by Tim Pears
‘Look, Klaus, I’m sorry,’ Ezra began, still staring at the letter. ‘I just had no idea, I mean, I don’t know what she –’
‘Please,’ Kuuzik interrupted. ‘Don’t apologise, my friend. I think it is so excellent, this letter.’
‘You do?’
‘This idealism, that is also independent. She shares our hopes, but from her own perspective. I think it is really impressive, Ezra. Maybe soon we can take her into our confidence, no? Let her know the real thinking behind the project. You know, my own daughters I believe are good girls; they take what we feed them. Your Blaise.’ Kuuzik shook his head. ‘She thinks for herself. You should be very proud of her, my friend.’
With which words Ezra decided that he probably was.
That afternoon Ezra slipped out of work a little early. He cycled not north but south, under the railway bridge and along Botley Road and then right into Abbey Road. At the end he pushed the bike over the bridge across the stream and on along the path beside the slow-moving Thames. The hot air hummed with midges. The ring-road droned in the background. The river on his left looked as if deep beneath the surface a great effort was required to move its turgid load towards the sea. To his right passed the new estate beside the railway line, and then the Cripley Meadow allotments.
Ahead of him Ezra could hear the shrieks and splashes of kids leaping into the basin of water by Medley Bridge. He paused and peered at them through his sunglasses until he was sure that none of his nor the Carlyles’ children were there, or any others he recognised.
Ezra dragged his bike into the trees on Fiddler’s Island. He lay the bike down and walked through to a patch of grass beside Castle Mill stream. Minty wasn’t here yet. Fortunately, there was no one else here, either, so far as he could see. He hoped that when they’d agreed to meet on the telephone just now, she was picturing the same spot as him. He’d gritted his teeth to tough it out, gambling that Minty remained sane and scared enough not to jeopardise their marriages. Today, though, when she admitted she honestly didn’t know whether she could hold it together for another day if they didn’t see each other, some hunch, or cowardice, made him weaken.
Dragonflies seemed to skate across an invisible plane some inches above the stream. Ezra gazed out across the Meadow. There were no kites in the sky, only birds: swallows veered and swerved as if scanning the ground below. Searching desperately for something. Like widow birds, seeking evidence of hidden graves. Swerving and veering without pause. Ezra laughed at himself: most likely the swallows had no interest in the land below them. No attachment whatsoever; no, they were swooping on insects in the gulleys and currents of the invisible sky. He had wanted to bring them in his mind down to earth, when they lived self-contained up in the air.
Minty surprised him. ‘Didn’t you see me? I was waving.’ She knelt down, out of breath, and embraced him, burying her head in his neck; he could sense that she was smelling him, inhaling his aroma. After what seemed like minutes, Ezra gently prised her off him.
‘How do you do it, Ezra?’ she asked, with what looked like adoration and anger cohabiting dangerously in her limpid eyes.
‘I have no choice,’ he replied. ‘And neither do you.’
Minty lit herself a cigarette. ‘Can’t we just see each other?’ she said. ‘Meet in some civilised friends’ apartment.’ She gave that worldly, throaty chuckle of hers. How misleading it was, Ezra thought. She looked at him, smiled with her mouth closed, raised her eyebrows. ‘Like French adulterers.’
Suddenly, as if a fuse had been lit to his libido, Ezra felt himself rise from disinterest to readiness in a second. ‘What would it do to Simon if he found out?’ he asked.
Minty blew smoke into the air. ‘Frankly, sport, I suspect he’d be delighted.’
Ezra folded his legs to cover up his erection. Surely it wasn’t Minty, surely it was her eagerness transmitting its chemical message to his reptilian nerves. But good God, he wanted it. Right now. He must get rid of her, make her leave first, then retreat into the trees, to shoot his spunk at the undergrowth before riding home.
‘Well, I think Sheena would be devastated,’ he said. ‘But the adults, I grant you, could cope and recover. It’s for the children, Minty, that we have to draw a line under this madness.’ He watched his hand reach out to her arm and squeeze it, his disingenuous hand, pretending a friendly gesture, in reality blind and hungry for contact with her flesh. It slid down her arm to her hand. His fingers encircled hers: he could feel the passage of his arousal advancing towards fulfilment.
Minty gazed out across the flat plain. ‘What about when the children have left home, darling?’ she asked.
‘What about it?’ Ezra laughed.
‘If we agree,’ Minty said, turning to face him. ‘Ezra: if we resolve to postpone our own happiness until all our children have grown up, I think I could live with that. But could you?’
They were looking into each other’s eyes. The tears Minty seemed to have brought with her had spilled, her mascara run. How weird it was. After fifteen years of marriage, he was still attracted to his wife, and they seldom had sex. Here was their friend he’d never considered himself attracted to, and Ezra wanted urgently to fuck her.
But what on this earth was Minty talking about? After the children have left home? Did she have any idea what she was proposing? Louie was three years old. Was she saying that if they pledged themselves to each other now, she would cause no trouble for the next fifteen years? A man could fall in love with a woman who would say such a thing. But they’d be in their mid-fifties then, and who knew what other ructions and calamities might occur in the meantime?
‘Oh, Minty, you fine undeserving fool,’ Ezra said, taking her hand. ‘Yes, I could,’ he told her. ‘But one thing might make it easier.’
‘What thing?’ Minty asked eagerly.
‘Do you think if we made love now, we could lay the ghost? Put it to sleep for these years ahead? For me, anyway, it might be possible. I mean, I don’t know –’
‘Oh, yes,’ Minty said, and she pushed against him. Ezra let himself fall on the grass behind, and Minty was kissing him, lying across his chest. Her body was identifiably lighter than Sheena’s. Ezra rolled her over and soon entered her, and humped her as he had two weeks before, at the party, though this time, without the drugs, Ezra came, and came soon, groaning with ecstatic regret. While Minty didn’t come at all. She came nowhere near, but lay there beneath Ezra’s spent weight, a mosquito hovering within earshot, wondering, as she looked up at the green-black leaves of the still branches above her, why she allowed herself this brutal, this unfathomable, deception.
At home Ezra showered and changed into white cotton trousers and a blue linen shirt. Sheena prepared supper. Rogue Male spread face down across his chest Hector lay on the sofa, exhausted; as if Summertown library were a fiendish organisation, dispersing these bromides across the locality, lulling the population for some insidious invasion. Luckily there was someone in the house capable of defending the family: Louie challenged his father to a wrestle on the carpet, where despite giving away a hundred and forty pounds he grappled him into a hotly disputed submission.
When Blaise entered the room Ezra recovered to tell her, ‘There’s a letter for you, over there.’
‘What’s it say?’ Blaise asked, as she opened the envelope that was on the mantelpiece.
‘Read it.’
After a split second’s perusal, Blaise said, ‘I can’t.’
‘Are you blind?’
‘It’s written in turquoise ink. It’s illegible.’
‘I’m sure it’s perfectly legible.’
‘Can’t you read it, Daddy?’
‘Give it here.’
Sheena came through from the kitchen to the sitting-room area, carrying a bowl of crisps, as Ezra read aloud.
‘My dear Blaise,
Thank you so very much for your frank and charming letter. I appreciate your comments more than I can say at this moment in time. I would only ask you to trust us –
me and your father and the rest of our team – when I say that we are involved in a project to make this world a better place. And if we did not believe this, we would not do it.
I look forward to renewing our acquaintance.
Yours sincerely,
Klaus Kuuzik.’
Ezra finished reading the letter and lowered it to his lap. Before he was able to say that actually he was, he had to admit, impressed that the busiest person he had ever met had found the time …
‘You see, Ezra?’ said Sheena, announcing a declarative question. ‘You see? You tell me there’s this incredible man running your company now, but this is why I won’t have any more to do with your work? Because he sounds like just the same patronising company stooge as all the rest. You see?’
Ezra shook his head. How he wished he could tell his family all about the project, and the real motives behind it. In time, he told himself. Be patient.
‘I don’t know what you’re talking about, Mum,’ Blaise said, reaching forward to retrieve the letter from her father. ‘It’s polite. It’s friendly. Obviously Dad’s told you about my letter. What did you expect? A complete shift in company policy because of a letter from a fourteen-year-old?’
‘Mum’s talking about the tone of the letter,’ Hector said.
Blaise looked at her brother sadly. ‘When what’s being said is sailing over your head,’ she said, ‘it might be better to lie low, don’t you think?’
‘There’s no need to be rude to your brother,’ Sheena admonished her.
‘Enough!’ Ezra declared, pulling himself to his feet. ‘Supper!’
‘Enough?’ Sheena asked, addressing anyone and everyone. ‘There’s plenty more. As much as anybody wants, as long as they’re living in this house.’
An hour or two later Louie and Hector slumped off to bed at more or less the same time. Sheena put on a DVD of a favourite old movie, Matador. Ezra went up to his spare-room study. The time had come to evacuate the clutter from his life. By Christmas they’d be in production at the Turkish plant and shipping bottles to Tel Aviv, and maybe even direct to Gaza. This weekend would be the launch for investors and brokers. Sober greedy lies and tacky razzamatazz. In a year or so the family could move to a bigger house, and he’d have his own room at last, but it wouldn’t bear a trace of his academic past: he’d use it for peace in which to think more deeply than was possible at work. He’d use it to listen to all the music he never seemed to listen to any more. To start collecting the books of photography he’d always wanted to. Maybe he’d even write again? But stories this time, knowing what they were.
On Friday afternoon Ezra left work. The Isis Water building was in a chaos of costume fitters and racks of clothes. He met Blaise at Oxford Station, where they caught the sixteen-fifteen to Paddington. He needed to be at the hotel a day early to join those overseeing preparations for the launch. Blaise could have followed her father on Saturday, but she was keen to take advantage of this stay in four-star luxury. And when Ezra asked if she planned to go shopping on Saturday Blaise surprised him by saying she’d just as soon watch the financial presentation in the afternoon, if that was possible; if that were permissible. She reckoned she’d find it interesting. Was she dropping hints, he wondered – to herself as much as to him – that she might be interested in a similar career to his? Well, and why not?
Between Didcot and Reading the railway line ran through the wide, sweeping Thames valley, green and gracious in this unending English summer. Blaise had heeled off her trainers and sat with her feet tucked under her buttocks in the seat opposite Ezra, who gazed out of the window, when there was a file open on his laptop awaiting last-minute suggestions for pepping up Alan Blozenfeld’s speech. Looking out at the bending river only made him dream of idling downstream in a rowing boat.
‘Daddy.’
Ezra turned to Blaise.
‘Daddy, tell me the story? Of the warrior who died?’
‘You want another story?’
‘Yes.’
‘His name was Pakani.’
Blaise shrugged.
‘Okay,’ Ezra said. ‘I know the one. Well, when someone died, everybody else gathered their belongings, and the whole tribe would leave at first light, to set up a new camp some way distant. They hoped that the spirit of the deceased – all dead spirits sleep during the day – wouldn’t be able to find them.
‘Now Pakani, husband of Tikangi, father of Bekoni and Kabuchi, was a great hunter, the best in the tribe, but one day he made a mistake: even though I’d been with the group for a year by then, and lived as they did, I’d been unable to give up my boots, for fear of snakes. I was often naked.’
Blaise grimaced. Ezra ignored her.
‘But never barefoot. And my caution was vindicated by Pakani’s misfortune: the great hunter stepped on a venomous snake, was bitten, and fell sick. His companions carried him back to the camp and the women applied a compress derived from a certain plant. Though this medicine might be important, it wasn’t crucial: everyone knew that whether Pakani recovered or declined was already decided. His destiny was preordained.
‘Tikangi nursed her husband: she covered him with ashes; she stuck vultures’ feathers on him; she spooned water and honey into his mouth. To no avail. Pakani died. The whole group mourned. Tikangi, his wife, grieved loudly, joined by her daughters Bekoni and Kabuchi. That night, however, one man was particularly distraught: Chimuni, the chief of the group, was also Pakani’s brother, and now with a voice of thunder he sang his lament.
‘“My brother has gone. He is here. He must be avenged.”
‘No one in the camp could sleep. Chimuni’s voice was stentorian and spellbinding. “The snake has killed the great hunter. My brother is dead. Who will avenge him? I will avenge him.”
‘Pakani had been the victim of a terrible injustice, and his dead spirit was certainly still there, hovering just beyond the light of the fires, waiting for the debt that was owed him. Tomorrow the group would leave this place, but that might not be enough. Pakani, after all, was a great tracker when alive, and surely would remain so in death. His people mourned him, but they wished he would leave them, and go to the Invisible Forest.
‘Pakani would not leave. Because he suffered the agony of solitude. To have lost the companionship of his fellows is the greatest injustice that could befall him. But it is also the avenue of redress.
‘“The hunter is gone,” Chimuni sang. “My brother is gone. I shall avenge him.”
‘Revenge against the snake,’ Blaise assumed.
‘The dead man desires one thing: a companion, to go with him on his voyage to the home of the spirits. If he is given one, he will leave the living. But who will it be? Someone he loved, of course, who made him laugh with happiness. One of his children will be killed, almost always a girl – a boy is a future provider. This is the hunter’s vengeance, with which he will be honoured. He will carry his daughter off crouching on his shoulder, just as he carried her so often when he was alive. On the voyage into eternal oblivion she will be her father’s faithful companion.
‘Chimuni was burdened with the pain of his brother’s death and with the responsibility of avenging him. Pakani had two daughters: Kabuchi, still a baby, whose birth I had witnessed less than a year earlier, and Bekoni, who was now eight years old, a spirited, happy, friendly girl.
‘“The snake has bitten the hunter,” Chimuni sang. “I shall kill the daughter of Pakani and Tikangi. I shall kill Bekoni. I shall take up my bow.”
‘How did Bekoni feel?’ Blaise wondered. ‘Lying there in her family’s hut, hearing herself named as the one to be killed? That’s so horrible. Sacrificed in revenge for her father’s death?’
‘I know,’ Ezra agreed. ‘She lay awake, trembling in the night, keeping herself from dropping off; listening, watching Chimuni across the campfires. Midway through the night Tikangi, her mother, emerged from the hut, stoked the fire just outside it and sat there, singing softly to herself. It was a barely audible dirge, bu
t I was able to decipher that her mourning for her dead husband was joined by grief for Bekoni, who in Tikangi’s mind was as good as dead.
‘Chimuni stopped singing. Tikangi ceased her lamentation. The village was silent and still. Perhaps everyone apart from me fell asleep during those next few hours, I don’t know. At dawn I saw Chimuni cross the clearing with his heavy bow, enter the hut, and strike the prone figure of Bekoni, breaking her neck. The girl was dead, killed in revenge for the accidental death of her father. They were both buried that morning, Pakani laid first in the grave, his body curled up and bound in a foetal position, Bekoni draped over his shoulder. And so she went with him into the Invisible Forest.’
Ezra looked at his daughter, then out of the window. What a terrifying story it was. He wondered whether Blaise, when she requested it, had remembered its content.
‘You didn’t do anything?’ Blaise asked.
Ezra turned back to her. ‘Do anything?’
‘To stop him.’
‘What could I do, Blaise? I was from outside their culture. I had no right to intervene.’ Ezra laughed bitterly to himself. ‘Not that I hadn’t already interfered enough. More than enough.’
‘But to save the girl’s life.’
Ezra gazed at Blaise without saying anything. How curious. His great sin, which he’d found hard to admit to himself, and never had to anyone else, was that he’d interfered too much in the Achia’s way of life. And here was his daughter castigating him for not interfering enough. Maybe she was right, maybe he should have. It wouldn’t have saved the girl, they would merely have killed him, too – he’d never have met Sheena; his children would not have been born; he would be extinct – but maybe he should have tried anyway. That, he supposed, would have been the heroic choice.
‘After the burial,’ he said, deciding to add a coda to the story, to leave his listener with a different temper, ‘the Indians packed their belongings in a matter of minutes. And in a festive mood they set off, to walk for some miles and set up camp in a new place further upriver, forgetting the dead left behind them with every footstep.’
