The Wilderness Read online

  “Henry doesn't sleep a lot,” Helen offered, pulling her chair towards the coffee table. She tucked her skirt underneath her as she adjusted her position.

  “Henry?” Rook grinned. “What a fine and regal name, like my own. Charles, that is, not Rook. Say it: Charles. It always sounds regal even if you swear first. Fucking Charles.”

  Wheezing, tittering, he reached for the bottle of wine and poured into each of the glasses. When Helen leaned forward and covered her own he leaned in farther, lifted her hand towards him, and turned it palm up. He ran a long finger across her palm, a finger livid with the life and anger of old age.

  “I'm a soothsayer. Sooth says you drink tonight.” Then he placed her hand carefully on the table and filled her glass. “Henry,” he repeated, nodding appreciatively. “Good name. I'm a royalist. Did Jacob tell you that? To the bitter end. Don't believe in politics, it's all buggery, that's the truth. It gives the illusion of freedom, freedom for the people. Truth is the people don't want to be free, they want to be owned by someone better off than them. They want to be pets, you ask anyone, you ask anyone what their fantasy is—it's being tied up and looked after. Yes, I'm a royalist. I'd let the queen tie me up any day. In fact I have. She's a busy woman, used silk and a slipknot. I let myself out after.”

  Rook glanced up towards the kitchen where Sara was cooking, gulped his wine, and made a contented sound in the back of his throat.

  “Don't you think the queen's a beautiful woman?” Helen ventured, smoothing away her smile with the hand Rook had touched.

  “And so are you,” Rook replied. “What a relief that Jake didn't choose a mangled peasant for his lady wife—he always had that in him, a taste for the perverse.”

  “I know,” Helen added with a quiet air of collusion. “I'm discovering, aren't I, Jake?”

  “Discovering?” he asked his wife lightly, returning her gaze. “Discovering what? What perverse thing have I ever done?”

  Helen inclined her head demurely, he thought, to one side. “It's not what you do, it's just your way.” Then she squared her head and shoulders in resolution. “I'm a royalist too, Rook, from this minute.”

  “Of course you are, beautiful girl. Of course you are.”

  He saw Sara light the candles of the menorah in the back window. The point of the menorah was to allow those outside to see in, so that the light became a flagship of faith and pride in one's faith. But of course there was nobody in the back garden to see in, and nobody beyond the back garden, and nobody for miles. What a suffocated little gesture it was, he thought; how the flames gulped at the air and then seemed to shrink in on themselves in denial of their own light. Years with his father had reined Sara in. Years of objection to that meno-rah, years of compromise. She shook out the match and hushed back to the kitchen. Against the orange carpet she looked like a waft of smoke in her grey suit.

  The breathtaking sweetness of custard that she used to stuff the sufganiya, and the breath-stopping syrup of boiling jam inside the hamantaschen, and then the smell of pastry that forgave everything—the baked scents of his childhood that created a memory understood by nobody else, just him and Sara. Next to him Helen was telling Rook about how she had dreamed she owned the most beautiful Bible in the world, and how when she opened it the pages were made of water and the parables floated through them as fish. Water from the Bay of Biscay, she was saying, and as she spoke Rook was fashioning a fish from a piece of old blue paper he had taken from his pocket, which he handed to her with a ceremonial bow.

  “Here, princess.”

  She held the fish in her palm and examined it. “This is so wonderful,” she said, and kissed the back of Rook's hand.

  He could still smell Rook, the ambivalent, industrial sweetness welded in his suit jacket. He began to get a feel for the old man again, his grainy temperament, sour breath, yellow fingertips, green eyes that didn't need (or wouldn't tolerate) glasses, and his endless giving—how he was always making and giving, his long fiddly fingers folding, bending, snapping, wrapping, tying as if driven by some hyperactive need to expel his heart through his hands.

  The food was fatty, creamy, and sweet. It had been so long since Sara had cooked like this. He was reminded of how she had used to conjure up these feasts, always with some apology, trying to disguise the Jewish theme of the food as mere coincidence. After all, there were potatoes everywhere, so it made sense to have latkes, hasselback, hash, dumplings, potatoes mashed and roasted with garlic, crisped, layered, baked, re-baked, twice baked, stuffed. After all, the fishing ports were not so very far away, so it made sense to have gefilte fish, lox, tuna with fruit tzimmes, trout with cream sauce made with the fat of the fish, haddock stewed in milk. After all, there was a lot of milk, a lot of cheese, until the war closed in even on their piece of apolitical black turf. She did not use these excuses now but simply put the food down in hot dishes, presented them with gleaming cutlery and fine china, and asked them to eat.

  “Sara, my queen,” Rook bowed, straightening his shambly old tie. “You have done us proud.”

  Sara smiled and muttered, “Asch.” She had always prospered in Rook's company. She bent forward and poured him more wine, her ringed finger clinking on the bottle and her mouth open by just a margin when usually it was closed implacably.

  “Are you from here?” Helen asked Rook, sipping at her wine, dissecting her fish with the impeccable cutlery that she manoeuvred with her impeccable manners. He had not really known how impeccable his wife was until that moment, a revelation that made him want to throw her a cigarette, tie her in silk, see her slump at the table in drunkenness.

  Rook grinned once more. “If you must know,” he said with a swish of his knife, “I'm from Italian stock. Real name's As-anti. Fredo Asanti.”

  “But you're called Charles—” Helen began.

  Rook swigged. “All I like about Italy is the olive groves and the criminals.”

  “Oh.” Helen scratched her cheek.

  “Italy is a country that's got itself obsessed with politics and corruption. They're blind with it, all of them.”

  “Except,” Sara said, “those men who tried to kill Mussolini. You don't mean they were blind. You like them so much.”

  Rook held up his glass suddenly. “You're right, Sara—to the men who tried to kill Mussolini!”

  For the sake of it, they raised their glasses. Fervour beamed in Rook's eyes. Suddenly he laughed as if deeply amused by something, then stopped and turned.

  “And what, Jake, do you think of fatherhood?”

  He considered considering. He considered applying himself properly to the subject matter and explaining how very strange it was, how vivid was the idea of a child and yet how remote was the reality now it had actually come, how impertinent it was of Henry to have his own character when once he had been the random collision of an accommodating egg and an ambitious sperm (his sperm, his!), how he loved him, how he was in some way afraid of and for him. But he knew that Rook was on his own course and that whatever answer he gave would be immaterial.

  “I like it,” he said at length.

  “Yes, and so you should. Parenthood is unpolitical—oh of course it becomes political, that's when it goes wrong and the trouble begins. But at first parenthood is monarchy. King, queen, and their wee little prince, and none of this manure about freedom and votes and agendas. No, it's just there. Ma and Pa. You can't choose them. Ma and Pa are your nation, your history, and your language, and all the rest—”

  “Not for you, Rook, Charles, Fredo, whatever you are called,” Sara chided, waving her hand. “There is nothing unified about you. You don't even know what language you speak, huh?”

  “But you have a point,” he told Rook, propelled into thought. “It becomes political. One day Henry will start to think he has rights himself. We won't be enough for him, or right for him. Too right wing or something. Our policies will bore him. Maybe he'll divorce us.”

  “Of course he won't,” Helen was quick to add.


  They were approaching a point of saturation with the food, merely toying with it. Helen had stopped some time ago and Sara had never truly started; Rook was picking at the kishke, modelling his napkin into a boat, he himself was de-fleshing the bones of the fish with greasy fingers.

  “We need to clean up The Sun Rises,” he said suddenly. “The place looks a mess.”

  “The sign is missing an e,” Helen added, pushing her glass away. She looked a little drunk.

  Rook chuckled and let his head rock back. “The sign is missing an e! You're a funny girl.” He reached over and took Helen's hand.

  “It is!” she said, flushing.

  Rook tried for a compassionate look. “Tell me which e.”

  “At the end of Rises”'

  “Then we must find it!”

  Helen assessed Rook for two or three seconds, trying, maybe, to gauge what sort of person this old man was requiring her to be. Her eyes flickered bright hazel and she crossed her arms. “Where can it be?” she giggled.

  He had never seen this accommodating trait in his wife before. She was mild and gentle to a fault, but never ingratiating. But now she smiled as Rook opened another bottle of cherry wine and poured some into her glass, and she drank as if wanting little more than to please the old man.

  “Rook, I'm serious,” he stated, straightening. “We need to help Eleanor clean the place up, there are all these workers at the steelworks now, and the beet factory, and they all need somewhere to drink. And poor Eleanor—”

  He trailed off. It was customary to refer to Eleanor as poor. Poor Eleanor with her roguish uncle, poor Eleanor with her lank hair, poor Eleanor with her matronly figure, poor Eleanor with her overgrown garden, her crooked teeth, her propensity to laugh in the wrong places, to become desperate like a dog, to suffer for her love, and to cook badly—to do most things, on the whole, badly.

  “Poor Eleanor indeed,” Sara said. “Did you know that her uncle has gone? About two years ago now, he just left overnight and she thought he left her nothing. She didn't hear from him.” Sara began collecting plates from the table. “Then she found some piles of money under her bed that he had put there for her. It was about a thousand pounds. And she came here and she cried and she said she hated him because all the love in her world had been taken and replaced with a thousand pounds and she would have liked it better if it had not been replaced at all.”

  Helen hiccoughed and shook her head in grief. “Poor Eleanor.”

  “You do not even know her,” Sara said in her disorienting, even tone. “Save your sympathy for those you know need it.”

  He was spared of having to jump to his wife's defence, or conduct some dreadful telling off of his mother for her lack of tact, when Rook took Sara's head in his hands and stroked her cheeks with his thumbs.

  “That's it, Sara,” he said quietly. “That's it.”

  It was as if he were taming a pet, and it was uncomfortable at first to see his mother controlled like this. But as the gesture went on (beyond, he decided, its appropriate limit) it was clear the control was both ways, that there was a meticulous but overbearing love between them. The gesture was so gentle it was hypnotic, even for the watcher. Sara did not recoil from it.

  “That e,” Rook said to Helen, besieging the mood with a new humour. “Let's see if your boy Henry has it.”

  Helen nodded and stood, flattening creases from her dress. The two of them went upstairs.

  They had been gone twenty minutes or more. The wine was almost finished, and he was full of hamantaschen and had jam in his teeth. His mother had made coffee and was not talkative, and after an attempt to draw her into conversation she had fallen into a doze on the bentwood chair.

  “They say, Sara, that Israel should never have been created in the first place and that they are set on nothing but threatening the Arabs. Is this true, do you suppose?”

  Sara had only sighed. “Perhaps.”

  “Maybe there's tension, of course, but Israel is so involved in its own growth, its socialism—confidence can easily look like tyranny.”

  “I don't think we can say,” she whispered. “I'm so tired. Asch, it's useless, I'm getting old. What a useless pastime, getting old!” And she closed her eyes.

  He went to the dresser and picked up the photograph of his grandparents. They were on the cusp of middle and old age when the picture was taken, and an odd-looking pair. Arnold was tall; without his straggling beard and nervous look he might have seemed much younger. He was shabbily dressed also, but maybe that was just a symptom of the time (1920 it said on the back of the photograph) when Austria's krone had crashed and thousands of them would not even buy a meal. He had symmetrical scars on his left and right cheeks, inch-long diagonal slivers of silver skin that invisibly influenced his face into a more aquiline shape than it perhaps really had. Sara looked like him. Henry even looked a little like him, in that rough grace. Arnold's wife, Minna, was thin and dark haired, crookedly good-looking with a mole on her right cheek. In the photograph she stood next to Arnold with a broad closed-lip smile and a straight back, holding a praise ring—an old embroidery hoop with ribbons attached.

  Upstairs he could hear Helen and Rook moving about; there was laughter. Once Sara had told him stories about her younger life, about how she was behind the lens in this photograph, and how she was the first of all her friends to have a camera. She was nineteen. She liked to take photographs of different scenes and then find numbers in them (a door number, a tram number, a date on a calendar or a painting), then she would add these together and the sum would be the number she would have to find somewhere in the apartment or the city: her own treasure hunt. She could not take another photograph before she found it. Patterns were important to her. Limits on chaos.

  He knelt and opened the doors to the dresser. In there was the praise ring his grandmother had been holding, and the hammered-silver samovar and tea set that Sara claimed was the first thing she saw when she was born, an intricate silver seder plate, a Star of David key chain, fine cups and saucers. He looked to see if his mother was asleep; she was. When he picked up the key chain he found he was examining it as he would an alien object. Even as an adult he did not feel he had permission.

  When he was a child an ancient boat was found buried in the peat near his house; its hull was a perfect black skeleton of long, strong spine and curved ribs, they thought it would probably be seaworthy with a little patching. Looking on he could sense his connection to it, but the sort of connection that comes without privileges, where all you can do is examine, observe, detach. So with these key chains and plates and all this silver; the only way he could be worthy of them was to remove himself from them. Like the boat, familiar and strange in one breath. He looked again at his mother. Her eyelids were heavy and dark and the shadows hard on her face. For a moment he thought she looked like his father.

  He closed the dresser doors and stood. In London he had left disputes about land. Being an architect seemed to be one long dispute about land. As he shut away his grandparents' belongings he thought again of the narrow columns of news he was reading about Israel, and of Sara's seemed indifference. The starved desire of a man for his home. He felt along with those men who wanted to find their patch of turf called home. He stood in the centre of the room, hearing Rook and Helen above hurrying from room to room, more laughter. He drank down another glass of wine.

  War is around the corner, he thought. The insight comforted him. Peace was becoming very popular, but the idea of peace made him uneasy. The fool believes in it. The wise man is edgier. In the photograph of his grandparents the gold frame seemed to say it all. The peace and beauty they thought would save them in fact locked them in a moment of time from which they never escaped. The photograph saddened him. He observed and examined it. Where did they belong? And him? Where did he belong? He felt that he had come home, and he was drunk, but that was not the only reason for the sensation. If he could get land he could provide for his family in the proper way; if ther
e were a nuclear war, say (he was not being negative, just pragmatic), they would be safe here with land. If there was not, they would still be safe here with land. If the house was glass they would be safe and happy; they could see what was coming. The image of birds lifting through the air of their handmade home coloured his thoughts and strengthened him—the idea that he could put colour here. The past was always black and white, but the future was colour. He was happy to be home, if only he could tie these strings together; he kissed his mother lightly on the forehead and went outside.

  In the garden he pulled himself up onto the wall and stood; from his vantage point he could see the outline of Sara's aggressively clipped hedges and shrubs, and into the next garden, neatly turfed, and out across the fields to the steelworks churlish on the near horizon. Steel and sugar, he thought. Such mixed exports, as if the people here really had no idea who they were.

  He heard somebody in the bathroom, and then the lights went out upstairs. He didn't know whether Rook had gone home or had settled on the sofa or had gone to Sara's room. It was too far, he decided, for him to have walked home, and if he had arrived here by car certainly there had been no sound of the car leaving. Rook's manifestations never had a history or a process, he simply issued from nowhere one minute and dispensed himself to nowhere the next.

  The clouds of smoke that rose from the factory chimneys were tin coloured, and to their right the orange gas flame seared the night sky. He had always found these sheer, hard colours rebellious and brilliant, strangely clean. It was so unlike the sugar-factory clouds that, dispersed in the toxic lights, came up neon orange and yellow and faded eventually into something sickly. He remembered standing on this wall as a child, watching the flame, brewing the courage to jump, and then one day finally jumping and landing two-footed, with a plump thud. But surely no; he had never lived in this house as a child. That was not a memory at all but a fabrication, perhaps a dream. He was drunk, he realised, on holy cherries. Still, he held his balance on the wall and tasted the residue of wine on his tongue.