An Imaginary Life

by David Malouf

Only the boy’s mother is too good-natured to have turned entirely against me. She has always considered me some sort of fool whose masculine weakness she ought to indulge. Her humorous affection goes back to my earliest days here, when she tried to teach me the names of the seeds she was sorting; and since she is afraid of the old woman, she is glad of my presence because I am a thorn in the old crone’s side. It is she who brings the water for my little plants. It is, I recognize, the subversive act of one who also exists in this house by a sort of uneasy tolerance and who sees in me another like herself.

  She comes from a distant village and is of a different race. Her only real hold on this house, now that her husband is dead, is through her son. Or rather, it would be, if Ryzak were not so inordinately fond of her. The old woman, no doubt, puts this down as another mark against him, another of those little softnesses that weaken the structure of things.

  It is, perhaps, a similar weakness that makes the young woman, despite the old woman’s warnings and her own fear, reach out sometimes and touch the Child as he is stooped over one of his tasks. Softly, and for the merest second, drawn by curiosity, or tenderness, or some impulse to put herself in contact with whatever force it is that is compacted in him, she strokes his hair, starting back the moment he feels her hand. But for that moment, brief as it is, the look on their faces is extraordinary.

  I mean to say only that our lives here, even in separation, are alive with tension. And the winter has just begun.

  All day today there has been that peculiar stillness in the air, that sickly greenish light that promises snow. Huge curdled clouds over the sea. The animals, who have already been brought indoors, are restless in their stalls, stamping and smoking, or shifting together in the dark. The Child too has been unwilling to settle to our tasks. Like any boy of his age, he can be difficult, and is forever on the lookout for excuses – a kingfisher’s wing in the swamp, a grub crawling over a log – to divert my attention. But today it is different. All his muscles remain tense, alert, as if he heard a footfall in the grass behind us. He cannot settle his mind on things, and once or twice he shows little bursts of temper, impatiently pushing my hand away and cocking his head as if the language I am trying to teach him were blocking out another that his ears must be especially sharp to catch.

  He is often attuned like this to the shifts of weather. He can smell a change of wind hours before the first breath of it shivers the sea or lifts the marram grass of the swamp. I see him abruptly sit upright in the yard, lift his head, as if at a sudden presence, and know that outside the grass-blades will be swaying in the first cool gust of a new wind, or that the first flickers of lightning will be at play far off on the northern skyline.

  But today it is the snow, which we have been expecting now for nearly three weeks. In the fort they are making final preparations. All over the flat gray land the stillness vibrates as if a string had been struck. Everything hums in sympathy.

  Sometime between midnight and dawn I am woken by a strange light in the room, an unnatural blue that pulses, not at all like moonlight. The door to the hut is open, and the Child’s place in the corner is empty. I get up quickly, and am struck with fear.

  But he has not run away. In all that dazzle of light off the snow that must have been falling for hours it is so deep, he is standing naked in the yard (he sleeps naked, even now, when the rest of us have to wrap up in fur) and seems to me to be asleep still – he has that remote entranced look of sleepwalkers, who even when they pass you in a corridor, or on stairs, seem untouchably beyond reach, as if they were moving in some other and equally present world that is separated from ours, but not by walls. He stands perfectly still, with his face raised to the sky, which is of an incandescent blueness, neither of night nor of day, a blueness that sings, it is so clear, so pure, so absolutely its own color.

  He stands like that, still in the cold, with the light striking up off the snow, for nearly an hour. I am too scared to wake him. Then when the first light flakes begin to fall again, he opens his mouth to them, rubs his face, his shoulders, his torso, then holds his arms out and his head up so that the light falls directly upon them.

  I make a little sound, of shuffling perhaps, since I too have been standing still in the cold, afraid to move lest I disturb him.

  He turns and is suddenly awake. Smiles. Lets out a whoop. And begins leaping about in the snow, throwing handfuls of it into the air. He seems unaware of the cold. His body keeps its color, his hands and feet are unnumbed. When he comes scrambling towards me with a handful of crushed snow I can feel the warmth he is giving out, his body glows, he is a furnace. He shows me the snow as if it were something out of his own world that I might never have seen.

  But when I try to draw him back into the room he resists. I have never known him so suddenly recalcitrant. I make the mistake of insisting, and he lashes out at me, spitting, tearing at my cloak, and runs to the wall of the stockade, scratching at the raw timber in his attempt to scale it. When I try to calm him he hurls me off and begins to howl. It is the old howling from his days in the forest. He howls, scratching at the wall like an animal, spitting whenever I approach, showing me his teeth and his hands with all the fingers tense and extended like claws. Behind me, the women. And Ryzak, looking alarmed. And the sleepy boy, with his eyes wide open as if one of the old man’s stories had suddenly come alive in the yard.

  I am on the edge of tears. There is nothing to be done. I wait, with Ryzak, for the Child to exhaust himself. He sinks against the wall at last, with his nails bloody, and I am filled with pity for him, and with a terrible feeling suddenly of guilt; but I cannot touch him. All these weeks I have been following my own plan for the Child, and have never for one moment thought of him as anything but a creature of my will, a figure in my dream. Now, as he kneels in the snow, howling, tearing his face with his nails, I have a vision of his utter separateness that terrifies me. I have no notion of what pain it is he is suffering, what deep sense of loss and deprivation his cries articulate. At last when the howling has subsided to a weak and childlike sobbing, we carry him to his pallet and I huddle at his side, with the door closed, in the dark, till he has sobbed himself asleep.

  In the morning he seems to have no memory of the night’s events. He watches from his corner while I roll up my bedding, pack my writing materials, my razor and bowl, preparing for a season to abandon this space that is mine – ours – for the common room over the byre. I assure him with gestures that I am not leaving without him and encourage him to get his own things together, such as they are: the rough gown he refuses to wear, his colored ball. But he seems unable to wake properly. He watches while I sweep out the room and, saying goodbye to the spiders, bar the door behind me. By the end of the week snow will have buried our hut, and after that, when it freezes, there will be no getting back inside save through the roof.

  Slowly, with all our belongings, we climb the ladder inside the byre to the upper room.

  IV

  OUR WINTER DREAM begins.

  It is my fifth year in this place, and I have still not grown used to it. Day in day out there is the same grayish light over the marshes, it snows, freezes, snows again, the wind blows steadily off the steppes. Inside our room the air is thick with smoke from the peat that smolders under us. The windows are kept barred for the most part against the wind, and can be opened only on those strange still days of absolute frost when the sky turns icy blue and the whole world holds its breath and glitters blue, gold, white, as if we had suddenly stepped through into a new land. Otherwise we huddle here in the half-dark, listening to the wind whistle around the eaves, shaking clumps of snow down with a heavy thump; listening to the wooden shutters rattle and the icicles clink, and protecting ourselves against the draughts that find their way in and blow up little eddies in the smoke-filled air. I write by a guttering candle, having to shield it, every now and then, with a cupped hand, to protect its being sucked out by a sudden gust. For a good deal of the time I sleep. It may be the heav
iness of the air, or some slowing of the blood in the extreme cold, or perhaps it is simply boredom but I find myself nodding off at odd hours of the day and seem always drowsy and thick-headed. How many hours a day, I wonder, do I spend half sleeping, half dreaming? Twelve, fifteen?

  The days, with so little to mark one off from another, pass quickly, falling away into absolute oblivion like the nights. A week passes, three weeks, five. Unless one notches them off on a stick, or marks them on parchment, one hardly knows they have been and gone.

  I measure the weeks by how many guard duties I have done. One night in five I go out for four hours and man the wall, pacing up and down on a wooden parapet, just below the spiked summit of the palisade, with twenty others. On clear nights it can be beautiful: the moon high among clouds, the river flats bluish, broken with thick shadow, the whole countryside open as far as the eye can see, all the way to the river. On such watches you can see the wolves moving in packs over the snow, and if it is still enough, hear them howling. Sometimes a lone wolf will come right up to the wall, and once or twice a whole pack will appear, showing their fangs in the moonlight and filling the air with their terrible yowling, as they smell the beasts in their stalls, and the oxen, the asses, hearing their howls, make their own uneasy bellowing and braying in return. But most nights we just pass up and down in the fog that swirls around us like the sea, moving like blindmen with one hand extended before us on the narrow walk. The four hours then are like another kind of sleep. There is nothing for the eye to fix on and every sound is dampened. It is gray, dreamless sleep, that makes the knees ache and tightens the skull, and I have the greatest difficulty preventing myself then from falling into real sleep, and may be plummeting twelve meters into frozen mud.

  The Child meanwhile has fallen into a state of apathy in which he sits for hours simply staring into the gloom, his elbows round his knees, his chin sunk on his clenched fists. He still quickens at moments, cocking his head for the rising of the wind after a lull or sniffing suddenly as the snow clouds move in upon us; and in the breaks of brilliant stillness when the windows can be opened, he becomes almost crazy with joy, rocking on his heels at the edge of the sill, and making little whimpering sounds like a puppy that has been let off the leash. But in the long periods when we are closed in by fog or snow, or by the severity of the frost, he sinks back into his old sullenness, and nothing will call him out of it. He feeds if the food is set in front of him. But he shows no interest now in our speech games, and I fear he will forget most of what we have learned. Once, when I tried to engage him again by making one of the calls he had been teaching me, he became quite hysterical. All that my futile attempt at a birdcall had done was remind him of the place in the swamp that we we have not visited now for three months or more, and I realize, painfully, that he does not understand, cannot understand, why we no longer go there or why our games have ended. Does he think I am punishing him?

  One clear night, when we opened the windows, he tried to throw himself out, and I had to wrestle with him at the sill, while he kicked and uttered the raucous animallike cries that have once again convinced the old woman that he is no child but a beast in disguise who has wheedled his way in among us.

  She watches him continually. She is terrified, I think, that he may touch something, some utensil, and thereby gain power over its users. And it is true that in his long hours of simply sitting, staring before him, he seems in no way like a normal child; and when he growls in his throat, or whimpers or makes little yelping sounds in his pain, even I begin to wonder if some animal spirit does not occasionally come creeping back into him – some spirit that succored him out there in the winter forest. He survived then. Can he survive now? I watch him retreat further each day into some invisible distance, some secret lair, where his spirit slumbers and cannot be recalled.

  Looking at him on occasions, I have a clear glimpse of what he is doing. He is dreaming himself out into the winter countryside. I see him, briefly, moving over the soft snow among the birch trees, chewing strips of bark, kneeling to tear up lichen. I touch his shoulder, and he feels nothing. The black eyes, sunk deep in their sockets, stare through me, to dazzling fields of ice under the wind. When he quickens to a change of weather, it is, I realize now, to the change that comes over a landscape he is moving through in his head. If I thought we might find him again in the spring, I would let him go. But that is impossible. Having brought him in among us there is no way back. Already, in the warmth of the room, he is losing his capacity to withstand cold. For weeks now he has wrapped himself, like the rest of us, in a blanket of hide. Out there he would freeze. Whatever his secret was, I have taken it from him. He is as vulnerable now as anyone of us, and in that at least – even if the old woman does not see it – he shows himself human at last.

  As if to prove what I have just perceived, the Child has a fever. Sitting as he does with his knees drawn up, staring, he suddenly pitches over and lies in a faint, but when I move to cover him, he wakes, and almost immediately begins shivering. Huge beads of sweat break out on his brow, his hair drips with it, his whole body streams. And in between the periods of burning, he freezes. I think he has never known before what it is to be cold. His whole body clenches on it, this new feeling, this discovery within himself of what winter means, what it is to be snow and ice, to feel oneself enter the realm of absolute cold, that polar world at the body’s limits. He draws his knees up, closing upon himself. Every muscle in his limbs, his shoulders, his neck, goes rigid, his fists clench, his jaws tighten. He looks terrified and when the convulsions begin I have to hold him, forcing a knife handle between his teeth, while he jerks, stiffens, goes through a whole series of spasms, and then sinks exhausted into a kind of nerveless sleep. Then again, the sweating. As I raise him in my arms and try to force a few drops of water between his lips, I am reminded of my brother, and realize what he means to me this Child, what it might mean to lose him.

  The old woman watches from across the room. I know what she is thinking. This is no ordinary fever. The Child is wrestling with his demon, the animal spirit who protected him out there in the forest, and is fighting now to get back. When I appeal to her for some sort of medicine, some of the herbs she gathers and makes potions of, she shakes her head and turns her thumb down, spitting. I have to watch the Child day and night. If she thought for even a moment that the spirit might triumph and enter the Child’s body again, she would cut his throat. I know it.

  But the younger woman, who has a child of her own and is softhearted, cannot bear to see the boy writhe as he does, and sweat, and shiver, and jerk about under the rugs. Secretly she brings me food for him and a bowl of clean water.

  I hear the old woman arguing with her, and I know what she is saying. What if the Child gave up the struggle, and we found ourselves shut up here with the giant white wolf who is his familiar, and who might at any moment succeed in filling the Child’s body and then breaking out of it. The fever, she believes, is part of the painful transformation. The Child’s blood boils and freezes, as drop by drop it is being changed. The Child’s belly cringes for the raw meat that is the wolf’s diet. His limbs strain to grow claws. His jaw clenches against the growing there of fangs. And what if it isn’t a wolf after all? But some other beast? Larger, more terrible than even she can imagine.

  The young woman quails. And I see a new doubt has been sown in her mind. What if the beast, finding the Child too difficult to conquer, chose the body of her own son instead? It would be so easy. While we are all sleeping, our bodies empty in the dark, the Child’s spirit slips out, crosses the room, enters her son’s body – and there, it is done!

  For two whole days the young woman refuses to come near us. She watches the Child, she watches her son, she keeps the boy as far from our corner of the room as possible, while the old woman whispers and flaps about between us.

  But in the dead of night, when the Child’s fever is at its crisis, and I am forced to call for help, it is the younger woman who stirs in the
dark, wraps herself in her cloak, and comes with water. I am desperately tired and through sheer exhaustion, after nearly five days of watching, seem always on the edge of tears. My hand shakes so much that I cannot lift the bowl to the Child’s lips.

  She takes it from me. Kneels. Lifts the boy’s head, letting him gulp at the coolness, and when she has laid his head back on the pile of rags I have contrived for a pillow, sits fanning him, while I rest for a moment against the wall and sleep. When I start awake again she is still there, her face just visible in the folds of the cloak. She sits perfectly upright, her hand moving back and forth to make a breeze. She nods, indicating that I may sleep again, and immediately I fall back into my body’s depths.

  In the early morning light that seeps in through the window cracks, I wake to find her holding the Child in one of his fits. She looks frightened, and I know that this is the real moment of crisis. I know too what it is she fears.

  The Child’s body jerks, loosens, his limbs fly about, his jaws clench and unclench, strange animal sounds come from them. I hear the others begin to stir, and see the old woman come out of the darkness to watch, and the boy rising sleepily behind her. The Child grunts, low growls come from his throat. His tongue lolls and saliva rolls from the corner of his mouth. His lips move. And suddenly, so clearly that we all hear it – I and the young woman, who suddenly gasps and pushes him from her, the old woman who lets out a howl – clearly, from his lips, among all the growling and whines of animal pain, comes a word, one of the words I have been trying all these weeks to teach him. He has discovered it at last in his delirium. It has come to the surface of his mind. His tongue has discovered how to produce it.

  It is quite an ordinary word, and has no significance. Just one of the common words of this people’s daily life. But the effect on them is immediate. And in my joy at his discovering his humanity at last I fail to see what it is that alarms them. The young woman stumbles to her feet, terrified and begins to back away. The old woman reaches a hand out to take her, and another behind to catch the boy. They huddle together with the boy between them, staring, while I look up from the floor at the Child’s side, unable for the moment to comprehend.