What needs explaining was that, and it was a funny thing, a very funny thing, I did not speak the language. It was not for lack of trying, for I had been enrolled in a programme of daily language tuition for several months prior to my relocation, tuition I continued remotely upon my arrival in the place my brother called home. I was studious. I was meticulous. For whatever reason it would not stick. I had never had a problem with language acquisition up to that point, in childhood I had spoken four languages, at least two of which I had lost in the passage of time, all the same I pursued in a haphazard manner my studies of foreign languages at university, picking up German and Italian with ease, in fact the facility with which I read and wrote, not to mention conversed, in these languages after barely a month’s attendance at weekly classes floored my instructors of German and Italian, in no small part because of a certain vacant quality I had always had. The teachers lavished me with praise, holding me up as an example in front of my classmates, who despised me with good reason, in the first place because I appeared to relish the attention, taking every opportunity to answer the questions the teachers posed to us, delivering sentences with multiple clauses to showcase my linguistic virtuosity, revelling in every single syllable as it rolled off my tongue and into the space of the classroom in which I sat, together with my classmates, who observed the spectacle with silent loathing, suspecting I had prior knowledge of the languages and was in point of fact a cheat. But the mother tongue of the locals foiled me, as it did not foil my brother, who had long mastered the language, who even as a child loathed any sign of weakness, who always sided with the victors, whatever their stripe. For a long time it did not occur to me that my brother had come to the town for just this reason, not an overwriting of history so much as a realignment of himself with the powerful, the crowning achievement in a lifelong pursuit of dominance.

But here again I go too far. Let me confine myself to my own motives. With regards to the problem of language, it was not the weather of the place that hindered me, for I liked the cold, had been born in the wintertime, and as a child had often lain down in the snow, in my snowsuit, and looked up at the white sky for hours, for hours. The situation in this northern country town seemed to me to offer a robust life, a hale life, a life of people with smooth and youthful skin, a much healthier lifestyle, in short, than I had been accustomed to, and my brother, prior to his illness, had been exactly this sort of vigorous person, could be found, at any given time, running a marathon or energetically and in a team rowing a skiff on rough seas. I, on the other hand, had been a dedicated and lifelong smoker, I loved nothing more than a smoke, it’s true, from the age of fourteen I could be found smoking on street corners and doorsteps, in alleyways and in stairwells, and yet I was a stationary smoker, never moved while smoking, hated the sensation of smoking while walking, and I walked plenty – if I had a second, not quite equal, love, it was walking; I spent entire days walking from one end of the city I lived in to the other and back again, travelling by foot from tram terminus to tram terminus, bus station to bus station, municipal park to industrial park, and back again, always back again. I felt these were pleasures that ought not to be mixed, I had always wanted to be good and so, as a kind of offering of gratitude for my new life, I gave up smoking, which was just as well, for I had enough to be getting on with, as it turned out.

At first, I stayed away from the town in the valley, supplementing my brother’s stores of dry goods with vegetables from the overgrown kitchen garden. I got to know my immediate surroundings. I explored the house, inside and out. I stood under the pines on the long drive, under the stand of alders by the creek, by the birch trees at the edge of the forest. I felt the cold ground of the kitchen garden give beneath me as I knelt down, so many hours spent weeding, mending the fences and darning the netting that cradled the winter crops. I untangled the tender leafy greens from the viny plants that had grown around them, wondering about the lives of cabbages, their hearts and their vitality. They did not know, how could they, the care and attention with which I applied myself to them, and I loved them for that, the essential mystery of their being, no exposition possible, no question of knowing or being known. The beautiful, the unthinkable cabbages! The kales too and the mustard greens, even the garlic, having survived the winter, throwing out its slender stalks. Do you understand what I am saying? Beauty is something to be eaten: it is a food. I endeavoured to learn from staying in place. I studied under the plants, under the earthworms, I felt the texture of the earth in which all these organisms lived changing with the seasons. How might a person, a people, take root? Roots and rootlessness, the preservation of what little remains of the past, such were the thoughts that blew through me on any given morning, standing very still in the porch, or in the garden in my bare feet, feeling suddenly: that sound, that rushing, it is the wind, it is the trees!

Sitting one afternoon on a rock by the creek that bordered my brother’s property to one side, I observed the water running under the melting ice, carving out patterns, and then the ice itself, in its incalculable shades of white and grey and blue, how long and lovely and terrible the springtime, how unbelievable to be alive. If I could be anything, I thought, sitting on my rock, eating a granola bar, I would be that ice, with its multitudes, always in the process of transformation. It was not long before I took to immersing myself, of course I did, in the creek where it pooled at a bend, breaking up the clear layers of ice with my walking stick, treading slowly into its dark waters, deeper and deeper, feeling on the brink of something, sinking, I thought, not knowing what else to call it. Another way of putting this is I began to take note of the rhythms of the place, and even, from the distance, of the town.

There was, for instance, the strange behaviour of the dogs. Three times a day, at daybreak, at noon and at sunset, in all corners of the township however far-flung, every canine, as if mobilised by some mysterious force, stood to attention and howled in one long, unbroken, collective howl. And there were other peculiar occurrences, some more alarming than others, but I will get to them in time. The people, for their part, so far as I could tell, had closed, white faces. They had, I am sure, characters of their own, interests of their own, but such things were difficult to discern from a distance. Nevertheless, I continued to observe them just as they, I know, observed me. Patterns became apparent, days of work and rest, feast days, market days, days set aside for religious devotion. I began to love the town in the valley, which seemed, from my vantage point in my brother’s house on the hill, so tidy, so well ordered. I began to love the people, whose history I knew was so entwined with mine, whose ancestors had lived side by side with mine, had worked with them, broken bread with them, lived under the same sky, suffered the same cold, the same blight, the same floods, the same kinds of catastrophes, for a time, for a time. For all things come to an end, yes, as the lives of my forebears had come to an end, life itself and life as they knew it, never knowing, never understanding why or wherefore, only that a feeling, running under the seams for centuries, had broken to the surface. How then could I not love these people, who represented the closest thing to an inheritance I could be said to have? I wondered how they would receive me. Of course I had heard stories of other such meetings, of spitting and stones, of defacements and assaults, but these people, I felt, were different, they were serious, devout. Above all, I sensed, they understood the importance of perceiving things without using their names, they understood that names were secret, they were sacred.

The time eventually came when I was required to leave the seclusion of the house and the woods and go into town for provisions. I knew that, whether or not I intended it, I would be presenting myself in public as the representative of my brother, as the one person, absent his wife and children, looking after his affairs. I could show no sign of weakness. I would do him proud. I dressed with care in one of the many loose, linen garments I had acquired over the years, a long coat against the weather, and set out on foot down the road, a single paved track that led down into the valley. At the centre of the town, there was a church, there was nothing sinister in that, and around the church, a churchyard. I had always had a feeling for churches, especially country churches such as this one seemed to be, surrounded by trees, planted perhaps at the time of the church’s construction, the church and trees growing together over the years, over the centuries, over the long and unbroken life of this town. I imagined the scrubbed wood benches, the kneeling on flagstones, the spareness of it all, I admired churches greatly, yes, and yet I confess I had never set foot in one, had then as now a superstitious fear of crossing the threshold, passing up the chance to see inside some of the world’s most famous churches and cathedrals on tours in my youth. But still, I liked to look out the window of my room on the second floor of my brother’s house, down into the valley, and see the church spire rising out of the trees, it felt like, as indeed it was, a meeting point – of life, of the spirit, of some kind of organising principle I had tried in vain my whole life long to live up to. There was so much one had to live up to, so many good deeds one had no reasonable expectation of carrying out, because of one’s resources, because of one’s will, and they would loom over the whole of one’s life, these specific failures, representing metonymically as it were the profound spiritual failure of one’s life, the community always holding one to account. In the Church it was different. In the Church, I felt, one began from the principle of original sin, one’s guilt assumed from the get-go. From childhood I felt always on some precipice, reaching for a state of grace ever unattainable to me, always on the point of falling. I tried yoga, I tried harmonising with Mother Earth, but only scraps of it took with me. Perhaps I liked looking at the church spire because I saw in it the possibility of a life of obedience where one’s sins had been acknowledged and already redeemed. Such were my thoughts as I walked into town that first time, crossing the road to get a closer look at the crocuses emerging in the churchyard, smiling up at the church itself, still there after all these years, never succumbing to fire or flood, to natural disaster or man-made catastrophe, a place whose doors were kept immemorially unlocked, to which confidence gathered, bringing the people along with it. In truth and as it happened a building further away from God one could scarcely imagine.

Driving the town’s economy, my brother had given me to understand, was, or at least had been, a trade in tombstones, in which he himself naturally had a hand. The quarries still brought up stone for this purpose, a dwindling number of carvers still carved it, and the finished stones were sent to mark the resting places of the dead all across the country. Much of the land in the township was owned by this quarrying company, but there remained a small community-run farm for the growing of fruit and vegetables and the rearing of various animals, including cattle and sheep. Perhaps, my brother said one evening, I might find some small, harmless way to become involved in the endeavour, make an effort to assimilate into the local community, take part for once in the things happening around me. There was a rota sheet in the shop, he explained, where one could sign up for such tasks as milking, feeding, walking, shearing, grading, carding, spinning, lambing, cleaning, digging, weeding, strimming, mowing, tilling, sowing, seeding, walling, liming, scraping, watering, erecting, dismantling, soldering, separating, hitching, unhitching, mucking out and transporting to slaughter. My brother had not specified which of the aforementioned I might be qualified to undertake, nor did he provide any advice with regards to the particulars of how to go about communicating my intention, my difficulty in learning the common speech was still painful to him, he was ashamed and even offended, owing it to some wilfulness on my part.

The single track that ran from my brother’s house became, down in the valley, the town’s main street, and where it intersected with one of the few subsidiary avenues, one could find the shop, a kind of general goods store. It stood on a paved lot, empty but for a lone petrol pump, a low wooden building lined with windows, over the entrance of which hung a neon sign in cursive script giving the name of the place. Underneath this was a second sign, striped yellow and white, that read: café. For, I noticed, peering through a window, one half of the space had indeed been given over to a number of booths, to a counter with a row of stools, where people sat eating such fare as one might expect to see in a roadside diner of this kind, admitting of course certain regional variations, such as the type of berry used in the pie, the thickness of the chips, the type of toast served alongside the plate of eggs, the brand of cherry cola, and so on and so forth. The far-reaching and long-lasting influence of mid-century American road culture might be cited here, though it hardly needs explaining at this point in history, cultural imperialism, military imperialism, the long march of the American diner, its rise and fall, its rise again in the present age of nostalgia, when one finds oneself yearning for a landline, for a rotary dial, for the hard edges of a VHS cassette, for the smell of the video store on a Friday night, for the commercial life of another era when one knew slightly less, for one’s personal golden age, yes, yes. From the outside, the shop, and especially the diner appeared like a haven from the age of anxiety, not to say terror, in which one lived. I wanted so badly to be able to sit alone in one of the booths and drink a cup of coffee that would be refilled periodically by a server, smoke a cigarette perhaps, have a slice of pie. It would be a long time, I reflected, before I could gather the courage to sit in the diner on my own, I would first have to brave the aisles of the shop, the counter where, no doubt, the shopkeeper presided over her till.

That first time I entered the shop I was in an extreme state of agitation, I so wanted to make a good impression on the shopkeeper and yet knew there was no hope of my doing so, for we could not communicate other than by pointing and nodding as a result of my continuing failure to learn her mother tongue, and although it was common in the country for people to speak English, I could not count on anyone being willing to use it. Thus, the anticipated difficulty was twofold: first, in the failure more generally of my own expression which, when not plagued by aphasia – receptive or expressive – or dysphasia, of the same orders, when not affected by aphonia, by a stutter or a lisp, by the loss of control of my vocal cords and sometimes the muscles in my face, was, at the best of times, ambiguous and even obscure. Second was the problem of comprehension on the part of the listener, taking into account the language divide, the listener’s incapacity or unwillingness, their degree of hearing loss – congenital, selective, injury-induced or as a natural result of ageing – and a number of factors besides. And so each time someone might try to speak to me, to place me, to find out where I came from, though they would already and without a doubt have the information second-hand from my brother who as I said spoke fluently, having mastered the regional accent and even the local idiom, his difference was barely perceptible, his proximity to the dominant culture within a hair’s breadth, I felt a renewed sense of shame and failure for being unable to do the same, for providing further evidence of the arrogance of English speakers, the way they contrived, by virtue of their tongue, to bring destruction with them wherever they went in the world, and I was sorry for the townspeople who, I knew, must, with the passage of time, only grow to resent this failure. And so as I stood in silence before the counter in the town shop on that first visit, in a state of heightened confusion, attempting to count out the currency that was still unfamiliar to me, and doing so with what must have seemed to any onlooker like deliberate and obstructive slowness, I groped for something to rescue the situation. My eyes alighted on a piece of lined yellow paper where other people had signed their names in hand-drawn boxes, names I could not read. I knew, or at least felt, that this must be the rota sheet for the community farm. My gaze roved to the single empty space, and before I could stop myself, I grasped the pen lying on the counter, a bolder action than I was accustomed to taking, and wrote in my name. As I did so, I told myself that it behoved me, after all, to give up my free time to this community initiative, to do something to show my gratitude for the beautiful place in which I lived, for my life which had proceeded up to that point without any major tragedy or disaster, no serious injury, no debilitating illness, no poverty or homelessness, no addiction or sudden psychological break, no love lost having never been gained, no kidnapping or attempted murder, no extortion or blackmail, no assault that had been reported, investigated and brought to trial, no genocide or exile in my generation, I had been fortunate, yes, luckier than most, I ought to do my part, to serve the community, to pay what I owed. I replaced the pen in its holder and ventured a look at the shopkeeper. Her mouth was in a thin, grim line and she had one hand under the counter, reaching, I thought wildly, for a weapon of some kind, yes, I thought, my time had come and I deserved it, for although on the one hand I felt I was expected to perform community service; on the other, I had come forward without first having been asked, without knowing the details of the project or the ways of doing things into which the townspeople had without a doubt been inculcated since childhood and which I would struggle to master despite all my best intentions and sincere efforts. I had always been awkward, if not completely inept, and I realised with horror that in signing my name to this rota sheet, ostensibly to offer my assistance, I had in fact placed a burden on the townspeople to teach me how to do things, to explain by gesture and with difficulty their ways of being, the local practice of animal husbandry, to give up their own limited time only so that I could feel good about myself, about my participation in society. It would be no bad thing, I had long felt, for someone to put me out of my misery, in any case it was too late to rectify my error, I could not now remove my name, not so soon and not under the watchful and suspicious eye of the shopkeeper. I stood for a moment, holding my breath, waiting for the shopkeeper to raise her hand from beneath the counter, which she did, and it was empty, and so she must therefore, I reasoned, have pressed some kind of security alarm hidden cunningly beneath the counter, to summon guards or the local police force, to release the large black dog I had seen kennelled behind the shop. I looked around, fully expecting to see a group of men, a group of women, a pack of dogs, coming through the front door, through the door leading to the storeroom, but nothing happened, no one came. When my gaze fell once again upon the shopkeeper, she did not seem to be smiling, no, not quite, but she took the coins and bills from my hand and counted out what she felt was the correct amount for the items I had placed on the counter in what seemed like some distant past. She held the door open for me as I left, I had purchased more things than would fit into my tote, out of guilt, out of terror, and I was required to carry in my hands certain items like a punnet of strawberries grown in the town’s polytunnel, a bottle of milk from one of the local cows, a box of eggs from the chickens. The shopkeeper did not chivvy me out, and yet the door closed swiftly behind me so that I found myself suddenly and once again in the car park. I felt a motiveless sorrow.

Photograph © Alice Zoo