A Jest of God - Margaret Laurence [37]
“This road leads to the Wachakwa.”
“Yeh, I know,” Nick says. “I haven’t been down around the river in years. I thought I’d like to have a look at it again. My brother and I used to come here a lot when we were kids.”
“I’d forgotten you had a brother. Didn’t he –?”
“Yes.” Nick’s interrupting voice.
He doesn’t want me to talk about it. I should have realized and said nothing. He thinks I’m tactless. Stefan Kazlik died, but I don’t remember how. That was years ago. They couldn’t have been more than eighteen. They –
“Oh. I remember now. You were twins.”
“That’s right,” he says grudgingly. “But not identical.”
“What difference does that make?”
“Oh, I don’t know. I used to be glad we weren’t the same, that’s all. How would you like there to be someone exactly the same as yourself?”
I’ve never thought about it. Would it make a person feel more real or less so? Would there be some constant communication, with no doubt about knowing each other’s meanings, as though your selves were invisibly joined?
“I don’t know whether I’d like it or not. You’d never feel alone, at any rate.”
“That’s what I wouldn’t care for,” Nick says. “Even with Steve and myself, people used to group us together, although we were quite different. He never seemed to mind. He just laughed it off. But I hated it.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know. I just did. I wanted to be completely on my own. And then it happened that way.”
What is he thinking? His voice is hard, cold, flat, nothing in it to give himself away. Did be reproach himself, when it happened, for having once wanted to be the only one? Was he surprised at how bereft he found himself? Or was he relieved, inadmissibly, and has never since been able to forget that relief or forgive himself for it? I can’t tell. I can’t tell at all what he’s thinking. I never can, not with anyone. Always this futile guessing game.
He stops the car.
“Here’s the place. Let’s go down by the river for a minute, eh?”
The barbed-wire fence is slack, and Nick holds the two top strands wide apart, with foot and hand, while I slide through, trying not to snag the blue folds of my dress on the metal thorns. I never wear high-heeled shoes because of my height, and this is fortunate. The pasture is hillocked, filled with stumbling-places, gopher holes, stones. The rough sparse grass is not high except in tufts here and there. Beside the river, though, it is different. The grass is thick and much greener. The willows grow beside the Wachakwa, and their languid branches bend and almost touch the amber water swifting over the pebbles.
Am I naïve to have come here so readily? Or am I naïve to imagine he might be thinking of anything except a half acknowledged pilgrimage to a remembered place?
He is so apart. He walks purposefully, but as though he were alone. Probably he is. Why ask me to come here, then? Because it would look stupid to walk here by himself? But he wouldn’t think that. He’s not that sort of person. I don’t know what sort of person he is. He doesn’t reveal much. He only appears to talk openly. Underneath, everything is guarded. What do I expect? Why do I want to go so quickly, to get to know what he really feels? I don’t speak openly to him. But I could. I might. My God, you’ve only seen the man twice, Rachel. Show some sense.
Yet I’ve touched him, touched his face and his mouth. That is all I know of him, his face, the bones of his shoulders. That’s not knowing very much.
He stands beside the river. I don’t know what to say, what remark to make. I’m sure I don’t know why I came here. He didn’t want me to come. Anyone else would have done as well, just for the company. Is it like that? I feel I must be taller than he, and this is excruciating, until I force myself to look at him and see it isn’t so. As I knew it wasn’t, really.
Nothing is clear