by Nino Ricci
I scanned the bookshelves. The books here were mainly German as well. There was a yellowing paperback copy of Mein Kampf, with notes scribbled in the margins; there were what looked like complete editions of Goethe, of Hölderlin, of Kant. John’s Germanness seemed the single message that I had so far gleaned about him, and even that less as some essence than as just a label affixed to things, an abstraction. It felt important suddenly to be clear whether I’d known he was German before this, whether I’d attached any significance to that fact. But somehow my sense of him had got skewed, as if every discovery, even the look of this place, the disjunction and the unfamiliarity, were after all just the remembrance of something I’d already known. I imagined him moving around this room, amidst these books, and could feel an almost corporeal identification with him, a feeling of being inside his skin, being able to take for granted things about him I couldn’t possibly know.
From the kitchen came a steady bustle and clink of movement. I tried the top drawer of the filing cabinet; it opened. There was a fairly orderly arrangement of files inside containing what seemed to be notes from courses he had taken, labelled by number rather than title, Hum 304, His 413, Psy 211. From the look of things, he’d taken courses over the years in practically every major department. Each file held a thick sheaf of notes, all in his tight, careful script, and all in English. In some of the files, though, two- or three-inch margins that held sporadic scribbled comments in German had been ruled off to the right of each page. Some of the comments were in a different-coloured ink, red or blue instead of black; almost all of them ended in question marks. There was something slightly eerie in the look of them, ruled off like that with their little question marks to the side of the page, in the running commentary they formed like the inscrutable underside to the plain certainties and facts that flanked them.
In the bottom drawer, the files were labelled in German. There was one that held a certificate of citizenship, issued in 1966: he had likely come to the country in the early sixties, then, the same time as I had. The certificate was issued in the name “Johannes Elias Keller,” written out in large, florid calligraphy. It was strange how the name, set out in full like that, seemed to open up some new side of him, as if names had the power to create our different selves. To Ieva, he was Mr. Keller the teacher; to Rita, John the student. Now there was this third person, this Johannes Elias; he was the one who lived in this slightly run-down flat, who read books and made margin notes, who in some way I was connected to.
Toward the back of the drawer was a file that was unlabelled. It held a single old and tattered five-by-eight photograph in black and white, deep creases dividing it in four as if it had been carried for a long time folded in a pocket. The picture showed a man in a uniform standing next to a young woman holding a sort of hamper in which a frilled-bonneted baby lay swaddled. But the photo was so faded and cracked, the surface come away entirely where the creases were, that many of its details were unclear. Where the man’s face should have been there was only a frayed blot of browning paper; and it was hard to say what sort of uniform he was wearing or what the baby’s gender was or even in what era the picture had been taken. The one thing that was clear was the woman’s face, which had a sort of haunted look, as if she was staring past the photographer to some point far beyond him.
“Tea’s up.”
Ieva was at the doorway. She saw me kneeling over the open file drawer and a look passed through her eyes that seemed both the sudden understanding that something was amiss and the quick suppression of the thought.
“Great,” I said, quickly replacing the photo and closing the drawer.
She served the tea at the kitchen table. Neither of us had mentioned the books again.
“So you’re a student?” I said.
“Yes.” But she had grown circumspect. “History. That’s why I was doing the German course at the institute. To help with some research I wanted to do.”
I hadn’t noticed the sticky heat in the room before. There was the barest patina of sweat on Ieva’s upper lip.
“Why history?”
“I don’t know. To get into law, mainly. Though also a roots thing, I guess. Latvia and all that.”
“Has your family been here long? In Canada, I mean?”
“Since just after the war.”
Something in the finality with which she said that seemed to cut off further enquiry. She didn’t look quite as innocent now as when she’d first come to the door. There was also something else, a vaguely Semitic look I hadn’t noticed before, that was there in a certain angle of her profile like a clue I’d missed, the little detail around which a hundred others might coalesce.
“So maybe he left those books at work or something,” I said.
“Yeah. It’s too bad.”
“Well, I should probably be going.”
She followed me down the stairs. At the exit, I had a sharp pang of regret at how I’d handled things, at being this stranger she was hurrying out the door after the openness she had greeted me with.
“Sorry to have bothered you.”
“It’s all right.”
I could feel the lingering sense of question in her, of betrayal. Perhaps if I had been honest with her; but I couldn’t shape my mind around what I would have said then.
“Anyway, thanks again.”
And I could feel her eyes on me as I turned, and the beat, then two, before the door closed and the lock clicked into place.
XVIII
The following day I dropped by Elena’s place, after looking for her at work and being told she was off. There was a letter from Rita on the kitchen table, a slim blue aérogramme from France.
“You can read it if you want,” Elena said. “Not that it says much.”
The letter read like the shorthand of journal entries, just the barest details of how they’d travelled, where they’d been – London, Paris, now a small tourist town in Lorraine. Everything was put in the plural, “we,” though she never referred to John by name. Toward the end she mentioned a monastery they’d been to, where, from a clifftop terrace, they’d had a view of the Black Forest across the border. The detail seemed an odd one to throw in after the preceding wash of bald fact; or perhaps it was simply that the nagging sense of strangeness from my visit to John’s had made things seemed skewed, meaning more than they said.
Elena was sitting across from me at the kitchen table with that inviolable air she had that always gave her a hint of threat.
“I was wondering about John,” I said.
“Wondering what?”
“I don’t know. Just wondering.”
“Like I said, he seemed normal enough, if that’s what you’re worried about. Better than that guy Sid.”
“You knew about him?”
“It was hard to miss him. He kept coming by here after our party. Rita wouldn’t see him.”
“I didn’t know that.” This put my encounter with him on the street in a different light. “Why wouldn’t she?”
“I didn’t ask.”
“So he’d come and you’d just send him away.”
“Oh, he’d hang around a bit. You know, talk me up, try to seem cool. But it started getting a little weird after a while.”
“It doesn’t sound like him.”
“Yeah, well, she has that effect on guys. They all want to take care of her. It’s the whole father thing again.”
“Whose father thing? Hers or theirs?”
“You have to admit she attracts it. Which is only logical given that she never had one.”
She always made these pronouncements about Rita that made my own knowledge of her seem so amorphous. I was never able to separate out the bits of her in this way, as if she were just an accumulation of small inevitabilities, the adding up of everything she’d suffered or lacked.
“Did the two of you ever talk about her father?” I said. “Her real one?”
“It’s not like we had much to go on. I mean, if anyone was likely to kn
ow anything, it would be you.”
She might have asked me at this point what I did know about him but that wasn’t the way with us. Instead she left openings like challenges that I might take up or not and that then set the rules between us, how close we would come to each other. I was on the verge of saying something to her now but was afraid that even the small bit of certainty I had would slip from me then – it had all been so long ago, from another life, set out in the approximations and half-phrases of memory like lists of contents written out on boxes that could never be opened. I thought of witnesses to a crime, who even moments after the event couldn’t agree on the simplest details of what had happened, how tall the man was, what he wore, the colour of his skin. But still across the years, an impression had persisted: I remembered the flies, the heat, the rustle of leaves, two eyes staring out from a stable door. I had a relationship to the eyes like one might have to some crucial, irretrievably lost object – I’d never expected to see them again, had long ago consigned them to the unexplainable, the out-of-reach, and yet in some under-narrative of the mind there had always been the point where they recurred, like in some final meeting place, the denouement of a story or life, where every loose end was tied and every lost thing restored.
In the days after my visit to John’s, my dreams began to take on a sudden vividness. A few times I dreamt I was in his apartment again, moving through the rooms, trying to elude some threat; but mainly the dreams seemed simply a hodgepodge of scattered images whose links were never quite clear, like bits of a story that had somehow got jumbled. Real memories were mixed in, or they seemed real enough, though sometimes on waking, or in the hazy middle of a morning when an image would suddenly surface out of nothing, it was difficult to sort out the real from the merely imagined. I felt I was losing myself, that the walls that kept truth from fabrication were slowly decaying; one day I might wake and be just the stranger that my dreams had conjured up, like some character in a science-fiction story whose memory had been subtly altered while he slept.
Sometimes I dreamt I was redreaming the dreams I had had as a child. That was the worst, because in daylight then I couldn’t piece together what was the dream and what the dream’s dreaming, back and back like the infinite regression of mirrors mirroring back your mirrored reflection. The dreams churned up memories, associations, that floated in the grey of almost-possibility like sea things briefly darkening the sea’s rippled surface: this might have happened, or this might have been what the dream’s dream had made me dream might have happened. There was a recurring dream that I’d had as a child in Italy that returned to me in this way: in it, two soldiers, Germans, came in the night to my mother’s room to lead her away. As I remembered things now, through this double scrim of shadow seen through shadow, the soldiers had had to do with the stories I’d been told of the Germans who had been billeted in our house during the war. That would have been a decade before my birth, when my mother would not have been much more than a girl. One of them wanted to be your father, my mother had said of them: that was what I remembered. It was the fact that I couldn’t have understood what she’d meant then, the joke she was making, that seemed to make this train of memories real, something I couldn’t have invented. The soldiers had come; my mother had spoken to them. Or else this version of events, along with all the bits and shreds of quarter-remembered things that my mind offered up now in relation to it, was just a story I’d dreamed up based on some lost, mistaken assumption or logic of childhood.
It seemed almost impossible now that any of these things could have happened at all, that my mother had been a girl, that she had existed, that soldiers had come to a place in the past whose rocks and stones had been solid and real; and impossible too that out in the world there still remained the residue of these things, that the mountainside where I’d grown up, the village, the church on a hill, hadn’t simply vanished with my leaving them. At any moment I could return to them, simply, in the time it took for a night’s sleep: close my eyes, and I would be there. There would be a house that I had lived in, perhaps crumbling now, the roof fallen in and lizards making their nests among the rotting floorboards; there would be a stable door at the back, leaning on its rusted hinges, and inside, a hovel of dirt and stone much smaller, much meaner, than I remembered it, with an ancient pig’s trough and the rough-hewn boards and posts of a sheep stall. It hurt my mind to think of these things still waiting abandoned there like injuries that had never been tended to. I remembered a man who had come once to sit cap in hand in my father’s kitchen in Mersea to tell me that back in the village, my grandfather had died: he had seemed like a messenger from the void then, from a world that could not possibly, in my absence from it, have continued to exist. He’d mentioned some property that had been bequeathed to me, some land, my grandfather’s house; and yet in all the years since then I’d never been able to trace a line between my existence here in this other country, this other present, and the stones and beams of an actual physical place that could be travelled to and walked around in.
Some time in June, after the postcard and the letter, after my visit to John’s, I had a phone call, in the middle of the night. Dead air; and then a transatlantic blip.
“It’s me.”
It was Rita.
“Where are you?”
“It doesn’t matter. Switzerland.”
There was a delay in the line, a split-second lag, and an echo like a voice reverberating through empty space.
“Are you okay?”
“I’m all right. I’m fine. I just wanted you to know that.”
Another blip.
“Is John with you?”
“Yes. Not right this minute. I’m at a phone booth.”
The crackly hollowness of the line gave me the sense that she was receding from me, that time was running out.
“I’m thinking of coming to Italy,” I said, forming the thought as I spoke it. “To our village.”
“Oh.”
“You could meet me there.”
A pause.
“I don’t know.”
Her voice sounded hopelessly frail and thin, as if the buzzing wires it travelled across could barely sustain it.
“Please,” I said.
“I don’t know. I’ll see.”
“Just go there. I’ll wait for you.”
“I’ll see.”
In the morning, I had a instant’s unsureness as to whether the call had been real. I had an image of a voice tunnelling through an impossibly long, hollow tube, and Rita at the end of it a tiny shadow against a pinprick of light. It took a moment for me to pull from the dimness of sleep the memory that we’d made an arrangement of sorts: I’d left no question that I would go, that I would wait for her. That had been how I had wanted to put things, as if there were no option involved, as if I were a place on a map that would be there whether she came or not.
I had tried to show her once in an atlas where the village was. But even in the big reference atlas in the university library it hadn’t been listed by name, so that it had seemed she had had to take it on faith that the place existed at all, wasn’t a figment of my imagination, that somewhere in the crisscrossing of tiny highways and relief lines the map showed was this unnamed cluster of real houses you could go to, with real people walking the streets. If she went now she would have to grope her way there with only this spectre to go by, this possibility. In my mind, I traced the line she would follow, the small dip down through a mountain pass out of Switzerland to the plains of the Po, the ride south into history and heat. The country would hold her; it was half hers, after all, the hills were in her blood and the sky, the crumbled ruins, the cooked earth. Even for her it wasn’t a place to visit but to go back to, like somewhere a road led after years of wandering; and slowly she’d drift down into the dream of it and the village would call to her like home, and she would go.
XIX
I began to prepare for my departure, dismantling my life as if it were a tent I’d briefly
pitched. It seemed necessary to divest myself of things: I gave up my apartment, sold off most of my furnishings, took boxes of clothing – ancient things, things I had owned since high school, that still had the smell in them of my life then – to the Goodwill. The ticket I bought was a one-year open return: it had the sound of a different order of travel, an open return, something that airlines, travel agents, slipped in amidst their usual fares to allow for those whose lives were unfixed, who might suffer catastrophe or a change of heart or find waiting for them at their destination the thing that put going back out of the question.
It was surprising how little my possessions – what was really mine, what had meaning, wasn’t just the detritus of being alive – actually amounted to when I gathered them up. There were Rita’s letters; there was a book I’d had as a child, The Guiding Light, that told the story of the Bible in pictures. I remembered how I had gone through the house after my father’s death collecting his belongings and had come up with only a few trinkets, a watch, a razor, his old wedding band, which I’d worn for a few weeks like a piece of string tied to my finger to remind me of some important errand, then removed. In the end, his things had come to no more than what fit in the old Crown Royal bag I kept them in now, that bulged it like so much ash or dust. I came from a line, it seemed, that did not hold on to things, that had no heirlooms to pass on, no signet rings, that didn’t think itself a weighty enough presence in the world to leave some record of its having passed through. I thought of the gifts I’d brought with me from Italy, a jack-knife, a Lives of the Saints, my grandfather’s war medals, things that I might have passed on to a daughter or son along with their stories but all scattered now, lost like memories I could not quite recall. It wasn’t so much that these things hadn’t mattered to me as that my life had not seemed receptable enough to hold them, to keep them from slipping away from me.