The Wilderness Read online

  “We did good work today,” he said. “We made a difference.”

  He looked up at the rear wall of The Sun Rises and then across the silken concrete and out over the moors. He loved the way this low, random wall marked man from nature, how there was so little separation. So little, but enough. Under the concrete the few remaining weeds were dying. The peat glowed in the sunset as if on fire.

  “There's so much we can do,” Eleanor said. She sat upright for a moment to clear a path for inspiration. “We can start doing food. Why don't we get some tables and those chequered tablecloths?”

  Rook flew one of his paper cranes across the garden where it landed and nestled the tip of its wing in the wet concrete. “We can bring back the debating groups.”

  “You know, the red-and-white ones, and candles in bottles. Sara can do the cooking.”

  “We can have snail races.”

  “We can have book clubs, Nescafé, we can have dances—”

  “We can start an Assassination Club.” Rook swilled whiskey around his glass. “We can jointly and democratically decide who to kill, and then we can fashion weapons from unlikely objects and go forth and murder. Being humble folk it may be messy at first but practice will improve us.”

  “We can begin,” he cut in on Rook, tired of this nonsense, “an action group. A pro-Israel lobby group.”

  Rook laughed. “This is Lincolnshire. You might not find many supporters.”

  “On the contrary, areas without any strong leanings this way or that are good fertile ground for this sort of thing.”

  “Why would you want to?” Eleanor asked, slumping her body weight onto her knees and gazing, as though longingly, at the creamy concrete beneath her. She looked tired.

  “Listen, it isn't enough just to give a people a block of land and then deny them their history. They're surrounded by countries who deny there was ever a holocaust. What the hell are they doing there, then, if there wasn't a holocaust? Why didn't they just stay in their nice European apartments? Has it ever occurred to you that they might not want to live in Israel any more than you and I do? Maybe they'd like to go back to Vienna or Berlin—the places they were born. And now everybody says the Jews are a—what was the word I heard?—an unscrupulous race. A naturally unscrupulous race. Why? Because they won't settle for being trampled? Because now that they've been given a piece of land and have to live with the hatred of their neighbours they would like something more?”

  It was the first time he had ever really voiced these views. Anger—albeit an anger that was blunted with smoke and drink—surfaced, ebbed, and surfaced. He was angry, not because he cared about a distant race but because he wanted to defend his mother, and his mother, if she were here now, wouldn't want him to do so. She would shake her head and say, Asch, Jacob, you would be better not worrying about it, you would be better starting up a wine-tasting club.

  “We don't want to become too—political.” Eleanor frowned.

  “Take this place,” he argued, “your uncle left it to you, a building, some land, a business. It's all very well, but do you want it? Is it enough, without any love, or—”

  He gave up on the thought. The word love had slipped out with the smoke and he wished it might disperse with the smoke.

  “No.” Eleanor pursed her lips tightly around the sound. “But I'd be stupid to think it's not enough when it's all I've got.”

  He felt slightly ashamed by the question, but then kicked the shame away. By Eleanor's argument nothing would ever improve or progress, it was a terrible, overly humble, defeatist thing to believe.

  Rook slung his legs over onto the moors side of the low wall and stood, cracking his knuckles. “For pity's sake don't start up some ridiculous Jewish group, Jake. You'll upset your mother.”

  “She might want to come along.”

  “She will not want to come along.”

  They eyed each other for a few moments and then he stood too and picked the butts off the wall. It was time to go home to Helen, he thought, and get some sleep. It had been a long day.

  “We could have a vegetable-growing club. A poetry club!” Eleanor, laid out along the wall, clapped her hands in fantasy. “We could be the hub of the community. We could have coffee mornings with custard, apple cake, apple strudel, ice cream, chocolate sponge—”

  In that moment he suddenly missed his father. He looked at Rook and was angry with him for his flippancy. For all that was disappointing, violent, and rigid in him, his father would not have joked childishly about assassination clubs, and he would have spoken up against the triviality of poetry and ice cream; his father was a man of strong political ideals. Circumstance meant that he could only live them through the impotence of nostalgia, but he defended them viciously in that domain, locked in his mind, locked in his colonial anecdotes. Ice cream would never have been on his agenda.

  These thoughts closed down. It was the only real stab of grief he'd had for his father and even then it didn't quite reach its object. The poor rotting man underground, the man who once took him to see the Blue Diamonds flying overhead in formation. He struggled and failed to find love in the grief. He just wanted an ally.

  It was almost dark now, and the pub looked a little forlorn without any customers. Tomorrow, when the paint was dry and Eleanor opened as normal for lunch, it would be a new dawn perhaps. He felt for her, without love as he had put it. If they could make a success of The Sun Rises it might change things for her. As he offered her a hand she sat upright, frowned deeply, and looked up at him as a child might.

  “Is that a storm coming?”

  On the horizon a barrel of black cloud was rolling in, a wind beginning to blow up.

  He nodded. She held on to his hand but did not move.

  “Can you hear the sound of the sign swinging?”

  “Just,” he said.

  She shivered. “Sounds like someone's hanging.”

  “Rich and nasty imagination you have, Ellie.” Rook put his leg over the wall and tested the concrete with his toe.

  “I often think I can hear people hanging,” she went on. “Then I wonder what it was they did, who they murdered, and why. Then I can't sleep.”

  “Nasty, nasty. You should think about pleasanter things, my dear.”

  “But it isn't actually unpleasant. It's quite comforting, to think about a crime being punished, do you know? Every person hanging is one less that can kill you—I like it, it makes me feel safe.”

  He and Rook looked at her in dismayed sympathy. He helped her to her feet; she was dozy and loose with smoking, and she wrapped her arms around him. Like a small child, he thought. Like he had grown up and she had not. The wind picked its way across the moors and seemed to shove itself suddenly through the tunnel between the open front and back doors of the pub, and gusted into the garden.

  Then, as though dealt up by the wind, a figure appeared. Rook turned and was taken aback. There was silence. All three foggy faces turned to behold it: a tall woman in a yellow dress. She was separated from them by the pool of concrete. The yellow of her dress was outrageous against the angered light. His first thought was her resemblance to the woman Helen had painted, and his second thought was, at closer scrutiny, her lack of resemblance to anybody he had ever seen. He took time to absorb the amber eyes and long face, the ears that protruded from her hair, the wide mouth that reminded him of Rook's, and the orange scarf around her head.

  “Darling,” Rook said with tender surprise.

  “Granddad.”

  She winked. That state of her face, on the brink of ugliness and beauty, was the most interesting of all states. He saw it sometimes—rarely—in a woman's face, and had even seen it in a man's. It was sometimes there in thin cats. One day soon, he vowed, he would build himself a house that was in that suspended state. Glass—gleaming and unforgiving.

  “This is Joy,” Rook said.

  They nodded in her direction. After a hungry pause Rook cocked his head. “What do you think of hanging, darling?�
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  She tilted her head slightly to one side. She managed to look deeply interested and at the same time deeply aloof, and intelligent at the same time as vacant. Her chin rested on her hand in consideration.

  “I don't like it,” she reflected at length.

  “Is there a reason?”

  She fixed them all with a firm gaze. “It breaks your neck.”

  A gunshot sounded out on the moors. Poor Eleanor breathed the word Jake—an involuntary betraying sound that fled from her mouth before she could stop it—and jumped into good posture at his side. He could have sworn she whispered a do-or-die I love you in his ear beneath the crack of the released bullet. In this spot where there were no trees, a leaf blew in across the white concrete, drifted to the pair of feet closest to the back door—a pair of yellow silk slippers at the end of eternal legs—and stuck.

  5

  Or no. Maybe the gunshot did not come like this. The leaf. Maybe not. Maybe the run of events is not precisely like this; but it is the curse of age to be confused, let him curse it back with improvised clarity. Nakhes, it sounds like. The gunshot is delivered in two snapped syllables: nakhes, joy.

  He loves this memory to range into his mind, the yellow dress gathered in tight to Joy's small waist and then falling im-practically to her feet, so unfashionable that it seemed it must be before its time. The straps that revealed the entirety of her long arms. The image is sticky on his memory like pollen on a bee, and happy, and invisible, and secret. The happiness of it is deep in his gut.

  And when he tries to place himself in the picture, in the concrete garden, the man he sees is one he likes. Usually his memory of himself as a younger man renders him sleek like a sea-cleaned stone. It paints him as Helen saw him—a man who is attractive in the way that men are usually not. Long-lashed, doleful. To his mind (though Helen never meant it this way) this began to mean unchallenged, dull, and overly accepting. Unruffled by resistance of any sort. Inert. But in this memory of first meeting Joy he is alive, with some of that electric energy that Rook always seemed to possess, with a fractious expression, with extra height and agility: he is a match for her.

  Now he doesn't know if that rendition of himself is romanticised, or if the other is demonised. Even looking at the few pictures of himself doesn't settle the dispute in his mind—and in fact he barely recognises himself in them. They don't correspond with either mental image. He is giddy with the sensation that nothing, nothing, not even himself, is certain. And then he begins to wonder if perhaps this is a godsend, and that he can protect himself by filling in the gaps with what he would prefer as opposed to what was.

  The story of the soldier comes to him. He is a child and Sara invites their blond-haired neighbour for dinner. It is wartime and the neighbour's husband is a soldier on leave from his duty in France. Over a meal of chicken soup and dumplings, and heaped plates of dry-roasted potatoes, the soldier tells the tale of how he was in a bombed hospital and the building collapsed, leaving all but him and a foul-smelling Frenchman dead. They were trapped for a day and night, these two soldiers.

  A year later the neighbour and husband come to dinner again. The husband is on leave, but hopes that this will be the last fleeting visit—there are signs that the war could end. He retells the story of the Frenchman. This time the one day of entrapment becomes four, the hospital a school, the Frenchman weak and maudlin to the point of near-death.

  Another year later and the war is over and the neighbour and ex-soldier invite them for dinner. The beleaguered soldier tells the story again. The four days has become a week; the Frenchman weeps at night about his beloved estranged dog. The two soldiers are sustained by a leaking water pipe that has conveniently surfaced in the tale.

  The next time the story comes out it is years later and the soldier drops by to say he and his wife are moving to London. Jake is moving to London, too, Sara tells him. To study to be an architect. The soldier stays for one of Sara's now-famous coffees which she makes strong and luxuriously milky. She hands out hot hamantaschen and the soldier asks if he ever told them about his encounter with the Frenchman. They say, perhaps.

  He tells it with expert flourishes. The week has become a fortnight. The Frenchman's estranged dog has become children, the Frenchman's wife beautiful, the water infected, the den smaller and hotter, death closer.

  The poor exaggerating soldier. It was clear that the man was at no point lying, just deluded, just craving after a drama in what had, for him, been a war of fairly undramatic, inevitable, unnarrated loss.

  They always joked about it, he, his father, and Sara. He picks up a black-and-white photograph of Helen when she was pregnant with Alice. There is such pressure to remain true to the facts, and it seems so important somehow, so vital to preserve events and people as they really were. But he knows how memory can make a shattered dream come true. Sometimes he loses the strength and vigilance to stand up to its forces, and thinks he would do just as well to let it transform the past as it wishes.

  Under guidance from the fox-haired woman he sketches up a timeline of his life and places major events and people along it. She instructs him to make simple logs such as who he was married to, who his children are, and what his profession was. She escapes his derision with a reasoning hand that slices the air—the gesture says, you'll thank me for this one day. So he bows his head and says he will do as she asks.

  The timeline raises questions. When was he born? What was his father called? Who is older—Alice or Henry? Certainly Henry came first, yes, because there were many times of three people. And if Henry came first that possibly makes him younger—one is a young number. But Alice, too, was young, in fact she was the youngest of all things. Here she is as immediate to him as a prime colour, and he marks the event on the timeline: 1967. She is wearing a blue dress with a large felt strawberry on the front; Helen had even stitched in the yellow specks, the— spots that one finds on a strawberry. His daughter is breathy and excited after tripping around the garden after Henry and a toy plane, and she comes to him, chirping Jape in an attempt at his name, and her fingers fiddle at his knees to get his attention.

  Something moves: the dog. She yawns from her place on the floor, snaps her jaws shut, and then contemplates him. He blinks to find he is just standing here in the kitchen with a pen in hand, and he can feel the vacancy on his own face, the typical elderly glaze. No idea how he came to be standing when he was sitting. Hasn't he even forgotten to breathe? His nails are bitten.

  He sits down again to the timeline and hovers his pen: 1967, that was the year of the Six-Day War. Agitation overcomes him. He can still just about grasp this war, its mechanisms, its reasons—something about it still makes sense to him. The Israeli planes attacked Egypt at sunrise, so that, with the sun behind them, they were difficult to see and distances difficult to judge; he has always had that image in his mind, of the planes silhouetted against a large sleepy orange ball, just as the steelworks are silhouetted. And Helen furious that the sun should be misused in this way for such ungodly crimes.

  Then it transpired that hundreds (thousands? Lots. Is thousands lots?) of Egyptian soldiers had died, while most Israeli soldiers were unharmed. Support for the underdog is never to be underestimated, he knows. He knows from years of marriage to Helen that whatever is losing is suddenly loved. And there was Israel, the tyrant, and Helen hated it until the hatred began to feel like it was directed at him personally, and as if the tide turning against that land was the tide turning against his own stupid beliefs.

  Nineteen sixty-seven. The day after the short-distant war ended he had taken his family to Quail Woods, it was June and hot even under the patchy shade of the trees, and Helen was a little irritable and perturbed. Extremes of temperature always made her so, where they had the opposite effect on him. He liked the feeling of being pushed to a limit, and that day the heat had caused him to wake up from a night on top of the sheets resolute and hopeful. He scooped Alice from her bed, kissed her, and carried her downstairs. She l
iked cornflakes with a little side bowl of mashed banana and jam, so he made it for her as was the ritual and they sat down to eat.

  Then, over coffee, he heard on the radio that the war had ended and Israel had won territory. The body count began: so many Egyptian soldiers dead. Numbers were reeled off. The BBC doubted its own news: impossible that Israel could have won; their correspondents must have got it wrong. For a while the news wrangled back and forth between fact and disbelief until the victory became undeniable.

  Helen came down from dressing Henry and sighed over poached eggs, swilling the coffee viciously around her cup, and after a tense silent breakfast he suggested a walk in the woods—anything, anything to get them out of the house.

  “Everybody needs to know what or where their home is,” he said as they walked the wide dappled path.

  “Agreed,” Helen nodded, “but their home is ultimately within themselves.”

  “No, Helen, stop that. It's about land. Israel was given to those people as a home and they have to fight for it.”

  “Not like this.”

  Helen walked barefooted along the path in her miniskirt, blotched in the green-and-yellow camouflage of the sunlight as it fought through from above. Military light, his wife called it. He carried Alice on his shoulders so that she could become a tree. And while they walked she needled her fingers through his hair, chirping, Jape, Jape, as though he were in fact the tree and she a bird in its branches.

  “They said at school the other week that Israel was going to be destroyed and we had to pray for it,” Henry offered suddenly. The content of the sentence made his voice all the more high and childlike.