Samantha Harvey - Dear Thief

He has told me virtually nothing else about that relationship, though I know it lasted three years and that he spent a lot of time alone in her family’s holiday home at Cape Ashizuri while she toured Japan with her productions. I have no concept of what Cape Ashizuri is like, though I gather he found it beautiful. To my mind Japan is made up of impossible intricacies and subtleties and isn’t capable of any kind of epic cape, but I kept this facile observation to myself. He said that while living there he would come back to England once in a while to work on a show for a few weeks, or he might do the lighting for some of her productions, as was the plan, but his lack of good Japanese made the process too slow and confused, and he gradually stopped asking and being asked.

He said she became tired of being his translator. I get the impression that it was a relationship that promised a lot and offered a little, in the way exotic things do; I think he misses all that it never was, the possibilities. And I have tried so hard myself to live in a way that doesn’t deal in possibilities so much as realities, but I understand how easy it is to come under the power of an obstinate dream, and in a funny way perhaps it is this that makes me want to say yes to his suggestion , not because I think I can fulfil any of his dreams but simply because of that flicker of empathy, which for a moment lays itself down like a bridge between us.

I do at least know that her name was Chihiro Mori, because it was written in the back of his passport as an emergency contact, and for whatever reason his passport had once been lying open at that page on his kitchen sideboard. He might have left it like that on purpose to save me asking the question. Such a peculiar relationship we have now, made up of things that aren’t said and dodging anything that might come from the other’s heart. We have been carrying on like this since Boxing Day, because that, of course (maybe you knew it from the beginning), is the real reason I started writing this then. He came round late on Christmas Day after Teddy had gone, to pay nothing but a friendly call with a bottle of brandy and some monkfish to cook, on the off-chance that we might escape the dry tasteless curse of turkey, and it was when he left on Boxing Day night that you appeared like that in my mind, so intrusively, perhaps jealously. Looking at the bed where some curious love of old had been invoked from nowhere, like spirits summoned by witch doctors. Looking at my face left irritated by his stubble, and the glasses of sparkling water by the bed, because as we know, where Nicolas goes, so goes sparkling water. Seeing, and shaking your head sadly, saying, My friend, do not — only the weak slip back.

It has been four months now of new quiet routines, trying out recipes on one another, making love with a certain defensive intensity, bickering where we used to argue, but bickering harmlessly, and remaining, both of us, completely unwilling to talk about the past. We simply deflect all matters of importance. Even when he asked me to marry him I just told him, with a small break in stride, that I didn’t know what to say. He said I should not answer yet, even if I could. When he came back from America in mid-June he would expect an answer, but before then he was actively uninterested.

When we were in the Isabella Plantation a fortnight ago I said something like, ‘Look at this tupelo tree, we should come back in autumn when it’s bright red.’ And again, that mention of us being together in autumn might have been casual or weighted, even I don’t know. It was simply evasive. Perhaps he has got tired of the evasion and decided it would be better if we just owned one another again, rather than dancing strangely in and out of one another’s vision. I also believe, based on his muted response when he found me writing this letter, that he had known of its existence for a while.

I used to feel there was comfort in remaining Nicolas’ wife even in our complete estrangement, and he must have felt the same about being my husband, because neither of us ever pursued a divorce. And the truth is that there is comfort in being somebody’s anything, and in a person even saying that of you: my wife, my husband, that little word of possession.

But possession, Butterfly. A word that didn’t impress you. Husband, wife, also words that failed to impress. You once threw a fork at Nicolas when he suggested that a husband owns his wife and a wife her husband. He ducked out of the way and then held your gaze as he laughed.

There is a sound I associate with the country rather than the city — the humming of electricity lines. In the city you can’t isolate this sound from all the others, but in the country, where the wind throttles along the lines across open fields, you can hear and feel the vibrating song, and it seems to me that the grass in the fields stands on its tiptoes.

I have in mind this sound and an autumn dawn, which is when the hum is amplified by wet air and by billions of droplets of dew on blades of grass and spiderwebs and on the cables themselves. There is Teddy running ahead and Nicolas’ strong back and the bits of leaves in his hair. This must have been the September or October of 32984, before the January you left, and we had all got up for a dawn walk. You were nocturnal by then, and night after night you upset the calm of the house with your silent restless skulking. The morning I am thinking of, Teddy woke up and there was no more sleep to be had for anyone, so we went out into some golden God-flung humming vibrating mist that had appeared as if to show humans they knew nothing about the Earth.

Along the lane you tried to part the mist with your hand. There was Teddy running ahead with Nicolas, bits of leaves in Nicolas’ hair, though why I can’t say. Had he lain down somewhere, had one of us stuck them there? Teddy perhaps, when piggybacking. You were talking about the deities of the morning, eulogising the breaking of the day; why did people get up after the day was already broken when they could stay up at night, watch the transformation of darkness into light rather than always light into darkness? There is Aušrinė, Lithuanian goddess of the morning star. Aurora in Roman, the rosy Titaness Eos in Greek. In Vedic philosophy the goddess of the morning, Ushas, is a kind of portal for awakening, we pass through her into enlightenment. Why do people not want to be enlightened, why do they only want to be endarkened?

I remember this word in particular, and your sullen wild nerviness, which had an energy of its own; you clung to your cigarette like a climber to a rope, you kicked at a stone and let it roll into the verge. I remember the mist, the smoke and the steam from your breath all at once. I think this was when you took my arm, pressed the wet wool of your shawl against me and said, ‘Have you ever seen through the gauze of this life?’ Or no, perhaps I said something first about how early morning is thinner, less real, how I felt I could pass through the mist, steam and smoke, through the wet wool, into a reality beyond. Maybe it was me who started it, but in any case you asked, ‘Have you ever seen through the gauze of this life?’ And I said, ‘Is there a gauze?’ and you said with a small smile, ‘You can’t tell me this is the sum of it.’

Whatever I might have been about to answer, I didn’t when I saw your face. I can hardly say what it was. Something in the very idea of dissolution seemed to calm you, in the same way you were calmed when you used to talk about your first memories — real or borrowed — of life in Lithuania, a life that was gauzy at best, shifting and lost. As if you found something of yourself in the loss of the world around you. You, you have wrestled with this religion and that, this love affair and that, from god to god and man to man, with prayers and needles, to try to see your way to something true; you have been like a heron thrashing a fish against the riverbank — you would say so yourself. But your face lit with the notion that it might all be unreal and might not matter after all.