Belomor

by Nicolas Rothwell

  ‘And then the change came?’

  ‘The radiative change: the change that changed us all as well. We were there, that night: we saw the guards on the Wall; they fell back; we saw it breached; we saw it come down. We crossed: we passed into the West, that other world. It was as though we’d been in silence until then, or in black and white. Suddenly, there was wild, rich, technicolour life around us, and all its frictions and its forces to bear. I found a path ahead: I began to make my way. I travelled. How strong the drive was to see the world we’d been kept from—to come to know it all: its countries, its peoples, everything we’d only been able to imagine. For us, the furthest journey we’d been able to make was to the Bulgarian Black Sea youth resorts for a week or two. The borders opened: we flew like birds. I made a journey with a friend of mine who’d found some work in West Germany; she’d already got hold of an American car: it was old, and deep wine-red, and in good enough shape to take us on our pilgrimage.’

  ‘Where to?’

  ‘Not to a place. After a man. Remember, for us literature had been everything: we were lost in books—they were the best place to be, in that secret world. We would always hunt down works by western writers, as though they held life’s blood in them; we passed them from hand to hand: the words on the pages of those authors shaped us—they sank into our hearts. Above all in those days we loved the critic Walter Benjamin, and the story of his flight from the Nazis—and his death. And so as soon as we could we drove off, into France, down the valley of the Rhône, to the coast, towards Spain, following him: we traced the route he took through the Pyrenees; we went to Portbou, where the trail goes dead—where he took his life. We ended up there, on the hillside overlooking the Mediterranean, gazing down. We wanted to feel for ourselves the truth of his experiences, which we already knew in words so well—see what he had seen, be where he had gone before. We were caught up in a longing to witness things. That was the pattern, all through that first summer: see something real. Get away from books, away from faded, bad-quality photographs on cheap paper stock.’

  ‘And then you found your way out into the world for good—with a camera—making films.’

  ‘And I left my old life behind: I was working, filming by day, editing all night long; I was completely consumed—it was a dance that never stopped. I tried to stay in touch with my friends, of course: we’d been so close; I felt those bonds couldn’t be undone. But things didn’t go so smoothly for all of them. Some of them became writers; a few became teachers, in the West. Armin had managed to find a position: he was at the university in Greifswald; he was not fulfilled. There’d always been an edge to him: too much acuity; and there was a thread of depression, as well, running in the family, in the blood. He had an x-ray vision of himself: he always said he could see the shape of the life path ahead of him, he could read off the experiences that would come to him simply by consulting his character: when he went into a new romance he knew at its beginning how it would end. He abandoned all his teaching tasks, one by one. He was looking for a pathway, a means to give shape to everything he knew—and I believe he came close to finding something very like that path: I almost believe it. But it was around then that I began spending long periods abroad, away with crews, on documentary projects: I made my first trip to the southern hemisphere—I came to Australia.’

  ‘Here—to the islands?’

  I gestured into the dark: low clouds were gathering, and blocking the gleam of the stars; there was that heavy moisture that forms in the depths of the build-up night.

  ‘First, in fact, to the north-west, to the Pilbara,’ she said: ‘That was our big project. We were making films about iron ore and the mining industry: the open-cuts, the trains that reached for kilometres on end, the great cantilevers and the causeways and the ports. I was wide-eyed. I’d never seen such landscape—I’d never seen anything made on such a scale, where man’s presence was so dwarfed by the horizon. We drove out. We broke our journey down that long straight highway that runs from Broome to Port Hedland: we stopped at Eighty Mile Beach—you know that coastline?’

  I nodded.

  ‘When I was a child,’ she went on, ‘every summer we went to the Baltic, to those cold, windswept beaches, with their hard sunshine and pale light—and they were the peak of beauty and nature’s perfection for me; that was heaven, just to walk along by myself, and scour the sand, and look for washed-up shells, or for the strange, half-eroded stones you could find there with holes worn through them: they were precious—you’d hang them on a string like pendants, and put them round your neck, for luck, because they were so rare. But when I saw Eighty Mile I realised the beaches from those times meant nothing—they were just narrow strips of crowded sand: the Indian Ocean’s waves were different, and the water—I never knew water could be clear like that. There were trochus shells lying on the high-tide mark that looked like abstract sculptures from a master’s hand! But I’d already been prepared for vastness: for silence. Our first tasks on that trip had been in the Centre, between Coober Pedy and Alice Springs.’

  ‘And what were they?’

  She laughed.

  ‘You wouldn’t believe it. You’d have to think yourself back into that time. In those days the memory of East Germany was still very much alive: we were searching for eastern subjects, and we managed to find one in the deserts: the writer from Dessau, Joachim Specht—our communistic king of the outback.’

  ‘It’s not a name I know,’ I said.

  ‘I’m shocked! You don’t know his majestic Australian Cowboy, or The Lady in the Bush, or Pearl Diver in Frances Bay?’

  ‘I’m afraid not.’

  ‘Specht was a refugee of wartime: he was still a boy when the fighting began; he lived through the bombing of Dresden. In the aftermath, he fled the East: he managed to make his way to Hamburg, and from there to Australia, to Adelaide. He didn’t speak that much English, but he’d been trained as a metalworker. That helped: he found work on the railways, at Peterborough, in the wheat country, near the foothills of the Flinders Ranges. He only stayed three years or so—but in that time he made a number of trips out into desert South Australia: he went to Woomera, to Ooldea siding on the transcontinental line—the new surrounds and new life didn’t suit him. He went back—to Germany, and then home, to the East. He set himself up as a writer there: he began writing frontier stories, adventure tales, and since the East German literary establishment was based on a strict doctrine of separate development, free from outside influences, and there was no one much left inside the country who knew anything about Australia, they needed just such an expert, someone with personal experience—and so there was a place for him: his brief, unhappy days in the bush became the core of his life. He was well known; he invented his own fantasy of the desert outback, and it was quite popular: he was a member of the regime’s own circle of approved writers—there was even a special publishing house that specialised in international-flavoured books of the kind that he turned out.’

  ‘Were they any good?’

  ‘I’ve tried a few of them: they’re not easy to forget. There’s Capricorn, and Coral Joe, and The Camp on the Burdekin. It’s strange writing—the bush, only with a faint socialist tint. Action, tension, but everything insubstantial, arid and unreal. That was Specht. He was still alive when we came to make our documentary: no one knew much about him anymore; he seemed quite untouched by time’s passage; he was still living in the East, in Dessau—probably he’s still there today. Someone in the production company I was working for had a bright idea: we should interview him, and take him back—back to the scene of his former glories, to the adventure landscape of his youthful days. We tracked him down: he didn’t need much persuading to go. But he turned out to be a hard case: we arrived, expecting him to be our guide and host; it became clear at once that he remembered next to nothing about his Australian years. He was quite withdrawn, not much inclined to talk or share in things. We travelled with him: to Peterborough, to Woomera, hoping for some gra
nd series of recollections—out, too, into the protected area where the atomic bombs were detonated all those years ago. And that journey was what mattered. Specht and his ambiguities and memories and all his made-up stories just fell away: we scarcely paid any attention to him.

  ‘I was overwhelmed. All my life I’d been hemmed in by lines and borders: what you could say; where you could go. I’d never had an experience until then of freedom—total freedom—freedom as the absence of any force acting on you. It was the first time I’d been in a landscape as simple seeming as that sandhill country, or as subtle in its complications. We went out into the deep desert: west, beyond Glendambo and the restricted zone; beyond Tarcoola; we made our way round Lake Labyrinth—we drove down dirt roads for days on end. That emptiness, full of questions! I felt opened up. Of course, for the first few days I could only register the surface things—the sweat, the heat, the colours of the sunset—then, slowly, my impressions deepened. I found I was sleeping heavily, dreaming with great intensity. People I’d known and loved came back to me; scenes from my life, scenes I’d long forgotten. I was living them again, and picturing whole episodes from my course in life: real experiences, and variations on them, too, things that never came to pass—I saw my yearnings, my longings—they came, unsummoned, in the most elaborate order, beginning, breaking off, interweaving, making new connections in what I’d already experienced and given shape and logic in my mind. It was like that all through the journey: my ideas were changed—my ideas about what we are, about what we carry in us, in potential; how we stand in the world.’

  ‘Meaning?’

  ‘That there’s no limit. That’s what those days showed me—the limits we see and agree on are the ones to break: there isn’t any boundary to what we can conceive, and make inside ourselves; or there doesn’t have to be—if only we can escape the gridlines of our thought, all the patterns that bear down on us and trap us every day. I had the sense that I was being shown something: it was a breakthrough. Ever since those days in the desert I’ve tried to keep the feeling I had then of unending dimensions in life—tried to look out, and see widely, not to zero in with the defining eye. Make films that explore, not fix; hide from rigid plot and fact and form: they’re death to me. Death—like everything set and still.’

  She fell silent. The fire was down to embers. We had travelled almost through the night on words.

  ‘And that was it, for Specht?’ I asked: ‘Or did he have a late-career renaissance?’

  ‘In a sense, he did. We came back to Berlin and made our documentary, and it was shown, and it presented his impressions and adventures in the most constructive kind of light. There was a good response: mild interest, some sympathy, even. We never heard from him again—but some years afterwards I was passing through Leipzig station and I noticed that he had a new book published. The title stood out on the newsstand shelves. G’Day, it was called: Return to Australia—so the trip must have sparked off something in his thoughts.’

  ‘And in yours?’

  ‘I was lifted up by those experiences: troubled, too; divided. Things were running well for me—work, new connections, success: but for my old band of fellow students, the way ahead was much less straightforward or clear. They’d spent their youth struggling to make contact with the outside world through books, films, through any means they could—suddenly it was there, all round them: they were in it, they were part of it; but their backgrounds and their temperaments were quite different from those of their western counterparts; they were much more serious, and more jagged; they had the minds of crusaders; they’d equipped themselves for a life of despairing, secret rebellion, not for competition, and cut-and-thrust. There was nothing they could do but think, and analyse: they saw their circumstances without sentiment; they saw themselves with ruthless eyes. There was a real harshness to them, my friends from the Eastern days: they were radicals—so radical as to destroy themselves in reflection of their times.’

  She stopped.

  ‘It upsets me still, and ten years have gone by, and more. Armin had made a long journey of his own, as I found out: it was his quest. His search for something that could serve him as a holy grail. It led him deep into a world of thought: it led him to other places, other cities, as if there might be clues and fragments lying there for him along the way. It began in a backwater. He went north, up the river Elbe, to a little town on its bank: Stendal. Have you been there? You’d remember—everything’s always closed there: every kiosk, every store. You haven’t? Then you have to go.’

  She said this with fierce, abrupt insistence, and I smiled.

  ‘There’s nothing to smile at,’ she shot back. ‘There’s an affinity. That’s why I’ve been talking to you. Don’t you understand? I’m giving you something. There’s a path to follow. Don’t you see life works like that?’

  She levelled her eyes, and looked straight at me: a look that was harsh and pleading at once.

  ‘Well?’ she said: ‘I think you do—I think you see very clearly: this isn’t just a story for the darkness, just a story to be thrown away. Some people have to seek, and hunt, seek out even to the borders of our world—and chase their intuitions down—like him.’

  ‘And why there?’ I asked.

  ‘If you make that pilgrimage, maybe you’d see what drew him there: good reasons. He was lifted up, at least for a while: he had grand plans; there would be some synthetic masterpiece he’d make, critical, explaining—but everything withered; the whole journey just seemed to bind him more deeply into his darkness; perhaps that was even its secret aim. What could a creature as made from words and highly wrought as him ever find out from searching? What was there that could free him from what he had inside himself; from the sadness that trapped him, that stopped him from feeling any other thing? I wanted to tell him all about Australia and what I’d seen when I came back: I looked for him; I found out where he was. He’d had a breakdown; he’d been hospitalised, at a clinic at Weissensee. Eventually they discharged him: he was full of medication. I went to see him: we talked through the night.’

  ‘Much like now.’

  ‘Night brings things out. He told me many stories I hadn’t known before: he told me he didn’t want to be a burden to people; he didn’t want to suffer through the next twenty years of life. And I listened, but I wonder if I really heard. It was quite soon afterwards that he went to a high-rise apartment block, and jumped from a window on the tenth floor: he chose a bleak landscape to die in, on a bleak day. I would have loved to show him other places—other sights—and perhaps all the films I make and I dream of making now I make for him, and everyone else I’ve lost.’

  She said this simply, quietly. Dawn was breaking now: light began to edge into the sky.

  ‘Many months later,’ she went on, after a pause, ‘I had to go back, to the East—as chance would have it, back to Halberstadt, on some kind of documentary business, a profile of the great poets of the past and their travels in the region, something like that—and I was caught up, also, in a project to describe the rebuilding of the cathedral, which had been gravely damaged, like the whole medieval town centre, by a series of bombing raids in the last month of the war.

  ‘It was a homecoming!’

  ‘If you like: it was the scene of my early childhood, but I hadn’t been back for years. I wandered through the streets, odd memories surfacing in my thoughts. I decided to visit the cathedral, and take a look: how cold and austere it was—the afternoon had worn on; it was wintertime. I went into the cloister. There was no one else that I could see: I walked round, checking shots, and camera angles, busy with all my setting up and planning—but with every step I took I could feel someone’s presence, close to me, keeping pace with me, right by my side.’

  ‘It was him?’

  ‘And if it was,’ said she, turning at last to face me, eyes full of anger, full of tears, ‘if it was—then what’s your part in this: who are you?’

  *

  That question, and her low voice as sh
e asked it, stayed with me during the unsettled weeks I spent after that encounter—weeks that stretched into months, while I made my slow way through the social archipelagoes of Darwin, the city I had chosen long before as my home, and to which I was just then returning after a prolonged absence—only to realise how little I knew of its changed face: its fabric, its people, the temper of the life. I made several trips to the other northern islands; I travelled in the Kimberley, and Arnhem Land: I traced out long journeys, alone and in company—but none of these displacements dimmed the memory of the Tiwi campsite and that night-time talk. On the contrary, the film-maker’s words took on greater depth. The exchange played continually inside me—the sweep of her story and its details; each distinct episode, their echoes and their joins—and though I never saw her again, it was as if her will was being slowly realised; I felt myself dwelling more and more on my own days in the East: days long gone. I would dream, and find myself back in some cold, distant capital; I would be driving through the deep bush, alone, on corrugations, and picture myself once more on cobbled streets, at dusk, in some rainy city on the brink of curfew.