Samantha Harvey - The Wilderness

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The Wilderness: краткое содержание, описание и аннотация

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It's Jake's birthday. He is sitting in a small plane, being flown over the landscape that has been the backdrop to his life — his childhood, his marriage, his work, his passions. Now he is in his early sixties, and he isn't quite the man he used to be. He has lost his wife, his son is in prison, and he is about to lose his past. Jake has Alzheimer's.
As the disease takes hold of him, Jake struggles to hold on to his personal story, to his memories and identity, but they become increasingly elusive and unreliable. What happened to his daughter? Is she alive, or long dead? And why exactly is his son in prison? What went so wrong in his life? There was a cherry tree once, and a yellow dress, but what exactly do they mean? As Jake, assisted by 'poor Eleanor', a childhood friend with whom for some unfathomable reason he seems to be sleeping, fights the inevitable dying of the light, the key events of his life keep changing as he tries to grasp them, and what until recently seemed solid fact is melting into surreal dreams or nightmarish imaginings. Is there anything he'll be able to salvage from the wreckage? Beauty, perhaps, the memory of love, or nothing at all?
From the first sentence to the last,
holds us in its grip. This is writing of extraordinary power and beauty.

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“Why is it you always get what you want?” she said gently.

He put the rest of the cake on the floor, stubbed his cigarette out, and began removing his shoes. He got out of his trousers, trying to keep his balance in the dark, kicking the trousers off his feet. The lame peace, the inertia of before, had now left him.

“Jake? Where are you?”

“We ought to mark our belonging here, shouldn't we, if there's three of us — if there's going to be four of us. That's an army, that's time to set territories.”

“Are you going outside?”

“Yes.” He lit a match and made his way to the door. “Come with me.”

Out in the drab moonlight Helen removed her shoes. It was easier to see out here. The smells of sugar and steel competed in the air. The white limbs of the birch trees made him think of Joy, he could not help it, he did not want to help it. Long white limbs in the darkness, skeletal and spectral. His memory saw Joy's slender hand cut a square across the black: Here, see it? Framed by the factory. He longed for everything he did not yet have, he longed for himself even, as if he were chasing himself and never quite catching up.

With summer gone the night held little warmth or consolation. He ran. It was a peculiar feeling, to run nowhere for nothing, naked. But he couldn't have done it clothed, it would have felt too absurd, as if he were mad and being chased by phantoms. He ran and shouted nothing for no one. He gestured to Helen to follow him and then flung his arms up and began stamping his feet into the miry soil. In response to his lunacy Helen laughed and scampered in circles. Freezing, she giggled. Bleeding freezing.

“Ours!” he said. “This is ours!”

“Ours!” she repeated.

He ran to the dyke by the road and bent to splash his face with water; the water was freezing and puckered his skin. Helen came up behind him and doubled in breathless laughter.

“You look ridiculous like that,” she said, “with your great long body and your big feet and your testicles hanging down — like a savage!”

He snapped off a few flowers from the bank of the dyke and named them: “Brooklime, Labrador tea — these used to be everywhere.”

Handing them to her he moved on again across the peat making figures of eight and shouting, “This is ours!”

When they were cold to the point that no running could warm them, even though they had years more running in them, they retreated to the car, turned on the engine for heat, and then the radio for celebration: Irving Berlin. Honey, and I've decided, love divided in two wont do, they sang together. They climbed into the backseat. They were three times too big for the space, four times, they crowded themselves.

He held her down and pushed himself inside her, almost savage, as she had said — checking briefly to see that she was with him, that she was receptive, and then closing his eyes to block everything out. His head hit the car window with rousing violence. The birch limbs appeared to his vision in drunken intervals, maybe he had opened his eyes to see them, maybe he had only imagined them along with the flare of yellow, the lilac blink of a child not yet born, a miniskirt draped over the steering wheel, a gunshot, a leaf, a gunshot, some bizarre rememberings of the hammered-silver samovar Sara used to display on the sideboard, appearing to him with erotic clarity as if the memory were extruded through the force of sex itself; a stray thought that he never let in of his grandparents in Dachau. Furious anger cancelled, with shameful ease, by overwhelming pleasure. Helen was shrieking, he clutched her hair and pushed deeper until her shrieks filled the car, filled the moors, made new waves on the sea.

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“Memory,” she said.

“I have none.”

She indicated right and they pulled out onto the main road, heading away from the moors.

“Memory?” he asked.

“We're driving along a highway in America. We're listening to Buddy Holly. I'm pregnant — but I haven't told you yet. I will tell you, soon.”

He took a packet of mints from the dashboard and handed her one. The radio played: the Crystals, James Brown, Buddy Holly, and he was grateful for its intrusion into their marriage. He closed his eyes against the memory of his wife's shrieks, and against the slight awkwardness that now tied their tongues as they drove home.

“In fact I do have a memory,” he said at length, turning the mint around in his mouth. “I'm ten, we have to get upstairs by climbing a ladder on the outside wall, it's late. We've had a dinner party with some neighbours and Sara and my father have had an argument, in public, about her being Jewish. She's saying that what she misses, really misses, is olives. You can't get olives in England. Then my father starts: he says she's putting it on —her religion, he meant — he starts mocking her. He hates Jewish food, you see. She's broken some cardinal kosher rules — mixed meat and milk, eating pork, I don't know, my father thinks it's proof that the whole thing is just a show—”

He looked outside the car window and saw nothing but night.

“My father starts mocking her about manna: Are you waiting for manna from heaven, do you think your God's going to save you or do you think, perhaps, that it's me going out to work that will save you? My father takes some money from his pocket and waves it around. This is manna, and it isn't from heaven!

“Then Sara tells him, very coolly, that manner is in fact the way you are, your disposition — she used that word — and manners, with an s , is also the thing you observe when you are in company, and that it is the first thing any self-respecting Englishman should learn. Then she goes upstairs, leaving my father and the neighbours to themselves. I follow her, in case she's upset, but when I find her in the bedroom she is turning slowly in a kind of dance, twisting the praise ring. She looks so happy. I have this vision that my mother is utterly indestructible. And that she will protect me from anything.”

He then turned to Helen with a more resolute expression.

“And then the next day, the Second World War breaks out and after we hear the announcement Sara goes upstairs again. I want to see her do that dance, be that amazing, strong mother. But this time there she is in the bedroom completely nude. Completely. Her body isn't what I expect.”

He examined Helen's face for a reaction but saw only the quick flick of her eyes towards him and back towards the road.

“It's, I don't know, womanly. With clothes on she always seems so narrow and contained. But she isn't. She has a small potbelly, and her hair is loose all over her shoulders. So pretty, that's what I think, and young, and — vulnerable.”

Helen crunched her mint. “Does she see you?”

“Yes. She tells me to go and fill the bath. When the war started there were no more stories about her childhood and Austria and the rest. She just gradually shed her skin and became — English. Her family died, so she thought she should die. And it was as if, Helen, that moment that I saw her naked and vulnerable was the moment where I grew up, and I didn't want to. I wasn't ready to.”

Helen put her hand on his knee.

“I think you were ready to.”

“And because I wasn't ready, I've spent my whole life missing what I left. And I'll spend the rest of my whole life doing the same.”

“No, darling. Don't say that. Everybody has a little something missing inside them, it's prudent, it's like keeping a spare room in the house for guests.” She opened the window for fresh air. “And if there is a big thing missing, find what it is and replace it. We can replace it.”

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