“You should read your own book sometimes,” says the Boy.
The Man now he sits at the kitchen table with the manuscript spread before him. The Boy sits opposite. Not nine years old. Not really. Older than that now. Fifty-eight in fact. Tired. Sad sometimes. But no longer frightened in quite the same way.
The strange thing about the Boy is that he had understood most of it immediately.
The Boy turns pages.
Milton Keynes.
The Barbican.
The lake.
The border.
The women.
The father.
O.
M.
G.
The same shapes appearing under different names. The same impossible hope travelling patiently through decades, attaching itself first to one person, then another, then another, while insisting each time that this was different.
For years the Man had assumed the task was understanding. The book had become the latest machinery for understanding. Every chapter another excavation. Another theory. Another witness called to testify.
The Boy closes the manuscript.
Outside the window Warsaw continues with its usual lack of interest. A tram slides past. Somewhere a siren sounds briefly before disappearing again.
The Boy studies the pages.
The father had loved him. That turns out to be true. The father had also used him. That turns out to be true too.
Peggy had loved him. That too is true. Peggy had left him. Also true.
M cared for him. Again true. But M did not want the life he wanted. Oh, very true.
The contradictions sit there quietly on the page. The Man waits for somebody to resolve them.
Nobody does. Nor does the book. Especially not the book.
The Boy smiles.
The Man laughs despite himself because that is exactly what he has been doing. The mothers were supposed to become innocent or guilty. The father was supposed to become villain or victim. M was supposed to become soulmate or mistake. The story was supposed to decide what kind of story it had been. Reality had stubbornly refused.
People loved and failed. Stayed and left. Protected and damaged. Wanted freedom and belonging simultaneously. Wanted contradictory things.
Part of adulthood, the Man belatedly realises, consists of abandoning the hope that one day the contradictions will explain themselves.
The Boy reaches for another page.
A conversation with his mother.
Sobbing words finally spoken aloud. The child spoke and his mother finally listened. The Man heard too, thankfully.
His grief had perhaps finally found its address.
The grief belonged somewhere.
For decades it had wandered through the world wearing disguises. It appeared as longing, jealousy, panic, obsession, romantic destiny, intellectual curiosity, analysis, explanation.
Now at last it had arrived at home.
The grief remained. But it was no longer homeless.
The relief was enormous.
The sadness too.
Because human beings cannot save us. But they also do not need saving from us.
The Boy stood and walked to the window.
The city stretched away towards districts and suburbs and railway stations and roads leading elsewhere. People continued falling in love, continued leaving. Children continued becoming adults. The world remained stubbornly unfinished.
Nothing was solved.
Yet something had ended.
The manuscript was finished. The dead had been buried. The living had been returned to themselves.
The future remained unwritten.
“What happens now?” asked the Boy.
“Now we choose a path and decide what we take with us and what we leave behind,” the Man says.
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