by Неизвестный
His arms are encircling her, his hands on her stomach.
‘It’s all true what you’re saying,’ she says.
‘Yes, it is . . .’
‘And none of it makes any difference. I just can’t.’
She takes his hands in her hands. Other than that, she does not move. Her hands are very warm and very damp.
She says, ‘This child has chosen me to be its mother, and . . . and I just can’t turn it away. Please understand.
‘Karel,’ she says, ‘please understand.’
His forehead is heavy on her shoulder. He has tears in his own eyes now and they are wetting the cotton of her shirt.
‘Do you understand?’ she wants to know, in a whisper.
‘No,’ he says. It is not quite true. Not quite.
The situation, anyway, is simpler than he thought. It was always very simple. The last two days have been a sort of illusion. There was only ever one possible outcome. He sees that now.
They stay there for a long time, on the pale sofa.
The sun won’t stop shining.
‘Now what?’ he says finally. What he means is: where does this leave us? Where does this leave our two lives?
‘Are you hungry?’ she asks.
‘No,’ he immediately says. He finds it hard to imagine ever feeling hunger again. He finds it hard to imagine anything. The future, again, seems no longer to be there.
‘Do you want to go for a walk?’ she asks, for the first time shifting her position, turning slightly towards him, so that her shoulder moves, and he has to lift his head. ‘Let’s go for a walk,’ she says.
‘Where?’ Having lifted his head, he is looking at the elegantly minimalist room as if he does not know where he is.
‘I don’t know,’ she says. ‘Wherever. Why don’t you put some trousers on?’
Docilely, he does.
They leave the hotel and start to walk towards Königstein. The pavement follows the main road. Traffic sometimes whizzes past. Sometimes there is silence, or a hazy noise of insects. Sometimes there are trees, or from somewhere the smell of cut grass.
It is five kilometres to Königstein, the sign says. They do not stop. It is high summer. The light will last for hours. They have time to walk it, if they want to.
* * *
MAUREEN N. M CLANE
Come Again/Woods
They party in the woods
as if they were meant for pleasure
not timber.
Cuts heal.
Second growth.
As if this world
were made for us.
Some think so.
‘People piss me off
specifically and species-wise.’
Oh well.
The beer bottle
on the abandoned foundations
of a cabin. Civilization.
Mangy teenagers
acid rain and a sunset.
Who’s done with ‘nature’?
That old sun
just now
blew me away.
* * *
TO THE OCEAN
Deb Olin Unferth
At the desk they said they encouraged guests not to walk, but she was determined. She took the useless map and they set out, she and her husband, following the boardwalk. When the boardwalk ended they followed the path, she saying the whole way, ‘Of course we can walk. Why don’t they want us to walk!’ until the path ended and they stepped out onto a field, which she determined was a golf course. They hiked across that – ‘Bourgeois assholes,’ she was saying, marching along, swinging her arms. Her husband kept saying, ‘Oh, here’s where it ends,’ and ‘I don’t think we’re allowed in there,’ and ‘I’m not walking in that,’ while she thought, If I had married someone else, it wouldn’t be like this. She thought longingly of a man she might have married, blurry, nondescript, one who no doubt would be laughing and running up the hills. This, while her sister sent a text, ‘Where are you? We took the shuttle. We’ve been here half an hour.’
Later at the picnic her husband would describe it to the sister, who’d be laughing. ‘Oh I can see it!’ the sister would say. ‘I can see her coming down the side of the mountain, struggling through the trees, bruised and bleeding.’ ‘There she goes!’ her husband would say about her imaginary figure cutting through the brush. And the sister and husband would both continue to tease her throughout the day, provide running commentary on her actions. ‘Making sandwiches for the revolution,’ they’d say. ‘Pouring coffee for the revolution. Having a swim for the revolution.’
Before all that, while they were still on their way, she and her husband came to the edge of the golf course and looked out over the cliffs and beyond, the first glimpse of their destination – the water, hazy and distant. There was so much to get through between here and there: trees, a whole forest of them, the downside of a steep mountain, tall grasses, weeds to your hips, misunderstandings, ticks and mosquitoes and spiders and other disappointments, lost jobs, lost faculties, dying parents and so much more. ‘Don’t,’ he said, but she would do it. She steadied herself to walk in.
* * *
ANDREW MOTION
Hunters in the Snow
The hunters have all failed,
the three hunters and their forlorn dogs
now arriving home from the mountain
which thunders above their village
with nothing to show for their expedition
except one dead fox.
Nobody has noticed yet:
not the crones attending their stringy fire,
not the families skating or playing hurly
on two square ponds among several
that fill the flat-bottomed valley.
Perhaps that large black bird – a crow
with a tail as long as a phoenix
sailing from its bare tree –
is paying attention.
If so, the friends he has left song-less
and frozen among their branches
show no appetite to follow suit.
One advantage the hunters still have
is the high ground that allows them a view
of the whole world as they know it,
and its population like dust-spots
darkening a smoky mirror.
This might well lead them to decide
they have the perspective of gods,
and have arrived here as men
who understand the future
and know it shares their wretchedness,
their dearth of any good things.
They might be planning in fact
to make everyone else in their image,
including the miller
who now appears beside his frozen wheel
and rhythmically claps his hands
in time with a song that has lasted for generations,
saying Winter will end in a trice, fol-de-rol,
and water will shortly run in its channels again.
But nothing like this will ever happen.
Their slow tramp and miserably lowered gaze
means they do not know their advantage.
Therefore they keep walking.
They do not speak.
They ignore their dogs.
And in a moment will pass from the bare trees
and flare of the firelight
and so make their descent,
with each in his own way
thinking it is enough to live
as nothing except himself.
To find sufficient beauty
in hearing their footsteps creak
when they approach the threshold
and break its crust of frozen snow.
* * *
FRAGMENTS
Roger Deakin
Introduction by Robert Macfarlane
In 1969 Roger Deakin bought a ruined farmhouse in Mellis, a small village in north Suffolk. Walnut Tree Farm sat on the edge of Mellis Common, a medieval grazing pasture that cent
uries of farming had made rich with wild flowers, including rare green-winged orchids and sulphur clover. Over the course of several years, Roger rebuilt the farmhouse – first raised in the Elizabethan era – according to a traditional East Anglian method of timber-framing that allowed the house to sit upon the shifting clays of Suffolk and flex in response to the earth’s own flexes. At the back of the house was a spring-fed moat in which Roger would swim, twelve acres of meadow and more than half a mile of hedgerows. Along one side of his land ran the Ipswich– Norwich railway line, and perpendicular to the railway was an ancient right of way known as Cowpasture Lane.
Roger lived at Walnut Tree Farm for thirty-seven years, until his untimely death in the summer of 2006. Though he travelled widely and often, he always returned: it was, he wrote, his ‘den’, his ‘sett’. Living there as long as he did, he came to know the habits, the weather and the creatures of his landscape intimately. Roger was a self-taught naturalist and over the decades he recorded his observations of life at Walnut Tree Farm in dozens of notebooks and journals, mostly Moleskines, which he filled with his spidery black handwriting.
Thinking of Roger in Mellis, I am often put in mind of Henry David Thoreau in Walden. Both men were journal-keepers, both were naturalists and phenologists, both lived by water, both loved trees and woods, and the landscape of Walden – like that of Mellis – was bounded on one side by a railway line, such that both men could hear the rattle of freight trains passing in the night. But Thoreau only lived by Walden Pond for two years, whereas Roger was in Mellis for almost four decades. The result of his chronic acquaintance with that place was a fabulously deep knowing, made subtle by the long view as well as the close-up.
Two years after Roger’s death, Terence Blacker and Alison Hastie edited a selection of his notebooks, which were subsequently published as Notes from Walnut Tree Farm in 2008. That much-loved book soon became a classic of English localism, part of a tradition that stretches back to diarists and journal-keepers such as Francis Kilvert and Gilbert White. It also completed a loose trilogy of Roger’s books, along with Waterlog (1999) and Wildwood (2007).
A year later, Roger’s archive was acquired by the University of East Anglia, which catalogued and organised his thousands of papers, files, cassettes and notebooks, and made them available to researchers and readers. What follows is a series of previously unpublished fragments from Roger’s work at Walnut Tree Farm, selected from the archive by Luke Neima and arranged seasonally. They offer glimpses through the remarkable eyes of the man who lived for so long in this remarkable landscape.
Spring
There’s a great spring-cleaning wind blowing away the dross of winter and ushering in the beginning of spring from the west. By the time it reaches Suffolk, the west wind has warmed itself over the Atlantic, then picked up all the scents of hazel catkins on the Burren, heather on Dartmoor and Exmoor, and the lichened oak woods of Wales, before flowing across Suffolk and the open Brecklands bending the reed tops on the fens and snapping my old maple tree off its westernmost roots, half severed by a digger in the ditch last year.
Yesterday the ash arch began to come into leaf, just sprouting at the tips of the laid horizontal branches at first, and then a few flowers. Wild hops suddenly leaping and grappling up the grey, smooth ladies’ stockings ash bark. The quince and cow parsley and ash blossom/leaf all began on the same day, when the wind went round and four swallows appeared. They flew over the house and then turned left and disappeared somewhere else. How I longed for them to stop here instead. They took a turn or two overhead, then just went. To Monks Hall in Syleham, perhaps. A moorhen is sitting on a nest in the front moat, too. Ash seedlings are coming through, and maple. Mistletoe and the kisses allowed beneath it, so long as it has berries. The white, the green and the gold of the plant and its legendary hardwood (it was once used to make spears). The only tree to leaf in midwinter and therefore magical. Kisses were forbidden at all other seasons except the anarchic, rambunctious Saturnalia.
The three woods are all very different. Stubbing’s is yellow with primroses, Gipping is pale pink white with wood anemones, or dark green with the shining leaves of ramsons, or snaked about with the blotched leaves of early purple orchids. Burgate is surprisingly bare of flowers, except in a few particular places, where there are beds of primroses or a tiny patch of lungwort or another tiny patch of herb Paris and early purple orchids.
We live in symbiotic association with trees – they are an intimate part of all our lives. We eat of them, open and shut them to go in and out of our houses and bedrooms. We play cricket with them, we sail the seas with them and row boat races with them. We eat our daily bread on them, we warm ourselves before them at the hearth, we sit on them, play croquet with them, canoe rivers in them, grow runner beans up them, build sheds and shacks out of them, sit underneath their shade in summer, reading books or picnicking, read them every morning on the train to work or borrow them from the library.
The roots of trees are a great mystery. Some, like the fig and the eucalyptus, are capable of putting down phenomenally deep systems. Somehow, they know the water is there beneath the ground, and they know where it is. How do they know? There’s a story of a fig that thrust its roots deep into the ground along the wall of All Souls College in Oxford and a root was found in the wine cellar, growing clean through the cork and into a bottle of vintage port.
Plunging into the cool green depths of a daydream always feels very much the same as swimming out across the dark bed of a wood. The book has leaves, the words are twigs, the trees whisper and breathe, and lovers record their passions in the bark, especially in the smooth bark of the beech, the buche – the book of love.
My sense of loss, of expulsion from paradise, stays with me since my father died when I was seventeen. I think my strong desire to find and buy a ruin – this house – and to repair it, to bring it back to life, to breathe new life into it, has been a way of bringing my father back to life. It is the same with my efforts at conservation, my interest in it. I don’t want things to die, to become extinct. I want to breathe new life into things and fight to defend their life.
Summer
A hot day, and I was in and out of the moat five or six times. Cleared some weeds in the boat. Slept in the railway wagon, as I did the night before. Deep, dreaming sleep; again a boat and islands and deep tidal channels somewhere – to the south of Spain, Ibiza or Mallorca. An indeterminate dream-landscape, tentatively trying to sail a boat I’m not fully in command of, which I don’t quite understand.
On Thursday, with the heat: a dozen little yellow-striped hoverflies at work on a white umbelliferae flower like a sea; a drunken bee asleep at the wheel on the blue globe of an echinops flower, too drunk with pollen to move.
I go weeding the moat.
Ask yourself unlikely questions about water, come at it from every angle. What lives in it – beneath its surface? Why is water like our own minds? There are the thoughts that flit about on its surface, but the real world of the mind all goes on beneath, in the depths of the unconscious mind, which are like the depths of the ocean. That’s the part of us that dreams.
The little purring, soft, bubbling calls of rooks as they fly home together.
I walked down to the railway meadow and surprised a pair of feral cats down there, one black, hunting in the felled rows of cut hay, one white, basking in the sun. I suspect the white one is deaf, as white cats often are, and that it uses the black one as a bodyguard, to warn it of approaching dangers. Both cats raced off into the wood when they noticed me, first the black one, followed by the white.
Out in the flowery hay, the meadow browns floated up wherever I went in their lolling flight, and the little gatekeeper butterflies winked their wings, almost like a chorus of thanks for being left alone.
Yesterday afternoon I picked blackberry in the hedge I laid a few years ago, now billowing back into exuberant life. It is almost September and the south-facing bushes are a glistening black cascade of berr
ies. They come tumbling into the bowl, as full of purple juice as grapes. Earwigs and spiders drop in too, scrambling up the sides to escape and sliding back to be lost again under the mound of nuggets.
Back in the kitchen I dissected one of the best of the fruit, prising off each fruitlet with a pair of tweezers to count them. As I did so, they burst and the juice splashed on the sheet of paper underneath, smudging into a misty purple watercolour of bramble bushes. There were sixty-four fruitlets on both the blackberries I dissected, then I weakened and ate the rest in a bowl with yoghurt.
Wasps and greenbottles crawled about the bramble bush on the fruit and a red admiral sucked in an ecstasy of intoxication completely still, just flexing its wings in pleasure now and then.
I take my rug outside to shake and lay it on the terrace and another red admiral comes and suns itself on the Turkish pattern’s butterfly colours.
Autumn
There is always something devotional about lighting a fire; praying it will kindle and take off with its own life. It is a kind of birth since it often requires bellows, there’s something musical about it too. And its careful construction twig by twig when the glow comes and the first tiny flames struggle out of the darkness is certainly architecture. It is also physics because you are learning about energy and mass, and their delicate relationship, how one turns into the other, leaving only a warmer room and a little ash to scatter on the roots of the russet-apple tree, or the potato garden.
