What Lot's Wife Saw (17 page)

At night he’d pull the covers over his head to shut out his present reality – the communal baths, the dreary rooms, the uprooted youths lying on the beds next to his, biting their lips in an effort to stifle their cries – and he’d try to return to his previous life. He ran his fingers over the seven letters and felt the sensations of kisses on his cheek, of hands ruffling his hair and of shy glances of budding love, all of which held the gloom of the oppressive nights at bay. He’d read these letters ten times a day and had learnt them by heart, but each time he re-read them he’d discover some new detail that had escaped his notice before. A misplaced comma that inexplicably split a sentence (Manon had been absent-minded), an accent disassociated from the letter it belonged to (the table had moved; Fabienne’s bicycle must have nudged it), the vague smear in the margin (they’d been peeling figs that Madame Thomas had brought round, so it must’ve been a Saturday), the faint fingerprint (Papa must have been pruning the rosebush). Momentary alterations in the handwriting (the door must have opened and caused a draught), poor choice of adjectives (the television must have been blaring), mechanical repetitions (food was nearly ready). He could see the afternoon sun passing through the large embroidery of the kitchen curtains casting a pattern on the letter because the words were written in lines of progressive slant as the shadow marched across the paper. He realised that Françoise’s schoolbag had been heavy enough to numb her fingers and prevent them from holding the pen properly. He could feel the morning breeze deliciously raise the hairs on their arms, he could see the sun’s rays refract in the glass mirror, he could hear the dripping tap in the kitchen.

The letters, unbeknownst to their authors, had absorbed their entire surroundings, down to the last detail. These little memory time-vaults would serve to treat the seven amnesiacs when he finally found them but could find no recognition in their vacant eyes. He’d give them their own letters to read and that would release their imprisoned consciousness, their eyes would focus, their disabilities would heal and they would cry, “Phileas, where have you been all this time? We never doubted for an instant that you’d save us. Hey, is that enormous shadow yours?”

Months passed and Phileas Book clung trembling to the radio, listening to the latest harvest of corpses, of cripples and of the insane. The names of Adam and Geneviève Book, Françoise, Manon and Fabienne Book, Gustave Coty and Mélanie Bouatier were not to be found amongst the survivors or the deceased. They remained listed as “Missing”. He could feel time maliciously slipping away from him, leaving him paralysed, inactive and useless at Europe’s edge. He had to think of some solution, some way to become active instead of passive, but where should he search? Since they hadn’t yet shown up it could only mean that they were hospitalised amnesiacs, probably in some refugee camp, and that they weren’t able to remember their own names. He ruled out any possibility of one of them having passed away since he’d have felt it immediately – he
couldn’t
have remained alive had they not survived.

By spring his anxiety had reached such a pitch that he was having trouble breathing. Six months without any news. All the uprooted youths who shared his ward had been blessed by some word from a loved one, but not he. At dinner he’d stare blankly and try to conjure a glimpse of hope from the void, trying to tease the perfect vacuum to offer up a tangible idea of action. Suddenly, out of the blue, the idea of
The Times
took root in his mind. He’d heard that the paper would be distributed, free of charge, to the refugee camps, in the spirit of aid that many of the companies of the North had initiated for the victims. He thought that if the paper printed the seven letters, they might act as elixirs and awaken the seven amnesiacs who might read them in the camps and then try to contact him. So for weeks he carefully hoarded the meagre allowance provided by the Social Services and stashed it patiently in a sock until he reckoned he’d enough to escape from Ireland. He took a bus, then a ship and finally a train that delivered him to
The Times
headquarters in London with the seven letters carefully wrapped in cellophane.

Unfortunately, neither his impassioned arguments nor the copious tears that rolled down his cheeks sufficed to convince the genial employees. They ruffled his hair and explained that it’d be impossible for the paper to allocate the space in its pages to accommodate his dream. They received thousands of heart-rending appeals to locate missing persons, and the paper dedicated enough space as it was to print the lists of names, but it’d be inconceivable and unfair to others to print the letters themselves. They promised to include the seven names in the next edition in the Missing Person’s Column. Book knew that this was futile, it had produced no response to date, it wasn’t the solution. On the other hand, his heart had leapt when he’d heard that masses of letters arrived daily with relevant appeals. Perhaps one of these contained his mother’s panic, his father’s anxiety or the wail of little Fabienne pleading for him to find her. The employees didn’t know what to do with him, but when they saw that he was penniless, they took pity and proposed that he could distribute the post to the various desks for a small wage. He was given the right to open the letters before distribution on the condition that no harm would come to them. His eyes had lit up and, armed with the letter opener that they’d issued him with, he’d sped off to the mail office.

He spent his days and nights next to the mailbags, which came in lorry-loads and were dumped in the basement. He read through all the letters because the amnesiacs might have enlisted the help of someone else to compose the letter, or some writer might’ve mentioned by chance that convalescing in the bed next to theirs was a youth with hair like seaweed, a slight stammer, and blind as a bat without his glasses, and Book would’ve immediately identified Gustave.

He soon realised that the process was too time-consuming because the piles in the basement were replenished faster than he could read them. He would lie, exhausted, among the bags at night, thinking that he wasn’t going about it in the right way. He had to focus on the seven and not to waste time reading all of Europe’s mail. But every time he opened a letter he couldn’t resist the temptation to read it, even if it was obvious from the postmark, name, language or handwriting that it couldn’t have come from those he sought. There was always a nagging thought that the shock might have radically altered their personalities so that the letters they produced would be practically unrecognisable, even differing in handwriting, language or signature. They might’ve ended up in the depths of half-submerged Asia or Africa, or in faraway Japan, Easter Island or Alaska. The only way that he could discern the soft giggle of Fabienne between the lines written by some unknown ten-year-old girl was to sniff out that particular aroma of his sister which set her apart from all other girls her age. There’s always something that’s never lost, no matter how drastically they’d changed, or how much they’d forgotten, or had made a huge conscious effort to forget or even been forced to forget, and this something he had to discover if he was to have any hope of success.

He would then switch on his torch and pore over the seven dog-eared letters once more in order to catch the underlying distinctive rhythm, the soundhues – that elusive combination of sounds and colours which, like hidden Moorish treasure, would be so firmly buried away in the personalities of the castaways that no shock and no amnesia could reach and change it. As he analysed these signals that escaped from the writing, he realised that the seven letters were somehow connected in a mysterious way, as if each one was complementary to the others. He had the impression that he was listening to seven instruments playing different chords but which all together produced a harmonious musical result. Deep down they’d been playing the same melody even though their solos were oddly dissimilar, and that underlying, connective melody was of their love for him – or perhaps his love for them?

He became furious that he hadn’t thought of this synaesthetic approach earlier and had wasted his time reading through all the letters as single entities, unconnected one to another. He realised that his castaways could only be revealed to him through this rich synthesis. No matter in which corner of the globe they’d found themselves, no matter what name, language or handwriting they employed, no matter how misleading the subject of the letter might be, they would reveal themselves as soon as he could correlate one letter with the corresponding six others.

He devised the musical model in his mind and drew it on a piece of paper – it looked like a meandros, the ancient Greek key pattern, which incidentally bore a remarkable resemblance to the enormous, helical wave that’d swept over the South of France. He assigned a proper place for each of the worn letters within the meandros, judging them by their respective underlying melodies, and the pattern became an instruction sheet on how to combine the melodies to produce the harmonious symphony. He plunged back into his search with renewed hope.

By the end of the very first day, he’d discovered seven letters that fitted perfectly into a meandros. Although they’d originated in different countries and their subject matter and styles were wholly unalike, their underlying, nearly inaudible music clearly indicated their hidden connection.

He ran as fast as his legs could carry him to the Correspondence Department Manager and asked him to check his amazing discovery. He laughed out loud, adding that the meandros reminded him of Sally’s backside and called some desk chiefs to see the drawing, hoping that Sally, who was busy working on an article in the next office, couldn’t hear. Sally, however, had not only heard but had left her office to join all the others from their floor. Two hours later, many of the staff from other floors had gathered around the meandros and were following with interest Book’s excited babbling. He was explaining how the complementary soundhues, the rhythmic refrain of the orchestra, the seven chords which weaved melodiously through the spirals of the meandros to join in a crescendo at the end, produced only one cry: “We’re coming for you!” That cry stood out as a diagonal of the meandros while the three horizontal letters created the tempo and the three vertical ones added the variations. The six horizontal and vertical letters gave the impression that they served to forge the diagonal, seventh epistle, which, in turn, was silent without them. Sally smacked her palm on the table and proclaimed, “This meandros has a future.” She collected the sheet with the drawing on it and barged into the Chief Editor’s office. “Bob, are you in the mood to listen to a fresh idea for a
Sunday Times
article?”

The Chief Editor, who found the meandros amusing but not serious enough to merit an article, forestalled Book’s cries of despair by promising to print the meandros in the supplement if he could give it the form of a crossword. This still gave Book the hope that the seven castaways, who must have similar abilities to Book, would solve the crossword and realise that Book had received their message. With the help of the typesetter, Book chose the crucial excerpts of the seven letters, arranged the blank squares on the meandros, wrote out the instructions and the clues for the potential solvers, and the first Epistleword featured in the
Sunday Times
supplement with Phileas Book’s by-line underneath.

More Epistlewords appeared in the following weeks’ supplements as Book continually discovered seven congruent, interdependent letters, which renewed his hopes. It was only when the first readers’ phone calls came in, some requesting assistance in finding the diagonal, as they’d only completed part of the Epistleword, and others demanding that the solution be printed in each subsequent edition, and, more importantly, when a radio broadcast discussed “the new cerebral crossword” of
The Times
, that Book signed his first contract.

The Epistleword was perfected, enriched and refined over the years and its readership grew. What stubbornly refused to grow was Book’s one metre forty-eight shadow. Even when he’d given up hope that the Epistlewords would find their target and even when the seven original letters had faded to such an extent that they could no longer be read but only recreated from memory, his height refused to budge. Measuring exactly one metre forty-eight, he’d now lived, resigned to this lonely existence, longer than the years he’d spent among his loved ones and the word
hope
had been stored, along with the persons that had inspired it, under the heading of “Memories”.

He’d moved to Paris, the newly coastal capital, where the breeze coming off the expanded Mediterranean Sea had passed over the sunken mountains of the Moors, the Massif des Maures, before caressing his prematurely aged face and whispering in his ears the sound of the countless drowned Mélanies. “Is it the same moon we gaze at at night?”

Book put his cup on the table, knowing that the bald man was waiting and wondering what would be an appropriate answer for such an absurd question like why he used letters for his Epistlewords.

“Letter-writing is the fundamental form of conscious written composition, sir, in that it must have a reason, an intent and a specific recipient. Literature, poetry, articles or scientific papers are but developments of this fundamental form but, because the writer is addressing a larger number of readers, he can remain more hidden in the text. A writer of epistles isn’t a professional and hasn’t learnt to disguise himself, so he always reveals more than he originally intended. He’s quite often the victim of his desire to conceal. An unexpressed smile, sigh or smirk that the writer’s lips form, but his hand does not record, is picked up by the Epistleword and is inscribed in the blanks. In addition, many of the readers of the paper are flattered when they see their letter reprinted for the puzzle, which in turn pleases the editors. Next question?”

He didn’t mention the seven original letters, as if it was a detail that had minimal relevance to the Epistleword, rather like a shellfish that might inadvertently neglect to mention its shell when asked to describe itself.