'The Gleaner's Wife' was originally published in The London Magazine in the Oct/Nov 2023 issue. It is an extract from a forthcoming novel.
The Gleaner’s Wife
I dreamed that my hair fell out at the river. I’ve been to that place before, in a clutch of nightmares that came around at the end of last winter. The river was present in all of them, but it was oblique. It began as the idea of a river, a blue or winding pattern on the wallpaper in the dream room I was standing in, and later as the persistent sound of running water somewhere out of sight, until finally a rivulet appeared by my feet, and once the river was established in the dream it became bold and showed itself whenever it wanted. In this new dream I was stooping to look at something moving under the surface of the water. The river was full of intricate little crosscurrents which obscured my view, or perhaps the form of the thing itself, the underwater thing, was continually changing and the water was in fact still, or maybe the water was the thing itself, and the patterns that I saw were the many flexions of its skin. As I looked, I had the idea that my hair would fall out, and at that moment my imagination of how that would feel – a cool breeze getting cooler, a hay-like sloughing on to my bare shoulders – began to come true, as if the thinking had made it so. I saw my dark reflection, backlit by the hard white light of the dream sky, and the shape of my head changed, became circular and bare. Waves of hair floated downstream like clumps of hay. The logic of the dream told me that I was losing my hair in preparation to become something else, but it would not reveal what that was. I awoke, breathing shallowly, and found his lump splayed out next to me. It was late spring, and the shutters could only keep out so much light. The aftertrace of the tunnel was rising off him like steam; I always knew when he’d been.
The woman at the kiosk owns a dress made of thin lace, which she has worn every time I’ve seen her since the war ended. The counter comes up to just above her waist, so I have never seen what she wears below that. Her hands work at the coins and notes, and the lace sleeves cover her wrists, sometimes riding up as far as the tip of her thumb. The kiosk is a hatch in the city wall, which was cut for a different purpose long ago. I have never seen her outside the hatch. Her face is lined and worn, though I suspect she is much younger than she looks. The woman in the bureau knows something about what he did, the kiosk woman’s husband. She says he was important. This makes me think that the lace dress, which looks too delicate among the dull sacks of goods in the little hole in the wall, must be an heirloom, or perhaps even her own clothes from her previous life, when her husband was an important man. The woman in the bureau says that she has seen her sleeping behind the counter. She told me that one evening, hurrying to get in before curfew, she walked past the closed wooden kiosk doors, and from inside she heard a piercing cry, the kind of noise that someone was trying to supress but was so intensely felt that it could not help but burst out in a moment of great pain. I have no reason to believe what the woman in the bureau says; others have told me that it was in fact her husband who was the important one, and that she has an interest in keeping attention away from herself.
*
I met him at the dance, before everything. He was rolling up his shirt sleeves to help an old man carry a table across the ballroom floor. I was impressed at how he allowed the old man the pretence of effort in the carrying, even though he was clearly bearing all the weight. This felt respectful to me. My mother would talk about how respect was important, and how one could tell whether a man was respectful by looking at the way he walked across a room. A respectful man, she said, would walk confidently but with enough caution in his step to stop abruptly if he needed to. A disrespectful man, she said, would walk with his chest out, hands balled into fists at his side, a prancing cock. There was another type of man, one who was so hesitant, so careful in his walk, that he invited only scorn and pity. You didn’t want to become involved with that kind of man, my mother said. She thought it better to attach oneself to someone disrespectful than to tie yourself to a hesitant man. She would sit at the kitchen table, a silver needle going through a bright piece of cloth, her eyes fixed at a point below the clock, dispensing her knowledge. Watch a man’s shoes, she said, watch them for dirt. If his shoes are dirty, he could be one of those men, those men you hear about. When I met him at the dance I looked down instinctively, and his shoes were gleaming blue, the backs of beetles. I felt keenly the power of my mother’s advice, of her dominion over what she called life, and I made sure to listen and keep the information close to heart. She died when a bomb fell and crushed her to pieces in her chair, that same chair. Keep your eyes up, she would say, her hands working automatically with the needle as she stared forward, unblinking.
He and I passed each other in the city. I saw him sometimes in the piazza as I was walking home, and after a time he was there every day. Back then I assumed that my knowledge of his face had simply unlocked his presence, and that he had been there the whole time, invisible to me, but over time I realised he was making himself available, and that he was taking a longer route to his gleaning. His hand, which I watched closely, had a long red weal diagonally across the palm from where he carried that hessian sack every day. He would walk with his friend, whom we stopped seeing after the war ended. One time he removed his hat as I passed, and I stopped to greet him, which was a foolish thing to do. There are a million women in this town, and they are always watching. There is one, a young woman, who I see beside the pillars on the edges of the piazza. Her face comes to a point, as though the many years of looking have sharpened it. Some people’s business is looking and recording things. As I greeted him, he wiped his forehead and left a dirt mark there, detailed like the map of a small country, smaller even, perhaps, than this one.
He will not tell me where the tunnel is. He must go at a time that is dictated to him. A letter is pushed under the door early on the morning in question. He does not open the letter anymore, because he already knows what it will say. He kept the tunnel’s existence from me for a long time, and it was only when I accidentally saw the letter that he offered something of an explanation. He tells me all men must go, though I don’t know if this is true. I asked the woman in the bureau if she knew of the tunnel, and she said she hadn’t. But in the moment afterwards, she looked up and our eyes met, and there was a look in her face of cold recognition, and I believed she was lying to me.
The tunnel did not exist before the war. The only thing I can guess is that it is somehow part of the agreement by which the war ended. I can see some of the architecture of the agreement when I am out in the city. The cylindrical tower, tall as a house, on the corner of the little street with the tobacconist’s shop; that appeared a little time after the agreement took effect. The extra doors in the streets off the piazza too; they are also new, and with an unknown purpose. During the war we spent a lot of time indoors, and whoever was out there had time to build these things unseen. I do not know where the tunnel is, whether he can walk there or whether he waits somewhere by a roadside with other men and is picked up in a vehicle. There is never an indication of when he will return. Once he came back in the middle of the night, and I lay there, awake, watching him as he tried silently to climb back into bed. At first I imagined it must be a dirty underground place, like a mine, but when he returns from the tunnel he is clean and needs no wash or change of clothes. But something of the tunnel lingers on him for a time afterwards like the steam that rises from a bather, a trace that manifests in his movements and speech, nothing strong enough to constitute a change in character, but an indication nonetheless of the tunnel’s presence. Once or twice, he has spoken sharply to me, in a voice that he does not otherwise use. When he returns after dark, his eyes seem to shine more intensely. I would liken the waning of the tunnel’s effect to the way one wakes from a dream, the way that it slowly leaches out of your body as you rise and scrub it silently away with the small tasks of your routine.
This place is an arrangement of women. Lying in the dark, I have imagined them as the invisible architecture of the city, the houses and rooms built around the scaffolding of their bodies. I think that if the women here knew their true strength they could change the structures of these buildings, could simply walk through stone and brick and go anywhere. I consider myself to be a woman of immense power. The solid systems through which the men move, their work, the tunnel; these contain only the simulation of power, and are instead simply preserves of a certain vulgar form of control. I mean vulgar not in the sense of indecency but more as a kind of tawdriness, a long-wasted length of dirty rope frayed at all of its edges. In that sense, the tunnel is only a mystery of the grubbiest kind. My curiosity about it is connected not to its power, but to its hiddenness. Once things are brought to light, they are as uninteresting as air, my mother would say, laying down the needle and squeezing a bead of blood from her finger into the handkerchief with the flower pattern. I would watch the blood change its form from a hemisphere, emergent from her fingertip, to a flat, spreading circle across the handkerchief’s wide face. In those kitchen days I would feel a sense of power and knowledge being passed down at the table, and I would forget the shape of my body in the chair. The sight of my mother’s blood elevated this feeling further; I had the desire to take the handkerchief from her hand and to place it in my mouth, to feel the metallic circle dissipate on my tongue. This, I thought, would be an ingestion of knowledge that transcended the rough arrangements of language we had been given. Blood does not speak, I thought, it communicates. But I knew that if I did this, I would reveal something of myself to my mother that I wished to keep hidden. I feared that if I did that the delicate thread between us would break, and I would become one of the people in her stories, rather than one to whom she told them. Instead, I watched the blood become part of the handkerchief, drying into its fabric, its bold red rusting. What this place needs, my mother would say, staring through the window into the world of the city beyond, is a good war.
We began to understand each other after we married. No woman here has ever truly known her suitor before the ceremony, other than those cousin-marryers who choose to leave and live on the wastes outside the city walls. Here, before one is married, the man appears as a collection of poses and textures; his hair, waxed and black, the cleanness of his shirtsleeves, the rough wash of his stubble, the teeth that emerge from behind the lips in a smile. The day of our wedding was the first time he had taken my hand, and it felt strange in mine, a less delicate, inflated paw of meat. As we walked together, hand in hand, I could feel his gait transmitted through my body. He is kind, and he listens, but the city and its world has impressed its ways upon him. These men know nothing but their own mothers, and I can see the child operating within him, just under the surface of his skin.
When I first dreamed of the river, I told him at breakfast. He looked at me without blinking, and nodded as I spoke, then offered a noise of acknowledgement. He knows my body well, but this is the extent of his understanding of my interior. When he does talk, he converses about things that have their referent in the world, but at the sign of abstraction he shrinks into himself. I’m not sure that the men in this city are taught that abstraction exists; to them, there is a thing, and that thing may have something done to it, or it may be used to do something to something else, and this is the extent of the world. Once, at night, when he lay softening next to me, I asked him what he had done during the war. It was dark, and I knew he was awake from his breathing, but he said nothing. I asked him again, and could hear him contrive a slowing of his breath, as if to convince me he was on the edge of sleep and falling into unconsciousness, and that my questions were as rain on the window of his dimming thoughts. I asked him once more, but by this time he had convinced himself into genuine sleep. I have not asked again since, but then, as my mother would say, silence is its own answer.
I went to the bureau today and the woman was not there. Instead, there was a new woman whom I did not recognise, and I had not seen in the city before. As with any new person, I watched first her hands, and how she moved them. Unlike the previous woman, she was clumsier, as if she was getting used to a new system. Her make-up was applied very thickly, like a shield. On one occasion she mislaid a piece of paper and had to search through a large stack of documents on the desk next to hers. I wanted to ask her where the previous woman had gone, but I knew that this was not a good idea, and moreover I could guess what had likely happened to her anyway. The new woman found my document and asked me if I was a gleaner’s wife. This arrangement of words confused me, as I had simply never seen myself from this position before. I understood the concept of my marriage, and even could have admitted that I was someone’s wife, but the idea that I was a gleaner’s wife seemed incorrect, as if the term belonged to someone else, or someone who looked very like me and did the same things and lived the same life as I did. She could see that the question had disturbed me, and wrote some unseen confirmation on the piece of paper in front of her.
I dreamed again of the river, but it had shifted in my vision once more. What began as abstract lines and had then become a lightly flowing thing was now a raging set of rapids. I hitched up my skirt and waded into the water, moving towards the churning currents. Looking down into the river’s surface, I saw my hair once again begin to tumble into the flowing water. I continued to walk, and the speed of the river began to push against my legs. I steadied myself. I wanted to wade further but I knew I would be knocked off my feet. Under the surface of the rapids, I could see shapes moving with the current; human bodies, in a continuous flow, borne endlessly into the world beyond the water. I woke to morning light and an empty bed, and I heard his noises in the kitchen. I rose and walked through, and saw on the edge of the table the small cream-coloured envelope. Upon seeing me he picked it up and cast it into the hearth to burn. He looked across at me, and his face communicated a sense of dry resignation. But within that face was the germ of something else, of anticipation or excitement. For all I knew he loved the tunnel and whatever he did there. Then I noticed that the skin on his knuckles was split and scabbed over, with flakes of dried blood still visible on his fingers.
The kiosk was closed when I passed it, but I paused to listen and could hear scuffling noises inside. It sounded less like a human than an animal, a dog walking around and making its bed. I considered knocking on the closed hatch, but instead I listened further. The sounds from inside became a breathing, guttural and deep. I didn’t know who was inside the kiosk; if the bureau woman could change then it could happen somewhere else too. The city had altered itself since the war, as if it was trying out new arrangements of ways to be. Some of the men had gone away and not returned. The men who were here and in charge during the war had vanished. To persist through this, through the whole theatre of it, can give you a feeling of immortality, of seeing the threads of history pass across and through your fingers like water, but immortality in this city would mean nothing other than performing the same tasks with no end in sight. There is some value in that, I suppose.
I did not dream of the river last night. I dreamed of nothing other than the bedroom itself. In my dream I was awake and lying there, his heat and breath next to me. He was awake and talking, which was how I knew I was dreaming. I was unable to remember the exact words he spoke, only the tone of them, and that something was very wrong. Occasionally, what light crept through the shutters would be abruptly extinguished and it was as if we were underground, somewhere deep and dark and out of human thought. When I eventually woke, I assumed initially that the dream had really taken place, and it was only when I looked over and saw his sleeping face that I knew he had not spoken any of those words, that they were my words ventriloquised through his dream figure, and that he would never speak them. The light poked around the edges of the shutters, and I rose silently and walked through to the kitchen. I filled the kettle from the tap and lit the gas to boil the water. The place was quiet. I opened the kitchen shutters a crack and looked out towards the edges of the city; it seemed as if it had changed again in the night, the architecture subtly shifting, new places appearing on the built horizon. I imagined the kiosk, its wooden hatch gone, bricked up and sealed. I pictured the bureau, its doors absent, replaced by blank walls and white paint. I heard him stir. I reached up and felt my scalp beneath my hair, my fingers searching for the beginnings of a patch. I heard no feet on the stair outside, but as I stood there at the window, the steam curling up and around and fogging the glass, I heard the insistent scrape of paper against stone as something was pushed carefully and methodically under the door.