by Alex Miller
Dougald was sitting at the table working on his laptop, as if he had not been away, his black briefcase open beside him. He looked up at me as I came in through the door and waited for me to speak. I wanted to tell him that I had no desire to leave just yet. I wanted to thank him while he and I were still on our own. Indeed there was a confusion of emotions in me that I could not hope to express and I could not think how I might speak of my gratitude to him or my fondness for him in a way that would not embarrass us both. I held the bucket for him to see. ‘Seven eggs,’ I said. Always seven.
8
Landscape of farewell
It was not the light of a passing meteor, nor a dream of youth, nor even the crowing of the rooster, but the barking of the dogs that I woke to. Why is it, I wonder, that I am forever recording my moments of awakening? I assumed Dougald had another early visitor, and I turned over and covered my head with the blanket. The barking persisted, becoming more frenzied by the minute, and I was soon convinced that something must be amiss. I got out of bed and pulled on my dressing-gown and went out to the back door. My two brown dogs pranced excitedly around me, barking and darting out into the yard and back to me again. It was just breaking day, a tight band of cold light splitting the sky in a great arc to the east. I could see no cause for the excitement of the dogs and asked them peevishly why they had woken me so early and had not waited for the rooster to perform his regular office of the day. I was about to return to the warmth of my bed when Dougald and his wolf-like bitch joined us. My dogs became at once subdued and hung close to me.
Dougald was wearing an old denim jacket over his jeans. He glanced at me as if he was surprised to see me there. Murmuring a greeting, he turned and stood looking towards the back of the yard. He was unsmiling, his manner close. I followed the direction of his gaze, and immediately realised the goat was no longer there. I experienced an unpleasant start of guilt at this, recollecting suddenly that I had not finished hammering in her peg the previous day after being distracted by Dougald’s arrival in the blue car. Dougald set off, suddenly and without a word, walking with an unusually brisk stride, along the path towards the back of the yard, his bitch close at his side. I and my dogs followed. He went on past the hen run until he reached the back fence, where he stood holding the slack barbed wire and waiting for me to climb through. I thanked him and ducked through the wire. I held it for him in turn and he stepped through after me. I waited for the dogs to jump through, which they did in such an orderly manner it might have been rehearsed—were we a band of circus performers practising our art at the edge of the town in the magic light of dawn? As we set off across the paddock the hulks of the abandoned bulldozers loomed in the silvery dawn light ahead of us—surely they were not innocent pachyderms after all, but were the abandoned conveyances of a doomed race whose members had all passed away long ago. I was impressed by Dougald’s gloomy manner and was anxiously hoping that everything was going to be all right. I knew, however, with that knowing we experience at such times, that everything was not going to be all right. Is it not a residue of our childhood dread, this, persisting in us, a superstitious fear of the unknown of the adult world and of the punishment we know we deserve at the hands of our superiors?
Dougald pointed ahead. I looked to where he pointed and at once made out the goat’s broken trail through the tussock grass. There were dark patches where her dainty hoofs had wiped the dew, and scuffs where she had dragged her peg across the patches of bare ground. We followed her trail, two men and their dogs walking with purpose across the open paddock in the dawn towards the tall timber lining the riverbank. Surely I had witnessed such a scene somewhere in my past life? An onlooker then, seeing those men and their dogs in the cold light out on some dire business? The air was cold now and Dougald’s hands were thrust into the pockets of his old denim jacket, his collar turned up, the closeness of his manner discouraging.
The moment we reached the riverbank we saw her. The ground fell away abruptly at our feet for ten or twelve metres in a near-vertical cliff. It was a dangerous and precipitous place. The elaborate root structures of the great trees had been deeply undermined by erosion, and the mesh of their intricate lattice exposed to the air. Except for a stagnant scum of green algae, which glowed in the cold morning light with a faint and eerie sheen, the riverbed was dry. The exposed tree roots formed the matrix of an elaborate trap. She was hanging by her tether rope, her wooden peg lodged in the fork of a root two or three metres below us. Her tongue lolled from the side of her mouth, purple and swollen, and might have been her disgorged stomach. She hung there, spinning slowly, grinning up at us, her teeth glinting in the rictus of death, her intelligent antique eyes no longer shining with her secret interior life, but bulging blindly, the pupils dull. She was a hideous sight. Her death must have been slow and terrible, for her hoofs had scored the bank deeply in her helpless struggle to free herself.
I looked at Dougald. He seemed not to be aware of me, and might have been alone there, gazing solemnly down the bank at the strangled goat. Even in that first moment of dismay, before I’d had time to reflect on my reaction to this terrible event, I thought it strange that Dougald did not appear to be surprised, but looked at the dead goat as if her death confirmed something for him—her carcass the fulfilment of a gloomy premonition that had been haunting him forever, a moment long expected, the end of something, not the beginning.
‘What can we do?’ I said, knowing there was nothing to be done but needing to break the terrible silence between us. So still and inward was he, I might not have spoken. I shivered in the cold morning air and clutched my old grey dressing-gown close around me. I felt accused and shamed by his silence. It was the way I had felt with my uncle when he and I had visited together the scene of a clumsiness of mine that resulted in damage to his new binder. My uncle stood then silently, just as Dougald stood now, looking at his broken machine, his silence more humiliating than if he had shouted or struck me. I thought sadly what an unhappy pair of old men Vita would find when we fetched her back with us later in the day from the airport at Mackay. Her visit was certain now to be painful and difficult for all of us. How was I to reconcile this sinister riverbank, I wondered, with her romantic fantasy of picnics beside a flowing stream filled with fish? I doubted if she had ever visited this river but had surely only ever imagined it from the distance of Dougald’s house, as I had myself. For the first time since my arrival I felt an awkwardness with Dougald, and was no longer confident of his goodwill.
I turned to him and, with a formality that was entirely unworthy of our friendship and the trust he had shown in me, I said, ‘Please accept my apology, Dougald. I am truly sorry. This is my fault. I did not take sufficient care to hammer her peg in firmly when I shifted her tether yesterday.’ I do not know what I expected him to say to this, but as soon as I had spoken, I heard in the stiffness of my apology an echo of that other apology in the foyer at Warburg Haus—the apology that had postponed my death and had been the beginning of all this.
Dougald turned to me. He looked at me steadily for a long moment, then he said, ‘This is not my country.’ It took me a moment to realise it was a confession, a revelation of a private truth, and that he required no answer from me. There was in his tone something of a decision, as if his mind had been made up after a period of great uncertainty.
I was incredulous. ‘How is this not your country?’ I said. What could he mean? It seemed as if he wished to absolve himself from any further connection to the gruesome sight below us, and even to dissociate himself from his entire situation in this place with this astonishing statement. With a small lift of his shoulders, which I took to be the gesture of a man who feels himself defeated—though whether by some internal incapacity of his own or by external circumstances and the inadequacies of others, I could not say—he said, ‘We’d better get going, or we’ll be late for Vita.’ He turned abruptly and set off across the paddock back towards the house.
I stood watching him go. The enor
mous silence of the landscape was suddenly close and oppressive, the unrelieved solitude of the forlorn township in the ocean of scrub, the abandoned machines rusting into the ground, the mean little fibro house; suddenly it was not a haven but a scene of desolation and failure, and Dougald a bewildered exile in it. I would have given anything to have been able to go back and hammer in the goat’s peg firmly. It felt to me as if it had been only the surety of her tether that had kept our expectations alive. I turned again to the riverbank, as if I expected her to be gone and for this to be nothing more than a momentary confusion of the senses. She revolved slowly in the grey light, displayed in her death agony as if she were the victim of a barbaric fetish, a warning to travellers. I felt once again that old sense of moral failure and I thought of the gipsy girl and her fruitless appeal to me. I saw her this time, however, not in a real scene recollected from memory, but in an imaginary setting imbued with the nostalgia of my youthful longing to one day grow up to be a good man. She walked away from me across a field in the soft light of a summer evening, and I was young again and I followed her, for there was a modest invitation in the way she paused and turned to look back at me, smiling her knowing, solitary smile, gazing at me from a landscape of farewell.
9
Encounter with a fellow countryman
We were sitting at the kitchen table eating our breakfast. I had developed a headache and had no appetite for the food. I pushed my plate away and sat back and looked out the door towards the tree. I remember the moment with such clarity I believe I could still count the bars of sunlight and shadow cast by the shed and the cottage across the trunk of that ancient eucalypt. As I sat looking out on the familiar scene, squinting against the light and the throbbing in my head, I asked myself, Why this depth of desolation? I was moved by love and sorrow for this place, and for the strange and sudden loss of it—my failure. My failure. That is how I saw it. How else was I to see it? What would Vita say? What would I say to her? I have rarely felt so useless to my fellow creatures. It should have been me hanging by that rope, not the innocent nanny-goat.
Dougald was sitting beside me, as we always sat for our meals, the two of us side by side facing the open door—as if we resolutely faced together whatever the day was to bring—but separated now by our own thoughts. The newspapers and old magazines and periodicals were pushed into an untidy pile on the far side of the table to make room for our plates. He paused in his eating and lifted his head, pointing with his fork through the wall of the kitchen in the direction of the highway, and he said in a voice that was easy and conversational, ‘Her mother was a road kill.’
I wondered for an instant who he could be talking about.
‘Vita picked her up out there two years ago. She was sitting by the mother’s carcass on the highway. The little thing was hardly strong enough to stand when Vita brought her in.’ He looked at me. ‘She bottle-fed her for weeks.’ He lifted his chin. ‘There, in your bedroom.’ He folded a piece of bacon with his fork, put it in his mouth and chewed, looking off thoughtfully through the wall. ‘There’s hundreds of them wild goats out there in the scrub.’
I said miserably, ‘I would give anything to bring her back to life.’
He said in a matter-of-fact way, as if it were a long-held belief, ‘Nothing’s ever going to work out up this way.’
I looked at him with surprise. But he offered no more, and might have believed he had pronounced a sufficient sense of his own fate, and an explanation of our situation, with these few words—the fault not in my failings nor in the death of the goat, nor yet in himself, but in the sterile equation of his exile, up this way. The air trembled with the distant thunder of the mine. It was as if a great wave approached us. I made up my mind then. ‘I’ll get the plane down to Sydney from Mackay today,’ I said.
He said nothing for a minute or two, but went on eating. Then he said mildly, and as if it were more an observation than a question, ‘You won’t be spending the week here with Vita, then?’
‘I think it’s time for me to go home.’
We sat side by side at the kitchen table saying nothing, the remains of our breakfast in front of us, looking out at the sunlit tree and the yard, the cottage and the shed with the old red truck, the two brown dogs watching from the concrete. We might have just received news that the battle had been lost. There did seem to have been a battle. And wasn’t it our dismay at finding ourselves on the losing side of it that had rendered us mute? For this was not our old easy silence. I knew well enough from the common experience of my generation that how we are to speak of defeat is less obvious to us than how we might boast of our heroism and our glorious victories. No doubt Dougald and I were both asking ourselves how it was we had come so badly out of this, when we surely had believed ourselves to be carrying the day with honour. And to this question we had no answer. Defeat is a great silencer. To explain it we must accuse ourselves, or we must lie.
He pushed back his chair and got to his feet. He walked across the kitchen and went into his bedroom. A moment later he came out and set a thick volume on the table in front of me. ‘This old feller was a German too.’ He stood looking down at the book, then turned and crossed the floor to his bedroom again. Before he went in he paused with his hand to the door and gestured at the book on the table in front of me. ‘You can read it later. We’d better get ready.’ He grinned, his features suddenly lighting up with his customary cheerfulness. ‘Young Miss Vita hates people being late to meet her. That girl likes the welcoming committee to show up on time. She’s not going to be impressed when you tell her you’re heading home.’ He held the door to let the bitch go in ahead of him, her claws tapping on the boards, then he followed her and closed the door. A moment later I heard the murmur of his voice. I guessed he was talking on the telephone. By the way the volume of his voice was rising I supposed him to be arguing with Vita.
I drew the book towards me. It was a nineteenth-century volume. Its covers and spine were missing, the binder’s stitches exposed, knotted with expert fingers long ago and still holding good. On the reverse of the first page, facing the title page, there was a steel engraving of a broad prospect of lake and mountains. Two men reclined on the grass in the foreground beside a smoking fire and observed with keen interest a flight of birds that was crossing the sky in the centre of their view. The title page read: Journal of an Overland Expedition in Australia from Moreton Bay to Port Essington, a Distance of Upwards of 3000 Miles, During the Years 1844–1845, by Dr Ludwig Leichhardt. So that was it, another German traveller in Australia. The date of publication was 1847. To have travelled three thousand miles across Australia at that time must have been a venture sustained by the most passionate of visions and an intemperate and rare persistence. Between Leichhardt’s name and the publisher’s imprint at the bottom of the page, there was an epigraph. It was a quotation from Goethe’s Iphigenie auf Tauris—Iphigenie, daughter of the god-like Agamemnon, that most merciless of warriors. Seeing Goethe’s familiar lines, I felt something of the poignant enchantment, indeed it is a kind of sadness, that we experience when we meet a fellow countryman in a foreign land far away from our own and know, suddenly, that it is ourselves who are the exotic objects in that landscape. This was the only real book I had seen in Dougald’s possession. I read the two lines aloud, filling the kitchen with the sound of my native tongue and making the dogs sit up and prick their ears at the strangeness of it—as if they thought I was casting a spell. ‘Die Götter brauchen manchen guten Mann/Zu ihrem Dienst auf dieser weiten Erde.’ I felt very keenly at that moment the pointlessness of my entire existence on this earth.
Dougald came out of his bedroom and began gathering his papers and putting them in his briefcase. He was wearing the black felt hat and the leather overcoat, his travelling costume. I watched him. He was a big man, tall and sombre, his complexion dark, his bold features filled with the shadows and crevices of his anxieties. He was an impressive figure. I greatly admired him and felt, suddenly, the privilege of his
friendship. At my age one does not expect new friends. Now I had two, and was about to lose them both. He straightened and looked across at me. ‘You’d better get your skates on, old mate,’ he said. I felt with him then as I had felt with Vita in Hamburg, when she had been going home. I knew I was going to miss him greatly and that he had left me with a question about myself that without him I would never be able to solve.
‘Let me read you this,’ I said. I read Goethe’s lines to him in German, then I offered my translation. ‘The gods need many a good man at their service in this wide world.’ The words seemed to apply to him as he stood there before me in his long coat and his black hat, a man surely directed by his conscience and his love towards the recovery of the broken realities of his people. ‘It is from Goethe’s great drama of exile,’ I said.
He considered a moment, his lips pursed. ‘It sounds better in German,’ he said.
It is what we most desire, to share with another the inexpressible solitude of our knowledge of ourselves. He was right. Goethe sounds best in German.
He set his briefcase on the table and gestured at the book. ‘We carried that old book around with us everywhere when we went out on our researches in the old days. We’re in there,’ he said, making the claim confidently. ‘The highways and villages of our Old People. Leichhardt set it all down just the way he saw it. There’s information in that book we could not have recovered by any other means.’ He laughed softly, but I think not because he was amused. ‘It’s yours,’ he said. ‘Take it back to Hamburg with you.’