The Wilderness (18 page)

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.

“I've decided to start up a group. I'm going to run it from The Sun Rises. A lobby group for Israel.”

Sara sighed and looked up at the branches.

“You have foolish ideas.”

“We might touch on CND, too. Or something stronger even, the Committee of 100. The issues are all bound up together.”

“You are not a pacifist, Jacob. You have a hawk's eye for war, since you were a boy.”

“CND isn't about pacifism, neither is Israel. I'm not talking about growing our hair and loving our neighbours, I'm talking about the real world.”

Sara's touched one cheek then the other with her large white hand. “My father, Arnold, had a scar across each cheek. Here, and here.”

She met his eye and then turned to face the path again.

“Fencing scars, Jacob. From his days at the University of Vienna. Look, let me show you.”

Under the shelter of a tree she dipped her hands into her bag, allowing them to swim for a long time in the blackness before she pulled out the photograph that he had seen so many times before.

“Here, my father.”

She presented the image to the dull light of the woods with a flourish: here is where it all begins, the gesture implied. Here in this picture is alpha and omega, and you would be wise to know it.

Then she touched the monochrome cheeks of her father tenderly, just as she had touched her own. “Do you see them, the scars?”

Yes, he saw them, the silver glints along his cheekbones, tribal almost.

“In his first term at university Arnold was beaten up a few times by fools.
Dummköpfe”'

She spat the word. Giving it in German seemed to do a greater injury, something to do with the hardness of it.
Dummköpfe.
Fools.

“And of course the fools usually got away with it. It was to be expected.”

“Die dümmsten Bauern ernten die dicksten Kartoffeln,”
he responded parrotlike, with some of the very little German she had taught him.

Sara looked at him as if to
say, you remembered,
and she put her arm around his waist—but the look and the gesture were
wary. She wanted him to remember? She didn't want him to? Had he done wrong?

“Fools are often lucky,” she translated. “Yes. You are right. It is a queer law of the universe. If the clever man jumps into the canyon he falls to his death. If the fool jumps into the canyon he falls into a boat and sails off down the water.”

She pocketed her hands and went on.

“The beatings were not very serious things, just punches in the stomach, a bit of hair pulls and calling names: Jewish shit, Jew scum. It was standard. But the Jews had to learn to defend themselves, and so they started fencing.”

She tilted her head back.

“Look up, Jake, look up at the branches.”

And so he did, and they walked in this way, the summer drizzle finding its way thinly to them; he could hear its delicate fall across the leaves. Their own faces were wet with it. He wiped his cheeks every few moments, and Sara scrunched a lace handkerchief into a ball and pushed it into his hand.

“Here, have this. The rain's on your face.”

He thanked her and she hummed something briefly.

“The fools didn't even mind Jews,” she then said. “Their lecturers were Jews, their doctors were Jews, their friends were Jews. It was just that they wanted to fight something. You know this feeling, Jake? You just want to fight something.”

“Yes, Mother,” he muttered, wiping his face roughly, surprised suddenly at how well he knew it.

“What I'm trying to tell you, Jacob, is that my father and the
other Jewish students practised until they were so good at fencing they couldn't help but win. They won everything.”

He turned to check her expression, expecting a smile, but she was in fact frowning.

“This is the Jewish problem,” she added. “Can't help but excel. When you really excel at something you make one friend and ten enemies. My father didn't know what it was to lose, and when defeat came he couldn't recognise it.”

He nodded, feeling the silk of the handkerchief in his palm, the luxury of it.

“We were beaten, Jacob, as a race. We had to start becoming individuals, and our lives have been better for it—my life is better for it. It is safe and free. You have to leave it alone. These groups, what good are they? You must leave it alone and save the energy for your family.”

Family!
She
was his family. That man in the photograph was his family. Why must she always forget it? And anyway, he was entitled to his own projects. As an adult he was allowed to do the things other adults were doing.

“Eleanor is happy for me to use that large table in The Sun Rises,” he continued unhindered. “And I think I could probably recruit a few people from work.”

They ambled onwards with no company for their thoughts but the patter of rain. After a minute of walking she took the flask and gold-rimmed cups from her bag and went through the ritual of coffee, a ritual he now saw as defunct if it harked back to a part of her that she had deleted. It was an echo, that was all. The thing that made the sound was gone.

“Sara, there's room in this world for idealism. Your father
and mother stayed where they were because it was their home and because they believed they had a right to be there. Why
should
we recognise defeat? Why?”

Sara was perfectly upright as she walked, and quiet for so long that he thought she either hadn't been listening or simply couldn't be bothered to answer. Eventually she turned her coffee out to the ground with an anxious flick of the wrist.

“What is better? To give up what you are and be alive, or keep what you are and end up dead? What you are is mere circumstance anyway. It isn't that important. What address you live at, what clan you belong to, what name you go by, what day you set aside for worship, what you worship. It isn't more important than being alive.”

She stopped in the middle of the path. Her face was anguished.

“They could have left Austria. Everybody else was leaving through the ports and escaping—my mother and father had the chance to leave and they didn't. They could have
left,
Jacob.”

He stepped forward to offer her his hand but she gestured him away.

“For my father the truth was a burning building and he was always searching inside it, even though it was safer to get out. I assure you that to persist with an idea that has run its course is stupid and will cause nothing but harm. All this talk of Israel! What clue do you have about Israel? What about your own home, your wife, your dear child whom you spend little enough time with as it is?”

An image of Joy's naked back played over him, her chalk
skin tight across the spine. Sara collected herself, tucked the cup back in her bag, and held his gaze.

“I am telling you and you must listen: where you are from, what is yours, what is home—sometimes these are not the point. The truth is not everything. You have to know when it is time to walk away.”

The mysterious letters to Helen rant at him from their pastel envelopes, but the more he is faced with them the less he knows what to do, except to cover them with an object—a plate, a salt cellar, or whatever comes to hand—so that the other woman, Eleanor, can never find them.