There will be time to step inside a little nondescript church where a stranger once heard a weightless voice suspend itself in ether, then pour itself down through the difficult descending figures of Allegri’s Miserere. Perhaps I shall walk past an art gallery, long ago an English-language bookstore, where an American girl—now nearing forty, maybe divorced, maybe with teenage kids, living in Austin or Cincinnati or Portland—once took a part-time job. And there will be time to rest along the way, beneath a linden tree, in the shadow of its broad leaves, in the odor of its greenish flowers.
The train will not leave until nine, so there will be time to find my way back by another route, the longer way along the Seine. (I won’t, after all, have luggage. All I will carry is a single, heavy envelope.) In Nevers, at midnight, the streets will be empty or nearly so. I will follow the rue de la Gare down to the river. Even an unhurried walk from the station to the Pont de Loire will take no more than half an hour. On the bridge, I will run my fingers over the softened contours of my crude inscription, perhaps leaning against the parapet, watching the current shoal up and break over the dike. From then it will take no more than ten minutes to cross to the opposite bank. I will descend the embankment road to the riverside downstream of the bridge, the sandy stretch of shore where trees and shrubbery press up to the river’s edge and the fishermen’s paths disperse through the underbrush. It will not matter which path I take. They divide and meet and divide around the hummocks of willow and locust, and in the end all lead to the curved spit of sand hooked out where the river runs deepest.
Will I recognize my correspondent when I arrive? Will his face be familiar from my years in Paris? From all my years in New York? Will I know it as the face reflected in Jessica Burke’s face in the bathtub, in the still-pensive expression she wears in the photograph? No matter. He will recognize me.
He will know how to fasten the chain, around my wrists first and then through the spokes of the flywheel. He will have thought it through, many times, how to secure my wrists so that the hands do not pull free when the body is betrayed to panic. When the lock clicks shut, the key will already be on its way—folded in a note and posted to the commissariat de police. The note (in anonymous, block capitals) will state where I, Daniel Abend, the undersigned, may be found, down past the Île aux Sternes, in the deeper current off the curving spit.
And soon enough, another envelope, containing her ticket to the United States, will be in the mail to my daughter, Clementine, wherever she may be. I will ask my correspondent to inform my lawyer of her whereabouts. Because I will have discharged my debt to my correspondent, he will do what I request. He is, above all, a man of honor. As for the expense of the ticket, my daughter will be directed to give no thought to the cost. Everything will have been paid in full.
What will she return to? The violets and the little pepper plant on her windowsill I have watered for the last time, perhaps excessively, in hopes they will survive long enough to greet her when she returns. When she emerges from customs at JFK, she will recognize, with puzzlement, her name inked on a placard, held by my attorney, a Mr. Albert Hale, to whom I have entrusted these instructions: He is to bring her to his offices for the unsealing of the will, and when she is ready he will explain the disposition of the estate. I have expressed my wish that he do so with utmost gentleness, and with utmost gentleness accompany her to the apartment, which she will enter for the last time.
She will find there that I have given nearly everything away. My room, always stark, is as I write this completely bare, without books, without pictures, without a radio even to receive the long sleepless broadcasts. My desk alone remains. As for her own things, they have been packed away in storage, where they await her. (I will not attempt to describe what it was to wrap each object, each garment, each book and photograph, and lay it in a box.) The sale of the apartment alone will net her a small fortune, to which shall be added the larger fortune of her inheritance.
On this desk, beside the violets and the pepper plant, she will find my last letter to her. It is brief, only the words necessary to express an infinite love and an infinite sorrow. I do not ask forgiveness. The only consolation I seek is release, at last, from the desire for consolation.
Unforgivable. What other word?
And this story I have told you, which is her story too, does she not deserve to know it? Does she not deserve to know the circumstances of her birth, who her parents were, that the man who has claimed her as his daughter is not her father? She does—it is her birthright—and yet she cannot know. I have burned the letters and the photographs, one by one. The only version of her story is the one you hold in your hand. You have
