by Alex Miller
She took hold of Lena’s hand again and the two of them went ahead of him into the generous hall. ‘Close the door, Robert,’ Birte called back over her shoulder, as if she and he had been familiars for years. He followed them into a wide, high-ceilinged room. The appearance was of comfort—shelves of books, pictures on the walls, indoor plants flourishing, the floor of pale polished timber, richly patterned Persian rugs scattered about.
‘Martin!’ Birte called out in a loud aggrieved voice as she went through the door. ‘Stand up so Robert can see you! Why are you sitting in the corner like that?’ Her voice rose to a high pitch of astonishment towards the end of her question, as if she could scarcely believe what she was witnessing.
The man who stood up and came forward to meet Robert hadn’t really been sitting in the corner at all, and Robert couldn’t see that there was anything for Birte to be so dramatic about. But it was true that the man whom she had addressed as Martin did manage to give the sense of not really being there, or that he would rather have been elsewhere, or might like to have been invisible, if only any of these things had been possible. He had evidently been reading and when he stood up had set his book, still open, face down on the chair with his glasses on top of it, marking his place so that he could pick the book up again and go on reading as soon as he had the chance to do so. He was of medium height and slight build, his thin greying hair brushed straight back off his broad forehead, the skin tight and pale. He was wearing a white shirt and a brown tie under a grey tweed jacket, and darker grey slacks. He gave an impression of physical frailty, which Robert was to learn was false, and of a sensitivity of an extreme kind, almost as if he was vibrating in response to his surroundings, shrinking from the coarser elements while tentatively advancing towards those things that appealed to him. There was something elusive and haunted about him. Robert was immediately attracted to him.
Martin looked into Robert’s eyes with a direct enquiring candour that was engaging rather than disconcerting, and when he took Robert’s hand in his he inclined his head slightly, acknowledging something. The odd formality of this inclination of his head, almost the beginning of a bow, made him seem reserved and in possession of an inner calm that would not be breached by this encounter. Like Birte, he was in his mid-fifties, the age of Robert’s father. And like Robert’s father, the skin of his forehead and his cheeks was smooth and without any sign of wrinkles. His grip when he took Robert’s hand was light and seemed to signify a touching of hands, a meeting, rather than the competitive encounter Robert was used to from men. His voice was quiet and unhurried, the volume falling off towards the end of his sentences, so that it was difficult to catch the last few words, and Robert found himself leaning towards him to hear. Martin’s accent was not as pronounced as his wife’s. After exchanging a brief greeting, Martin turned to Lena and they embraced warmly. ‘Oh, Martin,’ she said with feeling, ‘it’s so good to see you.’ Robert saw that Martin was a man who appreciated her beauty.
Birte brandished the unwieldy bunch of flowering gum branches that Lena had presented her with and buried her face in them. She sniffed and announced loudly in a dramatic tone of shock and affront, as if she’d been stung, ‘Martin! Martin! They have no smell!’
Martin shrugged and murmured, ‘So? They’re beautiful. What do you expect, smell as well as beauty?’ He shot Robert a quick look, a mischievous smile in his eyes.
Lena said, ‘Well, they do have a sort of smell. Especially if you go out into the garden in the evening or the early morning, then you can smell the blossom.’
‘It’s evening now!’ Birte said, stating the fact. ‘Flowers should have a smell. These don’t have a smell.’ She thrust them at Martin. ‘If you like them so much, put them in that ugly black jug Peta and Leonard gave us.’ She turned away and, gripping the arm of the sofa, eased herself down onto the cushions, grimacing and making small anguished sounds of pain, stretching her left leg out in front of her while glaring at it as if it was wilfully determined to torment her. ‘And bring the vermouth,’ she shouted. ‘And some ice! And turn the oven down to three.’
She turned to Lena and said something in German. Lena sat beside her and answered her in German. Lena sounded so completely German that Robert laughed at the sudden transformation. He sat in the vacant easy chair opposite them, facing Martin’s chair with the book and glasses on it. On a low table between them were two blue glass bowls filled to overflowing with peanuts and cashews, and in the centre of the table a large blue and white Chinese plate with an arrangement of smoked oysters on cracker biscuits. The oysters were the dark meaty colour and texture of the Danish bog man. Robert tried one, chewing it thoughtfully before swallowing it. He decided it tasted much nicer than it looked. A heavy glass ashtray on the edge of the table closest to the chair with Martin’s book and glasses on it was crammed with crushed cigarette butts. Beside the ashtray was a packet of Peter Stuyvesant, a brass lighter, and a glass with what looked like the remains of whisky in it—the faint familiar smell of whisky, always in the air after Robert’s father got home from work. Whisky and Digger Shag tobacco. The smell of the old front room of his childhood home.
Although Lena and Birte were talking in German, Birte holding Lena’s hand in her lap, Robert didn’t feel ignored by them or shut out. Sitting there in the easy chair smoking a cigarette, comfortably aware of Lena and Birte catching up, he looked around the room while he waited for Martin to come back. On both sides of the fireplace, which had been converted to gas, there were bookshelves filled with a jumble of books. Opposite the fireplace on the far side of the room, between the two tall windows, leafy pot plants stood in large green ceramic jars. The fine material of the curtains moved slightly, affected by a draft, the movement catching his eye and making it seem as if someone was about to come into the room from the darkness of the front garden. There were three pictures on the walls. A traditional Chinese watercolour above the fireplace, a delicate picture of flowers and a bird, its beak open, trilling. On the wall facing him was a coloured reproduction of one of Picasso’s clowns in a blue outfit. The picture that most intrigued him was a black and white drawing or etching, he wasn’t sure which it was. It was a head-and-shoulders portrait of an old woman facing the viewer, her head inclined slightly forward. She was shielding the expression in her eyes with the spread fingers of one hand across her forehead, the large bony hand strongly modelled and casting her right eye and the right side of her face partly into deep shadow. The half-concealed expression in the old woman’s eyes was one of sorrow or despair, or perhaps it was the fatigue of old age. The look in her eyes seemed to him to say, My feelings are private and are not to be shared. And yet there it was, the sitter’s inner sorrow displayed and withheld at the same time. Robert got up and went over and looked closely at the picture and its ambiguous enticement: Don’t look at me! See my sorrow! His father would have admired it.
From behind him, Martin said, ‘So you like our picture?’
Robert turned around. Martin was holding a tray with a bottle of dry vermouth, an ice bucket and four glasses on it. He set the tray down among the bowls of nuts and the plate of smoked oysters on the low table.
‘I like it very much,’ Robert said. His father would have said there was great tenderness in the drawing. Tenderness was one of his father’s most frequently used words after he returned from the front. His father’s wounds were raw and fresh then, in his mind as well as in his body. He was unable to express tenderness himself and was often moved to tears of shame when he met it in others. The clenched emotion of the picture, the refusal to directly expose her feelings, also made Robert think of his own struggle with the image of the fighting man. He could easily imagine a man like Martin being as deeply fatigued or as affected by sorrow as the old woman in the picture.
Martin said, ‘It’s one of her last self-portraits. Käthe Kollwitz did many self-portraits. She mirrored the tragedy of her times through her self-portraits. This one is unfinished.’ He stood looking at it
and Robert turned and looked at it with him. That the artist had not finished this last self-portrait made it even more expressive of loss and sorrow, the empty space, untouched by the pencil or the burin, a space in which something had remained private and closed from view. His father would have pointed out to him that the empty space was the picture’s most poignant statement. Robert said, ‘It’s beautiful. Did you know her?’
Birte said, ‘We didn’t know her. But you are right, it is beautiful. She was one of Germany’s greatest artists. She used art for good, not evil.’ She looked at Martin. ‘So, are we going to have a drink or not?’
Martin gave an expressive little shrug of his shoulders and murmured, ‘So, who uses art for evil?’ He served Birte and Lena with a glass of the vermouth each, two blocks of ice in each glass. Then he turned to Robert and asked if he would prefer a glass of beer, or perhaps a whisky?
Robert said, ‘Thank you. I’d like vermouth.’ He watched Martin serving the drinks. There was an almost abstract poise in the way he carried out the small tasks, taking ice blocks from the bowl with the tongs and releasing them into the glass with a light clink, each one separate and real, the glint of the stainless steel as he turned the tongs in his hand. He made it all seem intensely present in a way Robert knew himself to be incapable of, as if he would remember forever these small movements of Martin’s hands—long after he had forgotten what had been said, he would see Martin preparing the drinks. He thought to himself that an artist would make a delicate etching of the moment, and he would stand and look at the etching a hundred years later and know the moment just as it had been. He despaired of ever being able to make his own actions as real as Martin’s. Everything Robert did seemed to him to be an amateurish attempt at reality compared to the grace and poise of this man. There was no simple explanation for any of it. I would fail, he thought, if I tried to be like him. Martin poured a drink for himself and picked up his glasses and the book from the chair and sat down.
They all leaned forward and clinked their glasses and wished each other good health. Martin reached for his cigarettes and shook one from the packet and lit it with the brass lighter. ‘When she was old,’ he said, ‘and had lost her husband and her son, she used to dream that she was dead.’ He paused to draw on his cigarette and looked at Robert. ‘At first she liked her dream of being dead, then after a while she began to find the dream of death boring.’ He smiled. It was a moment before Robert realised Martin was talking about Käthe Kollwitz.
Birte said, ‘Art and literature can serve the cause of evil, Martin. You know very well they can. Just as they can serve the cause of good. Young people must be taught history and be trained in the art of criticism so that they can recognise evil when they come across it in art and literature and will not be so easily fooled by it. Young people want to believe in what is most passionate and so they are vulnerable to the passionate lies of demented demagogues. At universities they give students only the works admired by the professors. But literature is not so one-sided as they like to make out. I can’t understand why you ask me who uses art for evil. I’m not deaf, you know. It’s stupid to speak like that, even to yourself. Art has often been used for evil. We expect good writing to have a good effect on the young, but we don’t warn them against the impassioned ravings of the demagogues and the demented.’
Birte was not speaking casually. She sounded seriously upset and determined to give the matter a full and passionate response. She reached for her drink and took a large sip, frowning at the glass as if she might decide to criticise the way it was looking at her.
Martin said quietly, ‘There are plenty of good books. We don’t have to read rubbish.’ He said this in such a subdued voice that it seemed to Robert to come as an aside from a conversation they’d had with each other many times in the past. But Birte was right: the possibility of evil in literature had never occurred to him, and no teacher had ever drawn his attention to the possibility of it, but had only ever urged him to read and to read more.
Birte said, ‘How can we expect young people to recognise evil in works of literature when they come across it if we hide it from them and don’t teach them about it? It’s what the Victorians did with sex. And everybody forgot how to enjoy sex and started looking at pornography in secret instead, feeling ashamed of themselves for even thinking about it. Even today modern art is still under their ban. The male erection is never celebrated. Have you noticed that? When did you last see the male erection in a work of art? The last people to celebrate the male erection were the Romans. If the influence of literature and art is really as important as we say it is, then the young must be educated about the difference between propaganda and the real thing. We can only do this by making them familiar with both. The young are seduced by passion.’ She reached for her leg and shifted it with both hands and groaned, then she reached for her glass. It was empty.
Lena said, ‘So why didn’t you teach us about evil literature at school?’
Birte made an explosive sound and cried out, ‘But I did! You think it’s that simple? At the Methodist Ladies’ College? It would take a revolution. I’m talking about what we should do, not about what we can do freely in this prudish climate in Victoria. The school governors would sack me if I put that kind of thing on the syllabus. But you remember, we talked about everything. I didn’t leave you girls in the dark. I let you know such things could be found and were worth talking about and reading. I made you curious to go in search of them yourselves. I used to say, Close the door or Miss Curling will hear us.’ She laughed. ‘Remember?’
Martin sipped his drink and smoked his cigarette. He looked comfortable and relaxed.
Birte said, ‘Those of us who have witnessed evil have a moral duty to teach the new generation to recognise it.’ She held her empty glass towards Martin. ‘Martin! Are we going to be allowed to have more than one drink before dinner?’ Without pausing she went on, ‘Evil is not so easy to see when it’s masked by the banner of art and literature. Evil can creep up on us, and before we know it we are in bed with it and enjoying it.’ She turned to Robert, the thought evidently flashing across her mind like the shadow of a bird and startling her. ‘So tell me, Robert, what is it you want to write about? Lena has told us you want to be a writer.’ She thrust the question at him so abruptly he was completely thrown.
‘Well,’ he said, trying to think of something worth writing about and managing to think of nothing at all, his mind a perfect expanse of nothing. There was something he wanted to write about, but what was it?
Birte was staring at him, as if she was expecting an interesting revelation from him.
‘I don’t know,’ he said at last. Right at that moment he could think of nothing it might ever be possible for him or for anyone else to ever write about. ‘I don’t know,’ he repeated emptily, echoing the hollowness inside. He felt doomed. Stupid. Empty. Certain he was never to shine for these people. Martin would be sure to think him a fool.
‘You don’t know?’ Birte almost screamed. She appealed to Martin and Lena as if they were a crowd. ‘A writer must have something to say! You can’t be a writer if you have nothing to say. Imagine Goethe having nothing to say!’
Martin handed her a fresh drink and said quietly, setting his words out with care, so that even Birte paused to listen to him, ‘Robert didn’t say he has nothing to say, Birte.’ He looked at her steadily.
‘So?’ she said.
‘He said he didn’t know what he has to say.’
Birte said dismissively, ‘Ach, it’s the same thing.’ She appealed to Lena. ‘We have to know what we want to say, don’t we, or how can we say it?’
To Robert this seemed reasonable enough. Logical and clear. But he knew in his heart that it couldn’t possibly be true. But he didn’t know how to say it couldn’t be true. He could think of no way of challenging Birte.
Martin said, ‘No, it isn’t the same thing. Not knowing what we have to say and having nothing to say are not the same thing. We fin
d out what we have to say when we attempt to say it. We think we want to say one thing, then in the attempt to say it we find there is a deeper and clearer truth waiting for us just below the surface of our first thought. And this comes as a delightful surprise to us. The thing we wish to say is never just as we thought it would be. And we are either delighted by this discovery, if we are not fanatics out to prove our own prejudices, or, if we are, then we are dismayed and we reject our own truth.’ He turned and looked at Robert. ‘When Robert writes, then he will begin to know what he has to say. And then you will have an answer to your question, Birte. The poet is taken by surprise by the poem. You will be able to make up your own mind what Robert has to say when you read what he has said. Unless we intend to write polemic, it is important for us to begin by not knowing what we are going to say when we are faced with the necessity of having to say something.’
Birte said, ‘So, is he writing poetry? I thought he wanted to be a novelist. They’re not the same thing.’
Martin said, again with a quiet sense of belief and amusement, ‘How do you know they are not the same thing?’ He grinned at Robert. He was enjoying himself.
Robert was thinking of Frankie and his failed attempt to write the story of their friendship, but he felt he had missed his cue and it was too late to bring this up. He was imagining Birte asking Lena, ‘So what is it about him that attracts you apart from his good looks?’ What would Lena say to that?
Later that evening, in the middle of delivering a long and rambling soliloquy, and in the same panic-stricken voice in which she’d said the flowers had no smell, Birte fell silent abruptly and turned to Martin and appealed to him dramatically. ‘Martin! Martin! I’ve forgotten what I was going to say!’ It was as if she had been deprived of air, a woman thrown into the deep and drowning. The effect of her panic-stricken appeal was startling. The sudden cessation of her monologue. The awful silence, until Martin suggested quietly, ‘Well, why don’t you say something else?’