by Marc Levy
We’re not the same people we were then. Would I still take the same trip from Paris to Berlin today? What would happen if our eyes were to meet again, you on one side of a wall, and I on the other? Would you open your arms to me, like you did for Knapp that November evening in 1989? Would we run off through the streets of a town that has grown younger, while we have grown older? Would your lips still feel as soft? Perhaps that letter was meant to stay sealed in that drawer. Maybe it’s better that way.
The flight attendant tapped Julia on the shoulder. It was time to fasten her seat belt. The plane was beginning its descent into New York.
Adam had to resign himself to spending part of his day in Montreal. The Air Canada representatives had done everything they could, but the only seat back to New York was on a flight that took off at 4:00 p.m. He kept trying to reach Julia but only got her voicemail.
Along a highway on the outskirts of another city far away, the skyscrapers of New York appeared on the horizon. The Lincoln entered the tunnel that shared its name.
“I have a funny feeling I’m no longer welcome in my own daughter’s home. So I think I’ll forgo the dusty attic and retreat to my town house, spend my final days in the comfort of my own home. I’ll be back Saturday, to step back into my crate before it gets picked up. I think it would be wise if you’d call ahead and make sure Wallace isn’t home,” said Anthony, handing Julia a piece of paper with a telephone number on it.
“Your personal assistant still lives at your house?”
“I don’t really know what he’s doing. I haven’t had much time to touch base with him since I died. If you want to avoid giving the poor fellow a heart attack, please do make sure he’s not there when I arrive. And as long as you have him on the line, it would be lovely if you could find a good reason for him to go to the other side of the world until the end of the week.”
Julia dialed Wallace’s number. A recording explained that he was taking a month’s vacation following the untimely death of his employer. It wasn’t possible to leave a message. For urgent business matters concerning Mr. Walsh, the caller was instructed to contact the late Mr. Walsh’s attorney.
“The coast is clear. You can stop worrying,” said Julia, putting her phone back in her pocket.
Half an hour later, their car parked at the curb outside Anthony Walsh’s town house. Looking up at the building, Julia was immediately drawn to a window on the third floor. One afternoon, coming home from school, Julia had looked up to see her mother leaning dangerously over the railing of the balcony. What would she have done if Julia hadn’t shouted her name? When she spotted her daughter, Julia’s mother had given her a little wave, as though the gesture might wipe away any trace of the fatal act she had been on the verge of committing.
Anthony opened his briefcase and handed her a set of keys.
“How did you manage to get ahold of those?”
“Let’s just say we anticipated a scenario in which you wouldn’t allow me to stay at your place, but you also hadn’t elected to pull the plug either. Could you go ahead and open the door? We can’t risk any neighbors recognizing me.”
“You know your neighbors? That’s new.”
“Julia!”
“Fine, I get it,” she snapped, exiting the car and approaching the door.
Julia turned the knob of the heavy, iron door and stepped inside, casting light across the empty hallway. Nothing had changed; the inside was just as she remembered from her very earliest memories. The black-and-white tiles of the front hall floor still spread before her like an enormous chessboard. To the right, a flight of dark wooden stairs traced a gentle curve up to the second floor. The burled walnut banister of the staircase had been carved by a renowned woodworker, as her father used to enjoy telling guests when he gave them a tour of the house. Farther on stood the door to the kitchen and the butler’s pantry. Together, the two rooms were larger than any of the apartments Julia had inhabited since leaving home.
To the left was the office where her father had balanced his personal checkbook on the rare nights he was home. Signs of wealth were everywhere, a reminder of the vast distance between the father Julia knew and the man serving coffee in a Montreal skyscraper. A portrait of Julia as a child hung on the wall. She wondered if any of the glimmer the painter captured in that five-year-old’s eyes still remained. She looked up at the carved wooden ceiling, which would have seemed gothic and spooky had there been even a single spiderweb in the corners of the woodwork, but Anthony Walsh’s home was impeccably well kept.
“Remember the way to your old bedroom?” asked Anthony as he entered his office. “I’ll let you go up alone. If you’re hungry, there’s probably something to eat in the kitchen cupboards . . . pasta or some canned food. After all, I haven’t been dead that long.”
Julia climbed the stairs, two at a time, sliding her hand along the banister, just as she always did in her youth. Then, arriving at the top, she turned around to see if anyone was following her, the same way she used to as a little girl.
“What?” she asked, looking down at her father from the top of the stairs.
“Nothing,” replied Anthony, trying to conceal a smile.
He went into his office.
The hallway extended before her. The first door led to her mother’s bedroom. Julia put her hand on the knob. The latch opened slowly and softly . . . then closed once more, just as softly, as she decided against going in.
A strange, opalescent light filtered in through the sheer curtains. They had been pulled shut and floated above the carpet, whose colors hadn’t faded one bit over the years. She went over to her bed, sat down on the edge, and pressed her face against her pillow, taking in its scent. Memories flooded back—nights spent reading under the covers with a flashlight, evenings with imaginary characters coming to life and moving across the curtains, or nights when the window was left open and familiar shadows fueled her insomnia. She stretched her legs and had a look around. The ceiling lamp looked like a mobile, but it didn’t move, not even when she would stand on a chair and blow on its black wings. Near the dresser sat the wooden box where she kept her old notebooks, a few photos, and a set of cards printed with the names of magical countries—odds and ends purchased at the corner store or traded with friends by exchanging cards she already had in her collection. Why go to the same place twice, with so many new places to discover? Her gaze wandered to the bookshelf where her schoolbooks were neatly propped up between two old toys, a red dog and a blue cat. The couple had never come together from the opposite ends of the shelf. Catching sight of the dark-red cover of a history book she hadn’t cracked open since junior high, Julia was reminded of the spot where she had spent so much time doing homework. She got up from the bed and went over to her desk.
Countless hours spent doodling aimlessly at this wooden tabletop, with its compass point scratches, then masking her inactivity by writing interminable nonsense every time Wallace knocked at her door to check in on her progress. She had filled entire pages with:
I’m bored, I’m bored, I’m bored.
The porcelain knob was shaped like a star. All it took was a gentle tug for the drawer to slide out, but she opened it just a tiny crack. A red marker rolled around at the bottom of the drawer. Julia squeezed her hand in through the narrow opening and patted around but couldn’t reach it. She turned the blind search into a game and kept exploring the inside of the drawer with her hand.
Her thumb made out the shape of a ruler, and her pinky finger brushed over a necklace won at a carnival, too ugly to ever actually wear. Her ring finger hesitated a moment. Was that her frog-shaped pencil sharpener? Her turtle-shaped tape dispenser? Her index finger brushed against some type of paper. In the upper right-hand corner, she felt what was undoubtedly the perforation of a stamp. Over the years, it had peeled back around the edges. Within the darkened shelter of the drawer, she caressed the surface of the envelope and traced over the lines of ink made by a fountain pen. She felt her way blindly, like pla
ying a guessing game by tracing words on the skin of a lover’s back. Without even looking at it, Julia recognized Thomas’s handwriting.
She pulled the envelope out of the drawer, carefully opened it, and read the letter.
September 1991
Julia,
I was the only one to escape from this expedition. As I wrote to you in my last letter, we had finally set off in search of Masoud. But in the thunder of the explosion that still resonates inside of me, I forgot why I ever wanted to meet him in the first place. I forgot about the fervor that possessed me, filling me with the desire to document his side of the story. After the blast, the only thing I could see was the force of the hatred that I narrowly escaped . . . and that had taken the lives of my companions. The villagers fished me out of the wreckage, a full twenty yards from the spot where I should have perished. I’ll never know exactly why the blast sent me hurtling through the air, while it tore the others to shreds. Thinking I was dead, they laid my body on a little cart. If an opportunistic young boy hadn’t tried to steal my watch, and if my arm hadn’t twitched just then and made the child cry out, I would have most likely been buried alive. But . . . somehow I have survived the folly of men.
People say that when death reaches out a cold hand to pull you into its embrace, your entire life passes before your eyes. But I can tell you, when death curls its arms around you, what you see is unlike anything you’ve ever seen before. In my feverish delirium, all I saw was your face. I wish I could make you jealous—tell you that the nurse who took care of me was a beautiful young woman, but the truth is, it was a man with a long beard, and the only thing beautiful about him was his devotion. I have spent the last four months in a hospital bed in Kabul. My body is severely burned, but I’m not writing to you to complain.
It’s been five months since I’ve sent you a letter. Five months is a long time, after writing each other twice a week. Five months of silence, almost half a year—it seems far longer because it’s been so long since I saw you. Since I touched you. It’s funny how hard it is to love from a distance, which brings up the question that haunts my mind each day.
Knapp flew to Kabul as soon as he heard the news. You should have seen him weep when he came into the ward. I have to admit, I cried a little, too. Luckily, my neighbor in the next bed was sound asleep. Otherwise I don’t know what he would have thought of the two of us sobbing that way amid such fearless soldiers. Knapp didn’t call you right away to tell you I was alive, because I asked him not to. I knew he was the one who told you I was dead, and I decided it was up to me to tell you I’d survived. Maybe there’s another reason. Perhaps in choosing to write you this letter, I wanted to leave you free to continue mourning our relationship—that is, if that’s what you’ve been doing.
Our love was born out of our differences, Julia. Our shared thirst for discovery filled every morning that we awoke in each other’s arms. When I think of you in the morning, I think of all the hours I spent watching you sleep, watching you smile, blissfully unaware. The way you smile when you sleep, even if you don’t know you’re doing it, is something I’ll never forget. You can’t know the number of times you curled up against me, speaking words that I never understood, but I do. One hundred times, exactly. Not one more, not one less.
I know that building a life together is another matter entirely. My hatred for your father made me long to understand him. Would I have done what he did, under the same circumstances? If we had a daughter together, and if I were left alone to care for her, and she ran off with a foreigner from a world where everything appeared strange and terrifying to me, maybe I would have acted like he did. I never wanted to tell you about all of those years I lived behind the wall. I didn’t want to taint a single second of our time together with memories from that absurd time. You deserved more than sad memories about the darkest corners of human nature. But your father must have known about those things, and they probably didn’t have a place in the future he had planned for you.
I hated your father for taking you away from me, for leaving me standing with a bloody face in our bedroom, powerless, having you torn from my arms. I punched the walls where your voice still echoed, and yet still I wanted to understand the man. How could I tell you that I loved you, without having at least tried to understand?
Forces beyond your control pulled you out of my world and back to your own. Do you remember how you always talked about the signs fate sends us? I never believed in such things before, but I’ve learned to see things your way. Tonight, as I write this letter, the signs seem to be mounting against me.
I loved you so much just for being you. I never wanted you to be someone else. A love so strong and so pure, without any real understanding, had me convinced time would make everything clear. Maybe, lost in the grips of all that love, I didn’t try hard enough to find out if your love for me was strong enough to overcome our differences. Maybe you never gave me the opportunity to find out the answer—maybe because you had never really asked yourself that vital question. But the time has come now, whether we like it or not.
I’m going back to Berlin tomorrow. I’ll put this letter in the first mailbox I see. It will take a few days to get to you, as it always does. By the time you read this, it should be the 16th or the 17th.
You’ll find in this envelope a secret I’ve kept from you. I would have liked to send you a photo of me, but I can’t say it would make a very pretty picture, and, in any event, I wouldn’t want to be vain. So instead, I’m sending a plane ticket. You don’t have to work for months saving to come back here—that is, if you still want to come back. I had the ticket with me in Kabul, and I meant to send it to you . . . But, luckily, it’s an open ticket.
I’ll wait for you at the Berlin airport, on the last day of each month, until year’s end.
If we are reunited, and if we ever have a daughter together, I solemnly swear to never rip her away from the man she loves. Julia, I will respect your choice, whatever it is, and I won’t hold it against you if you choose not to come back to me. If that happens, if on the last day of the month I have to leave the airport without you, please know that I’ll understand. It is the very reason why I’m writing you this letter—to tell you that I will understand.
I’ll never forget the sight of that face, a gift life handed me on a November’s eve, at the moment when hope finally returned, and I scaled a wall and fell into your arms, me from the East, and you from the West.
I will cherish you always, if even just as a memory. It will be the memory of the most beautiful thing that ever happened to me. As I write these words, it dawns on me once more just how much I love you.
See you soon . . . maybe. Whether in my arms or in my heart, you will still be with me. I know you are breathing, somewhere out there, and that means so much. More than you could know.
I love you,
Thomas
Inside the envelope, Julia found a plastic sleeve, yellowed with age. She opened it. Fräulein Julia Walsh, New York–Paris–Berlin, 29 April 1991 had been typed on the red carbon paper of a plane ticket.
Julia slipped everything back into the drawer. She cracked open the window and lay down on her bed. With her arms behind her head, she stayed that way for a long time, staring in silence at her bedroom curtains. Upon the two panels of cloth, shadows of her old friends reemerged, the ghosts and relics of bygone moments of solitude.
As morning faded into afternoon, Julia left her room and went downstairs to the pantry. She opened the cupboard where they kept the jam, grabbed a pack of melba toast and a jar of honey, and sat down at the kitchen table. She saw the mark of a spoon left behind in the thick honey. It was a strange indentation, probably made during Anthony’s last breakfast in this house. She imagined him sitting in the place where she was sitting now, alone in that enormous kitchen with his coffee mug in front of him, reading his newspaper. She wondered what thoughts had filled his head that day. The mark was a curious echo of a past that was gone forever, never to return. This h
armless detail struck Julia—for reasons she could not understand, she suddenly came to the full realization that her father was dead. At times all it takes is a little something, a trinket or a familiar smell, to bring back the memory of someone who is gone. For the first time, in the middle of that huge room, Julia felt the sting of her lost childhood, miserable as it had been. She heard her father clear his throat and looked up to see him standing in the doorway, smiling at her.
“May I come in?” he said, sitting down across from her.
“Make yourself at home.”
“I had that sent over from France. It’s made from lavender blossoms. Do you still have the same passion for honey?”
“Guilty as charged. Some things never change.”
“What did the letter say?”
“That’s really none of your business.”
“Have you come to a decision?”
“A decision? About what?”
“Oh, I think you know. Are you going to write back to him, Julia?”
“Twenty years later? Don’t you think it’s just . . . too late?”
“It seems that’s a question you must answer for yourself.”
“What right do I have just barging in on his life? Thomas is probably married with children.”
“A boy and a girl? Twins maybe?”
“What?”
“Well, with your newfound psychic powers, maybe you can also tell me just what his charming family looks like. So what is it, a girl or a boy?”
“Okay, okay. What’s your point?”
“This very morning you thought him dead. Best not to jump to conclusions about what he’s done with his life.”
“Twenty years! For Christ’s sake, it’s not six months.”
“Eighteen years, to be exact. Enough to get married, divorced, married again—unless your Thomas has switched teams, like your antique-dealer friend. What was his name again? Ah, yes. Stanley. Maybe he ended up like Stanley.”