Four Letter Word

by Joshua Knelman

  You are a serious, conscientious man, my dear, and I know that even in happiness you worry about the past, accusing yourself of deep wrongdoing. You are also tender-hearted; you worry about me, because I’m so young and you fear to hurt me. I want to tell you something that might ease your mind somewhat. It is the kind of thing that is easier to bring up in a letter than face to face – which is why we really must learn to write.

  I want to tell you that I know what happened in Africa.

  Please don’t blame Achates for telling me about it. It was the green wine – he was a little drunk. He is such a dear! If he thought he’d been disloyal to you he’d be utterly miserable. You may blame me for listening, though, and you may blame me for wheedling more of the story out of your charming son Ascanius. He’s only too happy to go on and on about Queen Dido, and how pretty she was, and how nice she was to him, and how she let him ride the finest horses in her stable and go out on hunting parties with her, and even told him he could clamber around on the scaffolding of the buildings she was having built in Carthage – which you had strictly forbidden. ‘Oh, Dido was terrific,’ he says. ‘I wish we could have stayed there for ever!’ I know he finds Latium backward and boring. And of course he misses his real mother, and I’m not enough older than him to be much of a replacement.

  But anyhow, through his chatter, and good Achates’ sympathetic maunderings, I gathered a good idea of what happened. And all I want to say about it is that it breaks my heart. That poor queen! Of course she loved you. She was crazy about you – any woman would be who had the chance. You’re not only a gallant, romantic figure, a king in exile driven by inexorable fate across the seas, you’re also a very nice man. And handsome. Really handsome. You take after your mother in looks, though not altogether, I am glad to say, in personality.

  Dido must have seen you as the answer not only to her loneliness as a widow but to her need for a consort, a defender to keep the local kings from trying to annex her city by forcing her into their bed. You were godsent.

  And how could you have resisted her? You’d been widowed too, you were lonely too. Your father had just died. All your people depended on you and looked to you for every decision. And you had this mandate laid on you to go to someplace called Italy and found a huge empire – and it wasn’t working out at all. After seven years you’d only got as far as Sicily, and now here you were shipwrecked back in eastern Africa. You were at a low point. And Dido was offering you a haven, a kingdom, her love, everything. Of course you took what she offered. What kind of man wouldn’t?

  But the trouble was, you weren’t godsent. You were god-driven. And she couldn’t see that, she couldn’t accept it. What kind of woman would? She tried to keep you, to hold you back from where you had to go. But she couldn’t do it, because you weren’t just a romantic hero – you were a tragic one. And so she had to discover the same thing about herself. The hard way.

  Oh, when I thought about it, I felt so sorry for you both. I didn’t cry when you left last week, Aeneas, you told me not to; but I cried that night after Achates went home.

  I wonder, when you went to the Underworld, by the gateway in Cumae, did you meet either of your wives down there – Creusa, or Dido? Could you talk with them? I’d dearly like to know, but I dare not ask you. I only know you went there, and will not speak of what you saw.

  If I should die before you – don’t laugh, I’m much younger than you but nobody knows when death may come – if I do, I’ll wait for you down there by the dark rivers, in the sunless woods. When you come I’ll hold out my hands to you and I’ll cry out in all the voice a shadow can have, here I am, come to me, my dear, my love!

  But this is morbid. Forgive me. Let me tell you about the baby. Silvius thrives, suckles like a piglet, sleeps like a puppy. When I was sweeping the Vestal hearth and setting out the sacred meal this morning, he watched me and the fire for a long time, with such an attentive, intelligent look. You see, he’s pious, just like you! Seriously, the older he gets, the more certain I am that he’s going to look like you and be like you. Only perhaps he won’t have all the troubles you’ve had. What a good thought.

  Come home soon so that we can make a girl baby.

  Give my regards to Lord Tarchon. Be well, my dear husband. Come home soon, soon, soon!

  Please excuse errors in writing.

  Lavinia, Queen of Latium

  NICK LAIRD

  Belfast

  3 February 1987

  Father,

  You might have been surprised at my reaction.

  I was drying the dishes and listening to some farming programme on Radio Ulster; then I was sitting on the floor-tiles next to the fridge, hearing David’s voice on the phone repeating that it was over, that it was all over at last. He was crying – quietly, like everything he does – and that set me off. I shouted through to Jane who was doing her sums in the living-room and she helped me get up from the floor. I told her what had happened, then went over to the writing desk and got my phone book, and rang round the cousins. I finished the dishes later that evening and went to bed. Three large gin and tonics and one of the prescription sleeping pills I’ve been hoarding meant I passed out almost immediately.

  I missed the flurry of snow that fell in the small hours. Jane woke me with a cup of tea at eight the next morning and I went downstairs. I stood in my nightie in the living room, leaning against the sofa and looking out. The whole place had turned white. An occasional car would glide silently past, synthetically bright.

  It’s been several weeks now. We buried you in your churchyard, and I have talked to you more in these past two months than I had in the last twenty years.

  The day after – the day of the snow – I drove over to David’s with tray-bakes from the freezer and umpteen sandwiches. I’d sent Jane to the shop for two loaves and stood in the kitchen making rounds of ham and tuna and egg and cheese, unable to stop. There is a refuge in small acts of the domestic. Jane packed the sandwiches in Tupperware boxes, and kept making pots of tea. Jane knew enough to know your death was something very serious, and she became a little darling, docile, obedient, her anti-self. You know about children and death of course. We were always meek and invisible when you came in from taking a funeral. At your key-scrape and boot-stamp we’d stop talking or laughing or messing around and scurry off to our rooms to read or whisper.

  I began talking to you on the drive to David’s. I wanted to tell you what I was thinking. I was remembering the story of how you first came here, to the north, on the train up from Cork when you were eleven. It was in 1920 or ’21. Your father had started getting letters – telling him and all the other Protestants to get out of Ballydehob. He’d sold up the farm and taken all twelve children, most of his livestock – the horses and long-horned cattle – on the train up to Armagh. It was night when you reached the county. There was some confusion – at Hamiltonsbawn, was it, or Poyntzpass – and the family had disembarked quickly, unloaded boxes and furniture frantically, dropped the ramps from the cattle-cars and led the animals down onto the platform. The train pulled away and your father realised they’d got off too soon, several stops too soon, and were not in Mountnorris but the middle of nowhere. A farmer, who happened to be passing, took the whole lot of you in. I grew up best friends with that farmer’s granddaughter Mary. You liked her. She teaches physics at a university in Seattle now, and lives there with her third husband.

  To be honest, I prefer talking to you dead. I couldn’t have mentioned to the living you that Mary has been married three times; you would have frowned and talked of absolutes, of sanctity, of the perverted mind of man, of the enemies of the Gospel.

  Oh, the enemies of the Gospel! That glamorous list could go on for ever. Ireland, Britain, America, Muslims, Papists, Dancing, Liquor, Sodomites, Drugs, Disrespect, The Government, The Television, Portrush, Literature, Mum, David, Me.

  The funeral was, as you would have expected, gigantic. The church couldn’t take everyone. Your entire flock and most o
f the town huddled in pews or outside in great coats and scarfs and gloves. The church doors were kept open so the service could be heard in the car park; the draught blew straight up the aisle to your coffin.

  And you may be gladdened to know I wore a hat in the church: I had to borrow one of mother’s. Throughout, she was calm. She seemed to drift into the rooms of the manse: she had somehow straightened up, and looked taller.

  Grief is a strange thing. It’s sudden, localised in pockets like the snow I’d come upon weeks after, out walking the back lanes. Something always survives the thaw, lying out of reach in a hedgerow’s ditch or the divot left by a wind-felled tree. The sudden whiteness was wounding.

  I was pulling warm clothes from the tumble dryer yesterday, and I thought about you. Last week when they came to deliver the coal, the same thing happened. The lorry driver had pomade in his fine grey hair, and you could see the tracks of the comb still in it, just like in yours.

  It’s not that I’ve forgiven you. Don’t, for heaven’s sake, think that. It’s just I understand a little now how you were shaped by everything you met.

  You were so full of anger. It crackled from you in static electricity. Half the time you flicked on the big light in the living-room, the bulb would pop. Once I watched you press your hand on a man’s forehead in a revival tent near Garvaghy. He had come to the front to be saved and after he got off his knees the white imprint of your fingers remained on his temples.

  We didn’t speak for five years. I don’t know what that did to you. Jane will be twelve in three months. You missed her first five years completely. I haven’t told her that of course. I almost told you about her father before you died, but in the end you didn’t ask, and it seemed too much like dredging up some unexploded shell from an old, a superseded war. For the last few months all you did was lie in bed smiling weakly if someone arrived or held your hand or moved your pillow.

  It was the most relaxed I’ve ever felt with you, sitting there. I wanted to ask you about your life, your father, your youth, your faith. I sat there thinking that I had no idea who you were. Not that you knew David and me. You were irritated and bemused by us. You watched us much as Jane and I watch Penny now, the border collie, with some interest and concern but unsure that she’s even in the same reality we are.

  One day a month or so ago, after Jane had gone to school, I picked up a book she’d left on the arm of the sofa. It was an old St. John’s Ambulance manual, and listed the appearances that generally accompany death: breathing and the heart’s action cease; the eyelids are half closed, the pupils dilated; the tongue approaches to the under edges of the lips, and these are covered with a frothy mucus; coldness and pallor of surface increase. I couldn’t square any of those things with you. There was no way to begin.

  I’ve spent weeks reading around the old religions to try and find some means of imagining what happened to you, where you are or what you’re doing. I’ve found something in the Upanishads about that moment, the moment we leave. You wouldn’t approve. When the person in the eye turns away, and become non-knowing of forms.

  I think again of the snow that fell. There is an idea that we go back, when we die, to being part of one thing. Death is a catch being released. I’d like to have talked with you about this. I can imagine the look on your face, a defensive, lipless smile, as if to say, You already know what I think.

  Will you do me a favour, father? If you are there, somewhere, go out and find a bit of solitude, in a garden or an empty corridor, and read a fragment of the Upanishads aloud.

  He is becoming one, he does not see, they say; he is becoming one, he does not smell, they say; he is becoming one, he does not taste, they say; he is becoming one, he does not speak, they say; he is becoming one, he does not hear, they say; he is becoming one, he does not think, they say; he is becoming one, he does not touch, they say; he is becoming one, he does not know, they say.

  When I was a child and would tell you something your first reaction was a kind of wariness. Your responses were judgements. I would like to make you listen now to other ways we’ve dealt with being human.

  How about the Tao, Father, how about that? There, the knowledge of the ancients was perfect, since they were not aware that there were things and so nothing can be added. There, the Fall you preached is different, gradual, a slow taking on of knowledge. The ancients became aware that there are things but not aware there are distinctions, then some became aware that there were distinctions but not aware that there was right and wrong. When right and wrong became manifest the Tao thereby declined. Now, isn’t that something? The Tao thereby declined.

  A lot of wishy-washy rubbish. You were far too taken with Jesus Christ to think about the other paths. You were in love only once, and not with my mother. With Him. I remember the Sunday Margaret McConnell came to church without her hat. You opened the address by saying, very quietly and sadly, that it was a direct insult to Christ for a woman to come to the House of the Lord without a hat. You quoted St Paul: a woman should wear a veil on her head because of the angels, and then looked straight at Mrs McConnell. She was smiling, unperturbed. I was so shocked – shocked that someone would defy Christ, in his own house, and that someone would defy you, and in your church! The devil could choose any instrument he liked, even this silver-haired widow in lilac.

  She was my hero.

  As it turned out, she was also in the early stages of Alzheimer’s; she thought she was wearing a hat. She cried in the car park afterwards, when a church elder took her aside and explained.

  You thought you were another John the Baptist, sent here to prepare the people for the return. You talked as if Christ might be arriving for dinner. When I was very young, a freckled nervous thing with pigtails, I thought every knock at the door might be Jesus himself.

  And what else? I never told you but back in 1975 Jane’s father and I drove to Birmingham, for my interview for a research fellowship. It was just after the IRA bombings and I was heavily pregnant with Jane. We couldn’t find anywhere that would let us stay. No Blacks, No Irish, No Dogs.

  Well, you know which one of those Jane’s father was. And which one was me.

  We slept in the car.

  You were an idol to me when I was a child. When you fell, you fell completely. You betrayed yourself. There’s you on the UTV news, sharing that platform, shaking hands with a loyalist terrorist, endorsing him, smiling. There is more than the fall of the Latin, cadere, between the cadaver and cadence.

  And now what? Are you looking down on us? Has your soul been whipped up like a kite into the sun? Are you floating along above, sitting up as in a rowing boat? I think everyone should have to live an afterlife very different from whatever they believed in. That’s how it should work.

  The Toradja set the dead one’s body in a hollowed-out tree trunk. They have a litany for taking leave of a corpse. They say, ‘O father, we have put everything for you down here. Stay here. Your dead relatives are coming to keep you company, and among them is also so-and-so, who will tell you what you must do and must not do. As for us, whom you have left, we too have someone whose orders we obey. This is the end of our relationship. This far you have a claim on us as your children but we are making the steps of your house black. Do not come back to us.’

  Jane is upstairs on the computer, and Penny is asleep at my feet, stirring inside her separate dream. I hope your hollowed-out boat is passing above, on this bright cold afternoon, and you are trailing a hand in the water. Do not come back to us. Do not come back.

  Ruth

  SAM LIPSYTE

  Dear Miss Primatologist Lady in the Bushes Sometimes,

  Shhhh. Do not be afraid, my sweet. Please just read this. Try to glimpse my heart through the awful ape-ish scrawl.

  Thing is, I shouldn’t be telling you this, literally shouldn’t, as I haven’t acquired the capacity for language, let alone writing, none of us have, but to hell with language. I must speak. I may never return to this little patch of forest again. I ma
y never find occasion to lope over to your moss-soft blind beside the river, to feign wariness and a creeping hard-won trust, to let you cradle me and pick burrs from my scalp and call me by the name you have apparently bestowed on me, ‘Ari’.

  If such is the case, if I do not return, I want you to know how much I, your faithful Ari, will miss our afternoons by the river. Who cares that my name is actually Mike?

  Oddly enough, I once worried you would be the one to go, that after you’d come to understand our ways, or thought you had, you’d pack up your cameras, your notebooks and laptops and camp chairs, leave for ever, maybe to study those ridiculous bonobos. (We are well aware of the bonobo craze among you humans, though none of us can guess what knowledge you hope to glean from those fucked-out party monkeys.)

  But, as fate would have it, I am the one who must go, who’s getting, as they say, or, I guess, you say, shipped out. Worse, I know that the reason I am leaving will horrify you, so that even if I do return (and, as they say, or, I guess, we say, nothing’s certain under the canopy), you might not be able to look at me the same way again.

  You see, Miss Primatologist Lady in the Bushes Sometimes, word has come down from the Big Branch. We’re off to kill a chimp named Mingo. We don’t need language to liquidate. We’ve got opposable thumbs, a complex system of screeches. We’re incredibly strong. So’s Mingo. He’s one tough bastard, or so our intel would have us believe, and our intel is pretty decent as far as simian networks are concerned, or so I’ve been told. I’m not sure how we’ll handle Mingo once we cross into his territory and find him. Maybe we’ll do a bait-and-pummel. Maybe we’ll just beat him with a log. We’ll definitely bite his balls off. Our raid leader, Gilbert, will make sure of that. You know Gilbert. He’s the one you call Pushkin. He loves to bite off balls.

  Please don’t ask why we are going to kill Mingo. Probably even Gilbert doesn’t know. I’m sure there is a good reason. The Big Branch wouldn’t send us off without a good reason. Why do chimps kill chimps? Somehow Mingo must be threatening our way of life, not to mention our balls, and the balls of our children. But ours is not to wonder why. Ours is to bite Mingo’s balls off first, and maybe also beat him repeatedly with a log.