Samantha Harvey - The Wilderness

“What is this, Helen? Didn't you once used to ask me about my day, and I yours?”

Her eyes, either side of the blade, blinked rather calmly. “Yes, and you used to say, Do we have to talk about our days, Helen? It's so superficial, talking about days. Can we not just have a coffee and make love instead?”

The asymmetry of her face, divided as it was by the steel blade, captivated him. He had always thought of her as perfectly ordered, prettily symmetrical, delicate and unsurprising. She was, at this moment at least, not. Not delicate — her fearlessness made her formidable. Not pretty — too formidable to be pretty. No symmetry — one ear, he now observed, was higher than the other, one eye slightly wider, one cheekbone more threaded with fine blood vessels.

“Can we make love now?” he asked. He wanted to withdraw the knife, knowing the absurdity of it, but he did not want to restore her to the plainness of perfection quite so soon. He felt an urgent love for her; he thought, he had to admit, of Joy.

“No, not now.” She blinked again and backed away the few inches to the sideboard, and finally he placed the knife down. “Besides,” she said, “you didn't meet me to go shopping today.”

“Pardon?”

“I said you didn't meet me to go shopping today.”

He will never forget the way she brought her hands to her hips so as to challenge him not to lie. He did not lie.

“I'm sorry, I completely forgot. Are you punishing me?”

“No, of course not.” She sat at the table and leaned forward on her elbows, her hair crowding behind her ears and her eyebrows arched. “You forgot last week, you put the coffee in the oven instead of the fridge, you sometimes forget my name.”

“What is this?” he demanded to know. He was angered now by the slipping of the conversation from plums to death to God to this, this, whatever this was. An accusation perhaps, though of what he was unsure.

“Can you say anything, Jake, except what is this?”

“If you could start making sense, yes, then I could stop asking you to clarify.”

She stood and took a bowl from the table. “I'm going to pick some cherries.”

Then she walked barefooted to the French doors, and slipped outside.

After her death he stared into the dark and demanded a ghost. He had read bereavement leaflets that warned gently of the appearance of the deceased, at the foot of the bed, out of the corner of the eye, a smoky presence you might put your fingers through. If such a thing came he was not to be alarmed— no, far from it, he was to be comforted. And so he waited.

Each night he sat in his study and looked through an album of photographs Henry had put together for her memorial. There is one of her on that same day of her death, after she went out into the garden barefooted, and she is up the ladder in the branches of the cherry tree in her pinafore and shoes and socks that made her look like Alice in Wonderland. The more he sat in his study looking at those photographs, the more he became convinced that if she came back to life and he could ask her just one question, it would be this: When did you put your shoes and socks on?

The question plagued him out of all proportion. Maybe he was wrong about the bare feet. But he was not wrong about the bare feet. He remembered it. He would make himself a mint julep and swill it with the troubled concentration of a detective.

After closing the album he always sat back in his seat and replayed this scene: Helen barefooted in the kitchen on her last day alive, slicing salmon and plums, making mention of his forgetfulness for the first time as if she had been saving this conversation — as if, before dying, she wanted him to know she knew that it was not just a bit of absentminded aging but dementia, an illness; that her knowledge of this would go some way to protecting him after she was gone.

This is where I see God, in these — in these consistencies between things, she had said. Did she really say this, or is it just the kind of thing she might have said? Were her feet really bare, or was going barefooted just the kind of thing she would have done? And in perfecting that scene in the kitchen, has he simply perfected his version of it? And isn't it true to say that the more perfect the memory the less accurate it is likely to be? Like a Nativity scene on a Christmas card, rendered so many times it now no longer represents anything of the real birth of Christ.

Dogged by these uncertainties, willing her ghost to come, he rid the house of milk, knowing Helen's near phobia of it. For months he settled for black coffee and found himself remembering those days, so far back — before Alice's birth— when she did drink it, when she loved it, when her freckled skin itself was like cream dusted with cinnamon, when she would tell him his eyes were washed with milk, and when she loved the cherry blossom that curdled on the branches. But it was not to stay that way, and by the time she died her aversion to it was stronger than any aversion she had to anything; just the smell of it, she would say. Just the smell of it. So, in trying to lure back her ghost, he poured the remains of a bottle of milk down the sink and bought no more. She still didn't come. One day it suddenly dawned on him that he was being absurd and he bought a pint, put it in the fridge. Nothing whatsoever changed. The empty drudgery of the days went on regardless.

At night, occasionally, he would go through the photograph album once again and then try to feel the ghost or the delusion. He lay with his teeth gritted as his night vision, still sharp, interrogated each pixel of darkness in the bedroom. Each pixel gathered with others in a crouch of wardrobe or flow of jacket or a heft of beam; the handbasin and the chrome arm of the record player caught a splinter of moonlight. In there, between there, from there, he calculated, Helen will appear.

There is a story his mother once told him about the murderer Luigi Lucheni. In 1898 Lucheni stabbed the Austrian empress in the heart with a shoemaker's file and killed her. When he went to prison he began raving and went mad, and he spent twelve years this way, in euphoric insanity, until he finally killed himself. In this time his only comfort was the regular visitations, manifestations, of the ghost of the beautiful empress. She came wrapped in fur, crouching at his side at dog level; she gave him dog vision. You can call me Elisabeth, she offered generously. She gave him access to the brilliance of sights, smells, and sounds that humans perpetually overlook; she stroked him, he her. In whispers she explained how she had come back to the source of the sin that killed her in order to forgive it, to forgive him, and she told him that this close encounter with one's demise was the only way to heal the pain of being dead. The hole in her heart — a concise puncture that barely blemished the white skin of her breast — had begun to glow a little, and cool breezes passed through it. For the first time, she was happy. And he was happy, at last, he was happy.

(As an aside to this story, Sara also mentioned that Lucheni indirectly started the First World War by setting a precedent for the assassination of Austrian royals, which is what spawned the murder of the Archduke Franz Ferdinand sixteen years later, which is what flared the conflict between the empire and the Serbian assassins, which is when Russia stepped up to defend their Serbian allies, which is when Austria mobilised its army, and Germany theirs in support, and France theirs in opposition, and Britain theirs in support of France's opposition, and so: a war. Sara dipped a wedge of cold potato in her milky coffee and said, Hey presto —a phrase she had just learned— hey presto, Jacob, Elisabeth had a lot to forgive. And she remained impassive, inexpressive, as if the war had no personal dimension for her.)