The Narrow Road to the Deep North

by Richard Flanagan

  Little remains: but every hour is saved

  From that eternal silence, something more,

  —something more . . . something more . . . he had lost some lines somewhere and he no longer knew what the poem was or who had written it, so totally now was the poem him. This grey spirit, he thought despondently, or was he remembering?—yes, that was it—

  And this grey spirit yearning in desire

  To follow knowledge, like a sinking star,

  Beyond the utmost bound of human thought.

  And he felt shame and he felt loss and he felt his life had only ever been shame and loss, it was as though the light was now going, his mother was calling out, Boy! Boy! But he could not find her, he was returning to hell and it was a hell he would never escape.

  And he remembered Lynette Maison’s face as she slept, and the Glenfiddich whisky miniatures he had drunk before he left, and Rabbit Hendricks’ illustration of Darky Gardiner sitting in an opulent armchair through which little silver fish swam, in a Syrian village in which Yabby Burrows and his spiked hair was about to dissolve into Syrian dust. And somehow it made no sense to him that the picture survived and would be reproduced endlessly, but Yabby Burrows was gone and to his life no future and no meaning could ever be attached. There was someone in a blue uniform standing above him. Dorrigo wanted to tell him he was sorry, but when he opened his mouth only drool rolled out.

  He was in any case hurtling backwards into an ever faster swirling maelstrom of people, things, places, backwards and round and deeper and deeper and deeper into the growing, grieving, dancing storm of things forgotten or half-remembered, stories, lines of poetry, faces, gestures misunderstood, love spurned, a red camellia, a man weeping, a wooden church hall, women, a light he had stolen from the sun—

  He remembered another poem, he could see the poem in its entirety, but he did not want to see it or know it; he could see Charon’s burning eyes staring into his but he did not want to see Charon, he could taste the obol being forced into his mouth, he felt the void he was becoming—

  —and finally he understood its meaning.

  His last words, as witnessed by a Sudanese orderly:

  Advance forward, gentleman. Charge the windowsill.

  He felt a snare tightening around his throat; he gasped and threw a leg out of the bed, where it jerked for a second or two, thumping the steel frame, and died.

  18

  THE LONG NIGHT waxed, the slow quarter-moon continued rising through black rungs, the night moaned with many groans and snores. Bonox Baker turned up at the officers’ tent with the news of Darky Gardiner’s drowning. By the light of a kerosene lantern, Dorrigo Evans entered it in his diary as murder. The word seemed inadequate. What didn’t? In his small shaving mirror, which lay next to the diary, he glimpsed his frightful reflection, hair hoary and unkempt, fierce eyes lit with fire and a filthy rag hanging around his neck. Had he become the ferryman? He turned the mirror upside down. It was almost midnight, and he knew he should try to get a few hours’ sleep so he might have the strength to make it through another day. He wanted to be first at the dawn parade to meet the hundred men as they arrived and wish them well before they left.

  A bag of mail had arrived that morning with the truck, the first any of them had seen for nine months. As ever, the correspondence was random. Some men received several letters, many men none. There was one letter for Dorrigo Evans from Ella. He had intended to wait until now, the end of his day, for the immense pleasure of reading it, so that he might fall asleep with it filling his dreams, but he felt so home sick on seeing the letter when it was handed to him in the morning before the parade he had torn it open and read it there and then. He could not believe her news. All day it had haunted him. Rereading it now at the end of the day he still found it impossible to digest.

  The letter was six months old. It ran to several pages. Ella wrote that although nothing had been heard from Dorrigo or, for that matter, from his unit for over a year, she knew he was alive. The letter talked of her life, of Melbourne in all its mundane detail. All this he could believe. But unlike other men, who pored over every sentence of their letters and cards from home, only one detail registered with Dorrigo Evans. Enclosed with the letter was a newspaper cutting headed ADELAIDE HOTEL TRAGEDY. It told of how, after a gas explosion in its kitchen, the King of Cornwall hotel had burnt down with the loss of four lives, including that of the much-respected publican, Mr Keith Mulvaney. Another three people were unaccounted for and believed to have also perished, including two guests and Mrs Mulvaney, the publican’s wife.

  Dorrigo Evans read the newspaper cutting for a third and then a fourth time. Outside it was raining again. He felt cold. He pulled his army blanket round him tighter, and by the light of the kerosene lantern he once more read Ella’s letter.

  One of Daddy’s friends high up made some enquiries for me with the coroner’s office in Adelaide, Ella wrote. He said it had now been made official, but because of the tragedy and people’s feelings and morale and all that they’ve kept it out of the paper. They had to use teeth. Can you imagine? Poor Mrs Keith Mulvaney is now among the confirmed dead. I am so sorry, Dorry. I know how fond you were of your uncle and aunt. Tragedies like this make me realise how lucky I am.

  Mrs Keith Mulvaney?

  For some time the name made no more sense than the news.

  Mrs Keith Mulvaney.

  She had only ever been Amy to him. He had no idea it was a lie, the only lie Ella ever told him.

  He put out the kerosene lantern to conserve fuel and lit the stub of a candle. For a long time he watched the flame refusing to die. The smoke tapered into tiny smuts that played up and down in the pulsing areolae of candlelight. He looked at the light, at the smuts. As though there were two worlds. This world and a hidden world that was a real world of wild, flying particles spinning, shimmering, randomly bouncing off each other, and new worlds coming into being in consequence. One man’s feeling is not always equal to all that life is. Sometimes it’s not equal to anything much at all. He stared into the flame.

  Amy, amante, amour, he whispered, as if the words themselves were smuts of ash rising and falling, as though the candle were the story of his life and she the flame.

  He lay down in his haphazard cot.

  After a time he found and opened a book he had been reading that he had expected to end well, a romance which he wanted to end well, with the hero and heroine finding love, with peace and joy and redemption and understanding.

  Love is two bodies with one soul, he read, and turned the page.

  But there was nothing—the final pages had been ripped away and used as toilet paper or smoked, and there was no hope or joy or understanding. There was no last page. The book of his life just broke off. There was only the mud below him and the filthy sky above. There was to be no peace and no hope. And Dorrigo Evans understood that the love story would go on forever and ever, world without end.

  He would live in hell, because love is that also.

  He put the book down. Unable to sleep, he stood up and went to the edge of the shelter beyond which the rain teemed. The moon was lost. He relit the kerosene lantern and made his way to the bamboo urinal on the far side of the camp, relieved himself, and on his return noticed growing at the side of the muddy trail, in the midst of the overwhelming darkness, a crimson flower.

  He leant down and shone his lantern on the small miracle. He stood, bowed in the cascading rain, for a long time. Then he straightened back up and continued on his way.

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  Epub ISBN: 9781448192243

  Version 1.0

  www.randomhouse.co.uk

  Published by Chatto & Windus 2014

  First published in Australia by Knopf Australia 2013

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  Copyright © Richard Flanagan 2013

  Richard Flanagan has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 to be identified as the author of this work

  First published in Great Britain in 2014 by

  Chatto & Windus

  Random House, 20 Vauxhall Bridge Road,

  London SW1V 2SA

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  A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

  ISBN 9780701189051

  The author gratefully acknowledges the use of the following texts and translations: Poem 5, Catullus, from Bed to Bed, translated by James Michie, Orion, 1967; Selected Poems and Prose of Paul Celan, translated by John Felstiner, W. W. Norton, New York, 2001; The Essential Haiku, edited and translated by Robert Hass, Ecco Press, 1994; Issa and Kikusha-ni haiku from The Sound of Water by Basho, Buson, Issa and Other Poets, translated by Sam Hamill, c. 1995 by Sam Hamill, reproduced by arrangement with The Permissions Company Inc., on behalf of Shambhala Publications Inc., Boston, MA, www.shambhala.com; The British Museum Haiku, translated by David Cobb, The British Museum Press, 2002; The Narrow Road to the Deep North by Matsuo Basho, translated by Nobuyuki Yuasa, Penguin, 1966; Japanese Death Poems, translated by Yoel Hoffmann, Tuttle Publishing, Boston, 1986; ‘These Foolish Things (Remind Me Of You)’, lyrics by Eric Maschwitz and Jack Strachey, c. 1976 by Lafleur Music Ltd, reproduced by permission of Boosey & Hawkes Music Publishers Ltd.

  Every effort has been made to trace and contact all holders of copyright in quotations. If there are any inadvertent omissions or errors, the publishers will be pleased to correct these at the earliest opportunity.