The Wilderness by Samantha Harvey Read Free Book Online Page A

resolves, mumbling to himself.

    That evening—that Tuesday or Monday or Friday—he had watched Helen out on the ladder in the pinafore she always wore, and the socks and shoes; she looks like Alice in Wonderland, he had thought, and he took a picture. She was picking cherries from the tree with the familiar ineluctable energy that seemed never to leave her. So many times in the past she had come down from that tree, her fingers stained red, beaming— absolutely beaming at the bounty of it all.
    He had told her, many years before when they first moved to the coach house, about the Jewish laws of kashrut that dictated how the fruit of a tree could not be harvested until the third year—that before its cycles can be interfered with the tree must know about ripeness and withering, until it becomes so adamant in its growth and so voluptuous with fruit that no amount of picking will disturb it. And for the harvester'spart, the virtue of patience must be learned. The virtue of waiting for one's pleasure until the waiting itself doubles or triples the joy.
    “Joy,” she had said smiling, “is something I enjoy.” She had put the bowl of cherries on the grass and taken Henry from his arms. “And waiting is my favourite pastime. Waiting for my little boy to grow up, hmm, waiting for him to climb the ladder with me and pick the cherries, what do you say, Hen, what do you say?”
    She began to shower Henry's head with kisses, then sat at the bench beneath the tree and unbuttoned her shirt down the front. “Are you hungry, Henry, are you a hungry boy?” It had begun to rain, large plump raindrops landing in discreet crystals on the leaves, but she had stayed there nevertheless and laid bare her right breast in the same way she laid bare packets of fish or cheese, with the same tender efficiency.
    Whether she did, in fact, breast-feed there and then, whether this was, in fact, the exact occasion on which he had told her about kashrut, whether the rain had belonged to that occasion or to another, or many others, or none (for a thing that never happened can be remembered exquisitely, he knows) is beside the point. Kashrut and cherries were beside the point. As he watched her that evening in the pinafore, a much older woman, up the ladder, panic welled behind his eyes and he had what he now regards as his first true blankness. For a moment he forgot everything he had ever known, not just facts but the art of how to get facts. The utter blankness amounted to one solitary, stammering thought: What is it I'm supposed to do now?
    It was a moment, that was all, of extreme disorientation, but though it passed it did not, he felt, pass fully. He reachedunder the bed for the human-skin Bible and, kneeling over it on the bedroom floor, opened it at Psalms; perhaps he did not open it at Psalms at all, perhaps he scanned through page after page looking for something that might speak to him. He has remembered this evening so often that he has muddied it with his mind—but there it was in any case and however it came to be. There in Psalms it said,
Shall thy wonders be known in the dark? And thy righteousness in the land of forgetfulness?
    One cannot be expected to remember everything, and in fact remembering everything is a hindrance to living; if an event comes as a thousand details the brain needs to forget nine hundred of them in order derive any meaning from that event. So a woman with dyed red hair, coarse skin, and a pen in her hand has explained. But, she has also explained, too much forgetting is bad. He had wanted to take her to task over this: Define
too much,
define
bad,
who do you think you are, do you think I am a child?
    I'm going to say three words and I'd like you to repeat them after me: house, shoelace, picture.
He does not remember what answer he gave, only that he wished for the woman to look away as he strove to meet her ludicrous demands; and he knows that he must, despite an effort, have failed to please her.
    “Please