Daniel ushered them inside and, waving a hello to someone at the back, led them to the only unoccupied table.
“What do you think?” he asked.
“It’s perfect. Much more my kind of place than one of those trendy fusion spots where everything is layered in little piles, and they put a dot of foam on the plate and insist it’s one of the vegetables.”
“I’d never dream of doing such a thing to you,” he said, grinning. “Now let’s decide on what we’re eating. I’m starving.”
It wasn’t a first date, of course it wasn’t, but it felt like one, and Heather’s nerves insisted on thrumming with excitement the whole time they were ordering their meal and deciding on a bottle of wine. The impulse only deepened when he rolled back his sleeves and she caught sight of the tattoo on his wrist.
“When I first saw it, I thought you’d written a note to yourself,” she said. “Your to-do list, maybe.”
“Milk, eggs, bread? There’s an idea.”
He flattened his arm upon the table so she could see the lines of script that ran parallel to the tendons of his inner wrist.
I would have poured my spirit without stint.
But not through wounds; not on the cess of war.
Foreheads of men have bled where no wounds were.
“It’s familiar, somehow . . .”
“Wilfred Owen. From one of his long poems. ‘Strange Meeting.’ You might have read it in school.”
“Is that your handwriting?”
He shook his head. “Owen’s. Taken from the manuscript of the poem. Mine is illegible.”
“I like it,” she said. “You don’t regret it, do you?”
“Not precisely. The sentiment is the same, but I doubt I’d choose to immortalize it in the same way today. I was nineteen when I got it, which is about the same age as many of my students.”
“What do they think of it?”
“When they notice they’re usually gobsmacked. At least one per term is brave enough to ask me about it.”
“What do you say?”
“I tell them my grandmother’s family had tattoos forced upon them before they were murdered at Auschwitz, but I was able to choose the one I wear. I tell them it reminds me why I teach the history of the world wars.”
“Did you always want to be a history professor?” she asked.
“Not at first. I wanted to follow in my grandfather’s footsteps. He was a journalist, a rather famous one, at least in this country, and I idolized him.”
“What changed your mind?”
“The summer I was eighteen, just before I went up to Oxford, he took me out to lunch, and at some point we began to talk about what I’d been studying and what interested me and so forth. The same conversation we’d been having for years, but that day it felt rather more serious. More momentous, I suppose. He told me that he’d read history as an undergraduate, and while he’d been very happy with the direction his professional life had taken, he did regret that he hadn’t become a historian. He felt it would have helped him to better understand the war he had lived through and written about. And then he died a few weeks later, and if there’d been room on my arms I’d have tattoos of every word he said that day.”
“But instead you picked the poetry.”
“I did. And I can’t say I regret it.”
“So you became a historian because of your grandfather.”
“Yes, but also because of Mimi and the murder of her family. My family. I’ve been studying and writing about the Holocaust in France for close to twenty years, and even if I keep on for another century I’ll still have questions to ask. I’ll still be searching for answers.”
“Isn’t it depressing?”
“At times, yes, but that’s true of a lot of jobs. And I only live with the shadow of what happened, whereas Mimi’s entire life has been marked by it. Scarred, if I’m honest. So I cannot bring myself to turn away.”
Their food arrived, and their talk turned to lighter, softer, easier things. Daniel’s students and the courses he was teaching. Heather’s little apartment, her cat, her friends. Places they’d been on vacation and dream destinations they aspired to visit. Nothing to make the food in her mouth grow tasteless, or the wine she swallowed turn to vinegar. Nothing to make her worry about what was to come when she went home to Toronto and what she would do with her life.
They cleared their plates and Daniel refilled their glasses, and the silence between them was comfortable, and for the first time in her life she didn’t mind that a man was staring at her, since she was doing exactly the same to him.