by Alex Miller
I sat on the chair and gently pushed the strands of hair off Lena’s face and tucked them behind her ear. I took her hand in mine. ‘Well, you silly old thing. What did you want to go and do this for?’ Her fingers slowly closed over mine, a sense of a grip; then, as if a wave passed through her, her fingers loosened again. I sat holding her slack hand in mine. The faint smell of something chemical, or just the smell of sickness. I couldn’t detect any sign that she was breathing, but I knew she wasn’t dead. I shall turn eighty at the end of this year. Lena and I were the same age, so it must be seventeen years ago now that she had the stroke. She was sixty-three. The same age as her mother had been when she had her fatal stroke. It was as if her mother’s authority had hibernated in her for decades, waiting for its moment to make a lie of her daughter’s claim, ‘I’m fucking free!’ A claim only a young person could have made. She had been due to fly to St Louis on Monday to view their famous collection of the works of the German Expressionist painter Max Beckmann. She adored Beckmann’s work and was inspired by it to attempt things she might never otherwise have been bold enough to imagine. When I spoke to her on the phone that last time she told me she was feeling anxious about the trip. I told her it would be wonderful and to be sure to send me a Beckmann postcard. ‘Just go and enjoy it!’ I said. She had often cooled at the last minute and cancelled trips she’d spent years imagining and organising. ‘It’s important for you to see Beckmann.’ She thanked me for stiffening her resolve. ‘You’re right. I’ll be fine once I’m on the plane.’ We were both silent a while, not wanting to hang up yet. I said playfully, ‘Would you like me to come with you?’ She said, ‘Ah, if only.’
The nurse came in and whispered, ‘Are you all right, Mr Crofts?’
When I answered her I also spoke in a soft voice, the noises from the rest of the hospital building distant and muted, night sounds, like the low light. ‘You don’t expect her to recover consciousness then?’
‘I’m sorry, Mr Crofts, but I’m afraid there’s no chance of her waking.’
The nurse and I looked at her. The nurse said something, touched my shoulder, and left the room. I said, ‘They tell me you’re dead. But I can’t believe it.’ I took Lena’s hand in mine again and I leaned forward and kissed her forehead. ‘Lena! Dearest friend and companion of all those struggling years of ours.’ I pressed her cold hand to my forehead. The grief of her loss gripped me, and I wept. I had never felt closer to her than I did at that moment, nor more helplessly excluded from her presence.
I’d raised the blind and was watching the sun coming up over the bay, struggling through the haze of Melbourne’s polluted air. It was a rather wonderful sight; the sun looked as if it was made of solid gold, an Inca mask of great weight being drawn up by a massive force from the depths of the past. When I turned around, wanting to tell Lena to look at the sunrise, I saw at once that she had gone. I was reminded once again that the dead have nothing in common with the living. I was never to see Lena again. When I scattered her ashes it was 25 September 2000. A stormy day, waves crashing onto the rocks off Red Bluff. The waves rising up and snatching at me. A real Lena day. I would have told her about it. When I shook her ashes from the canister the updraft caught them and flung them back in my face. My clothes and hair were plastered with a mixture of sea spume and her grey ashes. What a laugh she’s having. The madness of it. Her will, to get me to walk along the old beach from those days together. And I did. She had her way. The wild girl in the elegant black swimsuit, out of my reach, having the last word. Lena.
What did we leave unsaid that still cries out in me to be said? To make something whole of us, after all, of what we were and what we strove for. Or is that too neat for life and death? The ragged ends of something incomplete and flawed, rather, a more likely ending. Closer to something we might dare to call our truth. The questions left unasked and unanswered.
66
It’s a bright clear Saturday morning. I’ll write to Ann today. She doesn’t specify how serious or trivial her illness might be, and I am left to think the worst. My wife and I are sitting in the garden reading the papers and drinking our morning coffee under the apple tree. Our son and his family were up on the weekend and we’re both feeling needed and reassured. The day is very still. There is not a breath of wind. Sitting under the leafless apple tree in the sun it is warm, a feeling of spring, the jonquils already out, their perfume heavy in the air. There is the noise of traffic along the nearby main road and the squabbling of the wattlebirds in the flowering gum, chasing the parrots away, then getting chased away themselves by the bigger birds, whose name I forget. The traffic noise too, it has increased greatly since we came here to live nearly twenty years ago. The Council put a set of traffic lights in, so now we get heavily loaded trucks and cars accelerating up the hill. It’s become a drag race out there.
Our lives are a series of days.
Our neighbour, Harold, passed away. He was ninety-four. We’ll go to his funeral.
I am suddenly awake. My bladder is on fire. My dream vanishes. Another day. I’ll have to get up and take a piss. The air in my room is cold. There’s no sign of the dawn around the rim of the curtains. I look at my watch. It’s six o’clock. I’ve done well. I’ve slept for nearly seven hours straight. I get up and put on a t-shirt and my old grey dressing-gown. I don’t put on the light in case it wakes my wife. On the way to the bathroom I turn up the dial on the heaters. After I’ve taken a piss I go into the kitchen and put the jug on. My wife calls, ‘Are you making tea?’
I say, ‘Did I wake you?’
‘I was already awake.’
We have separate bedrooms these days. We both snore and have different sleeping habits. I pour two cups of tea and spread margarine thinly on two corn biscuits and I carry the tea into her room—sugar in mine but no milk, a little dash of the thin milk in hers. She moves her book aside to make room for the tea and biscuits and I set them on the bedside table. Her book is Hilary Mantel’s Bring Up the Bodies. I say, ‘How’s it going?’
‘It has improved.’
‘As good as the first one?’
She hesitates, looking thoughtfully at the cover of the book. ‘Yes,’ she says at last. ‘It is.’
I say, ‘Did you sleep okay?’
‘I had a beautiful sleep,’ she says. ‘What about you?’
‘I had nearly seven hours straight.’ This is a boast.
She pushes a pillow behind her back.
I bite into the biscuit and take a drink of tea. We sit in silence a while. Then I say, ‘Now I must write the book about Martin.’
To celebrate the life of my dear friend Martin Bloch, a brave good man who never told his story, dead now so many years, but not dead to me. To find the broken fragments of his story and put them into an order that will redeem him from the silence. It is not, after all, what we find beyond Lukács’s empty horizon, whether grace or damnation, that consoles us, but the search itself. So long as the horizon remains empty, we go on. To go on is everything. That is our salvation. And the deeper we look within ourselves the less we understand.
After breakfast I go into my study and open my emails. There are no more shocks. Only the demand in me that I write the letter now and don’t put it off any longer. There are not another forty-three years to wait. Did I ever speak to Ann about Martin? I can’t remember. They’re linked now, the two of them, in these rearrangements of my memory. They’ve both returned to me, almost on the same day. It won’t be possible for me to rest until I follow Martin’s broken trail. His story appears to me like one of the fragmentary Roman wall paintings I stood and gazed at in Pompeii—a part of a figure here, then a gap, then another part of some other figure doing something else over there, then more gaps, the connections missing. I was in Melbourne when he died but I didn’t attend his funeral. That lapse will need explaining. Birte never understood why I stayed away. I’m not sure she forgave me. When she asked me why, I told her, ‘Martin and I had an understanding about these things.’ S
he scoffed at this. ‘What do you mean? What sort of understanding?’ I was unable to explain what I meant. I believed Martin would have understood. I was young then. Now, in my eightieth year, I would go to his funeral. I would go for Birte’s sake and for my own. And if I were leaving Paris now and meeting my wife again, I would write to Ann at once and not impose on her what must have been a painful and inexplicably cruel silence. If I had my time over I’d do many things differently.
I think of Ann and how we lay under the stars that night at the farewell party for her and Phil. We have all known such uncanny moments of remembering. But who can know the unconscious trigger of time and death and the connection of images long buried in the vast echoing vaults of the mind? Places lost long ago to consciousness. The great French novelist Marguerite Yourcenar, in her first novel, Alexis, said of this opacity, If it is difficult to live, it is even more difficult to explain one’s life. And perhaps it isn’t explanation that is needed, after all, but merely to remember. Did Ann spend a lifetime of devotion and study on the work of Yourcenar?
I turn my head to the right and see my pastel drawing of the fighting man, the ochre of his muscular body against the dark miasma that is threatening to engulf him from below. It is a portrait of myself as a young man. Suddenly I know what I must say to Ann. Hanging beside my drawing is Ed’s portrait of his mother, the richly overworked green background of that picture always putting me in mind of the deeply satisfying green background in Dürer’s portrait of Michael Wolgemut in Berlin’s Gemäldegalerie. Phil was right: Ed was a fine artist. He did several drawings of Lena, catching exactly the strength of her skull and her jaw, seeing in her a strange, elusive and determined woman, seeing her beauty, seeing her inner struggle. These attributes were there in his wonderful little sketches. I regret that I’ve lost track of the little sketch of her he gave me. He said he would paint her portrait in oils but he never did. Over the years I’ve grown to love his portrait of his mother as greatly as Lena loved it, and to see in it some of the quality that might have been in an oil portrait of Lena if he had made one. Ed’s portrait of his mother has become part of the aesthetic of my existence, a cherished relic from those days. On the bookshelves at the level of Ed’s mother’s portrait, and to the right of it, is the copy of Thomas Mann’s Doctor Faustus given me by Martin.
My past is collected in this room, just as it is collected in the strange diffusion of memory and imagination from which I am drawing the substance of this book. Like certain unwelcome memories—which I would be content to discard if only they would agree to being discarded—these material relics from my past can’t be denied their place in the story if I am to locate some part of my own and Lena’s truth within it. A more telling relic than any of these hangs beside the small window in our sitting room: the narrow tonal impression in oil of a view into a room through a partly open door that I’ve already spoken about. The accumulation of planes and shadows and the receding zones of reflected light suggesting a swirl in the air among the indeterminate shadows, a suggestion of someone’s passing, impossible to catch again or to pin down, but undeniably there. It is a successful painting of silence and absence. It was painted by Lena towards the end of her life. She came to our town on my sixtieth birthday and presented it to me. She had wrapped it in newspaper and tied it with string. The three of us stood at the kitchen table, Lena, myself and my wife. Lena said, ‘It’s what you’ve been waiting for from me all these years.’ I took the parcel from her. ‘It’s what I’ve been waiting for from myself,’ she said. At sixty she was an old woman. She and my wife, friends by then, stood and watched while I unwrapped it. I took the paper off and stood the picture on the table before me. I said, ‘It’s a self-portrait.’ Lena and I looked at each other and I saw how happy she was that I had understood at once. For she had described in her painting not the essence but the passage of love.
Looking at Ed’s portrait of his mother now—a portrait of a very definite presence—I find myself remembering Lena’s delight with Ed and the way they played together, children in the cruelty of their innocence. With him she at last began to find her answer to the terrible conundrum that had tormented her for years. She saw Ed then with greater clarity than I saw him, without the misery of my prejudices and my failures. She saw the tides and the wild energy in the man below the glint and glitter of his facetious make-believe. In Ed she witnessed the quality of freedom she longed for—not a liberation from authority, as I had often thought, but a liberation from the compulsion to perform her duty. A liberation from the burden of her conscience, the severe legacy of her class, her school, and above all, her mother and her home, a mother whom she had loved and whom even in death she could not bear to disappoint. In Ed, Lena caught sight of a way out of her bind.
I’m sitting here looking at Ann’s email address on the screen. I shall tell her of the great joy I have had from writing during my long life. I shall remind her that she saved my life and set me securely on my path. I shall tell her it was all worthwhile. I will tell her how important she has always been in my life. And I shall remind her of our great happiness as we stood together on that bridge in Paris, the snow falling softly around us in the silence, the astonishing moment of our happiness, a happiness that was never given the chance to erode into routine but which remains in my memory as a moment of perfection. Without you, I shall say, I would not have done any of it. I shall remind her of our moment in the fairy story when the evil wizard’s spell is lifted and the lovers are restored to their former selves.
I type Dear Ann, then delete it and retype Dearest Ann, then correct that to My dear Ann, and then My dearest Ann. How else are we to address the past, except to frame it as our legend? That past which is us, that legend which is ours and which sustains us.
My dearest Ann,
If it is difficult to live, it is even more difficult to explain one’s life…
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I would like to express my heartfelt thanks to my publisher, Annette Barlow, and the team at Allen & Unwin.