We made our way up the long drive beneath the stand of pines. I could see a dip where the creek ran down and away into the valley. It was a cloudy day, drizzling, the air suggesting ice. Spring thaw, a spell of danger lasting always longer than predicted, a promise unfolding and covering itself over once more, in frost, in a sudden snowfall. One had always to tread so carefully at the turn of the season, to keep one’s wits. Who knew what might happen, what one might be capable of? The house appeared suddenly, dark against the dark of the trees, a series of blank windows that reflected only the weather back to itself. One house is much like any other, I told myself, fumbling with the seat belt, feeling my brother observing me. There was nothing particularly watchful about the place, the trees swaying mutely, the summit blind, the windows blind, a place of blind corners. Beside it all ran the creek, never the same, holding no memory. Nothing to be afraid of here, I thought, nothing lying in wait. My brother stood beside the car as I retrieved my suitcase from the boot, so composed he was, holding himself in such a dignified posture. He gazed up at the house, the old manor house, he went on to explain, which had been sold off by the gentry after the wars of the preceding century for any number of the usual reasons – death duties, dissolute relatives, the rising cost of fuel, the difficulty of finding adequate help to dust the mouldings, which were prolific, to oil the many long banisters or wax the vast wooden floors. Latterly, my brother said, the house’s ownership had passed through the hands of a series of provincial upstarts, each more insolent than the last. During his own tenure he had endeavoured to restore the stately spirit of the place. It looked in other words much as one might expect a faded small-town manor house to look; my brother was nothing if not conventional, he would not have wanted to stand out, nevertheless even I was impressed at how precisely he had achieved the intended aesthetic effect, as if there had been no rupture in the house’s historical lineage, as though he were the natural inheritor of the house and its grounds, of its contents, of the social status and indeed bloodline these things suggested.
The bedroom assigned to me was in the east corner at the front of the house, with windows that looked out on two sides – one upon the creek, high and full from the recent thaw, the other upon the long drive that led down into the valley and from there into the town. My brother slept at the back of the house, in a dark room whose windows were shaded by trees. Each morning I was to wake him with his breakfast tray, I was to open the curtains to reveal the forest that was his by deed of law, I was to lay out his clothes. While he ate, I would run his bath and, while he bathed, I would sit by him and read aloud the daily news headlines, clockwise as they appeared on the front page of the local newspaper. My brother was a tall man, strong and fit at that time, with good eyesight and a high level of reading comprehension. But he liked nothing more than to be waited on, to be read to, tasks his wife and children had previously undertaken in a complicated rota designed by my brother that ensured whoever had begun reading to him the coverage on, say, the latest political scandal at the county seat would be able to continue their reading of this story as it unfolded, until either the coverage abated or the corruption was rooted out, whichever came first. My presence simplified things, since all the tasks previously divided between my brother’s wife and children would be my responsibility alone – the cleaning, the cooking, the shopping, the laundering, the airing out, the closing down, the warming up, the cooling off, the chopping of wood, the cutting of grass, the uprooting of weeds and many other things besides. My brother dealt with the payment of bills and invoices. Such free time as I had, as for example on weekend afternoons (for my brother was not an unreasonable man) or on weeknights after he retired to his bedroom, I spent roaming the surrounding countryside.
I thought we were getting along quite nicely when, only a few days after my arrival, my brother announced his intention to leave for a while, to go away, the legal complications related to his business were multiplying, he said, his clients were important, he was needed near at hand. It was true that since I had arrived, my brother had appeared nervous, not quite terrified but certainly not far from it, I could feel the tension in his back as I soaped it in the morning, a certain stiffness of posture when I dressed him, for I did like to dress him. I was disappointed at this news, so soon after our reunion, but comforted myself with the notion that his sudden departure meant I could roam more freely and at leisure, observing the frog life, which was prolific that spring, spawning in ponds and roadside puddles. I liked to sit under a tree by the creek and watch the creatures make their froggy way to the stiller pockets of water, both they and I watching out for the insects, newly emerged from pupae. Frogs had been a fixture of our childhood summers, my eldest brother often sent me out on excursions to capture a certain number of them, which he put to undisclosed use, even once a snapping turtle, an endeavour for which I employed a pair of tongs and a packet of frankfurters, lying on my belly on the dock every day for a week before I caught the creature, by which time my brother had moved on to some new project. I never knew what he did with the amphibian life I brought to him, and I did not ask, merely watched him as, with a shudder of pleasurable disgust, he peered over the edge of the red pail I was in the habit of using. On one particularly hot day, he placed two of the captive frogs side by side on the edge of the lake – one, much larger, my brother supposed to be a female, for reasons he would not reveal; the other, he said, clearly a juvenile male. My brother watched the frogs closely, with an anticipation I did not understand, until at all once, the larger frog turned and swallowed her companion whole. A single flipper flailed in her mouth. She swallowed again, and was still. I knew I must not weep, I must not scream, I must not run, though I wanted to do these things, yes, and to retch until my skin turned inside out. I was, it must be said, a sensitive child. My brother observed me closely. I knew he, together with the rest of my siblings, once they were informed, and who had been engaged in similar hunting operations nearby, would hold me responsible for this act of cannibalism, and they did, using it as further evidence, presented to our parents, who were at that moment sunning themselves quietly on the dock, of my essentially barbarous nature that needed to be controlled. And they did. They gave me direction. They gave me purpose. I lived for them. I lived especially for my brother, the eldest, the most handsome, most beloved of all of the siblings, so much energy and hope had gone into his conception and rearing. A firstborn son! The family was overjoyed, the siblings that succeeded him as well as the parents, we were all delighted, yes, we marked our eldest brother’s achievements with especial attention, were studiously ignorant of his failings in school, in extracurricular activities, in the social sphere, as far as we were concerned, he could do no wrong. He never had to ask for anything and yet he did, he was voracious. He grew to be a teenager, tall for our family and fair-haired, dark-eyed, eventually an adult, he allied himself with certain kinds of people, took part in group chats where compromising images were shared of unconsenting individuals, he was a man at last and he was beautiful. He took a particular interest in me, the youngest, so many siblings in between him and me, so many years, the rest of the family allowed him this indulgence although they had marked me as a lost cause from birth, weak of lung, allergic to most fruits, a scrawny and pale infant with wispy hair. Nothing took with me, not convincingly, I was vague and inattentive, trailing off in conversation and, hopeless though I was, still my eldest brother took it upon himself to remedy these failings in me. He took me under his wing. I became his pupil and his retainer and he made me understand the necessity of temperance and silence. I had made an essential error when organising my consciousness early on in life, my brother explained, and this was by entertaining the idea that it was reasonable for me to form my own judgements about the world, about the people in it. It was not an uncommon error, my brother went on, but it was a conviction particularly unwarranted and also deep-seated in my case. It would not be easy to remedy, no, it would be my life’s work to reorient all my desires in the service of another, that was the most I should expect to achieve. Seemingly, my brother told me, I was a girl, would perhaps one day be a woman, and it was up to me to ascertain how to gain mastery over myself. The character of a sister, the character of the brother: one to serve, the other to study, relations of kinship being various of course only in theory, one came up hard and often against tradition, against history, against the fact of the matter. And so such arrangements could be found up and down the suburban streets of one’s childhood, they were not uncommon, no, not surprising for a sister to grind the meat, not at all remarkable that the brother in turn should sit in silent contemplation of his books, rock quietly back and forth in prayer. Each morning I composed myself, as perhaps others all along the suburban streets composed themselves too, before the bedroom mirror and descended the stairs in the skin of a sister. I took the role seriously, intentionally, and in time and with practice it became me. Perhaps in time my brother too became scholarly, became saintly, anything was possible, who in the final analysis could read the heart of another, but in the event and little by little, he encouraged me to pull in my skirts, which must remain metaphorical since I only wore trousers as a child, and I determined to eradicate my pride and my will.
I tried to be good. I smiled as I did the bidding of others. I did my work and looked perfectly happy, tidy and unobjectionable, shining, shining the boot. Kneeling, crouching, toing and froing, standing too for hours at the foot of a bed, later sitting perhaps on the edge of a chair, ankles crossed, thighs apart, a look that should have been an offering. I did as I was asked, yes, but the outcome was too often unanticipated. Some problem in me people always felt but could not prove. What did I give? The sword for the sponge. Muscular where one would not expect it. And then a troubling streak just perceptible, perhaps, in the gaze. Since girlhood I held a great sense of injustice, I was always rooting for the underdog, it was a matter of principle. On the question of standing up for what I believed in however I was somewhat less certain, perhaps even weak-willed, what resistance I presented was negligible. The difference between me and anyone else was not that I wanted more to be good, it was not even that I was guiltier, no, it was something rather difficult to place, a surface placidity with which I moved through the days, plodding, plodding, what certain teachers had in my youth described as a kind of idiot impenetrability, who could blame them, the school systems were overburdened, understaffed, and to be frank there were prolonged periods during which I refused to speak a single word anywhere on the school grounds. It was not a pursuit of affliction so much as an inborn quality, a gravity pulling me low. I had learned over the course of my life that there was something unpleasant about this opaque kind of inwardness: at any rate the people among whom I was reared demanded legibility – if there was one thing they could not stand it was the obscure, they were not a people much interested in the pursuit of meaning. They liked constancy. Another way of putting this is that they had the soul of the lake, not of the river, and not of the sea.
At home our parents rarely spoke. They allowed no past, no precedent, they were of that generation. What they had was what they made. They were the depression into which we all pooled, the weight of their expectations shaping our experience of belonging. The rules and structure of feeling of our household were transmitted by osmosis, the family nexus embodied in the parents, the siblings, trailing lines of tension and responsibility. I learned to be watchful. I watched my mother, never idle and yet lethargic as an earthworm, her life outside the house unimaginable, and yet she spent much of her time away from us, giving back to the community, being useful. My father too was often away, a businessman of some kind, demonstrating in his work a spirit we never saw at home. I watched my siblings come of age, try in vain to choose a life for themselves, wander a while, feeling the pull, feeling their betrayal, returning finally to settle in sight and in safety. Nobody ever said anything about it. I came to understand what that silence asked of me.
So by and by I learned to speak in slow, declarative sentences. I limited myself to simple exposition or straightforward and open questions. I erred on the side of caution and as a result I developed a reputation for being pliable and easy to use. And it is true that when confronted with other people, those other people who tended always to be after the upper hand, my will to powerlessness was brought out, I tended to be deferential, basically meek, tugging at the proverbial forelock until all my hair fell out. This attitude presented its own set of problems – namely, that meekness brings out the sadist in people, the atavistic desire to bite at the heels of the runt of the litter. As one writer put it, it’s not the meek who inherit the earth. The meek get kicked in the teeth.
One morning for instance I stood eating a bowl of cereal by the window. In my brother’s garden a kite plucked out the intestines of a grey rabbit. The rabbit had been alive until as recently as a few seconds before, death had not come swiftly enough for this rabbit, it had struggled. I had always loved the countryside, the north, trees in snow, but I had to tell the truth not expected to find quite so much violent death. I knew I would have to assimilate this death, even in time come to welcome it. My mind turned often now to the ways human joy, my own pleasure, was subject to death, how various were the ways death threatened to take it away. Whenever a branch fell in the forest after a storm, whenever the wind blew smoke back down the chimney, whenever my arm twinged, I thought, by long years of habit, supposing that is death itself? I had my boots on, ready to go; I had long ago settled my affairs. Still the agony of this rabbit affected me profoundly, I found myself weeping, and yet I could not pull myself away from the window, at a certain point I even raised a pair of binoculars which had been sitting on the sill to my eyes to get a better look at the particulars of the scene. My allegiance became confused. Although on the one hand the rabbit was small, fluffy and at a disadvantage, having neither wings nor talons, and although the rabbit looked more familiar to me, who had kept mammals as pets throughout my life, more familiar and even, it seemed, capable of love, or at least of a kind of devotion I might be able to recognise, it was true, I reflected, that the kite had needs, needed to eat, needed perhaps to feed its partner or infant kites, waiting somewhere in a nest, crying out, their survival depending upon it. There was also the matter of the rabbit’s prolific relations, rabbits of various stripes could be found darting in and out of the hedgerows at any given moment, while the kites, I felt, without of course being able to prove it, procreated at a much slower rate. In taking a side, I thought uneasily, perhaps I ought to take the long view, the survival of the species as a whole. That was my problem, I thought, I was always thinking at the level of the individual, in this case the rabbit, the grim scene unfolding before me in the garden as the kite pecked at the belly of the poor beast, initiating a gyration in the corpse or almost corpse of the rabbit, a kind of organy wobbling. Now what was that that reminded me of? A hanging, tremulous, a doorway and a tidy garden. What happened to one’s past when one got beyond it? That solitary life, the shadows on the bedroom wall at dawn, waking suddenly to the sound of the window rattling against the catch as a small pair of gloved hands tried to prise it open. But that was not it. What was required to make a life was the disclosure of space. In my case, for various reasons, not a carving out, but instead a reorientation of myself: form as a gesture of the will. I would become legible, I would flatten and disperse, inhabit a composite ‘I’, refuse my own plane of perception. There. Swallow the anticipatory view of my life and live according to the contingencies of the other. Attention as devotion. Sometimes I could just see myself reflected, whole, as if on the other side of a smooth glassy expanse, as though from a very great distance, a watery light behind the clouds in January. The will to remain essentially intact, for the pane not to lift, for no fissure to appear in its surface.
To return to the rabbit and the kite. Was it a matter of personal feeling, or was it a structure of ethics that was and evidently would remain beyond my grasp? How to choose? In the mornings of those first few weeks at my brother’s house, I cherished the silence. I stood at my bedroom window and watched the greens emerge, the trees, the mountains. How to describe how I felt then, pacing the floorboards in my bare feet, unable to tear my eyes away from the world outside, unable to leave the porch, and finding it impossible to stay still. I experienced a physical pain as I watched the crooked pines blow in the wind. And then each time I cycled to the outskirts of the town, not yet confident enough to breach its limits, I pictured without surprise the bike skidding off the road and into the creek running below it, or else a load of logs coming loose from a truck bed and impaling me or crushing me to death. Or then again, I imagined losing my balance on the rocks as I took one of my preferred walks along the hill path, the axe slipping as I split a log, lodging itself in my thigh. I pictured any number of violent incidents resulting in injury or else death, yes, an array of potential painful deaths, deaths it must be said I had courted in both action and imagination, in both thought and deed. In short, the state of extreme precarity to which I had been accustomed up to this point, the state of permanent although latent terror that had characterised my existence until then, prevented me from believing my current situation was anything other than provisional, and as my desire increased to stay in the place forever, to remain at the mercy of the weather on the edge of the forest, so did my conviction that something, yes, something would intervene, something terrible would happen. From my chair by the window, I experienced a sensation of vertigo, as though at any moment I would be pitched head first into the situation outside. Much might be said about one’s misfortune, according to one philosopher, but not that it was undeserved. I understood vaguely that I must confine myself to what was possible, but what was to be done when everything was refused in advance? To what extent was I responsible? As the spring came into itself the sun did not rise for it had not set. I was caught in the machinery of certain manias and maladies, the engines of their compulsory performance urging me on. And so as I tramped daily through the woods, feeling for once in the world, I told myself over and over that I must remember this moment, here, now, a moment which could not last and would inevitably be followed by an unhappiness that would be commensurate with if not exceeding it in strength, and that I must therefore carry it with me, the knowledge that once, for a time, for a series of hours, even stretches of days, I had seen what happiness might look like, that would have to be enough.
In spite of this anticipation of my general undoing, I was committed to maintaining the delicate equilibrium life seemed to have attained. I kept up with my work for the legal firm, continuing the transcription of the audio notes of one of the firm’s partners, presently engaged by a multinational oil and gas corporation to pursue every possible course of action against a certain individual, who happened also to be a member of the legal profession, and who had sought to prove, indeed had proven in law in certain countries though not his own, gross malfeasance on the part of the multinational’s leaders that had resulted in the poisoning of a number of water courses, the destruction of ancient woodland, the decimation of at least two protected species of birds, the kidnapping of activists and the corruption of public officials, as well as tax fraud, racketeering, stock-market manipulation and other crimes besides. The firm for which I worked, in representing this multinational oil and gas corporation, had already succeeded in having the attorney in question disbarred in several states, provinces, unincorporated territories and crown dependencies; in some but not all places he could no longer practise law, the only profession he had ever dreamed of pursuing, he explained in a podcast interview from his home, where he was at present under house arrest. The law had been his one true passion, his chosen path to the pursuit of justice, and he believed the spirit of the law would prevail. He hoped at least, he said in an undertone, to have his ankle monitor removed in the coming days, as it had been causing an allergic reaction that was both painful to experience and unpleasant to look at.
The voices of the various experts in law, my now-distant colleagues, came through my headphones and appeared almost instantly on the laptop’s word processor. I was barely conscious of the act of typing, still less of the various processes of transcription going on inside me that turned the sounds into letters and the letters into words and then translated these words into movements in space on the part of my fingertips, which ticked away at the keyboard. I was at my best when I felt like a pure vehicle, a simple mechanism for the translation of sound into text, organised neatly into paragraphs, to be dated and signed. I typed and typed, trying not to listen too closely, balancing my attention on the fine point of understanding. If I could keep this balance, heeding the structure of what was said rather than parsing its significance, I could just about compose myself. The act of rendering another’s words in this way evacuated the requirement for listening, the attention necessary was to the words themselves rather than to their meaning. It had been suggested at a certain point that I would be better off the less I knew about the matter and so I strove to understand as little as possible, even nothing, of what was said by my colleagues involved in the case. Word and word and word and word, they appeared on the page one after the other, accumulating fidelities, revealing sequence, producing clarity. It might be said that the lack of interest I showed in the substance of my work represented a failure of imagination, even an act of cowardice. It’s true, I thought, pausing the audio, that imagination may be a moral faculty, as some writers have maintained, but how to understand its workings? What sort of self could be said to have an imagination? And was the self in this equation fixed, or was she mobile? If imagination was to be understood primarily in terms of morality, I needed to know how to cultivate it, I needed to understand the terms and structures of goodness and its pursuit. I never dared ask any of these questions aloud, merely took them into myself for the purpose of contemplation. The concept of cowardice was neither here nor there, I felt, but the charge of a lack of imagination was one I took seriously. Had I not spent my life imagining myself in the shoes of the other? Had I not done my utmost to see everything from other people’s perspectives, rather than my own? The problem, I felt, was that I had, at a certain point, without noticing it, departed from the basic principle of my own wrongdoing on which my practice of doing good ought to have been based. The work of family, the domestic order. A problem. I went back to the beginning, starting the process again. Over and over. It was my practice and I repeated it often, particularly at such times as there was no one to remind me of that crucial and fundamental thing, the void at the centre of the work.
But here I find myself wandering again, into the past, which after all is not an explanation for anything, the lines of flight being so various, the question of harm and its reproduction so unanswerable, the beginnings always beginning again. This is a story about my brother, and so let us begin once more.
Prone as I was to idleness, I tried to keep to a routine in my brother’s absence. Each day I unhooked the axe from its place by the back door and set to work splitting logs, one of my most important daily tasks for, while my brother had the most efficient central-heating system installed, although he had the house insulated to the rafters with the most modern technologies and at the greatest possible cost, and even though the rooms of the house reached more often than not blazing temperatures since my brother kept the windows closed and locked at all times, still he required the ambience and sense of history that only a log fire could provide. And so as I wielded the axe in my brother’s name, and as I watched the bare branches toss against the sky, a feeling came over me, or else I felt surrounded by a way of feeling that preceded me and would carry on once I was gone, an awareness of catastrophe just beyond the garden gate, some small and precipitate decision of my own sending me careering towards it. After all, there was nowhere else to go, everything reached its terminus. It was an anticipation congenital, intermittent and providential. It was barely concealed and not totally unwanted.
All this was perhaps a problem of inheritance, I thought, the lullabies of my people, of my brother’s people, of my and my brother’s people, singing of burning villages, of exile, in short, of a certain expectation of life passed on to us in babyhood. My people: for yes, they were that, I had to admit it, after years of denial, of immersing myself among strangers, if I had learned anything it was that I had no people if not them, and yet over the course of my adult life, and although I searched high and low, there never seemed to be any around. I occasionally looked up my schoolmates on the Internet, their social media accounts full of photographs of large suburban homes, identical in all respects to the ones in which they had been reared. I remembered these houses from childhood – the bare, shining floorboards and perpetual aroma of clean laundry rising from the basement, the space and privacy afforded even to the youngest offspring. I adored these houses, I envied the odious children and the frictionless way they moved through the world, they gave the impression of being clean and without history, like gentiles, like people unstained by ancestral shame. I learned early on that money could clean you up and make you anybody. My brother, I felt, had learned this, too, purifying himself, moving through the world with fluency, the only thing he allowed to shape his destiny was his will to accumulate and wield power in the world, in all its various spheres. The past, as far as I could tell, was not holding any of them back. For my part I learned that nobody got what they deserved. In the intervening years, as I scrolled or clicked through these photographs, I often wondered which of us could be said to be more perverse: my schoolmates, every last one of whom, it appeared, had turned away from the world, retired to their enclaves, chosen the lives of their parents; or I, who had been plagued since childhood with the feeling that I needed to scrub myself clean, that all that was needed to be free was to physically remove myself from the company of people who comprised the community in which I had grown up, as though life were easy, or even possible.
I had been a disappointment in so many ways, I often reflected, to my parents and siblings, who could not understand my perversity in this or any other regard, to my extended family, for much the same reasons, and to my teachers, in whose presence I steadfastly refused to say the bracha over our classroom Sabbath ceremonies each Friday afternoon. It was the one act of defiance I allowed myself in childhood, and it came to define me, no matter how hard I worked to be good, so long as I persisted in this unaccountable refusal to join in, the light of grace was and would continue to be withheld from me. In later years, it was enough for my intransigence to be suspected, no matter how stilled my lips, how low my head, no matter how I allowed myself to be used for the benefit of others, still goodness eluded me. As to my friends, I had none, although at school I had been briefly popular when it was revealed that the great-nephew of a famed writer of Holocaust memoir had held my hand. My proximity to this boy, a sort of community celebrity, made me acceptable, even slightly desirable, briefly, all too briefly. Our liaison did not last long, as the boy soon discovered my predilection for self-flagellation which, though not necessarily a tendency that was in itself uncharacteristic of our people, I had inflected with a strange and unwholesome character, he told me, not in so many words. I had lost much in the intervening years, and what I had learned was that it was no bad thing to stay in place. At last, I felt, I had arrived, in this place where our ancestors were born and whence they had fled, where my brother had chosen to live, where I had no right to a passport or citizenship documents of any kind though my brother had managed to procure these and more, much more, for himself.
And so, when my brother departed, just a few short days after my arrival, he left me to look after the house and also his dog, whose existence I had only just discovered, a small and sickly animal that spent its days, so far as I could tell, retching what little food it managed to choke down back up again on to the rugs and carpets of my brother’s home. It was difficult to discern the breed of this dog, so matted was its fur, so crabbed its limbs, of which as far as I could tell there were only three, and so unusual the sound it made, but it was a sort of light brown colour, and my brother called it Bert, he said, introducing the creature into my arms. The dog as it happened had some problems with his testicles, the veterinarian had recommended castration, an outcome my brother could not accept and said so, in no uncertain terms, but the veterinarian insisted, an argument ensued, the authorities were involved, and finally my brother had been compelled to give the veterinarian leave to remove the dog’s testicles, he explained, pointing at the raised pink scar near the dog’s privates. One could scarcely laugh at my brother. When he spoke, his words seemed to take on an actual presence in the room; they appeared credible, even demanded an anxious kind of respect. I nodded seriously in response. He looked away from me, disgusted, before rolling his carry-on bag across the floor of the entrance hall and out the door.
It took several days and a number of encounters with his few remaining fangs, but at last the little dog Bert and I got to know one another, arriving at a mutual if hesitant respect. I kept to my routine, going for walks through the woods and up on to the moor; given his various physical ailments, Bert did not accompany me on these perambulations, wisely limiting himself to a slow and deliberate description of the terrace to one side of my brother’s house. But Bert and I spent quite a few lovely afternoons together on this terrace, or in the garden beyond, which was lined with laurel hedging, I sunning in a chair, he sniffing the perimeter, we keeping our distance from one another but nevertheless getting along pleasantly. I had never particularly liked dogs nor had they ever taken to me, but Bert was a thoughtful creature, a ratcatcher, with an air of quiet dignity about him arising perhaps, I thought, from his physical malformations.
In the days and weeks that followed my brother’s departure, something in me quietened. It was as if I had been living my life against the backdrop of a roaring noise that I had not known was there and that had ceased suddenly and absolutely. My perceptions turned outward. I saw the grass grow, I saw it growing, I saw the green changing, noticed the new heights reached by the branches. I paid such close attention. It was disorienting to walk in the woods day after day, to mark the astonishing and impossible changes from one day to the next. I was dizzy with it all. I felt as though I were remembering something I had long forgotten. For one thing, there was the wind. For another, the silence, which seemed to open out and across my surroundings the longer I stayed in the place. My habitual walk was up the wooded hill behind the house, crossing a series of low and boggy places as well as higher and harder well-drained ground. I walked these woods daily, attending one day to the treetops, on another to the branches, or else to the minute plants at the bases of the trees, the mosses changing colour. In spite of this close attention, it remained for me a landscape that had no names: the plants were different from the ones in the country I had left, which anyhow I would not have been able to identify, and my Internet searches could bring up no English results. Since I could not interpret the diacritic marks of the language of the country, the shape of the words in my mouth could only be an approximate homophonic translation. And so although I walked in the forest nearly every day of the year, I felt perpetually estranged from it, as indeed I had felt estranged from most of the settings in which I had found myself over the course of my life.
About four miles behind the house, up beyond the treeline, in a dip between some hills, there was a small freshwater lake. A thin layer of ice still covered the surface of the water when I arrived that spring, and I liked to lie on my front at the water’s edge and watch the strange shapes moving beneath me. The spot was relatively protected and after the sound of the wind in the pines, the silence rang and rang. As I returned to this lake over the months that followed, I learned that this quality was intrinsic to the place: it was not merely the contrast of the wind and the stillness; the thrum of silence at the lake exerted a physical pressure that, while not painful exactly, overwhelmed me, pinning me to the spot, often for hours at a time. At times the silence was a sound: a humming, like a refrigerator in an empty house at night, it was tangible, I felt it as much as I heard it, and yet I knew that what I felt and heard was a nothing, something that was not there. There were no trees for the wind to blow through, no electrical wires either above or below the ground, only the ground itself, covered, that first time I visited, in frost. And yet there it was: presence and absence twisting together. Over the course of my life, so much of which I had spent in solitude, I developed a habit of speaking aloud, to myself or to my surroundings: at times this was to offer encouragement, some kind word to help me carry on, in spite of it all; at others to offer observations on the passage of time. In the bowl of the lake, my voice came back to me, and it sounded closely – it was more intimate than ever. I spoke and listened to myself at length as I watched the dark shapes move under the thinning ice. I cannot say whether I was ever overheard while I occupied myself in this way: if I had been, it would have been only one behaviour among many others, truthfully or falsely reported, that would later be held against me.