Landscape of Farewell Read online

  PRAISE FOR ALEX MILLER

  Prochownik’s Dream

  ‘Prochownik’s Dream is an absorbing and satisfying novel, distinguished by Miller’s enviable ability to evoke the appearance and texture of paintings in the often unyielding medium of words.’

  —Andrew Riemer, The Sydney Morning Herald

  ‘With this searing, honest and exhilarating study of the inner life of an artist, Alex Miller has created another masterpiece.’

  —Good Reading

  ‘Prochownik’s Dream … exemplifies everything we’ve come to expect and enjoy from one of Australia’s most accomplished authors … wonderfully absorbing and insightful.’ —Sunday Telegraph

  ‘A beautiful novel of ideas which never eclipse the characters.’

  —The Age

  Journey to the Stone Country

  ‘The most impressive and satisfying novel of recent years. It gave me all the kinds of pleasure a reader can hope for.’

  —Tim Winton

  ‘A terrific tale of love and redemption that captivates from the first line.’

  —Nicholas Shakespeare, author of The Dancer Upstairs

  Conditions of Faith

  ‘This is an amazing book. The reader can’t help but offer up a prayerful thank you: Thank you, God, that human beings still have the audacity to write like this.’

  —Washington Post

  ‘I think we shall see few finer or richer novels this year … a singular achievement.’

  —Andrew Riemer, Australian Book Review

  ‘Ambitious and convincing … highly readable … it explores the psyche of a woman torn between family and career with subtlety and grace.’

  —The New York Times Book Review

  ‘Rich and deeply emotional … a compelling portrayal of a young woman’s complicated feelings in the face of motherhood.’

  —Booklist (starred review)

  ‘My private acid test of a literary work is whether, having read it, it lingers in my mind afterward. Conditions of Faith fulfils that criterion; I am still thinking about Emily.’

  —Colleen McCulloch

  The Sitters

  ‘Like Patrick White, Miller uses the painter to portray the ambivalence of art and the artist. In The Sitters is the brooding genius of light. Its presence is made manifest in Miller’s supple, painterly prose which layers words into textured moments.’

  —Simon Hughes, The Sunday Age

  The Ancestor Game

  ‘Extraordinary fictional portraits of China and Australia.’

  —New York Times Book Review

  ‘A major new novel of grand design and rich texture, a vast canvas of time and space, its gaze outward yet its vision intimate and intellectually abundant.’

  —The Age

  The Tivington Nott

  ‘The Tivington Nott abounds in symbols to stir the subconscious. It is a rich study of place, both elegant and urgent.’ —The Age

  ‘In a virtuoso exhibition, Miller’s control never once falters.’

  —Canberra Times

  ALEX MILLER

  LANDSCAPE of FAREWELL

  Also by Alex Miller

  Prochownik’s Dream

  Journey to the Stone Country

  Conditions of Faith

  The Sitters

  The Ancestor Game

  The Tivington Nott

  Watching the Climbers on the Mountain

  For Stephanie

  & for my friend Frank Budby, elder of the Barada

  First published in 2007

  Copyright © Alex Miller 2007

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher. The Australian Copyright Act 1968 (the Act) allows a maximum of one chapter or 10 per cent of this book, whichever is the greater, to be photocopied by any educational institution for its educational purposes provided that the educational institution (or body that administers it) has given a remuneration notice to Copyright Agency Limited (CAL) under the Act.

  This project has been assisted by the Commonwealth Government through the Australia Council, its arts funding and advisory board.

  Allen & Unwin

  83 Alexander Street

  Crows Nest NSW 2065

  Australia

  Phone: (61 2) 8425 0100

  Fax: (61 2) 9906 2218

  Email: [email protected]

  Web: www.allenandunwin.com

  National Library of Australia

  Cataloguing-in-Publication entry:

  Miller, Alex, 1936–.

  Landscape of farewell.

  ISBN 978 1 74175 375 2

  I. Title.

  A823.3

  Set in 11.5/17.5 pt Fairfield Light by Midland Typesetters, Maryborough, Victoria Printed and bound in Australia by Griffin Press

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  From where rises the high tide of desire, of expectation, of an obsession with sheer being defiant of pain, of the treadmill of enslavement and injustice, of the massacres that are history?

  George Steiner

  Hamburg Autumn 2004

  1

  Agamemnon’s edict

  On examining my reflection in the hallstand mirror before leaving for the conference that morning, it was not my imminent death nor the poor quality of my paper that concerned me, but that I was in need of a haircut and had once again forgotten to shave. Winifred would have run her fingers along the back of my neck and reproved me, You need tidying up! As if I were a neglected room in her house. Winifred never had a house of her own, but in the ideal life of her imagination I am confident she had lived in one. For all the forthrightness of her modern feminist spirit, there was something immovably old-fashioned in Winifred’s secret longings and I am sure she saw herself, in this life of her interior fantasies, as the broad-hipped, bosomy mistress of a grand establishment with a vast brood of noisy and unruly children and large dogs. We never talked about it. I just knew it, the way I knew her mood before she came into a room. Could that be where she had gone? Not to nothingness, but teleported to her true home when the summons came? Although I am an unbeliever, I devoutly wished such a blessing on her. For she was a woman who deserved to meet her true—indeed her ideal and imaginary—self one day. Which I cannot say of everyone I meet.

  She seemed to stand behind me that morning as I examined my reflection in the mirror, unhappy that her husband, Professor Max Otto, for whom she once possessed ambitions, was not to cut a distinguished figure in front of his colleagues on the occasion of his last appearance before them, but was to be remembered by them at the end as a dishevelled, grieving, defeated old man. But perhaps that is too harsh. I am of average height and a little stooped these days, owing to the persistent pain of a mildly arthritic spine, and my hair, which in my youth was glossy and abundant, floats about at the back of my head like a luminous nimbus. My eyes too have faded—I had not expected this. Once a lustrous amber of great depth and clarity, my eyes are now a pale mud colour and are inclined to water, as if I am forever on the point of weeping—as I should be—or have been peeling onions. And speaking of onions, the skin of my face and neck has become thin and papery, and several of those darkly discoloured patches have appeared on my forehead. I resent this deterioration in my appearance more even than the daily allotment of pain. Until well into my middle years I enjoyed an unblemished complexion, which I no doubt owed to a distant Barbary ancestor. I took this blessing for granted as something that was mine for life, as if it were the unearned due of class or breeding. Absurd vanity! I am able to detect only the faintest remains of that g
lorious past today. Now I look on a landscape arid and deserted, where once a gay society flourished amid ripening pomegranates and purple grapes, the splash of fountains and cool sounds of laughter from the grove on summer evenings, from where the erotic imploring of the oud aroused our lusts …

  But I exaggerate. If only it ever had been thus.

  I ran my fingers through my ghostly hair, and touched with the forefinger of my right hand a flaky darkness above my left eye, then patted my inside pocket to make certain I had not forgotten my paper and my glasses, and turned from the mirror and went downstairs into the fresh morning. There was the mahogany glint of horse chestnuts littering the footpath and the grass verges. The fine old trees along Schlüterstrasse were clinging to the last of their leaves—as we humans cling to life and to memories beyond their season. It was that brief, charmed period in Hamburg before the cold arrives, when the weather can still be relied upon to be fine, and even reminiscent of summer. It did not seem inappropriate to me that I planned to end my life on such a day. I had written my paper without conviction, obedient to a duty felt more towards the dead than the living. There had been no joy in it. It had been a task imposed on me by the grim moral overseer who rules my life—my conscience, let us say. To claim now that I understood then my true motives for persisting with it would be a lie. Perhaps I persisted because I unconsciously desired a reason to persist. Who knows? I cannot truly say what my deeper motives were. I did not know them then and I do not know them now. I had postponed my death in order to write this valedictory paper because my daughter told me Winifred would have wanted me to do it. That was all. I composed it with only the most fleeting moments of pleasure and forgetfulness, and entirely without those surprising instants of inspiration that make intellectual labour worthwhile. Its arguments were concocted from yesterday’s leftovers, those stale thoughts out of that mouldering store of notes which I had preserved for thirty years—if preserved is the word for it—in the carton on top of my bookshelves in my study. I dug about in the cold ashes of that youthful folly and came up with something for this occasion. I hoped no one would notice how second rate it was, or that if they did notice they would not take offence, but would forgive this faltering of my advanced years and greet it with forbearance and silence.

  As I walked down the front steps of our apartment building, little birds flew up at my approach. The publisher’s unhappy wife from the apartment below mine, Lydia Erkenbrecht, herself a published poet, had scattered crumbs from her table for them. Or perhaps, more prosaically, not having a family of her own to feed and therefore having few crumbs on her table, the good woman purchased packets of birdseed from the supermarket for this purpose. At any rate, these little street birds were now her family—starlings and sparrows for the most part, with the occasional avuncular pigeon. I had noticed how shamed she was whenever my sudden appearance in the entryway to our building interrupted this pathetic substitution. But she kept on with it, and now the birds had come to rely on her, and she possessed, besides her poetry, if not love, then an object to her persistence rather less pathetic than my own desperate insistence on delivering my last paper to the conference in Aby Warburg’s old library.

  It was all—all this—on account of my wife’s death. I had stood at the window of our darkened bedroom that night, looking down into the deserted street, Winifred’s photograph clasped to my breast, my hands folded over it as if I were a devout clutching a crucifix to my heart. For me Winifred was still the young woman she had been then. To see her smile was to see the girl in the green scarf standing in the spring sunshine on the Pont Neuf that first morning of our honeymoon. It was a photograph I had taken more than thirty years ago. I looked down from the window into the deserted street, the leaves of the chestnut trees dancing in the wind and making agitated shadows on the glass, as if hands signalled to me, eager for me to understand. Transfixed by helplessness at my loss, I was numb with remembering. Until the moment of her death Winifred was an active woman, her energies youthful and her enthusiasms undimmed. We received no warning. There was no opportunity for us to embrace or to murmur a word of fond farewell. It was the evening of another ordinary day in the new routine of our lives. I had been retired from the university less than a month and she had made arrangements for us to travel to Venice for a holiday the following Monday. She was in the kitchen preparing our evening meal and listening to the new recording of Fauré’s Nocturnes I had given her. I was sitting on the sofa under the lamp reading a young Harvard professor’s New History of the German People. The astonishingly able professor was two years younger than our daughter Katriona … The hammer blow of Winifred’s skull striking the floor tiles drove a spear through my heart—I still feel it. I have no memory of tossing the book aside and crossing the room but was at her side, cradling her head in my arms. In her sightless eyes I saw that she was dead. She was gone. Just like that. In a shocking and mysterious way—which I found strangely humiliating and embarrassing—the body I held in my arms was no longer Winifred. We had been cruelly cheated. I howled to the empty room, begging her to return to me. The silence that greeted my howls, the absence, the nothing that death makes of us, overwhelmed me. I am ashamed to write it, but even in that first moment it was for myself I began to fear. The water for the linguini boiled frantically on the stove above me, spitting tiny arrows of fire onto my neck where I bent over her, Fauré persisting en mi mineur. Could I ever be myself again? Panic swept through me and I began to tremble violently. I knew that everything had come to an end.

  I stuck it out for a few weeks, perhaps for a month, stumbling around the apartment in a daze, wondering who had brought the flowers and whether I had thanked them, going out to buy eggs and bread and coming home without them, staring emptily at the television hour after hour, an iron band around my chest. Then I made my preparations and telephoned Katriona in London to say goodbye. The whisky and the two small bottles of yellow barbiturate tablets beside the telephone on my night table were a comfort. My good friend Jürgen assured me that in combination they were a painless but certain means for exiting this world of ours. I had never been a whisky drinker. This was to be a new departure for me in more ways than one. A part of me remained detached and interested in the process—the immortal part of me, I suppose it was.

  I wept helplessly when my daughter answered the telephone. ‘You can’t let go of everything just because Mum’s no longer there to hold your hand, Dad.’ She took me to task as if I were her child. ‘You know Mum would have wanted you to write your paper for the conference this year. Farewells were important to Mum.’ She was right of course. I was being selfish. I realised then that the faint ticking I was hearing behind her voice was the click of her computer keyboard—she was multi-tasking. Such was her life. I decided to tell her I was going to kill myself, but changed my mind and instead thanked her for her advice. ‘I’m sorry I lost my composure,’ I said.

  ‘For heaven’s sake, Dad! You’re allowed to weep!’

  How tired she had sounded herself. Our little Katya no more.

  When my paper was announced by the chair, I stood up and approached the rostrum along the centre aisle between the assembled delegates. Do I only fancy it now with the benefit of long reflection, and in the shadow of the events that have since transformed me, or did I experience then a tremulous anticipation, the swift touch of déjà vu, that fleeting breath of a bat’s wing in the dark—a premonition, indeed, that my world was about to change once again, a further shift in the cataclysm of my last days, a settling of the debris of my life, which had collapsed around me with such unexpected suddenness? Was it really so as I walked down that familiar aisle in the grand library of Warburg Haus for the last time, my steps accompanied by the untidy and distracted applause of friends and one-time colleagues? What are we to make of these premonitory experiences? Something shifts, giving in to the pressures that have built for decades in the tectonic plates that support our poor notions of reality, then, suddenly, a whipcrack splits the air a
bout us and we are no longer able to judge our world by the means with which we have habitually judged it. The vista before us, the emotional and psychic vista, I suppose I mean to say, is no longer quite what we have been accustomed to, and we find ourselves strangers among our familiars. It is as if our mother tongue were suddenly gibberish to us, our guidance system scrambled and encoded into an alien snickering for which we possess no cipher. Did I feel it then? Or do I only recollect it now in the retelling of this story—that sudden unsteadiness, the unaccustomed give in the ground beneath my feet?

  I stood at the lectern and took my paper out of my pocket and unfolded it. I did not see the delegates sitting in rows before me as individuals, but saw a kind of greyness topped, as the Baltic was often topped on summer evenings in my childhood, by little white caps nodding unsteadily on that never-still surface of the sea. I cleared my throat and read into the microphone the title of my paper, ‘The Persistence of the Phenomenon of Massacre in Human Society from the Earliest Times to the Present’. I smoothed the pages against the familiar slope of the lectern and began to read. I wished for no more than to be permitted to read my paper and then to slip away quietly, to leave unnoticed and unremarked, having paid my dues to Katriona and to Winifred by doing as I was told. I had always felt more at ease when I did as I was told. I began with a quotation from Homer, the first of the poets—according to Curtius the founding hero, no less, of European literature. Agamemnon, the commander-in-chief of the Greek expedition against Troy, and king of the Mycenaeans, cautions his younger brother, Menelaus, against sparing the life of a high-born Trojan. We are not going to leave a single one of them alive, Agamemnon says to his brother, down to the babies in their mothers’ wombs—not even they must live. The whole people must be wiped out of existence, and none be left to think of them and shed a tear …