Napoleon's Roads Page 6

  A Short Allegory

  A writer comes back to a paragraph he has written some years before, hoping he can take up its thread but finding he cannot. It is a story, of course, but the story does not exist – or rather, exists, for here is the trace – but he is no longer able to follow it. A man, it seems, has walked deeper and deeper into the jungle of his lover’s eyes – or perhaps it is only his own – leaving behind only this fragment, like a pencil, a cigarette lighter, a box of matches he might have forgotten, a last few sentences scrawled hastily to a friend only moments before taking his first steps into the giant trees, following something he has glimpsed there and, so great has been his haste to follow it, he has not had the time to describe it for us.

  ‘Imagine’, the paragraph begins ‘a jungle consisting not of trees, vines, mosses, flowers, but of towering sentences, dense paragraphs, referents, predicates intertwined and almost impenetrable, here and there, in small clearings, great-flowering words, phrases newly sprung from the damp ground starting to twine, even as one watches them, about the thick trunks or ground-touching limbs or, far above, leaning out from one sentence to another, giving themselves into the strange, separate world of the thickening canopy, the great cope of the text. Imagine the colours and exotic scents here. Imagine the snakes that lie in these vines, the birds that now and again flash suddenly from one sentence to another. Imagine – for this is what you do – the unimagined tribe that has never before had contact with your own civilisation, and that moment when, breaking through a veil of green words, you catch your first glimpse of brown limbs, black hair and a bright bird, breaking from the high phrases, shrieks, a piercing cry that goes out over the whole forest as if to register the end of everything.’

  A Time of Strangers

  … So it was, anyway, that we entered a time of strangers. It was hard to know how it had come about. Perhaps all that can be confidently said is that we must have had a great need of them, or – could this be possible? – they as greatly and suddenly a need of us. We found ourselves painting them, writing them. We found ourselves talking about them. We found that we had begun to dream of them. It was as if we had, many of us, been given suddenly, inexplicably, enchanted spectacles, wonderful glasses, that enabled us to see what had been invisible before, or that somewhere about us, within us, a barrier, a wall, a distance had broken down and beings were able to circulate among us that had been kept away longer than any of us could know. It is hard to say when the visions, the sense of their presences began, and for some time those of us who had seen or felt them had kept them to themselves, afraid that others would not understand, fearing – in fact certain, so great had become our loneliness – that these things could only be happening to ourselves alone. Now, after longer reflection – given what we have come to know – there may be those among us who are prepared to allow a kind of mass hysteria, a contagious suggestion, as if, as with all ideas whose times have come, there had been a need for the idea of them, and that idea itself had called them into being. (Do you see there the circles in my own thought, the specious argument? But I am convinced that the very thing that propels it, that turns it in upon itself despite all sense of reason or proportion, is typical of the things that revealed them to us in the first place.) Perhaps at last all that we can say is that the name, the thought of such creatures, had come again to us, to supply the questions, the vacuums, the shadows that beauty or wonder or fear had begun so urgently to set abroad. For we had tried all else – the confidence, the encyclopaedic knowledges, the cynicism – and perhaps it was that, the exhaustion, the loss of direction, the listlessness, that created the platform for their arrival, if arrival it was and not, as at other times it seemed, a sudden, inexplicable thickening of the atmosphere about us, as if what one day had been mere air had the next become inhabited, had taken on not only sinew, motion, but visage, character, identity as familiar as it was strange, as strange as it was hauntingly familiar. For although in our painting or our writing we had transformed them, in actual appearance they were almost always like ourselves – but for the cleanliness of line, the distinctive inner light that pearled every feature, the aura about them of a pale, bruising fire (once, in November, I held a face in my hands: I hoped the scent, the cool white burning on my palms would last forever).

  It was almost the end of the world, that was the thing. At least, there were more and more of us who found ourselves close to believing it. Air was running out, space was running out, imagination was running out, and so many of us had been wrought by this to such a frenetic pace that a kind of self-destruction seemed imminent and almost logical. We had given up resisting. We had given up hoping. We had given up trying to explain. We had even stopped posturing, had even stopped thinking there was something we should say. And in that torpor had found a strange relaxation, a lightening, even a kind of undesperate, effortless joy in the irresistible insanities of the heart. And then these beings. As if – but not actually? – from behind doorways, from the arms of our chairs, from the pillows beside us, rounding corners in front of us or falling into step beside us, staring at us from bus seats, looking up from desks or turning towards us in crowds with such intimate expressions, opennesses, a recognition that seemed to go through us, to penetrate immediately the heart of us, so that it was all that we could do to hold back from rising and, leaving our bags, stepping off from the bus, walking into the crowd to follow them. Not that they were all golden, all beings of light or beauty, for there were the darker ones, too, creatures of garbage, creatures of stone, bleak creatures, creatures of hate, creatures of emptiness, weakening creatures, creatures of drowning (and so many did, so many drowned).

  What they were, what it was that had so fertilised the seedbeds of our desire to create such an astonishing blossoming, to cause so exotic and alluring a mould upon our minds and spirits is hard enough to say, but harder still, in so many ways, is it to say why it was that they left. What had we said? What rule, what law had we broken? Was it the hope itself that somehow, in all that, began again, as if all such beings can only be beings of hopelessness? Was it that tiny sprout of green confidence, there amongst the asphalt grey? All that can be said is that, slowly, reluctantly, we came back to ourselves, and were now somewhat embarrassed by what had been, by what we had claimed to see, and had now to brace ourselves, as someone must recompose themselves after great laughter or unbounded sorrow, unbounded passion, and prepare themselves for the street, the people in the next room, relegating these delicate and extraordinary creatures – that had kissed us, that had taken our faces in their hands, that had come to the place just at the centre of our breastbone and undone the button there, and pushed their soft and exquisite tongues into the very secret and melting hearts of us, or passed, momentarily, their hot, intoxicating breath about our ears, or left about our necks and throats the kisses like clustered grapes with the mist of dawn still on them – again to the realm of the unthinkable. What had we said, what had we done? Was it, perhaps, as simple, and as complicated, as a single word, a word which, having long forgotten it, we uttered too often and too loudly in our delight, our uncontainable relief at so suddenly, so unexpectedly finding it again, a word that, even as I write of them, I can hardly – dare I? – bring myself to say?

  In the Centre of the World

  A moon has appeared in a tree. High up among the leaves and branches, yet visible from every direction, almost as if the leaves and the branches were not there at all. Not the real moon, which is still shining brightly above, but a small, perfect, different moon, right in the middle, silvery white with most of its craters intact, so like the real moon that it seems wrong to say it isn’t real also.

  Someone from the village has found it and alerted others, and now a small crowd has gathered. Almost everyone is there. Some people try to reach it using ladders and rakes, but it is so high up that when they step into the tree to take hold of it the thin upper branches bend too much, or start to break beneath their weight. Some – the very lightest,
the best climbers, the children – can actually touch it, but only just, with the tips of their fingers, and say that it feels like a small, wet, sandy rock at midnight, with the shine of the other moon on it. Others bring torches, as if light from something else might somehow explain it. Still others throw stones and pine cones and clods of earth, as always some people will do. But everything bounces right off it with a quiet and solid, non-metallic sound – the moon is hardly affected – and pretty soon they simply stand and stare like everyone else. A moon, a perfect moon, way up in the middle of a tree, in the centre of a farmer’s field, in what now, suddenly, unexpectedly, seems like it must, after all, be the centre of the world.

  In the morning it is gone, of course, as all moons are. But then, everybody agrees, it was a small, thin, thumbnail moon, as all moons also are, always, on the night before they disappear.

  Vierge Ouvrante

  A woman gives birth to death while a man stands watching – after all, he is the father, and what else can he do, his own death grown so large inside him, almost ready to be born?

  The Net

  High in the night sky over a country far below the equator the moon is casting great swathes of silver light into the emptiness about it. As they near the earth, transected by the high, thin tessellations of the evening cloud, they appear to turn into the kind of net that fishermen use to pull in sardines or mackerel from the bright night waters of the Mediterranean, or that natives might have employed, some hours earlier, in the broad, flat waters of a moonlit bay off an island in the South Pacific.

  Far below, a man is standing on a balcony, staring upwards, thinking of nothing but the moon’s astonishing brightness – the way, passing through a shoal of cloud that stretches away to the invisible horizon, it is as if the moon’s light were rising towards him from the bottom of a shallow sea. A corner of the net has entered his eyes. As might have been predicted, and without the aid of his actual hands – in fact without his being conscious of this at all – the mind of the man, arm over arm, is hauling in the bright fish of the moon.

  A Turkish Head

  The family of a veteran of the Gallipoli campaign, deceased at last at the age of one hundred and three, visit his house in Bendigo – it has been abandoned for years – and find in the potting shed, amongst his pieces of broken furniture and garden implements and suitcases full of old photograph albums and pianola rolls and 78 rpm records, a wooden box containing the severed head of a Turkish soldier, preserved as if mummified. The head is distorted and a dark unnatural brown, but still recognisable, with its teeth and moustache intact and a bullet-hole just above the right eye. After a great deal of debate and a few discreet and embarrassed phone calls the granddaughter finally persuades the family to give the relic up to the authorities and now the Australian and the Turkish governments are debating over where the head should finally be buried, the Australians wanting to send it back to Turkey and the Turks wanting the Australians to take responsibility and to bury it in Bendigo with a large memorial. After all, it hasn’t exactly come with papers. It could be anybody’s head.

  We Are Standing at the Low Stone Wall …

  We are standing at the low stone wall of a churchyard, in a village high on a ridge overlooking the border. The church is at the edge of the village and the view from the wall is panoramic, although that word does not seem to fit the time of day – near dusk, the darkness approaching – or the chill in the breeze coming in up the valley from the sea. Nor the stories that my friend is telling me, of the partisans who used to hide on the ridges opposite, the German killings, the reprisals, the raids that have lately been happening so much more. Over the border they are probably saying similar things about the people on this side, and on the far side of that country, on each side of another border, there are things being said that are almost the same. In this light the ridges look like great whales surfacing, in an already-mountainous sea.

  THE WALL

  It is Moon Sector 17 of what has already come to be called the Great Wall. Seven men to cover a two thousand metre stretch from the Quarter Moon guard house, westward eleven hundred metres to the gorge of the Eel River – down there, a hundred metres or so upstream, is another contingent of men, three or four, to watch for any who want to invade by water – and eastward almost nine hundred to where guards can wave at the guards of Sector 16, on the other side of the (guarded) staircase. In all weathers. Seven days a week with a half-day off each fortnight, during which the men are free to go down to the local villages – in fact to go anywhere they like – though most of them don’t want to, since it’s Imperial policy to send troops into provinces far away from their own, amongst unlike people, to reduce the risk of desertion. Though not, of course, of suicide, which has been known to happen. In all weather, but most often in winter, when the days are so short and so cold that seven-tenths of a guard’s life is lived in the dark, or half-dark.

  There is little for the guards to do but walk up and down the battlements, looking out every seven or eight metres when they come to a break just wide enough for one man to lean into and look out at more or less the same thing he looked at before, and think about jumping. Sometimes alone, sometimes in pairs (yes, the jumping, too). In the winter it’s most likely to be alone, since no-one wants to leave the guardhouse, which though not exactly warm is still a great deal warmer than the outside, and has the fire, food and drink. They can’t drink outside, not on duty, though in Moon Sector 17, as probably in most other sectors, no-one cares about that.

  In all weathers, seven days a week. Nothing happening. Nothing ever changing, except the day of the week, the weather. No enemies visible. No-one remembering when any were. The thought coming to everyone at some time or another that the Wall was not built to keep anyone out – how could it in any case with so many gaps in it? – but to convince those on the inside that they had enemies in the first place. After all, if there is a wall, there must be something that it divides. And if it is a Great Wall then there must be a very substantial reason.

  Here and there a hut is visible, a shepherd’s hut, or a farmer’s. And here and there a bit of track. Sometimes someone walking along it. Here and there a little human contact. Hardly a day, in fact, without human contact of a sort. It might be a wave, a shout, though most of the time the shout can’t be heard properly anyway. Unless the wind is right. Walls too high, and the air too damp, winter and summer. A shout could be almost anything, and they could shout almost anything back. Up to them to decide whether it’s polite or not. Only one of the seven soldiers speaks any of the local language. Not much need to, since the provisions – the food, the drink, the tobacco – are all pre-arranged, logged in by the staircase guards. And sometimes a woman, who will set herself up for a day or a night in the guardhouse before moving to another sector. Seven days a week no doubt; no doubt, like the rest, in all weathers. The frost on the ramparts, or the rain making them slippery, or the heat beating up from the stones. But mostly the frost and the rain, the stones greasy with cold. Nothing to do but walk up and down, drink, sleep, talk, fuck when they can. Think. After a year or so all arguments are argued out, all stories told. With a bit of luck there’s some variation in the repetition, or they weren’t listening the first time, or they’ve forgotten, or there’s a last little coin still rattling around in someone’s imagination. Every now and then someone is summoned to the staircase between the sectors and told to go home. For no apparent reason. Average time on the sector four years, give or take a year. That is, as far as anyone can tell. Four or five people sitting around comparing guesses is not much to go on. Any real idea of time requires watching it, and that only happens with new arrivals. It’s just that they think, Here’s summer again, how many summers is it now? Three? Four?

  A bleak place. Wind, rain, ice, snow, or a summer that’s so hot and dusty they long for them back again; mist for the mid-seasons. Sleep, eat, drink, fuck when they can (that’s a joke: what, once every month or so, with a rough woman who talks with the r
est while they do it, with another guy breathing down one’s neck?), patrol the wall, think, although it’s hard to tell when they’re thinking and when they’re not. Almost everyone gets to the point where they think that the Wall is doing their thinking for them, or at least giving them the thoughts, telling them how to think them. Almost everyone has got to the point where it occurs to them that they’ve had it wrong, that the side they thought was the outside, towards the enemy, is really the inside and vice versa. Almost everyone’s thought that they are totally forgotten, totally abandoned. Almost everyone’s thought that anyone seriously intent on being an enemy would not spend much time attacking the Wall. And if an enemy did come what would the guards do? Fight? Surrender? Offer them green tea and noodles? Wait for instructions? If there is a Headquarters anywhere it’s certainly not in this province or the next, or the one after that. The Wall could be taken and it might be weeks before Headquarters knew, if anyone ever took a message in the first place.