Free The Unknown Terrorist by Richard Flanagan Page A

maybe the marriage was over when the affair began. The affair lasted several years. He believed it would fall apart each time he saw her again, fearing that she would no longer want him.
    Nick Loukakis fell in love with the woman he had the affair with. Maybe he was in love with her from the beginning. Maybe he was still in love with her. His wife neverfound out. She always knew, but her knowing grew from a vague awareness easily put away, to a bitter knowledge she could still deny, to an enraged desolation when she one day told him she knew, that she had always known, did he think she was such a fool? And he felt his world collapse into a terrifying white hole into which he fell and in which he was still falling.
    They stayed together and watched each other slowly become strangers, watched their love die as you watch a great old gum tree succumb to dieback. The affair was over for him, but it was just beginning for her. She never found out then, but it was as if each day now she lived another day of those years of lies and deceit; and his punishment was to witness her suffering. First just the leaf tips in the distant crown brown a little at the edges, then whole leaves, then a branch here and there. Still the tree lives, and everyone says it will be fine, that it is the weather, or one of those things, or anything but the death of something as natural and as seemingly permanent as a tree. But when his marriage began dying back, Nick Loukakis discovered nothing is fine.
    Each day some small thing—a joke, a shared intimacy, a sweet memory—he found to have withered and died. Caresses fell like dead leaves. Conversations cracked and then broke. And in the end there was nothing to quicken the trunk with the rising sap that fed and was fed in return by the branches, by the twigs, by the leaves. And in the end what remained, Nick Loukakis discovered, was nothing; nothing to keep it going, just a large thing still standing erect and proud, only everything about it had withered and died.
    Nick Loukakis realised that for a long time there had beensomething about his life that he now saw as innocence. He would wait up at night until his family was asleep, then walk up and down the corridor of his small home looking into each of their rooms, glad simply to watch them sleeping, knowing they were warm and safe, knowing they were at peace. Sometimes he would pull their covers up, graze their foreheads with the lightest of kisses, and be grateful. Then he would sleep, and in the morning he would rise before anyone, so that he might be awake, sipping his coffee, when they came one by one into the kitchen, sleepy, dishevelled, and he could simply marvel that this joy had been allowed him.
    But then this thing happened—something broke and he came to realise he had broken it and that it could not be put back together, not his family nor his life. He realised he could never again be that man, standing in doorways or sipping coffee in the kitchen, that he had been allowed a kind of paradise on earth in his little fibro cottage in Panania, but it was all over, and he could never again be that man waiting to marvel at his life.
    Now whenever he tried to hold or hug his wife, she would say,
    “Not like that, I don’t like it like that. You know that.”
    Or she would say nothing, and he would fold and unfold her limbs as if she were an inflatable woman. When he tried to make love she made no response. It felt like rape, and he guessed it amounted to much the same thing. He felt the sadness overwhelming him. It clutched at him like death. It dragged him down into the earth. There seemed no good thing left in this life. He drove to an abandoned road with a garden hose, then drove back home. He felt for his children,and he could not escape the sense that it would have been a crime to do such a thing to children, an act for which there would be no forgiveness.
    And yet he knew his wife loved him, and he loved her. But something had happened,