Samantha Harvey: Dear Thief

If this could be one example of seeing through the gauze of life, then the answer to your question is resoundingly yes, I have seen through it. I think I sat in a trancelike state for hours that night and it was only when the sun came up that I moved. Then I flannelled my grandmother’s face with cold water gently, as if not to wake her, and called the hospital. It was about six-thirty or seven in the morning that she was finally taken to the mortuary.

As for ‘The Burden’, the story that became the last spoken words my grandmother heard, even now it springs so energetically to mind, and it goes as so: Two monks are walking down from the foothills of the Himalayas to the nearest village. When they reach the village it is raining and by the time they head back up towards the foothills with their bag of walnuts, rice, dhedo, vegetables, spices and the like, the streets are flooding and turning to mud. A beautiful woman is standing on the other side of the road trying to cross. The older monk passes his bag of shopping to the other, takes off his shoes and walks straight through the puddles to the woman, then he lifts her and carries her across. Later that evening after prayer the young monk seems worried and almost shifty and he keeps looking at his companion as if there is something he needs to say. Finally the older monk asks what troubles him and he responds, ‘We aren’t supposed to touch the opposite sex and yet earlier today you carried that woman right across the road.’ The older monk thinks about this for a moment and it looks like he might have no way of defending himself. But then he glances over each shoulder, opens his arms to show how empty they are and he replies, ‘Brother, I left her at the roadside where I put her down — it’s you who is still carrying her.’

On the whole I do not think of you any more. So it was strange when you came into my mind like that, standing over my bed with your spine stacked tall like a wonder of the world and with the thighs of someone who hasn’t eaten for a year, hovering as if you wanted something.

Thanks to this I am at my escritoire at just gone four in the morning with my hand welded to a pen with a split nib, suddenly curious about you after years of an incuriosity you might call callous. It’s been a mild and dreary Christmas but now, on Boxing Day night, it has started snowing, and I’ve had to go and find a blanket from the airing cupboard. As soon as the first flake of snow fell I thought of you, as it landed on the pane in that ludicrous wet collapse that removes all the mystery. I tried to put you from my mind but you wouldn’t go, so I got up. That was at about midnight, when the music from the jazz club a few doors down was coming to an end, and it was almost as if the first flake fell on the last note.

I sat on the edge of the bed trying to breathe in squares, the way a yogi or swami will tell you — breathe in for five seconds, hold for five seconds, out for five, hold for five, in for five. It made me thirsty. Does she think it was worth it? I wondered. This is what came to me when I pictured you there. Not: Is she happy, is she free, is she alive? — no. Does she think it was worth it? I would look to your face for an answer, if only I could see, in reality, in the flesh, that face. I got up for water, then for tea, then I sat in the armchair by the window and watched the snow. It has settled so thickly. Have you ever noticed the absolute chaos and panic of snow if you look up and watch it explode out of the sky? And yet it lands with order and without a hush, and sudden wellbeing is bestowed. How so? You can see people’s happiness condensing in billows of laughter; the few people who’ve walked along the street in the last hour from the bars along Goodge Street have all been laughing.

What I mean to say is: I haven’t resorted lightly to writing to you. It’s just that you appeared so expectantly at my bed earlier that I wondered if what you wanted was an answer to something, and the only vaguely urgent question I could think of you asking in all our long years of knowing each other was about the gauze of life. My hand has cramped in the process of giving it, and I think it is an uncertain start, an overly cautious and laughably sincere start, everything considered. And now actually I realise that far from wanting an answer, you have probably forgotten you ever even asked. It was seventeen years ago, eighteen even; hard enough to remember what happened two thoughts ago, let alone back in a life since lost.

But despite having been up most of the night I’m not tired at all and an energy is coming from somewhere behind me that might be the snow, falling without pattern. I wonder now why I didn’t just answer the question when you first asked it. I don’t understand myself, or for that matter the passing of time. Seventeen years! Can you credit this? No, nor can I. It’s late; I’ll make one more tea and go to bed.

I didn’t go back to bed. I went out in the snow because it won’t stay fresh for long in London. I went along to see Yannis, a Cretan who runs the Greek store on Hunter Street and opens up every day at five a.m. to make his own pitta bread and custard pastries, and we took coffee out onto the road and spelled out sweltering in the snow with our tracks — or, I should say, swelt ering because I did my half upper case, Yannis saved energy by doing his lower, and our halves didn’t quite meet. Yannis loves the snow, I remember this from last year. He relishes its crunch, like biting into an apple, he says. He tells me that Crete is never purified by snow and so it grows ever hotter and more corrupt; I say that the snow does not purify but temporarily shrouds, and ends up becoming dirt if it covers dirt — but Yannis is not ready to hear this and tells me I am like his wife, unromantic; like all modern women, passionate as a pot plant.

Before you say it, I know. I swore I would never live in London, but that was because of the Cold War. Nobody would take the time to wipe Morda off the map, and if you are raising a child it is of genuine concern that the place they live is not suddenly wiped off the map. Times are different now that we are not waiting for the Russians to extinguish us, even you have to admit it — and people are different too. I think our hearts do have a chance to warm up a little when not so full of fear, and ever since moving here I have found London to have a kind of sincerity, safety and solidness, like a stout old uncle, like Yannis almost.

There is also of course the jazz club, Jimmie Noone’s (Jimmie’s, as most people call it, and which I can never help reading, with a certain sadness, as ‘Jimmie No one’s’), which goes on until one or two in the morning on a Friday and Saturday night. In the summer the saxophone wafts in through the open window, and below that the clarinet, and below that the river of piano. I drop to sleep with birds singing in my throat. There seems to be no specialism; one night it is swing, the next avant-garde, or big band, bebop, ragtime, or Charlie Parker, Nina Simone and Thelonious Monk tribute evenings, ‘Ruby, My Dear’ played with the tenor saxophone alongside the piano, which makes it far more beautiful to my ears. Countless nights I have gone about life, cooking or reading to the sound of this jazz, and occasionally there will be a singer whose voice will make me stop and listen, or stop and sing, or stand with hands on hips racking my brains for the name of the tune, or look out of the window as if I might be able to see the sound. Sometimes people passing by will dance together in the street, tipping from foot to foot if swing, or swirling limbs if Latin, something like ‘Blue Bossa’. As I can confirm from my living-room vigils, people often stop to dance to ‘Blue Bossa’. I can imagine you doing just the same. And at those times, amongst others, I will think to myself: London, God bless you! For the summers that are warmer and stickier than in the countryside, and for all this free music. And being here then will seem like a homecoming.