Samantha Harvey - The Wilderness

“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 there 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.