In Lithuania people said that deaths come stinging like bees, but Magdalena learned that night that this was wrong. Deaths did not strike suddenly; they took time, one had to fill each moment. So Magdalena repeated the prayers she could think of. At some point one of the ambulance men told her there was nothing more they could do. Maybe she’d misheard, because even after he said it they kept trying, and Magdalena began to wish that they would stop, put Lina back on the couch, and go away.
The ambulance man made her sit on the bed and told her again that they were going to stop. She asked him to please try some more. I’m sorry, he said. Is there someone you can call?
Lina’s expressions had stayed with Magdalena for a while, stuck in her head like a song. The song faded, the way Lina squinted her eyes a little bit when she was thinking about something faded, but her eyelids, her feet turned out like a ballerina, the way she had looked, just the same and utterly different after the men from the ambulance laid her on Magdalena’s bed and went away—that stayed, and Magdalena could run the whole world round, live in her haze, take the pills Barry gave her in a little cup to help her sleep, help them all sleep in that house where the carpets ate up the sound. She could put up her hands, shut her eyes, and still the thing that was Lina but was not anymore would be there in her mind, its eyelids turning gray. No words she’d ever read anywhere had prepared her for that.
“Oh dear,” said a woman who had come up beside Magdalena in the church, without Magdalena noticing. She was wearing a little thing on her head that made Magdalena think she was probably a nun, but in a modern, English way. Magdalena took her glasses off and took a step back, keeping the woman’s face a blur.
“Oh, the poor thing,” the woman said, scooping the bird off the floor and onto a bit of paper. “I’ve said all along we ought to put something on that glass.” She folded the bird into the paper, then she turned to Magdalena. “Are you here for Santiago?”
“Yes?” Magdalena said.
“Hurry now and get into some proper walking shoes—the others left an hour or so ago. You’re the last group with a hope of making it by the Feast Day, if you ask me, and even so you’ll have to trot. You’ve got quite a bit of ground to cover before you get to France, and then it’s another good five or six weeks, unless you go by sea. The others will be off to Marlborough next, to meet the group coming over from Saint Andrew’s in Chippenham. You can probably catch them there if you take the bus,” the woman said. “It’s a bit of a cheat, but after all, it’s quite a long trip. I don’t suppose it matters much if you start off here or in Marlborough, does it?”
“I don’t know,” Magdalena said.
“Let me give you your stamp all the same. Come along,” she said, and Magdalena followed her into a little office. “Have you got a book yet?” she asked.
“No,” Magdalena said.
“You can pick one up in Marlborough. I’ll just put it here for now, shall I? You’ll paste it in your book later on.” She took out a stamp and ink pad and pressed the stamp down hard on a bit of paper. Magdalena brought it up close to her face to see it.
“What is it?” she asked.
“Scallop shell,” the nun said. “After the bones of Saint James had been lost at sea, his body washed ashore covered in shells and perfectly whole, and there’s your miracle, see? All the pilgrims buy little badges with the scallop shell on them, you can get one for yourself once you get to France. Don’t be shy about going up to anyone who’s got one on if you need a bit of help.”
“Okay,” Magdalena said.
“Off you go,” the woman said. “And let me give you something for the way.” The woman led her into a little office.
Whole, Magdalena thought. Such an odd word in English. It was the same word Dov Kitrosser’s brother had used. “The body must be left whole,” he’d said. At the time Magdalena hadn’t understood. “In a hole?” she said. “Whole,” Dov’s brother said. “Like, all in one piece.”
Magdalena wished she had been listening more closely to the other things the nun had been saying. Who was this man who had died and then washed ashore whole? There had been a time when Magdalena believed very strongly in miracles. While her mother worked cleaning the church, Magdalena would sometimes follow her and collect the bits of wax she scraped off the floor from under the votive candles, looking for the face of Mother Mary in the drippings. Magdalena wanted to think some more about the little forests of wax that grew underneath the rows of candles, each one all that was left of some certain prayer, and she wanted to know more about the place where dead people washed ashore whole. She might have asked, but the nun was still talking, and in another moment Magdalena forgot all about miracles.
“I made up loads of packages, but the others, you know, they’re so weighted down with packs and things they can’t bear the extra. But you haven’t got much.” The woman handed Magdalena a paper bag filled with buns. “The sisters had a bit of fun making bread from the old pilgrim recipes. It’ll take your teeth out but it won’t go bad. Let me get you some jam to go with it.” The woman reached past Magdalena’s head and opened a little cabinet behind her. Lost dog, Bishop’s Gate, bone cancer, Joey Dolan’s orchard with the apple blossoms out, it said across her arm. “You’ll get hungry, you’ll see—I’ve done the Way twice myself, but the old knees aren’t the same anymore.” She gave Magdalena a jar of orange-colored jam. “Our tree had such a crop, I’ve got more preserves than I know what to do with.” On the jar was a handwritten label. Apricot.
Magdalena had seen that word in typeface along Lina’s hairline so often that she had stopped seeing it, but she’d never realized that it was English. It didn’t look like an English word somehow, and yet there it was, written neatly in blue ink on the side of the jar.
“It’s apricot,” the woman said. “I don’t remember a year they were so sweet. Come and see the garden—you can pick as many as you like. Eat them as you walk, they’ll keep you regular. You’d be surprised how many pilgrims forget that sort of thing.”
Magdalena knew she should give the jar back to the woman and leave, bury the sight of the word in the part of her mind she made a habit of not going into. Instead, she let the nun rummage for an empty grocery sack and followed her outside and across the parking lot to a walled garden behind the rectory. “Soaks in the sun,” the woman said. “You should have seen our cherries.”
She knew she shouldn’t, but in another moment Magdalena was taking her glasses out of her bag and putting them on, and yes, there in the garden was a tree with its branches weighted down with little orange fruits. Some had freckles from the sun, and the ground was covered with the ones that had gone brown.
“It breaks my heart to see them spoil,” the woman said.
After the ambulance men lifted Lina off the kitchen floor, carried her into Magdalena’s room, and were gathering their things to go, one of them spoke to her quietly. For a person so young and with no obvious medical condition, there would have to be an inquest, he said. The body couldn’t be left alone. The ambulance men left and a police officer came to stay in the flat until the autopsy people could come in the morning. The policeman was black and his skin was very dark—not one word showed through. He kept offering to wait outside in the hallway, but Magdalena said no. They had left the door to Magdalena’s room open a crack, and she didn’t want to be alone with the thing that looked like Lina but was not anymore. So she made the policeman cup after cup of tea, even though she knew he didn’t want any, and they waited on like that till morning.
After the coroner’s people came to take Lina away and the policeman left, thanking her for the tea because he didn’t know what else to say, Magdalena could not stay alone in the flat, not just then, when so many things were just exactly the same—Lina’s shoes just as she’d left them, one on top of the other with the toes pointed inward like they were ashamed to have been left like that in the middle of the room—while other things, the little sheaths of plastic from the needles they had used on he
r, did not belong at all.
It seemed important to get the picture on Lina’s camera developed, but first Magdalena had to finish the roll of film. She walked to the park down the street. There were children playing. The face of one little girl was darkened by line after line of text. There were little words around her eyes, and bigger ones across her cheeks. Magdalena took a picture. She took a picture of a little boy whose dimples were spoiled by what was written there, and of a middle-aged man reading a newspaper on a park bench, whose nose reminded Magdalena of pictures of her father, but who had big block letters like stains across the rest of him.
The pictures came back to her in the opposite order from how they had been taken, and when Magdalena got to the one of the little girl in the park, her skin empty now in the photograph, she skipped the one that came next, which would be of Lina asleep on the couch. She didn’t know why she had thought she wanted to see it.
A few days later, while the inquest was being made, the police department telephoned Magdalena. They had found a policewoman who spoke Lithuanian to tell her what the coroner had found. Lina had eaten the seeds of an entire case of wild Turkish abrikosai, apparently by putting the fruits, pits and all, into a high-powered blender—which the police had found unwashed on Dov’s kitchen counter, a slush of skin and cracked seeds at the bottom and cyanide residue staining the blades. The policewoman began asking questions. Had Lina meant to do it? Could it have been an accident? Didn’t she know that the pits were poisonous? “Poisonous?” Magdalena asked. She’d never heard that before. “Of course,” the policewoman said. “Peaches too.” Why would Lina have put a whole box of them in the blender? Was she upset? Was she having problems in her life? Magdalena tried to explain that Lina was like that sometimes, that she scratched people’s names into her legs with paperclips when she was happy and lit fires in the sink when she got mad. And through all of it, with all the questions and the arrangements that had to be made, the calls to her mother in America and the trouble they had finding the place where Ruta was living, Magdalena never thought to ask what abrikosai were in English.
Magdalena took the grocery sack from the nun, who told her to help herself from the tree and be sure to latch the garden gate when she was done. The nun walked back toward the church, pinching dead blossoms as she passed a flowerbed. Magdalena went into the garden and picked one of the fruits. Its skin was soft, a shade lighter than the orange-colored jam the nun had given her. She could feel that the flesh was loose around the pit. She took a bite.
Somehow she hadn’t realized that the things written on Lina’s skin were happening one by one until there was nothing left for the future. There were no descriptions of marriages or children or disease, and when she’d cut off all of Lina’s hair, Magdalena had seen that acute cyanide-induced respiratory failure after ingesting the seeds of 30–40 wild Turkish came before that old word visible just below her hairline. Ap-ree-tsots was how Magdalena had always thought of it, but the c was meant to be pronounced like a k and not a ts like in Lithuanian because the word was English: apricots. And, as Lina stood with her head bowed over the sink and a hundred other things printed across her scalp, Magdalena had tried hard not to understand.
Stupid shitty Lina, to put apricots in the blender without even taking out the pits and then to come home to Magdalena as if she knew Magdalena would never have been able to believe it if she hadn’t seen it all the way through. It was the only thing that Magdalena could be grateful for. It was better to be left with the memories of that night pinned up like postcards behind her eyelids than to be like Ruta Valentukienė, who would never really know how to believe that Lina was gone. It was better to have been there, starting with the rosy shadow around Lina’s lips, then the chewing sound that woke Magdalena in the middle of the night, and on through the whole thing, the breathing, the thick paste that filled up her mouth, the sound her lungs began making when it was nearly over, the men from the ambulance and the time it took them to come up the stairs, the needles, the plastic gloves, and the little plastic caps they left littered on the floor.
The people doing the inquest questioned Dov Kitrosser again and again, and Magdalena too, asking her if she’d known that Dov had accepted a post with a biotechnology company in Zurich and had bought just one plane ticket there. Had she known about the fights, the threats from his mother, or the Australian businessman that Lina had been seen with the night before?
Tests were run on the blender, showing that the cyanide content of those apricot seeds was particularly high. But, as the policewoman said, it was commonly known that you weren’t supposed to eat them. They gave Magdalena an envelope with a copy of the inquest papers, in case she needed documentation when she brought Lina home.
Dov’s brother called to say they would pay for the airline company to take Lina’s body back to Lithuania. There’s no need, Magdalena said. After the autopsy there was nothing to do but cremate her, and she had the ashes double bagged inside a shoebox she could hold on her lap. Something was wrong, but Magdalena didn’t understand the silence on the other end of the line until Dov’s brother explained that according to Jewish law if Lina’s body wasn’t buried whole, there would be no way for her and Dov to rise together at the end of time and be reunited in eternity.
Magdalena stood under the tree in the church garden with the bite of apricot still in her mouth, unchewed and getting to be tasteless, like an unwelcome second tongue. She swallowed it.
She’d imagined this moment many times, wondering what would happen to her when she found out for certain whether the words were true or they weren’t. If they weren’t true, then she was crazy, and if they were, then the whole world was, crazy and cruel to leave little notes like that, as if life was worried it might forget what it had planned. The only thing Magdalena had always been sure of was that not knowing was better than knowing, and so she’d tried hard for a very long time not to look into things too much. The doctor her mother used to go out with did go back to his wife, just like it said under his chin, and her friend Marija did end up marrying somebody called Juras, whose name was written in a band around her ring finger. But Lina’s mother was the one who became a drunk, and her skin hadn’t said a word about that, while Magdalena’s mother had mostly stopped drinking, and still it said alkoholika like a brand on the side of her throat. And Marija’s baby who was born with a hole in his heart had had whole paragraphs filling up his cheeks.
Well? Magdalena said to herself. The question echoed around inside her head. Then an answer came, not a word but a feeling. A certainty, like a breeze that had found its way into her mind. She thought of the place where Luck was written on the inside of her mother’s wrist. In the stories Luck was sometimes beautiful and sometimes had to be tricked and locked in a basket. But she always got out, she got what she wanted and rode away holding the reins of the horse she shared with Death, who was her kinder sister. There was a drugstore just off Faringdon Road. She would stop there to get what she needed. She would do it today. Magdalena ate the rest of the apricot and spat out the seed.
{RICHARD}
Paris, June
As it turned out, my hotel was only a block or two from the boulevard de Sébastopol, not far from the tower under scaffolding I’d remembered seeing earlier that morning. A statue of a man holding a staff stood on top of one corner of the tower, giving it a distinctly asymmetric look. I made a note that my hotel was on the statue’s right-hand side, in case I got lost again.
It was still too early for check-in, so I left my luggage with the lady at the front desk. She insisted on putting an extra piece of tape around Aunt Cat’s suitcase before she stowed it in the closet, and then suggested I go out and have some breakfast. There was a bakery nearby. I bought some rolls and looked around for a bench where I could sit and eat them. I stopped at a souvenir stand to buy another city map, and when I saw that my tower had been included in a postcard-size street scene mounted on a tiny easel, I picked that up too. The picture was only a print of a
painting that, if you looked at it closely, had been sloppily done in the first place, and there was a sticker on the back saying the whole thing had been made in Vietnam. At ten euros I was sure I was being taken advantage of, but I bought it anyway.
As soon as I’d done it I felt a bit sheepish. I hardly needed another trinket to sit and gather dust, even one brought back from Paris. So I figured I’d send it to my friend Diana. Before Walt died I had her give me a hand sorting through Aunt Cat’s old boxes of knickknacks, and I could tell she liked that kind of thing. I’d come in to find her flushed and covered with dust, delighted at a miniature nativity scene set into a walnut shell or a bit of sewing advice—hide the knot as you would a secret—stitched onto a pincushion Cat must have made when she was a girl. When I picture Diana now, back home in her own kitchen, I’m certain that the windowsill above her sink is filled with those sorts of little things. The painting on its easel would fit in fine, something to look at while she waits for the water to run warm.
But then I thought that maybe I’d better not. I haven’t heard from Diana since she left to go home back in November, and I wasn’t sure she’d welcome a souvenir bought on a whim by a man she probably hasn’t thought of since. I put the little painting in my pocket, with one leg of the easel still sticking out, thinking that maybe I’d save it as a keepsake after all. It might be nice to look at it now and then and let the picture of the tower with its one corner higher than the rest bring me back to Paris.
The rolls I’d bought from the bakery were still warm, and I found a park with an empty bench where I could eat them. I had to take the painting out of my pocket to sit down. I looked at it again, thinking about life’s accumulations. Even my Aunt Cat, who never seemed the type for keepsakes; after she died we found a dozen boxes at the back of her closet filled with roadside souvenirs and baby shoes and bits of cracked china she’d saved over the years, so much stuff that I started having Diana come out every week just to get through it.
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