Dear Thief: A Novel

by Samantha Harvey

  This evening Yannis called by for a short time, and two things are strange about this. Today is Friday and the only evening Yannis has away from his shop is Tuesday, which is his day off. Also, although he knows which building is mine, he has never been to my flat before and he had to ring all four buzzers. So when I heard him on the intercom and when I opened my front door and called merrily hello as I watched him come up the stairs, I knew more or less that either his shop had burnt down or his wife had asked for a divorce; and there had been no fire engines that I had noticed going past, so I said, ‘Is she going back to Crete?’ He nodded.

  Inside, I poured us each a vodka and water and offered him some cashew nuts and dried apricots, which was all I had. You must offer Yannis food; to not offer him food is akin to not offering somebody else a seat. (Yannis would not mind if you forgot to offer him a seat, he likes to stand, which is why he has only two small tables in his café.) He took a clump of apricots and read from the packet. ‘Stoned and ready to eat,’ he said sadly. ‘This sounds like my son in his early twenties.’ He went to the window and leant out as if trying to see the sound. ‘When is she going?’ I asked, and without turning he slashed his throat with his hand. This is something he does, which is how I recognised the gesture even with his back turned. ‘Already gone?’ I asked, and again he nodded.

  ‘Can you believe that she came to me on Tuesday,’ he said, ‘to tell me that by Thursday she would be gone? You can’t believe this, can you? She has her ticket, she is going. Akis is meeting her at the airport, her witch of a sister is coming to me sometime soon to pack the things she wants to ship home, and I may visit any time from June, if I want to talk about a reconciliation. This is what she said, and then she was gone.’

  ‘A reconciliation, though,’ I said. ‘That’s good news?’ To which he replied, ‘No no no no, because you don’t know my wife. By reconciliation she means surrender. We may stay married if I surrender. Do you know what I think of that?’ I said yes, I did; he told me anyway. ‘What I think of that is she can put it in her spare hole and sit on it.’ I said yes, that’s what I thought he thought. Although I have no idea where he got this phrase from, or which, in his view, is her spare hole. For a moment I felt happy for her that she had left. ‘Do you want to play cards?’ he said. He stood by the rocking chair then and finished his drink, so I poured him another, which he finished, and I poured him another.

  I did not want to play cards, you have to be in the mood, you have to feel alright about losing or otherwise feel invincible; I told him I was sorry. ‘She treats me as if I am a monster,’ he said. ‘What have I done? You’re a woman—tell me what did I do?’ It was here that the music at the club started up, or that I noticed it had started up, so I stood with my arms open and beckoned him with a quick flick of the fingers of one hand, like I used to with Teddy when he knocked his knee and was about to cry. We held each other loosely and danced in slow steps around the room to these drifting sounds of bebop. Yannis put his big head on my shoulder. How dare she do this to him? I thought suddenly. This wife, whose name I don’t think I have even imparted to you and which I now don’t think I will, in case she is not deserving of it. How dare she simply escape like this, as if she has no responsibilities?

  I have always felt a kind of solidarity with Yannis, maybe in part because we both have just one child, a son, from whom we are far too estranged. Sometimes I feel we are both like disused sea ports, no longer harbouring anything. But this is self-pitying and ridiculous, I see it; we made our children, we were not made for them, we are not nothing without them. This is a coward’s view of life. And then I felt that his wife, Stefania—perhaps she does deserve a name after all—was precisely not a coward because she was doing what she wanted without giving quarter. Why should we give quarter? It is so hard in life to know what we want that surely, when we do know, we must act. She and Yannis had been together since they were teenagers; she had been a mother since the age of eighteen or nineteen. She had earnt herself some autonomy. This is when I heard your voice: The tyranny of possession! it said. The greatest tyranny of all is men’s possession of women and women’s possession of men. We want to own one another so that the other cannot outgrow us. You know how Chinese women bind their feet until the feet are deformed? This is what we do to one another’s hearts.

  I want you to know that I had these thoughts quickly, and that although I heard you say all those words, I heard those quickly too, so that the song we were dancing to—it might have been ‘Cotton Tail’, I don’t remember—was not even a third of the way through by this point. I found I was humming into Yannis’ ear, and that my shoulder, which was bare because of it being a warm night, was moist with his tears.

  Then, just as I had made peace with Yannis’ wife, I became angry with Lara. I thought, how can Lara escape her religion? I remembered her phrase, about carrying a sack of stones. A sack of stones that can be picked up and put down, dipped into as and when. But religion is not like this; the weight of God is upon those who believe, a burden from above, and love is the shouldering of this burden, the glad acceptance of it. Lara wants to think there is nothing higher than her head, and that she can orchestrate her own salvation through her acts. Next she will become a humanist, without realising that humanism is to a Christian what methadone is to a heroin addict, a way of weaning off. She will begin to believe in humans instead of God because it is hard to give up believing all at once. And then, when humans fail her, she will become a spiritualist and decide she can flee this illusory world like a bird sliding obliquely off the screen, slip through its gauze, as if religion’s sole purpose is to make escape artists of us.

  Of course, I was not angry with Lara. It is strange how unwilling anger is to alight directly on its object. Yannis’ hand slipped to my lower back and then down a little further still, and I let him because it did no harm. I said to him: ‘Yannis, the student asks the master why Japanese teacups are so delicate and easy to break. The master says that the teacups aren’t too delicate, it’s just that the person who drinks from them is too heavy-handed.’ He drew his head back and looked at me with the same slightly hostile incomprehension he had shown over the word humus. I concluded: ‘It’s not for teacups to change, but for us to adapt to what is.’

  It was the wrong thing to say, I know, because he raised his hand to my waist again in disapproval. And it was not really even all that relevant to him, but I said it because I was pressed upon by a feeling of—what can I say?—stringency, or obedience. It is not for us to try to change the world to something that suits us better, but for us to change, to bend to a greater weight. When he left ten or fifteen minutes later, at the end of the next song, which was ‘Goodbye Pork Pie Hat’, which we danced to in thoughtless silence, I stood at the window and watched him lope down the street towards his shop. He was going to get ready for the others who were coming at ten-thirty to play Poker. All I could think of was how I had used to dance with Nicolas and how unexpectedly gifted he was at finding a coherent stream of movement in a piece of music and how he would thread us both along it. We danced, you know, a lot, never formally but around the house, especially the big, decrepit house we rented in London just after we were married and before Teddy came. He was not a good dancer as such, he was just good at finding what others could not beneath the surface—mining, I suppose, mining the music for its rhythm. He had a way of holding my waist as if it were a piece of machinery he had undergone five years of training to use.

  We lived in that house for eight months. It didn’t have a single useable surface that he had not danced me towards and laid me on and entered me at. There was no surface that both my back and front had not become intimately familiar with, and no view of the floorboards or ceiling’s coving I had not had through the blind or ecstatic or gentle vision of being made love to by him, and no part of the bathroom mirror that had not reflected our daily selves doing their daily things, our white teeth bared for the brush, our bodies lowered into the bath, no spring in
the bed that had not known the weight of our deepest of sleeps, no knot of the hallway rug that had not known the precise indent of our four feet, no inch of brass on the doorhandles that had not been dulled with our palms.

  Shall I tell you what I think? I think Yannis should go after his wife. I think he should rush after his wife and bind his feet in front of her.

  Here we are, you and I, just back from Spain. We oppose each other across a table with a fan of thumbed cards. Twist, you say. Twist again. Like we did last summer, I reply. Your cards pressed onto the table add up to twenty, mine to eighteen, there is a flurry of dealing in which fingers fly and a twist and a twist and a stick; maybe I win. The games are quick and thoughtless and fill a post-supper lull while Teddy sleeps and the cottage becomes a dark missable shape in the lane. The cards are dealt, the pack settled, the trivial risks taken; if you are going to twist you flare your nostrils, if you are going to stick you suck in your cheeks: this is how I know your next move and how I have the card ready when you ask for it.

  In the two or more years you’ve been staying with us you have been trimming your hair by increments and oiling it, so that it is thick and dark and seems to flesh out your features, and the fringe you cut for yourself in Spain makes your eyes look startled. There is none of that flaming orange grease on your lids, and without that your eyes are freer and wider and the space between them more emptily purposeless. You have taken to looking at me squarely while your pupils expand and shrink with the movement of candle flame. You ask me if you should leave. Where would you go? I reply, and you shrug one shoulder as if this is irrelevant. I don’t give you a yes or no, and so you stay.

  I deal you four low cards, which leave you on something like sixteen. Deal me a queen or a king, you say, with a jut of chin and a short laugh. Bust me. Your face is surprisingly tender with its Spanish tan. When you make this invitation for me to bust you (half teasing, half morbidly serious), I know you know that there have been poisonous words hissed in your name in a marble-floored room at the back of the villa; you seem to know that I pummelled my fist uselessly into the side of Nicolas’ neck, how I saw that new light you put in his eyes and flailed my hands at it. You look at my hands holding the spread of cards as if they are something quick and savage that has, by mercy, gone temporarily still. Your moist bright eyes seem to say, Did you feel like strangling him, like strangling me?—then maybe you should have. You should kill me or leave him, your expression suggests. Or both, do both. And so, asserting my only power, I do neither. It is like we have turned a corner with one another. You have wronged me, and you dare me to care.

  I deal you a nine. Not a theatrical bust, but bust all the same. You say we should pray, just in case. Pray for what? In case of what? In case God exists and praying makes a difference, you say. So we pray separate silent prayers while we bend cards from pack to hand and we agree not to tell the other what was asked for. Whoever wins, you decree, will have their prayer answered. It comes down to the next game. I win again. You gather our cards in a small, neat heap and say that in this case I shall have my prayer. But I prayed I would lose, I say.

  You dip your hands into the gloom beneath the reach of the two wall lights, re-deal and remind me with a smile and a sigh, and with no words, that the victorious never pray to lose. Without discussion, we switch to Poker and gamble with a stack of coppers, undisturbed by the universe until two in the morning when Nicolas arrives home from a show in London and almost wordlessly shifts away upstairs to sleep, like an animal that has been ousted from the pack and is too tired to fight its way back in.

  Without him we go on in this sweet, smoky, murmured combat of yours, which is the only way of loving you know, just like a dog loves a bone. With its teeth and also its tongue. I win a hand, you win a hand; we play so long we start to read one another’s cards with our minds.

  Afight broke out at work today. One of the residents commented that in Australia there was a ban on smoking in restaurants. His daughter had been there and had reported this news back; I bet England will soon be doing the same, he said. You watch.

  I couldn’t have anticipated the reaction to this. These are people who receive news of fatal heart disease or nephritis or the death of a spouse or child with a certain aged poise, yet rumour of a smoking ban in restaurants inflames them to violence. One of the more dispassionate residents, Claudia, pointed out that they didn’t go to restaurants anyway, so what did it matter? This was where Frances, who has been made bent and quiet by months of pleurisy, found her verve again for a minute. Nothing in life stays where it is, she said; it starts in a restaurant in Australia and suddenly it’s everywhere—not just restaurants but every last place, including their smoking room at the back of the lounge and their summer house in the garden. Everything spreads like a joke, and suddenly you’re eighty-seven and you can’t smoke in your own summer house. Then you have to stand out in the rain, and life’s bad enough without that.

  Claudia replied that they shouldn’t smoke anyway. Uproar ensued. Frank, sitting next to her in the lounge, reached across and grasped her wrist with a fervour I cannot say I have ever seen in him before, and Claudia’s response was fast and majestic—an arcing slap to the face, her pink-nailed hand flying so elegantly towards the nice flat mottled surface of his cheek. I intervened. Please, I said, be calm. But by then there was shouting and rebellion against Frank for his violence towards Claudia, which lasted only so long. As soon as Frank reminded them of what Claudia had said, the judgement she had made about them, opinion swung. Who was she to say they shouldn’t smoke? Who were the Australians to say they shouldn’t smoke? When you’ve fought in a war in the East African mountains or driven an infantry tank into a destroyed Normandy village and put your own neck on the line for your country, why not smoke your lungs down to prunes? They’re your own lungs, that’s the thing, why not?

  And suddenly somebody took off his shoe and threw it at the wall, and so more shoes flew, and magazines, and cups were overturned, and even non-smokers became incensed. I am not sure anybody really knew what they were incensed about—but then I have always been amazed and amused by how quickly causes crumble and general childishness and petulance begin. Part of me wanted to applaud them. It is good to get angry, to throw your shoe! I wanted to throw mine. Instead I had to calm them down, which I did by standing in their firing line with my eyes closed and arms open. The shouting died down and the last of the flung things hit the wall or floor with apologetic thuds.

  Then I collected and reallocated possessions. In all of this, Gene had been sitting at the table in the corner taking apart the TV remote control, which has broken. He had laid out its component pieces and started putting them together again with only an occasional glance up at the furore. I made tea in two large stainless-steel pots, took one pot out to the summer house for the smokers who had made an emergency congregation there, and the other to the lounge. They all drank with those glassy fevered eyes that you only see in the elderly; even Claudia joined their larger cause and drank with them. Frank stroked her wrist and muttered warmly, Bastards! A swear word thrown back at the things that deny us, I suppose. Anger at the brutality of getting old. Later I found a teaspoon wedged in the bars of the gas fire, now bent because I had to prise it out. When I found it, there was a pool of tea in its belly still, held down by some centripetal force while the thing spun across the room. I stole it. Because it reminds me of your hurled fork I will enclose this little trinket of rebellion with the letter.

  Where are the younger selves in these people? Did we see them just then? Was that a thirty-year-old Claudia who unleashed a slap across Frank’s face? Was it a teenage Frank who muttered, Bastards? Did the eighty-year-old man throw the shoe, or did some stubborn child inside him do it? Some child who doesn’t understand the concept of eighty, let alone the practicality of getting there. A strange thing happened at The Willows during that fight, a truly strange thing: ghosts appeared. For a few minutes our number was doubled and we had the company of gh
osts of selves past. I saw them at everyone’s backs, I felt them. Young, lean rebels; I felt them, Butterfly. And then what? When we settled back down into our chairs, where did they go? When will they come back? Do they mind our betrayal of them?

  I am not only talking about getting older, no, I am talking about splintering. We hit certain points, we splinter, and bits of ourselves are left behind. I don’t know why this should be, only that time isn’t a slick medium that we slide through into old age, it is lumpy and irregular and breaks us into pieces. I see Nicolas dancing in the house in London or I see the man with leaves in his hair, who walked tall and was happy one autumn morning, or I see myself somewhat vaguely (it is always vague with myself) taking bones out of the sedge at the shore or standing with my arms crossed in the kitchen doorway watching Teddy immerse his hands in puddles on the patio. There is freedom there; there is always freedom in the past. The self you left behind lives in endless possibility. The older you get, the bigger and wilder the past becomes, a place that can never again be tended and which is therefore prone to that loveliness that happens on wastelands and wildernesses, where grass has grown over scrap metal and wheat has sprung up in cracks between concrete and there is no regular shape for the light to fall flat on, so it vaults and multiplies and you want to go there. You want to go there like you want to go to a lover.

  Have I stumbled on an answer to Nicolas’ proposal, is that why I’m telling you this? Doesn’t this amount to the conclusion that we cannot remarry? We will not be faithful to each other, I will have to tell him, and then he’ll frown as if I want to invent problems, just as he thinks I always do. Then I will have to tell him that as we get older—if we are honest—there are no longer only two people in a relationship, there is who you are now and also the person each of you used to be, or the one you always wanted to be, the one you split from at some point in the past, and try as you might you cannot get rid of these others. Just as you try to start again and let the past go, they wander into the house and hell breaks loose.