“You know, in the end, you’re my biggest success story.”
I thought of Sharon’s speech, the photos of the grave excavations. All the others, like my parents, who hadn’t yet been found.
“I don’t know if success is the word.”
She smiled faintly. “Maybe not. Truth is I don’t think I’ll ever get over the things I saw there.” She paused. “But I shouldn’t be putting that on you.”
I told her it was okay.
“Petar would be so proud of you.”
I mumbled a thanks and concentrated on my salad until the waiter mercifully appeared with the check. I reached for my wallet. Twenty and studenthood was an interim existence in which I frequently found interacting with “real adults” awkward, them waving off my offers to split bills as something ridiculous, and making me feel even more like a child.
“Don’t even think about it.”
“Are you sure?” I said, though in this case I was thankful; my work-study check was sure to take a hit from the priceless menu. Sharon gave an exaggerated nod as she tipped back the last of her wine.
Outside, the burst of spring had given way to a thin, cold drizzle. Sharon pulled the belt of her trench coat tight as we stood together on the curb. “Do you ever think about going back?” she said.
“I tried not to think about it at all until you called.” I moved to pull my coat closed, too, but the zipper was jammed. “Do you?”
“I don’t think it’s good idea. For me.” She stuck her arm out to hail a cab. “Looks like the skies are about to open up. You need a ride somewhere?”
I shook my head. Anyway, we were going in opposite directions. A taxi pulled to the curb on the other side of the street. “Guess I’ll take that,” she said. We shared a mannered hug and she ran across the street, still poised in her heels on the slick asphalt. I watched her into the cab, but she was typing something on her BlackBerry and didn’t look up again.
As I walked to the subway my mood blackened, something like anger but about what I couldn’t pinpoint. Frustration, maybe, that I still understood so little. Instead of clarity and insight, adulthood had only brought more confusion. At the next corner I dumped the index cards in the trash.
3
The city was crowded and wet and grim, with that air of gray desperation it sometimes took on in March. Lunch had gone long and I was going to be late for my appointment with Professor Ariel.
I tried to gauge whether I had enough time to return to my room to retrieve the book he’d loaned me, but decided against it and headed straight for his office.
Reading was one of the only ways in which I allowed myself to think about the continent and country I’d left behind. Though I hadn’t told the professor anything about myself, he seemed to know I was not at home in the world, and so he lent me books—Kundera and Conrad and Levi and a host of other displaced persons. I’d read one and return to his office, where he’d wax eloquent about the authors with such intimate detail I was convinced they were all his close friends. I’d just finished The Emigrants, and though most of the week’s anxieties had been UN-focused, the book hadn’t been much easier on my mind. I’d followed the wandering protagonist—at once forlorn and whimsical—all the while with an uneasy feeling that the professor somehow knew more about me than I cared to reveal.
I ran up the stairs to his office and knocked though the door was half-open. The room was small and warmly lit, with shelves covering nearly every surface. Stacks of overflow books lined the floor. Professor Ariel sat at a desk in the center, looking little and frail amid his collection.
“Come in. Sit down,” he said in his trembly way. “What did you think of the Sebald?” I moved some papers from the chair and put them on his desk. Behind him on the wall a giant poster of Wis?awa Szymborska, whom he’d also made me read, watched over our meetings like a chain-smoking guardian angel.
“It got to me,” I said.
“Remarkable prose, isn’t it?”
“Yes.” It was true, but that wasn’t the reason. “Not just that, though. The characters. To come face-to-face with people who never recover from their traumas. It was…”
“Disconcerting?”
I nodded.
“And yet Sebald continually points to the imperfections of memory. Not what we usually think of as the ‘searing’ of a certain trauma into one’s mind. That haunting lucidity. What do you make of it?”
That had been what scared me most. What if my memory of my parents’ final moments was all wrong? I felt certain I had kept them fresh and protected inside me. The idea that the whim of the subconscious might corrupt what little I had left of them was too much to accept. “But, maybe it’s not that way for everyone. Maybe some people do remember,” I said.
“Certainly. But that comes with its own problems, no? Consider the character of Ambros Adelwarth.”
“His uncle?”
“Tormented by such clear images of his past—”