by David Malouf
Mary had been at school with my mother and was the same age, though I could never quite believe it; she had children a whole ten years younger than I was, and I had always called her Mary. She wore bright bangles on her arm, liked to dance at parties, never gave me presents like handkerchiefs or socks, and had always treated me, I thought, as a grown-up. When she called us for tea I went to the garden tap, washed my feet, splashed water over my back that was streaked with soil and sweat and stuck all over with little grass clippings, and was about to buckle on my loose sandals when she said from the doorway where she had been watching: "Don't bother to get dressed. John hasn't.” She stood there smiling, and I turned away, aware suddenly of how little I had on; and had to use my V-necked sweater to cover an excitement that might otherwise have been immediately apparent in the khaki shorts I was wearing—without underpants because of the heat.
As I came up the steps towards her she stood back to let me pass, and her hand, very lightly, brushed the skin between my shoulder blades.
“You're still wet,” she said.
It seemed odd somehow to be sitting at the table in their elegant dining room without a shirt; though John was doing it, and was already engaged like the children in demolishing a pile of neat little sandwiches.
I sat at the head of the table with the children noisily grabbing at my left and John on my right drinking tea and slurping it a little, while Mary plied me with raisin-bread and Old Country cookies. I felt red, swollen, confused every time she turned to me, and for some reason it was the children's presence rather than John's that embarrassed me, especially the boy's.
Almost immediately we were finished John got up.
“I'll just go,” he said, "and do another twenty minutes before it's dark.” It was dark already, but light enough perhaps to go on raking the grass we had cut and were carting to the incinerator. I made to follow. “It's all right,” he told me. “I'll finish off. You've earned your money for today.”
“Come and see our animals!" the children yelled, dragging me down the hall to their bedroom, and for ten minutes or so I sat on the floor with them, setting out farm animals and making fences, till Mary, who had been clearing the table, appeared in the doorway.
“Come on now, that's enough, it's bathtime, you kids. Off you go!”
They ran off, already half-stripped, leaving her to pick up their clothes and fold them while I continued to sit cross-legged among the toys, and her white legs, in their green sandals, moved back and forth at eye-level. When she went out I too got up, and stood watching at the bathroom door.
She was sitting on the edge of the bath, soaping the little boy's back, as I remembered my mother doing, while the children splashed and shouted. Then she dried her hands on a towel, very carefully, and I followed her into the unlighted lounge. Beyond the glass wall, in the depths of the garden, John was stooping to gather armfuls of the grass we had cut, and staggering with it to the incinerator.
She sat and patted the place beside her. I followed as in a dream. The children's voices at the end of the hallway were complaining, quarrelling, shrilling. I was sure John could see us through the glass as he came back for another load.
Nothing was said. Her hand moved over my shoulder, down my spine, brushed very lightly, without lingering, over the place where my shorts tented; then rested easily on my thigh. When John came in he seemed unsurprised to find us sitting close in the dark. He went right past us to the drinks cabinet, which suddenly lighted up. I felt exposed and certain now that he must see where her hand was and say something.
All he said was: "Something to drink, darling?”
Without hurry she got up to help him and they passed back and forth in front of the blazing cabinet, with its mirrors and its rows of bottles and cut-crystal glasses. I was sweating worse than when I had worked in the garden, and began, self-consciously, to haul on the sweater.
I pedalled furiously away, glad to have the cooling air pour over me and to feel free again.
Back there I had been scared—but of what? Of a game in which I might, for once, be the victim—not passive, but with no power to control the moves. I slowed down and considered that, and was, without realising it, at the edge of something. I rode on in the softening dark. It was good to have the wheels of the bike roll away under me as I rose on the pedals, to feel on my cheeks the warm scent of jasmine that was invisible all round. It was a brilliant night verging on spring. I didn't want it to be over; I wanted to slow things down. I dismounted and walked a little, leading my bike along the grassy edge in the shadow of trees, and without precisely intending it, came on foot to the entrance to the Professor's drive, and paused, looking up beyond the treetops to where he might be installed with his telescope—observing what? What events up there in the infinite sky?
I leaned far back to see. A frozen waterfall it might have been, falling slowly towards me, sending out blown spray that would take centuries, light-years, to break in thunder over my head. Time. What did one moment, one night, a lifespan mean in relation to all that?
“Hullo there!”
It was the Professor. I could see him now, in the moonlight beside the telescope, which he leaned on and which pointed not upwards to the heavens but down to where I was standing. It occurred to me, as on previous occasions, that in the few moments of my standing there with my head flung back to the stars, what he might have been observing was me. I hesitated, made no decision. Then, out of a state of passive expectancy, willing nothing but waiting poised for my own life to occur; out of a state of being open to the spring night and to the emptiness of the hours between seven and ten when I was expected to be in, or thirteen (was it?) and whatever age I would be when manhood finally came to me; out of my simply being there with my hand on the saddle of the machine, bare-legged, loose-sandalled, going nowhere, I turned into the drive, led my bike up to the stockade gate, and waited for him to throw down the keys.
“You know which one it is,” he said, letting them fall. “Just use the other to come in by the poolside.”
I unlocked the gate, rested my bike against the wall of the courtyard, and went round along the edge of the pool. It was clean now but heavy with shadows. I turned the key in the glass door, found my way (though this part of the house was new to me) to the stairs, and climbed to where another door opened straight on to the roof.
“Ah,” he said, smiling. “So at last! You are here.”
The roof was unwalled but set so deep among trees that it was as if I had stepped out of the city altogether into some earlier, more darkly wooded era. Only lighted windows, hanging detached in the dark, showed where houses, where neighbours were.
He fixed the telescope for me and I moved into position. “There,” he “what you can see now is Jupiter with its four moons—you see?— all in line, and with the bands across its face.”
I saw. Later it was Saturn with its rings and the lower of the two pointers to the cross, Alpha Centauri, which was not one star but two. It was miraculous. From that moment below when I had looked up at a cascade of light that was still ages off, I might have been catapulted twenty thousand years into the nearer past, or into my own future. Solid spheres hovered above me, tiny balls of matter moving in concert like the atoms we drew in chemistry, held together by invisible lines of force; and I thought oddly that if I were to lower the telescope now to where I had been standing at the entrance to the drive I would see my own puzzled, upturned face, but as a self I had already outgrown and abandoned, not minutes but aeons back. He shifted the telescope and I caught my breath. One after another, constellations I had known since childhood as points of light to be joined up in the mind (like those picture-puzzles children make, pencilling in the scattered dots till Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs appear, or an old jalopy), came together now, not as an imaginary panhandle or bull's head or belt and sword, but at some depth of vision I hadn't known I possessed, as blossoming abstractions, equations luminously exploding out of their own depths, brilliantly solving th
emselves and playing the results in my head as a real and visible music. I felt a power in myself that might actually burst out at my ears, and at the same time saw myself, from out there, as just a figure with his eye to a lens. I had a clear sense of being one more hard little point in the immensity—but part of it, a source of light like all those others—and was aware for the first time of the grainy reality of my own life, and then, a fact of no large significance, of the certainty of my death; but in some dimension where those terms were too vague to be relevant. It was at the point where my self ended and the rest of it began that Time, or Space, showed its richness to me. I was overwhelmed.
Slowly, from so far out, I drew back, re-entered the present and was aware again of the close suburban dark—of its moving now in the shape of a hand. I must have known all along that it was there, working from the small of my back to my belly, up the inside of my thigh, but it was of no importance, I was too far off. Too many larger events were unfolding for me to break away and ask, as I might have, "What are you doing?”
I must have come immediately. But when the stars blurred in my eyes it was with tears, and it was the welling of this deeper salt, filling my eyes and rolling down my cheeks, that was the real overflow of the occasion. I raised my hand to brush them away and it was only then that I was aware, once again, of the Professor. I looked at him as from a distance. He was getting to his feet, and his babble of concern, alarm, self-pity, sentimental recrimination, was incomprehensible to me. I couldn't see what he meant.
“No, no, it's nothing,” I assured him, turning aside to button my shorts. “It was nothing. Honestly.” I was unwilling to say more in case he misunderstood what I did not understand myself.
We stood on opposite sides of the occasion. Nothing of what he had done could make the slightest difference to me, I was untouched: youth is too physical to accord very much to that side of things. But what I had seen—what he had led me to see—my bursting into the life of things—I would look back on that as the real beginning of my existence, as the entry into a vocation, and nothing could diminish the gratitude I felt for it. I wanted, in the immense seriousness and humility of this moment, to tell him so, but I lacked the words, and silence was fraught with all the wrong ones.
“I have to go now,” was what I said.
“Very well. Of course.”
He looked hopeless. He might have been waiting for me to strike him a blow—not a physical one. He stood quietly at the gateway while I wheeled out the bike.
I turned then and faced him, and without speaking, offered him, very formally, my hand. He took it and we shook—as if, in the magnanimity of my youth, I had agreed to overlook his misdemeanour or forgive him. That misapprehension too was a weight I would have to bear.
Carrying it with me, a heavy counterpoise to the extraordinary lightness that was my whole life, I bounced unsteadily over the dark tufts of the driveway and out onto the road.
A Trip to the Grundelsee
They were an ill-assorted party. Gordon and Cassie, who had known one another almost since childhood, were still just friends, as they had been for so long now that Cassie despaired of their ever getting further. She had spent four years being in love with Gordon and felt a fool, but was still under his spell. His various forms of selfishness, all so frank and boyishly certain of their appeal, still worked on her, and she knew that if he made the least offer of himself she would say yes and spend the rest of her life typing his articles, keeping up with his interests and defending him from detractors. That's how she was, and that's how Gordon was as well.
She had simply rushed down here, for example, the moment she thought he was involved, but by the time she arrived he had already lost interest in the girl who had turned up so frequently in his letters of the previous month, and Cassie, who had disliked Anick at sight, soon made a friend of her, seeing quite clearly that this spoiled and rather unworldly French girl would be no more successful with Gordon than she had been. She had even at last grown fond of her—they had something in common; though Anick was elegant, almost beautiful, and Cassie had never been either.
Anick made up the third in their party, and the fourth was a soft American youth of not much more than twenty who earlier in the week had fallen in love with Anick and had since been following her about like a whipped puppy. Anick tended to laugh at him, but when he cried, as he often did, she let him sit with his head in her lap while she stroked his floppy hair, but at the same time made faces; and afterwards made the same faces when she described the scene to Cassie in her limited and brutal English.
Michael, the American boy, was really Austrian—that is, his parents were, but he spoke worse German than the rest of them (they were all doing a summer course at Graz) and was foolishly impressed by everything foreign and picturesque: by the Alpine cabins they passed with their carved wooden overhangs, by votive crosses high up in the mist of passes, the leather shorts and dirndls of villagers, a little steepled church in a cleft among firs, and the pumpy band-music that was being played in one place in the light of a thunderous waterfall. Gordon and Cassie were Australians, but they had never been so wide-eyed and impressionable as Michael, to whom all this might, after all, have been as familiar as home.
Michael had hired a car and they were driving down to the Grundelsee to visit two middle-aged women who had been friends of Michael's father before the war. It was, on Michael's part, a duty visit made on his father's behalf, but also to fulfil a promise he had given, when just a child, to the elder of the two women with whom he had had a schoolboy correspondence. Gordon and Cassie were along because Anick had invited them. She hadn't wanted to spend a whole day alone with Michael. Michael resented this and they felt uncomfortable, but had accepted for the sake of the trip, though Cassie, who took on new loyalties very easily, and stuck to them, included Anick in her reasons for going; she was offering female support. She rather despised Michael and found his mooning over Anick disgusting, whereas Gordon, intent on the landscape and excited by the prospect of adding yet another baroque abbey to his list—and such a remote one—was merely indifferent.
“Another Kaisersaal!” Gordon exulted. (Being impressed by a Kai-sersaal rather than a cabin made him different from Michael. Superior.) "Another Kindertotentorte,” Cassie thought, making up with this minor disloyalty for her slavish adoption of all Gordon's vagaries of taste.
An ill-assorted party.
“What are these ladies?” Anick demanded, preparing to find them dull.
“They were my father's closest friends in Vienna before the war,” Michael told them solemnly. “In the days of Dollfuss, you know. Elsa.
Fischer and my father were going to be married, I guess. The other one, Sophie, is sort of my father's cousin. They were all in the same political group. My father was a Socialist—practically even a Communist—and they spent seven years—I mean Elsa and Sophie did—in camps. You know—concentration camps. They had a really terrible time. Boy! You should hear some of the things that happened to them. But they survived. And now they live together and have this little summer place on the lake.”
Cassie was frowning. She had tried to keep up with it, to let it enter her imagination as well as her head, but Michael went too fast. His narrative made all events sound the same, and outside the sun was flashing.
“And your father?” she demanded, grabbing at a comprehensible fact.
“Oh, he escaped. He got away to America just before the Nazis came. It was a very close thing. He's told me all about it, it's a real adventure story. And of course he married my mother. But you know— he used to talk a lot about the old days, and after the war, when he and Elsa and Sophie made contact again, I used to write to Elsa—I was just a schoolkid—and well—now that I'm here it's the least I can do, to go and say hello.”
The silence was filled with intensely dark fir trees, and above them the hard, unchanging whiteness of the Alps.
“They sound fascinating, these old women,” said Anick.
&
nbsp; Michael failed to catch her tone. “Well,” he said, after a pause, "they're sort of special—you know what I mean?” He added a more specific recommendation: "They've suffered‘a lot.”
It was a warm day. They had thrown their jackets aside, the two young men, and the girls were stockingless and in open sandals. They had already stopped once and eaten the most delicious cheesecake with cream on top, heaped Schlagobers that were absolutely continuous, Gordon assured them, with the confectionary clouds of local altars. The villages they passed were all very festive-looking, with boxes of bright red geraniums in the windows and in baskets on some of the wooden bridges, and the Alps were permanently, dazzlingly white along the skyline: so that Cassie wondered why she felt so depressed.
They were all four young and their whole lives were before them.
The big car waltzed and Michael took the mountain road at speed. They hoped to be at the Grundelsee before lunch.
The lake was tiny—you could walk around it in under an hour—and glassily blue, with fir trees in dark clumps making wedge shapes and rhomboids on the slopes, and very green meadows. The summer places, scattered in groups, were all made of the same stained timber and had the same painted shutters, each with a heart cut out of it, and the same shingle roofs. A cow here and there made the scene look pastoral, productive, but bathers along the shore, and a yellow canoe out in the middle of the lake, pulling a long thread in its picture of blue mountain-peaks, certified that this was a pleasure park and that the slightly sinister atmosphere that hung over it was a matter of weather, the oppressive proximity of so much heaped sublimity.
