We broke the bread apart and dipped the pieces in the honey. It tasted like the night, somehow, and like the grass that fed the cows. It tasted like the wooden piers. It was delicious and sweet, and Jack leaned over and kissed me, and his lips tasted of honey.
It was late, almost morning, by the time the boat returned us to the starting point. We had become friends of a sort with the crew. The first light of morning caught a portion of the river and turned it golden. It reminded me of days I could remember as a child. I could recall coming in from skating, or from sledding, and the world was quiet for a moment, was sincere in a way it could not always be sincere, and as eager as you were to be inside, to be warm and contained, it was difficult to leave the outside world, to say good-bye to all the air and wind and freedom. I always felt a traitor by going inside, as if I turned my back on a dear friend. I felt that now. When I stepped off the boat onto the solid framing of the pier, I felt my childhood beside me.
“Thank you,” I said to Jack after we had said our good-byes to the crew. The captain had joked again about hiring us. He said something—the translation wasn’t quite clear—about getting more work out of us than he got out of Emile. Emile smiled his bunny smile. Then it was over.
“That was an incredible night.”
“I like how you live, Jack.”
“Before,” he said, “when we watched Raef and Constance…”
I turned and looked at him.
“I know what we wanted to say to one another. I do. But I don’t want to rush it. I don’t want to say a single word to you that isn’t true.”
“Okay, Jack.”
“I’m filled with you, Heather.”
“I know. I feel that way, too.”
“I don’t want to name it yet. That’s too easy and too predictable. I want it all to rise on its own.”
“So you were paying attention?” I said and pushed my shoulder into his.
“I try to.”
“Now you have to buy me breakfast.”
“We always end up at breakfast.”
But he took my hand. And we walked down the dock, and when we turned back to wave at a shout from the crew, we discovered the crew had not called at all, but that a gull had made the sound of a human and forced us to turn.
27
July 12, 1946
I arrived in a small encampment near Vallorbe, Switzerland. I’m exhausted now and hardly feel I can stand on my feet. A friend suggested I go to see the Col de Jougne Fortress. The fortress was carved from stone and is kept active to guard against invasion. The friend—a thin man from Brooklyn named Danny—said it was a marvel of engineering. I like such things, but right now my thoughts are filled with longing, and I wish I could be home. It’s the evening light that always reminds me of the farm. My heart is heavy, and I wish I could free it somehow.
“It happened here, I think,” Jack said, pointing at the ruins in front of us. I had never seen a building that had been bombed before—at least one that had been bombed and then abandoned. You could say it was the skeleton of a building, but it failed to retain even that much identity. It was the corpse of a building, the empty skin of something that had once been vital but now had been opened and its entrails scattered in haphazard directions. If Jack hadn’t followed his grandfather’s journal, if we hadn’t asked a thousand directions on both sides of the French-Swiss border, we would never have found the site. The surrounding forest had reclaimed much of the stonework and the pig iron struts that had apparently served to span the roof. Birch trees, mostly still young, shed a dappled light on the mounded relics of the factory. A cold breeze fell southward along the Alps. Raef and Constance had gone off to Spain to a jazz festival. Jack and I were alone.
“So he stood here?”
“It was here. He described the bombed-out building. He was exhausted, he said. His heart was heavy.”
“You can feel it a little, can’t you? You can feel something horrible went on here.”
Jack nodded. His eyes scanned everything, looked to understand what had occurred. He squatted next to a pile of bricks and turned a few over, looking for names, any clue to the building’s history.
“What was the building?” I asked, stepping carefully off the old rutted cart path. Nothing, it seemed, had been down this way in ages.
“A rope factory. My grandfather said three families lived here in the burned-out building. He gave them some of his rations, and they gave him coffee, which was a true luxury then. They had stolen the coffee, he thought, but he didn’t say anything. He said in his journal that the coffee was black and horrible, but they served it with such pride that he pretended to enjoy it.”
“You really loved your grandfather. It comes through everything you do.”
“He was good to me. We understood each other in ways I haven’t found with many people.”
“How did he come to this place?”
“I don’t know, honestly. I think he grabbed rides when he could. He hiked and was on different trains and transports. I can’t reconstruct all of it because he didn’t always write about how he arrived in different locations. He went to see what the war had done to the world, I guess. He was traveling home.”
Jack stood and used the toe of his shoe to nudge more bricks around.
“So I think my grandfather stayed at least a week in Berlin. I think he found it horrible and fascinating. Everything, every particle of life, had to be picked up and reexamined. You couldn’t go back to believing the same things about human beings as you did before. You just couldn’t. He says that any number of times in his journal.”
“Then he came here? After Berlin?”
“With some stops in between. Not a straight line at all.”
We circled the building as well as we could, bushwhacking through clumps of brush and alder. We had to be careful, because you could not tell what was underfoot. Jack stopped several times to inspect the few piles of rocks or bricks that retained a semblance of a structure. But the forest had consumed the building; the birches and aspens fluttered in the early fall light. Whatever had occurred here, whatever had transpired in the wake of a world war, had now been reclaimed by the land. It seemed to me a fitting memorial.
Jack was different when he looked for sites from his grandfather’s journal. He became more serious. We had uncovered two on our travels. This was the third. It was as if he tried to establish himself with his grandfather, to journey back in time to understand what his grandfather understood. The effort made him melancholy. I was never certain if he wanted me with him or not in those moments. He continued to be affectionate, often reaching for my hand as a support, but he might just as easily pull it away to concentrate on his memory. He was like a man inspecting a sailboat, worrying about dry rot and unseaworthy features, while at the same time loving the sense of the design and imagining how it might flow through the water. I made it a practice to speak as little as possible at these moments.
“Well, we should get going,” he said eventually, stopping on our rutted path with his hands on his hips. “Nothing to see here, really.”
“When you’re ready, Jack. No rush.”