In Neil’s reimagining the ashes still spilled, but in a way that was entirely not his fault—perhaps the feral offspring of the German tourists had done it. In this version Neil helped Magdalena sweep them up, delicately lifting bone fragments out from the cracks in the floor and comforting Magdalena with a tactful little joke about how her friend obviously wanted to spend some time in Paris.
Then, as they talked, and Magdalena looked at him with that intensity in her eyes, the really important part would happen. She would be looking at him, and then when she lifted her hand up to his temple she would leave it there a moment, maybe letting her fingers brush down along his jaw, and she would say, “Ni-yell, I am just really wanting to kiss you right now, okay?” It seemed so entirely possible it might have happened that way that Neil was having a hard time thinking of anything else. Her lips would be moist from all that crying and her mouth would taste like gum—as would his, thankfully—and they’d probably end it sort of laughing at themselves, not an awkward laugh at all, but a laugh that transcended all the obvious differences between them, like the fact that she was perfect and Neil had baby fat, that they thought thoughts in separate languages and had only moments before been strangers to one another.
Madame Piot interrupted Neil’s dream, and Gare du Nord dissolved into the Piots’ living room again.
“Neil, why so quiet?” Madame Piot said. “Have some Camembert.”
“Okay,” Neil said.
The problem was that he would never, ever see her again. She had gone back to Lithuania, and unless she actually sent him those sixty euros, which he was now feeling like a real jerk for not having just given to her outright, he would never hear from her again. He didn’t even know her last name. He could ask his father, but that would mean he’d have to call his father, which would mean explaining about the Christmas presents, and that was definitely out. Why hadn’t he asked for her e-mail? Her mother was opening a pizza shop, she’d said. How many pizza shops could there be in Lithuania? Neil let Madame Piot refill his glass. He saw how it would happen. The place would be filled—maybe it would be the grand opening. She’d be running around taking orders, her hair sort of messy around her face. He’d stand off to the side, having a drink at the bar until she had a spare moment. Then as she went by he would say, “Hi Magdalena.” He would smile shyly but in a charming way, and she’d know right away that he’d come all this way to see her, just to make sure she’d made it on the bus okay. She’d push her hair up out of her eyes, worrying that she was sweaty or that there was tomato sauce on her shirt, but of course Neil wouldn’t care at all. And she’d look at him just for an instant in that way she had. What would happen next wasn’t very clear, but it hardly seemed to matter, and Neil was already refining the scene that hadn’t happened at the train station to make it happen in the pizza restaurant, when he realized that all the others were carefully transferring the crumbs from their knees to the saucers of their teacups, Madame Piot was thanking them for saving the foie gras from being thrown away, and it was time to go.
The next day Neil presented his findings on thirteenth-century monastic pilgrims, but he had to stop in the middle of his sentence because he’d totally forgotten to finish his research. He hadn’t checked the Patrologia Latina or found out when exactly the pope had forbidden monks to go on pilgrimages. He hadn’t even gotten very far in his translation of the Rouen monk’s own account, which was written in a strange Latin script that wasn’t like anything Neil had studied in his paleography class. Afterward Professor Piot took him aside and asked Neil to meet him for a beer that afternoon after he finished work at the archives.
Neil was pretty sure Professor Piot was going to give him a lecture on how a historian must do a complete review of his sources before making any kind of statement of fact. This had happened to him once before, when he improperly cited something in his final paper for Professor Piot’s Methods class in London. Neil knew he was being paranoid, but he also knew that Professor Piot wouldn’t hesitate to replace a sloppy researcher, even right in the middle of a project.
“So?” Professor Piot said as Neil carefully slid over the duct-taped part of the seat at the bar across the street from the archives.
“I’m sorry about the meeting. I don’t know what I was thinking,” Neil said.
“No, no,” Professor Piot said. “The meeting, who cares? But you? Everything is okay?”
Usually Professor Piot talked to Neil in French, working in a lot of nonintuitive colloquial expressions. The fact that he was using English now could mean any number of things, including that he no longer considered Neil worth the effort.
“I’m fine,” Neil said. “I’m just, I don’t know. There’s this girl and—things could have turned out better. It’s really not a big deal.”
“Hm,” Professor Piot said. “Maybe you’re spending too much time in the archives?”
“No, really, not at all,” Neil said. Before Professor Piot could say anything else Neil took out his notebook. “There’s a lot more I want to find out about that monk—he started out in Rouen, but he’s writing from Saint-Jean-d’Angély, so I think he’s pretty sure to have gone through Paris. And if so, he might have stopped at the church of Saint-Jacques. It’s 1259, and, you know, there just aren’t many first-person pilgrimage narratives from the mid-1200s.”
Professor Piot didn’t say anything, so Neil kept going. “I was even thinking we could feature him in the display, maybe talk about what motivated him to make the trip? It might be interesting because there was that decree forbidding monks from going on pilgrimages—I think it was Pope Urban II. I’m trying to figure out if the Rouen monk mentions getting any kind of special permission in his account. It’s just the handwriting, I mean, the translation is taking me forever.”
“Mmm, yes,” Professor Piot said. “Look into all of it, very interesting. But take some time for yourself too. Call up this girl. Take her to the Bois de Vincennes.”
“Okay,” Neil said.
“You can rent rowboats there.”
“Yeah, that sounds nice,” Neil said. “Only, she’s in Lithuania now. I mean, she took a bus. We got a coffee at the station and, I—I don’t know. I think I kind of blew it.”
“Oh?” Professor Piot said.
Neil didn’t want to explain about the ashes, so he said, “You know. I sort of said all the wrong things.”
“Ah,” said Professor Piot. “Well, yes, this can happen.”
They talked some more about the monk’s papers. The problem wasn’t the ink—in fact, the text from the 1200s was darker than the 1680 date on the colophon at the end, which explained that the papers had been salvaged after the Huguenots burned most of the Saint-Jean-d’Angély archives in 1568. The monk’s manuscript itself was vellum, eight folio pages covered in tight Latin script. Neil couldn’t read any of it. The penmanship was so perfectly uniform and the letters all finished with an odd downward stroke, so that nearly every one of them looked like a q. Professor Piot promised to get him a script key that might help. But the trick, he told Neil, was to forget everything he’d ever learned about the act of writing.
“Imagine instead how you would make your letters if you are writing with a piece of a feather on a very expensive parchment, and if you are a holy man, taught to write by holy men, and so on, you see?”
“Sort of,” Neil said.
“You say the date is 1259? So this monk is writing in a Gothic hand I think, yes?”
“That’s what it looks like,” Neil said. “But there’s something funny about the characters. There are these little, I don’t know, tails trailing off at the bottoms of the letters. I’m not sure it was ornamental. It’s more like he wasn’t lifting his pen all the way up.”
“Well, if you’re right and he was on his way to Santiago, perhaps his arm was tired. These old manuscripts, so much is said inadvertently, if we know to see it.”
“Well, the script is pretty formal,” Neil said. He didn’t want Professor Piot to thi
nk he was just being lazy. “It’s basically a book hand, so I think he must have been trained as a scribe. But Gothic normally finishes with little upturned feet on the letters, right? And his keep flicking downward. I’m sure I’ll figure it out. It’s just, you know, finding how to start.”
“It is often a question of changing one’s perspective,” Professor Piot said.
“Right,” Neil said. He took a sip of his beer and thought about the eight pages of tiny loops and hooks that would be waiting for him again tomorrow at the archives. “Actually, sorry. I’m not really sure what you mean.”
“When you yourself write, perhaps you think of making the letters to look distinct from one another, like they do in the newspaper. But this monk, it is some two hundred years before he will see a sheet from a printer’s press. For him the page must be harmonious first, only then does he think of clarity for his reader.”
Professor Piot dipped his finger in his beer and began to trace the alphabet across the table. “You live in the age of free will, you imagine that each of us may do what we like, independent of our circumstances. But this monk, he is a believer in the great narration. For him each act, each stroke on the page is part of a continuum. So? It is natural for him that a letter may be distorted by the letter next to it. A t for example, or very often an r, may change its shape depending on where it falls inside a word. This is true especially in the Gothic scripts, where the text was made to resemble the weaving of a tapestry. And a tapestry—it is not made of individual stitches, but of a single thread, you see? Look at the page from this perspective and the meaning may become more clear.”
Professor Piot ordered them each another beer.
“So this girl, she lives where, in Vilnius?” he asked, as if they’d been talking about her all along.
“Yeah, I guess,” Neil said.
“This is a very beautiful city, very rich, historically, you know. Napoleon passed through Vilnius on the way to his great defeat. There is a small monument there. On the side you see when you are facing east, it says, ‘Napoleon Bonaparte passed this way in 1812 with 400,000 men.’ From the other direction it says, ‘Napoleon passed this way in 1812 with 9,000 men.’ In fact, many of them froze to death just outside the city gates. A terrible winter, 1812. But this time of year the climate in Vilnius is very nice.”
“Have you been there?” Neil asked.
“Oh yes. I have one very good friend there, a professor at the university. Kazys Uzdavinys.” Professor Piot signaled the bartender for the check. “He wrote a lovely paper on the dental findings from the bodies of the Napoleonic conscripts. I’m sure you can stay with him for a few days.”
“In Vilnius?” Neil asked.
“Of course. Perhaps you would like to go and tell this girl what it was you wanted to say.”
“Mm,” Neil said, and he was going to explain how actually he didn’t really know her very well, he didn’t know where in Vilnius she lived, and that even if he did know, there was a major difference between imagining how things would go if he were to show up on her doorstep unannounced and actually doing it. But Professor Piot had got hold of one of his favorite subjects, which was advising his students to live lives of impractical adventure, and it was hard to get a word in.
“One must do such things, you know,” Professor Piot was saying. “I myself once made such a completely crazy trip when I was about your age, to a far off wilderness called Chicago. And in the end it all was shit, but you know, if I had not done it, well, it wouldn’t be a life, and that’s the way it is. For the sake of those historians of the future we must live our lives today.”
“I know, I know,” Neil said.
“And we must make them interesting.”
“I know,” Neil said. Professor Piot said this a lot.
“You need some money for the ticket?”
“No, no,” Neil said. “I mean, I’m not sure—”
“Take this,” Professor Piot said, pushing more than several twenty-euro bills across the table. “You can give them back in August. In fact, while you are there I have one small errand in Vilnius for you to do.”
So Neil found himself walking back to Professor Piot’s office to check the departure times for the all-night bus to Vilnius, because Professor Piot insisted that if Neil waited until morning he would never go. Neil was trying to think of some way to get out of the whole thing without disappointing Professor Piot, when he remembered about the pizza restaurant. He could find her that way. Professor Piot took out his phone and started dialing, and before Neil could tell him it really wasn’t necessary, Professor Piot was saying, “Kazys, old man!” and making all the arrangements. And while Professor Piot was talking, Neil remembered the light brush of Magdalena’s fingers along the side of his face, the way she kept taking her glasses off when he looked at her.
Professor Piot hung up the phone. “Okay, so they will expect you,” he said. “Fine people, Kazys and his wife, and as I remember they have a fold-out couch.” He wrote down their address and told Neil he was giving him three days off work in exchange for tracking down a certain file at the Lithuanian archives.
“Something about the Tour Saint-Jacques?” Neil asked while Professor Piot searched through the sticky notes on his desk, looking for the number of the file.
“No, no,” Professor Piot said. “This is a new project, one that came to me by way of a Jewish group here in Paris. They would like to learn more about a certain cemetery in Vilnius. An apartment complex is going up, and it appears that the spot was once an important burial place from the time when Vilnius was a great center for Jewish learning.”
“What do you want me to look for?” Neil asked.
“A little thing. I’ll go myself in the autumn, but while you are there you can get this—” he gave Neil a sticky note with numbers written on it “—at the Lithuanian State Historical Archives. I believe this is the founding document of the cemetery, a charter from the Polish king allowing the Jews the right to burials outside the city walls, but there has been some confusion about the date. Kazys has been promising for months he will check this for me, but then he goes abroad, and this and that. Frankly, I think there may be some politics involved. And Kazys—well, it can be a delicate subject. He may prefer to keep himself removed. Make sure you get photocopies.”
“Of course,” Neil said.
“Okay, so, give Kazys my regards,” Professor Piot said. “And have a good time.” He gave a big wink that Neil pretended not to see. Neil remembered too late that Professor Piot was not the most discreet person. By the next morning all the research assistants would probably have been told that Neil was off visiting his petite amie in Lithuania. But—who knew? By then it might be true.
{MAGDALENA}
Between Orléans and
Meung-sur-Loire, June
It was six days since they’d left Paris. Already nearly all of Magdalena’s euros were gone, the shoelaces she’d been using to carry the box with Lina’s ashes had broken, and most of the skin on her feet had been replaced by Band-Aids. Sometimes she and the others walked from town to town on little paths through fields of vegetables or in between planned forests of strange geometry, straight white poplars and birch planted neatly row on row with vines strung drunkenly between them. Other times they walked single file along the shoulder of the highway, where signs showed the towns still had French names for considerable distances ahead. She tried to ask the old man with the walking stick how far they were from Spain, but he couldn’t understand her, and neither could the nuns, who had started tearing off the ends of their sandwiches and giving them to Magdalena when they stopped for lunch.
Up till then Magdalena had kept her distance from the English speakers in their group, preferring not to get too close to the familiar words on arms and elbows and sunburned knees. But realizing that she would need someone to split the price of a bunk with her at the next hostel—either that or sleep outside—Magdalena let herself fall back behind the group a bit to walk with Rach
el, who, Magdalena had noticed, also slipped pieces of bread into her pockets when they stayed the night at a place with free breakfast.
Rachel had been born and would die in Clapham and, though she claimed to be one of the pagans, she told anyone who would listen that she was counting on the saint at the end of the road to wipe away the particular sin of having started a son out in life with a heroin habit.
“What’s the box for?” Rachel asked her as they walked.
“My friend,” Magdalena said.
“Like a present?” Rachel said.
“No,” Magdalena said.
“Yeah, all right,” Rachel said, and for a while neither of them said anything.
Rachel seemed to have twice as much skin as everyone else. It swelled the space between the top of her shorts and the bottom of her tank top and stretched the leather cords of the pendants around her neck. All that skin had a number of sad things written on it, some of which Rachel told her in not quite the same versions as they walked, Rachel panting a little and wiping the sweat from her forehead with the loose insides of her arms, where Magdalena read starving on the left and broken by Colin with a date a year in the future on the right.
“Are you walking for penitence?” Rachel asked.
“I don’t know,” Magdalena said, because she didn’t understand the word.
Indelible Page 22