The Pages

by Murray Bail

  Rosie would like a postcard of it. I couldn’t imagine what Roger would make of it.

  Whether it was seeing Mondrian’s messy painting, or writing the New South Wales address on the postcards, or the postcards of the painting combined with the Holbein ‘landscape’, or what – for the first time I had thoughts of returning home. It was about time I stayed in the one spot.

  I would pass through Amsterdam, quickly gather my thoughts in Germany.

  — How to avoid becoming blunt and plain-thinking again. It happened if and when a stranger spoke to me on a train, in a park, on a bridge. Once having spoken – where do I go from here?

  It had become part of my blundering about. Watch it!

  Little point visiting Prague. After a day I left. The river rushing through the centre of Geneva – cold and bottle-green. It continually carried history along with it (history from I don’t know where – from other countries?). To stand on one of the bridges, looking down, drew me into the flow and the flow of time, and quite separate the flow of consciousness which passes at a steady rate through us. While considering this, I didn’t notice any of the locals leaning over the bridge, lost in thought.

  It is a struggle.

  At any given moment there are signals, movements, metal and flesh, temperatures, opinions of others, corrections, differences of time, and other obscurities competing for our impressions. How to make sense of it; what to avoid (like the painter of landscapes).

  Almost everything seen will be forgotten. Very little of what I saw did I actually experience.

  On a canal in northern France a small girl on a barge was going higher and higher on a swing set up by her father, a carefree, semi-circular movement in contrast to the horizontal forward movement of the barge. Why this insignificant image has remained is beyond me. To any beggar holding out their hand I gave a coin. (That’s something in my day you didn’t often see in Australia – beggars.) The town of two rivers. So I turned to the man in the bus. ‘It is more than twice as interesting.’ As for me, the ancient stone bridges are an impediment. On the footpath outside the bar in view of the container docks, Rotterdam, I looked on as three men in orange boilersuits fought with bottles, a matter of standing back and estimating their chances until the police arrived. Europe’s systematic cultivation – the place has been levelled, squared up to within an inch of its life. The different densities of green. There’s no such thing as a brown paddock. No sooner would I choose a café, and sit out in the sun to enjoy a ham or a cheese sandwich than I began thinking of the paddocks at home where not a thing moves. In these circumstances, as I sat and allowed my thoughts to focus, an English newspaper on my knee had more importance than it deserved.

  When I arrived in Amsterdam I had real trouble finding a corner room on the second floor. It took me all morning, and then I had to pay over my budget – I recognised and admired my stubbornness. It was on one of the canals, the Hotel Brouwer. After putting my things on the bed, I set out to wander without any destination in mind.

  That morning I saw two women crying. One riding a bicycle with a wicker basket in front almost ran me down. Tears were flowing from behind her granny glasses. She had taken no notice of me. I made a movement to help, or at least offer sympathy, but she was on her way. Not long after, near the Stedelijk Museum, where I had no intention of entering, I sat at one end of a bench, away from a middle-aged woman seated at the other end. Straightaway she began crying. A wide face, I saw, and a small mouth.

  By leaning forward, more or less facing her, I gave the impression of a sympathetic figure. She might have glanced in my direction and nodded for help. Why, after all, begin weeping the minute I sat down? She went on weeping. I leaned back to my normal position believing it was possible to share without awkwardness the bench with an unhappy, exceptionally neat, middle-aged woman.

  After a few minutes I opened my notebook. Jot down the fleeting thoughts, even those that don’t appear important, in this case thoughts on the emotions. (The many different kinds of weeping. Tears and Natural Selection. Weeping is visual for the following reasons…)

  It was then a younger woman in jeans and khaki waistcoat with bulging pockets stopped and aimed a camera at me. I realised the gap between me and the unhappy woman on the bench must have indicated a married couple drifting apart at the rate of knots. Obviously, I was the guilty party.

  I stood up and waved my arms. I don’t like to be photographed. To drive home the point I launched into a diatribe against photography, its self-importance, its essential shallowness, its melodramatic seriousness, the ridiculous impertinence of photographers, et cetera. I had a sudden urge to break open her camera.

  Only when she said firmly but defensively, ‘Everybody has their photo taken today’ did I realise she was Australian (Brisbane).

  Not another tourist snapping at a picturesque scene, a serious photographer, an artist-photographer (her description) who exhibited in the museums, mostly in Australia. She did projects. These she constructed into exhibitions. The Amsterdam project, which included five other European cities, meant moving around with the camera, selecting people at random she imagined were Australian – only to discover most of them were Poles, Danes, Latvians, Italians, Canadians, British and even Icelandic. The idea being to demonstrate perceptions, habits, prejudices.

  ‘Are you one? I thought you looked Australian or something.’

  Out of the corner of my eye, I saw the woman on the bench blowing her nose, adjusting her scarf.

  ‘You have a British plum in your mouth. But your face – the jaw – shoulders,’ she went on, the perpetual photographer, ‘I think you’re Australian!’

  — Until I met the Kybybolite brothers, Carl and George, I intended staying only a day or two in Amsterdam. Lindsey and Rosie believed I was on my way home. I’d sent them a forwarding address in Berlin.

  As well, I was ready to leave Amsterdam in a hurry because Cynthia Blackman had moved into my corner room with her camera gear – the rucksacks, aluminium cases. Almost immediately, she opened the window and proceeded to focus her long lens along the canal and bicycle tracks, and into parked cars, in the hope of coming across a rare and enduring image. Restless in a room, restless outside – alert, that’s the better word. Enough to drive a man mad. While aiming the camera, Cynthia often swore. She had short black hair and dark eyes. I wouldn’t say she was a happy person.

  I agreed she could stay one night. But when she raised her T-shirt, again I was conscious of how the ordinary movements of life, offered here in the form of softness, shadow, warmth, invitation, pushed to one side all other thoughts, I mean my persistent philosophical thoughts, which have been a way of thinking I knew I could not avoid. The search for philosophical answers of any worth requires a certain remoteness from life. Keeping on the path is the difficulty. And there I was spending whole days and entire nights in pleasure with Cynthia Blackman.

  She never went anywhere without one of her state-ofthe-art cameras. Such was her alertness on the street I could only tag along in her wake. Anything I said didn’t seem to register. Aside from concentration, this mode of working was part of imposing authority on any image, which was very important, she said (even though, I told myself, the image was already there).

  I felt uncomfortable in public with Cynthia and her cameras. When she stopped in her tracks and took aim at an unsuspecting tourist I would turn and walk away – couldn’t bear the association. It soon became a source of trouble between us.

  Zoellner’s was a bookshop on Rosmarijnsteeg. It sold nothing but books on philosophy. As soon as I went in and activated the little brass bell over the door I knew Cynthia waiting outside would become impatient. She was anxious to add more subjects to her Amsterdam project.

  Spinoza was Zoellner’s speciality. Other philosophers were stocked but, it was made plain enough, they were eunuchs at the feet of a giant. Spinoza took up an entire wall. Rare items were displayed in a cabinet, including a lock of his hair…Benedictus Spinoza is a ve
ry impressive figure, as far as I’m concerned. I came to him late. ‘Love and desire can be excessive.’ And he then went on to explain why. He also wrote strongly about things I had not experienced, such as hatred and fame.

  Two Americans were talking and reaching out for books, turning a few pages by sliding their thumb down from the top right corner, before replacing them. Spinoza died at forty-four – consumption. Now three hundred years later, three men, four counting Zoellner, who sat at a ridiculously small desk, still found in the pages he wrote thoughts and reflections of worth.

  It was in Zoellner’s bookshop in Amsterdam that I realised I wanted to create a philosophy so I could die happily.

  In a loud voice one of the Americans asked, ‘Do you happen to know where Spinoza lived in this town? Is the house still standing?’

  Before the bookseller could answer, the brass bell above the door gave a tingle and Cynthia came in young, bra-less, and clearly not interested in books. As the Americans turned, and Zoellner looked up, she began snapping away with her camera.

  The Americans were relaxed about photography, Zoellner was not.

  Disconcerted, I found myself leaping in to defend photography, or Cynthia (since they were one and the same), who appeared unconcerned at the shouting. Zoellner had a black beard. He was a man in his sixties. Somehow he remained expressionless while raising his voice.

  The origins of a hot temper are difficult to trace.

  Out on the footpath the Kybybolite brothers hosed me down.

  ‘Not exactly the Spinozan way of resolving matters,’ I remember one of them saying. ‘But, hell, don’t go letting it bother you.’

  He went on to explain that spending every day for x number of years surrounded by the dense arguments and commentaries of the greatest thinkers, all turgidly or urgently – and cogently – put, had gone to his head (Zoellner’s). Never mind the scholarly, dim-lit atmosphere. He made the point that second-hand book-dealers tend to be uncommercial bilious personalities, the complete opposite to those choosing the glossy environment of rows of gleaming new bestsellers.

  We sat down in a café. They were big men, both of them. Always wearing the rough patterned shirt of the lumberjack. We joined them for breakfasts and dinners, and followed them to bars in suburbs almost but not quite off the beaten track. Together we took the train to The Hague to see the paintings. I had complained about Mondrian and his version of eucalypts. We had a good old time. It wasn’t all light-hearted stuff. I had never before talked with anyone about philosophical matters. Carl and George both had attended the University of Chicago, and so spoke with an assured, almost breezy knowledge of the main achievements in western philosophy. They finished each other’s sentences. Carl, though, had become addicted to dropping in significant quotes of other thinkers, sometimes two or three in the one sentence, so that it became hard to know exactly what his own thoughts were. I caught myself grinning at their extraordinary New World informality when Carl, in particular, identified quotes by the philosopher’s Christian name – ‘What Immanuel came up with…’ or, ‘An aim is servitude, as Friedrich would say’ or, ‘Consider for a second Ludwig’s…’ and, ‘The Bishop got it wrong, that’s for sure.’

  Although I had barely been ten minutes in Zoellner’s bookshop, and a few weeks in the company of Carl and George, it was in Amsterdam that I began positioning myself. I could feel it. I was beginning to gather my ideas. And I resolved to send Zoellner a copy of my philosophy, when it was printed (and to Carl and George, as well).

  Already Carl was about to publish his own thesis, The Science of Appearances – if I remember correctly. Nothing to do with photography, George gave Cynthia a nudge. She enjoyed their company. He and Cynthia used to joke at my expense.

  I could feel within myself a beneficial hardening. It was a foretaste of clarity. No doubt it made me solemn, stolid even, for I didn’t talk much. By contrast the Kybybolite brothers were playful. They took Cynthia to films.

  It was my continuing education.

  — Lindsey wrote to say our father was ill.

  I telephoned. My sister sounded matter-of-fact about our father. He was almost in the past. Of closer interest was when I was coming home, and was I eating properly? Had I fallen for a Dutch woman? She put Roger on and he too shouted, as if our family were barbarians, ‘When are we seeing you back here?’ – an interesting variation on, ‘When are you coming home?’

  Eventually, when I spoke to my father it sounded as if he didn’t recognise me, and could not fit the voice to the face. It was no use. Suddenly he mentioned in very clear terms a stamp-dealer in London I should visit, ‘a decent individual’. Then he lapsed again, making no sense.

  23

  IT IS CLEAR that ordinary subjects can acquire powers through special usage, and adjust their shape, or else we do, until they become extensions of our selves. The modest couch Freud employed in Vienna which had a central part in his treatment of, or listening to, hysterics became endowed with mystical qualities – the couch to which all others are compared. It should come as no surprise that when Freud in the nineteen thirties fled to London he was accompanied by the beetroot-coloured couch with its Austro-Hungarian tassels and fringes, and set it against the wall in his consulting room in Hampstead, just as a concert pianist can only play on his particular Steinway, which may be fifty or sixty years old, and not always in tune.

  Meanwhile, many photographs exist of philosophers half-reclining in deckchairs. Not merely the British philosophers shown at leisure amongst the dons in flannels on one of the back lawns of Cambridge, or at a 45-degree angle puffing the pipe on the outer of the Bloomsbury group, which is another part of the deck-chair story, or the picture we have handed down of Wittgenstein’s room where the only piece of furniture was a deckchair. There’s a shot taken through a telephoto lens of Martin Heidegger relaxing in what looks like a deck-chair, outside the hut at Todtnauberg. It’s him, all right – though barely visible. These slack canvas chairs suspend like a drop of water just above the grass. They are closer to the earth than other chairs. Two people cannot share one. They are difficult things to get out of. The philosopher tries a few different deckchairs until settling on one that fits his shape.

  24

  IN THE KITCHEN Erica sat with Roger at the long table. It was the room she liked best. From here people fanned out in all directions to continue their daily tasks, while the scrubbed table, chairs, cream-fronted stove and black kettle remained in fixed positions, waiting on their return. Erica poured the tea for Roger, as her mother did for her father when he came home from work.

  Roger Antill sat easily. It was his world. He was running the show. So he kept glancing out the window, one eye on the weather or whatever. As a rule, Roger didn’t mind if and when a gap opened in the conversation, and remained open, even if – or especially – with a woman, a city-woman he hardly knew. It would never occur to him to rush in ad-libbing. Better to sit back. In these circumstances he allowed his mind to wander into something altogether different from the woman-problem at his elbow. Grass was growing in the paddocks, and sheep loaded down with wool were multiplying. The stationary engine needed loading onto the truck and taken into town. He glanced at Erica and almost smiled at how she was slightly over-dressed for the district. With her head unnaturally bowed he could without being sprung take his time noticing her neck, vulnerable in its trusting curve and suggestion of hair which parted the way wind can leave a furrow in grass.

  ‘I have to tell you,’ Erica turned as Lindsey came in. ‘There’s been coffee spilt all over your brother’s pages. Ruined. I don’t know what to do.’

  Lindsey sat opposite.

  ‘How did this happen?’

  Normally at this point Roger would pick up his hat and leave.

  ‘There’s still plenty to go on,’ he said to his sister. ‘I wouldn’t get too worried.’

  Erica shook her head. ‘I suspect those pages were important. They were the ones on his desk.’

  Lindsey
poured herself tea.

  ‘Then we shall see.’

  This was more sharp than thoughtful. Erica glanced at her. She’s concerned about this more than her brother. He is kind to me.

  Such ‘accidents’ hardly ever happened to Erica. Her method of thinking reduced the chances of. But lately at work and with shopkeepers and fellow pedestrians she had been attracting misunderstanding, incidents, embarrassments, clumsy moments, confusions – the small awkwardnesses which of course represented something else. She preferred just then not to be in the welcoming kitchen – anywhere, but here. And yet, she wanted to stay. She could have screamed! Sophie, if she were there, would have spotted the tone and cut to the chase (professional habit), ‘Yes, but what do you feel?’ Sophie was alert to the strength of feelings. Most days in her work she patiently sought in a person what was hidden. And she could never be sure whether or not anything was there, or worth retrieving, held up, isolated – or how long it would take to uncover. According to her father, Sophie had the life of a detective who never moved from the one room. Not meant unkindly; it allowed Erica to lean back in bed and laugh. They were in the Sundowner Motel.

  Through the window Sophie now appeared on the veranda, pacing up and down, trying to work her mobile. And beginning with Roger they each paused to look at her.

  ‘I’d better tell her,’ Roger stood up. ‘If it’s Sydney she’s trying to get, she could be in a spot of bother. But they’re working on it,’ he said through his teeth.

  From her hand luggage Sophie had managed to find a T-shirt in English mustard Erica hadn’t seen before, chosen to display her figure to the full, and a filmy scarf with a few flowers as its feature. The trousers were burgundy linen, nicely cut. As if nothing had happened in the woolshed she waved, and signalled she was coming in.

  Excusing herself, Erica stood up and went to her room.