The Geographer's Library

Jon Fasman
Her smile vanished immediately, leaving no traces of warmth on her
aquiline face. She looked haunted; with the soft light on her pale skin and
long hair, she seemed to have sprung from the pages of a nineteenth-century
ghost story. “I’m so sorry about that. That he died alone. I hope he knew
where he was going.”
“Who does?”
“I do,” she said, turning to face me. She was so beautiful then, with the
lamplight on her face and an expression that just bored into me, that I nearly
sprang out of my chair and ran. Anyone who believes that beauty is alluring
rather than terrifying is either ignorant or uncommonly brave. “I do,” she
said again softly.
“Do you think he did?”
She wrung her hands in her lap. “I hope so. I really do hope so. He
just . . . He was so old, you know? So old. I hope he had thought about it,”
she said, more to herself, it seemed, than to me.
I cleared my throat. “Do you know how old he was?”
She gazed at me directly, and the haunted look jumped off her face; her
hair caught the light and set hard and fiery around her face, grave and deep as
a carved stone angel’s. “Exactly? No. He talked about living in an independent
Estonia, between the two wars. I guess that would make him about
eighty. But please,” she said as she saw me taking notes, “don’t make me a
reliable source for that. In fact, do you have to use my name in this article?”
I said no, I didn’t; if she didn’t want her name used, I certainly didn’t
intend to use it. I asked her how she knew him.
“I met him when I moved in, a couple of years ago. I knocked on his door
to introduce myself, and he shouted at me to go away,” she said, chuckling,
her face lit by the memory. “So I started walking back down his steps. Then I
guess he must have peeked out at me, because I heard the door unlock, and
he goes, in this thick accent, ‘Why you do not tell me you are pretty girl?’
Then he invited me in, we talked for a while, and that, as they say, was that.”
“Do you know where he was born, whether he had family, what sort of
work he did, anything like that?” I asked, playing dumb like Art had taught
me. Better to get too many answers than too few.
She was looking down and pulling tiny balls of wool from the pilling
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