5

Jonathan was not an experienced man – sexually speaking – in the way we think of experience. There had been Fritzi and a few other whores while he was on the railroads (not so many as there would have been if College hadn’t died), but the thirteen years of his ‘idyll’ were years of celibacy. He was thirty-six when he met Sarah. For most of us the intensities that come with first love are well in the past by that time, something that happens at sixteen, seventeen – even younger. What you feel then is so powerful that it lays waste everything around it and, even in the midst of your transports, you come to realize that if you’re going to survive you’ll have to do without feelings like it. So you grow up a little. You lose your intensity. You learn to manage with dignity but with a more shadowy product altogether. In such matters Jonathan was an innocent. His emotions had lain in wait for years: the cork hits the ceiling and the captive passions bubble out all over the place, splashing on feet, floor, furniture; there’s the wild laughter and the scramble for glasses; the wine goes on spilling out over everything. But Jonathan was a person who valued his control above all. Each new rapture brought with it a hangover of bile and self-hatred. He looked into Sarah’s eyes and forgot where he was as all lovers do, but instead of enjoying it he feared he was going mad. He thought of the timber wolf whose cock swells after copulation so that he and the bitch are stuck together in nature’s ferocious anxiety to ensure the purity of the genes, both of them whimpering helplessly, at the mercy of the elements and of any enemy that might happen by.

Because it was his profession – because it was the only way he could pay for the woman who aroused in him all these conflicts (and also because it gave him another of those pleasures he so much despised) – he held prayer meetings in houses and schools. He rode horseback from town to town through the great cedar forests of the northwest; he married, baptized, preached, buried and rode back to Sarah, held her in his arms in bed and railed against himself over the lies he told with every breath he took.

But this wasn’t the sum of it. Nobody could cross the gulf of a past like his. Over everything, around everything, through everything – even Sarah’s warm, eager body – lay the battlefield symbolized by the newly come-to-life George. Jonathan’s mind prowled along old roads inch by inch, reeling at the stench, the never-to-be-staunched wounds, the injustices too great to be righted. There were skirmishes at outposts that made no sense to anybody, even to him: feints, parades, half and quarter thrusts, ineffectual, meaningless. A battle, says Clausewitz, resembles ‘a slow disturbance of equilibrium which commences almost imperceptibly and then with every moment becomes stronger and more visible’. Jonathan’s life after the idyll was like this. He saw himself again as Christ in the Garden at Gethsemane, alone, friendless, awaiting crucifixion. One night, looking down at Sarah (her head was turned away from him and the moonlight lit up the curve of her cheek on the pillow), he said to her very softly: ‘“Sleepest thou? Couldest thou not watch one hour?”’