MargenI went back one last time. Not for the watch: for the book. I had spent two weeks unable to sleep on my left side, thinking about that half-fulfilled entry, and I decided there are two kinds of people: those who, being able to know when they will lose something, read the book, and those who close it. I was going to close it. With the porter watching, with both hands, for good.
Amberes was different. The water had dropped a metre; you could see the tracks, black and clean as if freshly greased. The porter was waiting at the edge of the platform with his cap on and the ledger under his arm, and for the first time he wasn't tagging anything.
—The convoy is coming —he said—. Every so many years the tide goes down and it comes through to collect. Tonight is the night. I'm glad you're here: the register calls for two signatures and I've been signing alone for a century.
—To collect what?
—What's been claimed. —He pointed at the rows with his chin—. Do you think I keep all this for pleasure? This is a left-luggage office, Miss Vera, not a museum. When someone up above misses something hard enough, the object claims itself. The convoy returns it. A glove turns up behind a wardrobe that was searched a hundred times. A letter arrives sixty years late and the postman swears it was at the bottom of the sack. People say what a coincidence, and we don't even get a plaque.
I heard it before I saw it: a displacement of old air, a polite screech. It entered the station without lights, six varnished wooden carriages, and stopped with a precision they don't manufacture anymore. The doors opened on their own.
We worked all night, the porter and I. He read out the number, I found the object and put it aboard: the accordion, the cardboard suitcase, hundreds of letters bundled by decade, the child's glove with its handkerchief —«claimed, at last», said the porter, and his braid trembled. We loaded until the book said enough.
My father's watch stayed on its shelf. I didn't ask. There are dates you don't argue with any register.
When the convoy left, the water began to rise again, meek, covering the tracks the way you smooth a sheet. The porter walked me to the stairway and held out the ledger, open at the last written page.
«No. 14,313 — Amberes station, complete — Lost in 1924 — Wept for by the porter. Claimed.»
—Two signatures —he said, offering me the pen—. And go up without looking back; the wall is theirs to close.
I signed. I went up. I didn't look.
The official report says the seepage between Fontana and Delicias stopped on its own, «cause undetermined», and the crew celebrated, because mysteries that fix themselves are the night shift's favourite kind. The wall, when I pass it, is cold like every other wall in the world.
All that's left is this, which nobody is going to read. And one thing more, which I found in the pocket of my overalls when I got home, with a cardboard tag tied on with string: a platform ticket from 1924, unused. On the tag, that neat hand I know by now:
«No. 1 — Return ticket — Does not get lost — To be kept by Vera, in case one day she misses something very much.»