Indelible by Adelia Saunders

Author:Adelia Saunders [Adelia Saunders]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781632863966
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
Published: 2017-01-17T05:00:00+00:00

He was still a little woozy as he helped her buy the ticket and left her on the street outside the station, where people with piles of luggage waited for buses bound for Warsaw and Kiev. Then Neil walked back to the archives on rue du Faubourg-Saint-Denis, even though it wasn’t the most direct route, because that was the path Saint Denis was said to have taken out of Paris carrying his head under his arm after the Romans chopped it off around the third century A.D. It seemed fitting somehow to be walking in the footsteps of the patron saint of Paris, who had personally delivered his own head to his tomb in a feat of cephalophoric ambulation—literally, walking while carrying one’s own head—the most ridiculous of miracles.

The gate of the old walled city was in front of him, an arbitrary arch rising out of the streets now that the wall itself was gone. There were shops selling vegetables he’d never seen before, where people bought unfamiliar melons and green tomatoes in papery husks. The windows of a Pakistani sweetshop were packed with sticky orange balls and honeyed bricks of colored paste.

At the Saint-Denis gate, rue du Faubourg-Saint-Denis became rue Saint-Denis and the shops changed. Professor Piot was right, Neil thought. A city trails its past along behind it. Merchants had been required to pay a tax to enter the old city, and the imprint of that fact had lasted through the centuries, so that even now the shops inside where the wall used to be sold different things than those beyond it.

Inside the Saint-Denis gate the vegetable stalls were gone and the stores were filled with rhinestone belts and wholesale lace, fur and wedding dresses, vente en gros. Shopkeepers smoked outside with their sleeves rolled up, a begging gypsy girl kneaded an orange between her hands, and a prostitute stood in a doorway, her breasts like brown balloons pushed up against her neck. Long passages cut between buildings ended improbably in sunlight, and it occurred to Neil that he was entering the portion of his life when one began to accumulate regrets. Before, somehow, no decision had seemed too permanent. But now that he was in college, wading straight into whatever it was that would turn out to be his life, suddenly each thing he did or didn’t do was tangled up in consequences. And with this thought, as if he’d gotten a look at his own life’s ledger of missed opportunities, Neil realized that he shouldn’t have let Magdalena get on the bus to Vilnius.

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