Wilderness Tips

by Margaret Atwood

  Isis in Darkness, he writes. The Genesis. It exalts him simply to form the words. He will exist for her at last, he will be created by her, he will have a place in her mythology after all. It will not be what he once wanted: not Osiris, not a blue-eyed god with burning wings. His are humbler metaphors. He will only be the archaeologist; not part of the main story, but the one who stumbles upon it afterwards, making his way for his own obscure and battered reasons through the jungle, over the mountains, across the desert, until he discovers at last the pillaged and abandoned temple. In the ruined sanctuary, in the moonlight, he will find the Queen of Heaven and Earth and the Underworld lying in shattered white marble on the floor. He is the one who will sift through the rubble, groping for the shape of the past. He is the one who will say it has meaning. That too is a calling, that also can be a fate.

  He picks up a filing-card, jots a small footnote on it in his careful writing, and replaces it neatly in the mosaic of paper he is making across his desk. His eyes hurt. He closes them and rests his forehead on his two fisted hands, summoning up whatever is left of his knowledge and skill, kneeling beside her in the darkness, fitting her broken pieces back together.

  The Bog Man

  Julie broke up with Connor in the middle of a swamp.

  Julie silently revises: not exactly in the middle, not knee-deep in rotting leaves and dubious brown water. More or less on the edge; sort of within striking distance. Well, in an inn, to be precise. Or not even an inn. A room in a pub. What was available.

  And not in a swamp anyway. In a bog. Swamp is when the water goes in one end and out the other, bog is when it goes in and stays in. How many times did Connor have to explain the difference? Quite a few. But Julie prefers the sound of swamp. It is mistier, more haunted. Bog is a slang word for toilet, and when you hear bog you know the toilet will be a battered and smelly one, and that there will be no toilet paper.

  So Julie always says: I broke up with Connor in the middle of a swamp.

  There are other things she revises as well. She revises Connor. She revises herself. Connor's wife stays approximately the same, but she was an invention of Julie's in the first place, since Julie never met her. Sometimes she used to wonder whether the wife really existed at all, or was just a fiction of Connor's, useful for keeping Julie at arm's length. But no, the wife existed all right. She was solid, and she became more solid as time went on.

  Connor mentioned the wife, and the three children and the dog, fairly soon after he and Julie met. Well, not met. Slept together. It was almost the same thing.

  Julie supposes, now, that he didn't want to scare her off by bringing up the subject too soon. She herself was only twenty, and too naive to even think of looking for clues, such as the white circle on the ring finger. By the time he did get around to making a sheepish avowal or confession, Julie was in no position to be scared off. She was already lying in a motel room, wound loosely in a sheet. She was too tired to be scared off and also too amazed, and also too grateful. Connor was not her first lover but he was her first grown-up one, he was the first who did not treat sex as some kind of panty-raid. He took her body seriously, which impressed her no end.

  At the time - what was the time? It was twenty years ago, or twenty-five. More like thirty. It was the early sixties; the precise year had to do with bubble-cut hairdos, with white lipstick, with dark rings pencilled around the eyes. Also, purple was big as a colour, although Julie herself favoured the more rebellious black. She thought of herself as a sort of pirate. A dark-eyed, hawk-faced, shaggy-haired raider, making daring inroads on the borders of smug domestic settlements. Setting fire to the roofs, getting away with the loot, suiting herself. She studied modern philosophy, read Sartre on the side, smoked Gitanes, and cultivated a look of bored contempt. But inwardly, she was seething with unfocused excitement, and looking for someone to worship.

  Connor was it. Julie was in her last year of university, in Toronto, and Connor was her professor for Archaeology - a one-hour-a-week course you could take instead of Religious Knowledge. Julie fell in love with his voice, rich and rough-edged, persuasive and abraded, rising and falling in the darkness like a stroking, insistent hand while he showed slides of Celtic tombs. Then she got tangled up with him in his office, where she'd gone intentionally late in the day to discuss her final term paper. Then they'd ended up in the motel. In that era such things happened more easily between students and their professors, without any fear on the part of the professors that they would be accused of sexual harassment and lose their jobs. There was no such phrase as "sexual harassment," even. There was no such thought.

  At the time, Julie did not think the wife and the three kids and the dog had anything to do with her and Connor. She was too young to make such connections: the wife was as old as her own mother, almost, and women like that did not really have lives. She could not picture Connor in any context other than the motel rooms they would sneak into, or the apartments of Julie's friends, shambling, cheap apartments furnished with mattresses and decorated with egg cartons painted black nailed to the ceiling and with Chianti-bottle candle-holders. She did not think of him as having an existence apart from her: the wife and kids were just boring subsistence details, like brushing your teeth. Instead she saw him in glorious and noble isolation, a man singled out, like an astronaut, like a diver in a bell-jar, like a saint in a medieval painting, surrounded by a golden atmosphere of his own, a total-body halo. She wanted to be in there with him, participating in his radiance, basking in his light.

  Because of her original awe of Connor - he was very smart, he knew a lot about ancient bones, about foreign travel, about how to mix drinks - she did not drive nearly as hard a bargain with him as she could have. But then, she had not been conscious of driving a bargain at all. She had been possessed by some notion of self-sacrifice; she had asked nothing for herself, except that Connor should continue to be superhuman.

  The first motel was two months ago. Julie feels she has aged a great deal since then. She sits in the uncomfortable maroon plush armchair in her room in the Scottish pub in the small town near the bog, beside the window with its grubby white curtains and the clear northern light coming in, smoking Gitanes and drinking from a cold cup of tea she's brought up from her spectacularly awful breakfast with its limp, underdone bacon and its burnt grilled tomatoes. She sits and she smokes, and she knits.

  Knitting is something she has just taken up again, having learned it as a child from a mother who believed in the female domestic virtues. She was also taught to crochet, to set in zippers, to polish silverware, to produce a gleaming toilet. This was baggage she'd discarded as soon as she hit Spinoza; two years, a year ago, she would have despised knitting. But there is not a lot to do in this town when Connor is not here. Julie has been up and down the main street several times; she has been drizzled on by the weather, she has been scowled at by the tweed-covered inhabitants. She has sat in the one cafe and drunk vile coffee and eaten bland and lard-flavoured scones. She has inspected the ancient church: not a lot to see there. The stained-glass windows must have gone when the Presbyterians took over. Dead soldiers' names on the wall, as if God were interested.

  The knitting is a last resort. Whatever else tiny Scottish towns like this one may lack, they all have wool stores. Julie had gone into the wool store, fended off enquiries as to her marital status and general mode of existence, and bought a pattern for a sweater - jumper, they call it here - and some big needles, and a number of skeins of dark grey wool. She'd wound the skeins into balls, and then she'd gone back to the store and bought an ugly tapestry bag with wooden handles to put them in.

  What she's knitting is a sweater for Connor. She's doing the first sleeve. After a while she realizes that she's knitted the sleeve eight inches longer than it should be. It will make Connor look like an orang-outang. Let him complain, she thinks. She leaves it that way and begins on the other sleeve. She intends to make it equally long.

  While Julie knits, Connor is off insp
ecting the bog man. The bog man is why they are here.

  When the bog-man find was announced, they were on the island of Orkney. Connor was looking at standing-stone ring sites and Julie was pretending to be his assistant. This was Connor's bright idea. It has allowed him to write off Julie as part of the expense of this particular expedition, but it has fooled nobody for long; at least not the barmen, at least not the maids in the various inns where they've been staying, who sneer at Julie in a dour, self-righteous way, despite the fact that Julie and Connor have taken care to book separate rooms. Maybe Julie should look more industrious; maybe she should carry notebooks and bustle around more.

  Despite the sneers of the maids and the innuendoes of the barmen, Julie enjoyed herself quite a lot in Orkney. Not even the breakfasts dismayed her, not even the congealed oatmeal and the dry toast. Not even the dinners. It would have taken a good many rock-hard lamb chops, a great deal of over-fried fish, to dampen her spirits. It was her first trip across the Atlantic Ocean; she wanted things to be old and picturesque. More important, it was the first time she and Connor had been alone together for any length of time. She felt almost marooned with him. He felt it too; he was more uninhibited, less nervous about footsteps outside the door; and although he still had to get up and sneak out in the middle of the night, it was comforting to know that he only snuck next door.

  The fields were green, the sun shone, the stone circles were suitably mysterious. If Julie stood in the centres of them and closed her eyes and kept still, she thought she could hear a sort of hum. Connor's theory was that these rings were not merely large harmless primitive calendars, erected for the purpose of determining the solstices. He thought they were the sites of ritual human sacrifices. This should have made them more sinister for Julie, but it did not. Instead she felt a connection with her ancestors. Her mother's family had come from this part of the world, more or less; from somewhere in the north of Scotland. She liked to sit among the standing stones and picture her ancestors running around naked and covered with blue tattoos, offering cups of blood to the gods, or whatever they did. Some bloodthirsty, indecipherable Pictish thing. The blood made them authentic, as authentic as the Mayans; or at least more authentic than all that clan and tartan and bagpipe stuff, which Julie found tedious and sentimental. There had been enough of it at her university, enough to last her for a while.

  But then the bog man had been discovered and they'd had to pack and take the ferry to the mainland, where it was rainier. Julie would have liked to stay on Orkney but Connor was hot on the trail. He wanted to get there before the bog man had been completely, as he said, ruined. He wanted to get there before everyone else.

  This particular bog man had been unearthed by a peat-digger, who'd cut into him accidentally with the sharp blade of his shovel, severing the feet. He'd thought he was a recent murder victim. It was hard for him to believe the bog man was two thousand years old: he was so perfectly preserved.

  Some of the previously uncovered bog people aren't much to look at, judging by the pictures of them Connor has shown her. The bog water has tanned their skins and preserved their hair, but often their bones have dissolved and the weight of the peat has squashed them flat, so that they resemble extremely sick items of leather gear. Julie does not feel the same connection with them that she felt with the standing stones. The idea of human sacrifice is one thing, but the leftovers are something else again.

  Before this trip, Julie didn't know very much about bog people, but now she does. For instance, this bog man died by being strangled with a twisted leather noose and sunk in the bog, probably as a sacrifice to the Great Goddess Nerthus, or someone like her, to insure the fertility of the crops. "After a sexual orgy of some kind," said Connor hopefully. "Those nature goddesses were voracious."

  He proceeded to give examples of the things that had been sacrificed to the nature goddesses. Necklaces were a feature, and pots. Many pots and cauldrons had been dug up out of the bogs, here and there around northern Europe. Connor has a map, with the sites marked and a list of what has been found at each one. He seems to think Julie ought to have memorized this list, that she ought to have its details at her fingertips, and acts surprised when it turns out she doesn't. Among his other virtues, or defects - Julie is just beginning to find it hard to tell the difference - Connor is very pedagogical. Julie has started to suspect him of trying to mould her mind. Into what, is the question.

  As she knits, she makes a mental list of other things that get moulded. Steamed Christmas puddings, poured-concrete lawn dwarfs, gelatin desserts, wobbly and bright pink and dotted with baby marshmallows. Thinking of these reminds Julie of her own mother, and then of Connor's wife.

  It's astounding to her, the way this invisible wife has put on flesh, has gradually acquired solidity and presence. At the beginning of her two months with Connor the wife was a negligible shadow. Julie wasn't even that interested in going through Connor's wallet to look for family photos while he was out of the way in the shower.

  She didn't bother then, but she's bothered since. Tucked behind the driver's licence there's the whole family group, in colour, taken on the lawn in summer: the wife, huge in a flowered dress and squinting; the three boys, with Connor's red hair, squinting also; the dog, a black Labrador that knew better than to look at the sun, its tongue out and drooling. The ordinariness, the plainness of this picture, offends Julie deeply. It interferes with her idea of Connor, with his status as romantic isolate; it diminishes him, and it has made Julie feel, for the first time, cheap and furtive. Extraneous, auxiliary. If they were all on a troika and the wolves were gaining, she has no doubt - looking at the dog, the red-headed kids, the suburban lawn - that she herself would be the first to be hurled off. Compared to those upper arms emerging from the short sleeves of the wife's florid dress - those laundry-toting, child-whacking arms - Julie, with her long dark pirate's hair and her twenty-four-inch waist, is a frill.

  It's all very well for Connor to say that his wife doesn't understand him. This hefty, squinting woman looks as if she already understands a great deal too much. If she and Julie were to meet, she would not take Julie seriously. She would glance at Julie, merely glance, and then she would chuckle, and Julie would shrivel away to nothing.

  Homely, is the word. That is the wife's ace up the sleeve, her insurance policy. Even though she looks like a truck tire, she has the territory staked out. She has the home. She has the house, she has the garage, she has the doghouse and the dog to put into it. She has Connor's children, forming together with them a single invincible monster with four heads and sixteen arms and legs. She has the cupboard where Connor hangs his clothes and the washing machine where his socks whirl on washdays, ridding themselves of the lint they've picked up from the bathmats in the rooms he's shared with Julie. Motels are a no man's land: they are not a territory, they cannot be defended. Julie has Connor's sexual attention, but the wife has Connor.

  Julie has knitted enough for one day; she rolls the newly begun second sleeve around the needles and tucks it into her tapestry bag. She decides to walk out to the bog, to find Connor. She has not seen the bog before; she has not seen the bog man. She has picked up the impression from Connor that she would be in the way. Even he has dropped the pretence that she is an assistant in any real sense. She runs the risk of being treated as an interruption, but it's a risk she is now willing to take. Boredom is the mother of invention.

  She picks up her shoulder bag from the chipped dressing table, peers at herself in the decaying mirror, pushing her hair back off her face. She is getting that sunless look. She ferrets in the closet for her raincoat, stuffs her Gitanes into her pocket, closes and locks the door and descends the stairs, skirting the cleaning woman, who gives her a baleful glare, and heads out into the mist.

  She knows where the bog is; everyone knows. It takes her half an hour to walk there, along the road that is so old it has cut itself into the land like a rut. Connor goes there in a car that has been rented in Edinburgh b
y one of the other archaeologists. No hope of renting a car in this town.

  The bog does not look much like a bog. It looks more like a damp field; tall grasses grow on it, small shrubs. The chocolate-brown scars of the peat-cuttings open into it here and there. It would have been more watery in the days of the bog man; more like a lake. More convenient for drowning.

  Connor is over by a roughly constructed tarpaulin shelter. There's another man with him, and several others out on the bog surface, fooling around in the peat-cutting, Julie supposes, to see what other buried treasures may come to light. Julie says hello but does not otherwise account for her presence. Let Connor explain it. Connor gives her a quick, annoyed glance.

  "How did you get here?" he says, as if she's dropped from the sky.

  "Walked," says Julie.

  "Ah, the vigour of youth," says the other man, with a smile. He's fairly young himself, or anyway younger than Connor, a tall blond Norwegian. Another archaeologist. He looks like something out of a Viking movie. The metallic scent of rivalry is in the air.

  "Julie is my assistant," Connor says. The Norwegian knows better.

  "Ah yes," he says mockingly. He gives Julie a bone-crushing handshake, gazing into her eyes while she flinches. "Did I hurt you?" he asks tenderly.

  "Can I see the bog man?" Julie says. The Norwegian expresses mock surprise that she has not done so already, an assistant like her. With a proprietary air - he was in the area, he got there right after the Scots, he beat Connor to it - he ushers Julie into the tent.

  The bog man is lying on a piece of canvas, curled on his side. His hands have deft, slender fingers, each fingerprint intact. His face is a little sunken-in but perfectly preserved; you can see every pore. His skin is dark brown, the bristles of his beard and the wisps of hair that escape from under his leather helmet are an alarming bright red. The colours are the effects of the tannic acid in the bog, Julie knows that. But still it is hard to picture him as any other colour. His eyes are closed. He does not look dead or even asleep, however. Instead he seems to be meditating, concentrating: his lips are slightly pursed, a furrow of deep thought runs between his eyes. Around his neck is the twisted double cord used to strangle him. His two cut-off feet have been placed neatly beside him, like bedroom slippers waiting to be put on.