A man’s voice, quiet and sleepy, from the corner of the room. I turned and saw Hans sitting up in bed, squinting in the lamplight. ‘You’re crying. What happened?’
‘Nothing,’ Thea said, turning to him. ‘Go back to sleep.’
Hans got out of bed and stepped to her, pausing when he saw the Book of Moses open on the table. ‘What are you doing?’
Thea wiped her eyes with the back of her hand. ‘Nothing.’ She started to laugh. ‘I don’t know what is happening to me. I’m . . . I’m seeing things.’
I told myself I must not, that to do so would be to harm him, but I walked towards Hans even as my hands reached for the table to hold myself back. My fingers slid over the wood. They did not grip it; there was no will in them. I stood behind him, so close that my lips almost touched the warmth of his bare skin. I saw the fine golden hairs on his neck. I closed my eyes, brushed my lips against his spine.
Is this what she does? I wondered.
‘Thea.’ Hans’s voice was husky. He was breathing quickly. ‘Who is here?’
From his shoulder I saw her look up.
She looked at me. She saw me. ‘Hanne,’ she said softly.
Hans turned and for one moment we regarded each other. For one brief moment he saw me and his eyes were wide and soft with recognition, and Thea smiled through her tears and brought her hands to her mouth. I felt my bones turning in the ocean, felt my mouth fill with sea water. Salt salt salt.
And then it passed. I was blanketed by the air, and I saw Hans search the darkness, heard the sob hook in Thea’s throat.
I knew they had seen me. Hans’s drowsiness was gone.
‘Was she . . .?’
Thea was looking for me. ‘She’s still here,’ she whispered. She sat down on their bed. ‘Hanne, stay.’
She was luminous. Pearl in the water. Moon in the night. Hans kneeled down before her.
‘What did you do?’ he whispered.
Thea’s eyes flicked to the open book on the table. ‘I called her here.’
Hans gazed up at her, full of wonder. ‘Is this a dream?’
I felt the sight of her quicken through him like wind over water. As it did me. As it always had.
Thea slowly shook her head.
I stepped forwards and placed a hand on Hans’s shoulder, and I felt his lust, so different from my lust, which was a deeper love, which was the ache of years, the weight of waiting.
Don’t, I thought. And then I did. The hunger of my heart led me.
It was as easy as slipping into water.
We kissed her. I thought I would die from the force of life I felt, from the softness of her mouth on ours, which was the same softness I had remembered, had thought of every day since I had first felt it. Then I felt her tongue against ours, and then her hands around our neck, fingers pulling us into fire. I felt the need of her for me. I knew that she felt me there beside him, with him. And I knew he felt me too: in the us of our body, I felt him accommodate me, felt him pull me with him in his desire, then felt him relinquish his self to me so that I might act on mine. We were in the forest again. The blanket desiccated beneath us into pine needles, the thatch peeled back to stars.
Thea pulled us back down onto the bed, she pulled us against her, and I felt the slow roll of her hips against us, and I gave myself over to feeling. She sat up to undress, her eyes closed, and we looked at her, the unfathomable hidden beauty of her, perfection of rib and breast and navel, of hip and thigh and neck. Rapture swept through us like a wave until we could not bear it. I could not bear my own desire for her. It was sharper than Hans’s. It carried a different sound.
Holy nail, to crucify me to such a cross.
And Hans closed his eyes, which were also my eyes, and I felt that I was in my own body, that she felt me as myself. We shed the clothes upon us and when I felt her skin against our own, I knew she felt me, was seeing me there with Hans, felt my warmth as she had imagined it. We ran our lips over her body, heard her breathing hard in our ear, felt her wet and sweet under our fingers, smelled sap, soil. We touched her again and again; we were inside her. My heart was yearning like a root ball for water, and she was tributary, she was river, and when she came, she called for me by name.
I woke later. I kept my eyes closed; I could not bear to feel myself away from her once more. But as I lay there, I felt Thea move next to us. I had not yet been thinned out of life, although I could feel it coming. I felt the darkness approach. I felt Hans sleeping and myself awake within him, Thea’s bare arm curved around our waist, her head resting on our shoulder. I felt the press of her lips against the ear that was not my ear but might have been.
I could not speak. But I kissed her hair, and I brought her fingers to our lips.
‘Don’t go,’ she whispered. She was half in sleep. ‘Don’t leave me. Not again.’
I did not know what to do. I could feel the pulling outwards from the intensity of life. But I wanted her to know I had been there, that they could both trust the memory of the night and find assurance that it had happened amidst its unreality.
As I felt again the gathering momentum of leaving, I placed Thea’s hand over the initials on her pillow cover. H and T, entwined. She opened her eyes and saw them there, and stared back at me, and she saw me. Hans was asleep in the bed next to her, his hand over hers, and I was standing beside the bed, and she knew I was there.
Her eyes found mine. ‘Don’t go,’ she whispered.
It was as much as I could do to walk three paces before I felt darkness close around me and was thrown up into it and knew no more.
walnuts
I woke suddenly in the scritch and call of the bush at midday, needles of she-oak beneath me. For one moment I did not know where I was, what had happened. And then I remembered the feel of Thea’s hands on my skin, the lift of her neck under my mouth, and my body thrummed so hard in memory I had to bite down on my hand.
What had I done?
What had we done?
Cold stones groaned memories of liquid heat. The song of the soil was loud about me.
My hands were shaking, and when I looked down I saw that they bore unfamiliar knuckles. The nails were dark with dirt I had not worked. The lines upon my palms were not my own.
‘Hans,’ I said. ‘Oh my God. Hans.’
The relief I felt when I found Hans alive, sitting opposite Thea at their table, was so overwhelming I felt scoured by it. He was not dead. I had not killed him.
‘I know it happened,’ Hans was saying quietly. The noon meal was on the table between them, but neither Hans nor Thea were eating and I saw, next to the untouched bread on their plates, the white-worked pillow cover I had left under Thea’s sleeping hand.
Thea was still. A waiting pyre. I could see it in her limbs, in the set of her chin. Her fingers twitched against the surface of the table.
‘I know it happened,’ Hans continued. ‘But I don’t understand how.’