Anne Korkeakivi - An Unexpected Guest

And she waited. Even as the park began to be crisscrossed by people leaving work for the day, she waited. She folded and unfolded her arms.

She was so tired. What time was it back in Boston now? She gathered her stiffened limbs up and wandered the park as dark began to settle in. All around her, she heard Irish voices. Could he have passed by, but in disguise? Had she missed him? But she knew how he moved, as though he were a song that she heard over and over in her head. She knew the way he held his head up, the strange scar like a sickle on his neck. She spent another sleepless night in the Let’s Go hotel, and the next day was back amidst the half-hidden stone amphitheater surrounding Henry Moore’s sculptural paean to Yeats, even as raindrops began to plop down like huge cold tears. She moved under a tree. She pulled her sweater in around her. Still, she waited.

He’d had her book a return trip for five days later, but after a third empty day, she went to the airport and asked if there was room left on the next flight to Boston. She knew now that Niall was never going to join her in Boston either. She had brought the money over to Ireland as he wanted, and she would never see him again.

“Aren’t you having a nice time?” the ginger-haired lady at the ticket counter asked, looking concerned.

“My father’s not well,” she answered, and realized she’d learned how to lie.

She climbed onto the plane home, feeling sickeningly weightless, half numb and half terrified. If anyone in her family found out about her trip, she had been instructed to pretend she’d taken off as a lark to find her roots, normal enough for an Irish-American girl of twenty. Niall had pretended to leave days earlier, hiding out in her room, and in other rooms he didn’t tell her about, so no one would connect their departures. But no one was likely to find out about her trip. She’d been instructed to lose her passport as soon as she got back, and school hadn’t started back up yet. No one would notice she wasn’t around for a week; she had no roommates, and though she was friendly enough with other students, she wasn’t the sort of girl people instinctively kept track of. But there was still the risk someone from the flight over would make the flight back with her and remember how recently she’d seemed so very pregnant.

“You just tell them you lost the baby,” Niall had advised her back in Boston before they’d set off, narrowing those eerily blue eyes at her. “You tell them you’re grieving.”

Clare stared down at the heavyset stranger’s street map in her hand, trying to bring into focus the lines and addresses, but all she could see was herself, after her plane had touched down in Boston’s Logan Airport, throwing out every last piece of evidence from the flight, even the small suitcase she’d carried and the clothing she’d worn and the book she’d brought on the plane with her and never opened. Already beginning to hate herself for having smuggled money into Ireland. At the request of a man who’d abandoned her.

“We’ll see in Dublin, then,” Niall said, as they stood face-to-face, eye-to-eye, their bags at their feet, their bodies separated by her now-expanded abdomen, preparing to leave separately for the airport. He didn’t kiss her. He reached out and clenched her hands, then turned and walked out the door of her room in Cambridge.

“You okay, Madame?” the heavyset stranger asked, looking at her queerly. He used his hand, freed from the map now, to hold her elbow. “You okay?”

Clare flushed and nodded. “Just thinking, just thinking where…the best way for you to get where you are going. I can help you. You are on the wrong street.”

She’d done what she’d done and now she was heading full speed ahead back to Dublin where maybe she’d even cross paths with the man who had taken the money from her. But there was nothing to be done about that now. Nothing but to help this man right now find his own way, as any decent human being would do.

He was Turkish, not Albanian. By the time she and the man parted ways, she felt as though she knew all about him: his former career as a wrestler, the village where he grew up, why he was in Paris, and what he thought about French food and French women.

“They are very proud,” he said of the last, “and very nervous. The others, they not stop. Maybe they not understand English? This is why I make sure you stop. I think you see paper you understand and show me with hand if you not speak English. But I know you English.”

Clare didn’t correct him. “Oh?”

“You tall. And”—he hesitated—“you have very nice…” He pointed to the skin on his face and pulled on it.

Clare smiled. His own skin was thick and pocked, perhaps from repeated steroid use or some similar type of muscle-enhancement drug. He’d told her about that, too, in his broken English, how his body had been abused by the rough usage of his days as a competitive athlete. How he was sure that was why he was sick now.

“Thank you,” she said.

They’d reached the intersection of the Rue de Sèvres and the start of the Rue Saint-Placide. The entrance to the food hall at Le Bon Marché was just a few steps away, but there wasn’t any reason to reveal her immediate destination to him.

She stopped and pointed to the Rue Saint-Placide.

“You follow that little street two blocks until it ends. You come out on the Rue de Vaugirard. Your doctor’s building should be somewhere right there.” She gave him a closer look. “Do you think you can do that?”

“Yes, yes,” the man said, waving a hand. “Is no problem. I good now. Back in my own country, I never am lost. You know?”

“I know,” Clare agreed, nodding. Although, she didn’t know. If anything, she usually felt less lost when she was away from home. In Paris or London or Cairo, she could create her person rather than try to read it off the faces of the people who’d known her all her life. That was one of the greatest unspoken perks of being married to a diplomat. She was never lost — because she made up her destination as she went along.

The man gave her a last smile and a grunt and stepped into the street, narrowly missing being knocked down by a taxi. She realized she still had his map in her hand, but she didn’t want to call him back. Surely now he wouldn’t need it. She stuffed it into her sweater pocket. She watched until his silhouette had disappeared down the Rue Saint-Placide and she could be sure he wouldn’t turn around and see where she was now headed. Once he was gone, she thought to herself, Well, that’s one thing taken care of.

She checked her watch. 10:29 a.m.

The tall wooden doors of Le Bon Marché food hall felt stiff against her push. Inside, the store was crowded, as usual: tourists seeking mementos from France to take home, expats seeking memories from home to bring to their Paris apartments, and well-heeled Parisian housewives selecting fine cuts of meat and Jean LeBlanc walnut oil for their dinner parties. A woman brushed past, toting a camera, and a guard glided out from the shadows and raised a single finger. No words were exchanged, but the woman dropped the camera into her knapsack. The guard returned his walkie-talkie into its holster and fell back into the shadows.

Clare moved forward, giving herself up to what felt like a glorious golden machine. Pale wood, brass fittings, and countless hanging lamps pouring amber over the aisles played backdrop to the heavy jewelry and braided-chain straps of the Chanel bags of the customers. Parisians scoffed at Le Bon Marché grocery store for being un-French, with its neat mountains of flown-in foodstuffs, and greasy tubs of overcooked, overpriced ready-made curried chicken and salmon Florentine, but they couldn’t stop shopping here. Over the years of moving from one city to another, she had always found grocery stores and markets to reflect each posting’s inner world in a way that was so reliable as to be almost laughable. In Cairo, the souk had been a sprawling Byzantine affair, a jumble of spices, beans, teas, and fruits, not always appetizing in odor or appearance but communal, a chaotic but exacting map of local relationships and social hierarchies. In Washington, she’d frequented a Safeway where even the uncut melons had been wrapped in plastic, as remote as the smiles on the other women shoppers’ faces, the only scent that of the cleaning products used to wipe the floors and the occasional underscrubbed grocery bagger. The grocery closest to their apartment in London was run by a brooding Bangladeshi family and filled with dusty tins of curry, chili, and turmeric, dried fenugreek and dhania leaves, jars of ghee, their labels rubbed pale, side by side with the marmalade and marmite and Walker’s Shortbread that Edward liked to have around. A fast-paced Jewish bakery, popping out oven-steamed bagels, shared the same building front. The packaging on British goods seemed more charming than the food itself, and all the print was neatly spaced across the labels. In Paris, the women dressed to shop, and the way they selected ingredients was as meticulous as their appearance.