There is a twinge in her back that she’s rubbing as she returns to the bottom of the garden. She has untangled the floppy tape measure from the reels in her sewing basket, and she aligns the metal end of it against one of her overgrown walls. With the rubber tip of her walking stick she nudges a rock to hold it, then unrolls it into the middle of the lawn. It lies there like a strip of barrier tape delineating the scene of a crime.
Pinpointing the spot with a clothes peg that she’d found on the kitchen table, she pulls the tape measure in again, then lays it out in roughly a perpendicular line. She makes allowances for the agapanthus that luxuriates in her flowerbeds, and measures the distance carefully between the peg and the perimeter fence.
She adjusts the peg’s position, then double-checks the coordinates against the ones in the back of her atlas, adjusting till she feels the distances are right.
Then, in a part of the lawn not far from the pomegranate tree, she tosses down her gardening cushion and lowers herself gently onto it, steadying herself with the back of her outdoor chair.
Beside her, she lays out her instruments: a pocket lamp, a knitting needle and a trowel.
The needle she uses to probe the soil around the peg the way she’d test a cake to see if it’s done. She is breathing a little too heavily, and her arthritic knees are hurting, and she begins to worry when she fails to strike anything hard. She stops and reconsiders, then starts again, but this time more methodically, stabbing the number eight needle in north–south, east–west lines.
Suddenly she meets resistance; the needle buckles and nearly breaks. Withdrawing it, she then uses it to feel her way around the obstruction. Then she picks up the trowel in her good hand and begins to saw a circle into the soil.
The grass roots are denser than she remembers so the going is tough and her grip slips off the handle several times. She jars her wrist and curses, and bites her lip as she waits for the throbbing to subside. She should have worn her gardening gloves, she thinks to herself, but she is not about to go hunting for them now.
Finally, the patch of turf comes free and she shifts it sideways. She shines the torch inside the hole, startling a millipede that uncoils itself and dives into a forest of roots.
Again she prods with the needle, then takes the trowel and digs deeper, quickening to the sound of metal scraping on tin. Carefully now, she works about the circumference, surprised how deeply they’d dug the first time around. Then, wedging the trowel beneath it, she levers the container to the surface till it pops out of the soil and rolls onto the grass by her knees.
In the drizzle that is starting to fall more heavily, Constanza stares as if astonished to have found anything there. Fingernails muddied by the digging, she wipes the dirt off the outside of the jar and shines the flashlight into it, then holds it up to the light of the house.
The glass is opalescent with the curiosity of subterranean creatures that have nuzzled it in the dark and gone around. The metal lid has rusted but not rotted and, as far as she can tell without her glasses, the jar is free from condensation on the inside.
She brushes the earth back into its hole and pats the puck of turf back into place. Slowly, mindful of her knees, she leans on the chair and winces as she eases herself to her feet. She slips the jar into her apron pocket where it clinks against the tape measure and the peg.
Her back twinges again so she rubs a little warmth into it, and stretches a little, then reaches for her stick. She replaces the trowel on the outside table and, chuckling now, takes the flashlight and the old glass jar indoors.
She has only to prise it open, but that proves harder than she’d thought. She bites her lip and says ffffffffff as she concentrates, and inserts her bluntest knife blade under the lid. She takes a towel and covers it and tries to twist it open, but the rusted metal sends bolts of pain ratcheting up through her wrist.
When the ache subsides, she boils the kettle and tries to steam it open, but even then the container will not give. She considers wrapping it in a cloth and looking for her hammer but is nervous about splinters of glass.
Constanza sits for a moment to catch her breath, and rubs her wrist, waiting for the strength to return. And while she sits, beside the coffee cups hanging from their double row of pegs above the table, she calculates – eighteen years it must be, eighteen years under the garden lawn, eighteen years to rust.
Finally she decides to re-boil the kettle and pour some more hot water over the lid. She lays a damp cloth over it, inhales sharply, and twists with every fibre of her strength. Pain sears her tendons and tears through the inflammation in her joints, but the jar falls suddenly open in her hands.
She exhales slowly, chasing away the burn of it, then smiles in triumph when at last she opens her eyes. She squeezes her wrist and elbow, massages the pressure points in her shoulder, and shakes out the tension in her hands.
The scrolls of paper are still wrapped in their plastic bags, and she extracts them. Suddenly it comes back to her: the day – sometime after that episode at the kindergarten – that she and Yolanda had sat at this same table wrapping each item in baking paper before sealing them in a gherkin jar.
Now she discards the external layers encasing the individual scrolls. With trembling hands she braces for disappointment: for pages glued together, or gnawed to lace, or decomposed into dust.
But when she peels them open, the pages curling back on themselves like wood shavings, she finds each one intact.
Folded, faded, but still legible, the documents they got from the kindergarten are all in there – copies of the enrolment form, two sets of medical data, and the birth certificate, signed beneath a military stamp.
Constanza peers at the signature now, bringing it close to her glasses under the light. This time, it looks familiar. She has seen it on other certificates belonging to other children that the Abuelas had had questions about.
And there are other things. A paper pouch with a single strip of negatives. Photographs, three of them, in black and white, one blurred but two quite sharp. They are the photographs Yolanda had taken outside that kindergarten, of a little girl who had raised her arms to show her the paint on her hands.
Constanza stops sifting through the documents. She removes her glasses and rubs her eyes and thinks about her friend. She remembers how anxious she’d seemed as she approached them, after the march in the Plaza de Mayo, the very first time they’d met. She remembers the look on Yolanda’s face when she’d shown her the marbles in her bag. She remembers the clack of Yolanda’s needles as they crisscrossed Buenos Aires in collectivos, how she always seemed to be knitting something new.
And she remembers the terrible day she came across her, motionless and crumpled on the stairs.
Constanza sits there awhile in the stillness, missing her and remembering her, knowing that she was doing this for all of them, that any child found was found for all of them, but that especially she was doing it for her friend.
Then she shakes herself. She shakes off her longing for her own still-missing daughter and her grandson, and takes herself back to her task.
She flattens out the birth certificate and the enrolment form and the medical information, pinning them down with the sugar bowl and the pepper grinder and the coffee cups she takes down from their pegs.
And beside them she lays out the fax that Osvaldo has sent her, a letter written by a woman called Adriana Martín.
Constanza’s faded cornflower eyes go back and forth behind her glasses. She examines the documents again and again to make sure.
Ana Lucia. Bettina. Victor Losada Bielka.
The names match up. All the names are the same.
So Yolanda had found her. She had photographed her missing daughter’s girl.
Constanza stops and cautions herself: they have known disappointment before. We cannot know beyond a doubt, she reminds herself. We cannot be certain of anything until she has done a DNA test.
Still, it all adds up, she thinks. The tiny crosses tha
t the midwife described to Osvaldo. The names on the kindergarten papers. And at last, the thing that links them: the letter from Adriana Martín.
She is ready to soar from the rooftops. She has to call Osvaldo in Mexico City. She wants to illuminate the metropolis and turn on all its fountains and dance all night in the rain.
But she sits at the kitchen table a moment longer, under the old-fashioned clock with its easy-to-read face and the empty spaces where she has removed her cups from the wall.
Yolanda had found her granddaughter. All those years ago she had found her and was never to know.
Constanza rubs her knees where they are aching from all that kneeling in the garden, then reaches for the phone.
PART V
THE HERACLES CROWN
June–September, 1999
1
Athens
Late June 1999
Lights. Passenger announcements. Words that look like algebra on newspapers, on electronic screens. You want taxi? We buy dollars! You speak English? German? Swedish? Overpasses. Underpasses. Revolving turrets of sunglasses. The sun. The blinding light. The barren land.
She squints into the heat haze and hoists her scarlet raincoat over her shoulder. Behind her, jets descend or clamber into the sky.
There are trains, somewhere. She is working from memory. She remembers, she thinks she remembers, the way.
At the end of the train line, a port, and a tide-surge of people. A shipping office in an air-conditioned building that shocks after the diesel-choked heat. Morning ferries, night boats, flying dolphins. A ticket for dawn and a grimy hotel in the crook of an oily street.
She is coming apart. What felt whole is now fragmenting. She can find no foothold, nothing solid to grasp.
2
The Aegean
Late June 1999
Vasilis looks up at the sound of the gate, his wet hands gloved in clay.
A woman, the figure of a woman, is moving towards him. He notices first that her clothes are all wrong for the weather; absurdly, she is carrying a raincoat, and limping on a broken heel. If it weren’t so far, he’d swear she had crossed the entire island in a pair of unwalkable shoes.
The late-afternoon light has turned the bushes golden; her shadow is as lean as the tallest ones as she stumbles down the path.
He rises from the wheel that continues to spin without him and moves towards her. Puzzled, he looks again, thinks he recognises her face.
‘Ana?’ he says.
He catches her by the shoulders with the inside of his wrists, his palms turned outwards like wings.
The summer house has no hot water so Anastasia heats some in a cauldron on the stove. She mixes it into the bath, then tests it with her elbow the way she would do for a child.
There are towels on a stool and soap in a dish that is glazed the colour of Japanese jade.
She makes sure Ana has what she needs, then leaves her, and returns with a small pile of clothes.
‘I hope these fit,’ she says, shaking out a nightdress, a swimsuit left behind by a long-ago visitor, a plain and a patterned shift dress, a scarf.
Anastasia hides her surprise at how much Ana has changed. Two years ago she was full of vitality, and on the cusp of life.
Ana looks at her but cannot bring herself to speak.
She has never been to the island but she remembers the name from Vasilis’s stories, and from the postcard Anastasia sent from their summer break. She still had it in the bottom of her handbag when she threw herself into the taxi in her street.
In the port she asked directions at a taverna. Click-clicking worry beads, an old man with a wind-hollowed face showed her on a map on the wall.
Anastasia gives her a sachet of something that fizzes furiously in a glass of water. She tells Ana it will help her get to sleep.
She wakes in the night and turns, confused by her dreams, unsure whether she isn’t still asleep. She lifts her head, searching for something familiar: the glimmer of a lamp, a rod of light under a door. All that comes to her is a paler square of darkness, a window hovering at some indeterminate distance like a painting suspended in mid-air.
A car approaches and recedes on a distant roadway; far away a donkey brays, and, nearer, another responds.
The throbbing in her head has subsided but her limbs are aching, still. Her blistered feet are tender and the bed sheets scratch the sunburn on her skin.
She places her hand on the coolness of the wall beside her. From beyond it, expectant as a breath being held, comes only the silence of the motionless sea.
When she stirs again she hears the murmur of voices. She lies there staring at the ceiling. In its whiteness she loses all sense of depth.
She turns again to the wall.
The door moves softly on its hinges and Ana opens her eyes. From the intensity of the light coming in through the window, it might be late afternoon.
Anastasia looks at her, not quite masking her concern.
‘What time is it?’ Ana says. It’s the first time since she got here that she’s spoken; her voice is fainter than the breeze.
‘It’s nearly five. You’ve slept for three whole days.’
‘Is it Thursday?’
‘It’s Friday today, what’s left of it.’
Ana drops back onto the pillow. Everything in the room is white: the walls, the bedding, the cloth over the jug on the table, the curtains with their handmade lacework band.
‘It’s peaceful here,’ she says.
Anastasia considers her for a moment. She wants to ask but sees it is still too soon. Instead, she enquires if Ana is hungry.
Ana’s responses come slowly, as if barely accessible to herself.
‘No, but thank you,’ she says. ‘I only want to sleep.’
Anastasia sits on the side of the bed. She is not sure if it’s the sleep of exhaustion that Ana is seeking, or sleep of some other kind.
‘I thought you might like this,’ she says.
Ana elbows herself up against the pillows.
Anastasia watches her as she sips from the cup, then places it on the nightstand by the bed.
‘Thank you,’ she says. ‘For letting me stay.’
‘You’re welcome here, you know that,’ Anastasia says, observing the shadows in Ana’s face. She looks bleached against the pillows, even her freckles seem faded, her hair turned hospital-limp. She seems drained of everything, strength, concentration, energy, as if merely standing would be asking too much.
Anastasia places a hand on Ana’s forehead and peers into her eyes. They are duller now, not the blue-green they turned that summer on the dig site when the sunshine put colour on her skin.
‘Ana, are you all right?’ she says.
Ana looks at her as if returning from some great distance.
‘I’m just so tired,’ she says.
Again she sleeps, tormented by dreams.
Through them, she hears the wind pick up, hears it caressing and then pushing at the pines.
A rooster crows on the edge of her slumber; the rising sea disturbs her, answering the wind.
‘How is she then?’
Anastasia and Vasilis are in the kitchen, their conversation disguised by the running tap.
‘Much the same, I think,’ says Anastasia.
‘But has she said anything?’
‘By way of explanation, you mean? No, I’m afraid. Not yet.’
She turns off the tap and sets down a colander of tomatoes, skins the colours of sunset, patched with woody scars.
‘It’s just the way she got here,’ Vasilis says, ‘blown in by the wind like that. No luggage. No proper shoes. It’s as if . . .’
‘. . . I know. I’ve been thinking it too.’
‘Well, what is she running away from? To have shown up halfway across the world without any warning . . .’
Propped against the table, he has his shoulders to the window so that he is framed by the green of the terrace, and beyond that, the blue of the sea.
> ‘It could be anything, Vasilis. I don’t think there’s any point trying to guess.’
She passes him a cucumber for peeling. The skin flays off in long thin strips that lattice the cutting board in green.
‘I just worry that we ought to contact someone,’ he continues. ‘Does anyone even know she is here?’
Anastasia pauses over the cutting board, and leans on the handle of the knife.
‘I was wondering the same thing,’ she says. ‘Though my instinct is to wait, at least until we learn what’s happened . . . She is an adult, after all. It’s not as if she’s a runaway child.’
Vasilis makes a small green haystack of his peelings, observes the ostrich-leather puckers in their skin.
Alerted by the sound of chopping, a beach kitten pokes its head between the strings of seashells to see what might be available to cadge. Anastasia claps her wet hands sharply and the triangular face withdraws.
She dries her hands and goes over to Vasilis who is now standing with his back to her, slender against the outdoors’ turquoise light. A sailboat in the distance clips the crests of the waves.
‘She may have come to us for a reason,’ Anastasia says softly, weaving her arms beneath his arms and folding her hands across his ribs as he gathers the stray cucumber wheels. ‘She’ll tell us when she’s ready, don’t you think so?’
She rests her chin on his shoulder.
‘Okay,’ he says, still worried. ‘Let’s give her a little more time.’
3
The Aegean
Early July 1999
It is not until the next morning that Ana finally makes her way downstairs.
Vasilis sees her descending the steps from where he is sorting through plums in the kitchen. He sees her brittle ankles, the plasters over her blisters, as she emerges into the light.
She is thin as a heron in her borrowed nightdress, barefoot on the cold grey flagstone floor.
The Memory Stones Page 29