Belomor

by Nicolas Rothwell

  ‘Thunder,’ I said. ‘Far away. An early storm.’

  ‘But it’s not really thunder,’ said Tony, then. ‘Or not only. It’s a presence. The noise of the country, talking. And it’s not far away at all: it’s very close. It’s here: it’s right with us, listening. When I come up here, and see this country, I realise we haven’t even begun to look at it, be lifted up by it—respond to it. Here it is. It’s showing itself to us: opening itself up. And all we do is hide away and fear it and flee from it. Do you know what I want to do here—here in lost, broken Wyndham, Wyndham at the end of the line?’

  ‘No idea.’

  ‘You can’t guess? It was last night that I decided—the idea came to me, while we were talking, on the verandah: it came in an instant; suddenly I could see it, there, in every detail, in my mind’s eye. I’m going to build a gallery! A majestic, beautiful gallery of modern art: the most perfect building in all the North. Can’t you picture it, set in this landscape?’

  ‘You could call it the Fitzcarraldo Gallery.’

  ‘You don’t believe me?

  ‘Well,’ I said, ‘it’s certainly a dream.’

  ‘It’s not a dream,’ he said: ‘It’s a promise. A pledge. I promise you. You’ll see. Come back, next wet season: come back, and you’ll find me. I’ll be here—and I’ll have built a palace. A palace fit for kings: the gallery at the end of the world.’

  *

  But it was years later when at last, in the wake of protracted travels, I drove the long road out to Wyndham once again. Tony’s celebrity, and Jirrawun’s prestige, were then at their height; he had fulfilled his pledge: he had built the gallery. It stood, whitewalled, angular, shimmering in the Wyndham landscape; it was his emblem: it took pride of place in all the films and photographic essays devoted to his project and its mounting success. More than anyone in the art archipelago of the North, he had found the key to worldly triumph—and this made the dark communiqués that issued from his bush retreat all the more captivating to their recipients, and all the more disquieting in their jewelled despair. It was clear to me the time had come to see him on his new stage: I set off. Again it was the peak of the build-up, the time of dry thunder: that brief spell, a week or two, no more, when lightning strikes constantly inside the massed cloud banks of the evening sky; thunder rolls, the storms strengthen, the flickers of the lightning sheets flash all through the night. The air is thick, and damp, and seems almost to possess a residual electric charge; one breathes with effort; one’s thoughts and associations become disjointed and rearrange themselves.

  Such was the backdrop: I sped through the silent landscapes west of Katherine as the sun sank down: parched country; green savannah turning to pale yellow, leached out—much like the pale backgrounds of the medieval altarpieces I used to hunt down and pour myself into in earlier years, when knowledge of a painted landscape and painted religion were the height, for me, of what a well-formed mind should seek out: those fine, receding vistas, which seemed to hide in them all the secrets that life held. They were opened up to me by one man, a man whose ideas and example made a strong impression on me, and whose memory still floats up to the surface of my thoughts, at strange moments, as on that drive—unbidden, brought back by chance impressions, by fleeting sights or words: Panofsky, the Princeton magus, who brought his rigour and his taste for structure from the old world to the new.

  He was born in Hanover, and trained in the great intellectual forcing houses of imperial Germany; he secured appointment at a young age as the foundation professor of art history at Hamburg; and it was there that he joined the circle of thinkers associated with the newly established Warburg Library. By character and cast of mind he was ideally suited to the furtherance of Warburg’s lifelong obsession: the pursuit of symbols and their shifting meanings, blown about as they are by the storm winds of our world. In his conversation Erwin Panofsky was all fluency and charm; at the podium he was the image of authority; on the page his writings combine a descriptive finesse and energy that still work their mesmerising effect today—his words bring alive each work of art he touches on; he lays bare not just their coded language but their moods, their tones—and it may be that this urgency and this need for precision stemmed from his perspective; from his yearning, distanced view, his exile.

  In 1933, while he was teaching in America, he received a telegram: ‘Cordial Easter Greetings, Western Union,’ declared the letters on the seal of the envelope; inside was an edict advising him that, in conformity with the newly enacted racial laws, he had been dismissed from all his German posts. There was nothing else for it: he decided to become an American. His fame in his adopted country grew; at the war’s end he was invited to deliver the Charles Eliot Norton lectures at Harvard: he chose as his subject the world of early Netherlandish art and the influences of the school’s master painters on each other—and it was these lectures that taught me the intricacies of that world, but in delayed fashion, long after I first read my way through them, struck purely by the elegance and beauty of the author’s thought and the freedom of its flow.

  Gradually, as years passed, I realised that my loves and enthusiasms were Panofsky’s; that what struck him struck me; what he saw was what I was striving to see—and this was a kinship of affinities, nowhere more strongly apparent to me than in my feelings on looking at the Portinari Altarpiece, a triptych, painted in the late fifteenth century by the mystic friar Hugo van der Goes: it hangs in the Uffizi, in Florence, surrounded by masterworks of the Italian Renaissance, its austere figures out of place, its landscape backgrounds seeming, in that lush company, like views onto country blasted by biblical curse and plague: pale hills and valleys, tall, gaunt trees—trees much like the gums and boabs that draw one’s eye all through the North.

  For Panofsky, this artist possessed a strong appeal: indeed, he is the hero of the age, the doomed genius of that world, the creator whose genius transcends the time. Melancholy presides over him and shapes his art; he is at once exalted and oppressed by the influence of Saturn; he is subject to alternate states of creative insight and black despair, ‘walking on dizzy heights above the abyss of insanity, and tumbling into it as soon as he loses his precarious balance’—and the work he makes bears this stamp. It is not still, and calm, and bathed in the certainty of a harmonious faith; it is not an art that communicates and shares itself with its onlooker: it is something new. Panofsky frames a theory for it—the human beings depicted in these altarpieces are not stable; they are radioactive; they give themselves up to the surrounding world; they lose themselves through art; they are in a process of continual decay.

  It is an idea that was plainly inspired by the dawn of the nuclear age, and by the detonation of atomic bombs above Hiroshima and Nagasaki, which took place only two years before the Harvard lectures were delivered; and the glow of those radiative clouds casts a strange, haunting light on the Portinari landscapes as he describes them—austere, bare, yet criss-crossed by networks of secret symbols; burned, scorched almost to nothing by firestorm flames. The fear Panofsky feels in the face of such deranged forces, the sense that grips him of art as an enterprise constantly endangered by unreason—all this comes through repeatedly in his words: to paint, to look, can bring too much clarity, too much intensity, until it threatens the very defences that keep reason supreme and stable in the world, just as that clarity of sight overwhelmed Hugo van der Goes, sunk as he was in depressions, afflicted by suicidal manias, despairing of the salvation of his soul.

  And those parched ranges and burnt trees round me as I drove—what would their words be to man: words of consolation? Judgement? Indifference?

  Night fell. How well I had come to know the rhythm of the road: the Kununurra turning; the shadow of the powerhouse; the lakeside lagoon; the diversion dam, its lights surrounded by wildly circling moths and insects; and ahead again, the highway, stretching straight, and pairs of light beams far away, advancing—the road trains, in procession. They drew nearer, their beams dazzling, and I
would grip the wheel, my eyes blinded by the glare, and wait for the collision that seemed inevitable as each one swept past; then darkness once more, pitch black, my heart racing, the next road train on the hill crest ahead beginning to bear down. At last the ranges loomed; lightning storms stretched away across the Cambridge Gulf; the gleam of Wyndham shone below. There was the Six Mile, and the town.

  I consulted the note; the directions were impressively precise: ‘Turn onto a faint track once past Deadman Creek: you’ve gone too far if you reach the sign for the rubbish dump.’ I found the track. It forked. There was the gate, with wheel-spoke decorations and a bleached-white cattle skull on each post. In, down, across a gully: I pulled up. The moon had just cleared the Bastion’s crest. It was almost full—in its gleam I made out my surroundings: a lush, tree-filled garden, arbours and avenues of young fruit trees and acacias, vines and creeper tendrils intertwining overhead. I climbed down from the Land Cruiser.

  Facing me, staring at me, its head quite still, was a dingo, caught in the silver light. I stayed motionless; it advanced, came close, circled me, once, twice, touched its muzzle to my legs and stepped back into the dark. I followed, and through the trees I caught sight of a low-slung house in the distance—more shack, though, than house: its verandah lights were on, but they were dim paraffin lamps; there was an outbuilding with a buckled roof of corrugated iron. A set of winding pathways ran off in its direction, before twisting, dividing, and doubling back upon themselves. I tried several of them: the dingo followed me down each one, padding silently, watching keenly. ‘What is this place?’ I murmured to myself.

  There was a sudden movement: rhythmic, loud, behind me. I wheeled about. A sprinkler had come on: water jets were playing at sharp angles all through the garden, striking against the leaves and branches of the trees. Close by me was a large fountain, spurting in every direction: its central spout was made of welded iron, fringed by bulbs of metal, curved, serrated blades and twisted lengths of sawn-off pipe. ‘It’s like the Villa d’Este—or Marienbad,’ I said, quite loudly, this time, into the night, half-expecting Tony to appear at any moment, so great was the noise from the waterworks, so abrupt, too, the variation in the sound: for one set of jets and fountains would shut off, only to be followed almost instantly by a fresh outpouring elsewhere in the garden.

  I made straight for the verandah, through scrub and undergrowth; past a creek bed, with large boulders, and a still pool; along a fenceline, its barbed-wire strands rusted and broken. The front door was ajar. A note, neatly folded, had been inserted into the fly-screen frame. I opened it. ‘Do not under any circumstances walk in the garden in the dark. Death adders very plentiful at this time of year!’

  I stepped inside. It was a large room, almost bare: plastic seats drawn up around a metal folding table, mattresses and swags piled up in the far corner, bookshelves overloaded with piles of dog-eared paperbacks; a kitchen, an old stove; two armchairs covered in bright red upholstery—and sprawled in one of them, asleep, Tony Oliver, a book propped open on one armrest, a serrated knife held against his heart. I shook him by the shoulder, gently, then more firmly. Nothing. I gazed down at him. How tranquil he seemed, in that soft light, as if care or anguish had never cast a shadow over him.

  I sank into the empty armchair, and closed my eyes, and heard the whine of mosquitoes on their first approach; and soon I had entered that despairing half-slumber old Kimberley hands know well: a state of exhaustion intensified, more than rest; one is prey to every doubt and every fear from waking hours, but dreams never come; the night’s hours revolve, and each of them takes its toll in turn, until the victim returns to awareness more broken than before the darkness fell.

  ‘Get up—you’ve got an appointment: a date with destiny!’

  I heard the voice; I opened my eyes. Tony was standing over me, smiling a demonic smile.

  ‘I do?’

  ‘Isn’t all life an approach to destiny? Lift up those tired limbs! Rise and shine!’

  He handed me a metal cup full of black coffee. I sipped it, and stared at him: he was in Western gear, his long hair slicked back, unkempt. I grimaced.

  ‘It’s got a strange taste,’ I said: ‘What’s in it?’

  ‘A little something! Don’t make a face like that. It’s the best espresso coffee, vacuum-packed, mail-ordered, flown in by courier from Melbourne, made in a professional machine: it’s the real thing. You couldn’t find better anywhere in all the North.’

  ‘So why does it taste so strange? It’s almost as if there was aniseed in it.’

  ‘Yes, well, it could just be the metallic edge you get from the bore water, round this time of year—but I did actually put a little shot of absinthe in as well, just to get things going.’

  ‘Absinthe? Where on Earth can you find absinthe in Wyndham? And isn’t it illegal—not to mention very out of fashion?’

  ‘You can get anything if you want it badly enough,’ said Tony, reflectively.

  ‘It’s not as if we’re in late-nineteenth-century Paris,’ I said.

  ‘Actually,’ said Tony, ‘in a sense, we are.’

  I glanced out. Green filtered light was all around us; on the shadecloth screening the verandah, an array of stick insects and dark-winged butterflies were perched, bathing in the spray from a fountain close by.

  ‘Where’s the dog?’ I asked.

  ‘What dog?’

  ‘That beautiful tame dingo that was outside last night.’

  ‘Truthfully?’ said Tony: ‘You must have seen the ghost dog—the pale dingo from the Dreaming. It only manifests itself to three categories of people: those about to die, those with heightened insight, and those in spiritual distress.’

  ‘I see,’ I said, and let this piece of information sink in: ‘And how do you know so much about it?’

  ‘It’s with me all the time,’ said Tony: ‘It stalks me constantly—it’s ever present, pacing after me, tracking down the pathways of my mind. What do you think of this place? The house isn’t much, but the gardens—they’re like an ornamental parkland—it could be Dessau, or Versailles. I bought it from a wonderful man: he was dying when he sold it to me; he’d been in the meatworks here—and when the place was demolished, all the old hands who wanted to stay in Wyndham sorted through the scrap metal that was left, and carted off whatever they could use. There’s plenty of houses in old Wyndham town that were put together from the meatworks ruins: when you know what to look for, you start to see bits and pieces everywhere. Here, for instance: all the fountain decorations and the little curlicues and the metal trellis arches come from the equipment in the boning chamber and the processing rooms.’

  He glanced back at me.

  ‘You look shocking,’ he said: ‘Where have you just come back from?’

  ‘Afghanistan.’

  ‘That might explain it. I’m still pretty jet-lagged, myself. I’ve been on a journey of my own. One I wanted to make all my life. I’ve just got back from St Petersburg. Do you know it?’

  ‘I knew Leningrad, once.’

  ‘I was visiting the Hermitage,’ said Tony, proudly, sweeping on: ‘We’ll be having an exhibition there. I’m choosing the paintings right now. Have a cigarette? A Russian souvenir. They’re quite strong!’

  He held out a pack: it was squarish, blue and gold, with white lettering arranged in a striking arc on its front, and a map of the Russian north emblazoned below.

  ‘Belomor,’ I said, and listened to the tone in my voice. ‘I’ve come across that brand.’

  ‘I didn’t realise you were such a connoisseur.’

  ‘It had associations, for me, long ago.’

  ‘Sometimes a cigarette is more than just a cigarette?’

  ‘That kind of thing. So: your journey?’

  He launched into his narrative: it was a bravura tale, with multiple perspectives, time shifts, interruptions for sudden reveries—the artists he most admired, the ecstatic moments that had come to him in front of paintings he loved, the nights full
of snow and days of frost. We walked in the garden, weaving through the maze of the trees; along the creekline; back.

  ‘The strangest part of it all, though,’ he said, ‘is how little of that time there has stayed in focus for me, now I’m here again. I just have fragments left: fragments—then great swathes of experience come flooding back, and stay for a moment, and vanish almost at once. The memories drift inside me like clouds, and emerge as images. I can be looking at the dry canegrass stretching out towards the peaks, and there’s an angle in the light, a gleam: something in my mind will catch—and then suddenly I’m walking on the slippery sidewalks of Petersburg, and watching the shadows shifting in the light and the canals flowing—or I can picture myself again the way I was as a young man, when I was just starting out in the art world, discovering paintings, making my first trips to Europe, seeing with my own eyes what I’d only seen in books. That’s when I decided to spend a few months living by myself in France—that’s how I met Dubuffet.’

  ‘Truly?’

  ‘He was a hero to me in those days: he is still. I had an exhibition of his work, at that gallery I used to run, in Melbourne—and he must have found out about it, somehow, though he was always remote from those events: I was in Paris when the call came. I was in my hotel room—I’d been there for several days; the lights were off, the curtains drawn. I was plunged in the most paralysing depression—and I was so young then I imagined the mood was permanent, and things would never shift. The phone rang; it was early—it woke me. It was Dubuffet’s dealer: the artist wanted to invite me to lunch; he was very struck that someone like me was showing an exhibition of his work at the other end of the world.’