Eventually I woke to the sound of blackout shutters being taken down from the window. Bright sunlight flooded the room. A dog nuzzled my face, licking my cheek with its wet tongue. I snorted to make it go away, shook my head gently.
“Good morning,” said a man’s voice, and I felt a gentle hand on my shoulder. “Are you awake?”
I blinked over and over again, tried to focus on the person standing in front of me. He was a thin man, older than me, with furrowed cheeks, and he was studying me with curiosity.
“It was a close call. I found you with your head under the water. I didn’t think you were alive, but when I lifted you out, you coughed. So many others were dead. There were bodies everywhere. This war . . . it’s going to be the death of us all.”
“Where am I? I’m not dead?” My throat hurt when I spoke.
“No, but you were probably only a whisker away. You had more luck than the rest of the crew. What’s your name?”
“Doris.”
He jumped, and an uncomprehending look appeared on his face.
“Doris? You’re a woman?”
I nodded. Of course, my short hair.
“I wouldn’t have been able to get on the ship from America otherwise.”
“You had me fooled. Well, man or woman, it makes no difference. You can stay here until you’re strong enough to move on.”
“Where am I?” I asked again.
“You’re in England. In Sancreed. I found you when I was out in my fishing boat.”
“Aren’t you at war?”
“The war is everywhere”—he lowered his eyes to the floor—“but we don’t notice it so much out here in the countryside. They’re focused on London. We hear the bombers and black out the lights at night. And we don’t have much food. But otherwise, life goes on like normal. I’d gone out to bring in my nets when I found you. I threw the fish back. Didn’t want them, not with all those dead souls floating around out there.”
The man loosened the blanket so that I could move my arms. I stretched gently. My legs ached, but I could move them. The dog came running back. It was gray and shaggy and it butted me with its nose.
“That’s Rox, you’ll have to excuse his obtrusiveness. My name is Paul. The house isn’t big, but there’s a mattress you can sleep on. Simple, but warm and comfortable. Where are you headed? You aren’t British, I can hear that.”
I paused and thought. Which of my two cities was I heading toward? I didn’t know. Stockholm felt like a distant memory, Paris like a utopia that would only disappoint.
“Is Sweden at war?”
Paul shook his head.
“Not as far as I know.”
“Then that’s where I’m heading. To Stockholm. Do you know how I can get there? Do you know anyone who can help me?”
He smiled sadly and shook his head. I would be there with him for quite some time. I think he knew that even then.
The Red Address Book
J. JONES, PAUL
There was a sleeping loft in the little cottage. A steep ladder next to the fireplace led up to a boarded-up hole in the ceiling, and Paul grabbed a hammer and pulled out the nails. We climbed up together. In the loft, the walls sloped inward to a thick wooden beam, and there was room to stand only in the very center. The floor was covered with junk: piles of old newspapers and books. Boxes of fishing nets, which smelled like seaweed. A big black suitcase. A small homemade rocking horse, which creaked as we moved across the floor. And everything was covered in a thick layer of cobwebs.
Paul apologized, blowing away the dust and spider’s webs and causing a thin cloud to spread through the air as he stacked the boxes on top of one another and heaped the books along one wall. I opened the half-moon-shaped window to let in some daylight. Then I scrubbed the floor and the walls with soapy water.
A thin horsehair mattress became my bed. A wool throw my blanket. At night, I would lie awake for hours, listening for planes in the distance. The fear of another explosion tormented me. In my mind, I saw the boat explode over and over again. Saw the bodies flying through the air. The water turned deep red in my feverish dreams. I saw Mike staring up at me with dead eyes. The man who had treated me so badly.
Paul had been right, the war was far removed from the villagers’ daily lives, but I wasn’t their only unexpected visitor. Several of the neighbors had small pale guests who cried themselves to sleep at night, longing for their mothers and fathers hundreds of miles away. Child evacuees from London. I saw them with their tattered clothes and bare feet as they untangled fishing nets, or scrubbed rugs in such cold water that their hands became chapped and red, or carried heavy objects on their weak backs. In exchange for somewhere to sleep, they were expected to perform manual labor.
I was put to work too. Paul taught me how to gut the fish that he caught. Using a sharp knife, I made a quick incision just above the gills on fish after fish from the boxes he placed in front of me. I stood at the end of the jetty, next to a rickety table made from weathered old wood, cutting off their heads and pulling out their innards, which I threw to the gulls. My fingertips were soon torn to shreds and dry from the sharp scales. But Paul just grinned when I complained.
“They’ll harden up soon enough. You just need to get your city fingers used to a bit of hard work.”
I was covered in fish blood. It made me feel sick, a constant reminder of death. But I held my tongue.
One night, we were in the cottage, eating our evening meal by the light of a single candle. Paul rarely spoke at the dinner table. He was kind, but not especially talkative. But now, he suddenly looked at me.
“You’re the only one of us getting fat from this food.” He held up his spoon and allowed the watery broth to run back into his bowl. It splashed onto the table and made the candle hiss.
“What do you mean?”
“You’re getting fat. Haven’t you noticed? Are you stashing food somewhere I don’t know about?”
“Of course not!” I ran my hand over my stomach. He was right. I had put on weight. My stomach was as taut as a sail in the wind.
“You’re not up the duff, are you?”
I slowly shook my head.
“Because we hardly need another mouth to feed.”
That night, my hands stroked a rounded belly that wouldn’t flatten, even when I lay on my back. I had been so stupid. My nausea while gutting the fish had nothing to do with the blood. I remembered how much Agnes had suffered when she was pregnant. Suddenly I noticed all the signs I had previously ignored. The realization that I was carrying Mike’s baby made me vomit straight onto the loft floor. Evil had taken root in me. It had mixed with my own blood.
22
Page by page, the stack of paper moves from one side of Jenny to the other. Tyra is lying next to her in bed, in a deep sleep, her thumb in her mouth. Every now and then, she makes a smacking sound as her suck reflex takes over. Jenny carefully pulls out the thumb and replaces it with a pacifier, but the girl immediately spits it out and raises her hand to her mouth again. Jenny sighs and turns her attention to the text. So many words, so many memories she’d never heard about. When she finally falls asleep, it’s with the lamp turned on and a half-read sheet of paper on her chest.
The hospital is huge and gray. A lump of concrete in the suburbs, with sea-green and rust-red details. On the roof, the huge white letters seem to float freely: Danderyds sjukhus. She pushes Tyra toward the entrance, past a glass booth in which gown-clad patients huddle, smoking and shivering. Inside, she sees more patients, all of them dressed in white, some with a drip snaking down to a hand. Each has pasty winter skin. San Francisco feels distant in terms of both space and time. The house, the sea, the traffic. Jack and his surly teenage moods, David, Willie. The washing, cleaning, and cooking. Now it’s just her and Tyra. One stroller to keep track of, one child. A sensation of freedom spreads through her body, and she takes a deep breath and heads down the corridor.
“She’s a little brighter now, you’ll be able to talk t
o her. But she still needs her rest, so please try not to stay too long. And no flowers, I’m afraid,” the nurse says, shaking her head at the bouquet Jenny is holding. “Allergies.” Jenny reluctantly puts the flowers down and, with a sigh, pushes the stroller toward Doris’s room. She pauses when she catches sight of her in bed. She is so small and thin, she almost seems to be disappearing. Her white hair is like a halo around her pallid face. Her lips are tinged with blue. Jenny leaves the stroller and runs forward to embrace her gently.
“Oh, my dear,” Doris whispers in a rattling voice, patting her on the back. A IV line is inserted into one of the thick veins on the back of her hand.
“And who do we have here?” In the stroller, Tyra is sitting wide-eyed, her mouth half-open.
“Ah yes, she’s awake this time.”
Jenny lifts Tyra from the stroller and sits down on the edge of the bed, with the child in her lap. She speaks to the girl in a mixture of Swedish and English. “This is Auntie Doris, Tyra. Auntie from the computer, you know? Say hello.”
“Itsy-bitsy spider climbed up the waterspout,” Doris sings. Jenny bounces her leg up and down, making Tyra jump. Her sleepy face soon cracks into a smile. She laughs loudly as Jenny swings her legs from side to side.
“She’s just like you,” Doris says, reaching out for the chubby little legs. “You had fat thighs when you were her age too.” She winks and grins.
“Nice to see you still have your sense of humor.”
“Yes, the old woman’s not dead yet.”
“Ugh, don’t say that. You can’t die, Dossi, you just can’t.”
“But I have to, my love. It’s my time, I’ve had my fill. Can’t you see how decrepit I am?”
“Please don’t talk like that . . .” Jenny squeezes her eyes shut. “I did some reading yesterday. Those pages you wrote for me. I cried when I saw them, everything you wanted to say. Everything that happened to you. There’s so much I didn’t know.”
“How far did you get?”
“Oh, I was so tired, I fell asleep in the middle of Paris. You must have been so scared on that train. You were so young. Like Jack today. It’s unbelievable.”
“Yes, of course I was scared. I can still remember it now. It’s strange. As you get older, your memory of recent things fades, but your memories of childhood become so vivid, it’s as though they just happened. I can even remember how it smelled that day when the train pulled into the station.”
“You can? How did it smell?”
“Thick smoke from wood-fired ovens, freshly baked bread, almond blossom and musk from all the rich gentlemen on the platform.”
“Musk, what’s that?”
“A scent that used to be common. It smells nice, but very strong.”
“Do you remember how you felt when you first got to Paris?”
“I was so young. When you’re young, everything is about the here and now. And in the worst cases, maybe a bit of then. But my mother had long since let me down, so I didn’t miss her all that much. The one thing I did miss was the sound of her voice in the evenings when she thought we were sleeping. She sang so beautifully. But I was probably quite comfortable with Madame. At least that’s how I remember it.”
“Which songs did she hum? The same ones you sang to me when I was a child?”
“Yes, I probably sang some of them for you. She liked hymns, “Children of the Heavenly Father” in particular. And “Day by Day.” But she just hummed, like I said; she never sang the words.”
“That sounds so nice. Wait, I can play them for you.” She pulls out her phone, presses play, and holds up the YouTube video for Doris, who squints at the small screen. A children’s choir singing “Children of the Heavenly Father” in their bright young voices. They can’t quite reach the high notes.
“That was exactly how it sounded when my mother sang; like a terrified child, she could never manage the high notes. She always had to start again from the beginning.” Doris laughs.
“I always liked it when you sang for me, when I sat on your knee and you bounced me this way and that. What was that song?”
“The priest’s little crow . . .” Doris sings the opening line of the old Swedish nursery rhyme and then hums the rest.
“That was it, yes! Oh, we have to sing it for Tyra.” Doris smiles and holds out her hand, places it on Tyra’s chubby leg. Then they sing together. Jenny stumbles over the words, mumbles and mutters, but they come back to her as she listens to Doris’s rattling voice. She wraps an arm around Tyra and swings her gently forward and back. The metal railing at the edge of the bed is digging into her legs, but it’s too much fun to stop. Tyra chuckles. “She slipped this way, she slipped that way . . .
“Everything was always so good when you came to stay with us. Dossi, I’ve missed you so much!”
With tears in her eyes, Jenny turns to Doris. She is lying with her eyes closed, her mouth half-open. Jenny quickly reaches toward her, feels the warm breath streaming out. Dossi is just sleeping.
23
She’s ashamed of what she is doing, but she can’t stop herself. Every box, every shelf, every wardrobe, every nook and cranny. She searches everywhere. Finds photographs, jewelry, souvenirs, foreign coins, receipts, notes on loose sheets of paper. Studies them carefully. Places them in piles, sorts them by geographical location. So much that she never knew about.
On a chair she spots a gray patterned cardigan, which smells faintly of lavender. Jenny wraps it around herself and sits down on the edge of the bed. Tyra is on her back, fast asleep, with her hands raised above her head. She is wearing only a diaper, and her round little stomach rises and falls as she breathes. Her mouth is half open and her breathing rattles gently. Her cold hasn’t let go; the cool Swedish air is always difficult.
“Sweet baby,” she whispers, kissing Tyra on the forehead. She breathes in the scent of baby-soft skin as she covers her daughter with a blanket.
Jenny is tired and would prefer to go to sleep herself, but Doris’s things have piqued her curiosity. She sinks back down onto the cold floor. Reads old receipts, a few of them handwritten in elaborate script. One, from La Coupole, is tucked inside a well-thumbed envelope; on one corner is a heart drawn in faded black ink. A bottle of champagne and oysters. Luxurious. She googles the restaurant on her phone and quickly finds that it still exists, in Montparnasse. She’ll visit it one day, and experience what Doris experienced. She wonders who Doris went with and why there is a heart on the envelope.
She opens a battered wooden box. Inside are a few French coins and a checked silk handkerchief. A huge silver locket catches the light. Jenny gently opens it. She has seen it before, so she knows what to expect. A black-and-white face peers up at her. She squints to get a better look at the small image, but it has faded, and the features look almost flat. The man in the picture has short, dark hair, combed to one side. Doris hadn’t answered when Jenny asked who he was. She gently pulls the picture loose. There isn’t a name on the back.
Doris’s words are in a pile on the bed. It’s almost midnight, but Jenny wants to know more. She takes another sheet from the pile and continues. Hears Doris’s voice in her head as she reads.
24
After hugging Doris the next morning, the first thing Jenny does is pull the locket from her bag and let it hang from her hand.
“Who is this?”
Doris smiles secretively, shuts her eyes tight, but doesn’t reply.
“Come on, answer me. I’ve asked you before, but you have to tell me now. Who is he?”
“Ah, just someone from the past.”
“It’s Allan, isn’t it? Tell me it’s Allan, because I know it is.”
Doris shakes her head, but her smile and the glimmer in her eye give her away.
“He’s handsome.”
“Of course he is, what else would he be?” Doris holds out her hand and tries to catch the locket.
“Swimming in the Seine. Oh, it must have been so romantic.”
“Let’s
see.” Doris opens the locket with trembling fingers and squints at the image. “I can’t see a thing these days.”
Jenny has brought Doris’s magnifying glass from the apartment. She reaches for it on the bedside table.
Doris laughs. “Imagine if Allan knew that seventy or so years later, I’d be lying here yearning for him through a magnifying glass. That would’ve made him happy!”
Jenny smiles. “Dossi, what happened to him?”
Doris shakes her head.
“What happened? I don’t know. I have no idea.”
“Is he dead?”
“I don’t know. He disappeared. We met in Paris and fell in love. He left me, but then he sent a letter from the United States, asking me to follow him there. I got the letter a whole year too late, so by the time I arrived in New York he was already married to someone else. He had assumed I didn’t want to come. We still loved each other, and we cried when we realized it was all a misunderstanding. Then he left for France, to fight in the war. His mother was French; he was both French and American. He wrote me a letter from there, saying that he loved me and wanted to live with me, that he had been stupid. He probably never made it home, though; otherwise I would have heard from him after the war. He probably suffered the same fate as the bridge we swam beneath. Blown to pieces by the Germans. There was nothing left. Just rubble.”
The Red Address Book Page 17
