The Wilderness

5

Or no. Maybe the gunshot did not come like this. The leaf. Maybe not. Maybe the run of events is not precisely like this; but it is the curse of age to be confused, let him curse it back with improvised clarity. Nakhes, it sounds like. The gunshot is delivered in two snapped syllables: nakhes, joy.

He loves this memory to range into his mind, the yellow dress gathered in tight to Joy's small waist and then falling im-practically to her feet, so unfashionable that it seemed it must be before its time. The straps that revealed the entirety of her long arms. The image is sticky on his memory like pollen on a bee, and happy, and invisible, and secret. The happiness of it is deep in his gut.

And when he tries to place himself in the picture, in the concrete garden, the man he sees is one he likes. Usually his memory of himself as a younger man renders him sleek like a sea-cleaned stone. It paints him as Helen saw him — a man who is attractive in the way that men are usually not. Long-lashed, doleful. To his mind (though Helen never meant it this way) this began to mean unchallenged, dull, and overly accepting. Unruffled by resistance of any sort. Inert. But in this memory of first meeting Joy he is alive, with some of that electric energy that Rook always seemed to possess, with a fractious expression, with extra height and agility: he is a match for her.

Now he doesn't know if that rendition of himself is romanticised, or if the other is demonised. Even looking at the few pictures of himself doesn't settle the dispute in his mind — and in fact he barely recognises himself in them. They don't correspond with either mental image. He is giddy with the sensation that nothing, nothing, not even himself, is certain. And then he begins to wonder if perhaps this is a godsend, and that he can protect himself by filling in the gaps with what he would prefer as opposed to what was.

The story of the soldier comes to him. He is a child and Sara invites their blond-haired neighbour for dinner. It is wartime and the neighbour's husband is a soldier on leave from his duty in France. Over a meal of chicken soup and dumplings, and heaped plates of dry-roasted potatoes, the soldier tells the tale of how he was in a bombed hospital and the building collapsed, leaving all but him and a foul-smelling Frenchman dead. They were trapped for a day and night, these two soldiers.

A year later the neighbour and husband come to dinner again. The husband is on leave, but hopes that this will be the last fleeting visit — there are signs that the war could end. He retells the story of the Frenchman. This time the one day of entrapment becomes four, the hospital a school, the Frenchman weak and maudlin to the point of near-death.

Another year later and the war is over and the neighbour and ex-soldier invite them for dinner. The beleaguered soldier tells the story again. The four days has become a week; the Frenchman weeps at night about his beloved estranged dog. The two soldiers are sustained by a leaking water pipe that has conveniently surfaced in the tale.

The next time the story comes out it is years later and the soldier drops by to say he and his wife are moving to London. Jake is moving to London, too, Sara tells him. To study to be an architect. The soldier stays for one of Sara's now-famous coffees which she makes strong and luxuriously milky. She hands out hot hamantaschen and the soldier asks if he ever told them about his encounter with the Frenchman. They say, perhaps.

He tells it with expert flourishes. The week has become a fortnight. The Frenchman's estranged dog has become children, the Frenchman's wife beautiful, the water infected, the den smaller and hotter, death closer.

The poor exaggerating soldier. It was clear that the man was at no point lying, just deluded, just craving after a drama in what had, for him, been a war of fairly undramatic, inevitable, unnarrated loss.

They always joked about it, he, his father, and Sara. He picks up a black-and-white photograph of Helen when she was pregnant with Alice. There is such pressure to remain true to the facts, and it seems so important somehow, so vital to preserve events and people as they really were. But he knows how memory can make a shattered dream come true. Sometimes he loses the strength and vigilance to stand up to its forces, and thinks he would do just as well to let it transform the past as it wishes.

Under guidance from the fox-haired woman he sketches up a timeline of his life and places major events and people along it. She instructs him to make simple logs such as who he was married to, who his children are, and what his profession was. She escapes his derision with a reasoning hand that slices the air — the gesture says, you'll thank me for this one day. So he bows his head and says he will do as she asks.

The timeline raises questions. When was he born? What was his father called? Who is older — Alice or Henry? Certainly Henry came first, yes, because there were many times of three people. And if Henry came first that possibly makes him younger — one is a young number. But Alice, too, was young, in fact she was the youngest of all things. Here she is as immediate to him as a prime colour, and he marks the event on the timeline: 1967. She is wearing a blue dress with a large felt strawberry on the front; Helen had even stitched in the yellow specks, the— spots that one finds on a strawberry. His daughter is breathy and excited after tripping around the garden after Henry and a toy plane, and she comes to him, chirping Jape in an attempt at his name, and her fingers fiddle at his knees to get his attention.

Something moves: the dog. She yawns from her place on the floor, snaps her jaws shut, and then contemplates him. He blinks to find he is just standing here in the kitchen with a pen in hand, and he can feel the vacancy on his own face, the typical elderly glaze. No idea how he came to be standing when he was sitting. Hasn't he even forgotten to breathe? His nails are bitten.

He sits down again to the timeline and hovers his pen: 1967, that was the year of the Six-Day War. Agitation overcomes him. He can still just about grasp this war, its mechanisms, its reasons — something about it still makes sense to him. The Israeli planes attacked Egypt at sunrise, so that, with the sun behind them, they were difficult to see and distances difficult to judge; he has always had that image in his mind, of the planes silhouetted against a large sleepy orange ball, just as the steelworks are silhouetted. And Helen furious that the sun should be misused in this way for such ungodly crimes.

Then it transpired that hundreds (thousands? Lots. Is thousands lots?) of Egyptian soldiers had died, while most Israeli soldiers were unharmed. Support for the underdog is never to be underestimated, he knows. He knows from years of marriage to Helen that whatever is losing is suddenly loved. And there was Israel, the tyrant, and Helen hated it until the hatred began to feel like it was directed at him personally, and as if the tide turning against that land was the tide turning against his own stupid beliefs.

Nineteen sixty-seven. The day after the short-distant war ended he had taken his family to Quail Woods, it was June and hot even under the patchy shade of the trees, and Helen was a little irritable and perturbed. Extremes of temperature always made her so, where they had the opposite effect on him. He liked the feeling of being pushed to a limit, and that day the heat had caused him to wake up from a night on top of the sheets resolute and hopeful. He scooped Alice from her bed, kissed her, and carried her downstairs. She liked cornflakes with a little side bowl of mashed banana and jam, so he made it for her as was the ritual and they sat down to eat.

Then, over coffee, he heard on the radio that the war had ended and Israel had won territory. The body count began: so many Egyptian soldiers dead. Numbers were reeled off. The BBC doubted its own news: impossible that Israel could have won; their correspondents must have got it wrong. For a while the news wrangled back and forth between fact and disbelief until the victory became undeniable.

Helen came down from dressing Henry and sighed over poached eggs, swilling the coffee viciously around her cup, and after a tense silent breakfast he suggested a walk in the woods — anything, anything to get them out of the house.

“Everybody needs to know what or where their home is,” he said as they walked the wide dappled path.

“Agreed,” Helen nodded, “but their home is ultimately within themselves.”

“No, Helen, stop that. It's about land. Israel was given to those people as a home and they have to fight for it.”

“Not like this.”

Helen walked barefooted along the path in her miniskirt, blotched in the green-and-yellow camouflage of the sunlight as it fought through from above. Military light, his wife called it. He carried Alice on his shoulders so that she could become a tree. And while they walked she needled her fingers through his hair, chirping, Jape, Jape, as though he were in fact the tree and she a bird in its branches.

“They said at school the other week that Israel was going to be destroyed and we had to pray for it,” Henry offered suddenly. The content of the sentence made his voice all the more high and childlike.

“They said that?” Helen instinctively reached for Henry's hand but he didn't go to her. “They shouldn't be saying things like that to children for heaven's sake.”

“Did you pray, Henry?” he asked suddenly. Helen blinked at him in anger and shovelled her hair behind her ear.

“Everybody did. We always do when we're asked. We pray for everything, last week we prayed for a girl who's got chicken pox.”

“Chicken pox is fine,” Helen said. “Politics is something else. Feeding politics to six-year-olds is wrong.”

“ Six-year-olds have brains,” he told his wife. “I don't see the problem.”

Henry ran ahead and threw pinecones at targets on the tree trunk — a knot in the bark or a red cross painted to mark the tree as fit for felling. Most of the trees were marked, and dotted about like bright mushrooms — though there were no men to be seen — were the yellow hard hats and jackets of the fellers.

“The woods are going to be cut down,” he said.

“Yes — it's so sad.”

“Sad, because this land is our home.” He looked hard at Helen to make his point. “We don't want to lose it. Do we?”

“So would you kill for it?”

“Of course not.”

“Well the Egyptians have been killed for the same.”

“It's over. By all accounts that little war is over.”

“Little war!”

“It was six days long.”

“Well it's not little, and it's not ever over for the people who grieve!”

“It's been three years,” he said, trying to splice the mood. “Three years since Alice was born, and it's a lovely day, and as of today the war is over. And our own kashrut is done — we'll go home and get up the ladder and pick cherries. We'll make, I don't know, a pie. We have everything now, it's complete. A house. Two children. Cherries. Each other.”

He pointed out onto the horizon through the trees, the infinity of its straight line now broken up with clumps of his own handiwork — houses, the prison with its fence barbs suspended like a swarm of flies, and a general suburbia gaining ground.

Alice whispered in his ear: Jape, I want to pick them.

He kissed her cheek, of course, of course, whatever she wanted she could have.

“The only ripe cherries will be on the highest branches,” Helen said tersely.

“Then we'll get an extra-tall ladder. We're not afraid, are we, Alice?”

He stood in the middle of the path, between the yellow hats and coats, and closed his eyes to the gunshot. Helen turned her face up to the sound and shivered as though she wanted to shrug off the aggression the shot had left in the air.

“You look just like a soldier,” she said. “The way you reacted to that gunshot. You look so — serious. So intent. Dressed in that military light.”

“I'm trying to work out what's on the other side of that sound.”

“Peace,” she said. “There's nothing quieter than the quiet after noise.”

Jape, Alice whispered to his ear. I want to pick them.

He decides to make coffee. The dog stands, stretches, and comes across to him; she rests her head on his knee. Knocked you down with my car, he thinks. Don't remember, but know I did. Am told, am told you came out of the blue. She observes his thoughts move across his face. Every one of his movements seems to interest her. She appears beguiled. Scratching the back of his head he strokes her until she lies out flat and closes her eyes, and he crouches until his legs are stiff — a minute or ten or twenty. He becomes absorbed — to the obliteration of all else — in the blue-black shine of her coat and the slowing rise and fall of her ribs.

He reads the name tag on her collar: Lucky. Yes, of course. They have become hasty friends as if neither can see any point in delaying or assessing. Back at the table he works again on the timeline, thinks he might have a coffee, stands, crouches to stroke the back of the dog's ear with his thumb, tells her, silently, that he is terribly sorry for running her over, returns to the table, thinks he wouldn't mind a coffee, stands, concludes that he needs to urinate. Urinates, and returns to find the dog barking at the coffee machine, which is banging with dry heat and a crack working its way up the glass. Fool that he is. He switches it off.

“I'm sorry about that,” he tells the dog. She winds back down to a curl on the floor and soon sleeps her mouth into a long, accepting smile.