At the exact moment Lina had decided to leave her clothes and run for the door of the hotel room just as she was, the boy opened his eyes. He looked at her through the web of black cords he’d made over his face, and asked her to please stay for breakfast. There was a knock at the door, and someone brought in coffee and a platter of star fruit.
The boy’s name was Dov Kitrosser, and he was the ninth of ten children born to a family of Orthodox Jews who had left Spain for Russia at the time of the Inquisition, and Russia for England at the time of the pogroms. His grandfather had sold figs beside a newsstand in Piccadilly Circus, and from there he founded Britain’s largest fresh fruit dynasty, which supplied London’s finest restaurants with champagne grapes, golden watermelons, and raspberries that came packed on cushions of honeysuckle.
According to Lina, Dov Kitrosser had started grafting cherry sprigs onto the branches of his mother’s rose bushes almost before he could walk, and by the age of twenty he’d made a name for himself as a botanical engineer, one of the sharpest minds in the field of genetic modification, which, he told Lina as he spritzed a blood orange over the star fruit, would one day feed the world on dryland rice and virus-resistant potatoes. The genes of plants could be combined and remixed to do incredible things. Look, he said, opening a little box attached to the black cords that he’d draped over the back of a chair. Inside was a glass globe the size of a walnut, and in it the world’s tiniest apple tree was heavy with pinpoints of fruit.
Lina always talked like this, some of it possible and most of it not, her eyes unnaturally bright, fingers picking at the edges of her dress. But the name reminded Magdalena of something, and the next time Lina took a shower, Magdalena said she had to use the mirror to do her makeup. She put her glasses on and turned for a tissue just as Lina reached for a towel. Dov Kitrosser. Like everything else on Lina, she’d seen those words a hundred times before, but they came with no explanation; she hadn’t even been sure they were a name. None of the others, not even Tobias Kronen with his cameras, had found their way onto Lina’s skin, but Dov somehow was stuck there, the last few letters of his name disappearing into the shadow under her breast.
Still, Magdalena didn’t think too much about it, and she’d forgotten all about Dov Kitrosser when several days later a crate of pomegranates was delivered to their flat. Even when he became a fixture in Lina’s morning storytelling and the long skirt Magdalena wore to work started disappearing—because all of Dov Kitrosser’s sisters wore them below the knee—Magdalena still thought that he would pass. Then one day Lina said that she was leaving. She had found a girl named Roxie to take her room, so the rent would still get paid, and she separated her socks from Magdalena’s. Dov Kitrosser came in a car to take her things, leaving Magdalena scouring the enamel off the stove to cover the sound of their footsteps fading on the stairs.
But Lina didn’t take the camera with its cracked leather strap that Tobias Kronen had given her; Magdalena found it under her umbrella the next time it rained. Magdalena’s glasses had gotten broken when Roxie sat on her purse, and so Magdalena began taking the camera with her when she went out, adjusting a lever on the viewfinder to bring street signs into focus when she needed to. The image through the camera was so sharp that the first few times a face wandered into the frame she clicked the shutter release almost by accident, she was so startled by the crispness of the words across a forehead that suddenly bobbed up to block her view. But when the first roll was finished and she had the film developed, the words were gone, and Magdalena looked through the series of anonymous faces, wondering how anyone decided who was or was not beautiful—to her the lack of words alone made each one perfect.
Lina had been gone for less than a week when Magdalena left the house one morning late for work. She was looking up the street through the camera to see if the bus was coming, when the space in the viewfinder was taken up by Lina getting out of a cab. Magdalena was just about to call out and tell her to hurry over before the bus came if she wanted to use Magdalena’s keys to get into their apartment, but she saw that there was someone else in the back seat. He handed Lina a laundry basket full of clothes, and she held his hand till she was all the way out and standing on the curb. Then she let go and the taxi pulled away. The man inside waved but Lina didn’t wave back, she just stood in the middle of the street watching it until it turned the corner, with little streaks of makeup running down her face.
It had been years since Magdalena had seen Lina cry, and for a moment she stood watching with the camera to her face. Lina always seemed so capable, like a master puppeteer who, though she might have loved or needed men for certain things, never forgot that they were dolls on strings, and if they danced it was because she made them do it.
Magdalena put the camera away and took out her phone to tell her manager that she’d be late, and she started toward the Lina-size shape that was now waiting in front of their building. Usually Lina’s stories of endings came days or weeks after they had happened, but this one she told before they’d even made it up the stairs.
She and Dov had gotten married, a crazy thing, done hastily in the middle of the night when they’d both taken too much of something—Lina wasn’t even sure of what—and in the morning Dov regretted everything. He went into convulsions of prayer and by the time he’d calmed down, Lina was so relieved he hadn’t torn himself to pieces that she agreed when he said they ought to be apart for a little while, to get their heads straight. So Lina found herself back at the flat, a married woman, leaning against the buzzer with her things in a laundry basket at her feet.
By the time they got up to the fifth floor, Lina wasn’t crying anymore. She had a plan, and she hung her head over the sink and made Magdalena cut off all her hair. To make things right, she said. It was part of a ceremony that should have happened on her wedding night. Her hair fell in long blonde sheets into the breakfast dishes. Magdalena pressed the scissors flush against her skin, and as she cut she saw that certain words at Lina’s hairline were in fact the beginnings of whole sentences that continued up across her scalp. Lina had more writing under her hair than anywhere else on her body. Some of it Magdalena recognized as history, the stories of things that had happened before Lina was even born. One string of words was in English; others were written in alphabets Magdalena couldn’t understand. She had no choice but to look at them. In this state she wouldn’t think of letting Lina use the scissors herself. Lina made her get a razor and clear away even the roots, so that no stray hair would float in the ritual bath that was supposed to precede her conversion. “What are you talking about?” Magdalena asked.
“Dov’s cousin is a rabbi, I’m going to him,” Lina said.