By the time they crossed the border into Poland Neil had decided that he would toss the bag into the first garbage can he saw when he got back to Paris, maybe even drop it in the river so there would be no changing his mind if he started thinking about how Dijana had knit the socks herself. He would feel bad about it for a day or two, but there was no other way. Getting rid of those presents might be the nicest thing he’d ever done for his father.
“Well?” said Professor Piot. He was outside smoking his before-lunch cigarette when Neil got to the archives.
“Here’s the file,” Neil said, giving him the copies. They had gotten kind of wrinkled because the guy who’d been sitting next to Neil on the bus kept putting his feet all over Neil’s bag.
“Very good, very good,” Professor Piot said, flipping through the papers. “So you had a good time?”
“It was great,” Neil said. “It was really nice to see her again.”
“Ah?” Professor Piot said, looking at Neil sideways.
“So, you can read Polish?” Neil asked. He didn’t want to talk about the trip.
“Oh yes,” Professor Piot said. “My father was born Piotrowski in Bialystok. You’d be surprised how often it comes in handy. Quite an important force in European history, the great Polish empires. Ah, this is interesting,” he said, looking closely at the documents. “It would seem that the Jews of Vilnius are being granted the continued use of a cemetery that has already existed. Very interesting. And the date? 1629? Yes, this is excellent.”
“What else does it say?” Neil asked. The document was several pages long.
“Well, it is an official act, so a number of issues are addressed. Questions of whether the community will be allowed to keep their butchers’ shops, make use of the public bathhouse, hm, yes, and so on. The spelling is really quite antique. Ah, which reminds me.” Professor Piot took out a packet of papers. “Here—the script key for Gothic Minuscule, not entirely complete. Take this one too, it is a secretary hand from around the time your monk was writing at Saint-Jean-d’Angély, and one that originated, I believe, in the monasteries of northern France. Notice the similarities between the b and the v if it comes at the beginning of a word.”
“Great, thanks,” Neil said.
“A number of letters are joined together, you will see. And also the simplified r, which comes only after an o.”
“Right,” Neil said, looking through the pages. It would be a relief to get back to the monk from Rouen.
“Ah, and there is one more thing,” Professor Piot said. “Something came for you at the office address.” Professor Piot dug through his briefcase, which was filled with books and papers and chunks of masonry he’d found at the site. “Here,” he said, handing Neil an envelope addressed in round handwriting with the 1’s made European-style, like upside-down V’s. It was stamped with Albergue Municipal de Peregrinos, and the name of a town in Spain as the return address.
“Who’s it from?” Neil said.
“J’en ai aucune idée,” Professor Piot said, with a smile that Neil didn’t understand until he turned over the envelope and saw Thanks also for nice coffees at station, M, written across the back as if it had been an afterthought.
“Wow, oh my gosh, wow, thanks,” Neil said. He held the envelope by the edges, not caring that Professor Piot was sort of chuckling as he ground out his cigarette and arranged some pieces of gargoyle in his briefcase until he could get it to close.
“If you see Beth, tell her I have gotten hold of some early drawings of the clocherie,” he said.
“I will,” Neil said.
Professor Piot said good-bye. Neil tucked the script key into his backpack and opened the envelope.
A sheet of paper was wrapped around a small stack of euro notes. The letter started out in blue, then there were several blots of ink and the writing became purple. Neil read it, then read it again. Some of the spelling was unusual, and she seemed to have picked up a little French.
Hello my dear Neil. I am writhing to You from the road which lots of other pelerins are on. Funny to say I am pelerin too, on the Way of Saint Jack just like You describe. Aktualy I am not taking this bus for Vilnius like we said, reason is long and very complicated histoire. You are telling to me about people of old times, remember? How they are going to Saint Jack always with so much problems in life? Aktualy I think still it is like this, people carrying weigths upon them, so much heavy and penitent things. And when You tell how this body comes on the beach, with Saint Jack looking like not even deathed and covered with scalped shells of all ocean and these shells are putting back his skin like the life, then I am thinking really to my friend, how I am making cinders with her when in fact it is important for her to be completed when deathed. So I will take her to End of the Earth where these pelerin nuns say Saint Jack, he has miracle for all (even those not quite believing!) But I writ You now for one other reason, is this: You are saying me name of Your father, yes? You know how I am knowing already his name, RICHARD? My mother isn’t calling him this. I know RICHARD BEART because this name my mother is all the time carrying, it is close on her heart. I do not meet Your father but maybe for him it is same? They are for each other? Do not worry so much for why, only please tell to father to call my mother for saying hello. I think she is really waiting him all life. Okay, I am going to tell You so long. Thanks also for kind help of euros 60.00. I have some small job now so I inclose the return of these euros here.
Sincerely regards,
Your Magdalena
There was something scratched out at the bottom, as if she’d started to write a P.S., then changed her mind. Neil read it a third time. It was pretty crazy of her to go off on the pilgrimage like that, and he didn’t know what she meant about his father’s name, or what it was her mother was carrying. But she’d asked him to tell his dad to call her mom, and that, at least, was clear.
Neil took out his phone to call his father, then remembered what he’d decided after he left Dijana’s apartment. He had to keep his dad from finding out about the shoes.
Neil put his phone away and read the letter again. It was interesting how much pilgrim vocabulary Magdalena had picked up—calling the pilgrimage the Way of Saint Jacques and using words like penitent. An example of how the old customs were passed on from pilgrim to pilgrim; Neil hoped it was a sign that Magdalena was traveling with people who knew what they were doing. He skimmed past the confusing parts. Something struck him about the particular words she’d used: people carrying weigths upon them . . . Neil tried to remember exactly what they’d been talking about at the train station when she’d asked about his research. He had mentioned the woman with the baby, the criminal priests and chronic adulterers. So much heavy and penitent things. Neil took out the script key from Professor Piot. He thought of the little tails on the monk’s letters, the way the strokes of the pen seemed to trail off the page. He looked back at the letter. There was the part about Magdalena’s mother, something she was all the time carrying, something close on her heart. Neil remembered what Professor Piot had said about the monk’s handwriting: Perhaps his arm was tired. Neil shoved Magdalena’s letter into his notebook, grabbed his backpack, and hurried into the archives.
He read Magdalena’s letter a few more times while he waited for the monk’s file, telling himself that the idea was crazy, he shouldn’t get too worked up. But when the carton from the Saint-Jean-d’Angély archives came and he opened the packet with the monk’s eight vellum pages again, Neil felt suddenly weightless as the bottom dropped out of time. For a moment he had the sense that he was looking straight through the monk’s parchment and into an afternoon at the Saint-Jean-d’Angély abbey seven hundred years ago. He could see the monk dip the sharpened quill of a goose feather into ink, trying to hold his hand steady as a heavy chain around his wrist dragged each stroke downward. The precise balance of a hollow quill against parchment took decades to achieve; Neil could see the monk struggling to keep his movements even, to recalibrate the pressu
re of his pen against the page, his wrists bound by by iron shackles, the kind a heretic would be required to wear as he walked toward Santiago de Compostela, dragging his chains.
Neil looked around. Beth must have gone to lunch and Professor Piot had already left for a meeting with the archeology students. There was no one for Neil to tell.
He looked back at the parchment. Now that he had the idea in his head he couldn’t see it any other way: The monk had been writing under some impediment. He’d been carrying an actual physical burden, even as he sat with his pen at the abbey of Saint-Jean-d’Angély. The date of the parchment was 1259, which, if Neil was remembering right, was around the time of the Inquisition of Languedoc. Local bishops would have been busy rooting out seditious thoughts among their clergy, especially in France, where the Cathars and other heretical groups had been challenging the church for some time. Neil had read about priests made to walk barefoot across Europe because of minute differences in the interpretation of the liturgy, the placement of the and in the naming of the Holy Trinity, things that seemed so laughably trivial now that it was hard to imagine heaven and hell had once hung in the balance.
Magdalena’s letter was lying open next to the monk’s parchment. Do not worry so much for why, only please tell to father to call my mother . . . Neil thought of Dijana and Nan’s red shoes. He thought of his father, so weighted down by a made-up memory that he couldn’t do much more than inch through life, and he knew what Professor Piot would say: A historian must not hide the facts for the sake of protecting the people or nations or ideas that are close to his heart. Neil checked his watch. It was still early morning in the States, but his father always got up early.
Neil left the monk’s documents where they were and went back downstairs to get his phone, thinking about how he would describe to his father the effort it must have taken the monk to form each letter, as every adjustment of the pen made the rough metal bands dig more deeply into the raw places on his wrists. He would tell his father about the trials of the early Inquisitions, and his father would picture the monk sitting silent, holding fast to some unsanctioned detail of faith while the church authorities measured out the weight of his heresy in iron—both of them remembering the thing with the school board and how Neil’s father had refused the lawyer the teacher’s union offered him and wouldn’t talk to the people from the newspaper when they asked if he denied the allegations. How he’d asked Neil to please just believe him, and how that hadn’t been enough.
There would be a silence, and then, if his father didn’t start talking first, and if the moment seemed right, Neil would tell him about Magdalena’s letter and Dijana and the shoes.
Neil got his phone out of the locker, but he hesitated a moment before he dialed the number, imagining his father, a little stunned, probably sitting alone at Nan and Pop’s old kitchen table, in the place he’d always thought she must have sat, finally knowing for sure that his mother really had abandoned him.
But then Neil thought about Dijana, who obviously really liked his father, and how she’d gotten all dressed up when she thought he was coming to dinner. He dialed the number. He thought about Inga Beart, who’d been too busy being famous to visit her son even once, who’d given his dad so little of herself that he’d had to invent a memory of her just to get by, and he thought about Nan, who must have bought herself a pair of fancy shoes in a moment of extravagance and then kicked them deep into the back of her closet when she found out they gave her blisters, never imagining that in the time she’d had them on, the little kid Neil’s dad had been had made an imaginary mother for himself.
The old answering machine chimed. Neil hoped his father wouldn’t take it too hard.
“You have reached Walter and Catherine Hurley. We probably couldn’t make it to the phone in time, or else we’re out in the yard . . .”
“Hey dad,” Neil said. “I’m really sorry it’s been such a long time, but, ah, that Lithuanian lady, you know, Dijana? I think she’d really like to hear from you. Actually, kind of a crazy thing—she found some shoes in Nan’s closet, some red ones, like you always said you—well, she’ll tell you all about it. I have her number here . . .” and so on, imagining the sound of his voice slowly turning those tired tapes on the old machine next to Pop’s chair, on top of the box where Nan used to keep coupons. He imagined his father coming in to find the little light blinking, rewinding the tape a couple of times to be sure he’d heard right, then picking up the old rotary phone and dialing the string of numbers that would ring to Dijana’s apartment with its lace and cooking smells, where, surely, somebody would answer.
Then, though he knew he ought to get back to his documents, Neil left the archives and hurried back to the oyster bar whose dumpster he had chosen to throw his father’s Christmas gifts into earlier that morning, when he’d been thinking that no matter how bad he felt about Dijana’s homemade socks, that dumpster was the one place where he wouldn’t be tempted to retrieve them.
The garbage hadn’t been collected yet, and Neil rolled up his sleeves and ignored the looks from people on the sidewalk as he plunged his arm in up to the elbow. He almost passed out when he accidentally grabbed something with legs and long limp antennae, but he kept at it, digging past shells and old lemons until he felt the edge of the shopping bag. Except for the smell and an orange stain on the toe of one of the socks, the Christmas gifts were fine.
Neil couldn’t put off sending the presents again, so he went straight to the post office on rue de Moussy, where the clerk wrinkled her nose but gave Neil an airmail envelope and a wet paper towel for his hands.
“Priority or Express?” she asked.
“Express,” Neil said. “It’s a Christmas present.”
The clerk looked at him oddly.
“Last Christmas,” Neil said.
“Seventy-four euros.”
“Oh,” Neil said.
“Priority is twenty-one euros.”
“That sounds fine,” Neil said. He paid with some of the money from Magdalena, then he ran all the way back to the archives. He knew he should hurry upstairs—the archives staff didn’t like it when researchers left documents lying out in the reading room for longer than the time it took to have a very small coffee or use the bathroom. But those eight vellum pages had kept their secrets for centuries; they could wait. Neil had one more thing he had to do. He sat in front of his locker and went through his notes until he found a map of the Camino Francés, the pilgrim route that started out in France. The address Magdalena had written from was one of the first few towns in Spain, which meant she was making good time. He took his computer out and walked around the locker room until he found a place where the wireless signal was strong enough to check the bus fares on the Eurolines site. Neil’s debit card got a lousy exchange rate; it would be better to go to the bus terminal and pay in cash. But he didn’t trust himself to wait. Magdalena wouldn’t get to Finisterre for at least a week or maybe two, and that would give Neil way too much time to change his mind. The ticket was ninety-eight euros. Well, if he spent that much he’d have to go. Neil punched in the number on his debit card and bought the ticket.
{RICHARD}
Paris, June
It takes eight minutes for sunlight to reach the Earth, my Uncle Walt once told me. Just eight minutes for the light to travel all that way, and when the sun goes out, for eight minutes no one down on Earth will know a thing about it.
Uncle Walt must have read that fact in one of his astronomy magazines, and it must have come into his mind on one of the summer dusks we spent digging our shovels into mud, trying to block the irrigation water in the far corner of the field for long enough that the hard ground would be persuaded to let a little in. I remember looking up at the sky bleached by a sunset without any clouds and imagining the sun blinking out and darkness sweeping down through outer space, while for eight strange minutes the trees were still growing and people were still walking around, opening their newspapers and watering their cows in a doo
med light, not knowing that the sun was already gone.
That thought has stuck with me all my life. It is less a fear of darkness than it is of those last few minutes of sunlight, of the world still going on normally when in fact the great irreversible event has already taken place, the end has already come and disaster is hurtling down.
One evening a year or two before he died when Walt and I were sitting in the old truck looking out at the half-drained pond, I asked him if he remembered telling me the fact about the eight minutes. He didn’t, but I suppose adults and children live in different worlds where words mean different things, and a remark a grown-up person doesn’t even remember making can bore right to the core of a child and stay there for the rest of his life.
Well, it’s those eight minutes of sunlight that come to mind as I think back over my first few days in Paris, when certain sights or sounds kept tugging on memories the way the shadows might begin to come in at different angles as darkness rounded Venus and rushed toward Earth on the heels of that final sunlight. Which is not to say my world went dark. As I made my way to the archives of the Assistance Publique-Hôpitaux de Paris I felt no subtle warning run down along my spine, no sense at all of what I would find there. And that is probably for the best. I am no Inga Beart, to put out my eyes at the sight of knowledge, however difficult that knowledge may be to bear.
During Uncle Walt’s last year I had Diana come out to the ranch every couple of weeks to clean. Walt and I didn’t do much picking up after ourselves; still, most of the dust and the clutter in that house was from years past. Diana would fuss over Walt, getting him another pillow and that kind of thing, and I think he liked it. I liked having her there too, and it wasn’t only because I knew she needed the money that I started asking her to come every week instead of every two. She washed the windows and cleaned out the back kitchen, where we found an electric mixer the size of a sink still in its crate, unused for all those years.
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