He couldn't remember how Mother answered. Perhaps she hadn't. Perhaps she simply closed the box, took his hand, and went out for the walk. How old was he then? Three? Five? It was hard to remember. The visits to Baba Tila stopped when he went to school. Or no, probably they didn't - Mother simply went without him, while he was in school.
A man of perhaps forty came up the street, just a little ahead of himself in the night's drinking. He climbed the stoop, then paused at the door and looked back down at Ivan.
"You want somebody?" he said. "It's late."
"I used to know somebody who lived here," he said. "Baba Tila. An old lady. That apartment, right in front."
"Dead," said the man.
"You knew her?"
"No," he said. "But after she died nobody would rent the place. It was a pigsty, had a smell to it or something. It was empty when I moved in, but they didn't even show it to me. I asked, too. Ground floor front - I could have used that. Stuck me three flights up in back."
"Doesn't matter," said Ivan. "Childhood memory, that's all."
"Just so you're not one of those damned burglars. Cause if I catch you breaking in I'll shatter your bones, I hope you know that."
"I'm an American student," said Ivan. "No burglar."
"American," scoffed the man. "And I'm Chinese." He went inside.
Ivan was flattered. He hadn't lost his native accent, not a bit of it, if a suspicious man refused to believe he was a foreigner. Cool.
Ivan walked away, began to break into a jog, and then turned and went back and looked up again at Baba Tila's window. He remembered that a couple of times when Mother brought him here, Baba Tila had not been home. Those times, Mother had left her gift on the windowsill, and then had reached up and taken something - he never saw what - concealed in the stones on the near side of the window, just out of sight from the steps. Remembering this, he had to reach up and feel the place where things had been concealed, touch the stones his mother had touched. And yes, of course there was the faintest tinge of a hope, a thrill of possible discovery: What if there was something hidden there for Mother after all these years, that he could bring home to her?
Ridiculous; but he could not resist the impulse. He stood on the top step and leaned over. It was an easy-enough reach - he was taller than his mother, after all, and she had not had to strain. His fingers skimmed along the surface of the stones that rose up the left edge of the window, then probed again into the cracks, into the gap between wooden window frame and stone wall.
And there was something. In a gap between, about where Mother's hands had always reached, he felt a corner of something. He stroked it with his finger, once, twice, each time drawing the corner of it a little farther out. The third time, it emerged enough that he could grasp the corner, draw out the whole thing. A folded slip of paper. Damp, stained and weathered, mottled and rippled and warped by the reshaping of winters - how many of them? All the winters since Baba Tila died? Or all the winters since Mother had stopped coming to see her? Was this paper a message to Mother? Or to some other visitor who took Mother's place?
He opened it. The writing was unreadable in the faint light available to him. It might not be readable at all. He refolded it and put it in his pocket, then jogged away, heading for his apartment.
There, under the bright light in the kitchen, he opened the note again, and found he could read it well enough, despite the streaking and staining of the paper. It was simple enough:
Deliver this message.
Simple, but recursive to the point of meaninglessness. Nothing else was written on the paper, so the instruction to deliver the message apparently was the message. But to whom was he to deliver it? And was he the intended message-bearer, anyway? Hardly likely. Maybe the paper had been attached to some other paper that had slipped farther back into the crevice. Or maybe it was part of a larger message which had been removed long ago, this little instructional note having been overlooked. But even as he thought of this,