‘I see that it is,’ said Bastian. ‘When will you…’ he stopped. ‘It’s your choice.’ He bent his head slightly.
‘When will we be back? I don’t know.’
The bending of Bastian’s head as Astrid asserted her wants cleaved Kellas. He had seen it before, when a man yields to a woman he loves in her going with another man. He had been both men; had never noticed the gesture in himself, but had surely made it, involuntarily, the gesture of male deferral in the herd. He was ashamed and savagely proud to be the victor. The two, shame and pride, nestled together, mirroring in adjacent chambers of his heart.
Astrid came in wearing her too-big black anorak, the coat she’d worn in Afghanistan. She held out an army surplus parka for Kellas. ‘Here,’ she said. ‘Let’s go. Bastian, see you later.’
‘Take care, sweetheart,’ said Bastian, raising his voice as Astrid went down the hall towards the front door. The intensity with which
Bastian pronounced the three words moved Kellas, as if they were a code that signified a book of instructions she must carry out in order to stay alive. While he put on the parka, he asked Bastian if he wanted help with the clearing up.
‘No,’ said Bastian. ‘Just bring her back safely.’
Kellas followed Astrid out towards the road. She’d already begun walking in the direction Kellas and Bastian had driven that morning. He caught up with her and they walked without speaking for a minute. Their footfalls were softened by pine needles. It was four o’clock and the sun was already low in the west. The last traces of snow had vanished and the air was milder. It smelled of moist earth.
Kellas asked about Bastian’s grace before the meal. Astrid glanced at him and smiled, then recited the same words. She explained that Bastian didn’t believe in God, but believed the flaws and limits of man required him to have some way of filling the needs that religion otherwise supplied. These were hope, gratitude, humility, restraint, confession and atonement. He’d found such a way for himself, and it came out in his graces, his conversations and his counsel.
‘What does he mean by “blind glory”?’ asked Kellas.
‘The blind glory of the world – he means that we witness how beautiful and rich the world is, we see its glory, and it’s right that we should; but we have to understand that the world doesn’t see any glory in us.’
‘Has he written this down?’
‘He wrote most of a book once, a long time ago. A novel. But there was a weird deal when he sold it—’
‘He told me.’
‘And now he’s turned against writing down what he believes. It has to be alive, he says, and it can only be alive and true when it isn’t written down, when it doesn’t even exist as a set of words. He thinks that to write down a credo is when it goes wrong. It becomes fixed and dangerous. Every word is like a nail hammering a living thing to a fixed place.’
‘It’s a secret doctrine.’
‘Not in any way. Bastian doesn’t like secrets. He’ll tell you what he believes. But he’ll say that the describing of the belief is not the belief. He’ll describe it a different way each time. Overlapping, but different. And you’ll get a good idea, even though it won’t be the very thing itself. He’ll tell you that his ideal is for it to be impossible to distinguish what he does from what he believes.’
‘You sound like his disciple.’
Astrid laughed and linked her arm in his. ‘I’m not his disciple and he’s not trying to make converts or recruit followers. He’s a wise man trying to live out a good life.’
‘Have you slept with him?’
‘Yeah, a long time ago. I would have been about twenty-three, I guess, and he was in his late forties. Not since then, since those few times.’
‘I’m jealous.’
‘Ah, because now I’m so old!’ They reached the church and Astrid led Kellas past it, across the forecourt of the Family Dollar store and onto the road leading back downtown. He could feel the warmth of Astrid’s arms through the anorak. He and Astrid were almost exactly the same height, the two of them in their boots, both with long legs, and they walked easily in step.
‘I remembered him from when I was little,’ said Astrid. ‘He was a good friend to my father. He was loyal to him, even though when I was growing up Bastian spent a lot of time travelling. He was always moving, all over the world, and reading wherever he went. There was always this conveyor of parcels of books moving, a line of parcels on their way out to him and a line of parcels on their way back. Then I was the one who travelled. I lived in New York for a while. I studied there. That’s where I met Bastian again. We met for coffee and went back to my apartment. It seemed—’
‘I don’t want to hear any more.’
‘—the right thing to do. That’s it, there isn’t any more.’
‘You must have made a handsome couple.’
‘I don’t know that it’s such a great idea to be jealous of people’s past lives.’
‘Is he still in love with you?’
Astrid didn’t answer. She kicked a pine cone into the scruffy, leafless shrubs at the side of the road. They were passing across the marsh. The setting sun ran across the reeds and a gust of wind pushed through them like fingers through golden fur.
‘I think he is,’ said Kellas.
They were walking inside a solid white line that had been painted on either side of the road, giving a yard’s width of walking and cycling room. Every so often an SUV or a pick-up truck would drive past. Most had tinted windows, making their occupants invisible. There were buildings ahead on the far side of the reed beds but the traffic didn’t alter the impression that Astrid and Kellas were the only live humans abroad in the twilight.
‘It must be hard here with one car between the two of you,’ said Kellas.
‘I have a push bike,’ said Astrid absently. She looked at him. ‘What you mean is, what do Bastian and I do for money? That’s what you were asking, wasn’t it? Bastian was smart and lucky. He inherited money from his parents and he got the money for his book from you-know-who, and he put it in real estate. He gets rent off a couple of properties.’
‘Do you still write articles?’
‘Where would I find the time? I have a daughter.’
‘Bastian helps you.’
‘She takes all the time I have, and I don’t mind. I never wanted to have a baby but now, you know, it’s so wonderful.’ Astrid spoke half-absently; she was looking at something on the far side of the road. ‘See that building there? It’s a hotel. That two-storey wooden building at the edge of the creek. Shall we get a room?’
They crossed the road and the unpaved parking lot of a restaurant. At the back of the lot was a gap in a low wooden fence. They went through and came to the hotel, which stood under pines as
tall as those around Astrid and Bastian’s house. Two sheds and a Coke machine stood in front and the hotel car park was empty. A pair of black squirrels darted around the roots of one of the trees.
‘Ask for a room upstairs,’ said Astrid. ‘Ask for an efficiency.’ She walked to a set of steps that rose to the upper floor at the near end of the building, away from the main entrance.
‘Where are you going?’
Astrid grinned, and put her finger to her lips. ‘See you up there. Say I’m your girlfriend!’
Kellas put ninety dollars on his card for a night in an efficiency, although he didn’t know what an efficiency was.
‘Two of us,’ he told the manager, a gaunt, trouble-girt woman with a bandaged foot. ‘My girlfriend will be along later.’
‘You’ve got the place to yourselves,’ she said. ‘I got duck hunters coming in tomorrow but that’s it till the weekend. You need anything, I’m at home. It’s the house on the far side of the parking lot. You have a good night, now.’
The hotel stood on piles sunk into the marsh. It projected out into the reeds, its lower floor a few feet above black, almost liquid mud. There was a single row of rooms on each floor, entered through sliding glass doors that looked out over the marsh. Between the doors and the drop to the mud was a terrace and a balustrade, made of the same solid, unpainted, greying lengths of wood. A T-shaped jetty ran out from the hotel to the edge of a little creek, about forty yards away. As Kellas climbed the open stairwell in the centre of the hotel, he saw a line of Canada geese swim up the creek past the jetty. The sun had gone down and a half moon was up over the road. Astrid was waiting for him in one of the heavy wooden garden chairs, sheathed in cracked paint the colour of rust, that stood outside each room. She was lying almost horizontal in the chair, with her feet up on the balustrade and the end of a drawstring from her anorak in her mouth. Her anorak was open. She was wearing jeans and a white vest and a dark blue sweater under the coat.
She slipped her feet down to the floor and twisted round. The restraints on Kellas’s happiness sprang apart. Astrid leaned forward to kiss him. They kissed for a long time.
He took the room key out of his pocket. They were outside that room.
‘Lucky guess,’ said Astrid.
‘I’ll bet.’ Kellas was unlocking the door and sliding it open. ‘Is this where Naomi was made?’
‘Maybe.’
‘You know the manager here.’
‘It’s a small town. You know everybody and everybody knows you. She and I don’t see eye to eye.’
An efficiency was a suite of three rooms, one with a cooker, a fridge, a table and a sofa, one the bathroom, the other the bedroom. There was a TV in each room. The walls were hung with prints of ducks and geese in flight, and a painting of a red-and-white striped lighthouse, executed on a piece of driftwood. Kellas took Astrid’s hand and tried to tug her towards the bedroom but she flopped down at the sofa and sat there, grinning up at him. Kellas shook his head in wonder. There was a place for him on this island. Three generations in one big house. He would be the bulge in the middle, until, perhaps, the base of the pyramid broadened with additional Kellas-Astridlings. It would be tough with Bastian but he would win him over. Flatter him – or better, honour him – by accepting him as a teacher. And he would follow Astrid on the hunt.
Astrid reached into her pocket, took out a fifty-dollar bill and handed it to Kellas. He didn’t understand.
‘There’s a gas station on Maddox,’ she said. ‘You go back to the road and turn left, keep going the way we were walking. You’ll see it on your left. We need some booze.’
‘Are you coming?’
‘They’re assholes in there.’
Kellas looked down at the bill. He had it stretched out like a miniature map. He was reading the number ‘50’ over and over again.
‘That’ll get you five bottles of red wine,’ said Astrid.
‘Five?’
‘We’re not going to drink it all tonight!’ said Astrid, reaching out her foot and kicking him lightly in the shin.
Kellas went and bought five bottles of Californian red wine. The woman behind the counter did not seem like an arsehole. She was polite and did not ask if he was having a party. He bought some bags of nachos and jars of dip and lugged the goods back to the room in two carrier bags. He wanted to drink with Astrid, but the weight of the bags and the clinking of the bottles as he climbed the stairs bent his spirit.
It was dark. A row of lamps lit the terrace, one outside each room, and Kellas could see light spilling out through the glass doors of the room they had rented. On the far side of the marsh, beyond the trees, the beam of a lighthouse swept the wainscot of the world. Astrid was sitting on the sofa where he had left her, watching the Cartoon Network and turning a chrome-plated corkscrew over in her hands. There were two plastic tumblers on the table. Astrid got up, kissed him on the mouth, stroked his side and began opening one of the bottles while Kellas took the others out of the bag and put them in a line on the table. He asked if she minded him switching off the TV and she shook her head. She handed him a full glass of wine, clicked glasses, welcomed him to Chincoteague, and took a swallow. They sat down with the bottle on the floor between their feet.
‘Can I stay with you?’ asked Kellas.
‘How would you live?’
‘I have to call my old editors. They don’t take people back easily but they might take me for the war. They spent a lot of money to train me.’
‘The new war.’
‘Yes, the new war. What else can I do? I’m in debt, badly in debt. I’m not much of a hunter. Perhaps you’ll teach me.’
‘I hunt by myself.’
Kellas ran his hand over Astrid’s shoulder. ‘I want to see your skin again. I love your skin,’ he said.
‘Love!’
‘That was quite a jump you made out of that helicopter, for a pregnant lady. Must have been six feet.’
‘No way was it six feet! It didn’t hurt. It was a ride for the kid.’
‘So you left later.’
‘Much later.’
‘When?’
‘June.’
‘Naomi was born in Afghanistan?’
‘Happens every day.’
‘And now you’re glad to see me.’
‘I don’t recall telling you that.’ Astrid hid her grin behind her glass. She’d taken off her boots. She brought her knees up to her chest and put her feet onto the sofa in front of her.
‘Do you remember that day, when you jumped out?’
‘Sure. I remember us all screaming at the guy who wouldn’t let our car leave the guesthouse until we’d given him ten bucks.’
‘I remember you turning up at the guesthouse just when the helicopter came in to land.’
‘I remember you screaming “We’ll kill you!”’
‘Yeah.’ Kellas blushed and looked into his wine.
‘I thought it was funny, you saying “We’ll kill you.” Not “I’ll kill you.” You were issuing him with a death sentence on behalf of the whole group.’
‘I don’t think he was worried,’ said Kellas, laughing.
‘No,’ said Astrid. She was laughing too. ‘It was that healed-up bullet wound in his cheek, from where he’d been shot right through the face and survived. That’s what made me think he wasn’t worried about your death threat. And then we gave him his money and got into the helicopter and you said “Next stop, the bar, Hotel Tajikistan.”’
‘Was I really screaming?’ said Kellas. ‘Not shouting? Was that why you left? Me having one of my fits?’
‘You’ll work it out,’ said Astrid, draining her glass and refilling them both. ‘I’d rather be judged by what I do than what I say I do.’