by Alice Nelson

The speculative essay is also a small kingdom of digressive freedom, where personal memory and tectonic shifts of history can find a place beside each other, where dispossessions and erasures of all kinds can intertwine and refract.

At the old Paravur synagogue in Cochin, the villagers have taken away all the gravestones to use as washing stones. They are the perfect size and shape. I imagine the river water flowing across the carved Hebrew letters. The press and slap of wet cloth against the old stone. A desecration, a travesty. But to the villagers it was not sacrilege, you said. Think of all those crumbling buildings in Bombay, ghostly banyan trees bursting through their hearts. India is a country where bodies are burned, not buried, where there are no graves. As bodies disperse into the air, so too should buildings decay and disappear. A return to formlessness. They would be effaced anyway, the letters on those gravestones, by time and by weather. In the end they are only stones.

Our desires always go far beyond the object of desire, you tell me. Desire is metonymy, mirror; the really urgent questions it asks us are of ourselves. Monsoon season. It is raining extravagantly and we are lying in bed together in the middle of the afternoon. I watch the spread of my hair across your chest, your fingers twisting a strand of it; how novel and miraculous it feels to be in such proximity to you. Let me have this, I want to say to you, this very specific object of desire. This particular body.

Bombay. You insist on the old name. Mumbai is where you go for a business meeting, Bombay is where you meet a lover.

From the edge of our garden in India you can see a mountain range that looks like a sleeping elephant. I show you, drawing the shape of it with my finger; the great sweep of the back, the long trunk. The weight and certitude of an elephant, you say softly. It’s from a Barbara Ras poem; later she writes about mad breaking-heart stickiness. There’s a photograph of the two of us standing at the edge of the valley, silhouettes in the afternoon haze, both wearing wide-brimmed hats. We had not ever touched each other then.

Dunwich, where you live, was once one of Europe’s most important ports. A merchant town, a trading town, second only to London in the Middle Ages, full of churches, convents and monasteries. Slowly, year after year, the city slipped into the sea. The storm tides, the crumbling cliff face, the incursions of the ocean. Every kind of defence was built against the sea; stones and sand shovelled away furiously, elaborate sea walls constructed and reinforced. But none of it was any good and the townspeople were forced to retreat inland. Now Dunwich lies under the sea like a lost Atlantis. It is said that on some stormy nights the church bells can be heard pealing beneath the waves.

We forgive everything of a lover, Ondaatje wrote. We forgive selfishness, desire, guile—as long as we are the motive for it. But can we forgive these things of ourselves? Deceit, disloyalty, slyness. How swiftly I learn to lie, how fluently lie after lie spills out of my lips as if I had miraculously mastered a foreign language, or a very complicated piano concerto. How easily we let go of the things we had once held as truths about ourselves. But perhaps we never move past who we essentially are. It’s a kind of wishfulness to imagine that somehow at our cores we are better people than those we turn out to be. That we are merely bent sideways by the burden of our circumstances.

Being with you, and not being with you, is the only way I have to measure time. —Jorge Luis Borges

Sometimes you speak about the blueberries you picked in the woods as a child, or the way your mother made tea with fresh ginger, and the past presses in on us. Shifting borders, the names of towns changed, villages razed, cemeteries covered over with new roads. Names lost too; the long unfurling foreignness of your father’s name cut away to create something more palatable for a new life in a new country. Swallowed histories, dismantled pasts. No wonder it turned you into a collector, an archivist, a rescuer of every lost thing.

The burden of our circumstances. You say this when what you should really say is that we hold the lives of others in our hands. That we wield the power of devastation.

I tell you about the place they call the graveyard of statues. After British rule ended, the city found itself with all manner of statues and monuments to various high-born Englishmen that didn't seem appropriate to the new post-colonial Indian city. So they moved all the statues to a garden outside the Prince of Wales Museum and arranged them in congenial circles, so that they could commune with each other. There seemed to me something so tender and solicitous about this. Perhaps there’s a place like this where you and I could meet. A room, a garden, a bench by the sea. Where everything can be forgiven.

The first book you lent me; a collection of Rilke’s letters about Cezanne. It seemed such an illicit thrill; to smuggle this small piece of you inside my house. Just as potent as the smell of you on my clothes, my hands, my hair. I kept staring at the slim volume-a little tattered, pages folded down here and there. Some sentences were underlined in pencil. The way that Cezanne made saints out of the objects he painted, the apples and the wine bottles. A paragraph on the interdependence of colours in his landscapes; as if every place knew about all the others. I don’t know what became of that book. I don’t remember returning it to you, but I don’t have it any longer.

There is one grave left on the cliff’s edge in the old churchyard of All Saints above Dunwich Beach. They have constructed a fence around it, as if this might protect it from slipping into the sea. One the other side of the cliff path, sheep move through the ruins of the Greyfriars monastery.

Once I drew a map of your garden. This was before I had been to your house in Dunwich so it was a dream map, spun entirely from your recountings. The ancient oriental plane tree whose boughs reach down to touch the ground. The row of linden trees at the bottom of the garden. The old greenhouse with its listing frame and warped glass. The holly bush where the neighbour’s tortoiseshell cat liked to retreat in the afternoons. The beds full of snowdrops, asters, phlox, dahlias. Flowers grown and tended by your wife, though you never said this. I pinned the map to the wall above my desk, but sometimes I cannot bear to look at it.

You have never made me a cup of tea. Would not know how long to steep the leaves, how much milk to pour. It seems a necessary form of knowledge.

There is an Elizabeth Bishop poem about a moose that took her twenty years to write. I read it to you one evening over the telephone. It’s long and you are very silent as I read, so silent I think the line has been cut off. We are a long way apart, our words carried over waves. I imagine you sitting at your desk, watching the sky darkening in the fields beyond the garden. Your listening heart. Two long decades of keeping company with one poem. The same length as your marriage. Twice the length of mine.

At a market in France, I buy antique linen embroidered with the initials of long-dead women. Sheets, pillowcases, once a ruffled nightdress with the name Claire stitched above the heart. My husband finds it baffling and somewhat morbid; it’s difficult for me explain to him that I can’t bear for these things be lost to history. So much about me is bewildering to my husband; sometimes I think that with each year of our marriage I grow stranger and more incomprehensible to him. In our linen closet the heavy sheets are folded carefully, with little cloth parcels of French lavender pressed between them.

Some of the gifts you brought me: a smooth stone from the shingle beach at Dunwich, a crab apple from the tree in your garden, a sprig of lilac heather. I kept the stone for many years on my desk.

Every time you speak the word home in my presence I feel it as a wound. One small word that bears the power to turn me queasy with loss. A little stab between the ribs. There are words we carefully excise from our vocabulary by some unspoken agreement. The word we, when it doesn’t refer to you and me. Two names.

Sometimes I grow weary of the weight of dragging my soul around in the world. I tell you this during one of our long telephone conversations and we both laugh. We are always laughing. After we hang up you send me an article about a physician who tried to scientifically determine whether the soul had weight. He chose several patients and weighed them on a minutely calibrated scale just before their death and immediately afterwards. One of the patients lost 21 grams in those few moments, leading the physician to speculate that this was the precise weight of the human soul. He also weighed 15 dogs immediately after their deaths but none of their bodies lost any weight. Twenty-one grams doesn’t seem so heavy darling, you wrote.

In one of our very first conversations about music all those years ago in the garden in India, you told me that Adorno had once written that in Mahler happiness flourishes on the brink of catastrophe. All these clues to yourself, scattered like breadcrumbs. I should have been a better student.

The last letter you ever sent me. Not even a letter, but an envelope containing a sepia photograph of the Gateway to India. The photograph had been taken to commemorate the departure of the last British troops from India after independence. But the choice of the image struck me as rather heavy-handed and obvious, rather unlike you. I thought perhaps it was evidence of your distress. Stricken and despairing, you had reached for a less sophisticated metaphor than you would usually employ, in the way that people often resort to cliché at moments of great emotion. But later I remembered a conversation we once had about the way that before the British left India they destroyed every shred of compromising evidence, every questionable record. There were great fires in the square of the Red Fort in Delhi, conflagrations that burned through the day and night. I remember you telling me that those tasked with this swift and determined destruction were called ‘burning officers’. There was no photograph you could send me of this furtive erasure, so instead you choose an image of the official ceremonial departure, the commemorated farewell.

What would we conceal or deny now that we had agreed that we must part? What versions of our histories would we take forth into the world?

In one of your essays you wrote at some length about Corsican funeral rites; the way that after a death the doors and shutters of the house are closed and sometimes the whole façade is painted black. The dramatic character of this appealed to me. A grief so consuming it needed to be made plain for all to see.

We were so careful to leave no trace of ourselves in each other’s lives. Two wineglasses on the sink, a long dark hair on the pillow, an earring lost between the sheets; small but devastating hand grenades. But I wonder if the places we have been together persist in remembering us, if they hold our presence silently. Some almost impalpable aura. Like a temple or a small country church. Something hallowed.

Wiesengrund wrote of Mahler that his music was the cardiogram of a breaking heart.

We are, all of us, revisionist historians. Not just those who have something to hide.

The night jasmine is blooming and I want to write to tell you.

In Corsica, small dwellings are built for the dead, and the living visit to talk with them, to ask their advice, to bring them news.

The enormous and terrible discipline of grief that must be unseen.

A single smooth stone, found on a shingle beach and many years later placed on a grave.

Once you told me that during the summer evenings of your childhood you watched the swallows circling and imagined they held the world together by the courses they traced through the air.

Natalie Diaz once wrote that the space between poems becomes a kingdom she wanders; a place for her griefs and anxieties to move in new ways—”unashamed and unafraid to be seen into.” The speculative essay is also a small kingdom of digressive freedom, where personal memory and tectonic shifts of history can find a place beside each other, where dispossessions and erasures of all kinds can intertwine and refract. Where what is not written must also be heard, and where the silences between the passages speak of the limits of expression and the way that every story is a kind of iceberg—with vast portions submerged beneath our knowing. The speculative essay, with its mutability, its form-resisting fluidity, its embrace of ambiguities of all kinds, seems the perfect medium for the speculative undertaking that is love itself. And when that love is wrenched into grief, it is a realm where it is possible to find buried within the history of what did not happen a way of preserving the essential traces that remain.

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Alice Nelson is an Australian writer. She was named Best Young Australian Novelist of the year for her first novel, The Last Sky, and has also published a non-fiction book called After This. Her most recent novel, The Children’s House, published by Random House in 2018, has received widespread critical and popular acclaim and is being translated into other languages. The novel was long-listed for the Australian Independent Bookseller’s Award for Fiction, the Australian Book Industry Awards and the Australian Literary Society’s Gold Medal. Alice’s short fiction, essays and reviews have appeared in publications such as The Sydney Review of Books, The Asia Literary Review, Southerly Magazine, Australian Book Review and the West Australian Newspaper.