“Doubtless,” he said, “you are seeking the Virgin.”
“I am?”
“Of course. Why else would you be here?”
“Couldn’t one just come in to see the beauties of the cathedral?”
“Only the lost and hopeless come in here,” he said, rather firmly. “I may be blind, as you can see – but I’m not weak in the head. The church has no more meaning now: the tide of faith has ebbed away. Those in the flow of life rush by outside. Those without a place come here.” He smiled at me, triumphantly. “Those like myself, for instance: exiles.”
“From where?”
“East Timor, of course: almost everyone of distinction in Darwin comes from Timor.”
“And you were never tempted to return, after the liberation?”
“The Timor I knew will never come back,” he said. “The past is safe only in my memory.”
He spread his hands, as if to express the elusive sadness of all creatures caught in the flow of time.
“Shall we?”
“Shall we what?”
“Go to see her – the Madonna of the Aborigines.” He made me a gesture, to show that I should take his arm; together, at a slow pace, we shuffled soundlessly towards the far transept while my companion told me, in several unfolding streams of narrative at once, the story of the coming of the Catholic faith to his own country, the adventures of the cathedral’s wounded, shrapnel-pierced angel, and the saga of the Madonna herself, her theft and her mysterious return. “And you know her most important attribute?”
“I’m afraid I know very little about her.”
“She listens. The Madonna listens. That was the intention of the artist who created her, who gave her life: an exile like myself, the Czech painter Kupka: you’ve heard of him?”
Perhaps at this, I gave a start.
“You’re surprised? You know his art? You know his story?”
“Since you ask,” I said, “I do feel that things are lining up inside my head – and that I’m coming to know it, bit by bit.”
We were in the transept now: my companion pointed up, his arm trembling lightly on mine: “There she is: how beautifully he drew the lines of her face!”
I craned my neck upwards, towards a large canvas, high above us, well out of reach, edged by a thin wood frame. The light was poor; the glare was sharp – so much so that it was almost impossible at first to make out a thing.
“Can you see them?” he asked. “The clan designs – and the look on the Virgin’s face: the wisdom and the knowledge in her eyes?” I peered through the murk.
“There seems to be some damage,” I said to him. “There’s a slash of purple, at her neck, or beneath her arm: it looks almost as if the undercoat has been exposed.”
“Not at all! That is the artist’s genius: his way of catching the iridescence of her skin. The mother of God is made flesh before you – and she has the body of a young Aboriginal woman. That faint purple is the holy colour – it is Kupka’s own way of expressing the grace and shimmer of God’s will. I know it. He told me.”
“You knew him?”
“When I was much younger. He confided in me: it was as if we were brothers. I know his story well. He felt he was at home here – among friends. We spent time together: I travelled with him on his first journeys, on the mission lugger, out to the Daly and to Bathurst Island. He wrote me letters, long letters, after he left Darwin – for many years. And then – just like that, without warning, or any word to say goodbye – he vanished from my life. You can hear many rumours about this painting, but none of them are true. Karel spoke to me about the Virgin: often. There are people who still say she is a portrait of a woman from the Tiwi Islands, or from Daly River mission.”
“And who is she – really?”
“There is a hidden tale that I can tell.” He dropped his voice down, and whispered: “A tale few people have heard: it is a love painting!”
And with this he launched into a complex story, clutching at my arm for emphasis whenever he reached a point of special intensity: how Kupka, on one of his first field trips to Yirrkala mission, had met a young woman from north-east Arnhem Land; how her totem, the crested tern, had remained an obsession of his in later life; how this secret romance, which came, like all the greatest loves, to nothing, and had been founded on the vainest of delusions, lay encoded in the patterns of the background behind the Virgin’s head; how the Madonna’s face, which had so struck the bishop and the priests of the diocese with its calm, contemplative expression, was in truth a portrait, painted with all the care and precision of romantic love.
“So it’s a profane painting?”
“If you truly believe love is a profane emotion, then I feel sorry for you,” said my companion, with the air of a man recalling a labyrinth of ancient trysts and star-crossed liaisons. He flared his nostrils dramatically.
“And when” – I hesitated – “when did you last see the Virgin?”
“You mean this painting? But I see her internally: with my mind’s eyes. Her feelings are communicated directly to me. I have never seen her as you see her – but I can promise you I know her more than you can – and I see her more. I know every line and shading of her face – even though I have been blind since birth.”
With a little flourish, he relinquished, at that point, my arm, and lifted up his dark glasses: the skin beneath them was lined and mottled. I could now see the declivities of his eyes, and I could not help myself from trembling slightly as I looked at them, for the lids had been neatly, with fine, even stitches, sewn closed.
Weeks passed after this chance meeting, and insensibly Kupka came more and more into my life. I met curators who had studied his collections, and anthropologists who knew his later work; and there were even brief references to his travels in a private memoir I was given from the time when outstations were being set up in the North. Soon, in the Darwin parliamentary library, I found a copy of his doctoral thesis on bark paintings, which had been published, complete with grainy photographs, as an academic text: it had been shelved, seemingly by accident, together with the histories of the Northern Territory Football League. In the musty stacks, perched on a metal stool, I skimmed with mounting frustration through its pages: they were written in the driest and most formal of styles, and betrayed nothing of the writer’s inward thoughts during his trajectory through Arnhem Land. Impelled by this flurry of new findings, and feeling by now almost as if my search for Kupka had become the great task of my return, I called in the next day at the office of the Catholic diocese in Parap. They had no leads: their records, like almost all of Darwin’s written past, had been devastated during Cyclone Tracy’s onslaught on the Christmas Eve of 1974. At their suggestion, I made a journey out to the Tiwi Islands, to visit the little church at Nguiu and the historical display preserved there by the sisters of the Sacred Heart – but all memory of Kupka’s Tiwi days had gone. Even the old missionaries I tracked down from Milingimbi, where he spent months on end, could call to mind little about their artistic visitor, beyond his fondness for French cigarettes and his overbearing ways.
Eventually, the widening circles of this quest brought me to that memory-refuge of last resort, the Commonwealth archives, a low building, almost invisible to the casual passer-by and well defended against the elements. Just beyond its walls runs the six-lane highway skirting Darwin International Airport, but within its cool reading rooms, which are invariably deserted, one has no sense of what lies outside. All seem permanently calm and sylvan: indeed, the central courtyard is thick with ferns and tropical palms, and even the photographs of old Darwin on the walls seem to conjure up the days of creeping vegetation and endless silence, when the town lay, almost unchanging year by year, lost in its own thoughts, and far beyond the boundaries of the active world. This air of pensiveness was reinforced, over the days I spent researching there, by a mood of pervasive grief. The director of the archives, Phyllis Williams, a woman of the most tranquil elegance, and a traditional owner o
f the rich rock-art sites round Mount Borradaile, was in mourning: her father had recently passed away. Phyllis was still wearing black, and I would catch sight of her from time to time, passing slowly through the research rooms, skirting the desks and microfilm readers, looking around with wide, distracted eyes. Her sadness had transmitted itself to many of her staff, who remained both subdued and silent, as though they had experienced losses of their own – with the result that the archives felt like a temple of reflection, where the past’s distance was a cause for continuing and profound lament. One by one, in solemn manner, the research assistants would approach me and hand me new batches of departmental files covering the years of Kupka’s visits to Milingimbi, which I studied dutifully, for hours on end, but almost all of them proved of little consequence. Another document, though, caught my eye: it was a brief record, noting Kupka’s intention to apply for naturalisation, and to remain in Australia. It dated from the time of his greatest triumph, when he had already gathered up his first collections of Aboriginal paintings and held his early European exhibitions, and the manuscript of Dawn of Art was beginning to take form.
That evening I went back to my copy of the book, looking for some trace of this intention, and I noticed for the first time the brief, stiff preface by Elkin, Kupka’s great protector, the controlling father-figure of Australian anthropology. Perhaps, I thought to myself, Elkin might have remained in contact, in later years, with his elusive protégé – and I even mentioned this idea to a friend of mine who knew the field.
“Elkin!” he said at once. “Elkin was a force of nature. He was in contact with everybody. No one in the history of this continent ever maintained so wide a correspondence, or preserved it so well. He was obsessional: he kept neat carbon copies of every letter that he sent. You should take a look at the Elkin collection: it’s kept at Sydney University – and it’s astonishing! It’s like a secret repository of every intellectual conversation that took place in the Australian twentieth century – every idea you dreamed of reading, every exchange you know must have happened but you could never find: there are traces of them or clues to them all in there. The librarians have it all kept in smart red boxes and sand-coloured files, as if it was arranged in some supreme order, but in fact it’s the wildest mix of dates and domains and subjects – and that produces unusual effects if you just leaf through: it becomes like some anthropological hallucination, full of jump-cuts. You’re always going from one mind to another: Strehlow, Thomson, Wentworth, Petri – everybody, from every walk of life, jumbled up together like prisoners in Elkin’s social net. Why not give them a call? They would be sure to have some idea of who wrote to the professor, and when.”
I took this advice, and was soon in conversation with the University’s reference archivist.
“And what exactly are you looking for?” she asked me, in her warm voice, quite kindly: the question reverberated down the line. She asked again.
“The letters of a Czech artist – an obscure, unknown artist.”
“You mean Kupka?”
“Maybe he’s not that obscure,” I said.
“Oh, he’s obscure – but that’s alright. We’re archivists, we like obscurity. And obscure people sometimes become famous.”
“Perhaps,” I said, feeling drawn in by this exchange, “with enough study, everyone in the past will eventually become famous.”
“But that would be the same as being obscure, if fame was a universal condition, wouldn’t it? I can put those files aside for you. In fact, more researchers seem to be mentioning Kupka’s name these days, although he’s been out of the limelight for years. It’s almost as if people are starting to realise that he leads on to interesting places.”
Shortly after this, my journalistic duties took me down to Sydney. Once there, I made an appointment to visit the Elkin archives, which are housed in a special suite of rooms on the top floor of the Fisher Library, overlooking the University’s lush parklands. Midway through a cool clear morning I took my place there at a narrow desk, alongside several grave-faced researchers who had the air of experts engaged in tasks of many years’ duration. A selection of filing boxes, brick red, and elaborately labelled, according to a complex numerical code, exactly as my friend had described them, was waiting for me: “Series 44. Box 222. Box 223.” They contained the great professor’s general correspondence for a selection of periods, and strewn through them was a scatter of aerogrammes sent to him by Karel Kupka. These stood out at once, for they were hand-written, and in a small, distinctively slanted script, the tops of the letters curving slightly, like fields of windswept corn. I began reading through them, lulled by the sound of pages being turned alongside me and the gentle breathing of the other men and women in the reading room – and often my attention would wander, and be drawn to different sets of letters in the files, until the whole day had passed and I had barely made any inroads into my pile of documents. Only after long hours in that room did the blur of Kupka’s life begin to take on a faint definition, in stray remarks appended at the end of his letters, or in the more systematic accounts he offered Elkin of his progress – and I felt something like the joy of a detective whenever I came on one of these little autobiographies. Their fragmentary nature lent them a kind of clarity, in the way details in ill-lit photographic images leap out to the eye. Slowly, from them, the story of Kupka’s passage to Australia became plain: he had arrived in hope, and left in shadow; he kept returning, almost in secret, like a ghost, until the last years of his life, which were drenched in the sadness of a constant retrospect. There were letters full of his love for northern landscape, and pleas for Elkin’s help in securing academic posts. There was the saga of the collection he amassed in the ’60s, and the rivalries that surrounded it. I reached the time of his return to Europe; his Parisian career began. I was reading faster – I found myself caught up in his story; he came alive, I felt the dance and pulse inside his words; then my eyes fell on a letter in broken, uneven script. All about me seemed quiet. I bent over, and traced the lines.
The letter had been written in Kupka’s little attic near Saint-Sulpice, and was dated from December 1968: it veered eccentrically between languages, and there was a tormented tone about it, as if its words had been ground out in the entrance to some hidden hell.
“Dear Professor,” he begins: “How many months it is I have written to you for the last time. They were so busy for me that I truely don’t remember.” He winds on into a tale of art: his hopes as a painter, and his fears: his abrupt decision to abandon this path. “I am becoming an apprentice ethnographer,” he then announces, but a gloom, by this stage, has taken hold of him, and it is this mood that guides his pen. “If everybody would receive me at least with half of the goodwill and friendliness you have always given to me. More than anything else, I would like to extend my research by filling gaps rather than by searching for the ‘new’ – which is problematic to find in our days anyway.”
Elkin, perhaps as much bemused by the shift in his correspondent’s style as the change in his avowed profession, replies in rather non-committal manner, offering up the local news from northeast Arnhem Land. It is not good: a shadow hangs over one of the settlements where Kupka secured his collection’s finest gems. “Yir-rakalla is going to be overwhelmed with the development of the bauxite mining,” the professor writes – and perched as we are now, much further down the track of progress, when an alumina refinery glints in the waters of Melville Bay, it would be hard to dissent too much from this prophecy. Elkin seeks for some upbeat, encouraging words to send his correspondent: “I hope,” he continues, “that some day you will return to Australia to see what the artists are doing.” But the prospects of such a future unfolding were limited, for Kupka’s thoughts were elsewhere now, and he had already, in an increasingly fractured script and broken English, given Elkin a sketch of the events that swept down on him during a brief trip back to his home country in the tumultuous mid-year of 1968: “My summer holiday was not really successful.
Going to see, after more than twenty years, the Czechoslovakia, I have chosen the ‘right’ moment: to see the Russian occupation was a ghastly experience. Yours – very sincerely – Karel.”
I leafed on through the remainder of the file. Nothing. I tried the next. For some while, I scanned on, through the ceaseless stream of letters sent to Elkin, all of them promptly answered in the professor’s cool, Olympian prose. From time to time, for relief, I would walk out from the reading room to the landing, and stare out through the floor-length window. Far below was the courtyard; the figures of students gathered, clustered and then separated, in sharp, spasmodic rhythms, much like cells growing and dividing in some accelerated scientific film. Across the lawns, and the tops of the trees, I could see the deep sandstone of the university’s mock-gothic cloister; it was the haunting colour of low bluffs and ridges in desert country. Elkin wrote again, but no reply came back – for more than a year, until December 1969 – by when the political opening in Kupka’s native country had been stifled:
Soviet forces restored order; the embrace of the state was slowly re-imposed. Whole lives were played out in the aftershock of those events, which held the world’s eyes once, but now seem nothing more than a detail in history’s winding channels, a deserted, half-forgotten anabranch in the flow of human time.
“15 December 1969.” I gazed down at Kupka’s letter: I knew what I was reading even before I made out the words. Stray thoughts ran through my mind: guilt; pleasure; the indifference that comes at the conclusion of the hunt. So here it was: the darkness in my precursor’s world. How little a life’s course comes down to. How little remains: a few words, a judgment here and there – ideas that form, and scatter, and leave scarcely a trace. All through the early pages of his letter, Kupka struggles for a smooth and tranquil voice. He paints a portrait of his country under martial law; he concentrates his efforts: it is as if he feels the press of Elkin’s viewing eyes. He describes to the professor his newest project: an exhibition, just staged in Prague, of Aboriginal bark paintings from Arnhem Land, and its reception, and the relief it offered from the city’s daily life. He even sketches his longing to work again in Australia, he dreams of coming back there, as if it was his true and chosen home – but then the other world intrudes, and he is back at once in dark, bleak Prague: “To see the despair of all that good-willing people who were hoping to build a state-utopia, and were so brutally stopped, to find again, after more than twenty years, my family and old friends – and leave them again in their bitterness, was a little bit too much for me. It was no doubt a main reason for a serious nervous trouble which needed recently an energic treatment for about a month. I am recovering slowly, trying to think only about work, and extension of my research.”
The Red Highway Page 6