The day final exams finished in London, Neil took the Eurostar to Paris with Professor Piot and the other research assistants. Professor Piot made them squeeze in around a little table in the family section and sent someone to the café car for champagne, and pretty soon they knew all about the Chunnel as an illustration of free-market versus socialized political economy. (“Imagine the embarrassment of the queen, who is on board, when this train doubles its speed as it arrives in France on its maiden voyage, suggesting that Britain’s private investors cannot be relied upon to fix the tracks . . .”) They heard grim stories of the World War One battlefields they passed. (“The mud was so permeated with human fragments that during the great rains of 1915 whole arms and legs would sometimes slide out of the walls of the trenches . . .”) Professor Piot promised dinner at Maxim’s to anyone who could name the genius whose idea was behind the fast-moving panzer tank divisions that crossed the Belgian border into France in May 1940. (“Himmler?” somebody guessed. “Göring?” “Aha!” Professor Piot said. “While the French generals built their Maginot line, Hitler read a pamphlet by a certain young colonel named Charles de Gaulle and used these ideas to plan the Blitzkrieg!”)
As they got nearer to Paris, Professor Piot opened a second bottle and told them about the project they’d be working on, which had been pretty vague up until that point because he was still ironing out the details with the Musée du Patrimoine. They would be preparing an exhibition on the old church of Saint-Jacques-de-la-Boucherie. Built by butchers and torn down by revolutionaries, only its sixteenth-century bell tower was still intact, “a fine example of the flamboyant Gothic style,” Professor Piot said. The tower was being restored, and the work was costing the City of Paris a lot of money. Professor Piot had been hired to help prove that it was worth it. “We must make a good story for the schoolchildren,” he said.
“Perhaps we begin with the Paris of ancient times—” Professor Piot was a hand talker and there were five of them in four seats, which meant he hit either Neil or Loren, the other American, each time he made a point. “It is the dawn of the Christian faith in France, the city takes up only the space of Île de la Cité. Today this is where the tourists go for ice cream. But then we are in Roman times. There are barbarian invasions, the city is behind stone walls. And already economic life is outgrowing them. The dirty professions, the infected trades, they call them—the tanners, the furriers, the butchers—are kept outside. And so on the banks opposite the city a great market grows up—you have heard of Les Halles? Now it is an empty shopping mall, a catastrophe of urban planning, but for centuries it is the larder, the very pungent ventre, the gut, we can say, of the city—the history of Paris begins some seventeen centuries before refrigeration. And the butchers of this quarter, these men in bloodstained aprons, must rise very early each day, must work through the night even, but at dusk the gates to the city are locked. They cannot attend Mass, you see? Performing each day the most biblical, perhaps, of professions—this butchering of meat—they cannot even pray. And so these men set out to build their own church outside the city walls—” Professor Piot poured a little more into each of their glasses. “From its first days, this is a church of Paris. In this church the basins of holy water must be refreshed each hour because so many hands are dipping in covered with the blood of the slaughterhouse, the lye from the tanning shops, the soot and filth of the life of the city—” The train shot through a tunnel, the pressure made everyone’s ears pop.
It was in medieval times that the butchers named their church for Saint Jacques, patron saint of laborers and pilgrims, who brought the Christian faith to Spain, was beheaded by Herod, and, so the story went, assisted posthumously in the Crusades. The journey to his burial place in Spain had been one of the most important pilgrimages of the Middle Ages, Professor Piot said. The old pilgrim maps looked like nets spanning the length of the known world, with the butchers’ church as the pilgrims’ Paris starting point. “In this churchyard penitents from all over Europe are swapping boots, coughing on one another and spreading disease. Monks from Lille are speaking in Latin to friars from Cork. Rumors are spread of miracles, philosophies are interchanged, as well as recipes of poultices for blisters . . .” Neil tried to find a more comfortable way to be sitting on the armrest. Beth was taking notes and didn’t notice that Jean-Claude was drinking out of her glass.
The church had been destroyed in the spasms of anticlericalism that followed the French Revolution: “Torn stone from stone in the name of the new Republic and used—who knows? To pave the streets? To replace the cobblestones that had themselves been hurled from barricades?” Professor Piot loved that kind of thing, and his hands were flying all over the place. Neil pressed his head flat against the back of the seat, but still he got hit in the nose. Today, all that was left of the church was its bell tower, from which Pascal had supposedly studied the impossibility of a vacuum and quantified the weight of air, and where, even to this day, meteorological equipment monitored pollution levels at the corner of rue Saint-Martin and rue de Rivoli.
Professor Piot sent Jean-Claude to get another bottle and then with a flourish—Neil and Loren ducked—he gave them their research assignments. Jean-Claude, whose French was, obviously, the best, would be the liaison to the reconstruction crew, making sure that details of archaeological and architectural relevance were preserved. (“The very dirt on the walls is of interest to us,” Professor Piot said. “If the walls are clean then we must ask why there is no dirt, and that too is of interest.”) Professor Piot himself would concentrate on the medieval era, Loren would cover the Revolution, and Beth, who was getting a Ph.D. in architectural history, would be responsible for the renovations that had been made since Baron Haussmann decided to spare the church’s remaining belfry—now called the Tour Saint-Jacques—as he went about razing and reshaping Paris into a modern city. Neil’s job would be to track down anything that linked the church to the pilgrimage to Spain. “Okay, so bonne chasse,” Professor Piot said, raising his glass. “And remember—a church of the butchers. Find for me a history a little bit au jus, okay?”
By the time they got to Paris, Neil and the others were so dizzy from all that champagne that they barely made it off the train, but Professor Piot did a little soft shoe to the “Marseillaise” as soon as he touched the marble floors of the station. “We meet tomorrow at the Archives nationales, nine o’clock,” he said.
In London it had been sticky early summer, but in Paris, somehow, it was spring. On his first day off from work at the archives, Neil sat in a café and watched the reflections of glass windows slide across the old stones of a church. Cigarette ash blew onto him from the next table and he had to stop himself from sticking out his tongue to catch the flakes and let them melt like snow. He watched the little bits of ash floating in the foam of his beer and he thought that it was wonderful. Music was playing. Neil read a book by a French historian in French, looking up every word he didn’t know, and a pigeon hopped around his foot with a bit of string looped around one of its toes, as if it had something important to remember.
That summer Neil almost never got phone calls. He didn’t know anyone in Paris, except for Loren, Jean-Claude, and Beth, who were all in grad school and barely even spoke to him, and when his mom called with the weekly update on what mail he’d gotten and who from his high school was getting married, she did it on Skype. Not that many people had called Neil in London either, except Veejay sometimes to tell him to hurry home, zebras were having sex on the BBC. So when his phone rang during one of Professor Piot’s seminars, he didn’t even realize it was his.
It was Neil’s third week in Paris. He was supposed to be auditing the seminar as a way to ameliorate his French in between trips to the archives, but so far it had only messed up his English. His thoughts had taken on an incredibly stilted tone—ameliorate, for instance—and Professor Piot’s lecture that day wasn’t much more than a collection of separate words. Taken all together, they had something to do with the Vichy regime’s co-opting of the Joan of Arc mythology, which was one of Professor Piot’s favorite topics, although it was possible that Neil was mishearing and Jeanne d’Arc was really gendarmes and they were talking about Pétain’s special police. Possibly both.
So as Professor Piot paused while Neil’s phone rang and rang, Neil kept scribbling in his notes—a lot of unconnected phrases that trailed off into nothing when they got to the verb—while the rest of the class wondered what moron had “Frère Jacques” for his ringtone. When he finally realized that it was his phone that was ringing and started fumbling around with it to try to turn it off—in an excess of optimism he’d switched the settings to French—he silently cursed Veejay, whose idea of a going-away present had been to secretly download some boys’ choir trilling “sonnez les matines” to Neil’s phone.
At the break, while the class smoked and drank their little coffees out of plastic cups, Neil tried to check his voicemail, only he couldn’t remember the new code. He tried to look cool, like he was just texting somebody a really long message, and finally he got the number right. “One . . . new . . . message . . .” a voice sang out. Neil had accidentally put the phone on speaker. He pushed a bunch of buttons and missed hearing the person say her name, but right away he figured out that it was the girl he’d met in Swindon. “So, I am coming to London for taking the bus to Vilnius and I am wanting to ask you do you want to meet for a coffee, because I am going to be there for some hours? So, okay, that’s all. Maybe you can call me when you have some moment. Okay, good-bye.”
Neil only rarely had the opportunity to return girls’ phone calls, and when he did, he liked to spend some time rehearsing a casual tone and working up a joke or two. But he had a sudden desire to speak his own language in front of all the Sorbonne kids milling around outside the classroom, flopping their hair in their eyes and discussing existentialism in Fascist literature without saying the second halves of their words, that French university dialect designed to exclude American research assistants.
Neil pushed the buttons on his phone until he figured out how to call the number back.
“Hello?” she said.
“Hey, it’s Neil,” Neil said.
“Oh, yes.”
“I got your message and, gosh, I mean I’d love to meet up, but actually I’m not in London right now.” He liked the sound of his own voice, casually speaking a language the Sorbonne kids had to learn from books.
“Well, it’s okay,” she said. “It’s no problem, really, you are busy.”
“No, it’s not that, it’s just that I’m in Paris for the summer.”
“Oh you are in Paris?” she said.
“Yep, till August,” Neil said. “I’m doing some work for my professor.” There was a pause. “Shoot, I mean I’m really sorry. It would have been fun to get a coffee and all.”
“Actually this is perfect,” she said. “I am changing my bus in Paris.”
“Wow, really?” Neil said.
“Yes, for this I have gotten the most cheap ticket.” There was another pause. “I will come tomorrow in the morning at six o’clock into the station Gare du Nord. This is Paris?”
“Yeah,” Neil said. The class was filing back into the classroom and Professor Piot was already writing a list of dates on the board. “Wow, that’s great.”
“Yes, so we can meet there tomorrow,” she said.
“Cool,” Neil said. Six o’clock seemed awfully early. “We can have some croissants.”
It was frankly a surprise to hear from her again. Neil had called her up the day after he got back from Swindon to tell her about the camera in the medicine cabinet, and instead of being grateful to him for telling her and pissed at Barry for being such a creep, she had sounded almost amused, leaving Neil wondering, as usual, what he’d done wrong.
He’d worked up the nerve to call her after talking it over with Veejay, who wasn’t helpful at all, suggesting that Neil try to blackmail Barry into letting him see the videos and maybe getting a cut of the profits if he were, like, selling them on the Internet or something. “Don’t be an asshole,” Neil told Veejay, and Veejay did finally call his cousin who was a solicitor in Sheffield, and found out that yes, it was totally illegal to film people in the shower without them knowing it, and even though Barry could try to make the case that it was all in his own house, that argument almost never stood up.
So Neil had called Magdute to tell her that he was really sorry he hadn’t said anything right away, but that he had found a hidden camera behind a double mirror in the downstairs bathroom. He’d even gotten Veejay’s cousin to say he’d do a three-way call and talk to her about taking Barry to court, but she said she didn’t want to. Neil had planned a whole speech about how he felt like such a jerk for having waited a full twenty-four hours to tell her about it, but in the end he didn’t have to use it, because Magdute only said “Mmm” when he started back at the beginning and told her about the padlock on the medicine cabinet and the Altoids box with the hole in its side and that weird note. “So this camera is looking at the bath?” she asked, and when Neil said yes, Magdute said, “Ahh, okay,” and that was it. When he asked if she was still there she said, “Oh, yes,” and something in her voice made him think she was trying not to laugh. He wondered if maybe he was getting worked up over nothing, or if it was all a big joke on him. But as soon as he hung up the phone he told himself that he’d done the right thing. You couldn’t know that there was a secret camera in somebody’s bathroom and not say anything. And it really couldn’t have been some kind of twisted practical joke. The hole drilled through the Altoids box had had rust around it and the box was stuck to the shelf as if it had been there for a long time. Finally he decided that if it was a joke, it would have fooled someone way less gullible, and if it wasn’t, well Magdute was a grown-up. Now she knew, and she could do what she wanted.
So it wasn’t that Neil was unhappy that Magdute was coming to Paris, it just seemed like it might be sort of awkward. And it wasn’t very convenient. There was no good way to take the metro from Gare du Nord to the archives, and he’d have to carry all his books and papers with him if he was going to go straight there after she left. And it wasn’t like he and Magdute were friends. Neil thought about calling her back and telling her he couldn’t make it. But on the other hand, it wasn’t like Neil had girls calling him up every day, asking if he wanted to have a coffee.
Her call reminded him that he’d never sent his father the Christmas presents from her mother. The shopping bag Magdute had given him at the bus stop in Swindon only had a packet of Euro-style coffee in it, along with some woolen socks and a couple of sort of unflattering photos of a woman in front of a Christmas tree. Pretty crappy presents, and they showed that Neil’s father and Magdute’s mother didn’t know each other very well because Neil’s father didn’t even drink coffee.
The problem was that whenever Neil thought about sending the presents—and he really had thought about it, several times—he ended up thinking about Barry’s house and the girl in the party dress he’d seen behind the door. Her particular expression made things complicated. Obviously she hadn’t wanted to be seen, and the noise Neil made opening the bathroom door had startled her. But the look on her face, the way her eyes had gone wide and she pressed two fingers to her lips—Neil still wasn’t sure if she’d been warning him to keep quiet or asking him for some kind of help. Each time Neil started to look for a box to mail the presents home in, he would get to thinking about the last time he’d been looked at like that, and he’d end up deciding all over again that he couldn’t let his father know he’d ever been to Swindon. It was better for his dad to think that Neil had flaked and never made the trip than to have to tell him about the house with the pictures of naked girls and the camera in the medicine cabinet.
Old guys doing weird, probably illegal things involving young women was a subject Neil was never in a million years going to voluntarily bring up in a conversation with his father, who had practically been fired from his job as an English teacher for some stuff that had happened with a student. It had been a pretty big deal in their really small town, on the front page of the local paper for weeks during Neil’s eighth-grade year. The girl was also in eighth grade, which made the whole thing worse, and after one single, horrible confrontation, when Neil had said ugly things to his father and his father had cried, neither of them had ever mentioned the thing again.
The girl’s name was Becca Gallegos and she and Neil had known each other since they were kids. When Neil’s parents got divorced, he and his mom moved into the trailer park where Becca’s family lived and she and Neil would ride bikes together and dig for treasure in Neil’s backyard. Becca started out a grade ahead of Neil, so they weren’t in class together until middle school, when she got held back. It wasn’t that she was slow or anything, she just had a lousy home life and missed a lot of class. Which, Neil’s father said, was why she needed extra encouragement.
By the time Becca got to eighth grade she was a mess. She wore a bunch of eye shadow and went around looking spooked and scribbling things in a little notebook. It was that notebook that was Neil’s dad’s undoing, because he offered to read some of her writing and began having her stay after class to discuss it. At some point Becca started telling people that Neil’s dad had done some inappropriate stuff and her father threatened to sue the school district.
Things got pretty ugly for a while. Neil’s dad didn’t do himself any favors by comparing the school board to the Inquisition and ranting about how the language arts department and the entire education system didn’t know the first thing about nurturing literary talent. He said he’d never touched her and she said he had. There was a hearing in front of members of the school board, but apparently there wasn’t much evidence of anything because Becca never pressed charges and they let Neil’s dad resign and keep his pension.
Neil would have dealt with the whole thing a lot better if he hadn’t known for a fact that his father was lying. As it was, when kids on the bus would say, “Hey, Beart, how’s your dirty old man?” and laugh like that was hilarious, he’d feel all the blood go to his face, but there was nothing really for him to say. He’d hunch down farther in his seat and draw designs in the mist his breath left on the school bus window.
Neil had taken Professor Piot’s “Methods of Historical Analysis” class while he was in London, and they’d talked about the theory of path dependence, in which events happened in a chain reaction, like a domino effect. One event caused a second, which caused a third, which made it all but impossible that a fourth could be avoided, which led, by necessity, to a fifth, and so on, history hurtling toward a foregone conclusion. It was a way of looking at things that Professor Piot, and, one gathered, all serious historians, looked down on, because a path-dependent explanation of, say, why the Fourth Crusade ended up sacking Constantinople rather than reclaiming the Holy Land didn’t take into account the thousand unpredictable nuances of how, why, and when, much less the decision-making role of individuals involved. The schism between the Orthodox and Roman Catholic churches may have set the stage for a confrontation between East and West, but who was to say that the Crusaders would have plundered their fellow Christians if their leader hadn’t been charmed at a dinner party by a pretender to the Byzantine throne? “Doubt all claims of the inevitable,” Professor Piot liked to say.
Neil, of course, agreed. But path dependence was the only way to explain how things had happened with Becca Gallegos. If Neil’s mother hadn’t insisted on having NPR on in the car in the mornings as she drove him to school, then he never would have heard about an effort to require House of Commons–style elections for Britain’s House of Lords. If he’d never heard the story, he wouldn’t have known the answer to the question “The British parliament includes which two bodies of legislators?” which allowed Neil’s team to win the district-wide Knowledge Bowl competition and go on to the state finals. If they hadn’t qualified for state, Neil wouldn’t have had to get parental permission to go on an overnight trip to Colorado Springs. And if he hadn’t had to get that permission form signed, he wouldn’t have gone to his father’s classroom after school one afternoon. He wouldn’t have found the door shut, and when he opened it a crack to see if his father was in there, he wouldn’t have seen his dad and Becca Gallegos, Becca sitting at one of the classroom desks and his father with his back to the door, bending over her like he was correcting her paper. Neil had been about to ask if he could interrupt for just a second to get his form signed when he heard his father say something like “There’s nothing to be afraid of,” and he smoothed his hand over Becca’s hair, then squatted down next to her and rolled down the cuff of her shorts to cover an inch more of her thigh, as if he were personally enforcing the school dress code. Just as he did, the door handle that Neil was holding onto made a noise. Becca looked up, and for what could only have been a fraction of a second but felt much longer she stared straight at Neil in the doorway. Until the girl behind the door in Swindon, Neil had only seen a look like that one other time, when he was a kid and he found a deer with its leg caught in a fence. Eyes frantic, calculating the chance of escape but coming up short, flicking away. Neil closed the classroom door as quietly as possible, and he almost missed going to the Knowledge Bowl finals because he had to wait until his mom got back from a conference she was attending to get his permission form signed. Because he did not want his father to ever, ever know what he’d seen.
None of it was necessarily all that bad in its own right, but it was a whole lot more than what Neil’s father said had happened. There had been no physical contact between them, absolutely none, Neil’s father said. And as for the things Becca said, about how he’d told her she was a beautiful young girl with talents he was going to help her realize, it was all a big misunderstanding. He’d meant to be encouraging, to give her a bit of self-esteem, and she’d taken it the wrong way.
Neil never told his father that he didn’t believe him. He didn’t want to admit to knowing anything more than what people were saying in the halls at school, but the look on Becca’s face had made it obvious that things had been happening that shouldn’t be, and his dad had had no good reason to be messing with her shorts.
Things ended even worse for Becca than for his father, with the very same people who wrote letters to the editor calling Neil’s dad a letch and a predator saying that she was an opportunist and her father was using the whole thing as an excuse to get money out of the school district. It might have been true, because pretty soon after the school board hearing, social services got involved and put Becca and her sisters in foster care. “Couldn’t have happened too soon,” Neil’s mother said. Neil’s mom wasn’t inclined to take his father’s side on anything, but she worked as a domestic violence counselor, and though she was pretty strict about patient confidentiality, it didn’t take a genius to figure out that the Gallegos kids had it rough.
Only Neil knew that Becca wasn’t lying, at least not entirely, and he kept waiting for Becca to tell the school board that Neil had seen her and his father together in the classroom that afternoon. Neil spent whole days not hearing a word of what was said in class, waiting for an announcement to summon him to the principal’s office. But even though Becca could have used a witness on her side, she never told. That made the whole thing even worse, thinking of Becca protecting him, as if they were kids again and she was answering Neil’s mom’s questions about where all the boxes of cherry Jell-O had gone so Neil wouldn’t have to open his bright red mouth. Neil stood outside the principal’s office one afternoon after it had become a big scandal, trying to convince himself to go in and tell what he’d seen. But in the end he couldn’t do it—not out of loyalty to his father so much as out of eighth-grade embarrassment at the thought of having to tell Ms. Schisler that he’d seen his father’s hand on Becca’s leg.
It was all really stressful, Neil’s stomach was in knots for weeks, and when she noticed he wasn’t eating, Neil’s mom tried to get him to go see one of her therapist friends. She even offered to let him change schools mid-year, which would have meant driving him to Pueblo each day, because she figured that being Mr. Beart’s son was making things tough. But Neil said no. He wasn’t about to talk to some hippie therapist, and changing schools wouldn’t make his dad any less of a liar or Neil any less of a coward. Plus, Becca Gallegos had transferred to Pueblo after someone wrote a big S-L-U-T all over her locker. The last thing Neil wanted was to have to avoid making eye contact with a reminder of his lack of personal heroism each time he passed her in the hall.
Looking back, it shouldn’t have been such a surprise to hear his father deny something that had so clearly happened. His dad did that kind of thing. He selected from a range of plausible realities the version of events he preferred to believe in. He did it with Neil’s mother when he said she left him because she fell in love with Carl, her Jazzercise instructor, as if he’d forgotten that they’d been fighting like crazy since before the town even had a gym. He did it when he had a fight with the Bureau of Land Management people over whose land the trees at the end of Pop’s back pasture were on, and he did it in a big way when it came to certain facts about Neil’s grandmother. Neil’s dad made such a habit of choosing what to believe, of course he’d found just the right story for himself when it came to Becca Gallegos.
So Neil knew exactly what Professor Piot was talking about when he warned Neil and the other research assistants against getting personally attached to a particular version of history. Too much emotional involvement could lead even a conscientious historian to bias, or worse. It was something they ran into a lot with the documents about Saint-Jacques-de-la-Boucherie. The official histories were often written by people overly invested in the church, and they included all kinds of inaccuracies: The church was said to have been originally founded as the first in the name of Saint Anne long before her cult even appeared in France, for example. It was perfectly understandable that a priest or a monk who had devoted his whole life to serving in that particular church might embellish its importance, but it did not make good history. “Fall too much in love with your subject, and you’ll find only the answers you already know,” Professor Piot said.
It sounded better in French, but it fit Neil’s father perfectly. The last time he and his father had talked, back in January, Neil had tried to point this out, and the conversation had not gone well. They hadn’t been talking about Becca Gallegos or anything like that—at least, not directly. The subject had been Neil’s grandmother, and though that particular topic always made Neil uncomfortable, it might have been anything.
It had been Neil’s birthday, and he was honestly surprised to get a call from his father. Neil’s mom had sent him a package of brownies and an e-card to see first thing when he woke up, but his dad wasn’t the type to remember birthdays, and he usually sent Neil a check a week or two late. It wasn’t that his father didn’t care, he just wasn’t very good with dates.
But as it turned out, his father hadn’t remembered Neil’s birthday. His dad said hello and started right in on small talk in a way that made Neil sure there was something else he was waiting to bring up. He asked Neil about the weather there in London—which was cold, it was January, it had just stopped raining and Neil was trying to avoid the half-frozen puddles as he walked to class. It was cold back home too, his father said. The pipes in the old well-house had frozen, the forecast called for more snow. His father asked about school; Neil said it was fine. His father wondered whether Neil had had a chance to pick up the Christmas presents from his friend’s daughter in Swindon; Neil said not yet, but definitely next weekend.
Neil kept waiting for his dad to ask him if he had any plans for his birthday, which in fact he did—Veejay had bought a bottle of something green that was supposed to be absinthe and the girls across the hall were coming over to watch the match against Chelsea. But instead his father said, “So. There’s a new book out about Grandma,” and Neil realized that this was the real reason for his father’s call. Grandma was not Nan, but Neil’s biological grandmother, Inga. As in Inga Beart, that Inga Beart, whose books were an unavoidable obstacle to passing tenth grade English. Though his father had never met her, he insisted on calling her Grandma when he talked to Neil, as if she had been somebody he and Neil actually knew.
“Oh yeah?” Neil said. The book had gotten a good review in the Guardian, but Neil decided not to mention it.
“By a fellow named Bristol,” his father said. “A real hack job. You wouldn’t believe some of the things they write these days.”
“Uh-huh,” Neil said. He knew what part of the book his father didn’t like. It said what all the others said: Inga Beart had a baby, left it, and never gave Neil’s dad a second thought.
Neil’s father cleared his throat. “And, well, I was thinking. If I could finally find some proof—”
Since they were talking on the phone, Neil was free to roll his eyes. Having a famous grandmother was embarrassing, and Neil had started lying on the first day of each new class when the professor called his name and then said, “Don’t suppose you’re related to . . .?” But he hadn’t meant to start an argument when he pointed out that his father sounded a little obsessive, that the guy who’d written the book was actually a well-regarded professor at Oxford, and that maybe now was the time for his father to deal with his abandonment issues in ways that didn’t involve trying to poke holes in the research of real scholars, who ought to have a pretty good idea of what had and had not happened in the life of a woman his father had never even met.
In retrospect, it was kind of a shitty thing to say. Neil had never challenged his father on his Inga Beart theories before. But it was his birthday, and his father was too caught up in rewriting the details of fifty years ago to remember that today Neil was twenty years old.
So maybe that was why, when his father started talking about how as a baby he’d somehow seen and remembered a certain pair of shoes Inga Beart wore—the same story Neil had heard a thousand times before—Neil pointed out how it obviously couldn’t be true. Neil’s dad was silent for a little while and then said, “Well. I guess I shouldn’t have brought it up,” sounding like he’d had his feelings hurt.
“Be reasonable, Dad,” Neil said. He felt bad, but his father was trying to twist the facts of his mother’s life in a way that would make him feel better, and that was exactly the kind of thing Professor Piot warned against.
“I am being reasonable. She came to see us out at the ranch. I was under the table, all I could see was her feet. How could I have seen her feet if she wasn’t there?”
“Maybe you didn’t really see them,” Neil said. “Memories are wrong all the time. People believe what they want to believe. I mean, it can happen.” He was pretty sure neither of them wanted to get into the issue of truths and untruths and which ones his father chose to tell.
“I was there, wasn’t I? For Christ’s sake. I remember.” Neil could tell by his voice that his father was getting worked up, and he wished he’d just let him leave a message. He had some reading he needed to get done before class.
But today was his birthday. He was twenty years old, a grown-up, and, as Professor Piot said, sometimes one has to stick up for the facts.
“The dates don’t work, Dad,” Neil said. “You were, like, two when she left the States, right? Even if you had seen her, you couldn’t have remembered it.” He’d never said anything quite like that to his father before, and he was a little impressed with himself.
“That’s not true—at two or three years old, kids remember. There are studies—”
“But you’re the only one who thinks it could have happened,” Neil said. “Everyone else says she never came back.”
“Well, son, sometimes everyone gets it wrong,” his father said, and the way he said it made Neil pretty sure that they weren’t just talking about Inga Beart and whether she’d made a secret and totally unrecorded visit to Nan and Pop’s ranch that Nan and Pop and everyone else had managed to forget.
There was another long silence on the phone. Neil stepped ankle-deep into a puddle hidden under dead leaves and almost forgot to look right instead of left as he crossed Oxford Street, accidentally letting himself remember how his father had said believe me that day back in eighth grade when Neil had come right out and asked him about Becca Gallegos. He had called Neil son then too, as in Son, you’ve just got to believe me.
“Okay, well, whatever, Dad,” Neil said, which came out sounding less nice than he’d intended. His phone beeped to say he was getting another call. He said, “Oops, just a second,” and when he tried to put his father on hold he accidentally hung up on him. It turned out it wasn’t another call, just a text telling him his credit was low. Neil would have called his father back, except that he didn’t have enough for an international number. He could have stopped on the way to class to buy more minutes, but he didn’t feel like it; one shoe was soaked through and now his foot was freezing. Neil kept expecting his father to call back and say he was sorry he hadn’t said happy birthday, but he never did, and a week or so later Neil got a birthday card and a check in the mail.
But that was back in January. Now it was June, and after Magdute’s call, Neil spent the rest of Professor Piot’s lecture feeling seriously bad about not having sent his dad her mother’s Christmas package. So much time had passed, his father had probably forgotten all about their last conversation. When he got the package he might not even think to ask about Neil’s trip to Swindon, and if he did, Neil could always lie and say that Magdute was living with friends. He didn’t know why he hadn’t thought of it before. The shopping bag Magdute had given him was in his suitcase, along with the jacket and dress pants he’d brought to Paris but hadn’t had any reason to unpack. When he got home from class he put the presents in his backpack, planning to mail them on his way home from the archives that afternoon. He figured that if he left a little early, he could get to the post office at Hôtel de Ville before it closed, and next to it was a kiosk with flowers. If he could find some that hadn’t quite bloomed and if he remembered to put them in a vase, they would still be fresh enough to give to Magdute the next morning at the station.
But that afternoon Neil didn’t end up leaving the archives until quarter to six, which meant that the post office and the flower kiosk would be closed. He’d requested some documents from the abbey of Saint-Jean-d’Angély, where medieval pilgrims on their way to Spain had stopped to see the head of John the Baptist. A choir of a hundred monks was said to have surrounded the relic, singing to it day and night. Neil thought it said something useful about the medieval worldview that so many sleepless voices had been raised perpetually in praise of a decapitated head, and he was trying to figure out if it had been the actual head with flesh still attached or just the skull—the relic itself went missing during the wars of religion in 1500s—when he found a thin bundle of vellum that contained what seemed to be an account written in the thirteenth century by a monk from Rouen who was making the Saint Jacques pilgrimage to Spain.
Neil was interested to see if the monk mentioned stopping at the church of Saint-Jacques-de-la-Boucherie on his way through Paris. At the end of the document was what Professor Piot called a colophon, a description of the manuscript that had been added centuries later by an abbey historian, and Neil started his translation there. If what the colophon said was true and it really was a first-person account of the pilgrimage, it could be a real discovery. A famous guide to the Saint Jacques pilgrimage had been written in the twelfth century, and in the fourteenth century a number of wealthy or important pilgrims had recorded their impressions, but there was a gap in information from the thirteenth century, when the roads were particularly dangerous and church authorities began to be concerned about so many penitents and adventurers roaming the continent. Neil thought, with a quick silvery shiver, that just possibly he had come across something new in the dusty carton of records from Saint-Jean-d’Angély.
But before he’d had a chance to look past the spidery Latin of the abbey historian to the monk’s own words, it was far past the time he should have been leaving if he was going to make it to the post office, and the archives staff were beginning to turn out the lights. He was the last in line to return the documents to the stern men in gray smocks at the requests counter. He tried to explain that they could just set the Saint-Jean-d’Angély papers aside somewhere, that he would be back first thing in the morning and there was no need to send them back down into the recesses of the National Archives, which Neil of course had never seen, but which he imagined to be the very innards of Paris itself, filled not only with crumbling cartons bound with strings, but with abandoned metro cars and extra guillotines, statues of various Napoleons, flying buttresses, and spare dauphins.
One of the men in the smocks listened to Neil’s explanation, then told him that, in fact, he would have to officially request the documents all over again. The box disappeared below the counter. He would have to fill out the yellow form and the green form and get the stamp from the chief archivist again if he was ever going to find out if the monk from Rouen had stopped in Paris at the old church of Saint-Jacques-de-la-Boucherie.
The next morning Neil snoozed his alarm four times, then woke in a panic and had to shower so quickly that the water never got warm. He’d meant to get to the station a little early so he’d have a chance to buy Magdute some flowers, but by the time he got off the metro at Gare du Nord it was already after six.
Neil would have skipped the flowers altogether—now that he thought about it, he wasn’t sure they were appropriate—except that he’d been in such a rush, he’d forgotten to brush his teeth. He needed gum. A man walked past pushing a newspaper cart with one hand, holding a bucket of roses in the other, each wrapped in plastic. Neil waved for him to stop. He bought a rose, thinking that white was probably better than red, but when he asked for gum the man rustled through the candy bars and bags of chips on his cart and shook his head. There was a real newsstand at the other end of the station, but before Neil could get there he saw Magdute standing near the information booth with an old gray suitcase and a box under her arm, a stationary point in the flow of travelers. She raised her hand and waved to him.
“Hi,” he said when he made it through the crowd. He leaned in to do the cheek kiss thing. She leaned in too, and at the last instant Neil panicked, not knowing which way she was going. He tried to switch sides, which meant they almost ended up kissing each other on the lips, and so they abandoned the whole thing.
“Bienvenue,” he said and handed her the flower. It was already starting to be too heavy for its stem.
“Okay, so nice,” she said.
“I like your glasses,” Neil said. Starting off conversations with girls by complimenting them was a nervous tic Neil had. As usual, it just made him look like a jerk, because Magdute took her glasses off right away and put them back into a case in her purse, saying, “I only wear them sometimes.”
“Oh, well they look good,” Neil said. “I mean, they suit you.”
“Well, this is nice for you to say,” Magdute said.
“So how long till your bus?” Neil asked. “Should we get some breakfast?”
“Yes, I will have time for that,” Magdute said.
Her suitcase flipped over when he tried to roll it, so Neil picked it up and carried it back toward the trains, where there was a little café right on the platform. Magdute sat with her bag and Neil got them each a coffee and a couple of pastries. He didn’t know how Magdute liked her coffee, so he got a whole handful of sugar packets.
When he got back to the table, Magdute had her glasses on again, but she took them off as soon as she saw him. It was funny to think that she was shy about something like that.
“I wasn’t sure how hungry you were,” Neil said, putting down the pastries. “They have sandwiches too.”
“No, this is great, really,” Magdute said.
They took the first sips of their coffee, which tasted like it had been scraped right off the train tracks, and reached for the sugar packets at the same time. “I hope I got enough,” Neil said.
Sunlight filtered in through the yellow glass of the vaulted ceiling, making a web of shadows on the floor. Birds flew around and pecked at an old brioche. A German family at the table next to them was playing cards. Brakes hissed and musical chimes sounded as trains arrived, sliding into their slots at the platform like trained snakes. When Neil looked up, Magdute’s pain au chocolat was gone and she was licking her finger to pick up the crumbs. Neil wished he’d bought her a chausson aux pommes too.
“So you’re headed home?” Neil asked.
“Yeah,” she said. “Actually I have been losing my job in Swindon, and it is not so easy to find another one, so, you know, I am thinking I will go home.”
“Gosh, that’s too bad,” Neil said.
“No, it’s okay, really, I think I am a little bit finished in England. My living situation is not so good there, and actually at home in Vilnius my mother is opening one pizza restaurant, so maybe I can help her for running it.”
“Oh yeah,” Neil said, since she brought it up. “Yeah, that Australian guy, that was definitely weird.”
“Which Australian?”
“That guy, Barry,” Neil said.
“No, he is not from there.”
“Oh, he sounded Australian,” Neil said.
“He is from Africa.”
“Really?” Neil asked.
“Yeah. You know, Rhodesia?”
“Sort of,” Neil said. “But he is weird, right?”
“Yeah,” Magdute said.
Neil wanted to ask her more about it, like what had happened after he told her about the camera, but he knew it wasn’t his business.
“So how long is it going to take you to get home?” Neil asked.
“Maybe one day and half, something like this,” she said.
“Boy, that’s a long bus ride,” Neil said, and they were both quiet for a little while. Magdute was still picking pastry crumbs off her napkin, even though there weren’t any left.
“I’m starving,” Neil said. “I’m going to get some sandwiches. What kind do you want? I think they have ham.”
“No really, it’s okay,” Magdute said.
Neil got a ham sandwich and one with egg and cheese and a chausson aux pommes and brought them back to the table.
“Look,” he said. “I really hope nothing I said about that thing, you know, that I found, made things too weird for you with that guy. I mean, obviously, it was weird, but I hope it didn’t, like, freak you out too much.”
“Well, no,” Magdute said. It didn’t look like she was planning on saying anything else.
“So did you find another place?” he asked.
“What other place?”
“To live—you know.”
“No, I am staying all time at Barry’s house,” Magdute said.
At the table next to them, the German mother won the card game. Three army guards with assault rifles paced in synchronized steps along the platform. Neil thought of the archives with its long tables and the lamps with their little green shades, the cartons of yellowed papers tied up with strings and the old men sneezing quietly into their handkerchiefs, and wished he were there.
“Actually the camera isn’t working like you said,” Magdute said. Her sandwich was almost gone. Neil hadn’t started his yet. He pushed it toward her. He wasn’t really hungry.
“What do you mean?” Neil said. “Of course it was working.”
“Is working, yeah, but not for recording. I am checking, and the wires are going totally wrong. Barry is shit for installing electronics, he will even have to ask me how to turn on the TV.”
“Yeah, but he can still see you, right?” Neil said.
“Only if he is looking just at the moment.”
“Still, that’s illegal, what he did. It’s an invasion of privacy, did you tell him that?”
Magdute shrugged.
“Magdute, I’m serious,” Neil said. “He should be in jail.”
“Well, no, not for this.”
“Yeah,” Neil said. “For this.”
“It’s complicated,” Magdute said.
“No it’s not. He could have other ones. He could be making videos and, like, selling them on the Internet.” Magdute had finished the sandwich and the chausson aux pommes and was folding her napkin into the shape of a boat.
“This is the only thing what I know for making,” she said, creasing the bow. “I am one time making good roses, but I’m forgetting for how to start.”
“Look,” Neil said. “My mom’s a therapist and she deals with this kind of stuff all the time. You think it’s your fault or something. It’s not your fault. He probably has cameras and stuff like that all over his house. You need to tell the police. I mean, there are still other people living with him, right? Other, like, girls?” He was probably talking louder than he should have been, but he was getting worked up. He lowered his voice, remembering how his mom talked to clients when they called her at home with an emergency. “Magdute,” he said, “this is not your fault.”
“This is funny that you keep calling me Magdute. My name actually is Magdalena,” she said. “Magdute—this is, like, name for some little girl.”
Normally Neil would have been embarrassed, but he wasn’t going to let this go.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “Magdalena. I think you should call the police. If you don’t, then I will, because I really think it’s sick that he’s, you know, filming in the bathroom.”
“I told you, this is not for Internet. I am really checking this good.”
“That’s not the point,” Neil said, taking out his phone as if he had the number for the Swindon vice squad programmed in.
“Don’t call the police,” Magdalena said.
“I think it’s my responsibility,” he said.
“Okay, Neil, that is not a good idea,” she said. “Calling police will really not help anyone and it will make a lot of trouble for Barry. Actually he is pretty okay guy sometimes and he have helped me a lot, so don’t do this, okay?”
They looked at each other for a minute.
“That doesn’t make any sense,” Neil said.
“Yeah,” Magdalena said. “There are really a lot of things that doesn’t make any sense.”
After that the conversation was pretty awkward, especially when it turned out that Magdalena didn’t even have a ticket to Vilnius yet, and needed to borrow money from Neil to buy one. The ticket cost sixty euros, which was most of his weekly stipend from Professor Piot, and Neil knew there was, like, zero chance she’d pay him back. He was honestly pretty pissed. He felt like he was being taken advantage of, but he knew that, as usual, he’d be nice, say no problem, and it would ruin his day. So it might have been with a little more force than was necessary that he scooted his chair out from the table, not really caring if it made a big screech across the floor, saying he’d have to go find an ATM. As he did, he accidentally knocked over the chair next to him, where Magdalena had put the shoebox she was carrying. Neil tried to catch it as it fell, and ended up batting the box into a table leg. The top flew off, and a Ziploc bag tumbled out. Magdalena gave a little gasp and when Neil picked it up, the seam of the bag broke and powder started pouring out.
“Shit, I’m really sorry,” Neil said, cupping his hand under the leak.
“Oh my God,” Magdalena said. She dove under the table and started scooping up what had fallen down there. Neil dumped his handful back into the shoebox and ducked down to help her. He sneezed as a puff of fine white dust rose up.
Then the realization of what was happening hit him with all the weight of a cell door slamming shut: Magdalena suddenly leaving Britain with bags full of some kind of powder. Had Barry put her up to this? The powder was dirty white, it had a slight yellowish tint. Jesus, Neil thought. Words he didn’t know the precise meanings of, like horse and flake and dust and snow, started running through his head. Little cracks appeared in what had been his entire life up until that moment. The cracks grew and Neil’s future, all his hard work, his potential, the scholarships he’d won and his dreams of thick books with his name on them, all of it crumbled around him as he crouched under the café table with the cigarette butts and paper cups and pale dust all over his clothes.
Not realizing there was a hole in the bottom, Magdalena was frantically scooping the stuff back into the bag—which, by the way, was one of those gallon-size freezer bags, it was not small, and it was mostly full. The German mother grabbed her nearest child and pulled it away. A guy with a laptop next to them was standing to get a better view. Magdalena was crying and Neil realized for the first time in his life how quickly the tables could turn, how somebody who took honors seminars and was extremely conscientious about not bringing so much as a ball point pen into the archives could become, tout à coup, a fugitive from the law. He found himself scooting backward. He banged his head on the underside of the table. Dust puffed off his shirt when he stood up. The guards in their pincer formation hadn’t noticed yet, but they were headed in Neil’s direction, their gaze sweeping across the station like a pendulum with each step they took. In a moment they would see. Every instinct in Neil’s body was tensed to run.
Magdalena, on the other hand, seemed totally unconcerned by the fact that the whole world was watching her scoop up a shoebox’s worth of the stuff. She had stopped her frenzied sweeping and was kneeling under the table with her face in her hands, sobbing. There were smudges of it in her hair. A crowd was gathering, and the three guards with their giant guns were coming toward them, now at a quicker pace. Neil, as usual, was totally fucked.
“Magdalena,” he hissed. “Magdalena, get up,” but she was crying, keening, with her feet bent under her at funny angles and a string of spit hanging out of her mouth.
“What’s happening here?” one of the guards said in French.
“I don’t know,” Neil said. “She had this box and it fell.” The guard looked at him oddly, and Neil realized he’d said “helmet” instead of “box.” The guard squatted down and asked Magdalena what was going on. She just went on crying.
“Does she speak French?” he asked Neil.
“I don’t think so,” Neil said. And he had an idea. “I just met her,” he said. “I’ve never seen her before.”
“Lina, Lina, Lina, Lina,” Magdalena was saying. Another guard came over. His finger rested on the trigger of his gun.
“What’s this?” the second guard asked. The first guard dipped his finger in the powder, the way they did on TV.
“Cendres,” said the first guard.
“Oh là là,” said the second. “A member of the family?” he asked Neil.
By the time Neil remembered what cendres meant, the first guard was giving Magdalena some napkins and helping her scoop up the last bits, including one or two largish fragments of what looked like soup bones.
When they had gotten most of it, the first guard said something to the second, who went and got a trash bag from a janitor’s cart that was standing by. He wrapped the torn Ziploc bag in the trash bag and knotted it tight, then put it back in the shoebox and helped her up. “Apology and condolence,” he said to her in English, with a little bow, and he and the other guards went on their way.
Magdalena wiped her face. Neil wanted to die.
“It was my fault,” Neil said.
“No, is totally okay.” Magdalena had gray smudges around her eyes. Neil hoped it was makeup. “I am hearing her in my head right now saying, ‘Magdalena you are big fucking idiot for not making the box closed better than that.’ ”
“Mm,” Neil said, not exactly sure who she was talking about.
Maybe Magdalena realized he was confused because she looked toward the shoebox, whose top didn’t fit right anymore because of the garbage bag inside, and said, “She is my friend who is dying last year.” Neil felt himself inclining his head a little toward the box, as if saying hello.
“I’m so sorry,” Neil said. “I just had no idea.”
“Well, I am not really wanting to tell you, it is a little bit not-so-happy, you know?”
“Yeah, I know,” Neil said. “It was last year?”
“Like over one year ago,” Magdalena said. “We are living in London together and then she have some problems with one man, and well, with some other things also, but she accidentally deathed herself on some apricots.”
“What?” Neil said.
“Here you want to see?” Magdalena took some papers out of the shoebox and handed them to Neil. It was an autopsy report. Presence of cyanmethaemoglobin. Marked dark cyanotic hypostasis, petechial haemorrhages, pink mucosa. “There,” she said, pointing to where it said Cause of death. “She gets one big juice machine and like totally stupid person she puts in all those fruits with still having the seeds.”
“Oh my God,” Neil said.
“Yeah, is fucking one in the million, they are telling me,” she said.
“That’s awful,” Neil said.
“Yeah. She is my best friend,” Magdalena said. “I am thinking now it’s time already I should bring her home.”
Obviously, after that he gave her the money for the bus ticket. She asked for his address, saying she’d send it back to him when she got home, and Neil said, “Okay, but really, whenever,” because he was pretty sure they both knew she never would. But he wrote it down on a napkin anyway and gave it to her.
She lifted the napkin up close to her face. “This is your name?” she asked.
“Yeah,” he said. “Usually you say it ‘Neil,’ like, to kneel, but I like the way you say it too.”
“No, I mean this. This is also name of your father?” she said, pointing to Neil’s last name.
“Yeah, didn’t you know?” Neil said, then realized there was no reason a person from Lithuania who wasn’t some kind of book freak would have heard of Inga Beart. “My dad usually makes it seem like a big deal, so I figured your mom would have heard all about—”
“And your father’s other name is Richard?”
“Yeah. Or Rick,” Neil said. “It’s funny he’d tell your mom Richard. Pretty much he just goes by Rick.” But he could tell Magdalena wasn’t listening. She was tracing her finger through a bit of sugar that had spilled as if she were trying to think of how to spell it.
“R-I-C-H-A-R-D,” Neil said.
“Oh, yes, I know,” she said.
They had another coffee, and Magdalena asked him about Paris and what he was doing there, which was nice of her. Neil could tell she didn’t feel like talking. Her eyes were still wet, and she kept taking her glasses out of her bag and unfolding them, then putting them away without putting them on. But she had a way of looking at him so intently, with her lips tensed a little, as if something important was going on behind them, that Neil started believing she was actually interested in the Roman-era origins of the Châtelet butchers’ quarter.
In his notebook Neil had a postcard of the Tour Saint-Jacques and he showed Magdalena. It was an old one he’d found at the flea market in front of Les Halles, probably from the 1950s or ’60s, back when people kept getting killed by chunks of mortar falling off the sides, it was in such bad shape. In the photograph the tower looked sort of corroded, studded with half-dissolved gargoyles. It was going to look a lot better than that when they were done with the reconstruction, Neil told her. The tower had been under scaffolding for almost eight years now, and Neil wouldn’t have even recognized it in the postcard except for the unmistakable asymmetry caused by the statue of Saint Jacques himself, who stood perched on one corner, walking stick in hand, pointing pilgrims on their way.
Magdalena flipped the postcard over to read what was on the back.
“It says ‘Leaving tomorrow,’ ” Neil said. “I think it could have been written by someone who was going on a pilgrimage, which is, you know, like a religious trip, because this was the starting point for the Saint Jacques pilgrimage. And see the date? Right around this time of year. Which makes sense because people who wanted to make it by the Feast of Saint Jacques, which is July 25, would have had to leave Paris in June. See, they had to go all the way down to a place in Spain called Santiago de Compostela and also another place, Finisterre—you know, ‘the end of the earth.’ That was where this guy, Saint Jacques, supposedly washed up on the beach. And he should have been all rotten and dead but instead he was perfectly preserved with scallop shells stuck to him, and so it was, you know, a miracle.”
Something he’d said had caught Magdalena’s attention. She looked up from the postcard, waiting for him to go on. “I mean that’s one story. There are lots of others. And of course it’s pretty unlikely it was actually him. To have floated all the way from Jerusalem? It’s basically impossible. But in medieval times people wanted to worship something they could see for themselves, like an actual body. So churches started saying that they had, you know, relics, which were usually parts of holy people, their heads or a bone from their arm or even—” The cathedral at Conques had claimed possession of Jesus’s prepuce, which was a word Neil had had to look up. “Well, some of the stuff they had was pretty gross. But Saint Jacques, he was one of the few whose relics stayed intact. Sorry, intact, it’s like all together. That was part of the miracle. People traveled huge distances because they believed that the saint was so powerful he wouldn’t let his body be broken up.”
Magdalena was leaning toward him a little bit, like it was important that she hear every word.
“And it’s interesting, the reasons people had for traveling all that way, hundreds of miles sometimes. Like, look, I think I’ve got it here—” Neil went through the papers in his backpack until he found a photocopy of a record from the mid-1300s. “I found this in the archives—see, isn’t the script beautiful? What it says is actually pretty sad. It’s a dispensation for a woman who’d promised to make the pilgrimage if her baby recovered from some sickness. And it did recover, but then it died of something else, and she was, you know, so heartbroken that she couldn’t make the trip. It’s not important, historically, except that these kinds of documents are all we have to piece together what it was like for people back then. I mean, you get a sense that life was hard, you know, and short. People lived closer to death than we do today. And that’s why religion was so important in every aspect of people’s lives.” Magdalena was nodding. “Like, instead of going to jail, a pilgrimage would be used as punishment. Criminals or people convicted of heresy—which was basically disagreeing with the church—they’d be forced to walk barefoot, sometimes even with chains locked around them, so that everyone would know what they’d done. I found a list of people from a certain parish who were made to go—people caught sleeping with other people’s wives, priests who were, you know, stealing or having affairs. I think I have a copy of it here somewhere—yeah, this is it. See, it says the reason right there: adultery, adultery, lechery, et cetera. Of course sometimes people just did it to get away. You know, get out of town, see the world—in the Middle Ages going on a pilgrimage was almost the only way a regular person could travel. And who knows, when they came to the place where the saint’s body was kept they might witness a miracle. People really believed in that stuff back then. Sight restored to the blind, cripples made to walk—”
Now Neil was the one who was leaning in over the table. He suddenly had a terrible thought. Did he have bad breath? He couldn’t smell it, but that was no guarantee.
“You want a piece of gum?” he asked.
“Okay,” Magdalena said. Neil searched around in his pockets and remembered he hadn’t bought any. Then, speaking of miracles, he found a single stick of Wrigley’s Doublemint at the bottom of his backpack. He absolutely had to have some for himself, so he broke it in half. “Sorry,” he said. “I thought I had a whole pack.”
“And where is it happening, these bodies all together like life coming up on the beach?” Magdalena asked.
“It’s down in Spain,” Neil said.
“And it’s a miracle?”
“Well, I mean, it’s a story. It’s not like bodies are washing up all the time,” Neil said.
“But sometimes?” she asked.
“Well, yeah, that’s the idea.”
As if this had answered a question she’d been thinking about for some time, Magdalena smiled. Then she changed the subject to the thing they’d spent the last half hour being careful not to talk about.
“I’ve been making one big mistake having her burned after death,” Magdalena said, pressing down the lid of the shoebox. One corner was bashed in and the box didn’t look like it would make it all the way to Lithuania.
“Why?” Neil asked.
“Well, some people are saying that the body must be—like you say. In-tact. For her religion.”
“Oh,” Neil said.
“If she is not whole, then at the end she doesn’t go up with God, something like this,” Magdalena said. “So, I have really fucked up.”
“Well, I guess,” Neil said, which wasn’t what he’d meant to say at all. “But, I mean, you didn’t know?”
“Not this, about the body. Some person was telling me later on. She have to be having all parts, nothing missing.”
“I think I’d rather be cremated,” Neil said. “Otherwise you just rot, you know?”
“Not this Saint Jack on the beach,” Magdalena said.
“Yeah,” Neil said. “But like I said, it’s just a story.”
Magdalena was quiet for a little while, and then she said, “You know something, Ni-yell? Maybe this is pretty good thing to be dropping those burned parts all on the floor, because until this time, for the last entire year actually, I’m not so much knowing what to do with her, and I’m really wanting to do right, you know?” Somehow with that tiny piece of gum Magdalena blew a bubble big enough to pop and she smiled at Neil again, her one grayish tooth like an exclamation point at the end, all of it at odds with her eyes, which were so light and clear that airplanes might have flown across them. Taken altogether she was the most perfect person Neil had ever seen.
And then something happened that was not a big deal in itself, but was so open to romantic interpretation that it made Neil feel as if the chemical balance of his entire body had been rearranged. Looking at him in that funny way of hers, Magdalena brought her hand up to his face and with a quick movement she traced her fingers along his temple. “You are having one small insect there, is nothing,” she said, and smiled again. But Neil hadn’t felt any little legs, only the soft touch of her hand brushing back a bit of his hair.
He was still a little woozy as he helped her buy the ticket and left her on the street outside the station, where people with piles of luggage waited for buses bound for Warsaw and Kiev. Then Neil walked back to the archives on rue du Faubourg-Saint-Denis, even though it wasn’t the most direct route, because that was the path Saint Denis was said to have taken out of Paris carrying his head under his arm after the Romans chopped it off around the third century A.D. It seemed fitting somehow to be walking in the footsteps of the patron saint of Paris, who had personally delivered his own head to his tomb in a feat of cephalophoric ambulation—literally, walking while carrying one’s own head—the most ridiculous of miracles.
The gate of the old walled city was in front of him, an arbitrary arch rising out of the streets now that the wall itself was gone. There were shops selling vegetables he’d never seen before, where people bought unfamiliar melons and green tomatoes in papery husks. The windows of a Pakistani sweetshop were packed with sticky orange balls and honeyed bricks of colored paste.
At the Saint-Denis gate, rue du Faubourg-Saint-Denis became rue Saint-Denis and the shops changed. Professor Piot was right, Neil thought. A city trails its past along behind it. Merchants had been required to pay a tax to enter the old city, and the imprint of that fact had lasted through the centuries, so that even now the shops inside where the wall used to be sold different things than those beyond it.
Inside the Saint-Denis gate the vegetable stalls were gone and the stores were filled with rhinestone belts and wholesale lace, fur and wedding dresses, vente en gros. Shopkeepers smoked outside with their sleeves rolled up, a begging gypsy girl kneaded an orange between her hands, and a prostitute stood in a doorway, her breasts like brown balloons pushed up against her neck. Long passages cut between buildings ended improbably in sunlight, and it occurred to Neil that he was entering the portion of his life when one began to accumulate regrets. Before, somehow, no decision had seemed too permanent. But now that he was in college, wading straight into whatever it was that would turn out to be his life, suddenly each thing he did or didn’t do was tangled up in consequences. And with this thought, as if he’d gotten a look at his own life’s ledger of missed opportunities, Neil realized that he shouldn’t have let Magdalena get on the bus to Vilnius.