Inland

by Gerald Murnane

  If both the writer of books from Tolna County and the man from the library in Szolnok County had gone thus far in exchanging confidences, then perhaps one or the other would have asked the question whether from among all his droves of sows or heifers a man might remember a particular young female for long after he had sent her back to his sties or his pastures.

  Who knows into what deep places their talk might have led the writer of books and the man from the manor-house? But, in fact, neither man would talk openly of heifers or young sows. The writer of books talked about the pages of books, and the man from the library of the manor-house talked about the grasslands of America. The writer of books talked about a young woman who was dead, and the man from the library talked about a woman who was alive and well and living on the Great Plain of America and who sometimes wrote to him.

  After a lengthy silence, during which both men eyed each other searchingly, the man from Szolnok County declared that he had been preparing for some time to write on a few pages and to send the pages to the young woman in America, but he was afraid that if he wrote on too many pages someone in America might bind the pages into a book with his name on it, after which the people of America might well suppose he was dead.

  At this, the writer of books leapt suddenly to his feet, drained his glass with a flourish, and strode purposefully to the glass door of a bookcase on a shadowy wall. Gesturing passionately towards the hundreds of volumes, he announced:

  ‘You are dreaming of yourself writing in the library of a manor-house, in Szolnok County, but while you were dreaming at your table I was writing on pages of books.

  ‘You are dreaming of yourself writing to a young woman in America, but in all the years while I was writing, no young woman wrote to me from America or from any other country.

  ‘I am a writer of books. I have died. I never saw, nor ever could have seen, the land of America, but I wanted to breathe with ecstasy, through the curtain of the falling rain, the scent of invisible yet enduring dream-prairies.

  ‘I am a writer of books. I am a ghost. While I was writing I died and became a ghost. While I was writing I saw ghosts of hundreds of books that I have never seen, nor will ever see, in libraries where ghosts of men that I have never seen, nor will ever see, dreamed of writing to young women in America. I saw ghosts of my own books in ghosts of libraries where no one comes to unlock the glass doors of bookcases. I saw ghosts of men staring sometimes at ghosts of glass panes. I saw ghosts of images of clouds drifting through the ghost of an image of sky behind ghosts of covers and spines of ghosts of books. I saw ghosts of images of pages white or grey drifting through the same ghost of an image of sky. And I went on writing so that ghosts of images of pages of mine would drift over ghosts of plains in a ghost of a world towards ghosts of images of skies in libraries of ghosts of the ghosts of books.’

  The writer of books took up my challenge. He pretended to be the man from Szolnok County. The night was too dark and too cold for staring through windows, but the writer of books stood in front of the glass doors of my bookshelves as though he was staring at images in the glass of the nearest field and a long line of poplar trees and even, perhaps, an image of the first field behind the poplars and an image of a sweep-arm well or of the place where an image of a well might have been.

  The man standing in front of the bookshelves said he was a simple man who had never written about anything that he had not seen and who saw only what was in front of his eyes. He had never seen ghosts of men and women or ghosts of libraries. He had never seen, nor would ever see, Tolna County or the Sio and the Sarviz trickling side by side before they meet at last. He had never seen, nor would ever see, Tripp County or the Dog Ear trickling north to meet the White. He had never seen, nor would ever see, Melbourne County or the Moonee Ponds and the Merri trickling. And yet he wanted to breathe with ecstasy, through the curtain of the falling rain, the scent of invisible yet enduring ghosts of places.

  He wanted, said the writer of books pretending to be the man from Szolnok County, to see the roadway where long, narrow puddles of cloudy water lie in the wheel-ruts all through the winter.

  The water lies for so long in the ruts because the soil is mostly clay. A thick pad of white clay clings to the sole of each of the black boots on the feet of the young woman who walks along the edge of the roadway. She is not so much a young woman; she is hardly more than a child. Her face is pale and faintly freckled. Her eyes are grey-green and her hair is yellow.

  He could hardly believe, said the writer of books, that he would dream one day of a ghost of a man walking over the flat land between the Moonee Ponds and the Merri and looking for the ghost of this young woman, or looking for the ghost of her ghost.

  For most of today I have stared through my windows at a corner of the nearest field. One of my foremen and a dozen of my farm-servants are planting small bare stems of trees in rows across the field. I suppose my overseer has decided to turn the field into a grove of fruit-trees, but I cannot remember his talking to me about it, and I have not noticed any well for water near by.

  My overseer will look after these affairs. For most of the day I was watching the farm-servants, and they were so far away from me that I had to mount my spyglass at the window. I watched a young woman, hardly more than a child. I watched also the sullen young man a few years older who had begun to watch the young woman. Later in the day I began to watch also the foreman, who had begun to watch the other two.

  Fewer clouds than usual were drifting across the sky over my estates. The season is spring. When I opened my window and aimed my spyglass, a warm breeze blew against my face. The sun never shines on these windows but it shone all morning on my fields. At midday when the farm-servants stopped to rest. I saw the young woman walk deep into the shade of the poplar trees. The sullen young man followed a few paces behind her, and the foreman watched them both.

  I have watched the young woman on other days. I have watched her walking in and out of the white-walled cabin where she lives with her parents and her brothers. I first began to watch her on a day like today in the spring of last year – or it may have been another year.

  If you could have watched me, reader, from the day when I first began to watch her, you might have supposed I was watching for the calves of her legs to become rounded, for the bones of her hips to spread apart, for the mounds of her breasts to become apparent behind her clothing, for a look of knowingness to settle on her face. And now, when all these have appeared, you may suppose, reader, that I watch her with pleasure.

  I have watched her well. I was still watching her today when the sullen young man among my farm-servants stepped in her way and pretended to stumble against her. I was watching when my foreman called her into the shade of his own poplar tree and when he gripped the bare flesh of her arm, pretending he did it absently, and when he said something with his face close to her face, looking around him as though he spoke about trees or soil.

  I was still watching when the foreman had turned away, and when the young woman had stepped over to sit with the other female farm-servants in the shade of the poplar trees. I even saw through my glass the stirring of the branches, and I dreamed that I heard the sound of the wind in the leaves.

  The girl is far beneath me. I do not know whether or not she can read and write. And yet I watch her, not with pleasure exactly but with a queer mixture of feelings. And until this morning I had thought of myself speaking to her.

  I thought I would have done no more than speak to her. I would have had her stand at sundown by the fence around my parkland. She might have stood well hidden under the green and shaggy branches of my Chinese elms. After night had fallen, my most trusted servant would have led her by way of private passages towards this very library. And here I would have questioned her closely.

  I was about to write the words: This is a strange confession I am making to my editor...I was on the point of forgetting that all these pages will lie one day on the desk of Gunnar T. Gunnarsen, scientis
t, in the Calvin O. Dahlberg Institute of Prairie Studies.

  I have been writing about myself dreaming. I have been writing only to confuse you, Gunnarsen. I have confessed nothing. Read on, Gunnarsen, and learn what kind of man I am in fact. Read the true story, forger.

  I am not a tyrant. The overseer of my estates or the overseers beneath him or the foremen beneath the overseers – those may be harsh men, but I do not oppress. I have sometimes lightened the load of a widow or an orphan who has pleaded with me. Only one thing I will not be refused. If I ask for any young female farm-servant to be waiting at nightfall by a certain gate in the fence around my park, then that female must be waiting alone when my servant calls for her.

  I do not ask in my own person. I transmit my message through one or another of my overseers. The stern man taps at an elbow with the butt of his riding-crop. The young female lowers her head. My overseer mutters a few words. The young female keeps her head lowered; she has heard and understood.

  If I wondered about such matters, I might ask myself how many a young woman, when she first hears my instruction, supposes that the man she will visit by night is my overseer. I have no doubt that each of my overseers and my foremen chooses certain young females for himself, and that this is well known among the farm-servants. The fathers and the brothers of the young females shake their fists behind the backs of the overseers, or else they joke about the harsh men. Nobody looks towards the windows of this library. If the young women who visit this library keep silent afterwards, as all of them swear to do, then I remain hidden. Here at this table I hide safely behind other men.

  I am writing to you now, Gunnarsen, because I no longer dream of my pages coming into the hands of a young woman.

  I am writing about the young females on my estates so that you will wonder, Gunnarsen, what else I have done that I have not yet told you about.

  But you will write an answer for me from your suite of rooms in the Institute of Prairie Studies. You will write to me about a young woman I have never seen nor will ever see. You will write to me about a young woman who has never seen nor will ever see the Great Alfold but who breathes with ecstasy, through the curtain of the falling rain, the scent of invisible yet enduring lands sloping gently between the Sio and the Sarviz.

  But then I will write to you again, Swede scientist. I will write to tell you what the young females have told me when I have questioned them in this very library, on nights after I have bolted the doors and after my trusted servant has prepared the couch in the adjoining room that I call my study and after the same servant has brought into the library the silver salver and the bottle of wine and the drinking glasses. I will write to you about the young females in the days even before I first saw them walking in and out of their white-walled cabins or planting trees in corners of my fields or scraping dung out of my cattle barns. I will write to you about mere children: boys and girls together on the banks of trickling streams.

  I will write such things to you, Swede – I will write such things to you in your Institute with the walls of dark glass that if you are a man in any way like myself you will shut yourself in a room that resembles this library; you will shut yourself away and you will write on pages like these pages of mine; you will write to a young woman who once lived in your own district of America but who lives now far away from you, beside her dream-prairie in a county that neither of us can name.

  It was her face that first attracted me. I watched her face for day after day, long before I first looked at her body.

  For much of my life I have listened to drunken men talking about the body: ‘And then I did this or the other to this or that place on the body...’ If any man questioned me I said this or the other about this or that place on the body. It is easy to say such things when all bodies are so much alike. But I would never have spoken about a face.

  She pushes open the door in a white wall of her parents’ cabin and walks towards me under the dark-green leaves and the bunches of red berries of an evergreen tree whose common name I have never learned. She does not see me; I am well hidden from her.

  She passes by me. She is so close that I could look into her eyes and suppose they looked into my own eyes. I have looked into her eyes on other mornings but today I look at the red mark on the clay path behind her. She has stepped on a small cluster of fallen berries, and the thrust of her foot has burst open the fruit and has squeezed out the red pulp and the yellowish seeds and has smeared them together on the path.

  I am still thinking of her face, but my thinking leads me by way of many places. I am thinking of the large house, not quite a manor-house, where my uncle and my aunt live with their three daughters, my cousins. The eldest daughter, who is sixteen years old, is holding my hand and leading me around the garden. She is trying to teach me the scent of each flower. I am not more than seven years old.

  My cousin leads me to a small shrub in a dark corner and tells me that the pink and white flowers have the sweetest scent of any plant. She tells me that the shrub is a daphne.

  I step forward and put my face to the daphne, although I do not expect to smell it. I have already learned that flowers have no scent for me. But I step forward so as not to disappoint my cousin, who has a pretty face. I have already begun to judge young women by their faces.

  I am still pretending to enjoy the daphne, but now my cousin takes out from her clothing a tiny pair of scissors and cuts a spray of leaves and flowers from the bush. She forces the stem of the spray into a buttonhole below her throat. Then she kneels on the lawn and puts her arms around me and draws my head towards her so that my nose is almost touching the pink and white bunch of the daphne on her chest.

  I do not want to tell my cousin that I cannot enjoy the daphne, but she seems to suspect this without my telling her. With one hand she presses my head against her chest, and with her other hand she drags me forward from the waist so that I stumble against her.

  I still believe my cousin is holding me so that I can learn the scent of daphne. I try to tell her that my nose is a long way short of the flower: that the flower is being crushed between my forehead and her chest I try to explain this, but by now the young woman is holding me so that I cannot speak.

  My cousin sends me away and I walk towards the large house. The time is early on a Sunday afternoon. I walk into the passages of the house and then out to the lawns and the flower-beds at the rear. The people of the house are looking at their clocks and expecting visitors, but I am remembering the daphne below my cousin’s throat and regretting that I could not look at her face while her arms were around me.

  The first short shadows of the afternoon are on the lawns behind the house. I stand in the shadows and I look out, just as I stand and look out from the shadows of this library today.

  I stand at the shaded, quieter side of a many-roomed house. Far away behind me at the front of the house, the wide driveway encircles a lawn where a fountain froths above a shallow fish pond. The sun shines on the lawn and on the white water and the green water and on the people coming and going. I know the names and the faces of the people, but what concerns them does not concern me. From where I stand I have seen already what is going to happen to the sunlight that makes the people so cheerful.

  While the people of my cousin’s family are standing on the wide steps of white marble at the front of their house and waiting to welcome the man who will marry my eldest cousin a year later, I am staring at a poppy-plant. The hairy stem and the lobed leaves are below the surface of the shadow cast by the house, but the flowers reach into the light. The petals are an unusual colour between red and orange.

  I would like to ask somebody the name of the colour of the petals. But I do not want to be told that the colour is red or orange, or even that the colour is orange-red. I would prefer to discover that the colour has a name known only to a few people.

  This is the day when I begin to learn that the colours of things appear more truly if I look at them from out of shadow. And on this day I begin
to learn also that most of the colours of things have no names but that someone such as myself might follow all his life the winding and branching paths of all the colours he has seen or remembered himself having seen.

  Now my thinking leads me from the colour of the petal on the poppy-plant to the colour of the jelly where the seeds are embedded in a tomato-fruit. I see large drops of the jelly, with unripe seeds still inside, sliding and then clinging and then sliding again from the lower lip to the cleft of the chin of the same cousin who pressed me against her only weeks before.

  I have walked quietly into the kitchen of the house. My cousin and her mother and other older women are watching the servants preparing hampers of food for an outing to the bank of a stream. My cousin, who is now engaged to be married, has been eating a sandwich of salad vegetables. One of the women has said something that has made my cousin laugh and blush. My cousin has pressed the sandwich between her fingers and has burst it, and has gone on laughing. The colour of the poppy on the day when my cousin pressed me against her – that same colour trickles now from the young woman’s mouth and down her chin.

  All my life I have been so fastidious that I prefer to eat alone rather than watch other people putting food into their mouths. While the picnic-party was leaving for the bank of the stream, I was at the rear of the house, hiding between the rows of red-currant bushes and trying to vomit.

  I notice the red mark on the path behind her, and then I notice protruding from under the sole of her boot a cake of the pulp and the seeds of berries and of white clay. On another day this might have been my pretext for speaking to her. I would have told her to look down with her green eyes at the red and the white: at the seeds crushed against the clay.