Indelible

by Adelia Saunders

  After his parents got divorced Neil would spend weekends at his father’s house, and sometimes they would work silently, building wooden cities. Neil’s father would be absorbed in the project while Neil cracked stick after stick in mute frustration, trying to make the rounded sides of a space station. Later they switched to sugar cubes, which had the same problem, but which allowed Neil’s father ever more elaborate creations, variegated palaces tinged with Easter egg dye, castles with turrets and double-thick walls.

  Then Neil went to middle school and he and his father stopped building things. Neil had speech and debate practice on the weekends, and his father started spending most of his time doing research. When Neil did stay with his father he played Tetris while his dad looked through old books, and during long summer afternoons wasps would eat the sugar cube castles his father had never bothered to throw away.

  It was still raining, but Neil was tired of thinking about his childhood. He was almost guaranteed to get lost trying to find his way back to the Uzdavinys’ apartment, and Renate was expecting him for dinner. So he zipped up his sweatshirt, put his phone in his pants pocket, where it had the best chance of staying dry, and dug around in his backpack for the map of Vilnius that Renate had given him. But he must have left it at the pizza place, because he got all the way down to the bottom of his pack without finding it. He did find that he’d accidentally brought his Latin dictionary with him from Paris, which explained why his backpack was so heavy, and underneath it was the bag of Magdalena’s mother’s Christmas presents for his father. He’d forgotten all about sending them after he left Magdalena at the bus station. The wool socks were going to get wet and the photos of Magdalena’s mother were already a little bent, though the coffee in its vacuum pack was fine. Neil thought of his dad waiting for those presents since way back in December, checking the mail, maybe even calling the post office to see if a package had come that was too big to fit in the mailbox, and felt awful. He needed to buy a new map anyway, so he put the shopping bag under his shirt to keep dry and went out into the rain, heading back toward the post office where he’d bought the phone card.

  The post office was farther from the phone booth than he’d realized, and by the time Neil got there he was soaked. He found a map of Vilnius, but the clerk just stared at him when he asked if she spoke English and kept staring as he mimed putting the things for his father in a box. Finally she got up and went into the back. Neil waited a long time. He heard a kettle boil. The woman came back sipping a cup of tea and holding a box that was way too big. Neil put the presents in and then, because he had to have something to keep them from sliding around, he ripped out most of the blank pages from his notebook and crumpled them up for padding. Since he didn’t know whether Magdalena’s mother was Dijana, Nellija, or someone else, he didn’t know how to say who the presents were from, or how to explain why they were coming with a Lithuanian postmark. He used another notebook page to write Hi Dad—Here are those Xmas presents from your friend. Sorry it took me so long. He threw the note away and wrote it a couple more times, trying out a few different explanations for why he was in Lithuania, but it all seemed too complicated. He didn’t know which would make his father feel worse, not getting anything or getting a big box in the mail and then opening it to find only coffee and socks and a crappy note. So he scrapped the whole thing. He’d send the presents when he got back to Paris. The lady made him pay for the box anyway; she gave him his change and went off to find the sugar. Neil said thank you, though she was already gone, put the presents back in his backpack, and walked out into the rain.

  The next morning Kazys Uzdavinys told Neil how to get to the Lithuanian State Historical Archives, and he took the trolley bus to the outskirts of the city, past markets where old ladies set handfuls of tiny strawberries out for sale. He got off the trolley and followed Kazys’s directions until he came to a medium-size building with thick curtains drawn across the windows.

  The reading room of the Lithuanian archives looked like an orderly classroom, with rows of school desks facing front. He had a reference number and a note from Kazys; he gave them to one of the archivists, and she took him to a section of the indexes.

  “Polish?” she said.

  “No, American,” Neil said.

  “But you speak Polish?” she said.

  “No,” Neil said.

  The archivist shrugged, and she flipped through the index to the number Professor Piot had written down.

  “This?” she asked. The description of the documents meant nothing to Neil.

  “I guess,” he said. “I don’t know Lithuanian. I’m just supposed to get this file.”

  “This is Polish,” the archivist said. “If it is before 1795 it is Polish.”

  “Oh, right,” Neil said. “What does it say?”

  The archivist shrugged again. “I don’t speak Polish.” Then she said, “So you come tomorrow?”

  “Well, I’m leaving tomorrow,” Neil said.

  “The documents are ready only tomorrow.”

  “Oh,” Neil said. “Well, okay.”

  There wasn’t really anything else for him to do, so he asked the archivist if she had a phone book. She gave him a newer one than he’d seen in the phone booth, but still no Bikauskaitės. “Is there anything like a registry for phone numbers?” he asked when he went to return it.

  “If it is public, it is in the book,” she said, not looking up.

  “Just, there’s someone I know who lives here, but I can’t find the name,” Neil said.

  The archivist looked at the paper where Neil had written down the spelling of Magdalena’s last name, and then at the page in the B section of the phone book.

  “Here,” she said. “Bikauskas is father. Bikauskaitė is just for unmarried girl.”

  “Oh,” Neil said. “I’m looking for her mother actually. Her father isn’t around. I don’t think.” What if his father’s friend was married? He hadn’t asked Magdalena, he’d just assumed her parents were divorced or something. It could be pretty awkward if her mom had a husband Neil’s dad didn’t know about.

  “So it will be Bikauskienė for the mother,” the archivist said, pointing to Dijana and Nellija, the same numbers Neil had called from the phone booth, and pronouncing them slowly as if she were talking to someone very stupid—which was a good thing, because Neil hadn’t realized the j’s were pronounced like y’s.

  “That’s great,” he said. “That’s really great. Thanks.”

  The archivist gave him something that was almost like a smile.

  The next morning he was going to call both Dijana and Nellija again, but he never got to Nellija, because when he called Dijana Bikauskienė’s number, a woman answered.

  “Hello, Dijana?” Neil said. He was a little nervous and his throat was dry. His voice sounded like it belonged to someone else.

  There was a pause, then, “Yes?” she said in English.

  “Hi, my name is, I’m Rick Beart’s—Richard’s—” Neil had forgotten to practice what he was going to say beforehand. But it didn’t seem to matter, because Dijana made a sound like she was happily surprised.

  “Ah, hello!” Dijana said. “This is great to hear you.”

  “Thanks, it’s really nice to talk to you too,” Neil said. He cleared his throat and wished he had some water.

  “How are you?”

  “Good,” Neil said. “Actually, the crazy thing is, I’m here in Lithuania. I had to come here for, ah, work stuff, and so I’m in the neighborhood and I was just wondering if—”

  “You are here? You are in Vilnius?”

  “Yeah,” Neil said.

  “Great, this is great! So you will come to see me?”

  “Well, sure, that would be nice,” Neil said, amazed it had been so easy.

  “I am almost not believing this. Really, you are here?”

  “Yep. Yeah, it’s a little crazy.”

  “No, not crazy. I am—ah, I forget English.”

  “It’s okay,” N
eil said.

  She invited him to come for dinner that night and gave him the address, saying again, “I am really not believing.”

  Neil couldn’t believe it either. Magdalena must have said some pretty nice things about him because her mom seemed genuinely excited he’d called. Neil had been expecting Dijana to pass the phone to Magdalena, but it was probably just as well that she hadn’t, because Neil had no idea what he would have said. Or maybe her mother wanted Neil’s visit to be a surprise. That was okay by him. In his mind he started rewriting the scene in the pizza restaurant, changing the setting one more time to Magdalena’s mother’s apartment, but keeping all the most important details the same. He called Professor Piot to tell him he would be staying in Vilnius an extra day, and then he took the trolley bus back to the archives to look at the documents.

  The file Neil had requested was actually a very old book, centuries older than the century-old carton holding it together. The carton was covered with archival stamps and crossed-out notations; it was confusing, and Neil had to look at it for a few minutes before he realized that what he was seeing was the history of Lithuania, more or less, stamped and restamped across the carton. It seemed that as the country changed hands, the archives did too, because next to the faded Polish label was an archival notation in darker ink, which Neil, who was normally pretty good at deciphering old handwriting, studied for a long time before he realized that he was looking at the cursive form of another alphabet, with loops and swirls in unfamiliar places. It must be Cyrillic, Neil thought, but it had clearly been made by a much older Russian administration than the heavy block letters of the Soviet archival stamp next to it. That in turn had been crossed out and replaced with a much newer-looking stamp, with its own reference numbers added in thick permanent marker, as if the Lietuvos Valstybės Istorijos Archyvas intended to have the last word.

  The book itself had once been bound with thick leather covers held together by strings. Neil could see the weave of the paper; it crumbled when he accidentally touched an edge, leaving fine dust on his fingers. On the first page there was an official-looking invocation of the monarch, Sigismundus Rex, dated 1623. He turned the pages carefully. It seemed to be a collection of administrative documents—charters, registries, and acts, the daily business of an empire recorded in ornate Polish script. Neil had spent a lot of time looking at those sorts of documents, but he still felt a thrill at the thought that someone like him, a college kid who was basically nobody, could find himself holding pieces of paper that had been signed by kings.

  Neil often wondered if other people felt like this, and he looked up, wanting suddenly to find a stranger to smile at, some old man with a stack of notes and a magnifying glass who would understand exactly how Neil felt. But the other people in the reading room were all hunched over their documents. Microfilm machines whirred and clicked. Behind the glass window of her office the archivist arranged white and purple flowers in a vase. She wiped her desk with a rag, then arranged the flowers again so that the white ones were surrounded by purple.

  Neil found the document that matched the reference number Professor Piot had given him. He made a note of the title of the document, and that it came under the year MDCXXIX.

  It was getting late, and Neil wanted to be sure he’d be able to take a shower and still have plenty of time in case he got lost on the way to Magdalena’s mother’s apartment. He started sweating just thinking about it, and he wiped his hands on his jeans before carefully closing the book. He put it back in the carton and stood in the doorway of the archivist’s office, watching as she pinched a dead blossom and found a better angle for the vase, waiting for the right moment to ask how to get copies.

  {RICHARD}

  Paris, June

  I wasn’t the only one who’d forgotten that the French National Archives opened late on Saturdays. I waited outside the gate with one or two others until a guard came and unlocked it for us, then I went upstairs to the office of the woman I’d spoken to the day before. She seemed slightly put out to see me there and reminded me that the staff were available for consultation from Monday to Friday only, and that such meetings had to be scheduled in advance.

  “Well?” she said when she’d finished. “What is it you want to know?”

  I told her I was interested in seeing my mother’s medical files. “No, we have nothing like this here,” she said. The records from Inga Beart’s stay at the Hôtel-Dieu hospital, if they existed, would be located some blocks away, where the archives of the Assistance Publique-Hôpitaux de Paris were kept.

  She wrote down the address. “It isn’t far. You know the Place des Vosges? The street is just beyond. But I think you will have to wait. I don’t think you will find anyone there to help you on a Saturday.”

  “Thank you very much,” I said, and wished her a good weekend. I still had the rest of the comtesse’s twenty-three cartons of playbills and memoirs to look through, and so I went back to the documents counter and asked for carton number seven.

  I settled down at one of the long reading tables and spent the morning and most of the afternoon on cartons seven, eight, and nine: receipts from various dressmakers, old rail tickets, the sorts of things most people have the sense to throw away. I checked all the files that had dates from the early fifties, but none of them connected the comtesse to my mother.

  The funny thing is, I might never have discovered anything at all if the man from the art gallery hadn’t offered me a cup of tea the night before. I only opened the folder labeled “Hirondelle” thinking that maybe the comtesse had financed one of those murals he’d talked about—and I only knew that Hirondelle was spelled the way it was because it had been traced in gold script across the rim of my saucer.

  The folder contained just two sheets, printed out on heavy paper with the name of a transatlantic steamship company at the top. They were in French and I thought that it was too bad the gallery owner wasn’t there to see them, because it seemed that the comtesse herself had taken a trip onboard the SS Hirondelle sometime during the 1950s. I’d scanned most of the first paper without thinking much about what I was doing when it occurred to me that in fact the voyage had been made in 1954, which might give the lie to Carter Bristol’s claim that the comtesse was present when Inga Beart did what she did. But I double-checked the dates: Inga Beart was taken to the Hôtel-Dieu hospital on August 10, and the Hirondelle arrived at Le Havre, France, on August 8, 1954, which would have given the comtesse just enough time, I suppose, to be back in Paris in time to witness Inga Beart’s disaster.

  That is when I realized something odd. The paper I was looking at was an embarkation schedule for a round-trip ticket with New Orleans as the city of origin rather than Le Havre. After arriving from the United States on August 8, the comtesse was set to leave France again on August 20. And it seemed she wasn’t traveling alone. The price was given in francs for two tickets, tourist class, which the comtesse had apparently paid for in June of the same year.

  The second piece of paper was a receipt from the steamship company. In just the way one hears one’s name above the din of a crowded room, the one familiar word on the page jumped out at me. My hands were shaking as I got out my notebook and copied down “deux billets pour passager Beart et gardienne, classe touriste . . .”

  I’d never quite imagined that Carter Bristol might have been right, although, as I told myself without really believing it, this was among the least important of details. So what if my mother had had an affair with the comtesse? It hardly proved Bristol’s theory as to why she put her eyes out, and certainly the trip was never made, since it’s well established that Inga Beart was in Paris the whole time. The Hirondelle left New Orleans on July 28, 1954; Inga Beart sat at the tabac on August 1, and after her injury on August 10 she did not leave France until October 1954, when they transferred her to a psychiatric hospital back in New York. I looked up the word gardienne in my dictionary, and found it meant guardian or caretaker, just as I’d thought. So it seemed clear t
he comtesse understood that Inga Beart was in a bad way, even when she bought those tickets in June 1954.

  After that, as you can imagine, I set out to look at every bit of paper in every one of the sixteen remaining cartons. In carton number fourteen I found what I’d come for: a file nearly an inch thick, labeled “Inky”—a nickname my mother must have picked up sometime after she left home, because I never heard Aunt Cat or any of the cousins refer to her that way. They say she had the habit of biting down on the tip of her pen while she was thinking, leaving a bit of blue on her lips.

  There was no doubt it was the file Carter Bristol had seen. I really can’t be sure of all of what was inside, but there were letters from the comtesse to various doctors and psychiatrists on my mother’s behalf, and handwritten drafts of what could only be love letters from the comtesse to my mother. There were letters from my mother too, written in French, specifying dates and times to meet. There did seem to be a great deal of secrecy surrounding their relationship. I did as best I could translating word for word with my pocket dictionary, and though much of what I came up with made no sense at all, I did learn that they chose to meet in “unknown places with enough darkness,” and that the comtesse had called my mother “chérie.”

  I copied everything down, going carefully page by page and putting in all the accents. Toward the end of the file I came to a thick waxed-paper envelope. It was marked “juin 1954.” Just as Carter Bristol had said, inside were a half dozen photographs printed on small squares of paper with scalloped edges. In one picture Inga Beart stands in front of a dressing room mirror, her face mostly in shadow; in another her bare shoulders are reflected in that same mirror. I looked through them slowly, hoping as I turned over each one that it would show her feet. But the angles of the photographs were intimate; the person who took them had been standing close. Only one included anything of my mother below the waist. She and several others are seated on a sofa with an ornate mantle behind them. Two light-haired women smile up at the photographer, a man in evening dress raises a glass, but my mother has turned away. Her legs are crossed in the parallel slant that women seemed to favor then and her feet are hidden, as if by design, by an elaborate tea service placed on a low table in front of her.