At the mouth of a cave formed by ivy hanging from the grey fence, a bird of white cement pointed a long red, tapering bill upwards into the air. The bird was the European stork from the story that had been read to me at the age of six by my aunt. She had read the story from the thick red-covered book called The Children’s Treasury, which was still kept in the bookcase with the two glass doors, in a corner of the room whose windows overlooked the moss and the ivy and the cement stork.
A flock of storks like a long grey cloud returns once again from the other side of the world and settles among chimneys and the steep slopes of roofs. From the houses beneath the roofs two boys come out to watch the storks. One boy admires the storks but the other boy throws stones at them. When the storks have hatched their eggs, the same boy throws stones at the naked young birds. But the storks on the roof are the birds that bring unborn human babies to the houses. Later, the storks bring to the house of the boy who had admired them a living baby; but to the house of the boy who had stoned them the storks bring a dead baby.
In the living-room of the stone house I leave the red-covered book on its shelf behind the glass, but I remember a small, greyish line-drawing of the bottom of the deep pool where the storks obtained the human babies.
In the pool the green strands of weeds are unwavering. No currents or tides disturb the deep water. The pool is far inland, in soil that is mostly clay. If any stream flows into or out of the pool, it is only a trickling stream.
At the bottom of the pool the unborn human babies are arranged as though seated with their backs against an underwater wall. All the babies are plump, with chubby thighs hiding their sex. Their eyes are closed, and the lids of the eyes never flicker. According to the story, the human babies are sleeping. In time, the storks with their long red bills will prod the babies gently awake and will take them up to live on the earth. But even as a child, I thought of the story as having been falsified for reading to children; I thought of all the babies as dead.
Each January, as my holiday passed, I spent more time in the living-room overlooking the stork and the ivy and less time walking through the caravan park. I still looked out for my few chosen girl-women among the tents and caravans, but they seemed, as I knew them better, too frivolous and too eager to follow in the way of their older sisters. I tried not to feel harshly towards them. I asked myself how a girl-woman could be expected to know that a young man walking past with his face shaded by a straw hat was ready to sit patiently under the fruit trees in her backyard, waiting to talk to her about the grasslands that began just inland from his and her native district.
In the last week of January in Melbourne County and surrounding counties, one day at least is always a day of north winds. On that day every year the wind is so strong and the air is so hot that even the people on beaches or safe among the streets of Melbourne County look up at the sky for the smoke of bushfires inland. And even if no smoke drifts in the sky, the people think of the month of February still to come, with days of hotter air and stronger winds.
I was born on a day when the north wind blew in late February. In the January before that February, in the counties around Melbourne County, bushfires had burned more forests and grasslands and towns and had killed more people than any fires had burned and killed in all the time since Europeans had first settled in those counties. Even when I was born, one month after the fires had burned away, the stumps of trees were still smouldering on mountainsides just outside Melbourne County.
Some places are many more than one place. In the first photograph taken of me, I am a child of three weeks lying in my father’s arms while he stands under a fruit tree on a patch of lawn in the heart of my native district between the Moonee Ponds and the Merri. In each year of the past ten, on a day like today when the north wind is blowing, I have looked at that photograph. Nothing in the photograph has changed since the last hot and gusty day when I looked at the patch of lawn and the fruit tree. The child is still blinking against the sunlight; the father still looks down at the child and smiles stiffly. The place where they stand is still the same place on the patch of lawn. But the place where I am has been changed. The place where I stand to look at the photograph is many more than one place. I am standing in one place after another where those men stand who see themselves as a child in the same photograph that I hold in my hand but who were never taken away as small children from their native district. I am standing on one patch of lawn after another under one fruit tree after another and remembering one after another all the patches of lawn and all the fruit trees I have stood under as a child and as a boy-man and as a man in the district where I have lived all my life between the Moonee Ponds and the Merri.
Each year, on a day of north wind towards the end of January, I gave up walking past the girl-women in the caravan park. I had seen enough to persuade me that each of my girl-women would soon allow some boy-man to claim her. Next year when I looked for her she would have joined the young women and the boy-men and the young men on the beach and in a few years she would no longer accompany her parents when they crossed the plains in January.
On the day in every January when I foresaw this, I pulled my hat low over my eyes and turned at last towards the beach. I walked through the first gap that I could find in the windbreak of tamarisks and then I climbed the low dunes and walked along the sand for the first time in a year. I paid no attention to the howling and frothing and blubbering of the idiot-sea. I kept my head down and went on walking until I had found and studied, for ten seconds from under the low brim of my hat as I passed, the body of a female aged between about sixteen and about forty years, wearing only a bathing suit and with her face concealed behind one or more of a pair of sunglasses, a pair of folded arms, a coloured magazine with a picture on the front of a female in a bathing suit, or a straw hat even wider in the brim than my own. Having found and studied this body, I strode to the low building of grey stone which was the men’s changing-shed and toilet block. There, in one of the dark cubicles, with the door snibbed behind me and the walls of grey stone in front of me, I closed my eyes and forced myself to dream of doing to the body on the beach what some boy-man or some young man who had never thought of grasslands would do to each of my girl-women in some year to come, while he and she were in my native district between the Moonee Ponds and the Merri and I was in the district of swamps and heaths between Scotchman’s Creek and Elster Creek.
On the day near the end of January when I dreamed of a body on a beach, I would stride out afterwards from the building of grey stone and then through the streets of the provincial city and then inland. From the hill where my grandmother lived at the northern edge of the city I would look as usual towards the plains before I turned aside and went in through the gate in the picket fence. On each of those days I walked to the laundry in the backyard of the white house and I hung my straw hat behind the laundry door for another year. Then I went indoors, and during what remained of January I kept to the shaded rooms.
I kept to the living-room, where the carpet was a faded red and a maidenhair fern hung down from each of two bronze jardinieres. I looked into one of the books from behind the glass doors, or I looked into shallow glasstopped boxes at collections of seashells arranged on a frozen sea of white cotton-wool. Or I sat at a window and looked out at the ivy and the European stork while I prepared myself for the year to come. I prepared to assume the look of a man whose girlfriend is for the time being in another country.
At dusk, on one of those days late in each January, I walked around to the side garden outside the living-room. The lights were on and the blinds had not been pulled down inside the room, but no one sat in the armchairs or stood by the bookshelves. I rattled the leaves of the ivy; I pushed the stork back and forth until the cement slab attached to his feet clattered against the flagstones. I turned on the tap, and water streamed into the cement basin and frothed over the edges and flooded the soil around. I made all these sounds as though I could bring to the window the man who wa
s somewhere in the room, sitting calmly at the table and writing to the young woman he loved, who was in another country.
I stepped further back until the overhanging ivy was like a cave around me. The soil where I crouched was wet from the pouring tap. If the man had come to the window I would have been wholly hidden from him. But the man went on writing out of my view. I saw nothing of him. All I could have heard or seen on such an evening was a sound like a hand scrabbling in the ivy over my head and the dark shape of a bird flying away from just above me. Even in January the blackbirds were still hatching eggs and feeding their young in the hedges and shrubs around the stone house.
In the year when I was fourteen and spending my second January in the stone house, I searched for blackbirds’ nests. For three days I peered into every patch of green where a nest might have been hidden. I kept careful count of the nests that I found and of every egg and baby bird.
I cannot remember today whether I began the search for blackbirds’ nests on my own part or whether my uncle or my aunts had first encouraged me. It was understood that I was making war on the birds because they damaged the fruit on the trees in the back garden. But it seems to me today that the half-size apples and pears and the small, woody figs were left to fall and to rot on the grass every year. Perhaps I had decided to make war on the blackbirds because they were European and had driven out some of the native birds of the district.
I made war on all the breeding birds and their young. Whenever I found a clutch of nestlings I wrapped them inside a nylon stocking and drowned them in a bucket of water. Each of the blue-green eggs I found I dashed against a brick wall in a far corner of the backyard. I inspected every smashed egg and counted the unhatched young I had destroyed.
I reported my tallies to my aunts, and they paid me a penny for every drowned baby-bird and every spilled embryo. I reported my tallies honestly, and if my aunts had asked I was ready for them to have counted the dead bodies, both hatched and unhatched. But I was anxious to keep the women from seeing those eggs that had only a blob of bloody stuff in them, even though I had already spread the blob and stirred it with a twig so that I could admire the band of rich orange where the blood-colour met the yellow of the yolk.
I was not anxious to hide the hatched birds that I had drowned, or the birds that were still unhatched but had recognisable bodies. The whole or the almost-whole corpses with naked bellies and with eyelids bulging like black currants and grinning mouths of creamy rubber – these might only have made my aunts think of birth. But the blood-stains mixed with the yolks, I thought, would have made the women think of fertilisation.
I had found in the bookcase in the living room, in the summer when I was thirteen and spending my first holiday in the stone house, a volume bought from a mail-order bookseller, with the words Famous Artists in its title. (My aunts kept mostly to the house and were often seen clipping coupons from newspapers or signing for parcels at the front door.) The plates in the book were the first large coloured reproductions I had seen of paintings. Every day before my walk to the caravan park I studied the landscapes and the nudes.
The landscapes, with deep shade under the trees and with streams trickling and clouds drifting, belonged in my own dream-landscape: in the place where I was going to live one day, with alternate bands of white grass and green trees around a house with a roof of red iron.
The nudes repelled me. The skin of the women was yellowish; their bodies were too plump. The fabrics beneath the reclining bodies were too richly crimson or purple, and the carefully arranged wrinkles in the fabrics made me resent the wealth and the power of the men of Europe, who could order their female servants to pose naked for hours and afterwards to set in order the same vast beds that earlier they had been commanded to disarrange artfully and then to sprawl their interesting but lumpish bodies on.
Even in the last days of that first January, when I was thinking of female bodies on the beach rather than faces of girl-women from my native district, the nudes did not attract me. Their tinted skins put me in mind of diseases of Europe that were not yet known between the Moonee Ponds and the Merri. I thought of girl-women dying before their time. I thought of some frail membrane bursting inside my own body when I stood in the dark cubicle with the grey walls. I thought of red as well as cream-white bursting out of me. I thought of myself far from my native district and beside the blue-green sea that I hated and with the red and the sickly white of Europe dripping from the walls around me.
But I had seen the colours of Europe only for that one summer. In the following year I walked to the caravan park on the first day of my holiday and afterwards took down from the bookshelf the volume with its cover brown and made to look from a distance like old leather. The landscapes of Europe were still where they had been, but the nudes were gone. One of my aunts had carefully cut out each tipped-in plate, leaving instead of a nude a white page with a tiny trace of glue on it. The title of each painting was printed across the bottom of the page, but above the title was only blank paper with a yellowish crust or scab at its centre.
I looked into the room from under the ivy. I saw on the ledge below the glass doors of the bookshelves numbers of the magazine that was sent to my aunts from New York City. My aunts subscribed to the coloured magazine. They kept the most recent numbers on the ledge of the bookcase and the back numbers behind the wooden doors lower down. One of the jobs that I did every year in return for my free holiday was to carry outside and to burn for my aunts the stack of back numbers from the past year.
The fiery furnace, as my aunts called it, was roughly circular and reached to the height of my chest. The walls were of grey-white stone blocks with an opening low down at the front for stoking and an opening underneath for scraping out the ashes. The furnace stood in a far corner of the backyard, near the mulberry tree.
On one of the last days of January in each of many years, I knelt on the lawn in the shade of the mulberry tree and tore out pages from magazines and then crumpled them ready for the furnace. Some of the berries were ripe just above me, but I preferred not to touch them. I disliked the stains they would have left on my hands. Once in a while, if I felt especially thirsty, I would gently pick one of the bright-red, half-ripe berries and place it between my teeth. If I punctured only one lobe of the fruit with a corner of a tooth, the tart juice would turn me against all the crop on the tree.
I pushed into the fiery furnace pages I had looked at briefly in the shaded living-room and had meant to look at again. Even in a large house, said my aunts, you ought not to keep stacks of old pages. And so I burned them all – so many pictures and words that if I had stayed in the living-room on every day of my holiday and instead of wandering through the caravan park had turned page after page, I would not have come to the end of America.
On a green hillside in New Hampshire stands a house with enormous windows. Behind the glass a man and his wife and their daughters of thirteen and fourteen look out at treetops red and orange. No harm came to those people on the day when the picture of them was blackened in an instant in the furnace. The flock of grey and white birds over the level yellow paddocks of Kansas, and the red and white barns and the green fields dotted with stones where the man and his wife and their daughter and her husband all work together breeding pheasants in Wisconsin – those people and those birds lived on after I had seen their pictures turned into powdery ash.
The people and the birds lived on, and I could dream of them for long afterwards, but I was sorry that I had not learned the place-names before I burned the pages. I could remember the names of states of America but I would never know the names of the small towns or of the pairs of streams in the districts where the people would live all their lives. I could never write to the girl-women in New Hampshire or the young married woman in Wisconsin.
My aunts would never have asked me to light the fiery furnace on a day of north winds, but sometimes a breeze would be blowing, and a few pages would be lifted out of my hands and wafted across the l
awn. I would walk after those pages, putting my feet down carefully among the soft fallen mulberries. Sometimes, when I had caught up with a page, a young woman or a girl-woman would be looking up from the grass at the sky of a district far away from her own. Perhaps I should have spared that one female. Perhaps I should have taken her page’s drifting so far as a sign that she ought to be rescued from the fire. Perhaps if I had kept that page I would have found in the caption beneath the photograph the name of the small town or of the district or the names of the two streams that would have enabled me even long afterwards to send my letter.
But I would have been hurrying, even on mornings when a cool breeze blew, to finish the job for my aunts and then to walk, if only for the last time, among the faces in the caravan park or the bodies on the beach. I may have paused and looked down at the face on the grass, but I did not spare her, wherever she lived.
I am far from having forgotten you, reader. You would be surprised if you knew how close you seem to me just now.
Reader, I may be far from the man you think I am. But who, in any case, do you think I am? I am a man, as you know; but ask yourself, reader, what you consider a man to be.
You can dream easily enough of the body of a man sitting at this table where all these pages have been strewn. The body is not yet old, but certainly it is no longer young, and the belly on the body protrudes a little, and the hair on the head of the body is turning grey at the edges. You can dream of yourself seeing that body, and I was going to write that you can dream of the words that the hand of the body writes on the pages in front of the belly of that body, but of course you do not have to dream, since you are reading this page at this moment.
Do you suppose then, reader, having dreamed and read, that you have learned what I am?
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