Landscape of Farewell

by Alex Miller

  I stood beside him, calm enough it must have seemed, but wanting to snatch the book out of his hands and tell him, You can’t read it! It’s not yours! It’s mine! I felt certain he would not understand what I had written as I understood it myself, and would perhaps even find it offensive and a betrayal of the trust he had placed in me to preserve the truth of his story. I said nothing, however, but stood watching him read, compelled against my will to read with him: To choose the moment of his own death. There was a nobility in that … I could not bear it and murmured an excuse and hobbled out into the yard.

  I stood on the concrete in the shade of the tree—it was a familiar haven, this place in the shade of the old tree; I had missed it. I was trembling and my heart was hammering with the confusion of emotions that had taken me so much by surprise. My two brown dogs watched me warily, as if they feared I might aim a sudden kick at them. ‘Oh, it’s all right,’ I said. ‘You needn’t look at me like that. I just need a drink.’ There was nothing to drink in Dougald’s house. Early in our acquaintance, when one of his people had been drunk on the telephone, he had expressed such a fierce abhorrence for drink that I had understood him to fear it.

  In the absence of the goat, the weeds and grasses had overgrown the yard. The place looked uncared for and abandoned. The grass swayed in the light airs, just the way my uncle’s barley swayed when it was ripe and he and I stood admiring it and hoping we would get the reaper to it before a storm flattened it. And suddenly I could smell the sweet ripe barley fields of my childhood. I hobbled across to the shed and found a curved slasher among the hoard of tools there and I took it out into the yard and began to slash helplessly at the weeds. I had once known how to do this job efficiently. My uncle and I had reaped the headland swathe by hand before bringing the mechanical reaper into the field behind the horses. I bent from the waist and embraced an armful of the rank growth now and hacked at its base. Thistles prickled the palm of my hand and the blade was blunt. I kept at it.

  My ankle was soon torturing me and my heart thudded so heavily I thought I must have a stroke or a heart attack. There was a perverse pleasure in defying the odds and keeping at it. Go on, then, kill yourself and be done with it! It was an attitude that amused my disdainful other self, who never did anything unreasonable or silly but preserved his dignity and his calm in the face of every extremity—he had not agreed with my original decision to kill myself and had mistrusted me ever since. But I was determined never to be him. I was sweating and threw off my dressing-gown and dropped it behind me. It amused me—the real, the helpless, stupid me, I mean—to think of Dougald coming out of the house when he finished reading the story and finding me sprawled on the ground on my back like the leader of the white strangers, the reaping hook tossed aside and glinting in the sunlight, his great-grandfather’s spear sticking from my side. Was I the leader of the strangers? No. Never. I was only Gnapun in my dreams; in reality I did not possess his great soul. I knew that. But I was not the leader of the strangers … I bent and gathered one armful of the prickly grasses after another, gasping in the hot air, my mouth open, sweat streaming down my face and back. My pyjama top was soon wet with sweat and sticking to me. I tore it off and threw it aside and worked on, naked to the waist. I was not young. And I was not pretending to be young. But for this brief season with the reaping hook in my hand it would be as if I were young. My vision was blurred with sweat and thousands of insects flicked around me, touching my face and hands and sticking to my eyes. I kept working. There was a joy in defying old age and pain …

  The touch of Dougald’s hand to my shoulder startled me and I straightened and stared at him. He withdrew his hand from my sweating skin and stood looking at me. My chest heaved and the sweat cascaded down my face, the reaping hook gripped in my hand as if it were the weapon of a berserker. He held my journal and looked at me. The air thickened in my throat and a terrible prickling dryness threatened to choke me.

  With a solemn and grave astonishment, he said, ‘You could have been there, Max.’

  Joy and relief swept through me—a little tsunami it was. And I wanted to repeat his words aloud—I heard them repeated aloud in my head. ‘Oh, you like it then?’ I said, my tone surprisingly conversational. A rush of wellbeing raced through my blood.

  He stepped up to me and embraced me and held me strongly against his body, pinioning my arms to my sides. The point of the reaping hook was digging into my leg.

  He released me and stepped away. ‘Thank you,’ he said.

  I saw that he was greatly moved by what I had done for him. I wiped at the wet hairs sticking to my face and grinned at him foolishly. ‘I’m glad you like it,’ I said. ‘So, it’s okay then? That’s good. I’m glad.’

  ‘Oh yes, old mate,’ he said, and he laid his open hand on the cover of my journal. ‘It’s all here.’

  I said, ‘Your approval means a great deal to me. I was afraid you might be offended by it.’

  He smiled and reached out to put his hand on my shoulder and gave me a small shake, as if he forgave my foolishness and uncertainty. ‘As soon as that ankle of yours is up to it, we’ll take a drive down there to my country and pay the old Gnapun a visit.’

  I said carefully, ‘But of course he is no longer with us.’

  ‘Gnapun’s still with us, old mate.’ He brandished my journal. ‘His story’s not over yet. We’ll go up to that cave of his in the escarpment.’ He was almost jubilant. Something real had happened. He had his wish. His precious story was preserved.

  ‘Will you be able to find your way there?’ I said. ‘I mean, after all this time?’

  He touched his chest with the tips of his fingers, just the way I had imagined Gnapun touching himself when he told the leader of the strangers his name. ‘There’s a map of my country in here.’

  I was under the shower and was singing the Beatles’ song, ‘All You Need is Love’—or is it all we need? I am never sure—when the obvious struck me and I fell silent. It was the superior voice of my knowing other self, of course, and it rang like a bell in my head: So you have identified yourself at last with the perpetrator of a massacre. Was there a note of triumph in this claim? A gleeful delight at having caught me out? It was true. But it had not occurred to me. I would have liked to ignore it. Not once during those long nights struggling to bring Gnapun’s story into being, those long nights of being him, the joy I had felt, the kindred intensity of my feelings, not once had I ever experienced the remotest touch of guilt-by-association with the terrible crimes of that day. You would think I would have flinched. But I hadn’t. By what knotted confusion of my unconscious reasoning, I wondered as I stood there under the cascading shower, had I considered myself to be in the clear with Gnapun? He and I were both members of this same murdering species. It was a puzzle to me how I could have composed his story with such a sense of innocent detachment from the crimes, and yet with such an intense belief in the emotions of the motives that had brought those crimes about. Clearly the massacre of the strangers had been for me more than just the telling of a story. For once in my life I had not been constrained by the severe discipline of history, but had been at liberty to invoke the dilemmas inscribed in my own heart, inscribed there during my childhood, and which had haunted me ever since.

  I turned off the water and stepped out of the shower. I had not found a resolution to these dilemmas, of course, but by writing Dougald’s story I had found a certain calm, and even a feeling of possibility, in relation to them that I had not known before. Was it that I had at last broken my silence about such things as guilt and innocence and the unreasoning persistence of evil? Now that I had Dougald’s reassurance about the worth of my story to him, could I dare to think of it not as something completed but as a modest beginning of something more complex, more ambitious, a larger project altogether that might occupy me for the rest of my life? The idea excited me. Winifred was the only person who would have understood the powerful claim on me of such a possibility. To a stranger it must have seeme
d a cheap arrogance. But I was thinking of the carton of mouldering notes on my bookshelves in the study at home. I was not thinking, I will do something with them. Oh, no. I was just seeing them there. My mind flew to them but did not give me a reason for flying to them, it only gave me the emotion, the feeling of being, at that moment, happy.

  After I had dressed I carried one of the hard-backed chairs from the kitchen into the yard and set it by the back door in the shade of the gum tree. I sat on the chair and supported my ankle on the block Dougald used for splitting firewood. The shower had greatly eased the pains and my body throbbed steadily, like an idling motor. When Dougald said to me, in that disbelieving, admiring tone of voice, You could have been there, they were the sweetest words I had ever heard. For, of course, I had been there. But only I knew that.

  It was a week later and Dougald had been working all day on the engine of the truck. He was getting the truck ready for our journey south into the escarpments of the Expedition Range. He was determined to make the trip, but was nervous and anxious about this return to his country after such a long absence from it. That night I believe his habitual calm failed him. I lay awake listening to him traipsing around the house, the claws of his bitch tap-tapping on the boards, as if a blind harbinger announced him in his nocturnal wanderings.

  In the morning, the purple caverns of his eyes were darker and more recessed than usual. He told me at breakfast that since reading my story—and he had reread it several times—he had begun to look on this indifferent world of his exile at Mount Nebo with the hope of a return to his own country, and that it made him anxious to be gone as soon as possible. ‘I feel as if I’m running out of time, old mate.’ I reassured him that he had plenty of time, but I understood his concern. As soon as we have something precious to achieve we begin to fear death, where before we had remained indifferent to it. To go back with assurance now to that place he had dreamed of all his life, that idealised place of his imagination which he had not seen since he was a youth, was a grave and uncertain undertaking for him. And he had never disclosed why he had not gone back sooner. This was to remain a mystery. Even when we are young there is a risk of disillusion in revisiting the scenes of our first joys and despairs. But to return to the place of our youth when we are old is surely to hazard our most cherished dreams. He was determined, however, that he and I would visit together the place of Gnapun’s last days. He spoke of it to me several times, his eyes alight with his dream of actually being there. ‘We’ll do it, old mate,’ he said, and must have repeated the mantra of this reassurance a dozen times or more, no doubt in order to convince himself of it as much as to convince me.

  In the evening he sat rereading the story. ‘Old age is not the time for clambering about among mountainous escarpments,’ I reminded him. But he was not to be put off and was proof against my cautioning. ‘The truck will get us most of the way,’ he said, not looking up from his reading. ‘It’s only a bit of a hike from the river. You’ll see.’

  While I was washing the breakfast dishes the next morning he returned from feeding the hens and brought me a fine knobbed cane. ‘Here,’ he said, handing it to me as if it were the answer to my misgivings about our proposed journey to the Expedition Range. ‘It belonged to my mother. It was in the cottage.’ He stood and watched while I stepped across the kitchen with it. My gait fell with a surprising naturalness into a pivoting of the hips and a rolling of the shoulders that was not unlike the action of my uncle’s gait. ‘You look like you’ve never been without it,’ he said approvingly. ‘That’s just the way Ma used to walk.’ So natural to me was the action, indeed, and so effective the stick in taking the weight from my ankle, that I might have been using it for years. In a way I felt myself to be more me with it than I had felt without it. The polished globe of the knob fitted familiarly and firmly to my palm, like the reassuring grip of an old friend. I was delighted with it. It was as if I and the stick had been reunited. The rap of the ferule against the boards was a satisfying sound.

  I turned at the door and grinned at Dougald, flourishing the stick grandly. ‘You see, I am now an old man with a walking stick.’ I saw that he had indeed seen just such an image of me. It was a transformation. I felt it. And he saw it. The stick changed me. With it in my hand I ceased to resist old age. I offered Dougald a go but he declined to play the game, no doubt reluctant to appear to me as I appeared to him. I walked about the kitchen some more, and the sound of my uncle stumping about downstairs at night in the farmhouse on his wooden peg was vivid within me.

  Expedition Range

  17

  The demons of the road

  Frost glittered on the corrugated iron roofs of the houses as we drove through the township, the three dogs shivering in the back of the truck with our gear. I thought Mount Nebo had never looked so romantic, as if it were a slumbering hamlet on the edge of a Russian forest a century ago. Dougald waved and hooted the horn as we drove past the service station, but I did not see any sign of life there. Esmé was to look in at the house each day and keep an eye on things. She would feed the hens in exchange for the eggs. When she asked Dougald what had happened to the goat he replied without hesitation, ‘She got away on us.’ He was evidently not afraid of a lie, and had no intention of giving me up.

  After we left the last house behind, the road swung south, its red surface spearing through the grey ocean of scrub to the horizon. We sped on, the secret world of the yellow robin rushing past in a blur. Dougald hugged the trembling wheel and said little, keeping the truck to the crown of the gravel, a plume of dust fanning out behind us, his foot hard down on the accelerator.

  As we travelled south all that day, seated beside each other in the noisy cabin of the old truck, Dougald’s mood became more silent and inward and he was not responsive to my attempts at conversation. No doubt he was meditating on what lay ahead of us. It was a moment of great uncertainty for him. The countryside we drove through was unchanging and uninhabited. I saw no cattle or wild animals and we encountered no traffic.

  I once drove through the forest with my uncle in his truck all one wintry day, when the late wartime countryside of Germany possessed just such an appearance of austere melancholy and abandonment, its only occupants seemingly ourselves in the speeding truck, the trees rushing past and the wind roaring at the windows. It was a landscape in mourning, and that is how I think of it still, that country of the past to which my soul belongs. My uncle’s features were set that day in the mask he often wore of forever reaching into himself for something final, some elusive thing that he could never quite lay his hand to, hoping and longing for a sudden illuminating sign that would confirm his need to be at one with his earth. Not the land, not quite the country the way Dougald spoke of it, but the deep, black, arable earth that his father had fed and enriched and his father before him. How his silence during that drive, the expression that was confirmed on his features, spoke to me of his anxiety to draw me into his religion of the earth and to baptise me with its sacred torments. It was his principal preoccupation while I was with him, how this might be accomplished. His passion, his jealousy of my father, his brooding loneliness, his despairing knowledge that the search for the spiritual is always elsewhere, had driven him down into himself until he had lost sight of the world. He was not a man of the city, but was a man whose mind remained closed, a man whose obsession drew him into a solitary place where he could no longer be reached by others. And it might have been that his arms flew up out of that lonely place and he cried out to me, beseeching me, that I, his nephew, his only nephew, the son of his sister, would hear him and would at the last reach down to him and take hold of his hands and be at one with him in his final years, and that for this betrothal to the soil of my ancestors I would renounce my own father.

  We camped that night, my uncle and I, by a cold stream at the edge of the forest, and in the night I heard him knocking on his wooden leg. I more than half-believed he tapped a message to a spirit presence with whom he held sinister comm
union. Your father is not at the front, he murmured to me, the madness of belief in his blue eyes. He is engaged upon secret work. Had he tried he might have won me with love, but he was no longer capable of love. He could not win me with fear and enmity. The seed of fear and doubt he sowed in me against my father set him apart from me in a world of his own that I could not have entered even if I had desired to, for I loved my father. My uncle’s fierce despair was founded in his knowledge that his earth was to die with him. That was the vision that haunted him, just as Dougald had been haunted by the thought that Gnapun’s story would be lost forever when he died. There was a fear of extinction in both their dreams. My uncle knew that no one would replace him in his priestly dedication to the wellbeing of his soil when he was gone. And he was right. He foresaw the end of his meaning. Today there are vast suburbs where he grew his crops and grazed his sheep and cows, and he and his ways and his peculiar obsessions are unknown by the people who live in those suburbs. It all ended. Everything. Nothing of him, nothing of his house or his ideas, not a thing of it remains, except my own doubt about the decency of my father that he seeded in me, and which found its sustenance in my childhood fears and took root there, growing within me as I grew, drawing its canopy of silence over me like the canopy of a great dark tree that my uncle had planted at the edge of his fields in a moment of despair and bitterness.

  I have lived my life within the shadow of this doubt. I have been unable to know, certain one moment of my father’s goodness, and the next as certain of his guilt—to sense the atrocious participation of his hands that had held me with love. When I was a boy during the war there was much I could not know, but I knew, as everyone knew, that an evil beyond the reckoning of humanity was being done in our names and that we were never to understand it or to recover from it. It has haunted my generation and the ghost of it will not be gone until we are gone. A capacity for deep silence was revealed within each of us, like a cavern we had not known to exist before. No matter how lofty our moral principles, few of us proved immune to the pernicious charms of silence. My mother, my father, my sister and I. We all kept our silence. We children were crippled by it and lost our voices to it. No doubt people will forget, one day, eventually. And of course there are those brave and gifted souls who do find their voices. I wonder sometimes if Katriona, living her life in London with her English husband, has already begun to forget. And her children. Will they even be told? But one lifetime is not long enough to forget. One lifetime is not time enough for anything much at all.