The file Neil had requested was actually a very old book, centuries older than the century-old carton holding it together. The carton was covered with archival stamps and crossed-out notations; it was confusing, and Neil had to look at it for a few minutes before he realized that what he was seeing was the history of Lithuania, more or less, stamped and restamped across the carton. It seemed that as the country changed hands, the archives did too, because next to the faded Polish label was an archival notation in darker ink, which Neil, who was normally pretty good at deciphering old handwriting, studied for a long time before he realized that he was looking at the cursive form of another alphabet, with loops and swirls in unfamiliar places. It must be Cyrillic, Neil thought, but it had clearly been made by a much older Russian administration than the heavy block letters of the Soviet archival stamp next to it. That in turn had been crossed out and replaced with a much newer-looking stamp, with its own reference numbers added in thick permanent marker, as if the Lietuvos Valstyb?s Istorijos Archyvas intended to have the last word.
The book itself had once been bound with thick leather covers held together by strings. Neil could see the weave of the paper; it crumbled when he accidentally touched an edge, leaving fine dust on his fingers. On the first page there was an official-looking invocation of the monarch, Sigismundus Rex, dated 1623. He turned the pages carefully. It seemed to be a collection of administrative documents—charters, registries, and acts, the daily business of an empire recorded in ornate Polish script. Neil had spent a lot of time looking at those sorts of documents, but he still felt a thrill at the thought that someone like him, a college kid who was basically nobody, could find himself holding pieces of paper that had been signed by kings.
Neil often wondered if other people felt like this, and he looked up, wanting suddenly to find a stranger to smile at, some old man with a stack of notes and a magnifying glass who would understand exactly how Neil felt. But the other people in the reading room were all hunched over their documents. Microfilm machines whirred and clicked. Behind the glass window of her office the archivist arranged white and purple flowers in a vase. She wiped her desk with a rag, then arranged the flowers again so that the white ones were surrounded by purple.
Neil found the document that matched the reference number Professor Piot had given him. He made a note of the title of the document, and that it came under the year MDCXXIX.
It was getting late, and Neil wanted to be sure he’d be able to take a shower and still have plenty of time in case he got lost on the way to Magdalena’s mother’s apartment. He started sweating just thinking about it, and he wiped his hands on his jeans before carefully closing the book. He put it back in the carton and stood in the doorway of the archivist’s office, watching as she pinched a dead blossom and found a better angle for the vase, waiting for the right moment to ask how to get copies.
{RICHARD}
Paris, June
I wasn’t the only one who’d forgotten that the French National Archives opened late on Saturdays. I waited outside the gate with one or two others until a guard came and unlocked it for us, then I went upstairs to the office of the woman I’d spoken to the day before. She seemed slightly put out to see me there and reminded me that the staff were available for consultation from Monday to Friday only, and that such meetings had to be scheduled in advance.
“Well?” she said when she’d finished. “What is it you want to know?”
I told her I was interested in seeing my mother’s medical files. “No, we have nothing like this here,” she said. The records from Inga Beart’s stay at the H?tel-Dieu hospital, if they existed, would be located some blocks away, where the archives of the Assistance Publique-H?pitaux de Paris were kept.
She wrote down the address. “It isn’t far. You know the Place des Vosges? The street is just beyond. But I think you will have to wait. I don’t think you will find anyone there to help you on a Saturday.”
“Thank you very much,” I said, and wished her a good weekend. I still had the rest of the comtesse’s twenty-three cartons of playbills and memoirs to look through, and so I went back to the documents counter and asked for carton number seven.
I settled down at one of the long reading tables and spent the morning and most of the afternoon on cartons seven, eight, and nine: receipts from various dressmakers, old rail tickets, the sorts of things most people have the sense to throw away. I checked all the files that had dates from the early fifties, but none of them connected the comtesse to my mother.
The funny thing is, I might never have discovered anything at all if the man from the art gallery hadn’t offered me a cup of tea the night before. I only opened the folder labeled “Hirondelle” thinking that maybe the comtesse had financed one of those murals he’d talked about—and I only knew that Hirondelle was spelled the way it was because it had been traced in gold script across the rim of my saucer.
The folder contained just two sheets, printed out on heavy paper with the name of a transatlantic steamship company at the top. They were in French and I thought that it was too bad the gallery owner wasn’t there to see them, because it seemed that the comtesse herself had taken a trip onboard the SS Hirondelle sometime during the 1950s. I’d scanned most of the first paper without thinking much about what I was doing when it occurred to me that in fact the voyage had been made in 1954, which might give the lie to Carter Bristol’s claim that the comtesse was present when Inga Beart did what she did. But I double-checked the dates: Inga Beart was taken to the H?tel-Dieu hospital on August 10, and the Hirondelle arrived at Le Havre, France, on August 8, 1954, which would have given the comtesse just enough time, I suppose, to be back in Paris in time to witness Inga Beart’s disaster.
That is when I realized something odd. The paper I was looking at was an embarkation schedule for a round-trip ticket with New Orleans as the city of origin rather than Le Havre. After arriving from the United States on August 8, the comtesse was set to leave France again on August 20. And it seemed she wasn’t traveling alone. The price was given in francs for two tickets, tourist class, which the comtesse had apparently paid for in June of the same year.