The Letters in the Drawer

In my family, there is an old book. It belongs to my grandfather. It is from 60 years ago. I sometimes look at it. I think it is special.

Last summer, I helped my mother to clean out my grandfather's house. He had died six months earlier, and we were finally ready to sort his things.

In the kitchen, I found a small metal tin on the top shelf. It was dusty and old. Inside the tin, I found a small black-and-white photograph and a piece of folded paper.

The photograph showed a young woman I did not recognise. The piece of paper had only two words on it, in my grandfather's handwriting: 'My Anna'.

MOTHER: Who is that?

ME: I don't know. There is just this photo and his words.

My mother looked at the picture for a long time. She said her father had never spoken about anyone called Anna. We put the tin back where we found it. We decided not to throw it away.

When my grandfather died, my father asked me to help him sort through his old papers. We sat in his study for two hours, looking at letters, photos, and old documents. Most of it was ordinary — bills, postcards, work papers from forty years ago.

In an old folder, I found a small black-and-white photograph. It showed my grandfather as a young man, perhaps twenty-five years old. He was wearing an army uniform. Next to him stood another young man, smiling at the camera. On the back of the photo, my grandfather had written: 'Tomas, who saved my life.'

I showed the photo to my father.

ME: Did Grandpa serve in the army?

FATHER: Yes, when he was young, before he met your grandmother. He never talked about it much.

ME: Who was Tomas?

My father looked at the photo for a long time. He said he did not know. He had never heard the name. We put the photo carefully into a small envelope and added it to the things we wanted to keep.

Walking home that evening, I thought about my grandfather. I had known him as a quiet old man who liked gardening and bad jokes. But he had also been a young soldier whose life had been saved by someone called Tomas, sixty years ago. There were parts of him I would never know.

When my father's older sister died last summer, my father and I went to her flat to clear it out. She had lived alone for thirty years, and the small flat had become, over those decades, full of carefully kept things — books, photographs, small ornaments, the kind of unimportant souvenirs that long lives produce.

We worked slowly through the morning. My father, who had been close to his sister, was quieter than I had ever seen him. He handled her things gently, sometimes pausing over a particular book or photograph for longer than I expected.

In a small box in the kitchen, I found a thick envelope of papers. Inside were maybe fifty pages of typed text, neatly held together with a paper clip. The first page had a title: 'A Life in Translation', by my aunt's full name.

I showed my father.

ME: Did you know she was writing a book?

FATHER: A book? She never said.

My father read the first page slowly. It was, as far as we could tell, a memoir — about her work as a translator, her years in different cities, the people she had known. We read about ten pages, sitting together at her small kitchen table, in silence.

When we were done, my father carefully put the manuscript back in its envelope.

FATHER: Thirty years she lived alone in this flat. I came to see her every Sunday. I never knew she was writing this.

ME: Should we read the rest?

FATHER: I don't know. I think she would have given it to me if she had wanted me to read it. Maybe she didn't. Or maybe she meant to and didn't manage. We will keep it. We don't have to decide today.

We put the manuscript into the box of things to take home. Driving back that evening, I thought about my aunt — the small thin woman who had visited us at Christmas and brought small careful presents, and had also, apparently, been writing a memoir for thirty years that no-one in the family had known about. There was a part of her I had not known. The pages, I realised, would not change that. They would only show me where I had not been able to see.

When my mother's older brother died last winter, I helped my mother clear out his small flat. He had lived alone for over thirty years — a quiet man, never married, who had worked all his life at the same office and retired without much ceremony. My mother had been close to him, in the careful undemanding way that adult siblings sometimes are.

We worked for two days. The flat was orderly, almost spartan; my uncle had not, on the whole, accumulated much. In the bottom of an old chest of drawers, however, my mother found a thick wooden box. It had no lock. Inside it were perhaps a hundred photographs, all carefully arranged, of a woman my mother did not recognise.

The woman appeared at different ages. In some photographs, she was perhaps in her thirties; in others, considerably older. The most recent ones, judging from the colour and the clothing, must have been taken within the last ten years. In all of them, she was looking, with what struck me as a particular kind of warmth, at the person holding the camera — who had presumably, in every case, been my uncle.

It is necessary, at this point, to register what such a discovery is and is not. There were no letters; there was no name written on any of the photographs; there was no evidence, anywhere in the flat, of who this woman was, or whether she was still alive, or where she might now be. There was simply the box, and inside it, a careful arrangement of images of a woman who had clearly mattered greatly to my uncle and whose existence none of us had known anything about.

My mother held one of the photographs for some time without speaking.

MOTHER: I don't recognise her.

ME: Do you think she's still alive?

MOTHER: I don't know. He never said anything. In all those years.

We did not, in the end, find any further information. We took the photographs home. My mother, with a kind of careful respect that surprised me, did not show them to anyone else in the family.

Driving home that evening, I thought about my uncle — the quiet undemonstrative man whose life I had assumed was unremarkable, and who had also, apparently, loved someone for many years in a way none of us had noticed. The photographs had not given us her name. They had only shown us, with an eloquence that words might have spoiled, that she had existed, and that she had been seen, and that my uncle had cared enough to make a small careful record of her, to be kept in a wooden box in a chest of drawers, for a future audience he had perhaps not entirely been able to imagine.

When my mother's older sister died last winter, after several years of slow decline, my mother and I went to her flat to clear it out. My aunt had lived alone for almost thirty years — a quiet teacher of music, never married, who had retired in her sixties and continued, in the years afterwards, to teach the violin to a small succession of children whose parents had eventually grown old and stopped sending them. The funeral had been small, attended by perhaps twenty people, several of whom were former pupils, now adults, who introduced themselves to my mother with the slightly formal warmth of people honouring a teacher who had mattered.

We began the cleaning on a Saturday in February. The flat was orderly, almost spartan; my aunt had never accumulated much, and the work, on the surface, was straightforward. We had agreed, before starting, that there was no rush.

In a small drawer in the bedroom, beneath a folded scarf, my mother found a thin leather notebook. It was old — perhaps from the early 1970s, judging from its appearance — and had, on the inside cover, my aunt's name in careful young handwriting.

It was a notebook of poems. There were perhaps fifty of them, all dated, all in the same neat hand, all written between 1972 and 1976. Most were short. Several were addressed, by initial, to a person whose name had not been written out. A few referred to specific places — a particular café, a particular bench, a particular evening — with the unspecific specificity that poems sometimes have.

It is necessary, at this point, to register what such a notebook is and is not. My aunt had never, to anyone's knowledge, written poetry. She had taught violin; she had, in her later years, played in a small local string quartet; she had not been, in any of the obvious ways, a literary woman. The notebook was not labelled or hidden, but it was, to a degree we could not fully measure, private. It contained the work of a young woman whose interior life had clearly been more elaborate than the family version of her had quite suggested.

My mother read three or four poems, sitting on the bed, before closing the notebook gently.

MOTHER: She never showed any of these to me.

ME: Did you know she wrote poetry?

MOTHER: I had no idea.

We sat for some time without saying anything else. Outside, the February afternoon was beginning to dim. My mother put the notebook into her handbag without ceremony, and we went on with the cleaning.

Later, driving home, I asked her whether she would read the rest. She thought for some time before answering.

MOTHER: I'm not sure. They were never given to me. I think she could have given them to anyone in her life, and she didn't. I am not certain that finding them after she died is the same as being given them. They are, in some sense, still hers.

We drove the rest of the way home in a quiet that contained, between us, the new information about my aunt — that she had written poems, in her twenties, to a person whose name we did not know — and the awareness that this information would not, in any meaningful sense, change anything. My aunt would still be remembered as a teacher of violin who had lived alone for thirty years and had, in some part of her younger life, also been a young woman with an interior we had not quite imagined. The notebook was, on inspection, evidence that there had been more, and that the more had been carefully held by the person who had lived it. Whether we would ever read all of it, my mother and I had not, that evening, decided. I suspected that the not-deciding was perhaps part of what such things were for.