The Borrower

by Rebecca Makkai

  I wanted to stop him, to tell him he didn’t need this lie, but he seemed to have a plan worked out, and he wasn’t acting desperate or trapped. I told myself I should let him work this out, but I knew my real motive for staying quiet was selfish curiosity. It was like finishing a horrible new children’s book just to see how the author would rescue the imprisoned babysitter and her dog from the pirates. Ian stalked between the graves, reading the legible ones out loud.

  “Thomas Fenster! 1830–1888! That is definitely not my grandmother!” He stopped in front of another and counted on his fingers. “This girl only lived to be six! She probably died in a fire!” Had he really needed his fingers to find a difference of six? I’d always assumed he did very well in school, based on his reading, but math must have been another story. Math, logic, problems with solutions: they didn’t really fit into Ian’s world.

  I watched him as I followed behind, waiting for the first sign of a breakdown so I could tell him to give it up, that I would have driven him anywhere in the world anyway.

  After about five minutes, he stopped in front of an old thin rectangle of stone and squinted. I stood behind to look over his shoulder. The writing was almost completely illegible, especially at the top where the name should have been.

  “I think this is it,” he said.

  “How do you know? You can’t read the name.”

  “Oh, because I think I saw a picture of this gravestone once. And also I was here, even though I was pretty young. And these are the right dates.” He pointed to the only clear part, where it said 1792–1809.

  “You know, Ian, that was a really long time ago. This person died almost two hundred years ago.”

  “Well, yes,” he said. “Also I forgot to say that this was like my great-great-great-great-great-something-grandmother.”

  “Mm-hmm,” I said, and felt more than anything that I wanted to go to sleep. He squatted down in front of the stone. I would have sat beside him—would have lain down on the ground—if it weren’t for the slush and snow and mud.

  “What does the rest of it say?” he asked.

  “I can’t really read it.” There were two words under the dates, and both seemed to start with Ds or Os. On the next line were four words. The first and third were very short, and the second looked like “town.”

  “I have an idea,” he said. “Miss Hull, if you stand there above it, you could cast a shadow, and it would be easier to read.” He was right. The sun was shining directly on the stone, making any indentations practically invisible. I stood with my body blocking the sun, and he crouched down, shading his eyes with his hand. “I think the first word is ‘died.’ That would make sense, right? Because she’s dead. The second one is like ‘deafening’ or something. It’s a lot longer. I’m sure the last letter is a G.”

  Suddenly I had it, before I’d even looked down myself. “Defending,” I said. “I think this was a soldier.”

  “Cool!”

  “Your grandmother was a seventeen-year-old soldier?”

  He didn’t answer. “Stay there! I still can’t read the last part, but I have an idea!” He ran a few feet away to the big leafless tree between the last row of graves and the church, and began to climb up. “I think I can see better from here!”

  And those were the last words he said before he plummeted to his death, went the movie voice-over in my head, but he was fine and up on the low bottom branches in seconds.

  He shook his head. “No good. Why don’t you try? I can block the sun.”

  “I won’t climb the tree,” I said, “but I’ll look.” We switched places. I was sure now of those first two words, and together with the word “town” in the next line it probably read “Died Defending the Town of.” I stared at it a long time, and as my vision went fuzzy it all came together to form a blurry but readable word. “It could be Howe,” I said, “but I think it’s Havre. I think he died defending the town of Havre.”

  “She. My grandmother was a girl.”

  Ian memorized the gravestone, or at least what we thought it said, and asked if we could go find a library so we could look up the dates and the town. And so we got back in the car and headed west and then south, without saying good-bye again to Father Diggs, without heading over the border to a new life.

  We could still do it. I could put him in the trunk and gun it. I could drop him at the church and do the same. But I knew I wouldn’t. I’d lost any momentum I’d had, not that I’d ever had much to begin with. I was almost ashamed of myself, of my inability to unstick from America, when I had so little here to stick to. I had my parents, true, but they would come see me anywhere. I had Ian, but not for long. I didn’t have friends. Even the ones I’d thought I had, I didn’t. What is half a Russian? Half an American. What is half an American? Only half a runaway.

  34

  The Battle of Havre

  We found a white brick library two towns over, in Lynton, with a golden retriever sleeping in the doorway. I told the librarian about the gravestone (avoiding pronouns, in case Ian decided to pitch a fit), and asked if she knew of any local battles in the early 1800s. She was a blank-faced woman with dull hair, and she looked sleepily at my shoulder as she talked. “All I know is there was off-and-on fighting all throughout, with the Canadians, over where the border would be. Some of the disputes would have been pretty small, just one family against another, really. Not much written up, but you could try.”

  “Have you ever heard of a town called Havre?” I asked. “Or possibly Howe? Here in Vermont, presumably?”

  She sighed and looked at Ian’s shoulder. “Well, all these names would have changed a lot. Sometimes when they kicked the French out they’d give it an English name. So it could be anything now, or it could have just vanished. A lot of settlers would come up different times and try to farm the land, and then they’d see how harsh it was with the winters, and then they’d leave. They’d sometimes just abandon a whole town.”

  “We read about that,” Ian said.

  “I don’t mean to discourage you, but if you can’t find it on a map, my guess is it just isn’t there anymore.” And she left us to our piles of books.

  We searched all afternoon with virtually no luck, except that the books and the Internet seemed to back up the librarian’s statements about constant border fighting. We looked not just for Havre and Howe but anything else of that length starting with an H, and nothing fit. We tried Haven, which I was fairly sure was the translation of Havre, and we tried Harbor, because I thought that might be it too, and I was too lazy to get up and find a French dictionary. There was, indeed, a town called New Haven, presumably smaller and less erudite than the one surrounding Yale. It was a good forty miles south. “That’s my best guess,” I said, showing it to Ian. “And it makes sense that when they won they’d give it an English name. And call it ‘new,’ to celebrate.” It didn’t sound right, but I was more interested in giving him an answer he’d be happy with than being correct. But he just shook his head, still staring at his book, and held up one finger as if he were about to say something, which he never did.

  “I have a theory,” he said at about 4:00, taking his glasses off and wiping them on his shirt. “I think that Mankson and Havre were the same town. That makes the most sense. Because when they won, they would definitely have changed the name, like to celebrate their new freedom. Like you were saying. But your town wasn’t even anywhere near the border, so it doesn’t make sense to have a battle there. And also, I think that if she died fighting, they wouldn’t have carried her away very far. They probably just buried her right near where she died. She would have been bloody and possibly amputated.”

  I closed my book. I was so out of ideas that I’d actually looked in the index for “Drake, Eleanor.” “Maybe,” I said.

  “Anyway, she was a war hero, and that’s what matters. She helped save her town.”

  I was glad he was happy, and he seemed genuinely proud of this fake ancestor. Sitting there pushing his hair back, he gr
inned the way Tim did when he’d pursued some ridiculous scenario all the way to its absurd end, forgetting it was never real.

  We returned the books to their dusty reference shelf and checked out a few chapter books for fun.

  (How to check out a book without a library card:1. You, to young teenage trainee behind the desk: “I’m afraid we forgot our cards. My last name is Anderson.”

  2. Trainee, concentrating on pushing right buttons: “Joan Anderson or Jennifer?”

  3. You, with swish to your hair: “Jennifer.”

  4. “Can you just confirm your address for me?”

  5. “Oh, we just moved! Let me give you the new one!”

  6. Jennifer Anderson can sort it all out later.)

  In the car, Ian leaned his head back smiling and stared out his window. I drove aimlessly southeast and thought about the inscription. Now that Ian had constructed his story, I had to make mine. There was more than one way to read it. Die defending. Defend thy beliefs even unto death. Defend your country from the Pastor Bobs of the world. But what compelled me to keep doing this, reading it like a personal message to me, as if some teenager died in 1809 just to give us a cryptic direction?

  Maybe the problem was that I’d had no signs so far. Or no intelligible ones. My family crest, with its conflicting symbols, was too ambiguous: Head on a pike! Or maybe just stay home and read a book! The finger in the church was pointing west and east and north and south; home, away, Canada, hell. And here, finally, regardless of the unclear direct object, was a firm directive: Die defending. Do not go home. Do not give in. Do not abandon this child on the steps of the Lynton Public Library. Fight, not flight.

  We checked into a disintegrating motel twenty miles south, the cheapest place we could find. We were almost completely broke, and I wasn’t sure we had money for gas to get back home, or even bus tickets. I paid while Ian nosed around the little table of things for sale: candy, maps, French-English dictionaries, soda, gum. He stuck his finger into the change slot of the pay phone. I turned and watched him while the manager fiddled with the computer, and it struck me how normal this seemed, how practiced: Ian with his nose to the glass by the Snickers bars, my elbow on the wooden counter, his left shoelace fraying on one side so he couldn’t tie it properly if he tried. Yes, this is what we do. We do this every night. I check in and look casual. He stares at the candy. His shoe falls off.

  We collapsed on the beds with books we’d checked out, and I felt a strange combination of deflation and energy. I thought of Tim and all his friends heading down to the rally this weekend, and what they’d think of me if they knew. If they only saw my actions and not the equivocal, self-loathing thoughts that accompanied them, they’d take me for a kind of hero. And I thought of my father’s flight—the original one, the self-righteous, potato-stuffing, tract-writing one, before Ilya died, before things turned from revolutionary to desperate. It was in my blood, in the thick Russian veins of the Hulkinovs, this need to fight. I’d have it tattooed on my back, in prison: Die Defending.

  I looked over at Ian, lying flat on the bed with his arms straight up, holding The 21 Balloons above his head, already a third of the way through. His arms were streaked with dirt, and his bare feet looked like they hadn’t been washed in weeks. I said, “Ian, do you mind my asking when you last took a shower?”

  He scrunched up his face. “I don’t like hotel showers, because they might be slippery, and it’s very dangerous to fall in a tub. But I took one at those ferret people’s house, remember?”

  “We’ll make a deal. You take a shower now, and if you’re not out in half an hour I’ll call an ambulance.”

  “When I finish the chapter.”

  I couldn’t argue with that. When he finally went into the bathroom, I called my father collect from the room phone.

  “You are out of money? Listen, I have Ophelia, my black secretary, put a thousand dollars to your bank account, okay?”

  “I don’t want money.” I wasn’t sure that was true, but I could always change my mind later and he’d still jump at the chance.

  “Ha! You already ask for money by calling collect! Who is paying this call?”

  I asked how he was and apologized for upsetting him the other night.

  “You don’t call people when the people are drunk.”

  “But I think what you did was very brave, and I wanted to make sure I said that. You could have used your past to get in good with the Party, and you didn’t. And I didn’t get to say that the other night.”

  My father began speaking quietly, at least for him, a sure sign that my mother was in the next room. “Lucy, you think this is hero stuff, this running around like crazy with the potatoes and this ridiculous book? The problem with you is you read and you read, but you don’t listen to anything someone says with the mouth. And you don’t understand what I’m saying: it was stupid, this fighting. What did it accomplish? Ilya gets killed and I waste some potatoes. Do I end communism? Do I make Khrushchev give a state apology to my poor mother? And my mother loses both sons. Because after this I can’t go back, and she can’t come out.” My grandmother had died when I was two, before she ever met me. I hadn’t thought much about that part of the story, about the woman who lost her husband, and then her son, and then her other son. But then I’d been fairly preoccupied. And perhaps I’d successfully blocked whatever part of the brain it is that deals with parents and their missing children.

  I couldn’t think of any reply that wouldn’t sound ignorant or make things worse. So I said, “There is one thing you can do. If anyone calls there looking for me, can you forget that I ever came through Chicago? I just need some time away right now, in peace, and I don’t want anyone tracking me down. From work, or anything.”

  “I already did this!” He sounded proud of himself. “Some boyfriend, he called here and asked for you. He sounded no good.”

  “Rocky Walters?”

  “Yes, some ridiculous name like this.”

  “Thank you.”

  Ian came out of the bathroom, his wet hair sculpted into a Mohawk. He had put on his red T-shirt, the one from the police report, but I couldn’t ask him to change without explaining why. And I was still too busy seething at my father, at his puncturing my little balloon. But he had to be wrong. Or maybe he’d just forgotten what it felt like. There’s a reason revolutionaries are young. Three young Russians are a revolution. Three old Russians are just a bunch of people sitting around the kitchen, arguing how much cabbage to put in the soup.

  Ian lay back on the bed and began reading again, but after a few minutes he rested the book on his abdomen and stared at the ceiling, where water leaks had stained the paint.

  “Miss Hull, can I have some coins?”

  “It’s too late for candy.”

  “No, it’s not for candy, it’s something else. I can’t tell you. It’s a secret.”

  “How much?”

  “A couple dollars, I think.”

  I remembered the pay phone in the lobby, and my heart sank through the bed and onto the floor underneath. I tossed him my coin purse anyway, lay back and closed my eyes, heard him count change in a stack and leave the room.

  So it was over.

  He wasn’t calling the police, or he wouldn’t have asked for money. Unless he didn’t know that it was free. More likely it was his teacher, his parents, some kind aunt or uncle. The library, for all I knew. Pastor Bob. All I could really do was breathe, and so that’s what I did for the next five minutes. It was over. If he came back and said that we were through, that someone was on the way to pick him up, then that was it. I couldn’t cross the line to actual kidnapping.

  When he came back with paper in his hand, I thought it was a small phone book. Even when he unfolded the whole thing on the bed, I couldn’t comprehend the lines, the tiny lakes, the words. It was a subpoena, a picture of jail, a mass of pink and green hell. Really, it was a map of Quebec.

  “No,” I said. I sat up. “We are not going to Canada. We’ve
been over that.”

  He rolled his eyes. “Do you think I’m stupid? They’d arrest us at the border. I think I figured something out, though.”

  “What?”

  “No, just read your book. I’ll tell you in a second.”

  I lay down and held the book above my head, the other hand fingering the spongy polyester of the comforter. Soaking it in: it wasn’t over. The book was Anna Karenina, from the Lynton library. I suppose I had wanted a book whose horrible ending I could see coming from page one, a book where I wouldn’t hold out hope for a happy resolution that never came.

  “I got it,” he said. He started giggling, red-faced. He picked up a pillow and held it on top of his head with both arms. Glasses falling off, laughing.

  I went over to look, and he pointed his pinky at a small dot by a big green patch, a few miles north of the Vermont border. Havre, it said.

  It took me a second. “So you think this all happened up—you think your grandmother was Canadian.”

  “No.” He was laughing the way no one would unless they’d just won something impossible—a kingship, a lottery. Or maybe the way they would laugh if their house burned down. “Don’t you get it? They lost.”

  When he disappeared to brush his teeth, I felt like crying. It was hunger and fatigue and stress, and more than anything, it was the writing on the wall. I’d been looking for a sign, looking for the dead grandmother soldier to tell us something, and here it was. Not Run for it, not Trust that he’ll be okay, not Keep fighting, but You’re going to lose. And it was true, and my father seemed to agree, and it was the only thing I could see clearly right then. The wallpaper of the room was a blur, the numbers of the digital clock were a single red stripe, the mirror was a glaring yellow spot, but this was absolute: you can’t keep going, you can’t go back, and you can’t stay here. What did you think, with your bag full of potatoes? How did you think this was going to end?