Inland

by Gerald Murnane

  I stood in this room of my own and I held out in front of me the page where the word window is printed. If a page of a book is a window, I should have seen at that moment – in order from the nearest to my eyes to the furthest from them – the man in his room, the window of that room, and on the other side of that window the face of a female child calling herself Catherine Linton. I should have seen, while I went on looking at the page which was itself a window and which had the word window printed on it, the man thrusting his fist through the glass from inside outwards, then the female child gripping the man’s hand with one of her own hands, then the man trying to shake his hand free from the grip of the hand of the female child, then the man dragging the wrist of the female child backwards and forwards across the edge of the broken pane until the wrist is marked by a red circle of blood.

  But what I saw instead was myself in the room and a girl-woman on the other side of the window and trying to get in. I was a man whose hair had turned grey at its edges and whose belly had begun to protrude. The girl-woman was someone I had last seen when she and I were twelve years old. And I did not thrust my fist through the glass; I turned a key in one of the double panes of the window and swung the panes apart and then back against the walls of the room. Then I took hold of the wrist of the girl-woman and guided her into the room.

  I had believed for most of my life that a page of a book is a window. Then I had learned that a page of a book is a mirror. I had found in more than one book a page showing me not a young woman and a grassy place in a landscape on the other side of the book but images of what was somewhere near me in this room. I had seen in the glass of more than one page the image of a girl-woman and the image of the edge of a grassland that was covered over with roads and houses thirty years ago.

  I had seen images of a girl-woman and of a grassland, but I wondered where exactly were the girl-woman and the grassland that had given rise to those images.

  I knew without having to look around me that not even an image of a girl-woman is visible in this room. My room contains only this table, the chair underneath me, a steel cabinet, and all the shelves of books around the walls. The shelves leave no space on the walls for pictures with images of females or of grasslands. The books have only their spines showing. But then I thought of my pages.

  In all the room the only places where the images of girl-women or of grass could have appeared, I thought, were the heaps of pages on this table or the scattered pages on the floor or the margins of pages exposed in the half-opened drawers of the steel cabinet.

  I have never seen, nor will I ever see, an image of a certain girl-woman or an image of certain patches of grass for as long as I sit here in front of these pages. But a man who could stand a little to one side of me and who watched my pages from the sides of his eyes and who studied not the rows of my words but the shapes of the paper showing between the words – such a man might well see an image of a girl-woman or an image of a grassland or the ghosts of such images.

  That was what I supposed on the day when I wondered where the images came from that I saw reflected in the pages of more than one book from these shelves around me. I supposed I held each book in my hands in such a way that its pages stood open at the place in the air where the face of a man would have been if the man had stood watching my own pages from the sides of his eyes.

  I had learned where the images of grass and the image of a certain girl-woman had come from, but where was the girl-woman herself and where was the grass? I answered these questions by telling myself that the girl-woman and the grass were where they were – where I could see them clearly reflected from one sort of page to another. If I could not touch the hand of the girl-woman or walk through the grass, neither could I touch the hand of any other female and neither could I walk through any other grass for as long as I went on sitting in this room between the different sorts of pages.

  Whatever I have written lately about images reflected from page to page is true also for echoes of sounds. Standing between these pages of mine and the pages of certain books, I have sometimes heard an echo of the sound of wind in certain grassy places or an echo of the voice of a certain girl-woman.

  The sound of the wind in grass or leaves is mentioned by writers of books other than Thomas Hardy and Emily Brontë. Today I remembered a few words from the book Indian Country, by Peter Matthiessen, published in 1984 by Viking Press. When I found the book on my shelves I learned that the words I had remembered belong in another book. Peter Matthiessen acknowledges in a footnote that the words I had remembered belong in a work-in-progress – in a bundle of pages.

  I had remembered from Peter Matthiessen’s book the words of an American man who said that the wind in the leaves speaks the message: Have no fear of the Universe. The words belong in a bundle of pages written by a man named Peter Nabokov and called America As Holy Land.

  I have sometimes heard in this room an echo of a sound from a word in a language other than my own.

  One day I read aloud in this room a word from the spine of a book on one of these shelves around me. The word is the word for grassland in a language other than my own. In those days I used to dream of myself writing about grasslands; but the grasslands were in the land that I call America, and I had not dreamed of any girl-woman in the grasslands I dreamed of writing about.

  The word that I read aloud sounded heavily in this room. I took the book down from the shelf and looked into the pages. Most of the words in the pages were in my own language but a few words were in the other language, and all of those words too sounded heavily when I read them aloud in this room.

  I carried the book across the room to this table and I read some of its pages. They were not the first or the last pages in the book but pages deep inside the book. After I had read the pages I got up from this table and walked to the window. I looked out across folds of hills covered with streets and houses and yards, but while I looked I was dreaming of myself looking at pages of my writing.

  I came back to this table and I began to write on the first of all these pages around me, which are pages about grasslands and about a certain girl-woman.

  I addressed the first of all these pages to a certain married woman of my own age. I had never seen the woman, but twenty-five years earlier she had been a girl of twelve in the district between the Moonee Ponds and the Merri. I had never thought of her as my girlfriend, but I had talked easily to her in those days.

  I wrote to that woman because of all those I had known twenty-five years before, she was the only person whose whereabouts I knew. In the year before I wrote to her, or it may have been another year, I had seen by chance in a newspaper the notice of the death of the father of the girl I had once talked easily with. In the notice I had read that the man had lived until his death in a street named Daphne, which was where he and his wife and children had lived when I was twelve years old. From the same notice I had learned the name after her marriage of the girl I had once talked easily with. The name in fact was my own name. She had married a man who was unknown to me but who had the same surname as myself.

  Before I wrote I learned from a telephone directory that the widow of the dead man still lived in Daphne Street. I therefore addressed my letter to the woman with the same surname as myself, in care of the woman whose surname was still what had been the surname of the girl I had talked easily with twenty-five years before, and whose address was still what had been the address of the girl in those days.

  When I looked at the envelope before I posted it, I seemed for a moment to be sending a letter to my wife – not to the wife who is in this house at the moment and somewhere on the other side of these walls covered with books, but the wife of the man who had stayed in his native district for the previous twenty-five years.

  I wrote to the woman with the same name as my own that my youngest daughter had recently turned twelve years of age; that I had decided impulsively on a fine afternoon in early autumn to show my daughter the district where I had lived when I
was twelve; that I had felt a trifle nostalgic as I walked along certain streets; that I found myself wondering what had happened to the children I had known in those days; that I remembered having seen in a newspaper the notice of her father’s death (for which I expressed my regret); that I remembered also having learned from the same notice that her husband had the same surname as mine and that her mother still lived in Daphne Street; that I was still curious about my former schoolfriends and about two of them in particular; that I wondered whether she herself might know something of what had happened in after years to those two; that if she knew anything I would be much obliged to receive a short note from her; that the two were a boy (whom I named) who had lived in Magdalen Street and a girl (whom I named) who had lived in Bendigo Street.

  As soon as I had posted my letter I persuaded myself that I would not receive a reply. I persuaded myself that the woman with the same surname as my own would see through the pretence of my letter. I supposed she would understand at once that I had never walked with my youngest daughter between the Moonee Ponds and the Merri but that I had walked there alone (and for the first time in twenty-five years) a few days before writing the letter; that I was not curious to learn what had become of the boy from Magdalen Street, although he had been one of my friends in the last months before I left my native district, but that I had learned where the boy lived as a man by looking, after I had written to her, into a telephone directory and finding his rare surname and the initials that I remembered and noting that his home was in Fawkner, only a few kilometres north of Sims Street; that I had only mentioned the boy from Magdalen Street in order to make less noticeable my asking about the other person from my schooldays; that I would not have written the letter, with its transparent lies, if I could have learned the whereabouts of the girl from Bendigo Street by simply looking into a telephone directory but that I assumed she had married long before and had changed her name and that I had noted some years earlier when I looked, as I had looked each year, into the latest edition of the telephone directory that the entry for the father of the girl at the address in Bendigo Street had been removed; that I had felt while I walked lately in the streets where I had walked twenty-five years before not a passing nostalgia but a strange mixture of feelings; that I had felt as I walked in Ray Street a mixture of sadness and shame while I dreamed of myself looking into the backyard of the ugly house and seeing the water in the pond dwindled to a shallow green sludge with the red fish lying on their sides and opening and closing their mouths and flapping their fins – or seeing my father’s fowl sheds turned long since into an aviary but with the shrubs in it dead and brittle and the birds only scraps of feathers and bones by the empty water trough – or seeing the skeleton of a small dog at the end of a rusted chain; that I had felt the same mixture of sadness and shame when I walked along Sims Street and looked ahead of me as though I wondered whether I was about to see across Cumberland Road a girl-woman at a front gate with a small dog beside her.

  In the days after I had posted my letter I read every page in the book with the heavy-sounding word on its cover and its spine. As soon as I had finished the last page of the book I began to write on these pages of my own. I did not expect to receive an answer to the letter that I had sent to the woman with the same surname as my own, but I wrote on my pages as though I might send the pages, all in good time, to the girl-woman I had dreamed of myself seeing by her front gate in Bendigo Street.

  Twenty-five days after I had posted my letter to the woman who had once lived in Daphne Street, I received a letter in reply.

  I left the reply in its sealed envelope in my steel cabinet for two weeks. I took the envelope out of my cabinet each night and looked at it and handled it. All I learned from this was that the girl who had once lived in Daphne Street in my native district had gone after her marriage to live on the far side of the Moonee Ponds. Her letter had come to me from the district between the Moonee Ponds and the Maribyrnong.

  While I handled the envelope I used to dream of myself reading on the page inside (I had felt only one thin page through the envelope) the words of the writer with the same surname as myself warning me that I was doing a very strange thing – me, a man of nearly forty (as I was then), approaching a girl-woman of twelve.

  Or I dreamed of myself reading that the girl from Bendigo Street had died many years before, or that she had lived for many years with her husband and children in America, or that she lived in the same district where I was living (which was only ten kilometres from the heart of my native district) and might well have passed me sometimes in a street.

  Late on a night after I had been drinking beer all day, I opened the letter. I began to read it slowly, uncovering one line after another of the woman’s neat handwriting.

  The woman told me a little about herself and her children and her husband, who was a distant cousin of mine. In the last paragraph she told me she had gone to much trouble to find out where the boy from Magdalen Street lived. Then she told me the address that I had found one night in a few seconds by looking at the telephone directory.

  After this came one short sentence before the woman thanked me for my letter and then signed her name, part of which was also part of my name. The words of the short sentence were: I do not know where (and here she wrote the first name only of the girl from Bendigo Street) lives nowadays.

  I burned the envelope and the letter, and I crushed the charred paper into a powder of ashes. I swept the ashes into a jar, filled the jar with water, and stirred the water until it was a uniform dark grey. I poured the water down my kitchen sink and then ran the tap afterwards for half a minute.

  Then I walked to this room and sat down at this table and began to write on one more of the pages I had still not written on.

  On grasslands I almost forget my fear of drowning. Grasslands have waves and hollows, but the shape of the land under the waves is easy to dream of seeing. If the shape of a grassland changes, it changes too little to be noticed during a lifetime. When the wind makes waves in the grass, I lie under the leaning stems. I am not afraid of drowning in grass. On grasslands I have solid soil under me, and under the soil rock – the one thing I have always trusted.

  I walk long distances across grasslands before I come to a creek or a river. And even I, who was always too frightened to learn to swim, can wade across a stony bed and poke a short stick into the deeper holes, and can find bottom and come out safely on the other side.

  Ponds, swamps, bogs, and marshes frighten me, but I know where to look out for them. Much more alarming is to learn from seeing a subsided place or a sudden, cream-coloured cliff at my feet that for some time past, while I thought I was safe, I was walking over limestone country.

  After I had written the sentence above, I remembered a thin book of poems by W. H. Auden that I had put on my shelves twenty years ago. I found the book and I turned to a long poem I had remembered as praising limestone country. I began to read the poem, but I stopped half-way through the third line of the first stanza after reading that the poet is homesick for limestone because it dissolves in water.

  I did not want to read the words of a man sick, or pretending to be sick, for stone that dissolves in water. I did not want to hear from a man wanting to stand at the site of the wearing away of the thing I most trust; at the site of the melting of the most solid thing I know into the thing I am most afraid of.

  I did not read any further into that poem, but I turned to another poem I had remembered: ‘Plains’.

  This time I read the whole of the first stanza, but I did not read past the poet’s announcing that he cannot see a plain without a shudder and his pleading to God never to make him live on a plain – he would prefer to end his days on the worst of seacoasts in preference to any plain.

  I put the book back on the shelf where it had stood unopened for twenty years, and I thought of all the poets who have stood on the seashores of the world watching the sea pulling idiot-faces at them or listening to the sea making id
iot-noises at them. I thought the reason for my never having been able to write poetry must be that I have always kept well away from the sea. I thought of all the lines of poetry in the world as the ripples and waves of an idiot-sea, and all the sentences of prose in the world as the clumps and tussocks, leaning and waving in the wind but still showing the shape of the soil and the rock underneath, on a grassland.

  I am hardly frightened of the creeks or the slow, shallow rivers of grasslands. But I prefer not to think of the underground streams of limestone country. The worst death would be to drown in a tunnel, in darkness.

  I am not likely to die in limestone country. I am more likely to learn one day that the grass of the world is all one grassland. For most of my life I have looked at strips and patches of grass and weeds among the outlying streets of districts or beside railway lines or even in corners of graveyards. Or I have looked at the bare spaces between streams on maps of landlocked districts and great plains far from my own district. More likely than my being tricked by limestone country, I expect to find one day that I can walk easily across all the grasslands of the world: I can walk easily because the seas and the deep rivers have shrunk to the corners and the margins of the pages of the world.

  Even the rain on grasslands seems no threat.

  From a certain cloud high above the horizon a grey feather hangs down. The clouds around are whitish and drifting steadily, but one grey cloud drags a wing like a bird trying to lead the eye away.

  Later a fine rain falls. The drops cling to skin, or they slide slowly down the sides of grass-stems. The feel of rain on grasslands is no more than the brushing past of a wing of water.

  Whenever I want to read about the rain on grasslands, I take down from my shelves the book Proust: A Biography, by André Maurois, translated by Gerard Hopkins, and published by Meridian Books Inc. of New York in 1958.