People pressed in around Magdalena, jostling each other to get on the bus. All around her words in Lithuanian sprouted on the backs of hands and across foreheads and chins. Taking off her glasses didn’t help. The people were so close and the words were so familiar that Magdalena knew their meanings without even realizing she’d read them.
The line was moving. People were getting on the bus. She looked over her shoulder at Neil, who was now just an orange-headed blur. She waved. Part of the blur waved back. An old woman in front of her was telling her husband to check and double-check their passports. Stazinis širdies nepakankamumas, which meant congestive heart failure, looped like a noose around her neck.
The patch of color that was Neil waved again. Then it turned and got smaller and smaller among the other shapes. The old woman in front of her was stepping onto the bus. PARIS-WARSZAWA-VILNIUS said the sign in the window. Magdalena looked again for the orange-topped shape, but it was gone.
She got out of line. She took her bag out from under the bus, ignoring the bus driver who shouted after her in Lithuanian and then in Polish that she wasn’t allowed to do that, and she walked with her head down across the street and back toward the station. She didn’t look up again until she was far away from the bus and the words on the skin of the people around her didn’t mean anything to her at all. She put her glasses on and looked around for the ticket counter.
She returned the ticket for half its value, hoping thirty euros would be enough for a ticket to the place where bodies washed ashore whole. She tried to remember exactly what Neil had said. In English she asked several people how to take the bus to Spain. They told her to go to the Montparnasse Station. Was there a bus to a place called the End of the Earth? They didn’t know.
The people in Paris looked different. They seemed to have been collected from all over the world. She wished she still had Lina’s camera, so she could see the exact shapes of their noses and cheeks. She felt like she had when she and Lina had first arrived in London and she let herself stare and stare at people, trying to see their features underneath foreign words, not worrying that she would read them.
The Montparnasse station was far away, but Magdalena didn’t want to use any of her money to take the metro there, so she got a map from the man at the information desk and, feeling a little dizzy because she wasn’t used to wearing her glasses, she walked out of the station with the shoebox under her arm, pulling Lina’s bag behind her on its shaky wheel. She felt so happy that she blew a bubble with the gum that Neil had given her, even though it was not the bubble-blowing kind.
After Barry had dumped her clothes out of the upstairs window, he’d hurled the camera after her into the street. It had bounced, then shattered its lens against the curb, and in all the confusion with the police and the new girl and Veronika screaming, Magdalena never had a chance to take out the film. She wasn’t sorry to leave Barry’s house, but she was sorry about that camera.
Barry had been very nice to Magdalena for a few weeks after the day in the bathroom when she told him about the words while his cut from the razor blade was bleeding all over her jeans. But once he stopped being afraid that Magdalena was going to try to cut herself up again when he wasn’t looking, he started treating the whole thing as a big joke.
“C’mon Magdute, tell my future,” he’d say to her. But most of the things that were written on Barry were in the past. Magdalena didn’t understand a lot of what it said, but there were quite a few dates, most of them before she was born, as if Barry had fallen face-first into a history book while the ink was still wet. She kept her mouth shut.
Before she found out the meaning of apricots, Magdalena had felt almost comforted by the nonsense on Barry’s face. Ugly things were written there, but they were interspersed with words that were still meaningless after more than two years in England, and she found them easy to ignore. But after that day in the churchyard, Magdalena started paying more attention to Barry’s skin, knowing the things it said were probably true. He caught her studying him once or twice. “Oh, give us a hint,” he would say. Or he’d try to give her a kiss and say, “What’s it got to say there about you and me?” But when Magdalena finally did read him what was written there, she did it not because he kept asking her to, but to shut him up about the numbers.
Barry had a whole library of books on World War Two, and his favorite, the one he had tabbed with sticky notes, one with the name of each girl living in his house, was called The Holocaust of the Jews in Eastern Europe. When he got mad about something, he’d start yelling at Magdalena and the other girls about the things that had happened during the war as if they had personally been the perpetrators and he was the victim, which was really something, considering what it said on his chin and the back of his neck. They could tell when he was really mad because he replaced their names with death tolls.
To Zosia from Poland he’d say, “Two Point Nine Million, who the fuck is this guy hanging around across the street? Get out there and tell him to push off,” or to Veronika, who was Czech, he’d say, “Two Hundred Seventy-Seven Thousand, your goddamn orange hair is stopping up my drains.”
But it was Magdalena who got the worst of it, not because her number was highest, not because Barry’s family had even come from Lithuania, but because he had read in that book that the Lithuanians hadn’t just handed over the Jews, but in fact had done most of the killing themselves.
When he got worked up, even if it had nothing to do with her at all, he’d call her down and ask her how many Jews she knew. Not so many, Magdalena would say, knowing what was coming. How many synagogues were there in Vilnius? Maybe a few, Magdalena would say. “Nope, not maybe a few. Fucking two. How many were there in 1939?” He’d open the book with the sticky notes and point to a page. “Fifty. It was forty percent Jewish, how about that? And how many pits in the forest did it take, would you say? For all of them?”
“I don’t know,” Magdalena would say.
“But if you had to guess.”
“I really don’t know.”
Once, when she had just moved in and before she’d learned to keep quiet, Magdalena told Barry he’d better be careful of what he said, that a lot of people had died in Rhodesia too. She didn’t know what she was saying at the time, but Barry got very quiet after that, and he looked at Magdalena in a way she didn’t like at all. It said a lot more than that across his chin and his arms, and even though Magdalena didn’t understand exactly what it meant, she knew better than to get into it. From then on she let Barry say what he wanted.
“How many bullets did it take for the babies?” he’d ask.
“I don’t know.”
“Sure you do. Bullets aren’t cheap. Think about it.”
“I don’t know.”
“One? Two? For the little ones, the really tinys. Give up?”
“Yeah, I give up.”
“It’s a trick question.”
“I don’t know.”
“One half of one bullet. Guess how.”
“I don’t know.”
“Don’t know much. Ask Granddaddy. Go on, use the phone. Call old Grandpop up long distance.” And Barry would say in Lithuanian in a singsong voice, “Make mama hold baby close. One half for mama, one half for—”
“Okay, it’s enough,” Magdalena would say, but Barry was just getting started.
“Did you ever go hunting for bones in the forest? You ever go off to take a piss in the forest and poke your cunny on a Jew bone sticking out of the ground?”
“No, I never did this.”
And it would go on like that until Barry got tired and said, “But cheer up kiddo. Nobody knew a thing about anything, did they?”
But the truth was, she did know some things about those places in the forest.
Sometimes after school Lina and Magdalena would take the bus to Lina’s grandmother’s house. Magdalena didn’t have any grandmothers, and knowing this, and because she was grateful to Magdalena’s mother for taking Lina to live with them, Lina’s grandmother let Magdalena call her Baba like Lina did, and she stitched both of them tiny dolls that she turned inside out to hide the seams.
Lina’s grandmother lived just outside the city in an old wooden house painted blue. She didn’t like to go out because she was Polish and she didn’t want people to hear her accent, so Lina and Magdalena did her shopping, going to the butcher’s and the vegetable market and the pharmacy all by themselves, almost too shy to say what they wanted and then running home with their bags of cabbages and bread and medicines as if they’d stolen them.
Lina always took care of the money, because she was older and it was her grandmother, but Magdalena held on to the list that Baba had written out for them in her old-fashioned handwriting with the spelling all wrong, because Magdalena was the better reader. And when they came home, poppy seed cakes would be warm on the oven and Baba would be stitching yarn onto the heads of the dolls, yellow for Lina and brown for Magdalena.
Baba’s skin hung like tissue paper over her bones, and if it hadn’t been for her white gold hair anchoring it to her skull it would have slipped off a long time ago. There were hollows under her ears and in her collarbones and her hair was so thin she could hold it all in a child’s barrette. From time to time Baba patted her hair and brushed the fine bits back behind her ears in a way that showed that Baba had once been so beautiful that Lina’s grandfather had taken a great risk during the war and married her, to save her from being sent away.
But Baba’s hands were like the hands of another person. The older and tinier Baba got, the bigger her hands became. They looked to Magdalena like pieces of driftwood that had been soaked and rounded and sanded and smoothed by the sea for hundreds of years.
Baba had been a seamstress, and though her hands looked like blocks of wood they could do anything. If Lina or Magdalena had brought a bit of shiny cloth or a piece of lace with them, Baba would turn it into a dress or a long winter coat for their dolls, with cuffs that turned up on the ends of the sleeves and bits of thread knotted to look like buttons.
Magdalena liked to watch Lina’s grandmother work, because when she used the old sewing machine she pushed up her sleeves and Magdalena would get to see the paintings on her skin. Baba had letters on her face and hands and in the gap between her stockings and her skirt like other people, but on her arms the words were written in another kind of alphabet, with letters that looked like tiny paintings, each one shaped almost like so many things but not exactly like anything, and Magdalena would lean in close, pretending she was watching Baba as she finished off a tiny hem, trying to understand what they said.
Baba’s skin was so thin and she was so covered in writing that from far away she looked blue. Most of the words on her face and neck must have been Polish because they were much harder to stack one sound on top of another than the words they learned in school, or the words on Magdalena’s teacher’s face or Lina’s or anyone else’s. Sometimes Baba would catch Magdalena looking at her, trying to make sense of the line of letters that started at her ear and ran all the way down to the collar of her dress.
“Don’t move your lips like this,” Baba would say, and Magdalena would try as hard as she could to keep all the sounds in her head without saying anything. But she always lost the first part by the time she got to the end, and without meaning to she’d be back to shaping the letters with her lips. “Stop this,” Baba would say again, more sharply. “Someone will see.”
One day when they went to visit Lina’s grandmother, Ruta was there. Baba stood in front of the door and said to them, “Please, you must not come in today,” but they could see Ruta behind her wrapped in a blanket. Ruta started calling for Lina, and Lina ducked under her grandmother’s arms. But Ruta was sick and her hands weren’t steady. Baba tried to get Ruta to sit down, but she didn’t want to. Ruta ripped Baba’s dress at the shoulder and Magdalena saw that all across Baba’s body there were words, some of them in the language of paintings, written over and across each other as if they were meant for a person with twice as much skin. Ruta’s face had changed, there was something slack in her mouth and as soon as Lina saw it she pulled away. Ruta tried to make Lina come back to her, but Lina didn’t want to. There were two red points at the tops of Ruta’s cheeks. When Baba tried again to make her sit down, Ruta slapped her. Suddenly Lina was crying, and it was as if her crying had no beginning, she started right in the middle with big sobs. Ruta yelled at her to stop it, but Lina only cried louder. It was a screaming, hysterical cry like Magdalena had never heard, and Ruta put her hands over her ears and ran toward the door. She stumbled and got up again, only taking her hands off her ears to take Baba’s purse off of the hook by the door, and then she left.
As soon as Ruta was gone Lina stopped screaming. She stood for a moment, then she ran after her mother. Baba called to her, but Lina was already halfway down the street, running after Ruta who was just then disappearing around the corner with Baba’s purse dangling from its broken strap.
Baba started down the steps after them, but she nearly lost her balance, and it was only Magdalena being there that kept her from falling. Baba wanted to stay right there on the steps, but Magdalena led her back inside to the sofa. Baba’s big hands were tented over her face as if she were reading them, and she sat there shaking her head slowly, not saying anything.
So Magdalena did what she thought her mother would have done. She shut the door. She pulled the torn sleeve back over Baba’s shoulder as best she could. She patted Baba’s hair and brought a wet rag from the kitchen for the place on her cheek where Ruta had hit her. Then, because she didn’t know what else to do, she started singing to Baba as if she were a little child, and by the time she ran out of words to the songs she knew it was getting dark. Baba was still looking at the palms of her hands, and so in the last light Magdalena read to her what was written there, spreading Baba’s hand on top of her own and tracing the letters like a gypsy telling the future, except that when she put the sounds together, what came out was all in the past, and she sang it to Baba like the continuation of a lullaby.
In the forest past the station Paneriai they stop the train. First Lidya Kamiemiecki, Jakob and Jacha Gornowski, Solomon Marmorsztejn and his mother Gita, Lejba Byk and Ester Kowarska. Malka who never waited. Smuel, Boris and Ilja. Varvaza brought the children with her. Anna Litvinova and the baby Misha. Irina Kac and the man on the train. Josef Lewin’s fiancée Rivka. Mira and Luba Erlich. Jakub, Mama and Anucia at once. Professor Ginzbergas who wore his shirts one for each day. Chana Bir, then Mr. Izakov, the man who sells buttons . . .
“Where is Anucia?” Baba asked, and Magdalena showed her. “And Misha?” There on her thumb. “Jakub and my mother?” There and there.
Then Baba said, “You have to pretend you don’t see such things. If you tell like this again they will take me away.”
Right before Baba died she lost her caution and asked Ruta to bury her in the old Jewish cemetery, where the gravestones were covered with the same kinds of letters that Baba was. Ruta didn’t have the heart to tell her that the cemetery had been dug up years ago when the Russians built the Sports Palace. Magdalena didn’t know about any of it at the time, because Lina and Ruta had moved away to Kaunas and it was while they were living there that Baba died. It was only when they came back to Vilnius that Magdalena heard, and only then because Ruta came to their door drunk one night and told Magdalena’s mother everything, how Baba’s whole family had been killed in a pit in the forest, and how Baba would have been killed too if it hadn’t been for an old man, a sage of the community who had always frightened the children by reading from books that weren’t there. He looked to where Baba stood with the others beside the train tracks and told her she would run, and she did. She ran through the forest until she was found by Ruta’s father, who it seemed very likely had been doing some of the killing. He was a peasant man who lived nearby and he saved her because of her beautiful blonde hair. He hid her for a time in his chicken coop and then when the war was nearly over he married her.
Magdalena’s mother had been the one to tell Ruta the night that Lina died. “If I had known,” Ruta kept saying over and over on the phone, never finishing the sentence. Magdalena’s mother didn’t understand what she meant, but Magdalena did. How could Lina’s mother have looked at her daughter each day, fed her and taken her to school and sometimes slapped her and left for days without saying why, bought her dresses and held her hand across streets, if she had known that Lina would be gone at twenty-one?
With Dov Kitrosser it was the same. He’d pressed his wet face into Magdalena’s shoulder and said, “I never would have left her alone if I had known.” And when the policewoman called to explain the results of the inquest, she’d said, “We believe Ms. Valentukaitė ingested the seeds without knowing their toxicity.”
But Magdalena had known. If she’d locked Lina in the bathroom the moment she shaved away the last bits of her hair and saw the words cause of death underneath, if she’d made up some lie to keep her there long enough to look up ingesting and acute, to make sure respiratory failure meant what she thought it did and then—with Lina probably threatening to pour her lotions down the drain if Magdalena didn’t unlock the door—if she’d flipped back to the A’s in her high school English dictionary and seen that apricots were a fruit and that was Dov’s specialty—well, everything might have been different. Lina and Dov might at that moment be together sampling a shipment of pineapples grown without any skins. Or things with Dov might have ended as they usually did and Lina would be back in their flat in London, sitting in front of the open fridge, cooling her feet in the vegetable bin.
It had been a mistake not to believe what it said on Lina’s skin, and she didn’t want to make that mistake again. So for a little while after Neil called to tell her about the camera and Magdalena realized why Barry happened to bang open the bathroom door just when he did, she thought about taking Neil’s advice and reporting Barry to the police. Not for what he’d put in the cabinet—somehow that didn’t seem right. After she cut the lock on the medicine cabinet with Barry’s hedge clippers she pulled the camera out of the wall and held it up in front of Barry, dangling wires. But Barry just laughed and wagged the finger that was still wrapped in cotton from where he’d cut himself trying to grab the razor from Magdalena, saying, “Guess you’re not in much of a position to complain.” And it was true. She didn’t know why, exactly, but she was glad Barry had come in when he did.
It was the other things she wondered about. Barry had guilt written all over him, and it seemed that someone ought to know. He’d been a young man when he did what he did, and, like the Lithuanian peasants drunk on country brandy and the unfamiliar power to remove whole families from the history of the world, he may have believed that what he did was necessary or found a way to close his mind to the worst of it. But if he had an explanation, it wasn’t written down. All that Magdalena saw on Barry’s skin were facts and dates.
Still, for a while after the day Magdalena told Barry about the words, she was careful not to say anything more. When Barry yelled to her from the living room one afternoon because somebody had spilled something on his keyboard, calling her Two Hundred Twenty Thousand instead of by name, Magdalena answered. But when he made her take the book with the sticky notes off the shelf and told her to start reading the chapter on Lithuania, marked Magdalena, she told him, “You are some sick fuck, you know that, Barry?”
“Read,” he said.
“I don’t want to,” she said.
“It’s for your own good. You should know these things.”
“No,” Magdalena said.
“Then get out. Pack your bags,” Barry said.
Magdalena put on her glasses and then, instead of looking down at the book, she looked at him, pretending to stumble a bit over the names, so he would know she was reading.
“Mount Darwin, 2 September 1975. Chained the feet of Erasmus Chiutsi made it look like he hung himself,” she said.
“What?” Barry said.
“Burned and beat his brother Amos,” she said. “Number 5 Rest Camp, Chilimanzi, 25 September 1975. Beat Mariya Mandiuraya with a stick, set dogs at her breasts. Covered Grace Mandirova’s head with a white cloth poured water on her face six times gave her tablets and cotton wool.”
“Get out,” Barry said. “What the fuck is this? Get out.”
He knocked her glasses off, but Magdalena picked them up again and held them to her face—not because she needed them; she’d known it all by heart for months.
“Pokwe Rest Camp, 28 September 1975. Told Mushandi Kurwara the children he has will be the last ones. A bag with wires coming out. Three shocks. Chiweshe Protected Village No. 12, 2 August 1975—”
“I’m going to kill you,” Barry said.
After that there was a lot of shouting. Barry chased her out of the house and threw her things after her. The new girl started screaming; there was the sound of police sirens and Lina’s camera crashing onto the pavement. Barry ran out after Magdalena with a piece of pipe from the basement, and to stop him from using it Magdalena told him what he’d wanted to know, which was his future. Little words, written small across his eyelids: blood cancer, metastatic. He set the pipe down on the pavement, where it rolled a little until Magdalena stopped it with her foot. When she looked at him again Barry had slumped like an old man down onto the curb. She put the pipe in the bushes where the police wouldn’t see it, and told the new girl to be quiet. Beginning with the things that Barry had thrown out onto the street, Magdalena started packing her bag.
“ ‘Saves the life of Magdalena Bikauskaitė in the bathtub,’ you have this written too,” she told Barry as she left. But it was a lie, it didn’t say that on him anywhere, and Barry just sat, not looking up.
She’d been walking for a long time. The sidewalks in Paris were uneven; her arms felt like they were tearing out of her shoulders from the effort of pulling the suitcase while trying to keep it balanced on its one wheel, and she still hadn’t found the street that would take her to the Montparnasse station. Two women passed by, their faces lined with French words that might have meant anything. A man in a doorway smoked a pipe with his sleeves rolled up; she could see columns of text running down his arms.
Magdalena was beginning to have serious doubts about what she was doing, and she was starting to think she was really crazy for not getting on the bus to Vilnius. The street she was on wasn’t on the map she’d gotten at the station and she was trying to read the name on the street sign at the next corner and at the same time thinking that maybe she ought to go back to the station and ask please if it were possible to buy back her canceled ticket—when she nearly bumped into a man who was standing still in the middle of the sidewalk.
He was bending down to look in the window of a shop. Magdalena stepped off the curb to go around him and lost her grip on the handle of Lina’s suitcase, which rolled over into the street. The man turned to help her and Magdalena hurried to take off her glasses, because it seemed that out of all the millions of people in Paris, this man was also Lithuanian; the meaning of a string of words in her own language jumped from the man’s face into Magdalena’s head before she even knew she was reading them.
She had gotten out of the habit a long time ago of reading out loud the words she saw, but the particular phrase on the man’s skin was so familiar that she heard her own voice saying it before she could help herself. “Akys nemato, širdies nesopa.” It was something Magdalena’s mother said all the time. If the eyes don’t see, the heart doesn’t hurt. Something like that. It was one of Magdalena’s mother’s favorite expressions. She said it when she bought a bottle of high-quality shampoo, taking it off the shelf with a laugh, not looking at the price. She said it, quietly, to Magdalena when they passed a young woman swaying over a bottle on an empty street, and if a friend’s thieving ex-husband drove past in a new car, Magdalena’s mother would narrow her eyes and say it as loudly as she liked. It was an old-fashioned saying, so well used it hardly meant anything, and the man on the street looked at Magdalena strangely. She was about to hurry past before he could ask her why she’d said something like that out of nowhere in a language she couldn’t possibly have known he’d understand, but as it turned out she didn’t have to explain, because it seemed he hadn’t understood her after all.
“I’m sorry,” the man said in English, “I don’t speak—”
Magdalena put her glasses back on, just for a moment, and she saw that the man couldn’t be from Lithuania; all the other words on him were English. She scanned his face quickly. There were details of his retirement accounts and a life insurance policy: She could see its payout date printed below his ear. At the corner of the man’s eye were descriptions of things from his childhood: a matchstick castle, a secret, a time the gate of the chicken coop was not shut tight. On his jaw a marriage, mentioned briefly. Magdalena didn’t want to be caught looking too closely, so she took her glasses off.
The man was bending over her suitcase. “I’m afraid you’ve lost a wheel,” he said. He lifted it back onto the sidewalk, and she had to explain that it wasn’t his fault, the wheel had been lost a long time ago and that suitcase was always flipping over.
The man turned back to the shop window. Magdalena wondered if maybe her mind was playing tricks and she had imagined seeing words in Lithuanian.
“Do you know what street is for the station Montparnasse?” she asked. He turned to say he was sorry but he didn’t know, he was only visiting; she put her glasses on and read again, high on his cheek, Akys nemato, širdies nesopa. Magdalena could hear her mother’s voice saying it, and it even looked a little like her mother’s handwriting on the man’s skin. If the eyes don’t see, the heart doesn’t hurt. It was her mother’s all-purpose answer to everything, her way of explaining the things one couldn’t know and might not want to understand.
The man said something about the shop he was looking in. There were little figures in the window and the man started telling her about his son, who liked that kind of thing. When he bent to point inside the shop she read that he’d come to Paris for a reunion with his family; it was written on his cheek just below her mother’s words.
“So you are here together?” Magdalena said.
“My son? No, no he’s not here with me,” the man said.
It was a risk to ask him anything more. But she could see that the k in the word akys on his face was made like a Russian character. Magdalena’s mother still made her k’s like that, the way she had been taught in school. Magdalena suddenly missed her mother—the sound of her voice and the spot of perfect comfort between her mother’s chin and her collarbone, where Magdalena’s head could still fit when it needed to.
“So, you come for—reunion?” she said. She wasn’t quite sure how the word was supposed to be pronounced, but she wanted the man to keep talking.
He looked at her strangely, and Magdalena knew she’d made a mistake.
“A reunion? No, did I say that?”
She shrugged as if he had, and though the man looked uneasy he seemed to believe her. He went back to talking about his son, and she nodded, reading the words again. She was tired, her arms and legs were tired, her feet hurt, and it was restful to see letters arranged in familiar patterns. Akys nemato, širdies nesopa. That old phrase uncluttered by articles and prepositions, so that four Lithuanian words did the work of nine in English. If the eyes don’t see, the heart doesn’t hurt.
“But you know, those things,” the man was saying. “Sometimes they don’t work out.”
Magdalena nodded again, though she hadn’t really been listening. “Things usually can be like this,” she said.
The man cleared his throat and picked up his luggage as if he’d suddenly remembered he was in a hurry. She would have liked to keep him standing there a few minutes more. Next to her was the shop window he had been so interested in, and she looked inside. But before she could come up with a polite way of making him turn his cheek to her again so she could get another look at her mother’s words, the man was picking up his suitcase and turning to go. He’d been carrying a city map, better than the one she had, and he gave it to her, saying, “Here, maybe you can ask someone else about the station.”
“For me?” she said. “Okay, thanks.”
The man tilted his head to say good-bye and Magdalena stood looking in the window of the shop. The gum Neil had given her was hard and tasteless. She blew a tiny bubble.
Inside the window the shopkeeper was hanging up his apron. He sat to put on a pair of leather boots. When he was done he turned to the window, nodding to Magdalena when he saw her standing outside, and started clearing a place among the dusty figurines on the display shelf. After a moment he got a box out from behind the counter. He took something out of it and set it in the space he’d made on the shelf. It was a tiny saint, its features pressed into leather so soft it looked almost alive. Magdalena turned to see if the man on the sidewalk was watching too, but he was already gone. She looked back in the window and noticed that the saint’s body was covered with tiny shells. The shopkeeper took out a note written in French and taped it to the glass.
The shopkeeper went into a back room and Magdalena stood looking at the little saint. She blew another bubble with her gum. Then the lights in the shop went out. The window display got dark and she had to lean in closer and cup her hands around her face to see inside. They were real shells on the body, each no bigger than a fingernail. Underneath the little saint the shopkeeper had sprinkled a bit of sand. She got too close. The bubble popped against the shop’s window and stuck to the glass. The door opened and the shopkeeper came out.
She thought he would be mad about the gum, but he didn’t seem to have noticed it. He said something to her in French and began to lock the door behind him. He lifted an old knapsack onto his back and nodded again to Magdalena, then started walking up the street.
Magdalena looked back at the window. She couldn’t read the words on the note the shopkeeper had left, but at the bottom he’d drawn a shell shaped like a Chinese fan. The shopkeeper was only a few steps away. He was old, but the boots he was wearing were strong and he had a long staff to lean on as he walked. Magdalena remembered what Neil had said about the pilgrims leaving Paris around that time of year.
“Excuse me,” she called after him. “Please tell me—what is this saint from the window?” The shopkeeper stopped and looked at her, not understanding.
“Very sorry, but English, not,” he said.
Magdalena tried again. “This little man,” she said, pointing back at the window. “With shells?” She cupped her hand along her arms. She tried to remember the name Neil had told her. “Saint Jack?” she asked.
“Ah oui. But no for sale,” the man said.
“Okay,” Magdalena said. “But where? Where is this happening?”
“No for sale,” the man said.
“I want to go there,” Magdalena said.
The man shrugged. “Very sorry,” he said.
In Magdalena’s wallet, behind the thirty euros and some expired top-up cards, was the piece of paper the woman at the yellow church in Swindon had given her, with the outline of a scallop shell stamped in pink ink. She took it out and showed it to the man.
“Ah, Compostelle,” he said.
“Yes?” Magdalena said.
“Okay,” the man said, and he pointed down the street. “Venez.” He motioned for Magdalena to follow him, and seeing her heavy suitcase with its one wheel he shook his head.
“C’est mieux comme ça,” he said, pointing to the old sack on his back and tapping his walking stick against the boots he was wearing. He looked at Magdalena’s sandals and shook his head again. He turned back to the shop, unlocked the door, and went in. He came back out in a moment with a package of rubber insoles and a roll of tape. He handed them to Magdalena, nodding toward her feet. “You come,” he said. She adjusted the shoebox under her arm and followed him down the street.
After only a block or two they stopped next to a construction site. “Okay,” the man said. He looked around. A group of people had formed around a backhoe at one corner of the lot. As they got closer Magdalena saw five or six nuns in hiking boots filling water bottles from a big jug, and several older couples with backpacks and matching parkas. “To Compostelle,” the old man said. “Pèlerins.” He held out his arm and walked his first two fingers through the air.
“We go by feet?” Magdalena asked. The old man didn’t say anything, but his fingers were still walking. He held up six fingers, shrugged, then held up seven.
“Weeks,” he said.
“Okay,” Magdalena said.
She took the miniature bow and arrow from Neil’s father out of Lina’s suitcase and put them in her purse, along with the rubber soles the man had given her and anything else that would fit. She tied a jacket around her waist, then shoved the suitcase under the fence, next to a shed full of construction equipment. She was so used to life without her glasses that it was only then that she thought to look up. It might have been Neil’s tower above them, or it might have been another place covered over with white boards and scaffolding. She used some of the tape from the shopkeeper to close the shoebox tight and tied a pair of shoelaces together to make a loop so she could carry it over her shoulder. The nuns looked at their watches, and church bells chimed.
“Okay,” the old man said to her. “We go.”