Was there a message here?
Probably. And if only Joe had kept him on as a patient, he might have been around to answer it.
Parsifal walked on.
Sometimes when Parsifal had a fever, Pearl would lay clumps of damp moss on his forehead and, if the fever was severe, also in his armpits and on his groin. The moss felt cool, and later, when it had absorbed his body’s heat, Pearl would return it to whatever place she had taken it from.
“For the next time,” she used to say.
And: “A person has to plan ahead.”
Not very surprisingly, not a single one of those plumbers, whoever they were, who had been responsible for Joe’s fatal accident ever stepped forward to admit his honest error.
Parsifal had not gone much farther in the forest when, putting his foot down into a small depression, he found it deeper than he’d judged and twisted his ankle. It hurt, so he took off his sock to look at it. The ankle was swollen and had already begun to change color, so he laced his boot slightly tighter to give it more support, and cut himself a new cane to use in walking. Somehow he must have left the last one behind when he removed the blindfold. He also took the time to change into a dry pair of socks. Then he ate half an energy bar, which took the pain away, and he began to travel again, but slowly. He had had enough. He resolved that the very second he came to the end of the forest, he would take the next bus home. Forget following the creek to the sea. Forget the door. Forget about Fenjewla — at least for now. He had made a reasonable try; there was no point in endangering his health over the matter.
Misty.
Above him, though the sky was clear, Parsifal still saw no sign of that persistent bird, or plane, or whatever it may have been.
Was he sorry to see it gone?
Almost.
When Parsifal was small enough that Pearl could hold him in her lap, they would sit waiting for Conrad to arrive home from the city where he had been staying in his comfortable but — he took pains to assure them — modest townhouse. While the two waited, Pearl sat on a swing made out of a log and two thick vines, and rocked quietly, holding Parsifal. Sometimes she sang, smelling all the while of fresh leaves and the flowers she had tucked into her hair to please Conrad, and Parsifal would fall asleep.
Of all the time he spent in the forest, this was his favorite.
The silence of a falling star
Once Pearl and Parsifal waited a whole month for Conrad to arrive with the antibiotics to treat a disease Pearl told Parsifal his father had accidentally passed on to her.
Lights up the purple sky
Pearl said that she held no grudges, and sometimes that was the price a man had to pay for having a secretary.
Fenjewla.
XII
a fountain pen forces no one to read its words.
A pen writes only as necessary, running out of ink every so often to remind a person he or she is mortal, and also to give the writer a little extra time to think about what to say next.
A pen does not censor the content of its writing.
A pen does not even need to use words but can write symbols and draw pictures.
A fountain pen needs no batteries.
A pen does not have to be plugged in and charged.
A fountain pen, no matter how beautiful it is, will lie humbly in a drawer until it is wanted.
A fountain pen, with just a little rinse now and again, will never need replacing, except for a new sac or piston seal every so often in the course of normal use, an easy enough job for a trusted person who repairs fountain pens.
The writing produced by a pen not only provides words but also gives insight into the character of the writer.
Treated carefully, a fountain pen will last for a long, long time.
Parsifal’s ankle was starting to hurt even more.
Sometimes he wondered if his mother could have been blind, because how else to explain her sending Parsifal out to find food while she stayed back in their small house made of branches, “tidying up”? How else to explain that when there were leaks and the rain or snow came inside, Pearl would have to wait for Conrad to return from the city or, when Parsifal was older, to have him climb up on the roof and repair the places where water got in? How else to explain the lack of mirrors, and Pearl’s reluctance to go far from the house (with the one disastrous exception of her following him out at the time of the forest fire) unless she was in the company of Conrad, and the fact that when Conrad would arrive from the city, carrying a sack of whole wheat, or chickpeas, or couscous, Pearl would tell Parsifal, “I hear your father coming,” and never say, “I see your father”?
Because yes, now that Parsifal was back in the same forest in which he was raised, it all was starting to fall into place, despite the warning Joe would have given him had he lived: the fact was that for him — as for any child — the world he was born into seemed the normal one, the one by which all others were measured. Therefore it was no wonder that when Parsifal saw his first blind man in the city he did not know what to make of him. No wonder that the man seemed no different from anyone else, and especially no different from Pearl. No wonder Pearl had never taken a trip to the city to track Conrad down to see how he really spent his life there, had never gone on her own to the pharmacy to buy the antibiotics she had such need of, or ever tracked down Margot, her husband’s secretary, to give her a piece of her mind and maybe punch her. No wonder Pearl had never even visited the townhouse where Conrad stayed, but instead accepted his poor excuse that it wasn’t clean enough for her because his housekeeper had stopped coming. No wonder Pearl had chosen to stay there, in the forest, apart from most people, and to live out the only life she knew. Thus it was, when the fire raged behind her, Pearl had sent Parsifal away to safety on the outside rather than risk a life where she would be pitied.
Yes, Parsifal thought: Pearl must have been blind. That would explain why Conrad had carved those anchors in the tree by their front door — not, as Conrad had claimed, because his family were the anchors in his life — but so that by running her small hands over the tree’s rough bark, Pearl could find the mark on that one tree out of all the other ones in the forest, the mark that would tell her she was home.
It felt as if Parsifal suddenly understood everything: the forest, his isolation as a child, his mother’s often messed-up though always beautiful appearance, plus the fact that Pearl never wore makeup, something Parsifal had earlier attributed to what Pearl had called “the natural look.” His mother had been blind, but Parsifal had been the one all these years who had not seen, and now that he did, what a difference it made.