by Alex Miller
I looked across at Dougald, where he sat hunched over the wheel beside me, glowering at the endless road that seemed to stand, vertical and stationary, before us, as if it were a great porphyry obelisk denying us entry into the landscape instead of providing us with a way forward. With his gift of the story of his great-grandfather, Dougald had unknowingly instructed me in my own way forward. I had asked myself since then if it was too late for me to go back and to search the records for my father’s war service. Was it too late for me to write my fiction of his life? For what else might it become but a fiction? I could never again pretend to a sufficient objectivity to write the story of my father’s life and times as history. I had failed at history, and there was no point returning to it. Suppose I uncovered the worst? What then? What if the facts of my father’s story were so dire they refused to yield to the poetics of fiction? Perhaps some things cannot be, and should not be, written as fiction. Perhaps it is only with the detached gravitas of historical scholarship, with words based upon the undeniable facts of documentary records and eyewitness accounts, that some things can be set before the generations that follow us. Perhaps fiction dissolves the pain too readily, and too readily enables us to accept and to absolve ourselves. Acceptance is surely an early stage of forgetting. I had already begun to accept the reality of Winifred’s death, and was this acceptance not the beginning of forgetting the grief of my loss? But we cannot go on accumulating griefs on griefs. Writing the story of Gnapun’s terrible deeds I put on the mask and danced, and the dance exhilarated me. Eventually we accept the ghosts that haunt us and we become their familiars, at which they lose their terrors for us and are soon our playthings. But to make a fiction of the deeds of the generation of my father must inevitably be to humanise those deeds and to betray the truth of what was inhuman, not to preserve it. Perhaps only history can preserve it. So what then, I wondered, had I done with Gnapun’s story if I had not humanised the motives of the perpetrators of the massacre? I needed, I realised, to reread the story in order to know what I had done. To have done it was one thing, but to know what it was that I had done was another. Perhaps I would wish to destroy it when I read it. Was it mine to destroy? Who owned the story now, Dougald or I? Or was it the property of us both? The story satisfied him. It delighted him. It was what he wanted from me. It fulfilled his dream of a continuation. He was possessive of it. He had not returned my journal, but told me he would return it to me once he had entered the story on his computer. But I had seen no sign of him beginning to do this.
As we rattled on along that road all day, my doubts and uncertainties circled around in my head like insistent crows over a cornfield. Suppose one day the descendants of those massacred innocents should come upon my story and see in it a celebration of what had taken place? The thought chilled me. Might it be enough for them that I acknowledged the brotherhood of Gnapun and the leader of the strangers, and that I had seen a biblical parallel in the murder of one brother by the other? I turned to Dougald and shouted above the din of the rattling cabin, ‘Did you bring my journal?’
He did not respond, but gazed down the road like a blind man. So engrossed, so hypnotised was he by the road, he might have forgotten I was beside him. I longed to escape from the vibrating cabin and to stand alone in the stillness of the scrub and to be face to face once again with the fearless, inquiring eye of the yellow robin. For where else but in such creatures can we find the certainty of innocence?
18
Wylah
Late in the afternoon Dougald pulled up in a small town and bought some stores. Before leaving the town we ate a meal in the only café there. The man who served us was Greek and spoke scarcely two words of English. I asked him which island he was from but he did not understand my question. I have never encountered a living soul who seemed to me to be further from his home than this man. He sat on a stool behind his counter and smoked one cigarette after another. His features were without expression as he watched us eat our meal. It was as if he watched the sea at his door. When he saw that we had finished eating he stubbed out his cigarette and walked over to us and collected our dishes without a word, then returned to his dreaming solitude behind the counter and lit another cigarette. Dougald and I were his only customers. We might have been the only customers he had ever had. When we had eaten I thanked him and we drove on. Soon it was as if the town had never existed. I remarked to Dougald, ‘That Greek is a true exile.’ I felt for the fate of the man, as it seemed to touch something in all of us. Dougald said nothing to this. He was preoccupied, his thoughts no doubt far ahead of us in his own country.
I dozed for a time after our meal and when I opened my eyes we had left the scrub behind and were passing through a landscape of vast open downs on which crops had recently been sown. In the distance the ramparts of great cliffs rose abruptly from the plain. Rising behind the cliffs were the soft outlines of a range of wooded mountains and steep valleys. When we came to within a few kilometres of the cliffs, Dougald gave up his anxious embrace of the wheel and squared his shoulders, and he rested against the back of his seat, as if he were satisfied at last that the view before him was not a mirage but was real and would not disappear as we drew close to it, but would soon resolve faithfully into its familiar details. He lifted his hand and pointed. ‘There she is, old mate,’ he said. ‘The Expedition Range.’ He described with his outspread fingers the silvery lines that lay along the flanks of the great rock walls. ‘They are waterfalls,’ he said. ‘They’ve had good rains down this way.’ He spoke as if there had been no tension between us. I looked across at him and he turned to me and smiled, a youthful delight in his eyes. ‘This is it, old mate,’ he said.
I saw how moved he was to see his country once again, and I envied him this reunion with his past and wondered how I might have felt if such a reunion were possible for me. There was, of course, no place such as this that I might return to. Hamburg today is not the city in which I was born, nor is it the place where I grew up, but is a new construction, and the strange and beautiful countryside where my uncle had his farm, and where I encountered the gipsy girl, is no longer countryside but has been transformed into suburban streets and schools and playgrounds and small, mean strips of parkland that are supposed to have preserved something of the countryside for the new inhabitants but which really are no more than a parody of preservation. The sacred hazel coppice of my childhood has long since been covered by concrete and asphalt.
Seeing the look in Dougald’s eyes as he recognised the place of his own boyhood, I understood what a unique privilege it was for him to experience the reassurance of this return after half a century to a country unaltered by time and war and the developments of the twentieth century. It was still the country of his Old People, as he called his ancestors, the term familiar and intimate, as if they were not remote beings whose individual features had been forgotten long ago, but were known to him, and were a people still in occupation of their lands. It was a term that seemed to suggest that the entire colonial enterprise might never have taken place, and that the old reality, like the Old People themselves, had not become extinct but had defied our belief in history and had survived. The Old People, indeed, suggested to me another way altogether of looking at reality and the passage of time than my own familiar historical sense of things, in which change and the fragmentation of epochs and experience is the only certainty.
The waterfalls did not reach the ground but joined together and became a pale drift of mist as they descended, riding across the face of the cliffs like clouds of smoke, glowing pink and orange in the late afternoon sun, touched here and there by the delicate hues of rainbows, the whole scene altering as I observed it. As we drew close to the cliffs Dougald slowed and turned off the narrow dirt road. He eased the truck across a cattle grid and drove on in low gear, at little more than a walking pace, following a meander of half-buried wheel ruts through open woodland towards the base of the stone ramparts. We were soon crossing a meadow dotted about with gracef
ul trees, their black trunks and spreading canopies of slender leaves casting a delicate lacework of shadows on the untrodden grass. These stately trees might have been planted to grace the estate of a landowner hundreds of years in the past. Dougald raised his hand and pointed to them. ‘Here’s your ironbarks, old mate.’
‘So this is it then?’ I said, for he clearly meant me to understand that this was the meadow Gnapun had crossed that early morning, striding through the ground mist on his way to meet the messengers. I was about to say more when he laid his hand on my shoulder, silencing me. He brought the truck to a halt and switched off the motor. He sat at the wheel in the silence examining the country to our left, his lips parted and his eyes narrowed, as if he anticipated something. I followed the direction of his gaze. A hundred metres or so in that direction the grassland ended abruptly and a forest of tall cinnamon-coloured trees began. These tall, elegant trees were evidently unrelated to the ironbarks of the open woodland through which we had been passing. The valley had narrowed around us and we were enclosed now by the naked rock of the grand escarpments. The crimson and purple granite of the cliffs stated the dominance of these stone presences in this picturesque valley as confidently as if they had been the fortress walls of a medieval lord. I was reminded of the towering stones of the fortified acropolis at Lindos, beneath whose vertiginous buttresses I stood in awe with my father in 1948, when I was a boy of twelve. It was the first time I had visited an ancient site of human worship and refuge. Indeed it was the moment I discovered history. Those monumental antique walls, which seemed wedded to the native rock, had awoken in me a longing to become familiar with the mysteries of our human story, and after my father and I returned to our pension that night I told him, I am going to be a historian when I grow up. I can still see my father’s joy. Although he was an engineer, no man I have ever met loved to read history more than my father did. Oswald Spengler’s peculiar and now long-forgotten volume, The Decline of the West, served my father as his Bible, and remained for him throughout his life a consolation to his private disillusion.
Dougald raised his hand and pointed dramatically towards the trees. ‘Old Wylah!’ There was excitement and relief in his voice. ‘See that old fella?’
A large black bird, fully the size of an eagle, detached itself from the topmost branch of the tallest of the cinnamon trees and fell towards the ground in a tumbling flight, like a falling umbrella, flashes of yellow from the undersides of its tail feathers semaphoring as it turned this way then that. Its wailing cry reached us through the silence then; kee-aah, kee-aah, it went, echoing from the cliffs and lingering in the air after the bird itself had vanished from our sight. With a thrill I knew that I had heard the sound of Gnapun’s signal to his men to strike the death blow against those doomed settlers. I saw the scene that day, the leader’s wife standing by the trellis in the garden looking off towards the clouds that bloomed above the hills, her dark hair shining in the sunlight, the blue ribbon in her hat lifting in the breeze, then settling back and resting on the flowers of her dress. It was Winifred I saw, and she was young and beautiful and in love. I realised Dougald was watching me. I said, ‘So that was him then?’ I had readily acknowledged the cry of the falling bird as Dougald’s welcome to his country. It was in Dougald that I witnessed the truth of this, not in myself. I began to understand from that moment that he had needed me to be with him there in the country of his Old People in order to bear witness to his truth. I could see in his happiness how his great-grandfather’s welcome offered him the spiritual comfort he had longed for during his years of exile, and how it permitted him to know himself to be truly at home once again. It was a great moment for Dougald. One of those moments in our lives when things turn out exactly as we had hoped they would. Wylah’s cry of welcome restored to Dougald a former state of confidence and wellbeing, and from this moment on his manner was for some time more youthful and more self-assured than I had ever known it to be during my brief acquaintance with him.
‘That was him, old mate,’ he said.
My uncle might have known something of Dougald’s emotion at this moment of his reunion with his country. But no one from the city, no worker with the mind, no one who had dealt in the currency of unbelief as I had all of my adult life, could have known the restoration of wellbeing Dougald knew just then.
We sat for a time, silent with each other, looking through the windscreen of the cabin towards the base of the trees where we had seen the falling bird. At last Dougald started the motor and drove off the trail and through the untracked grass to the edge of the timber. When he had manoeuvred the truck closely in among the trees, he switched off the motor. ‘Me and Grandfather camped here while we fenced this place,’ he said, as if he imparted the most ordinary kind of information to me, the emotion of his arrival behind him now. ‘We lived here for a year.’ He gestured at the meadow behind us and towards the valley where it slid narrowly between the cliffs. ‘We split fence posts all through here.’ He pointed. ‘See that stump? Me and Grandad sawed that old ironbark one fine morning and split more than a hundred posts out of her before lunch.’ He looked at me and grinned. He seemed capable of splitting a hundred posts before lunch again if he had a mind to do it. ‘We’ll have a drink of tea before we set up camp,’ he said, and he opened his door and stepped down from the cabin. He paused and looked up at me. ‘How’s that ankle holding up?’
‘It’s fine,’ I said. It wasn’t, but I was not going to complain. I looked down at him and thought of how he must have been as a boy here, big and strong and willing, working alongside his grandfather, the violent days of his own father behind him. Setting the knob of my walking stick in the palm of my hand, I opened the door and stepped to the ground. The stick had become a welcome new part of me. I liked it. I liked the feel of it. Once safely down I stood and breathed the sweet cool air and leaned on my stick. There was a sound of water tumbling over stones. As I stood there listening, it seemed to be the very sound, I swear, of the voices of schoolgirls in a glade confiding secrets to one another. I was moved and astonished to find myself alone with this man in such a place so late in my life. I wanted to know the names of the trees and shrubs and grasses, the flowers and the birds, and it seemed to me just then that it would have been a grand thing to be a familiar of this place. My two brown dogs were making off across Gnapun’s meadow in pursuit of something, their rumps bouncing along. They were happy dogs. I whistled to them and they paused and looked back at me a moment then ran on. There was the sudden intense smell of wood smoke. I turned to see Dougald squatting by a crackling pile of sticks. He was like a boy on holiday. I hoped my ankle would not let us down tomorrow when we were to climb into the escarpment.
19
Visitors
Dougald picked up his haversack and shrugged into it, his head to one side as he adjusted the straps. In the darkness he looked like a woman adjusting the straps of her brassiere. It was one of those old khaki packs sold in army surplus stores the world over. ‘It will be light soon,’ he said, and with that he set off. I lurched after him.
We crossed the river where the water ran shallowly over a wide stretch of stones. This morning it did not gossip but murmured privately to itself—of secret things, perhaps, or even prayers to strange gods. It was the ghostly form of his bitch I followed, not him. He had quickly merged with the deep shadows of the far bank. My old town shoes were soaked at once, and I slipped and tottered on the smooth stones, flailing his mother’s stick wildly in the air as I struggled to keep myself from falling into the water. I came out of the river behind the bitch and started up the sandy incline. The stick was more use to me here. I planted it in the resistant sand and it took my weight loyally as I heaved myself upward, my shoes squelching and filling with sand. By the time I made it to the top of the bank Dougald had already disappeared in among the solid shadows of the trees, his shape there a moment then gone. I stumbled forward into the trees, trusting I was still on the right path, brushing aside the small branc
hes and ducking under the large ones. A moment later I came out of the trees and there he was ahead of me, standing looking up at the escarpment. I was breathing heavily and wondering at my chances of staying the distance. The way forward was barred by a sheer rock face of grey stone.
‘We’re not climbing that,’ I said as I came up to him. We might have been pilgrims arrived at the wall of a fortress. Was this as far as we would go? I asked myself, did Dougald really remember his way about this country, or had he already taken a wrong turn?
He murmured something that I did not catch and began picking his way with care along the base of the cliff. Great tumbled rocks lay about everywhere. I followed him with difficulty, greatly concerned that I would utterly destroy my injured ankle at any moment. I would have liked to stop to empty the water and sand from my socks and shoes, but I was afraid to pause in case I lost sight of him.