Chapter 26
ROSALIE
We draw it on the kitchen table and it takes until four in the morning.
Teodoro brings paper from the office, a whole roll of the stuff they use for the manifests. We lay it down the length of the table with mugs on the corners and I draw the Greenhouse from memory.
All of it.
Every building, every wall, the water tower and the boiler house and the lane and the poplars and the two hundred metres of hedge and the gate that has never been locked, and the propagation wing with nine beds in it drawn as nine small rectangles, and the fourth pane from the east end marked with an X because I cannot help it.
Teodoro does not talk for two hours.
That is the most frightening thing that has happened in this house.
At two he says, "How do you know the brick is bad?"
"Because it is."
"Rosalie."
"Because in the summer the mortar comes out on your thumb," I say. "Because I have had my thumb on it every summer since I was fifteen and every year there is more of it on my thumb."
"And nobody has ever noticed you doing that?"
"Everybody has noticed me doing that. There is nowhere else to stand out of the wind."
Teodoro looks at his brother.
"She is going to be the death of me," he says, "and I want it recorded that I said so before it happened."
Ottilie comes down at half past three in a dressing gown because the light is on.
She stands in the doorway and looks at three people bent over a roll of manifest paper covered in a floor plan of a building none of them will name, and she does not ask one question.
She puts the kettle on.
She makes tea for four and sets a cup down beside each of us, and beside mine she puts it down and takes her hand off it and steps back, which she has been doing since the second week and which I have never once mentioned.
Then she stands behind Teodoro and looks at the drawing for a while.
"Your water tower is wrong," she says.
Everybody looks up.
"It is not," I say.
"It is too close to the yard. If a tower is that close the shadow is on the glass in the afternoon and nothing grows, and that is a horticultural station, so the tower is further out and it is on the north side."
The kitchen is very quiet.
"How do you know that?" Teodoro says.
"Because I have lived in this country for fifty nine years and I have eyes," Ottilie says, "and because a glasshouse is a glasshouse. Move your tower. And go to bed, all of you, it is nearly four."
She goes up.
I look at the drawing for a long time.
Then I move the water tower nine metres north, because she is right, and I have been drawing it wrong in my own head for nineteen years, and I have no idea what to do with that.
Here is what happens after they go up.
The house goes quiet. Teodoro leaves at four with the roll under his arm to photograph it in the office where there is a good light. Cesare stays.
He is down at the other end of the table with his sleeves rolled and a pen he is not using, and the radio is off, and it is the middle of the night and neither of us is going to sleep.
And I say it.
I do not plan it. I have never planned one of these in my life and I have said four things out loud in this kitchen that I never intended to say, and this is the fifth and it is the worst.
"I think."
He looks up.
"What?"
"I think," I say again, and stop, because the two words are already wrong in my mouth, because I do not say them, because I have not said them since I was small enough to be corrected for saying them.
He puts the pen down.
He does not say anything. He does not help. He sits at the end of a table at four in the morning and lets me have the whole of it, and I stand at the other end of it and get the whole thing out.
"I think I do not have a name."
It comes out at the wrong volume, obviously.
Everything I have ever said in this room has come out at the wrong volume and I have stopped being embarrassed about that and I am embarrassed about it now, at four in the morning, in front of one man.
"Rosalie is an intake name," I say. "You get one on the first day. It is a flower. They are all flowers. Mine was already taken by a girl who went out in the spring, so I got it a week late, and for a week I was nothing at all, and I do not remember what that week was like."
He does not move.
"I was seven," I say. "I had a name before. Obviously I had a name before, everybody has a name before, and I know that I knew it, and I know that I said it to myself in a bed for a while because that is what you do."
"And then?"
"And then I stopped."
"Because they made you?"
"No." That is the part. That is the part I have never been able to say to anybody and it is why it has taken nineteen years.
"Nobody made me. There was no punishment.
Nobody ever hit me for it and Hanno never once told me not to.
I stopped because after about a year it did not do anything any more, and it was just a word I was saying in the dark, and one night I could not be bothered and I never picked it up again. "
The kitchen clock does its thing.
"I have tried," I say. "About four times. When I was fifteen. When I was twenty. Twice since Wren came. You lie there and you go through it, letters, sounds, the shape of it in a mouth, and there is nothing there, and it is not like a locked door. It is like a room that was never built."
"Do you know your mother's name?"
"No."
"Anything?"
"A ward in a hospital," I say. "And a school gate. And that the gate was green."
I want to write down what he does because I have thought about it every day since.
He does not offer me one.
I have run this conversation eleven times on a roof over the last three weeks, in the terrible chair, and in every single version of it there is a man saying then we will choose you one, and I have hated all eleven versions and I have not been able to work out why until this moment.
He does not do it.
He sits at the end of a table and he takes about four seconds, and then he says:
"All right."
"That is it?"
"What did you expect?"
"I expected you to give me one," I say.
"Yes," Cesare says. "I know. That is why I am not going to."
He gets up and comes the length of the table and stops about a foot away, which is where he always stops.
"I am not going to name you," he says. "Two people have named you in your life and both of them did it to own you, and I am not going to stand at the end of that queue, and if I ever do it I want you to walk out of this house."
"I did not say."
"I know what you did not say." He is looking at me steadily. "You have got a name somewhere. It exists. It is in a hospital record and a school register and a woman's mouth, and it is not gone, it is filed, and you have spent nineteen years being told the filing system is the world."
"That is not."
"There is a green gate," he says. "There is a ward. There is a woman who was ill in the spring, in a hospital, in a city, in a year, and there are four of us in this house who are extremely good at finding out where things are kept."
I have to sit down.
I do it badly and I catch the edge of the table on the way and something goes over, a mug, and neither of us picks it up.
"Do not," I say.
"Why?"
"Because if you look and there is nothing there."
"Then there is nothing there," he says. "And you will have a nothing you looked for, which is a different object entirely from a nothing you were handed."
"That is a sentence."
"It is a very good sentence. I have been working on it since Sunday."
Then he does the thing.
He crouches down beside the chair so that his eyes are lower than mine, which nobody has ever done in my life and which I do not have any defence against at all, and he says:
"In the meantime, I have a question, and it is not a small one, and you can say no."
"Ask it."
"When I say Rosalie."
"Yes."
"Do you want me to stop?"
The kitchen is completely silent and the mug is on its side on the paper with tea coming out of it and neither of us is doing anything about it.
Nineteen years.
Forty seven files. A photograph and a number and a name in a mouth that meant the asset is in position.
And a man in a lift saying it in the half dark. And a man saying it twice into my hair. And a man crouched over a photograph on a roof in the wind, writing it in ink on the back, because somebody should have written it down.
"No," I say.
"You are sure."
"It is not theirs any more." My hands are flat on my knees and I make myself turn them over.
"It was theirs for nineteen years and then you put it on the back of a photograph and now it is somewhere else and I do not know how you did that, and I have got about four things and it is one of them and I am not giving it back. "
He puts his hand out.
Palm up, on the arm of the chair, and leaves it there, and does not reach.
I put mine in it and he folds my fingers closed inside his.
"Then I will keep saying it," he says. "And when we find the other one I will learn that, and I will not say it in front of anybody until you tell me I can, and I would like it very much if the first person who says it out loud in a room is you."
I do not cry. I want that in the record.
There is a thing that happens for about eleven seconds and it is the same thing that happened in the dark when I said Wren, the door off the hinges, and it goes through me at four in the morning in a kitchen with tea running off the edge of the table onto the floor.
And when it has finished he says, in a completely ordinary voice, looking at the mess:
"I would like you to stay."
And I say, "I know."
"That is not what people say."
"No," I say. "But I have not got the other one yet. Ask me again in the spring."