“It happened here, I think,” Jack said, pointing at the ruins in front of us. I had never seen a building that had been bombed before—at least one that had been bombed and then abandoned. You could say it was the skeleton of a building, but it failed to retain even that much identity. It was the corpse of a building, the empty skin of something that had once been vital but now had been opened and its entrails scattered in haphazard directions. If Jack hadn’t followed his grandfather’s journal, if we hadn’t asked a thousand directions on both sides of the French-Swiss border, we would never have found the site. The surrounding forest had reclaimed much of the stonework and the pig iron struts that had apparently served to span the roof. Birch trees, mostly still young, shed a dappled light on the mounded relics of the factory. A cold breeze fell southward along the Alps. Raef and Constance had gone off to Spain to a jazz festival. Jack and I were alone.
“So he stood here?”
“It was here. He described the bombed-out building. He was exhausted, he said. His heart was heavy.”
“You can feel it a little, can’t you? You can feel something horrible went on here.”
Jack nodded. His eyes scanned everything, looked to understand what had occurred. He squatted next to a pile of bricks and turned a few over, looking for names, any clue to the building’s history.
“What was the building?” I asked, stepping carefully off the old rutted cart path. Nothing, it seemed, had been down this way in ages.
“A rope factory. My grandfather said three families lived here in the burned-out building. He gave them some of his rations, and they gave him coffee, which was a true luxury then. They had stolen the coffee, he thought, but he didn’t say anything. He said in his journal that the coffee was black and horrible, but they served it with such pride that he pretended to enjoy it.”
“You really loved your grandfather. It comes through everything you do.”
“He was good to me. We understood each other in ways I haven’t found with many people.”
“How did he come to this place?”
“I don’t know, honestly. I think he grabbed rides when he could. He hiked and was on different trains and transports. I can’t reconstruct all of it because he didn’t always write about how he arrived in different locations. He went to see what the war had done to the world, I guess. He was traveling home.”
Jack stood and used the toe of his shoe to nudge more bricks around.
“So I think my grandfather stayed at least a week in Berlin. I think he found it horrible and fascinating. Everything, every particle of life, had to be picked up and reexamined. You couldn’t go back to believing the same things about human beings as you did before. You just couldn’t. He says that any number of times in his journal.”
“Then he came here? After Berlin?”
“With some stops in between. Not a straight line at all.”
We circled the building as well as we could, bushwhacking through clumps of brush and alder. We had to be careful, because you could not tell what was underfoot. Jack stopped several times to inspect the few piles of rocks or bricks that retained a semblance of a structure. But the forest had consumed the building; the birches and aspens fluttered in the early fall light. Whatever had occurred here, whatever had transpired in the wake of a world war, had now been reclaimed by the land. It seemed to me a fitting memorial.
Jack was different when he looked for sites from his grandfather’s journal. He became more serious. We had uncovered two on our travels. This was the third. It was as if he tried to establish himself with his grandfather, to journey back in time to understand what his grandfather understood. The effort made him melancholy. I was never certain if he wanted me with him or not in those moments. He continued to be affectionate, often reaching for my hand as a support, but he might just as easily pull it away to concentrate on his memory. He was like a man inspecting a sailboat, worrying about dry rot and unseaworthy features, while at the same time loving the sense of the design and imagining how it might flow through the water. I made it a practice to speak as little as possible at these moments.
“Well, we should get going,” he said eventually, stopping on our rutted path with his hands on his hips. “Nothing to see here, really.”
“When you’re ready, Jack. No rush.”
“It’s strange for me to think of him here. I don’t know why. I feel as though he was in pain.”
I nodded.
“Maybe he was afraid to go home,” Jack said. “Maybe that was part of it.”
“Why would he be afraid?”
He shrugged. I saw he had grown emotional. I resisted the impulse to comfort him. It broke my heart to see him in such anguish. As much as he loved his grandfather, and spoke of him often, he was also haunted by this trip, by the journey his grandfather made after the war. Something didn’t add up, or added up in a way that he found disturbing, and I couldn’t ask without intruding. I decided early on that if he wanted to tell me, he would. I wouldn’t dig or ask to know.
“I guess I’m all set. We should find a place to stay.”
“Okay, Jack.”
“Thank you for coming with me.”
I put my hand on his back and brushed it lightly.
“It’s a puzzle. I don’t understand what he was looking for.”
“You said you didn’t think it was any one thing, right? He might not have known himself what he was searching for.”
Jack nodded.
“Would you take a few pictures?” he asked me.
I slipped my phone out and took a dozen shots. He didn’t direct me. I tried to be as comprehensive as possible. I didn’t ask him why these pictures were all right, but pictures of us having a good time were problematic. I guess he would have told me we were documenting something he needed for research.
We left late in the day and arrived at dinnertime in Vallorbe, Switzerland. Jack wanted to visit the Fortress Vallorbe, the fort his grandfather had described in the journal. It was located in the Col de Jougne mountains, an easy trip the next day. It was too late to investigate it that night, so we found a restaurant and ordered the prix fixe.
And that was where we fought again. Our own World War II.
28
A million years ago, my family drove west on a vacation to Yellowstone. I was twelve. When we reached Nebraska, my father got it into his head that we should watch the sand cranes in their annual migration. It was the proper season, and he claimed that none other than Jane Goodall, the famous primatologist, had recommended it as one of the great world animal migrations. My mother simply shrugged, and off we went. It was more or less on the way in any case.
I remember the cranes, but I remember even more the approach of a rainstorm across the wide Nebraska plains that we experienced on I-80 one late afternoon. It came from the west, and it blocked out everything. We had been driving along, playing the inevitable game of spotting various state license plates, when suddenly my father leaned close to the windshield, looked up with a strange expression on his face, and said, “We’re in for a little weather.”
I had tasted the storm in my teeth, in the soft palate of my mouth, sensed it in the nerve endings of my fingers. We did not enter the storm so much as puncture it; our car became a pliant needle that probed deeply into the rain cloud’s epidermis until, at last, we understood its nature.
“Is it a tornado?” my mother asked, her hand out to brace herself on the windshield, her other hand holding a camera.
My father shook his head, leaned closer to the windshield in order to look up, and said again, “We’re in for a little weather.”
That was the phrase that came to mind when Jack suddenly clouded.
We had been going along, sipping a salty consommé, waiting for the waiter to refill our wineglasses when suddenly I recognized the signs of a storm approaching, and nothing I could do or say could prevent its devastation. Jack smiled. And then the weather took us.
* * *
“I want to kn
ow what the next day will bring. Not everything—I don’t want to know everything—but I want a degree of certainty,” I said, my neck flashing red. “At least I want that option. Is that such a horrible thing?”
“It’s just…” He smiled and looked away.
What was happening? I wondered. How had we gone from these lovely, lovely, lovely weeks, traveling together smoothly and without argument, to arrive suddenly—in the mildest of environments, a perfectly acceptable tourist restaurant with checked tablecloths and soup bowls hung from hooks along the walls for decorations—at the edge of another argument? We’re in for a little weather, I thought, even as Jack became vivider and leaned forward in his seat.
“This is not about New York this time,” he said. “It’s not about New York being a prison we build for ourselves. This is about an approach to life and to living.”
“You sound very young when you talk like that.”
“Like what?”
“When you make these grand proclamations. Didn’t you just finish saying New York might actually be a good thing for you career-wise? That it might be a place where you could start your climb to world domination in journalism? You just finished saying that, Jack. Or am I crazy?”
“It’s not all one thing or another. It’s not.”
“I don’t even know what you’re saying anymore. Do you want to go to New York and try it with me? You don’t have to. There’s no gun to your head. We’ve been talking about it, but we haven’t committed yet, have we? We haven’t.”
“I’m worried what it means.”
“What what means?”
He smiled again. I realized I hated his smile at these junctures. It wasn’t so much a smile as the camouflage for a snarl.
The waiter returned with more wine. We smiled at him. We had plenty of smiles to go around. Jack said something in French. The waiter smiled. I wondered if I should get up, pretend I needed the WC, do anything to break the trajectory of where this seemed to be headed.
At the same time, I felt my heart breaking.
When the waiter moved away, Jack took a drink and sighed.
“You were my biggest fear,” he said. “You really were. You, Heather Christine Mulgrew.”
“Me? Why me?”
“A person like you. A person who I would want to join. I didn’t want to meet anyone like you. I had a pretty good plan, I thought. I had six months I could use for traveling. I think that’s why I’m reacting.”
“You still can.”
“Maybe I don’t want to. Maybe that’s the confusion I’m feeling.”
“Jack, we’re making a problem where there isn’t one. You can continue on your trip. I wouldn’t blame you if you did. Not in the least. It might even make things easier for me. I can settle into New York—”
“There is a problem, though. You know it, too, at some level. You’re trading in freedom for security. You’re trading in this wide world,” he said, and he gestured to the restaurant with his right hand, “for a nine-to-five job. It doesn’t matter how well paid you’ll be; you’re deliberately trading something for your life. We both know that life. We know what it can offer and what it kills. It’s predictable. That’s why people are drawn to it.”
I tried to be calm. He seemed to be all over the place with his ideas. If I hadn’t been beside him all day, I might have wondered if he had been drinking. I tried to remember how the sand cranes had looked when we finally reached them. They had been more impressive, in many ways, than Yellowstone. They had fallen out of the sky like origami kites, their wings outstretched, their feet shifting slightly to balance their pitch and yaw. Their large wing feathers shifted like piano strings in the air, and they called plaintively, searching for their mates even before they landed, the vast Nebraska plain sending motes of grass and dust into the sunlight to color it.
Somewhere outside of what Jack said to me, the cranes waited. But for the time being, for this horrible, horrible quarter hour, the storm had us, and we could not leave it.
* * *
I forced myself to slowly sip my consommé. It was too salty, but I didn’t care. I ate with a straight back, the soup traveling in a dignified square to my mouth. Up, right angle, to the mouth, sip, out, right angle, down, bowl. The waiter passed by and checked on us. We smiled at him. He was a young kid, maybe eighteen, with shaggy hair and a Texas bolo tie. Why he wore a Texas bolo was anyone’s guess.
“Should we just drop this discussion for now?” I asked after a little time had passed. “It seems to be a point of conflict for us.”
“I’m sorry. I guess this is my personal demon, right?”
“Just so I understand, Jack, are you worried that you will lose something by joining your life, in whatever way that means, to mine? Is that it?”
“I don’t know.”
“You have to know, Jack. I don’t mean this minute, but you have to know eventually, right?”
He drank more wine, then pushed his soup away.
“Salty,” he said.
I nodded.
“The last time we fought, we more or less exploded. I don’t want to do that this time, Jack. I want us to be honest with each other. The last thing in the world I want to do is invite you to be with me in New York if that’s not what you want.”
“The thing is, I do want that. That’s why I said I didn’t want to meet someone like you. Not now, maybe not ever. Part of me is drawn to everything about it. About you. And another part, the one that I can’t quite understand, that part wants me to keep moving and keep experiencing things. New things.”
“We could do that together. We already have. We’ve been traveling together and seeing new things every day.”
“I know. It’s true.”
“And you’ve made me look at my life and how I lead it. It isn’t all you bending to me, Jack. I haven’t even filled out all the stupid forms from Bank of America. That is so not like me, you can’t even begin to imagine. My focus is wider now. You’ve made me examine my choices, and that isn’t easy. You’ve put a crink in my plans, too.”
The waiter came and took our soups and replaced them with a pork chop of some sort. It was the specialty of the house. I had no appetite for it, but I smiled anyway and told Jack it looked good. He reached across the table and took my hand.
“I had a friend named Tom, Heather. He was an older guy, but not that old. Maybe midforties. Great guy. He was a bit of a mentor for me. I worked with him on that newspaper. He wanted the same things I did, more or less. Wanted to be a journalist, all of that. Then one day when he was shaving, he found a lump right above his collarbone. He went to the doctor, the doctor diagnosed it as cancer, and nine months later, he was dead. I don’t know if I’ve ever fully acknowledged what it did to me. Mentally, I mean. He went from being a fortysomething-year-old in perfect health to a cancer patient in a matter of weeks. You don’t just get over that. Seeing that happen to someone. So I made promises to myself, and one was to see as much of the world as I could, to experience as much as I could as fully as I could. I know that’s impossible, I do, but I also know we are going to die one day, and it won’t be as long off as we imagine. It can happen anytime. Trust me, I heard the mortal knock when Tom got sick. It’s one thing to know that in the abstract, sure, sure, I’m going to die someday, but when it suddenly becomes a possibility that you might die now, this week, tomorrow, then something changes. It changes, Heather, believe me. I know that I am dying. Tom taught me that. This is my problem, Heather, not yours. It’s my worry. You’re perfect. You are. If there’s anyone in the world I want to be with, it’s you. But I’m not sure what I can give you.”
He kept my hand in his. His color had gone up and red.
“Okay,” I said after a long pause. “I get it. I do.”
But I didn’t really get it. I couldn’t think. I couldn’t put two words together. I sipped my wine. My brain felt like a crab scuttling for someplace to hide. Was he breaking up with me? Was he saying this had been fun, we were great,
while warning me not to get hooked on him? If so, he was too late.
“Are you all right?” he asked.
“Sure. Just sad.”
“I didn’t mean—”
I stood very, very carefully. Poise, I reminded myself. I needed to be away from him. I needed time to think. The back of my neck felt like it might burst into flame.
“I’m sorry about Tom’s cancer, Jack. I really am. I’m sorry he died. I’m sure that was a shock, and I’m sure he was terrific. It’s not something you get over. But even so, it’s not a free pass to hurt other people. You don’t get to do that. You don’t get to think of people as simply another experience. Not like this, you don’t. You don’t get to play around about being in love and then pull back because you never wanted to be involved in the first place. That’s using people. So you can talk about New York and building prisons and making choices that limit you, but you’re the guy who flirts about getting married and what my name would be, and the whole time you’re wondering how you can get out of this and keep going on your walkabout. Well, don’t give it a thought. Go on your quest, Jack. Don’t let me stand in your way.”
“Heather—”
“I’m not angry. Honestly, I’m not. But I’m also not a trap, Jack. I’m not a dead end you need to avoid. You know where the real prison is? It’s in your mind. It’s in your head. We live in our heads, Jack, and you can travel your legs off, but you’re still going to be right inside your brain when the day is done. You made me think it might be nice to have someone along for the movie, someone who might be next to you eating popcorn and watching the same show so you could discuss it and compare it later. But if that’s not what you want, if being free means watching the movie alone, okay, I get it. Good luck with that, Jack.”
The Map That Leads to You Page 14