—
More than fifteen years had passed since I had set foot in my country, or should I say, our country? You could have no memory of it, and what I saw in Paris I hardly recognized: new heroic architecture crowding the Seine and the avenues, American coffee shops, Russians on the Faubourg Saint-Honoré, Senegalese priests in the pulpits. You were not, for all that, difficult to find, nor was it difficult for me to blend in—no longer Basque, no longer Itzal Etxebarria, just an aging Frenchman like so many others. You never noticed me. How could you have? You were not looking for Itzal the doorman, but for someone you had never seen. You were looking for Miriam’s parents. How close I came to you that day in the café as you pored over that map of the Morvan, that range of black hills rising east of Nevers and the farmland of the Nivernais.
It was there, in the Morvan, you came looking for me. It was there, after my departure from New York, that I had broken open the door of my house—hardly a house, really a cabin—and swept away the cobwebs and accumulated dormouse droppings. The cabin is the only possession I had kept in France, paying the pittance of tax I owed with an American money order sent in once a year. The run-down structure had been my father’s, and before that his great-uncle’s. Originally it had been a tenant farmer’s, one half for housing animals, the other for human habitation, a single room with an open hearth. My wife and I would bring Miriam there on the weekends; it is not far from Nevers. The land around it was sold long ago, so aside from the building itself, all I own is a little gravel court enclosed by a hedgerow on three sides and by the house on the fourth, the hillside sloping up behind it. My nearest neighbor lived almost a kilometer away, a spinster who had for reasons I never knew nursed a grudge against my father and all Levaux. She allowed the use of her telephone at the rate of one franc—now one euro—per call. When I took up occupancy again after my long absence, I undertook to cultivate her favor, clearing brush from her woods, and, on the morning you appeared, carting her garbage to the town dump in her old Renault sedan.
It had been in the same moldering sedan that I had made my final trip to the post office, to send my final letter to David Oppen. Every New Year, David Oppen had given me a gratuity, two stiff new hundred-dollar bills folded in a card. You would sign the card too—just a little scribble at first. Naturally, receiving even a single cent from him would be intolerable, but the fact that he tipped me twice as much as any other resident was torture. Of course I could not spend the money, but I did force myself to keep it. I set it aside. The years went by. The stack of bills grew, folded over and stuffed in a bandage tin. A week or so before you appeared on my hillside, I had taken the money out of its tin. I counted it. A little over three thousand dollars. The sum no longer tormented me because I knew what I would do with it. I would prepare the last letter.
My last letter: it was smaller than some of the others had been, just a regular envelope in which I had placed the two tickets I had purchased with the folded bills, one for the flight from New York to Paris, the other for rail passage from Paris to Nevers.
Along with the tickets, I had sent a small photograph of some items I had assembled in the underbrush of the riverbank, just downstream of the Isle of Terns: a length of chain, purchased at the hardware store LaPorte, as well as a flywheel from an old steam pump, bought at a flea market. I placed this little sheaf of documents in an envelope addressed to David Oppen at his postal box, our little rendezvous. I had seen his face after I sent the photograph of Jessica Burke. I knew how deeply the hook was set in him, how inexorable the compulsion to return to the box, to learn what awaited him there.
The day you appeared at my house in the Morvan was only two or three days after I sent that letter. When I had returned my neighbor’s Renault after carting her garbage to the dump, she said to me, “Your American granddaughter is coming to visit you.” Of course I told her I had no granddaughter, American or otherwise. She said, “Monsieur, it is not impossible that you would have a granddaughter whom you do not know,” then announced with evident pride that she had received a call from this person, not an hour earlier. My neighbor said that this person sounded Parisian but claimed she was American, and had stated that she hoped she could pay her grandfather a visit. She was to arrive in the afternoon.
I made it known to my neighbor that I had no intention of staying at home to receive a nonexistent granddaughter. Nevertheless I hurried back, and in great agitation contrived to spend the rest of the day on the far side of the hedgerow bordering my yard, pretending to trim the outer side even though the cows had already cropped it. When you arrived, you appeared alone, on foot, though
