You will want to come back to me, but you cannot come back. You can go only one way now — to the end you have chosen.
These are the last words you will ever have from the woman who was once your wife.
When Jachin-Boaz’s wife had posted off the five copies of the letter she felt fresh and clear and clean. As she walked back from the post office (she could have trusted no one else with that errand, had felt that she must see with her own eyes the letters disappear into the slot) it seemed to her that she saw the sky, felt the sunlight and the air on her face for the first time in months. A burst of pigeons upward from the square was like the winging up of her spirit in her. Her step was youthful, her eyes bright. A man younger than she turned to look at her in the street. She smiled, he smiled back. I will live long, she thought. I have strong life in me.
At the shop she hummed songs that she had not remembered for years. An old man came in, stains on his clothes, flecks of tobacco and dandruff. He won’t live to be as old as this one, she thought.
‘Stroller’s map?’ the old man said. ‘New one out yet?’
‘Voyeur’s map, you mean?’ said Jachin-Boaz’s wife with a bright smile.
‘I don’t speak French,’ said the old man, and winked.
She went to a cabinet, opened a file drawer, took out cards. ‘Two alleys crossed off,’ she said. ‘The servant girl at the bedroom window has gone, and the new one draws the curtains. The house where the two girls always kept the lights on is up for sale and empty now. The revised map isn’t ready yet.’
The old man nodded as if it were nothing to him one way or the other, and pretended to be interested in paperbacks.
‘Let me show you a pasture map,’ said Jachin-Boaz’s wife. ‘You can watch sheep and cows. You’ve no idea what goes on at farms.’ She was laughing. The old man became red in the face, turned and left the shop, stumbling against the lion door-stop at the open door. Through the shop window Jachin-Boaz’s wife watched him going down the street. Dogs trotted past without looking at him.
Later that day the surveyor who had told Boaz-Jachin what he knew about maps came in. He was tall, with a weathered face and an aura of distance, desert wind in open spaces. He gave Jachin-Boaz’s wife the special-order maps he had been working on.
‘Some people’, he said when they had finished their business, ‘don’t need maps. They make places for themselves, and they always know where they are. To me you seem such a person.’
‘I don’t need maps,’ said Jachin-Boaz’s wife. ‘Maps are nothing to me. A map pretends to show you what’s there, but that’s a lie. Nothing’s there unless you make it be there.’
‘Ah,’ said the surveyor. ‘But how many people know that? That you can’t learn — either you know it or you don’t.’
‘I know it,’ she said.
‘Ah,’ said the surveyor. ‘You! I’ll tell you something — with a woman like you my whole life might have been different.’
‘You talk as if your whole life’s behind you,’ she said. ‘You’re not that old.’ She leaned forward over the counter. He leaned towards her. Music drifted down from the coffee shop upstairs. The assistant rang up a sale and rattled money in the till. The lion at the door seemed to smile as customers came in, went out. She kept the door open most of the time now. ‘A man like you’, said Jachin-Boaz’s wife, ‘could be of great value to oil companies, foreign investors. A monthly newsletter, for instance, with the latest information on property and development trends. Who knows what you might do if you cared to? A man who knows what’s what, who sees what can be done and puts his hand to it…’ She saw bright offices, large windows overlooking the sea, charts on the walls, teletypes clicking, conferences, telephones with many pushbuttons, international visitors, articles in business magazines. She picked up the maps he had brought in, laid them down again. ‘Boundaries,’ she said. ‘Wells. Water wells. Did you ever hear of a water millionaire? How are water shares doing on the stock exchange?’ They both laughed.
‘You see what I mean?’ said the surveyor. ‘I think little thoughts, you think big ones. Ah!’ They leaned towards each other across the counter, both humming the tune that was drifting down from the coffee shop. ‘Perhaps we could have dinner this evening?’ he said.
‘I’d like that,’ said Jachin-Boaz’s wife. That afternoon she left the assistant to close the shop, and went upstairs early. She lay in the bathtub for a long time, steeping in the silky heat of the steaming water, smelling the scented bubbles, feeling back to the youth still somewhere in her, the excitement of an evening out. She remembered painting quiet landscapes when she was at university, afternoons of sunshine and her hair blowing in the wind. She would get her paintbox out of the cupboard. She would paint again, sit in quiet places in the sun, feel the wind. Green places.
She dressed, made up her face carefully, practised relaxing her mouth in front of the steamy mirror. In the twilight she went up to the roof, looked at the palms in the square darkening in the fading light. She remembered a song that her father used to sing, sang it softly to herself while the evening breeze stirred her hair:
Where the morning sees the shadows
Of the orange grove, there was nothing twenty years ago.
Where the dry wind sowed the desert
We brought water, planted seedlings, now the oranges grow.
She had bent her wedding ring back into a circle and put it on, and she touched it now. She remembered Boaz-Jachin as a baby laughing in his bath in the sink, remembered herself singing in the kitchen and Jachin-Boaz young. She shut the memories out of her mind. She thought of the five copies of the letter she had posted, and smiled. Pigeons circled the square, and she cried.
20
A mighty fortress is our God, sang Gretel in her mind, hearing the voices of the choir in the church of the town where she had been born as she stood behind the counter in the bookshop. Painted on the wooden gallery-front were Bible pictures, pink faces, blue and scarlet robes, too much colour, leaving a taste of marzipan in the eye. The three crosses on Golgotha, black sky, grey clouds. The Resurrection with many golden beams of light, Jesus in white gooseflesh. Potiphar’s wife, lusty, opulent, clutching at Joseph.
From deep despair I cry to thee, sang the choir in her mind. The dead nobles in the crypt beneath the altar were only acoustics now. Sound-absorbers, however gauntleted and sworded, fierce in battle and the chase, dead wives virtuous beside them. Silent they were below the altar, but clamorous in stone monuments in the sanctuary, praying in stone effigy, noisy with stone silence in the hymn. From deep despair I cry to thee, Lord God hear thou my call. The street outside the shop moved slowly in its daily march of buses, cars, pedestrians. ‘Do you sell ball-point pens?’ a lady asked.
‘No,’ said Gretel. ‘Try the newsagent at the corner.’
‘Greeting cards?’
‘No,’ said Gretel. ‘Sorry, books only.’ Apple cores came into her mind. Why apple cores, what apple cores? Brown apple cores in the autumn in a neighbour’s garden. Yellow leaves and she scuffling among them, squatting to eat the apple cores dropped there by someone else. Baskets of apples at home. Why had she wanted someone else’s brown cores? How old had she been? Five, perhaps, or six. Her earliest memory. What did Jachin-Boaz dream of? What waited for him in his sleep? What waited for him outside in the early morning? How could he go out into the street and come back with claw-marks on his arm? What was the meat for? Something that he was afraid of. Something that could kill him. Something that he wanted to be killed by? A man could not be completely a liar in his lovemaking. Jachin-Boaz made love like a man who wanted to live, a man who wanted her. How could he be so full of life and so full of despair? His face above her in bed was easy and loving, the morning face before the dawn was haggard, haunted.