19
We made our bodies fit while on the Otranto by placing our cycles on rollers and riding stationary, drawing in the miles sitting quite still on the saddles. The boredom was exquisite. We sat and watched as the sea refused to come closer, pedalling towards the horizon off to port; all that came at us was the swell and the thought that if it ever arrived it would be with water vying for room in our lungs as the ship went down to the bottom of the sea: the site of all things we can’t know or ever hope to know.
And now I think something similar as we angle our machines towards the Alps. The Alps, distant and without advent. I come from a country precipitous and layered in fern and grass and forest. I have been amongst our Southern Alps. They seem spawned by great violence, by the heaving nature of earth’s propensity to gnarl and twist. Hard ruptures holding glacier and rubble from many millions of years in one colossal hand, the other fist punching at the sky. In fact the mountains seem born of something other than the lavic ructions spitting up mounds and steam and new hot earth that are apparent in my North Island. And so too does their title seem born from other forms of hostility. I was 19 when I discovered their name was borrowed, taken from another set of splendid peaks. At this discovery I’d felt quite weak-kneed, a disappointment beyond the usual. How could you name something unique in such uninspired fashion? In this way they too never seemed to arrive, waylaid by idiocy.
I was with Thomas and Katherine when we visited them in the south. We drove the coast, the rutted roads that map the west of the South Island. We came upon the peaks looming beyond the cut valleys. The white ice in a measured fall. All land from the terminus to the sea seemed the deposit of torn valley walls, stripped mineral and heavy metals, of decades and centuries and minutes counted between your arrival and the eventual decay of awe for other things. Franz Josef; a conveyor of time and earth. A conveyor of perspective.
Katherine and my brother stood under its terminus. It was a month before my vague triumph in the Timaru–Christchurch Classic; bravado had yet to rise and long silences had taken hold. The columns of ice, the huge banyan-like structures that collapse there to become water for the oceans and sky and lakes and limitless cycles of hydration for idiots like me to perspire and drink and piss. They held each other’s hands waiting for the sound to hit them, for a glimpse of the power a glacier has over time and the physicality of time. It groaned in its deep and we eventually left, slowly walking away, our backs to that patient ice. It was vital we stepped quietly and stayed silent. We said nothing, Katherine and I. We joined my brother in the deepest of quiets. We trod softly amongst high boulders and ice. A silence that seemed to bring closer the size of all things the glacier represented. We let it grow inside us as we stepped, waiting for the sound of ice hitting the floor of the valley.
I’m heading inland, but in Nice I sat in the sand, then walked out into the light surf, the water warm on my feet and legs. I tried to imagine Katherine there, a bathing suit wrapped about her form and the quiet that would envelop us if the conditions were right. I tried to invent a conversation, a burst of speech we might have had, had we been allowed to sit in that salt-heavy sea and float together for a few hours. A perfect tide between the two of our bodies. But despite my best effort, the image didn’t take. Instead I was drawn towards that other coast; damp and wet on the Tasman’s eastern shores. The West Coast. A true day, though one that eventually ended in lies. Whether it was the long hours of the driving, or the effect of staring at the white blue of the ice amongst the shadows of peaks all day, or the fact we had run out of conversation, I wasn’t sure, but it seemed to hit us all with a shock when we came upon that day’s date. We were sitting in the dining room of the large white hotel we were booked to stay in at Fox, and remembered.
‘I was not going to say anything,’ Katherine said, ‘but it’s here. It’s a fact. Look at it.’ She pointed behind us where a calendar was pinned to the wall.
‘Her birthday?’ Thomas said, a half-hearted run of surprise on his face. Or if it wasn’t surprise, something else quick and weighted by unseen change in emotion. I thought of the tree Marya used to sit under in the centre of the drive. A great deciduous thing in the autumn losing its leaves with the thought of the coming cool.
‘I look at dates and look at the gaps between them,’ I said. ‘I start thinking: they’re the only keepsakes, only reliable ones at least.’ I looked at them. ‘Dates. I’m talking about dates.’
‘What’s he saying?’ my brother asked his wife. Katherine looked startled at the question. His voice a rare thing suddenly ringing.
‘In the past,’ I said. ‘All the rest – I don’t know.’
‘He thinks he’s being serious,’ Thomas said, his fork amongst his potatoes and peas and beans and cabbage.
‘It’s a theory I’m working on,’ I said.
‘He sounds like someone who’s run out of dinner jokes,’ he said. Thomas’s voice was rough, as if small stones lined his vocal cords.
‘Sounds like an excuse, you mean,’ I said. ‘I sound like I’m making an excuse.’
‘For what?’ his wife asked.
‘It says nothing’s up to par,’ I said and shrugged.
My brother rightly ignored me and ate his dinner. It was the anniversary of a number of things: the anniversary of the week he made his march around the house in his slow walk, the anniversary of his pauses and pants, the anniversary of his proximity to our sister. How he stood in the hall and whispered in her ear. Both quite asleep in their own ways. The date, however, was not known because of these things, but rather because it was that dear sister’s birthday. And dear sister’s birthday was close to her last day.
There isn’t an easy way to think about that week, the hundred things that happened. The car and her wish to be taken out in the car. We each sat, glazed eyes, cigarettes resting in the ashtray and the food unwelcoming. I started thinking about his arrival home and found myself speaking out loud, the end of winter and the trains that brought in the broken. ‘He was wifeless,’ I said, and hooked a thumb at Thomas as I gazed at Katherine. ‘My brother. No wife.’
‘Quite so,’ she said and arched an eyebrow. ‘When?’
‘Dad and I picked him up at the train station,’ I told her. ‘He was blue. August.’
‘Be quiet,’ Thomas said.
‘What?’ Katherine said. ‘Why?’
‘He was blue. People don’t look blue, but he was blue. Dad said we’d down a lamb’s leg for dinner and we got home and mum had the house full of roast fumes. He wasn’t saying much. His face was like porcelain, but translucent. We could see right through him.’
‘They didn’t let me see the sun,’ Thomas put in. ‘They thought me too frail.’
‘He wore pyjamas on the deck of the ship,’ I said.
‘Don’t be ridiculous. I wore my uniform.’
‘He wore pyjamas and he didn’t touch the meat.’
‘Of course I didn’t touch the meat.’
He’d arrived overnight from Auckland, the sea black beyond the platform. Cold air off the Taranaki Bight and families gathered dressed as if for the opera, though I doubt there were such a thing in that town in those months. He stepped from a carriage full of stone grey uniforms in that light. I touched his arm and he looked at me, then at my father. Men around us embraced amongst tears. Katherine wasn’t there, of course. Her two brothers would return in the summer once it was all over, just as her father had years earlier from South Africa. Bleak, a part in the middle of them torched by the uneasy anticipation of returning to an unchanging home. But things had changed, despite what my brother would later claim.
‘I wonder sometimes,’ Katherine said, ‘only sometimes, and not out of love or anything close, but I wonder about the Austrians, or the Germans, or those people. Their husbands, brothers and fathers arriving off the trains, out of packs of lousy men. Even the Russians.’
‘Who would, why would you care?’ Thomas asked.
‘The war lost and they come ho
me; the sadness and pride?’ she said. ‘I wonder about it. When my father came back from South Africa, the Boer thing, he said he missed the families he met, the old Dutch. He was big enough to worry for them.’
‘Why?’
‘And the hopelessness. I don’t know. God, I have never really thought about this. What he meant by worrying about them. What do you think? The Germans? I’m talking about the losers, of course. That’s who I’m talking about. We were so happy. So happy. And they, well, I don’t know.’
‘Depends,’ Thomas said. ‘It depends. I don’t think they even believe they’re beaten. Things you read.’
‘How was it to see them come home?’ Katherine says. ‘Faces and how a beaten man looks. What kind of joy did they have?’
‘Much the same,’ Thomas said, ‘just in a different language.’
‘This bloke didn’t speak for six months,’ I said and remembered something and then we were all quiet. It was Marya, of course. Marya standing in the hall welcoming him home with her hands at her side, her night shirt all askew. He did say something. Something was said. Something whispered in her ear. He spoke, put something in her ear.
‘What do the beaten carry with them?’ she asked.
‘The same,’ Thomas repeated.
A trek of British arrived in the restaurant at that precise hour and made great noises as they began drinking. One still carried his ice axe from his day on Fox Glacier, he bore it like a pig hunted and shot, later to be hung on the wall after the taxidermist had had his way with it. Katherine bent over the table as if to whisper something, or as if to listen to what we were saying. She smelt of something warm and soft and strong. None of us were speaking and she sat there, preserved in this position, waiting.
After quite some time, after the British had gone, it was plain and obvious the last of the staff desired us to vacate the dining room. We did; we went and sat on the outside seating. There we watched the birds fly low over the field out in front of us and up into the hills before the mountains, the forest and the heavy sky above. We watched the mist in the trees, the haunt of things slowly rising and the threat of their fall. Ghosts and the fear of ghosts. Mist climbing until it’s rain; everything is in a race to the sea. Even the mountains. And even the mountains were gone, a heft of cumulus taking their place. When you can no longer see what was once there, the easiest conclusion is not that it has vanished utterly, but it has been replaced.
Thomas spoke slowly. He breathed into his fist to warm his hands. It was summer, but cooling in the late evening. He said: ‘If you’re still wondering about them. If you’re still wondering, they go back to work. Just like us. The Krauts, Boche, Hun. They go back to making a living. Making families. Making things. Making bread, making faces at babies. It doesn’t matter if you win, if you lose, everything stays the same. We eat, we drink. In the end we fight again. In the end it is all the same.’ He looked at us, a bright gleam dancing on his eyes, as though he’d been drinking and had hit the point where all ideas are good ideas and all eyes seem welcoming. He sat back and leant forward. He clicked his knuckles and started on his way. He spoke until our glasses were taken away, until our glasses had been returned filled and emptied and refilled by the last staff member willing, and on and on. I learnt about the towns out around Wissant and Calais. We heard about flight and sound of flight, and learnt about all that too. How the gun fires timed shouts of glory through the propeller. I learnt about places he hadn’t been, learnt about Verdun, learnt about the arrival of the Americans. And then we learnt about Persia and the Turks, how they had India in their sights, how Arabia was promised to the Arabs and how it will never be given. We learnt about the north, the brutality of the north. We learnt about being quiet as he spoke and not giving in to the need we both felt to interrupt. He became a man beside a deserted restaurant, telling stories, we his audience, polite and weak.
Late in the evening, when I saw Katherine in her nightgown walk through a certain light, I thought of taking it from her and seeing the inches of her skin white. Later I thought of my brother squirming and in pain. I imagined it because it was something I could imagine.
And then later again, Katherine held me. She held me close and muttered things not meant for my ears, nor, I suspect for hers. She said, once she was finished, she said: ‘Do not ever think. Do not ever think if we do this it is because of love. It is not that, it will never be that. This is about distance. Distance from him. Remember: only love is about love.’
And I said: ‘Love. That’s something. What name do we have for love when it isn’t around? I’m asking. What’s the term for an act of love when there is no love?’
The two of us stood just inches apart from each other, the fine pant of our breath. Everything so close: mouths, breast, hands, skin. Distance in this instance is made of time, the way it separates the smallest things. She watched my face for over a minute before she left, looking for the thing that brought her into that room in the first place, but we both knew it was gone. She left me without the warmth of her body, without a dram to take me out of the gloom that accompanies me on memory’s many divided paths.
These were my thoughts on the beach, a long-ago conversation and how we tried to acknowledge the precise nature of how things were changing. We tried with our bodies, then found they couldn’t touch. And perhaps that’s why things never seem to arrive, everything is always on the move, always shifting from one thing to another. And yes, the Alps come near, but they’ll never turn up, so it seems. We have no ability to stand on the outside and peer into the things we make and forget we make. We name a mountain so we might behold the mountain.
We climb in air I hope will rapidly cool from the deep temperature of the heated southern cities, but it doesn’t. We spread out early. Percy then Ernie let go and fail in the evening. In Grenoble we wait on their return. The town resting in a deep valley, alluvial and flat. A place once of river and stone.
Percy and Ernie, they take last place and the Spaniard is no longer with us.
20
‘You know what it is?’ Louvière asks.
‘Yep.’
‘Do you know?’
‘What’s that?’ I ask.
‘It’s the anticipation,’ he says.
‘What is?’
‘It’s the expectation of whatever,’ he says, and he nods that bald head. Bald but his voice sounds like Ernie’s, Australian and puckered. ‘Of anything, things, things you can’t know.’
‘Things you can’t know? What’s the point?’
‘You can’t know without relentless, bloody agony.’
‘That’s it?’
‘That’s terror, that’s dread,’ he says.
I smile for him. He makes a laugh. ‘Where are we?’ I ask.
‘We are in Hendaye and you are speaking to me in the café and we are drunk. Men slipping on the vomit outside the stalls. They call to you. You come from their mouths. You know you are here because Harry has just left and you are alone in this conversation. I can smell you. You are “the Prince of New Plymouth”.’
‘How’s your wife?’ I ask.
‘She’s putting out the soup,’ he says and quietly Louvière starts to look like Harry. He speaks in Arabic and then I am awake, or I am already awake and this never happened. Celia mouths certain words and I don’t make them out. I arise and from beside the bed I take what she has left for me. I walk out of the hotel in the dark at 2 before the sun.
21
We climb the four mountains, hit the peak of the race, the highest point of the damned 3,000 miles at the Col de Galibier. There is no pause to think, no admiration of the view, no thoughts of understanding and awe that mountains are so adept at producing in people, there is just a man watching at the mouth to the mountain.
Four days before she died, my sister spoke of Egmont, of the volcano that leaned over our view outside the curtain. She was deep in the illness and barely making words. Dying, oblivious, charming. She asked me if I would drive our father’s
car, if I would drive it into the foothills so she could be on the mountain one last time. I told her the road didn’t ride so high and she said she knew. She said she only wanted to feel the air cool and trees close in. She said she didn’t mind we weren’t going to the summit, she only wanted to feel it near, sense she was a part of it. I thought of this as we waited to leave Grenoble, the tremble of her voice, the hope in her face quite ashen. We hope for great things when we are reduced, reduced as our body shuts down, closing out the peripheries. There is little left but a few verbs and organs, a couple of eyes and their increasingly tunnelled vision. To be able to walk again, to see the land and feel a sense of size, but to know that one doesn’t need legs to imagine the scope of the world. That is what let her mumble her request. And we rode a timeless straight out of Grenoble. I imagined her in the crowd, waving a wan hand. I waved back to her, happy to take her on any ride I make to the mountains. I take her everywhere, it seems. Into sleep and into these hills and the madness they make.
Finally we angled left at Eybens and began a slight incline into the green. There time seemed to switch back on and I told her to close her eyes, to shut out the sight of these men beside me. The things we become, I want no love to see. We hit Vizille. Its road the thinnest lane through the township, only enough room for two to ride abreast. We squeezed past shouters – I believed them to be the same people carted from hamlet to village to commune to city. Above us, just a few feet above us, families leant from the shutters and yelled. The flapped flags of unknown provenance, bosoms and dawn shadow on the faces of men. The shaven and the unshaven shouted. If I knew what they said I would report, for the words were repeated and repeated and they began to hum in a resonance that touched me, though I can’t say why unless I make meaning of their words afresh: name a noise a noun; name another a verb. The birth of sentences teeming with life.
The Invisible Mile Page 16