by Nike Sulway
I had been waiting for a place for a long time before I bought this block of land for Morgan, searching for somewhere he might return to. It had to be nearby, but not too close. We needed to maintain our privacy, our separate worlds. When this block came up for sale – not far from my own, but within walking distance – I called and made an appointment to see it without any real sense that it would be the right one. The block was oddly shaped – a long, thin throat between neighbouring properties, opening out into a chipped diamond with a rounded shoulder, as though hunched into the creek’s valley. I had followed real estate agents into the hills and stood at the cleared outlooks on property after property, but the outlook was always wrong, or it was too close to town, or there was some building already there – some other man’s dream made of brick and timber and stone. The first time I saw this block of land it was winter, and dry. The bush at the side of the road was coated in a thick patina of ochre dust and the road itself had not been graded in months.
The estate agent’s four-wheel drive bounced in the ruts as he grimaced his way up the rise. He stood at the top of the ridge, showed me the path that went down to the creek and pointed out the boundaries of the property. He spread out a map of the area on the hood of his car and the two of us bent over it while he drew, with his finger, the outline of the block. The creek ran through from the south-west corner, making a dogleg around the hilly rise and leaving the property up along the northern border. The land was uncleared, not fit for horses or cattle. There was no power nearby, and no plans to bring lines up the road in the foreseeable future. The previous owner had cleared a bit of land down by the creek, but had run out of money and enthusiasm before the plans for his house were approved. His son had put up a tepee, and for a while he and his mates lived there in a kind of commune, growing a bit of pot and playing music, before he got tired of it all and got a job down in Sydney, working for a bank.
We walked in together, the agent and I. The path was a riddle of deep ridges, a kind of channel along which the water roared during summer storms. Close to the road there were thickets of lantana leaning in over us, up through which young wattles cricked their thin black fingers. Deeper in, the forest was purer – tracts of eucalypts with tall, spindled trunks. Regrowth, maybe fifty, sixty years old, that had sprung up between the rocks and shutes after the last of the cedar-getters walked away.
When we reached the clearing we were both sweating. The agent – Mick – took off his hat, dipped it in the creek and tipped water over his face and hands. I knelt beside him and did the same. The water was shallow, but clear, running over the rocks with a steady, reassuring whisper. On the bank near where we were kneeling there was a large, heavy iron cookpot and a small stack of tin cups. There was a fire ring nearby with timber piled up in it for the next cold night, and a tripod set up with a chain and hook for the pot.
‘Too heavy to carry out,’ Mick said.
I nodded and smiled, imagining the property owner’s thinarmed son loping up the path to the road with his dreadlocks and beads, carrying a small pack of weed, maybe a notebook with a leaf pressed into its pages, his guitar slung across his back.
Mick took a packet of Drum out of his pocket and held it out to me. ‘Smoke?’
I shook my head and leant back, watching the light shaft down through the trees, listening to the birds racketeering.
‘There’s falls further up,’ he said. ‘Not huge. We used to swim there when I was younger – me and a few mates.’ He quickly rolled a thin cigarette, put it in his mouth and grinned at me, almost shyly. I could see the boy in him then – the freckles scattering across his nose, the mischief that softened his mouth and eyes. ‘Wife won’t let me smoke at home any more,’ he said, cupping his hands around the end of a match to light his smoke before flicking it out and tucking it back into the box.
He leaned back against a tree. He was still holding the sheet of A4 paper with the property details on it and began idly folding it as we sat. When he had smoked his cigarette and tucked the butt into the matchbox, he held up his paper boat and studied it. He went over to the edge of the creek, knelt among the rocks and settled his ship on the waves. He was tall and heavy, at least ten years older than me, but he looked like a boy, bending there, holding the stern of his ship. ‘Good journey,’ he said, and let it go. His paper boat shuddered into the current, almost tipped, but then held steady and went, swiftly, skirting around the rocks. I knew then that this was the place. I remember the determination with which I knew; how I thought of the letter my brother had sent me, in which he had written that he knew I would find a place, and that we would be what the place required.
‘What do you think?’ Mick said, and I heard in his voice that he had given up expecting me to say that he had found what I was looking for, that for him these treks into empty blocks had become an act of friendship rather than business.
As children, my brother and I had often made paper boats. On those long summer days we would sometimes go out onto the timber jetties lining the river and lie on our bellies on the sun- warmed timber, setting our boats off to wallow and meander towards the ocean. Each boat was inscribed with a secret message, part of the ongoing story of Nahum we were writing in our own language. Sometimes we read them out to each other before launching them into the harbour.
‘One spring morning,’ my brother would intone, holding his tiny craft aloft in his wide, pale hands, ‘the father leaves his son sleeping and goes to sea. He does not know, when he steps onto the deck, whether he will return, whether it will be a good day, or a bad day, but he goes down to the sea, because that is what men do.’ Then he would reach down and settle the boat on the water and we would both watch it make its way between the thick, shell-encrusted legs of the wharves.
The first story we wrote in Nahum came in fragments, and though we never spoke about it, I knew that the story we were writing was being written for our father, our greatest hero, whose voice shuddered the walls when he laughed. Whose absences were long and difficult. Our Odysseus, always journeying, always coming home.
I had been standing by the creek, looking downstream after Michael’s paper boat for too long. I looked up and caught his eye and we both smiled. ‘This is the one,’ I said.
Spring
Although Morgan gave considerable emphasis to the language of progress and improvement, his stories are constantly under the pressure of other, darker imperatives – of rapine, degradation and loss. The human is everywhere and nowhere in his work. The individual is persistently shown as overwhelmed and infinitesimal, and yet as necessary. A necessary medium for understanding. A necessary vehicle for change.
His last work – sent to me two years before his death and finally, three months after it, almost translated – is called There May Be Birds. The story concerns a man of Nahum who discovers a child-sized boat washed up on the shore of his island. There is nothing unusual in this: it is how the men of Nahum get their sons. A great bird cries in the night; a cradle washes up on the shore. There are some who say it is these night birds who deliver the children. That they are a strange and uncertain breed, invisible as night, furnishing themselves with darkness for feathers.
When this man cracks open the small vessel that has come to him, he finds within it not a son, but two sons. There is no word for brother in Nahum; no syntax to address two boys, no custom of naming, since on any island, at any time, there will only ever be one boy and one man. According to the men of Nahum, an island cannot bear the weight of more than one man’s heart. Every man of Nahum lives alone on his island until his son washes up on the shore. He raises his son to the cusp of manhood and, when he sees that his son is ready, he pushes his own boat out into the water and sails away into death. Or else, if there is madness, the two remain, and sink beneath the ocean together. There are legends about such men: unable to acknowledge when their sons have become men, or too frightened of what they will discover at world’s end to sail away when the time comes.
In this wor
k, he writes about the individual, overwhelmed and infinitesimal, limited by his mortal span, but still a necessary medium for life, for stories, for truth. About the endless mutability of narrative: a medium through which records and languages, tools and machines, futures and histories are built, and change – the possibility of change – is released.
I had come to the final chapter. The passages at the end were difficult. Their meaning opaque. At my desk, in my study, my mind wandered, struggling to grasp the elusive ripple of his thoughts, to bring such a strange creature through the meniscus into another world. The startling light of English. I couldn’t find the right way to bring over the sense of hesitation and release in Morgan’s writing, the way metaphor troubles the surface of it: his attempts to say what is, and his attendant efforts to use metaphor to awaken the reader, to make them, at last, responsible for the words they hold in their hands. This is my story, I wrote – I translated – I leave it in your hands? I give it into your hands?
I worked at night, in the muffled dark, the bruised light offering its counsel – the light of translation – between one world and another. I could almost hear him whispering to me, breathing from that other world. This, this, is what I mean. But then the words skidded away, or came too close, the vowels vibrating in my ears like thunder – toneless, tuneless, terrible. As morning broke, I took the pages up to the ridge. Perhaps there, in the slanted, eucalypt-inflected light, the words would fall into their proper forms. I walked, and found my spot and spread out the work: copies of my brother’s final pages, my notepad and pencils. After a while, I realised the page I had been working on was useless. Rather than improving on the earlier version of my translation, I had lost faith with the hard work of bringing over Morgan’s voice and begun to impose my own. The sentences I had made out of his words were bald and unsubtle. I tore the page from the notebook and began to fold a boat out it. The paper was thin. I folded it carefully, pinching the creases, smoothing the curve of its bow, using a twig to raise a rudimentary sail. When it was time to go home, I set it on the flat rock where I had been sitting, peering out over the ridge towards Ana.
I began to imagine going down to the river. Standing thighdeep in the water and feeling it rush around me as I launched an armada of paper boats into the world, each bearing a sentence of Morgan’s last book on its hull. I felt like a ghost, reliving this childhood game, working to remember those days when we had stood side by side in the rushing current.
My memories of our childhood were already fading. I was consumed by a sense of panic at their going. As though only my brother’s presence in the world could make those days seem real. Though we had not spoken in more than twenty years, I had known he was alive and I had held his words in my hands every single day. The connection had been fragile, but tense with life. While we had that – while I had his words ahead of me – there was still a sense he might return. Coming to the end of this work terrified me. What was there now except to go back, again and again? He was dead. He was gone. He had fallen silent. His death intervened between me and the text before me: so thin now, so small. I looked back over the pages I had translated with renewed horror, renewed love for the children we once were, for the limits of the words he had written. This was it, now, this was his life’s work complete. He was gone. He was always gone. And I was borne relentlessly forward into the gaps, into his ongoing, ever-widening silence.
There was nobody left to remember our days in the river. Nobody else’s memory existed to shore up my own. He had taken that part of me with him when he left. When he abandoned me here, disinherited, unarmed, in the kingdom of the living. An exile from my own childhood.
I printed out the pages I had done – my unruly notes and halftranslated sentences – and tidied them into a stack on the table. I poured myself a drink and opened all the windows, letting the last of the September light sift in through the trees and find me. I closed my eyes, and saw the islands loom up out of Morgan’s wine-dark sea. Each one round and perfect. The central island with its lighthouse, swamped after centuries of wind had raised the island higher and higher, piling sand and driftwood on its shores until only the top half of the lighthouse could be seen. And further back, the island where an old man has built a garden: a fanciful thing. Two acres of cultivated earth. Moats, creeks, ponds and bridges. A rose garden and strawberry beds, beehives, herb gardens, an orchard with a colonnaded walk. A fountain filled with black carp. When we were boys Morgan called this my island. A space like a well-ordered room, where the wild storms never came.
His island is further out, at the northern tip of the archipelago. An island so removed it is almost not a part of the great chain to which it belongs. His island is a place of wildness and loss. Of rocks and crags and cliffs and strange, disordered light. Punctured by dark caves, like black open wounds. Deep, voiceless throats through which the wind howls.
I was surprised when Ana knocked at my door, pulled from sleep. I hadn’t heard her old ute come crunching down the drive to the house, or the sounds of her unloading firewood from the tray.
There were still a couple of hours of daylight left, though it had started raining while I slept, which made it seem later. The rain lit up her skin. I had not realised she was so beautiful, or so small. ‘Come in,’ I said and stood aside.
She wiped off the soles of her feet with a cloth she then tucked into a pocket on the outside of her bag and came into the house. She did not peer at the bookshelves or the cushions strewn over the floor, or the crumb-dusted plates between which trails of ants made their long journeys. She took them in, that is, but did not appear to make anything of it. She went straight to the dining table.
She stood looking at Morgan’s manuscript – the pages laid out in piles on the dining table. Each chapter was represented by a pile of pages: his original pages were each sheathed in a plastic sleeve, and lay at the top; beneath them were the archives of notes, annotations, references. The finished translation – freshly printed out – lay in a separate pile, ready to be posted.
She walked around the table and picked up one of his handwritten pages in its sleeve, peering at the marks on the page, her eyes tracing the lines, though the words would mean nothing to her. Perhaps she had seen his writing before, in Amsterdam. She put the original down and moved to the finished translation, bent over and touched the clean page. ‘You’ve finished?’ she said.
‘Just about.’
She leaned over the two piles, ran her finger over the photocopy of Morgan’s original. ‘This looks like an owl,’ she said.
She was pointing at an image at the base of the page, near Morgan’s name. The image was dark and small and round. A rubbing of some kind. Birds were mentioned throughout the manuscript: gulls and crows and nightjars, and the great, dark creatures that clothed themselves in night and cried out when a new child was washed ashore, or when an old man died. For these, Morgan had created a new word, but I had been unable to settle on what English word to use and had settled for the generic ‘bird’ or ‘night bird’. I leaned closer over the smudge she had pointed out, as did she. ‘Here,’ she said, ‘this is the wing, the big eyes. It’s a rubbing of the coin he gave me.’
‘The tetradrachm?’
There was a long, fine silver chain around her neck, the pendant hanging inside her shirt. She fished it up and held it out for me, flat on her palm. ‘He wanted to divest himself of all worldly possessions and connections,’ she said, ‘so he asked me to wear it.’
I reached into my pocket and fished out my own coin. ‘The owl,’ I said, and laid it down on top of the page. She slipped the necklace off her neck and placed Morgan’s coin alongside mine.
She put her hand on my arm. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said.
‘I should have realised what it was. I knew he’d taken it with him. It’s just that it was so blurred, and it’s not always easy to make the connection between the real and the imagined when you’re dealing with Morgan.’ I picked up a pencil and struck out the word ‘birds’ fr
om the title, writing ‘owls’ instead. There May Be Owls. ‘It’s a better title,’ I said.
She nodded. ‘Much better.’
I picked up the necklace and held it out to her. She tipped her head and I slipped it over her neck. ‘Thank you,’ I said.
‘You’re welcome.’
‘Would you like to stay? For dinner. Share a bottle of wine with me to celebrate nearly finishing.’
She tilted her head and smiled, then turned towards the door. I was surprised by the realisation that I didn’t want her to leave. Not yet. But she was only gone for a moment. She had brought some firewood up to the house, which she quickly brought in and laid up near the fire. I went into the kitchen, took out a bottle of wine and stood peering into the cupboards wondering what I could offer her to eat. The pantry was almost empty. I’d been living on red wine, coffee, cheese and crackers. There was some soft, old fruit in the fridge, a couple of eggs.
She came into the kitchen and, as though I was being foolish, took me by the shoulders and turned me towards the unlit fire she had laid. ‘When you’re done with the fire you can open the wine,’ she said.
‘I thought you might be hungry.’
‘I am,’ she said, ‘that’s why I brought dinner.’ She lifted her backpack onto the bench and began to pull out ingredients, most of which seemed to have been harvested from her garden. She looked in each of the cupboards for pots and knives, ran a sink full of hot water and suds. While the water boiled she sent me out into the garden to find some basil. ‘Any herb,’ she said, ‘whatever’s still growing.’ When I came back in with a few handfuls of sage, a sprig of rosemary and something else I no longer recognised, she had lit the candles that sat in the window, and was washing the dishes she had collected from the table and the floor.