Script quote on the outer thigh

Forty years ago I stood at the Stanovo crossing with a shoebox of letters tied in string, and my daughter on the other side, gone over with a cardboard suitcase and a borrowed coat. The guard was a boy with a moustache he was too young for. He turned my pages one by one, holding each to the lamp as if the ink might be smuggling something. Every sheet was about bread and weather and the goat we had sold. He yawned through all of it. Then he reached the last page, the one I had written at three in the morning, and he stopped, because beneath my name I had squeezed in a line, small, sloping up the margin like a child climbing stairs.

He read it aloud, slowly, the way you read a sign in a language you do not speak. P.S. You will always be my baby girl. Then he looked at me, and I saw he was thinking of his own mother somewhere behind a different window. He folded the letter back along its crease and passed it through without stamping a thing.

That is the whole secret, if you want one. The postscript got through when the bread did not. I still keep the carbon copy, which is why my handwriting is so careful now, and when people ask what the last line means I tell them it means exactly what the boy said it did, and then I tell them to drink their tea before it goes cold.