“Nobody lives where they grew up anymore.”
“What's that?”
“Just something he said to me once.”
“He said he was heartbroken, Mamma. That's what he said. That he's been heartbroken ever since.”
“He lives alone?”
“I don't know.”
“Swann,” Zoli says with a slow, sad laugh. “Swann. A capitalist.”
She tries to imagine him there, amid a row of wooden racks, learning to count prices, the bel on the doorframe tinkling. He stands and greets the customer with a smal bow of the head. Later, stooped, he shuffles to the corner shop to buy his half-liter of milk and a smal loaf of bread, then goes home to a smal house in a row of smal houses. He sits in a soft yel ow chair and looks towards the window, waiting for the light to disappear so he can have his evening meal, wander off to bed, read the books that wil make up his mind for him.
“He wants to see you again, Mamma. He said that his ideas were borrowed, but your poems weren't.”
“More of his horseshit.”
“He says he has some of Stransky's poems too.”
“Did he say anything about Conka?”
“He fel out of touch with everyone. They were made to stay in the towers, that's al he knows.”
Francesca's body stretches away from her as if, in their huddling, they might be able to extend each other.
“And the other man, the journalist?”
“He'd like to talk. That's what he said. He found an old book of yours, and went searching. He was just curious at first, enjoyed the poems, he said. He'd like to talk to you. Tomor-row.
“You can talk to him for me, Franca. Tel him something.”
“Tel him what?”
“Tel him I've gone somewhere.”
“You're going home, aren't you?”
“Of course I am.”
“What wil I tel him?”
“Tel him that nothing is ever arrived at.”
“What?”
“Tel him that nothing is ever ful y understood, that's what I'd like to say.”
A peace descends between them now, a quietness that travels across the sheets. Her daughter hikes herself onto an elbow, a little hil of shadow where her hip juts out.
“You know what he wanted to know? Swann. At the end?”
“Tel me,” says Zoli.
“He was a bit embarrassed. He kept looking at the floor. He said he just wanted to know one thing.”
“Yes…?”
“Wel , he wanted to know what had happened to his father's watch.”
“That was his question?”
“Yes.”
Zoli watches as a smal bar of light moves along the wal and down. Someone passes in the corridor outside and a series of shushes sound from the living room. She closes her eyes and is carried away on the notion of Swann resting on one smal fixed point of an ancient clockhand, as if it al might come around again, as if it al could be repeated and cured. A single gold watch. She wonders if she should feel pity, or anger, or even amusement, but instead she locates the pulse of an odd tenderness for Swann, not for how he was, or what he has become, but for al he has lost, the flamboyance of what he had once so dearly believed in, how absolute it was, how fixed. What must it have been like for him, to break the border one final time and to move back to England? What must it have been like for him to return empty, to be back with less than he had ever imagined leaving with? Swann, she thinks, did not learn for himself how to be lost. He did not know the meaning of what it was to turn and change. She wishes now that she had kissed him, that she had taken his slack face in her hands, touched her lips against the pale forehead to release him, to let him walk away.
Zoli lays her head against her daughter's breastbone and feels the breath trembling through Francesca's body.
“You know what I want to do?” Zoli says. “I'm going to see him tomorrow. Then I'd like to get on a train and go back to the val ey. I would very much like to wake up quietly in the dark. That's what I'd like.”
“You're going to tel Swann where you're living?”
“Of course not. I couldn't bear the thought of him coming there.”
And then Zoli knows for sure what she wil do: she wil take a taxi to the train station, stop off first at the hotel, move under the birdsong, cal Swann's room, stand in the reception, wait, watch him shamble across towards her, hold his face in her hands for a moment, and kiss him, yes, on the forehead, kiss him. She wil al ow him his sorrow and then she wil leave, take the train, alone, home to the val ey.
