Shadows of the New Sun: Stories in Honor of Gene Wolfe (9 page)

I decided to take matters into my own hands. I went to a seedy tattoo parlor on the Westgate Road, halfway up the hill, hidden away between the pawnshops and the secondhand stores, and had a huge shaven-headed brute step straight out of a Tom of Finland calendar ink the words “be brave” over my heart.

It was as I was walking out of that shithole that I first saw Isla Durovich.

She took my breath away.

I’d always thought that was the biggest cliché in the book, but there she was, this woman looking in the window of a pet store at one of the capuchin monkeys hanging upside down by its tail, and I couldn’t breathe.

I put my right hand over the wound where Tom of Finland had inked those words to live by, and thought: It’s now or never. “Be brave,” I told myself, and crossed the street into what was supposed to have been the rest of my life.

And it would have been, if . . .

If wishes were fishes, as my gran used to say, beggars would ride. She never could keep her aphorisms straight.

Instead of being forever it was four years, six months, two days, fifteen hours, and thirty minutes. And then the car hit her and I was robbed of my happily ever after. Sometimes the fairy tales suck. The whole idea that it’s better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all is rubbish. The Isla-shaped hole in the rest of my life was unbearable. I was numb. I drank even though I don’t drink. It didn’t help. I didn’t leave the house. I closed the curtains and hid in the dark. It didn’t help. I looked at the packing list on the table, the last thing she’d written, all the things we were going to need for the honeymoon. It didn’t help. I listened to her voice on the answerphone. Hearing her say “You know what to do” just hurt. I lay on her side of the bed, trying to absorb her essence as though she might have left more than just an impression in the wrinkled sheets. I breathed in her fragrances: the shampoos, perfumes, even the musty old pages of her favorite books, obscure paperbacks she’d picked up at jumble sales and charity shops, all secondhand because, she liked to pretend, that meant they’d been loved and loved so much someone had wanted to share them with the world.

We’d mapped out our honeymoon from those old books: Eurostar from London through the tunnel to Paris, just because we’d always wanted to go through the tunnel. The train from Paris to Prague. Prague to Vienna, down through the mountains to Venice. Venice on to Rome, then up to this little place on Lake Garda. We were going to do it properly, four weeks of traveling. A full moon’s worth of exploring, living, and to hell with real life.

And just like that, the whole “be brave” thing became so much harder. Sometimes I think God punishes us by answering our prayers. I remember lying in bed, looking at Isla sleeping beside me, and just thinking I wanted this moment to last forever. I wanted the world to stop and it did, with a knock on the door and two somber- looking policemen with their hats in their hands. It was the hat in the hands that did it. That only ever means one thing. The older of the two asked if I was me, and then if they could come inside. Isla was a schoolteacher. Was. That’s still stupidly hard to say. It’s so . . . past tense. Final. I don’t like finality in words anymore. I like words that are open and that at least allow for some kind of hope, like the word yet. Yet is a powerful word. It’s a good one.

Kids had been playing in the yard during lunch when the ice- cream man drove tantalizingly close to the gates. One of the grade threes had wriggled through the gate and wandered across the road, following the Pied Piper of Ice Cream’s call. Isla had been on playground duty. She’d run into the road to save the girl and taken most of the impact while the girl had walked away with a few bruises. The policeman had called it a small mercy. It wasn’t. Not really. I didn’t get any comfort out of knowing the love of my life had died saving some kid I didn’t know or care about. That wasn’t mercy to me.

The funeral was on the day we were supposed to be married, and all I can remember is thinking it should have been raining.

I put a rose on her coffin and went home.

But it didn’t feel like home anymore. Home is where the heart is, and mine was broken and it felt like it would be that way forever. It wasn’t just that she wasn’t there, though that was a huge part of it; it was the part of me that she’d taken away that was the worst. It’s hard to explain, but I was a better version of myself when Isla was around.

The last present she’d ever given me was still on the table beside the packing list and tickets: a vintage Omega watch. It was Speedmaster, the same model that Buzz Aldrin had worn when he took the second “giant step” behind Neil Armstrong. The first watch on the moon. Not that this one had been into space, of course. Well, I assume it hadn’t. Aldrin’s had disappeared on its way to the Smithsonian, but I’m pretty sure Isla wasn’t that connected.

I set the time and put it on.

I couldn’t tell you why I did it, but I picked up her list and started randomly stuffing things into a backpack.

I was halfway to the station before I realized I actually intended to go on my honeymoon.

I took some battered old paperbacks with me and a few fun little trinkets, things that were absolutely her, quirky little things that were like little pieces of her soul. If it couldn’t be a honeymoon then it could be a pilgrimage. I’d take those parts of Isla to all of the places we’d been meant to visit together and bury them at the different landmarks we’d talked about.

It was my version of scattering her ashes.

First stop, Paris.

There’s the obvious attractions, sure: the Eiffel Tower, the Louvre, Sacré-Coeur, the Champs-Elysées, Pont Neuf, and Notre Dame. But Paris for Isla would always be Les Pont des Arts because of Julio Cortázar’s book Rayuela. I only knew it because of that scene in Amélie where Audrey Tautou decided to secretly do good deeds for those who deserved it. Isla had made me promise we’d put a padlock on the bridge and throw the key into the Seine like lovers do. There’s something wonderfully romantic about thinking of something of ours locked there forever, even if it was the padlock from the suitcase she wouldn’t need anymore.

I fastened it in place and threw the key as far and as hard as I could into the river below.

The lights of Paris illuminated the wonderful dichotomy of the city; on one side of me the chaos of the medieval city, all angles and shadows, and on the other the serenity of the Louvre, so calm and so cultured. I savored the feel of the wind on my face and wondered what else there was left to do here. We had three days booked in Paris, but I was done here. I’d fastened our padlock and bound us to the city forever. I just wanted to move on to Prague and show Isla the next place on our journey.

I walked, head down, a tired, beaten man, shuffling through the same streets countless tired, beaten Parisian feet had shuffled through during the Second World War, looking for an entrance to the Metro.

There was a wonderful piece of pavement art chalked onto the path beside the entrance. It looked like a man struggling through a storm, his umbrella turned inside out while the rain began to wash him away as though he’d never been there. I dropped a handful of coins into the artist’s hat and went down for the train. I checked my watch. It had been losing time, but I’d never thought about getting it fixed. Nothing too drastic, maybe twenty seconds an hour, but that made eight minutes a day, or fifty-six minutes a week. In a month I’d lose a little over four hours, which meant something like two days over the course of a year. It was funny how time could just fritter away because a spring was coiled a little too loosely.

An old couple sat huddled up so close together they might have been Siamese twins. The woman had a yellow Kodak envelope in her hands and was thumbing through pictures. She tutted in that wonderfully French way when I sat down beside them and went back to her photographs, occasionally shrugging oh so expressively.

Her fingers fastened on one. She pulled it out of the pack and then turned to her husband, tapping it. They looked at the photograph together, and then she looked at me and said, “Est-ce vous? Ilest, n’est-ce pas?”

I felt like an idiot. My French didn’t go beyond, “Je m’appelle Steve,” and I wasn’t one hundred percent on how to say that. I shrugged in a much less expressive manner and said, “I’m sorry?”

“English?”

I nodded.

She smiled, slightly. “It’s you, isn’t it?” she said, holding the photograph out for me to look at.

It was.

Or more accurately it was me and Isla. It took me a moment to realize when it had been snapped—about nine months ago. We’d taken shelter under the bandstand at Hyde Park, because the rain was pouring down. We’d huddled up close and watched the swans while Isla had told me how swans mate for life, and I’d asked her to marry me. I smiled. I couldn’t quite believe that some complete stranger waiting for a train on the Parisian underground had a photo of one of the happiest moments of my life. I could see it all in my head, me going down on one knee, her giggling, then putting her hand to her mouth when she realized I was serious, and the way she couldn’t stop saying yes.

I nodded. “Yes. Yes, it’s me. How did you get this?”

The old woman smiled, but it was the man who answered. “That is where Isuelt agreed to be my wife,” he said with a smile, obviously remembering the day. And I thought again just how much I missed the woman I never got to marry. All I wanted to do was grow old with her, like these two. “The war was over, and we were young, reckless and very much in love. I convinced her to come with me to England, and it was the start of a lifetime together. We went back for the first time last year, and it seemed only right we should take a photograph of the place where it all began.”

“I was asking Isla—my girlfriend— to marry me,” I said, pointing at the photograph.

“We know,” the old woman said. “We stood in the rain watching you. Where is she?”

And there it was, the question I didn’t want to answer. I didn’t want to rob this lovely old couple of their happy memory, but I didn’t know how to deflect the question either, so I said, “She couldn’t make the trip.”

“Ah, that’s a shame.”

“This is going to sound strange, but would it be possible to keep this?” I asked, reluctant to let go of the photograph.

“Oh, of course, of course. We’ve got the negatives, we can easily make another copy. You should have it. It’s the start of your life, after all,” the old man said.

“Thank you so much.” I put the picture in my pocket.

A few minutes later the train rolled in and we said our good- byes.

I can’t begin to explain how I felt. It was as though they’d given me a part of my life back that I’d lost forever. Now it wasn’t just my memory. I’ve always believed that the more people who remember something the more real it is. Now, with three of us to remember, that day in Hyde Park was real again.

Next stop, Prague, guided by May, a battered collection of poetry by Karel Hynek Mácha. The train was cramped and hot and sweaty, filled with backpackers. I’d booked a private compartment, which I ended up sharing with half a dozen young students broken up for the summer and looking to get drunk and lucky in one of Europe’s party cities. The only other “grown-up” in our carriage was a businessman who didn’t like flying. I know that because he said it at least five times in three hours. He kept telling the kids how they were fifteen years too late and how Prague had been the city to visit after the Gentle Revolution. He leaned over toward me and said conspiratorially, “It’s the closest we’ll ever come to the spirit of the sixties. Free love, if you know what I mean? Especially as a Westerner. We were like gods back then.” I didn’t say much to them, just leaned against the side of the compartment with my head resting against the window reading through the pages of the poems. I made it to the line about the lover weeping, and took it as an order.

There were two places in Prague I wanted to visit, a restaurant we’d always talked about going to, Svata Klara, which wasn’t so much a restaurant as it was a treasure trove of history trapped in a seventeenth-century wine cellar, and of course the Charles Bridge at midnight. I booked myself into the hotel, which had been an old Dominican monastery in a previous life, and then went out for a walk, wondering if I would somehow stumble upon Mácha’s so- called Alley of Sighs, the white chapel, or the execution hill he wrote so hauntingly about. I knew the poem inside out now. Reading nothing but it for six hours will do that to a man.

The Old Town center of Prague is like another world—a place out of time. Of course there are all the touristy bits you’d expect, the overpriced coffees thanks to the invasion of Starbucks, and the locals have really embraced the ideals of capitalism to the point that what’s theirs is theirs, and what’s mine is theirs seems to be the maxim of the day. Some of it, like the Jewish cemetery built on top of a row of shops, made me smile at the quirkiness of it, right up until I saw just how many gravestones were crammed into that tiny space. I started to think about what it really meant. Then there were other parts where the wealth of the city is on display with the rows of shop windows filled with Hermès, Dolce & Gabbana, Versace, and Bulgari. When you thought about the beggars on their knees two streets away it was kind of sickening, really, but that was the modern world all over.

I walked around for a couple of hours. That was all it took for me to stumble on the underbelly of the city.

Walking down Karlova, this wonderful Brothers Grimm kind of street that leads toward the Charles Bridge, I was confronted by a naked woman doing her best to walk seductively down the middle of the cobbled path. She had that vaguely stoned look to her brown eyes. And yes, I was looking at them, it was the only place I felt safe to look. She seemed to be finding it increasingly difficult to walk— never mind seductively—in heels without breaking her neck.

A fat man with greased-back hair and a thick gold chain around his neck that made him look like something out of a seventies sexploitation movie was ten steps in front of her, walking backwards, and filming the looks of passersby for his website and encouraging her to bend and twist, dip a little thigh, flash a smile, be coy, and cover up, open up.