Landscape of Farewell (21 page)

In the evening he sat rereading the story. ‘Old age is not the time for clambering about among mountainous escarpments,’ I reminded him. But he was not to be put off and was proof against my cautioning. ‘The truck will get us most of the way,’ he said, not looking up from his reading. ‘It’s only a bit of a hike from the river. You’ll see.’

While I was washing the breakfast dishes the next morning he returned from feeding the hens and brought me a fine knobbed cane. ‘Here,’ he said, handing it to me as if it were the answer to my misgivings about our proposed journey to the Expedition Range. ‘It belonged to my mother. It was in the cottage.’ He stood and watched while I stepped across the kitchen with it. My gait fell with a surprising naturalness into a pivoting of the hips and a rolling of the shoulders that was not unlike the action of my uncle’s gait. ‘You look like you’ve never been without it,’ he said approvingly. ‘That’s just the way Ma used to walk.’ So natural to me was the action, indeed, and so effective the stick in taking the weight from my ankle, that I might have been using it for years. In a way I felt myself to be more
me
with it than I had felt without it. The polished globe of the knob fitted familiarly and firmly to my palm, like the reassuring grip of an old friend. I was delighted with it. It was as if I and the stick had been reunited. The rap of the ferule against the boards was a satisfying sound.

I turned at the door and grinned at Dougald, flourishing the stick grandly. ‘You see, I am now an old man with a walking stick.’ I saw that he had indeed seen just such an image of me. It was a transformation. I felt it. And he saw it. The stick changed me. With it in my hand I ceased to resist old age. I offered Dougald a go but he declined to play the game, no doubt reluctant to appear to me as I appeared to him. I walked about the kitchen some more, and the sound of my uncle stumping about downstairs at night in the farmhouse on his wooden peg was vivid within me.

Frost glittered on the corrugated iron roofs of the houses as we drove through the township, the three dogs shivering in the back of the truck with our gear. I thought Mount Nebo had never looked so romantic, as if it were a slumbering hamlet on the edge of a Russian forest a century ago. Dougald waved and hooted the horn as we drove past the service station, but I did not see any sign of life there. Esmé was to look in at the house each day and keep an eye on things. She would feed the hens in exchange for the eggs. When she asked Dougald what had happened to the goat he replied without hesitation, ‘She got away on us.’ He was evidently not afraid of a lie, and had no intention of giving me up.

After we left the last house behind, the road swung south, its red surface spearing through the grey ocean of scrub to
the horizon. We sped on, the secret world of the yellow robin rushing past in a blur. Dougald hugged the trembling wheel and said little, keeping the truck to the crown of the gravel, a plume of dust fanning out behind us, his foot hard down on the accelerator.

As we travelled south all that day, seated beside each other in the noisy cabin of the old truck, Dougald’s mood became more silent and inward and he was not responsive to my attempts at conversation. No doubt he was meditating on what lay ahead of us. It was a moment of great uncertainty for him. The countryside we drove through was unchanging and uninhabited. I saw no cattle or wild animals and we encountered no traffic.

I once drove through the forest with my uncle in his truck all one wintry day, when the late wartime countryside of Germany possessed just such an appearance of austere melancholy and abandonment, its only occupants seemingly ourselves in the speeding truck, the trees rushing past and the wind roaring at the windows. It was a landscape in mourning, and that is how I think of it still, that country of the past to which my soul belongs. My uncle’s features were set that day in the mask he often wore of forever reaching into himself for something final, some elusive thing that he could never quite lay his hand to, hoping and longing for a sudden illuminating sign that would confirm his need to be at one with his earth. Not the land, not quite the
country
the way Dougald spoke of it, but the deep, black, arable
earth that his father had fed and enriched and
his
father before him. How his silence during that drive, the expression that was confirmed on his features, spoke to me of his anxiety to draw me into his religion of the earth and to baptise me with its sacred torments. It was his principal preoccupation while I was with him, how this might be accomplished. His passion, his jealousy of my father, his brooding loneliness, his despairing knowledge that the search for the spiritual is always elsewhere, had driven him down into himself until he had lost sight of the world. He was not a man of the city, but was a man whose mind remained closed, a man whose obsession drew him into a solitary place where he could no longer be reached by others. And it might have been that his arms flew up out of that lonely place and he cried out to me, beseeching me, that I, his nephew, his
only
nephew, the son of his sister, would hear him and would at the last reach down to him and take hold of his hands and be at one with him in his final years, and that for this betrothal to the soil of my ancestors I would renounce my own father.

We camped that night, my uncle and I, by a cold stream at the edge of the forest, and in the night I heard him knocking on his wooden leg. I more than half-believed he tapped a message to a spirit presence with whom he held sinister communion.
Your father is not at the front
, he murmured to me, the madness of belief in his blue eyes.
He is engaged upon secret work
. Had he tried he might have won me with love, but he was no longer
capable of love. He could not win me with fear and enmity. The seed of fear and doubt he sowed in me against my father set him apart from me in a world of his own that I could not have entered even if I had desired to, for I loved my father. My uncle’s fierce despair was founded in his knowledge that his earth was to die with him. That was the vision that haunted him, just as Dougald had been haunted by the thought that Gnapun’s story would be lost forever when he died. There was a fear of extinction in both their dreams. My uncle knew that no one would replace him in his priestly dedication to the wellbeing of his soil when he was gone. And he was right. He foresaw the end of his meaning. Today there are vast suburbs where he grew his crops and grazed his sheep and cows, and he and his ways and his peculiar obsessions are unknown by the people who live in those suburbs. It all ended. Everything. Nothing of him, nothing of his house or his ideas, not a thing of it remains, except my own doubt about the decency of my father that he seeded in me, and which found its sustenance in my childhood fears and took root there, growing within me as I grew, drawing its canopy of silence over me like the canopy of a great dark tree that my uncle had planted at the edge of his fields in a moment of despair and bitterness.

I have lived my life within the shadow of this doubt. I have been unable to
know
, certain one moment of my father’s goodness, and the next as certain of his guilt—to
sense
the
atrocious participation of his hands that had held me with love. When I was a boy during the war there was much I could not know, but I knew, as everyone knew, that an evil beyond the reckoning of humanity was being done in our names and that we were never to understand it or to recover from it. It has haunted my generation and the ghost of it will not be gone until we are gone. A capacity for deep silence was revealed within each of us, like a cavern we had not known to exist before. No matter how lofty our moral principles, few of us proved immune to the pernicious charms of silence. My mother, my father, my sister and I. We all kept our silence. We children were crippled by it and lost our voices to it. No doubt people
will
forget, one day, eventually. And of course there are those brave and gifted souls who do find their voices. I wonder sometimes if Katriona, living her life in London with her English husband, has already begun to forget. And
her
children. Will they even be told? But one lifetime is not long enough to forget. One lifetime is not time enough for anything much at all.

I looked across at Dougald, where he sat hunched over the wheel beside me, glowering at the endless road that seemed to stand, vertical and stationary, before us, as if it were a great porphyry obelisk denying us entry into the landscape instead of providing us with a way forward. With his gift of the story of his great-grandfather, Dougald had unknowingly instructed me in my own way forward. I had asked myself since then if it was too
late for me to go back and to search the records for my father’s war service. Was it too late for me to write my fiction of his life? For what else might it become but a fiction? I could never again pretend to a sufficient objectivity to write the story of my father’s life and times as history. I had failed at history, and there was no point returning to it. Suppose I uncovered the worst? What then? What if the facts of my father’s story were so dire they refused to yield to the poetics of fiction? Perhaps some things cannot be, and should not be, written as fiction. Perhaps it is only with the detached gravitas of historical scholarship, with words based upon the undeniable facts of documentary records and eyewitness accounts, that some things can be set before the generations that follow us. Perhaps fiction dissolves the pain too readily, and too readily enables us to accept and to absolve ourselves. Acceptance is surely an early stage of forgetting. I had already begun to accept the reality of Winifred’s death, and was this acceptance not the beginning of forgetting the grief of my loss? But we cannot go on accumulating griefs on griefs. Writing the story of Gnapun’s terrible deeds I put on the mask and danced, and the dance exhilarated me. Eventually we accept the ghosts that haunt us and we become their familiars, at which they lose their terrors for us and are soon our playthings. But to make a fiction of the deeds of the generation of my father must inevitably be to humanise those deeds and to betray the truth of what was inhuman, not to preserve it. Perhaps only history can preserve it. So what then, I wondered,
had I done with Gnapun’s story if I had not humanised the motives of the perpetrators of the massacre? I needed, I realised, to reread the story in order to know what I had done. To have done it was one thing, but to know what it was that I had done was another. Perhaps I would wish to destroy it when I read it. Was it mine to destroy? Who owned the story now, Dougald or I? Or was it the property of us both? The story satisfied him. It delighted him. It was what he wanted from me. It fulfilled his dream of a continuation. He was possessive of it. He had not returned my journal, but told me he would return it to me once he had entered the story on his computer. But I had seen no sign of him beginning to do this.

As we rattled on along that road all day, my doubts and uncertainties circled around in my head like insistent crows over a cornfield. Suppose one day the descendants of those massacred innocents should come upon my story and see in it a celebration of what had taken place? The thought chilled me. Might it be enough for them that I acknowledged the brotherhood of Gnapun and the leader of the strangers, and that I had seen a biblical parallel in the murder of one brother by the other? I turned to Dougald and shouted above the din of the rattling cabin, ‘Did you bring my journal?’

He did not respond, but gazed down the road like a blind man. So engrossed, so hypnotised was he by the road, he might have forgotten I was beside him. I longed to escape from the
vibrating cabin and to stand alone in the stillness of the scrub and to be face to face once again with the fearless, inquiring eye of the yellow robin. For where else but in such creatures can we find the certainty of innocence?

Late in the afternoon Dougald pulled up in a small town and bought some stores. Before leaving the town we ate a meal in the only café there. The man who served us was Greek and spoke scarcely two words of English. I asked him which island he was from but he did not understand my question. I have never encountered a living soul who seemed to me to be further from his home than this man. He sat on a stool behind his counter and smoked one cigarette after another. His features were without expression as he watched us eat our meal. It was as if he watched the sea at his door. When he saw that we had finished eating he stubbed out his cigarette and walked over to us and collected our dishes without a word, then returned to his dreaming solitude behind the counter and lit another
cigarette. Dougald and I were his only customers. We might have been the only customers he had ever had. When we had eaten I thanked him and we drove on. Soon it was as if the town had never existed. I remarked to Dougald, ‘That Greek is a true exile.’ I felt for the fate of the man, as it seemed to touch something in all of us. Dougald said nothing to this. He was preoccupied, his thoughts no doubt far ahead of us in his own country.

I dozed for a time after our meal and when I opened my eyes we had left the scrub behind and were passing through a landscape of vast open downs on which crops had recently been sown. In the distance the ramparts of great cliffs rose abruptly from the plain. Rising behind the cliffs were the soft outlines of a range of wooded mountains and steep valleys. When we came to within a few kilometres of the cliffs, Dougald gave up his anxious embrace of the wheel and squared his shoulders, and he rested against the back of his seat, as if he were satisfied at last that the view before him was not a mirage but was real and would not disappear as we drew close to it, but would soon resolve faithfully into its familiar details. He lifted his hand and pointed. ‘There she is, old mate,’ he said. ‘The Expedition Range.’ He described with his outspread fingers the silvery lines that lay along the flanks of the great rock walls. ‘They are waterfalls,’ he said. ‘They’ve had good rains down this way.’ He spoke as if there had been no tension between us. I looked across at him and
he turned to me and smiled, a youthful delight in his eyes. ‘This is it, old mate,’ he said.