Stream System: The Collected Short Fiction of Gerald Murnane

by Gerald Murnane

  The decaying tree hid until the last moment the few broken bricks and the scattering of jonquils. As soon as I knew we were standing on the site of a house of which nothing survived but the ruins of a chimney, and that my father’s brother had been intending all afternoon to lead me to that spot, I was apprehensive again. I thought I was in for a little ceremony – a rite of familial piety. I thought I might hear of some pilgrimage that the men of my father’s family had kept up for years. But nothing of the kind happened.

  I followed my father’s brother into the level place where the grass was shorter and more yielding than the pastures around it. I felt the sudden dying-away of the sea-wind. The jonquils barely nodded. Of all the places I had observed that day, the green clearing with the hill behind and the shaggy tree in front was the most suitable for my meeting with a young woman.

  My uncle had strode into the place with no change in his gait. He stopped only for long enough to glance around as though he had to deliver to someone afterwards a brief report on the crumbs of bricks and the neglected jonquils. Then he strode on again into the paddocks and towards the road.

  I caught up with him and asked him off-handedly whose house we had just seen. He said I had just visited the home of the Cotters, who were among my forebears. The tone of his voice told me he had no banter just for the moment. But then, when I had already begun to see the Cotters as venerable husband and wife, my uncle went on to say that the Cotters had been his own great-uncles: two bachelor brothers of his grandmother who had spent the last twenty years of their lives in their cottage at Lake Gillear.

  The influence of the Cotters reached me by way of the poem I had first heard a mile or so from their quince tree and jonquils. Following my uncle back to the road, I began to hear my remembered version of his poem being recited by what I supposed were nineteenth-century voices. When they reached the fourth of the lines they introduced a variant.

  And Cotters come no more.

  The reciters intoned their poem of regret, but I tried not to hear them. I thought of the green grass and the nodding jonquils and the shady tree. I thought of myself alone there with a young woman, perhaps my wife or perhaps not. The place was so sheltered and secluded that I could have recited poetry to the young woman or told her about the lonely Cotters before I took my pleasure.

  We reached the road, which was a pair of faint wheel-marks in the grass. My uncle had left his car a hundred yards short of where the road ended and the coastal scrub began. While my uncle and I had been walking, someone had parked another car near the edge of the scrub. The other car was not a new Holden like my uncle’s car but a shabby, canvas-topped car of some make I did not know – a young man’s car.

  Quite incautiously I craned my neck while my uncle was beside me. All in one moment I saw the rear door of the shabby car hanging open, I divined why it had been allowed to hang open and why I saw no heads and shoulders above the level of the seats, and I understood that my uncle had not only seen what I had seen but had seen that I had seen it.

  And surely in the next moment I knew I was going to hear, during the many long pauses while my uncle and I travelled afterwards further away from the coast, the Cotters my forebears calmly reciting.

  There Were Some Countries

  T here were some countries so far from this city and so little spoken of among my acquaintances that no one objected when I summed up their terrain or their people in a few words. Nor did I object when I found equally brief descriptions of the same countries in reviews of books I would never read or in magazines I would never subscribe to.

  This was not because I was impatient with the subtleties of actual geography. I believe I might have distinguished between the characteristics of each neighbourhood in Tashkent or Ulan Bator, if I had cared for such matters. But I preferred to discern, on the distant borders of the space I inhabited, countries that gave themselves away at a glance.

  I assumed that I shared this preference with those who accepted my descriptions of remote places, and even with those who composed the sentences that served my needs. There was therefore no reason for me to question what I read not long ago in an American weekly: that the people of pre-war Romania were credited with a fondness for sexual perversions.

  There may have been explorers who correctly predicted the whereabouts, and even some of the features, of the places they finally discovered. But I thought none of them could have placed his conjectured country so accurately as I had placed mine on my most private maps.

  I had not known what name it would eventually bear, but I was familiar for many years with its folkways, and even some of its sorry history. During that time, of course, I was unable to verify my suspicions and intuitions. I hesitated a little before saying openly what was concealed among the close-set mountains deep within the borders of the land I knew.

  I kept to myself some of my interpretations of its forbidding architecture, the awkward restraint of its dances, and the provoking fluidity of its language. And few people had the opportunity to dispute my explanations for the decline of some dynasty or the relentless persecution of some wayward sect.

  But I never doubted the existence of the land, even when I least expected to learn where it lay. Whenever I was assured that it could not be located beyond this or that frontier, I only intensified my researches into its culture. I even surmised that some traveller had already uncovered in an actual territory the way of life that I knew as necessary to some nameless folk, but that his account of his travels had been suppressed or hopelessly mutilated.

  When I read at last that brief reference to pre-war Romania, I believed I had learnt no more than the name of a country I had known since my schooldays. In those days I had begun to study what I called geography from my collection of second-hand National Geographics. The illustrations of Europe were mostly black and white, and I used to hope that the men in shabby suits and the women in drab frocks were only wearing such clothes until they could replace the precious embroidered costumes they had lost in some bombing raid. The maps were too detailed to copy, but my teacher praised the page I reproduced from my school atlas showing three brightly coloured nations on the north-east shores of the Baltic and the free city of Danzig prominent nearby.

  On the steep side of a mountain, in the country that I first found in those days, a ragged shepherd sprawled beside his flock. He was able to watch all day the comings and goings of villagers among the huddled houses across the narrow valley. But he himself lay almost unnoticed among the lowest reaches of a dense forest. In the languid hours of afternoon, the men and women moving in and out of his field of vision were mere blurs of limbs propelled by the same insistent energies that drove the wind through the branches above him or brought his snuffling sheep to the very grass where his legs rested.

  The thoughts that occurred to this man might have seemed outrageous to anyone but myself. I had watched many a distant village in sombre illustrations and seen their inhabitants stripped of the invisible but bulky layers of moral fabric that I sensed about the people nearer me. The face of the man was haggard and creased. I knew he had done in his native valley what I would not have failed to do between far hillsides. And years before I knew that his homeland was called Romania, I called it, for convenience, Romania.

  A group of farm-workers straightened their backs and rested for a moment from their threshing. Women and men stood elbow to elbow. The drudgery of their work in the shadeless sunlit field and the nearness of the keen-eyed older women should have protected the only girl I was interested in. And even though she looked willingly into the eyes of some passing traveller with a camera, the folds of the white shawl hiding half her face should have proved that she held herself aloof from the stocky scowling men around her. But I could devise only one explanation for the troubled expression that marred her delicate features. Young as she was, she had been besmirched already by the ruling vice of her race.

  It was some time before I could calmly appreciate the extent of her predicament. But
I came to see in her face the very blend of resignation and resentment and regret that would have been only a further incitement to her tormentors. I took those men, of course, for Romanians, and years afterwards found I had not been mistaken.

  Like every other country I knew, Romania had its outcasts – its despised nation within a nation whose chief function was to bear the worst imputations that an already debauched citizenry could bring against its supposed inferiors. I was as repelled as any respectable Romanian would have been by the squalid ways of the homeless gipsies, even though I accused them of nothing I was not myself capable of doing in my whitewashed cottage or gabled manor house.

  I was ready to suppose that the gipsies in their wanderings saw aspects of a land that my countrymen and I had overlooked in our obsessive journeys across our territory. It was at least reassuring to learn in time that even the closest secrets of the gipsies were still preserved somewhere within the actual boundaries of Romania.

  When I knew at last that all the lore and customs of Romania were in fact known to the Romanians, I might have felt an even closer kinship with my fellows, the saturnine men sipping their murky plum liqueurs while sunset reddened the Carpathian peaks above them. I knew now what was closest to their hearts. It was only what I had once thought so unlikely that I located it in the fancies of a people impossibly remote from me.

  I might have enjoyed my own interpretations of the music of George Enesco or the writings of Eugene Ionesco. I might have begun my own investigations into the origins of Dada, knowing that Tristan Tzara was an expatriate Romanian. I should perhaps have been one of the few readers of Mircea Eliade who responded less to his scholarly essays than to his obscure remark that his life’s work was inspired by his awed recollections of what he called Old Romania. And when I watched a certain popular film that was said to have made clearly visible something that had only been glimpsed in the landscapes of Australia, I might have been amused to hear, as an accompaniment to images of glaring skies and granite peaks and schoolgirls with Nordic complexions, the sound of Pan-pipes passed beneath the pursed lips of a native of Romania.

  But none of these reactions occurred to me. For I had discovered the location of Romania by the wrong means altogether. Alone at my desk in a side street of a suburb of Melbourne, I might suppose myself the only man of my nationality to own a copy of the selected poems of Tudor Arghezi, and certainly the only such man at a given hour to be savouring his bold imagery:

  Statuia ei de chihlimbar

  Ai rastigni-o, ca un potcovar

  Mînza, la pamînt,

  Nechezînd.

  But I could no longer enjoy my secret penetration of such matters, even knowing they were authentically Romanian. For I could not forget that the truth about Romania had been published in a magazine with a circulation of millions.

  Bookstalls on every continent displayed its familiar cover. People who read no books still scanned its columns for something more coherent than the unremitting signals from radio and television. My prized information about Romania had been available to countless others. How many people, who never before could have visualised a solitary hillside in Banat, were now free to imagine whatever they chose in all the land from the Iron Gates to the banks of the Prutul?

  It was no consolation for me to reflect that the Romania now exposed to general view was a land that had disappeared nearly forty years before. This was no assurance that my own discoveries in Romania had not been anticipated by others. For the best of my own insights had been obtained from places I never expected to visit. Now, as the passage of time made daily more remote the lands known as ‘pre-war’, more and more of the curious might be encouraged to speculate about a Romania beyond reach of all of us.

  I considered the possibility of excluding Romania from my thoughts. For of course I knew of other places where appearances scarcely concealed a way of life peculiarly suited to my own understanding. I could have gone back to the same magazines that first taught me about Romania and examined what it was that disturbed me in Madagascar, Mystery Isle, or what I found so oppressive in Rambles in the Ryukyus. But any satisfaction that I got from my study of those far places would have been threatened by the chance that some scholar or journalist had long since published what now passed for the truth about their corruption.

  A simple course of action would have been for me to conceal all evidence that I once sympathised with the Romanians and arrived unaided at a knowledge of their strange habits. This would have safeguarded me from the accusation that I am poorly read and almost unaware of the wealth of information available for students of mountainous hinterlands.

  For a time I chose to do just this. I consistently referred to Romania as though I had never dreamed of anything beyond the scant images that anyone might entertain of an outlandish, irrelevant landscape. Yet no one but myself seemed to observe any such restriction in their talk or their writings. I heard or read of scores of places with characteristics that could only have been discovered by a solitary observer with no more inspiration than an ambiguous text or an imperfect illustration. And few of those places seemed equal to Romania as I knew it.

  I soon resumed my usual habits. I discussed, whenever I wished, those countries so far from this city and so little spoken of among my acquaintances that no one could object when I summed up their terrain or their people in a few words. I made no special mention of Romania. I was no longer anxious to interpret its strangeness for myself or for others. I believed that I, like everyone about me, was an exile from a stranger place still – the country that allowed us all to think ourselves exiles from a stranger place still.

  Finger Web

  This is a story about a man who visited Sydney only once in his life, in 1964. When I was asked to write this story I was in the middle of writing quite a different story about a man who visited Sydney only once in his life, in 1957.

  I have visited Sydney only twice in my life.

  When the man in this story first decided to visit Sydney, he did not think of himself as about to visit a large city four or five hundred miles north-east of his own city. Even when he said one Friday night in April 1964 to the men that he drank beer with every Friday night, ‘I’m thinking of going to Sydney for a couple of days,’ he was not thinking of himself as approaching a large city beside a semi-circular bridge with yachts sailing under it. If he had told the men in the hotel where he drank beer every Friday night what he was thinking of himself as doing, he would have said, ‘I’m thinking of walking up and down for a couple of days in a corner of a garden where a few dark-green ferns hang down in front of a wall of cream-coloured rocks.’

  After the man in this story had told the men in the hotel that he was thinking of going to Sydney, one of the men asked him where he would stay in Sydney.

  The man in this story answered that he would stay with his married cousin in Granville. But this was not where the man saw himself as staying after he had arrived in Sydney. He had heard three years before that he had a married cousin living somewhere in Granville, but he had never thought of trying to find his married cousin. He told the men in the hotel that he would stay with his married cousin because he did not want the men to know that he was going to stay at the Majestic Hotel in Kings Cross.

  The man in this story was going to stay at the Majestic Hotel in Kings Cross because one of the men that he played cards with and drank beer with every Saturday night had told him that the Majestic in Kings Cross was the place where he stayed whenever he went to Sydney for a couple of days.

  The man in this story had said one Saturday night in March 1964 to the men that he was drinking beer with and playing cards with that he was thinking of going to Sydney for a couple of days. One of the men had then asked the man where he would stay in Sydney.

  The man in this story had answered that he had never been to Sydney and he did not know where men such as himself stayed when they went to Sydney for a couple of days.

  The man in this story had not felt comfort
able when he said this, but if he had not said it he would not have learned where he might stay in Sydney, and in that case he would not have been able to go to Sydney.

  The other men drinking beer and playing cards had each stayed for a couple of days in many places such as Sydney, but the man in this story had always lived in the room or the rooms that he called for the time being his own room or rooms in one or another of the suburbs in the only city that he knew. In March 1964 the man in this story had been frightened of what might happen to him if he went to Sydney for a couple of days. He had been frightened that the men and especially the women of Sydney might jeer or laugh at him because they saw about him some sign that he had never been to their city before. He had been frightened of the moment when he would have to walk up to a woman sitting behind a sort of walled desk such as he had seen in drawings of hotel foyers in cartoons and comic strips and would then have to ask the woman whether he could stay for a couple of nights in her hotel. (The man had not been so stupid that he supposed the woman behind the walled desk would be the owner of the hotel, but he understood that when he walked towards the woman both she and he would understand that she called all the rooms in the hotel for the time being her own rooms.) The man had expected that he might be too frightened to understand the words that the woman would speak to him from behind the walled desk, but he had expected that he would understand from the tone of the woman’s voice that she had known from the moment when she first saw him creeping towards her walled desk that he had never been to her city before.