To the Back of Beyond(5)

When he ran off in the night, he had instinctively headed west. Now for the first time he stopped to think which direction he should follow. If he continued along the valley, he would soon get to the city and areas with too much light, too many people, and a dearth of places to hide. Even at night he wouldn’t be safe there. He needed to head south, into the hills, the mountains.

He followed a narrow gravel track that led into the woods and up the slope. But before long, it was curving around, back into the village. Thomas left it, and cut up through the steeply banking trees. There was a steady hum of traffic; the road was more clearly audible up here than from the airstrip. The birds had quieted down.

At the top the woods came to an end, and Thomas saw scattered farmhouses surrounded by fields and meadows, stately forms with large outbuildings and mighty silos. A little farther off was a small village, consisting of a handful of houses and a church, and behind that, on the horizon, a chain of wooded hills. Thomas walked down the narrow aisle of a maize field. The stalks were so tall that only their movement would have indicated his presence. After that, the country was open, meadows with occasional tall fruit trees and lower-growth wheat and beet fields. So as to draw the least attention to himself, Thomas followed footpaths. Once, when he saw a tractor approach, he stopped and looked around for a hiding place, but there was no cover anywhere. The tractor was being driven by a kid barely older than Ella, who greeted him with a nod of the head. Thomas replied as casually as he could.

He managed to get around the village, and came to a crossroads with a little wayside chapel and a large cross with a gilded Savior. He read the Bible verse on the pediment. All ye that pass by, behold and see if there be any sorrow like unto my sorrow. The chapel was locked, but through the barred windows he could see a couple of plain wooden pews and a small altar, decorated by fresh flowers. Thomas sat down on the sandstone steps outside. On the horizon he could see the hill on which his village was situated. He had come much less far than he had hoped. The safest thing would be to hide somewhere and wait for it to get dark, but he was afraid of losing his way, and he was scared too of dogs, which by night were still more unpredictable than in the daytime. He looked up at the sun to orient himself. Not long ago he had taught Konrad the old Boy Scout trick: point the hour hand of your watch at the sun, and south will be halfway between there and one o’clock.

The gently rolling country continued to rise, and before long, he was in another wood. There were raspberries growing at the edge of it, and Thomas picked a few. A chilly wind had got up that shook the boughs and caused the leaves to rustle. It was an airy, well-tended beech wood, the smooth trunks like pillars in a lot of space, their green canopy in continual motion, casting shifting shadow patterns on the ground. Thomas sat down on a pile of logs beside a logging road. The alertness he had felt after getting up was a memory, he was sleepy now, and exhausted, and unable to think clearly. When he heard footsteps, he fled into a little thicket of pines that felt like a tumor in the body of the wood. He hunkered down and only yards away a woman cantered by on horseback. She had to be roughly his age and sat bolt upright in the saddle, bouncing rhythmically up and down. Through the treetops, sun dogs fell on her slender form. For a moment Thomas had the feeling all was well. The only thing wrong and out of place in the harmonious scene was himself. He went deeper into the tangle of pines. Once he was quite certain that he could no longer be seen from the track, he lay down on the soft, pine-needle-strewn ground. He thought of Astrid as the equestrienne. She had ridden as a girl, there were photographs of it in her old albums. She looked confident and sure of herself, as though she was exactly where she wanted to be. It was that confidence and uprightness that Thomas had fallen in love with twenty-five years ago, even though (or maybe just because) he sensed that it cost her an effort to keep up the illusion. It was at moments of uncertainty, of crisis and quarrel, but also of sexual passion that he felt closest to her, and their love seemed to him as strong now as in the first months of their relationship. He wondered how long she would manage to keep the illusion going before she collapsed.



The children were in the living room, doing their homework. Astrid hadn’t been able to stand being at the table with them and had gone upstairs. She was sorting through the clothes, folding things up and stowing them away in cupboards. She ironed Thomas’s shirts. Briefly it crossed her mind that it was pointless, and the absurd notion came to her that what she was doing was wiping away his traces. Irritated, she shook her head. The warmth of the steam, the smell of the tidily stacked laundry calmed her. Everything was all right. She concentrated on her work, the collars, the shoulders, the back, the sleeves, the cuffs, and when they were done put the shirts away on hangers on a rail. They hung there like inert clones of Thomas. Once, Astrid thought she heard the doorbell. She set the iron down on the board and listened, but everything was quiet downstairs. She called down to the kids. Have you finished your homework? Konrad’s bugging me, called Ella. Leave Ella alone, called Astrid. She heard Konrad climb the stairs. He stopped in the doorway. Have you finished your homework? I’m bored. Will you play with me? I need to fix dinner, said Astrid. Why don’t you read something. Where’s Papa, asked Konrad. He’s not coming, said Astrid, he’s gone away for a few days. She was surprised at the way Konrad, at the way everyone, seemed to accept her crude lies without a murmur. She seemed to be the only one who actually registered the fact that Thomas had disappeared. To begin with, there had been a kind of consolation in that, but the longer he stayed away, the more panicky she felt, and for moments at a time she had the sense she was going mad, she had only imagined it, and Thomas had never actually lived here, had never even existed.