The following day I dropped by Elena’s place, after looking for her at work and being told she was off. There was a letter from Rita on the kitchen table, a slim blue aérogramme from France.
“You can read it if you want,” Elena said. “Not that it says much.”
The letter read like the shorthand of journal entries, just the barest details of how they’d travelled, where they’d been – London, Paris, now a small tourist town in Lorraine. Everything was put in the plural, “we,” though she never referred to John by name. Toward the end she mentioned a monastery they’d been to, where, from a clifftop terrace, they’d had a view of the Black Forest across the border. The detail seemed an odd one to throw in after the preceding wash of bald fact; or perhaps it was simply that the nagging sense of strangeness from my visit to John’s had made things seemed skewed, meaning more than they said.
Elena was sitting across from me at the kitchen table with that inviolable air she had that always gave her a hint of threat.
“I was wondering about John,” I said.
“Wondering what?”
“I don’t know. Just wondering.”
“Like I said, he seemed normal enough, if that’s what you’re worried about. Better than that guy Sid.”
“You knew about him?”
“It was hard to miss him. He kept coming by here after our party. Rita wouldn’t see him.”
“I didn’t know that.” This put my encounter with him on the street in a different light. “Why wouldn’t she?”
“I didn’t ask.”
“So he’d come and you’d just send him away.”
“Oh, he’d hang around a bit. You know, talk me up, try to seem cool. But it started getting a little weird after a while.”
“It doesn’t sound like him.”
“Yeah, well, she has that effect on guys. They all want to take care of her. It’s the whole father thing again.”
“Whose father thing? Hers or theirs?”
“You have to admit she attracts it. Which is only logical given that she never had one.”
She always made these pronouncements about Rita that made my own knowledge of her seem so amorphous. I was never able to separate out the bits of her in this way, as if she were just an accumulation of small inevitabilities, the adding up of everything she’d suffered or lacked.
“Did the two of you ever talk about her father?” I said. “Her real one?”
“It’s not like we had much to go on. I mean, if anyone was likely to know anything, it would be you.”
She might have asked me at this point what I did know about him but that wasn’t the way with us. Instead she left openings like challenges that I might take up or not and that then set the rules between us, how close we would come to each other. I was on the verge of saying something to her now but was afraid that even the small bit of certainty I had would slip from me then – it had all been so long ago, from another life, set out in the approximations and half-phrases of memory like lists of contents written out on boxes that could never be opened. I thought of witnesses to a crime, who even moments after the event couldn’t agree on the simplest details of what had happened, how tall the man was, what he wore, the colour of his skin. But still across the years, an impression had persisted: I remembered the flies, the heat, the rustle of leaves, two eyes staring out from a stable door. I had a relationship to the eyes like one might have to some crucial, irretrievably lost object – I’d never expected to see them again, had long ago consigned them to the unexplainable, the out-of-reach, and yet in some under-narrative of the mind there had always been the point where they recurred, like in some final meeting place, the denouement of a story or life, where every loose end was tied and every lost thing restored.
In the days after my visit to John’s, my dreams began to take on a sudden vividness. A few times I dreamt I was in his apartment again, moving through the rooms, trying to elude some threat; but mainly the dreams seemed simply a hodgepodge of scattered images whose links were never quite clear, like bits of a story that had somehow got jumbled. Real memories were mixed in, or they seemed real enough, though sometimes on waking, or in the hazy middle of a morning when an image would suddenly surface out of nothing, it was difficult to sort out the real from the merely imagined. I felt I was losing myself, that the walls that kept truth from fabrication were slowly decaying; one day I might wake and be just the stranger that my dreams had conjured up, like some character in a science-fiction story whose memory had been subtly altered while he slept.
Sometimes I dreamt I was redreaming the dreams I had had as a child. That was the worst, because in daylight then I couldn’t piece together what was the dream and what the dream’s dreaming, back and back like the infinite regression of mirrors mirroring back your mirrored reflection. The dreams churned up memories, associations, that floated in the grey of almost-possibility like sea things briefly darkening the sea’s rippled surface: this might have happened, or this might have been what the dream’s dream had made me dream might have happened. There was a recurring dream that I’d had as a child in Italy that returned to me in this way: in it, two soldiers, Germans, came in the night to my mother’s room to lead her away. As I remembered things now, through this double scrim of shadow seen through shadow, the soldiers had had to do with the stories I’d been told of the Germans who had been billeted in our house during the war. That would have been a decade before my birth, when my mother would not have been much more than a girl. One of them wanted to be your father, my mother had said of them: that was what I remembered. It was the fact that I couldn’t have understood what she’d meant then, the joke she was making, that seemed to make this train of memories real, something I couldn’t have invented. The soldiers had come; my mother had spoken to them. Or else this version of events, along with all the bits and shreds of quarter-remembered things that my mind offered up now in relation to it, was just a story I’d dreamed up based on some lost, mistaken assumption or logic of childhood.
It seemed almost impossible now that any of these things could have happened at all, that my mother had been a girl, that she had existed, that soldiers had come to a place in the past whose rocks and stones had been solid and real; and impossible too that out in the world there still remained the residue of these things, that the mountainside where I’d grown up, the village, the church on a hill, hadn’t simply vanished with my leaving them. At any moment I could return to them, simply, in the time it took for a night’s sleep: close my eyes, and I would be there. There would be a house that I had lived in, perhaps crumbling now, the roof fallen in and lizards making their nests among the rotting floorboards; there would be a stable door at the back, leaning on its rusted hinges, and inside, a hovel of dirt and stone much smaller, much meaner, than I remembered it, with an ancient pig’s trough and the rough-hewn boards and posts of a sheep stall. It hurt my mind to think of these things still waiting abandoned there like injuries that had never been tended to. I remembered a man who had come once to sit cap in hand in my father’s kitchen in Mersea to tell me that back in the village, my grandfather had died: he had seemed like a messenger from the void then, from a world that could not possibly, in my absence from it, have continued to exist. He’d mentioned some property that had been bequeathed to me, some land, my grandfather’s house; and yet in all the years since then I’d never been able to trace a line between my existence here in this other country, this other present, and the stones and beams of an actual physical place that could be travelled to and walked around in.
Some time in June, after the postcard and the letter, after my visit to John’s, I had a phone call, in the middle of the night. Dead air; and then a transatlantic blip.
“It’s me.”
It was Rita.
“Where are you?”
“It doesn’t matter. Switzerland.”
There was a delay in the line, a split-second lag, and an echo like a voice reverberating through empty space.
“Are you okay?”
“I’m all right. I’m fine. I just wanted you to know that.”
Another blip.
“Is John with you?”
“Yes. Not right this minute. I’m at a phone booth.”
The crackly hollowness of the line gave me the sense that she was receding from me, that time was running out.
“I’m thinking of coming to Italy,” I said, forming the thought as I spoke it. “To our village.”
“Oh.”
“You could meet me there.”
A pause.
“I don’t know.”
Her voice sounded hopelessly frail and thin, as if the buzzing wires it travelled across could barely sustain it.
“Please,” I said.
“I don’t know. I’ll see.”
“Just go there. I’ll wait for you.”
In the morning, I had a instant’s unsureness as to whether the call had been real. I had an image of a voice tunnelling through an impossibly long, hollow tube, and Rita at the end of it a tiny shadow against a pinprick of light. It took a moment for me to pull from the dimness of sleep the memory that we’d made an arrangement of sorts: I’d left no question that I would go, that I would wait for her. That had been how I had wanted to put things, as if there were no option involved, as if I were a place on a map that would be there whether she came or not.
I had tried to show her once in an atlas where the village was. But even in the big reference atlas in the university library it hadn’t been listed by name, so that it had seemed she had had to take it on faith that the place existed at all, wasn’t a figment of my imagination, that somewhere in the crisscrossing of tiny highways and relief lines the map showed was this unnamed cluster of real houses you could go to, with real people walking the streets. If she went now she would have to grope her way there with only this spectre to go by, this possibility. In my mind, I traced the line she would follow, the small dip down through a mountain pass out of Switzerland to the plains of the Po, the ride south into history and heat. The country would hold her; it was half hers, after all, the hills were in her blood and the sky, the crumbled ruins, the cooked earth. Even for her it wasn’t a place to visit but to go back to, like somewhere a road led after years of wandering; and slowly she’d drift down into the dream of it and the village would call to her like home, and she would go.