“No,” I sighed.
“It’s a ticket for the ferry.” His tone was gentle.
“A ferry… ticket…?”
“That’s right. Look. It’s badly faded, but the destination and the fare are printed here. This ticket would have taken you far to the north, to a very big island. Everyone bought a ticket and boarded the ferry. The same ferry the old man worked on.”
I held my breath and stared at the soiled scrap of paper with unblinking eyes. In the center was a picture of a boat sailing over the sea. I wondered what the name of the boat had been. The letters painted on the hull of the old man’s ship had long ago faded in the salt spray—just as the print on the ticket was faded and illegible.
“I seem to remember something, but it’s very vague.” My eyes hurt and l wanted more than anything to close them, but I forced myself to keep looking, afraid that if I didn’t the slight stirring in my memory would fall still. “It’s nothing specific about this piece of paper, nothing as distinct as that, not like your memories.”
“It’s not a contest. We just want to gather up every memory you have. Go ahead, try to recall something, anything at all.” R set his hands on my knees, and our shoulders touched.
“I remember only one thing. I remember how it looked when I saw it with my mother in the basement. It was folded just as it is now, sitting quietly there in the drawer. When I pulled the handle, the paper seemed to tremble, as if I’d startled it. And I recall my mother, as she unfolded it as gently as you just did. It was always night when I went to the basement, with the moon shining through the high window. The room was strewn with splinters of wood and pieces of stone and plaster. The river whispered outside. My mother’s warm, strong hands were dirty, crusted with modeling clay and cuts from her chisels. I think I touched the ticket, too. I took it from her as carefully as I could, looking back and forth between her and the ticket. I felt my heart beating hard, though not from pleasure or excitement exactly. It was more that I was afraid that the ticket would slip through my fingers and be lost. But my mother gave me an encouraging smile. The ticket was nothing more than a worn scrap of paper that might have been rescued from a trash can, and I had no idea why she had guarded it with such care. Still, not wanting to disappoint her, I treated it as carefully as she had.”
Having said all this almost in a single breath, I placed my hands on my chest and bent forward. I had concentrated so completely on this memory that I was having trouble breathing. A pain ran through my chest, deep under my ribs.
“Don’t overdo it. You should rest a bit.” He put the ticket down on the bed and brought me a cup of tea. Supplies of tea were so low now that it was little more than colored water, but it was comforting nonetheless.
“It’s always like this. I can never remember anything that can satisfy you.”
“It’s not about satisfying me, it’s about waking up your sleeping soul.”
“My sleeping soul. I wish it were just sleeping, instead of completely gone.”
“But it’s not. Didn’t you just remember something about the ferry ticket? The handle on the drawer, the palm of your mother’s hand, the sound of the river?”
He stood up to turn down the lamp and then sat on the bed again. The hidden room had been almost completely restored after the earthquake, and the mirror, razor, and bottles of pills were back in their places. The only visible difference was the trapdoor, which had been repaired with new boards.
I realized that the two of us always talked on this simple, sturdy bed that the old man had made in a great hurry. This bed draped in a fluffy quilt I made sure to air out every few days. We had no place to be, other than this small rectangular space. It was here we talked, and ate, and gazed at each other, here where our bodies came together. It was the one space that had been granted to the two of us. It seemed impossibly cramped and vulnerable.
“When the surface of your soul begins to stir, I imagine you want to capture the sensation in writing. Because that’s how you’ve written all your novels,” he said. Then he picked up the object that looked like a bar of chocolate wrapped in silver foil and brought it to his mouth. As I was wondering whether it was really something to eat, he began to breathe in and out, his eyes smiling, and as he did, sounds began to emerge from the bar.
“Oh!” I cried out, but R didn’t answer, since his mouth was filled with the bar. Still, the noises continued.
The sound was different from the music box. Fuller somehow, and strong enough to fill every corner of the hidden room, and yet, from time to time, it wavered forlornly. Unlike the music box, the bar did not repeat the same melody over and over. Each sound seemed to have its own distinct characteristics.
He gripped either end in his hands, pressed his lips against it, and then began moving it back and forth. The farther he went to the right, the higher the pitch, to left, the lower. The bar had completely vanished into his folded hands, so that it almost seemed the sound was coming from his lips themselves.
“It’s a harmonica,” R said, when he was finished.
“Har-mo-ni-ka,” I repeated, as though drinking each syllable from his mouth. “It’s a romantic name, don’t you think? The kind you’d give to a fluffy, snow-white kitten.”
“It’s a musical instrument,” he said, handing it to me. Once it was in my hand, I could feel just how small it was. The metal was tarnished in places, but it glinted silver in the lamplight. In the middle were letters that must have been the name of the company that had made it. On the side where R’s mouth had been were two even rows of holes like a honeycomb.
“You try,” he said.
“Me? I can’t play it.”
“Why not? I’m sure you must have played it when you were young. Why else would your mother have bothered to keep it safe? Go ahead, give it a try. It’s simple, just like breathing.”
I hesitated a moment but then put the harmonica to my lips. I could feel a bit of warmth lingering from his mouth. A light puff of air produced a louder sound than I’d imagined, and I pulled it away in surprise.
“You see how easy it is?” He smiled. “This is ‘do.’ Next is ‘re.’ Then ‘mi.’ If you just keep blowing in and out, you’ll be able to play a scale.”
Then he played several tunes, some I knew and some I didn’t, but they seemed to calm me either way. It had been a long time since I’d held a musical instrument or heard one played, a long time since I’d forgotten their very existence. But now I remembered that I’d taken organ lessons when I was a girl. My teacher had been a fat woman with something of a temper, and when she tested me on scales—always my weakness—I had cowered down behind the keyboard cover. I had no ear for music and could never tell the difference between do, mi, so and re, fa, la. When I had to play with a group, I would just move my fingers without actually pressing the keys, to avoid ruining the performance. I carried my sheet music in a bag my mother had made, with an appliqué of a bear cub with an apple perched on its head.
I wondered where the organ and that bag had gone. I remembered that the organ had been expensive and my mother had grumbled when I’d quit my lessons after less than a year. For a time, she had draped a sheet over it and had used it as a stand for one of her sculptures, but at some point it vanished. I suppose, over time, that happened to lots of things, even without the disappearances…
He continued to play, his left shoulder drooping slightly, his eyes shaded. His hair hung down over his brow. He played extremely well, without ever making a mistake, and he seemed to know any number of tunes, from bright and fast to slow and gloomy.
From time to time he handed me the harmonica and asked me to play again. I hesitated, embarrassed at my lack of skill, but he told me he wanted to take a break, to be the audience for a while. So I sounded out the children’s songs my nurse had taught me or the tune we had used to count for tiddlywinks. It was painfully slow, and I had no idea where to find fa or ti or how to judge the intervals, and since I wasn’t used to the breathing, I produced sounds that were too loud or that were so soft and tremulous that they threatened to fade away. Still, when I had finished playing a song, R would applaud my effort.