At the Saint-Denis gate, rue du Faubourg-Saint-Denis became rue Saint-Denis and the shops changed. Professor Piot was right, Neil thought. A city trails its past along behind it. Merchants had been required to pay a tax to enter the old city, and the imprint of that fact had lasted through the centuries, so that even now the shops inside where the wall used to be sold different things than those beyond it.
Inside the Saint-Denis gate the vegetable stalls were gone and the stores were filled with rhinestone belts and wholesale lace, fur and wedding dresses, vente en gros. Shopkeepers smoked outside with their sleeves rolled up, a begging gypsy girl kneaded an orange between her hands, and a prostitute stood in a doorway, her breasts like brown balloons pushed up against her neck. Long passages cut between buildings ended improbably in sunlight, and it occurred to Neil that he was entering the portion of his life when one began to accumulate regrets. Before, somehow, no decision had seemed too permanent. But now that he was in college, wading straight into whatever it was that would turn out to be his life, suddenly each thing he did or didn’t do was tangled up in consequences. And with this thought, as if he’d gotten a look at his own life’s ledger of missed opportunities, Neil realized that he shouldn’t have let Magdalena get on the bus to Vilnius.
{MAGDALENA}
Paris, June
People pressed in around Magdalena, jostling each other to get on the bus. All around her words in Lithuanian sprouted on the backs of hands and across foreheads and chins. Taking off her glasses didn’t help. The people were so close and the words were so familiar that Magdalena knew their meanings without even realizing she’d read them.
The line was moving. People were getting on the bus. She looked over her shoulder at Neil, who was now just an orange-headed blur. She waved. Part of the blur waved back. An old woman in front of her was telling her husband to check and double-check their passports. Stazinis ?irdies nepakankamumas, which meant congestive heart failure, looped like a noose around her neck.
The patch of color that was Neil waved again. Then it turned and got smaller and smaller among the other shapes. The old woman in front of her was stepping onto the bus. PARIS-WARSZAWA-VILNIUS said the sign in the window. Magdalena looked again for the orange-topped shape, but it was gone.
She got out of line. She took her bag out from under the bus, ignoring the bus driver who shouted after her in Lithuanian and then in Polish that she wasn’t allowed to do that, and she walked with her head down across the street and back toward the station. She didn’t look up again until she was far away from the bus and the words on the skin of the people around her didn’t mean anything to her at all. She put her glasses on and looked around for the ticket counter.
She returned the ticket for half its value, hoping thirty euros would be enough for a ticket to the place where bodies washed ashore whole. She tried to remember exactly what Neil had said. In English she asked several people how to take the bus to Spain. They told her to go to the Montparnasse Station. Was there a bus to a place called the End of the Earth? They didn’t know.
The people in Paris looked different. They seemed to have been collected from all over the world. She wished she still had Lina’s camera, so she could see the exact shapes of their noses and cheeks. She felt like she had when she and Lina had first arrived in London and she let herself stare and stare at people, trying to see their features underneath foreign words, not worrying that she would read them.
The Montparnasse station was far away, but Magdalena didn’t want to use any of her money to take the metro there, so she got a map from the man at the information desk and, feeling a little dizzy because she wasn’t used to wearing her glasses, she walked out of the station with the shoebox under her arm, pulling Lina’s bag behind her on its shaky wheel. She felt so happy that she blew a bubble with the gum that Neil had given her, even though it was not the bubble-blowing kind.
After Barry had dumped her clothes out of the upstairs window, he’d hurled the camera after her into the street. It had bounced, then shattered its lens against the curb, and in all the confusion with the police and the new girl and Veronika screaming, Magdalena never had a chance to take out the film. She wasn’t sorry to leave Barry’s house, but she was sorry about that camera.
Barry had been very nice to Magdalena for a few weeks after the day in the bathroom when she told him about the words while his cut from the razor blade was bleeding all over her jeans. But once he stopped being afraid that Magdalena was going to try to cut herself up again when he wasn’t looking, he started treating the whole thing as a big joke.
“C’mon Magdute, tell my future,” he’d say to her. But most of the things that were written on Barry were in the past. Magdalena didn’t understand a lot of what it said, but there were quite a few dates, most of them before she was born, as if Barry had fallen face-first into a history book while the ink was still wet. She kept her mouth shut.
Before she found out the meaning of apricots, Magdalena had felt almost comforted by the nonsense on Barry’s face. Ugly things were written there, but they were interspersed with words that were still meaningless after more than two years in England, and she found them easy to ignore. But after that day in the churchyard, Magdalena started paying more attention to Barry’s skin, knowing the things it said were probably true. He caught her studying him once or twice. “Oh, give us a hint,” he would say. Or he’d try to give her a kiss and say, “What’s it got to say there about you and me?” But when Magdalena finally did read him what was written there, she did it not because he kept asking her to, but to shut him up about the numbers.
Barry had a whole library of books on World War Two, and his favorite, the one he had tabbed with sticky notes, one with the name of each girl living in his house, was called The Holocaust of the Jews in Eastern Europe. When he got mad about something, he’d start yelling at Magdalena and the other girls about the things that had happened during the war as if they had personally been the perpetrators and he was the victim, which was really something, considering what it said on his chin and the back of his neck. They could tell when he was really mad because he replaced their names with death tolls.
To Zosia from Poland he’d say, “Two Point Nine Million, who the fuck is this guy hanging around across the street? Get out there and tell him to push off,” or to Veronika, who was Czech, he’d say, “Two Hundred Seventy-Seven Thousand, your goddamn orange hair is stopping up my drains.”