The Safekeep(72)

Eva opened the door. She was wearing two jumpers, one over the other. A pair of tights and socks. A scarf around her shoulders like a shawl. Her face was a blotchy red from the cold. Isabel’s chest clenched like a vise and did not let up. Eva looked tired and confused and then on seeing Isabel—evened out. A blank sheet. She had let the bleached hair grow out, or had dyed it back, or had cut it off and let it return as it wanted: brown, frizzing around her ears. It made her look shorter somehow. Her hair, and how she stood there, with Isabel looking down at her from halfway up the basement stairs.

“Ah,” Eva said, and swallowed. “You found me.”

Isabel could not reply. Eva’s voice was as familiar to her as her own. She stared. Behind her the crowd did not let up, footsteps in the snow, bikes, trolleys, a loud tram pushing through it all.

“Have you come to call the police on me?” Eva asked. She had begun to shiver. “Are they on their way? Have you come to watch the show?”

“No,” Isabel said. “No, I…” And then, “Eva,” only to feel out the shape of her name. To look at her and say her name. She had agreed with herself, before coming, what she was allowed, what she was not allowed. It made no difference now she was here, she already knew. Her mouth would not be her own. It would say what it wanted.

Eva said, “Who was it?”

“Who was…?”

“Who told you where to find me.”

“Eva,” Isabel said. “I only want—”

“Who,” Eva said, and Isabel held her purse close, held the shape of the book within it and said, “I went to—the store. De Leeuw. Someone there knew where you’d—”

Eva turned sharp. “De Leeuw?” And then a sound like she had a question, cut it off, understood: “You read my diary.”

Isabel tried to move quickly but it was cold and she was warm under her coat and her hands did not go as she wanted them to go. She fumbled. She got the book out of the purse. She held it out to Eva. She said, “I realized too late. I only—I wanted, I mean to—”

Eva took it from her and walked inside and left the door open and spoke as she went, “Well, I suppose you’ve come for your stuff, then. You won’t get them. You can fight me if you’d like. Should we fight? I might be able to take you. Should we try? Might as well. You can call the police after all, I don’t care much, you can fight me if you’d like.”

The apartment was a matchbox, a doll’s house. Isabel had to duck to get through the doorway. A kitchen by the window, a table by the back door. A corner for a bed. The sheets were mussed. A red gauze had been draped over a lampshade. The space smelled like Eva. Like her, and like cigarettes, and like oil fried with the windows closed.

There was something of a garden out back: a single square meter of concrete. A dead plant in a snow-filled pot. A jar for cigarette butts. Eva, wrapped in knits, opened the back door and leaned against the post: lit a cigarette, blew out the smoke. She’d tossed the diary onto the table.

Isabel stood lost in the middle distance in her coat and muddy heels and said nothing. The house was cold. There was a heater in the corner and it was turned off. Isabel tried to consider Eva, tried to consider her face and her health and found she couldn’t, found she had to look away. Found that love was a sickly thing that punished you for each step you took in its direction.

“You cut your hair,” Eva said. Then, into the next silence: “God, to look at you,” and then she, too, looked away. Spoke to the dead plant outside her door: “It suits you.”

It could have been an insult as much as a compliment. Eva smoked half her cigarette, unmoving. Isabel stood and stood. Then she stepped forward: took the packet out of her purse, placed it on the table. Placed it next to the diary.

“Have you brought me a gift now? How kind,” she said. She was trying to be mean about it, but it came out strained. Isabel watched her take the packet, watched her unwrap it. She held her smoke between two knuckles, and the plume rose and lingered under the ceiling. Eva had a palmful of brown paper and in its heart: a piece of china. A sharp cutoff, a shard of a thing. Blue flowers along the inch of a rim, the suggestion of a hare’s leg where the crockery had broken.

My cousin got a hare, Eva had told her once. A stormy day at the lake. A terrible idea, of course, to keep a hare inside a house. It jumped around from room to room, into the garden, scared for its life. Gosh. Got up on the table somehow. Smashed a few plates…

Eva’s throat worked. She licked her lips, twice, put the thing back on the table.

“So what is this,” Eva said. “You’re not here to fight? You’ve come to apologize? You’ve come to weep at my feet and beg for forgiveness?” She added a laugh. She made to take a drag of her smoke and found it had gone out. She said, “I was born there. Did you know? You do now. You’ve read it. My father bought the house. He was a principal at a school. He died in the camps. He didn’t pay his mortgage because he died in the camps. That’s why the house was sold—because he didn’t pay his mortgage. Because he died.”

“I—” Isabel held back. She pressed her teeth together. She said, “I didn’t know. Not a thing. I didn’t know a thing.”

“I know. I know you didn’t. Isn’t that funny? No one ever knows anything in this country. No one knows where they live, who did what, who went where. Everything is a mystery. Knowledge is elusive. People disappear in the night and—”