He could imagine how it might have happened: his dad as a little kid, so used to seeing his Aunt Cat in farm boots that the one time she got dressed up for a party he got confused and thought she was his mother finally coming home.
“For this you should take honey,” Dijana was saying. “Honey from farm, this is the best thing. You want some?”
“No thanks,” Neil said.
“I have some in kitchen. Really good. Really organic.”
“I’m fine, thanks,” Neil said.
Dijana cleared the glasses, and Neil dabbed with his napkin at a wine spot he’d made on her tablecloth. This had been some evening for the Beart men, he thought. Magdalena was off camping with her boyfriend, and the shoes Neil’s dad was sure were his mother’s had really belonged to his aunt—however impossible it was to imagine Nan putting her foot into something that did not keep her heel planted firmly on the ground.
As Neil was leaving, stuffed full of cake and drunker than he’d intended, Dijana said, “So your father, he is not liking these presents I am sending for Christmas?”
“Oh, gosh, I forgot to tell you. He loved them. Wow, I’m really sorry. He told me to tell you,” Neil said. He wondered if Dijana had somehow sensed that her Christmas presents were right there in Neil’s backpack, still a little damp from the rain.
But she was smiling. “Yah, your father is telling me he is really needing for socks, and these I have made with hands.”
“He said they fit great,” Neil said.
“Well, you must give him thanks for me also. Magdalena tells me the things he sends are very beautiful.”
“I’ll tell him,” Neil said.
“She tells that they are Indianish things, but she will not tell me more than this. I must to wait, she says, but now you are here before she is coming home.”
“Yeah, that’s true. Crazy thing.”
“She tells me I will be very happy when I see these things. So you must to tell your father thank you very much.”
“I’ll tell him,” Neil said, but he was pretty sure he never would. He wasn’t thinking all that well as he left Dijana’s building, but his mind was clear enough to recognize something new: a feeling of responsibility, like he was the parent and his dad was the child and it was up to Neil to head off hurtful and unnecessary truths. When his father found out about the shoes in Nan’s closet he would finally have to admit to himself that Inga Beart never came back, not even for a visit. And with that thought came a realization, as if Neil had stepped off one of the invisible edges of childhood and found to his surprise that everything was simpler on the other side: His father didn’t have to know.
It was well past ten o’clock as Neil walked to the tram stop, but the sun had only just then fully set behind the buildings and the sky was turning from pink to red. Neil felt sad and wise and sort of dizzy. He hadn’t been able to stop his mom from running off with the Jazzercize guy, he couldn’t fix his father’s lousy childhood, and he obviously hadn’t been able to keep his dad from getting into trouble with Becca and the school board. Now it was happening again. Life had set his father up for a major disappointment. But this time there was something Neil could do about it. And as he waited in the late-night dusk, hoping the tram was still running, Neil made up his mind not to tell his father about seeing Dijana and her old red shoes.
The next morning Neil picked up the photocopies of the file for Professor Piot at the Lithuanian archives, then spent the first few hours of the bus ride back to Paris worrying about Magdalena, who, it seemed, was either seriously unreliable or in real trouble, stuck with no money on a broken-down bus or kidnapped by human traffickers who might at that moment be securing her to the wheel well of an airplane bound for Abu Dhabi. At absolute best, the text she’d sent her mother was the truth and she was off toasting marshmallows with some guy who didn’t deserve her. And then there were his father’s Christmas presents, still balled up in their shopping bag at the bottom of his backpack. Neil had been planning to mail them first thing when he got back to Paris, but now that didn’t seem like such a good idea. When his father got the package he would probably call Dijana up right away to say thank you, and when he did, she’d be sure to tell him about how she’d worn the things from Nan’s closet when she thought he was coming to dinner. She’d mention the red shoes, and while a normal person wouldn’t think anything of it, Neil’s dad would be sure to ask, just out of habit, exactly what they looked like, and the whole story would come out. Neil pushed the bag down deeper in his backpack, and felt awful.
By the time they crossed the border into Poland Neil had decided that he would toss the bag into the first garbage can he saw when he got back to Paris, maybe even drop it in the river so there would be no changing his mind if he started thinking about how Dijana had knit the socks herself. He would feel bad about it for a day or two, but there was no other way. Getting rid of those presents might be the nicest thing he’d ever done for his father.
“Well?” said Professor Piot. He was outside smoking his before-lunch cigarette when Neil got to the archives.
“Here’s the file,” Neil said, giving him the copies. They had gotten kind of wrinkled because the guy who’d been sitting next to Neil on the bus kept putting his feet all over Neil’s bag.
“Very good, very good,” Professor Piot said, flipping through the papers. “So you had a good time?”
“It was great,” Neil said. “It was really nice to see her again.”
“Ah?” Professor Piot said, looking at Neil sideways.
“So, you can read Polish?” Neil asked. He didn’t want to talk about the trip.
“Oh yes,” Professor Piot said. “My father was born Piotrowski in Bialystok. You’d be surprised how often it comes in handy. Quite an important force in European history, the great Polish empires. Ah, this is interesting,” he said, looking closely at the documents. “It would seem that the Jews of Vilnius are being granted the continued use of a cemetery that has already existed. Very interesting. And the date? 1629? Yes, this is excellent.”
“What else does it say?” Neil asked. The document was several pages long.
“Well, it is an official act, so a number of issues are addressed. Questions of whether the community will be allowed to keep their butchers’ shops, make use of the public bathhouse, hm, yes, and so on. The spelling is really quite antique. Ah, which reminds me.” Professor Piot took out a packet of papers. “Here—the script key for Gothic Minuscule, not entirely complete. Take this one too, it is a secretary hand from around the time your monk was writing at Saint-Jean-d’Angély, and one that originated, I believe, in the monasteries of northern France. Notice the similarities between the b and the v if it comes at the beginning of a word.”
“Great, thanks,” Neil said.
“A number of letters are joined together, you will see. And also the simplified r, which comes only after an o.”