Landscape of Farewell (12 page)

Dougald was sitting beside me, as we always sat for our meals, the two of us side by side facing the open door—as if we resolutely faced together whatever the day was to bring—but separated now by our own thoughts. The newspapers and old magazines and periodicals were pushed into an untidy pile on the far side of the table to make room for our plates. He paused in his eating and lifted his head, pointing with his fork through the wall of the kitchen in the direction of the highway, and he said in a voice that was easy and conversational, ‘Her mother was a road kill.’

I wondered for an instant who he could be talking about.

‘Vita picked her up out there two years ago. She was sitting by the mother’s carcass on the highway. The little thing was hardly strong enough to stand when Vita brought her in.’ He looked at me. ‘She bottle-fed her for weeks.’ He lifted his chin. ‘There, in your bedroom.’ He folded a piece of bacon with his fork, put it in his mouth and chewed, looking off thoughtfully through the wall. ‘There’s hundreds of them wild goats out there in the scrub.’

I said miserably, ‘I would give anything to bring her back to life.’

He said in a matter-of-fact way, as if it were a long-held belief, ‘Nothing’s ever going to work out up this way.’

I looked at him with surprise. But he offered no more, and
might have believed he had pronounced a sufficient sense of his own fate, and an explanation of our situation, with these few words—the fault not in my failings nor in the death of the goat, nor yet in himself, but in the sterile equation of his exile,
up this way
. The air trembled with the distant thunder of the mine. It was as if a great wave approached us. I made up my mind then. ‘I’ll get the plane down to Sydney from Mackay today,’ I said.

He said nothing for a minute or two, but went on eating. Then he said mildly, and as if it were more an observation than a question, ‘You won’t be spending the week here with Vita, then?’

‘I think it’s time for me to go home.’

We sat side by side at the kitchen table saying nothing, the remains of our breakfast in front of us, looking out at the sunlit tree and the yard, the cottage and the shed with the old red truck, the two brown dogs watching from the concrete. We might have just received news that the battle had been lost. There did seem to have been a battle. And wasn’t it our dismay at finding ourselves on the losing side of it that had rendered us mute? For this was not our old easy silence. I knew well enough from the common experience of my generation that how we are to speak of defeat is less obvious to us than how we might boast of our heroism and our glorious victories. No doubt Dougald and I were both asking ourselves how it was we had come so
badly out of this, when we surely had believed ourselves to be carrying the day with honour. And to this question we had no answer. Defeat is a great silencer. To explain it we must accuse ourselves, or we must lie.

He pushed back his chair and got to his feet. He walked across the kitchen and went into his bedroom. A moment later he came out and set a thick volume on the table in front of me. ‘This old feller was a German too.’ He stood looking down at the book, then turned and crossed the floor to his bedroom again. Before he went in he paused with his hand to the door and gestured at the book on the table in front of me. ‘You can read it later. We’d better get ready.’ He grinned, his features suddenly lighting up with his customary cheerfulness. ‘Young Miss Vita hates people being late to meet her. That girl likes the welcoming committee to show up on time. She’s not going to be impressed when you tell her you’re heading home.’ He held the door to let the bitch go in ahead of him, her claws tapping on the boards, then he followed her and closed the door. A moment later I heard the murmur of his voice. I guessed he was talking on the telephone. By the way the volume of his voice was rising I supposed him to be arguing with Vita.

I drew the book towards me. It was a nineteenth-century volume. Its covers and spine were missing, the binder’s stitches exposed, knotted with expert fingers long ago and still holding good. On the reverse of the first page, facing the title page, there
was a steel engraving of a broad prospect of lake and mountains. Two men reclined on the grass in the foreground beside a smoking fire and observed with keen interest a flight of birds that was crossing the sky in the centre of their view. The title page read:
Journal of an Overland Expedition in Australia from Moreton Bay to Port Essington, a Distance of Upwards of 3000 Miles, During the Years 1844–1845, by Dr Ludwig Leichhardt.
So that was it, another German traveller in Australia. The date of publication was 1847. To have travelled three thousand miles across Australia at that time must have been a venture sustained by the most passionate of visions and an intemperate and rare persistence. Between Leichhardt’s name and the publisher’s imprint at the bottom of the page, there was an epigraph. It was a quotation from Goethe’s
Iphigenie auf Tauris
—Iphigenie, daughter of the god-like Agamemnon, that most merciless of warriors. Seeing Goethe’s familiar lines, I felt something of the poignant enchantment, indeed it is a kind of sadness, that we experience when we meet a fellow countryman in a foreign land far away from our own and know, suddenly, that it is ourselves who are the exotic objects in that landscape. This was the only real book I had seen in Dougald’s possession. I read the two lines aloud, filling the kitchen with the sound of my native tongue and making the dogs sit up and prick their ears at the strangeness of it—as if they thought I was casting a spell. ‘Die Götter brauchen manchen guten Mann/Zu ihrem Dienst auf dieser weiten Erde.’
I felt very keenly at that moment the pointlessness of my entire existence on this earth.

Dougald came out of his bedroom and began gathering his papers and putting them in his briefcase. He was wearing the black felt hat and the leather overcoat, his travelling costume. I watched him. He was a big man, tall and sombre, his complexion dark, his bold features filled with the shadows and crevices of his anxieties. He was an impressive figure. I greatly admired him and felt, suddenly, the privilege of his friendship. At my age one does not expect new friends. Now I had two, and was about to lose them both. He straightened and looked across at me. ‘You’d better get your skates on, old mate,’ he said. I felt with him then as I had felt with Vita in Hamburg, when she had been going home. I knew I was going to miss him greatly and that he had left me with a question about myself that without him I would never be able to solve.

‘Let me read you this,’ I said. I read Goethe’s lines to him in German, then I offered my translation. ‘The gods need many a good man at their service in this wide world.’ The words seemed to apply to him as he stood there before me in his long coat and his black hat, a man surely directed by his conscience and his love towards the recovery of the broken realities of his people. ‘It is from Goethe’s great drama of exile,’ I said.

He considered a moment, his lips pursed. ‘It sounds better in German,’ he said.

It is what we most desire, to share with another the inexpressible solitude of our knowledge of ourselves. He was right. Goethe sounds best in German.

He set his briefcase on the table and gestured at the book. ‘We carried that old book around with us everywhere when we went out on our researches in the old days. We’re in there,’ he said, making the claim confidently. ‘The highways and villages of our Old People. Leichhardt set it all down just the way he saw it. There’s information in that book we could not have recovered by any other means.’ He laughed softly, but I think not because he was amused. ‘It’s yours,’ he said. ‘Take it back to Hamburg with you.’

‘No!’ I objected. ‘I can’t possibly accept such a generous gift. You will need it when you go out on your researches again.’

‘When’s that going to be? I don’t think I’ll be going out on too many of them. But if I do, I promise you I’ll come over there to Hamburg and get that book back off you.’ He looked at me and said steadily, ‘Take it. It will be a reminder to you.’

Dougald’s old red truck bounded over the corrugated surface of the road at a surprising speed, its shock absorbers, like the knees of old men, no longer absorbing the shocks but delivering them to our spines. We had left the town behind some while ago and were travelling along the wide gravel road that Vita and I had come in along those three weeks earlier. I did not remember it. To either side of us the unbroken drift of low grey scrub. We saw no other vehicles and when Dougald’s mobile telephone rang he did not pull over to the verge to answer the call but stopped on the crown of the road, at which our following dust rolled over us, as if the sky darkened. Vita’s voice was loud and aggrieved. There was a crisis in her department and she was needed. Dougald grimaced at the loudness of her voice and held the telephone
inches from his ear. I could hear Vita’s every word, Dougald discreetly murmuring his responses. She was not on the plane to Mackay but was in her office at the university preparing to go into a meeting. ‘This trip’s just never going to work out,’ she yelled. Where had I heard this phrase before? I wondered why I did not feel surprised. Our dust drifted slowly over the low scrub. I got out of the truck and walked to the side of the road.

Standing in the cool morning air was a relief from the pounding in the cabin of the truck, and I was glad to be in contact with the place. I did not really want to leave. There was a delicate spiciness in the air. I could see that the surface of the ground within the scrub was a grey hardpan and was littered with dried leaves and twigs, as if someone had gone around scattering them there to make it look real. The small trees and shrubs were so densely grown I had to search for a place where I could gain access. The branches yielded easily, however, when I pushed against them, bending and swaying with the movement of a curtain. I had soon penetrated fifteen or twenty paces into the scrub, my footfalls crunching lightly on the dry ground cover. I stopped and looked back the way I had come. I could not see Dougald’s truck or the road. Had I arrived at this place from within the interior, as Leichhardt and his party must have done had they come this way, I would not have suspected the existence of a road only a few metres away. The sense of concealment and solitude was perfect. I stood in the perfumed silence and looked
about me, charmed by this unlikely other world so enclosed within itself and hidden from the outside. I was standing there listening, as if I expected to hear something, when a small bird landed on a trembling twig a few inches in front of me. I held my breath. The exquisite little creature examined me curiously with its tiny black eyes. It was the size of the European robin; its breast, however, was not red but a rich cadmium yellow that glowed from within the shadows of its perch. The bird observed me without fear, the two of us regarding each other with a kind of wonder. Suddenly the yellow robin was gone. I had entered its magical world. There was a serenity, untroubled and modest, within the shelter of the scrub that was at once calming, reassuring and strangely familiar. I could easily have belonged there. There was something akin to memory in my recognition of it, quite as if I had been there at an earlier period of my life, or in another life altogether. How many lives do we have? But I am no kind of resurrectionist.

The dry crunching of a step behind me made me turn. Dougald was making his way towards me, the mobile telephone held to his ear, his outstretched arm brushing aside the branches of the low trees and shrubs. He came up to me and handed me the telephone. ‘Vita wants a word, old mate.’

I took the telephone from him and held it to my ear. ‘So you’re not coming up to see us after all?’ I said. But she did not want to talk about her aborted trip.

‘I met someone,’ she said, imparting a secret.

‘Is he the black prince?’

‘This feller’s not what I had in mind, Max.’

‘But you like him?’

‘He’s a whitefella.’

‘I see,’ I said, although I was not sure that I did see.

‘I want to know what you think of him.’

I wondered if Dougald had told her about the death of her goat.

She said, ‘That’s not all.’

I could not see Dougald and supposed that he had gone back to the truck.

‘He’s an academic. I can’t seem to get away from them. I just feel so good when I’m with him, Max. We never stop laughing. It sounds so bloody clichéd! What I want to know is, what am I going to do when the black prince does show up? It scares me. What am I going to do with my little Brian then?’

I smiled to think of her dilemma. ‘Keep them both.’

‘It’s not funny! Don’t laugh at me! I love the little guy. There’s nothing to him. Honestly, wait till you see him. His shoulders are narrower than mine. D’you reckon that’s all right, for the bloke to be narrower than the girl? And what’s this shit Dougald tells me about you heading home?’

Her abrupt switch took me by surprise. I replied carefully, ‘I was going home with you anyway.’

‘That wasn’t settled.’

‘This is only a week sooner. It’s time for me to leave, Vita.’

She said, ‘You’re making a run for it.’

‘That’s nonsense.’

‘You’re a disappointment!’

‘I know. I’m sorry.’

‘What happened?’

‘Dougald didn’t tell you?’

‘You tell me.’

I cleared my throat. ‘I’m sorry, Vita. But I’m afraid I accidentally caused the death of your goat.’

She said nothing.

‘I’m sorry,’ I said.

‘Fuck you, Max!’ she said quietly.

‘I’m sorry.’

‘That poor little bugger. Jesus! What happened?’

I told her.

‘You’re hopeless. You’re not to be trusted.’

‘I’m sorry.’

‘Don’t keep saying you’re fucking sorry! This is not why you’re running out on Dougald.’

‘I’m not running out on Dougald.’

‘He needs a mate to get him out and about or he’s not going to last the distance. I’ve told you that. What happened to the idea that you’d talk him into showing you his country? You’re running out on
him. Face it. He needs you. But he’s never going to say so. He’s too proud to do that. You don’t know anything about that man.’ She was silent. Then she said, ‘This could be your last chance. Have you thought of that?’