by C. D. Rose
And there had been no more school, not for a long time. If they had had children, perhaps, the ritual would have been repeated, and she would have felt pleasure in sending a son or daughter off with a clean apron and a sharp pencil, but that hadn’t happened, and perhaps it had been for the best after all. Would the visitors leave when school began? Did they not have families of their own to care for? Jobs, earnings, houses to keep? Taxes to worry about and accounts to be settled? How long would they stay? They had been kind, yes, but she wanted them to leave now, they had only come to help, after she had let Lily go, there wasn’t enough work for her, and, after Emil, there wasn’t enough money either, she didn’t need help, she said, and Lily had gone, and then the visitors had come, some time after that, some time after she hadn’t had long enough time to be alone in the empty house.
She had almost reached the end of the grass now. It grew longer and thicker here, a different type, Emil would have known which, or pretended to know, at least. It had grown wild over the summer and now stood thick enough for mice to nest in. Emil had once had a vision, he’d told her like he sometimes did, or perhaps it was a dream, she couldn’t remember now, of a man walking into the forest. That was it, that was all, nothing more. A man walking into the forest. He had written about it, like he often did, and even tried to paint it, though he hadn’t been good with paint. Just that, only that. A man walking into the forest. It sounded like the beginning of an old story, she’d said, or a joke, “a man walked into the forest,” but couldn’t think what sort of story or joke it would be. Probably not much of one. She hadn’t seen the painting for so long, and wondered what had happened to it. The visitors might have moved it or stored it away somewhere, she thought, the attic or the cellar where she never went, or even sold it for good money and the upkeep of the house now that she was alone. The thought gave her the sadness again, or perhaps it wasn’t the thought that caused it; sometimes it just came on her, the sadness, tugged at her gut and ran through her veins, over her skin, like a wind that came from nowhere, a cold gust through the warmth, no reason, no cause, no motive.
The visitors brought no sadness with them, she told herself, they had come to help, to stop the sadness, and this was a good thing, but even as she told herself this, she thought of the twin sisters, and the young woman always alone with a book, and the quiet man with the beard, and she thought how their melancholy was palpable and made her want to help them, but she could not, because she could not reach them.
The grass grew thicker, the smell of the forest stronger. She stood at its edge now. She needed someone to invite her in. The woodsmen from the other side, perhaps, one of them might be passing through, or a friendly animal, a rabbit, or fox, like in a children’s tale. Deep inside, the dark thickened, but there was still light enough for her to see a slip of a figure appear, then disappear among the trees. A second, only. Then again. There it was, a girl, a young one, Elizabeth thought. A flicker, little more, a flash. Again, the figure appeared, her back turned, then went again, deeper into the forest. A fleck of white in the deep green. Elizabeth thought she could hear a voice. This was enough. An invitation. Someone was there. Never alone.
Once inside, Elizabeth felt herself as if at the bottom of the sea, moving slowly across thick sand like some ancient pincered creature, barnacled and lugubrious, looking up at the canopy of leaves as if it were the surface of the water, filtering weak shafts of the late sunlight, dappling everything. The canopy shifted and waved so gently it was scarcely perceptible, whispering like the sea she had once seen at Ventspils or the sound of a thousand hushed voices. She moved slowly at first, big, heavy steps, picking her feet up deliberately for fear she should take leaves with her, but soon the path firmed up and opened out, the well-trodden route she had taken so many times before, but never alone. The forest’s breath had been colder than the forest itself, and she relaxed into the warmth of the surroundings, the thickets to each side and the canopy above storing up the late summer heat. A thick silence wrapped around her like the heat, and she liked it. The loam underfoot found her steps and returned her quiet strength, and she liked it. She paused to watch birds—Emil would have known which ones—hop between branches, and she liked them and called to them and, even if they did not reply, was sure they were listening to her, too.
That was what she should do: listen to the forest, listen to what it could tell her. She paused, and looked for a place to sit, but no convenient log or stump proffered itself. It mattered not, she would just stand as still as she could, play statues, and listen.
She listened to the silence grow thicker and deeper, and then within that silence she began to discern patterns and figures, the path of the breeze, the fall of the heat, almost of the very light itself. The forest was alive with whispers and murmurs, echoes and traces. If she stood there long enough, she thought, she would surely learn to decipher them all, to be able to hear the forest speaking to itself.
As the sounds grew, the light faded, and shadows took on body. The visitors had come with her, she thought, some of them, at least. It was kind of them to come, but she did not want them now. They were only there to help, to share her company, for companionship, now that she found herself alone in the forest, but she had no need of them and they faded again, growing silent and indistinct as they headed back down the path or merged into the trees. One lingered, a young girl Elizabeth had known many years ago but whose name she could not quite remember. The girl had been a schoolmate but had gone missing, and no one knew what had happened to her, and no one ever spoke of her again. Elizabeth tried again to remember the girl’s name, but as soon as she did, the girl had gone. It didn’t matter, she thought, the girl would come back, would visit again, in some form or another. Nothing, no one, ever vanished completely. The heat of the summer was not leaving, or even fading, merely turning into something else: it became the colour of the leaves, the plump berries, the skins of the pears, the prickles of the beechmast, the thick bark of the trees, it became the rot that broke things down into the earth before reforming them as plant, or earth, or some other form of life. Everything left its trace, everything was trace. All energy was heat, and only when heat had finally gone would the visitors go, too, and that was a long way off.
That girl, she wasn’t the only one, Elizabeth realised, there had been others, several people who had appeared in her life for a brief time, and then gone again, without warning or explanation. A man with big teeth who had said he was a friend of her father, a dark-skinned girl she had played with as though she were a sister, a man called Gilbert with a foreign accent. Little wonder she couldn’t remember who all of the visitors were; there had been so many.
Night should be coming by now, but it was taking its time. The long evening light held, even this far into the forest. She should head back soon, but the path went on, its dirt and sand and stones well-worn, grass and bushes cleared to its edges, offering her a way through. She remembered the times she had passed this way before but could not remember who she had come with. Sometimes, the strange shapes the branches formed or the cawing of birds she couldn’t name had spooked her, but now she felt only friendship being offered. Everything was whispering, and it was whispering to her. The light through the leaves spelled out words, but she couldn’t read them. The trees wanted to speak to her. The trees had something to say.
She stopped. This couldn’t be right. She felt scared a moment, and gathered herself. The trees were not speaking. Trees could not speak. She had come out for an evening walk only to be alone for a while, nothing more. The forest was the forest, the trees the trees, and the birds the birds. Nothing more. Everything had its place, and everything was in its place.
Emil had told her that moths were messengers from the dead and carried messages inscribed on their wings, but that we were not able to read them. He wasn’t serious, it had been something he had read, but he had loved the idea. The moths had caused the blight on the pear trees.
; But if the tree had spoken, if Elizabeth had let it speak, what would it have said to her?
There had always been someone at the bottom of the garden, in the long grass, at the edge of the woods, as long as she could remember. There she was again, just ahead, just slipping from view.
That one time Elizabeth had seen the sea, it had been for her. The space, the open, the endless vastness, the huge moil and roar of the waves, the salt wind stinging her face. The air had reached deep into her lungs and buoyed her up, though she was scared even to put her feet into the water. It had always been so: she was for the sea, the hills, the fields, for the wide-open spaces. The sea offered emptiness, loss, vastness; the forest held tiny loops and eddies, pockets and lapses, folds and creases. Little mysteries gathered at the foot of each tree, each turn of the path. The forest was not her, but she was welcome nevertheless. Even though she had walked this way before, the forest always showed itself anew, and always hid something else, a new warp or weft, another fork or turning. By the sea, or on the hills, time vanished; in the forest, time turned in on itself, reiterating itself constantly, the familiar ever unknown.
The trees hadn’t spoken to her, but the birds were calling to her. Soon, she felt she would be able to understand the messages inscribed on the moths’ wings. Time was all. The sea and the forest had different times, they were not of the human. Some of the butterflies in here lived only for a few days; some of the trees for a thousand years. She was merely passing through. If she listened carefully enough, if she could slow or speed up, everything would become clear. Emil would know that now: where he had gone, there was no more time. It had been the blight on the trees that had disturbed him so, sent him off down that final pathway. It had gone now, the strange white dusty fungus, cleared up as mysteriously as it had come, but only after Emil had left. He had taken it upon himself, and taken it with him. She would say that the next time she wrote to him. She still wrote him little postcards sometimes, simple messages, nothing more. She hadn’t written since the visitors had arrived. She could tell him about them. She wrote but had nowhere to send her letters, because there was no address for where he was now.
She paused to take her shoes off, to rub her feet, and felt for the first time closed in, especially now the light was beginning to fail. She closed her eyes and breathed deeply, and she was back at the sea again. He had come to find her there, in her memory, in the story she told herself; she had been standing there on the shore and he had come there. She had seen him coming, or perhaps he had touched her shoulder and she had turned and seen him again, and they had cried, she thought, both of them. It had been such a long journey. “I came to find you,” he had said, and she had begun to cry. She had travelled so far, all alone, and he had followed her and found her. I’m sorry, she had wanted to say, though was not sure if she ever did. She should write this to him, the next time she wrote. She should write that she was sorry. She was sorry that the blight had come and killed so many trees. She was sorry about the child, the baby that never was. She sat on the edge of a log—the woodsmen must have passed this way—and hoped and hoped and forced herself to hope that she would see him again, following her, that she would feel his touch again on her shoulder and turn and find him there. But not this time. There was no one behind her, only someone ahead of her. There she was again, the figure in the trees ahead of her. There she was: a young girl, running off to play German Jumps or Dead Johann. Not at the sea. There she had been afraid to put her feet in, but the forest was beckoning, welcoming. She would go on.
It wasn’t she who had left, she thought, it had been him, in his way. He had started not being well, and she hadn’t been either, so she’d taken the train, through all kinds of places, places she didn’t know and had never heard of, and travelled until she could no more, until she’d reached the end, until the sea had stopped her, though she had heard there was an island out there, and she thought maybe she should try to reach the island, but no, the sea had been enough, it had been there that she had been lifted by the sea’s open expanse. There was no time there, on that shore, by that sea. Not until he had come and she had seen him from afar or he had touched her shoulder, and then time had started again, and she had been back in the turmoil of the world, of life itself. But it was good he had come, he had come so far to find her. They had had to separate. No one had done any wrong, but they could no longer stay together, not after that loss, because all they could see in each other, all they knew now of each other, was that pain. They had to leave, to be apart so each could start again, so each of them could have no past. He had been the first visitor, come to find her and to help her, or she had been, a visitor for him, no need for the messages of trees or leaves or moths’ wings.
She got up again and followed the path. Somewhere ahead was a clearing where the light would still be there. That was where the figure had gone, the girl she knew to be herself when she was younger.
She could still write the letters, perhaps, but in a different way. She could write them by placing stones carefully, by collecting leaves or arranging twigs and branches in a particular form. She could write the words and leave them here, perhaps, in the forest, or by the lake where they would slowly fade and become one with the soil and water again. This was the best way to write to him, to anyone. What more would she need? Look at the tree, for example, this one here, right in front of her now. What did it need? Air, water, light. Of the human world, it cared little; it would be there if she were or not. The trees cared nothing of the human world until the woodsmen or the loggers came, or the fire that they had started. Nothing was far from the touch of the human. Nothing was an island; everything was everything else. The forest had once covered the entire country, she’d read, the whole continent, even, and now it was lost, lonely, going, dwindling, remembering what it had once been. Maybe the forest was sad for its own loss, she thought, then dismissed the idea. The forest knew nothing. The forest was ignorant of the tales told about it. The forest just was.
She listened again to the music it made: the creaks and hums, how they formed a harmony, a rhythm with the calls of the birds, the whispers of the animals, her own footsteps. The sounds grew until she could hear it all, each note perfectly placed in space and time. Was the forest making its music, or was it only in her hearing of it? Why should there be patterns? Why should there be form?
And did her life have form? Had she wanted that? Shape, order, logic, reason. What had she wanted? The past had become stronger than the future, it had amassed like a wave, built up pressure like a wine bottle or pickle jar ready to explode. Only it hadn’t exploded, it had broken like a wave or dissipated like a cloud that had threatened storm and then passed without breaking. The visitors had come. Some of them were following her out here now, she was sure of it, even though she couldn’t see them. It was like the ribbon of the typewriter, or a spool of thread now bare, though it had created something in exhausting itself. Elizabeth felt the weight of memory greater than the weight of anticipation. Now there was nothing to wait for, or to hope for. There was the light, the evening, the forest, and this was enough for her. She could look back, right now, but she didn’t. She walked on.
It hadn’t been the lack of the child that had taken him, nor his own writings, which he thought had come to nothing, nor the fall he had taken, nor the blight on the trees. There had been so much more to him than all that. It had been, she knew, the more general murk and tangle of his mind that had never been quite right. But she had been more. Her husband’s life had not defined her. “Art is all we have,” Emil had said. And even when he said it, Elizabeth had known that it might not be enough.
She always wanted to find a life in the world of things; Emil in the world of forms. A nice line, but not true, perhaps. Object and essence were indistinguishable, she knew that now, walking through the forest. Emil had never known that and had wanted to make sense of the chaos of life, and not find sense in that chaos. He had to work hard to do that.
And herself? She had never borne children, raised a family; had she known life? Love was all they had, and that might not have been enough.
And this, this walk, this moment now, she could only do this by walking away from all that. Though again, turning back, turning a corner, she didn’t know if she was walking away or walking into. This forest had unmade her, unmoored her. Here, now, she was coming to a space she was sure she had passed through a hundred times, yet each time it was the first.
One of the visitors, Elizabeth wasn’t sure who, a sombre-looking young woman, appeared beside her and began to tell her a story. “I had a dream,” she began, “and in this dream there was a house with two rooms and two rooms only. In one I lay asleep in the most comfortable bed, covered in soft, thick blankets. I slept so deeply and so soundly, yet I knew I was sleeping and felt myself more content than I could ever imagine. The other room was empty, save for a noose and the sound of it tightening. When I woke up from the dream, I realised that these were the two chambers of my heart.”
The woman fell back into the trees, and Elizabeth sat herself down again on the stump of a tree. She knew where she was now, had been here before. A space opened, a hole in the forest. Up above, the canopy cleared to let in the sky, which had held its light, even this late. No shadows were cast. Everything was still. In front of her was that strange tree they had always called the Blind Accordionist because of its odd shape, hunched, ageless, and ever regrowing. She thought it might speak to her for a moment, but it remained silent. Another visitor came and sat next to her instead.
“Dear friend,” he said, “you cannot cross here.” And when she turned to look at him he had gone, and she didn’t know who he had been, or if what he had told her was true. She stayed where she was and at the same time saw herself get up and leave, and cross the clearing and go back into the forest. She heard herself behind herself, still walking. She was the little girl collecting acorn cups and husks of beechmast, singing rhymes and playing skipping games, and the young woman writing in her diary, telling of how her father had died and her mother fallen ill, and the older one who would meet Emil and then leave him and then return. She was the young girl who had set one mirror opposite another to see herself reflected infinitely, and who had been told she would bring spirits into the world if she did so, and the woman who had watched as they had covered those same mirrors with black cloths when her husband died, and the woman who had removed the cloths, because she wanted to trap his spirit as it flew from this world.