An Imaginary Life

by David Malouf

  I go out each day with the old man. He is the closest friend I have ever had. How strange that I have had to leave my own people to find him. He has taught me to weave a net, and I begin to be good at it. There are different sorts of nets, and traps also, for the different kinds of fish. There are also the various hooks. I am happy to learn all this. What is beautiful is the way one thing is fitted perfectly to another, and our ingenuity is also beautiful in finding the necessary correspondence between things. It is a kind of poetry, all this business with nets and hooks, these old analogies.

  I have also begun to gather seeds on my excursions in the brush – there are little marsh flowers out there, so small you hardly see them, and when I come back I push them into the earth with a grimy forefinger and they sprout. I have begun to make, simple as it is, a garden.

  And all winter I drilled with my company of guards and have discovered in myself what my father must always have known was there, however much I denied it, the lineaments of a soldier. How I have changed! What a very different self has begun to emerge in me!

  I now understand these people’s speech almost as well as my own, and find it oddly moving. It isn’t at all like our Roman tongue, whose endings are designed to express difference, the smallest nuances of thought and feeling. This language is equally expressive, but what it presents is the raw life and unity of things. I believe I could make poems in it. Seeing the world through this other tongue I see it differently. It is a different world. Somehow it seems closer to the first principle of creation, closer to whatever force it is that makes things what they are and changes them into what they would be. I have even begun to find my eye delighted by the simple forms of this place, the narrower range of colors, the harsh lines of cliff and scrub, the clear, watery light. Now that spring is no longer to be recognized in blossoms or in new leaves on the trees, I must look for it in myself. I feel the ice of myself cracking. I feel myself loosen and flow again, reflecting the world. That is what spring means.

  I have also, in a winter of long evening arguments, won my battle with Ryzak. In the autumn, when the birches are bare, we will go out and find the boy, and this time, if it can be managed without harm, we will bring him back. Ryzak has only one doubt. He must first get the assurance of the shaman that they can bring the boy into the village without antagonizing some spirit of the woods.

  What they are afraid of, I think, is that by allowing the Child into the village they may make themselves vulnerable to whatever being it is that has raised and protected him. It may be the wolves that prowl round the stockade in winter, howling above the wind, gray packs that are themselves like spirits of the winter plains, shaggy, iron-fanged, famished with cold. Might the boy, Ryzak wonders, have the power to turn himself into a wolf in the winter months? Is that how he survives? And where would we be then? Might he be able to creep out at night and open the gates to his brothers? Or is it some spirit even more savage and terrible than wolves that has nursed him? Some animal presence we do not know and have never seen. What if he were in communion with that, or had the power of assuming the form of a creature whose shape, whose horror, we can only imagine, and have no magic to placate?

  I argue that he is just a boy, a male child as human as ourselves, and Ryzak believes me, or pretends to, because he has a great desire, in my presence, to appear superior to his superstitious people and as reasonable as he thinks I am.

  But in fact I am deceiving him. I know it is not an ordinary boy. It is the Child.

  The summer comes, and my garden flourishes. Wild flowers mostly that I have found in the marshes or between the stalks of oats in our narrow ploughed land. Who knows where the seeds blow in from? Careful tending has made them strong, and regular feeding with leaf mold and manure brings out their color, blue, red, yellow. The women of the house find so much effort spent on something that we cannot eat foolish beyond belief; but they like the colors and are happy enough to provide me each day with a little water from our meager store. Mostly, I think, they humor me as they would a child. Everything else about us exists purely for use. The women wear no ornaments. What they sew has good strong seams but not a stitch that is fanciful. Only my flowers are frivolous, part of the old life I have not quite abandoned. Only the time I spend upon them is play.

  For these people it is a new concept, play. How can I make them understand that till I came here it was the only thing I knew? Everything I ever valued before this was valuable only because it was useless, because time spent upon it was not demanded but freely given, because to play is to be free. Free is not a word that exists, I think, in their language. Nothing here is free of its own nature, its own law.

  But we are free after all. We are bound not by the laws of our nature but by the ways we can imagine ourselves breaking out of those laws without doing violence to our essential being. We are free to transcend ourselves. If we have the imagination for it.

  My little flowerpots are as subversive here as my poems were in Rome. They are the beginning, the first of the changes. Some day, I know, I shall find one of our women stopping as she crosses the yard with a bag of seed to smell one of my gaudy little blooms. She will, without knowing it, be taking the first step into a new world.

  Meanwhile I think only of the Child. The rest is mere filling of empty time. The summer passes with flowers. The grain is brought in, threshed, stored. It is autumn again.

  We go out to take him.

  I have no wish to tell how it came about. Coward that I am, I did not take part in the chase and would have preferred not to witness it. Crouched against one of the birches with my hands over my ears, I let the others do it for me, the big horses surging about the wood, chopping at the leaf mold with their iron hooves, the men whooping and yelling, weaving in circles, so that the Child, driven this way and that in the thick undergrowth, must have been confounded utterly by strange cries coming at him from all directions, shadowy figures darting out from all parts of the sky. When he suddenly stumbled into the clearing and stopped before me, he was in a state of utter panic, exhausted, half-crazed, his shoulders torn and bleeding where twigs had caught them, his body filthy with mud. His mouth, as he stood there surrounded at last, poured out a terrible howling that was like nothing I have ever heard from a human throat.

  But as the first of the young men swung down behind him, he suddenly discovered a new force of energy, lashing out with fists, heels, teeth, till the young man covered his mouth and nostrils with a fierce hand, squeezing the breath out of him, and the others were able to hold and then tie him with thongs. Only the eyes continued to move wildly, and I thought from the spasms that shook his body that he might be in a fit. I put my hand on him, and a savage hissing came from the nostrils, the spasms increased. At last we left him to himself, trussed like a pig, under an oak tree, while the shaman began his ritual. The high singing of the shaman’s other, polar, voice, seemed to quiet him. It was as if the shaman were singing the wildness from him, leading it north in his trance towards the polar circle of eternal whiteness, taking it down through a hole made with a fish bone, under the ice. When the shaman woke and came out of his circle the Child was asleep, and he slept like that all through the journey back, slung forward over the headman’s saddle, and for another whole day after we had returned.

  What a strange procession we must have made, coming up the long slope from the marshes in the late afternoon, with the autumn light over the river flats and the long black line of the cliffs, beyond which, shining flat and gray, lay the sea. Children left off splashing about in the pools and ran shouting behind us, wide-eyed, staring. Women gathering their clothes off thornbushes came and stood with their arms full of washing to watch us, only their eyes visible under the black shawls. Rumor of the boy’s capture had preceded us. The lean body, about the size of a deer, slung across the headman’s horse, might have been lifeless, drained of blood and spirit like the joints we were bringing home on the other horses.

  But the news is already abroad that the creatu
re, whatever he is – wolf boy, godling, satyr – is alive. The village has accepted him within its walls. It is all to begin.

  III

  WHAT HAVE I done?

  The Child is lying, still trussed, in a corner of the room opposite me. Since the first occasion the women have refused to touch him. When he fouls himself I must wash him down. They prepare his food, a gruel made of meal and sweetened with honey, but will not cross the threshold of the room. I untie his hands and leave the bowl, listening at the door for him to drag himself over the rushes and sup it up, snuffling like an animal in his hunger. He whimpers but does not cry. His eyes remain dry and nothing like a human sobbing ever comes from him, none of that giving of oneself over to tears that might release the child in him. The whimpering comes from somewhere high in his head and has been learned from one of the animals. He keeps it up for hours on end. To comfort himself, quite shamelessly, as some children suck their thumb, he excites himself with his hand to a series of little shudders, as I have seen monkeys do, then again, and again, till the spasms have exhausted him and he is quiet, squatting in the corner with his knees drawn up sharp and his mouth clenched; or curled up in a ball in the rushes, his knees under his chin, his elbows tight between them.

  We spend hours simply staring at one another. And I have no idea what feelings might be at work in him. He shows no sign of interest in anything I do. I write a little. I eat. I mend a tear in my cloak. He stares but does not see. At first when I touched him in the cleaning he tried to bite me with his sharp incisors. Now he accepts all that I do with a passivity that has begun to disturb me. I am afraid we may already have killed something in him. I have a terrible fear that he may die – that what we have brought back here is some animal part of him that can be housed and fed for a while, and kept with us by force, but only till it realizes that the spirit is already gone, having slipped away out of the arms of that first young man who caught and held him; or worse still, having been dreamed out of his body in that first protracted sleep.

  I watch him sleep. His limbs twitch like a dog’s, with little involuntary spasms along the inside of the thighs.

  Does he dream? If only I could be certain he was dreaming I would know that what I have to contact at last, what I have slowly to lead up through the ladders of being in him, is still there. I must know that he can dream. I must assure myself that he can smile, that he can weep.

  But I have not even described him.

  He is about eleven years old, tall, strongly but scraggily made, with the elbow and knee joints enlarged and roughly calloused. There are sores on his arms and legs and old scars that appear as discolorations of the flesh, brownish under the yellow tan. The limbs are lightly haired, the chest hairless; but all along the spine there is a hairline, reddish in color like a fox, and it is this that terrifies the women and has made them unwilling to touch him, though the phenomenon is common enough. You may observe it in small children everywhere, as they play naked on doorsteps or splash about in summer under water showers. It usually goes unremarked. Only in this boy has it become, for the women, some sort of sign. That and the feet, which are splayed and hardened from being unshod in all weathers, the toenails worn away, the underside of the foot thickened to a crust as deep perhaps as an earthenware dish, but in no way resembling anything other than a normal foot. The rumor that he is covered with hair and has hooves, which the boy Lullo brings back from the village, is absurd.

  I dragged the boy in this evening and made him look at the Child and tell me what he saw. But he was too terrified to look properly, and though he has seen what there is to see, I know he is not convinced. What he imagines is so much more powerful than the facts.

  I know what he thinks. He thinks I have somehow bewitched the Child’s hooves into stunted feet to deceive him, or that I have bewitched him.

  I had imagined that the boy, being something like the same age as the Child, might have some special interest in him, some special sympathy. But he has none. He regards the Child with loathing, as if he were somehow about to be displaced here by a changeling; as if – is it that? – the Child might, while he was sleeping, steal his spirit. These people believe profoundly in sleepwalkers and stealers of souls. Do they suspect, as I have begun to do, that the Child has lost his spirit, and may, while we see him curled asleep in his corner, be capable, like the shaman, of walking out of his body, through the walls into the next room, and into the boy Lullo’s body while he is absent on one of those dream journeys small boys are accustomed to make, into the hunting woods or out over the river? The old woman and the boy’s mother, I know, are encouraging him in this, because of his influence with the old man. But Ryzak, for what reason I do not know, remains my supporter in the business. Against the women. And against the shaman, who has come only once to examine the Child, and on that occasion refused to sing – another fact that the women mutter over and hold against me. The shaman and the women, of course, are in league.

  So all day we sit in the half-dark.

  I have come to guess a little of what the Child thinks by examining his features, but at no time have we communicated as before, when we spoke to one another in the woods. It is as if the spirit in him that I spoke to then were no longer present. I watch the mouth with its small, broken teeth. He has a way of drawing his lips back over them and taking the breath in sharp as if he were in pain; though he makes the same gesture, I notice, when he is exciting himself, and it is in this gesture that the odd bone structure is revealed, the high cheekbones, the pointed chin, the lines of the jaw. The eyes too I watch. They are very black, and deep set. The eyebrows tilt upward. The hair, which we have washed and cropped a little, is inky black, straight, and coarse in texture, not at all silky or fine; though this may be because he is undernourished or because his spirit is so low in him, or no longer there at all. I have noticed before how the hair takes on the shine or the dullness of the spirit, especially in the ill. He still seems, for all our scrubbing, less than clean. As if the earth had got so deep into his skin that he has taken on its color. It is perhaps dirt in the old wounds that accounts for the brownish scars on his limbs. He is not at all beautiful, as I had imagined the Child must be. But I am filled with a tenderness, an immense pity for him, a need to free him into some clearer body, that is like a pain in my own.

  I think and think. What must the steps be? How should I begin? Kindness, I know, is the way – and time. To reveal to him first what our kindness is, what our kind is; and then to convince him that we belong to the same kind. It is out of this that he must discover what he is.

  But we have begun so badly. How can he possibly think of us as anything but cruel? Which of the beasts would have done this to him? Which of the beasts would hunt him down on horseback, truss him up, carry him away from all he has ever known? Then there is the spitefulness of the boy, who I have decided must be kept away. And the hostility of the women.

  In the end I must do it all myself. I must, at first, be the only one he has contact with.

  I think, strangely, of the wolf in my dream that threatened to consume the whole pool of my being, and begin to be afraid.

  The weeks pass.

  I no longer leave the room now when the women bring his food. At first he was wary, as if perhaps I had set a trap for him as before. He edged towards the bowl, sniffed, examined it, took it in his hands, and all the while as he ate, more slowly than before, watched me over the rim with his deep black eyes, which seemed these times to have points of red. Then when he had cleaned out the last of the stuff with his finger, he rolled the bowl over the floor and dragged himself back to his corner, where he crouched with his knees up, waiting for me perhaps to make some move. Now he eats without being aware of me. As if I were not there. Grunting as he feeds.

  I have also brought my straw pallet into the room, and sleep in the corner opposite him. He has got used to that as well. And I begin to feel again that I have been in contact with him, though it is impossible to know when the contact occurred
. It may have been while I was washing him. He submits to that easily enough, though with no sense of his being touched in any part of his real body. It may have been in some chance meeting of the eyes as we pass in and out of each other’s sight. Or it may have been in our sleep, as we move through this room in the same liquid medium, as if floating together in a pool, some casual meeting of one dream with another, a flowing into his sleep, or of his sleep into mine, at some point that the waking mind would not know of. Or in stirring about here, one part of the invisible current I make as I write, as my pen dips in the ink and my hand moves across the parchment, or as I drag the razor over my chin, may have broken against him so that he felt it. Who can tell? But I am certain now that the contact has been made. He no longer whimpers, or rocks back and forth on his knees, making little growls at the back of his throat. He watches. And I begin to believe that something I will have to call his mind has been engaged, and has started to move out into the room. I feel it. It is there after all. It is there. Some process of reaching up out of himself has begun of its own accord.