Indelible

by Adelia Saunders

  The man turned back to the shop window. Magdalena wondered if maybe her mind was playing tricks and she had imagined seeing words in Lithuanian.

  “Do you know what street is for the station Montparnasse?” she asked. He turned to say he was sorry but he didn’t know, he was only visiting; she put her glasses on and read again, high on his cheek, Akys nemato, širdies nesopa. Magdalena could hear her mother’s voice saying it, and it even looked a little like her mother’s handwriting on the man’s skin. If the eyes don’t see, the heart doesn’t hurt. It was her mother’s all-purpose answer to everything, her way of explaining the things one couldn’t know and might not want to understand.

  The man said something about the shop he was looking in. There were little figures in the window and the man started telling her about his son, who liked that kind of thing. When he bent to point inside the shop she read that he’d come to Paris for a reunion with his family; it was written on his cheek just below her mother’s words.

  “So you are here together?” Magdalena said.

  “My son? No, no he’s not here with me,” the man said.

  It was a risk to ask him anything more. But she could see that the k in the word akys on his face was made like a Russian character. Magdalena’s mother still made her k’s like that, the way she had been taught in school. Magdalena suddenly missed her mother—the sound of her voice and the spot of perfect comfort between her mother’s chin and her collarbone, where Magdalena’s head could still fit when it needed to.

  “So, you come for—reunion?” she said. She wasn’t quite sure how the word was supposed to be pronounced, but she wanted the man to keep talking.

  He looked at her strangely, and Magdalena knew she’d made a mistake.

  “A reunion? No, did I say that?”

  She shrugged as if he had, and though the man looked uneasy he seemed to believe her. He went back to talking about his son, and she nodded, reading the words again. She was tired, her arms and legs were tired, her feet hurt, and it was restful to see letters arranged in familiar patterns. Akys nemato, širdies nesopa. That old phrase uncluttered by articles and prepositions, so that four Lithuanian words did the work of nine in English. If the eyes don’t see, the heart doesn’t hurt.

  “But you know, those things,” the man was saying. “Sometimes they don’t work out.”

  Magdalena nodded again, though she hadn’t really been listening. “Things usually can be like this,” she said.

  The man cleared his throat and picked up his luggage as if he’d suddenly remembered he was in a hurry. She would have liked to keep him standing there a few minutes more. Next to her was the shop window he had been so interested in, and she looked inside. But before she could come up with a polite way of making him turn his cheek to her again so she could get another look at her mother’s words, the man was picking up his suitcase and turning to go. He’d been carrying a city map, better than the one she had, and he gave it to her, saying, “Here, maybe you can ask someone else about the station.”

  “For me?” she said. “Okay, thanks.”

  The man tilted his head to say good-bye and Magdalena stood looking in the window of the shop. The gum Neil had given her was hard and tasteless. She blew a tiny bubble.

  Inside the window the shopkeeper was hanging up his apron. He sat to put on a pair of leather boots. When he was done he turned to the window, nodding to Magdalena when he saw her standing outside, and started clearing a place among the dusty figurines on the display shelf. After a moment he got a box out from behind the counter. He took something out of it and set it in the space he’d made on the shelf. It was a tiny saint, its features pressed into leather so soft it looked almost alive. Magdalena turned to see if the man on the sidewalk was watching too, but he was already gone. She looked back in the window and noticed that the saint’s body was covered with tiny shells. The shopkeeper took out a note written in French and taped it to the glass.

  The shopkeeper went into a back room and Magdalena stood looking at the little saint. She blew another bubble with her gum. Then the lights in the shop went out. The window display got dark and she had to lean in closer and cup her hands around her face to see inside. They were real shells on the body, each no bigger than a fingernail. Underneath the little saint the shopkeeper had sprinkled a bit of sand. She got too close. The bubble popped against the shop’s window and stuck to the glass. The door opened and the shopkeeper came out.

  She thought he would be mad about the gum, but he didn’t seem to have noticed it. He said something to her in French and began to lock the door behind him. He lifted an old knapsack onto his back and nodded again to Magdalena, then started walking up the street.

  Magdalena looked back at the window. She couldn’t read the words on the note the shopkeeper had left, but at the bottom he’d drawn a shell shaped like a Chinese fan. The shopkeeper was only a few steps away. He was old, but the boots he was wearing were strong and he had a long staff to lean on as he walked. Magdalena remembered what Neil had said about the pilgrims leaving Paris around that time of year.

  “Excuse me,” she called after him. “Please tell me—what is this saint from the window?” The shopkeeper stopped and looked at her, not understanding.

  “Very sorry, but English, not,” he said.

  Magdalena tried again. “This little man,” she said, pointing back at the window. “With shells?” She cupped her hand along her arms. She tried to remember the name Neil had told her. “Saint Jack?” she asked.

  “Ah oui. But no for sale,” the man said.

  “Okay,” Magdalena said. “But where? Where is this happening?”

  “No for sale,” the man said.

  “I want to go there,” Magdalena said.

  The man shrugged. “Very sorry,” he said.

  In Magdalena’s wallet, behind the thirty euros and some expired top-up cards, was the piece of paper the woman at the yellow church in Swindon had given her, with the outline of a scallop shell stamped in pink ink. She took it out and showed it to the man.

  “Ah, Compostelle,” he said.

  “Yes?” Magdalena said.

  “Okay,” the man said, and he pointed down the street. “Venez.” He motioned for Magdalena to follow him, and seeing her heavy suitcase with its one wheel he shook his head.

  “C’est mieux comme ça,” he said, pointing to the old sack on his back and tapping his walking stick against the boots he was wearing. He looked at Magdalena’s sandals and shook his head again. He turned back to the shop, unlocked the door, and went in. He came back out in a moment with a package of rubber insoles and a roll of tape. He handed them to Magdalena, nodding toward her feet. “You come,” he said. She adjusted the shoebox under her arm and followed him down the street.

  After only a block or two they stopped next to a construction site. “Okay,” the man said. He looked around. A group of people had formed around a backhoe at one corner of the lot. As they got closer Magdalena saw five or six nuns in hiking boots filling water bottles from a big jug, and several older couples with backpacks and matching parkas. “To Compostelle,” the old man said. “Pèlerins.” He held out his arm and walked his first two fingers through the air.

  “We go by feet?” Magdalena asked. The old man didn’t say anything, but his fingers were still walking. He held up six fingers, shrugged, then held up seven.

  “Weeks,” he said.

  “Okay,” Magdalena said.

  She took the miniature bow and arrow from Neil’s father out of Lina’s suitcase and put them in her purse, along with the rubber soles the man had given her and anything else that would fit. She tied a jacket around her waist, then shoved the suitcase under the fence, next to a shed full of construction equipment. She was so used to life without her glasses that it was only then that she thought to look up. It might have been Neil’s tower above them, or it might have been another place covered over with white boards and scaffolding. She used some of the tape from the shopkeeper to close
the shoebox tight and tied a pair of shoelaces together to make a loop so she could carry it over her shoulder. The nuns looked at their watches, and church bells chimed.

  “Okay,” the old man said to her. “We go.”

  {RICHARD}

  Paris, June

  When I’d finished with the microfilm, satisfied that the French newspapers hadn’t covered Inga Beart’s loss of her eyes in any greater detail than the papers had back home, I left the library and walked back along the river. It would be evening soon and all up and down the banks of the Seine young people were sitting in groups, tearing off pieces of bread, and passing bottles of wine because no one had thought of bringing paper cups. I might have felt disappointed at what I hadn’t found except that I’d never seen a crowd so lovely, clinging like that to the edges of the river, dangling their bare feet out over the water and stretching their toes toward the night.

  I imagined my son in with all those young people, leaning on the shoulder of a girl with a ring in her lip or tossing a bit of bread to the ducks. He has the kind of courage I never had, going off to school half a world away. When I was his age there were unspoken boundaries; people didn’t think to do those sorts of things. But the rules that were unspoken by my generation went unheard by his, and it turns out that a boy from our little town can go off to college anywhere he likes and learn the things that would make him fit right in among the city kids toasting the sunset in London or New York or Hong Kong or Paris.

  I could see my church tower wrapped in scaffolding on the other side of the river and I walked toward it, knowing my hotel was just behind and to the right. According to my map, there was Notre Dame in front of me, and I thought I might go in and have a look, but music drew me back along behind it. I listened to an accordion player, and when the song was done I gave him some money and walked on. At one end of the bridge a man was making a puppet dance while he played the harmonica without any hands, and at the other end a little group had gathered around a young fellow singing “Bye Bye Miss American Pie.” When he didn’t know the words he filled them in with “wa wa wa-wa wa wa wa-wa whiskey and rye . . .” and the crowd just loved it.

  As a little boy Neil and his cousins used to like to jump off the haystack in the barn down at the ranch. Pearl’s kids would hurl themselves off, so certain that I’d catch them. And I’d brace myself, calling out, “Ready! Set!” with more confidence than I really had, watching their little bodies fly over the edge and praying to God I would. Neil always faltered for a moment. He would start to jump, my heart would tumble, then he’d stop and start all over. But he always jumped, hollering all the way down, then he’d race Carly and the twins up the ladder to do it again. I ought to give his mother a call, I thought, find out where I can reach him now that his classes are finished for the summer. I don’t like to be a bother, but I was remembering Neil as a child, a tiny missile hurtling off the haystack and into my arms back when things were no more complicated than that. I imagined how surprised he’d be to hear from me. “You’re in Paris??” he would say, not believing. “Sure,” I’d say. “Beautiful city.” I would have done it too—they sell prepaid calling cards in the tourist shops—but I remembered our last conversation. I figured I’d wait until I had something to show for my being there.

  My landmark disappeared as I went down one street, then reappeared not exactly in the direction I’d expected. The sunset lit up the windows of the buildings around me with such an orange that each one looked like it was burning on the inside.

  I was nearly back to my hotel when I found myself on the same narrow street I’d taken my first morning in Paris. I went along until I came to the shoe repair shop again, and I half-expected to see the girl with the suitcase still standing out in front. But this time the street was empty.

  I stopped for a moment to take a closer look at the miniatures in the window. The owner was clearly a religious man: There were little saints and scenes from Scripture along with the crusading knights I’d noticed earlier, all of it made out of scraps of shoe leather and bits of old tools. Sharp tacks found use in a crucifixion scene, and beside the workbench I recognized the guests at the Last Supper, carved out of blocks of saddle soap. The fellow was quite a craftsman; he’d managed delicate expressions with a few twists of an awl in soft wax. Good hands, my Aunt Cat would have said. She had them too, fingers that understood pressure and give and suited their strength to the task. She could wring the neck of an old chicken with a quick snap of her wrist or splice the tiny wires of a toy locomotive, and a pinch on the ear hurt just exactly as much as she meant it to.

  I got my share of spankings from those hands, but I have my fond memories too, and these came back to me with unusual clarity as I stood in front of the cobbler’s window. I remembered how my Aunt Cat used to scoop finger-fulls of something called Chap-Chap Balm for Irritated Udders out of a giant jar she’d brought from the old Beart family dairy, its label gone translucent with grease. Each night before bed she’d coat her hands with it, wrap them up in dishcloths, and sleep like that, and for all they did, my Aunt Cat’s hands stayed smooth. I remembered when that case of scarlet fever landed me in a big city hospital, how all through the days or weeks of quarantine in a tiny room that seemed to list from side to side, its round little windows looking at me like animal eyes, the only points of solidness as the whole world tilted and lurched were my Aunt Cat’s cool hands cupping my cheeks.

  I wasn’t the only one who noticed those hands. I recognized them the first time I came across the character of Verna in Inga Beart’s last novel. A dairyman’s daughter with braids down her back and fine-work hands; she takes a cactus spine out of the barn cat’s paw and wins a yellow ribbon for her needlework. She appears later in the novel, briefly, as the mother of a boy and girl, a hardworking rancher’s wife who takes care of her hands, as if she’s saving them for something.

  The biographers say Inga Beart never came back to see her sister or anyone else after she left home at the age of seventeen. But the portrait of Verna, fingers still quick and supple as she grows into a woman of steely middle age, so resembles my Aunt Cat that even if I didn’t have my own memory of that day under the table I’d still be certain Inga Beart visited her sister later in life. And in any case, there is a needlework ribbon—yellow for grand champion, going yellower with age—hanging above the telephone back home, in the frame it’s been in since my Aunt Cat won it at the county fair in 1939, three years after Inga Beart left her parents’ home for good and ran off with her Hungarian.

  Next to the apostles in the window a little Madonna held the baby Jesus wrapped in moleskin in her arms. After all the walking I’d done that day I could feel the heat of a blister-to-be on my foot. A square of moleskin was exactly what I needed. But by then it was getting late and the shop was dark. I leaned in to see if anyone was still inside, and when I cupped my hands against the window to block the glare my palm stuck to the glass. Someone had left their chewing gum. The gum had gone stringy in the heat of the afternoon and when I pulled my hand away a sticky thread stretched between my palm and the shop window, then broke and reattached itself to the glass. Having taught the middle grades for so many years I’ve found plenty of chewing gum in unwanted places. I got out my handkerchief and cleaned it off as best I could.

  It took some doing, and I may have only made things worse. A man had come out of a shop across the street and was standing in the doorway, watching me while he filled his pipe. In another moment he started toward me.

  “The proprietor is away,” he said, nodding to the shoe repair shop. I shouldn’t have been surprised that he spoke to me in English; I must have looked like Yankee Doodle in my old sun hat and the gym shoes I’d brought for walking in.

  “I see,” I said.

  The man didn’t seem concerned by the smudges on the window, because he said, “If you have left something to be repaired, I have the possibility to go into the shop and take it for you. I keep a key.”

  “Oh, well thank you,” I sa
id. “I was only going to ask about something for a blister.”

  “Ah, then perhaps they will help you at the pharmacy. The owner, it will be some weeks until he returns.”

  “Is he a friend of yours?” I asked.

  “Well, we are here day by day, the same street, which is not so full of people, as you see, and so we talk to one another. I watch his shop while he takes his lunch, and sometimes he watches mine.” And then, as if he had just noticed that my handkerchief was stuck to my fingers and there was still a gob of gum on the glass, he said, “Ah, this again. I find it happens on my windows too. The children, they pass just here on their way to school.”

  “A bit of some kind of oil would do the trick,” I said. “I used to teach school, and I always kept a bottle of oil soap in my desk. It takes chewing gum right off.”

  “Mm, yes, I may have something,” the man said. “One moment.” He crossed the street and went into a small art gallery I hadn’t noticed before. After a minute he came back out, carrying a box filled with tubes of paint.

  “You’re an artist?” I asked.

  “No, no,” he said. He shrugged in the direction of the gallery and gave a little laugh. “I hope you will say nothing to my clients, but these days it is very difficult to find at once an artist and a master of technique. And so I keep a few things—” He dug around in the box until he found a can of painter’s oil and handed it to me. “This I use for fattening the paints. One never knows when one will be required to adjust the perspective, to add a spot of color that must be there.”

  My handkerchief was ruined anyway, so I used it to daub some oil on the window. I let it sit for a moment. The man gave me a palette knife and I scraped the glass as gently as I could. The oil did the trick, the gum came off. I did my best to wipe the window clean.