“Think gas station lights before northern lights,” I said. “Probably a good rule to follow.”
“Oh, I don’t know,” Constance said, her voice quiet and solemn, her eyes still down at her book. “I admire a man who wants to see the northern lights so much that he sees them in a gas station sign. That’s a man who understands dreaming.”
“Thank you, Constance,” Jack said with mock indignation as he sat beside me again. “Glad someone here understands.”
“If you hear hoofbeats, assume horses, not zebras,” Raef said. “Isn’t that the phrase?”
“If you hear hoofbeats, assume unicorns,” Constance said, bringing her eyes up to look at each of us. “That’s the way to live.”
The train passed a little closer to the offending gas station. It went by in a blur. The lights were green, and they were muted in the late-night mist, but they were not the northern lights.
I fell asleep a little later. Raef and Jack talked a long time about the nature of reality—how do we know a thing, how do we trust our senses, what can we take for truth? It had to do with Jack’s vision of the northern lights, I supposed, and I tried to follow the line of their reasoning for a while. Little by little, sleep took me over, and when I woke, the train had begun to slow down for Kraków. It was early morning, not quite light, and the sound of the train wheels on the harsh metal rails sounded like all the waking in the world.
*
“I’m kidnapping you,” Jack said the next afternoon. “I’m taking you to a place you would never want to go but that you need to visit. We both need to visit it.”
“That’s not a way to make someone want to do something, Jack.”
“Trust me on this,” Jack said. “Our lives are about to change.”
I couldn’t tell if he was serious or not. We stood at an outdoor lunch wagon eating cheese sausages and fried potatoes from a cupped bouquet of newspaper that had gone wet with oil. Jack loved to eat on the street, and he loved the feeling of Kraków. Raef had been correct again: Kraków possessed incredible old-world charm. We had already hiked to the Wawel, the lovely castle anchoring Kraków, and we had plans to travel north to the famous brick castle, Malbork, outside of Gdańsk. Kraków seemed less corrupted by tourists than Paris or Amsterdam, though it was still plenty busy.
“We need vodka with our meal,” Jack said, clearly enjoying himself. He dipped his sausage into the sharp brown mustard served as a dot beside the sandwich. “We need to toast the ineffable.”
“You can’t toast the ineffable. The ineffable is impossible to know.”
“Oh, yes, you can, Ms. Amherst. The ineffable is the only thing worth toasting. Every toast in the world is about the ineffable even if the people toasting don’t know it.”
“You’re never lost for opinions, are you, Jack Quiller-Couch?”
“I am a font of ineffable opinions.”
“And our lives are going to change today?”
“Without question.”
“Ineffably?”
He nodded.
Then we had one of those love fogs.
Our eyes locked. It wasn’t on a mountaintop, or beside a blue ocean, or in a flowered meadow. It was in the center of Kraków. I couldn’t speak for him, but I wasn’t feeling particularly in love, or gushy, or anything else. But then he turned to me and smiled, and I smiled back. We didn’t say anything. The world kept going on around us, I was aware of that, but then the world no longer mattered. What mattered was Jack’s gaze and his shy, soft smile that invited me in, invited me to share the pleasure of being here, in a foreign city, being in love, or the beginning of love, and knowing that we had the world by the goddamn tail if we wanted it, wanted each other, stayed with each other. The humor of the look slowly faded, and what remained deepened in the most profound way, and flitting around my head was a little mosquito of doubt that said, No, no, things don’t happen this way. It’s not this easy, it doesn’t happen so quickly, you don’t love him, you just like him, and you’re going to go back to New York and that’s going to be that, and look, pull your eyes off him, because his eyes are a rabbit hole, and if you keep looking you are going to fall and fall and fall.
But neither one of us looked away.
To his credit, he didn’t try to kiss me, or try anything at all to heighten what couldn’t be heightened. We stood and swam into each other’s eyes, and I had maybe shared a baby cousin of this look with other men, but this was something different, something terrifying and wonderful, and if I didn’t live a moment longer at least I would have known what it meant to hold someone’s look with your own and to know, without question, that whatever we call a soul had answered your soul, and that going forward this look, this instant, would be carried between us like rare treasure, would be carried with the knowledge that neither of us ever had to be alone again, not entirely, not completely, not ever.
“Come on,” he said when we broke off the look. “Finish and we’ll go.”
And we did.
25
Jack couldn’t hide our destination for long. After a thirty-minute train ride from Kraków, we stood in front of the entrance to a salt mine. Of all the things I had thought to visit while in Europe, a salt mine might have been at the bottom of the list.
“A salt mine?” I asked. “You’re taking me to a salt mine?”
“A salt mine,” he confirmed.
“In Europe, in one of the most beautiful cities we’ve ever seen, we are abandoning that particular form of beauty for a—”
“Salt mine,” Jack repeated. “But not just any salt mine. The Wieliczka Salt Mine. It’s a must-see.”
“Who must see it?”
“Should that be whom?”
“You tell me.”
“I think it should be. Whom must see it? No, maybe not.”
“I’m not persuaded,” I said. “Why a salt mine?”
“You mean, why the Wieliczka Salt Mine, don’t you?”
“Yes, of course.”
“Because the mine no longer produces salt. It’s now a national treasure of sorts.”
“A salt mine treasure?”
“The chambers have been made over into chapels with chandeliers. It’s supposed to be quite beautiful.”
“As far as salt mines go.”
“Yes, as far as salt mines go.”
“You’re a strange man, Jack.”
“I’ve eaten a lot of salt in my life. It’s time to see where it comes from.”
“It’s like salt’s origin story, is that what you’re saying?”
“Something like that.”
We stood in front of the entrance booth. Jack held my hand. I looked at him several times, trying to gauge his interest. I knew him well enough to guess that he was, in fact, intrigued by the salt mine. He liked the unusual, the off the beaten trail. But a salt mine seemed like a new standard for him.
“What else is at the salt mine? And don’t say—”
“More salt,” he beat me to it.
“Besides salt. I’m assuming we’ll see more than salt.”
“You don’t think it’s enough to see a world constructed inside a salt mine? You’re very hard to please, Heather.”