Чести рожден ден. I know the card in the red envelope is from him, even before I open it. Who else would be sending me birthday greetings in Bulgarian? The stamp is local, and the handwriting on the envelope is not his… so I assume he had given it to someone to post it for him when he came back to Malta.
Inside is one of the new 10-lev notes. “Let’s go camping! Meet me at the usual place, Spark!” My heart misses a beat. No sooner do I sit down, then come three missed calls, in quick succession, from a withheld number. It’s Our Signal.
I call the 12-digit number I had concocted out of our combined birthdates. This hooks up to an exchange, whence it is re-directed to the self-same phone from which he had called me.
I hate this cloak-and-dagger stuff, but it’s a necessary safety precaution. The procedure involves allowing the phone to ring seven times at his end, and I count the beeps. Click!
“Meet me at the usual place in ten minutes. Hurry!” That’s all he says. Not even the usual “See-you-love-you!”
He knows I’m pregnant and the oedema means I can’t run fast. I jam my hair under the crochet beret he had bought me from Paris when he was on assignment, in 2015. He’d left the Charlie Hebdo offices at 11.00a.m., in order to catch the 11.15a.m. train to his hotel.
I put on my parka, and rap on my neighbour’s door and tell her I need to run. Handing her the key to the flat, I tell her to switch off the oven in fifteen minutes’ time. “Careful!” she looks at my tummy.
“Yes.” And I run, though it’s uphill all the way.
“You made it!”
It strikes me simultaneously that he looks deathly pale, and that he does not get up to hug me (he knows that within his arms was the safest place in the world for me). I notice he is sitting in a wheelchair. I flinch.
“They broke both my legs. And then kneecapped me, to make sure I never walked again. Here, take this,” he says, handing me a huge manila envelope.
He puts his hands gently on either side of my belly. Our child moves. “Go. Now.”
“No!” I shout, and lean over to kiss him.
Suddenly, the wheelchair is empty. I know that for the baby’s sake, I have to leave. The downhill run is faster, albeit not much easier.
I don’t even realise I have Googled his name, until I have actually done so. The first link that comes up is his obituary. He had died five months previously, in a freak accident in Bulgaria.
I turn away from the screen, and retch.
I riffle through the contents of the envelope, which will later have worldwide repercussions. What I had imagined would be a red-letter day was totally, unequivocally, a black-letter one.
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