Indelible

by Adelia Saunders

  “R-I-C-H-A-R-D,” Neil said.

  “Oh, yes, I know,” she said.

  They had another coffee, and Magdalena asked him about Paris and what he was doing there, which was nice of her. Neil could tell she didn’t feel like talking. Her eyes were still wet, and she kept taking her glasses out of her bag and unfolding them, then putting them away without putting them on. But she had a way of looking at him so intently, with her lips tensed a little, as if something important was going on behind them, that Neil started believing she was actually interested in the Roman-era origins of the Châtelet butchers’ quarter.

  In his notebook Neil had a postcard of the Tour Saint-Jacques and he showed Magdalena. It was an old one he’d found at the flea market in front of Les Halles, probably from the 1950s or ’60s, back when people kept getting killed by chunks of mortar falling off the sides, it was in such bad shape. In the photograph the tower looked sort of corroded, studded with half-dissolved gargoyles. It was going to look a lot better than that when they were done with the reconstruction, Neil told her. The tower had been under scaffolding for almost eight years now, and Neil wouldn’t have even recognized it in the postcard except for the unmistakable asymmetry caused by the statue of Saint Jacques himself, who stood perched on one corner, walking stick in hand, pointing pilgrims on their way.

  Magdalena flipped the postcard over to read what was on the back.

  “It says ‘Leaving tomorrow,’ ” Neil said. “I think it could have been written by someone who was going on a pilgrimage, which is, you know, like a religious trip, because this was the starting point for the Saint Jacques pilgrimage. And see the date? Right around this time of year. Which makes sense because people who wanted to make it by the Feast of Saint Jacques, which is July 25, would have had to leave Paris in June. See, they had to go all the way down to a place in Spain called Santiago de Compostela and also another place, Finisterre—you know, ‘the end of the earth.’ That was where this guy, Saint Jacques, supposedly washed up on the beach. And he should have been all rotten and dead but instead he was perfectly preserved with scallop shells stuck to him, and so it was, you know, a miracle.”

  Something he’d said had caught Magdalena’s attention. She looked up from the postcard, waiting for him to go on. “I mean that’s one story. There are lots of others. And of course it’s pretty unlikely it was actually him. To have floated all the way from Jerusalem? It’s basically impossible. But in medieval times people wanted to worship something they could see for themselves, like an actual body. So churches started saying that they had, you know, relics, which were usually parts of holy people, their heads or a bone from their arm or even—” The cathedral at Conques had claimed possession of Jesus’s prepuce, which was a word Neil had had to look up. “Well, some of the stuff they had was pretty gross. But Saint Jacques, he was one of the few whose relics stayed intact. Sorry, intact, it’s like all together. That was part of the miracle. People traveled huge distances because they believed that the saint was so powerful he wouldn’t let his body be broken up.”

  Magdalena was leaning toward him a little bit, like it was important that she hear every word.

  “And it’s interesting, the reasons people had for traveling all that way, hundreds of miles sometimes. Like, look, I think I’ve got it here—” Neil went through the papers in his backpack until he found a photocopy of a record from the mid-1300s. “I found this in the archives—see, isn’t the script beautiful? What it says is actually pretty sad. It’s a dispensation for a woman who’d promised to make the pilgrimage if her baby recovered from some sickness. And it did recover, but then it died of something else, and she was, you know, so heartbroken that she couldn’t make the trip. It’s not important, historically, except that these kinds of documents are all we have to piece together what it was like for people back then. I mean, you get a sense that life was hard, you know, and short. People lived closer to death than we do today. And that’s why religion was so important in every aspect of people’s lives.” Magdalena was nodding. “Like, instead of going to jail, a pilgrimage would be used as punishment. Criminals or people convicted of heresy—which was basically disagreeing with the church—they’d be forced to walk barefoot, sometimes even with chains locked around them, so that everyone would know what they’d done. I found a list of people from a certain parish who were made to go—people caught sleeping with other people’s wives, priests who were, you know, stealing or having affairs. I think I have a copy of it here somewhere—yeah, this is it. See, it says the reason right there: adultery, adultery, lechery, et cetera. Of course sometimes people just did it to get away. You know, get out of town, see the world—in the Middle Ages going on a pilgrimage was almost the only way a regular person could travel. And who knows, when they came to the place where the saint’s body was kept they might witness a miracle. People really believed in that stuff back then. Sight restored to the blind, cripples made to walk—”

  Now Neil was the one who was leaning in over the table. He suddenly had a terrible thought. Did he have bad breath? He couldn’t smell it, but that was no guarantee.

  “You want a piece of gum?” he asked.

  “Okay,” Magdalena said. Neil searched around in his pockets and remembered he hadn’t bought any. Then, speaking of miracles, he found a single stick of Wrigley’s Doublemint at the bottom of his backpack. He absolutely had to have some for himself, so he broke it in half. “Sorry,” he said. “I thought I had a whole pack.”

  “And where is it happening, these bodies all together like life coming up on the beach?” Magdalena asked.

  “It’s down in Spain,” Neil said.

  “And it’s a miracle?”

  “Well, I mean, it’s a story. It’s not like bodies are washing up all the time,” Neil said.

  “But sometimes?” she asked.

  “Well, yeah, that’s the idea.”

  As if this had answered a question she’d been thinking about for some time, Magdalena smiled. Then she changed the subject to the thing they’d spent the last half hour being careful not to talk about.

  “I’ve been making one big mistake having her burned after death,” Magdalena said, pressing down the lid of the shoebox. One corner was bashed in and the box didn’t look like it would make it all the way to Lithuania.

  “Why?” Neil asked.

  “Well, some people are saying that the body must be—like you say. In-tact. For her religion.”

  “Oh,” Neil said.

  “If she is not whole, then at the end she doesn’t go up with God, something like this,” Magdalena said. “So, I have really fucked up.”

  “Well, I guess,” Neil said, which wasn’t what he’d meant to say at all. “But, I mean, you didn’t know?”

  “Not this, about the body. Some person was telling me later on. She have to be having all parts, nothing missing.”

  “I think I’d rather be cremated,” Neil said. “Otherwise you just rot, you know?”

  “Not this Saint Jack on the beach,” Magdalena said.

  “Yeah,” Neil said. “But like I said, it’s just a story.”

  Magdalena was quiet for a little while, and then she said, “You know something, Ni-yell? Maybe this is pretty good thing to be dropping those burned parts all on the floor, because until this time, for the last entire year actually, I’m not so much knowing what to do with her, and I’m really wanting to do right, you know?” Somehow with that tiny piece of gum Magdalena blew a bubble big enough to pop and she smiled at Neil again, her one grayish tooth like an exclamation point at the end, all of it at odds with her eyes, which were so light and clear that airplanes might have flown across them. Taken altogether she was the most perfect person Neil had ever seen.

  And then something happened that was not a big deal in itself, but was so open to romantic interpretation that it made Neil feel as if the chemical balance of his entire body had been rearranged. Looking at him in that funny way of hers, Magdalena brought her hand up to his fa
ce and with a quick movement she traced her fingers along his temple. “You are having one small insect there, is nothing,” she said, and smiled again. But Neil hadn’t felt any little legs, only the soft touch of her hand brushing back a bit of his hair.

  He was still a little woozy as he helped her buy the ticket and left her on the street outside the station, where people with piles of luggage waited for buses bound for Warsaw and Kiev. Then Neil walked back to the archives on rue du Faubourg-Saint-Denis, even though it wasn’t the most direct route, because that was the path Saint Denis was said to have taken out of Paris carrying his head under his arm after the Romans chopped it off around the third century A.D. It seemed fitting somehow to be walking in the footsteps of the patron saint of Paris, who had personally delivered his own head to his tomb in a feat of cephalophoric ambulation—literally, walking while carrying one’s own head—the most ridiculous of miracles.

  The gate of the old walled city was in front of him, an arbitrary arch rising out of the streets now that the wall itself was gone. There were shops selling vegetables he’d never seen before, where people bought unfamiliar melons and green tomatoes in papery husks. The windows of a Pakistani sweetshop were packed with sticky orange balls and honeyed bricks of colored paste.

  At the Saint-Denis gate, rue du Faubourg-Saint-Denis became rue Saint-Denis and the shops changed. Professor Piot was right, Neil thought. A city trails its past along behind it. Merchants had been required to pay a tax to enter the old city, and the imprint of that fact had lasted through the centuries, so that even now the shops inside where the wall used to be sold different things than those beyond it.

  Inside the Saint-Denis gate the vegetable stalls were gone and the stores were filled with rhinestone belts and wholesale lace, fur and wedding dresses, vente en gros. Shopkeepers smoked outside with their sleeves rolled up, a begging gypsy girl kneaded an orange between her hands, and a prostitute stood in a doorway, her breasts like brown balloons pushed up against her neck. Long passages cut between buildings ended improbably in sunlight, and it occurred to Neil that he was entering the portion of his life when one began to accumulate regrets. Before, somehow, no decision had seemed too permanent. But now that he was in college, wading straight into whatever it was that would turn out to be his life, suddenly each thing he did or didn’t do was tangled up in consequences. And with this thought, as if he’d gotten a look at his own life’s ledger of missed opportunities, Neil realized that he shouldn’t have let Magdalena get on the bus to Vilnius.

  {MAGDALENA}

  Paris, June

  People pressed in around Magdalena, jostling each other to get on the bus. All around her words in Lithuanian sprouted on the backs of hands and across foreheads and chins. Taking off her glasses didn’t help. The people were so close and the words were so familiar that Magdalena knew their meanings without even realizing she’d read them.

  The line was moving. People were getting on the bus. She looked over her shoulder at Neil, who was now just an orange-headed blur. She waved. Part of the blur waved back. An old woman in front of her was telling her husband to check and double-check their passports. Stazinis širdies nepakankamumas, which meant congestive heart failure, looped like a noose around her neck.

  The patch of color that was Neil waved again. Then it turned and got smaller and smaller among the other shapes. The old woman in front of her was stepping onto the bus. PARIS-WARSZAWA-VILNIUS said the sign in the window. Magdalena looked again for the orange-topped shape, but it was gone.

  She got out of line. She took her bag out from under the bus, ignoring the bus driver who shouted after her in Lithuanian and then in Polish that she wasn’t allowed to do that, and she walked with her head down across the street and back toward the station. She didn’t look up again until she was far away from the bus and the words on the skin of the people around her didn’t mean anything to her at all. She put her glasses on and looked around for the ticket counter.

  She returned the ticket for half its value, hoping thirty euros would be enough for a ticket to the place where bodies washed ashore whole. She tried to remember exactly what Neil had said. In English she asked several people how to take the bus to Spain. They told her to go to the Montparnasse Station. Was there a bus to a place called the End of the Earth? They didn’t know.

  The people in Paris looked different. They seemed to have been collected from all over the world. She wished she still had Lina’s camera, so she could see the exact shapes of their noses and cheeks. She felt like she had when she and Lina had first arrived in London and she let herself stare and stare at people, trying to see their features underneath foreign words, not worrying that she would read them.

  The Montparnasse station was far away, but Magdalena didn’t want to use any of her money to take the metro there, so she got a map from the man at the information desk and, feeling a little dizzy because she wasn’t used to wearing her glasses, she walked out of the station with the shoebox under her arm, pulling Lina’s bag behind her on its shaky wheel. She felt so happy that she blew a bubble with the gum that Neil had given her, even though it was not the bubble-blowing kind.

  After Barry had dumped her clothes out of the upstairs window, he’d hurled the camera after her into the street. It had bounced, then shattered its lens against the curb, and in all the confusion with the police and the new girl and Veronika screaming, Magdalena never had a chance to take out the film. She wasn’t sorry to leave Barry’s house, but she was sorry about that camera.

  Barry had been very nice to Magdalena for a few weeks after the day in the bathroom when she told him about the words while his cut from the razor blade was bleeding all over her jeans. But once he stopped being afraid that Magdalena was going to try to cut herself up again when he wasn’t looking, he started treating the whole thing as a big joke.

  “C’mon Magdute, tell my future,” he’d say to her. But most of the things that were written on Barry were in the past. Magdalena didn’t understand a lot of what it said, but there were quite a few dates, most of them before she was born, as if Barry had fallen face-first into a history book while the ink was still wet. She kept her mouth shut.

  Before she found out the meaning of apricots, Magdalena had felt almost comforted by the nonsense on Barry’s face. Ugly things were written there, but they were interspersed with words that were still meaningless after more than two years in England, and she found them easy to ignore. But after that day in the churchyard, Magdalena started paying more attention to Barry’s skin, knowing the things it said were probably true. He caught her studying him once or twice. “Oh, give us a hint,” he would say. Or he’d try to give her a kiss and say, “What’s it got to say there about you and me?” But when Magdalena finally did read him what was written there, she did it not because he kept asking her to, but to shut him up about the numbers.

  Barry had a whole library of books on World War Two, and his favorite, the one he had tabbed with sticky notes, one with the name of each girl living in his house, was called The Holocaust of the Jews in Eastern Europe. When he got mad about something, he’d start yelling at Magdalena and the other girls about the things that had happened during the war as if they had personally been the perpetrators and he was the victim, which was really something, considering what it said on his chin and the back of his neck. They could tell when he was really mad because he replaced their names with death tolls.

  To Zosia from Poland he’d say, “Two Point Nine Million, who the fuck is this guy hanging around across the street? Get out there and tell him to push off,” or to Veronika, who was Czech, he’d say, “Two Hundred Seventy-Seven Thousand, your goddamn orange hair is stopping up my drains.”

  But it was Magdalena who got the worst of it, not because her number was highest, not because Barry’s family had even come from Lithuania, but because he had read in that book that the Lithuanians hadn’t just handed over the Jews, but in fact had done most of the killing themselves.

  When h
e got worked up, even if it had nothing to do with her at all, he’d call her down and ask her how many Jews she knew. Not so many, Magdalena would say, knowing what was coming. How many synagogues were there in Vilnius? Maybe a few, Magdalena would say. “Nope, not maybe a few. Fucking two. How many were there in 1939?” He’d open the book with the sticky notes and point to a page. “Fifty. It was forty percent Jewish, how about that? And how many pits in the forest did it take, would you say? For all of them?”

  “I don’t know,” Magdalena would say.

  “But if you had to guess.”

  “I really don’t know.”

  Once, when she had just moved in and before she’d learned to keep quiet, Magdalena told Barry he’d better be careful of what he said, that a lot of people had died in Rhodesia too. She didn’t know what she was saying at the time, but Barry got very quiet after that, and he looked at Magdalena in a way she didn’t like at all. It said a lot more than that across his chin and his arms, and even though Magdalena didn’t understand exactly what it meant, she knew better than to get into it. From then on she let Barry say what he wanted.

  “How many bullets did it take for the babies?” he’d ask.

  “I don’t know.”

  “Sure you do. Bullets aren’t cheap. Think about it.”

  “I don’t know.”

  “One? Two? For the little ones, the really tinys. Give up?”

  “Yeah, I give up.”

  “It’s a trick question.”

  “I don’t know.”

  “One half of one bullet. Guess how.”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Don’t know much. Ask Granddaddy. Go on, use the phone. Call old Grandpop up long distance.” And Barry would say in Lithuanian in a singsong voice, “Make mama hold baby close. One half for mama, one half for—”