by Alex Miller
The sight of him appalled me and I clamped my jaw shut and steadied my head on my neck. What was to be done? The dismay on the faces of the old tells its own story. Their world is not our world. It is old age, not the past, that is a foreign country. We observe its inhabitants all our lives, not as if we are looking at ourselves in the future, but as if we are observing another species than our own. How often do we hear the phrase, to grow old gracefully, as if this were an essential virtue of our humanity? But how is such grace to be achieved? Old age is not a graceful thing. Yesterday morning the idea of my death did not trouble me, but to think of entering this last stage of life alone, this final solitary advance—or retreat, rather … Well, I did not wish to think about it. It made me angry that I had been reminded of it.
I hated the old man for that moment, and when the lights changed to green I pushed down hard on the accelerator with my foot. The bald rear tyres of our old ’83 Peugeot hissed on the wet road and for a chilling instant I lost control. I murmured an apology, but Vita seemed not to have noticed the car’s sickening lurch. I wondered what she was thinking. At her hotel earlier I had waited in the lobby while she went to her room and changed out of the elaborate costume she had worn for her performance the previous day, which by then was looking wilted and unconvincing. She soon reappeared in a smart black business suit, a pale scarf at her throat. The scarf was a rather subtle and expensive faded pink and it cast a faint reflection of its warmth onto her features, as if she were gently bathed in an unearthly glow. Not only I, but everyone in the hotel lobby, women as well as men, turned to watch her progress towards me across the carpet. Even in a simple black suit, Vita was an event.
She had been silent ever since we left the hotel car park, but after I accelerated away from the doddering apparition she roused herself. She looked straight ahead through the windscreen at the rain sheeting across the road. ‘You owe a debt to Winifred,’ she said, evidently voicing the conclusion of a private meditation of some duration. She might have been speaking of a woman she had known well, a woman who had been her friend and whose mind and opinions she was familiar with.
I was astonished. ‘To Winifred?’ I said. ‘A debt? What do you mean?’ I had thought of my paper as the payment of my final dues to Winifred.
‘You owe it to the beautiful thing you and Winifred had together for thirty years to at least try to look for the answers to your questions. Why you didn’t write your book on massacre. Why you didn’t ask your father what he really did during the war. There are service records. If we bother to look for these things, there is evidence of them to be found. You owe it to yourself and to Winifred to face up to the truth of all that. If you don’t, you’ll have failed to make sense of your life.’
I forgot I was driving and listened to her lecturing with astonishment.
‘You owe it to your generation.’ Now she turned in her seat and looked at me. ‘You owe it to my generation. You said so yourself. You owe it to me. An apology is just a start. That’s all it is. It’s a start. It’s not everything. That apology yesterday, it was beautiful. I haven’t really thanked you properly for it. But it was just a start, Max.’ She waited a moment. ‘You’re not offended, are you?’
‘No,’ I said, ‘I’m not offended.’
‘We’re friends,’ she said. ‘Friends have to be able to be honest with each other, or what’s the point of it?’
‘Of course.’
‘We all owe a debt to someone. My parents made an enormous sacrifice for me so I could go to university. I’m the only one in the whole family to have ever gone to university. If we don’t pay our debts, we can’t go on believing in ourselves. We’re just empty. We’re nothing. We’re a joke.’
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘You are right.’
‘Our lives are meaningless if we give in,’ she said. ‘We can’t just give in, Max. We have to fight. Or they’ve won and we’ve lost.’
I realised that she was talking about herself.
‘Why you didn’t insist on knowing the truth about your father is the biggest thing in your life. It’s affected your whole life. It haunts you, but you don’t do anything about it.’ She looked across at me as if she expected me to argue with her. ‘How unreal is that? You like to pretend you’re too old and that it’s all finished for you. But that’s your game. That’s the way you excuse yourself from having to do anything. You just have to have the guts to break your stupid vow of silence and ask your questions before it really is too late.’ She sat up straighter. ‘Shouldn’t we be in that lane over there?’
I swerved across the two lanes and just made it into the airport turnoff.
She looked at me and laughed. ‘You’re a bloody rotten driver, Max.’
‘Sorry,’ I said.
She began to hum a tune.
‘What is that?’ I asked her after a minute or two.
‘Dad always sings it when Mum gets into a bad mood. I didn’t realise I was humming it.’
Miraculously, without knowing how I had done it, I had found the correct entrance to the airport car park—if you know the Hamburg airport car park you will understand my feeling of triumph. I pulled into a vacant spot and parked. I turned to her. ‘Here we are,’ I said, as if I expected her to congratulate me. She said nothing. We got out of the car and I took her two enormous suitcases from the boot and set them on the concrete.
‘You weren’t even listening to me, were you?’ she accused me.
‘Of course I was,’ I said. ‘It was interesting. Who are you flying with?’
‘You owe me, Max.’ She glared at me in mock anger, then she tucked her arm into mine and pressed it to her side, just as she had the previous afternoon outside Warburg Haus. ‘I’m organising a cultural studies conference at Sydney University in March,’ she said. ‘It’s the first time I’ve been responsible for an international conference. There are a lot of people waiting to see me fall in a heap over this so they can say I told you so to the idiots who appointed me to this chair. It’s my first semester in the job.’ She looked at me steadily. ‘You must come to my conference. I need you. Having a real live German professor of history on my side will silence the doubters. None of them will have the guts to stand up to you. They’ll be all over you.’
I was hoping she was not going to let go of my arm just yet. ‘But I am no longer a professor,’ I protested. ‘I am retired.’
‘Don’t try to wheedle your way out of it!’ She looked at me seriously. ‘We got drunk together. That means a lot where I come from. We told each other a few truths. You told me something you said you’d never told anyone before. I cherish that. You trusted me, Max. It’s important to me. It feels good to be trusted. Now you have to pay your debt honourably.’
I felt faintly excited. Was it really possible? She had a way of making things seem possible that had ceased to seem possible.
‘After an apology, reparations are due,’ she said. ‘You know that. You know your own history.’
‘Reparations,’ I said, echoing her.
‘Yes, reparations. You know what I mean. After the conference, I’ll take you up to North Queensland to meet Uncle Dougald. He’ll show you his country. Uncle Dougald’s country is full of beautiful secrets you guys have never dreamed of. You can give a paper in Sydney on why you didn’t ask your father what he did in the war. You’ll have a few months to think about it. It will be a start. When you get back to the apartment today you can begin.’ She shook me gently. ‘Stop pretending you’re a lost cause. It’s not interesting.’ She leaned and kissed me on the cheek, then she drew away and smiled her soft, vulnerable smile and pushed herself from my side, as if she were pushing off in a boat. ‘We’ve got time for a coffee.’
We each dragged one of her wheeled suitcases through the car park and into the reception hall of the airport. She stood looking for her check-in counter. ‘Just for that minute yesterday,’ she said, ‘when you turned away and left us all standing there by the door of Warburg Haus—you know?—you silenced us.
We didn’t know what to think. We were each waiting for someone else to be the first to say something. You changed what we were thinking. You cut across our assumptions about ourselves. About the whole thing. It was impressive. It was a good moment. It was something I don’t want to forget. The way you came up to us and apologised. It was beautiful. You know what I mean? We could see you didn’t know how good it was and that it had sort of taken you by surprise too. We all thought at first that you were coming up to defend yourself in the usual way. You caught us off guard. After something like that you can’t just go back to being silent, can you? Silence is no longer an option for you after something like that, is it? Silence would make a mockery of it all. We have to take the next step.’
We?
She checked her luggage and got a boarding pass and we took the escalator to the cafeteria. She pulled out a chair and sat in it. ‘Get me a double-strength espresso.’ She reached and took hold of my arm. ‘And, hey!’
I waited.
‘I speak my mind, Max. I don’t keep silent. We’ve got more than enough of that deep silence stuff over there too.’ She waved me away. ‘Get me a coffee.’
I bought two coffees and carried them back to our table. When I sat down she said, ‘You should see yourself. Did you look in a mirror this morning? You look like crap.’ She laughed. ‘Winifred wouldn’t want to know you. Hey! Cheer up! We’ll be seeing each other in Sydney in March.’
I stirred sugar into my coffee. ‘I would like to come,’ I said. I looked up and met her eyes. ‘I’m not sure I can.’
‘You don’t have a choice. It’s either come to my conference, or it’s go back to the apartment and do what you were thinking of doing yesterday.’ She sipped at the hot coffee and closed her eyes. ‘You decide.’
I watched her. ‘You saved my life,’ I said.
‘Bullshit!’
‘It’s not bullshit,’ I said. ‘It’s the truth.’ Suddenly I could not bear the thought of knowing I was never going to see her again. ‘I’ll come to your conference,’ I said.
She looked at me, as surprised as I was to hear it. ‘Is that a promise?’
‘I guess.’
She leaned and kissed me on the cheek. ‘That was easy.’
‘I want to come.’
‘I knew you would!’ she said happily. ‘I ought to call you Mad Max.’ She took my hand in hers and examined it, counting my fingers as if she might be about to recite the nursery rhyme, This little piggy went to market. ‘For a guy who’s spent his entire life reading books, how come you’ve got such nice strong hands?’
‘I was a farm labourer once, with my uncle, during the war.’
She relinquished my hand. ‘Go to London and see your daughter and your grandchildren for Christmas.’
‘You like to give advice,’ I said.
‘Some people need advice.’
I walked with her to the security barrier. Before she went through she embraced me, holding me strongly against her ample body. With her mouth close to my ear she whispered, ‘Take care, Uncle Max!’ She released me and turned and walked through the barrier. On the other side, she looked back and waved and blew me a kiss.
I waved and stood watching until she was out of sight. Professor Vita McLelland, the black princess of the barbarous new order. I missed her the moment she was gone. I turned away and went in search of the Peugeot. I had no idea where in the vast car park I had left it. It didn’t seem to matter greatly. If I couldn’t find it, I would take a taxi home and save myself the anxiety of the drive. I stood looking along the endless ranks of parked cars thinking about her. She had insisted that we were friends and that our friendship mattered to her. I was grateful to her and was shamed by my timidity, by the fragility of my morale. I realised I no longer felt alone. The image of the old man crossing the road in the rain suddenly rose up before me, and I silently apologised to him for having hated him for that moment. I saw then that I was standing next to the Peugeot.
Mount Nebo
5
A sense of arrival
Mount Nebo was the name of the remote township in the ranges of the Central Highlands of Queensland where Vita’s uncle, Dougald Gnapun, lived. Despite its name, I could see no mountain from the summit of which I might expect to catch a glimpse of the Promised Land before I died. Indeed the silence of the township, and the low grey scrub surrounding it, was so unnatural that I felt as if I had arrived at the moment of stillness after the end of the world.
Vita and I had seen no one when we drove into town along the forlorn main street. It was late in the afternoon and the shops were empty, the buildings apparently abandoned, their yards and sideways neglected and overgrown with weeds and small bushes. There was not a vehicle nor a pedestrian to be seen. The only sign of life was a Shell service station at a crossroads, and even this had the appearance of being temporarily unattended.
A kilometre or two back along the road in from the coast Vita had pointed out the towers and gantries of a coal mine. ‘That’s what killed the town,’ she told me. ‘They built their own residential compound and stores. It’s all air-conditioned. So who needs the town?’
As I stood there beside Dougald and his three dogs at the side gate of his house watching Vita drive into the distance in her bright little hire car, I realised that it must be the throbbing of the machinery of the mine that I could hear. It was a sound that emphasised the uncanny stillness within which we were encompassed. Then a rooster crowed nearby. It was as if a signal had been given to begin, but nothing stirred.
When Vita’s car was lost to our sight over a distant rise, Dougald continued to stand looking down the road. Did he expect her to return and to announce that she had forgotten something or that she had changed her mind and had decided to stay with us? The dogs knew better, however, and lost interest in the vigil. Standing there in the perfect stillness beside Dougald, the fine red dust of Vita’s departure drifting between us and the sinking sun, the expectant silence of the landscape seemed to open around me and I experienced a sense of anticipation. I looked at Dougald. He smiled, as if he took my meaning. Then he picked up my suitcase and carried it into the house.
I followed him. He was not the fierce square-jawed axe-wielding Scot that I had imagined, but a gentle, large-bodied man of my own age, a widower for considerably longer than I, soft looking and considered in his movements. He was darker than Vita, a good head taller than me, and, as I was soon to discover, inhabited a deep and very private silence of his own—as some poet has expressed it, listening to his own depth. His small, square, unpainted fibro-cement house was set on an irregular fenced block of land in alignment with the dusty gravel road on the extreme edge of the town, isolated from other dwellings. The house was not more than two hundred metres from the river and the commencement of the low grey scrub that extended to the horizon in all directions beyond the town’s perimeters, except to the south, where softly rounded hills, or small mountains—among them, perhaps, the Mount Nebo of the town’s name—broke the monotony of the level horizon line. I did not know then that these modest hills could only be seen for a short time after sunrise each morning and in the evening, when the atmosphere was clear of the ochreous haze that otherwise obscured any distant prospect during the heat of the day.
The room to which Dougald showed me was a small cell with a narrow uncurtained window which looked onto the empty road. A single bed stood against the wall beside the window. Next to the bed there was an upended wooden crate of the kind that had been in service when I was a boy and which might once have contained a dozen bottles, of beer perhaps or soft drink. It was the only object in the room with which I felt the faintest kinship of familiarity. Opposite the door there was a varnished cupboard, its single door hanging open. Dougald set down my suitcase beside the bed and went over to the cupboard and closed its door. He turned and looked at me. Behind him the door of the wardrobe silently swung open again.
‘If there’s anything you need, old mate,’ he said, his voice sof
t and encouraging. He might have been welcoming me back to this room after a period of absence. He took out his mobile telephone and frowned at it, perhaps reading a message, or considering sending one.
I thanked him and said the room would do fine and that I would let him know if I needed anything. ‘Where is the bathroom?’ I asked.
He led me back through the kitchen and out onto the square of concrete behind the house. He indicated an enclosed water-tank stand. ‘The shower’s in there. She’s not too bad this time of year.’ He turned and pointed towards the back of the yard. A path through the grass led to a wire enclosure in which a dozen or so brown hens and a rooster were penned. Beside the hen run there was a narrow shed constructed of timber slabs with a door at the front. The door of this modest building, like the door of the wardrobe, hung open. ‘That’s the toilet,’ he said. Behind the toilet, beyond the back fence, was an open field in which three large yellow bulldozers, rusting and overgrown with creepers, had evidently been abandoned. ‘See them tall trees? The river’s down there,’ he said, pointing. ‘She’s not much just now. We haven’t had any decent rains this year.’ He examined the screen of his telephone again. He seemed to be expecting a call.
Alone in the small bare room that was to be mine for the duration of my visit, I stood at the window and looked along the deserted road. I had not felt so abandoned to strangeness since the day my mother left me at my uncle’s farm when I was a boy. If Vita had still been with us, I would have carried my suitcase out to her car and sat in the passenger seat with my arms folded and insisted she drive me back to civilisation. I have nothing against your uncle. Indeed, he seems to be a most sympathetic man. But why, Vita, why have you brought me to this place? The peculiar feeling of anticipation that I had experienced for a moment while standing outside with Dougald was gone. I listened for the sound of the mine machinery, but I could not make it out from inside the house. I suddenly realised I was exhausted. We had travelled for hours in the car over rough roads after leaving the airport at the coastal town and my back was aching, the pain going down into my left hip. I examined the bed linen. The sheets were freshly laundered and the blanket smelled pleasantly of wool. I realised it was new. The pillow, too, was generous and soft, its white case still creased from its first unfolding. The smell of the bed was of fresh linen and home. I had not expected it, and felt a flood of gratitude towards Dougald for this consideration. I took off my shoes and lay on the bed, my arms by my sides. My left leg throbbed steadily from the referred pain in my spine. I gave a small groan and closed my eyes. My dearest, you do not know where I am.