She wakes to the sound of people coming into the apartment. The clicking of bottles and a hol ow boom of an instrument in a case being banged against a wal . She sits up and feels the photo pasted against her breast.
“Mamma.”
She is startled to see Francesca at the end of the bed, curled up, knees to her chest. The room seems familiar now, almost breathing.
“You'l take the life from me, precious heart.”
“I'm sorry, Mamma.”
“How long have you been there?”
“A little while. You were sleeping so wel .”
“Who's there? Who's that? Outside?”
“I don't know, that asshole is bringing people here.”
“Who?” says Zoli.
“Henri.”
“I mean who's with him?”
“Oh, I don't know, just a group of drunks. The bars are closed. I'm sorry. I'l kick them out.”
“No, leave them be,” says Zoli. She pul s back the sheet and shifts sideways on the bed, puts her feet to the floor. “Can you give me my nightdress?”
She stands with her back to her daughter and pul s the dress over her head, rough against her skin.
“You were sleeping with Daddy?”
“Yes, how sil y is that?”
“Just sil y enough.”
A series of shushes come from the living room, then one clink of a bottle cap fal ing to the floor, rol ing across the hardwood, and a series of stifled laughs.
“Mamma, are you okay? Can I get you something? Hot milk or something?”
“Did you talk to him? Swann?”
“Yes.”
“And he said he was sorry, didn't he?”
“Yes.”
“Did he say what he was sorry for?”
“For everything, Mamma.”
“He's always been an idiot,” says Zoli.
The low sound of a mandolin niters through the apartment and then a harsh piece of laughter, fol owed by the faint pluck of a guitar.
“Come here beside me.”
Her daughter swings longways across the bed, spreads herself out, takes a piece of Zoli's hair and puts it in her mouth. In so many ways, her father's child. They lie side by side in the intimate dark.
“I'm sorry, Mamma.”
“Nothing to be sorry for.”
“I had no idea.”
“What else did he say?”
“He lives in Manchester now. He got out in ‘68, the whole Prague thing. He says he thought you were dead. There were bodies found along the border. He was sure that something bad had happened to you. Or that you were living in a hut somewhere in Slovakia. He says he looked for you.
Searched al over.”
“What's he doing here?”
“He said he likes to fol ow things. To keep in touch. That it was a hobby. He stil uses the word Gypsy. Goes to a lot of conferences and things.
The festival down there in Santa Maria. Al over the place. He says he owns a wine shop.”
“A wine shop?”
“In Manchester.”
“Nobody lives where they grew up anymore.”
“What's that?”
“Just something he said to me once.”
“He said he was heartbroken, Mamma. That's what he said. That he's been heartbroken ever since.”
“He lives alone?”
“I don't know.”
“Swann,” Zoli says with a slow, sad laugh. “Swann. A capitalist.”
She tries to imagine him there, amid a row of wooden racks, learning to count prices, the bel on the doorframe tinkling. He stands and greets the customer with a smal bow of the head. Later, stooped, he shuffles to the corner shop to buy his half-liter of milk and a smal loaf of bread, then goes home to a smal house in a row of smal houses. He sits in a soft yel ow chair and looks towards the window, waiting for the light to disappear so he can have his evening meal, wander off to bed, read the books that wil make up his mind for him.
“He wants to see you again, Mamma. He said that his ideas were borrowed, but your poems weren't.”
“More of his horseshit.”
“He says he has some of Stränsky's poems too.”
“Did he say anything about Conka?”
“He fel out of touch with everyone. They were made to stay in the towers, that's al he knows.”
Francesca's body stretches away from her as if, in their huddling, they might be able to extend each other.
“And the other man, the journalist?”
“He'd like to talk. That's what he said. He found an old book of yours, and went searching. He was just curious at first, enjoyed the poems, he said. He'd like to talk to you. Tomor-row.
“You can talk to him for me, Franca. Tel him something.”
“Tel him what?”
“Tel him I've gone somewhere.”
“You're going home, aren't you?”
“Of course I am.”
“What wil I tel him?”
“Tel him that nothing is ever arrived at.”
“What?”
“Tel him that nothing is ever ful y understood, that's what I'd like to say.”
A peace descends between them now, a quietness that travels across the sheets. Her daughter hikes herself onto an elbow, a little hil of shadow where her hip juts out.
“You know what he wanted to know? Swann. At the end?”
“Tel me,” says Zoli.
“He was a bit embarrassed. He kept looking at the floor. He said he just wanted to know one thing.”
“Yes…?”
“Wel , he wanted to know what had happened to his father's watch.”
“That was his question?”
“Yes.”
Zoli watches as a smal bar of light moves along the wal and down. Someone passes in the corridor outside and a series of shushes sound from the living room. She closes her eyes and is carried away on the notion of Swann resting on one smal fixed point of an ancient clockhand, as if it al might come around again, as if it al could be repeated and cured. A single gold watch. She wonders if she should feel pity, or anger, or even amusement, but instead she locates the pulse of an odd tenderness for Swann, not for how he was, or what he has become, but for al he has lost, the flamboyance of what he had once so dearly believed in, how absolute it was, how fixed. What must it have been like for him, to break the border one final time and to move back to England? What must it have been like for him to return empty, to be back with less than he had ever imagined leaving with? Swann, she thinks, did not learn for himself how to be lost. He did not know the meaning of what it was to turn and change. She wishes now that she had kissed him, that she had taken his slack face in her hands, touched her lips against the pale forehead to release him, to let him walk away.
Zoli lays her head against her daughter's breastbone and feels the breath trembling through Francesca's body.
“You know what I want to do?” Zoli says. “I'm going to see him tomorrow. Then I'd like to get on a train and go back to the val ey. I would very much like to wake up quietly in the dark. That's what I'd like.”
“You're going to tel Swann where you're living?”
“Of course not. I couldn't bear the thought of him coming there.”
And then Zoli knows for sure what she wil do: she wil take a taxi to the train station, stop off first at the hotel, move under the birdsong, cal Swann's room, stand in the reception, wait, watch him shamble across towards her, hold his face in her hands for a moment, and kiss him, yes, on the forehead, kiss him. She wil al ow him his sorrow and then she wil leave, take the train, alone, home to the val ey.
“I'm happy there,” says Zoli.
A note jumps out from deep in the apartment, a hard discordant thing moving through the air, surrounded a second later by a new one, as if testing the old one, until they start to col ide, rising and fal ing, taking air from each other.
“Idiot,” says Francesca. “I'l tel him to shut up.” Her body pul s taut, but Zoli taps her hand. “Wait a moment,” she says. The music rises and draws itself out, quicker, more turbulent.