The Simplest Words

by Alex Miller

  What parent could remain unmoved by the scene in Romulus when the boy Rai tells the headmaster of St Patrick’s that he does not wish to see his mother if she should ever again visit him at the school? The tragedy is that of an educated and refined European woman who loses everything in the move to the Australian bush in the 1950s, an environment for which she was totally unfitted and which left her no room or opportunity in which to even begin to change or to nurture her natural gifts. Unlike Hora and Romulus, there is nothing Christine can do. There is no place for her to turn to. There are many father-son books but there is none I know of that carries a greater tragic force than Romulus. It was the move to the Australian bush in the early fifties that drove Christine into the arms of madness and other men. The irony is that it was she herself who chose to come to Australia. As Virgil said, We make our destinies by our choice of gods. For the migrant, surely destiny is determined by the choice of destination. We, all of us, are capable of breaking—breaking emotionally and spiritually, I mean. The break, when it comes, will take a different form in each of us and will reveal where our weakness has lain all along. Given the right environment, I believe Christine would not have been pushed to the point where she displayed the symptoms of the defeat of her reason.

  Trustingly, with an extraordinary generosity that I’ve learned to treasure in our friendship, Rai sent me an unedited draft of his essay on his mother in early April. It is written with great courage and honesty. It is written with a confessional honesty far beyond anything I would be capable of if I were ever to write about the private emotional wounds of my own family’s history. I was greatly moved by the essay and wrote to Rai at once.

  I have just finished reading your chapter. It is very beautiful and deeply moving. I was gripped by it and wanted it to go deeper and deeper into the elusive life of your mother—I wanted it to find her. And it was terrible in that she remains unsighted in the tragedy. It is a grand and wonderful piece of writing. I could never write of such intimate moments in the life of my parents and myself, but I am glad you have found the courage—or sufficient cause—to do it. It took me through the emotional and historical landscape of your life in Central Victoria once again—the landscape of Romulus—like a tour you needed to make, going back and revisiting Romulus, still haunted by what had remained implicit in that book—for all this, the tragedy of your mother that you render explicitly here was already in the book and was, more than anything, what moved me when I first read it. The presence of her absence was at the core of that book. I am very grateful to you for writing this, Rai, and I can understand your need to do it. To look again and know, once and for all, that you can never know her.

  Alex with Rai Gaita, Castlemaine, 2013

  People who write—or, for that matter, who attend sessions of psychoanalysis—are almost always surprised by how much of the seemingly irrecoverable we are able to recover once we begin to write. Memory opens up under the stimulus of our close attention. It takes courage to write memoir; more courage, I believe, than it does to write fiction, where one hides one’s intimate sins behind the mask of make-believe. All art, I believe, is engaged in a search for truth. But for Rai truth is a sacred good and he is incapable of consciously falsifying for effect—as, say, a fiction writer or a painter will often do. It is, I believe, that for Rai truth itself is the work of art. While truth may be sacred to him, it is not a given but must be striven for. And for this courage is required, including the courage to fail, the courage to find that the truth may not be available to us. Rai’s search for truth in his books—in all his books and in his daily life—is a conscious striving that is beautiful and good and which is often nearly impossible, is elusive and is sometimes difficult beyond words. The richness of his mind is exemplified for me in that we can never know in advance what he thinks but must hear from him. It is a great privilege for me to know myself his friend, and to know the friendship and love I feel for him is cherished by him in turn. I hope you’ll forgive me, Rai, for this inconclusive personal meander. You can tackle me on some of my obscurities next time we’re shovelling gravel from the back of your ute at Shalvah or collecting firewood for my Rayburn.

  2014

  The Mother of Coal Creek

  My boss on Goathlands Station, Reg Wells, took me down to the yards on my first morning and asked me to choose a horse for myself from the mob milling around in the big yard. He had yarded up the horses the previous evening and they were restless and thirsty and bad-tempered with each other. He leaned on the rails and smoked a cigarette and watched me climb into the yard. I was carrying a bridle. The horses backed off, leaving a wide space around me, watching me and forcing up against each other, then making a sudden rush by me, the way a mob of sheep will make for an open gate. The yard was inches deep in fine bull dust and it was hard to see. I was being tested and I knew it. The Gympie office of the Australian Estates Company had sent me up to the Central Highlands of Queensland to fill Reg Wells’s request for a young ringer to take the place of the man who’d left him a month earlier. Reg had asked for a man who knew horses. I’d spent the last two years riding second horse for a hunting farmer on Exmoor in the west of England. I’d cared for that man’s two hunters and helped the farrier shoe them every six weeks, so I knew what I was doing around horses.

  The horses in this yard at Goathlands Station were not of the quality of those Exmoor hunters and looked pretty rough to me. The mare I chose was a dark blood bay, short in the body and muscular. When she saw I was wanting to cut her out of the mob she squared up to me and tossed her head, giving a snort and fixing her eyes on me. She did not object when I put the bridle on her. I led her out of the big yard into a smaller yard and Reg climbed in and came over. The mare was unshod and I told him I’d shoe her. He asked me if I didn’t want to climb on her back first. I said there would be no need for that as I believed she was keen to work.

  That mare’s name was Mother. She was the most willing horse I have ever ridden and had some good ideas of her own for dealing with wild old cows that liked to break out of the mob and make for the scrub when we were bringing a mob down the valley. Mother was alert to these breakaways and was quick to get onto them. As we drew up alongside the heifer, going at a good pace by then, Mother propped and swung her backside around and let go with both hind feet. If the beast did not go down, as some did, it always made a beeline back into the thick of the mob. Mother and I worked Reg Wells’s wild country together for two years. I was riding out on the night horse one foggy morning to fetch the horses into the yard and Mother was lying among the dark lime trees. She was all swelled up, her legs sticking straight out, her eye dead and cold. We assumed it was snake bite. She was still young and in fine condition. I had often thought of paying a tribute to her.

  2015

  EXCERPT FROM

  Coal Creek

  After we come up out of Coal Creek, Mother planted herself on the bank and she spread her legs and give herself such a mighty shake I thought the gear was coming off her. When she was finished shaking she straightened up and tossed her head, rattling the bit and letting me know she was ready to move off. I set her over towards the moonlit skyline of that saddle where the last of Long Ridge comes down off Mount Esson and peters out in a stretch of poison bendee. Mother knew where we was heading and eased into the long striding walk she had, which was the easiest ride I had ever had on any horse. Mother was not a horse to stumble and she could weave her way through the brigalow at a flat-strap gallop when we needed to head some beast, which was usually an old cock-horned cow making her run with the knowledge of what was waiting for her in the yards. Once they had read the story them wild cattle was slippery, but Mother could outpace them and turn the fastest of them. I do not wish to exaggerate the ability of that horse, but I cannot help myself paying a tribute to her in this account whenever I see the chance to do it.

  2013

  Teetering

  We are sitting at a table by the window. The street is deserted except fo
r a group of black men standing at the entrance to the park, as if they are on duty, or perhaps are charging a fee for admission. They say things to people who go past, but are mostly ignored. Every now and then someone, usually another black man, will stop and speak with them. They seem menacing to me and make me feel aware of being old and a stranger here and vulnerable without a word of the language. There is rubbish blowing about in the street and in the gutters. Paper and plastic and broken bottles. Large garbage collection bins are parked on the footpath next to the black men.

  Me and my wife of thirty-seven years. So we don’t have a lot to say to each other. It is small signs and a kind of telepathy these days. Our silence embarrasses me. Young people see in our silence the aura of old age. Sainthood. We wear it uneasily and would rather be at home where there is no need for us to talk to each other. When I look out the window again the black men are staring back at me. They speak to each other and laugh and look across at me sitting in the cafe window with my wife. It worries me that they might decide to come over and enter the cafe and say something to me. Issue a challenge of some kind. I will not be able to answer them. I will not know what they have said. I fear to be shamed by them. My wife and I look out the window frequently. We do it anxiously and together, like the Queen’s guardsmen turning their heads to salute the passing of their monarch. But our daughter is not coming along this strange street in Berlin. The black drug dealers on base at the park gates opposite are at the same time idle and alert in the windy sunshine. I can’t help looking at them. Lilac trees thrash about behind them. Theirs is a manner I could not hope to mimic. I think of the German Erich Auerbach’s wonderful book, Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature, and the great pleasure and consolation it has given me. In the park behind the group of black drug dealers, through a small green opening between the wall and the lilacs, I see girls and young men jogging. They are wearing little shorts and singlets. And there are dogs running after balls. And then, as I watch, a young man goes past pushing a pram. He is smoking a cigarette and talking on his mobile phone. This little window of normality reassures me. All the young people smoke. I too loved to smoke when I was young. Every wall surface is covered with graffiti tags, the language of a newly arrived alien civilisation. Doors too. Everything. Undiscriminating. Everything. I stare at it and understand nothing. In its presence I am illiterate. Like Australians looking helplessly at the intricate knowledge maps of Aborigines and claiming the Aborigines had no written language rather than admit their own illiteracy.

  I say to my wife, ‘What did she say the name of this suburb was?’ My wife says something. I don’t catch it. It sounds like, Half an hour. Then she adds, ‘It’s a bit much.’

  I agree but I don’t say anything. We finished our coffee a long time ago and I wonder if the young man behind the bar would like us to either order some lunch or vacate the table. I look at him but he is talking on his mobile phone and appears to be indifferent to our presence. When I was a young man. Oh, then!

  I’m looking at the menu again. It is written in German. My wife watches me flicking through the pages. I feel her mounting irritation. After a minute she says, ‘The English version is at the back.’ As if I am not able to understand the simplest of things. But I don’t want to see the English version. There are several other customers in the cafe. They are all in their twenties and they talk and they laugh, their voices loud and free and full with enthusiasms. I recognise the word Berghain, it stands out from my daughter’s talk. Muscled-up, sweating, half-naked men being excessively polite in tricksy voices to half-naked young chicks. Like my daughter. Everyone enjoying themselves and dancing to the music until four or five in the morning. A scene from Fellini’s Satyricon, is it? The Degenerates? Was I ever so free? Even then?

  My wife says, ‘Three quarters of an hour. It’s not fair.’

  We both look out the window. I am relieved to see the black men jumping around and engaged among themselves. My confidence returns.

  ‘It’s so thoughtless of her,’ my wife says.

  The menu is illustrated with photocopies of grainy black- and-greyish-white photographs from a hundred years ago. One is of a group of young men and women, the women in long dresses to the ground and broad hats and the men in dark suits and hats. They are standing very close to the edge of a sheer rocky precipice above a valley and have assumed various poses for the camera. One girl stands on the very lip of a jutting piece of the cliff that looks as if it might break off under her weight at any moment, her head thrown back as if she is defying someone who has told her to come away from the edge. A parent, I suppose. In her mind. In her memory of parents and home. The village in the valley is tiny and is several thousand feet below them. Have they climbed up from there by some circuitous path? Are they on a picnic? Out for the day? Are the men artists and the women their models? Will the women pose naked for the men on the rocks later, after they have drunk the wine and made love? They are not English, after all, and might be like the expressionist artist Kirchner and his group of soulful libertines.

  My wife says irritably, ‘What are you writing? You’re always writing something.’

  I say, ‘It’s some notes I’m making. An idea for a short story.’

  She looks at her watch and then out the window.

  ‘An old man waits for his daughter in a cafe in Berlin,’ I say. ‘The old man hasn’t seen his daughter for more than a year. When his daughter doesn’t turn up to greet him at the appointed time he becomes anxious and begins to lose the dream he has had of meeting her and of them both embracing joyfully, and to fear that something has happened to prevent her from keeping the appointment with him.’

  My wife says something but I don’t catch it.

  ‘I’m afraid I have to leave you out of the story,’ I say. ‘A solitary old man waiting in the cafe is more inviting for the reader to engage with than an old couple. If I say you are with me in the cafe it becomes a story about the old man’s relationship with his wife.’

  My wife says, ‘I’ll bet she’s forgotten and is still asleep. I bet you that’s what’s happened.’

  I decide to repeat myself. ‘If I put you in the story,’ I say, ‘it becomes a story about the relationship of these two old people. The way they have nothing left to say to each other and how when they get anxious about their daughter they begin taking out their anxiety on each other. Picking at each other irritably without seeing what they are doing.’

  My wife is looking at her watch again. She was given the watch by her parents for her twenty-first birthday and she has to remember to wind it and often forgets to wind it and needs to check with me to find out if it is showing the correct time. She gave me my watch for my seventieth birthday. It is a Longines and keeps perfect time without ever needing any attention from me. She frowns at her watch now and winds it. The face of her watch, she has told me often, is crystal and does not show any wear or scratches after all these decades of use. She is proud of it and dreads to lose it one day. To leave it somewhere or not notice that the band has broken and it has slipped from her wrist. The insensitivity of skin as it ages. The peril of her watch. She clings to the past with it. I watch her winding it and frowning at it and I suppose there is another story in her fears for her watch that goes all the way back to her twenty-first birthday.

  The next photo is of another group of young people, or perhaps it’s the same group but they have moved on and rearranged themselves into a new tableau. They are balancing precariously on a huge boulder that is itself balancing on another enormous boulder which appears to be teetering on the brink of an abyss. The slightest shift of weight, it appears, will send them all hurtling to their deaths. I can see their skirts and hats flying through the empty air, the grey boulder keeping alongside them, dislodged from its perch after how many millions of years? Was it glacial activity that perched it there? Or is it the weathered core of something much vaster and more ancient even than that? Now, of course, they are all dead.

&nbs
p; My wife says, ‘You wait here. I’m going to call her and go and see if I can find her flat.’

  I sit at the window in the cafe and watch my wife walking away along the strange road and I feel an immense longing and love for her and my throat tightens with fear for us all.

  2012

  Alex and Stephanie Miller, White Sands, New Mexico, 2013

  Song of the Good Visa

  I was on a train going somewhere,

  Somewhere pleasant.

  The sun was shining

  The country we were passing through was beautiful.

  The fields soft and green;

  So deeply familiar.

  And I always thought: the very simplest words

  Must be enough.

  You could say, I suppose, it was my country.

  Not a fine country of my own

  Where I was at home, but

  The divided country of

  My childhood

  Seen from a passing train.

  And I always thought: the very simplest words

  Must be enough.

  The train was comfortable, and

  Not going too fast for me to enjoy the scenery,

  So it must have been an old train,

  Furnished with blue plush upholstery