Banacharski reaches into the pocket of his filthy trousers and produces something. Isla sees it glint, and then she startles at the pressure as he presses it into her palm. As he does so he looks furtively about him, into the distant trees, the empty ground between.
He withdraws his hand and she looks into her own. It is a ring, right where her lifelines cross – a simple silver thing, with a figure-of-eight design sweeping over the top of it.
‘It was my mother’s,’ says Banacharski. ‘I have nobody. Now I give it to you.’
‘I can’t.’
‘I have nobody. You take it. That ring will be – how should I say it? – a lucky charm for you.’
He gives her a strong, fond look. ‘Borrow it, then. Think of it as a loan. Come back at the end of the summer. Bring it back to me. God keep you safe.’
Isla sets off for home the following day, walking down into the local town, from where she arranges a taxi – it takes her half a day – to get back to Toulouse. That is the last time she sees Banacharski alive.
As Hands described to Red Queen, they continued to exchange letters. But Banacharski’s letters had become wilder. Isla, back in Cambridge, felt uneasy – as if there was someone shadowing her. When she went out every morning to get the newspapers, she found herself casting suspicious glances down the aisles at the Co-op. There’d always be someone holding up a pot of yogurt or a tin of sweetcorn, fondling it abstractly, reading the label with studious distraction.
She thought for a time that she might be going mad – that Nicolas’s paranoia was rubbing off on her. The magazine continued to forward his letters. Sometimes, the way they were folded in the envelope, a certain looseness about the glue, made her feel like they might have been tampered with. She took to hiding them.
At the same time, other letters started to come – more personal ones, addressed directly to her. The handwriting on the envelopes of these was different – more restrained – though the writing inside was the same.
In the last of these, he wrote: ‘Don’t worry. You have my love. I am nearing the centre of the artichoke. Do not trust. Destroy.’
Something, she thought, had started to confuse him. The letters were in the same handwriting, but they seemed to be from two different people. The letters that came through the magazine raved about this ‘machine’, which he said was ‘nearly built’. She puzzled over that.
In these letters, he promised her that ‘when the time was right’, he would share his discoveries with her: she was, he said – and here it was triple underlined – ‘the custodian of his legacy’. But he said the time was not yet right. He said he was ‘storing some parts of the machine’ in a place known only to him.
The other letters, the ones that she told nobody about, were love letters, of a sort. That is, they did not profess love directly. But they were personal. They were trying to make a connection. And they talked at length – great length – about his childhood, and what he remembered about the war. Much was about his mother, Ana, the presumed owner of the ring he had entrusted to her. She had lived through the war but cancer got her while Banacharski was in his teens. He talked about his first memory of her, rocking in a chair with him, sitting in her lap wrapped in a woollen blanket. That was at his grandparents’ house in Allenstein, what is now Olsztyn in northern Poland. He said he remembered how the blanket had tasted: of dust and pine.
Banacharski enclosed, in these letters, pages from a manuscript he said was ‘my mother’s testament’. It seemed to be a memoir of some sort, but it was told in the third person, annotated in pencil by Nicolas, and quoted from in his letters. Between the two narratives – and what of the history of his life remained on the public record – Isla was able to piece together the sequence of events.
One fragment described Ana Banacharski’s courtship with Nicolas’s father, Sergei Mitrov, in Berlin in the late 1920s. Mitrov was a Russian anarchist who had fetched up there after fleeing the Bolsheviks. She had moved to the city as a student, and they met after she attended a meeting in the radical bookshop where he was staying. She had fallen pregnant, and they moved through Europe together living, unmarried, as a family.
Then came the Spanish Civil War. Mitrov joined the International Brigades, and Ana moved back to her parents’ in East Prussia. Nicolas would then have been seven. Three years later, when Germany annexed Poland, and the persecution of Allenstein’s Polish-speaking minority began, Ana fled with Nicolas to France. Ana’s story described the old man, her father, waving from the door of the town house – his moustache, his mild smile and the turn-ups on his trousers. It was the last time she saw him.
Mother and son spent the war years in a series of refugee camps. ‘Her Nicolas, her little Buddha, her watchful child,’ her narrator wrote. ‘Ana knew she would have to leave him.’
Nicolas’s own narrative picked up here. He talked about his memories, the watchful child reporting. At some point they had been reunited with Mitrov. He remembered his mother, terribly distressed, in the camp outside Paris. He had worked out afterwards, only from his mother’s memoir, that he had had a sister who was stillborn at about that time.
But in 1942 Mitrov was separated from Ana and his son by what Banacharski called ‘a malign chance’. His letters stopped coming. He did not survive the war. Nicolas wrote, curiously, that he had no memories of his father at all.
These communications resembled love letters not in anything explicit, so much as in their intimacy of address, their notes of tenderness, the parallels they drew between past and present. There had been a girl he had known in the refugee community at Chambon-sur-Lignon, he said, called Kara. Isla reminded him of her. She had resembled Isla, he said, though he did not say in what way. He sketched out a chaste friendship between the fourteen-year-old Nicolas and sixteen-year-old Kara, complicated by longing. Her father was Danish – a wealthy man in the antiques business. He had not encouraged their friendship. They’d been separated, though he’d had letters from her after the war. She hadn’t died. But she had disappeared. In his early twenties Nicolas had tried to find her without success.
‘Gone,’ he wrote. ‘Another gone. Another lost to time.’
His letters seemed confiding, tender, anxious that what had happened to him would be known, and his connection with her maintained.
‘Chance – or the illusion of chance – is what divides us one from the other. It is chance that carries us apart. Chance that kills us. But what if chance could make us live? What if chance brought us together again? It is just a matter of seeing it right. Of turning it around.’
Isla wrote back, in one letter: ‘Nicolas, you say it is chance that divides us. But is also chance that makes us live. You lost people by accident. But you also found them by accident. You found me by accident. Every human being on the face of the earth is here – you said it yourself – by chance.’
‘You misunderstand. Deliberately?’ he wrote back. ‘For everyone who is born hundreds of millions of people – real people – are never born. Who speaks for them? They are nobody. Who will rescue them? What if you could imagine a world in which those people live and are not alone and do not grow old and die? And what if by imagining you could make it so?’
In early autumn, via EtUdes/RecOltes, came another letter, sharper in tone than any of the previous. It wondered, with crude sarcasm, whether she was in the employ of ‘the other side’. It asked her to come and visit him. It said he had something to give her. But before, it said, she needed to answer him one simple question: ‘Nobody has been reading my letters. I have proof positive. I need to know that you are who you are. So answer me this: what is a metre? Reply quickly.’