The interlocutor coughed. I looked up over at him. You know, he said, we think of memory as a redeeming thing. We build monuments that appear to be monuments to this person or that person or this struggle or that, but really, do you know what they are? They are monuments to memory itself, so said the interlocutor. We want it to be meaningful that things be remembered. Everything proceeds from that. If we do not remember what has happened before, then we are powerless to give meaning to what is, day to day. Because, he cleared his throat, because we are all like the Vikings, hoping to be feasted for eternity in a mead hall, there to have our deeds shouted out again and again for the regaling of some fierce and terrible company. In fact, he continued, memory is not the heart of the endeavor. That is the human secret. Forgetting is the precious balm that helps us to travel on, past the depredations of memory. His voice slowed as he said these last words. He drew a long breath. There was a bulb overhead in a loose casing. Suddenly, it was very bright, for the lights in the hall had been turned down. A man stuck his head in the door. The interlocutor assured him it was all right. We were just finishing our business. Though we would be some time, it was all right for the janitor to leave for the night. I will lock up when I go, so said the interlocutor. The door shut. What is the rest of it? he asked, and again I was struck by the horror, as I had been, again and again, during my tale, that I was confiding all this in my grandfather. It was inconceivable to me that I would say such things to a man I had hated, and, already distraught to begin with, I recoiled at the sudden fear. Then, his eyes met mine, and they were full of sympathy. It was like that — when he was looking elsewhere, I felt that he was very much like my grandfather, and when he met my eyes, I knew him as this new person, a sort of confessor. Do you need some water? he asked. He was holding a cup. He had filled a cup with water and it was extended to me. I drank it. We arrived, I said, at the inn for the night. She was still driving. This was a territory she had often passed over. She whirled into the parking lot and stopped the car just about anywhere. She pulled up and hopped out, leaving the car, as if it were a horse, any which way in front of the inn. This was something I liked. No one else would be coming, clearly. There was no reason not to do it just the way she had. The people inside the inn did not know us, but were efficient, kind, effective, gave us the keys to a room, showed us the room, brought us some supper, a dish of cold meats that was more than we needed, and dismissed themselves for the night. Rana said, Clement, she said it from the bathroom, Clement, come here. There was a large bathtub — larger than usual, one could actually stretch at one’s length. This was the sort of inn it was — a way station, for people to get back the energy they needed in order to travel on. It must have been there forever, I said to Rana. It has been for my entire life, or at least as long as I can remember things, I can remember it. She was precise in this way — and hated to say things that were not true. Sometimes, she would correct herself, days after having said something, it would occur to her that she had not been
specific enough. Then, she would demonstrate the thing she meant, at length, from several angles, to her satisfaction. I, who had never been specific, for whom specificity was a dream, and on whom specificity was wasted, was now the chief recipient of her wonderful specificity. We sat in the bath, and I remember, so I told the interlocutor, that she wanted me to tell her about my hopes for my life. Tell me, she asked, as she sometimes did, what do you plan for yourself? I hated these questions, but I was always calm and quiet. I always avoided them carefully. I had a plan, I said, once, to be a ferryman. That lasted a while, then I wanted to be a traveler, some kind of marco polo. What do you hope for? I asked her. She said, now that we are grown so close, I have begun to include you in my hopes. What if we were to move to another city, one we hadn’t ever been in, and learn it together — we could learn the whole city together. We could learn a new language, just to live there, and we could speak that language together. We could start some business, a business that we know, because it is common here, but the sort of thing that isn’t to be found at all in that city. Then, we could sit in the shop and now and then sell something, and we would have a fine life. I have enough, she said, to support us doing something like that. We wouldn’t even need to make money with the shop. It would be our pastime. Then, every so often some of our friends would travel and visit us and we could see them, and at their arrival we would be so pleased. Hello, hello, we’d say, and after they had been with us a time in that new place, they would go, and we would be equally pleased to see them leave. That’s how it would be, she must have thought to herself, before saying it out loud to me — we can have a fine life like that. I am prepared, I said, to go anywhere. I only want to know ten minutes in advance. Why is that, she asked. Ten minutes? If you will go, you’ll go. You don’t need ten minutes. Ten minutes? She pretended to be wounded at the thought, so I told the interlocutor. Only that I might bury a few things, I said. When I live in a place, I always like to bury some of my belongings in the ground near where I lived. Then, when I come back, I can have the sense that — if I like, I can dig them up. I don’t believe I ever would, but it is nice to feel, even if everything else changed, one’s few things are waiting there beneath the earth. Like bones, she said. If you were really brave, you might leave a finger or two, or an ankle. I would do it, I said, if I thought there was something there worth remembering that badly.