The people doing the inquest questioned Dov Kitrosser again and again, and Magdalena too, asking her if she’d known that Dov had accepted a post with a biotechnology company in Zurich and had bought just one plane ticket there. Had she known about the fights, the threats from his mother, or the Australian businessman that Lina had been seen with the night before?
Tests were run on the blender, showing that the cyanide content of those apricot seeds was particularly high. But, as the policewoman said, it was commonly known that you weren’t supposed to eat them. They gave Magdalena an envelope with a copy of the inquest papers, in case she needed documentation when she brought Lina home.
Dov’s brother called to say they would pay for the airline company to take Lina’s body back to Lithuania. There’s no need, Magdalena said. After the autopsy there was nothing to do but cremate her, and she had the ashes double bagged inside a shoebox she could hold on her lap. Something was wrong, but Magdalena didn’t understand the silence on the other end of the line until Dov’s brother explained that according to Jewish law if Lina’s body wasn’t buried whole, there would be no way for her and Dov to rise together at the end of time and be reunited in eternity.
Magdalena stood under the tree in the church garden with the bite of apricot still in her mouth, unchewed and getting to be tasteless, like an unwelcome second tongue. She swallowed it.
She’d imagined this moment many times, wondering what would happen to her when she found out for certain whether the words were true or they weren’t. If they weren’t true, then she was crazy, and if they were, then the whole world was, crazy and cruel to leave little notes like that, as if life was worried it might forget what it had planned. The only thing Magdalena had always been sure of was that not knowing was better than knowing, and so she’d tried hard for a very long time not to look into things too much. The doctor her mother used to go out with did go back to his wife, just like it said under his chin, and her friend Marija did end up marrying somebody called Juras, whose name was written in a band around her ring finger. But Lina’s mother was the one who became a drunk, and her skin hadn’t said a word about that, while Magdalena’s mother had mostly stopped drinking, and still it said alkoholika like a brand on the side of her throat. And Marija’s baby who was born with a hole in his heart had had whole paragraphs filling up his cheeks.
Well? Magdalena said to herself. The question echoed around inside her head. Then an answer came, not a word but a feeling. A certainty, like a breeze that had found its way into her mind. She thought of the place where Luck was written on the inside of her mother’s wrist. In the stories Luck was sometimes beautiful and sometimes had to be tricked and locked in a basket. But she always got out, she got what she wanted and rode away holding the reins of the horse she shared with Death, who was her kinder sister. There was a drugstore just off Faringdon Road. She would stop there to get what she needed. She would do it today. Magdalena ate the rest of the apricot and spat out the seed.
{RICHARD}
Paris, June
As it turned out, my hotel was only a block or two from the boulevard de Sébastopol, not far from the tower under scaffolding I’d remembered seeing earlier that morning. A statue of a man holding a staff stood on top of one corner of the tower, giving it a distinctly asymmetric look. I made a note that my hotel was on the statue’s right-hand side, in case I got lost again.
It was still too early for checkin, so I left my luggage with the lady at the front desk. She insisted on putting an extra piece of tape around Aunt Cat’s suitcase before she stowed it in the closet, and then suggested I go out and have some breakfast. There was a bakery nearby. I bought some rolls and looked around for a bench where I could sit and eat them. I stopped at a souvenir stand to buy another city map, and when I saw that my tower had been included in a postcard-size street scene mounted on a tiny easel, I picked that up too. The picture was only a print of a painting that, if you looked at it closely, had been sloppily done in the first place, and there was a sticker on the back saying the whole thing had been made in Vietnam. At ten euros I was sure I was being taken advantage of, but I bought it anyway.
As soon as I’d done it I felt a bit sheepish. I hardly needed another trinket to sit and gather dust, even one brought back from Paris. So I figured I’d send it to my friend Diana. Before Walt died I had her give me a hand sorting through Aunt Cat’s old boxes of knickknacks, and I could tell she liked that kind of thing. I’d come in to find her flushed and covered with dust, delighted at a miniature nativity scene set into a walnut shell or a bit of sewing advice—hide the knot as you would a secret—stitched onto a pincushion Cat must have made when she was a girl. When I picture Diana now, back home in her own kitchen, I’m certain that the windowsill above her sink is filled with those sorts of little things. The painting on its easel would fit in fine, something to look at while she waits for the water to run warm.
But then I thought that maybe I’d better not. I haven’t heard from Diana since she left to go home back in November, and I wasn’t sure she’d welcome a souvenir bought on a whim by a man she probably hasn’t thought of since. I put the little painting in my pocket, with one leg of the easel still sticking out, thinking that maybe I’d save it as a keepsake after all. It might be nice to look at it now and then and let the picture of the tower with its one corner higher than the rest bring me back to Paris.
The rolls I’d bought from the bakery were still warm, and I found a park with an empty bench where I could eat them. I had to take the painting out of my pocket to sit down. I looked at it again, thinking about life’s accumulations. Even my Aunt Cat, who never seemed the type for keepsakes; after she died we found a dozen boxes at the back of her closet filled with roadside souvenirs and baby shoes and bits of cracked china she’d saved over the years, so much stuff that I started having Diana come out every week just to get through it.