Fortunately, the little town was well-supplied with seaside cafés, most of them serving coffee and pastries on tented outdoor terraces, which seemed wonderful at this time of year. As small as it was—only a few blocks square, excluding the citadel, Calvi was a more cosmopolitan, international-looking place than I’d expected. There were sleek, expensive-looking yachts in the marina, and the cafés had plenty of visitors in them—trendy, fashionable Italians and French, mostly—who all seemed to have two words on their lips: “Sophia” and “Loren.” It seemed an Italian-American movie company was filming there, and everyone was engaged either in talking about where she’d supposedly been seen last, or in swiveling their heads in hopes of catching a glimpse of the great lady right then.

  The cafés looked nice, but I had some questions to ask and I didn’t think I’d find the answers in the tourist spots, so I hauled my bag two blocks up the hilly road from the harbor to Rue Clemenceau, a twisty old street with a few of the more decrepit souvenir shops, not open for the day’s business yet, and some dim, small bars and cafés that were clearly not there for the jet-setters I’d seen at the waterside.

  I walked into the first one I came to, a nameless bar with a lap-top counter at which five or six working men stood smoking, chatting, and knocking back coffee or hot chocolate, croissants, and some kind of plum-colored liqueur served in shot glasses. The tables, which cost a few francs more to sit at, were empty except for one elderly German couple who looked as if they’d wandered in by accident and were trying to figure out how to leave gracefully. I went up to the counter and nodded at the men on either side of me, receiving courteous-enough tips of the head in return, then ordered a café au lait and a couple of chocolate-filled croissants (asking for the chocolate was a sure sign that I was feeling low, if I didn’t already know it), and dug in. The café au lait came in one of those soup-bowl-sized cups that you need two hands to lift, big enough so that I could practically stick my face into it, which I did, more or less, gratefully inhaling the aroma and feeling my spirits revive as I gulped a third of the rich, milky stuff down. A couple of hunks of the chocolate croissant, and my feet were solidly on the ground again. The world was a brighter place, full of hope and possibilities.

  “I’m from America,” I announced to the bartender in French, loud enough for all to hear. “I’m looking for the family Vercier. They live around here, or at least they used to. They had a chestnut farm.”

  To my surprise, this created a lively debate around me. Yes, there were some people named Vercier who had a chestnut farm, up in the hills above Capu di Bestia. No, that was in the old days; they’d sold it, hadn’t they? No, they hadn’t sold it, they’d turned it into a restaurant, La Castagna. No, they—

  “That’s right,” I exclaimed, “La Castagna!” That was the native Corsican term—the Italian term, really—for “chestnut,” as opposed to the French châtaigne, and I remembered Lily telling me that that was what they’d named the farm: La Castagna. Had I actually struck oil on my very first try? I could hardly believe it. “Where can I find it? How do I get there?”

  But nobody was paying attention to me. The argument went on. No, no, not a restaurant, but an inn, declared a wiry, black-haired man in a beige duster streaked with flour. He knew because he made deliveries there every morning, didn’t he? Sometimes he talked to the housekeeper, so he was able to keep up with things. What they’d done was sell off most of the land and use the money to install indoor plumbing in the farmhouse and generally fix the place up for business, but it wasn’t doing so well, and anyway, it was closer to Bocca di Melaja than Capu di Bestia, because to get there you had to turn in from the coast—

  “You go there every day?” I interrupted.

  He addressed his friends. “Isn’t that what I just said?”

  “You’re going today?”

  He looked at me. “Is today a day?”

  “What I mean is, could you possibly take me with you?”

  He hesitated, began to shake his head.

  “I’ll be happy to pay.”

  Oops, wrong approach. I’d forgotten the stories I’d heard about the pride of the Corsicans. Down here, you didn’t take money for favors, and you didn’t offer any either. His face closed. “It’s not a question of money.”

  The others muttered their agreement. Mumblegrumblemumble.

  “The Verciers are my wife’s family,” I blurted, appealing to anyone within range. “Her father came from Corsica, he grew up on the farm before the war. …”

  It made all the difference. Suddenly I wasn’t an intrusive outlander, I was kin, or the next thing to it. There was a barrage of questions about Lily’s father from men who wondered if they might have known him (none of them had, although one or two believed their fathers or grandfathers had spoken of him as a young man).

  “Okay, you can come with me,” said the man in the duster, noticeably more friendly. “But I go in five minutes.”

  That gave me time to ask if there were someplace I could leave my bag and winter coat for a while; if I actually found Lily, I wanted everything to be as right as possible, and for me to be lugging a suitcase and a heavy New Yorkish coat when I saw her would have added a bungling, comic quality that was the last thing I wanted. The bartender told me that I was welcome to leave them in the storeroom in back, which I did with thanks, but I could see the question in their eyes: He comes all the way from America to visit his wife’s family, but he doesn’t plan to stay the night with them? This too apparently went against Corsican notions of honor, or rather of hospitality. Clearly, I wasn’t making the best of first impressions.

  My driver gulped the last of his liqueur, ground out his cigarette stub in an overfull ashtray, and jerked his thumb toward the door. “Let’s get going.”

  His name was René Benedetti, and he delivered bread from Calvi north along the coast road to Île Rousse, then back via the mountains through Belgodère and Muro. La Castagna was one of his first stops, only fifteen minutes from Calvi. So as it turned out the final leg of my journey to find Lily—if she was really there—was to be made in an ancient, rackety, red panel truck that said Boulanger on the sides, with a rifle jiggling in a rack behind my head (“You never know when you’re going to come upon a boar.”), and munching a warm baguette that René had generously offered me, and which I knew enough to accept and for which I knew better than to offer payment.

  Naturally, the first thing I asked him was whether he had seen Lily there—that is, whether a single woman in her thirties had appeared there in the last ten days or so, but he wasn’t able to help. Generally, he left his loaves in the mailbox at the bottom of the road up to the farm house, and didn’t see anybody at all, except maybe the housekeeper. There were some people staying there, that’s all he knew, because they were taking eight loaves a day, instead of the three they took when there weren’t any guests.

  So I settled uneasily back to wait, chewing restlessly on the fragrant bread while Benedetti pointed out the sights, or so I think he did; I was too wired-up to listen. We stopped for a couple of deliveries at little grocery stores on the outskirts of Calvi, then turned up into the hills, driving through a landscape of rocky outcroppings and scrubby but densely packed bushes— the famous, near-indestructible, native maquis of Corsica, from which the maquis of the Resistance had taken their name.

  After a while we passed through a stony, near-deserted village—San Croce, Benedetti said—of roughly cut granite blocks. No gardens, no bushes, no trees, except for a manicured plot of land, in the very center of the village, on which sat an ornate Pisan church painted pink, its fancy Baroque curlicues embellished with white; the one spot of brightness and color in this otherwise harsh, gray setting. The only people we saw were some melancholy-looking old men drinking coffee and playing a board game in a bar, and a few women—how old they were it was impossible to tell—trudging along in black shawls and long black dresses and carrying well-used cloth shopping bags. We were no more than five or six miles from lively, trendy Calvi with its fancy yachts and well-heeled tourists, but here we seemed to be on another continent and in another century.

  Not far beyond the edge of the village Benedetti stopped the truck in front of a rickety row of mailboxes at the foot of a steep, rutted road running up into a copse of oak and chestnut trees and disappearing after about fifty feet around one of the many outcroppings of rock that studded the countryside. “Here we are, my friend,” he said as he went around to the truck’s back doors. A carefully handpainted wooden sign, “La Castagna,” was nailed to the framework supporting the mailboxes. A painted arrow pointed up the road.

  I didn’t move. Suddenly I wasn’t ready for us to be there. Those cold feet had come back with a vengeance. Let’s just say I’d been right about the paper size and she was here. What then? How did I approach her? What would she be like? The old Lily? The new Lily? How would she feel about seeing me walk in on her like this? Above all, what the hell did I say to her? I’d played the scene over in my mind a thousand times but never worked out what I was supposed to say. Things had changed so much—I’d learned so much, in so short a time—that I was having trouble getting a fix on who she was. And I was worried that my own resentments would come boiling to the surface: Why did she run away like that without warning me? Why didn’t she tell me where she was? How could she do that to me? How could she not trust me?

  “Here,” Benedetti said, holding out an armful of unwrapped loaves. “It’s not far. You take them up to them. A man with a loaf of bread is always welcome. With eight loaves, they’ll love you.”

  We shook hands and I nodded my thanks and started trudging up the hill with my arms filled with bread and my mind strangely unfocused, almost floating. The brushwood growing beside the road, I thought bemusedly, seemed familiar, almost as if I’d walked up that road many, many times before. That added a surreal element to an already dreamlike situation. It was almost as if—

  As I came to the jumble of boulders I remembered where I’d seen this countryside before. It was vegetation like this—heather, myrtle, thyme, rosemary, other exotic things I didn’t know the names of—that surrounded me in The Dream, when I lay hidden, near the old farmhouse, watching the Sphinx-lady with the basket. How curious. Was it possible, then, that the dream took place in Corsica, not mainland France? But how would I have known what Corsica looked like? And anyhow, dreams didn’t “take place” anywhere, did they? They were inventions: bits and fragments and mixed-up pieces of nobody-knew-what, patched together from things one had read, or heard, or dreamed before. …

  Still, the association was enough to bring out a sweat on my forehead and slow my steps down to an irresolute crawl, and when I rounded the outcropping and saw what lay before me I stopped moving altogether, and probably stopped breathing as well. There, thirty yards In front of me, unmistakable in the clear, slanting morning sun, was the house.

  Or rather, The House. As in The Dream.

  In the movies it’s common to show astonishment by having actors drop things. Supposedly startled people are always losing their grip on trays of food (crash!), books, pencils; cigarettes or pipes fall out of their mouths. But to me it had never seemed very believable. I mean, why would you let go of something when you’re surprised? The natural tendency would surely be to flinch, to contract your muscles and thus grip things tighter, not to relax them and lose hold?

  Well, no. I don’t know when it was that I’d let go of the loaves, but there they assuredly were, scattered at my feet on the stones like pick-up sticks. I could make no sense of what was in front of me. Stupefied, I continued to use what I’d seen at the movies as a guide: I blinked, I shook my head. But the stark two-story house remained, complete in every detail, and as real and solid as … well as solid as a stone farmhouse.

  No, not quite in every detail, I realized as my mind slowly unfroze itself and the gears began to turn again. True, ninety percent of it was the same. The rough-plastered, whitewashed walls with the underlying gray stone showing through here and there; the picturesque, steeply pitched, slate-tiled roof; the chimneys at either end; the two doors, one full-size and one only about three feet high (for farm animals in the old days, I had always supposed); the off-kilter, uneven windows—all these things were as I remembered them. But the window shutters—in my dream they were green; now they were red.

  If anything, the discrepancy made it all the weirder. Why would I have everything right but the color of the shutters?

  But mistaken colors or not, it was without question the same building, the place I’d dreamed about. All it needed now was the Woman Without a Face. I was shaken enough so that it was with a sense of dread that I made myself look toward the clump of gnarled bushes at the corner of the house, where she was usually standing. To my relief she wasn’t there (the bushes were, however). I began to untense a little, but as I did, the full-sized front door opened and out She came, down the two stone steps. Not in the familiar, long, blue dress with a basket on her hip, but in a short-sleeved, square-throated blouse and a pair of red pedal-pushers, and with an envelope in her hand.

  It was, of course, and always had been, Lily.

  Chapter 20

  Her eyes were fixed on the rocky, uneven footing, so she saw the bread strewn across the path before she ever saw me. She stopped, puzzled, and glanced up, and there I was, once again looking into those deep, clear, lovely cornflower-blue eyes, only fifteen feet away. “Lily—”

  She was extravagantly startled to see me, that much was apparent. What else she was feeling I couldn’t tell, but speaking for myself, I was reduced to jelly, as stricken as I’d been the first time I’d seen her, back in London so long ago, when she’d walked up to my desk, also carrying an envelope.

  Don’t blow it, I warned myself. Shut up, don’t start chattering away. Don’t frighten her, don’t reproach her, don’t drown her in sympathy. Don’t ask a million questions. Give her a chance to react, let her say something first.

  She stared uncomprehendingly at me, squinting as if to make sure I was real. “Pete… ? But how did you, how did you… ?”

  I came a couple of nervous steps closer. “If that letter’s for me,” I said, “I can save you the postage.”

  Was it supposed to be a joke? Don’t ask me. I think I was just trying to say something mundane, something silly, to decrease the extraordinary tension.

  In any case, I don’t think she heard me. She just kept staring, her mouth working, and then the letter fell from her hand (I’ll never sneer at movie conventions again) and she took a jerky step back. I could see that she was going to run back to the house.

  “No, don’t do that,” I said, reaching for her with both hands as she turned and managing to get my arms around her and gather her in. It was like catching hold of a terrified bird. She seemed more fragile than I remembered, and I could feel her heart fluttering against my chest. She was pushing rigidly away from me, straining backwards, both tightly clenched fists raised between us. To feel her struggling like that—against me, as if I were some kind of monster—was horrible, but I held her tighter still, pressing her head down against my shoulder and putting my lips to the familiar, velvety pelt of her hair.

  “Lilylilylilylily, shhhh, shhhhhhh …”

  For a second more she remained stiff and resisting, her muscles like wire, and then I felt them slacken a little. She let out a long, shuddering sigh.

  “Lily, Lily, Lily …” I rocked back and forth with her.

  Slowly, slowly, like an ice-sculpture thawing, her body relaxed, her fists unclenched, and her arms came down and wrapped loosely around me. After another moment they tightened. I closed my eyes, knowing that I was happier than I’d ever been in my life or was likely ever to be again. If I’d been offered the opportunity to spend the rest of my time on earth standing there with her just like that, I’d have taken it without hesitation.

  “Pete,” she murmured into my shoulder, “I can’t believe it’s really you. I’m so sorry about everything. I’ve made such a mess. … I just didn’t know how … Pete, darling Pete, there’s so much about me you don’t know.”

  I stroked her hair, over and over. “Lily, I do know. I know about everything. I know what your father did during the Occupation, I know about … about what they did to you—”

  She caught her breath. “Did to me?” she whispered. She had stopped breathing altogether.

  “In Veaudry,” I said gently, keeping her face against my shoulder. “I know about Werner, I know about your baby girl. How could you think it would make any difference to me? It only makes me love you more, if that’s possible.”

  She began weeping freely into my shoulder now, so that it was hard to understand the words that came pouring out of her. “Pete, I thought … I thought you wouldn’t want to touch me … Oh, darling, darling, I know you love me, but I thought … I thought … even you wouldn’t be able to forgive me—”

  “Forgive you—!” I cried and was unable to say more.

  “But my father—he was so … such a …”

  “Honey, I don’t care, it doesn’t matter. You’re not your father.”

  Her head came up now, so that we were looking earnestly into each other’s faces. Her blue eyes were tear-washed and luminous. “But it’s me too, Pete. I’m my father’s daughter, isn’t it obvious ? I was so selfish … so greedy. The things I did—”

  “Lily, you were fifteen. Look, think about Natalie for a minute, will you?”

  “What? About. …?”

  “Natalie.” Natalie Gardener was one of the kids that Lily counseled at the school, a fifteen-year-old girl who had been in Juvenile Hall twice for soliciting. “Would you call her a bad girl, an evil girl?”