Where She Has Gone (17 page)

In the days after my visit to John’s, my dreams began to take on a sudden vividness. A few times I dreamt I was in his apartment again, moving through the rooms, trying to elude some threat; but mainly the dreams seemed simply a hodgepodge of scattered images whose links were never quite clear, like bits of a story that had somehow got jumbled. Real memories
were mixed in, or they seemed real enough, though sometimes on waking, or in the hazy middle of a morning when an image would suddenly surface out of nothing, it was difficult to sort out the real from the merely imagined. I felt I was losing myself, that the walls that kept truth from fabrication were slowly decaying; one day I might wake and be just the stranger that my dreams had conjured up, like some character in a science-fiction story whose memory had been subtly altered while he slept.

Sometimes I dreamt I was redreaming the dreams I had had as a child. That was the worst, because in daylight then I couldn’t piece together what was the dream and what the dream’s dreaming, back and back like the infinite regression of mirrors mirroring back your mirrored reflection. The dreams churned up memories, associations, that floated in the grey of almost-possibility like sea things briefly darkening the sea’s rippled surface: this might have happened, or this might have been what the dream’s dream had made me dream might have happened. There was a recurring dream that I’d had as a child in Italy that returned to me in this way: in it, two soldiers, Germans, came in the night to my mother’s room to lead her away. As I remembered things now, through this double scrim of shadow seen through shadow, the soldiers had had to do with the stories I’d been told of the Germans who had been billeted in our house during the war. That would have been a decade before my birth, when my mother would not have been much more than a girl.
One of them wanted to be your father
, my mother had said of them: that was what I remembered. It was the fact that I couldn’t have understood what she’d meant then, the joke she was making, that seemed to make this train of
memories real, something I couldn’t have invented. The soldiers had come; my mother had spoken to them. Or else this version of events, along with all the bits and shreds of quarter-remembered things that my mind offered up now in relation to it, was just a story I’d dreamed up based on some lost, mistaken assumption or logic of childhood.

It seemed almost impossible now that any of these things could have happened at all, that my mother had been a girl, that she had existed, that soldiers had come to a place in the past whose rocks and stones had been solid and real; and impossible too that out in the world there still remained the residue of these things, that the mountainside where I’d grown up, the village, the church on a hill, hadn’t simply vanished with my leaving them. At any moment I could return to them, simply, in the time it took for a night’s sleep: close my eyes, and I would be there. There would be a house that I had lived in, perhaps crumbling now, the roof fallen in and lizards making their nests among the rotting floorboards; there would be a stable door at the back, leaning on its rusted hinges, and inside, a hovel of dirt and stone much smaller, much meaner, than I remembered it, with an ancient pig’s trough and the rough-hewn boards and posts of a sheep stall. It hurt my mind to think of these things still waiting abandoned there like injuries that had never been tended to. I remembered a man who had come once to sit cap in hand in my father’s kitchen in Mersea to tell me that back in the village, my grandfather had died: he had seemed like a messenger from the void then, from a world that could not possibly, in my absence from it, have continued to exist. He’d mentioned some property that had been bequeathed to me, some land, my grandfather’s house; and yet in all the years
since then I’d never been able to trace a line between my existence here in this other country, this other present, and the stones and beams of an actual physical place that could be travelled to and walked around in.

Some time in June, after the postcard and the letter, after my visit to John’s, I had a phone call, in the middle of the night. Dead air; and then a transatlantic blip.

“It’s me.”

It was Rita.

“Where are you?”

“It doesn’t matter. Switzerland.”

There was a delay in the line, a split-second lag, and an echo like a voice reverberating through empty space.

“Are you okay?”

“I’m all right. I’m fine. I just wanted you to know that.”

Another blip.

“Is John with you?”

“Yes. Not right this minute. I’m at a phone booth.”

The crackly hollowness of the line gave me the sense that she was receding from me, that time was running out.

“I’m thinking of coming to Italy,” I said, forming the thought as I spoke it. “To our village.”

“Oh.”

“You could meet me there.”

A pause.

“I don’t know.”

Her voice sounded hopelessly frail and thin, as if the buzzing wires it travelled across could barely sustain it.

“Please,” I said.

“I don’t know. I’ll see.”

“Just go there. I’ll wait for you.”

“I’ll see.”

In the morning, I had a instant’s unsureness as to whether the call had been real. I had an image of a voice tunnelling through an impossibly long, hollow tube, and Rita at the end of it a tiny shadow against a pinprick of light. It took a moment for me to pull from the dimness of sleep the memory that we’d made an arrangement of sorts: I’d left no question that I would go, that I would wait for her. That had been how I had wanted to put things, as if there were no option involved, as if I were a place on a map that would be there whether she came or not.

I had tried to show her once in an atlas where the village was. But even in the big reference atlas in the university library it hadn’t been listed by name, so that it had seemed she had had to take it on faith that the place existed at all, wasn’t a figment of my imagination, that somewhere in the crisscrossing of tiny highways and relief lines the map showed was this unnamed cluster of real houses you could go to, with real people walking the streets. If she went now she would have to grope her way there with only this spectre to go by, this possibility. In my mind, I traced the line she would follow, the small dip down through a mountain pass out of Switzerland to the plains of the Po, the ride south into history and heat. The country would hold her; it was half hers, after all, the hills were in her blood and the sky, the crumbled ruins, the cooked earth. Even for her it wasn’t a place to visit but to go back to, like somewhere a road led after years of wandering; and slowly she’d drift down into the dream of it and the village would call to her like home, and she would go.

I began to prepare for my departure, dismantling my life as if it were a tent I’d briefly pitched. It seemed necessary to divest myself of things: I gave up my apartment, sold off most of my furnishings, took boxes of clothing – ancient things, things I had owned since high school, that still had the smell in them of my life then – to the Goodwill. The ticket I bought was a one-year open return: it had the sound of a different order of travel, an open return, something that airlines, travel agents, slipped in amidst their usual fares to allow for those whose lives were unfixed, who might suffer catastrophe or a change of heart or find waiting for them at their destination the thing that put going back out of the question.

It was surprising how little my possessions – what was really mine, what had meaning, wasn’t just the detritus of being alive – actually amounted to when I gathered them up. There were Rita’s letters; there was a book I’d had as a child,
The Guiding Light
, that told the story of the Bible in pictures.
I remembered how I had gone through the house after my father’s death collecting his belongings and had come up with only a few trinkets, a watch, a razor, his old wedding band, which I’d worn for a few weeks like a piece of string tied to my finger to remind me of some important errand, then removed. In the end, his things had come to no more than what fit in the old Crown Royal bag I kept them in now, that bulged it like so much ash or dust. I came from a line, it seemed, that did not hold on to things, that had no heirlooms to pass on, no signet rings, that didn’t think itself a weighty enough presence in the world to leave some record of its having passed through. I thought of the gifts I’d brought with me from Italy, a jack-knife, a
Lives of the Saints
, my grandfather’s war medals, things that I might have passed on to a daughter or son along with their stories but all scattered now, lost like memories I could not quite recall. It wasn’t so much that these things hadn’t mattered to me as that my life had not seemed receptable enough to hold them, to keep them from slipping away from me.

I had a coin that I’d got a few years before from an old man in Mersea, a pre-war one
lire
, the exact duplicate, down to a flaw on one side from the minting, of one I’d been given as a child by a friend of my mother’s and had lost. The coin seemed now the symbol of everything that had vanished from my life, in every respect the same as the first except in the important one of being the actual physical thing, what had passed from hand to hand, what could have proved the reality of a certain moment or person or place. It hardly seemed possible sometimes that a life could go on at all with only such phantoms of phantoms to lend it credence, with almost
nothing that could ever be nailed down for certain. Yet that was what matters always came down to, to faulty recreations of things that had themselves perhaps only been tokens, that hadn’t been adequate even in their first moment of meaning to take in the fullness of the world that they’d strained to represent. I set the coin aside now to bring with me, a shibboleth; perhaps something would accrue on it that would make it cease to be simply a copy of a lost original.

I brought a few boxes of belongings to Elena’s for storage. Her apartment seemed even emptier than usual, with the damp, cavernous feel that our house on the farm used to take on in summer, the sense of not being quite lived in. She and I hadn’t talked much about my trip: I had tried to put it as a spur-of-the-moment thing that Rita and I had arranged when Rita had phoned: but she seemed to have understood that there was more to it than I would say, and that made any casual reference to it awkward.

“I’m not sure what you guys hope to accomplish there,” she said.

“I don’t know. I was born there. It’s normal to want to go back. Maybe things are different for you.”

“You mean because I’m adopted. Because you think my parents left me in a trash can or something so why would I want to know about that.”

“That’s not what I said. I just meant –”

“Forget it.”

She was feeling abandoned, had that angry, restless energy she took on when she couldn’t admit she was hurt. Getting close to her when she was like this was like scratching at an irritation, not knowing if you would soothe or inflame it.

“You’ve never talked about your parents,” I said. “Your real ones, I mean.”

“You’ve never asked.”

“So I’m asking.”

She gave a half-laugh.

“Here we go. True confessions.”

“We don’t have to do this,” I said.

“No. Fine. It’s not as if it’s some deep, dark secret. They didn’t molest me or anything like that.”

“So you knew them, then.”

“I was with them till I was five. I guess my dad was a bit of a drunk and he smashed me around a couple of times. End of story.”

“And they took you away.”

“Yeah, well, you know how they did things back then. Very quiet. I doubt my folks ever even knew what hit them. Then they moved away and I never heard from them again.”

“And you’ve never tried to find them?”

“Why bother? They probably feel bad enough as it is. And then I’m sure they’d be really pleased to find out their daughter’s a lesbian. It would be just one more set of people I’d have to lie to.”

“Maybe they wouldn’t care about that.”

“Wouldn’t your family?”

She was getting an edge in her voice from having revealed too much. There was a hard look in her eyes that in a different person, one less wilful, might have been a prelude to tears.

“I ought to get going,” I said.

“Sure. Send me a postcard.”

She saw me to the door. There was a mat there where a pair of Rita’s winter boots had sat since her departure.

“Are you still seeing Suzanne?” I said.

“I suppose. Not really. It’s pretty casual.”

“Oh.”

She laughed.

“I guess you thought lesbians mated for life.”

“Something like that.”

We stood awkwardly a moment but then both in the same instant reached out for a sort of hug.

“Hope you find what you’re looking for,” she said.

I hadn’t told my family yet about my going. When I was a child, a return was always a matter of a certain ritualized formality like a funeral: those returning would sit in wait in their kitchens or rec rooms the night before their departure and all evening long people would come to them like petitioners with their envelopes or little packages to be carried back to their relations. It had always struck me how little joy there had seemed to be in these events, as if a return were a matter of grave risk or threat or as if it were a sort of judgement against those who remained behind, a source of quiet humiliation. Once I had gone with my father to see off his cousin Alfredo: he had brought a small package with him wrapped in brown paper and string to be passed on to his mother, but he hadn’t been able to look
Zi
’Alfredo in the eye as he’d handed the parcel over to him. It was probably merely some token, a shawl or a piece of cloth that my Aunt Teresa had picked out; but my father had carried it as if all his shame, his own failure, inability, to return was somehow enclosed within it.

It was less than a week before my departure when I called Aunt Teresa.

“I’m going away,” I said. “To Italy. I thought you should know.”

I could never tell with my aunt from what set of mind she would respond to me out of the competing ones that seemed to play in her head. She could be smug or gruff, could put on an informed, cynical tone that appeared to come from her church group or revert to an old-world atavism and incomprehension as if a gap of centuries divided us. Or sometimes she responded with perfect, lucid understanding.