by Alex Miller
At the edge of the field he stopped and looked back and called, beckoning to me. He waited until I came up to him, then he put his arm around my shoulders and said in a calm voice, ‘I have been up all night,’ as if this explained or excused his behaviour. We walked home together thus, his heavy arm over my shoulders like a bag of something we had dug out between us from a grave. I took his manner to be a kind of apology all the same, the best he could do. I was soon to learn that he looked upon his rages as if they were the actions of another and not his true self. He could be gentle, kind and thoughtful when the mood took him. Remembering him now, I remember him as two men who were not alike and who feared each other, as if two rival brothers inhabited the same body.
He was my mother’s elder brother and had lived a solitary existence on the farm since the death of his parents, his one passion the rich dark earth of his forefathers—I was about to write, his unearthly passion. And so it was. I soon learned that he worshipped the soil in a desperate, hopeless way, as some men worship a woman whose affections they despair of ever winning. He looked on his bondage to the soil with longing and with loathing, tormented by his solitary enslavement to it, and exulting in its power to hold him. He had not married and had no son of his own, and it was soon evident to me that he hoped to win me to his faith while my father was away at the war and my mother and sister were in Hamburg. I was to become a son of the soil of our fatherland. Such was his mad dream for me. I was to be his continuation. I was to make sense of his life for him. This, no less, was what he wanted from me. After my mother left me in his care he must have stayed up all that first night, aware of me sleeping under his roof, meditating on the means by which he could win me over. And so that wild initiation in the field at dawn, grabbing me by the arm and dragging me from my bed at the first hint of daylight. I think he afterwards realised he had overdone it and feared he might have alienated my sympathies for good.
The strangeness of his solitary existence on the farm frightened and fascinated me in equal measure, but I eventually came to regard him with a guarded affection. There is only one thing for which I have not forgiven him, but aside from that I recall him now more with sympathy than with dislike, seeing him not as an evil man, but as the bewildered victim of his own solitary intensities. The improvement of the fertility of their soil, which they understood themselves to be holding in trust for the generations of their kind, was in those days the obsessive preoccupation of many small landholders. The question of how many bushels of grain they and their neighbours had managed to harvest to the acre, or how many fat bullocks they had turned off that year, was a source of fierce rivalry between them. It was a rivalry that was not always friendly and which sometimes resulted in passionate hatreds that endured between neighbouring families from one generation to the next. As with all forms of madness, my uncle’s madness had its origins in what usually passes with us for sanity.
Despite his bizarre tutelage that year I came to no physical harm, and in my solitary wanderings about the countryside I learned to love the gentle rural landscape inhabited by my uncle. He had a wooden leg, and had been exempted from military service. He had lost his right foot when he was a boy and was working with his father in the fields. He had lifted a leaf of the spike harrows at the headland to free the clods of grass that had accumulated underneath it, when the horse was startled—it was said by the whisper of a gipsy—and bolted. My uncle’s foot was caught under the harrows and he was dragged the length of the field. The accident might have killed him, but he survived thanks to the skill of a retired surgeon who lived in the village. His right leg was amputated below the knee. In a cupboard under the stairs in the farmhouse, my uncle kept a collection of wooden legs of different sizes that he had worn at the successive stages of growing up. He showed them to me one evening, the way people show us old photographs of themselves when they were young, wishing us to share with them something of their pride in who they have become. I asked him why, when he had outgrown these legs, he and his parents had kept them, for surely neither he nor they could have imagined a future use for them. The legs leaned against each other in the corner of the cupboard, as if they were a little band of runners who rested there in order to regain their strength before continuing the journey, and for a long moment my uncle said nothing, but reached and touched first this one, then another, no doubt remembering himself at the stages of his life they represented to him—there were memories in those legs too. At length he turned to me. ‘They are my legs, Max,’ he said simply, and he smiled, as if he answered my uncertainty. It was a private, inward smile, however, and referred I think to a reality he believed to lie beyond my childish comprehension. In a darker mood, later that same evening as we sat at our supper in his kitchen, he said to me, ‘Your father is not at the front, but is engaged on secret work.’ Despite my youth it was clear to me that he wished to suggest that my father’s role in the war was not an honourable one. I was sickened by the charge and did not believe him. He watched me closely to see how I took it. I looked down at my plate and busied myself with my food, hiding my dismay from him. ‘Yes!’ he said firmly. Then he banged the handle of his knife on the table, so that I jumped with fright, and he shouted, ‘Yes!’ It was the less ordered brother breaking through and threatening me with insanity if I resisted his representation of the truth about my father, his despised brother-in-law, a man he considered unworthy of his sister. Such things are never simply what they seem to be.
I brooded for that whole year on what my uncle had said about my father. And although my uncle did not refer to it again it was like a dark secret we shared and dared not speak of, and it remained thereafter a cause of tension and distrust between us. When my mother eventually came to the farm to take me home, I told her what my uncle had said about my father and asked her what she supposed him to have meant by it. I kept my own understanding to myself and did not speak openly of my fears to her. I remember the pained and weary look that came into my mother’s eyes when I repeated her brother’s words to her, and I wished in that moment that I had said nothing, but had kept them to myself. After a moment of silence, during which she seemed to gaze at an object in the distance, she reached and drew me against her side and said in a voice of great sadness, ‘Take no notice of him, darling. Your uncle has lived too long on his own.’
I felt my mother’s distress that day and, although I knew her answer to be inadequate and evasive, merely a dutiful attempt to reassure me, I did not press her further. Witnessing her distress confirmed my fear, however, that my uncle’s charge was not to be lightly dismissed. My mother and I never again approached the subject. It was too fearful. My uncle’s suggestion left in me an indelible and tormenting uncertainty about my father’s decency which I was never able to speak of to anyone. As the years went by and the war came to an end and we learned the full horror of what had been done, I was not able to rid myself of this tormenting doubt about my father, and it remained between us thereafter until his death, locked in a silent chamber of mutual anxiety and denial that neither of us possessed the courage to breach, for we feared that to breach it would be to end our belief in each other. To this day I possess two unreconciled histories of my father in my imagination—or is it in my memory? One is of a good soldier who leads his men into battle with courage; the other is of a dimly seen figure engaged upon unspeakable acts in a place where the light fails to penetrate. I still experience a chill in my heart whenever I think about this second history. And this chill does not grow weaker with the passage of time, as I once expected it to, but returns to me and comes closer and is stronger as my own end draws nearer, as if its time is approaching. Life, the span of my life I mean, has come to seem to me to be the brief inscription of a circle, the two ends of which are soon to meet, intimate and known to each other all along.
There was a hole in the wall beside my bed in my room under the roof of my uncle’s farmhouse. Within this hole I knew there to be another dark place in which violence and human torment were en
tombed in silence. That it was not a real place but was a place entirely of my own imagination did not weaken its effect upon me, but intensified it. I have never spoken or written of this until setting it down here in my journal alone this night in Dougald Gnapun’s house in the abandoned town on the edge of the silent wilderness of featureless scrub. I wonder what influence it is here that liberates me at last to write of these things? From what source do I receive this permission to speak of what has always been for me the unspeakable? I have no doubt that we all harbour within us secret, dark histories of the soul, and that most of us take them to the grave with us, unreconciled and unshared. What consequences might arise for us, we wonder, from turning such imaginary histories into words? We know that to speak of such things is to liberate them from the narrow prison of our own imagination, and that once they are released we cease to be their master and they are seeded in the imagination of everyone who hears of them, and soon they become the common property of our fellows to do with as they will, and then they are changed forever and are no longer ours. My uncle’s stories of his legs became mine in this way that night he shared them with me, and it is I who now, alone in this world, give those old legs of his the manner of their continuation, which is not the manner he had of them. And so it is with all shared stories, and has been so since the pitiless Agamemnon was first spoken of.
The hole was roughly circular and, although it was not quite big enough for me to push the first joint of my little finger into, it afforded me the most exquisite nightly terrors. After blowing out my candle each night, I lay in bed under the covers resisting the imaginative attraction of the hole in the wall until I could no longer bear the suspense and was compelled to get up and kneel on my bed and put my eye to the hole, to see if they were still there! A faint draught, chill and damp, breathed upon my eyeball. I knew it to be a breath from another world, and I shivered with the dread expectation it aroused in me. For minutes I knelt there, my eye pressed to the hole, gazing into the impenetrable blackness, until at last I caught the flash of starlight on steel. First I made out one figure, then another, and another, until at last I saw the two vast armies, thousands of creatures, half-human, half-beast, engaged in a silent, bloody and desperate struggle to the death in the country that lay mysteriously beyond my wall.
My imaginary war beyond the wall in my uncle’s farmhouse was a source of far greater dread and excitement to me than the real war that was being fought all over Europe at that time. I knew, of course, that these deformed creatures of my imagination who dwelled beyond the wall were not real, but were aspects of myself mysteriously masked, but the knowledge that they possessed no objective reality did not lessen the terror they inspired in me. My greatest fear each night, a fear which often kept me from sleep for hours, lying rigid between the sheets, was that while I slept these demonic powers would notice the breach in my defences through which I observed them and would make their way through to me and possess me. Worse than this even was my dread that, by a means I dared not contemplate, I would be drawn through the hole into their world while I lay helplessly enthralled in my dreams, and would wake to find myself an exile among them, never to return to this life and to my mother. Once I was among such creatures in their country, I knew, I would not be able to find my way back to this world. Such was, I understood, the iron rule of this fantastic contest. I knew this without needing to inquire how I knew it. My knowing was an intuition. The outcome of this imaginary war was what I most dreaded; that vision from my own underworld, the struggle of these forces, sub-human and terrifying, that were known only to myself and which I was able to share with no one. What would happen in the end? I could hardly bear to think of it. There were no comrades in this struggle to whom I could look for the reassurance that I was destined to fight on the side of good. I knew myself to be alone. And in my solitariness I suffered the silent doubt of the soul that we suffer as children when first we begin to know that we are not innocent, but that it is the common humanity of our species to be both good and evil. How was it to turn out for me? What sort of person would I become in the adult world when I at last took my place in it? To which side would I belong? To the side of good or to the side of evil? The answer to this question caused me great anxiety. I had already failed the gipsy girl’s appeal to my goodness and dreaded that this had marked me for the other side. I asked myself, had that failure not been an indication of my essential weakness? As a young boy I lived in a world of good and evil and my fear that the forces of evil would win me to their side was real and was a torment to me. I did not know if I would have the courage or the strength to withstand the evildoers on the day they at last came to challenge me, as they most assuredly would, the merciless steel of their weapons glinting in the starlight, and I facing them alone, to be proved either the staunch, good man of my longings or the evil man of my greatest dread. Which was it to be? The question haunted me. Which of my father’s histories would I become?
It was daylight when I at last put down my pen. I did not attempt to sleep, but set my journal aside on the covers of my bed and got up. I was out in the yard later, after breakfast, shifting the tether peg of the goat, when I heard the car returning. I straightened and turned towards the house, the hammer held in my hand, the peg half-beaten into the ground. The goat and the dogs turned with me; the four of us, dogs, goat and man in the sunlit yard, all turned, looking to where Dougald was getting out of a shiny blue sedan. ‘Here’s our man back,’ I said. He was carrying a black briefcase and was wearing a broad-brimmed black hat and a long black leather coat, which shone like plastic in the sun. His appearance was that of a tall, sombre stranger and I wondered at the world he had just returned from. It was not this world on the edge of the abandoned township. I thought then how little I really knew of his life. He was a stranger. He stood watching the blue car reverse down the sideway, then he turned and walked towards the house. His wolf-like bitch came out of the back door. She did not run joyously to meet him, but walked towards him sedately, her head held low and her ears flat, as if she reproached him. This was her first appearance since he had left. She had eaten nothing during his absence. Before going in at the kitchen door, Dougald seemed to recollect himself and he paused and looked towards us. I lifted my hand, the hammer raised in the air—as if I boasted to him of a triumph over some unseen adversary during his absence. He returned my salute, lifting his hand briefly, then turned and went inside.
I was very glad to have him back. With his return the balance of the place, and of my own sanity, seemed at once to be more certain. After a sleepless night in the company of old ghosts from my childhood I was not certain I would remain sane for long if I were to live here alone as he did.
I was walking down the path towards the house from the hen run, carrying the bucket with the eggs in it, when he came out the back door and signalled to me with his mobile telephone. He had taken off his hat and coat and was wearing his familiar faded red-checked shirt and jeans, the sleeves of his shirt buttoned at the wrists as usual. When I drew level with him I said with feeling, ‘Welcome home, Dougald. It is really very good to see you.’ I would have embraced him, but was too shy to do so. He gave me a slow smile, as if he enjoyed a secret pleasure, knowing in my eyes the ghosts who had haunted my solitary hours during his absence. He handed me the telephone. ‘Vita wants to say g’day, old mate.’ He turned and went back inside the kitchen and I stood out on the concrete under the tree. She said she was flying north the next day and would spend a week with us before taking me back to Sydney with her. She was not hiring a car this time but expected Dougald and I to meet her at the airport in Mackay. ‘Before you go home to Hamburg you can stay here at my place for a few days and I’ll show you Sydney properly.’ I said it would be wonderful to see her again. My pleasure at the thought of seeing her was genuine, but I also felt a sharp regret that my time alone with Dougald was to come to an end so abruptly. She was so enthusiastic about her visit that I did not feel I could ask her to postpone it, however, an
d said nothing about my ambivalence. ‘I can’t wait to get away from this madhouse,’ she said. ‘It’s going to be wicked up there with you guys. Hey listen, we’ll go for a picnic to the river. The three of us and the dogs.’ It was an idyllic scene she described to me then, our warm, lazy afternoons drifting into evening as we cooked fresh-caught fish over the coals of our fire, and later walked in the moonlit bush together, arm in arm, engaged in animated conversation, as she and I had done as we walked together down Heilwigstrasse that first day of our meeting in Hamburg. There was in her enthusiasm, it seemed to me, an unrealistic expectation of a renewal of that first delight at our surprising friendship. I knew such things could not be repeated and feared her expectation would result in disappointment. Before she hung up she said, ‘Make sure Dougald’s not late getting in to Mackay. I hate not being met at airports.’
I stood outside the kitchen in the shade of the old tree and looked around me with a feeling of intense regret that I was to take my leave of this place and of Dougald so soon. I felt very strongly in that moment that I had failed to understand what it was I was doing there. I felt I had missed it. That it had evaded me. That I had proved inadequate to it. My silly notion of being on leave from the questions of my life. I felt, as I stood, my dogs pressing their flanks against my legs, that I had been a disappointment. I looked off towards the scrub and I leaned and rubbed the soft ears of the dogs between my fingers. There was, in my friendship with Dougald, surely no sense of an ending but rather of an aborted beginning of something that had not had the opportunity to mature. Vita was certain to take charge the moment she arrived. Her large, energetic presence would bring to an end the peculiar silence of this place. The silence between Dougald and I. His silence. A silence that was, in a mysterious way, the medium through which he and I had only just begun to understand each other. ‘It’s time to go,’ I said to the dogs, and picked up the bucket and went into the kitchen.