There is a blank line, then Kupka bids farewell to Elkin: it is his farewell to the tropics, and to northern travels and the pursuit of art. In years to come, he would present himself as a man of rigour and of science; he would rewrite his studies of the first Australian painters; he would be cured at last of his collecting passion, and his desire to find a home. He signs his name, once more, at the end of this letter, which has all the force of a testament, or a confession: “Yours – very sincerely – Karel” – and the correspondence comes to its end.
I listened to the sounds of the archives, flowing round me. I glanced down again at the page; it was smudged. At that moment, the young attendant came over from the far side of the room and bent down beside me, almost kneeling at my desk.
“Please,” she whispered, “be careful not to damage the letters.”
“What do you mean?” I whispered back.
“You look full of grief,” she said. “We can’t have tears falling on the page.” I touched my fingers to my eyes.
“I’m sorry,” I said.
“It’s not allowed,” she went on, smiling slightly.
“Not allowed?”
“You’re not allowed to be sad, in a library, or archive. Didn’t you know?”
“I know some,” I said, “where sadness seems to be obligatory.” “On the contrary: that’s not the way it’s meant to be. Archives are where things live on, and memories triumph. This is where the pain of the past is redeemed – and sadness falls into its place.”
A week later, when I came back to Darwin, I found a message from my friend George Chaloupka, the founding genius of north Australian rock-art research, a man of the greatest charm and sweetness, and the mainstay, through both his company and conversation, of my northern life. George had been away on a trip with his grandchildren back to his native Bohemia; I had not seen him since setting out on my brief journey down the Kupka trail. We arranged to meet at one of our regular points of rendezvous, the Sailing Club veranda on the foreshore of Fannie Bay. I found him there, at the appointed hour, seated alone, beyond the crowds, looking out to sea – and at once I began to tell him the news of all my discoveries: the Madonna in the cathedral, the secret story of her origins, the records unknown in the archives, the letters lying like hidden treasure, in distant Sydney, in the Elkin files. I went into fine detail: it was a warm, moist evening, fit for slow, unfurling conversations: the tide was low; the sun, almost wholly masked by clouds and rain veils, was just setting; we had reached that soft, magic time when the light begins to lose its definition and the whole of Darwin seems poised on the brink of vegetal decay.
“And what do you really think you were looking for,” George asked me, “in all this story of Kupka’s life?”
“A rhyme – a parallel,” I said, surprised by the directness of the question, which was most unlike him. I shrugged. I ran on, building great castles of theory for him, as though my own motivations were wholly hidden from me, and they could only be established with the most elaborate analytic efforts. I told him how Kupka had gone down paths that I was following, that he was a forebear, that it was quite natural to want to know the story of a figure of such glamour from the far past.
“The far past,” George echoed, with a certain irony.
“Yes: it’s natural to seek to reclaim people from the murk of time. Don’t you ever feel you can come close to knowing what people have felt; that you can animate them, bring them alive by living in their words? Isn’t that something of the secret appeal of history – as much as understanding the past, or knowing the roots of the present, isn’t it just a longing to be elsewhere, to ease the burden of the self?”
“No,” said George, frowning, and staring at the horizon. “But it does sound like the kind of thing Kupka might have said.”
“I didn’t realise that you knew him!”
“You never asked. It’s true, his name doesn’t ever seem to come up. I suppose that’s because we generally spend our time talking about Aboriginal issues – like most people in Darwin. But his path and mine crossed, quite frequently, in fact, in the days when he was here. That was only natural: we were both Bohemians, both foreigners, in a small town. We spoke Czech together. I knew him, to the extent he could be known, or wanted to be known. He cut a very distinctive figure, of course, in those days.”
“Tell me.”
George began, and as he spoke, at last Kupka shimmered into being for me: no longer was he just a printed name, or a fleeting image in old photographs. His tone of voice, his way of speaking, his gait, the set of his hooded eyes – George caught all these things, and his subject’s quiet evasiveness. It was a striking portrait; it had the sharp, resistant feel of life.
“He must have made quite an impact on you,” I said.
“Of course – he was exotic, when I first met him here, in the ’60s. He reminded me very much then of my own father: he was a civilised European, a being from another time. But there was something tormented about him, in that he was far away from his background and had been forced to become an émigré: he didn’t want to return home – he knew his own culture was in chains. He told me about his life in Paris, how he moved among the refugees and intellectuals; how he gave one of his pictures as a gift to Picasso. That all made an impression on me: it was very different from the life he was leading in Darwin, staying at the church, or with that big, noisy accountant, Gerry Kostka, who was the town’s unofficial Czech ambassador back then, or at the old hostel near the Esplanade. I can still picture him as he was in those days: he was thin, and distinguished, and he knew that he was a striking figure – but there always was a kind of silence at the core of him. I found it quite frightening, the wave of loneliness that came from him sometimes.”
“Maybe that was the silence of a man of faith,” I hazarded.
“No, no.” George laughed. “He didn’t impress me as a serious Catholic. He had only one interest in life. He made a religion out of art, and his collecting. That was always what we spoke about: it was impossible to have a conversation with him that didn’t veer back to that subject. I can still remember when he had just assembled his first great collection from Arnhem Land: it was 1963 – I saw it all before it left the country. The Methodist Overseas Mission had a storeroom in Knuckey Street, and Kupka displayed his pieces there to the representatives of the Welfare Branch, to show them what he was taking away. Some of the pieces were incredible. One was a forked log, bound with string all the way up: it was seven feet high, and overmodelled with the most intricate designs. It was clearly a ceremonial object. He was a remarkable collector – he got the best of everything – and he even became part of the tradition, in a sense. If you look closely at the pieces that he chose, you can see the change in the work of the artists he was collecting, you can see them developing: he pointed them in the direction they followed later in their lives. He stood at the very outset of the Aboriginal painting movement: and perhaps it was in that way, that diagonal way, only, that he was able to fulfil his ambitions in the world of art.”
George fell silent. The noise from the waves, and the voices from the sailing club, washed over us. There was a long pause, in which the past’s weight, and the sweetness of recalling it, seemed palpable, and one could almost feel the speed with which our experiences of each moment turn into the stuff of memory, and rush away. “There was one last time that Kupka came to see me here,” George said, eventually. “It must have been on the final collecting trip he made. I was in the old house, in my studio downstairs. I was still painting in those days, like him, and he knew by then that I was involved in studying the rock art of Arn-hem Land. And by that stage I had collected a handful of early works from Port Keats, and pieces by Midjawu-Midjawu, which he wanted. He had a beautiful sculpture with him. We made an exchange – although I seem to recall that he gave me a carving of a dugong in the end, instead.”
“You didn’t mind?”
“No – of course not: he was a collector. What else could you expect
? It wasn’t money that drove him. We stayed in touch – he sent me cards, in Czech, but they’re all gone now. They went with the cyclone, like everything from that time. I could never entirely forget about Kupka, though. I had the odd, strong sense that he knew something – some secret thing about the North. At any rate, many years later, when I went back to Europe on a research trip of my own and passed through Paris, I went to visit him. He was living in a garret, on the Left Bank …”
“Place Saint-Sulpice,” I said, in triumph.
“Exactly. He seemed to survive there on next to nothing. All the money he spent was on cigarettes: Gauloises, the blue ones – the ones he could never get when he was on his travels in the North. I was only there for a few days. I spent as much time as I could with him, in the galleries, and bookshops, and cafés. He would lead the way on our long walks through the streets, dancing ahead through the boulevard traffic, stopping the cars with his outstretched hands. We spoke a great deal, about the past and our respective journeys out of Czechoslovakia; his longing to go back, and the way all that had come to nothing. One evening, he took me to a restaurant nearby, his favourite. It specialised in the cuisine of the Lorraine: it was very heavy food, dreadful – all sausages and sauerkraut.”
“Maybe it helped him to feel at home: it must have been the closest thing to Czech food in that part of Paris.”
“Who knows?” said George, rather pointedly failing to leap to the defence of his native land’s culinary traditions. “I can only recall brief flashes of what we discussed: it was a talk that left me feeling on edge. He told me how difficult it had been for him to renounce the hopes he had for Australia; to realise that he was at home, at rest, nowhere.”
“But he was a cosmopolitan,” I said. “Or he became one.”
“And I wonder if all that explains something of the appeal he holds for you,” George continued. “That longing he had, to remake himself in the image of the northern landscape. That sense of Darwin as the place that might save him, although of course it’s a place that tends to take things away: youth, love, hope.”
“Life, in the end, in fact?”
“Naturally: but it didn’t claim him, although he always used to say he thought those dark mission luggers were machines of fate. And I wonder how his story ended?”
That tale is quickly told. After his breakdown, and slow recovery, there was a shift in Kupka’s path through life. He pursued his new vocation: he recast himself as an anthropologist and carried out his researches in Paris, at the Documentation Centre for Oceania, under the flinty eye of the Pacific specialist Jean Guiart. Kupka had already donated most of his private collection of works from Arnhem Land to the Musée des Arts Africains et Océaniens: and it was in a gallery of this museum, filled with these familiar objects, like a room full of approving friends, that he defended his doctoral thesis, which dealt with questions of anonymity in primitive art. In 1972 he gave away the remainder of his sculptures to the museum. Soon afterwards Aboriginal Painters of Australia, the austere summation of his studies, appeared in print as a special publication of the Société des Océanistes. It was little read, but greatly prized, and even in recent years one could find copies, kept like some set of Torah scrolls, in the closed recesses of the Musée de l’Homme.
Kupka made trips back to northern Australia, but they were brief: he passed almost unseen. He devoted himself to tracing the genealogies of the artists he had known and encouraged, almost all of whom had died long before – and these researches, and their implications, occupied him for many years, although he published nothing further. His health began to fail; his place in the world of art had long since been eclipsed, and he played no part in the great upsurge of enthusiasm for Aboriginal barks and desert paintings that began in the 1980s and rages to this day. A sketch of Kupka in the last phase of his life was set down in a memoir by his friend Michèle Souef. She was present at his bedside in the Hôpital Cognac-Jay on 14 January 1993, when a team of doctors and nurses came calling, anxiety and compassion in their eyes – but soon, as she describes, they found themselves caught up in conversation with their dying patient. Kupka leaned up on his arm, and outlined for them his last conviction: art, he told them, should not be judged from an aesthetic viewpoint. No, he insisted, fighting for breath: it was nothing more, nor less, than an attempt to communicate. The next day was his last. In his apartment high above the Place Saint-Sulpice a few surviving tokens of his artistic youth were found: a box of paint tubes, a palette and brushes, an empty frame or two, a handful of rough, unfinished portrait sketches, with purple highlights, made during his first trips to Milingimbi mission decades before. Not one work of Aboriginal art remained in his possession: the prince of collectors had kept nothing for himself.
In the first shipment of barks Kupka had brought back with him from Arnhem Land to France, one work stood out in his mind as both the finest and the most unsettling: this was the sorcery bark from Croker Island, which he gave André Breton as a sign of his friendship following the French publication of Dawn of Art. It was also very dear to Breton, who loved “these strips of eucalyptus, pollen-dusted,” and viewed them as devices that could transport man through time. Indeed, in Breton’s eyes this bark was a magic entity, “as discreet as the Mimi spirits of Australian myth, who at the slightest alert breathe on a crack in the rock until it opens to let them pass.”
It was one of the jewels in Breton’s collection, the dominating, all-consuming centre of his life, a trove of curiosities and wonders without equal in modern times. Breton’s studio, filled with masks and surrealist objects, with shells and stuffed animals and tribal carvings, stayed intact for many years after his death, but its contents were eventually sold off, amidst protests, at the Parisian auction house of Drouot-Richelieu. Among the early lots was the sorcery painting of the two spirit figures – the piece which had first opened Karel Kupka’s eyes to the potency of Aboriginal art. There was little bidding: as swiftly as a breath, it passed into unknown hands.
Belief
I
Even before I went to the Middle East, I had spent many hours discussing the Holy Land with various Kimberley friends of mine, who were desert-born and had long since been captivated by the imagery of wilderness they encountered in the pages of the New Testament. Was it sand-dune country over there, like their own, they asked me? Were there many snakes living in the wastes where Jesus underwent his ordeal of forty days and forty nights, and if so what kind; and how exactly did the cloud formations gather and disperse above Bethlehem in the wet season’s early days: would I be sure to check? I often promised that I would pay special attention to such questions, and from time to time, during my travels between countries, exchanges like this would come back to me: I would glance out at the harsh landscapes lining the airport freeways, and think back to the sandhills of the western deserts, and the bloodwoods, and the waving pattern of the spinifex.
In quieter spells, if I found myself away from the front-line, in Israel or in Jordan, I sometimes ventured out to ancient ruins or religious sites, and while I made these little explorations I would cast my mind back and try to imagine what might interest that waiting, distant audience: so that much of my immersion in the Bible landscape in those months was through Aboriginal eyes, and whenever I was drawing near some place of Christian pilgrimage, I would feel myself, as if by some fleeting act of magic, returned to the Australian inland. The mountains of Samaria, the ravines of the Jordan rift valley, the coastline of the Dead Sea, the cities of the plain – in my thoughts they all rhymed with the far reaches of the Gibson Desert, and with the gaunt, mirage-torn ranges that lead off from the mid-section of the Canning Stock Route into nothing and the shimmer of the sky.
On many of these biblical excursions, I was careful to take snapshots of the scenery, and I sent these back, in emails, to the Kimberley art centres I knew well, at Turkey Creek or Fitzroy Crossing, marvelling at the incongruity of modern life, that allows one so freely to stitch together worlds and times. S
ometimes I would even receive a brief reply, usually with a vast picture file of desert country attached – but as luck would have it, almost always these responses reached me only after long delays, and at moments of tension, in bleak corners of Syria or Iraq. I might be hunched in an internet café, bodyguard at my side, hurrying to transmit some story – or it might be late at night, and I would be leaning halfway out of some back-street hotel window, balancing my satellite receiver on the sill, struggling to keep a signal and turning the angle of its disc to find the best reception, while the wait for the incoming messages stretched on. Then abruptly, there it was on the screen: word from the bush, usually rather peremptory, and including detailed instructions for further pictorial research.
Most often, though, it was Jerusalem that served as backdrop for my forays into the Christian past: each time I was dispatched there I would set off on walks through the old city as soon as my day’s reporting tasks were done. Once through the Damascus Gate, the logic of the crowded streets and passages took over: I would find myself heading from busy market squares through run-down, deserted alleyways, past madrasas and monasteries and synagogues arrayed in the most promiscuous confusion alongside each other. There was nothing for it: on those afternoons in old Jerusalem, I resolved to have no aim in mind. I followed my most immediate impulses and inclinations, and almost invariably they were enough to bring me by odd routes to well-known places: the Via Dolorosa, the Armenian Cathedral, the police fort with its languid throng of taxi-drivers, the gateway to David’s Citadel.
The Red Highway Page 7