It had been a mistake not to believe what it said on Lina’s skin, and she didn’t want to make that mistake again. So for a little while after Neil called to tell her about the camera and Magdalena realized why Barry happened to bang open the bathroom door just when he did, she thought about taking Neil’s advice and reporting Barry to the police. Not for what he’d put in the cabinet—somehow that didn’t seem right. After she cut the lock on the medicine cabinet with Barry’s hedge clippers she pulled the camera out of the wall and held it up in front of Barry, dangling wires. But Barry just laughed and wagged the finger that was still wrapped in cotton from where he’d cut himself trying to grab the razor from Magdalena, saying, “Guess you’re not in much of a position to complain.” And it was true. She didn’t know why, exactly, but she was glad Barry had come in when he did.
It was the other things she wondered about. Barry had guilt written all over him, and it seemed that someone ought to know. He’d been a young man when he did what he did, and, like the Lithuanian peasants drunk on country brandy and the unfamiliar power to remove whole families from the history of the world, he may have believed that what he did was necessary or found a way to close his mind to the worst of it. But if he had an explanation, it wasn’t written down. All that Magdalena saw on Barry’s skin were facts and dates.
Still, for a while after the day Magdalena told Barry about the words, she was careful not to say anything more. When Barry yelled to her from the living room one afternoon because somebody had spilled something on his keyboard, calling her Two Hundred Twenty Thousand instead of by name, Magdalena answered. But when he made her take the book with the sticky notes off the shelf and told her to start reading the chapter on Lithuania, marked Magdalena, she told him, “You are some sick fuck, you know that, Barry?”
“Read,” he said.
“I don’t want to,” she said.
“It’s for your own good. You should know these things.”
“No,” Magdalena said.
“Then get out. Pack your bags,” Barry said.
Magdalena put on her glasses and then, instead of looking down at the book, she looked at him, pretending to stumble a bit over the names, so he would know she was reading.
“Mount Darwin, 2 September 1975. Chained the feet of Erasmus Chiutsi made it look like he hung himself,” she said.
“What?” Barry said.
“Burned and beat his brother Amos,” she said. “Number 5 Rest Camp, Chilimanzi, 25 September 1975. Beat Mariya Mandiuraya with a stick, set dogs at her breasts. Covered Grace Mandirova’s head with a white cloth poured water on her face six times gave her tablets and cotton wool.”
“Get out,” Barry said. “What the fuck is this? Get out.”
He knocked her glasses off, but Magdalena picked them up again and held them to her face—not because she needed them; she’d known it all by heart for months.
“Pokwe Rest Camp, 28 September 1975. Told Mushandi Kurwara the children he has will be the last ones. A bag with wires coming out. Three shocks. Chiweshe Protected Village No. 12, 2 August 1975—”
“I’m going to kill you,” Barry said.
After that there was a lot of shouting. Barry chased her out of the house and threw her things after her. The new girl started screaming; there was the sound of police sirens and Lina’s camera crashing onto the pavement. Barry ran out after Magdalena with a piece of pipe from the basement, and to stop him from using it Magdalena told him what he’d wanted to know, which was his future. Little words, written small across his eyelids: blood cancer, metastatic. He set the pipe down on the pavement, where it rolled a little until Magdalena stopped it with her foot. When she looked at him again Barry had slumped like an old man down onto the curb. She put the pipe in the bushes where the police wouldn’t see it, and told the new girl to be quiet. Beginning with the things that Barry had thrown out onto the street, Magdalena started packing her bag.
“ ‘Saves the life of Magdalena Bikauskait? in the bathtub,’ you have this written too,” she told Barry as she left. But it was a lie, it didn’t say that on him anywhere, and Barry just sat, not looking up.
She’d been walking for a long time. The sidewalks in Paris were uneven; her arms felt like they were tearing out of her shoulders from the effort of pulling the suitcase while trying to keep it balanced on its one wheel, and she still hadn’t found the street that would take her to the Montparnasse station. Two women passed by, their faces lined with French words that might have meant anything. A man in a doorway smoked a pipe with his sleeves rolled up; she could see columns of text running down his arms.
Magdalena was beginning to have serious doubts about what she was doing, and she was starting to think she was really crazy for not getting on the bus to Vilnius. The street she was on wasn’t on the map she’d gotten at the station and she was trying to read the name on the street sign at the next corner and at the same time thinking that maybe she ought to go back to the station and ask please if it were possible to buy back her canceled ticket—when she nearly bumped into a man who was standing still in the middle of the sidewalk.
He was bending down to look in the window of a shop. Magdalena stepped off the curb to go around him and lost her grip on the handle of Lina’s suitcase, which rolled over into the street. The man turned to help her and Magdalena hurried to take off her glasses, because it seemed that out of all the millions of people in Paris, this man was also Lithuanian; the meaning of a string of words in her own language jumped from the man’s face into Magdalena’s head before she even knew she was reading them.
She had gotten out of the habit a long time ago of reading out loud the words she saw, but the particular phrase on the man’s skin was so familiar that she heard her own voice saying it before she could help herself. “Akys nemato, ?irdies nesopa.” It was something Magdalena’s mother said all the time. If the eyes don’t see, the heart doesn’t hurt. Something like that. It was one of Magdalena’s mother’s favorite expressions. She said it when she bought a bottle of high-quality shampoo, taking it off the shelf with a laugh, not looking at the price. She said it, quietly, to Magdalena when they passed a young woman swaying over a bottle on an empty street, and if a friend’s thieving ex-husband drove past in a new car, Magdalena’s mother would narrow her eyes and say it as loudly as she liked. It was an old-fashioned saying, so well used it hardly meant anything, and the man on the street looked at Magdalena strangely. She was about to hurry past before he could ask her why she’d said something like that out of nowhere in a language she couldn’t possibly have known he’d understand, but as it turned out she didn’t have to explain, because it seemed he hadn’t understood her after all.