by Alex Miller
‘The son listens to his father in silence, but in his heart he is not convinced that this plan of his father’s is a good one. The son knows nothing of our plans, but he senses our intentions. He will not openly oppose his father, for he is a loyal son, but his father’s words have no effect on the conviction in his heart. He senses our intentions because he is himself a young man just as we are and knows that if a powerful party of strangers were to come into his country and desecrate the sacred places of his land and take it from him and his brothers and sisters, then he and his brothers would not rest until they had taken their land back again and had revenged themselves. The leader’s son understands something of this in his private thoughts,’ Gnapun tells the assembled warriors, ‘and he knows that young men, unlike old men and women and little children, will not stand meekly by when what is their own future is stolen from them and is destroyed, but will strike back with a tigerlike desire to annihilate. This young man cannot sleep at night, but lies awake in dread listening for our stealthy approach,’ Gnapun tells them. The young men laugh at this picture of the leader’s son waiting anxiously for them through the night, wakeful and alone, while they sleep peacefully by their fires. ‘Our plan is to strike not in the night, however, when men are watchful and afraid, but in the bright morning, at that time of the day when a man’s hopes are at their highest and his fears have been conquered, when death is furthest from his thoughts and there is a boldness in his beliefs that makes him see his own future with assurance in the day that remains to him to live.’
Gnapun has observed that the leader’s son sometimes rides far into the scrubs to the south of the camp during the heat of the day, and he knows that he goes in search of a sign of the approach of his brothers and their party, hoping they will soon arrive to strengthen him against his father. Gnapun says nothing of this to the others but falls silent. Looking over the assembled warriors, he senses their eagerness for him to inspire them with the hot desire to kill the strangers, and so he addresses them with the words that come naturally into his heart at this moment, and which he is well satisfied will rouse their spirits to the fierce heat that is required if a man is to kill another human being, which he knows is not an easy thing to do.
‘We are not going to leave a single one of them alive,’ he cries out. And he shakes the long shaft of his favourite spear until it hums menacingly and fills the air by the waterhole with the sound of the great red hornet, promising the fiery sting of battle. ‘We are not going to leave a single one of them alive,’ he cries, ‘down to the babies in their mothers’ wombs—not even they must live. The whole people must be wiped out of existence, and none be left to think of them and shed a tear.’ Gnapun turns to the tall messenger, who stands at his side, and he lays his hand on the messenger’s shoulder and offers him the privilege of killing the leader’s son, whose hand is never far from his gun. The tall messenger smiles and the young men look at him with respect and envy, eager to see on the day how he will perform this task. ‘I shall deal with the leader myself,’ Gnapun says. ‘For he and I are brothers and we know this is the way it is to be decided between us.’
The young men possess only a kind of vague poetic sense of what Gnapun might mean by this puzzling claim to be the brother of the leader of the strangers, but they do not ask him for any further explanation of his meaning, for they trust that if he wished them to have a fuller sense of his extraordinary claim at this time, he would give it to them without them needing to ask it from him. They are confident that one day the fullness of Gnapun’s meaning will become clear to them. One day, if they survive the battle, long after these events, when they are old men and are walking alone through their own country thinking of nothing in particular, an understanding of Gnapun’s meaning will suddenly blossom in their minds like the rare flower of the moon tree that blooms only once in a man’s lifetime, and they will know what Gnapun meant when he stood before them and told them the leader of the strangers and he were brothers. Then they will pause in their walk and smile to see him once again as he was this day, a young warrior of great wisdom and strength who led them on that auspicious occasion without fear or hesitation. And for each of them, on the day of the blossoming of understanding, Gnapun the warrior will live again and they will know in their hearts the pride of having joined him in his resistance to the strangers; and they will remember their resistance was untarnished by unworthy motives but was a passion and a pure thing of the spirit. Then they will resume their solitary walk, old men nearing death themselves, accompanied by the thought that each man finds death in his own way and carries it within him in the manner of his character from his earliest days. Brothers, they will murmur aloud and will smile to think of the puzzlement they felt as young men.
‘There are nineteen of them,’ Gnapun says. ‘If any of them live they will continue their leader’s enterprise of the Book and will make of this their own story, and we shall not figure well in it but will be portrayed as the evildoers.’
When the day to arm themselves dawns, not a man among them can predict how that day will end for him, and as they leave the comfort of their fires and move out from their camp in the chill dawn, they consider Gnapun’s words and they are in a mood either to kill or to be killed, whichever way events fall to them. Their skin glistens in the sun with the sweat of anticipation and unease and there is a tremor in their limbs that is like the tensioning within a deadly shaft that sings to itself with the power of the man who wields it before the instant of its release.
The moment they enter the camp of the strangers that morning, Gnapun feels the unease of the strangers. It is an unbidden rising of fear among the strangers that does not know itself or its cause, an unlooked for hesitation in the gaze of these people, a hesitation in the action of their hands and their limbs as they struggle to know the smooth and customary necessity of their daily work. He catches Winifred’s uncertain glance and smiles, but she shakes her head and turns away and goes into the hut where her daughters work. Men involuntarily cast their eyes towards Gnapun, and one of the women cries out, then covers her mouth, shocked by the sound of her own alarm, for which there is no visible cause. There is a stillness of anticipation over the morning camp that makes the air tremble. Gnapun feels their bewildered terror running through them like a sickness and he knows that he and his warriors cannot waste a moment but must position themselves quickly and do the deed at once or be overwhelmed by the outbreak of fear, for a kind of panic is rising around him among these people and they are suffocating in its horror. They cannot draw breath freely and they stand and gape as if something grips them from within. A child’s sudden wail of fear cuts the eerie silence and its mother cannot comfort it. The eyes of the strangers seek each other but there is no comfort or reassurance to be found. Each man and woman knows only the nameless terror in their own heart.
Gnapun sees the son of the leader of the strangers then. The young man is running towards them from the stockyards, where he has been supervising the work; he has drawn his revolver and it is in his hand. As he runs towards them he waves the revolver above his head, his mouth open. He is shouting a warning to his father, but his shout is held in the air by the urgency of his despair. He has seen that it is to happen and time has ceased for him and he knows he can do nothing but still he cries out and runs towards his father. The leader of the strangers stands close beside Gnapun on the bare patch of ground near the vegetable garden and he shields his eyes and looks anxiously towards his running son, fearing some dreadful accident at the yards.
Gnapun sees that every man is at his place and he stamps his foot, sudden and hard, on the claypan, making a drum-like sound that alerts the leader to his closeness. The leader begins to turn towards him, his son’s warning taking hold in his astonished eyes, and he begins to tug the sacred Book from his side pocket and to make his turn, so that he can bring the Book to bear upon his black brother, his eyes meeting Gnapun’s, his gaze beseeching, seeing the spear appear in Gnapun’s hand as if from nowher
e, and crying out in disbelief, ‘No! Gnapun, my brother!’ With the Book of God held out towards his brother he wards off the terrible knowledge that is rushing in upon him like the breaking of a great flood that will bear him away, and he clings like the drowning man he is to his broken dream of a new Jerusalem that has possessed him and has driven him, dispossessing him of his clear sight, his Christian vision in thrall to the gift he will bestow upon a benighted family of humankind. ‘No, Gnapun!’ he cries again, his fingers white against the black binding of his sacred Book, his other hand reaching to take hold of Gnapun’s shoulder, his body off-balance and twisting in the ungainly turn.
Gnapun stays his hand, giving his brother time to search deep into his eyes and to take upon himself the fullness of his approaching death and to know it. Then he cries out with the wailing cry of the funereal Wylah and slips the fierce quartz blade into the cringing flesh of the leader and he bears on the shaft with all his weight and cries again with the cry of the great black bird of his spirit and the spirit of his fathers, lodging the hungry point deep in the bone of the leader’s pelvis, so that the leader is flung violently to the ground, his scream unable to escape from his frozen lungs, the Book flying from his hand as he strikes the hard-packed earth on which the feet of the messengers’ people have danced since before the beginning of time, his spectacles flying from his face and catching the morning sun in their flight—the eyes of a dead man. And still Gnapun bears on the groaning shaft. Then, with an abrupt flinging action of his hands, as if he is disgusted and wishes to rid himself of something distasteful, he relinquishes the shaft and steps away from the dying man. The man, who is himself.
‘Keep my spear!’ he shouts with a kind of wild, angry despair and he turns away. In the distance then he hears a single shot, but he does not look around to see how the others have fared. He turns his back on the leader and walks to the leader’s house and enters by the door. In the darkness he stands while his eyes adjust, the cries and screams from outside rising now to a crescendo of human terror and dismay, the horror breaking upon the place as if it has been harboured there for centuries awaiting this moment of flowering. Gnapun sees the rifles in their rack and he gathers them and carries them outside and flings them to the ground. Still he does not look around him to see how the messengers’ men have fared. He sees that life persists in the eyes of the leader, his gaze on the fluttering pages of the Book. He steps past the leader and picks up the Book and he places it with the rifles in a pile and makes fire. Without their Book they will have no plan.
Already he knows that the resistance he has begun this day will persist for the rest of his life and will never release him from its grip. This day he has become the man he was destined to become. He is himself, and he knows what it is to be alone—the cringing of his heart by the cold ashes of his fire in the depths of the scrub, the thing greater than death that he has struck down here but has not defeated. Since the banishment of the Old People the now has been lost and everything is subject to change. No man will ever again live within the moment but all people will be the victims of Time, this terrible thing that has been set free among them like a pestilence and will devour their souls. There is no one to whom he can tell his story and he will carry it silently in his heart like a beast that sleeps but will not die. As he watches the Book burn, the pages curling and flicking bright stars into the morning air, he thinks again that perhaps one day he will have a son to whom he will be able to pass on the burden of this story.
When the Book is ashes and the stocks of the rifles glow with the light of coals, he gets up and walks over to the leader and looks down at him. He sees that there is a thread of life in the man yet, a small light of broken dreams in his bewildered gaze, as if his gods have forgotten him and he already looks back at his shattered world in sorrow from a great distance, as if he looks back at the ruins of life from the infinite cavern of death, from the margins of that other world where he will never again meet his wife or his daughters or his sons, who are bringing the flock through the scrubs. The leader’s hand moves against the hard-packed ground and Gnapun squats and takes his fingers gently in his own. Between them there is only the bewildering mystery of their brotherhood: Thou has driven me out this day from the face of the earth; and from thy face shall I be hid; and I shall be a fugitive and a vagabond in the earth; and it shall come to pass, that everyone that findeth me shall slay me. Gnapun caresses the leader’s hand and lingers beside him. Then he lays the leader’s hand on the desecrated ground of the messengers’ Old People and stands. The leader is still now. His eyes have seen the last thing they will ever see. He is a dead man. He is too far away for even the kindest thought to reach him now. He is beyond consolation. The fires burn and their crackling is the only sound that breaks the silence of the morning.
Gnapun looks around him at last to see how the young warriors of the messengers’ people have fared. The strangers lie where they have been felled, the men, the women and the little children. The ground is soaked with their blood and the air is filled with the hot stench of it and of their burning dwellings. Not one of the young men of the messengers’ people lies among them. He sees the tall messenger watching him from beyond the garden but he does not approach him or offer him a sign. He turns away and begins the long walk home. Alone he walks for three days and nights through the unwelcoming scrubs and while he walks he wonders if any man will ever know the truth of his story, or if it will remain with him forever in the silence.
16
A made-up world
Cautiously I swung my legs over the side of the bed and with a gasp I stood up. My ankle was still tender but it held my weight shakily. Teetering unsteadily like an old drunk, I took my dressing-gown from the head of the bed and dragged it on over my pyjamas. I stood gathering my resolve, steadying myself with a hand to the bedhead, trembling and unshaved, my spectacles askew. I had not expected this wretchedness. Writing his story had been a secret and a nightly joy. I did not want to lose it. Alone with Gnapun and my journal I had forgotten this old age, this grief, this terrible decline and had lived again as a young man. No, I had not expected this euphoria to end with the end of the story, this sudden miserable fall into the banal realities of my poor existence. If it was a reward I looked for, then I had already received it. I gazed unhappily at my journal where it lay on the covers. I would have gone on with the story, but there was no more to be said. The story was finished. The bird had flown. My little journey into fiction was over. The surprise, more impressive in its way than my disappointment, was that what I had done was no longer mine. By finishing I had not gained something but had lost something, and I did not know how I might remedy the loss, or fill the gap it left in me, unless I were to write another story and to make my escape again by this means. But what story? I knew no stories. I picked up the journal and, clutching the cursed thing under my arm, hobbled out to the kitchen with it. No doubt Dougald would loathe it and Vita, when she read it, would be offended by my presumption.
Dougald was working at the table on his laptop as usual, surrounded by the disorder of his papers. He looked up as I lurched across the kitchen towards him. A pile of our unwashed clothes lay on the chair beside him. Some of the dirty clothes had fallen to the floor and the grey bitch had made her bed on them. She eyed me with distrust. The sink was also filled with dirty dishes. In my absence the household had slid back into the state of neglect and disorder in which I had found it. I was anxious and felt intensely irritated suddenly for no reason. I did not want to hand the story over to Dougald. My reluctance was partly that he would disapprove of it, but more than that, I felt I had made the story my own and that he would not understand it. I had enacted it on the page, word by word, night after night. I had lived it. I did not want to hand it back to him, just like that, as if it were merely his to receive and to thank me for, and there was to be an end of it. A job done. I resented both the possibility that he would calmly repossess it and that he would reject it. Neither would satisfy me. He
did not look at me as I approached him but looked at the journal.
I set it on the table beside him. ‘There,’ I said. ‘It’s done.’ It was not the generous spirit that I had expected between us at this moment. I had written it for him, after all, not for myself. Why was it so awkward for me now, and so fraught with this mean-spirited reluctance to part with it? He had cared for me since my foolishness that night without ever once complaining. Indeed he had probably saved my life at the stinking waterhole. And had I not wept while he held me in his arms? Under ‘Massacre’ I had written, ‘A true story by Dougald Gnapun’. For it was not authorship in the usual proprietary sense that I was laying claim to, but something more private than that, something more intimate and intuitive. It was my own secret that I wished to keep, a thing not to be disclosed or shared with anyone. He looked up at me and I saw how he doubted and hoped and was afraid and eager all at once to know what I had done with his hero—I saw how he had waited these last ten days and nights, as anxious all that time as I was now. It seemed selfish and unfeeling of him to me, the way he took the journal then into his hands without a word. I hated him at that moment, with the fierce hatred we reserve for our most deeply loved intimates—as if a match is struck in our brains and flares for an instant, leaving us ashamed and burned.
