Samantha Harvey - The Wilderness

When his mother comes back she is wearing a loose, chequered dress and a shawl. She gives Eleanor a curt, kind hug and begins filling the pans with water to heat. His father goes out to talk to some friends about “the future” (he will always remember this phrase, the future, wherein everything that was to come was already history) and to see what could be done about draining the land for crop growing.

They get in the bath, he and Eleanor. His mother runs warm water over their heads and backs and lathers soap through their hair.

“You can stay here in Jacob's room,” she tells Eleanor. “Until your uncle reappears.”

Eleanor nods and blinks the soap from her eyes. She has stayed with them many times for the same reason and they are used to sleeping top-to-toe in his bed. She has grown since last time he bathed with her. Her body is older than his and has become alien in its configuration of thick pink thighs, soft deep cut of flesh between her legs, rolling waist, awkward breasts obscured by a pair of clutching, self-conscious arms, fat hands, fat rosy feet. Sara sings to them as she washes their hair, Komm doch, mein Mädel, komm her geschwind, dreh dich im Tanze mit mir, mein Kind —and, having heard it all their lives, they sing along, rocking the water over the sides of the bath.

As they are getting dry he asks Sara to tell him the story of Lucheni again — this time he resolves to make himself Lucheni, to create himself where Sara began, to surface in the minutiae of her birthmark — and so they travel through the European vistas in her words murdering and loving and ending and beginning, until she, finally, is born to the sounds en, oh, peh, kuh, kuh, peh, oh, en, and the sight of a silver samovar.

“This is the first thing I ever saw,” she says. “The first thing you see is precious, because it is also the last thing you see.” She towels them dry and boils milk for cocoa.

They ask for more stories, but Sara shakes her head. “No, that's it. That's the last of them. You're too old for stories, there won't be any more stories.”

That night in bed he wonders about war and is angry in case the moors, in their wide blackness, absorb even this extraordinary event, and he decides, there and then, that whatever the war will or won't do, one day he will come back here as an adult and make a difference. But as soon as the thought is born it terrifies him — that there are no more stories, that there is a future in which this moment of childhood is lost. He hugs Eleanor's feet. He presses her toes into his cheek and closes his eyes.

All that night he reconsiders the question: Do you remember being born? He doesn't know if he remembers or not; he doesn't know the difference between what you remember and what you think you remember, or worse still, what others remember for you. He doesn't know who he is. The boy who was not magnificent enough to lie on the tiger-skin rug, “All the way from India!” his father had said. “Look at it, an English victory, get your scrawny white knees off it.” The boy who is trained to revere a curious praise ring and to learn, as if it were a game, the laws of kashrut. The boy who gets beaten by his father and pretends he knows nothing about kashrut. The boy who goes seeking Rook, and fights out his confusion in the peat until blood comes.

He doesn't know what legitimises him, so he decides that he can remember being born. He can remember opening his eyes for the first time and seeing the tiger stripes. He can remember being a baby; if he concentrates hard enough he is still a baby, he does not want to grow up and be free. His mind covers his mama's hips and belly with the brown dress, and ties her hair at her neck. He decides, yes, he can remember opening his eyes and seeing the tiger's eyes, he might as well remember being born and the sound of his own cry. It is, at least, a start.

She hums as she washes his hair. His head keeps falling forward, so she tucks her fingers firmly under his chin and holds it straight. She is talking to him, and though he barely hears or understands what she says, the sound of her voice alone, in the rise and fall of the story, is music to him.

Relationships sketch themselves out in his memory — wife, child, children, husband, parent — and form lines that are either snaking towards him or snaking away. And maybe they are not memories but inklings. He does not feel alone. Just the motion of the cloth over his skin and the peripheral voice skittering off the white walls prevents that. Of the relationships he is aware of, mother is the only one he can speak of, and though he cannot produce her name at this moment, he can see her, and then he can define himself: child. Child. He suddenly knows himself, not through fragments of memory or mirrors, but as a gut feeling, a seed deep in the stomach.

Life spreads ahead of him, choices he must one day make. They appear as planes on the horizon no bigger than flecks, but as they near and their drone is more insistent, his tiredness pushes them away and sends them spindling down into the peat. Somebody else can save them. He looks over the high rim of the bath, at the big unfamiliar bathroom. The palm of the mother's hand rests lightly on his forehead as she pours water over the crown of his head; he is not confused — she is not his mother, she does not have the clean cut of his mother's presence, but she brings with her the dense grounding feeling of somebody with whom he can be pale and wordless. The water washes past his ears, the only sound.

He sees again that peg painted blue with an elastic band wrapped around it. After all it links to nothing. Just a blue peg turning in a void. Just a strange, remembered peg.

The sea washes up to his ankles. He steps back. When he looks up the beach there are no people, only stones, rocks, and a flurry of leaves scudding across in the wind. Are they leaves, or are they birds? He reaches his arm out and snatches one from the air, inspects it to see it is a leaf, and puts it in his pocket.

Now there seem to be an infinity of leaves which he rushes up the beach to catch. But not an infinity, that is reckless, just a lot. How much is a lot? Is seven a lot? Running is easy even on the stones. The beach is made of pebbles here, stones there, rocks over there, and boulders beyond them, and the increase in size gives the impression that he is running into a reverse perspective, and that gives the impression that he is not really here, but he is. Of course he is here. If he keeps running he too will get bigger. The thought interests him, but does not grab him; maybe he wouldn't like to be bigger. Every now and again, as he pushes the leaves into his pockets, he looks back at the black bag he has left by the shore to check it is at a distance from the tide, then he progresses forward again until his pockets are full and the sky is cleared of leaves.

He returns to the bag and catches his breath. Then he squats and reaches his hands into its endlessness, where they disappear for so long that he wonders if he has lost them. Eventually he has to peer in. Hands? he calls quietly. Where are you? There in the bag's darkness he sees them large, paper white, and ageless. It is with surprise that he manages to take hold of the urn when his hands are so desperately cloudy, but he does, he clutches it either side and, holding it to his face, sees the breakage of his reflection in the hammered-silver surface.

Maybe his hands unscrew the lid or maybe the spiralling wind does — in any case he drops the lid to the stones where it falls with an insolent clang as if announcing a song it will never again sing. He kicks it aside. Step by step, and holding the urn, he walks into the sea, up to his knees at first, stopping to see one lone leaf blow past and push its way out onto the horizon, then pressing his thighs into the water until he is up to his waist. He raises the urn, tips it, and shakes the ashes to the wind. As they leave the urn the ashes appear to stop momentarily and study their reflection in the silver, and then, without a second thought, they become smoke. Might as well have had her cremated after all, he thinks lightly. The smoke leaps out and up and disperses. Goodbye, Mother, he says. Mother, he thinks over and over as if it is the only word left to him. Up and down the shore the stones tremble the word back.