Dear Thief: A Novel

by Samantha Harvey

  They point out all the things you should be dissatisfied with and suddenly you fall in love with them. Their courage, their unwillingness to compromise, their passion! They went off and saw the world, they took risks, they played the high cards for big money while you dabbled with the low ones, and they have come back strong and empty-handed to show that your own clinging is pointless. They are commendable in every way you are not—they haven’t gone back on their principles or put out their fire or need forgiving for the unforgivable, that is, for becoming unattractive, frightened, despicable, for falling in on themselves like a mountain in an avalanche. How can a person be forgiven that? It is such hard work to love you now, they say. Who will love you now? It used to be so easy, back when. But now, so much has to be made out of so little, more effort than Christ had to make with the fish and the bread. They like to remind you of all these battles you have lost. They haven’t lost any! You become besotted with them, hungry for them, like an old man for a schoolgirl who makes him forget he is ineligible, had it, finished.

  This is what I think I want to explain to Nicolas when he comes back, that we are all more than one person and we all conduct love affairs with the selves that we were—it is a sort of lurid duplicity in which we creep off back into our own pasts and try to make ourselves whole by becoming jealously infatuated with the self that got away. Any marriage we had now would have to be bigger and more generous than we could make it, because I bring into it another woman, he another man. I want to warn him: if we lived together again as husband and wife neither of us could be faithful, we would sneak downstairs every night to that other person.

  June 2002

  You see? Time has passed, another week, gone with the snap of a twig. This is exactly what I mean, about time. Where and how it goes is unfathomable to me. I make my way back and forth across the city half watching out for you, until everybody looks like you. I know the futility of this, but the eyes look, don’t they, without the involvement of reason. Meanwhile June has come as you can see, the start of the gracious season, the season for forgetting that one’s windows need cleaning because the light is too high and full to glare off the glass. You would think that living is a kind of scholarship in time, and that the longer we live the more expert we become at coping with it, in the way that, if you play tennis enough, you get used to coping with faster and faster serves. Instead I find that the longer I live the more bemused I become, and the more impenetrable the subject shows itself to be. I sit on a heap of days. My feet no longer touch the ground. The day after Teddy’s fifth birthday he asked if it was his birthday still and we had to tell him no. He began sobbing inconsolably and he didn’t stop, nothing we could say would make him stop.

  Is this a trick played on us? I remember stroking Teddy’s hair then and feeling that, as a mother, there ought to be something I could do, somewhere I could lodge a complaint.

  Adog is barking. Something small like a terrier or a—I don’t know. I don’t know a thing about dogs. Making a chopping sound through the forest, which is driving you spare. After two days of this you bash about the hut singing, you clank pans with sticks, you shout out: This is perfect, this is perfect! This is perfect, perfect, perfect, perfect! You turn up the squawking of the geese—honk, bark, honk, bark, an animal orchestra; if only you had not caught the mouse that thrived in the one food cupboard on bags of oats and barley, then there would have been vocals to the percussion and that would have been perfect, perfect, perfect, perfect. Outside the hut you stand and bark with it. It, you, it, you. It hesitates at first because it doesn’t recognise your language—dog, but not dog. You are some big dog, a mastiff maybe; you howl. It barks. You growl, it barks. You bark, it barks. Please! you shout, and it barks.

  You pull up a log outside the hut and sit; if you close your eyes and do that thing whereby you gather the outside world inwards, you can put the dog in your head. If the dog is in your head it is not a dog any more but a passing perception. What is it they say? A cloud, moving across the clean sky of your mind. A dog-shaped cloud, bounding through your mind; a dog, barking in your mind, a dog up against your skull, a dog-bark gnawing through your skull.

  Why is there no peace! The dog must be shot, or pelted with stones. You march down to the lake where the mosquitoes swarm and you go in up to your ankles. If you were a different sort of a person you would swim, it being the right day for it—warm and still. The water sits motionless against the shore like a spread blanket. If cold water did not make you feel instantly hostile, you would take off your tired old cotton dress and get in and get your head under, into the dogless silence. If you were one of those women who love to bake and to swim, you would. You know the ones I mean—women with curves and a boisterous brood and recipe books from their grandmothers, women with wild-flower arrangements and menstrual cycles that work with the moon, women whose milk flows, whose cheeks are ruddy in the cold, whose long thick hair lightens in the sun, who can improvise something interesting with rhubarb or even turnip, who reread the classics, who rub almond oil into their nice thick middles, whose skirts give to a full easy stride, whose calves are strong and ankles fine, women with small dignified noses amid wide compassionate faces, women who are trusted by birds and lambs.

  You stand ankle-deep in the water and let a mosquito settle on the vein on the back of your hand, before squashing it quick as a flash. It gave so easily; it is hard to take any pleasure out of this retaliation. You flick its corpse off your hand, angry at its weakness. Angry with everything today because of that dog, angry with this forest and this country. The spruce-pine-spruce-pine, the violent swinging of the seasons, the brackish lifeless sea, the food that sits like clay in your stomach; everybody is melancholic and drunk. They all drink too much. The national disease. You shouldn’t say it but there it is, the truth. Your ancestors, coming to Scotland, must have been relieved to find a similar picture there, and no wonder they failed to prosper on the whole. It was only your grandmother who slipped through the eye of that needle.

  Evening falls, but not darkness. The dog is still hacking away at the calm. You lie for a while on the charpoy but more of the ropes have broken and your weight is unsupported on the left side; using an old winter scarf you lace it up again like a shoe and contemplate your exile. Why has she put me here? you ask. Why has she locked me here in a forest inside a letter? On one piece of evidence that is extremely scant: a postcard to Teddy with a Lithuanian stamp and a comment, rashly made, about deserts. From which she fashions a life. Does she not consider that I sent that postcard on a visit to see Petras’ grave, perhaps? A four-day visit, nothing more? No, instead she fashions a sad and absurd life.

  I have considered that, of course. You made it clear that day on the windowsill, when you showed me the photograph of your great-grandmother scowling drably from the roadside, that you did not want a heritage. There is a type of person who does not want back, but wants out. Out! Out of the confines of yourself. You are not the type to have a sentimental relationship with your past, or to feel, like Gene, drawn back towards the valley of songs. The Jew in you is indifferent. She is sorry that the past has been one long fight, she is sorry for the suffering; sorry, but not that interested.

  Heaven is for those that are masters of themselves. They can move anywhere in this world at their pleasure. Anywhere in the world, you say aloud. So why here? You take out from under the mattress the short letter Petras wrote you before he died, a letter that, in reality, might not even be in your possession. But I am giving it to you, herewith. It arrived at our house a few months after you left in January 1985, and I opened it, because you had left no forwarding address and because I owed you no discretion. Whether it ever ended up in your hands depends, I suppose, on Nicolas, whether he passed it on to you when he saw you next, or else sent it to you later, and this is for only you and him to know. But here, I have stashed it under your mattress and given you the will to look at it again.

  As you see, it describes great happiness at the prospect
of a free country now that Gorbachev has come. He is so young, Petras enthuses. So progressive! Attached to the letter is a newspaper clipping with a picture of Gorbachev; the clipping is seventeen years old now, and looks it. You inspect his square, strong face, fascinated by the violent wound of a birthmark and the downturned mouth that appears so kind. So unassailable, yet avuncular, so trustworthy; he is the sort of man you have to assimilate all at once, because the separate parts of him don’t add up.

  Meanwhile Petras and his scientist friends are planning to test the eutrophication of Lake Drūkšiai to see if the nuclear-power station has warmed the water, and this all sounds hopeful and noble indeed, and with Gorbachev and his reforms on the scene they might even be able to publish their results. You let the letter drop to the floor. Five months later Petras will over-indulge his love of a drink and will spread himself face-down on the roof of a car that is hurtling along a dark lane and will die laughing, as will his friend who is driving. Weeks away from forty and he dies the death of a teenager.

  Why have you put me here? you say. Punishment? To teach me a lesson? You were always the coward in a family of heroes; it was the others who fought the fight, and that they only sometimes won is testament to their courage. This is what you think I am trying to tell you now by trapping you here, still alive, in a country the rest of your people have left, either by accident or design. That you are a coward. I have consigned you to pining for those who were bolder than you. I have you craning your neck backwards. I know you feel you have tolerated me enough, my insinuations and implications. I am a coward, you say. So what? I never claimed to be anything else. You lie flat. All this with Petras; why must you be forced to rub up against terrible loss that cannot be undone when all you want is to be free, and when I know that this is all you want, and take it from you out of cruelty.

  I have contemplated, between this paragraph and the last, a peace offering. How about if you put on your shawl, take some oatcakes and a bit of leftover chicken in some newspaper from the pile by the stove, and walk out along the track towards the only building in the vicinity, where the barking dog must be tied up. I have given you this building, and this sudden compassion for the dog, out of sheer love and friendship. It seems wrong for you to be so alone. But I think, when I approach you with this idea about the chicken and oatcakes, you shake your head. I see you sit up on the charpoy and look intently ahead as if I were sitting opposite; you are wearing that look, the one you reserve for arguments you don’t intend to lose. You straighten your back a little for dignity. Do you think you have punished me? you say. You will have to try harder than that; let the thing bark.

  So, deep into the night, it does.

  As I say, I am not a gentle person. I have not succeeded in becoming one, despite my efforts.

  At work I was called in and asked how I had allowed that fight to happen, and at first I said the usual things, like there being nothing I could do, and that I had stopped it as soon as I was able, but we all knew that if it had been another member of staff on duty the fight would not have happened.

  Why? Because I suppose I liked it happening. Of course I could have stopped it, but I enjoyed the flare of energy ripping through that room, and I wanted heartrates up. I wanted them to be angry again, instead of lost. We find ourselves in anger, we shout and there we are. I appreciated the bit of pink on Claudia’s wrist where Frank had grabbed her. I thought: She flushes still! Her body is alive enough to object to violence against it. She feels pain. Good. They want to smoke their lungs down to burnt prunes: encourage them. If their lungs can wither, that means they are living things, since only living things wither. We let elderly people smoke forty a day because we think it no longer matters, they are as good as dead anyway so we let them do what they like. But I say do more than let them, it matters more than ever that they smoke, because only living things can smoke, wither, go pink in the wrist, reel out a slap, spit the word bastard, hurl a teaspoon, a shoe, a cup, be angry about what happens in Australia, feel pain, protest.

  There is that little bit of savagery in me that my grandmother did try, to her credit, to smooth away. She would say that it was always better to be peaceful and non-reactive and I don’t think she would agree that we find ourselves in anger. On the contrary, we lose ourselves. But she didn’t manage to take the last few thorns out of my side. Eventually I admitted at work that I had probably not done enough to keep control, and they talked to me at length about insurance, health-and-safety, legal responsibility, moral responsibility, in loco parentis. In loco parentis. At the age of their children we are asked to act as their parents.

  And so I spent my breaktime watching over Gene’s sleeping body, trying to glue together a porcelain statuette of a boxer puppy that had lived on the mantelpiece and been broken by something like a slipper, trying without success to imagine myself as Gene’s parent. I can tell you I felt indignant on Gene’s behalf that I should be asked to make him half a man like this, while I somehow, in this little shuffle of roles, became twice a woman. But I tried it, to feel that protective care I mean, to want to dandle his aged, frightened spirit while it creeps towards the next world; to let him be done for. To let him have nothing left to be angry about.

  Since telling me about M that day he hardly speaks, to me or anybody. He keeps some interest in the things of life (like the remote control, which he obsessively dismantles and rebuilds), but he seems to have lost much investment in what happens to himself. I get the feeling he has come here to do one thing only, and that is to die with as little trouble to others as possible. Some days he barely gets out of bed and barely even wakes up, and he sleeps on top of the covers completely naked and with the window wide open. This made it all the more surprising when he said to me the other day, with sudden force, ‘I should have chased her.’ It was just after the fight, when everybody else went out into the garden and he was still at the table reassembling the remote control. He raised his head as I walked towards him and inspected the mess in the room. ‘I should have chased her,’ he stated as a fact. ‘Who?’ I asked. Because he said nothing I asked, eventually, ‘M?’ He nodded. ‘Do you regret it?’ I asked. ‘Yes!’ he said, pressing the side of his fist into the table.

  I put my hand on his shoulder and said something consoling like, Don’t regret it, or You did all you could, or simply, Well. I don’t know which words slipped out and I don’t suppose they made any difference to him anyway, but when I was tidying the room after that I found I was comparing myself to him again, in the sense of being passive I mean, passive to the point of losing somebody, and I enjoyed this fantasy. I bought deeply into it for a few minutes, thinking about those few months after Spain, before you suddenly disappeared, and seeing myself as docile, tolerant, self-possessed and, at last, gentle, in the way Gene is, and Yannis too. When I pictured you and I playing 21 just after we got back from Spain I was, in my imagination anyway, tending expertly and quietly to my cards in the way Gene had tended to the remote control, while the rest of the place went to pieces.

  Went to pieces? I hear you say. Who or what went to pieces?—we were a house of calm. Weren’t we happier in a way? I hear you ask it almost sweetly. After all, you might have slept with Nicolas, but you were never going to expect him to leave his family or give himself in any way to you; devotion was not a quality you asked of people, commitment neither; you did not give these things and did not ask for them. If you could give and receive moments of happiness and self-escape, that was enough, that was, in fact, everything. Didn’t Nicolas become a different man after that, one who went from investing endless hope in a world that rarely delivered to one who had had a hope met? After a month or so of bitter exclusion he found himself gradually allowed back into the fold and he did not come back in regret and self-loathing, but with a certain muted victory over life and over the forces of loss. He had done what he liked and got away with it; his incredulity was plain to see, his new faith in the ability to be happy, to have what one wants. To have all the things
one wants, at once, without conflict or reproach or guilt, to be allowed such a thing.

  Didn’t we live in a kind of new communal harmony? Didn’t our household take on a new unity and balance? Everybody was someone and had a role to play. By that point you had been with us for two years as an outsider and then all at once you were part of our number. You developed a perverse obsession with cooking, mainly single-pan maverick meals of meat and foraged greens. You were going through a phase of eating liver and kidneys that the butcher gave you for next to nothing, so you dealt up fortified pans of iron and blood, and the zincy phosphorus of greens, thick glossy chard cooked down to a mulch, limp chickweed and sweet nettles that were, pre-massacre, probably emerald and springy; a plateful of soft metals that Teddy would not have eaten if anybody but you had put it in front of him.

  I remember one meal in particular, one I’m sure you will not remember at all (or which did not even sink in far enough to become a memory), when you put one of these plates of chickweed and liver in front of us, and Nicolas, staring at it expressionless for a few moments, said, ‘I am not going to eat this.’ There was no anger in that or even impatience or frustration, he just put it to you as a fact, and you smiled from somewhere remote and said thickly, ‘You don’t like the look of it?’ ‘Starvation would be preferable.’ You patted his knuckle lightly with your knife: ‘Starve then.’