He seemed unchanged: but as he spoke on, it was hard to miss an edge in his words, a racing in his thoughts. At last he fell quiet. He turned from the view of the rain clouds and the shifting light.
‘I have to tell you,’ he said. ‘Something’s happened. A kind of milestone. You remember that artist we met together, a year ago: Don Namundja, from Oenpelli? I went to see him at his outstation, over Cahills Crossing. I spent weeks out there. We became friends, in a way: he took me out, into the stone country, into the hills behind Injalak. He told me all about the python, and the best ways to look. All year after that I was out walking in Kakadu, and across the southern flood plains—always watching out, of course.’
‘And you found the snake?’
‘Wait—let me tell the story. Don’t you want to hear?’
I made a sign for him to go on. He set the scene. It was the late dry. He’d begun exploring along the edge of the Arnhem Land escarpment, on the borders of the national park. With each trip he pushed further.
‘You can climb from the flat quite easily, if you follow where the wet season creeks come down. It’s another world up there: discreet, unvisited, calm. There are fresh waterholes with white sand, places you’d think no one’s ever been. There are springs coming up from underground, and pink satin bush, and palm doves, and multicoloured butterflies, and green tree snakes everywhere: it’s like an earthly paradise. On one trip, just before the first rains came, I’d led a group a long way up the creekline from Jim Jim Falls, and we’d made an early camp. It was the midpoint of the day. The whole world seemed to be fading, on the verge of sleep: but I was alert. It was one of those spells when you feel you can see everything, you see the whole structure of the bush around you, what it holds and what it hides. I went on, alone, deep into the jumbled back country: full of outliers and ridgelines and breakaways. I’d gone along the base of a low cliff of sandstone—it turned into a narrow overhang. There was a stand of evergreens, and a recess in the rock face, almost hidden by the shading of the trees. I bent down; I stepped in—and I saw it: a grey, gleaming python, with the echoes of the rainbow in its scales. It was very drowsy—it had just had a big feed—you could see the outline of some poor mammal in its gut. It gave me an anguished sort of look, and didn’t move. I just lay down alongside it.’
‘And told it how beautiful it was?’
‘That kind of thing. It calmed down, once we’d cleared up that I didn’t want to eat it. It had a very gentle presence. Extremely feminine. I stayed as long as I thought was right, and then I tiptoed out, and back, beneath the cliff, along the creekline, and down, to where we’d made camp. I couldn’t resist, though. I had to see it again. In the morning I went back: it had gone. There was just a faint track left. That was months ago—but it’s still with me. I remember how quiet, how soft those moments were. They balanced up everything life hurls at you. Every sadness, every pain, every harsh look, every stab. Don’t you find that if we stay open to life, it just irradiates us with all the wonders that it has?’
I smiled, at this.
‘But there’s a dark side, too.’
I turned. I looked more carefully at Palomor—but his eyes were fixed on the distance; he was gazing at the sunset, and the light beams piercing through the clouds.
‘By which you mean?’
‘Don’t be too analytic—I mean lots of different, inconsistent things: that I’d been longing for that second of discovery so much, and dreaming of it so much; and once it came it almost seemed as if it hadn’t happened; I was just too far forward in my mind. Why is it we can’t stay in ourselves, and in the motion of our lives: why are we nothing but hope, and fear? Is that being human? What does it help us, then, to know who we are?’
‘That doesn’t sound like a Randian set of conclusions to come to—to be regretful when you reach your heart’s desire.’
‘That’s not really what I was saying, or not the only thing. I just had the feeling, very strongly, in that cave, that I’d actually been there, in that moment, already—not imagined it but been in it—and suddenly I had a picture of life, what it really is; just the images that we receive: a cavalcade of images, blurs of light, patterns rushing by—from the future, from our past, from the people round us, from the landscape—and we’re trapped by the world’s glare, and struggling constantly to make sense of what comes in.’
‘And that’s the update?’
‘In part—there’s a new enthusiasm as well. Glare-related!’
‘I thought the snake obsession was forever—you’re reinventing yourself.’
‘I’ve been inventing myself since I was a child. Isn’t that what everyone should be doing? Don’t you?’
‘So what is it—the latest thing?’
He nodded in the direction of the harbour, with great formality, as if towards the altar of a cult. I followed his look with my eyes. There was a grey-hulled customs vessel heading out, past East Point, and an empty Perkins barge bound in: a cattle boat was riding at anchor off the far shore, by the Mandorah jetty and hotel.
‘You’re going to sea?’
‘No, I mean diving, of course: free diving. I’ve begun wreck diving in the harbour: you know it’s full of reefs, and wrecks, from the bombing in World War II, and even before, from cyclones in the pearling lugger times.’
He told me something of the story, in an involved, staccato fashion, jumping between sequences of experiences, picking up his first forays into this new kingdom, his halting progress, his path towards expertise.
‘It sounds almost like bushwalking,’ I said when he stopped: ‘You’re in a strange environment, deep in it—completely dependent on it. It’s indifferent to you, but you have to read it; you have to know its signs, know them perfectly; you have to win it over, and make it your ally and friend.’
Palomor gave a little, pitying smile at this, as though to suggest at once how creditable this attempt at insight had been, and how far from the crystal truths he knew.
‘I’ll tell you how it started,’ he said then: ‘While you were gone, I was off in Far North Queensland: trying to buy, trying to build. I was looking for ideal spots: for a place far from the power grid, where there’s water flowing, and the sun shines all the time. I went everywhere I’d heard of that was wild, with strange people; behind Ayton and Cow Bay; up and down the scrubland edges of the Tableland as well: Almaden, Dimbulah, Chillagoe. But after all that searching, and never finding, you get ground down. I’d been looking in the hills round Greenvale and Lynd Junction, just going down bush tracks, coming on camps of squatters living rough; I’d travelled into the deserted mine sites of the cape. I had a sense of ghosts around me all the time in that country; ghosts without names, collective ghosts: it was a whole landscape full of unfulfilled and disappointed souls. I had to break away from it. So I began driving north, up the spine of the cape. I’d got into a Dice Man mood. You know that book? No? When the hero decides to live his whole life on the throw of a dice. You give yourself alternatives: and then you roll, and follow chance, and trust it. I was at the Archer River Roadhouse, fuelling up. I waited. I gave myself the options: follow the next car south, turn back—or keep on going till the road runs out. I made the throw: it was north—behind a supply truck; pretty soon it took the Weipa turn-off. All day long I sat behind it, in its dust: it kept on, up the peninsula, right through to Mapoon. That was the destination. I stopped there, and found myself a place to stay: there were teachers I fell in with; they didn’t have anyone much to teach. We went on their boat the next day, out into the gulf: I’d never seen sea waters like that before—so still, so ominous. It turned out they were serious divers, and I went down with them. They had a favourite spot—beside an old jetty that had decayed away: there was nothing of it left except the line of wood posts and cross-ties stretching out beneath the waterline. They gave me a speargun. It took me a few dives to get used to things: there was a weight to the water, and a gleam, from all the flow of sediment. So many fish, great schools of them e
verywhere—and round the jetty there were bait fish, all together, a vast ball: hundreds and thousands of them, touching each other, bunched up along the line of wooden posts. I was down below, looking up at them; and then a shark of some kind came racing in: they scattered—behind them, above us, there was the sun streaming through the water: blazing, molten light, so bright it turned the world to nothing. I was staring up at it; I could see right through it. I could see beyond.’
He laughed. ‘That was an experience: I almost forgot I had to come up to the surface to breathe.’
‘No scuba?’
‘Free diving. That’s why it’s called free—that’s the point.’
‘And when you’re down there, holding your breath, there’s danger every second: you’re on the edge, you’re between life and death, the risk is the thing?’
‘More that it just doesn’t matter, in that world, in that filtered light, away from words, at one with everything around you. It doesn’t seem to matter if you live or die. You’re on the same level as everything—nothing is superior, nothing less than you. Everything is just the light.’
He said this in a half-enraptured voice, his hands tracing out a faint arabesque on the table between us as he spoke.
‘Do you remember when we were down at Lake Newell, in the desert, on that long trip you took me on? The lake you said looked like a question mark on the map, and in the landscape as well?’
‘I do.’
‘Where it was so bright that even opening one’s eyes and looking at the white salt surface of the lake in full sun was enough to make you feel you’d gone too far—you were about to pass out and lose your senses—something very much like that.’
He stopped, and glanced up; but this time there was the beginning of a new, fear-laden expression on his face—and though I had known him for several years by then, though we had travelled together in each other’s company so much, that moment was the first time that I grasped how frail he was, for all his certainties, how faint and vulnerable. I had the impulse to reach across to him: I said nothing, and stared, in fascination.
‘What are you staring at?’ he said: ‘What? You’re almost smiling.’
And it may be that I was: I saw him again for a second as he was when he first came north; when he was driving with me down desert roads; out by the dam causeway, too, on the snake hunt as darkness fell; and I saw others like him I had known before. We sense, after some while, the shape and pitch of the lives we know; we begin to make out the destinies of the swirling cast around us; their course through life no longer surprises us; their weaving path announces and contains their fate. And so it was with Palomor: in those instants, as the light from the clouds before the late sun changed, I gazed at him, and shuddered, despite myself.
‘What are you thinking of?’ he asked.
‘About people I knew, before. Friends I had, people you remind me of. And how there’s a point in life where memories stop being disconnected things: they form themselves into a pattern. You realise your experiences came in the way they did, in their exact sequence, for a reason—to help you learn, to give you pointers to the depths of life.’
‘What are you talking about?’
‘There are some people who stay with me—very strongly—even though I haven’t had anything to do with them for years: and as I come to understand them more, their stories and they way they tried to live and steer their course make me feel how hazardous the paths we go down can be; how narrow the right way; how full of cracks and dangers. How easy it is for us to lose our bearings, to stumble and fall—and we should always be on the watch, always on guard.’
‘And watch out for each other.’
‘Precisely.’
‘But I’m not in any danger.’
‘Of course not,’ I said: ‘One never thinks one is.’
We said our goodbyes. He was heading off: a long trek, this time, through the North Kimberley; it would take him from Wyndham across the Cambridge Gulf, first to the old mission settlement at Oombulgurri, where the red gorgeline rises high above the huddle of the houses on the bank—then he meant to cross the rough tableland, down to the Berkeley, a straight, fast-flowing river which gives all the landscape it runs through a sharp, dynamic tone. Palomor had already gone through that country: its ranges were choked with rock art, incised and painted, ancient and new. He wanted to record everything he found, and record it in wet season conditions: he believed the most elusive features of the art panels could only be seen in conditions of moisture and extreme humidity.
‘And then what?’
‘I know what I’m doing; there’s a plan: come out at Carson River, through the gap in the ranges, and down to Moonlight Camp; you can see the path down marked very clearly on the charts—and on, then, to Kalumburu. I’ve heard so many stories from there, such stories—I’ve been longing to go and see for myself.’
‘Soon there won’t be anywhere left on the surface of the Earth for you to discover.’
‘That’s the idea,’ he said: ‘But there’s always the underwater world: you could never run out of wonders there, as long as you lived—and I’ll be diving this weekend, on the harbour wrecks.’
*
I travelled down to Sydney the next day, on a short trip, and each morning I made sure to read the northern headlines. I went through them mechanically, going over every little article with the utmost attention. It was as if I knew what I would find. My tasks had brought me to the city’s centre early one day: I was sitting close by the waterfront at Circular Quay. The sky was an Elysian blue; the cries of gulls and sounds of churning engines from the ferries filled the air. Then my eyes lit on a story: ‘Territory Tragedy’, a few lines, hackneyed words, no more. Brief, sharp sentences; sentences like any others: the death sentence of my friend, whose youth, and clear eyes, and longing for life’s depths had brought him no protection. He had made his pattern. It was done. I stared out, at the light, the skyline, the bridge’s ironwork, the clouds. The conversation was flowing smoothly at the table one along from me: its phrases seemed, at that instant, precise beyond belief: ‘At Mount Maragen, the sound of the riflebirds was always clear,’ said a voice, with slow, grave emphasis, before the talk swirled on. I looked again at the words before me: A diving accident in Darwin. A thirty-year-old man. ‘His companions made repeated attempts to locate the victim’s body and revive him…’
And so, with soft, swift movements, those we know depart from us, and leave us in this world, and leave behind them memories to disperse like plumes of smoke haze in the air. I took the flight back north a few days later. We drew near the airport; we passed over the Mary River wetlands; we approached. Soon I could see the outline of the harbour, with its twining currents and its gleams and the light shafts falling on its surface that seem to sink through to the reefs and channels lying below. We touched down. It was close to sunset. I drove out, slowly, following familiar roads—along the highway, left at Humpty Doo, and on, to Fogg Dam, stray notions running in chains through my head. There were rainstorms. I had the radio switched to the news channel: the bulletins came cycling round: more details on the harbour episode. The dead man had been found lying face up, speargun in his hand, resting like an effigy upon the upturned hull of the wreck.
I edged my way in along the half-submerged back road. I stopped at the viewing platform, as before. All was quiet. The downpour had swept the causeway clean; it shone in the last light’s glow, the cries of night birds began, and I sent my thoughts back: back to my previous visit there with Palomor, when I read him, at that spot, a part of Warburg’s lecture on the serpent handlers, and told him something of its author’s fate. And I could still hear his voice, in the humid darkness, just as I can hear it now, asking: ‘What then? What happened to Warburg then?’
*
The story is simple enough to tell. Confined in Bellevue, kept in the clinic’s closed wing, isolated, with little prospect of release, Warburg had the freedom only of his eyes: at certain hours he was permit
ted to stroll through the parklands of the sanatorium, amid the larch trees and the chestnuts, and gaze out across the waters of Lake Konstanz, where the reflections from the peaks above the far shore shimmered and played. Each day he was subject to the healing attentions of Dr Binswanger, and the clinic’s nurses and psychologists; their diagnosis was broad-brush: schizophrenia, but also a manic-depressive mixed condition. What were his thoughts, then, and his fears? Given the regime of close supervision the patient was subjected to, they are documented very well. At the onset of his troubles, Warburg had wished to kill his wife and his children, the better to safeguard them from their enemies. Now, he was persuaded that he himself was the chief target of these pursuing foes—they were behind his footsteps, they were round the corner, they were closing on him with every second, there was nowhere safe. In addition, he had come to believe that a group of well-organised conspirators was at large, and plotting to eliminate the most prominent of Germany’s Jewish leaders, in the realms of finance, the academy, the stage and the arts—and this was a fear that had its seeds in the world beyond the clinic’s walls. Warburg’s brother Max, who was at the helm of the family bank, kept guards in those years to watch his house, and his name did figure on the assassination list of a right-wing terror band; Walter Rathenau, the foreign minister of the Weimar Republic, and an intimate of the Warburg circle, was, after many threats, gunned down by extremists near his villa in Grünewald. Warburg had built his anguish on the secret currents in the air—and, as was fitting for an art historian and iconographer, his imaginings were gruesome and baroque. He was convinced that his entire family had been locked up in the clinic and were to be executed in its cellars; when he heard cries echoing in the hallway, he was sure he knew the voice: it was his wife’s, and she was being tortured by the Bellevue doctors; the meat set before him at the dinner table was surely the flesh of his own slain children, victims of Binswanger; Binswanger himself was the chief pursuing murderer on Warburg’s trail, coming closer, ever closer—he was trapped.
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