The Simplest Words

by Alex Miller

  And so we may have continued to stand, until we were cut down, had we not been alerted to a new circumstance by the sound of motors revving wildly close at our backs. On turning around I saw our lieutenant running towards the truck where I had got the cigar. He was shouting something and waving his cap. But he was ignored, and the truck turned in a tight circle and accelerated away rapidly in the direction of the Warsaw road. The hasty retreat of the colonel pulled the plug and drew after it the flood. Bedlam ensued, and men, trucks, motorcycles and horses converged in a panic-stricken mob onto the road and streamed away through the deepening dusk towards Warsaw.

  Pawel touched me on the shoulder, his beautiful white teeth gleaming as he bent close to my ear and shouted, ‘Now, Janek!’ I stared at him and he smiled slowly, then shouted, ‘Now, Janek, you will learn how to run!’ He unclipped his bayonet and leapt nimbly out of the trench. His rifle he left lying in the mud, the bayonet he rammed firmly into his belt.

  ‘Pawel!’ I yelled, senselessly—it was like shouting into the teeth of a storm. He paused and looked down at me, his lean frame poised for flight. Then the first salvo of shells shrieked over our heads and detonated beyond the lines among the retreating mob on the road. Pawel turned and began to run.

  Someone trod on my hand and I was knocked violently aside. Grovelling about in the bottom of the trench I was gripped by panic and I struck out, slipping and stumbling as I clawed my way onto the parapet and, hurling my rifle aside as if it had been a drowning companion, I sprinted after Pawel’s retreating figure. I shall never forget how I thrust myself through the press of men and called on God to keep Pawel in my sight. But no, I did not choose to follow Pawel, it was he who chose to lead me!

  Pawel’s pace was steady, almost unhurried, a regular clip-clip of his heels going up and down. So naturally I soon caught up with him, for my pace was headlong. If I had not indeed checked my pace abruptly I would have crashed into him. As soon as he reached the road he dropped lightly into the drainage ditch which ran along just off the verge. The ground was muddy and uneven in the ditch, with pools and rivulets of water to further impede our progress. But the congestion was a great deal less than it was on the road, and in addition to this the parapet provided us with an excellent shelter from the lethal shrapnel with which the air was now filled.

  Also, it is worth adding, even had I wished to I could not have passed Pawel without first knocking him out of the way. Those on the road above us were fairly flying along, overtaking us with ease and, it seemed to me, leaving us in the rear. In my panic I urged Pawel, with all the force in my lungs, to go faster. He may as well have not heard me for all the difference it made to him. Clip-clip, clip-clip, went his heels and he may have been running for the exercise of it to see him.

  It was at this point, being forced to content myself with the unhurried regularity of Pawel’s pace, that I began to overcome my panic and to perceive the sound common sense behind his attitude. I settled in a pace behind him and it was not long before I noticed that the crowd of figures on the road had started to thin out. The strain of their initial sprint must have begun to quickly tell on them. Also I was further encouraged after a time to notice that the shells were now exploding more often to our rear. Unlike me, Pawel looked neither to his left nor to his right, but kept on, his heels going like clockwork and his arms held up and swinging like a real runner. It occurred to me that perhaps the whole front had not broken before the onslaught of the tanks, and that perhaps only our sector had bolted in panic, the rest remaining behind to engage in a hopeless struggle. But I had no thought of turning back. It was too late for that, and I stayed in close behind Pawel, who ran not as a man who is running away from something in fear of his life, but as a man who has a destination to reach. Also, I must say, that despite my strong initial sense of being led by him, he ran as though he were alone. It was impossible to say whether or not he knew that I was close behind him, for if he knew he gave no sign. So, copying his style as well as I could and disciplining my breathing to the regular rhythm of his pace, I followed.

  We ran on into the deepening night, leaving the roar of the battle further and further behind us, and any straggler who was still on the road above us we overtook with ease. It was a great reassurance for me to feel the firm thump of my boots and the energetic drive of my legs carrying me along. I was his shadow. Clip-clip, clip-clip, went our heels, spattering the mud effortlessly aside. And while I was still fresh then and able to view the situation with a little clarity it seemed to me almost beautiful, this running not like a scared rabbit ahead of the dogs but running with control and rhythm, driven on by a purpose not by fear.

  It is easy enough for a man in the last decade of his life to become intoxicated with memories of his youth, and not difficult at all for him to create a legend for himself. You must understand that such beauty as there was that night was brief.

  Without the slightest change of pace or of direction we ran on, our boots thudding in unison like the steady beat of a pump, and an hour or more or less passed. By now I was seriously feeling the strain. After sitting in a trench for three weeks without drill or other exercise my muscles were slack and my wind, despite my attempts to control my breathing, was shallow and erratic. A pain which had begun in my knees was rapidly extending upward into my thighs and making each stride an effort. Somewhere far in the rear I thought I heard the sound of a motorbike and this put thoughts of calling Pawel to rest quite out of my mind. And Pawel? Well he just kept on running. A metronome could not have maintained a more imperturbable measure.

  My chest and thighs felt red-hot, and at every breath and every step the pain increased, and I was soon calling on unimagined reserves to measure stride for stride with Pawel. And minute by minute it began to seem to me that he was going faster and faster. The mud itself seemed to congeal and grope at my boots, as if it had a conscious design against me, and all this time Pawel moved seemingly with the ease of a phantom. Once I slipped and almost fell. So close was I to Pawel that my outstretched hand touched his heel, and that accidental, minute event was enough to keep me going. Though it was almost certainly too dark for me to see his boots, my imagination was enough, and I believed that I could see his heels flicking back at me with each stride. Undoubtedly I could hear the thud and splash of his boots but it was not that, it was the imagined sight of them which mesmerised me and kept me compulsively attached to him from then on.

  And so we ran, measuring stride for stride until the lapse of time ceased to have any meaning for me. The moon rose and I saw then how the distance between Pawel and I would increase perceptibly the moment I permitted my concentration to falter. That is when I began seriously to fight in order to retain my clarity. So long as I held doggedly to the unwavering and rhythmical flick of Pawel’s heels I could keep up, but the moment I permitted fatigue to blur my vision I would begin dropping behind. Though it was impossible that any man should have been unaffected by the strain, Pawel ran, or seemed to me to run, as though his energy and spirit were without limit.

  My goal, which was simply to keep up with him, began to seem to me hopelessly unattainable. I prayed that his stride would break, that he would trip or stumble or change his pace, but he ran relentlessly on like a machine. All I prayed for was a sign from him that he too was suffering, that the strain was also becoming intolerable for him, that he was human flesh like me. But I received no sign and the race continued with the hypnotic insistence of a nightmare. The end lay in the vague moonlit spaces ahead of me, where I would at last drop, and where Pawel would run on, his emphatic strides carrying him into another world that lay somewhere beyond my endurance.

  I ran, and I entered at last into a final strange dimension of exhaustion in which weird and fantastic images leapt into my mind, dazzling and bewildering me as if a flashbulb were being repeatedly exploded in my face. I scarcely knew whether it was the moon I saw or Pawel’s heels, and the struggle for clarity—to keep before my mind some sense of the real—became hard
er minute by minute. Impressions of huge birds sailing and looping around my head distracted me, and I shied wildly as grotesque and threatening shapes leapt at me from the passing shadows. I would shake my head and thrust myself forward through the illusions and for an instant I would regain touch with those relentless heels.

  But increasingly the illusory became more seductive as the pain of my reality increased. I gave in for brief moments without really meaning to, then came to with a start, terrified for an instant that I had actually ceased running. In the end it was only my pain which told me whether I was still running or had finally given in. If I could feel pain then I knew that I was still in the race, but the moment a warm feeling of effortless wellbeing began to spread through my consciousness, I knew that I had at once to renew the struggle without a second’s delay. To renew the struggle at each lapse I had forcibly to smash my way through this mental barrier, I had to cry out in my mind that to give in would mean death. But no sooner had I broken through the numbness to a sight of Pawel’s heels than I was again assailed by unbearable pain, and the question arose once more … Why not death? Because, I cried in my mind. Because … because Pawel! And so it assumed the metre of a chant, an echo and reinforcement of the physical rhythm, and I could not relinquish my hold, I refused to die, and the wind roared in my lungs and I was shackled to the mud and I tore my feet from the earth with my teeth and I ran and ran and ran in pursuit of the unreachable Pawel. And like a phantom of my mind Pawel ran on ahead …

  He must have hit the wooden footbridge a split second ahead of me and I must have crashed into him, for I came to my senses with a feeling that I was suffocating beneath a great weight. I hadn’t the strength to push his body off me, and lay there half deliriously aware that there was nothing to be done about it. I think I passed out a couple of times before at last beginning to regain a real sense of my surroundings.

  With an effort I struggled out from beneath Pawel and rolled him onto his back. On all fours and shivering like a wet dog I gazed down into his face. His mouth was wide open and he was making a loud snoring noise. The blow had smashed out most of his teeth and blood from a large wound on his forehead was welling blackly across his face. I sat back on my heels and closed my eyes.

  As I sat there slowly recovering I became aware of the distant sound of gunfire. Another sound, intermittent and closer than the guns, began after a time to intrude on my consciousness. I listened, then crawled up onto the bank with difficulty, and gazed back the way we had come. The skyline was lit by a continuous series of flashes, and from my new elevation the sound of gunfire was much louder. About a mile down the road a powerful light swept the fields on either side; slowly it traversed, probing this way and that and occasionally coming to rest briefly, then moving on again. About twenty yards off to my left, and no doubt served by the bridge that had proved our downfall, there was a barn. I slid into the ditch and began alternately hauling and pushing Pawel up the bank. It took all my remaining strength, but with frequent rests I at last managed to drag Pawel into the barn and out of the moonlight. Then I lay back on the straw and gave myself up to exhaustion.

  I opened my eyes and saw him. Pawel was kneeling at my feet and swaying slowly from side to side. He was a ghastly sight. His toothless mouth, through which he breathed noisily and with difficulty, gaped blackly, and without his cap his shaven head and deep-set eyes gave him a cadaverous appearance. In his right hand, with the point lightly touching the open palm of his left, he held his bayonet. His gaze was fixed steadily on my face. We confronted each other thus for a full minute before I managed to speak.

  ‘So,’ I said, and my voice was like a dry whisper in the straw, ‘you are going to kill me, Pawel.’

  He gave no sign that he had heard me, but went on rocking slowly from side to side, and I realised that he was working himself up to the point where suddenly he would plunge the bayonet into my chest. My body contracted involuntarily beneath the threat, my muscles cringing away from the steel shaft in his hands.

  Suddenly the roar of a machine-gun shattered the silence and, as Pawel’s lifeless body fell—it seemed with an infinite leisure—I glimpsed the silhouettes of two German soldiers in the doorway of the barn.

  1975

  The Story’s Not Over Yet

  This lecture was given in honour of my late friend Frank Budby, elder of the Barada Barna people

  To stick only to the facts seemed to deny the fictional paradox of truthfulness.

  Drusilla Modjeska, Poppy

  I’m a novelist, not a critic, but something I’ve noticed and think worth remarking on is that the most vigorous development in Australia’s cultural landscape in the last twenty years has been the emergence into the mainstream, and onto the international stage, of Aboriginal art, music and literature. This seems to me to be a reflection of what is happening in contemporary Australian society generally. Not politically, to be sure, and not quickly enough for people who are understandably frustrated by the slowness of cultural change, but it does seem nevertheless to be a reflection of what is happening within contemporary Aboriginal culture and to the wider underlying cultural realities among the general Australian population. The Aboriginal voice in art, music and literature is now heard from centre stage rather than from the wings. For the first time since the arrival of Europeans in this country, in fact, the idea that artistic inspiration runs from its origins in Europe to Australia no longer holds true. And this is not a matter of the empire writing back, but on the contrary is the origination of new formal artistic inspirations from within Australia’s own Indigenous culture finding a central place here and being widely celebrated in Europe, America and Asia.

  I say twenty years, because as well as cultural change generally it’s particularly the novel I want to talk about and it is roughly twenty years since Kim Scott’s first novel True Country was published by Fremantle Press in 1993. It was recognised by a number of critics as marking the debut of a powerful new voice among Australian novelists not only in its subject matter but also in its style and tone. The reviewer in the Australian Book Review rightly said the ‘novel marks an impressive debut and a challenging direction for Aboriginal writing’. With hindsight we might now amend this to say that True Country marked a challenging direction for Australian writing generally. Since then Scott has won this country’s most coveted literary prize, the Miles Franklin Award, twice, the first time in 2000 for his second novel, Benang: From the Heart, and the second time in 2011 for his third novel, That Deadman Dance. It is an astonishing record. With his first three novels Kim Scott has established himself nationally and internationally as one of this country’s, and the world’s, most innovative novelists writing in the English language.

  Even more challenging, arguably, than Scott’s is the work of Alexis Wright. Wright’s monumental second novel, Carpentaria, was published by Giramondo in 2006 and won the Miles Franklin Award the following year. Her third novel, The Swan Book, published by Giramondo in 2013, is just as uncompromising in its challenge to the traditional form of the novel as is Carpentaria. While the source of Wright’s vision arises principally, though not exclusively, from her confident sense of her place within the contemporary forms of Indigenous and European cultures and language uses, she sees that to adhere to any one culture or tradition is too questionable a proposition to be embraced in the twenty-first century. Belonging and home are not what Wright seeks to establish. When you read Wright you are aware of reading a new literature that is not striving to make itself new in the traditional European modernist sense, but which is of itself authentically new. If I were a critic, which I’m not, I suspect I would be examining here the complex new ways in which Wright perceives cultural decline and revitalisation. The re-emphasis of what might be called an Australian tradition is not Wright’s concern. For Wright, something that might once have stood for an Australian tradition is far too simplistic and, indeed, manifestly outpaced by events, to hold her attention. She is a writer of the world. While her cent
re is Australia, it is crisis and ambiguity, what might be called the whirlwind of diffuse cultural collision in our world today, that offer the widest focus of Wright’s vast imaginative energies. The result is a revitalisation of the novel form itself.

  Benang: From the Heart, That Deadman Dance, Carpentaria and The Swan Book have radically reinscribed not only the cultural sources of the Australian novel’s energies but its form in a way that no non-Aboriginal novelist has done, except possibly Patrick White. These four novels, and they are all large major works in the widest sense, represent by far the most challenging, vigorous and innovative development in the Australian novel that has ever occurred and take it beyond the traditional European confines of the novel form as that form was theoretically developed in the Hungarian Marxist philosopher Georg Lukacs’s The Theory of the Novel, which was written during the First World War. I’m not a great fan of Lukacs, but he said some beautiful things. Lukacs, like Milan Kundera fifty years after him, in his persuasive and influential 1986 The Art of the Novel, was writing about the European novel. For Kundera, the European novel had its origin in the early seventeenth century with Cervantes’s Don Quixote, which was published when its author was nearly sixty. Lukacs, like Kundera and the Russian philosopher and literary critic Mikhail Bakhtin, was also examining the European novel as essentially the form of long prose fiction that replaced the epic, which they too saw as having its origins in the classical world. I want to make the point that the novel is a universal form which has belonged and continues to belong to all literate cultures.

  One of the greatest strengths of the novel form has been its durability and its adoption by and adaption to all literate cultures. The Greek ‘novels’ of Achilles Tatius, Chariton, Heliodorus, Longus and Xenophon, with the exception of Chariton, were all written during or after the second century AD. There was a continuous tradition of prose fiction among the Greeks long before Europe possessed a literate culture. Chinese and Japanese novels also existed at a highly developed stage well over a thousand years ago.