Servants of the Map

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Next to my heart, in an oilskin pouch, I keep the lock of Elizabeth’s hair and your last unopened letter to me, with your solemn instruction on the envelope: To be Opened if You Know You Will Not Return to Me. If the time comes, I will open it. But the time won’t come; I will make it back, I will be with you again.

This comes to you with all my love, from your dearest

Max

The Forest (#ulink_1aaa7b77-3e51-5a6d-8863-8865617c607b)

LATER THE SQUAT WHITE cylinders with their delicate indentations would be revealed as a species of lantern. But when Krzysztof Wojciechowicz first glimpsed them, dotted among the azaleas and rhododendrons and magnolias surrounding Constance Humboldt’s kidney-shaped swimming pool, he saw them as dolls. The indentations cut the frosted tubes like waists, a third of the way down; the swellings above and below reminded him of bodices and rounded skirts. Perhaps he viewed the lanterns this way because the girls guiding him down the flagstone steps and across the patio were themselves so doll-like. Amazingly young, amazingly smooth-skinned. Sisters, they’d said. The tiny dark-haired one who’d appeared in the hotel lobby was Rose; the round-cheeked one driving the battered van, with her blond hair frizzing in all directions, was Bianca. Already he’d been clumsy with them.

“You are … are you Dr. Humboldt’s daughters?” he’d asked. The sun was so bright, his eyes were so tired, the jumble of buildings and traffic so confusing. The step up to the van’s back seat was too high for him, but neither girl noticed him struggling.

The small one, Rose, had laughed at his question. “We’re not related to Constance,” she’d said. “I’m a postdoctoral fellow at the institute.” The blond one, who called to mind his own mother sixty years earlier, pulled out of the hotel driveway too fast and said nothing during the short drive to the Humboldts’ house. He feared he’d hurt her feelings. For the last decade or so, he’d been subject to these embarrassing misidentifications, taking young scientists for children or servants when he met them out of context. They all dressed so casually, especially in this country; their faces were so unmarked—how could anyone tell them from the young people who chauffeured him about or offered trays of canapes at parties? But these girls he should have known, he’d probably met them earlier. Now, as he stepped down into the enormous back garden and moved toward the long table spread with food and drink, the girl called after a flower veered toward a crowd gathered by the pool and left him with the girl he’d affronted.

“Dr. Wojciechowicz?” she said, mangling his name as she steered him closer to the table. “Would you like a drink or something?”

Reflexively he corrected her pronunciation; then he shook his head and said, “Please. Call me Krzysztof. And you are Bianca, yes?” He could not help noticing that she had lovely breasts.

“That’s me,” she agreed dryly. “Bianca the chauffeur, Rose’s sister, not related to the famous Dr. Constance Humboldt. No one you need to pay attention to at all.”

“It’s not …” he said. Of course he had insulted her. “It’s just that I’m so tired, and I’m still jet-lagged, and …”

Could he ask her where he was without sounding senile? Somewhere north of Philadelphia, he thought; but he knew this generally, not specifically. When he’d arrived two days ago, his body still on London time, he had fallen asleep during the long, noisy drive from the airport. Since then he’d had no clear sense of his location. He woke in a room that looked like any other; each morning a different stranger appeared and drove him to the institute. Other strangers shuttled him from laboratory to laboratory, talking at length about their research projects and then moving him from laboratory to cafeteria to auditorium to laboratory, from lobby to restaurant and back to his hotel. The talk he’d given was the same talk he’d been giving for years; he had met perhaps thirty fellow scientists and could remember only a handful of their names. All of them seemed to be gathered here, baring too much skin to the early July sun. Saturday, he thought. Also some holiday seemed to be looming.

“Do forgive me,” he said. “The foibles of the elderly.”

“How old are you?”

Her smile was charming and he forgave her rude question. “I am seventy-nine years of age,” he said. “Easy to remember—I was born in 1900, I am always as old as the century.”

“Foibles forgiven.” She—Bianca, he thought. Bianca—held out her hand in that strange boyish way of American women. Meanwhile she was looking over his shoulders, as if hoping to find someone to rescue her. “Bianca Marburg, not quite twenty-two but I’m very old for my age.”

“You’re in college?”

She tossed her hair impatiently. “Not now. My sister and I were dreadful little prodigies—in college at sixteen, out at nineteen, right into graduate school. Rose already has her Ph.D.—how else do you think she’d have a postdoc here?”

Would he never say the right thing to this bristly girl? “So then you … what is the project you are working on?” Americans, he’d been reminded these last two days, were always eager to talk about themselves.

“So then I—I should be in graduate school, and I was until two months ago but I dropped out, it was seeming stupid to me. Unlike my so-successful sister Rose, I am at loose ends.”

She moved a bowl of salad closer to a platter of sliced bread draped with a cloth, then moved it back again. “Which is why I’m driving you around. Why I’m here. I’m sort of between places, you know? I got a temp job typing for an Iraqi biophysicist—see the short guy near the volleyball net? He hired me because I can spell ‘vacuum.’ I’m staying with my sister until I get enough money together to move. I might go to Alaska.”

“That’s nice,” Krzysztof said helplessly.

“Oh, please,” she said. “You don’t have to pretend to be interested. Go talk to the other famous people. Constance collects them, they’re everywhere.”

She huffed off—furious, he saw. At him? In the battered leather bag that hung from his shoulder he felt the bottle he’d carried across the ocean as a special gift for his hostess. But his hostess was nowhere to be seen, and no one moved toward him from either the pool or the round tables with their mushroomlike umbrellas. Already the top of his head was burning; he was all alone and wished he had a hat. Was it possible these people meant to stay in the sun all afternoon?

Bianca made a brisk circuit through the backyard, looking for someplace to settle down. There was Rose, leaning attentively toward Constance’s camel-faced husband, Roger, and listening to him as if she were interested. Entirely typical, Bianca thought; Rose submitted herself to Roger’s monologues as a way of pleasing Constance, who was her advisor. Constance herself was holding court from a elegant lawn chair beneath an umbrella, surrounded by graduate students and postdocs—but Bianca couldn’t bear the way Constance patronized her, and she steered wide of this group. She considered joining the two students Constance employed, who were trotting up and down the steps bearing pitchers of iced tea and lemonade; at last week’s reception, though, Constance had rebuked her for distracting the help. The knot of protein chemists at the volleyball net beckoned, Rick and Wen-li and Diego stripped of their shirts and gleaming in the sun, but she’d slept with Diego after that reception, and now they weren’t speaking. Perhaps Vivek and Anisha, easing themselves into the shallow end of the pool just as Jocelyn, already cannonball-shaped, curled her arms around her legs and launched herself into the deep end with a splash?