by Alex Miller
I drew the belt of my dressing-gown tight around my waist and knotted it, then I lay down close against the rough bark of the great tree and, clutching a knobby protuberance at its base, edged out over the drop along the principal root, feeling my way backwards into the horrid darkness above the pool with my slippered feet. The root curved out strongly from the base of the tree and for the first two metres or so remained almost horizontal. As it reached out into space, getting further from the tree, however, it began to dip more steeply, until it branched into two just above the peg, by which time it was pointing almost straight down into the void. At this point its separate limbs were joined by the trellis of other smaller intersecting roots. I felt foolish lying there on the root in the moonlight and may even have laughed out loud. Certainly a detached intelligence in me observed these antics of the old man with a superior scorn from the safety of the bank, where the dogs had stayed. As always, there were two of us, the I who did the thing and the superior other within who stood aside and commented on the doing of it. Why is it that this other within is always younger and better informed and more critical than the I who is required to engage with the unyielding facts of reality?
It was an impossible thing to have attempted. But the further I went, the bolder and more justified I felt myself to be in attempting it, and the more worthy I felt myself to be. To be worthy. And to be a fool. I was afraid, to be sure, but surely I was not a coward. I eased myself out along the root until I reached a point where, if I were to continue, I would have to let go of my handhold on the tree. I stopped at this point, lying along the narrow root and clinging to the tree with my outstretched hand, the emptiness of the drop into the dark pool beneath me, my weight drawn downwards by the increasing curvature of the root, which had begun to sag under me. In order to progress further with my plan I needed to let go of the knobbly protuberance at the base of the tree, but I found that my fear of falling was too great and I could not open my fingers and release my hold. My faithless observing other reminded me, in his always faintly scoffing voice, how Katriona had stubbornly resisted Winifred and I in just this way on many occasions when she was a small child, and how we had been forced to prise open her fingers in order to make her relinquish her grip on some toy or other, or from the seat of a swing in a park when we told her it was time to leave and to go home and have a bath. It was more in revolt against the derision of this inner voice than innate courage that spurred me to snatch my hand away from the tree. ‘There!’ I cried, and sent a hysterical laugh into the uncaring night that drew an astonished bark from the dogs. I was now clinging to the root with both arms wrapped tightly around it.
Once I no longer had a steadying grip on the tree I experienced the greatest difficulty retaining my balance, and I swayed back and forth above the blackness, the flexing of the root seeming to increase dramatically with this loosening of my attachment to the bank. I felt myself to be on a springboard of the kind one sees at public swimming baths. Too afraid to move any further out along the root, I clung there in the moonlight like a giant insect that has found a place in which to undergo the transformation of its pupation. During my struggle my slippers had fallen soundlessly from my feet into the pool below. I looked up and met the eyes of my dogs, who lay side by side on their bellies above me, their heads and forepaws over the bank, wriggling and whimpering, as if they would have joined me had they possessed the foolhardiness to attempt the leap.
Providing I did not attempt any further movement I knew myself to be in no immediate danger of falling. There was also no imperative for a further development of my plan of action just yet. The night air was soft and cool and I was warmed by my exertions and was not too uncomfortable. I remembered lying for hours along the branch of an old chestnut tree on my uncle’s farm one endless summer day of my solitary childhood, dreaming of life, no doubt, or what in my imagination then passed for life. Now that I was lying perfectly still I noticed a small rhythmic movement of the root. My struggles had set the carcass of the goat below me swinging from side to side with the motion of a pendulum, causing my root to sway gently back and forth. I rested my cheek against the cool wood and closed my eyes. I would rest a while before attempting my next move.
A moment later I opened my eyes. The toes of my left foot were touching the goat’s peg! I was sure of it. I recognised the slim tapering form of the peg that I had hammered into the ground a number of times. And, yes, there was the knotted rope! I explored the peg and the knot blindly with my toes and realised that if I could hook my foot under the peg and, by bending my knee, slowly rotate it upwards towards me, I could probably release it. I had barely begun the manoeuvre when the trap let go with a vicious snap. The carcass of the goat plummeted to the river below and the recoil of the root, released from her weight, clamped my foot in a vice-like grip. The pain was fierce. I cried out and involuntarily drew myself downwards towards my trapped foot. As my foot rotated several degrees, a movement caused by the levering action of my upper leg as I drew myself downwards, the root released me as suddenly as it had gripped me, like a bow releasing an arrow. I yelled with fear and pain and swung about helplessly, hanging vertically now above the pool, my weight on my extended arms. I sobbed and hung on. I did not possess the strength to drag myself back up the root and regain the bank. The only thing would be to let myself slip down the root a little at a time and to drop the final three or four metres into the stagnant pool, where the carcass of the goat no doubt floated belly up in the moonlight beneath me.
Crying out with the fierce pain in my shoulders and ankle, I endeavoured to let myself slip down the root inch by inch, but I did not have sufficient strength in my arms and with a howl of fear and pain I fell through the tangle of roots into the darkness.
12
Winifred’s naked shoulders
So here I am sitting up in bed again—it is an image from which I am finding it difficult to escape. It is the apartment on Schlüterstrasse, and I am reading an article in some journal or other which is revisiting, with a certain wit and imagination, Orloff’s 1936, Bismarck und Katherina Orloff, a book of my father’s day which, among other delights, offers an account of the romantic love of a young woman of twenty-two for a man of fifty.
Winifred comes in to the bedroom and begins to undress. Winifred always undresses at the foot of our bed in front of the dressing-table mirror. While she takes off her clothes she glances at herself from time to time in the mirror. At fifty Winifred is still a handsome and sexually interesting woman. I have often observed, with a small thrill of jealousy, how men much younger than she look at her with admiration. Her bare arms and shoulders in the soft lamplight of the bedroom are as exciting to me as they were when we first met. Winifred is a woman who has matured into her beauty. Although she was scarcely more than twenty when we first met, she had not been, as Bismarck’s Kathi Orloff was, pretty, irresponsible and gay, but was a rather serious young woman. Most people, I think, would probably not have described her as beautiful at that age. She became beautiful later, and people who knew her only when she was young were surprised when they met the woman of beauty and distinction Winifred grew into later in life.
I saw her beauty, however, from the first moment. I was in my early thirties when we first met. I was coming down the central staircase at the university library and she was standing at the index boxes on the lower floor going through cards, bending forward to make a note, then straightening again. There was something so lovely in the way she moved her shoulders, her dark hair falling forward over her face, that it made me catch my breath. Entranced, I stood on the landing of the stairs and watched her until at last, feeling my gaze on her, she looked up and saw me. For more than thirty years we were happy together …
While she undresses at the foot of the bed, she is telling me about something that happened to one of her colleagues at work during the day, and she removes her clothes in a preoccupied and unselfconscious way, her attention caught up in the telling of her story. I am not really lis
tening to her story, but am admiring her. I pretend that I am not present, and that she is a woman alone in the privacy of her bedroom, or even the bedroom of her lover. There is in this subterfuge an element of trespass and of the forbidden that I find attractive and enticing. This woman who I am watching undress is not my wife, the mother of my daughter, my friend and companion of thirty years, but is a stranger, a woman I desire and whose nakedness I have never before seen.
With care, slowly, she takes her clothes off and places them on the low tub chair beside the dressing table, raising her arms, leaning and bending; then, when she is naked at last, she stands before the dressing table and removes her jewellery. It is only now, finally, that our eyes meet in the mirror. It is an exquisite moment. In the middle of a lecture at the university one morning I paused midway through a sentence at the sudden intrusion of this image of Winifred standing naked at the foot of our bed, her arms raised to unclasp her beads, our eyes meeting in the dressing-table mirror. I fell silent, my notes on Innocent III forgotten as I gazed at the image of my beautiful wife, and my spirits lifted with the certainty that I would see her again that night, and no doubt I smiled stupidly at my bemused students …
It is this moment, this image, that stands at the centre of our erotic life. This is the portal through which Winifred and I are transported to that other world of our sexuality, an enchanted landscape beyond the commonplace of our day. After being together for thirty years we no longer make love every night, of course, but often read or talk of our concerns about the tedious life Katriona is living in London with her unpleasant husband, or discuss our plans for travelling, or we speak of our work or the news we have seen on television that night, the massacres and famines. But when we do make love, it is for me always with these soft lamplit images of Winifred’s naked shoulders and arms, and the lovely hollow of her back, in my mind. To this day, making love with her astonishes me. Naked in each other’s arms she and I cease to be the everyday companions of our lives, those people whom we know so well, whom we care for and love so dearly, and whom we hate fiercely in moments of pure insanity, but are transformed into the perfect strangers of our erotic desires. During the day we never discuss the lives and times of these perfect strangers to whom we give ourselves so passionately and with such greedy abandon, crying out with voices that are not our own and do not belong to our daily selves. These secret strangers never meet as familiars during our daily lives. The human and natural tragedies that are reported every day on the television and in the newspapers, and which preoccupy and often dominate our conversation during dinner and at the breakfast table, do not exist for these other beings whom we meet only at night under cover of darkness. It has always been so, from the very beginning, from that first day of bliss that began for us in the university library when she and I looked at each other and held our breath with the certain expectation of what must follow from such a meeting. From that first day we have lived our erotic lives outside the history of our time, in a perpetual present. On all quotidian subjects these secret erotic selves remain silent, as if such knowledge, such a mixing of one with the other, would erode the power of the spell under which we each cast the other. Naked in bed at night together we are released from the real world of the everyday and become the subjects of a power that we do not understand. It is the greatest power we know. It is the source of our joy. It is our most sacred place. We never discuss it, either with each other or with anyone else …
The bright light of dawn burst through my closed lids suddenly and drew me up from the depths and I opened my eyes. The light blinded me and I turned my head away and groaned and closed my eyes again. She was gone! The darkness was only darkness! ‘She is dead,’ I cried, stricken. And I heard my voice as if it was the voice of another, a desperate and a forlorn man who has lost his reason to live. Without her I am blind and dead too …
I heard Dougald speak then, or curse, but I did not understand him. I opened my eyes again and looked up. He pushed his torch into his pocket and leaned and grasped me under the arms and dragged me from the edge of the pool and out of the mud onto the dry bed of the river. He bent over me, his features inverted so that he seemed to grimace at me in the cold dawn light, the great purple pouches under his eyes sagging and his cheeks puffed out, his breathing hard and laboured. Pain and grief washed through me and I cried out. He knelt beside me and cradled my head in his arms, holding me to him and murmuring words of comfort. My two brown dogs were licking my hands. Then I remembered the fall. The anguish of my loss washed through me like a violent poison and I wept and called her name aloud. She was gone. My Winifred was gone and would never come back. I had lost her forever. How was I to endure without her?
13
The storyteller
The days of my convalescence passed pleasantly. Dougald bound my ankle and made me stay in bed. I did not resist. He was a capable nurse and I was not in great pain. In a way it was a relief to give up all resistance and to lie back and let him take care of me. He, too, seemed changed by my altered state. Once I had been immobilised, propped in bed against my pillows, and was no longer threatening to run off to Hamburg, he began to talk to me. I was content to listen. I was more than content; I was intrigued by what he had to tell me. Now that he had begun to speak he spoke well and without hesitation of the things that most concerned him. It was agreeable, indeed restful, to be diverted from my own troubles and to learn something of the sum of his.
He stood beside my bed looking out the window along the road. ‘Winter’s coming,’ he said, no doubt seeing some subtle change in the look of things. It was the season, he said, that everyone waited for; the dry, cool season, with frosts in the mornings and a need for fires in the evenings, the days windless and warm, the sky a soft blue without clouds. As he spoke he moved his large hands about with ample gestures, describing the things he spoke of, lingering at my window as if he possessed all the time in the world—which no doubt he did. He brought me a breakfast of toast, two soft-boiled eggs and a mug of tea and stood at the window watching the empty road that we had returned along, his presence filling my room.
‘You’ll be fit enough to walk on that in three weeks.’ He said this with the authority of a man who had lived his life without doctors, in situations where sprains and broken bones were commonplace. ‘She was the decoy, old mate,’ he said, and smiled down at me, watching me scoop at the innards of an egg. ‘It was you they were after.’ I looked up at him, realising only when I saw the amusement in his eyes that he spoke of the goat. It was his judgment on the affair. I did not ask him who they were. The fates, no doubt, or some equivalent of those blind forces that interrupt the ordered course of our lives and set us on paths we have not wilfully chosen to follow. That I had possessed the capacity to have behaved in such an erratic way that night, obedient apparently to an inner force that was neither rational nor sane, seemed to have greatly reassured him. My dependence on him too, it was plain, pleased him no end and seemed to have been the thing that had liberated in him the confidence to speak to me of himself.
One evening, a few days after the accident, he did not watch the television after his meal as usual but came into my room with a box of wood and lit a fire in the brick hearth. He brought a chair with him and when he had lit the fire he sat on the chair tending it. I had been reading Leichhardt’s Journal and I set it aside on the box beside my bed. I was glad of his company and was expecting something from him. He said nothing for some time, but looked across at me once or twice, acknowledging the homeliness of our situation. The wolf-like bitch did not come into my room with him, but lay across the threshold, her head on her paws, her disapproving gaze on her master. My brown dogs were camped beneath us under the floorboards in the dust. This was our small family, reduced—indeed, brought together—by the death of the beautiful nanny-goat. At length Dougald turned from tending the fire and said, ‘You’re going to be laid up here for a while with nothing to do, old mate.’
I reached and touched the book
lying beside my journal and Winifred’s photograph on the box beside my bed. ‘I shall read Leichhardt,’ I said.
He considered the book. ‘I think you’ll soon run through that.’ He looked at me. ‘Then what will you do?’
‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘I may reread it. All good books are better at the second reading.’ He seemed to wait for me. ‘Is there something you would like me to do?’ I asked him.
He indicated my journal with a small fling of his hand. ‘You keep a diary.’
‘It is my journal,’ I said. ‘I don’t write in it every day. It is not really a diary.’
‘Have you written about the nanny?’
‘No.’
‘Will you?’
‘Is that what you want me to write?’
He laughed. ‘Do you think you will write the story of your night with Vita’s little goat?’ he asked. ‘It would be an amusing thing to read.’
‘I’ve not thought of doing so. I don’t think Vita would be amused by it.’
He considered me. He was half-turned from the hearth, in his hand a stick which he had been using to adjust the pieces of wood on the fire. ‘Would you write something for me?’
Although he made the request in a relaxed, even in an offhand way, and without evident anxiety, I sensed that my answer was of great importance to him. ‘I would be very happy to try,’ I said. ‘What is it you want me to write?’