‘Fairly bleak!’ I said.
‘No! Not at all. There’s such overwhelming acceptance of reality, in that sentence: and truth. Such love of life, such delight in being in the world. That’s the heart of life for him. Sight, breath—just that; he remembers the acrobats somersaulting on the hot pavement in Algiers; he leans back; he thinks of Lucienne’s sun-tanned body, the salt spray on the wind, the red fishing boat through the window.’
‘And you’re building that room here: with the shutters, and the view of the ocean, and the red boat.’
‘Perhaps I am. I know now that our path in life is to live not by program, not by idea and manifesto, but through the senses and the heart—and it took me the lion’s share of my time on Earth to find that out.’
‘Who from?’
‘We go through the world, and from time to time we meet people who fill us up with grace, and hope. Nature throws them up, and gives them to us—people who are more at one than we are with the rhythm of the world: rice-farming peasants from the country round here, old Aboriginal painters from the Kimberley. People who live without dark hesitation. That’s what I’ve come to believe in. This life, here; not life after death, not salvation far ahead, but life itself: what we live now.’
‘And for so long you dreamed of permanence, and worshipped art.’
He looked at me. The noise from the breaking waves was getting louder as we walked on: I could barely hear his words.
‘And I still do,’ he said: ‘Only now I see permanence in dreams.’
‘It does feel like a dream, walking here, with this constant crashing of the sea, and the spray in the air all round us.’
‘It is one. Don’t you have that dream sense, that the living and the dead are all part of consciousness? That both find their way through time and space? I see life as a dream, more and more, and I think the old men I knew in the Kimberley lived that way: that was their life; all time was running at the same time for them, and death somehow forms completeness, and time and history stop running, and come into phase—in the same way a piece of music can end but the notes still play on in the mind: the way old songs from Crocodile Hole are still echoing inside me now.’
I looked across at him.
‘Why are you staring at me? Back to staring? It’s not just the North that made me think this way: it was childhood, it was travels, it was everything. We see so much in life, too much—and then there’s a dreadful weariness just from what we know. It’s natural to want to renounce knowledge, and go back to a world of simple things: rhythms, colours, patterns, tides. We only ever needed ideas to mask what lies ahead.’
All this was said in a calm, tranquil way, as if exchanges of this kind were common on that hazy beachfront, with the late sun pouring down its dazzling light.
‘What lies ahead?’ I echoed.
‘You always pretend not to know what I mean, and you always do, of course. Why else do you want to talk to me, and seek me out, if not because you think I’ve seen things: found something out. And I have. Deep things: in the Kimberley; here, too. Some people dive pretty deep, in their art—and then they find a very simple thing. The world joins up. The patterns become one. The light on the waves when you look down from the Wyndham Bastion as the tide’s just turning; the brushstrokes on Leonardo’s paintings in the Hermitage when you inspect them through a magnifying glass; the markings on an old Hanoi sketch work from the wartime years with the pigments drawn on hessian ground. They’re the same: the same pattern. Things cohere. Every sadness finds its place; even the darkest griefs fade away. There’s just life—that’s all we have to worship.’
‘And at the close of it we’re extinct: we’re nothingness.’
‘I feel increasingly that it’s more as if we’re turned inside out, we’re set free from a container that’s holding us: we leave its confines; we achieve an end. And we recognise the brutal truth: that life’s just the colour of the light hitting the water, or the red sail on the blue ocean, or the salt on one’s skin. Enough. Let’s go on up!’
‘Up where?’
‘Don’t you see the house—almost hidden—surrounded by the palm trees?’
There, among the lines of low, rough shacks and concrete dwellings on the sand dunes was a white structure, with a pediment and columned façade, and a separate pavilion alongside, its square bulk softened by overhanging eaves, much like a temple, or a tomb.
‘There? I noticed it before, when we were walking. I wanted to ask you about it; it’s extraordinary: it looks like a palace from another world.’
‘That was rather the effect that I was striving for, actually—so come: we’ll talk more; there are whole realms we haven’t even touched on. Come, and leave all your regrets and cares behind.’
I paused a moment.
‘I know they’re all you’ve got, but leave them! Come with me—come with me, after so many years of only knowing me marooned and lost—come up, and see my home.’
IV
MINGKURLPA
IT WAS NEAR THE year’s end; the build-up heat was pressing down. It was dark; there was a young moon in the sky. We were on the beach, at the waveline, I with a torch in my hand, my friend Jared with a shotgun in his. We advanced. The spray hung in the air; lightning from far-off storms flashed.
‘You really feel you’re at the edge of things, don’t you,’ said he, ‘down here on this shore? You feel the nothing close at hand.’
I listened. What I felt was that trapped sense that comes in the Australian tropics—the immediacy—everything depends on the next breath; life to that point has been nothing; hope, memory, they mean nothing: the only choice is to endure. How wonderful it would be to have some passage out, some way of breaking free, some tale to while away the heat of the night; what was the point of living if not to live through tales, and then retell them, and be consoled by their words as they flowed through time: words that give us the surest sense of knowing who and where we are.
‘What are those lights?’ I asked him, ‘Out so late?’
‘Patrol boats, maybe. Or tankers, and supply vessels, headed for the rigs in the Arafura Sea. Have you ever been out that far, or made a flight over them? What structures: they rise up like cathedrals, towers looming from the waves—and they’re all blazing with light by darkness too. Still, they’re just specks in the seascape—I can’t set eyes on them without thinking how fragile everything human is on Earth.’
‘You? A soldier like you?’
‘I was more of a strategic operative, actually: the point was never to go to war.’
‘You mean the threat of war guarantees peace? That kind of thing? Like now, when your presence guarantees we won’t see a single crocodile all night?’
I flicked the light beam over the swell: it frothed, and tossed, and seethed with menace.
‘Haven’t you grasped the basics yet?’ he said: ‘Quests are fulfilled by the act of questing, not the goal. These islands are the wrong place for you if you’re looking for something solid and real.’
‘We aren’t on a real survey?’
‘We’ll come back out later,’ he said, in a long-suffering voice: ‘It’s real enough. We’ll make another transect, maybe, when the moon’s gone down. We’ll stop for a spell, there, at the Dingo Camp—just ahead. After too long keeping a lookout in this humidity, just staring at the torch beam picking out the waves in their rhythm, I find you start seeing things.’
‘Imagining things?’
‘And the languor this weather breeds: the hopelessness, the sense of being at the end of your tether, being half-dead, so close that dying wouldn’t even be a change of state, and there’d be nothing interesting about it at all.’
I made no reply.
‘I thought you’d appreciate that last one, at least,’ said Jared. ‘I give you my best, always, in my reflections on the trap of consciousness.’
‘I did appreciate it,’ I said: ‘It was remarkable. I know exactly what you’re talking about. Isn’t it the same for e
veryone? Sometimes, when you hear things like that, so perfect in their phrasing, it seems right just to be quiet, and let the words go, let them flash by, and give them silence for their flight. Why’s it called Dingo Camp?’
‘Who knows? Does it matter? Maybe Ernie Dingo did a live broadcast here. Maybe an ancestral dingo lived here. That’s the name. It’s just this way, sheltered, in between those dunes—and there’s someone you might want to meet.’
We came up. There was a circle of figures sitting round the fire. A young woman with angular features was speaking, telling a story, gesturing, her gestures picked out by the glow of the flames.
‘Who’s that?’ I whispered to Jared.
‘That’s the film-maker I was telling you about,’ he hissed back. ‘They’ve just been out to Seagull Island, north of here, out past the reefline, the last island, in the open waters.’
And it became clear that trip was being retold. I listened. Her voice was rhythmic, and soft. She had a slight accent; there was an elegance about her manner; she chose her words with great precision, correcting herself, frowning, leaning forward as though her life depended on catching the perfect phrase for each tiny detail of her recitation: the boat’s movements on the swell, the look of the island, which was in truth no more than a low sandbar, its surface covered by the nests of thousands of blackcapped, fork-tailed terns.
‘Even from far away we could hear them,’ she was saying: ‘Their calls, the calls from those hundreds of seabirds, thousands, they blended together, into a single noise, a note constantly held— horrible at first hearing, terrifying, like a curse, a curse being rained down—but after some minutes it shifted; the birds began flying close above us, swooping low, and circling, or hovering against the wind, and then the noise seemed different, quite different, and beautiful, more like a song, or a prayer. We were close, almost aground: the boat’s hull was scraping against the sand. We went ashore. We knew we were short of time. There was a storm on the way: even as we set foot on the island the clouds in the distance were building up.
‘We’d only been filming a few minutes when the boat crew started signalling to us: they were getting desperate; we were taking too long; they were on the verge of leaving us behind. They’d already told us how dangerous those shallow waters were when the waves picked up, and how quickly the winds could turn. The light had changed completely: thick sunbeams were falling through the clouds. I left the cameraman, and walked up to the very tip of the island. I had to see it: the point where the sandbar comes to nothing, where it narrows to the point of a sword—that little island marks the place on the continental shelf where the swell from the Indian Ocean and the currents from eastern waters meet; they collide there; the waves come from both directions, and in those moments they were crashing against that strip of sand, and making a wall of spray: screens of spray on both sides, hanging in the air, and you could walk between those drifting curtains, and it was still where you were; you could walk, and your shadow seemed to be beside you, on your left and on your right at once; there were rainbow arcs, ahead, above; the terns were in the air, crying out, calling. I stretched out my arms. It felt as if some revelation was very close by.’
‘It sounds,’ said one of the listeners, ‘just like one of those out-of-body experiences that saints and mystics have.’
‘And even as I tell you I wonder,’ she said then, ‘if we truly made it back—that was days ago: I still feel as if I’m there. We hurried: we went into the waves, waded out, clambered on to the boat; all the gear was drenched—half-wrecked—we had nothing we could use from that whole day. It was a tense trip back—pitching constantly, being tossed here and there, watching the corals gleaming just beneath the surface of the water all the way, until at last we reached the shelter of the strait, and we were in the channel: we could see the outline of the wharf and Garden Point ahead.’
‘That was quite a story,’ I said to her later, after the talk around the fire had died down. We spoke more: we fell into conversation. She looked at me, carefully, appraisingly: she shielded her eyes from the glow of the flames.
‘And who are you?’ she said: ‘Where are you from? How do you fit in?’
‘Does one have to fit in?’
‘It was compulsory, once, where I came from.’
‘Where’s that?’
‘A place that’s no longer what it was.’
‘In Germany?’
‘In Eastern Germany. A town whose name no one here would ever have heard.’
I glanced across.
‘Try,’ I said.
‘Halberstadt,’ she said, then solemnly: ‘Halberstadt, the damaged jewel of Sachsen-Anhalt—the town of rebuilt spires, the broken gateway to the Harz.’
‘And how was it, growing up there? When you had to fit in?’
‘What? You want me to tell you the story of my childhood? Here—now—in the darkness; it’s almost midnight; everyone on the crew’s exhausted: we’ve been working all day long.’
‘Why not?’ I said: ‘Reminisce. Bring back the past. You’re at a beach camp on the Tiwi Islands: probably you’ll never come here again; you won’t cross paths with anyone here again. Just talk, for no reason: don’t you find it sinister the way everything in our life has to lead somewhere? Tell a story—just for the darkness—for the night and for the heat. Anything—at random.’
This challenge issued, I leaned back.
‘No,’ she said. She frowned again, and looked at me. ‘I won’t do that. But I will tell you something that matters to me: about a friend of mine, a friend from those times. Someone I was very close to: who was a part of me; who still is. I never bring him to my thoughts, and yet he’s always in my mind. I carry him with me. When I see something beautiful, or something strange, like those mists and rainbows on Seagull Island, it’s as if I want him to see them too. And do you know why I’m going to tell you about him?’
‘Of course not: how could I?’
She stared over.
‘It’s strange: it’s very striking. I thought it at once. You’re like him: you remind me of things about him. Not in the look, so much: no—it’s something in the tone. I’ve always thought there were ties between people far apart, people without links or bonds of any natural kind: you can sense them, sometimes; an intuition reminds you of something you’ve caught onto elsewhere, with someone else. Don’t you think so? Haven’t you ever had that idea?’
I let the thought run through me for a moment.
‘I used to work in the East, the Eastern Bloc, in Soviet days: I still feel caught up in that world. I think there are ties to places: maybe that’s what you’re picking up on—maybe that’s why I came to talk to you.’
‘Ties to places! And what are people, but places crystallised—the world’s mirrored in them. There’s a way people can have the same being—be alike at some deep, hidden level that we never see. I feel that, more and more with time. And with you, it’s as though that friend of mine has come back to life—that friend from whom I learned so much, who I grew with, who I would have wanted to protect: who was swept away by all the changes we experienced in our world.’
All this was said in a low voice, swiftly, in the most straightforward manner.
‘You don’t need to reply,’ she went on: ‘Don’t say anything.’
‘What was his name?’ I asked, and looked around. Everybody else in the camp had moved away. Sleep had taken hold.
‘His name was Armin,’ she said: ‘That was him.’ She stared into the embers of the fire, and clasped her hands. ‘We went to university together: in Jena.’
‘This was still in the communist times?’
‘The last years, yes—there was a small group of us, studying literature, and he was the one who knew everything: he was a scholar, he specialised in Greek and Latin. He’d been to school at the famous Graues Kloster, in Berlin: it was an elite academy; it was for insiders of the party—they still taught those subjects there. His father was very prominent: a prosecutor in the m
ilitary court, and there was a dreadful, oppressive atmosphere in the family—he was in flight from it—but we were all in a kind of exile from the world in which we found ourselves. We stuck together: we had something rare in common.’
‘Dissent?’
‘Not dissent, or not precisely: we could feel the system pressing down on us, its rules and its constrictions—we knew we didn’t belong there; we existed in it almost as if by chance; we made our own quiet, internal rebellion against it. We had a kind of special standing, in those days, as students in that university, studying those subjects—but there was anxiety and fear all around. There was the façade: acceptance, conformity—and there was another way of seeing, thinking; and in that shadow world, if you understood the way things were, if you knew, then quickly you recognised others of the same cast of mind. We acknowledged each other. We spent our lives together, in a small circle: he and I shared an apartment together—in Jena—Schottstrasse, number twenty-nine—near the Westbahnhof. It was in an old rundown workers’ house—to get there you had to climb up a steep hill. Living right underneath us there was an alcoholic couple who used to scream at each other constantly. What a time that was, coming to awareness of the landscape stretching ahead of us in life.’
‘But surely you had some sense that the end was coming for the East?’
‘Not at all. That world was all we knew: that was our reality. We could barely imagine such a change. We couldn’t see that future until it came. They were days when the regime was under stress, we felt that—of course. We talked about it: but most of all we talked about books, and art, and how they were linked to life, and that was nothing at all theoretical. We relied on art, then, for lessons, and clues: how to exist, how to be true to oneself. We’d travel up to Berlin for performances of classical pieces, old Greek dramas at the national theatre—all that was vital for us: you could translate those plays into your own little situation; there was some hope from their example that you could survive, and make sense of things; you saw that the tragic was nothing new. Knowing what there was ahead for us, we had few hopes, we couldn’t take ourselves too seriously—we learned quickly during those years of study. Maybe we might have wanted to be of some use in the world—but you could see that was quite impossible in the East.’
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