by Alex Miller
Lena handed Robert the book. ‘Look what Birte has given me.’
He took her book and gave her the Kazantzakis to look at. Birte’s gift to Lena was pocket-sized, the covers decorated with an elaborate fawn and pale yellow crisscross pattern, in which the diamonds of the intersecting diagonal lines were filled with smaller diamonds. The title and author were printed on a pasted-on label. The lettering was the old Gothic script of a Germany of the past. He was unable to make out the title, but the author was Stefan Zweig. He opened the book. On the title page, in browned and faded ink, there was a handwritten dedication. Birte’s name stood out. The rest of the inscription was indecipherable to him. He handed the book back to Lena. ‘It’s beautiful,’ he said. ‘What’s the title? I can’t read it.’
She took the little book from his hand. ‘Brennendes Geheimnis,’ she said. ‘Burning Secret.’ She looked across at him and smiled. ‘Your flu has gone. You haven’t coughed once all night.’
Martin said, ‘Birte’s mother gave Zweig’s book to her at the border, after Birte was released from prison in Germany during the war and was being escorted into exile by the police.’
They both turned and looked at him.
‘The police refused to let her mother go into exile with her. Birte never saw her mother again.’
Lena looked down at the book, her lips moving silently as she read the German text to herself. A large tear was sliding down her cheek, catching the red glint of the heater. In her left hand, behind the book, she held between her fingers the single sheet of a letter from Birte that had accompanied this extraordinary gift of love from her old teacher and dearest friend. Lena closed the book and pressed it against her breast with both hands. She stood up and walked over to Martin. She leaned and kissed his cheeks, first his left and then his right. One of her tears fell into his thin hair where it was swept back off his forehead. She straightened and stood looking down at him. She set the book aside on the low table and he reached up both his hands and she took his hands in her own. They stood like that for a long moment. Neither spoke.
At last Lena said, ‘I’ll make fresh coffee for you both.’ She let go of Martin’s hands and picked up the book and went out to the kitchen, carrying her precious gift with her.
Martin and Robert sat in the silence. Martin said, ‘Lena wrote to Birte and told her about Sydney.’
Robert looked at him. ‘She’s better. I mean emotionally. She’s strong again. But I think she’s always going to be terribly thin from now on.’
Martin said nothing for a long time. Then he said, ‘And you? What about you?’
There was so much to say that Robert didn’t know where to begin. He said, ‘I feel as if I’ve completely lost my way. I can’t write here. It just doesn’t work for me. The job’s not so bad. My boss is a good man. Everyone’s kind.’ He fell silent again. This wasn’t what he had meant to say. ‘I was writing happily in Sydney before Lena’s crisis. I thought that was it. I really believed I was on my way with it. I spent every day at it. Now it’s just not there anymore. I don’t seem to have the ability to feel it any longer, not in the way I felt it while I was writing in Sydney. It isn’t enough to want to write.’
He turned and looked at Martin and saw that the older man was still looking into the darkness outside.
Robert said, ‘I feel as if I’ve betrayed something. I’m not sure what. Whenever I try to write the story I was writing in Sydney there’s a dead blankness inside me. I feel as if something has closed down.’
He waited, but still Martin said nothing.
Robert said, ‘You’ve been mistaken to believe in me. That’s what I really think.’
Martin turned to him. He looked into Robert’s eyes for several long seconds, then he said, ‘Every one of us betrays something. Everyone who is compelled to search for meaning and purpose in his life is forced by circumstances to betray his finest hopes. Sometimes again and again. We all founder in our struggle to find our way. Our way to our own truth. Success in the end is to survive these repeated failures.’ He gestured at the book lying on the coffee table where Lena had set it. ‘Kazantzakis took many wrong turns before he found his truth. He despaired many times. It was the same for all of us. I and my comrades, each of us in our own ways, we all made terrible mistakes and misjudged the realities of our situation a hundred times.’ He lit a cigarette and drew in the smoke. ‘So long as we don’t give up, that’s all.’
Robert said, ‘And you don’t think I’ve given up?’
Martin made an impatient gesture towards the windows with both hands. ‘This situation here in Canberra is no doubt perfect for some people. It is such a beautiful place to live. It is unique among the cities of the world. That was obvious to me as we drove here from the airport. I’m sure it is a fine career here for many of your colleagues. But for you it is the wrong thing. The wrong place.’ He spoke with vehemence. ‘I am sure of it. For you and for Lena this life you are living here is not the right thing.’
He paused, reached for his glass and drank off the last inch of vermouth.
‘You haven’t given up. I can see that. You are still troubled by your failure. To have given up is to have become apathetic and embittered, or fatalistic. I know. I have seen such tragedies many times. It is my own tragedy. Friends I loved. To give up when you have struggled is to enter a bitter, hard place. It is to be driven to extreme behaviour in the desperate search for a solution to your pain and your disappointment. Giving up is harder than going on. I understand this. I still love those friends who took their own lives. To do that required great courage.’ He looked directly at Robert. ‘I believe you are one of those who will persist.’
‘It means everything to me to hear you say that.’
‘And to me,’ Martin said with force. ‘To be able to say it. Don’t imagine it means nothing to me.’ There was a fierceness in his eyes and in his voice Robert had witnessed only briefly once before, when Birte accused Martin of making a mistake in giving Thomas Mann’s novel to Robert. ‘Our friendship has given me hope too,’ Martin said. ‘Don’t forget that. You are not the only one for whom friendship is important.’
Robert said, ‘As soon as you and I are together and I hear you talking like this, my energy and my belief return.’
‘We’re fortunate to have met each other. I have the same revival of my spirits when I think of you. Birte and I love you and Lena. We look at you both with hope in our hearts.’
Lena came out with the coffee and biscuits. Martin and Robert drank coffee and Lena nursed her cup of weak black tea and they talked about Melbourne and the school where Birte was deputy head. They didn’t talk about Perugia or the dead child or London. They were tired and the three of them had fallen silent, when Martin asked just one question. It was late and they were staring emptily at the glowing bars of the electric heater, when he stirred and drew on his cigarette and roused himself.
‘So for how long do you plan to stay in Canberra?’
Everything was in that one question. Everything that Lena and Robert had been unable to speak about openly with each other. The whole dilemma. It was the one crucial question silently haunting them both—where to look now for a place and a style of life that would suit them? Neither of them had an answer. Since leaving Lena’s family home in Red Bluff they had been to Italy and London and Sydney and then here to this place. Was there some magical place that they had not yet thought of where they would find themselves at home? If they were to leave Canberra now, wouldn’t they be running away again? This thought was in both their minds. They had been afraid to ask themselves the question.
And when Martin casually asked it, at that moment when they were all tired and ready for sleep, Lena and Robert looked at each other, and each waited for the other to speak first. Martin said no more but left his question hanging in the silence.
Eventually Robert said, ‘We haven’t decided what we’re going to do next.’ Saying it out loud made it seem as if he and Lena had been talking about i
t already and might even have been on the brink of deciding something.
At once Lena said, ‘We never planned to stay here forever, Martin.’ She looked at Robert. ‘Did we?’
‘No, of course not.’
She turned to Martin. ‘Robert doesn’t have the time to write.’
‘It’s not that I don’t have time,’ Robert objected. ‘I do have the time. Other people make time to study and to do other stuff. Look at Phil and Ann and everything they did apart from working. It’s not time, it’s just that writing and Canberra don’t make sense to me.’ He didn’t want to say that in coming to Canberra in obedience to the Sydney doctor’s instructions he had been required to renounce the idea of being a writer. But that was what he believed he had done. He believed he could not have abandoned Frankie and committed himself to a life as a public servant in Canberra the way he had without making this renunciation. For him at the time of Lena’s crisis in Sydney, discarding his manuscript hadn’t been just a renunciation of the manuscript but a renunciation of the whole complicated edifice of his dream of becoming a writer. Without at first realising it, he had discarded himself as well as Frankie. The alternative at the time, and he knew this, was to abandon Lena. Frankie would have said he’d laid a curse on himself and that he would need to move away from the hollow ground he’d created with this curse if he were to restore the life of his dreaming.
Robert hadn’t had a cigarette all evening. Now, without thinking about it, he lit a cigarette and sucked the smoke back into his lungs. His tender throat closed tightly over the smoke and he leaned forward and coughed harshly into his hands. It was some moments before he could get his breath. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said. He stubbed the cigarette out in the ashtray. Lena was looking at him with concern. When he looked at her she said, ‘You’ve still got a touch of that bronchitis. Please don’t smoke!’
They were silent, the creaking and settling of the new timber in the house frame as the cold outside began to bite. The storm had not reached them. A sickle moon appeared and disappeared between broken clouds. Robert could feel the cold around his ankles from the glass of the uncurtained windows. There would be a frost again in the morning.
Lena said, ‘I’ve always dreamed of having a little place in the country.’
He looked at her with astonishment. ‘Since when? I’ve never heard you say that before.’
‘Since forever,’ she said defensively.
‘It’s news to me.’
‘You don’t know everything about me. When I used to go riding with Dad we’d talk about it. A little place in the country where we could be happy. There were paddocks and open country the other side of Sandringham in those days. Dad and I used to tell each other stories about our imaginary place in the country. It was his dream. It was my dream too. Somewhere where we could grow our own vegetables and be self-sufficient. We would have an orchard.’
She sat smoothing the cover of Birte’s book in her lap.
‘Other people have done it,’ she said. ‘I don’t see why we couldn’t. You know about outside work and farming and that sort of thing. You could teach me. Dad always had a good vegetable garden.’
‘We haven’t got any money to buy a farm with,’ he said.
‘I didn’t say a farm. Anyway, we could use some of Mum and Dad’s money.’ She was watching him. ‘I know what you’re going to say, but we wouldn’t be spending their money. We’d be reinvesting it. The place in the country would still be there if we ever wanted to sell it again. It would just be moving the money from one kind of investment to another.’
Martin said, ‘Birte and I bought factories when we received our compensation from the German government. We could just as easily have bought flats or shares or a place in the country. A farm might have been a better investment in the long run than the factories have been. A great many factories have been built in Melbourne by developers since we bought ours and rents have gone down instead of up as the agent said they were certain to. And there’s always something for us to attend to, either with the factories themselves, the roof or a crack in the wall, or with the people who lease them from us or trouble with the neighbours. Problems you don’t think of when you buy things like that. We can’t just own the factories and live off the rents and forget about them, which is what I thought we were going to do. Birte was more realistic. Every week there’s something. Birte attends to it.’ He smiled, no doubt thinking of Birte yelling at the agent down the phone, and lit another cigarette.
Robert envied the way Martin smoked without any concern for his health, enjoying every puff.
Martin said, ‘I think a place in the country sounds like a good idea.’ He looked up and grinned at them. ‘I’d come and stay with you for holidays. I could help. My father and I were workers. I haven’t forgotten how to handle tools. The country air would do us all good.’
Lena said, ‘I really would love to have an orchard. I’ve always wanted to be able to look out of my room at an orchard. Dad loved fruit trees in bloom. Plums and apples and pears. That’s why Mum and Dad went to Japan for their honeymoon. It was his idea, to see the cherry blossoms in the spring.’
Martin was holding his cigarette delicately between two fingers, the smoke drifting about his head, his gaze on Lena, listening to her with evident pleasure, his legs crossed at the ankles, his socks wrinkled, a strip of white leg showing. He was leaning back in his chair, his hairless cheeks waxen in the ruby light of the electric heater, a sense from him of deep unlimited patience, an extraordinary pleasure in listening to Lena’s rapture, as if listening to music. He murmured, ‘A cottage in the country.’
They drove Martin out to the airport on Tuesday morning. Lena didn’t work at the hospital on Tuesdays and Robert was still on sick leave. The two of them stood in the departure hall and watched Martin’s plane lift away from the tarmac and fly into the blue distance.
She took his arm and they walked out to the car park and climbed into the Holden. ‘Imagine Martin coming to stay with us when we have our little place,’ she said. ‘Wouldn’t it be wonderful.’
41
They drove over the border into New South Wales and were soon on a minor road, the narrow strip of tar spearing straight ahead through open grazing country, the day cold and bright. Every now and then a stock truck or a utility passed them going the other way. They drove for maybe an hour through flat, dry, withered-looking country, where the storm had obviously not softened the grip of the drought, skinny sheep nibbling the roots of the grasses, a few red cattle gathered here and there under a scatter of shade trees.
They crossed a bridge over a dry riverbed and came into the town of Braidwood. Robert drove slowly down the main street. Utes and cars nosed into the kerbs. A few people about. Two men standing by a stock truck watching them go by. Robert raised his hand from the wheel and the men raised their hands. Old Victorian buildings, two-storey shops and agencies on each side of the street.
Lena said, ‘Who were they?’
‘No idea.’ He turned and looked at her and grinned. ‘Just being friendly,’ he said. ‘They haven’t seen the Holden around before and were wondering who we were.’
She said, ‘Let’s stop and have a look. We can ask someone about places for sale.’
He parked outside a two-storey brick-and-stone building with a cast-iron balcony. It was the Australian Estates office. There was a cafe next door, a single-storey weatherboard shop with a canting false front and no verandah. A signboard over the door—ROYAL CAFE. Nothing less. They went in. There was a blower heater going and it was warmer inside. A fan in the ceiling moving the warm air down over them. A smell of fruit. On the counter small piles of shrivelled apples and oranges and spotty bananas along with a box of potatoes and another of brown onions. Behind the counter, shelves along the wall stacked with rows of tinned food—Heinz baked beans, Spam, IXL peaches in syrup and pineapple chunks. Bottles of tomato sauce. The cafe area was in the back, up a low step. They went up the step and sat in the first booth
on the left. The sound of country and western music coming from the back. Slim Whitman lamenting the loss of Rose Marie. A voice out of Robert’s past. Half a dozen dead blowflies littering the sill of the sash window beside them in the booth, their living mates battering against the glass. The window looking out onto a dirt laneway, kids’ broken toys, a mattress leaning against the wall, two rusting forty-four-gallon drums lying on their sides. Across the laneway facing their window an unpainted weatherboard wall with a small four-pane window. Every pane of glass in the window broken.
A handsome Greek in his mid-forties came out from the back and walked over to their booth. Lena looked up at him and smiled. ‘Can I have a cup of black tea, please? Not too strong.’
He turned to Robert.
‘I’ll have tea and two rounds of ham sandwiches, with hot English mustard, if you have it.’
The Greek said, ‘We have the mustard. Tomatoes with the ham?’
‘Just the ham, thank you.’
When he’d gone back into the kitchen to prepare their order, Lena said, ‘Wow, what an amazing-looking man.’
Robert said, ‘And it’s not just his good looks.’ There was a self-contained grace about the Greek that had impressed them both. Robert said, ‘Zorba.’
When they’d finished their sandwiches and tea the man came back to their booth to collect the dishes. While he was putting the dishes together he said, ‘You folks down from Canberra for the day?’
Lena said, ‘We’re looking for a small farm to buy. Is there anywhere around here you’d suggest we could look?’