Samantha Harvey - Dear Thief

Have I stumbled on an answer to Nicolas’ proposal, is that why I’m telling you this? Doesn’t this amount to the conclusion that we cannot remarry? We will not be faithful to each other, I will have to tell him, and then he’ll frown as if I want to invent problems, just as he thinks I always do. Then I will have to tell him that as we get older — if we are honest — there are no longer only two people in a relationship, there is who you are now and also the person each of you used to be, or the one you always wanted to be, the one you split from at some point in the past, and try as you might you cannot get rid of these others. Just as you try to start again and let the past go, they wander into the house and hell breaks loose.

They point out all the things you should be dissatisfied with and suddenly you fall in love with them. Their courage, their unwillingness to compromise, their passion! They went off and saw the world, they took risks, they played the high cards for big money while you dabbled with the low ones, and they have come back strong and empty-handed to show that your own clinging is pointless. They are commendable in every way you are not — they haven’t gone back on their principles or put out their fire or need forgiving for the unforgivable, that is, for becoming unattractive, frightened, despicable, for falling in on themselves like a mountain in an avalanche. How can a person be forgiven that? It is such hard work to love you now, they say. Who will love you now? It used to be so easy, back when. But now, so much has to be made out of so little, more effort than Christ had to make with the fish and the bread. They like to remind you of all these battles you have lost. They haven’t lost any! You become besotted with them, hungry for them, like an old man for a schoolgirl who makes him forget he is ineligible, had it, finished.

This is what I think I want to explain to Nicolas when he comes back, that we are all more than one person and we all conduct love affairs with the selves that we were — it is a sort of lurid duplicity in which we creep off back into our own pasts and try to make ourselves whole by becoming jealously infatuated with the self that got away. Any marriage we had now would have to be bigger and more generous than we could make it, because I bring into it another woman, he another man. I want to warn him: if we lived together again as husband and wife neither of us could be faithful, we would sneak downstairs every night to that other person.

You see? Time has passed, another week, gone with the snap of a twig. This is exactly what I mean, about time. Where and how it goes is unfathomable to me. I make my way back and forth across the city half watching out for you, until everybody looks like you. I know the futility of this, but the eyes look, don’t they, without the involvement of reason. Meanwhile June has come as you can see, the start of the gracious season, the season for forgetting that one’s windows need cleaning because the light is too high and full to glare off the glass. You would think that living is a kind of scholarship in time, and that the longer we live the more expert we become at coping with it, in the way that, if you play tennis enough, you get used to coping with faster and faster serves. Instead I find that the longer I live the more bemused I become, and the more impenetrable the subject shows itself to be. I sit on a heap of days. My feet no longer touch the ground. The day after Teddy’s fifth birthday he asked if it was his birthday still and we had to tell him no. He began sobbing inconsolably and he didn’t stop, nothing we could say would make him stop.

Is this a trick played on us? I remember stroking Teddy’s hair then and feeling that, as a mother, there ought to be something I could do, somewhere I could lodge a complaint.

Adog is barking. Something small like a terrier or a — I don’t know. I don’t know a thing about dogs. Making a chopping sound through the forest, which is driving you spare. After two days of this you bash about the hut singing, you clank pans with sticks, you shout out: This is perfect, this is perfect! This is perfect, perfect, perfect, perfect! You turn up the squawking of the geese — honk, bark, honk, bark, an animal orchestra; if only you had not caught the mouse that thrived in the one food cupboard on bags of oats and barley, then there would have been vocals to the percussion and that would have been perfect, perfect, perfect, perfect . Outside the hut you stand and bark with it. It, you, it, you. It hesitates at first because it doesn’t recognise your language — dog, but not dog. You are some big dog, a mastiff maybe; you howl. It barks. You growl, it barks. You bark, it barks. Please! you shout, and it barks.

You pull up a log outside the hut and sit; if you close your eyes and do that thing whereby you gather the outside world inwards, you can put the dog in your head. If the dog is in your head it is not a dog any more but a passing perception. What is it they say? A cloud, moving across the clean sky of your mind. A dog-shaped cloud, bounding through your mind; a dog, barking in your mind, a dog up against your skull, a dog-bark gnawing through your skull.

Why is there no peace! The dog must be shot, or pelted with stones. You march down to the lake where the mosquitoes swarm and you go in up to your ankles. If you were a different sort of a person you would swim, it being the right day for it — warm and still. The water sits motionless against the shore like a spread blanket. If cold water did not make you feel instantly hostile, you would take off your tired old cotton dress and get in and get your head under, into the dogless silence. If you were one of those women who love to bake and to swim, you would. You know the ones I mean — women with curves and a boisterous brood and recipe books from their grandmothers, women with wild-flower arrangements and menstrual cycles that work with the moon, women whose milk flows, whose cheeks are ruddy in the cold, whose long thick hair lightens in the sun, who can improvise something interesting with rhubarb or even turnip, who reread the classics, who rub almond oil into their nice thick middles, whose skirts give to a full easy stride, whose calves are strong and ankles fine, women with small dignified noses amid wide compassionate faces, women who are trusted by birds and lambs.

You stand ankle-deep in the water and let a mosquito settle on the vein on the back of your hand, before squashing it quick as a flash. It gave so easily; it is hard to take any pleasure out of this retaliation. You flick its corpse off your hand, angry at its weakness. Angry with everything today because of that dog, angry with this forest and this country. The spruce-pine-spruce-pine, the violent swinging of the seasons, the brackish lifeless sea, the food that sits like clay in your stomach; everybody is melancholic and drunk. They all drink too much. The national disease. You shouldn’t say it but there it is, the truth. Your ancestors, coming to Scotland, must have been relieved to find a similar picture there, and no wonder they failed to prosper on the whole. It was only your grandmother who slipped through the eye of that needle.

Evening falls, but not darkness. The dog is still hacking away at the calm. You lie for a while on the charpoy but more of the ropes have broken and your weight is unsupported on the left side; using an old winter scarf you lace it up again like a shoe and contemplate your exile. Why has she put me here? you ask. Why has she locked me here in a forest inside a letter? On one piece of evidence that is extremely scant: a postcard to Teddy with a Lithuanian stamp and a comment, rashly made, about deserts. From which she fashions a life. Does she not consider that I sent that postcard on a visit to see Petras’ grave, perhaps? A four-day visit, nothing more? No, instead she fashions a sad and absurd life.