A bird had flown into the yellow church. Magdalena watched it dodge the blue and red streams of light from the stained glass windows, then, seeing the clear glass at the back of the church, the bird turned suddenly. Its wings caught the sun in a flash of white and it slammed against the glass, then fell like a drip of pale ink down onto the floor of the church without making much of a sound. A little lie, to say that life left off like that, like a pause for breath, a little sigh, a tap against the glass.
When they got there the ambulance men told Magdalena to go into the other room. They put Lina on the kitchen floor and started working on her, sticking her with needles and pumping her stomach. Magdalena did not go into the other room, but rather noticed that Lina’s body was seven kitchen floor tiles long and three across. Her new hair had gotten knocked to one side and Magdalena saw that it was a wig, like Dov’s sisters wore. It was fanned out across the kitchen tiles and Magdalena kept thinking it was going to get dirty. The ambulance men cut open Lina’s shirt and pressed paddles against her chest, and Magdalena remembered the story of the girl with beautiful hair. She cut it in hanks and floated them down the river to the man she loved, who wove them into a rope to catch her with.
In Lithuania people said that deaths come stinging like bees, but Magdalena learned that night that this was wrong. Deaths did not strike suddenly; they took time, one had to fill each moment. So Magdalena repeated the prayers she could think of. At some point one of the ambulance men told her there was nothing more they could do. Maybe she’d misheard, because even after he said it they kept trying, and Magdalena began to wish that they would stop, put Lina back on the couch, and go away.
The ambulance man made her sit on the bed and told her again that they were going to stop. She asked him to please try some more. I’m sorry, he said. Is there someone you can call?
Lina’s expressions had stayed with Magdalena for a while, stuck in her head like a song. The song faded, the way Lina squinted her eyes a little bit when she was thinking about something faded, but her eyelids, her feet turned out like a ballerina, the way she had looked, just the same and utterly different after the men from the ambulance laid her on Magdalena’s bed and went away—that stayed, and Magdalena could run the whole world round, live in her haze, take the pills Barry gave her in a little cup to help her sleep, help them all sleep in that house where the carpets ate up the sound. She could put up her hands, shut her eyes, and still the thing that was Lina but was not anymore would be there in her mind, its eyelids turning gray. No words she’d ever read anywhere had prepared her for that.
“Oh dear,” said a woman who had come up beside Magdalena in the church, without Magdalena noticing. She was wearing a little thing on her head that made Magdalena think she was probably a nun, but in a modern, English way. Magdalena took her glasses off and took a step back, keeping the woman’s face a blur.
“Oh, the poor thing,” the woman said, scooping the bird off the floor and onto a bit of paper. “I’ve said all along we ought to put something on that glass.” She folded the bird into the paper, then she turned to Magdalena. “Are you here for Santiago?”
“Yes?” Magdalena said.
“Hurry now and get into some proper walking shoes—the others left an hour or so ago. You’re the last group with a hope of making it by the Feast Day, if you ask me, and even so you’ll have to trot. You’ve got quite a bit of ground to cover before you get to France, and then it’s another good five or six weeks, unless you go by sea. The others will be off to Marlborough next, to meet the group coming over from Saint Andrew’s in Chippenham. You can probably catch them there if you take the bus,” the woman said. “It’s a bit of a cheat, but after all, it’s quite a long trip. I don’t suppose it matters much if you start off here or in Marlborough, does it?”
“I don’t know,” Magdalena said.
“Let me give you your stamp all the same. Come along,” she said, and Magdalena followed her into a little office. “Have you got a book yet?” she asked.
“No,” Magdalena said.
“You can pick one up in Marlborough. I’ll just put it here for now, shall I? You’ll paste it in your book later on.” She took out a stamp and ink pad and pressed the stamp down hard on a bit of paper. Magdalena brought it up close to her face to see it.
“What is it?” she asked.
“Scallop shell,” the nun said. “After the bones of Saint James had been lost at sea, his body washed ashore covered in shells and perfectly whole, and there’s your miracle, see? All the pilgrims buy little badges with the scallop shell on them, you can get one for yourself once you get to France. Don’t be shy about going up to anyone who’s got one on if you need a bit of help.”
“Okay,” Magdalena said.
“Off you go,” the woman said. “And let me give you something for the way.” The woman led her into a little office.
Whole, Magdalena thought. Such an odd word in English. It was the same word Dov Kitrosser’s brother had used. “The body must be left whole,” he’d said. At the time Magdalena hadn’t understood. “In a hole?” she said. “Whole,” Dov’s brother said. “Like, all in one piece.”
Magdalena wished she had been listening more closely to the other things the nun had been saying. Who was this man who had died and then washed ashore whole? There had been a time when Magdalena believed very strongly in miracles. While her mother worked cleaning the church, Magdalena would sometimes follow her and collect the bits of wax she scraped off the floor from under the votive candles, looking for the face of Mother Mary in the drippings. Magdalena wanted to think some more about the little forests of wax that grew underneath the rows of candles, each one all that was left of some certain prayer, and she wanted to know more about the place where dead people washed ashore whole. She might have asked, but the nun was still talking, and in another moment Magdalena forgot all about miracles.