Samantha Harvey - Dear Thief

I wonder if not being able to see ourselves is one of the great paradoxes of being alive — knowing oneself intimately and also not at all. You turn to look at your own profile in the mirror and it is gone. It means we can harbour all kinds of illusions about ourselves that others can see through as clear as day. What I mean is that if you had been able to see yourself objectively that afternoon you might have realised that the game was lost, but instead I think you fancied yourself in some little role in some little story in which you were the heroic returner, the one much waited for, the one who would be forgiven by some obscure law of justice that grants immunity to the tragic.

It was late October, and I suppose there is something heroic and melancholy about autumn and these monolithic trees unable to keep for themselves a single leaf, and things coming home and coming in and coming back and preparing to shelter again. And the world is going down onto its knees. You show up on a station platform in October of 1986, after almost two years without word. One train after another pulling in and out of the station while you stood watching and waiting for nothing. You had been there for hours before you called us to pick you up. To your mind’s eye you might have been positively operatic, a woman in her late thirties alone at a station in an ankle-length out-of-fashion dress and a shawl and her hair wrapped up in a green scarf, standing beneath the transom of the waiting-room window where she holds defiantly to the burden of her beauty. Leaves gathering at her suitcase and feet, like the children she never had. Tell me you did not think like this.

You think like this because it is difficult to accept that when we find ourselves most operatic we are usually just farcical. I could cry to think of you now, the way you turned to smile at me when I walked up to you. You had the Devil dull and black in your eye. You were too thin and you were not old enough to look as old as you did, which is not to say you were no longer beautiful — for an overwhelming minority of people, beauty is an affliction they have to bear regardless of what they do to themselves, and which prompts other people to expect too much from them. Fools others, I mean, into thinking that the beautiful always have cause for hope. I expect you had already fooled fifty people that day. Maybe you could have fooled me too, had it not been for one thing, your shawl, the tear at its left shoulder. Or maybe that is overstating it. But it was the torn shawl that I remember most. How can one ripped piece of fabric call up such loss, somehow, of dignity, or of eligibility in this world, of care for oneself? And it was a cold windy day, but your shoulder through the hole was bare. Because of this blind spot we find ourselves in, you won’t have known how scandalous that shoulder looked, sharp and white, with its little collection of thrusting bones. You exposed yourself on that chilly platform like a degenerate in a city park. Scandalous; a strong word, but I mean it. Even the trains hurried their passengers in, with a sort of motherly protectiveness, and rattled away.

Our conversation in the car at the station went something like, ‘What happened to you?’, to which you replied, ‘What happened to me? I happened to me. That’s always my problem.’

‘You look terrible.’

‘It’s kind of you to notice.’

‘Where have you been?’

‘Somewhere north of your opinion, where it’s cold.’ You might be interested to know that I since realised this was a vague and spliced bit of Twelfth Night (which I happened to see with Ruth last year). You might have also said something like, ‘I’ve been walking through the blizzards of your disapproval. I have been in the Arctic of your disgust.’ I don’t know; whatever it was you said while we sat in the car at the station, it was oblique and facetious and aloof, purposefully insincere. I turned the ignition key.

‘So you haven’t come back to say you’re sorry, then,’ I said. ‘Or to see if I’ll forgive you. Just to stretch out like a cat on your old territory.’

I have a feeling you didn’t answer, but watched me all the way home out of the corner of your eye.

This music we hear now is vocalese; it is not your favourite. You would call it mewling or warbling. You would say, Why are you listening to a record played backwards?

Well, it is not my favourite either, but when you hear somebody do it well, the singing voice sounds just like the instrument, not so that you can’t tell them apart, but so that the voice takes on the instrument’s qualities in the way that a Cézanne painting finds the qualities of a given landscape, without slavishly reproducing it. It just looks, and picks out what it considers true. I like this about it. I have had the window open all evening and let the music from Jimmie’s drift in while dusk comes and the buildings disintegrate. The best song I’ve heard (which isn’t to say I have heard them all) was a woman’s rendition of ‘Goodbye Pork Pie Hat’, her voice had the saxophone’s hollow depth that most other singers never manage. Climbing up and down the scales to a background of percussion.

This evening Yannis called by for a short time, and two things are strange about this. Today is Friday and the only evening Yannis has away from his shop is Tuesday, which is his day off. Also, although he knows which building is mine, he has never been to my flat before and he had to ring all four buzzers. So when I heard him on the intercom and when I opened my front door and called merrily hello as I watched him come up the stairs, I knew more or less that either his shop had burnt down or his wife had asked for a divorce; and there had been no fire engines that I had noticed going past, so I said, ‘Is she going back to Crete?’ He nodded.

Inside, I poured us each a vodka and water and offered him some cashew nuts and dried apricots, which was all I had. You must offer Yannis food; to not offer him food is akin to not offering somebody else a seat. (Yannis would not mind if you forgot to offer him a seat, he likes to stand, which is why he has only two small tables in his café.) He took a clump of apricots and read from the packet. ‘ Stoned and ready to eat ,’ he said sadly. ‘This sounds like my son in his early twenties.’ He went to the window and leant out as if trying to see the sound. ‘When is she going?’ I asked, and without turning he slashed his throat with his hand. This is something he does, which is how I recognised the gesture even with his back turned. ‘Already gone?’ I asked, and again he nodded.

‘Can you believe that she came to me on Tuesday,’ he said, ‘to tell me that by Thursday she would be gone? You can’t believe this, can you? She has her ticket, she is going. Akis is meeting her at the airport, her witch of a sister is coming to me sometime soon to pack the things she wants to ship home, and I may visit any time from June, if I want to talk about a reconciliation. This is what she said, and then she was gone.’

‘A reconciliation, though,’ I said. ‘That’s good news?’ To which he replied, ‘No no no no, because you don’t know my wife. By reconciliation she means surrender. We may stay married if I surrender. Do you know what I think of that?’ I said yes, I did; he told me anyway. ‘What I think of that is she can put it in her spare hole and sit on it.’ I said yes, that’s what I thought he thought. Although I have no idea where he got this phrase from, or which, in his view, is her spare hole. For a moment I felt happy for her that she had left. ‘Do you want to play cards?’ he said. He stood by the rocking chair then and finished his drink, so I poured him another, which he finished, and I poured him another.