Border Districts

by Gerald Murnane

  For as long as I was inside the altered house, I could not remember how it had formerly looked. Whenever I was far away from the house, I was able to recall certain details of the former interior, but they seemed to belong to a house that I had not visited since I was a boy. On my first visit to the house, nearly sixty years ago, I had noticed panes of coloured glass in the front door, in the door leading inwards from the end of the return veranda, and above the bow-windows of several rooms. On my first visit to the house after an absence of fifty years, the coloured glass was the first detail that I noticed. I could not recall any of the colours and designs that I had seen long before but I had no doubt that the panes had not been replaced during renovations. Yet the sight of the glass in no way helped me to reconcile my two sets of memories. Whenever I was a guest of my friend and his wife, I was quite unable to recall the earlier house, so to call it. Whenever I was out of sight of the house, I was able again to recall the earlier house but as though it was a different house from the later. (This might have been hardly worth my reporting here except that it seems to justify a claim made by the narrator of some or another work of fiction that I last looked into perhaps thirty years ago and the title of which I have forgotten: what we call time is no more than our awareness of place after place as we move continuously through endless space.) As for the coloured glass, I saw the same colours and shapes in each mental image but in different surroundings. Moreover, each of the two images of coloured panes affected me differently.

  Whenever I remembered the house of fifty or more years before, the coloured leaf-shapes and petal-shapes and stem-shapes and the other shapes that signified nothing to me – those shapes seemed connected with the olden days, as I would have called the few decades leading back from the year of my birth to the beginning of the twentieth century. The woman who kept house for the motherless boys and their widower-father, she who was always called Aunt by my friend, had grey hair and peered through spectacles with thick lenses. She said little to my friend and nothing to me for as long as I was in the house. My friend had told me that she went to her room every evening as soon as she had washed and dried the dishes. She would never listen to the radio. It was understood that she spent much of her time in her room reading from the Bible. Every Sunday she went to some or another Protestant church. That was all that I knew about the woman. When I thought of the olden days, I had in my mind an image of a younger version of the grey-haired woman as she taught a Sunday-school class or while she sat at a piano and played hymn-tunes to her parents and siblings of a Sunday evening or while she dusted every day the photographs on the piano and on the nearby mantelpiece, one of which may have been a photograph of a young man in military uniform, a friend of the family who had written to her once from his troopship and once from Egypt and who might have courted her, so she often supposed, if only he had returned from the Great War. Whenever I had caught sight of the panes of coloured glass during my visits long ago, I had felt a mild gloom. The pale-coloured flower-shapes might have been derived from the far-away garden that appeared in the mind of a solitary grey-haired woman whenever she prayed her dreary Protestant prayers, hoping to meet up in paradise with her lost young suitor.

  During my visits to the restored house, so to call it, I looked boldly and often at the coloured glass. I understood that every detail there was exactly as it had appeared to me fifty years before, and yet I got from my sight of those details a certain reassurance and satisfaction. My friend and his wife and I had outlived by far the persons who had once had power over us. We no longer had to defer to parents or to fear the disapproval of church-going aunts. Customs that had bound us in former times we now joked about at dinner-tables in newly restored houses where the so-called features were often the same furnishings or fittings that had bored us or intimidated us long before. The same coloured glass that I had once thought suitable for the middle-aged or the unmarried now reminded me of the good taste of my friends and contemporaries who were saving from decay the houses of the inner suburbs and preserving their quainter details.

  I had never been able to read or hear the words spirit or soul or psyche without my seeing a mental image of an ovoid or diamond-shaped or rhomboidal or many-sided zone of one or more colours superimposed on or congruent with or permeating the space occupied by the inner organs of its possessor. I have asked myself often what are the origins of this image. I have sometimes supposed that I was influenced as a child by the rainbow-flashes I saw when sunlight fell at a certain angle on the bevelled edge of a mirror hanging in the lounge-room of a cream-coloured house mentioned elsewhere in this report, in which room everything seemed to me tasteful and elegant. Whatever are the origins of the image, its details owe much to my having heard fifty years ago from a young acquaintance of mine that his first notable experience after he had taken the hallucinogenic drug that he regularly took was his having a skull not of bone but of translucent glass through which his thoughts appeared as teeming points of one or another primary colour. During one of my first visits to my friend and his wife in their newly renovated house, and while the afternoon sunlight reached us through the coloured borders of the lounge-room window, it seemed to me suddenly self-evident that each of us three was defined not merely by a wrinkled face and body but by some or another intricate design or structure by definition invisible, even if it appeared to me as a fantastic counterpart of the glowing glass at the edge of my view just then. On the first evening of my latest visit to the capital city, after I had lain down to sleep in one of the front rooms of my friend’s and his wife’s house, and while I studied the appearance of the three panes above the bow window above my bed, which panes were partly lit by a streetlight, I thought of adopting for the remainder of my life the beliefs of an animist so that I could not only think of every person and every living being as possessing an inner luminous essence but could speculate often as to the colours of one after another of those glass-like entities against one after another source of light.

  So thoroughly had the house been renovated, and so few were my memories from my visits there long before, that I did not know who had formerly occupied the bedroom where I lay. Perhaps my friend had slept there as a boy and a young man, he who told me often during our schooldays that he had watched on the previous evening this or that film in this or that cinema in this or that suburb adjoining his own and had afterwards seen in his dark bedroom this or that image of this or that female film-star. My friend’s father indulged the motherless boy, who was free to go to the cinema whenever he chose. I lived at that time in an outer suburb towards the end of a railway line that passed through my friend’s suburb. Even if cinemas had been near by, and even if my parents could have found the money, I would not have been permitted to watch more than an occasional film. Sometimes an image of a female film-star would appear to me in my darkened bedroom, but the image was usually of black and white and grey, being derived from some or another newspaper illustration. Most of the images of females that appeared to me were derived from persons that I had seen while I travelled by train to and from the inner eastern suburb where I attended secondary school, and even though I had first seen those persons in daylight, their images seemed to me less lively and less vivid than if they had been derived from close-up views of film-stars such as my friend sometimes described to me.

  Whatever sort of image-female appeared to me after dark, I understood that my image-dalliance with her was an offence against Almighty God: a grave sin that I would later have to confess to a priest. Things were far otherwise with my friend. His mother had been a churchgoer, and his father, who claimed to have no religious beliefs, had sent the boy to church each Sunday as his mother would have wished. However, according to my friend, he took no part in the service but sat idly in a rear seat. He had never, so he said, given the least credence to anything taught him by nuns, brothers, or priests. What I thought of as the vast depository of the Faith was for him on a level with fairy stories. I envied him his composure whenever he dismis
sed in a few words something that I felt obliged to comprehend; to translate into clear visual imagery. When I asked him as a boy of fourteen what the word God brought to his mind, he claimed to see an image of a church with its windows empty and only its walls standing, like an illustration he had once seen of the ruins of Tintern Abbey in England.

  Lying as an elderly man in the room where my friend might have lain nearly sixty years before, I was no more able than I had been as a boy to envisage whatever nothingness or absence might have appeared to my friend whenever he heard such terms as heaven or after-life. I stared at the coloured panes above the window- blind and thought of technicolour imagery on screens in darkened suburban cinemas long since demolished.

  Sometimes before I slept, I supposed that I was in the room that had been the bedroom of my friend’s wifeless father or of the single lady his cousin. The father, when I knew him, had seemed an old man although he was nearly twenty years younger than I am as I write this paragraph.

  He was a man of many prejudices who often irritated me. He had never attended any church except for the occasion of his wedding, and yet he often urged his son and me to be true to our religion. He had drunk much beer in his early years, but I knew him as a teetotaller who preached against strong drink. He died in his eightieth year, and his funeral service was conducted by the minister from his cousin’s church, who had obviously never met the man. Whenever I thought I was lying in his former room, I supposed he might sometimes have consoled himself during his thirty and more years as a widower with imagery derived from the few Sunday School sessions that he might have attended as a boy. Lying beneath faintly lit seeming representations of stems and leaves and petals, I thought of a man who thought of the virtuous as strolling after death in an endless garden or park. I had learned from my friend that his father had lived as a boy in many districts and knew little about his forebears but that he often spoke as though he was somehow connected with a certain township in the central highlands of the state. This township was no great distance to the east from the huge expanse of mostly treeless grazing land that I drove across on my journey from just short of the border to the capital city. For much of my life, I supposed that I could travel only westward if ever I should move from the capital city. Even when I seemed to have decided to spend all my life in that city, I stipulated in my last Will that my remains should be buried in the west of the state. It was easy for me to assume that the father of my friend, when he heard as a boy from the young woman his Sunday School teacher that heaven was a beautiful garden or that heaven had many mansions – that the boy would think of what lay to the west of him; would think of the mostly level and treeless district where I sometimes noticed a certain word on a signpost and then began to think of a mansion with a return veranda overlooking paddocks where racehorses were bred. Many years later, so I supposed many years later still, the middle-aged widower who was formerly the boy just mentioned called to mind before he fell asleep an image of his dead wife strolling in an image-garden surrounding an image-mansion with a return veranda in the district that still seemed always to the west of him.

  Sometimes I supposed that the room where I was lying had been, fifty years before, the room where my friend’s so-called aunt had read her Bible every evening while her widower-cousin listened to the radio or watched television and while his motherless son was at the cinema. I supposed the middle-aged woman had often had in mind an image of the young male personage that she would have called her saviour or her redeemer or her lord. I was unable to conceive of the woman’s mental image as differing in any way from the image of the same male personage who had appeared often to me as a boy and a young man. Even fifty years after I had decided that the image was no more than an image, I could easily call to mind the youngish image-man with chestnut-coloured hair falling to his shoulders and wearing a long cream-coloured robe beneath a crimson cloak. One source of this image may have been the illustration on the certificate that had been presented to me on the occasion of my first communion. In the illustration, an image of the youngish man with the chestnut-coloured hair is holding in front of the face of a kneeling image-boy a tiny glowing image-object that he would have lifted out, moments before, from a golden chalice-shaped image-vessel. A shaft of image-light falls diagonally across the scene from somewhere outside the dark margins of the illustration. The colour of these rays allows me to suppose that one or more windows lie outside the margins mentioned and that one at least of the windows contains an area of glass of a colour between gold and red.

  After I had written the previous paragraph, I took the certificate mentioned out from the folder where it has lain out of sight for perhaps twenty years in one of my filing cabinets. I was not surprised to find in the illustration a number of details differing from those in the image that I had in mind while I wrote the previous paragraph. Even the image-boy and the young image-man with the chestnut-coloured hair were posed differently and with different facial expressions from their counterparts in my remembered version of the illustration. The one detail that seemed identical in both the actual and the remembered illustration was the light falling diagonally from an unseen source. In the course of many years, I had allowed myself to falsify, as it were, the central images of the illustration: the image-boy receiving the gift of the Blessed Sacrament from his image-saviour. And yet, I seemed to have been at pains to keep in mind the precise appearance of a certain shaft of light, which was the only evidence for the existence of a certain invisible window of invisible colours somewhere in the invisible world whence arises the subject-matter of illustrations.

  If I suppose myself to be occupying the room formerly occupied by the so-called aunt, then I sometimes suppose that she was sometimes visited before sleep by an image of the young man who wrote a letter to her while he was travelling by ship across the Indian Ocean and a further letter while he was camped in Egypt and who might have written more letters to her and might later have proposed marriage to her if only he had not been killed in action soon after he had been sent ashore on the Gallipoli Peninsula. Some of the images, so I supposed, would have been of the young man in a soldier’s uniform, but these interested me less than the images of the young man after he had returned home safe and well, and after he had married the young woman, the recipient of the letters mentioned and of many subsequent letters. (As a student of mental imagery, I am interested to note that the images mentioned in the previous sentence appeared to me as clearly as any other images mentioned in this report or any other images that have appeared to me; and yet they were images of images that might have appeared at least thirty years before to a middle-aged or elderly woman who is no longer alive; moreover, the images that might have appeared to the woman were of a young man as he might have appeared if he had not already died.)

  The images mentioned did not lack clarity, but I admit that a few details were blurred. I have never taken any interest in the clothing of earlier periods, much less in military uniforms or service medals or such things. I believe that my images of the young man in uniform derive from my having seen nearly forty years ago in a biography of the English poet Edward Thomas a reproduction of a photograph of the poet in uniform soon after he had enlisted for service in the First World War, in the course of which he was killed in action. My interest in Edward Thomas arose not from an interest in his poems, hardly any of which I have read, but from my having once read his biography of the English prose writer Richard Jefferies.

  When I visualise the house where the imagined husband and wife first lived after their marriage, the front elevation derives from no house that I recall having seen. My view of the kitchen, however, includes several images that derive from details of the kitchen in the weatherboard house where I lived for several years as a boy in the provincial city mentioned earlier in this report. The detail that most deserves mention is the sink, so to call it. When I lived in the house mentioned, more than sixty years ago, the word sink referred only to the basin of chipped and stained porcelain
beneath the tap. The place to one side of the sink where utensils were stood or food was prepared was called the draining-board and was of wood. When the draining-board had first been fitted, it would have contained perhaps six deep grooves. These grooves, like the surface of the whole draining-board, sloped slightly towards the sink. By the time when my family had moved into the weatherboard house, the surface of the draining-board had been so worn as to be almost smooth. Even so, the scrubbed and bleached wood was still sufficiently indented for me to be able to use it as the site for pretend-footraces.

  In many a town or city to the north of the capital city of this state was run during my youth a footrace with a considerable cash prize for the winner. Each race was decided by the running of first heats and then semi-finals and, towards the end of the day, the final. None of these events was contested by more than six runners, each of whom followed his own path from the starting blocks to the finishing tape, which path was marked out by a length of string on either side, the string being kept by metal pegs at the height of a man’s knee. Each of the six men in each race wore a singlet of a colour that distinguished him from his fellows. The man who was handicapped to start at the rear wore red; the man second from the rear wore white; the others wore, in order, blue, yellow, green, and pink, if I remember rightly. Sometimes, on a quiet afternoon, when my mother had cleaned the kitchen after lunch and had not yet begun to prepare the evening meal, I stood for perhaps an hour at the sink while I decided the outcome of a pretend-race with a rich prize. The contestants were as many of my glass marbles as had for their predominant colour one or another of the colours mentioned above. I decided each heat or semi-final or final by having six marbles roll across the draining-board, one in each groove, before falling into the sink, where a folded tea-towel protected the marbles from being damaged by the porcelain.