Samantha Harvey - The Wilderness

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.

“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, Jacob, 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?”