The Wilderness

14

The main thing he thinks now is that somehow he must get out.

A man leads him to his seat in the dinner hall and shows him his meal. He objects by shaking his head roughly. They did not used to sit like this at school, each person at their own chair with their own small table in their own world — instead they were in rows along benches, elbow to elbow, forming one long chain of interconnected worlds that nudged at each other, feet that tangled and rationed food that migrated from plate to plate in bouts of fighting and sharing. If it were like that now he would sit, eat, and talk, but the place has the restless quiet of things lost and forgotten and it makes him anxious.

He spends his time getting up to look for his dog, then, after some wandering, sits, forgetting what it was he had got up to do. Then he gets up to look for his dog, and ends up out in a summerhouse in the thawing snow, smoking with a group of elderly people he does not know or care about, then returns inside to look for his dog.

He will not go to bed, he will not piss while being watched, he will not go for a walk, he will not drink his tea, and he will not sing songs or play games. There is a chink in the earth which he will have to head for in order to be funnelled out — a small port of exit — and so he will wait in the corridor for somebody to come for him, eventually to take him home.

“But you're going home in two days,” he is told by somebody who has no right to know more about him than he does. “You're just here for a break, try to enjoy it.”

Not true, he has been here for weeks or months already, and can feel every one of the days dragging behind him, a load too heavy to pull. Abandoned! His wife has left him to rot, his mother too, his son. As a woman scrubs at his back in the bath he covers his crotch with his hand and bends his head downwards to hide his face from her. He tightens his body and refuses to move his arms from his body. If he had the words he would tell her what he thinks, but as it is he has a throat closed rigid with sentiments that have lost form. Eventually he is dragged from the bath by several hands, dried off, and shovelled into a pair of pyjamas that he objects are not his. He is given a cup of tea that he refuses to drink, and then put into bed when not in any mind for sleep, and lies with an aching stomach and a need for the toilet. He is anxious that if he sleeps he will miss his lift home. The light goes out; he puzzles over where he is, where his mother is. He calls her name quietly in the dark—Mama?

When he finally sleeps he dreams that he is in the car with his wife on the moors and there are planes flying overhead; when the planes reach the steelworks they begin twirling and diving in spectacular formation, doing so for minutes until the twirling loses control and they pirouette down into the huge factory chimneys in yellow flames. He jumps out of the car and tries to catch the planes as they fall, one in this hand and one in that, and though he beseeches his wife to help she sits in the passenger seat nursing a child at her breast, her smile milky and cool and a song on her lips, and watches while the planes crash around him.

He dreams afterwards — or is it all the same dream? — that a woman with glossy black hair is in the back of the car whispering sharply to him with a polished Austrian accent: Wake up, I have left the man in the prison and he is dying there, wake up.

He does wake up, dumbfounded with fatigue and disorien-tation. A woman is at the side of his bed and gives him a glass of water and a tablet. The sheets are wet and cold. Ashamed of himself and too tired to fight he takes the tablet down with a gulp, sits blindly in a chair while she changes the bed, and feels a tiredness well in him as if he is clotting. She takes his hand and puts him back in bed, pulling the blankets up around his chin, and the next thing he knows they are still at his chin and his body has not moved, and it is morning.

Here, a perfect memory afloat in nothing. A blue peg with an elastic band wrapped tightly around it. Wait, it links back.

On the chair in the corner of the bathroom he presses his knees together and watches the peg spin past his vision. A woman bends over the bath and oars the water with her hand. This is not a bathroom he recognises, very large, white, and clean, and the bath itself is as wide as a rowing boat and high sided so that, once the confused process of undressing is done and he has stepped into the water, he can barely see over the lip. He brings his long legs up to his body while the woman, humming, begins to lather soap over his back. In the water his skin is as white as a newborn's. The woman flannels up and down his arms, taking his hands one by one and cleaning the palms.

“So pale,” she says, “compared to your lovely brown face. You haven't seen the sun for a while, Mr. Jameson, hmm?”

He turns his face up to the ceiling, peaceful and sleepy. The woman cups her hand under his knee and runs the cloth over his leg, then down under water to the ankle, then between the toes and the soles of his feet. Time moves forward at a stroll, his skin taking time to remember the cloth as it passes on to the next place, as if, patch by patch, it is waking up after a heavy sleep.

“We need to get you nice and clean for going home to night,” she says, wringing the cloth with a quick strong tug. “Can't have your wife thinking we haven't looked after you.”

She hangs the cloth over the taps and takes a bottle of something, pours it into her hand.

“Pop your head back for me, there we go.”

He is sitting cross-legged on the tiger skin, ten years old, and his mama is showing him how to turn the praise ring with the wrist, and she suddenly asks, Do you remember being born, Jacob?

He pushes his fingers through the tiger's fur and nods. They hear the tired creak of the front door opening.

Sara hoists him up from the tiger skin and says, Come on, Jacob, your father's coming home. She tucks the photograph of her parents in her dress and there ends the stories of warring Europe, Lucheni, the Big Death. She shoves the praise ring back in the tea chest. When his father comes into the room to see them standing quite innocently and Englishly, pale and upright, he rants at them anyway, just in case either has done anything. His father blows out the menorah, it clashes with his sense of identity. It is all about identity. All about What You Are, or What You Are Not. All about being something because you were born that way and about being legitimate. His mother lights it again. She uses firm words in a language nobody else in the house understands, dabs her dress to check for the photographs, and puts the kettle on without another word.

When they hear that evening that war has broken out, the three of them watch the scratched sound fizz through the speakers of the wireless, and he and his mother think (he knows what she thinks) that a device so strange, insectile, cannot be trusted with such huge news. She blows out the menorah candles and goes outside, up the ladder, and into her bedroom. His father mutters that if there is going to be a war he needs to get maps, and they need to start storing supplies, and they need to start working their land better. Excited about what will come, he wants to sit with his father and work out a plan, a strategy, but he feels he should check on his mother, so he follows her upstairs.

There, in her small damp room, she is naked, and the smart brown dress she had been wearing is folded on the bed, its row of four buttons picked out bright in the gaslight like four unspent coins. Because he can think of nothing else to do he stands and stares at her, and he weighs up whether he is a child or more than a child, whether they should be embarrassed, whether her surprising hips and small, smooth potbelly are those of a mother or a woman, whether therefore, to hug her or run away.

She doesn't even blink. “Go and start filling your bath,” she says.

He goes back down the ladder, takes the tin bath from the shed, drags it across to the front door and into the kitchen. There is Eleanor, poor Eleanor in the kitchen in her purple-and-turquoise dress, come to say that her uncle has disappeared again and she is scared to be alone. His father is giving a lecture: Your uncle shouldn't leave you like this, it's preposterous, I'll have the police on to him — and Eleanor scuffs her foot at the stone floor in pleasure at his anger, because nobody ever takes the time to be angry on her behalf.

He, meanwhile, is thinking of the birthmark he has just seen on his mother's hip, a faint leaf-shaped mesh of finely patterned sepia, like a scaled-down shadow of crisscrossing branches. His mother was born. She is not his, she is her own. If she is not his, he is not hers. If he is not hers, he is not a child and does not even exist. He doesn't want to simply hear the stories she tells, he wants to live in them, so that he might have been there from the beginning, from her birth, so that he is not left out.

When his mother comes back she is wearing a loose, chequered dress and a shawl. She gives Eleanor a curt, kind hug and begins filling the pans with water to heat. His father goes out to talk to some friends about “the future” (he will always remember this phrase, the future, wherein everything that was to come was already history) and to see what could be done about draining the land for crop growing.

They get in the bath, he and Eleanor. His mother runs warm water over their heads and backs and lathers soap through their hair.

“You can stay here in Jacob's room,” she tells Eleanor. “Until your uncle reappears.”

Eleanor nods and blinks the soap from her eyes. She has stayed with them many times for the same reason and they are used to sleeping top-to-toe in his bed. She has grown since last time he bathed with her. Her body is older than his and has become alien in its configuration of thick pink thighs, soft deep cut of flesh between her legs, rolling waist, awkward breasts obscured by a pair of clutching, self-conscious arms, fat hands, fat rosy feet. Sara sings to them as she washes their hair, Komm doch, mein Mädel, komm her geschwind, dreh dich im Tanze mit mir, mein Kind—and, having heard it all their lives, they sing along, rocking the water over the sides of the bath.

As they are getting dry he asks Sara to tell him the story of Lucheni again — this time he resolves to make himself Lucheni, to create himself where Sara began, to surface in the minutiae of her birthmark — and so they travel through the European vistas in her words murdering and loving and ending and beginning, until she, finally, is born to the sounds en, oh, peh, kuh, kuh, peh, oh, en, and the sight of a silver samovar.

“This is the first thing I ever saw,” she says. “The first thing you see is precious, because it is also the last thing you see.” She towels them dry and boils milk for cocoa.

They ask for more stories, but Sara shakes her head. “No, that's it. That's the last of them. You're too old for stories, there won't be any more stories.”

That night in bed he wonders about war and is angry in case the moors, in their wide blackness, absorb even this extraordinary event, and he decides, there and then, that whatever the war will or won't do, one day he will come back here as an adult and make a difference. But as soon as the thought is born it terrifies him — that there are no more stories, that there is a future in which this moment of childhood is lost. He hugs Eleanor's feet. He presses her toes into his cheek and closes his eyes.

All that night he reconsiders the question: Do you remember being born? He doesn't know if he remembers or not; he doesn't know the difference between what you remember and what you think you remember, or worse still, what others remember for you. He doesn't know who he is. The boy who was not magnificent enough to lie on the tiger-skin rug, “All the way from India!” his father had said. “Look at it, an English victory, get your scrawny white knees off it.” The boy who is trained to revere a curious praise ring and to learn, as if it were a game, the laws of kashrut. The boy who gets beaten by his father and pretends he knows nothing about kashrut. The boy who goes seeking Rook, and fights out his confusion in the peat until blood comes.

He doesn't know what legitimises him, so he decides that he can remember being born. He can remember opening his eyes for the first time and seeing the tiger stripes. He can remember being a baby; if he concentrates hard enough he is still a baby, he does not want to grow up and be free. His mind covers his mama's hips and belly with the brown dress, and ties her hair at her neck. He decides, yes, he can remember opening his eyes and seeing the tiger's eyes, he might as well remember being born and the sound of his own cry. It is, at least, a start.

She hums as she washes his hair. His head keeps falling forward, so she tucks her fingers firmly under his chin and holds it straight. She is talking to him, and though he barely hears or understands what she says, the sound of her voice alone, in the rise and fall of the story, is music to him.

Relationships sketch themselves out in his memory — wife, child, children, husband, parent — and form lines that are either snaking towards him or snaking away. And maybe they are not memories but inklings. He does not feel alone. Just the motion of the cloth over his skin and the peripheral voice skittering off the white walls prevents that. Of the relationships he is aware of, mother is the only one he can speak of, and though he cannot produce her name at this moment, he can see her, and then he can define himself: child. Child. He suddenly knows himself, not through fragments of memory or mirrors, but as a gut feeling, a seed deep in the stomach.

Life spreads ahead of him, choices he must one day make. They appear as planes on the horizon no bigger than flecks, but as they near and their drone is more insistent, his tiredness pushes them away and sends them spindling down into the peat. Somebody else can save them. He looks over the high rim of the bath, at the big unfamiliar bathroom. The palm of the mother's hand rests lightly on his forehead as she pours water over the crown of his head; he is not confused — she is not his mother, she does not have the clean cut of his mother's presence, but she brings with her the dense grounding feeling of somebody with whom he can be pale and wordless. The water washes past his ears, the only sound.

He sees again that peg painted blue with an elastic band wrapped around it. After all it links to nothing. Just a blue peg turning in a void. Just a strange, remembered peg.