Kinder Than Solitude

19

“It’s a good story, Moran,” Josef said.

“But?”

He sighed. “It’s a very good story,” he said. “It’s romantic and melancholy. But it’s not a real story.”

They were sitting on a lakeside bench. An early heat wave had confused all the trees and flowers into blossoms. Wait until the next snow, people kept warning one another, as though they needed to remind themselves, before hope was taken away, that it would not last. Yet the daffodils and tulips did not heed the warnings. There is no point in waiting, as every moment is the right moment.

“Why does it matter?” Moran asked. She had told Josef the story of Grazia, of her childhood in Italy, of her cold death — too early, too quiet — in Switzerland. It was the details she liked to describe to Josef: the dolls Grazia’s nanny had made for her; her French governess’s face, small and heart-shaped; the German musician who came to the house to give piano lessons to her and ended each encounter with a severe bow. In the days and weeks to come she would tell Josef other stories, too, of the Parisian cobbler and the Bavarian peasant, of the Russian maid riding in a coach with her mistress to Baden-Baden. “I like the stories.”

“I like them, too, but I would like it more if you could tell me something else.”

“About what?”

“Things I don’t know about you. Your parents, for instance. Your traveling with them.”

When they had gotten married she had told him that her parents had not been able to get visas; her father worked for a government ministry, which made traveling to the States complicated for him. Later, still in the marriage, the 9/11 attack made their traveling even less practical. She would not want them to go through stringent security checks, she had explained. Josef had agreed because it had seemed as though there would be plenty of time.

“But there is little to say about them,” she said.

“That must not be true,” Josef protested mildly.

Moran thought about it, and told Josef about when she and her parents were on a tour in Central Europe. In the old town of Zagreb a man was playing a Soviet song on the accordion, and her parents had come over to sing along, her father in Russian, her mother in Chinese, and the musician in a language none of them understood. “The Night in the Suburb of Moscow,” she said, a most romantic song that her parents had sung when they had been in their early twenties.

Josef waited for more, and Moran smiled apologetically. “This doesn’t work. I don’t think I can make up a good story about real people.”

“I’m not asking you to make up a story.”

“But I like myself more when I make up those stories,” Moran said. They were not her stories. They were not about her time, or her people, but what she had once found in these stories — escape — would eventually become her wisdom. Perhaps if she kept these tales going Josef would one day forgive her stubbornness in choosing solitude, because he, kinder than solitude, was always here for her.