Day 52: A Signature in the Register

"The moving finger writes, and having written, moves on." Omar Khayyam wrote that, in one of his short verses of four lines, nearly a thousand years ago.

Nothing you could do, the verse goes on, would bring it back to cross out half a line. I thought of that this morning with a pen in my hand.

Dear Grandmother,

Mr Okafor came on the morning bus with a folder under his arm and mud on his good shoes. He apologised for the mud and then for the folder. "Paperwork," he said, as if it were a cold he had caught. He had come to see that the school was well after the weeks I was away, and to have me sign for the spring term. I had missed the signing in March. Nobody had minded. But he likes things to be in order, and so, it turns out, do I.

He asked for the old register. I took it out of the cupboard, the one with your handwriting, the grey cloth cover gone soft at the corners like the cover of a much-used cookery book. I had not known what was at the back of it. Mr Okafor did. He turned to the last pages, and there was a list of signatures, one for every term, going back to before your time. Teachers have signed this book at the start of each term for longer than anyone in the town can remember. The newer ones sign the school's papers too, of course, but they sign here as well. Nobody wants to be the one who stops.

Your signature is there three times. Autumn, winter, spring. Anna Sorel, in a hand much rounder than the one I know from the recipe cards, as if you were still deciding what kind of grown woman to be. There is no fourth signature in your hand, because you left before the next autumn. After yours come a great many others, some for a year, some for twenty. Then mine, from September, a little shaky. Then a space.

I sat down at my desk and practised first. I would like you to know this, because it made me laugh. I wrote my name on scrap paper six times, like a child. Then I tried something I now want to do with the class. I wrote it once with my left hand. It came out like a child's, all wobble and surprise. Try it once. The other hand shows you how much your writing hand has learned without ever being told, the way you only notice how well you know your own kitchen when you cook in someone else's.

Mr Okafor had brought blotting paper, and he told me about it while I practised. Ordinary writing paper has a little size in it, a thin glue that stops ink from spreading. Blotting paper is made without it, so it drinks ink the way a dry sponge drinks water. Before it was common, people shook fine sand over a wet page from a small pot with holes in the lid, and then poured the sand back. He keeps a sheet in every folder, he said, because ink that has not dried has not finished being written.

Then I signed. Vera Lind, Spring Term. Slowly. Mr Okafor blotted it with a sheet of paper from his folder, very carefully, as if it were important, and I understood that to him it was. He looked at the two names, yours and mine, with a page of years between them, and said, "Well. That is a good line." Then he asked whether I would like to sign for next autumn too, when the time comes. I said I would think about it. He said that was the right answer to give on a Tuesday.

Sami and Yuri came in during the break and wanted to see. I showed them your three signatures and my one. Sami counted the teachers between us on his fingers and ran out of fingers. Yuri asked whether he could sign it. I said only teachers could. He said, "Then I will be a teacher," with great seriousness, and went out to play.

Khayyam says the finger writes and moves on, and nothing will cancel half a line. He meant it sadly, I think. But today I looked at your line, which nothing could cancel, and was glad. I do not want to cross out a single word of it. I only want to write my own line underneath, slowly, and let it move on.

Vera

Day 53: Emil's Envelope

"Many waters cannot quench love, and rivers cannot drown it." That is from the Song of Songs.

I have read that line before. Today I held it in my hand.

Dear Grandmother,

Emil asked me to come at six, when he rings the bell. I went down to the ferry house a little early and waited on the bench by the landing while he pulled the rope. The bell sounded its six slow strokes across the water, once through, the way it does every evening now, and the ducks lifted off the reeds and came back down. Then he went inside, and I followed him, and he put the kettle on without asking whether I wanted tea, because he knows I always do.

The kitchen was the same as always. The blue cups. The oilcloth with the pattern of lemons, worn white along the edge where his elbows rest. His mother's bread board on the wall, never used, because the crack in it has gone too far. He made the tea strong, the way you both liked it, and set out a plate of the dry biscuits he buys on Fridays. Then he opened the drawer of the dresser and came back with an envelope.

It was a small envelope, yellow with age, soft at the corners. Your name was on the front. Anna Sorel, and the name of a street in the city, in a young man's careful hand. There was a stamp in the corner, so old that its colour is not one stamps come in any more. The flap was sealed. It has been sealed for fifty-eight years.

"I would like you to keep it," Emil said. "In the tin. With yours." I asked him whether he wanted me to read it. He thought about this for a long time, turning his cup. Then he said, "No. It was for her. It still is. But I don't want it to be alone in a drawer when I am gone." He did not say it sadly. He said it the way someone says where the spare key is kept.

I did not know how to carry it home. It seemed too light to be so important. In the end Emil showed me what he does with the ferry ledgers when the pages curl. He laid the envelope flat between two pieces of stiff card, the backs of an old calendar, and tied them loosely with kitchen string. "Damp makes paper wave," he said. "Card keeps it straight." When I got home I left it under the big dictionary overnight, still between its card, the way you press a flower. You can try this with any old letter that has started to curl. Flat, dry, a weight, a little time. Paper forgets its bends if you are patient.

I have been reading about oilcloth this week, because I could not stop looking at Emil's. It was once exactly what its name says: plain cotton or linen painted with boiled linseed oil, coat after coat, until it was stiff and shining and water ran off it. It cost less than a good tablecloth and could be wiped clean with one stroke, so it covered kitchen tables in houses where nobody had time to scrub them every day. The patterns came later. Where an oilcloth wears white, as Emil's has along the edge, the cloth underneath is showing through, like a doorstep worn pale by the same feet going in and out for years.

Nobody has looked at Emil's letter. Not even Emil, he says, since the night he sealed it. He told me he wrote it at that same kitchen table, by a lamp, on the night after you left the lake town. He told me again how he had stood outside the post office the next morning with the letter in his hand, and carried it home. After that, he said, it seemed too late, and then it seemed too late for so long that it became part of the furniture.

The tin is very full now. I put Emil's envelope on the top, flat, above my own letters, with the card "Plum cake — for E." next to it. I did not close the lid at once. I sat at the kitchen table and looked at the two handwritings side by side, yours on the card and his on the envelope, both from the same year, both young.

The Song of Songs says that many waters cannot drown love. I used to think that was a big, grand line, a line for weddings. Tonight I think it is a small, plain one. A lake lay between you for fifty-eight years. The letter did not cross it. And still here it is, dry, flat, kept, on top of all the others.

Your Vera