An Imaginary Life

by David Malouf

  Tomorrow I am to go with the old man’s hunting party to the birchwoods, where there are deer.

  When we assemble in the little yard it is frosty, and there are stars, hard, pointed, hanging low overhead.

  We eat together at the bench: dishes of curd that have been thinned with water, warmed in a pot and sweetened with dark-tasting honey. The bees are wild, grazing on herbs deep in the brush, and the honey has some of the bitterness of those mysterious plants, and gives the curds a fragrance that fills the nostrils before its sweet aftertaste comes to the palate. The effect is not pleasant until you get used to it. But I am hungry and accept a second dish with the rest.

  We are barely finished when the others arrive, wearing strapped leggings, shirts laced open across the chest, and carrying bows. There are three youngish men, looking fierce with their dark whiskers and long hair, and one old man, diminutive and gray, who is the village shaman. Behind them in a noisy rabble are half a dozen barefoot children.

  My old man greets them, clasping hands with each in turn and embracing the shaman, who mutters words of blessing, not only to the old man but to each of the women, to the boy, to the benches, the doorposts, even to me.

  We gather in a circle and fall silent. The boy goes off to where the pot stands warm in the yard, and his mother ladles into his hands a little of the curds we have eaten. The boy comes with it into the circle, and there is a stillness as the household demons assemble, creeping out from under the embers, from our empty bowls on the bench, from odd cracks and corners of the walls. The boy who is the center of all this looks nervous. His eyes move about the yard, from the fire to the bench, looking for the creatures whose interest for this moment is concentrated on him, on his cupped hands with their mixture of all the grains and weeds of the local fields, aware that he is, for the brief period of the ceremony, no longer himself – the youngest member of the household, a pudgy seven-year-old, more than usually spoiled and mischievous – but a conductor of dark forces, an embodiment of the house itself, breathing heavily in the silence, trembling, holding out to be tasted by invisible mouths the meager fruits of the earth.

  The shaman begins to sing and is joined by the rest. The boy stiffens and shakes. When a little of the gruel spills from his hands, and after a moment’s doubt he lowers his head to lick at it, the old man, without ceasing his chant, clips the boy lightly over the ear. The gruel drips, and one of the young men, motioning to the boy that he is not to be blamed, draws the earth over it with his boot. The chanting ceases. We stand quiet. The boy’s eyes shift anxiously and I see them move quickly to his mother, who nods, and then to his grandfather, who pats him lightly on the head. He turns stiffly, and we watch him, very carefully now, bearing his cupped hands before him, walk slowly back to the pot and spill the remains of the gruel on the fire. Which hisses. And with that, the circle breaks. Everyone laughs and begins talking at once, the yard is filled with activity as the men move away to resume their bows, the woman cleans the child’s hands with a cloth, the two old men joke and slap one another’s shoulders. All the signs, it seems, are propitious. We can go.

  The horses – short, stocky beasts, with wooden saddles covered with cloth – are brought round now to the palisade entrance and we mount. The old man, who is a little ashamed for me in front of his neighbors, shows me how to ride without stirrups, by gripping the horse’s flanks with my knees, and the younger men, out of politeness, busy themselves with their saddle straps. One of them whistles, looking away over the river flats to where the sun is just a wash of pale light on the eastern horizon, diffused and glowing in the mist. We ride down out of the village. The ground towards the marshes is white with frost, and our hooves as we pass leave big prints that immediately break up and spread, as if gigantic horsemen, like the ones in my dream, were walking invisibly behind us, placing their hooves very carefully in our tracks. Mist swirls in off the flats, round the breasts of our horses, round our knees. We might be wading through clouds. But high up there is yellow light, broken with ribs of cloud wrack, and the birds are singing.

  Half an hour later, with the sun high over the brushwood, a single red ball, the air is still cloudlike, thinning on the rises but as thick as surf when we dip down into the hollows.

  We move slowly, the horses plashing through tussocky swamp, breathing heavily as we push uphill. All the land above the river flats is uneven, and we must keep to the uplands because the marshes are still flooded after the summer rains.

  At last the mist begins to disperse. We have come out into a sparsely wooded landscape, all whitened stalks and spearlike grass heads, that is lighted gold and brown in the early sun. Rabbits tumble away from us in the brush, and the men laugh and halloo as the little white tails bob away. We are climbing now towards a wooded plateau beyond an outcrop of split rocks, that might, in another world, have been an old fortification. We push steeply up between the rearing granite walls, and at the head of the file I hear the first of the horses gallop away into what must be a clearing. Then as I come over the last of the grassy rise, with the horse very nearly slipping under me, I see.

  It is a huge natural circle. The first of the horsemen has stopped about thirty yards off, and each of the others gallops up beside him. Then together, in line, they ride into a screen of pines blown ragged in the wind, with me just a little behind, since I realize that in coming up here we have made a detour; some ritual is being enacted in which I have no part. We move into the screen, over a carpet of soft needles, and the horses’ hooves stir up their scent.

  As the pinewood begins to thin, what lies beyond comes into view. At first I cannot guess what it is. Then I realize from the tales I have heard that it is a great circle of funerary mounds, a hundred of them perhaps, all made of broken stone and many of them still surmounted by the skeleton of a horse and rider, impaled on a pole, which is the proper burial for a horseman. I follow the riders around the great circle. Big birds go flapping away and climb in a circle above us. The wind shakes the poles, which clatter in their sockets, and I am reminded, by this ghostly army, of my dream. We ride around the circle, once, twice, a third time, then come to a halt. The headman takes from his shoulder a wallet full of grain, and suddenly leads the whole party off on a wild race amongst the dead, back and forth between the rattling poles and their skeletons, casting handfuls of grain to the dead mouths and shouting to scare away evil spirits and birds. I observe for the first time that there are stunted stalks of barley, wild oats, wheat even, all around me in the sunlight. We are in the middle of an immense field.

  The men’s yelling dies away and the old man rides up beside me, smiling, and offers me a handful of seed. I take it sheepishly, but fail at first to catch his intention. With a grin that shows all his bad teeth, he throws his head back and lets forth a bloodcurdling cry. Then nods and looks expectant.

  Self-consciously, I repeat the sound. He smiles again, and still smiling, claps me on the shoulder. I ride off into the glittering circle, offering my feeble parody of a horseman’s death cry and scattering my handful of grain.

  Oddly enough as I weave back and forth between the towering forms I feel a moment of exhilaration, and am reminded of something – something that my mind just fails to grasp, as if all this had happened before. I shout again, louder, and make a narrow circuit of the field, as I have seen the others do, letting the cold air fill my lungs, then expelling it in a long cry, and feel freed of something. It is as if some fear went out on my breath and left my spirit clear. I am a Roman, I tell myself, trotting back to where the others sit, grinning broadly. I am a Roman and a poet. But that breath and the sound it carries still moves out from my body into the world, and I feel freer for it. The old man greets me with a handclasp. He says words that I do not understand, and as we ride off one of the young men holds his horse aside, so that I go down the steep defile immediately behind the headman, with the rest of the party behind.

  Riding out into the sunlight I find myself thinking, for perhaps the first time
in thirty years, of the brother who died when I was a young man, and whose place I took as my father’s heir.

  Thirty years ago. Riding just like this after his funeral, with my father at my side, I suddenly urge ahead and put a horse’s length between us. He is angry with me, and I feel hurt, slighted, because I know what he is thinking: that of the two of us it is my brother who should have survived. I am the frivolous one, who will achieve nothing in the world. It is my brother who would have saved the last of our lands, won important public office, done all a good son can be expected to do in the way of piety towards his family gods. I know this is true and feel my life, my whole body’s weight in the saddle, as a burden. I would do anything to be lying in the stone tomb, and to have him riding away in the sunlight with my father at his side. But pride has made me stubborn. And guilt. I have just told my father, as we move into single file, that I am leaving and will not return. I have already begun to leave – starting away from him on the narrow path from the grove and keeping the whole horse’s length between us. I am already on my way to Rome. I am already, though I cannot know it yet, on my way to exile, setting out for this day, thirty years later, when I will be an old man riding with barbarians at the edge of the world, outside the Roman Law my father believed in so passionately, and the Roman State to which he dedicated our lives, with not a man now in nine days’ riding distance who knows the Roman tongue. Who could have guessed that morning, that we should ride so far from one another – that his curse upon me, unspoken perhaps, not even allowed to break the surface of his mind, should have carried me so far, and should have been, all these years, like a cold draught upon my back, even in sunlight.

  Now, suddenly, the sunlight upon my back is warm. Somewhere, in all that barbaric shouting up there on the plateau, I had let them back into my life, the brother thirty years dead, the father buried only a year before my disgrace. It was for them that I was shouting. Rites that I had merely gone through the motions of at my father’s funeral – a Roman son sacrificing, sprinkling a few cold drops for a Roman father – suddenly came alive in that shout and I was finished with the dead. Free, at last, to prepare a death of my own.

  We enter the birchwoods of the hunting place towards midday.

  The trees are already bare for the most part, their silvery trunks slashed with black, the last golden leaves caught in a broomstick of twigs, and the earth under our hooves sighing and sifting with the drifts of those that have already been shaken down. The sun is watery, the sky pale, the day windless. Almost unnaturally still.

  One of the young men dismounts and leads his horse, stooping to examine the earth, where it is visible, for tracks. We all climb down and walk behind him, and he leads us to a wolf’s den. The bitch stands at the entrance with her fangs bared, and her cubs, caught in the open, stop tumbling about on the earth, nipping at one another, little soft things, all fur, and as we come up start back and stand on all fours behind her, staring. We pass by, and later, find the tracks of a bear, and then deer tracks. And among them, astonishingly, though the others seem unsurprised, the prints of a human foot, bare, small, the prints perhaps of a child. The old man nods gravely and explains with signs. It is a child, a boy of ten or so, a wild boy, who lives with the deer. They found the prints first two seasons ago. And last year one of the hunters saw the boy but could not get close.

  I am in a ferment. I have a thousand questions to ask them but can say nothing. Where does the boy come from? Who were his parents? How did he get here? How can he have survived, naked in all seasons, and with no one to feed or nurse him? Of course I have heard of such occurrences before. There are stories of wild children all over, but nobody, when you pin them down, has actually seen one. Then there are our Roman twins, the wolf brothers, the fathers of our state. Does anyone believe, I wonder, the actual facts of their legend – anyone, I mean, except a few simple peasants? But the child’s prints are real. As real as the deer tracks beside them.

  I touch one with my fingertips, and try to conceive, from that contact, the creature that has made the print. Beginning with some warmth I imagine I can feel, I conjure him up, I call him to mind. But this is absurd. The foot must have touched the ground for the merest flash of a second. The child was running, springing along over the leaves. You can tell by the depth of the impression, and how wide apart they are, these prints, that the child runs with the deer and can equal them in swiftness.

  I touch one of them again. They seem miraculous. And suddenly, as if my imagination had indeed summoned him up, I see the child, and stranger still, recognize him. I, first of all of us, see him outlined against the blue light between two birches about fifty yards off, crouched like an animal, staring at us, a small boy as lean as a stick, with all the ribs of his torso showing under the tanned skin, bony elbows and knees, and straight black hair to the shoulders. He springs up at my cry and goes bounding away into the woods.

  Did I really see him? Or did I see suddenly, after all these years, the Child who used to be my secret companion at Sulmo, and whose very existence I had forgotten. Suddenly he was there again before me. Was the vision real? I am skeptical. But the men believe. They mount quickly and go galloping off in the direction my arm is pointing, their hooves kicking up clods and showers of leaves; and at the same time half a dozen deer who have been grazing out of sight come skittering across the clearing towards me, swerving in panic as I shout and fall.

  The men when they come back are full of a story they cannot get me to understand. Did they actually see the boy? Surely he cannot have outrun them. He must have gone to earth somewhere, in a wolf’s lair, or deep into a trough of leaves, or under the roots of some tree. We ride slowly among the trees, weaving in and out among the silvery trunks, as in a dream, calling to one another to mark positions and keeping our eyes open for any sign of movement, our ears pricked for a sound. We startle odd groups of deer, and one of the young men shoots one and slings it across his shoulder to make our evening meal. All afternoon we circle round the same few hundred yards of forest as in a dream, till the evening mist begins to gather and the light fades. What will we do, I ask myself, if we see the boy? Give chase and capture him? Then what? And who is he? The day grows blue, shadows gather around us and the old man decides to make camp.

  We tether the horses and the old man assigns each of us a task. Mine is to gather sticks for the fire. One of the young men also stays behind, to flay and butcher the deer, which he does swiftly and cleanly, hanging the whole skin over a branch and chopping the meat into haunches and chunks for roasting. The entrails he leaves to one side, together with a gourd filled with the first of the animal’s blood.

  I wander about, muttering to myself and making my pile of sticks, then sit hugging my knees and thinking of him: the Child.

  Where is he? Is he still watching us from where he cannot be seen? What I remember clearly now are his eyes, fixed on me across the open space between the trees. That stare is something I could not have imagined. I have seen nothing like it before, except from the eyes of my Child, too many years ago. I have invented nothing like it in my poems, that were full of strange creatures caught between man and some higher or lower creature, in a moment of painful transformation. It exceeds my imagining, that sharp little face with its black stare, and I think how poorly my poetry, with its elegant fables and pretty, explainable miracles, compares with the accidental reality of this creature who must exist (if he does exist) not to impress but simply because he has somehow tumbled into being. I hug my knees and talk to myself in my own tongue, so that the young huntsman, who is covered with blood, but very open-faced and innocent looking, is alarmed and keeps away from me. When the others come back I see him speak to the old man, who glances shyly over his arm at me, and I have to shake myself back into society – if that is what it can be called, when I and these men have only the likeness of our humanity to share, and neither experience, custom nor tongue between us.

  I watch the shaman spread out his symbols on the beaten gra
ss. A fish-bone needle, a lump of river clay formed into a crude ball, a handful of seeds. He places these objects in a circle drawn around him with the bone, and I listen as he begins to rock back and forth on his haunches, drawing out of himself a high-pitched womanish voice like the one the old man uses in his tales, but higher far, more unearthly, as he lets it forth in little yelps and squeals or in long slow whistles, and sways above the earth. At last, when he falls still and seems asleep, his hands open before him, the young man who has killed and butchered the deer comes to the edge of the circle with his gourd of blood. He paints a little of it on the shaman’s forehead with his forefinger, touches the wrinkled lips, then pours a few drops into the shaman’s hands. The rest he trails around the margin of the circle, and we sit outside, in the growing dark, till the shaman begins to speak, half a dozen syllables repeated over and over again in his own voice, with little yelping sounds of the other voice between. Then suddenly he wakes and it is over. He has, while we watched, been on a dream journey to the distant polar regions. His spirit has been there, moving fast over the frozen steppes across the river into the grinding wastes, and it is the voice of the polar spirits we have heard through him. Now suddenly he is one of us again, a perfectly ordinary old man, hungry, a little stiff in the joints, moving about on his buckled legs to help make a fire and to strap birch branches together in a high conical shelter.