Forty-Two
With each year, fewer things were delivered to our door. Large book orders, which Sveva made every month, now had to be picked up at the train station. When I went to collect them, instead of going directly inside, I would go around the building, stand on the platform and watch trains arrive and depart, as though to reassure myself that people could still do this – come and go at will. Teenaged boys queued in a row along one side of the brick building, pants rolled to their ankles, smoking cigarettes. They didn’t see me as I passed. Why would they? I was invisible to them, an old woman – there was nothing for them to see. They felt dangerous to me. Dangerous and so fragile, as boys and men are.
I could hear a train coming, the daily from the coast. Even though I knew no one who would be on it, my anticipation built as it pulled in, as though I could feel the quickened blood and heartbeats of those who were waiting for loved ones resonating in my own body. I didn’t look directly at the train but let my vision blur into the middle distance as people moved around me, a stone in a current, until there was nearly no one on the platform. I was about to turn and leave when I saw him.
I saw his face. Hermann. My H, but older, much older. I watched his face shift with recognition but he was already moving away from me, the train pulling out of the station. He leaned against the window, straining to keep his eyes on me. I raised my hand as though to say – what? Yes, it’s me. Or, come back. Or, goodbye again. The train was heavy on the tracks, then the rhythm increased in speed. I began to run. At first, it was as though I was lumbering through a dream, my limbs oddly heavy, waterlogged, but I picked up speed. I heard my footsteps, as rhythmic as the train on the tracks, my heartbeat like roaring water in my ears. The platform ended but I could keep running on air down the tracks. I reached out, as though to pull the train back, but there was a hand tight around my arm. I didn’t turn; I wanted to see him again, my H. I tried to mark the moment when I could no longer see his face, when we were no longer looking at each other but only the moving distance between us.
The other person pulled more insistently. I turned around – a man, a stranger – “Are you okay, ma’am?” He put his hand on my other arm to steady me. I pushed him away, but the train was already gone.
I was sure it was him I saw. Hermann. It was his face, older. He had leaned against the window, tried to keep his eyes on me. I had raised my hand as though I could reach far enough back in time that I’d be able to touch him. I’d been pulled away, and now the train had left the station. It was gone and I was simply an old woman again, clutching my chest, a knot of pain. I looked at the tips of my shoes on the platform, ran my hands along the fabric of my dress at the hips and cleared my throat before I turned back to the station. The other man had stepped away, and no one else showed me any interest.
Was it really Hermann I’d seen? It couldn’t have been. It could not have been him. I was so tired. I hadn’t been sleeping well, waking often to listen for noises from Ofelia’s room. Many nights, I was up two or three times, either unable to sleep for the listening or helping Ofelia back to bed. I was tired, perhaps delirious. It couldn’t have been him.
I went into the station to pick up the parcels, unfolded my wheeled metal basket to trail them home. As I walked, a magpie laughed and others joined in. There was a sound from behind me, a kick of gravel, a warm whooshing noise. The blare and then sputter of a horn. I stepped away from the edge of the road and a car passed, a woman’s face in the passenger seat turned to look at me, her lips painted dark red, mouth open as though she was saying something. The car passed and with it, sound – the crunch of gravel, whir of motors, noise of the horn trailing in the air, magpies jibing – and then there was nothing. I stood on the side of the road and lifted my chin to feel the sun like a warm mask on my face. One car passed, two, before I started to walk again.
When I got home, I closed the gate behind me and walked up the drive. As if on cue, a flock of waxwings smudged the sky. They swirled and contracted, then formed a dark crease and descended into a tree at the base of the driveway. The click and whir of the birds’ calls caught on each other, hooked into the trees, the air, all of it too loud. Inside, the house was quiet. I locked the door and decided to lie down for a bit, just for a bit. I thought of him, my H. He was no longer mine. He hadn’t been for years, had never been. I thought of his face, his lips, his hands on me. I pressed up against myself, rose and rose and fell, felt sleep wash over me then retreat, over and over. I turned my head toward the window and watched light leach out of the sky. Darkness built until it was too much and had to be pricked through with the pinpoints of stars.
THREE
Elegy to a Neverland
But must words be words?
Wings are a wanting:
All reasonableness defying,
They leap not just to land, rather
To bear and beat away.
– Sveva Caetani, “A Psalm of Birds”
Forty-Three
Canada, 1960
There were days and nights when the fist of loneliness that clenched in my chest would open up and the pain would cramp through my body. Did it seem normal, our life? Well, no, but then it never had. There was some comfort in knowing that I had once lived such a full life. The choices I made became the life I’d led – more than that, I’d become the choices I made. Only I knew the curves and relief of my own topography.
I had once sent letters to my own family in hopes that I could trade the stories of my life abroad for a place in theirs. I asked them to write to me of their spouses, their children. I still have photos of my nieces and nephews in christening gowns, later perched on top of horses or standing stiffly in front of gates in their Sunday best. We kept writing, my siblings and I, through the first war, though our letters arrived months late and some didn’t make it at all. I learned what a struggle it had been to keep the farm during the war and of my brother Soren’s money woes afterward. I’ve had to sell all but one horse, Marie, he wrote, and I knew how much this would have pained him.
When I was in Egypt, my cousin Kristine had married. No longer in anyone else’s service, she wrote. Her husband was an admiral in the army, and she lived in the best homes on the bases, had her own staff. It was staff who kept her company on her husband’s tours of duty, staff who comforted her when he didn’t return from his last post, only days before the end of the war. They hadn’t had any children and now she was a widow. Do you ever have regrets, Marie? she asked in one letter.
They had each implored me to return home. I’d used the First World War as an excuse for not returning earlier. When the fighting ended, however, my excuses were just that. My sister, Johanna, and her husband now ran a shop in which they built coffins and caskets. You could join our business, Marie, she wrote. We’re busier than we can keep up with and now I have the children to care for. I could not go back to that small place to help bury the dead. In Denmark, I had nothing but memories of my childhood on a farm, the mistakes of my youth. By the time I arrived in Italy, I carried the mistakes of a woman. I packed these with me to Canada instead. I expected that the letters would become a record, would become memories themselves when I was finally reunited with my family. Our correspondence continued, and then it ended sometime after the duke died, when it became likely we wouldn’t be travelling back to Europe again. When exactly it stopped is hard to say. If I went back and looked, I might be able to find the final letter that I received from Kristine, and from each of my siblings, none of us knowing it would be the last.
* * *
One afternoon, Sveva came up from the basement and asked, “Why do you think there were so few letters between Mother and Father?”
“I imagine because they were together most of the time.”
“I suppose. I can’t even find their marriage certificate.”
I said nothing beyond, “Hm.”
That afternoon, Sveva offered to help me clean and bandage the u
lcers that had developed on Ofelia’s legs. She was rarely out of bed now, and the dressing needed to be changed every couple of days. Sveva did as I asked, held damp cloths, gauze and pins, though they kept falling out of her hold. She was distracted.
“I’m getting some papers together, Mau.”
“What for?” Ofelia was propped somewhat upright on pillows, rolling her wrists, watching her hands.
“Perhaps I like a sense of order as much as you do, Mother.”
Ofelia dropped her hands to her lap.
“I haven’t been able to find your and Daddy’s certificate of marriage.”
“Oh?” Ofelia tacked a small smile on her lips, turned her face away from us to the window.
“Do you know where it is?”
“Of course I don’t.” Her chest rose and a sigh came out ragged from her mouth.
“Could it be back in Rome? Should I ask Auntie Nella?”
Ofelia turned back to her daughter, brow tight. “Your poor old aunt. I’m afraid she doesn’t need to go on a mad search for a piece of paper she’s unlikely to find. She’s too old, Sveva. We’re too old. Be easy on us.”
“You are not that old, Mau.”
Ofelia looked toward the window, lowered her voice to nearly a whisper. “When I am gone, Sveva, you will have so many friends.”
“Mau, I don’t want to speak about when you’re gone. You won’t be gone for a long time.”
Ofelia continued as though she hadn’t heard this. “They will gather around you and take care of you as you’ve taken care of me. They will be your reward.”
“I need no reward for this, Mau.”
Ofelia turned toward her. “I know you don’t, but I can see how they’ll help you. They will protect you.” She had always claimed to know what would happen to Sveva, warned her that misfortune was lurking, waiting for her. “Your father thought democracy and freedom were the ideal, but they were a bane to his family.”
“What are you talking about, Mother?”
“I suppose no one has told you about the curse?”
Ofelia was taking several different prescription drugs each night, and the priest was making house visits at least once a week, sometimes two or three times. Her mind addled by prescription drugs and religiosity, it didn’t surprise me that she would be muttering about being blighted.
“Yes, Mau, you have told me about the curse.” Sveva sounded bored, like a teenager again. How we each kept to our roles, even though she was in her forties now, middle-aged, as the young women Ofelia and I had once been became trapped in old women’s bodies.
“So, you’ll remember that Pope Pius cursed the Caetani family line to die out within two generations.”
“That’s absurd. Why would he do that? Besides, there are still my cousins Leila and Topazia.”
“Absurd, yes, but there are fewer Caetanis with each passing year, and no male heirs, but you are a Caetani. It has been up to me to protect you.”
“Don’t be ridiculous, Mother.”
“Ridiculous or not, it’s been my lot.”
When Ofelia closed her eyes, there was a tremor in her lids, as though it took some will to keep them shut. Sveva and I looked at each other across the bed. Her lot had become both of ours. In what ways did we enable her fears to become what kept us together? We were each grown women, after all. You might assume we’d have the agency to make our own decisions. It felt as though the things that bound us were both too subtle and too numerous to see clearly. Like a spider’s web, invisible until we stepped into it.
* * *
I took the back stairs to the kitchen and met Sveva as she was coming up from the basement again. “I’m afraid I’ve left a bit of a mess down there,” she told me, her curls standing on end around her face, dark smudges beneath her eyes.
“What are you looking for, exactly – a wedding certificate or something more?”
“I’m not really sure, to be honest. Something, some kind of document that will make sense of all of this – where we are, what brought us here, our lives.”
“Sveva, sometimes few things make sense, regardless of what is written and what we read.”
“I suppose, though you can’t blame me for searching, can you?”
“No, though I can blame you for the mess I’m sure you left down there.”
Sveva flung a hand at me and snorted a short laugh, touched my shoulder briefly, then walked out of the kitchen.
I didn’t need to go to the basement. I could have left the boxes tipped, papers strewn across the floor, and waited indefinitely for Sveva to clean up after herself. Instead, I gathered the documents and tried to find each one its proper box. Family correspondence, bank and investment statements, drafts of the duke’s publications and his unpublished drafts, Sveva’s. There were file boxes of her essays – written for what readership, I didn’t know – copies of the letters she had sent to editors of papers around the world – this had been an occupation of hers for a time, to write letters in response to articles in papers and magazines, praising or scorning them or, often, both.
There was at least a box worth of articles cut out of papers, a folder devoted solely to obituaries for the duke. These mentioned his lineage and professional accomplishments – his time in parliament, publications, the Annals of Islam that still distinguished him as a scholar of the Middle East, even though his life as an academic ended when we left Italy. There was little of his personal life, no mention of Ofelia or Sveva in any of them. As I collected the newsprint, some of it crumbled in my hands. I lifted everything gingerly, placed the documents in piles. When I found envelopes, I tried to tuck the corresponding letters into them to protect the paper.
I had little idea of how much time passed. There was no natural light and the bulbs dangled bare from wires slung from the ceiling. It was warm down there. We had a gas furnace by then, and it clunked, chugged and rattled, the sound blocking out most others. Both the wood and the coal furnaces were gone, but there were still dark stains on the concrete walls and floors. In places, I could see where the concrete was cracked along both walls and the floor, the crumbling along these unintended seams. We’d been told that the foundation of the house was built into ground packed with clay, that the pressure on it would build with time.
I found an envelope tucked between a furnace duct and the concrete floor. I pulled it out and looked at the names printed on the surface, then I turned it over again, held it with both hands, shaking. It was addressed to me, Inger-Marie Jüül, at our address on Pleasant Valley Road. His name. The handwriting was firm and clear, though not overly neat, and I recognized the peaks and curves of it. Heat jolted through me, blazed the surface of my skin with pins and needles. The return address was in Vancouver, the envelope postmarked September 1935. I turned it over again, ran my fingers into it, but there was nothing there. No letter.
In one of the last letters I’d received from Onkel, he’d written, Please, please, I implore you, Miss Jüül, do not write again until neither the censors nor the war itself exists. The war ended when I had been in Italy for three years, with the Caetanis for two. When peace was declared, I wrote again, the tone different from the desperate appeals I’d sent from the cloister. I told Hermann I was well, I’d found good employment in Rome, that I lived amongst nobility now. I told him that I would wait until I heard word from him and then – I had paused there in my letter. I would welcome a visit from you, or an invitation for us to meet. I travel widely with the family and could likely arrange to meet you in any of the prominent cities in Europe.
I’d waited for word from Cairo or Alexandria – a letter, a telegram – but none came. How had Hermann known to write to me here, in Canada? In September 1935, I’d have been nearly fifty years old. By the following winter, I would have retreated into seclusion with these two women. What had become of the letter, and why hadn’t he written again? My hands were
moist and they itched with a sudden sweat. I sat on one of the file boxes, felt it give slightly under me, and scratched each palm until both were raw, streaked with pink and red marks.
All I had was an empty envelope, his handwriting. His name, mine. I carried it upstairs and circled the main floor, turning off lights and closing doors as I did. I stopped in the parlour, where the wood floors were cold; a draft came from the windows on either side of the room and a chill dropped down from the ceiling. I stood, envelope in my hand. Perhaps I would drink to things falling away, or to things returning. So rarely did I have a drink, certainly not socially in decades by then. I lit the fire, a roar of kindling followed by a desperate fanning of the flames until it was going. Once that was done, I took the decanter from the sideboard, poured myself a finger, two, of brandy.
The fire hot on my skin, the drink a small flame in my throat, bloom in my chest, I thought of seeing the man who looked like Hermann on the train. It had been H I’d seen; I was sure of it then. I would write to him at this address, but where would I begin – seeing his face blurred through the glass of a train window? Perhaps I’d begin with that day in June, the last we were together, the ferry pulling away from the wharf. I thought I prepared myself to be apart from him for weeks, a few months at the most, and this – the time not yet lived – already seemed too long to get through. Instead it had been a lifetime since I’d clutched the rail of the boat and watched the water widen between where I stood and what I’d left behind, a horse kicking against the sky, the retreating shore.
Little Fortress Page 24
