The Wilderness Read online

  “They said that?” Helen instinctively reached for Henry's hand but he didn't go to her. “They shouldn't be saying things like that to children for heaven's sake.”

  “Did you pray, Henry?” he asked suddenly. Helen blinked at him in anger and shovelled her hair behind her ear.

  “Everybody did. We always do when we're asked. We pray for everything, last week we prayed for a girl who's got chicken pox.”

  “Chicken pox is fine,” Helen said. “Politics is something else. Feeding politics to six-year-olds is wrong.”

  “ Six-year-olds have brains,” he told his wife. “I don't see the problem.”

  Henry ran ahead and threw pinecones at targets on the tree trunk—a knot in the bark or a red cross painted to mark the tree as fit for felling. Most of the trees were marked, and dotted about like bright mushrooms—though there were no men to be seen—were the yellow hard hats and jackets of the fellers.

  “The woods are going to be cut down,” he said.

  “Yes—it's so sad.”

  “Sad, because this land is our home.” He looked hard at Helen to make his point. “We don't want to lose it. Do we?”

  “So would you kill for it?”

  “Of course not.”

  “Well the Egyptians have been killed for the same.”

  “It's over. By all accounts that little war is over.”

  “Little war!”

  “It was six days long.”

  “Well it's not little, and it's not ever over for the people who grieve!”

  “It's been three years,” he said, trying to splice the mood. “Three years since Alice was born, and it's a lovely day, and as of today the war is over. And our own kashrut is done—we'll go home and get up the ladder and pick cherries. We'll make, I don't know, a pie. We have everything now, it's complete. A house. Two children. Cherries. Each other.”

  He pointed out onto the horizon through the trees, the infinity of its straight line now broken up with clumps of his own handiwork—houses, the prison with its fence barbs suspended like a swarm of flies, and a general suburbia gaining ground.

  Alice whispered in his ear: Jape, I want to pick them.

  He kissed her cheek, of course, of course, whatever she wanted she could have.

  “The only ripe cherries will be on the highest branches,” Helen said tersely.

  “Then we'll get an extra-tall ladder. We're not afraid, are we, Alice?”

  He stood in the middle of the path, between the yellow hats and coats, and closed his eyes to the gunshot. Helen turned her face up to the sound and shivered as though she wanted to shrug off the aggression the shot had left in the air.

  “You look just like a soldier,” she said. “The way you reacted to that gunshot. You look so—serious. So intent. Dressed in that military light.”

  “I'm trying to work out what's on the other side of that sound.”

  “Peace,” she said. “There's nothing quieter than the quiet after noise.”

  Jape, Alice whispered to his ear. I want to pick them.

  He decides to make coffee. The dog stands, stretches, and comes across to him; she rests her head on his knee. Knocked you down with my car, he thinks. Don't remember, but know I did. Am told, am told you came out of the blue. She observes his thoughts move across his face. Every one of his movements seems to interest her. She appears beguiled. Scratching the back of his head he strokes her until she lies out flat and closes her eyes, and he crouches until his legs are stiff—a minute or ten or twenty. He becomes absorbed—to the obliteration of all else—in the blue-black shine of her coat and the slowing rise and fall of her ribs.

  He reads the name tag on her collar: Lucky. Yes, of course. They have become hasty friends as if neither can see any point in delaying or assessing. Back at the table he works again on the timeline, thinks he might have a coffee, stands, crouches to stroke the back of the dog's ear with his thumb, tells her, silently, that he is terribly sorry for running her over, returns to the table, thinks he wouldn't mind a coffee, stands, concludes that he needs to urinate. Urinates, and returns to find the dog barking at the coffee machine, which is banging with dry heat and a crack working its way up the glass. Fool that he is. He switches it off.

  “I'm sorry about that,” he tells the dog. She winds back down to a curl on the floor and soon sleeps her mouth into a long, accepting smile.

  STORY OF THE FAILED ESCAPE

  “I've decided to start up a group. I'm going to run it from The Sun Rises. A lobby group for Israel.”

  Sara sighed and looked up at the branches.

  “You have foolish ideas.”

  “We might touch on CND, too. Or something stronger even, the Committee of 100. The issues are all bound up together.”

  “You are not a pacifist, Jacob. You have a hawk's eye for war, since you were a boy.”

  “CND isn't about pacifism, neither is Israel. I'm not talking about growing our hair and loving our neighbours, I'm talking about the real world.”

  Sara's touched one cheek then the other with her large white hand. “My father, Arnold, had a scar across each cheek. Here, and here.”

  She met his eye and then turned to face the path again.

  “Fencing scars, Jacob. From his days at the University of Vienna. Look, let me show you.”

  Under the shelter of a tree she dipped her hands into her bag, allowing them to swim for a long time in the blackness before she pulled out the photograph that he had seen so many times before.

  “Here, my father.”

  She presented the image to the dull light of the woods with a flourish: here is where it all begins, the gesture implied. Here in this picture is alpha and omega, and you would be wise to know it.

  Then she touched the monochrome cheeks of her father tenderly, just as she had touched her own. “Do you see them, the scars?”

  Yes, he saw them, the silver glints along his cheekbones, tribal almost.

  “In his first term at university Arnold was beaten up a few times by fools. Dummköpfe”'

  She spat the word. Giving it in German seemed to do a greater injury, something to do with the hardness of it. Dummköpfe. Fools.

  “And of course the fools usually got away with it. It was to be expected.”

  “Die dümmsten Bauern ernten die dicksten Kartoffeln,” he responded parrotlike, with some of the very little German she had taught him.

  Sara looked at him as if to say, you remembered, and she put her arm around his waist—but the look and the gesture were wary. She wanted him to remember? She didn't want him to? Had he done wrong?

  “Fools are often lucky,” she translated. “Yes. You are right. It is a queer law of the universe. If the clever man jumps into the canyon he falls to his death. If the fool jumps into the canyon he falls into a boat and sails off down the water.”

  She pocketed her hands and went on.

  “The beatings were not very serious things, just punches in the stomach, a bit of hair pulls and calling names: Jewish shit, Jew scum. It was standard. But the Jews had to learn to defend themselves, and so they started fencing.”

  She tilted her head back.

  “Look up, Jake, look up at the branches.”

  And so he did, and they walked in this way, the summer drizzle finding its way thinly to them; he could hear its delicate fall across the leaves. Their own faces were wet with it. He wiped his cheeks every few moments, and Sara scrunched a lace handkerchief into a ball and pushed it into his hand.

  “Here, have this. The rain's on your face.”

  He thanked her and she hummed something briefly.

  “The fools didn't even mind Jews,” she then said. “Their lecturers were Jews, their doctors were Jews, their friends were Jews. It was just that they wanted to fight something. You know this feeling, Jake? You just want to fight something.”

  “Yes, Mother,” he muttered, wiping his face roughly, surprised suddenly at how well he knew it.

  “What I'm trying to tell you, J
acob, is that my father and the other Jewish students practised until they were so good at fencing they couldn't help but win. They won everything.”

  He turned to check her expression, expecting a smile, but she was in fact frowning.

  “This is the Jewish problem,” she added. “Can't help but excel. When you really excel at something you make one friend and ten enemies. My father didn't know what it was to lose, and when defeat came he couldn't recognise it.”

  He nodded, feeling the silk of the handkerchief in his palm, the luxury of it.

  “We were beaten, Jacob, as a race. We had to start becoming individuals, and our lives have been better for it—my life is better for it. It is safe and free. You have to leave it alone. These groups, what good are they? You must leave it alone and save the energy for your family.”

  Family! She was his family. That man in the photograph was his family. Why must she always forget it? And anyway, he was entitled to his own projects. As an adult he was allowed to do the things other adults were doing.

  “Eleanor is happy for me to use that large table in The Sun Rises,” he continued unhindered. “And I think I could probably recruit a few people from work.”

  They ambled onwards with no company for their thoughts but the patter of rain. After a minute of walking she took the flask and gold-rimmed cups from her bag and went through the ritual of coffee, a ritual he now saw as defunct if it harked back to a part of her that she had deleted. It was an echo, that was all. The thing that made the sound was gone.

  “Sara, there's room in this world for idealism. Your father and mother stayed where they were because it was their home and because they believed they had a right to be there. Why should we recognise defeat? Why?”

  Sara was perfectly upright as she walked, and quiet for so long that he thought she either hadn't been listening or simply couldn't be bothered to answer. Eventually she turned her coffee out to the ground with an anxious flick of the wrist.

  “What is better? To give up what you are and be alive, or keep what you are and end up dead? What you are is mere circumstance anyway. It isn't that important. What address you live at, what clan you belong to, what name you go by, what day you set aside for worship, what you worship. It isn't more important than being alive.”

  She stopped in the middle of the path. Her face was anguished.

  “They could have left Austria. Everybody else was leaving through the ports and escaping—my mother and father had the chance to leave and they didn't. They could have left, Jacob.”

  He stepped forward to offer her his hand but she gestured him away.

  “For my father the truth was a burning building and he was always searching inside it, even though it was safer to get out. I assure you that to persist with an idea that has run its course is stupid and will cause nothing but harm. All this talk of Israel! What clue do you have about Israel? What about your own home, your wife, your dear child whom you spend little enough time with as it is?”

  An image of Joy's naked back played over him, her chalk skin tight across the spine. Sara collected herself, tucked the cup back in her bag, and held his gaze.

  “I am telling you and you must listen: where you are from, what is yours, what is home—sometimes these are not the point. The truth is not everything. You have to know when it is time to walk away.”

  6

  The mysterious letters to Helen rant at him from their pastel envelopes, but the more he is faced with them the less he knows what to do, except to cover them with an object—a plate, a salt cellar, or whatever comes to hand—so that the other woman, Eleanor, can never find them.

  The letters bring to mind a vision of him and Helen in bed one night talking about jealousy—or no, there is more to the story than that. It begins in the garden of the coach house and it is a Saturday, perhaps five years ago. He hazards a cross on the timeline. Helen is reading in the sun while he is putting the finishing touches on a model plane, sticking the Solarfilm to its bright-red wings and fuselage. Henry arrives unexpectedly. Though he lives nearby, Henry doesn't visit often—instead he and Helen meet for cups of coffee, or Helen goes to see him in his damp little flat that designates the triumph of his independence, and they appreciate his baking. But he rarely comes here. Seeing him, Helen jumps from her seat to hug him, repeating, Henry, Henry! How nice! While Henry returns, Helen, you look so well, what are you reading?

  They bow their heads together over her book like two children, their small hands pawing through the pages, their dark hair touching. The sun coppers the outer strands of their hair like fused wires.

  “These are some of the paintings I'll see when I go to Paris,” Helen says.

  Henry puts a hand on her shoulder. “Show me.”

  The book is about art, a subject they both are interested in. Helen likes the turn-of-the-century paintings and the pictures of downtrodden women in shabby rooms, or a poor man smoking in a bar with nothing but his shadow for company, or paintings of dancing girls and prostitutes, young women with drooping eyes. Marvellous! Helen always remarks, tracing her fingers across the colours. Amazing!

  “Paris?” he says, interrupting them. “You're going to Paris?”

  “Yes, Jake.” Helen turns the sweet oval of her face to him. “With my Bible group. Surely I told you?”

  “No, you didn't.”

  “Oh. I was sure I had. In any case, you don't mind.”

  He goes back to making the plane. “Of course not,” he says.

  That night he writes to Joy at length, and his words are fuelled on by the image of his wife and son conspiratorial over works of art, and how anything, even the racy and demoralised paintings, appears innocent in her grace. He is excluded from her, and this distance makes him love her more, and love Joy more. A win-win situation, perhaps. In bed that night Helen has difficulty sleeping because of the feary imps in her chest, a queasiness, a worry about old age that comes only in the dark. He asks her about Paris and she kisses his forehead and says she is sorry for being remiss about telling him. Fine, it's fine. But he finds himself picking a fight as if he wants her to be doing something wrong to salve his own bad conscience. He quite wishes she would confess to a secret affair; years and years of writing to Joy are eroding even his own astonishing ambivalence. But she will not fight. Are you jealous? she asks, smiling with curiosity, and some of the worry of age falling from her face.

  Jealous! He tells her he does not suffer from jealousy.

  Her response is the comment that base feelings are perfectly acceptable sometimes—she likens love, honesty, loyalty to flowers, and jealousy, greed, hatred to weeds. To pretend the weeds are not there is more destructive than to admit they are there and tend to them.

  He nods and agrees, but insists he does not suffer from jealousy. She says something about Moses and the Mountain of Solitude, but he is not listening. Instead he is considering whether to tell her about Joy, maybe just to see what her response will be. She is saying something about the Ten Commandments. Before he has the chance to confess anything she is asleep, so suddenly, as if she has a disease that abruptly shuts her down.

  Now, leaning over his timeline, he thinks he might look up that section about Moses in the Bible, his human-skin Bible, and find out what it was she was trying to tell him. When Helen died he marked in his human-skin Bible all the passages that she had marked in hers. Maybe those passages held a code, a message she had left for him, a greater reason for these days than eating, sleeping, shitting, breathing. He was mad back then, he spent months poring over the quotes, ordering and juxtaposing them, and he learnt them all until their sense was completely washed out by overuse.

  He jerks his head up, thinking he has heard some movement in the house, and finds his heart beating hard. Helen? The other one—the other woman? When he looks for the dog he sees she is still sleeping and is comforted again by her long peaceful breaths. Perhaps in a moment he will make himself a coffee or a mint julep, something to relax him.

  Somewhere
, here on the timeline, is the felling of Quail Woods when he was a child. He will have to mark it. He had been with Sara, who had brought with her a flask of coffee as usual, and the two of them had been looking up, always up, until, unexpectedly, the branches above them thinned, and when they looked ahead the woods were horizontal rather than vertical. Sara had breathed in sharply and murmured, Dreck! Fallen like matchsticks! He remembers the loud drone of a plane overhead. And scattered around were the yellow hard hats of the foresters, but no men. Yellow hats everywhere, this is what he remembers. The event is difficult to plot exactly on the timeline but he guesses he had been about nine or ten, and so he makes a mark near the beginning and stands to make coffee.

  The dog will have to fit somewhere on this timeline too— she is certainly an event—but where she goes is mysterious, whether it be a day, a month, or a year ago. He off-loads a cross where there is a space, though in fact there are many spaces—his life is not very well inscribed with events. There are entire decades he doesn't remember at all, and which have slid off the great mountain of his life into the valleys below. And then there are curious, bloated memories like this one of Helen and Henry poring thicker than thieves over an art book in the garden, with the sun catching their hair.

  Then the recollection of his mother in that wood with those words: You will cause nothing but harm. I am telling you and you must listen.

  Then the recollection of a gunshot which explodes his muggy ennui and levers open the air to provide a place from which he will never be excluded. His place. His moors. Every happening, every person, every defining instant, every sense has succumbed to this black gravity of the moors and to a flag of yellow like a flame in his brain setting him on fire. His whole life would appear to be an object hurtling towards a miniature window of time: Joy feeding a mint into his mouth, putting on her yellow silk shoes, and wrinkling her nose up to the weather swarming down the rattling old windows. Going to go to America as soon as I can, leave this rain behind, she said. Him, sucking the last bit of flavour from the mint, in no doubt that she had the courage to leave and wishing he had it himself. And then his life passes through that window and comes out the other side altered, as if a piece of glass embeds itself in him during the transition and digs in deep.