He wanted to tell me that he is in love with me. Why did I stop him? Am I so ashamed that it might be true? The view from that place was incredible, amazing. We were so high that we looked down on the kites that flew so high above the children’s heads. He said that I don’t smile. I’m glad he said that, and I wonder why.
Beneath that entry she’d written the words:
I don’t know what frightens me more,
the power that crushes us
or our endless ability to endure it.
I remembered the remark very well. I remembered her saying it after the slum huts had been smashed and dragged away. Like so many of the things she said, it had the kind of cleverness that insinuated itself into my memory. I was surprised and perhaps a little shocked to see that she, too, had remembered the phrase, and that she’d copied it down there-even improving it, with more aphoristic roundness than the impromptu remark had possessed.
The last page carried a poem that she’d written-her most recent addition to the almost completed journal. Because it appeared on the page following her reference to me, and because I was so hungry for it, I read the poem and told myself that it was mine. I let myself believe that it was meant for me, or that at least some part of it was born in feelings that were mine. I knew it wasn’t true, but love seldom concerns itself with what we know or with what’s true.
To make sure none followed where you led
I used my hair to cover our tracks.
Sun set on the island of our bed
night rose
eating echoes
and we were beached there, in tangles of flicker,
candles whispering at our driftwood backs.
Your eyes above me
afraid of the promises I might keep
regretting the truth we did say
less than the lie we didn’t,
I went in deep, I went in deep,
to fight the past for you.
Now we both know
sorrows are the seeds of loving.
Now we both know I will live and
I will die for this love.
Standing there, at the desk, I snatched up a pen and copied out the poem on a sheet of paper. With the stolen words folded secretly in my wallet, I closed the journal and replaced it exactly as I’d found it.
I walked to the bookshelf. I wanted to study the titles for clues to the woman who’d chosen them and read them. The small library of four shelves was surprisingly eclectic. There were texts on Greek history, on philosophy and cosmology, on poetry and drama. Stendhal’s
A row of journals, similar to the one I’d discovered on the desk, occupied half of one shelf, some twenty books in all. I took one of them down and flipped through it. The fact that it, like the others, was written in English, struck me for the first time. She was born in Switzerland and she was fluent in German and French, I knew; but when she wrote out her most intimate thoughts and feelings she used English. I seized on that, telling myself that there were good and hopeful signs in it. English was my language. She spoke to herself, from her heart, in my language.
I moved around the apartment, studying the things she chose to surround herself with in her private living space. There was an oil painting of women carrying water from a river, with matkas balanced on their heads, and children following with smaller pots on their own heads. Prominently displayed on a dedicated shelf was a hand-carved, rosewood figure of the goddess Durga. It was surrounded by incense holders. I noticed an arrangement of everlastings and other dried flowers. They were my own favourites, and very unusual in a city where fresh flowers were plentiful and inexpensive. There was a collection of found objects-a huge frond from a date palm that she’d picked up somewhere and fixed to one wall; shells and river stones that filled a large and waterless fish tank; a discarded spinning wheel on which she’d draped a collection of small, brass temple-bells.
