“I couldn’t have known,” Dov said. “How could I have known?”
Suddenly Dov was kneeling on the floor at her feet, his head in her lap like a child. “I love her,” he said, and now Magdalena saw that this, at least, was true. Up close the dusky color of Dov’s skin was not his skin at all; it was caused by hundreds—thousands—of tiny letters, as if his entire body had been caught in a fine black web. Magdalena leaned in, and she could see that the letters did not make sentences, like they did on other people. They did not tell stories or record important dates. All over Dov’s body, on the back of his neck and on his cheeks and his hands, even darkening his lips and the skin under his fingernails, four letters were repeated again and again. Lina Lina Lina Lina.
When Barry asked Magdalena why she’d tried to do it, as they sat on the floor of the bathroom and she wiped the cut on his hand with alcohol then wrapped it up tight to help stop the bleeding, she looked to where Barry’s blood and not her own was washing pink down the bathtub drain and she read what was written along the edges of the gash in Barry’s palm. Tell him, it said. The dot in the i had been sliced through by the razor. And Magdalena did. She told Barry about Lina dying and the words she’d seen since before she could even read them, and Dov, who had asked her how can I go on? and how she had had to say, honestly, that she didn’t know. She’d never seen such singleness of purpose across a person’s skin. And how her own skin was blank, as if her existence was an oversight or an accident, and no record had been made. She told Barry about the apricot tree in the church parking lot and what it said on the coroner’s report, how she knew now that the words she saw were true, and how she’d cost Lina and Dov their chance at eternity.
But she could tell that Barry thought she was making it all up, because from that day on he started asking her why she wouldn’t read out loud what was written on his skin.
Magdalena had met Barry in London, on one of the days when she was out with Lina’s camera. By that point she’d lost both her jobs. Roxie had gotten spooked about living in a place where someone had so recently died and moved out, leaving Magdalena to pay the rent. Dov had promised to help, but there was no answer at the number he’d given her, and when she called his office they said he was unavailable and would be for some time.
She was in Regent’s Park, taking pictures. By then she’d used up three more rolls of film and was most of the way through a fourth. She didn’t know how she’d pay to have them developed, but she didn’t care. The important thing was the snap and click of the shutter, the stiff advance of the film. There were bills from the funeral home and the police inspector in charge of the inquest had been leaving her increasingly curt messages, insisting that she go to the station house to fill out the last forms. But it seemed more important just then to peel layers off the faces of strangers like the skin of an onion, too translucent to capture what was written there, so thin as to never be missed. If Tobias Kronen had been right and each photograph robbed a person of a tiny layer of themselves, then each photograph that Magdalena took might dim the words a little, eating away the dot of an i, changing an e to a c. Eventually, if only someone would stand still long enough for her to take a hundred pictures or a thousand or a million, Magdalena thought it was just possible that she could erase the words altogether. But people moved around too much, and the rolls of film were short, so Magdalena had to hope that other photographers would come along to strip the last layers away.
In the meantime, there was the problem of her English. It had improved so much in the months she’d been in London that she read without meaning to as she focused the camera.
West London Chess Club Champion, 1978
Chief comptroller Mackay & Singh (embezzler)
Born with a caul
When we come back the flowers have bloomed take off my clothes I think it is for the best
Homosexual
￡43,880 a year
Broke Hamida Grigoryan’s collarbone in two places
Asks for the children, they say there never were any
Automobile accident, 17 November 2019, 06:59
Simon’s hands
The baby’s feet
But it would all disappear, along with the diseases, addictions, loves, and debts, when she got the little envelope with the photographs back from the drugstore.
She thought she was taking pictures of all kinds of people, until she heard a voice behind her say, “Oh yeah, she’s your best yet.” Magdalena turned around and saw a man sitting on a bench with a camera of his own. “Go on, take it before she moves,” the man said, motioning for her to turn back to the girl who was standing a few yards away, talking on the phone, making circles with her toe in the sand.
“You’ve got an eye for the girls, eh?” the man said.
“What do you mean?” Magdalena asked.
“Ah, not from here,” he said, hearing her accent.
Magdalena started walking away.
“Don’t go away,” he said in Lithuanian. Magdalena turned around.
“What did you say?” she said in Lithuanian.
“A good guess,” he said, back to English now. Magdalena didn’t say anything, but she also didn’t go away.
“I’ve been watching you,” he said. “You like taking pictures of pretty girls, yeah?”
“I’m just taking pictures. Not just of girls.” Even as she said this she realized he was right, she had been taking pictures only of girls, and only, really, of girls who looked a little like Lina.
“Hey, labas,” the man said. “Maybe you’ll let me see the pictures when you’re done?”
“I don’t think so,” Magdalena said.
“I like taking pictures too.”
Magdalena didn’t say anything.
“That’s a nice camera. Where’d you get it?”
“It was my friend’s,” she said.
He looked at her for a second. “Hey, are you alright?”
“Yeah,” Magdalena said. But she’d started to cry. The camera hung around her neck, with the lens cap dangling on its string. The girl on the phone looked up and moved a little farther away.
“Hey,” Barry said. “Now don’t do that.”