The Steady Running of the Hour: A Novel (40 page)

Mireille and I stop at an Internet café a few miles from the house. We check our e-mail at a pair of aging computers beside a humming refrigerator stocked with soft drinks. The keyboards are sticky with grime.

There’s a new message in my in-box, but I don’t recognize the sender’s name. I scroll down to the bottom of the message:
Gregory Bailey, Information Officer: Archives, Royal Geographical Society
. I read the e-mail again and call to Mireille. She leans over to my monitor to look.

—What does it mean?

—They found the telegrams.

I explain that in 1924 the Mount Everest Committee kept copies of all telegrams sent through the expedition to its members. I’d requested them in London, but it had taken weeks for the archive to pull them from storage and scan them. I click through images of old telegraph forms, yellow and pink slips with cryptic messages in purple type, transcribed and carbon-copied, marked by pencils and rubber stamps. I stop at one of the messages.

2 AP 24

IMOGEN SOAMES ANDERSSON HOTTINGUER ET CIE 38 RUE DE PROVENCE PARIS

PLEASE CABLE ADDRESS HAVE WRITTEN POSTE RESTANTE BERLIN GPO RETURN ENGLAND AUGUST YOURS EVER ASHLEY

Mireille shakes her head in disbelief.

—They were in contact. But what does it mean?

—Hold on—

I run a search for “Hottinguer et Cie” and learn that Banque Hottinguer was a private bank established in Paris in 1786. Then I log on to an online encyclopedia and check the entry for
poste restante
.

Poste Restante
(French, trans. “post which remains”) is a service where the post office holds mail until the recipient calls for it. It is a common destination for mail for people who are visiting a particular location and have no need, or no way, of having mail delivered directly to their place of residence at that time.

Mireille looks at me.

—So she wasn’t in Paris?

—I don’t think so. That’s just where her bank was. It seems like she was in Berlin—

—But how did she get the telegram if she wasn’t in Paris?

—It must have gotten forwarded by her bank. Lots of people used to do it when they traveled, I’ve seen it in archives. People could just wire your bank and you’d let the bank know which hotel you were staying at.

—I don’t understand. The message doesn’t tell you anything—

—It does. I just have to think about it.

We stare at the telegram on the screen. I think of Ashley in 1924, sending the message from a hill station in India or the remote Tibetan plateau. I think of Imogen in Berlin the same year, and I wonder why
she would be there and why Ashley would be writing to her. I turn to Mireille.

—He was on an expedition. He was on the other side of the world and he wanted to send her a letter.

Mireille shakes her head. I touch her shoulder.

—Just listen. He didn’t have her address, but he knew what her bank was, and I guess he knew she was in Berlin. So he wrote her poste restante to the Berlin general post office, then sent her this telegram telling her to collect the letter.

I make a printout of the scan. Mireille goes to the cash register and pays the clerk.

—Let’s go outside, she says.

We stand outside the café, at the crossroads of this deserted hamlet where no cars drive by and most of the businesses are shuttered. Mireille draws tobacco from a paper pouch and taps it into a neat line on a leaf of rolling paper. She looks at me.

—
Tu veux aller à Berlin?

—I think I have to go.

—But this telegram, Mireille insists, has nothing to do with your grandmother’s birth. Chasing it won’t get you any closer to the money. You have no idea how long she was in Berlin—

Mireille tucks the cigarette into her pocket.

—Or if she was there at all, she adds. Maybe he was guessing. Maybe she never even got the telegram.

We walk past a
boulangerie
, its rusted steel shutters drawn shut. A stiff wind blows along the street and Mireille zips her coat up to the neck.

—You wouldn’t even have an address to look for there.

—No.

—But you’ll go anyway.

—I know it seems crazy. But every time I’ve tried to be logical and
look at records or archives, it hasn’t worked. And when I just go after something, like when I went to Leksand, or when I came up here with you, I’ve found things. It’s just like Prichard told me, there isn’t anything in normal records, so the only thing that works—

Mireille walks on past our car, shaking her head.

—Works, she repeats. You’ve learned a few things. But you haven’t found anything that will get you the money. Do you think you’re better off than before all this began? You’re nervous all the time, worrying about something you can’t control, something that already happened. You’re spending all your savings on this crazy search, and now you want to go to Berlin. Where would you even look there?

—I don’t know. The post office.

Mireille lifts her hand in the air.

—I don’t understand you. I don’t understand what you’re after. You say you don’t care about the money, but you’ll go anywhere to chase this story. Why not Amsterdam while you’re at it, why not Bruxelles or Genève? You’re just guessing, you can’t keep this up forever. How much money do you have left?

—Enough to get there.

—
Et après
? What do you think you’re going to find over there? A hundred million Swiss francs? Even you aren’t that crazy. You think this is going to have an answer at the end—

—There has to be some ending.

—There doesn’t.
Même si—

Mireille breaks off in frustration, shaking her head. She looks down the empty street.

—Even if there’s an ending to all this, maybe it’s lost. Maybe there’s a reason it ought to stay lost. And even if you’re lucky enough to find an ending, it might not be the ending you wish for.

—I’ve been lucky. I found the letters. I found you.

—And I’m asking you not to go to Berlin. Stay here and we can go back to Paris next week.

I stand in the street, not knowing what to say. Mireille stops before
the window of a small
mercerie,
her back to me as she stares at the bundles of black and cream-colored lace.

—Just give me a month, I say. Then it’ll all be over.

She shakes her head and walks on ahead of me. I follow after her.

—It’s not because I care so much about you, she says. You’re no one. You don’t understand what’s going on around you, or what any of it means. But what bothers me is that every amazing thing that happens to you, you’ll just get on a train and go somewhere else, where you expect another amazing thing to happen.

—I don’t expect that.

—You expect that, she continues, but that’s not life.
C’est un conte
. A fairy tale. Forget about the lawyers and the money. They’re never going to give you anything. And forget about these dead people and their story, it’s probably not even true. What about our story? What were the chances that we would meet, that you would choose that bar in Paris, for no reason at all, and that I would take the seat beside you? Isn’t that enough? Or are you only going to care about it in ten years or a hundred years, when I’m gone and you can’t do anything about it?

—I didn’t know you felt that way—

I reach for her shoulder, but she walks on a step ahead.

—I don’t feel that way, she counters. But even if I did, you’d still go to Berlin.

—I’ll be back. I’ll come right back here when I’m done.

Mireille stops in the street and turns to me. Her face is streaked black with running mascara. She wipes her face with her sleeve, her chin raised high.

—No, she says. I’m sure you won’t.

30 December 1916

Lake Ejen

Dalarna, Sweden

Eleanor always woke first. Dawn came late here, a dim haze of white in a world already carpeted in deep snow. And Eleanor rose instinctively at the first inching of day, as if her body were trained to extract the maximum of light from the grim Nordic winter.

The problem was not that Imogen slept late. It was that she stayed in bed. The days were short and bleak, and when her sister did not rise until noon it left her less than three hours’ paltry daylight. Such gloom would sap anyone’s spirit. So in the morning Eleanor would cross the hallway to find Imogen lying with her eyes already open in a vacant stare, her face turned toward the slim gray band of light slipping between the baize curtains. Eleanor would part the curtains; Imogen would continue looking where she had been looking, her gaze now passing through the squares of leaded windowpanes.

—Darling, Eleanor would say. You ought to just open the curtains yourself.

Then Eleanor would lean over her sister and kiss her lightly upon the forehead.

It was not only Leksand that was wholly alien to Imogen. It was her own life. It seemed a sentence levied for some private crime: an entire winter in a rough cabin at the northern extremity of civilization, quarantined from all society save her sister and an elderly Swedish housekeeper. Not that Imogen was bothered by the house, the snow, the isolation. She had often dreamed of such a life. What troubled her was how she had come to it.

No matter how often Imogen retraced the course of events that brought her here, she could never detect the aberration she sought, the mistake that had condemned her to this calamity—an existence that was ghastly chiefly because it could not be redirected. She could not go back. But if only she knew her error, she might find the thread that had been pulled to unravel her; perhaps then she could use that knowledge to repair everything. Imogen recalled an article she had read about the ingenious antivenin of Brazilian physicians, proof against the bites of pit vipers or adders: cures deposited in corked vials in a laboratory, crafted arcanely from poisonous venom. Where was the vial for her own condition, the cure that would swoop her back to six weeks ago, offer her a chance to replay the scene where a few missteps had derailed everything?

Still the unreality of Leksand bloomed on for Imogen, thriving as she refused the coming of each new day, lengthening as the icicles draped off the shingled roof. This was her life now, and yet she would not have it—the low sloping pineboard ceiling; Eleanor donning overboots and mackintosh downstairs to light the fire in the barn, as Mrs. Hasslo filled the kettle from a great pitcher; the bilious drifts of snow gathering and gathering around the house, obscuring the lush grass that was all Imogen remembered from the summer visits of her youth.