—
For several days it rested on my table, the package he had consigned to me, addressed to a Reverend Nelson Spurlock, at the Church of the Incarnation. He had already affixed postage in the corner and had marked the package “Printed Material, Third Class Mail.” Such a package would take a month to arrive. (I saw how in choosing to mail it from France, he had built in a delay, sufficient time for you to return home, to learn what you were to learn from the lawyer. He had also, I knew, made it possible for me to read it.) If I sent it first class instead (I thought to myself as I cut the twine), if I sent it first class after I read it, the package would arrive in New York no later than he had planned.
“Father, you will not remember me. My name is Daniel Abend.”
So began his narrative. But that you know already. Along with this letter, has not the priest Nelson Spurlock brought it with him to give to you, the true testimony of that invented person, Daniel Abend? How queer it was to read it through, as though I too did not know how it would end. When I was finished, I sealed it in an envelope and sent it to the priest.
—
Soon after that, still unused to sleeping in this house, I had a dream. A week or two later, I had it again, exactly the same, just as I have had it ever since then, always the same. In it my daughter is alive again, still a child, and she and my wife have climbed the hill behind the house to look for blackberries in the clearings. From up on the hill they call to me. They want me to join them. Yves! cries my wife. Come look! And Miriam calls out, Papa! Papa!
I hear them, but I am detained below, though by what I do not know. When I do not answer, Miriam joins her mother in calling out my name: Yves! Yves! At first I am touched and mortified that she addresses me by name, but then I understand that my daughter alone is calling me, that she is alone, lost somewhere on the hillside. Papa! she cries out again, but I cannot answer her. Yves! she calls, but more weakly now, her voice the voice of someone who expects no response. I hear her but am paralyzed and cannot make a sound. Finally, despairingly, she calls out, Itzal! Itzal! Answer me! But she has already wandered to the other side of the hill, and Itzal cannot answer her. He is no longer here. Itzal has dissolved, as a shadow dissolves in darkness.
—
The years flowed past me, an old man and in time a sick one. Death, I believed, would be my next caller. I imagined him showing up, perhaps in the winter, out of breath, knocking the mud off his boots on my doorstep. “Yves, mon vieux,” he would say, “better late than never.” He will be welcome when he arrives, but he has not found his way yet. And so I wait for him. Each night now the dream returns like an enormous black bird. It alights again on my chest. It feeds once more on my heart.
—
No one visits, no one except the fat Moroccan curate from the church in Préporché and the silent, whiskery woman (his girlfriend, I assume) who prepares my meals, what little I can eat. The curate drives me to my doctors in Decize, when he can persuade me to go, or he comes on Sunday evenings, just to drink my gnôle and smoke his disgusting Dutch tobacco. When the evening is mild, he brings me out beneath the walnut tree. He calls me Old Goat and Infidel and I call him Eunuch and the sun goes down. This past Sunday I told him I would not be keeping my doctor’s appointment this week, and for once he did not argue. I asked instead if he could mail a letter for me to the United States. “The old goat Levaux,” he said, “finally making amends to one of the women he ruined.” One likes to let the curate dream a little, no? The price of my gnôle, he knows, is his promise to let me die in my house.
God will forgive us all, he says, even the old goat Levaux.
Sad God, I say, with no one to forgive Him in return.
Is that, my child, what I am asking you, your forgiveness? David Oppen was right: it is unforgivable that we should ask such a thing from our children. And yet I have written you, knowing that the Reverend Nelson Spurlock will find you. You are reading this, so I trust he is there with you now. As for me, I must go. The night is far gone. My child, will you permit an old ghost to address you as he always did, indeed, as he always shall? Ma petite fille, ma Miriam à moi—adieu!
Yves Levaux
“Em,” he said, and she looked at him for the first time, the nickel gray of her eye bright with a suspended tear. “Em,” he said. “Em is for Miriam. Your name is Miriam.”
“Yes,” she said, “though no one calls me that.” She smoothed the sheets and folded them back into the envelope, staring for a long moment at the patch of grass between her shoes. The dew was gone now, but her shoes were still wet.
“It’s over. It is all over now,” said Spurlock, because he did not know what to say. The words passed dry and comfortless from his lips. He had wanted them to convey, if nothing more, that she was not alone on this stone bench. Instead,
