It was at this point in her deliberations that she remembered what she’d heard of St Brigid’s Convent and Orphanage. Fridleif would never think of searching for her there. He would as soon go looking for his child in hell. In the anger that spilled from her she took pleasure from the thought that a Roman Catholic orphanage was an even greater anathema to him than her parents’ home.
Though she would have liked to check the nuns out, there wasn’t any way she could do so without arousing their suspicions. They might recognise her as the wife of a minister, and she did not want them to connect Fridleif to the child. She pulled at the bell to the orphanage at an hour it was evident there were nuns about, and then fled. What the nuns found when they answered the door was a basket with a baby inside. ‘Moses’ they would have called her, had there not been a label tied around her neck identifying her as Coira. No surname. Rebecca would have liked to restore her own name to the child but — though she didn’t share her parents’ suspiciousness, especially of the conventual — didn’t think she dare risk it. Coira Lestchinsky! — maybe not. An accompanying note explained that the mother was suffering clinical depression and, though she loved the child with all her heart, did not feel capable of looking after her as she would have wished. She commended Coira, who had been baptised far from here, to the tender Christian mercies of the nuns. ‘Love her,’ she pleaded.
Towards the early years of Coira’s education she made what she hoped was a fair contribution. She would collect the child at a later date when, God willing, she would be in better health, but, if she failed to return, a more substantial donation would automatically be made. She left a parcel of letters with the child’s belongings. These, were she not to return, were to be opened only on Coira’s majority.
She wasn’t sure, at the moment of leaving her, that she could go through with it, but her grief reminded her of what her parents must have felt when she left them, and she knew she had to find them if she could.
She removed the label from Coira’s neck and wrote a further message on it. ‘Protect her for me. See how small she is — she is more shawl than baby. Pray for her. Pray, if you can, for me. Pray that this has a safe and happy outcome.’
But like many other prayers uttered in these days, the nuns’ prayers, if they remembered to say them, were not listened to. Rebecca did not locate her parents nor did she ever return, in safety and happiness, for Coira.
Not counting the letters, all she bequeathed to her bereft daughter was her own sense of being between the devil and the deep blue sea. And the terrible conundrum of not knowing which was which.
iii
In the days he’d been without Ailinn, Kevern had gone again through his parents’ papers. He had been tempted to open the box intended for a grandchild, should one materialise, but couldn’t bring himself to disobey instructions he had long considered sacred. For a non-believer, Kevern had a highly developed sense of the sacramental. Duty, to the living and the dead, hemmed him in. His life, from the moment he opened his eyes — and whether he found Ailinn beside him or not — was a chain of rituals he could no more break than he could go without food or self-reprobation. Without obligation and repetition he was as chaff in the wind. If religion meant anything he could understand, it was this: doing again what had worked when you did it the last time, doing it because you believed you had to, remonstrating against the random, refusing to be tossed about the universe as though the universe had no use for you. That was the beginning and the end of religious devotion to him, anyway. Not what you owed to a god but what you owed to the idea that you weren’t arbitrary or accidental. And whatever you did more than three times a week, at the same time and with the same reverence, was another blow struck against the haphazard.
Densdell Kroplik had told him, the last time they met, that he was lucky to have been born in Port Reuben. Lucky? The thought that he owed anything to chance disheartened him. If he was only here by chance then he was indeed chaff in the wind and might as easily have been blown somewhere else. So where? Absolutely anywhere, was the answer, but how do you live a life that isn’t random when the circumstances of your living it are? There had to be something between him and Port Reuben that was more than fortuitous; each had to have needed the other. All right, he accepted Kroplik’s view of him as a child of aphids who were themselves children of aphids. No one can go all the way back to the beginning. Invaders, migrants, vagrants, came and went. He’d settle for ten generations. If he had to, he’d make do with even fewer. Soil was all he was after. Not real soil, God forbid, but the idea of soil. If not native soil then soil that at least was congenial to his growing. Bodies rejected implanted organs; some took but others the body found too alien. Why did he feel that the village of Port Reuben, in which his papers certified he’d been born, had always been rejecting him like an organ it didn’t need or want?
This rummaging through his parents’ papers was not going to help him find an answer. It never had before. Yet each time he did it he came upon something he hadn’t paid attention to previously. A 
oke so acidic that it had burned through the paper on which his father had written it. The names of azz records he intended to buy. Titles of books still to be read. A manila folder containing a few watery sketches, none of them remarkable, done by his mother presumably, of him as a baby, of his father as a younger but no less rancid-looking man, of a beautiful dreaming woman he didn’t recognise but whom now, after Kroplik’s description, he took to be his grandmother, of the cliffs, of a sunset, and of hands — just hands — drawn so tenderly they had to belong to her butcher-lover. So they’d lived here at least, his mother and father — because bitterness and infidelity constitute lives.
He missed their lives for them, missed what he didn’t remember, yearned for what he hadn’t known. Can you be nostalgic for nostalgia, he wondered. His answer was yes, yes you could.
It was while he was again, ritualistically, going through drawers in his father’s workshop that he came again upon a foolscap black notebook with scribbled entries in his mother’s hand. It hadn’t interested him the first time he’d found it, because it seemed to contain no more than lists of non-essentials his father must have asked for, sacks for rubbish, a new coffee mug, a fan heater, antiseptic cream. But he realised he should have wondered why it was here, in his father’s space, among his father’s things. After the first half-dozen pages the book became something else. Sketches again, but not at all watery this time: strong charcoal portraits, in the manner of woodcuts — had she been thinking of actually doing woodcuts with her husband’s help? — of people he didn’t recognise, squatting careworn women in turbans, angular men in long beards, carcasses of slaughtered animals, executioners in bloody aprons standing over them, a child looking out of the barred window of a train, figures huddled in fear, and one of herself, he was sure it was her, with her mouth open and a hand, not hers, over it, pressing hard into her face. And then, at the back of the book, half a dozen small crayoned studies in a style so different he marvelled the same person could have done them — what they depicted he couldn’t say for sure, cityscapes a couple of them seemed to be, whores, or were they birds, cranes or storks, standing under phosphorescent yellow lamp posts, their scarves or feathers blowing about their necks, their bodies rendered in patches of the most vivid colour, purple shoulders and breasts, vermilion bellies, attenuated lime-green legs, the stones they stood on as black as night. Two were more abstract still, mere blobs of violent colour, like pools of blood, and one a nude, somehow African in conception, primitive certainly, painted freely, her eyes orange, her skin a throbbing pink, her hands stretched out towards. . towards whom?