Magdalena was leaning toward him a little bit, like it was important that she hear every word.
“And it’s interesting, the reasons people had for traveling all that way, hundreds of miles sometimes. Like, look, I think I’ve got it here—” Neil went through the papers in his backpack until he found a photocopy of a record from the mid-1300s. “I found this in the archives—see, isn’t the script beautiful? What it says is actually pretty sad. It’s a dispensation for a woman who’d promised to make the pilgrimage if her baby recovered from some sickness. And it did recover, but then it died of something else, and she was, you know, so heartbroken that she couldn’t make the trip. It’s not important, historically, except that these kinds of documents are all we have to piece together what it was like for people back then. I mean, you get a sense that life was hard, you know, and short. People lived closer to death than we do today. And that’s why religion was so important in every aspect of people’s lives.” Magdalena was nodding. “Like, instead of going to jail, a pilgrimage would be used as punishment. Criminals or people convicted of heresy—which was basically disagreeing with the church—they’d be forced to walk barefoot, sometimes even with chains locked around them, so that everyone would know what they’d done. I found a list of people from a certain parish who were made to go—people caught sleeping with other people’s wives, priests who were, you know, stealing or having affairs. I think I have a copy of it here somewhere—yeah, this is it. See, it says the reason right there: adultery, adultery, lechery, et cetera. Of course sometimes people just did it to get away. You know, get out of town, see the world—in the Middle Ages going on a pilgrimage was almost the only way a regular person could travel. And who knows, when they came to the place where the saint’s body was kept they might witness a miracle. People really believed in that stuff back then. Sight restored to the blind, cripples made to walk—”
Now Neil was the one who was leaning in over the table. He suddenly had a terrible thought. Did he have bad breath? He couldn’t smell it, but that was no guarantee.
“You want a piece of gum?” he asked.
“Okay,” Magdalena said. Neil searched around in his pockets and remembered he hadn’t bought any. Then, speaking of miracles, he found a single stick of Wrigley’s Doublemint at the bottom of his backpack. He absolutely had to have some for himself, so he broke it in half. “Sorry,” he said. “I thought I had a whole pack.”
“And where is it happening, these bodies all together like life coming up on the beach?” Magdalena asked.
“It’s down in Spain,” Neil said.
“And it’s a miracle?”
“Well, I mean, it’s a story. It’s not like bodies are washing up all the time,” Neil said.
“But sometimes?” she asked.
“Well, yeah, that’s the idea.”
As if this had answered a question she’d been thinking about for some time, Magdalena smiled. Then she changed the subject to the thing they’d spent the last half hour being careful not to talk about.
“I’ve been making one big mistake having her burned after death,” Magdalena said, pressing down the lid of the shoebox. One corner was bashed in and the box didn’t look like it would make it all the way to Lithuania.
“Why?” Neil asked.
“Well, some people are saying that the body must be—like you say. In-tact. For her religion.”
“Oh,” Neil said.
“If she is not whole, then at the end she doesn’t go up with God, something like this,” Magdalena said. “So, I have really fucked up.”
“Well, I guess,” Neil said, which wasn’t what he’d meant to say at all. “But, I mean, you didn’t know?”
“Not this, about the body. Some person was telling me later on. She have to be having all parts, nothing missing.”
“I think I’d rather be cremated,” Neil said. “Otherwise you just rot, you know?”
“Not this Saint Jack on the beach,” Magdalena said.
“Yeah,” Neil said. “But like I said, it’s just a story.”
Magdalena was quiet for a little while, and then she said, “You know something, Ni-yell? Maybe this is pretty good thing to be dropping those burned parts all on the floor, because until this time, for the last entire year actually, I’m not so much knowing what to do with her, and I’m really wanting to do right, you know?” Somehow with that tiny piece of gum Magdalena blew a bubble big enough to pop and she smiled at Neil again, her one grayish tooth like an exclamation point at the end, all of it at odds with her eyes, which were so light and clear that airplanes might have flown across them. Taken altogether she was the most perfect person Neil had ever seen.
And then something happened that was not a big deal in itself, but was so open to romantic interpretation that it made Neil feel as if the chemical balance of his entire body had been rearranged. Looking at him in that funny way of hers, Magdalena brought her hand up to his face and with a quick movement she traced her fingers along his temple. “You are having one small insect there, is nothing,” she said, and smiled again. But Neil hadn’t felt any little legs, only the soft touch of her hand brushing back a bit of his hair.
He was still a little woozy as he helped her buy the ticket and left her on the street outside the station, where people with piles of luggage waited for buses bound for Warsaw and Kiev. Then Neil walked back to the archives on rue du Faubourg-Saint-Denis, even though it wasn’t the most direct route, because that was the path Saint Denis was said to have taken out of Paris carrying his head under his arm after the Romans chopped it off around the third century A.D. It seemed fitting somehow to be walking in the footsteps of the patron saint of Paris, who had personally delivered his own head to his tomb in a feat of cephalophoric ambulation—literally, walking while carrying one’s own head—the most ridiculous of miracles.
The gate of the old walled city was in front of him, an arbitrary arch rising out of the streets now that the wall itself was gone. There were shops selling vegetables he’d never seen before, where people bought unfamiliar melons and green tomatoes in papery husks. The windows of a Pakistani sweetshop were packed with sticky orange balls and honeyed bricks of colored paste.