by Nino Ricci
“And the baby,” the counsellor said. “The girl. After your mother died. You didn’t say what happened to her.”
“Oh. She was all right. She came to live with us.”
“Your father accepted her?”
“Yes. Not really.”
I found myself telling her about Rita, how we had treated her, how she had ended up leaving us. There was that one incident that had started things, when my father had beaten her while my aunt and I stood by.
“It seems stupid now,” I said. “It was over a dog we’d taken in. My father wanted to kill it because it got into the chickens, and Rita tried to stop him.”
“Kill it how?”
“With a shotgun.”
“He was holding a gun the whole time?”
“Yes. I mean, he dropped it or something when he took off his belt. I don’t remember exactly.”
“And then he hit her.”
“Yes.”
“And what were you thinking?”
“I don’t know. We were all thinking it. That he was going to kill her.”
“Would he have done that?”
“I don’t think so.”
“But you didn’t know that then.”
“No. But that wasn’t even the point. It wasn’t even that he was actually angry at her. It’s just that she was always there. That she didn’t just disappear or something. I thought then, we all must have thought it, that if he just killed her it would be easier.”
“Oh.”
We both seemed a bit taken aback to have arrived at this admission. There was an instant’s awkward silence.
“Anyway it’s normal,” the counsellor said. “You were only a child then.”
“Yes.”
At the end of the session, she made a few quick notations on a writing pad and said I could pick up the letter I needed the following day.
“And your sister?” she said. “Do you still see her?”
“Yes. She lives in the city now. She goes to school here.”
“And you get along?”
“Yes.”
She gave me a sort of timid look, as if embarrassed for me at all I’d been forced to reveal.
“You can come back again if you want to. I’m here the whole summer.”
“Thank you.”
I went back to my days of television and sleep. They were growing almost comfortable now, like time taken out from the ordained order of things that was only for me, that didn’t connect to any future or past. It occurred to me, in this state, that there could be a dissolution point in a life where the logic of cause and effect suddenly ceased to apply, where there was not enough sense in things for any forward line to present itself. Perhaps that was how people came to kill themselves: they simply reached this blankness they disappeared in, this moment when the story of their lives no longer cohered.
To get out of the apartment I’d sometimes stop in at the café on College where Elena waited tables, sitting with her in a back booth during her breaks while she drank coffee and chain-smoked cigarettes. She was letting herself turn pretty again, had let her hair grow and had revived some dresses and skirts from her old wardrobe as if she was reverting through a sort of negligence to her former self. She had taken to her work with what looked liked a dogged commitment to getting it right, quick and civil and precise in everything she did as if waitressing were a science she was mastering. But it was clear from the quiet energy that came off her as she worked that she relished being out in the world like this, having a job, being on her own. It was a kind of respite for me to watch her, to see this little piece of the world that was still functioning and sound, hadn’t lost its way.
She’d finally had a call from Rita, from London, about a week after her departure.
“How did she seem?” I said.
“I dunno. Just fine, I suppose. We didn’t really get into details.”
She’d had a call from Mrs. Amherst as well, who was back in Mersea finalizing the details of her move. Apparently Rita had phoned her and given her some story about travelling through Europe with a tour group.
“Did you tell her the truth?” I said.
“Which is what, exactly?”
“She must have wondered. Where she got the money, for instance.”
“It’s not the kind of thing Mom would ask about. She doesn’t really like to know any more than she has to.”
“Maybe it’s because you don’t tell her things,” I said.
“Tell her what? That Rita’s run off with a sixty-year-old man? That I’m a lesbian?”
A couple of heads turned at the booth across from us, but Elena ignored them.
“I know you think I’m hard on her,” she said. “But we’re the kids, remember? She’s the parent. When Dad died she was basically drunk the whole time we were home. We could have used a little support then too. Just a word. Anything. Rita especially. She’s pretty messed up where Mom’s concerned. When she was a kid Mom used to make her feel she was defective or something because of where she came from. It was like she was hedging her bets in case she didn’t turn out right.”
But beneath the bitterness in her voice there was a lingering note of question, of doubt, as if she were inviting someone to contradict her.
“Will you see her before she goes back to England?” I said.
“Yeah. I don’t know. We’ll see.”
Since the night of Rita’s party, Sid seemed to have gone back into whatever hole it was he occasionally disappeared into; I’d sometimes see his lights on in the night or hear his steps on the fire escape, but then days would pass and there’d be no sign of him. Finally one day I ran into him outside our building. Somehow he’d managed to find out that Rita had gone.
“So I guess she’s doing the whole sixties trip,” he said. “On the road and all that.”
“I guess.”
He was his usual blithe, unreadable self, with that disarming smile he would put on like a reflex to hide the wheels turning beneath.
“Anyway, I just wanted to say that nothing happened between us,” he said. “I mean, she’s a nice kid.”
I had no word from Rita directly until nearly a month after her departure, when I got a postcard from her, from Paris. It showed a reproduction of a Degas, a pastel sketch of a dancer done against a wash of pale, almost unearthly green. The note on the back had no salutation, only a single floating phrase, “Just to let you know I’m okay,” and her initial. At the bottom, John had included a note: “Sorry to have missed you when we left. I hope your work goes well.”
I took heart from the simplicity of her note, had been imagining her completely changed, inaccessible, and yet there was still this core of her that I knew that for all the questions and revelations was still something I was connected to. The thought of her in Europe, in a specific, locatable place there, conjured up less a sense of distance than of proximity: it was the continent that had conceived us both even if we had never shared it. If things had been different I would have liked to have returned there one day with her, into the mountains that were perhaps encoded in her cells, into the winding streets of our village. We’d go along and I’d point out this street, this house, her own womb-dark history, what she perhaps had taken in back then through some dim, deeper-than-thought awareness.
There was something about her card, though, that left a niggling residue: the note from John, its simple presence or just the look of its tight, careful script that wasn’t right somehow. I was reminded again that I knew next to nothing about him; and yet the strange thing was exactly that I’d never had the least doubt that Rita was safe with him, had known from the outset, in some animal way, that he wouldn’t harm her. I thought back to the day that I’d followed him home, the sight of him in the shop doorway, the weird, almost preternatural energy that had seemed to come off him then but which I’d never quite been able to give a shape to or trace to an origin.
One night when I was out in my car I drove by John’s apartment. I thought I notice
d a light on in his front room, and drove back around to the sidestreet nearby to make sure I’d seen correctly. Yes, it was his place: I remembered the shop below, the pale yellow brick of the façade. Perhaps he had a timer on; but then I saw a figure move across the light, in one direction and back again. I had an instant’s throb of suspicion, a sense of duplicity like a tiny alarm in some not-quite-accessible chamber of the brain, before realizing there was probably a simple explanation, that he’d sublet the place or that a friend had come by to look after things. My first thought then was that it would be possible, therefore, to get inside; and it was in having the thought, in seeing, in my mind’s eye, John’s apartment laid out before me as if it were the inside of his head, that something shifted in me like a tumbler falling into place, and some new understanding of him seemed to shimmer briefly before me. For an instant that sudden sense of him played in my mind like the barely held fragment of a dream, never quite coalescing into solid shape; and then it was gone. I sat watching his window for several minutes more, hoping it might help dredge up what that instant’s certainty had been, what it had been trying to tell me. But finally the window went black, showing only the mirrored reflection of neon and of other blank windows across the street.
XVII
I went by John’s apartment again the following morning, watching it from the window of a coffee shop across the street. It was a Saturday, and the sidewalks were thick with shoppers, in shorts and halters and flimsy summerwear because of a sudden heatwave. The heat gave a slow, shimmery unreality to things as if some conspiracy were unfolding, as if every movement, the passersby peering in windows, the customers emerging from shops, had been carefully choreographed to present the bland, false face of normality.
Around eleven o’clock a woman emerged from the door that led up to John’s apartment, wearing sunglasses and jeans and an untucked Indian blouse. She fumbled with her keys a moment as she went to lock the door, dropped them, bent to collect them. Her hair was a dark, wavy mass that shifted and swayed like a separate entity when she moved, with that permanent windblown look as if she’d been standing for hours in a stiff ocean breeze.
She went down the street and into the variety store I’d seen John use. A few minutes later, a bag of groceries in hand, she emerged and returned to the apartment. It was unclear to me now what my plan had been, how I’d thought that just the evidence that someone was actually inside John’s apartment could be enough to gain me entry into it. I watched the people going in and out of shops along the street and it seemed strange that one floor above there were these other spaces that were completely inviolable.
I crossed the street. There was a single buzzer at John’s door; I pressed it.
She was at the door in an instant, swinging it open with a guilelessness that made my heart sink. Her hair had got tousled in her descent and she reached up to pull it back from her shoulders, her blouse hiking up a split second to reveal a thin rim of naked waist.
“Hi,” she said, a little breathless. Behind her, a narrow staircase led up through semi-darkness.
“I’m sorry to bother you. I’m a friend of John’s.”
“You mean Mr. Keller?”
I realized I didn’t know John’s surname. It crossed my mind that this whole thing might be a mistake, that I’d got the apartment wrong or that John had moved, had never existed.
“Yes,” I said.
“He’s away in Europe. I’m just subletting.”
“Oh. I wasn’t sure if he’d gone yet.”
“Yeah. About a month ago.”
I was losing heart. She looked younger than she had from a distance, in her early twenties perhaps; without sunglasses, her face radiated a pale, freckled innocence.
“There were some books that I lent him. They were kind of important. For my thesis. I’d replace them but they’re sort of hard to get a hold of.”
A barest flicker of hesitation: there was this problem to solve, but no clear solution.
“I could look for them, if you want. I don’t think he’d mind that.”
At some point soon, she would begin to see through me and the whole thing would turn ugly.
“I’d have to write out the titles, they’re a bit complicated. If you’ve got a pen and paper –”
The hesitation again. Her eyes flitted to the stairs and then to the street as if she were seeking permission from someone.
“I guess maybe it would be easier if you just came up and looked for them yourself.”
“I don’t want to bother you. It would just take a minute.”
“Just don’t look at the mess, that’s all.”
I was in. I felt a kind of horror at the ease of the thing: it would be this simple to plot a con or a murder or rape, I had it in me to deceive like that. I watched myself go inside, follow her up the stairs, as if I were watching a stranger, not sure what he was capable of.
“So you’re a friend of Mr. Keller’s?” she said.
“More an acquaintance, really.” I couldn’t see her face in the narrow stairwell, to judge if there was any suspicion in it. “And yourself? I mean, do you know him at all?”
“I was in a class of his at the institute this spring. You know, one of those crash courses for beginners. I thought it would be faster than doing it at university.”
So he was a teacher of some sort.
“I see,” I said.
We had come to the landing. There was no separate entrance, just an arched passage that opened directly into the apartment.
“I’m Ieva, by the way.” There was an overly cheerful tone in her voice that made me think she was lonely. “It’s Latvian for some kind of tree that doesn’t grow here, if you’re interested. People usually ask.”
“Oh. I’m Victor. Vittorio really. It’s Italian.”
I had started to incriminate myself. At some point John would return, and all this would have to be accounted for.
“Italy,” she said. “I’ve always wanted to go there.”
The apartment had a long, open-concept living and dining area and kitchen on the street side, and then a hallway at the back that led past a series of closed doors. At first glance there seemed an odd disjunction in the place, a combination of the already dated earth-and-smoky-grey-toned modernity of the seventies with an older, fustier, more cluttered sensibility as if some graft of different species hadn’t taken. The furniture had that look of having been culled over many years from second-hand shops, a little frayed and not quite matching, and arranged with a haphazardness that didn’t give much definition to the openness of the front space; the one exception was an arrangement of bookshelves and a worn, maroon-coloured leather armchair and matching ottoman near the window that formed a sort of reading area. The walls throughout were covered in prints and old photographs of various sorts, though with that same, slightly cluttered look as if part of a life never quite under control, never quite cared about enough for its minutiae to be put in proper order.
“It’s not exactly the sort of place I thought he would live in,” Ieva said. The bit of unease she’d shown at the door was gone now, as though the simple fact that I was here, that she’d allowed me entry, was somehow proof that I wasn’t dangerous.
“How’s that?” I said.
“I don’t know. Him being German and all that. I thought it would be more Bauhaus or something. Not that I know a lot of Germans.”
My mind registered the fact that he was German without any sense of revelation, though I wasn’t sure if he or Rita had ever said as much.
“Help yourself looking around,” Ieva said. “I’ll check the bedroom to spare you having to look at my dirty laundry.”
Now that I was here, I had no idea what I was looking for. I’d somehow expected that all the secrets of John’s life would be set out for me in plain view; instead there were only these bits of things like some archaeologist’s half-hearted reconstruction of a life. There was something sad in this gloomy half-completeness the place had, though perhaps it wa
s just the sadness of how little of ourselves we actually surrounded ourselves with, how much was just the generic debris that accumulated against us like litter against fences.
I went to the bookshelves near the window. They held a host of texts in what I took to be German, most by authors I didn’t know, and an eclectic assortment of novels, philosophy, poetry, in English. On a bottom shelf was what looked like a collection of Holocaust literature – Primo Levi, Elie Wiesel, Jerzy Kosinski. It was the only shelf on which the books weren’t arranged in alphabetical order. I wondered if there was a meaning to this, if some special code was being revealed to me.
Ieva had emerged from one of the doors along the back hallway.
“Nothing in the bedroom. Any luck?”
“Not yet.”
“You’d think he’d have set the books aside in a special pile or something.”
She led me to a small office toward the back of the apartment. There were no windows in the room, only the deep shaft of a skylight sending a rectangle of honeyed light onto the parquet floor. Two walls were covered with bookshelves, more untidy than the ones in the living room, many of the shelves double-stacked.
“I forgot how many books there were in here,” Ieva said. “I can give you a hand if you want.”
“I’ll be all right.”
“I’ll leave you to it, then. I’m making some tea, if you’d like some.”
“Sure.” But I never drank tea. “That would be great.”
There was an old oak desk in the room with some bulging manila files and dog-eared notebooks stacked precariously to one side of its surface as if someone had tried to make quick order; next to it was a two-drawered filing cabinet, with more files on top and a framed Kandinsky print, floating circles and squares in purples and oranges and blues, on the wall above it. There were a few reference books lined up against the wall on the desktop: a German-English dictionary; Fowler’s Modern English Usage; a German for Beginners teacher’s guide. The desk was like the one my father had had where I’d found my mother’s letters, with a big double drawer on one side and those pull-out side counters like breadboards whose uses, as a child, I had never been able to fathom.
