Where She Has Gone (16 page)

The hesitation again. Her eyes flitted to the stairs and then to the street as if she were seeking permission from someone.

“I guess maybe it would be easier if you just came up and looked for them yourself.”

“I don’t want to bother you. It would just take a minute.”

“Just don’t look at the mess, that’s all.”

I was in. I felt a kind of horror at the ease of the thing: it would be this simple to plot a con or a murder or rape, I had it in me to deceive like that. I watched myself go inside, follow her up the stairs, as if I were watching a stranger, not sure what he was capable of.

“So you’re a friend of Mr. Keller’s?” she said.

“More an acquaintance, really.” I couldn’t see her face in the narrow stairwell, to judge if there was any suspicion in it. “And yourself? I mean, do you know him at all?”

“I was in a class of his at the institute this spring. You know, one of those crash courses for beginners. I thought it would be faster than doing it at university.”

So he was a teacher of some sort.

“I see,” I said.

We had come to the landing. There was no separate entrance, just an arched passage that opened directly into the apartment.

“I’m Ieva, by the way.” There was an overly cheerful tone in her voice that made me think she was lonely. “It’s Latvian for some kind of tree that doesn’t grow here, if you’re interested. People usually ask.”

“Oh. I’m Victor. Vittorio really. It’s Italian.”

I had started to incriminate myself. At some point John would return, and all this would have to be accounted for.

“Italy,” she said. “I’ve always wanted to go there.”

The apartment had a long, open-concept living and dining area and kitchen on the street side, and then a hallway at the back that led past a series of closed doors. At first glance there seemed an odd disjunction in the place, a combination of the already dated earth-and-smoky-grey-toned modernity of the seventies with an older, fustier, more cluttered sensibility as if some graft of different species hadn’t taken. The furniture had that look of having been culled over many years from second-hand shops, a little frayed and not quite matching, and arranged with a haphazardness that didn’t give much definition to the openness of the front space; the one exception was an arrangement of bookshelves and a worn, maroon-coloured leather armchair and matching ottoman near the window that formed a sort of reading area. The walls throughout were covered in prints and old photographs of various sorts, though with that same, slightly cluttered look as if part of a life never quite under control, never quite cared about enough for its minutiae to be put in proper order.

“It’s not exactly the sort of place I thought he would live in,” Ieva said. The bit of unease she’d shown at the door was gone now, as though the simple fact that I was here, that she’d allowed me entry, was somehow proof that I wasn’t dangerous.

“How’s that?” I said.

“I don’t know. Him being German and all that. I thought it would be more Bauhaus or something. Not that I know a lot of Germans.”

My mind registered the fact that he was German without any sense of revelation, though I wasn’t sure if he or Rita had ever said as much.

“Help yourself looking around,” Ieva said. “I’ll check the bedroom to spare you having to look at my dirty laundry.”

Now that I was here, I had no idea what I was looking for. I’d somehow expected that all the secrets of John’s life would be set out for me in plain view; instead there were only these bits of things like some archaeologist’s half-hearted reconstruction of a life. There was something sad in this gloomy half-completeness the place had, though perhaps it was just the sadness of how little of ourselves we actually surrounded ourselves with, how much was just the generic debris that accumulated against us like litter against fences.

I went to the bookshelves near the window. They held a host of texts in what I took to be German, most by authors I didn’t know, and an eclectic assortment of novels, philosophy, poetry, in English. On a bottom shelf was what looked like a collection of Holocaust literature – Primo Levi, Elie Wiesel, Jerzy Kosinski. It was the only shelf on which the books weren’t arranged in alphabetical order. I wondered if there was a meaning to this, if some special code was being revealed to me.

Ieva had emerged from one of the doors along the back hallway.

“Nothing in the bedroom. Any luck?”

“Not yet.”

“You’d think he’d have set the books aside in a special pile or something.”

She led me to a small office toward the back of the apartment. There were no windows in the room, only the deep shaft of a skylight sending a rectangle of honeyed light onto the parquet floor. Two walls were covered with bookshelves, more untidy than the ones in the living room, many of the shelves double-stacked.

“I forgot how many books there were in here,” Ieva said. “I can give you a hand if you want.”

“I’ll be all right.”

“I’ll leave you to it, then. I’m making some tea, if you’d like some.”

“Sure.” But I never drank tea. “That would be great.”

There was an old oak desk in the room with some bulging manila files and dog-eared notebooks stacked precariously to one side of its surface as if someone had tried to make quick order; next to it was a two-drawered filing cabinet, with more files on top and a framed Kandinsky print, floating circles and squares in purples and oranges and blues, on the wall above it. There were a few reference books lined up against the wall on the desktop: a German-English dictionary; Fowler’s
Modern English Usage
; a
German for Beginners
teacher’s guide. The desk was like the one my father had had where I’d found my mother’s letters, with a big double drawer on one side and those pull-out side counters like breadboards whose uses, as a child, I had never been able to fathom.

I scanned the bookshelves. The books here were mainly German as well. There was a yellowing paperback copy of
Mein Kampf
, with notes scribbled in the margins; there were what looked like complete editions of Goethe, of Hölderlin, of Kant. John’s Germanness seemed the single message that I had so far gleaned about him, and even that less as some essence than as just a label affixed to things, an abstraction. It felt important suddenly to be clear whether I’d known he was German before this, whether I’d attached any significance to that fact. But somehow my sense of him had got skewed, as if every discovery, even the look of this place, the disjunction and the unfamiliarity, were after all just the remembrance of something I’d already known. I imagined him moving around this room, amidst these books, and could feel an almost corporeal identification with him, a feeling of being inside his skin, being able to take for granted things about him I couldn’t possibly know.

From the kitchen came a steady bustle and clink of movement. I tried the top drawer of the filing cabinet; it opened. There was a fairly orderly arrangement of files inside containing what seemed to be notes from courses he had taken, labelled by number rather than title, Hum 304, His 413, Psy 211. From the look of things, he’d taken courses over the years in practically every major department. Each file held a thick sheaf of notes, all in his tight, careful script, and all in English. In some of the files, though, two- or three-inch margins that held sporadic scribbled comments in German had been ruled off to the right of each page. Some of the comments were in a different-coloured ink, red or blue instead of black; almost all of them ended in question marks. There was something slightly eerie in the look of them, ruled off like that
with their little question marks to the side of the page, in the running commentary they formed like the inscrutable underside to the plain certainties and facts that flanked them.

In the bottom drawer, the files were labelled in German. There was one that held a certificate of citizenship, issued in 1966: he had likely come to the country in the early sixties, then, the same time as I had. The certificate was issued in the name “Johannes Elias Keller,” written out in large, florid calligraphy. It was strange how the name, set out in full like that, seemed to open up some new side of him, as if names had the power to create our different selves. To Ieva, he was Mr. Keller the teacher; to Rita, John the student. Now there was this third person, this Johannes Elias; he was the one who lived in this slightly run-down flat, who read books and made margin notes, who in some way I was connected to.

Toward the back of the drawer was a file that was unlabelled. It held a single old and tattered five-by-eight photograph in black and white, deep creases dividing it in four as if it had been carried for a long time folded in a pocket. The picture showed a man in a uniform standing next to a young woman holding a sort of hamper in which a frilled-bonneted baby lay swaddled. But the photo was so faded and cracked, the surface come away entirely where the creases were, that many of its details were unclear. Where the man’s face should have been there was only a frayed blot of browning paper; and it was hard to say what sort of uniform he was wearing or what the baby’s gender was or even in what era the picture had been taken. The one thing that was clear was the woman’s face, which had a sort of haunted look, as if she was staring past the photographer to some point far beyond him.

“Tea’s up.”

Ieva was at the doorway. She saw me kneeling over the open file drawer and a look passed through her eyes that seemed both the sudden understanding that something was amiss and the quick suppression of the thought.

“Great,” I said, quickly replacing the photo and closing the drawer.

She served the tea at the kitchen table. Neither of us had mentioned the books again.

“So you’re a student?” I said.

“Yes.” But she had grown circumspect. “History. That’s why I was doing the German course at the institute. To help with some research I wanted to do.”

I hadn’t noticed the sticky heat in the room before. There was the barest patina of sweat on Ieva’s upper lip.

“Why history?”

“I don’t know. To get into law, mainly. Though also a roots thing, I guess. Latvia and all that.”

“Has your family been here long? In Canada, I mean?”

“Since just after the war.”

Something in the finality with which she said that seemed to cut off further enquiry. She didn’t look quite as innocent now as when she’d first come to the door. There was also something else, a vaguely Semitic look I hadn’t noticed before, that was there in a certain angle of her profile like a clue I’d missed, the little detail around which a hundred others might coalesce.

“So maybe he left those books at work or something,” I said.

“Yeah. It’s too bad.”

“Well, I should probably be going.”

She followed me down the stairs. At the exit, I had a sharp pang of regret at how I’d handled things, at being this stranger she was hurrying out the door after the openness she had greeted me with.

“Sorry to have bothered you.”

“It’s all right.”

I could feel the lingering sense of question in her, of betrayal. Perhaps if I had been honest with her; but I couldn’t shape my mind around what I would have said then.

“Anyway, thanks again.”

And I could feel her eyes on me as I turned, and the beat, then two, before the door closed and the lock clicked into place.

The following day I dropped by Elena’s place, after looking for her at work and being told she was off. There was a letter from Rita on the kitchen table, a slim blue
aérogramme
from France.

“You can read it if you want,” Elena said. “Not that it says much.”

The letter read like the shorthand of journal entries, just the barest details of how they’d travelled, where they’d been – London, Paris, now a small tourist town in Lorraine. Everything was put in the plural, “we,” though she never referred to John by name. Toward the end she mentioned a monastery they’d been to, where, from a clifftop terrace, they’d had a view of the Black Forest across the border. The detail seemed an odd one to throw in after the preceding wash of bald fact; or perhaps it was simply that the nagging sense of strangeness from my visit to John’s had made things seemed skewed, meaning more than they said.

Elena was sitting across from me at the kitchen table with that inviolable air she had that always gave her a hint of threat.

“I was wondering about John,” I said.

“Wondering what?”

“I don’t know. Just wondering.”

“Like I said, he seemed normal enough, if that’s what you’re worried about. Better than that guy Sid.”

“You knew about him?”

“It was hard to miss him. He kept coming by here after our party. Rita wouldn’t see him.”

“I didn’t know that.” This put my encounter with him on the street in a different light. “Why wouldn’t she?”

“I didn’t ask.”

“So he’d come and you’d just send him away.”

“Oh, he’d hang around a bit. You know, talk me up, try to seem cool. But it started getting a little weird after a while.”

“It doesn’t sound like him.”

“Yeah, well, she has that effect on guys. They all want to take care of her. It’s the whole father thing again.”

“Whose father thing? Hers or theirs?”

“You have to admit she attracts it. Which is only logical given that she never had one.”

She always made these pronouncements about Rita that made my own knowledge of her seem so amorphous. I was never able to separate out the bits of her in this way, as if she were just an accumulation of small inevitabilities, the adding up of everything she’d suffered or lacked.

“Did the two of you ever talk about her father?” I said. “Her real one?”

“It’s not like we had much to go on. I mean, if anyone was likely to know anything, it would be you.”

She might have asked me at this point what I did know about him but that wasn’t the way with us. Instead she left openings like challenges that I might take up or not and that then set the rules between us, how close we would come to each other. I was on the verge of saying something to her now but was afraid that even the small bit of certainty I had would slip from me then – it had all been so long ago, from another life, set out in the approximations and half-phrases of memory like lists of contents written out on boxes that could never be opened. I thought of witnesses to a crime, who even moments after the event couldn’t agree on the simplest details of what had happened, how tall the man was, what he wore, the colour of his skin. But still across the years, an impression had persisted: I remembered the flies, the heat, the rustle of leaves, two eyes staring out from a stable door. I had a relationship to the eyes like one might have to some crucial, irretrievably lost object – I’d never expected to see them again, had long ago consigned them to the unexplainable, the out-of-reach, and yet in some under-narrative of the mind there had always been the point where they recurred, like in some final meeting place, the denouement of a story or life, where every loose end was tied and every lost thing restored.