The old man was not in a bed but rather had been laid out on a plain metal table with wheels that resembled a kitchen cart. The room was tiled and very cold. His body was draped with a cloth, a frayed, faded blanket that looked rough to the touch.
“He apparently collapsed on the sidewalk and was brought here by ambulance, but he had already lost consciousness by the time he arrived and his heart stopped; we did everything in our power to revive him, but he passed away at seven fifty-two p.m.… As for the cause of death, we found an intracranial hemorrhage, but we’d need to do additional tests to discover why it occurred.”
The doctor stood next to me and talked, but I understood almost nothing of what he said. The flat voice of this unknown man droned in my ears.
“Had he recently received any sort of trauma? A sharp blow to the head?”
I looked up at the doctor and tried to answer, but the pain in my chest kept the words from coming out.
“The hemorrhage was not deep in the brain but close to the surface, just under the skull. In those cases, the cause usually turns out to be head trauma. But it’s also possible that he had a heart attack and hit his head as he fell, in which case…” He continued in the same monotone.
I lifted the corner of the blanket. The first thing I saw were the old man’s hands folded on his chest. Hands that would never make anything again. I remembered the dark blood that had come from his ear when he’d been pinned under the dish cupboard after the earthquake. I remembered how much trouble he’d had skewering a pickle or feeling the objects inside the statues. Had the bleeding started slowly back then?
“But he fixed the drainpipe. And what about R’s haircut? He did that so beautifully,” I murmured. But my words were absorbed by the tiles on the walls and did not seem to reach the doctor’s ears.
The old man’s shopping basket had been left next to the cart, carrot greens and a package wrapped in butcher’s paper peeking out from the top.
The funeral was modest. Those in attendance included a few distant relatives—the grandson of a cousin, a niece and her husband—some old friends from work, and a few neighbors. R, of course, could offer only his prayers from the hidden room.
I found it terribly difficult to come to terms with the old man’s death. I had lost many people who were important to me in the past, but somehow my parting with them had been different from what I experienced now. I had of course been terribly sad when my mother and father and my nurse had died. I missed them, and wished I could see them again, and I regretted the times I’d been selfish or cruel when they were alive. But that pain had lessened with the passage of time. Their deaths grew distant with the years, leaving behind only the most precious memories I associated with them. But the laws of the island are not softened by death. Memories do not change the law. No matter how precious the person I may be losing, the disappearances that surround me will remain unchanged.
But this time I had the impression that something was different. In addition to the sadness, I was overcome by a mysterious and menacing anxiety, as though the old man’s death had suddenly transformed the very ground under my feet into a soft, unreliable mass.
I had been left alone, with no one to comfort me, no one to reach out and take my hand, no one to share the terrible void in my heart. Of course R would sympathize with me, would console me, but he was locked away forever in that tiny space, and I found it difficult to descend from my unstable, unbalanced state into the hidden room. Likewise, once I was with him I found myself unable to stay for long. It always proved necessary to return to where I’d come from. And always alone.
The materials of the world that surrounded R and me were simply too different—as though I were trying to glue a pebble I’d found in the garden to an origami figure. And the old man, who always reassured me at such moments, who promised we could find a different type of glue, was no longer here.
In order to boost my courage, I threw myself into the activities of daily life. I rose early in the morning and prepared the most elaborate meals possible for R. At the office, my head was full of schemes to get my work done as efficiently and accurately as possible. At the markets, I persevered, no matter how long the lines, navigating my way through the crowds and somehow managing to fill my shopping basket. I carefully ironed the laundry, recycled old blouses as pillow covers, unraveled a frayed sweater and reknit it into a vest. I scrubbed the kitchen and bathroom until they sparkled, took Don for his daily walk, cleared snow from the roof.
Yet when I crawled in bed at night, what came was not sleep but deep exhaustion and anxiety. Closing my eyes, I would feel a kind of panic, and tears would begin to flow. Certain I would never get to sleep, I would go to the desk and take out my manuscript. I could think of no other way to pass the night.
I would take some of the objects from the statues that I’d hidden next to the funnel speaker and arrange them on the manuscript pages. Often, when I was visiting him in his room, R would tell me to take any that interested me and keep them with me. To be honest, nothing was likely to interest my soul in its weakened state, but in order not to disappoint R, I chose one or two that happened to be close at hand.
Now, in the middle of the night, I would stare at them. And when I tired of that, I touched them, smelled them, opened their lids, wound their springs, rolled them about, held them up to the light, blew on them. I had no idea how they were really meant to be used.
From time to time, for just a moment, one of the objects would show me something more. A slight curve in the shape or a depth of color would catch my eye—and I would startle, wondering whether this could be the revelation that R was hoping for. But whatever it was, it never lasted more than a moment. Nor was it within my power to bring it back. Worse still, only a small fraction of the objects ever showed these special traits; the rest were content to remain sitting modestly on the manuscript pages.
Passing my nights this way did not relieve the anxiety I’d felt since the old man’s death, but it was better than weeping in my bed. Occasionally, these flashes of recognition were sparked by some object two nights in succession—once it happened three times in one night—but then I might go four nights without encountering even one. I began to wait for these brief moments with increasing impatience, seeing them as luminous signposts that would lead me to R. And I, too, hoped the light would illuminate the cavity in my heart.
One night I made an effort to write some words on the manuscript paper. I wanted to leave a record of what I saw in that dimly illuminated void of my memories. It was the first time I had done such a thing since the novels disappeared. I held the pencil awkwardly, and my characters were either too large to fit within the lines or too small and misshapen. Nor did I have any confidence in the things I wrote—and yet my fingers were moving—however slowly.
I soaked my feet in water.
It had taken me an entire night to write that one line. I tried reading it aloud a number of times, but I had no idea where the words had come from nor any guess as to where they might be leading. When I returned the objects to R the next day, I held out my manuscript along with them. He stared at it a long time, though it was no more than a single line.
“It’s just scribbling,” I told him. “Not something you need to read. I’m sorry. Just throw it away.” He had been quiet so long, I was sure he was disappointed.
“Don’t be silly!” he said at last, placing the page carefully on his desk. “It’s extraordinary progress! This is the first thing you’ve written without tearing holes in the paper with your eraser.”