Samantha Harvey - The Wilderness

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.”

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.