Dear Thief: A Novel

by Samantha Harvey

  You knew I would be pleased. ‘Who?’ I asked, as we were reaching the summit. ‘In London,’ you said. ‘Does he have a name?’ ‘Don’t they all? One man is so very like another.’ The summit had a view over the lake and a different, more hopeful kind of air that made us both turn our faces upwards. You sat at the base of a cairn. I remember this very well, the way you brushed your hair back behind your shoulders and looked down towards the lake and town. You said, ‘Nicolas is coming to get us from Bala, yes?’ and I nodded. ‘Are you happy with him?’ Again I nodded, or said yes, or of course, and you stared out with something that was almost a smile, and almost sad. ‘You’re lucky to have him, he’s a good find.’

  I watched you. In the four or five months you had been staying with us you had never spoken about him in that way before, in fact you barely referenced him at all. ‘Two is not a holy number,’ you said, and you leant across and put a rock on top of the cairn. ‘Maybe that’s why I get tired of relationships so quickly.’

  ‘Come on. You’re not tired of yours already?’

  ‘Like I said, you’re lucky.’

  I became aware that the conversation had been sliding between subjects until I no longer knew what it was about. First politics, then the trinity, then your inadequate lover, then Nicolas; and when you talked about Nicolas a kind of repose took over you. I felt that you were moving in on me with your talk of Hinduism and perfect triangles, and this was when I began to feel threatened, not comforted, by religion. I watched you sit and I knew you were thinking of Nicolas. The breeze flapped the bottom of your loons. This was the early eighties, nobody wore such things any more. But you had joined me in the bathroom that morning and put them on uncertainly, asking for approval, as if they were a new fashion. You could be so naive and guileless, so out of step that, at those times anyway, I always wanted to give you the approval you asked for in the same way I would give it to Teddy when he showed me a drawing or an attempt at handwriting.

  Very suddenly I felt outmanoeuvred, and I was. Wasn’t I? You were going to work your way into my marriage and you were going to call its new three-way shape holy, and I, pinned like a snared bird to one corner of a triangle, would have to watch it happen. And it felt to me, if you will forgive the overblown metaphor, that in religion I’d had a magnificent wild cat, which I fed and watered and loved and to which I granted respect and freedom, in return for protection. And then, when I came under threat, when my house was besieged, it did not protect me but glanced back once, skulked away and gave itself to somebody else.

  It astonished me that I saw your ‘trinity’ coming so clearly, yet didn’t stop it, as if, in a way, I chose not to stop it. I said nothing about this to you at the time, though; as I remember, the two of us just looked down into the valley we had to reach, thinking of Nicolas making his way along its road. We walked down, didn’t we, quietly, and I think I slept in the car on the way home while you and Nicolas played Twenty Questions. Or did I pretend to sleep? I honestly can’t recall.

  Here you are, miles from your hut. Get up! Stir Yourself! the Upanishads have said. (Book I, Katha Upanishad, in which Death tries to evade difficult questions.) I imagine how it is—you read those words, Stir Yourself! When the book urges you along the hard path of wisdom, the sharp edge of the razor, you stand from your charpoy as if stung, throw on your shawl, leave the gloom of the hut and walk.

  Let me see. I think there are the beginnings of a track you have worn through the forest, which snakes inefficiently between trees, twice the distance the crow flies. And amongst the spruce and ferns, suddenly a camellia. Its flowers are deep pink and the rain is drifting into them. You crouch and rub the sandy soil around its roots. You smell it, then sift it between your fingers. I know what you are thinking now; you are thinking of the time Petras told us about the genocide in the Polish forest of Bieszczady, not one act of genocide but several, in the hands of the Nazis, then the Ukrainians, then the Soviets. If you found sudden outbreaks of camellias or willowherb or rhododendron you would know that was a patch of soil made acid by fires where a family’s home had been burnt down. There would have been residue of blood in the earth without doubt. At that time he would have been in his early twenties and we fourteen, fifteen at most, and we had been walking through the woods at Morda in a perfectly relaxed mood. He said these things and then commented brightly on the soft loam underfoot, or the crunch of the beech leaves.

  You stand and look around you for more; the isolation of this one camellia makes it all the more fabulous in the otherwise bare forest, among bonelike trees. Why have you never noticed it before? Maybe it is Petras reborn, his soul transmigrated. Of course, this is not the kind of soul-cycle bullshit you believe in, and yet. The Upanishads say it, don’t they? We hatch from the seed, we hatch from the seed, we hatch from the seed, until we no longer need to do it, and then we are finally free. Petras was, wasn’t he, the kind of person who made the unlikely probable, the one who shone a rare light? Or was he? The problem is that you have glorified him as people do with the dead, which is something you observed in others even as a teenager reading the obituaries in the paper. ‘All the people in the news today are liars, cowards and criminals,’ you said. ‘But all the people in the obituaries are loving, loyal and full of joy. It seems the wrong people die.’

  Maybe Petras was not so much a gallant freedom fighter, but a dog blindly following a scent. There you go again—you are thinking about the walk in Morda, when he told us about Bieszczady; to think he had, for years, been writing dissident material about the Soviets uprooting local people, destroying the Lithuanian countryside just as they had done in Poland. Even you, who were not easily surprised, were surprised to see the book he pulled from his bag, full and battered by the onslaught of his private words. Then, a year or so after that, in 1972, he heard about the student who set himself on fire in Kaunas while proclaiming ‘Freedom for Lithuania!’, and he promptly added to a list of heroes that included Gandhi, William Wilberforce, Dos Passos, Jesus and Elizabeth Fry the name of Romas Kalanta, a student with long hair and a shabby jacket who, seen in some ways, might have been the softest, gentlest visionary of them all. He left to attend the funeral and, as we know, he never did return for any length of time, as if he thought he had to take up a cause Kalanta had left off.

  You have never been able to stop imagining Petras out in an ethereal woodland examining and cataloguing indigenous bark samples, his pen his sword. It is only now that you have found yourself in a woodland that replaces the likes of that one, following your own blind scent, that you wonder if your brother and Kalanta were really visionaries at all, or just young men who saw their unhappiness and labelled it Russia. You have often considered how useful it would be to have something to blame that is not yourself, but you have not found a compelling victim. Am I right? I see you looking at the camellia bush and biting your lip in thought. You don’t know how you feel about it, so you stand in the light rain with your hands in your pockets. You are thinking several things at once, as humans—to their detriment—can. I cannot second-guess what they all are, but one of them is another line from the Kasha Upanishad that you read just a few hours before: Do not run among things that die.

  First thing this morning when I was walking from the Tube to work I caught the smell of marzipan that comes off new gorse. It’s early for gorse, but possible, so I looked around, even detoured up a side street to see if I could find what was giving that scent. There was no gorse and anyway I lost the smell, but when I got back to the original spot I could smell it again.

  So, in my mid-morning break I went back to that same place, just to see if I could still smell it, and I couldn’t, and I couldn’t account for why I had even thought I might, or why I had bothered to try. But it was the most curious thing, because as I was about to walk back I saw my bracelet on a low wall at the end of somebody’s front garden—the silver bracelet with the pearl inset. It must have somehow come undone when I was standing there earlier this morning, maybe when
I turned my watch round to see if I had time to go and trace where the smell was coming from.

  Again, that strange sense I described before, of tuning in through static. You see, the pearl in that bracelet is the one Nicolas found on our last pearl-fishing trip in Scotland, and I always associate this trip with the smell of gorse, because we went in late spring when the valley of the Oykel River was rife with it. We woke up in the morning and unzipped the tent to the smell of marzipan and heather, of water, sky, bracken.

  I am writing this in Gene’s room—the man who has recently moved into The Willows. It must be almost nine at night and he is sound asleep. He sleeps a lot, and badly, waking up anxious every hour or so, but we have discovered that if somebody sits by his bed while he goes off to sleep he will probably go for hours, maybe all night, before waking up again. I’m writing by the shaving light, and I have been sitting here quietly in the chair with my eyes closed, listening to his breath. This is what remains of a big, strong man after eight-and-a-half decades on the planet—such a small amount of time relatively speaking, eight-and-a-half decades. Really nothing cosmologically, an eye blink, and yet it completely undoes a strong man.

  There was an almighty storm on that last trip to Scotland. It has always felt to me that we ripped the pearl from its jaws, plunged our hands in and pulled it out a minute before the landscape collapsed. We arrived on the Friday night in good weather, pitched our tent by the river in the dark and got up just after sunrise. The sky was a pale, vast blue. Before bed, I had boiled water in the pot over the fire and filled up hot-water bottles, then dug the hot-water bottles into our bag of clothes so we could put them on warm and dry in the morning.

  There was nobody and nothing in the valley, and every sound was of water, flowing through things, into things, around things and against things. Teddy probably ran the short distance down to the river beach where Nicolas stood and began shovelling the shingle into piles; he, like his father, loved to dig. I built a fire with the dry wood we had brought. Nicolas waded knee-deep into the river. To fish for river pearls you need shallow, fast-flowing water. You lower a glass-bottomed bucket into the river and scan the gravel bed, and if you find a mussel you use your hands or a cleft stick to pick it out, and you break it open. There will almost never be a pearl inside.

  ‘There,’ Nicolas said, and I too waded in and squinted onto the riverbed at the cluster of mussels. They were shallow enough to pluck from the gravel where they had been filtering the rushing water for food. In his palm I could see their exposed siphons, liplike and wide open, as if suffering an unbearable thirst.

  We took them to Teddy who was standing at the river’s edge ankle-deep, stuffing his small hands between rocks to feel for mussels there, and we helped him prise them apart. ‘Look!’ he said. He ran his finger around the inside of a shell, the thick and silky layer of nacre. I told him about the nacre and how the pearl is made. ‘Isn’t it beautiful?’ I said. ‘The purples and blues.’ I held the dead mussels in my palm while Teddy squatted, nose wrinkled, and peered at them.

  Before we discarded the shells I sat with him and counted their rings to see how old the creature was. ‘Like trees,’ I explained. ‘The more rings, the older it is.’ Some must have been sixty or seventy years old, a figure that astounded Teddy into one of his stern, focused silences in which he would stare blankly and meanwhile prod at something with his thumb—the ground, his thigh, in this case the hollow of the shell. He would prod almost painfully. Then reanimate and leave the thought behind, whatever it had been.

  We fished from daybreak until mid-afternoon. Often in the Highlands the very early mornings are clear and blue and then become gradually duller as if, I always thought, our human presence clouded the landscape like breath clouds glass. So by mid-morning the clouds were grouping around the mountains. The duller light made the mussels more visible—the water’s surface no longer glittered and reflected or threw down phantom shapes to the gravel bed. Nicolas handed them to me in fistfuls and I took them to Teddy on the shore where we sorted through them. Teddy would peer deep into the open shell. ‘Nope,’ he would say. And, ‘Nope again’, with a sceptical sigh that was adult and borrowed and, I knew with some embarrassment, was my own.

  Nicolas could spend hours in the water without rest, and he did that day. Though he had always found pearls when he fished for them on his own, on our three or four pearl-fishing trips together we had never found one. It was a matter of pride to him to find one this time, and proof of purpose: I don’t assume this, I know it. He tells me that it is common amongst boys who have grown up without a father, in an environment of mother and sister and mother’s friends and sister’s friends and conversations that considered in depth the precise nature of men’s shortcomings, for the boy to be almost pathological about pleasing women, as though he might, and must, single-handedly right all male wrongs. In the cool, head-shaking statement, Typical men, which he heard so often after so many a story of maltreatment, selfishness and recklessness, the boy grew up wishing to be anything but a typical man. So he divests hours in the cold task of finding this proverbial needle in a haystack, turning himself inside out to find a pearl in this river for his wife.

  You might not recognise this picture of a labouring, tireless man, because at home he was looser and lazier, whereas when he was pearl-fishing or mudlarking he interrogated the earth, he was almost merciless. There were no breaks in duty; I took tea out to him midstream and he drank it only because he had nowhere to put the mug down. For lunch he ate a bacon sandwich out of the same necessity. Otherwise he submerged his bucket into the monotone of his own reflection and waded slowly downriver and up. His shoulder bag would fill with mussels and every so often I’d go to him or he’d come to me to empty it, and we’d replace it with an empty bag.

  One of the strongest memories I have of this day is of a moment that came just before we found the pearl. Teddy and I were breaking shells open on the shore. I looked up and for once Nicolas wasn’t leaning into the river, but was standing upright in the water with one of his feet in the bucket to stop it being taken by the current, and he was staring at us. He has a tendency to make the softest and saddest of faces when thoughtful, which I have never been able to interpret. Maybe they are real moments of sadness but, if they are, they come from somewhere else, and not from the moment at hand. And sometimes I am inclined to think I misread the expression altogether and what seemed sad is just pensive, or not even that. Just the way the flesh falls. Do you know the face I mean? Did you ever have a way of interpreting it? That was the way he looked at us then.

  A moment later there it was, in the heap of mussels I had just taken out of the bag, a pearl. I laid it on the flat of my hand and our fingertips rolled it around. Like most freshwater pearls it was a baroque—like I mentioned before, an irregularly shaped pearl that is slightly pitted. It was no bigger than a back tooth and had a faint lilac sheen, coloration from the peat, Nicolas said when I called him to the bank. A good lustre, he said. A good pearl.

  What you will know about Nicolas is that he has a simple way of seeing. Anybody who has spent any time with him will know this; he sees in images that can be held up on cards, sometimes unobvious but visual and graspable. I used to tell him that he has a mind like Japanese food: simple, yet strange. A pearl appears inside a mussel and we pick it out, killing the mussel. Along the way we squander hundreds of creatures for the sake of this one pearl, and we pile their shells up on the shore without shame. And when I comment blithely on that waste he says that taking a pearl is only like taking a perfect photograph, you get through hundreds just for the sake of one.

  Days were always short on those spring trips, but this day got hunted down mid-afternoon by a highway of violet cloud that had come charging over the mountains. As soon as we had found the pearl we looked up and seemed to notice the cloud for the first time. The tent was rippling in a wind we hadn’t even been aware of. Nicolas put the pearl inside a matchbox, which he put in the pocket of his coat. As the
rain started we went inside the tent and huddled together with the flysheet open so that we could see the storm. But when the wind began funnelling down the valley, blowing our stove and cups along the riverbank, lifting and shaking the tent, we made a run for it to the car, which was parked fifty yards up the track closer to the road. The rain came and pelted the insects and blossom off the windscreen, the thunder shook the old windows, the sky came down as low as the roof, a tree half a mile away across the river caught fire in a lightning strike. Nicolas rolled the car away from the apple blossom we had parked under, down the track towards the river.

  It must have lasted the best part of an hour; the three of us clasped hands and laughed. Teddy cried as well as laughed, in little uncertain bursts. It was a kind of wonderment to watch the trees bend and the river turn mulberry and spin round the rocks. Our tent had collapsed but somehow stayed pegged, and we watched the rain hammer it to the ground. The rain itself was a wall shifting endlessly down the valley, and it was only apparent where the mountains were when the lightning earthed itself at their summits.

  When the worst of the storm cleared, the rain continued and the thunder rumbled around quietly. We drifted off to sleep in the car, waiting for it to end so that we could go and assess the damage. I rested my head against the window, thinking, half awake and half asleep, of that small, dented pearl. Inside the pearl was whatever tiny thing got stuck in the mussel, the grit or dirt or parasite. Inside it was a fragment of the life of the river, the life of the river constituted by the salmon and trout, all the particles and the rocks that made the particles, the plants, the eroding mountains, the clouds, rain, sun, the cosmos stretching back through time. May we never, never stop wondering at this world we’re given. An image keeps coming to mind: those iterated shapes, a pentagon within a pentagon within a pentagon, say, and this is the form my feelings take of that trip now. Us inside the tent, the tent inside the landscape, the landscape inside the pearl, the pearl inside the tent, the tent inside the landscape, repeating onwards, iterating and reiterating.