Chapter 10 The Sleeping House
The Sleeping House
Her suitcase was so heavy that she’d had trouble heaving it off the baggage carousel.
A fellow traveller had offered to help her, but she’d managed to retrieve it before he could intervene.
She dug out some coins from the lining of her raincoat pocket.
After all these years, she still saw finding them as a sign – good or bad, she couldn’t say.
But the four coins she discovered this time were just enough to unlock a luggage trolley from the rack.
She passed through customs and left the airport.
Her fellow travellers were shivering as they waited in line for a taxi, but Anna was a veteran of icy winds, fields covered in glittering snow, drifts frozen solid in the ditches, her breath coming out in clouds of white.
She wasn’t afraid of the cold anymore. These past years spent far from home hadn’t always been easy, and, when the taxi driver asked her if she’d had a nice trip, she couldn’t think of an appropriate answer.
The winters she’d endured had been merciless.
She’d worked endlessly, without counting the hours.
She’d ended a relationship because the plan in her heart mattered more to her than being loved, or loving anyone.
She’d fled everything that was familiar, learned many things about her profession and herself, her limits and her endurance.
And she’d saved up enough money to make her dream a reality.
As the taxi merged onto the highway, Anna leaned her head against the window and dozed off.
An hour later, she opened her eyes to the familiar sight of her suburban hometown.
A perfume shop had replaced the art-house movie theatre, and a pharmacy now stood on the corner where the bank used to be; an ATM was all that remained.
She paid the driver, dragged her suitcase to the porch, took out her keys, and let herself into her home.
The house hadn’t suffered too badly from being left empty for so long. Anna opened the shutters on the ground floor, turned the water and gas back on, and began ripping the sheets off the furniture.
By late morning, after a lot of cleaning and dusting, the place had regained its charm.
Upstairs, she ran the bathroom faucets until the water turned from brown to clear and then took an ice-cold shower that left her feeling like a new woman.
She unpacked her suitcase and put her clothes neatly away, then pulled on a pair of trousers and a cotton blouse.
She had an appointment in the afternoon that she wouldn’t have missed for anything in the world.
She brushed her hair, took one last look in the mirror, and headed downstairs. A misty rain was tapping on the windows. The silence in the house unsettled her. Five years of forced exile hadn’t erased the memories.
Throwing on her raincoat, Anna stepped out the back door.
Tall weeds choked the garden all the way to the railroad tracks at the bottom of the hill.
She waded over to the shed adjoining the fence that separated her garden from the neighbours’ and wrestled with a swollen door that wouldn’t budge.
As a train roared past, she kicked hard at the warped wood, and finally broke it free from its frame.
From the shed she retrieved a rake, an old lawnmower, and a roll of burlap so tangled in cobwebs that it looked mummified.
Then she knelt down and thrust her arm deep into a hidden spot of the shed, reaching for what she’d really come for: a calfskin pouch bound with a leather cord, the kind in which chefs usually keep their knives.
Anna’s pouch held not blades, but a pipette and two glass vials filled with a brownish liquid.
While she’d been away, before falling asleep at night, she’d often wondered why she’d kept them.
Was it guilt? Some kind of remorse she couldn’t let go of?
She felt neither of those things now; quite the opposite, in fact.
She would never be a victim again, and the world was better off without Commissioner Jabert.
Anna closed the pouch again, placed it back where she’d found it, and propped the shed’s broken door into its doorway.
Then, calmly, she set off down the narrow footpath that followed the tracks toward the station.
An hour later, she stepped off the train into the clamour of the city and headed for her destination: an attorney’s office.
* * *
The fading grandeur of the building bore the tell-tale signs of cost-cutting.
The smell of cheap floor wax assailed Anna’s nostrils the moment she pushed open the front door.
The elevator was out of order, so she climbed the stairs to the third floor and paused on the dimly lit landing before ringing the bell.
A young clerk greeted her and ushered her into an office.
All parties were already present, seated around a circular table in the middle of the room: Anna, in her black raincoat, her hair pulled into a low bun; the seller, a balding man with bushy eyebrows; the attorney, in a grey suit to match his complexion; and the clerk, whose moustache made him look like a young English lord from the nineteenth century.
The seller pulled a handkerchief from his pocket to dab at his forehead each time the clerk turned a page of the deed of transfer, which he was reading aloud.
Anna signed the cheque. The seller signed the deed.
The attorney stamped the document and congratulated them both.
The premises Anna had just purchased to open her own restaurant were in a dilapidated state, but then again, for the price she’d paid, she could hardly complain.
She’d spent the last year combing through listings in a nice trade paper – one that took a full week to reach her in the mail.
She’d been waiting for the kind of opportunity that would finally allow her to bring her dream to life.
The photos she’d received of this building must have put off all the other prospective buyers, but not her, and she’d spent half of her savings on it.
The other half would go toward renovations and wages for a skeleton staff – just enough people to keep the place afloat until some cash flow gave her a little breathing room.
And so, on that drizzly afternoon, still acclimatizing to the neighbourhood, Anna walked happily through the rain. If everything went according to plan, in just a few months she would be opening her very own restaurant.