On the other hand perhaps it’s the light. We’re finally in spring and the light is as it was that April evening when you arrived at the back door. It’s clean and sudden and at times it confuses me. Or confuse might be too strong a word—sometimes it distracts me, in the way the luminous words in a poem distract me from the poem’s meaning. The ink on the last few pages of this letter is already fading from exposure to these unpredictable outbreaks of light. The first few pages are still unfaded, those from December. It gives the odd impression of the reverse passing of time.
Meanwhile, I keep looking but I do not get the impression you intend to be found. I have been tracing my eyes around the map of Lithuania, wondering where the bee-keeping farm might have been, where Petras was staying with friends. I am reduced to the wildest suppositions. What do I know about Petras, Lithuania or bees? And yet, this is where my mind has decided you are and my mind is not a thing that is easily changed, as I have often lamented. You are not at the farm itself, bees would trouble you, as do all things in large numbers—no, you have found a spot half a kilometre behind the farm where the pine forest deepens and nobody goes.
There: you amble half desperate through the forest and you see it, a hut. Maybe there is a lake after all. For one short interlude the forest thins and gives way to a lake, but a lake that eases from the shore so gradually that you cannot tell where one ends and the other begins. You stay clear for fear of drowning. Inside the hut are his things, his shoes, his writings, his name doodled repeatedly down the margin, Petras Petras Petras, a childlike fascination with himself. You sit at the table and read his notes, but you can’t read his notes. Too faded, simply illegible.
Then in my mind you come back to the Upanishads, which only serves to remind me of the poverty of my imagination. The Self has four conditions, you read, cupping the sides of your head with your hands. Always, just as this tentative, hypothesised you is about to break into action or do something instructive, she starts reading the Vedas, as if the whole of her life and future is snagged on their wisdom, as if she doesn’t know how to operate any more in the world, how to have agency, how to live in time like the rest of us and suffer the consequences of her actions.
(Sometimes I imagine, out of sheer playfulness, that I am writing this as a kind of defence for having murdered and buried you under the patio. It turns out I am not at my desk in central London but in a cell awaiting trial without bail, because whoever bought the cottage in Morda decided to dig foundations for an extension to the kitchen, which was admittedly always too small, and the digger turned up bones and teeth and a silver cobra, which they believe would have been worn on a woman’s upper arm, some small hooped earrings and some scraps of undecomposed leather and zip from a pair of winter boots.
People in the village mutter: How could she have done it? Which leads me to think: How did I do it? Suffocation is the kindest way, especially if you were in one of your stupors; strangulation unlikely since you would not have let me; knifing or bludgeoning impossible because you are, after all, a friend, one held dearly and much loved, and I am not a monster.
I will plead guilty to a crime of passion, something I have often imagined with fondness and craving, as though nothing could be more wonderful than such a crime. Some days I look around me at the hundreds of people all moving purposefully towards a blind fate, or not even at this, but at something more banal—the arch of the underground train tunnels, which are made with human hands and are as courageous as a swan’s neck, or a swan’s neck as breakable as a hazel twig, or the sheer, pointless, brilliant glare of sun on glass that makes you blink and long for something that vanishes before you know what it was—and it seems to me that this whole universe is a crime of passion. So reckless in its short-termism, wreaking such magnificent havoc on those who come to live in it, so unreasonable and grotesque and glorious and rampant and murderous, because nothing escapes it alive, yet nothing escapes it without having lived either, without having been zealously loved and brought to its knees—even if only once, for a moment—by it.
Oh, to have murdered you, Butterfly, with my heart on fire. And then to write out my defence just as the universe defends its crimes with a sunset. Happy days, happy, wild and playful thoughts. Meanwhile, both (probably) alive, I suppose we proceed meekly on.)
Yesterday evening after work Ruth’s daughter was waiting for me. Or I should say I saw her outside in the driveway of the care home about half an hour before I was due to finish, so I went out to her, and she said she’d be happy to wait. She sat in the summer house until seven.
‘You could have come indoors,’ I said, when I was finished. ‘The evenings are still so cold.’
‘I prefer it outside.’
‘Did you want to talk about something?’ I asked, at the same time as she said, ‘I’d like to talk about something.’
So I suggested that we walk towards the Tube, and go to a café there. By the time we got to the café it was closing, so we just walked up past the farmers’ market at Swiss Cottage and made a loop behind Hampstead Theatre and back, and repeated it. She told me that she wanted to give up her religion, this was the gist of it. It had suddenly become very clear to her that she needed to leave it behind.
‘Do you feel guilty for that?’ I asked.
‘Guilty? No, no.’
I was going to ask her in that case why she was telling me and not her parents, why she seemed to be coming to me for reassurance. But then I saw she hadn’t come for reassurance, she had come to be heard as an adult. She must be twenty-one, a year younger than Teddy, but she has a plump dimple in the middle of her chin that makes her look perpetually childlike. All of Ruth’s children have this, a look that is almost Amish—thick honey-coloured hair and smoke-grey eyes and fresh, gentle features. We hardly ever saw them when they were growing up, they were always at this group or that class, or staying with Ruth’s mother in Suffolk. I can’t even remember when you would have last seen Lara; it must have been when she was four or five, and I can’t say she’s changed much essentially since then. Goodly, we called Ruth’s children; the goodly brood. All the same we—you too—were awestruck by their looks and kindness in our own way.
‘It’s since we saw the Pinter play,’ she said. ‘I watched that old man speaking to an empty chair and pouring a glass of wine for nobody, and it’s exactly like speaking to God, and taking communion for God. Have a glass of wine, God. Here, let me drink it for you since you haven’t shown up again.’ She paused and looked at me.
‘Is that how you see it, that God stands you up?’
There was a small sound that was almost laughter and she looked at me as if to say I didn’t know the half of it. Then she asked, ‘Did you think that man in the play seemed lonely?’
When I answered yes she said, ‘Every Christian, Jew, Muslim is lonely. They speak to God, and God never speaks back.’
I had been moved, or maybe impressed, by her rapture at the Pinter play. It wasn’t a child’s rapture. Now I suppose I could see why, though I wasn’t prepared for this kind of discussion or for how agitated she was. And I realised that she had chosen me to speak to about it, not arbitrarily or for lack of other opportunities, but very specifically, because she viewed me as the godless family friend who countered their piety with cynicism; I wanted to say: But I am not godless! It’s just that God has got tired of me. I could feel how much she wanted my cynicism now, and for that reason I couldn’t give it—because I didn’t want her to give up the cause so easily.
‘My grandmother used to tell me that everybody without God is lonely,’ I said.
‘Well, that’s what they say isn’t it? That’s the official thing, the—’
‘Party line.’
‘Yes.’
‘But maybe the point is that we’re lonely either way—sometimes anyway. Atheists and believers alike.’
‘At least atheists aren’t also stupid. I sit in church every week with my head all low like a bad dog, falling for the biggest joke that ever wa
s.’
I couldn’t help but smile. ‘There’s no shame in falling for a joke,’ I said, and I might not have sounded sincere but I was, oh I was—because of course all life is a joke and falling for it is the best we can do. Better than refusing to laugh along, which I sometimes think is the route to madness.
I put my hand on Lara’s shoulder as we walked, and I wondered at how much courage had gone into this conversation on her part, or how much going against the grain. If ever the phrase ‘in the bosom of one’s family’ could be used without irony, it would be in relation to the belonging, wholesomeness and gentle piety of her family, its sheer warmth and durability. I remember Ruth once saying that she had created for her children a home that was failsafe; there were no needs, spiritual at least, that could not be met by the love they found there. And in light of that, Lara seemed to me, in the dusk, a fledgling that had crept out of the nest and up the branch an inch or two, and wanted to go neither back nor forward, nor up nor down.
‘When I used to ask God to speak to me,’ she said, ‘I was always sure he did. I heard a man’s voice, which actually is just my Uncle Billy’s voice. Not God at all, just Uncle Billy, who Dad says is a gambler, a womaniser and a racist. And now when I ask there’s nothing at all.’
I took my hand from her shoulder and put it in my pocket. ‘Then withdraw your belief. If God exists he’ll wait for you to come back, and if he doesn’t you won’t feel his loss.’
For a while she didn’t answer, and when I looked at her she was staring straight ahead, and I thought she was irritated with me for being facile. Her cardigan was draped over her bag and the belt was dragging along the ground, so I picked it up and looped it around the bag strap. Then she said, ‘I feel like I’m always carrying a sack of stones.’ And she smiled, as though I had given her permission to put it down.
All the same I wanted to retract my comment, and I was sorry I had made it. I wasn’t sure it was true at all that God would wait for her; he has always struck me as the life and soul, wanting to be where the action is. But she did look genuinely brighter and less racked, as Teddy once did when I lent him money he desperately needed.
‘You won’t tell my mum I’ve spoken to you, will you?’ she said. I told her no, and I had the sense that we had just shared an entirely asymmetrical conversation in which one person idly muses while the other weighs up their life. All the same, I told her she could talk to me any time and I gave her my number.
It was only when she’d walked away and I was going down the escalator into the Underground that I wondered if there was a man involved in this religious crisis. I remember you saying that everything essentially is about men wanting women and women wanting men, that everything came down to this brute thing, no matter how heavenly it might have reckoned itself to start with. God himself is just the ultimate sexual fantasy, you said. The infinite, ultimate mover and maker and dominator. I thought of that as I rattled along in the Tube, which you also interpreted sexually. I thought of a church full of folk poised like naked bodies on beds waiting to be loved. A funny image, a sad one. A body wide open, and nobody entering.
* * *
What I mean (another day now, but I feel like I can’t let this lie) is that Lara, who has never had much to do with me, has singled me out as an ally in her defection from God. Not just God, from religion. And as soon as I left her at the station I began to wonder why I felt uncomfortable in accepting that role. I don’t know. Perhaps it is because I suspect that my reasons for being dismissive of religion are not very good ones.
Let me tell you something. In our house, growing up, God was a celebrity, and my parents threw lavish parties for him, which alarmed the church-going population. There was always red wine, whisky and ginger beer, smoked salmon and crackers, meringues, piles of fruit. I know you know this, but I write it to make a point you do not know. In our house, the question of religion was one of love and an open heart, regardless of denomination; everybody was welcome, whoever they were and whatever they believed. The holy city of the heart. The heart is where God, the infinite, takes his seat without jealousy, but with passion. All creatures can live there, all men, all their beliefs. All conflict is settled there. My mother’s faith was firm, but she practised it with a pot-pourri of rituals. She burnt Indian oils in a little crucible under the rosary that hung from the wall light, and she wore attars of sandalwood and jasmine sambac, or majmua, meditative fragrances that kept the Lord near, she said. They gave the straight-faithed women of Morda dreadful headaches behind the eyes and in the temples—or so I overheard once in the post office. And so, in time, every member of the congregation fell out with my mother and father over their religious promiscuity and their lack of moderation, their winters in India and their drinking of whisky and ginger on the rocks, and their smattering of Sanskrit followed by quotes from the smokiest passages of the Song of Solomon, all of which made them seem vaguely lewd and aristocratic and incapable of an authentic feeling. The falling-out went only one way, though. My parents argued with nobody and continued to throw the parties, and people continued to come because they were fascinated despite themselves.
And so I lived with my open heart that had no religious preferences but was tilted towards God like the Earth is tilted towards the sun; just spinning harmlessly. I was wreathed in his spirituality, I never had to practise devotion because my life itself was the devotion. When I was born I was given to him, my mother said, like a drop of rain is given to the ocean. When did I lose my right to this faith? When did I question it? You imagine we question and lose it gradually, that it seeps away. But not so; I think I can name the moment, on a hilltop overlooking Bala Lake, with you, in the late summer of the year you arrived at our door.
(Ah, it would have to involve me, I hear you say. To which I reply, yes, it all involves you, of course. I see you put your elbows on the table and lean your chin on your fists, to fortify yourself against the coming slander.)
You had been in a buoyant mood all day, which was unnerving at the best of times, but alone with you in the Welsh hills on a fifteen-mile walk while you pranced in those terrible purple loons that you had salvaged from the rubbish after Nicolas threw them away, this was like being visited by a jester on death row. By this point in life your ups never came without downs, nor did they often come naturally.
So you strode about in some suspect interval of high spirits, in Nicolas’ trousers and Petras’ cap, which you said you were not wearing, but storing on your head until he came back. By the time we got to the top of the hill, before our last climb down to the lake, we had been talking about war, which had somehow moved on to religion. It was a hot day and we had drunk all our water and the valleys were stale. I know that you were feeling helpless: Petras in Lithuania, and people he knew being sent off to some or other Russian labour camp for speaking against the state. You never did say where you had been in the years since I had last seen you (you were singularly, bloody-mindedly silent on this subject) but I know there had been one trip to Lithuania because the baggage label had been on your suitcase when I finally—perceiving you were not about to leave—put it in the loft.
But this would have been nothing more than a short, unwelcoming visit. We heard about these things back then, Westerners travelling behind the Iron Curtain, funnelled towards tourist hotels and eagerly encouraged to part with their strong Western currency, and then just as eagerly encouraged to go home. I doubt you ever saw your brother, or anyhow if you did then briefly, over a coffee or brandy in a hotel bar where he came to meet you. Any longer with him and you both would have been considered suspicious; any trips into the countryside to his farm would have had you questioned. I think those times in your so-called homeland, supposing they happened, only confirmed to you your lack of belonging. By anything but birth it was not your country. Britain was, this mannered land that was too small for you and which you were striding across in cap and bright flares.
As we got stickier and more tired you started, with an inversely
proportionate enthusiasm, to talk about how little there was to be done about war; it was always and everywhere and man would never learn. I took issue with this, maybe because, in part, we could see from that point the abandoned Frongoch Camp, where German prisoners were kept in the First World War and then Irish dissidents after the Easter Rising. My father had taken me there when I was about ten, when it was redundant and ghostly, and it had left me with a feeling I am proud to own: that we are better now than we were. No longer do we accept war with our neighbours. A childish thought, but as I said, I am proud to own it, it is my one optimistic vehemence: our politics are more peaceful now, we are better than we were.
You dismissed the idea. Politics could never solve war because it created it; asking politics to be peaceful was like asking a gun to shoot droplets of sunlight. And man—man! Man was not better, he was what he was and always would be: frightened and selfish. We were toiling up the hill at the time, you ahead of me. I was surprised by how well Nicolas’ trousers fit you, snug across the hips where they had been looser on him, and tight and long on the thighs before they flooded outwards. I am glad to have had no cause to think of them for years, but now that I do I see you striving up the hill and telling me about the Hindu trinity, Brahma, Vishnu, Shiva. Brahma the creator, Vishnu the preserver, Shiva the destroyer.
They were not idols, you said, they were not supposed to be worshipped as real. They were merely illustrations of ideas that could not be conceptualised otherwise, almost like dreams. I remember you saying this because the more time that grows between me and that conversation, the more I realise how true it is, that we are forced to invent form to understand the formless, time to understand the timeless. Religion has trinities, you said, because a triangle is the holiest and most elegant of things; with two lines you can only create two lines, but with three you can create a shape. This is why three is a transformative number. Brahma and Vishnu—creation and preservation—these are two lines. It is Shiva that transforms them into something new. And then, just as abruptly, you said, ‘By the way I have a new lover.’
Dear Thief: A Novel Page 9