Your Perfect Year(119)
What did he expect to find here? Nothing but a mother who didn’t even recognize him anymore. Sofia, who had ignored him for decades and, after a lukewarm cup of espresso, would wish him all the best for the future and a safe journey home.
If he was lucky. If not, he would see no one and come away frustrated. Why on earth was he doing this?
As he made his way reluctantly to the rental-car desk where he had reserved a vehicle, he recalled the answer to that question: Hannah.
This undertaking was the only connection he had left with her. Because the diary with the task she had set was the paltry remains of all that had once been. Of all that once could have been. And because Hannah was right. Not only because he was a coward who, when making a second “fearless inventory,” had been forced to acknowledge how fatally wrong it had been to lie to Hannah about his rejection letter to Simon. But more than that, because he had something else very important to work out as the first step toward finding his inner peace: he, Jonathan N. Grief, had to know why his mother had broken off contact with him.
Was it really because of a stupid postcard written by an angry teenager, whose hormones or whatever else had fogged his brain? Was that enough to cause a mother to turn her back on her only child?
That is, if he had remained Sofia’s only child. Jonathan didn’t know that with any certainty. Thirty years was a long time; maybe he had seven half brothers and five half sisters here in Florence; the Italians were known to be keen on reproduction.
The thought made him shudder and rejoice simultaneously (he had grown used to his new split personality). Could he be part of a Mediterranean tribe? Offspring of a major clan including some godfather who controlled the destinies of all Florentines? His imagination ran away with him, and he had to smile as he filled out the forms in the rental-car office.
Jonathan could all too happily have parried the questioning eyebrows of the young employee behind the counter with a breezy “Do you know who I am?”—except that his Italian wasn’t yet good enough for that. And there was the fact that he didn’t himself know who he was to the young man: simply Jonathan N. Grief from Hamburg, or an estranged descendant of Sofia the Great, wife of the famed Alfonso di Firenze, and therefore . . . No, even if that were the case, to express it would have taken quite a few more Italian lessons than the forty or so he’d completed to date on his language app. So he kept it to a simple “Mille grazie” when he was handed the keys to his car and given directions to the right parking space.
Ten minutes later, he was sitting behind the wheel of the Lancia he had been allocated. He sighed with relief. It had all gone smoothly so far. He was in Italy, and he had a car with a navigation system and even an address in the vicinity of Florence where he was now heading.
Tracking down the address had not been as easy as he’d expected. Renate Krug had been awkward about it when he first asked her. And she hadn’t wanted to book his flight to Florence, saying that in her opinion it would be a waste of time and she was sure that after all these years his mother would definitely no longer be living there.
Jonathan had been taken aback. After their “family outing,” Renate Krug had not been anywhere near as formal with him, but he had never experienced any argument from her or refusal to do what he asked.
And after he had tried to explain to her that the trip was extremely important to him for personal reasons and had asked her again for his mother’s last known address; after he had assured her that, even if his mission failed, he wouldn’t descend into a pit of depression, and, moreover, at over forty (!) he was more than capable of making his own decisions and accepting the consequences; after he had even confessed to her that, in a way, he owed it to the young lady Hannah Marx—whom she had recently had occasion to meet (although he kept quiet about the precise circumstances surrounding her memorable appearance, preferring to take the whole matter of his rejection letter to his grave with him rather than reveal it to another living soul)—to tidy up this loose end in the story of his life; and after none of this had borne fruit and Renate Krug continued to insist that the trip was something he should refrain from, Jonathan N. Grief had been compelled to remind his assistant that he was her boss and she was not his mother, so although he valued her opinion he was certainly not prepared to consider it when making this decision.
It was only after these tough negotiations that Renate Krug wrote down the address and booked the flight, scowling all the while and insisting that Jonathan would find nothing when he got there but an empty shack and a withered old cypress hedge.
Well, Jonathan would soon see. According to the navigation system it was a short half hour’s drive from the airport to Via di Montececeri 20 in Fiesole, where his mother had last been known to live.
When he had entered the address into Google for the first time, back in his office, he hadn’t known whether to laugh or cry. It turned out that Monte Ceceri (which meant “swan hill”) was where Leonardo da Vinci had made his first attempts at flight in the sixteenth century.
On seeing this, it was not Leonardo that interested Jonathan, but the swans. He had immediately been tempted to pick up the phone to call Hannah and tell her about the extraordinary coincidence (swans . . . Alster . . . Simon . . . capito?) But of course he had thought better of it, as he had known what her reply would have been: nothing. Only the click of the phone being hung up, closely followed by a beeping on the line.
He would always be persona non grata to her—swans or no swans. Maybe the opposite. If he were to remind Hannah once again of the moment when he had last seen Simon alive . . . It didn’t take much imagination to realize that her reaction would hardly be a tearful reconciliation, but more likely a full-on meltdown.