Chapter 20: The Light

We left Lisbon on a moonless night in a fishing boat I promised some chapters back not to describe, and I will keep the promise, except to say that the man who owned it would not take our money and would not give his name and put us off past the harbour mouth into the swell with a flask of bad brandy and a direction, and that I have thought of him often and know nothing about him except the one enormous thing, which is that in a war that had taught the whole world to count the cost of everything he did a great kindness for two strangers and declined to enter it in any ledger at all. The city fell away behind us the way it had stood the whole time I knew it, lit — every lamp along the Avenida and up the hills burning into the dark over the water while the rest of the continent lay blacked-out and waiting, the great foolish blazing innocent-looking city shrinking to a smear of gold on the black, and I stood in the stern with Vera’s good hand in mine and watched it go and thought about the thing I had thought on my very first night there, in another life, that I had once mistaken all that light for innocence. I knew better by then. I had learned, in that city, exactly what the light was and was not. But I will come to that, because it is the last thing this account has to say and I have earned the right to say it last.

I have to give you Lola first — not because she was there at the end, for she was not; she was the first of us out, gone on a Tuesday Clipper while I was still down in the worst of the arithmetic — but because a man does not get to leave Lola Schiff out of the telling merely because the war was decent enough to lift her clear of it early, and because the thing she said to me on the quay at Cabo Ruivo, with a dead fox in her case and a seaplane the size of a wronged hotel sitting on the bright water at her back, turned out to be the one instruction the whole rest of my life has been spent trying to carry out.

She had taken my face in her two gloved hands that afternoon at the seaplane base — half of Lisbon was taking my face in its hands that year; it was a city of people saying goodbye, and mine was a convenient face to say it to — and she had ordered me not to be tender, because she could not be packed and be touched at the same time, having only the two hands, and then she had been tender anyway, in the single manner she allowed herself, which was an instruction dressed as a joke. ‘Go home someday,’ she said. ‘Not to America — home, wherever that turns out to be. Go and find it. Promise me you will look.’ And I said I promised, and it was one of the few things I said in that entire year of professional lying that I meant all the way down to the floor of myself, even though I had no more notion then of where home might be than of where or when the war would stop — and I have come to think the two questions had the same answer the whole time, and that it only took me twenty years and a great deal of other people’s blood to learn to read it.

I will tell you, because you have come this far and are owed it, that Lola Schiff lived. She got out clean that Tuesday, across the Azores and the ocean to the impossible safe enormous country, and she and I wrote — she had warned me that everyone swears they will write and everyone writes twice, a long letter and a short one and then a Christmas card with a lie in it about meeting again, and that this is not failure but life, the twice and the card; and we beat her estimate by a good margin, the two of us, it turning out that neither of us had as many people left to write to as a life is meant to come supplied with. The last true letter came in 1947, four pages of complaint about America and one line at the very bottom, under the signature, that said only — Well? Did you look? Did you find it? — and I wrote back a single word, which was yes, and she never answered, because she did not need to; with Lola the answer was always the whole of the conversation, and the four pages of complaint were merely the toll you paid to reach it. She is gone now, these six years. I keep the letter in the drawer with the other things I cannot put a price on, which is not a large drawer, and it is the most valuable in the house.

We came, by ways that do not matter, to the country neither of us was born in, where this is being written, and we were nothing when we came — I have told you that, the particular weightless freedom of the disavowed, wanted by no one, vouched for by no one — and we set about, with the slowness of the very tired, the business of becoming something small and real and ours. It is not an interesting story and I will not pretend it is. A man with a burned cover and a good ear for languages can always find work that asks no questions, and a woman who keeps flawless books, even left-handed, even crooked-slanted, is wanted in every back office in every port in the world and asked nothing about her past so long as the columns come out true, and Vera’s columns always came out true; it was the one thing the war had not been able to take off her, the keeping of an accurate account, and she kept ours, and it came out true. We were poor and then less poor. We were, slowly, home.