like a kerchief wrapped tight and hidden under her hair. Her mother was Ruta, born Kazlauskaitė, whose mother was Ona, born Chana Gitelson, whose mother was Rivka, born Fein. When Lina made Magdalena fill the bathtub and said that Magdalena would have to help her because her entire body was supposed to be submerged at the same moment, Magdalena didn’t tell her the stories of great- and great-great-grandparents that darkened her scalp or that over one fresh-shaved temple she carried instructions for prayers Magdalena knew Lina had never learned. Instead Magdalena said, “It’s not going to work. Your butt will float.”

  “Please,” Lina said. “The rabbi won’t do it if I haven’t had the bath.”

  So Lina held her breath and Magdalena pushed her under, trying to make sure that Lina’s heels and calves, her bottom and shoulder blades and the back of her naked head all got wet at once. The bathtub was too small and she couldn’t quite do it. Just as well, Magdalena said. The whole idea was crazy, and anyway, no rabbi was going to accept an at-home immersion. But Lina wouldn’t listen. She gathered her things, wrapped a scarf around her strange pink head, and shouted good-bye from the stairs. For a moment Magdalena thought about calling after her, but Lina was already gone. Magdalena cleared the hair out of the sink by the handful and put it in the bin.

  Inside the yellow church it was quiet. Back in Lithuania old women might sit in the last few pews straight through a Sunday afternoon, but in Swindon not so many people went to church and this one was empty except for the smell of flowers left too long in their vases. Magdalena put her glasses on and watched the light filter through the colored glass.

  When she was eight or nine years old, after Lina had gone back to live with Ruta in Kaunas, Magdalena’s mother got a job cleaning in a church. In the afternoons after school Magdalena would sit in the basement and watch the sisters while they made communion wafers. Sometimes they’d let Magdalena do the mixing, so long as she didn’t touch the dough. If she’d been confirmed she could have helped them roll it out and cut it into little squares, but as it was she just watched as the nuns made two cuts for a cross into each square, murmuring body of Christ, sprinkled them with holy water, body of Christ, and covered them with a white cloth until they could be baked for Sunday morning.

  The nuns were old, but they were happy. Magdalena’s mother said that this was because the Russians were gone and they didn’t have to be nuns in secret anymore. But Magdalena believed she knew the real reason. Now the nuns could wear their old clothes again, with low hoods that covered the words on their foreheads and pinned down over their necks and ears. That was back when Magdalena thought that everybody saw the writing, and she was sure that the nuns were glad not to have to read each other’s secrets anymore.

  One night a few months after Lina made Magdalena cut her hair, she came to the bar where Magdalena worked on weekends. She was soaking wet—she must have walked all the way from Dov’s flat in Stamford Hill to get that wet because it was barely raining. Her hair seemed to have grown back, darker now and unnaturally smooth. Her face was flushed and the things she was saying weren’t making a lot of sense. If Magdalena had thought about it she would have known something was wrong. But right then she was worried about her cash drawer, which was coming up short again and again. So she poured Lina a drink and told her to sit at the bar until she was done counting. The register was under by twelve pounds fifty. She counted the drawer again while one of the regulars bought Lina another drink. Twelve pounds fifty short. It was funny how she remembered that. If she’d just paid the difference herself and taken Lina home. If James the day bartender hadn’t dropped the petty cash receipt into the ice bin—where Magdalena found it, finally, blotted it dry with a napkin, circled the amount (he’d taken out £12.50 exactly to buy lemons for the bar), and stuck it in the cashbox, then shooed the closing time regulars out and took Lina home. If she hadn’t made Lina wait for her, if Lina had had one or two fewer drinks—well, it might not have made any difference, and that was the truth. But what was also the truth was that Magdalena had been glad to make her wait. It had been a long time since she’d heard from Lina, weeks had gone by without even a text, so let her take her turn waiting, and never mind that her head kept dipping up and down.

  Lina seemed all right on the bus ride home, except that she was talking too loudly. She and Dov had been living together, there were problems with the family, Dov was spending more and more time away, leaving Lina alone in the big empty flat they had moved to because Dov’s mother wouldn’t let Lina stay with them. Without his family Dov was losing touch with things, he was going out too much, not caring if Lina was there or not, and so Lina tried to do the things Dov’s mother had done, keeping certain fasts and doing things with candles, although Dov hardly noticed. That particular day had been a special one. The women were supposed to go without food or water till sundown when the men would mix honey into wine and tip it to the women’s lips to drink. Lina had waited at home all day and into the night for Dov to come. When he did, his eyes were tiny pinpoints, and when Lina asked him if he knew what day it was he said it was probably already Saturday, and he was going out again. When she said that she was hungry he said there was some fruit in the fridge, to help herself, and he was leaving. He had some things he had to do.

  So Lina put handful after handful of little orange fruits into the blender until the motor jammed—“Yeah, of course,” Magdalena said. “You didn’t take out the pits”—and drank them down. And when she’d finished she came to find Magdalena, a little unsteady on her feet and with something bitter on her breath. Magdalena helped
her off the bus and down the street and up the stairs to their flat. She cooked some Minute Rice and fed it to Lina with a spoon. Lina fell asleep on the couch and Magdalena got out the camera, wondering what Lina would look like without the writing on her face, and if the blush around her lips would come off too. She wound the camera. Lina was sleeping with Magdalena’s jacket balled up underneath her head, and she didn’t wake up when the flash went off.

  A bird had flown into the yellow church. Magdalena watched it dodge the blue and red streams of light from the stained glass windows, then, seeing the clear glass at the back of the church, the bird turned suddenly. Its wings caught the sun in a flash of white and it slammed against the glass, then fell like a drip of pale ink down onto the floor of the church without making much of a sound. A little lie, to say that life left off like that, like a pause for breath, a little sigh, a tap against the glass.

  When they got there the ambulance men told Magdalena to go into the other room. They put Lina on the kitchen floor and started working on her, sticking her with needles and pumping her stomach. Magdalena did not go into the other room, but rather noticed that Lina’s body was seven kitchen floor tiles long and three across. Her new hair had gotten knocked to one side and Magdalena saw that it was a wig, like Dov’s sisters wore. It was fanned out across the kitchen tiles and Magdalena kept thinking it was going to get dirty. The ambulance men cut open Lina’s shirt and pressed paddles against her chest, and Magdalena remembered the story of the girl with beautiful hair. She cut it in hanks and floated them down the river to the man she loved, who wove them into a rope to catch her with.