Magdalena unlocked the door and Dov followed her up the stairs. He didn’t say anything else until they were in the flat and he was sitting at Magdalena’s kitchen table, crying, hands at his sides, not bothering to wipe the tears away. Magdalena felt suddenly furious at this child, this slack-lipped boy who had been stupid enough to spend some of his family’s fortune on a fine Swedish blender with blades capable of pulverizing even the hard pits of the fruit that had made him so rich, Lina couldn’t help but fall in love with him. He was wearing jeans that fit like they’d been made especially for him. With his angel face just starting to grow into something firmer, he might have walked out of an advertisement for cologne or flavored vodka if it hadn’t been for the soft dark curls at his temples and telltale strings at his sides, like little children wore back home when they dressed up as Jews on the carnival night before Lent began and went house to house, demanding coins and blintzes.
“I brought you her things,” Dov said, pushing the paper bag toward her. Inside were a few crumpled dresses, some stockings, and a nightgown.
“I don’t want them,” Magdalena said.
“Bury them with her,” he said.
“I can’t,” Magdalena said. The funeral home had already delivered Lina’s ashes in a plastic bag; they were sitting in a shoebox on the kitchen counter. “I told your brother,” she said. “I’m sorry. I haven’t known.”
She would have explained to Dov how, when the people from the coroner’s office finally got Ruta on the phone, she hadn’t been able to understand what they were asking and it was left to Magdalena to tell the funeral home to go ahead and cremate what was left of Lina after the autopsy. But she realized Dov’s brother hadn’t told him about the ashes, or Dov hadn’t listened, because before Magdalena could say anything more he put the bag of clothes in her hands and said, “Please. They have her smell.” He dug in his pocket and brought out a toothbrush in a plastic bag. “And this, put it with her body.”
“Why?” Magdalena said. What did she want with Lina’s toothbrush?
“The inside of the mouth, each time you brush your teeth millions of cells come off.”
“What are you talking about?” Magdalena said.
“I need her back,” Dov said. “I need every part of her back.” He was crying again, and it made Magdalena want to scar his smooth face, rake the tan off his skin with her fingernails. Dov kept talking, about a day of judgment and the garden he would make for Lina when they both rose up from the ground at the end of time.
Magdalena did her best not to listen to him. What could have made Lina choose this boy, who now had a thin string of mucus hanging from the end of his nose, over all the others? What did it mean that he had been the one to have his name planted—like a curse—under her heart?
“I think you should go,” Magdalena said, breaking into what Dov was saying. She walked to the door and opened it for him, but he didn’t move.
Dov had been there all along. When, as skinny kids, she and Lina poured an entire bottle of Magdalena’s mother’s bubble bath into the tub and painted bikinis on themselves with the bubbles, he was there, his name curled like a snake under the foam that kept running down Lina’s chest before they could scoop enough up to make a proper bosom. Dov’s name was there when they took off their clothes and jumped into the river on the night of Magdalena’s high school graduation, feeling the icy shock of the water give way to a rush of warmth as every bit of blood they had coursed through their bodies.
“Why are you buying just one ticket to Zurich?” she asked him, remembering what the policewoman had told her.
His family wanted him to take the job. He and Lina had argued, he’d bought the ticket, but he wouldn’t have gone, he said. They couldn’t bear a single day away from each other. What about the fights the neighbors said they had heard? Stupid things, Dov said. Things that didn’t mean anything, now. And that night? Magdalena asked. Why had he gone out and left Lina alone like that? What kind of husband was he to leave her in a house without any food, except for fruits with poisoned seeds?
“I couldn’t have known,” Dov said. “How could I have known?”
Suddenly Dov was kneeling on the floor at her feet, his head in her lap like a child. “I love her,” he said, and now Magdalena saw that this, at least, was true. Up close the dusky color of Dov’s skin was not his skin at all; it was caused by hundreds—thousands—of tiny letters, as if his entire body had been caught in a fine black web. Magdalena leaned in, and she could see that the letters did not make sentences, like they did on other people. They did not tell stories or record important dates. All over Dov’s body, on the back of his neck and on his cheeks and his hands, even darkening his lips and the skin under his fingernails, four letters were repeated again and again. Lina Lina Lina Lina.
When Barry asked Magdalena why she’d tried to do it, as they sat on the floor of the bathroom and she wiped the cut on his hand with alcohol then wrapped it up tight to help stop the bleeding, she looked to where Barry’s blood and not her own was washing pink down the bathtub drain and she read what was written along the edges of the gash in Barry’s palm. Tell him, it said. The dot in the i had been sliced through by the razor. And Magdalena did. She told Barry about Lina dying and the words she’d seen since before she could even read them, and Dov, who had asked her how can I go on? and how she had had to say, honestly, that she didn’t know. She’d never seen such singleness of purpose across a person’s skin. And how her own skin was blank, as if her existence was an oversight or an accident, and no record had been made. She told Barry about the apricot tree in the church parking lot and what it said on the coroner’s report, how she knew now that the words she saw were true, and how she’d cost Lina and Dov their chance at eternity.
But she could tell that Barry thought she was making it all up, because from that day on he started asking her why she wouldn’t read out loud what was written on his skin.
Magdalena had met Barry in London, on one of the days when she was out with Lina’s camera. By that point she’d lost both her jobs. Roxie had gotten spooked about living in a place where someone had so recently died and moved out, leaving Magdalena to pay the rent. Dov had promised to help, but there was no answer at the number he’d given her, and when she called his office they said he was unavailable and would be for some time.
She was in Regent’s Park, taking pictures. By then she’d used up three more rolls of film and was most of the way through a fourth. She didn’t know how she’d pay to have them developed, but she didn’t care. The important thing was the snap and click of the shutter, the stiff advance of the film. There were bills from the funeral home and the police inspector in charge of the inquest had been leaving her increasingly curt messages, insisting that she go to the station house to fill out the last forms. But it seemed more important just then to peel layers off the faces of strangers like the skin of an onion, too translucent to capture what was written there, so thin as to never be missed. If Tobias Kronen had been right and each photograph robbed a person of a tiny layer of themselves, then each photograph that Magdalena took might dim the words a little, eating away the dot of an i, changing an e to a c. Eventually, if only someone would stand still long enough for her to take a hundred pictures or a thousand or a million, Magdalena thought it was just possible that she could erase the words altogether. But people moved around too much, and the rolls of film were short, so Magdalena had to hope that other photographers would come along to strip the last layers away.
In the meantime, there was the problem of her English. It had improved so much in the months she’d been in London that she read without meaning to as she focused the camera.
West London Chess Club Champion, 1978
Chief comptroller Mackay & Singh (embezzler)
Born with a caul
When we come back the flowers have bloomed take off my clothes I think it is for the best
Homosexual
£43,880 a year
Broke Hami
da Grigoryan’s collarbone in two places
Asks for the children, they say there never were any
Automobile accident, 17 November 2019, 06:59
Simon’s hands
The baby’s feet
But it would all disappear, along with the diseases, addictions, loves, and debts, when she got the little envelope with the photographs back from the drugstore.
She thought she was taking pictures of all kinds of people, until she heard a voice behind her say, “Oh yeah, she’s your best yet.” Magdalena turned around and saw a man sitting on a bench with a camera of his own. “Go on, take it before she moves,” the man said, motioning for her to turn back to the girl who was standing a few yards away, talking on the phone, making circles with her toe in the sand.
“You’ve got an eye for the girls, eh?” the man said.
“What do you mean?” Magdalena asked.
“Ah, not from here,” he said, hearing her accent.
Magdalena started walking away.
“Don’t go away,” he said in Lithuanian. Magdalena turned around.
“What did you say?” she said in Lithuanian.
“A good guess,” he said, back to English now. Magdalena didn’t say anything, but she also didn’t go away.
“I’ve been watching you,” he said. “You like taking pictures of pretty girls, yeah?”
“I’m just taking pictures. Not just of girls.” Even as she said this she realized he was right, she had been taking pictures only of girls, and only, really, of girls who looked a little like Lina.
“Hey, labas,” the man said. “Maybe you’ll let me see the pictures when you’re done?”
“I don’t think so,” Magdalena said.
“I like taking pictures too.”
Magdalena didn’t say anything.
“That’s a nice camera. Where’d you get it?”
“It was my friend’s,” she said.
He looked at her for a second. “Hey, are you alright?”
“Yeah,” Magdalena said. But she’d started to cry. The camera hung around her neck, with the lens cap dangling on its string. The girl on the phone looked up and moved a little farther away.
“Hey,” Barry said. “Now don’t do that.”
In the end, it was Barry who paid the rent that was due on her flat, and he said she could stay with him in Swindon if she promised to teach him Lithuanian. It seemed like the kind of situation Magdalena would have tried to keep Lina from getting into. But she couldn’t stay in the flat in London anymore and she couldn’t face the thought of going home to Vilnius where their apartment was empty because her mother was in America, and where everyone had pale skin filled with words she had no hope of not understanding.
At least on Barry’s skin most of the words were unfamiliar. What she did understand, she didn’t like, but those things had happened in such faraway places that it was easy to imagine they didn’t belong to Barry at all. Even when he told her that he was also a foreigner, born in a city that was now called Harare, which, when Magdalena found it on a map, was not so far from the places mentioned on his face and arms, she let herself believe that he’d somehow gotten wrapped in other people’s crimes. So she packed Lina’s old suitcase, which was the better of the two, and took the bus from London to Swindon, with Lina’s ashes still in their plastic bag inside the shoebox.
A month passed after the day in the bathroom when Magdalena told Barry about the words. Now it was June, and she was leaving Swindon the same way she’d come, on the bus back to London with the shoebox in her lap. The bus windows were open and Magdalena could hear the music from an ice cream van outside. She wished she’d made Barry give her enough money for the trip home to Vilnius before she read him anything. She wished that at least she’d had time to buy something to eat. As it was, there had been a scene and Barry had thrown every bit of Magdalena’s clothing out onto the street. Veronika had called the police, the new girl had been screaming, and Magdalena had run all the way to the bus station in the center of town with Lina’s old suitcase wobbling like a sick dog behind her.
The bus rolled through the outskirts of Swindon. Magdalena knew she should call her mother to tell her she was coming, but she had hardly any credit left on her phone. She looked through her purse again, just in case there was a top-up card in there that hadn’t been used. If she called her mother, then her mother could call Ruta Valentukienė, to let her know that Magdalena was finally bringing Lina home. But Ruta had been in and out of hospitals and rest homes, and now she could be anywhere. Magdalena might have called one of their old school friends, but so much time had gone by, she wasn’t even sure who knew about Lina and who didn’t. It was one thing to tell people in the rush of disbelief right after it happened, the way she’d called her mother during the long night of making tea for the policeman, hardly hearing her mother’s voice on the other end of the line as they both said again and again, Lina is dead, using the words like shovels to hollow out a place for the empty space to live. The sound of the words dug a little grave for Lina in each of their minds that first night, when the world itself had not yet made room for the lack of her.
The bus was going faster now. The blur outside her window changed from brown and gray to green. Magdalena put her glasses on and watched the countryside.
She hadn’t planned on calling Neil, but as the bus got closer to London, Magdalena realized she didn’t have much of a choice. There would be no taking Lina home at all if she couldn’t come up with the money for the ticket. She’d thought of asking one of the girls she’d worked with in London, but she knew that those kinds of friendships didn’t go much past sharing a cab or a cigarette. This is what men are for, Lina would have said, with a dozen possible sources of the price of a ticket to Vilnius programmed into her phone. If there had been time, Magdalena might have asked her old boss at the bar in Swindon, or even Ivan, but now it was too late. She had thirty-eight pence left on her phone—enough for one call to someone who, when her credit ran out, would be sure to call her back. Someone who would be too polite to ask why she was leaving Swindon with her suitcase half-full. She dialed Neil’s number, but he didn’t pick up.
When she got to London, Magdalena stood in Victoria Station, reading the outbound timetable and thinking about the meat pies fogging the glass of the pastry stand next to the ticket counter. She counted the money she had left from the catering work she’d done after she lost her job at the bar, calculating how many meat pies it would buy, because it was not enough to get her even one quarter of the way to Vilnius.
The tops of the meat pies were beaded with grease, their crusts gone limp under the hot lights of the pastry counter. Magdalena settled on beef and onion. She was taking out her wallet when her phone rang. It was Neil. He’d gotten her message about stopping in London on her way home to Vilnius, he said, but he wasn’t there anymore. There was something artificial in his voice.
“Well, it’s okay,” Magdalena said. “It’s no problem really, you are busy.” She would sleep in the station, buy another top-up card, call her mother and ask her to wire the money.
“No, it’s not that, it’s just that I’m in Paris right now,” Neil said, sounding more normal.
“Oh, you are in Paris?” she said.
“Yep, till August,” Neil said. Something about a professor.
She wondered if it was possible that her name had been written under his eye as a kind of receipt. If he’d gotten a haircut since she’d seen him last she might see that her name came at the end of a sentence: lends bus fare to Vilnius to Magdalena Bikauskaitė. She’d seen plenty of people covered with little things like that. She was still holding the timetable. London to Paris: the cheapest bus left late that night. She had just enough for the ticket, counting her change.
“I’m really sorry,” Neil was saying. “It would have been fun to get a coffee and all.”
Magdalena shook her head at the girl behind the pastry counter, who had come up to ask what she wanted.
She looked at the timetable and told Neil the time the bus would arrive. Then she bought her ticket. The man behind the window said something under his breath as she dug in her purse for the last of her coins. She tried not to look at him as he gave her the ticket, but she couldn’t help seeing that debts were wrapped tight around his wrists.
“To Paris Gare du Nord, departing tonight, eleven o’clock,” he said.
Magdalena looked around the station until she found a bench that was fairly clean. She had hours to wait, and she was too hungry to spend them awake. She put the ticket and her passport and the papers from the inquest inside her blouse. She rested her head on the shoebox, closed her eyes, and listened to the sounds of her stomach until she fell asleep.
{NEIL}
Paris, June
The day final exams finished in London, Neil took the Eurostar to Paris with Professor Piot and the other research assistants. Professor Piot made them squeeze in around a little table in the family section and sent someone to the café car for champagne, and pretty soon they knew all about the Chunnel as an illustration of free-market versus socialized political economy. (“Imagine the embarrassment of the queen, who is on board, when this train doubles its speed as it arrives in France on its maiden voyage, suggesting that Britain’s private investors cannot be relied upon to fix the tracks . . .”) They heard grim stories of the World War One battlefields they passed. (“The mud was so permeated with human fragments that during the great rains of 1915 whole arms and legs would sometimes slide out of the walls of the trenches . . .”) Professor Piot promised dinner at Maxim’s to anyone who could name the genius whose idea was behind the fast-moving panzer tank divisions that crossed the Belgian border into France in May 1940. (“Himmler?” somebody guessed. “Göring?” “Aha!” Professor Piot said. “While the French generals built their Maginot line, Hitler read a pamphlet by a certain young colonel named Charles de Gaulle and used these ideas to plan the Blitzkrieg!”)
Indelible Page 12