On one of those rare afternoons when the sky cleared up briefly, I went looking for my mother to ask her to come with me to the bunker, but I couldn’t find her. I did run into my grandmother though. She was standing in a hallway, muttering angrily at a portrait of a gentleman with a pince-nez and a high collar. As I passed her she nodded her head toward the dream room. I looked at her for a moment, dumbfounded, but she turned and shuffled away to the staircase.
My mother was sitting with her knees raised on the wide sill of the bay window. The light of the sun, which had already gone down behind the dunes, shimmered softly on her skin. The sea glistened in the distance and the wet sand, just beginning to dry, had an iridescent sheen. My mother’s head was raised slightly and she was staring out the window. She must have been cold, because she had her arms wrapped around her and was hugging them tightly.
By the time she noticed my presence, I was already standing next to her. She didn’t look at me when she said my name.
“I used to sit here and read.”
I looked out the curved window.
She turned her head toward me.
I frowned. Her eyes were large and dark. We looked at each other for a while and then suddenly she reached out her arm and pulled me toward her, my face in her waist. She smelled like grass.
“Would you like me to read to you?” Her voice sounded faint.
I shook my head.
“Do you think that you are too old for that kind of thing?”
I tried to shrug my shoulders. She let me go. I leaned against her hip and said, “I came to ask if you wanted to go to the bunker.”
Her gaze wandered, to the sea, the raw sky above it that, even now, was threatening a storm that would drive away this clarity. “Let’s wait. I want to walk in the rain. We’ll put on our windbreakers and boots and go outside.”
I laughed, a bit incredulously.
“What, you think I’m getting as funny as your grandmother?”
“She was standing in the hallway, talking to a photograph.”
My mother climbed out of the window seat and stretched her arms. Her back hollowed, her face was turned to the ceiling. “Why on earth do we ever come here?” she said. “This must be the most boring place in the world.”
She was acting strange this afternoon. She was saying things she didn’t normally say.
She ruffled my hair with her fingertips, which made it stick straight up, and then walked around the room, her hands clasped behind her back, with odd little ballerina steps. She peered up at the framed photographs on the walls. Each photo, each print—some had been cut out of magazines, others came from markets and bazaars—had a special meaning. Above the wide wooden bed hung a photograph of a path that disappeared into a dark, tangled forest. There were other pictures, hung at varying heights, showing elaborate picnics held long ago under shady trees, empty bottles here and there, baskets of strawberries and peaches. There were photographs of boat races with lots of flags and cheering spectators, and a reproduction of a page from a medieval book of hours, in which one group of travelers toiled up a winding mountain path while another group strolled down a wide dirt road from one jolly inn to the next.
WHEN MY FATHER was moved from the hospital to the village in the dunes, he had had a relapse. That afternoon he was running a fever and felt too weak to get out of bed. The doctor, who happened to be there anyway—he was just about to go off hunting with my grandfather—quickly examined the patient and said that it was “the exertion of the journey,” nothing to worry about. He advised rest, plenty of fresh fruit and fresh air. When he was gone, leaving behind the smell of boot wax and gun oil, the young nurse sat at her patient’s bedside, musing. She looked at the patient, lying there on his pillow in a troubled sleep. His forehead was beaded with droplets of sweat, his parched lips seemed to be searching for something. The exertion of the journey? Nothing to worry about? She wasn’t so sure.
She tried to imagine how he must feel, feverish, in unfamiliar surroundings, anxious, perhaps, about his future. A fallen angel. He had liked it when she read to him. “I hear your voice,” he had said, “and I close my eyes and see what you’re telling me. Sometimes the story goes left, but I go right.”
That afternoon she climbed the stairs to the attic, armed with a flashlight and the decisiveness of someone who didn’t plan to seek, but was certain she would find. She didn’t know when anyone had been up in the attic last. Her father never went up there, why should he? She wasn’t sure about her mother, but she couldn’t really imagine her moving around in this dark, dusty space in one of her voluminous black dresses.
When she got upstairs she saw that she was right. The last additions to the attic were standing, any which way, around the stairwell. Someone, her mother or perhaps the maid, had lugged everything up the stairs and dumped it on the first available bit of floor space, then fled. She shone her flashlight over the dusty boxes and piles. Right next to the stairwell stood a crate that had once contained wine and now turned out to be full of commemorative plates, flags and pennons, and hideous tin beakers. She held a plate up to her flashlight and read the words around the rim. The pseudo-medieval handwriting was
