Inland

by Gerald Murnane

  The boy-man bends his body violently backwards. The silver salver and the decorated parcel fall to the carpeted floor. Neither bounces; each falls flat. The geranium-red is deep and yielding.

  The Swede releases the boy-man and then stoops. He picks up the parcel and then strides off around a corner and down a corridor where the carpet is ankle-deep and flecked with green-grey.

  The door marked HINTERLAND is opened quietly from within. The boy-man turns to face the doorway. The person inside the room stands just beyond the doorway so that I see only the tips of a pair of ladies’ shoes. Higher up I see a female hand reaching out towards the boy-man’s hand in a gesture offering comfort.

  I strain to see the female who offers comfort. I view the scene from several vantage-points. I see the corner of an enormous desk in the room beyond the open door. I see black or violet lettering on yellow or lilac spines of books on shelves against a wall. I see heaps of grey clouds in the sky beyond the window beyond the door, and below the grey clouds the orange-gold of a plain covered with ripened wheat, and deep beneath the plain the words: Gray and Gold; John Rogers Cox; Cleveland Museum of Art. From between the grey clouds a shaft of sunlight picks out the pointed bell-tower of a small church of white timber far away to the east, in the valley of the Merrimack in Middlesex County; another shaft of sunlight reaches down through the window of the room labelled HINTERLAND and touches the face of the boy-man, which is thick with freckles, and picks out a single teardrop on his cheek. The teardrop magnifies a particular red-brown freckle. The female hand begins to stroke the clay-coloured hair standing stiffly out from under the boy-man’s flattened hat. The hand is withdrawn and then returns to view with a small white handkerchief in its grasp. On a corner of the handkerchief is embroidered a spray of the leaves and fruit of the tree whose name in my language is mulberry. The hand with the handkerchief wipes away the tear from the cheek, and then every tear from the eyes. The bell in the church begins to ring.

  Now I stand as well in that place. My feet are deep in red and the red is flecked with green-grey. My feet are heavy to lift, and I wonder why the people around me are stepping so lightly.

  I walk to a low table and a group of chairs five paces from my editor’s door. I sit in a chair that tilts me far backwards, and I lower my eyes.

  I look up, and I see that the door labelled HINTERLAND has been closed. Around me at the low table, seated men and women hold outspread covers of illustrated magazines in front of their faces. On the covers of the magazines, shafts of yellow light fall on white churches, on trees with orange or red leaves beside dark-green streams trickling, and on boy-men walking towards the streams. The boy-men have fishing-rods on their shoulders and twigs or grass-stems between their front teeth. A shaft of sunlight touches the face of one of the boy-men and picks out teardrops. A little bell rings monotonously. I look far into the pictures around me for some other place that some of the boy-men might be walking towards. But all the boy-men, and even the boy-man with the tears on his face, are walking towards streams in America.

  I climb out of my chair and I look among the magazines on the low table. Each name on a magazine is in the American language. On the covers of some magazines are pictures of indistinct grasslands under grey clouds, but none of the names on those covers is Hinterland.

  The boy-man in livery dark-grey with gold trim appears from around a corner. On his silver salver he carries a bottle of whisky and drinking glasses and a jar with silver machinery on top. He pushes open the door marked HINTERLAND and walks in without knocking and leaves the door open behind him. I see clearly the desk and the person sitting behind it. The person is a man with an American bow-tie of white spots on black; he is a stranger to me.

  The boy-man places the silver salver on the desk. The man with the spotted bow-tie pours whisky for himself and for one other person out of my view. Then the man with the bow-tie sets the machinery working on the jar, and frothing water spurts into the glass that will go to the person out of my view. The boy-man turns to leave the room, but the man with the bow-tie signals to him and pours him a small measure of the whisky. The boy-man smiles at last.

  I look again at the table in front of me. I want to look once more at the picture of the boy-man with the tears on his face. The picture is not where I last saw it. I look at the covers of magazines in front of the faces of people around the table. One face is hidden behind swamps, with flocks of birds circling overhead, in Buenos Aires County far away but not so long ago. The face of a young female is hidden behind the plains of Melbourne County, where spiked and thorny bushes grow, and stones and boulders lie. One of the persons with faces hidden behind flat land is a young woman with silk stockings. I suspect from the shape of the legs and from other signs that this is the woman I used to call my editor when I lived on the Great Alfold.

  In front of the face of the woman with the silk stockings is a view of a landscape so level and so vast that it can only lie in the steppes of Central Asia. And now I know that this woman is my editor. This woman with her legs in silk and her face behind a desert of grass is Anne Kristaly Gunnarsen, and she is about to look at me after all these years. She has hidden herself here with her supporters in order to win back the room and the desk and the books on the shelves that should be hers, and she is about to beg me to help her.

  Yet I do not want the woman to look at me. She will look into my face and I will have to speak to her. I will have to explain to her what I meant by all those pages that I covered with my writing when I was a man in the library of a manor-house and she was a young woman looking out at her dream-prairie near the town of Ideal. All this is too much to explain.

  I reach towards the table for a page to put in front of my own face. The young female lowers from in front of her face the view of thorn-bushes and grass and stones on the plains of Melbourne County. She is hardly more than a child. She tosses the magazine onto the table. I pick up the magazine from where it has fallen. I am about to hide my own face.

  But just now, across the table and on the other side of the heap of pages with views of grasslands in many countries, the landscape in the steppes of Central Asia is lifted away and I see the face behind it.

  The face is only one of many faces such as I have seen in my lifetime, here in Szolnok County. It could hardly be the face of the woman I have called my editor for so long.

  My own face, from long habit, has remained stern, unblinking. Neither the young woman nor the child will ever know that I was mistaken about her.

  Elsewhere in a corridor of the building, I lift my feet with effort through flecks of green-grey in geranium-red. I look down and I see the green-grey stirring like dust and then settling again into the red. I understand that powerful people in this building and rivals for the position of editor of Hinterland have torn open in this corridor all the parcels of pages addressed to their enemies and rivals. They have torn open the parcels and unfastened from the pages the leaves and the grass-stems pressed and dried and the grass-flowers mounted as in life. They have ground into dust between their fingers the sword-shape and the feather-shape and every bell-shape with its tongue-shape dangling inside. And then they have let the dust drift down from their fingers to settle among tufts and strands geranium-red.

  I have found bell-shapes sometimes growing by hundreds in my family graveyard. I have pressed and dried a handful of the bell-shapes between blank pages of writing-paper under a stack of the largest books from my shelves. I had hoped to send a page of the pressed leaves and flowers to Anne Kristaly Gunnarsen. I know of no name for the bell-shapes in my language, but I thought my editor would surmise from the look of the dried things on the page how the bell-shapes had swung in the wind when the sap was in them. I thought she would remember having seen the bell-shapes during her childhood between the Sio and the Sarviz. I thought she might have told me the name she used as a child for the bell-shapes, and where she had seen them, and how she had shaken them on their stalks.

  Now in these corrid
ors I see the green-grey dust of all the plants that men from grasslands have sent to the women they call their editors. If my nose could be of any use to me, I would kneel in these corridors and press my face into the red. I would try to learn what kinds of leaves and flowers other men once hoped to send to their editors. I would like to write much more about the skyscraper of glass and marble on the Great Plain of America. I remember that I saw from one of the windows of the skyscraper two or three young women far away, by a fish pond with floating leaves and flowers on a lawn in front of the white building with the golden dome in Lincoln, in Lancaster County, in the state of Nebraska.

  Even from so far away, I could see a book in the hands of one of the young women. And I understood that the young woman wanted to show me something on one of the pages of the book. I have never looked into any of the books in my own library, but the young woman by the fish pond wanted me to meet her in Lancaster County and to look at something she had found in a book.

  From where I stood, high up in the Calvin O. Dahlberg Institute, all the land between Ideal, South Dakota, and Lancaster County, Nebraska, was a lawn with ornamental ponds and streams. Instead of villages or towns I saw patches of orange-gold or red-brown like the pattern of flower-beds in the garden that I see from the windows of my library. I waited for the young woman with the book in her hand to begin to walk towards me from beside the fish pond. I waited to watch her crossing the wide lawn among the flower-beds and shrubs and coming slowly nearer the district of Ideal.

  Then I remembered where I was: where I have always been. And I thought of the young woman approaching Ideal and finding herself in grass with the look and the feel of virgin prairie. The young woman looks up at the rows of glass panes on the building of the Institute of Prairie Studies. She sees the shapes of men and women behind the greyish glass and she supposes that one of those shapes is myself. She does not know that I am far away in my library in Szolnok County.

  I would like to write more about the skyscraper of marble and glass on the Great Plain of America, but that sort of writing is by no means easy. I have written that sort of writing only since I first thought of my editor as thinking of me as dead.

  It is not easy to think of myself as a man who is thought of as dead. I might as easily think of myself as dead. And perhaps this is what some writers do before they begin to write. They think of themselves as dead. Or they think of themselves as thought of as dead.

  I have always understood that the people whose names are on the pages of my books are all dead. Some of those people were once alive but now they are dead. Others of those people have never been alive; they have always been dead.

  Today I am thinking of the people whose names are on the covers of books: the same people who wrote the pages inside the books. I have always supposed that all of those people are dead. But I used to suppose that the people first wrote the pages of the books and then died. They wrote their books and then they died. Today I believe that the people who wrote the pages of the books may have died before they wrote. They died, or they thought of themselves as having died, or they thought of themselves as thought of as dead – and then they wrote.

  On a certain day in a certain year a writer of books arrived at the front door of my manor-house. Why did the writer of books visit me of all men? When I asked the writer that question he told me politely that all my questions would be answered when I read the book that he was writing. The book would be about people who were alive and had not died, and about grasslands.

  On a certain afternoon when more clouds than usual were drifting over my estates, a writer of books stepped into this library and told me his name. If ever I had seen the name on the spine or the cover of a book, I might have remembered the name today. I only remember, however, that the writer of books was born in Transdanubia, in Tolna County. And perhaps you ought to conclude from this, reader, that something in the soil of that county urges men and women to become writers or readers of books, or to die or to read about people who are dead.

  If the writer of books had already died before he called at my manor-house, then the man who stepped into this library was a ghost. As a ghost he was able to stand at any window in any manor-house on the Great Alfold, but he stood for a while at the window where I sometimes stand, and he stared at the row of poplar trees and the same almost-empty fields that I sometimes stare at.

  If the writer of books was a ghost, did he see the same view that I see from my window? I believe the writer of books saw the ghosts of things from my window. He saw things that I might have seen long ago but cannot see today. He saw the arm of a well, perhaps, that I no longer see. He saw men and women, perhaps, who no longer live on my estates.

  I told my guest, the writer of books, that my library and my estates were his. But the writer of books wanted only to look out through one after another of my windows and then to walk around the boundaries of my park.

  I walked with the writer of books to the place where the brick wall gives way to the iron spikes. The writer looked back in the direction of my manor-house. He stared at the high fence around the tennis courts. The fence is overgrown by an ornamental vine, and the writer of books saw the vine when its leaves were red – so red that I preferred not to look at them.

  The writer of books spoke to me. Some of what he said was in his and my native language, but sometimes he seemed to be speaking in the language of ghosts, which is even more heavy-hearted. He said he would write in a book that a redness had overhung my manor-house when he called on me. But he said also that he would write also about the whiteness that would have been seen from my library window on a morning in winter. And I understood him to say also that he would write also that a greenness would have met the eye of anyone who walked out onto my estates and looked down into a well.

  (Whitney Smith, Executive Director of the Flag Research Center, Winchester, Massachusetts, and author of Flags Through the Ages and Across the World, McGraw-Hill (UK), Maidenhead, 1975, writes that the red comes from the flag of Arpad in the ninth century, which was all red; the white comes from Saint Stephen, who introduced a white cross into the national coat-of-arms in the eleventh century; the green is the green of the low hills from which the cross was shown as rising.)

  Late in the afternoon the writer of books saw the sky filling with clouds and said he would spend the night in my manor-house.

  The writer and I dined alone together and afterwards retired to the library and sat at the fireside. Some people have called me a dull man, but I knew that the writer of books was waiting to question me as soon as the wine had made me talkative. Before he could ask his questions, I challenged him to a game: I would pretend to be a writer of books and he would pretend to be a man who looked out from the windows of his library in a manor-house in Szolnok County.

  The writer of books nodded absently, and I supposed he had agreed to take part in my game. I got pen and paper from my table and took brief notes, as though I was in fact a writer of books who would write one day about himself and the man in the library of the manor-house.

  The firelight glimmered in the mellow gold of the wine and the ornate gilt lettering on the sombre volumes behind the glass of the bookcase. The wind thumped and cried eerily at the windows like the ghosts of lost children beating their fists on the panes and pleading to be taken in. An occasional gust was heard in the chimney, causing the flames in the grate to bend violently sideways. Sipping contentedly from their glasses, the two men stared into the flames and spoke in quiet tones.

  ‘One thing I’ve always been a little curious about,’ said the writer, tapping his glass idly with a fingernail and trying to appear somewhat bored by his subject. ‘You chaps in your manor-houses out here on the Great Alfold...do you handle your young heifers when they come of age? pinch their flanks? squeeze their pointed udders? stretch their little breeding-parts for them?’ He paused...‘And how do the young heifers take to this? Do they let fly with their dainty hoofs? Do they bellow for their mothers?’


  (Some people have called me a dull man, but I had known all along why the writer of books had visited my manor-house.)

  The man from Szolnok County eyed his questioner shrewdly over the rim of his glass. ‘You’ll have your answer just as soon as I learn whether you writers of books in Transdanubia tamper with your yearling sows before you send them to the boar!’

  The man from Szolnok County had expected the writer of books to fling his head back at this and to laugh, which would have been the signal for the glasses to be refilled and the two men of the world to clap one another about the shoulders and embark on a frank exchange of reminiscences.

  ‘Ah, yes!’ the man from Szolnok County had expected the writer of books to say with a knowing smile. ‘Ah, yes! Our chubby yearling sows! They have to be scrubbed first, most of them. We tame them with a glass or two of the very wine you have in your hand. We tame them first and then we stand by to see them scrubbed. Or we scrub them with our own hands if we dare; we scrub them until their hams are red and glowing. Then we unwrap our own meat, our flitches of well-cured bacon, and we and the chubby young sows pig it together. And they thank us afterwards, most of the little pink sows; they thank us with tears in their eyes for having taught them how to enjoy a piece of good old well-cured Transdanubian bacon.’

  If the writer of books had uttered these words, smiling quietly and moistening his lips with his tongue from time to time, then the man from Szolnok County would have answered: ‘You writers of books from across the river are welcome to your plump young sows, but this is cattle country here on the Great Alfold. Our heifers are not bred for wallowing in bathtubs or for having their haunches shined with soap. The legs of our heifers are long and their shanks are lean, and the frisky creatures lead us a merry chase before we throw them. But we always catch them and throw them in the end. We throw them down, and they wave their long white legs in the air, and then we prod the heifers, and they lie still for a little while. Yet our young cattle are full of spirit, and not the least of our pleasures is to see them toss their pretty heads and kick up their heels at us when we turn them loose afterwards on our grasslands.’