The Safekeep(65)

And then, as always, this emotion was followed quickly by a shudder, a tightening: sit up straight. A voice, perhaps her mother’s, perhaps her own: dramatics. The worst of verdicts, the worst behaviors—dramatics.

She went hungry that day. Tried to right her posture. She left the plate on the table, where it stayed, untouched, for the rest of the week.



* * *



Rains came quick, a mouth opening and closing. It had rained on the drive over, and the streets smelled of wet stone. Uncle Karel lived in a canal-facing town house, a tall building with a triangle of a staircase leading up from both ends. He had a garden out the back with a narrow strip of land and a plum tree with half a head: the branches that had grown over the neighbor’s fence had been cut back to their border line.

Karel insisted they sit outside. It would stay dry, he said, and the afternoon was so nice and cool—a gift, he said, after the summer they just had. Isabel agreed with a hum and kept on touching her bare neck, as if to pull down the line of her hair—as if uneasy about the hem of a skirt. Uncle hadn’t commented on it yet. When he opened the door he’d taken her in and had paused a moment, then said, “So!” and nothing else.

The tea was steaming on the garden table. Uncle had taken out the biscuit tin and had put two single biscuits on a small plate—one for her, one for him—and closed the tin again, put the tin away. When he sat down, he did so directly opposite her. He put his elbows on the armrests. He laced his hands over his belly and gave a few smacking mouth sounds to indicate: I’m waiting. Talk.

Isabel had requested this meeting. She called him, she demanded he make time. She had refused to say why. And when he asked that she give him an idea of what was the matter at hand—of how worried he should be—it was Isabel who went quiet on the line, a quiver of a breath. Hand gripping the phone.

The tea was bitter, steeped too long. The leaves were reused from this morning. Isabel scalded her tongue drinking too quickly.

Karel said, “Your hair.”

Isabel touched it again. She had cut it off in a fit in the night. A hairdresser had later made of it what she could, but there had not been much to work with—it was choppy and uneven. Now it sat in a thick bob under her ears, at the hinge of her jaw. She caught sight of herself in mirrors these days and would quickly look away.

She said, “My hair. Yes.” She wondered whether her uncle saw anything else, other than the hair. She felt he must. She felt she was not who she once was. She felt that this should be visible from a great distance.

“Is this what you wanted to see me about?” he asked. “A new haircut?”

Isabel stopped touching her hair. She held the cup and asked him how he was. He said he was well, and then named several items that were considerably more expensive now than they were last year this time, and then went quiet.

Birds in the plum tree. Isabel held a nail to a chip in the rim of the cup and said, “The house…”

“Something has broken,” he concluded. “You have come to ask for—support. Of course, Isabel. Come now, what kind of family is this, what do you think—”

“No,” she said. “Nothing is broken.”

He looked at her a moment.

She said, “You bought the house.”

“What house?”

“Our house. During the war.”

“I did,” he said. It was slow. He considered a moment, added: “For you. You and your brothers. Your mother.”

“Was it…” She smoothed her hands over her skirt, over her knees. “It was empty,” she said it like it wasn’t a question, which it was.

Karel reached for his biscuit. “What an odd thing to say, Isabel. What are you wanting to know? What an odd thing to ask. It was a house, the four of you moved in, of course it was empty. Wouldn’t you have noticed if someone else was living there? What a question.” He ate as he spoke and crumbs collected in the weave of his sweater-vest.

“Were there things in the house?” she asked. “Furniture, I mean. Plates.” A beat. “Spoons and—and the like.”

He seemed to notice her now. A slowing of movement, a slowing of his gaze. He finished his biscuit in a purposeful way, thoughtful. He said, “You mean to ask if I came by the house in a dishonest way.”

Isabel didn’t answer. She sat up somewhat straighter. She fought the urge to swallow.

“Have you read something in the news, Isabel? Is that it? Has someone told you a fantastical story of robbers and thieves and the war? What nonsense. You, of all people, to believe these—”

“No one told me anything. I—” She swallowed. Cleared her throat, said, “I had a memory. I remembered—when we moved in, the house, how it was… full of things.”

Karel brushed the crumbs from his chest. He took his time doing so. “You were very young,” he told her. It was a judgment. “These things are not as they seem when you’re a child, Isabel. And now you are no longer a child. Yes, a family lived there. But they left. They did not pay their mortgage, they did not pay their taxes. This happens, it happens every day, people make gambles they cannot keep, people pack up and leave and they don’t take their—their plates and their spoons. Goodness! Do you understand? It happens every day. There is nothing untoward here, Isabel. It’s the law.”