by Alex Miller
She turns away from the window, crosses the room and lifts the lid of the piano. It is a tall instrument made in the workshops of Carl Ronisch of Dresden in the first decade of the twentieth century. The instrument was chosen for her by her music teacher. She has owned the piano all her life. Its top is level with her breastbone. She examines her reflection in the front panel, seeing there a woman in the mysterious lamplight of a romantic interior, the edges of her form softened, the contours suggestively broken and dispersed, the tones blending her into the tapestry-like background of the room, the picture on the wall behind her, the motley of the tall bookcase beside the fan in the corner, a highlight from the window catching the deep yellow fabric of the armchair by the fireplace, the dark cavern of the Victorian grate beside the chair.
It is the figure of an anonymous woman that she sees in this softened world. A woman living happily in an indeterminate other time and place than her own, a character from Chekhov, an inaccessible time and place that is both timeless and place-less and forever, the place of Middlemarch, the place of novels she has loved, movies she has loved, stories she has read and not forgotten, the imaginary place of Emily Dickinson’s claw in the flesh. Why can that place never be here?
There is the sound of a car door being slammed outside, then another, and a woman’s voice. Marie walks out of the room, leaving the door open, and along the passage to the front door. She waits a breath or two after the bell rings, composing herself, then she opens the front door.
The woman is young. Perhaps twenty-five. She is slim and looks fit and as if she takes good care of herself. She is wearing a soft grey shirt with breast pockets, a fine wool and cotton mix of some kind, the top three buttons undone. Narrow shoulders and small pointed breasts. No bra. And blue jeans. Indian sandals on her tanned feet. She is without makeup. Her skin is clear and fresh and lightly browned. She is a homemade loaf. She smells fresh. The pupils of her eyes are a deep velvety brown, their expression kindly and concerned. She is hoping to be liked by the new piano teacher. The woman holds out her hand. ‘Hi, I’m Anne. We’re not late, are we? I hate it when people are late.’
Marie takes the young woman’s hand lightly in her own.
‘This is our Maurice. He’s seven. Seven’s not too young, is it?’
She looks at the boy. He is carrying something called Pianoforte Book 1. He holds it tucked tightly under his arm. Marie sees that he is an old barrister carrying a slim and familiar brief. A studious little chap from a back lane in Dickens. She sees indeed that he is an ancient little boy and she is amused, and feels for him a fear she can attribute to no cause. His dark expectant gaze on her face is grave and serious, a composure in him she envies. In his eyes she sees that the piano, after all, is his idea and not his mother’s.
Marie does not resist the impulse to take his hand in her own. He willingly permits her to lead him along the passage and into the room with the piano. She forgets to bar his mother, who follows. And isn’t all this exactly as he has dreamed it would be with his new piano teacher today? Old age, she knows, is not encased in the passage of the years but is embraced by experiences that are private and unacknowledged, ineradicable; the hidden life of the soul, she might have called it had she believed enough in souls just then. She knows it, just as the young soldier who sees death knows and is suddenly old. Not everyone is destined to experience the antique in themselves. For many it will pass undetected. The boy has it.
They stand side by side, she and the boy, holding hands in front of her beloved Ronisch. ‘It was my grandfather’s,’ she says, and cannot imagine why she has invented this lie, except perhaps in order to have a sense of family.
‘It’s taller than ours,’ the doomed boy offers.
‘They don’t make them like this anymore.’ She would tell him that the Dresden factory where it was made no longer exists but she doesn’t. She reaches with her free right hand and caresses the precious veneer. ‘I play Bach, but Herr Ronisch is not a Bach piano. Bach loves a bright tremulous sound. Herr Ronisch is a Beethoven piano. His voice is enormous. It is rich and warm and is all the grand and mysterious things that come after Bach. It is not in my nature to play him as he should be played. Perhaps you will one day give him the chance to become the storm in the mountains again, as my grandfather used to do.’ She is aware of having begun a lie that she must persist with or confess to now, before it is too late, the lie that gives her beloved old music teacher’s place in her life to an imaginary grandfather. Robert would have been amused.
She is wasting time. The boy’s warm hand in her own hand is close and still against her—a mouse safely home in its nest. His trust is palpable. The throb of his pulse. The boy’s presence is calming and she cannot deny to herself the deep pleasure of his handclasp. He has placed himself in her care.
‘Herr Ronisch sulks when I play Bach,’ she says and laughs.
‘You love him,’ the boy says, ‘because he was your grandfather’s.’ His hand moves in hers.
Impossible now to disillusion him with the truth. Should they be friends for twenty years, it is already too late to undo her lie. The imaginary grandfather already has a life with the boy. She will defend its truth. Her father’s lie was precious to him too. Can nothing remain simply itself? Does fiction always triumph over truth?
She is suddenly happy and wants the moment to go on and never end. She loves the boy. Their little Maurice. Her Maurice.
She might have said his hand nuzzles in hers, but it isn’t quite that. Where there is hatred, let me bring you love. ‘I play Schubert too. Schubert always cheers him up. Schubert used to see the great Herr Beethoven in his local coffee shop, but Schubert was too shy to approach his hero and so they never met. In that situation I would be like Schubert too. My father called it the woman’s disease—my modesty, he meant—and was impatient with it. But it is not only women who feel like that. Men feel it too. Artists feel it. People who believe in something greater than themselves feel it.’ She stops herself from going on and looks down at him, allowing the boy his modesty.
‘Did you love your father?’ the boy asks. His question is quiet, sudden, impeccable. He is looking up at her as if, were she to say, ‘No, I hated my father,’ he would not be perturbed or surprised but would simply know from that time on that some people hate their fathers. Does he have a father himself?
She is moved and grateful for the wisdom of his innocence. ‘Oh, yes. I did. Very much.’ The boy doesn’t ask her about her mother. Her friendship with her father was her best truth for so long. It was the best truth anyone had ever known. Then, at the end, the other truth came out of him. He kept the other truth to himself until his last day, as if it had belonged only to himself and had not been hers too. Until the despair of his dying drew it out of him. His tortured cry of regret as he went over the edge into death everlasting. ‘Yes,’ she says, and feels in her chest a stirring of the anger against her father she felt then for his betrayal of their perfect trust. The bitterness that is not dead in her soul but which has resisted decay, attendant upon its resolution in an action as yet unconceived by her, as yet undreamed, an action she has yet to imagine. ‘I loved him and he loved me. I’ll play for you,’ she says. And such is the slippage between words and meanings, to the boy’s ear his new teacher might have said, ‘I’ll pray for you.’ He waits beside her while she settles herself on the stool.
She turns to him, her eyes on a level with his eyes now. ‘Schubert’s Impromptu No. 4 in A-flat major. You will hear Schubert’s modesty too. My father was mistaken when he called modesty the woman’s disease.’ She does not require the music. The piece is an old friend. It lives whole in her memory. She is unafraid of not playing it well for the boy. She is glad she has had the piano tuned. She will never betray this instrument. Her teacher Robert sits at her shoulder. She closes her eyes and plays.
While the last note is fading into the sublime silence which the music has carved out, like a perfect negative shape in an old-master painting, even b
efore Marie opens her eyes, the boy’s mother says, ‘Oh, that was so beautiful,’ and she gives two uncertain little claps.
Marie has forgotten the boy’s mother is with them.
She draws breath and says, ‘We should begin your lesson, Maurice.’
The boy does not applaud her but stands entranced, himself his own wooden effigy. An odd little person.
Marie sits there, seeing the boy has joined her now in her secret place within the reflected room, standing beside her deep within the enchanted landscape of the disfigured walnut.
‘I can see us in the piano,’ he says.
Has she ever been so happy?
Her own first piano lesson at this boy’s age; Robert, her teacher, a tall deep-chested Viennese, his long hair flinging out of his great round skull in every direction, falling over his eyes as he plays. A beautiful man, he tosses his hair back like a horse tossing its shining mane, vigorous and impatient with the uncomprehending world around him. At that first lesson he sat at his princely black Steinway and played for himself Bach’s first prelude.
When the brief simplicity of the prelude had been brought to its end, a tremor remained in Robert’s hands, poised above the keyboard like a pair of skylarks trembling on air, and for an instant she expected him to continue. But he stood up, abruptly and with a kind of violence in his action, and stepped away from the piano, as if this sudden physical wrench was needed to disengage himself from the charm of the instrument. According to Robert, Bach’s Prelude and Fugue in C Major was the single greatest moment in the entire history of music. Marie believed him. She believed everything Robert said. She had never before encountered such an authority as his. She still believes him now, today, here at her piano with Maurice standing beside her, the pair of them mirrored in the figured walnut of the Ronisch and dear, dear Robert dead years and years ago.
Marie turns to Maurice. ‘Now I’ll play Bach for you.’
Her memory of her first lesson is that Robert played for her on that occasion (when she was seven) without saying anything. Not a word. Now here she is talking when talk isn’t needed, failing to trust to the moment and to the boy’s intelligence. ‘This is the simplest and most beautiful work ever written for the piano. Everything that comes after it is foreshadowed in it in some way, either in a hidden way or in a manner to celebrate it. But of course it wasn’t written for this great masculine instrument, but for a lovely feminine clavichord.’
She plays the prelude. It lasts barely three minutes. Three minutes of eternity.
She turns to the boy and doesn’t wipe away her tears.
‘You cry when you’re happy,’ he says. ‘Like Mum.’ He looks to his mother, who steps forward and touches him.
Marie says, ‘There’s only one rule for us to follow. We must love what we do. That will be our one rule. And if ever you or I forget it, we must promise to remind the other of it. Let’s call it the rule of the first prelude, shall we?’
‘The rule of the first prelude,’ the boy echoes, and he smiles, knowing he is embarked now and has learned something from this strange woman, though if his mother were to ask him later in the car what it is he has learned he would not be able to tell her. He has already begun to bestow his love on this woman, too, without knowing it.
There is a sudden noise outside in the street. Marie stands and goes to the window and looks out. Something has fallen.
Rising for thousands of feet above the roof of the Housing Commission tower a deep red cloud approaches, its leading edge boiling with energy against the hard blue of the sky.
Anne comes and stands at Marie’s shoulder, the boy beside her, the mother’s arm around the boy’s shoulders.
‘God! What is that?’ Anne says.
The man on the park bench has his back to the approaching cloud. He is struggling to fold his newspaper against the snapping and sucking of the wind. The wind is too strong and the man lets his paper go with a flinging gesture of anger, as if to say, Well fuck off then! The white pages fly like maddened birds into the air, the dog chasing after them, barking and leaping.
‘Is it smoke?’ Anne says.
An image of the young woman has come into Marie’s mind suddenly. She stepped out of her office that day thinking of something and the girl was lying on her back in the corridor with her throat gaping, a terrible smile of triumph and despair on her stricken features, the bread knife still clutched in her left hand, as if she clutched her life still, the vast pool of blood a cloak flowing out from her small girlish shoulders. She had seemed to Marie not real but an actor in a tragic role in a school play. Then the truth of it came, like this great red cloud, and there was nothing to do but watch.
The cloud reaches the edge of the sun and the day suddenly goes as dark as evening. The poplars are being whipped and bent by the wind, leaves and twigs, and bits of rubbish rattle against the window. The light of the world after the apocalypse. Why is it, Marie wonders, that all stories of the future are cast in the ash and gloom of a destroyed civilisation? The wind strikes the house then with the force of a blast. The man and his dog have gone. The air is now so thick with the whirling red dust that she can hardly see the terrace of houses on the other side of the park. The wind roaring against the house, shaking it. The Housing Commission block is a black tower rising to fantastic heights, its upper storeys lost in the swirling cloud. Marie expects to see a shaft of light driving down through the tormented sky as it does in old paintings, but there is no shaft of light, only the thickening darkness of the dust cloud as it roars across the city.
Marie says, ‘It’s a dust storm. That’s all it is.’
Anne touches the sleeve of Marie’s dress. ‘We should move away from the window.’
Marie hopes secretly, perversely, that this is the beginning of something irresistible and vast beyond imagination or experience. Something so powerful it will sweep away everything familiar, until beyond the window there is only the landscape of the apocalypse predicted by the writers. She wonders if she has expected it. Perhaps everyone has expected it. Perhaps the predictions are all true. She hopes to see the beginning of the fire through the thick brown gloom of the astonishing day, the roaring of flames through the thunder of the hurricane wind, great tongues of flame bellowing and devouring. There will be no stopping a fire in this wind. She wants to stand outside and hold up her face and look into the obliterating Martian storm and know that this is the end of everything. She can feel the grit between her teeth; fierce eddies of red dust from the parched hinterland spin in the corners of the window. A long branch detaches from one of the thrashing poplars and falls across the bench where the man was sitting reading his paper. In the city there will be few survivors among the black ruins when the storm has passed, the red dust settled like dead snow over the silent streets. And in a wonderful way she knows it won’t matter. None of it. The beautiful young woman cut her throat and tossed her young life away with that terrible fierce smile of impossible dismay that Marie will never forget so long as she lives. She covers her face with her hands and weeps.
2014
On Writing Landscape of Farewell
Landscape of Farewell is a celebration of friendship between two men of my own generation. The novel speaks of the shadow of the past they have each lived with in silence for the whole of their lives. It is the story of how their friendship empowers them to penetrate that silence and to give voice to it.
I first heard the story of the Cullin-la-Ringo massacre when I was a boy of sixteen and was newly arrived in Australia from England. I was working in outback Queensland as a stockman on Goathlands Station in the beautiful valley of Coona Creek, south of the Central Highlands town of Springsure, not far from Cullin-la-Ringo Station, where the massacre of nineteen white settlers by the local Aborigines took place on a lovely summer morning in 1861. Over the years since then I often wondered how I might write the story of that massacre without setting it in an historical reconstruction of the times in which it took place, when European pioneers
were first penetrating that country with their vast flocks of sheep and dispossessing the local Indigenous people of their traditional homelands, which until that time they had enjoyed without challenge since before the beginning of time.
A cave high in the escarpment, 1954
My inclination has always been to write of my own times, or at least the times of my family and friends. The idea of writing about Cullin-la-Ringo, however, continued to pester me. When I was in Hamburg in the autumn of 2004 at the invitation of the Gesellschaft fur Australienstudien (the German Association for Australian Studies), I met and became friends with Dr Anita Heiss, one of Australia’s foremost Indigenous writers and intellectuals. Anita was teaching Indigenous Studies at UTS at the time and told me of her admiration for my novel Journey to the Stone Country, a story also set in North Queensland and which dealt with a profound reconciliation of the past that had been effected by two friends of mine, one a Queensland Murri and the other a descendant of one of the white settlers who had dispossessed the Aborigines of their country in the 1860s. These two people were, of course, familiar with the Cullin-la-Ringo massacre, the white woman’s father even having owned for a time a section of the original run on which the massacre took place. I told Anita about this web of connections and she encouraged me to write about it. Although I’m certain Anita was unaware of it, I felt that her enthusiasm was a green light to my desire to write this book. So it was in Hamburg that I first began to imaginatively piece the story together.