The old man explained how to use the heater, the toilet, our improvised intercom, and various other features of the room. R nodded in response to each item.
“I’m afraid it isn’t very comfortable, but as long as our friend is here to help us, everything should be fine. He can make just about anything you could need.” I patted the old man on the shoulder as I said this.
He blushed and rubbed the stubble of white hair on his head. R simply smiled.
Once these explanations were finished, the old man and I decided to leave R alone in his room. He had been under tremendous strain and needed to rest. I thought as well that he might need time and privacy to process such a sudden separation from his family.
“I’ll bring you lunch at noon,” I told him, stopping for a moment on the ladder. “But if you need anything in the meantime, just call on the intercom.”
“Thank you,” he said.
I closed the trapdoor and unrolled the rug, but for a moment I stood there, frozen, staring down at my feet. I recalled the sound of his voice thanking me, a voice that seemed to rise slowly up as though from the depths of a swamp.
Chapter 11
Ten days had passed since R had taken refuge, but it was apparent that it would take longer still before we accustomed ourselves to this strange way of living. We needed to decide about each little detail—when to bring more hot water for his thermos bottle, what time to bring meals, how often to change his sheets.
Then, too, when I sat down at my desk to write, I found myself thinking about the hidden room and I made very little progress on my novel. It would occur to me that R might be lonely and want someone to talk to, but then I’d reconsider, still holding the funnel at one end of our intercom, and conclude it would be better to leave him in peace. No matter how hard I listened, there was never any sign of someone living under the floor, and yet this silence made me all the more conscious of his existence.
Eventually, the days came to pass according to a fixed schedule. At nine o’clock, I would bring the tray with his breakfast and a thermos of boiling water and knock on the trapdoor. During that visit, I would retrieve the empty water tank and refill it. Lunch was at one. If R needed anything, he would give me a list and some money, and I would do the shopping when I went out for my walk in the evening. Mostly he asked for books, but there were other requests as well—razor blades, nicotine gum (since the cramped quarters made smoking impossible), notebooks, tonic water. Dinner was at seven. He bathed in the evening every other day, using a basin of hot water to wash himself. After which, he had nothing to do but wait for the long night to pass.
The only time I lingered in his room was when I came to retrieve his dinner tray. If I’d been able to get something good for dessert, we sometimes ate it together. I would put the cookies or pastry on the desk and we would talk at length, reaching out from time to time for another bite.
“Are you feeling a little more settled?” I asked him.
“A bit, thanks to all your kindness,” he answered. He was wearing a plain black sweater. Lined up on the shelf that hung on the wall were a mirror, a comb, a tube of ointment, an hourglass, a good-luck charm. Books, all of them old, were stacked high next to his bed—a memoir by a composer who had committed suicide long ago, a treatise on astronomy, a historical novel about the time when the mountains to the north were active volcanoes.
“If something’s wrong, please tell me.”
“No, everything’s fine.”
But it seemed that he was not yet completely accustomed to this room. He sat with his back hunched, his hands on his knees, constantly worried that any unguarded movement would mean bumping into the lamp or the shelf or the wall around the toilet. The bed was clearly too narrow, and there was nothing to brighten the room, neither flowers nor music nor anything else. It was as though the air around him and the air in the room had gone stale, having failed to blend together.
“You should eat,” I told him, pointing at the cookies on the desk. Food became scarce during the winter, and it was especially difficult to get sweets. The old man had made the cookies from oats he had obtained from a farmer he knew.
“They’re delicious,” R said, popping one into his mouth.
“The old man could make his living as a cook,” I said. There were a half-dozen cookies. R ate two and I ate the rest. He refused a third cookie, saying he had little appetite since he could not move about much.
The electric heater was turned down low, but it was not particularly cold. When the conversation died, I could hear R’s breathing. There was no choice here but to sit practically touching each other. When I glanced over at him from time to time, I could see his profile outlined in the orange glow of the lamp.
“May I ask you something?” I said, still looking at him.
“Of course,” he answered.
“How does it feel to remember everything? To have everything that the rest of us have lost saved up in your heart?”
“That’s a difficult question,” he said, using his forefinger to push up the frames of his glasses and then leaving his hand at his throat.
“I’d imagine you’d be uncomfortable, with your heart full of so many forgotten things.”
“No, that’s not really a problem. A heart has no shape, no limits. That’s why you can put almost any kind of thing in it, why it can hold so much. It’s much like your memory, in that sense.”
“So you have everything inside you that has disappeared from the island?”
“I’m not sure about everything. Memories don’t just pile up—they also change over time. And sometimes they fade of their own accord. Though the process, for me, is quite different from what happens to the rest of you when something disappears from the island.”
“Different how?” I asked, rubbing my fingernails.
“My memories don’t feel as though they’ve been pulled up by the root. Even if they fade, something remains. Like tiny seeds that might germinate again if the rain falls. And even if a memory disappears completely, the heart retains something. A slight tremor or pain, some bit of joy, a tear.”
He chose his words carefully, as though weighing each one on his tongue before pronouncing it.
“I sometimes wonder what I’d see if I could hold your heart in my hands,” I told him. “I imagine it fitting perfectly in my palms, soft and slippery, like gelatin that hasn’t quite set. It might wobble at the slightest touch, but I sense I’d need to hold it carefully, so it wouldn’t slip through my fingers. I also imagine the warmth of the thing. It’s usually hidden deep inside, so it’s much warmer than the rest of me. I close my eyes and sink into that warmth, and when I do, the sensations of all the things that have disappeared come back to me. I can feel all the things you remember, there in my hands. Doesn’t that sound marvelous?”
“Would you really like to remember all the things you’ve lost?” R asked.
I told him the truth. “I don’t know. Because I don’t even know what it is I should be remembering. What’s gone is gone completely. I have no seeds inside me, waiting to sprout again. I have to make do with a hollow heart full of holes. That’s why I’m jealous of your heart, one that offers some resistance, that is tantalizingly transparent and yet not, that seems to change as the light shines on it at different angles.”
“When I read your novels, I never imagine that your heart is hollow.”
“But you have to admit that it’s difficult to be a writer on this island. Words seem to retreat further and further away with each disappearance. I suspect the only reason I’ve been able to go on writing is that I’ve had your heart by my side all along.”