by Alex Miller
She drank the rest of her wine. I stood at the kitchen window and watched you. And you know what I thought? I thought, if I don’t go out to them now, this is how I’ll remember them. If I never see them again, if they really have heeded a warning to leave, this is how they’ll be for me forever. For the rest of my life. Steven and Lang. The world and I really will go on without them. Two friends in an old garden. That’s all I’ll have. And eventually, one day, I might begin to draw things about them. Eventually. Not for ages though. Years. And, well, perhaps never.
She was silent for some time. Then she pulled off the bandanna and shook out her hair. O, that’s better, she said and lay back on the dry grass and sighed with contentment. She held the stem of the empty wineglass loosely betwen her relaxed fingers and she stared straight up at the sky. The glass toppled slowly, flashing the sun into my eyes. She looked like someone who’d been drugged. Or bewitched. Her work glowing in her. One of Lang’s collection of drypoints. A sensuous Felicien Rops’ woman, half-satyr half-woman, in the flawed pastoral idyll she’d predicted. Dreaming lustful thoughts behind half-closed eyes. Waiting for a lover. She’d come out. She’d completed the composition. There was the triangle now. She’d joined the men. She said, matter-of-factly, as my mother might have said it, effacing the image I’d been developing of her, I know what it is. I’ve just realised the Australian sky is innocent. She rolled onto her elbow and looked at me intently. I had to get out. I couldn’t stand it a minute longer. I was working, I was in the middle of work and suddenly I thought, suppose I had no one to go and talk to.
I remembered them both as I’d first seen them standing by the unlit gas heater in the staffroom. Yes, I said. She rolled on to her back again. Anyway. I love this weather. I love dry autumn days, don’t you? She held her empty glass out to me. I stood up and my shadow lay across her. I refilled her glass from the bottle at the table.
My mother, I said, told me about something which changed her life. I knelt beside Gertrude and handed her the glass of wine. She half sat up. What is it, she said, that changes people’s lives? What can that mean? People say it don’t they? It changed my life. I don’t think anything will change my life. You’d have to change inside. You’d have to become a different person, wouldn’t you? Perhaps I’m conservative. Do you think I am? Sit here, she invited me, touching the grass beside her. Tell me about your mother’s experience.
I sat beside her on the mound. I was in bed. With a real illness or pretending to be ill. I can’t remember. They never made me confess my lies so I don’t know whether the things I remember are memories of real events or of events I made up. The effect on my parents was the same in either case. I don’t think they noticed. She came and sat on my bed, but instead of asking me how I was feeling she looked off into the distance through my window, and told me she was a colonist. It was the first time I’d heard the word. She and people of her caste, she said, had colonised England. I ought to be proud. As if I was ill, or pretending to be ill, which was the same thing, because of a lack of ancestral pride. At first they’d been refugees. I’d been spared that. The turning point, she said, was something Lord Acton would never have guessed. After she left Ireland and was looking for work she got a position – a ‘place’, she called it – as a chambermaid in one of London’s West End hotels. It was at The Grosvenor. Not one of the really posh ones, but all right. It was during the First World War. She was a girl. There was a fuss in the street outside the hotel one day. When they looked out the window they saw a crowd. People were pointing at the sky. There was a German Zeppelin several hundred feet above London’s great buildings. It was stationary. It was the first one and no one knew what it was. It was black. It looked, she said, like a big black grub. A huge maggot that something horrible was going to hatch out of. It hung there above them, its shadow lying on the ground, like a terrible message from a giant they’d thought had died long ago. (I realised I’d begun making it up.) A modernist’s version of the Trojan Horse. The beginning of the death of beauty. As if everything familiar was to be returned to the larval stage and reconstructed along unfamiliar lines.
Gertrude laughed softly. Now you’re making it up.
No, I’m not. Honestly. It’s the way my mother used to put things. It’s just the sort of thing she said. She always talked to me as if she was a guest speaker. There was never anything I could say in reply.
Go on! Gertrude urged me.
Some people laughed at the Zeppelin and went back inside their clubs and had another brandy. Others wept and caught the bus home to their children. And some went on as they had been and pretended it wasn’t there. When brave people looked for it again in the morning and saw it had gone, they realised at once that its absence was somehow even more sinister and portentous than its presence had been. Some of those who hadn’t seen it, and even quite a few of those who had seen it, started saying it hadn’t really been there at all but was a rumour being spread by the enemies of England to undermine the morale of the populace. People stopped talking about it in case they were thought to be somehow siding with it. But it stayed in everybody’s mind. For the English, my mother said, the sky was never the same again. The English had never before in their history cast furtive glances towards the sky. Their sky lost its innocence to the Zeppelin, she said. But it was from that day that she dated her own self-assurance. In an intuitive and visionary kind of way, which is possible at seventeen, she’d seen in the unsteady reaction of the English to the Zeppelin that they were not indestructible but were a fragile race nearing the end of their term. In this vision she saw that the disenfranchised polyglot from the far-flung corners of Empire, and from the nearby provinces as well, were one day going to achieve the ascendancy. Perhaps not in her own lifetime. But she’d seen it coming and she was happy. She knew now she was the equal of the English. Historically. Individually she’d always known she was their equal but that hadn’t given her a sense of destiny as this did. The irony is that once she’d seen that the English were a doomed race she of course fell in love with them. She’s never attempted to be like them. As a colonist occupying their homeland she observes them sympathetically and collects their artefacts – porcelain shepherds and shepherdesses and that sort of thing – but she doesn’t ape their manners. She has never ‘gone native’. She has retained her youthful vision and it is this which enables her to mourn their passing while assisting in it.
Lang leaned over me, blocking out the sunlight. He placed the manuscript on my lap. His cold right eye gleamed at me malevolently. You could have been there, Steven, he said.
It should have been a compliment. There was something so begrudging in the way he said it, however, that it came out as an accusation. Gertrude sat up. But you don’t seem very pleased about it Lang?
He laughed, knowing and bitter and uneasy. He lifted up the wine bottle from the table and squinted through it. Then he came over to us and very deliberately poured the last of the wine into our glasses, leaving the merest dribble for himself. His hands trembled. The demon in him was abashed. Unable to rise up and mock. Reeling about in there biting its own tail.
Lang stood with his back to us on the outer edge of the mound looking towards the tremulous poplar. What did he mean, You could have been there? Been where? Not Shanghai or Hangzhou in 1926, for he hadn’t been there himself then. I supposed he’d meant, whether he quite realised it or not, that I could have been in his mind. Wasn’t I to understand from his begrudging affirmation that I’d written an acceptable reconstruction of what he’d always imagined things to have been then? Before he was born; an understanding put together from evidence left behind by other’s memories of those events. Not China but an Australian fiction of China, like Gertrude’s Australian fiction of Germany. I watched him standing there prodding the empty wine bottle with the toe of his shoe. But I knew it wasn’t the wine he was regretting sharing so generously. How was he going to recover his own version of those past events now? How was he going to rid himself of my images, so very
nearly coincident with his own that he’d been forced to acknowledge them. But not his own. A distortion of his own. How was he going to expel the intruder? Or was it already too late to think of that? Was he going to have to accept my version of his past? My mother identified our caste as both refugees and colonists. But isn’t that, sooner or later, what everyone must become? Victoria would have agreed with that. Did I need to defend and justify what I was doing?
As if he found himself to be suddenly exceedingly weary, Lang bent down and picked up the bottle from the grass and said, I’m going in.
Gertrude came and stood beside me and took my arm in hers, and we watched him walk back along my mowed path towards the house, carrying the empty wine bottle. He’s my whole family, she said.
I was moved by the realisation that she saw in me an entirely reliable ally. On that fiercely hot day back in February, just after we’d met, he’d said to me, We are all only children. I remembered it now. I pressed her arm against my side and she returned the pressure. After a minute she said, What are we going to do? I didn’t know what she was asking me to decide. Arm in arm we stood there on the mound, like a couple. The sun had dipped behind the tree and already there was a chill in the air. A soft mist was drifting across the face of the river below us.
A MEMOIR OF DISPLACEMENT
PAGES FROM THE JOURNALS OF DOCTOR AUGUST SPIESS,
TRANSLATED FROM THE GERMAN BY HIS DAUGHTER, GERTRUDE SPIESS:
MELBOURNE 1966
9 am, 18 December 1927 Hangzhou, at the house of Huang Yu-hua the literary painter! I am elated and exhausted. That I am here at all seems still to be a dream. I have just this minute returned to my room from speaking with Feng on the telephone to Shanghai. He was reserved. Perhaps even unmoved. His reaction not as I had expected. I told him she must rest for at least a week. She is deeply exhausted and there is a risk of puerperal fever. Was he subdued by a surfeit of emotion? Or unfeeling? I am not sure. The line, as usual, was poor, but he seemed merely to grunt. He agreed with my advice, I suppose. I take it he intends to await our return and not come down. He has waited twenty years for this.
My emotions compel me to record the event. Two hours ago, at seven o’clock this morning, Madame Feng was delivered of a son after an heroic labor of more than twenty-seven hours duration. When I left them a moment ago they were both sleeping. A little after one this morning, at that hour when the human will sinks to its lowest point and the aged and sick give up the ghost, I believed she was entirely spent. I decided there could no longer be any hope of saving them both. Despite the certainty that I would thereby earn Feng’s undying enmity, I decided without hesitation to sacrifice the life of his son in order to save the life of his wife. I saw how Madame Feng was slipping deeper every minute into a state of great depletion. Without either assistance or the proper facilities, and in her weakened condition, a caesarean delivery of the infant was not possible. I did not consider it, but readied myself for the gruesome task of butchery that lay before me. As I prepared my instruments by the uncertain lamplight in her cold room, observed all the while from the shadows by the two old women who had been attending her before my arrival, I reflected with a strange detachment upon the fact that I felt no fear of Feng. As the moment approached for me to use the knife it was not of myself that I thought but of the child, whose torso and limbs hung helplessly from her body, its head locked firmly behind the android formation of its mother’s ungenerous pelvic bone. When I moved to the side of the bed to do my work Madame Feng must have sensed my purpose, for she opened her eyes and spoke to me. I do not know by what means she roused herself from the deep exhaustion into which her labors had driven her; there is no sufficient medical explanation to account for such a re-awakening. It was as if she had visited a secret shrine hidden within the far recesses of her soul and there been granted a renewal of her will. Her splendid eyes keenly searched my features, seeking for a resolve in me to match her own. Do not kill my child, she said. We must not give up, Doctor Spiess. I was abashed and moved by the calm assurance of her words.
Midnight, 19 December 1927 There is a sharp frost, but I have left the casement open, for outside my window, illuminated by a full moon riding in the clearest sky, there lies the original of this world’s formal landscaped gardens. I am indeed in the city of heaven! It has ever been my view of a normal birth, in which the infant presents head first, that it puts on life like a new set of garments, that such a happy child mounts upward and is received into a welcoming world. The infant born in the breech position, on the other hand, struggles blindly against its birth, is thrust downwards unwillingly through the dilating cervix by the crushing pressures of the muscles of the pelvic floor into a cavity which has opened mysteriously beneath its feet. The infant so born enters at once upon a blind and threatening passage in which its life is placed in danger at every turn. Surely in the primal memory of the child who survives this awesome journey there lodges the perception that at the very beginning of its life it set out in the wrong direction? Must not every such child carry with it throughout life an unshakeable conviction that it has never arrived at the place where it was destined to go? That another destination, a truer world than the one it inhabits, awaits it if only it can locate the singular doorway through which it must pass in order to reach this homeland?
I was so delivered into the world myself and do believe this fact accounts for my own sense of displacement – the unease with which I daily confront reality. How often have I sought to reason with myself on this matter. Be content August, I say. You are a grown man and a respected physician and ought not to be any longer bedevilled by such doubts. Uncertainties such as these are for the young. How you arrived in the world does not matter. Whether coming up or going down makes not the slightest difference. The point is, you are here. The world is the world. There is only one of it and you are firmly in it. Accept that as a fact which you cannot choose to alter and you will enjoy contentment for the rest of your days.
And yet, within my mind this other voice persists. It is a voice that quietly reflects upon experience and which knows better than to be so beguiled by mere reason as to accept the overwhelming evidence of appearances as a barrier at which our deepest longings must be turned aside. It is the voice of an intuition and will not be silenced. You are lost, August, this voice murmurs to me sadly. Go at once in search of the entrance to the true world or your existence will have been in vain. Looking back upon my life I see it has been the discontented murmurings of this voice that I have obeyed. Even when I have thought I was being directed by practicalities alone, it has been the irrational urge to respond to this intuition that has driven me from one end of the world to the other in search of something I have been unable to describe even to myself. Though I was born in Hamburg and loved by the dearest of parents, as a small child I knew I did not belong there. This knowledge cast a sadness over everything I did. If I rode beside my beloved father upon a sleigh through the forest, my mood would be affected by the wistfulness of nostalgia; as if the scene before me was never to be of my own experience, but must remain elusive and lost to me. As if, indeed, it belonged to the experience of another child in another time.
When I was urgently called to attend Madame Feng in her apartments, my brief sojourn in this exotic and beautiful Chinese house of the scholar Huang Yu-hua had induced in me a peculiar state of receptivity. I was prepared, as it were, to encounter the magical in this place. My life seemed to have been leading me towards this meeting. When I entered her room I saw that labor was well advanced. It was immediately clear to me that the women had hoped to deliver the child without my assistance and that they had only called upon me now because a disaster appeared to be unavoidable. Understandably, they preferred that I rather than they themselves should be held responsible for this state of affairs.
The room was poorly lit and I indicated my need for another lamp. The instant the light fell upon her and I saw that the infant was presenting in the breech, I felt a certainty grip me a
s strongly as if it had been a powerful blow upon my shoulder – such as I used to receive from my old professor of anatomy whenever he caught me day dreaming at a particularly tricky moment during a dissection. Now look here Spiess! he would admonish me. Be alert! Make no mistake! You have arrived at the place through which you must pass successfully if your life is ever to amount to anything. Go to it!