“He opts for electroshock therapy. To wipe out the thoughts.”
“Precisely.”
“So what am I supposed—I mean, what are we supposed to take from it?”
“Damned if you do—” He smiled a little, then turned to look out the window. He began talking about Sebald’s recent death, a car crash of questionable explanation, but I was feeling too rattled to respond. “Ana, you all right? You’re looking a bit peaked.” He said my name the Croatian way, not with the long, flat a’s most Americans used.
“I’m fine. Sorry,” I said. “Just a little under the weather.”
“Sebald has that effect on people. I call it the ‘spell of despair.’?”
I tried to protest, not wanting him to think I couldn’t manage his assignments, but he turned and stared right at me and I fell silent.
“Where did you say you were from again?”
“I—well. Originally?” I had not said. I didn’t want to say. But it came out anyway. “From Croatia. Zagreb.” A strange, weightless feeling came with having spoken the truth. I gripped the side of the chair as if I really was at risk of floating away.
Professor Ariel did not seem surprised. “Mmm,” he hummed. “I thought so.”
“What?”
“I had an inkling. Not Croatia, exactly. Just from somewhere else. Though the Balkans makes sense.”
“But how could you tell?”
“You have an old soul. I should know—I’ve got one, too. Also, you read too much.” He winked, and I allowed myself a little smile back. “The good news is your friends will catch up.” He swiveled back toward the corner bookshelf. “Now, for next week. Can you handle another Sebald? I’ve got his latest around somewhere…” Slowly he stood and jimmied the book off the shelf with a skeletal finger. “Here it is. Austerlitz.”
“Sorry I didn’t bring the other one back. I came straight from—a meeting.”
“Never mind. You keep it anyway. I’m sure I have another copy.”
He shuffled around his desk and put the book in my lap. “Go on then.”
“Thank you,” I said. But something else had caught his attention and he was far away now, running his fingers along the spine of a book as if it were braille, or the hand of someone he’d long loved, so I closed his heavy office door behind me.
I returned to my dorm, glad to find the hallways quiet and my roommate gone. I should call Brian, I thought, but could not bring myself to do it. Now that I’d told Professor Ariel even just a little about me I felt dangerously open. If I saw Brian I might tell him, too, and I was not ready to deal with the consequences of my deception. Instead I filled my oversize skateboarder’s backpack—remnant of my high school antiestablishment phase—with homework and Sebald and dirty laundry, and left. At Penn Station I bought a dollar bag of oversalted popcorn and climbed aboard the first in a series of commuter trains to Pennsylvania.
—
By the time I boarded the commercial jet in Frankfurt I hadn’t slept in two days and was afraid of nearly everything. I was frightened by the pressure in my ears at takeoff, of catching the sickness of the man who was throwing up into a paper bag across the aisle, of whatever was waiting for me on the other side of the ocean.
When we landed flight attendants took turns reading the airline tag around my neck like I was lost luggage. One grabbed my wrist and dragged me toward customs, where I moved through a series of roped-off queues and signed my name to a form I couldn’t read. An announcement over the intercom caught her attention, and she stared at the wall clock and tapped her foot. A man with too many badges rifled through my passport, eyeing my makeshift visa with its crooked staple. Behind him I watched suitcases wind around a black track. The officer asked me a question that, from what I could understand, was about whether I’d recently been on a farm. I looked at his badges and shook my head.
The officer stamped my passport and sent me onward, and the flight attendant said goodbye. At the baggage carousel I found my suitcase and followed everyone else toward a set of glass doors. The doors looked sealed, with no knobs or handles, but no one else seemed to notice. I thought about yelling out that everyone should be careful, but couldn’t think of how to say it in English. As the first people pushed ahead I narrowed my eyes, anticipating a spray of broken glass. But the doors slid open at the last minute, like magic.