I considered myself the Reader. Even after the greenness of the world had been buried under the greyness, the Reader would have to remain alive in order to read what the Writer had written about the green and the grey.
For twenty-five years, until I began to write on these pages, I would have said that the child had been right. I would have said that I had remained alive. I was alive and reading.
When I began to write on these pages I thought often about a person I called my reader. Sometimes I addressed the person named Reader. I could not think of words without a reader. I could not think of a reader who was not alive. But since I first began to write on these pages I have learned that a reader need not be alive. I can think of this page being read by a person who is dead as easily as you, reader, can think of this page as being written by someone who is dead.
Heaven and earth shall pass away but my words shall not pass away.
I had never expected my parents to allow me to travel to the mountains between the King River and the Broken River and to live there as I believed the Catholics of Europe had lived in the Middle Ages. I never actually saw the dark-green mountains with clearings of red soil among the tall eucalypts and with long rows of green potato-plants in the soil. Instead, I was taken just before my thirteenth birthday to the district between Scotchman’s Creek and Elster Creek.
Before I left the old weatherboard house I scooped the two goldfish out of the laundry trough in the backyard. I carried the two fish to the other side of the city of Melbourne in the same biscuit-tin that had carried them from the fish pond behind the first house my parents had owned to the house beside the sheep yards in the district between the Ovens and Reedy Creek and then back to the weatherboard house in my native district.
While I had been living in the weatherboard house, the glass fish tank had been in storage with the rest of my family’s furniture. When the house was built in the clearing among the tea-tree scrub, in the district between Scotchman’s Creek and Elster Creek, the furniture was brought out from storage and my parents and my brothers and I moved into the house. I set up the fish tank in the fibro-cement shed behind the house. I spread pebbles across the bottom of the tank, and I bought a few water plants and pushed their roots in among the pebbles. But I was no longer interested in the two fish. I only noticed the fish when I sprinkled crumbs of fish food on the surface of the tank every second afternoon. Occasionally on those afternoons I saw a little raft of bubbles in a corner of the tank or clinging to the floating leaf of a water plant. I wondered whether the bubbles were eggs and whether, if they were eggs, the fish might have been a male and a female after all. But the next day the bubbles would have gone. Either they had been mere bubbles and had burst or, if they were eggs, they had been eaten by the two fish.
One warm afternoon about a year after the fish had been taken from their brick pond, I went into the shed and saw one of the fish lying on the floor beside the tank. The fish was dead. Its scales were quite dry and the fins that had always looked transparent and soft in the water now looked whitish and were spiky to touch. I supposed the fish had thrown itself out of the water and over the shallow rim of the tank. I had sometimes seen fish flip themselves out of the water and then fall back again on hot evenings when I had sat on the edge of the brick pond a year or two earlier. I had thought that the leaps were connected with what I vaguely called breeding.
The fish in the shed had not fallen to the cement floor. I had laid flat on the floor beside the tank a plywood door left behind by the men who had built the house. I was using the rectangle of plywood as a base for a model railway layout. I had only a simple oval track but I was hoping to add loops and sidings. And already I had sketched on the wood beneath the layout of rails an approximate outline of part of the continent of North America; I was going to think of the wide landscapes of America while my engine and rolling-stock travelled around the circuit. The fish had flung itself from the fish tank almost to the centre of the rectangle of plywood.
The dying of that particular fish I always remembered afterwards. Of the other fish I remember nothing. I suppose I found it dead and floating in the tank one day. I can remember from the years after my first year in that house that the fish tank was sometimes filled with soil and that I tried to grow small flowering plants in the soil.
The cowherds pulled her out when they watered the cattle at dawn. By the time we arrived there on our way to school, she was lying on the thin ice formed by the water which had been spilt from the well. Under this covering the black clods of earth, the pieces of straw and dung glinted and sparkled like rare jewels under glass. There she lay with open eyes in which, like the small objects under the ice, was frozen the broken terror of a startled glance. Her mouth was open, her nose rather haughtily tilted, and on her forehead and beautiful cheeks there were huge scratches which had either occurred during her fall, or had been made by the cowherds as they let down the bucket before they caught sight of her among the ice-patches in the dark winter dawn. She was barefooted, she had left her boots in the assistant farm-manager’s room, by the bed from which she had suddenly leapt and dashed straight as an arrow to the well.
I first read these words ten years ago, on a hot day in February. Early in the morning of that day I had closed the window of this room and had pulled down the blind in order to keep out the sunlight and the north wind. I had then taken a book down from one of the shelves and had sat at this table and begun to read.
The name of the book that I read on that hot day has already been written on one of these pages. I had taken the book down from the shelf in the morning because I wanted to read a book about grasslands. Even then, ten years ago, I had grown tired of most of the books on my shelves. Each year I had read fewer books. The only books I was still interested in reading were books about grasslands.
Until that hot day in February I had never opened the covers of the book containing the words that I wrote on this page fifteen minutes ago. I took down the book from the shelf on that hot day because I understood that one of the words on the cover of the book was the word for grassland in the Magyar language.
Ten years ago I believed that any person named or referred to in a book was already dead. The person named on the cover of the book might have been alive or dead, but any person named or referred to inside the book was unquestionably dead.
On the hot day when I first read in a certain book the words beginning, The cowherds pulled her out when they watered the cattle at dawn...I did not at once cease to believe what I had believed all my life concerning the people named or referred to in books. What I did was to write on a page.
Of the many hundreds of pages I have written in this room, the first page I wrote was a letter. After I had written the letter I addressed it and posted it to a woman who had once lived in a street named Daphne in the district where I was born. Then I went on writing on other pages, every one of which is still lying somewhere around me in this room. On every day while I was writing on pages, I thought of the people referred to or named in the book with the word for grassland on its cover.
At first while I was writing I thought of those people as though they were all dead and I myself was alive. At some time while I was writing, however, I began to suspect what I am now sure of. I began to suspect that all persons named or referred to in the pages of books are alive, whereas all other persons are dead.
When I wrote the letter which was the first of all my pages, I was thinking of a young woman who was, I thought, dead while I was still alive. I thought the young woman was dead while I remained alive in order to go on writing what she could never read.
Today while I write on this last page, I am still thinking of the young woman. Today, however, I am sure the young woman is still alive. I am sure the young woman is still alive while I am dead. Today I am dead but the young woman remains alive in order to go on reading what I could never write.
Anyone standing at the corner of Landells Road and Sims Street, in the suburb of Pascoe Va
le, would be one kilometre from the corner of a rectangle of about one and a half square kilometres of grass and scattered trees both native and European. The place of grass and trees is called Fawkner Crematorium and Memorial Park. A person standing at the corner of Landells Road and Sims Street today would see to the north-east only fences and gardens and windows and walls and roofs of houses built mostly in the last years of the 1950s. A person standing on the same corner in a year before any of those houses had been built would almost certainly have seen the tops of the trees in the Memorial Park but would probably not have seen any of the boundary fence of the Memorial Park, so that the trees might have seemed merely a clump or a row of trees in the middle distance of a grassland.
Once each year, in the spring or the autumn, I travel by rail to Fawkner and then I walk for an hour through the grounds of the place that most people call simply Fawkner Cemetery.
If anyone asked me why I walk each year among the graves and the lawns and the patches of unkempt grass, I would answer that the cemetery is the only place I know where I can still see the plains to the north of Melbourne as they must have seemed before people from Europe arrived there. This would be a true answer, but in fact I have other reasons as well for visiting the cemetery.
I do not look directly at trees or grass while I walk in the cemetery. I aim my eyes ahead of me, but I notice only what lies to one or the other side of me. What I see in this way from the sides of my eyes is mostly more convincing, as though I had glimpsed what is present to the eyes of a person who keeps always to one side of me and a little behind me but whose judgement is much more sound and whose vision is much clearer than mine.
My second reason for visiting the cemetery at Fawkner is that I intend to have my body buried there. Each copy of my last will and testament has attached to it an instruction that my body may be either buried whole or burned first and buried afterwards, but that in either case my so-called remains must be put nowhere else than in the soil of my native district: the level and unremarkable land north of the city of Melbourne between the Moonee Ponds and the Merri creeks.
Like most people, I can only guess how much longer my body will last. But whether it lasts for thirty more years or only for the few days more that I need for writing on these pages, I am comfortable knowing that the end of my body will be the same in either case.
Like most people, I wonder sometimes about other places where I might have lived or gone on living if things had happened differently. I wonder sometimes about other memories of places and people that another man bearing my name might have called by now his life. And whenever I suppose that my body will last for many more years yet, I wonder about the different collections of items that might yet comprise what I will call after many more years my life. And during each of those many more years I may well wonder about other memories of places and people that one or another man bearing my name might have called by then his life.
Each year when I look around the cemetery at Fawkner I know I am looking at the place where all my lives, actual or conjectured, will end. Whoever I am, whoever I might otherwise have been, whoever I might yet become – the lives of all these men will end in the one grassland, only four kilometres from the street where I was born.
In the cemetery at Fawkner each year I look more often at grass and trees and birds than at graves. If I look at a grave I hardly expect to recognise the name on it. I know by name only one person whose grave is somewhere in the one and a half square kilometres of the Memorial Park. I have never seen that person’s grave, and if ever I see the grave I will only have seen it by chance.
The person I am thinking of died between forty and fifty years ago. I know only his surname and that he was a small child when he died. I hardly ever think of the boy, but I remember each year when I walk in the cemetery that the grave of the boy is somewhere among the grass.
I know about the boy only that he lived a few years and then died, and I only know this because the sister of the boy mentioned him once to me when she and I were a girl and a boy each twelve years old. I had noticed that the girl seemed to have no sisters or brothers, and I asked her whether she was an only child. She then told me that she had once had a younger brother who had died when she herself was a small child, and that the grave of the boy was in Fawkner Cemetery.
I think often of the sister of the dead boy. I think of her always as a girl of twelve years or a year or two older, although by now, of course, the girl I knew in 1951 would be a woman as old as I am. I hardly ever think of the dead boy, except for a few minutes each year while I walk in the cemetery at Fawkner. Then I think that the boy’s having died and been buried at Fawkner may have been the chief reason for his parents’ having decided in 1950, in their rented cottage in the slums of East Melbourne, that of all the suburbs around Melbourne where brick veneer homes were being built and offered for sale they would choose to buy the first house they had bought in Pascoe Vale, where certain streets overlooked paddocks with a view of the distant trees in the cemetery at Fawkner.
Or I think that if the boy had not died when he died, then the girl I knew in 1951 would have had a younger brother. She might not have been the somewhat solitary girl who did not object to my talking to her sometimes, even though she risked being teased afterwards by some of her classmates. If the boy had not died, his sister might never have told me, as she once told me in 1951, that her only friend was the small dog that she hurried home to feed and to exercise each afternoon. If the boy had not died, the girl might never have owned the dog that barked on a few fine Sunday afternoons late in the winter and early in the spring of that year, causing the girl to look through the curtains of a front window and to see me loitering in the street with my own dog, having just come from Sims Street, where I had let my dog run loose while I stared to the north of me at the paddocks that I called my grasslands and at a line of trees that I did not then know were some of the trees of Fawkner Cemetery.
I think often of the girl whose brother died as a small child, but I could hardly suppose that the woman who was once the girl would think nowadays of me.
When I last saw that girl I was about to travel with my parents and brothers from my native district to a district two hundred kilometres away. I cannot remember talking to the girl or even seeing her in the last days that I spent in my native district. I have wanted for many years to remember that I felt during my last days in my native district something of the desolateness that I feel nowadays whenever I remember the house with the fish pond behind it and the girl who lived in Bendigo Street.
I remember mostly from my last days in Pascoe Vale that I looked often at a map of the district between the Ovens and Reedy Creek and that I urged my parents to buy a glass fish tank so that I could take two fish from the pond to the inland district. But I remember one thing else. I remember that the girl from Bendigo Street walked up to me on the first morning after I had spread the news at my school that I would soon be leaving the district. The girl asked me, as though it was a small matter to her, how far away was the district where I was going. I told her, as though it was a small matter to me, how far away was the district between the Ovens River and Reedy Creek. If the girl or I said anything to one another after that, I have not remembered it.
The girl had asked me her question as though it was a small matter to her, but I had read in her face that it was not a small matter to her, and I have not forgotten today what I read in her face.
I believe today that the girl from Bendigo Street would have thought of me often during the first weeks after I had left her district. She would have thought I was far inland in a district she had never seen. She could not have thought I was living in the parish of Saint Mark, Fawkner, only a half-hour’s walk from Bendigo Street, and yet not thinking often of her.
If the woman who was once the girl from Bendigo Street has thought of me a few times since the year when I left her district, she has probably thought of me as still far inland and never thinking of her. She could hard
ly suppose that I think of her often and that I look out sometimes, in the cemetery at Fawkner, for the grave of her only brother, who died between forty and fifty years ago.
For most of my time in the cemetery I look at birds. I have never expected to see among the lawns and the plots of the cemetery the quail or the bustards or the almost-extinct species Pedionomus torquatus, the plains wanderer, that I sometimes dream about in dreams of grasslands. But one day in spring five years ago I saw a species I had never seen before in the cemetery or anywhere else.
The weather had been by turns sunny and cloudy. I was in the south-west corner of the cemetery. The sun began to shine. Then faint rain fell.
The rain was the same filmy rain that I think of whenever I read the last paragraph of the biography of Marcel Proust by André Maurois. When the mist of drops had passed over me I stood still and looked around as though I ought to have seen, after such rain, something unexpected.
I heard behind me tinkling calls of birds. A flock of small greyish birds was drifting through the tall stems of a patch of unmown grass. The drifting of the birds was like a further sprinkling of rain, but this time with flashes of yellow in the grey. I recognised the birds from colour-plates in books: the yellow-tailed thornbill, Acanthiza chrysorrhoa.
The stillness after the birds was even more noticeable than the earlier stillness after the rain, and I looked around again for a sign.
The only signs I am sure of are signs in words. In the cemetery after the birds had drifted past, I looked for the nearest words.
The nearest words were on the nearest grave. Some of the words were in English and some were in the Finnish language. In the grave was the body of a man who had been born in Tapiola twenty-seven years before I was born and who had died in my native district five years before I saw his grave.
I read the English words and the two dates on the grave of the Finn, and then I stared at some words in the Finnish language, which is incomprehensible to me.
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