The parsonage has forty years of my aunt in it, and I have a week to take it apart. I am Friederike, thirty, and I have been sorting her life into boxes marked keep, give, burn. The drawer in the writing desk sticks. When it finally gives, it is full of letters tied with a shoelace, all in the same slanting hand, all addressed to a man at the monastery on the hill.
I read one. I know I shouldn't. It is from 1986 and it says nothing scandalous and everything, and by the end I am sitting on the floor with my back against the desk and my aunt is a stranger I would have liked to know.
So I walk up the hill with the bundle under my coat.
The porter's door opens, and it is not an old man. He is perhaps my age, in the plain habit of a novice, with the kind of stillness that makes you lower your voice. “Brother Gabriel,” he says. “I keep the archive. Brother Anselm doesn't receive visitors any more.”
“These are his.” I hold out the letters. He doesn't take them. He looks at the handwriting on the top envelope, and something crosses his face that he has clearly trained himself not to show.
“Then they belong in the archive,” he says at last. “But I would need to know what they contain before I file them. Would you sit with me while I read?”
The room he leads me to has one window and two chairs. He unties the shoelace with more care than I did. Halfway through the first letter he stops, and I see his hand rest on the page as if he is steadying it, or himself. “I take my final vows in the spring,” he says, to no one, to me. Then he looks up and waits, and I understand that he is asking whether I will come back tomorrow.
