This is a short story I wrote in the summer of 2007.The desk Mirna purchased was made of oak from Germany. It was built by a young man in Regensburg whose family owned a watch shop. Mirna discovered the family seal stamped onto the under panel of one of the larger drawers – a pocket watch containing the patriarch’s three naturally curved initials: C.L.D. Beyond this she didn’t know much about the desk, the history of its ownership, or what was contained in the top right cabinet, which was locked by a key lost decades ago.
There were twenty-four drawers in all. Six slim, wide ones along the bottom and twelve miniature drawers on top, six on either side. In the center was a grid of six identical cabinets, each with its own lock and uniquely stubborn hinge. Without the key none of these would lock shut of course, and all of them opened only after some provocation, save for the cabinet on the top right. The writing surface was expansive and flawless, a single section of wood, whose rich luster and swirling grain gave the entire artifact the appearance of melted chocolate.
Mirna’s husband Bob did not like the desk. For one thing, it dominated the room, crowding out the other pieces of furniture like the first grim sky scraper erected in a small town. The previous owners had kept it in a damp basement covered in a patchy wool blanket, and so the thing retained a certain musty stench. He disapproved of the cabinets especially, saying they looked like something that belonged in a post office. Mirna remarked that this had perhaps been the desk’s original purpose, but Bob wasn’t interested in the stories behind the objects his wife brought home. Her collection of antique makeup compacts bored him, as did her imitation Fabergé egg, a dusty conversation piece which failed to inspire any conversation. For Bob, the desk was just another in a long line of expensive, fragile and useless artifacts whose presence pinned him ever more securely to the leaning, ramshackle Tudor and the wet, cramped, half-impoverished college town he and Mirna lived in.
For Mirna, the desk was an inspiration. It was a solid, immovable monument to fine German craftsmanship, a hardy workhorse, which, whether or not Bob believed it, she planned to put to good use. All the other furniture in the house was either like her (frail, decorative, foreign) or like him (old, worn through, cheap, mismatched and always slightly unsettling as if she could never remember where she’d bought it or how, or why she’d thought it was a good idea at the time). The desk, though, was something entirely different. It was the tall, powerful, handsome young son they’d never had, slightly out of place among their dowdy possessions but loud and commanding and useful. Moreover, the desk was a purchase which corroborated the new literary career Mirna had planned. It was the flag ship on which she would cross the wide, uncharted seas of a first novel. And its many drawers and locks and cabinets evoked tiny, secret hiding places the likes of which Mirna liked to believe she, too, possessed. So she and the desk had a kind of kinship.
The original placement was decided in Bob’s absence. The men from the auction house arrived at two thirty-seven and thundered into the living room with her prize. Mirna was a small woman and self-conscious, not just about her own size but about the smallness of her house. This was not a matter of pride but self-preservation, and when the movers stomped by, squeezing past her in the foyer, the baubles on the chandelier rattled and the sheet music slipped from the piano and Mirna was so convinced they would break something she blurted out, “Oh, just put it down over by the wall, there.” Bob returned from the faculty meeting at seven and took in the situation before removing his jacket. It was snowing outside and the driveway had taken on a deadly glaze, but still he’d refused to retire the nylon windbreaker for his winter coat. Mirna heard him come in, and told herself she simply could not run out of the kitchen just to hear his response. In agony she stood by the cutting board, listening to the hall clock cluck away the seconds. At last she heard him mount the stairs to the second floor, where he would change into his walnut-colored cardigan and take an extended shit in the upstairs bathroom, The New York Times open at his feet.
She did not always cook dinner. Occasionally they ate instant meals, and Bob was known to tackle the deceptively complicated minimalist cuisine he read about in the “Dining Out” section. But tonight so happened to be a Mirna’s-Lamb-and-Mint-Sauce night and they ate in the living room in front of the fire.
“Gordon’s coming back after all,” Bob said halfway through the meal. They were reading separate books and had not yet spoken a word to each other since he’d been home, but after thirty-four years of marriage the conversational padding had worn away and they now communicated in news bulletins. Mirna, who was determined not to be rattled by Bob’s silence regarding the desk, finished her paragraph and uttered a simple, “Oh?”
Bob grunted and recrossed his legs. Gordon was the perennially cancerous department chair with drawn, pock-marked features and a sallow, translucent complexion due not so much to his illness but living constantly in death’s neighborhood. He was a silent, bitter man prone to tantrums and he and Bob despised each other. The mention of Gordon’s name typically marked the start of a satisfying tirade –something they could share – about the frustrations of muddled bureaucrats mucking up the institutions of higher learning and turning them into expansionist cash cows for building contractors. But Mirna refused to take the bait, forcing Bob to address the desk before his ire had come to a full boil.
“So this thing is moving.” This was a pronouncement, not a question, and the distaste with which he let the word thing dribble from his lips made it clear which thing he was talking about.
“Moving where?”
“The garage? The attic? I don’t care where it goes, but it can’t stay there, of course.”
“Why not?” Inside, Mirna reeled. She had no attachment to the desk’s current placement, and since “the dump” had not been on Bob’s list of suggestions, this was a kind of victory.
“My God, Mirna, you can’t expect to put every piece of garbage you drag home on display, can you? It’s an eyesore, it’s too large for the room and the corner is blocking the window. Call the movers tomorrow and have them take it upstairs.”
“I’ll put it in the hall,” Mirna said. “Under the eve.”
George turned the page of his Sunday journal. Its crisp, fluttery crackle was his only response.
# # #
On Tuesday two of her students arrived to bring the desk upstairs. They were smaller than the moving men, but they treated her home with reverence, like a place of worship, or, more likely, like a museum piece – the carefully preserved home of some famous shut-in. Emily Dickinson, perhaps. The boys were friends, one from California and the other from a town just a few miles to the west. They were charming and deferential, referring to her as Professor Sorenson and taking the time to compliment the piano, the rusted samovar in the dining room and the Fabergé egg in its spidery brass cradle. They faltered once on the stairs, the top of the desk swooping towards the floral wallpaper, threatening to gouge away several faded peonies. But the boy from California braced his body against the groaning banister and managed to steady himself. Mirna imagined a terrible scene: The boy pinned beneath the desk, her new favorite possession an agent of death, a four-hundred pound slab of unforgiving old forest oak driving this young man’s body into the floor like a tent spike through soft earth. But at last they made it up and she could breathe easy and focus instead on what to do with these two giant children now standing with their hands in their pockets on the second floor of her house.
“This is so old,” one of them said, knocking the wood lightly with his fist. “You should take it on Antique’s Road Show. You’d probably make a mint. What are these for?” He opened one of the cabinets, then another. They were empty. “Are these like little safes or what?” He tried to open the locked door and, thinking it was being stubborn, tugged at the brass handle roughly. His arm jerked backwards in quick, angry jolts. He must have felt silly because his face went red. “It’s stuck,” he said, jerking again. “This one’s messed up.”
“It’s locked, for goodness sake,” Mirna said at last. “It’s locked. It’s locked.”
“Oh.” The boy stepped back from the desk, grimacing as if he’d been tricked.
“I wonder what’s in there,” said his friend.
“It’s probably just empty like the others,” replied the other.
“No, I bet it’s like old love letters. Or secret government contracts. What do you think, Professor Sorenson?”
Mirna had asked herself this question many times already. She had played with more or less the same ideas. Letters, personal documents of some sort, something someone had locked away back when the desk had lived in a house with nosy servants and destructive children. But the part of her brain that recognized patterns, arguably the largest and most well-developed of her faculties, insisted on the preservation of the mundane. Perhaps it simply was empty, or filled with objects which may have been treasures to someone else but which would have appeared meaningless to her: a scrap of newspaper, a crumbling leaf.
Mirna taught the boys in a literature survey course, and as they were presently studying the gothic novel she said, “It contains the ashes of the desk maker’s father.” They smiled and laughed and Mirna ushered them downstairs for tea and a plate of Fig Newtons.
# # #
Over the next several days, in the light of a miniature table lamp which fit just below the eve, Mirna began to populate the desk with bits of herself - the tools she would need to write her novel. She had a collection of sentimental objects: an incense burner full of old movie stubs, a piece of defunct currency, a photograph from her youth of a young man in an open shirt and gray slacks. She thought these talismans might guide her now. But in the end their presence felt forced and she packed them away and instead filled the drawers with more practical implements. Pens, a box of pencils, the pencil sharpener, a pocket thesaurus. At the end of the semester, in three weeks, her sabbatical would begin. Her students would go home for the holidays and Mirna, whose private spirituality demanded no feasts or celebrations, would retire here to the landing at the top of the stairs, her back to the window, her only view two neat rows of cabinets, two by three, simple arithmetic, simple scene, simple task.
Occasionally she thought of the sixth cabinet. She knocked on its door and heard a hollow sound. She knocked on its neighbors and tried to discern a difference in resonance. Was it just empty after all? She gave the handle a little tug. It was silly to hope for a satisfying answer, but one thing Mirna’s faith did allow was the possibility of a certain rare miracle here and there, the exception that proved the rule. And she discovered if she really thought about it, wasn’t there just the chance that something really fantastic was inside? Couldn’t she at least allow for the possibility of such a universe? The door didn’t budge. Bob was home, and hungry.
# # #
She was born in a small, poor country whose fate lay in the hands of its powerful neighbors. What sort of a place it was couldn’t be determined by names or borders, for those were always changing, but rather seemed to stem from several enormous families which had been settled in the same mountainous region for a thousand years. Mirna was born to one of these. Her existence then was so detached from her life now that part of her assumed everyone had the same fairytale sense of their childhood, of cobbled roads hugging limestone walls, climbing lavender hillsides, and stucco churches with dusty schoolrooms in the basement. The smell of animal fur and sun kissed skin.
When she was eleven there was a boy with fine dark eyelashes who liked to throw yellow and green tomatoes at her from the iron balcony of his mother’s apartment. He lived above the café where her father met his friends and once a week she would go there (had it been Sunday? There were always church bells) and watch them play checkers and watch the stairs for the appearance of the hostess’s son. In her memory, fine, sun-dappled impressions yielded to facts. Things she’d heard or knew as a matter of course. His mother died when he was twenty. He left to find work on the other side of a river whose ownership was in dispute. The name of the town changed and soon, so did her own. Then there was America and Bob and Eastern European Literature in the 20th Century and History on a page that seemed so remote from cobbled streets hugging limestone walls.
At first, Bob told her terrific stories. She was amazed by his memory, his internal log book of places and dates. He had done a few extraordinary things – smuggled illegal literature into Russia, smuggled unbound, frayed manuscripts back out – but it seemed to her not so much that he had led a remarkable life, but that he retold it remarkably, with all the names and colors and snowfalls reproduced with such exactness. Mirna reasoned that she too could reanimate the shadows of her past and that someone, somewhere would want to see them dance. But whenever some watery hay field hung above a friend’s mantle reminded her of the days before they met, Bob's eyes would begin to wander, to greet familiar faces over her shoulder, and to add to that sole sphere of knowledge that interested him: himself. She wanted to remember people’s birthdays, the names of their friends’ children and where all their receipts were kept. She wanted the shades of lipstick, the smells of old barns, the play of light on a particular bend in the road, all these useless items which he could store away so effortlessly, labeled under “miscellany.” He had a historian’s brain, one which she wanted to remove and rebuild for poetry. She wanted Bob to tell her story, a feeling so visceral it had disguised itself as love and made her marry him. And now they were old and she knew no such story was coming. But being who she was, Mirna had forgotten that this was what she wanted in the first place.
To start her work on the novel Mirna kept a notebook of details. She had plans to categorize, to divide into sense, shape and perhaps chronological order. But at first she simply listed what she knew as it occurred to her. These items could be mundane or fanciful, she made no distinction. Each was given a separate line and number. She might fill half a sheet in one sitting, writing the date at the top right hand corner to mark her progress. These items would become the building blocks of her book, the thin, gummy filaments which strung it together like a human nervous system. On one particular morning she wrote down the color of the tile floor in the woman’s bathroom at her first university (sea foam). She followed this with the state bird (the chickadee) and the brand name of the first shampoo she’d purchased in the States (Lavender Waterfall). Other colors included charcoal, clay, pine, teal, taupe, honey and silver. Some of the names listed were Carlo, Saul, Nikolai, Sasha, Mary, May, Susan, Rodger and Bob. She covered five continents, thirty-one pieces of merchandise and countless old novels. The dates were scattered, with two large groupings near the turn of the last century and a spotted, dwindling list skipping into the present like a path of stones through a river. What emerged on these pages was a rough map of her consciousness, with all its gaps and strange fixations, as floral, elegant and ambiguous as ancient sea charts, the borders shaded and dark, with warnings to travelers reading “There be Dragons.”
She stored these lists, rolled into tubes, in the five available cabinets, taking care to shut each door before leaving for the day. The desk proved to be an effective incubator, and by nightfall her morning’s efforts took on a savory significance. She discovered things she didn’t remember writing down, and these unexpected treats, these letters from her subconscious, were enough to keep her coming back, day after day.
A month into this process she and Bob had friends over for dinner. They were a younger couple who had endeared themselves at an earlier party by trading lines from Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? The couple became one of their few common interests, and Mirna made it a point to have them over at least twice a month. The man was shy, slightly built and famous among his students for sudden, violent outbursts. The woman was the more garrulous of the two, dark and beautiful. She was the darling of the Spanish department, the youngest professor to receive tenure in the history of the school, a woman who had retained the tilt and lisp of her native tongue and otherwise slipped effortlessly into her new country as if putting on a new pair of gloves. As “the talkative ones,” Rosa and Bob recognized each other as counterparts immediately, and set to work erecting the private scaffolding of jokes and anecdotes that steadies a platonic relationship. Mirna found it difficult making the same kind of connection with Lou, who she saw more like a child, a sulky nephew who needed pampering and attention. This was a role she typically enjoyed, but tonight something had made Lou talkative, and Mirna felt superfluous.
“Oh, don’t listen to him,” Rosa said, responding to some comment her husband had made. “Tonight Lou is a little drunk on himself because of his new grant. What is the expression?”
“I believe it’s ‘high on life,’” Bob said, pouring another glass of wine. He had destroyed the cork and bits floated inside the bottle, collecting in the neck as he poured.
“Yes, that’s it,” she said, placing a hand on his knee. “Your idioms. There are so many. I will never understand them.”
Mirna was past the age of jealousy, but this statement annoyed her. She turned to Lou, who slouched in his chair, a misty smile on his lips.
“So does this mean you’ll be taking this semester off?” she asked.
“He’ll be working on his new book,” Rosa broke in, now resting a hand on the table cloth, fingers splayed. Why did this woman need to touch things when she spoke?
“A book?” Bob said. “What kind of book?”
“I’m studying the dialectic hegemony of early-modern British literature,” Lou said, leaning forward.
“He means Shakespeare,” Rosa said, touching her glass now. “He’s burning the Bard at the stake.”
“Ah,” Bob said, brightening “Some more subversive readings, no doubt. I love it.”
Lou shrugged. Rosa smiled at Mirna. “Don’t worry. I won’t let him tear up the entire canon. We can’t let these boys destroy all our old heroes, can we?”
“Darling, Shakespeare would have called you a Moor,” Lou said.
“And what’s so terrible about being a Moor?” She spread her arms, the wine in her glass sloshing dangerously close to the rim. “Men call me exotic, but I don’t mind. They think I’m Latino, Italian, one even thought I was Lebanese. What does it matter if what he really means is he thinks I’m beautiful?”
“When we were in Paris for our honeymoon, the hotel owner kept trying to speak to Mirna in Greek.” Bob chuckled. The others laughed but Mirna was silent. It had been the concierge, not the owner, and it had been Russian he spoke, not Greek. Normally Mirna would have let this go except she had noted this very detail only just that morning and the accuracy of her notes was vital to her.
“That was the concierge,” Mirna said. “Not the owner.”
Bob turned, as if surprised to find her in the room. “Well, what does that matter?”
“And it was Russian, not Greek.”
Bob placed his glass on the table. “No, Darling. I’m sure it was Greek. Hs name was Sergey and his family was from Lesbos.”
“You’re thinking of the waiter in Tilton,” she said, astounded by the enormity of his error. The teenage waiter from New Hampshire and the obese Parisian concierge placed side by side like a before-and-after shot.
Bob implored their guests. “Poor girl. Couldn’t remember her maiden name without me.”
Lou chuckled politely at this. Rosa set her mouth into a tight smirk.
“Now Bob, you shouldn’t make fun of your wife this way. Who knows? Maybe he was Russian.”
“His name was Herman, his sister lived in Moscow and he only knew the words for ‘thank you’ and ‘goodbye.’” Mirna followed this chain of memory, entranced. “He was a cook before he worked at the hotel and his wife died of...of...” she faltered for a moment, but recovered herself, “typhus.”
This last, victorious word burst from Mirna’s lips and settled in the air like gun smoke. The others were silent. Rosa traced the eyelets of lace on her napkin. “Well, Bob. Looks like she’s got you beat, yes?”
Bob said nothing, only narrowed his eyes and drank.
# # #
Mirna knew what her novel would be about. It would be the story of an old woman, an amnesiac, and her slow but glorious recovery. The facts the woman learned, through meditation and detective work, would be culled from Mirna’s own lists, with a few names and dates changed of course, and the blank places filled in, as Mirna saw fit, through invention. Her progress was slow at first – the process of narration felt cumbersome. But she appreciated the circular world of fiction, the universal significance of every detail, and the absence of frayed ends. Here, the map had no dark places. It couldn’t, or the fragile structure would collapse in on itself. She would start while it was still dark, pausing only to check the sun’s progress as it turned the blue world brown, or on days with snow, mother of pearl.
The new semester wore on. Without classes she could work until two in the afternoon and spend the rest of the day reading. Being the one at home all day, the job of cooking dinner now fell solely to her. But Mirna didn’t mind. It seemed only fair and gradually she even found it pleasurable to cook in the evenings. Bob was only more sour, and though he’d always come home after her, her presence now struck him as an unwelcome surprise, an unpleasant jolt that hit him afresh every evening just after he shrugged off his jacket and just before he dropped his keys into the ceramic bowl on the end table. They’d bought the bowl in Morocco, and every time he saw it now he said that word aloud to himself, quietly. “Morocco. That bowl is from Morocco.”
In February Mirna received a small card inviting her to the wake of a woman she’d known ten years before. Geographic rather than emotional proximity prompted her to go, and so for one weekend she abandoned the desk, its drawers and cabinets now bursting with her novel. She took their Honda north through three hours of rain, pulling at last beneath the marquis of her hotel, its illuminated sign running down her windshield like mascara. Alone that night, the sheets tucked tightly around her body, she listened to the rumble of trucks on the interstate and thought of her friend lying in a satin-lined box, waiting in a cold basement for tomorrow’s ceremonies. She thought of her friend being lowered into a pit carved to fit only her and her disposable container, the lip lined with green felt, strangers standing above, as if waiting their turn. Mirna felt a sudden rush of vertigo, staring into the gloom, the invisible floor, the imaginary walls. She flicked on the light, summoning them all back into existence. She saw gooseflesh on the arm that had reached for the light switch and felt the tips of her fingers tingle as if charged with electricity. Alone, there was nothing to keep her from slipping away into nothingness, no one to bring her back the way she’d brought back the room by simply turning on the light. She felt that she would die, not soon but instantly, that she was in immediate mortal danger. She rose, crossed the room and went to the window. She stood, holding the rough, pleated curtains before crossing back to the bed, taking a long breath and climbing under the sheets. After a moment she tossed off the covers. The light was still on. Gradually, she fell asleep.
# # #
The following afternoon, after the service was over, Mirna returned to her room to find Bob had left a message. She dialed home, half frantic, dress unzipped and hanging off her shoulders like a corn husk. She held the receiver in both hands, pressing the cold plastic against her ear. Finally, on the fourth ring, Bob answered.
“Hello?”
“I don’t understand, what about the desk?”
“Mirna. How was the...”
“Fine. What did your message say? I couldn’t understand...”
“Wood rot.”
“Impossible.”
“I could smell it from the bedroom.”
“It can’t be rotted. What’s there to...”
“Maybe the previous owners...”
“What?”
“...stored it someplace damp.”
“Well what did you...?”
“I took the liberty of calling a man. He’ll come by this afternoon to take a look at it.”
“Don’t touch it.”
“Mirna...”
“Don’t touch it.” There was a digital alarm clock on the table. She might hit rush hour near Boston, but the sun had most likely dried the roads and another storm didn’t seem likely. Mirna factored this in to her calculations. “I’ll be home by six,” she said. “Leave it till I get there.”
“Mirna, he’s only going to look at it.”
“I said leave it.”
# # #
The wood rot was serious. A small, puss-colored dimple had blossomed on the back panel, near the base. No wonder she hadn’t seen it before, tucked away back there.
“It’s a good thing we caught it when we did,” Bob said, hands thrust in the pockets of his corduroys, standing at the top of the stairs as if the rot was contagious. “Didn’t you check it at the auction?”
“I didn’t see it,” Mirna said. She was exhausted. The scene that greeted her when she came home was violent. The desk had been pulled away from the wall and now stood at a forty-five degree angle to the window. The effort expended in moving it was obvious: most of the drawers had opened a few inches, their contents jostled and confused, evoking the image of her red-faced husband, slippered feet braced wide apart on the carpet as he shoved her treasure outwards via a series of short, angry jerks.
She disguised her dismay as concern for his welfare. “Did you have to move it? You could have thrown your back out. Or given yourself a heart attack.”
“You could have had a dead animal back there.” He raised his voice, waving a hand in disgust. “Jesus, I don’t know. I smell something bad, I look.”
He waited until I was gone, Mirna thought. He waited until I was out of the house to do this. She thought of a word for what he’d done. It would have been ridiculous to say aloud; she would not even articulate it to herself within her own inner monologue. But she knew what it was. Desecrate.
“When is the man coming to look at it?”
“The neighbor’s son, Eric. He said he’d come by tomorrow. He’s in construction or something. I don’t know.” He was exhausted now. It would have taken him a quarter of an hour to move the desk, and still more effort to phone around for someone to come look at it. Now he couldn’t be bothered. As far as Mirna was concerned Bob would only expend energy on things that hurt her. He’d detected the cancer, opened the body, and then called it a day.
“I’m going to bed,” Mirna said, leaving him on the stairs. She saw no sense in moving the desk back and could not bring herself to confront the disarray of her things. Instead she kicked off her shoes and lowered herself onto the bedspread. A man would look at it tomorrow. Eric. The name inspired confidence. Someone young, competent. A young professional. A young, competent professional was coming to look at her desk.
# # #
Eric pronounced the wood rot benign, but there were complications. The back panel would have to be replaced. He could get her the wood, something younger that could be grafted onto the host.
“I’ll cut it and stain it in my garage,” Eric said. In Eric Mirna had a kindred spirit, another member in the desk’s small fan club. “It’s so beautiful. Such a shame. People just don’t know how to take care of their stuff, you know? Someone at the auction house should have told you. They would have spotted it during the appraisal is the thing. Such a shame.”
Eric took the dimensions and made some phone calls from their downstairs phone. As Mirna had hoped he was young and in need of a project. A craftsman in search of a craft. When he hung up he was smiling. “Great. Oak. Two pieces from Syracuse. We can do this up really nice I think. I can even use the old nails. Great. Okay.” He rubbed his hands together.
“I can’t thank you enough,” Mirna said, searching for her purse. “How much do I...”
“Oh, no,” Eric shook his head. “No, I couldn’t. Thanks, but just cook me a dinner or something. How’s that?”
Mirna didn’t argue. She would have adopted him. “Lovely,” she said. “I’ll do veal.”
“I’m a vegetarian.”
“Eggplant, then.”
“Perfect.”
Eric returned the following afternoon to remove the back panel. “You want to go ahead and take your stuff out. That’d be fine.”
Mirna removed her things and set them on the dresser in the bedroom. It all seemed so small, gathered into two neat piles rather than spread over a dozen drawers and cabinets. She returned to the hall to find Eric on his knees, an open tool box on the carpet beside him.
“Let me know if you need anything,” Mirna said. “Would you like a glass of iced tea or...a beer?” She had no beer, but you had to offer a young man a beer. To her relief Eric shook his head. “I’m all set now, thanks.”
“Okay.”
Mirna retreated downstairs. Bob was in the kitchen reading the paper and left as she came in. No argument need occur for them to be fighting, just the simple absence of communication and an enforced physical distance. He would go up to the bedroom now. With Eric in the hall he would close the door. He would lay on the comforter, socks off, slouched low, the paper tipped back over his chest like a sunbather’s reflector. Mirna took her writing tablet to the kitchen table and took Bob’s seat, the one facing the pantry. Today was an important one for her writing. Today Mirna’s protagonist would make the ultimate discovery, remove the final pin that would allow her past to spill down, unraveling in a clear, straight band of cause and effect, a narrative, a trajectory.
It was strange to write at the kitchen table. The light was warmer; Mirna felt more exposed. New shadows played on her page and it seemed as if this scene had a different coloring from the others. Slow, deliberate and almost accidental discovery yielded to the forced hand of this final moment, the appearance of a hidden third party, the uncovering of the linking fact which defined plausibility and made the story, finally and officially, a work of fiction. When she had finished Mirna felt as if she’d captured a rare insect under glass. She put down her pen and sat back. The muscles in her shoulders ached – she had been bent over the page at an awkward angle, clutching the pen with more ferocity than usual. She massaged the ball of her writing hand, feeling the circulation gradually return, her fingertips stabbed with darts of electricity. She was aware that someone had come in while she was writing, passed in pantomime through the room, outside her creative sphere and so almost completely invisible. Now she saw what Bob had left on the table, a sheaf of papers, the ink light, printed off the upstairs computer. Their arrangement made it clear they were for her to peruse. She brought the waxy sheets close to her face, struggling to read the tiny print. It was from a hotel listing, a website. Under one listing with a French name she saw a photograph. A large gentleman stood behind a front desk, a man’s hat, something from another era, tipped back on his brow. He looked like a friendly old fat man, the kind who flirted harmlessly with the cleaning ladies and liked to take his male guests aside to give them a wink and a handshake. Beneath the photo a caption read, “Raised in the Greek isles, hotel owner Sergey Aymeloglu opened Le Joli...”
Mirna lowered the page. The colors of the room had faded to a pale sepia. Suddenly she felt dead, inorganic. The link had been severed, the connection broken. With a break in the circuit all the successive lights dimmed and went out, and suddenly she felt herself returned to an obscurity she could not articulate. But she had been so sure the man had been Russian. The concierge and the owner two countries, one journey and another thirty years apart suddenly blended, and without their discrete identities became meaningless. Mirna felt her story vanishing. Internally she raged against Bob, his quiet aggression, the way he’d slipped in and delivered his blow without a word, the time he must have spent doing his research. Why deny her this? Why work so hard to punish her for such a small indiscretion as believing, wrongly even, that she knew their lives, knew her own life, better than he did. Mirna tossed the bundle of papers, letting them flutter and settle across the floor like doves coming to roost. She went to the stairs, feeling the beats of her own heart, each an individual seizure. She came to the top of the stairs. The bedroom door was shut, perhaps even locked to guard against intrusion. The desk stood apart from the wall, and Mirna saw the back panel had been removed and now leaned against the opposite wall in two large pieces. The original nails lay in a fan pattern on the carpet near the open tool box. There was a miniature hammer, a tiny crow bar. Eric had disappeared for the moment. Slowly, Mirna approached. Light from the window was visible through the opened cabinets. Without the back panel they were open on both sides and light poured through, all except the top right cabinet, still locked tight, its impassive door facing her now. Mirna approached the back of her desk. Its grid of drawers was now exposed. The inner support system was visible and Mirna could see something of how it was constructed. From behind she saw through to the opposite wall and there, in the top left hand corner, the exposed interior of the locked cabinet. Inside was a flat object, turned sideways. A letter or a photograph? A photograph. She took it out, careful not to scratch it against the rough lip of the wood. In the photo was a brittle and aging wall. Beyond the wall was a field full of some dark plant, its violent color dulled by age and the restrictions of the ancient camera. In the photo was a young girl with locks of black hair, posing prettily for her boyfriend, the person holding the camera, most likely a beautiful man in an open shirt. There was no one to hold it for them that day; they must have been alone on the path outside the village. So she took a photo of him and then, switching places, he took a photo of her. They kept their mementos, she between the pages of a novel, he in his pocket. The photos traveled far, his to Germany, hers to America. He had become a watch maker, she had become a teacher. She had lived and he had died, but with a son to carry on his family name, a son born in Germany to a different woman. The boy was an artisan, a builder of furniture, a dark, intelligent but clumsy boy, who’d left some old photograph of his father’s locked away in a desk he built.
The line was so clear, delivered to her whole, like a gift.
The End
