“I do. I want that. But you can’t say it.”
“I can say this—you are afraid that might be true, also that it might not be true.”
“I was right,” she said after a long pause. “You can’t say it.”
She was right. What could I have said? The world’s more full of weeping than you can understand?
—
Somewhere in a book by Simone Weil there is a passage Miriam showed me. Weil writes that the only thing anyone truly possesses is the ability to say “I,” nothing more. This I, our sole possession, is what we owe to God. Whatever else we think of as our own—names, bodies, languages, families, nations—all these belong to fate, to be lent or revoked as fate alone decides. Standing beside Clementine’s crib, in the night-light’s weak glow, had I ever remembered this passage? Had I ever thought: Fate can, fate will, take you away? I never thought: You are not mine; you never were. How could I have, listening to your breathing as you slept, or, later, making you peanut-butter-and-mayonnaise sandwiches for school?
This was my crime: having held her as my own, my crime, for which I am called to account.
Que ce soit avec toi, que ce soit avec la fille, je serai satisfait.
Whether with you or with the girl, I will be satisfied.
NINETEEN
Called to account. My answer forms itself inside me. It is not a plan, not even a purpose, not yet. But still it forms itself: silent, intent, unmoving.
—
I peer into the second photograph: the one of the river and the railing above it where I had chiseled the date of Miriam’s suicide. The other photographs are intolerable, as though from behind them my correspondent scans my every thought. The photograph of the river, however, conceals no such gaze. What it conceals is something no one else can see.
At first, when I noticed the inscription, I had thought it was a picture of one thing only, the one place I could not bear to see again. I thought I understood what my correspondent was saying. He said, Look, this place remains. I have been there, just as you were once, working your hammer and chisel. You cannot revisit or repair the past, but you can return to this place. I thought, he wants me to know that my secret is a shared secret, that the inscription is still there, a slate recording a debt unpaid and unforgiven. But though the photograph says all of that, it conceals something my correspondent cannot know. It is more than merely the picture of a place. It is also the picture of a memory—no one’s but my own.
—
In the afternoons during our silent retreat at the monastery, the one Miriam took me to on our first trip outside Paris, Miriam and I would walk out in the fields, following in single file a narrow path through the pastures and hedgerows. We took with us a hiking map we’d found in the monastery, so detailed that even the faintest footpaths appear as thin, broken lines. The path we found traversed the grade crossing of an abandoned rail spur, curved along a small copse of acacias, then happened abruptly upon a stream. The stream, its banks steep and narrow, cut a course nearly invisible from the level of the field. At a bend, however, a herd of white cattle had trampled the bank into a mud slope where they gathered hock-deep to drink from the stream. They shied a little as we passed but then moved to follow us en masse like a slow-moving, rumbling rain cloud.
The third or fourth day we were there, the warmest yet, we walked out farther than we had before, still refraining from speech. After a while we came to where a dilapidated bridge spanned the stream. It had no rails, its planks silvered and soft with rot. We sat down at the bridge’s edge, our feet swinging over the water that flashed shallow and clear over the stones of the streambed.
Staring down into the water, Miriam seemed unaware of my presence. What I had believed to be silence, mutually elected and shared, in fact sizzled with the shrilling of insects, urgent and indistinct at once, like the ringing of a faceless clock, while the heat of the day bore down like the blare of a horn. At some point Miriam had taken off her shoes as though she were going to climb down the bank into the water, but then she had removed her shirt also, revealing her small breasts and the faint hair of her armpits as she pulled it over her head. Once entirely naked she crouched beside me, her feet flat on the rotten boards, and unbuttoned my shirt, whispering something to each button as she eased it through its buttonhole. Sweat beaded minutely on her upper lip, and the warm, released smell of her nakedness rose from her like air tautened before a squall. At first she crouched over me, but then she wanted to be on her back. She wanted my mouth against her, and held my head against her with one hand, spreading her labia with the fingers of her other. She couldn’t come like that, she had said before, but nevertheless rocked her hips harder between my mouth and the grunting boards, her breathing straitened, both hands now knotted in my hair. Usually she pulled me slowly into her, looking, teasing herself with the tip of my penis, dipping it inside her, then rubbing it against her clitoris, always watching, mouth slack, brow knit. But this time there was no delay, only the same frantic grip now on my hips, now my buttocks, pressing me against her as though all of my weight and all of her force were not enough, nothing could be enough—her neck sinews bar-hard from jaw to collarbone, eyelids clenched—her climax no release but a wrenched, shuddering current relenting only to shift its grip and seize her again
