The Wilderness (41 page)

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.

The sea washes up to his ankles. He steps back. When he looks up the beach there are no people, only stones, rocks, and a flurry of leaves scudding across in the wind. Are they leaves, or are they birds? He reaches his arm out and snatches one from the air, inspects it to see it is a leaf, and puts it in his pocket.

Now there seem to be an infinity of leaves which he rushes up the beach to catch. But not an infinity, that is reckless, just a lot. How much is a lot? Is seven a lot? Running is easy even on the stones. The beach is made of pebbles here, stones there, rocks over there, and boulders beyond them, and the increase in size gives the impression that he is running into a reverse perspective, and that gives the impression that he is not really here, but he is. Of course he is here. If he keeps running he too will get bigger. The thought interests him, but does not grab
him; maybe he wouldn't like to be bigger. Every now and again, as he pushes the leaves into his pockets, he looks back at the black bag he has left by the shore to check it is at a distance from the tide, then he progresses forward again until his pockets are full and the sky is cleared of leaves.

He returns to the bag and catches his breath. Then he squats and reaches his hands into its endlessness, where they disappear for so long that he wonders if he has lost them. Eventually he has to peer in. Hands? he calls quietly. Where are you? There in the bag's darkness he sees them large, paper white, and ageless. It is with surprise that he manages to take hold of the urn when his hands are so desperately cloudy, but he does, he clutches it either side and, holding it to his face, sees the breakage of his reflection in the hammered-silver surface.