David Malouf's An Imaginary Life

IV

OUR WINTER DREAM begins.
It is my fifth year in this place, and I have still not grown used to it. Day in day out there is the same grayish light over the marshes, it snows, freezes, snows again, the wind blows steadily off the steppes. Inside our room the air is thick with smoke from the peat that smolders under us. The windows are kept barred for the most part against the wind, and can be opened only on those strange still days of absolute frost when the sky turns icy blue and the whole world holds its breath and glitters blue, gold, white, as if we had suddenly stepped through into a new land. Otherwise we huddle here in the half-dark, listening to the wind whistle around the eaves, shaking clumps of snow down with a heavy thump; listening to the wooden shutters rattle and the icicles clink, and protecting ourselves against the draughts that find their way in and blow up little eddies in the smoke-filled air. I write by a guttering candle, having to shield it, every now and then, with a cupped hand, to protect its being sucked out by a sudden gust. For a good deal of the time I sleep. It may be the heaviness of the air, or some slowing of the blood in the extreme cold, or perhaps it is simply boredom but I find myself nodding off at odd hours of the day and seem always drowsy and thick-headed. How many hours a day, I wonder, do I spend half sleeping, half dreaming? Twelve, fifteen?
The days, with so little to mark one off from another, pass quickly, falling away into absolute oblivion like the nights. A week passes, three weeks, five. Unless one notches them off on a stick, or marks them on parchment, one hardly knows they have been and gone.
I measure the weeks by how many guard duties I have done. One night in five I go out for four hours and man the wall, pacing up and down on a wooden parapet, just below the spiked summit of the palisade, with twenty others. On clear nights it can be beautiful: the moon high among clouds, the river flats bluish, broken with thick shadow, the whole countryside open as far as the eye can see, all the way to the river. On such watches you can see the wolves moving in packs over the snow, and if it is still enough, hear them howling. Sometimes a lone wolf will come right up to the wall, and once or twice a whole pack will appear, showing their fangs in the moonlight and filling the air with their terrible yowling, as they smell the beasts in their stalls, and the oxen, the asses, hearing their howls, make their own uneasy bellowing and braying in return. But most nights we just pass up and down in the fog that swirls around us like the sea, moving like blindmen with one hand extended before us on the narrow walk. The four hours then are like another kind of sleep. There is nothing for the eye to fix on and every sound is dampened. It is gray, dreamless sleep, that makes the knees ache and tightens the skull, and I have the greatest difficulty preventing myself then from falling into real sleep, and may be plummeting twelve meters into frozen mud.
The Child meanwhile has fallen into a state of apathy in which he sits for hours simply staring into the gloom, his elbows round his knees, his chin sunk on his clenched fists. He still quickens at moments, cocking his head for the rising of the wind after a lull or sniffing suddenly as the snow clouds move in upon us; and in the breaks of brilliant stillness when the windows can be opened, he becomes almost crazy with joy, rocking on his heels at the edge of the sill, and making little whimpering sounds like a puppy that has been let off the leash. But in the long periods when we are closed in by fog or snow, or by the severity of the frost, he sinks back into his old sullenness, and nothing will call him out of it. He feeds if the food is set in front of him. But he shows no interest now in our speech games, and I fear he will forget most of what we have learned. Once, when I tried to engage him again by making one of the calls he had been teaching me, he became quite hysterical. All that my futile attempt at a birdcall had done was remind him of the place in the swamp that we we have not visited now for three months or more, and I realize, painfully, that he does not understand, cannot understand, why we no longer go there or why our games have ended. Does he think I am punishing him?
One clear night, when we opened the windows, he tried to throw himself out, and I had to wrestle with him at the sill, while he kicked and uttered the raucous animallike cries that have once again convinced the old woman that he is no child but a beast in disguise who has wheedled his way in among us.
She watches him continually. She is terrified, I think, that he may touch something, some utensil, and thereby gain power over its users. And it is true that in his long hours of simply sitting, staring before him, he seems in no way like a normal child; and when he growls in his throat, or whimpers or makes little yelping sounds in his pain, even I begin to wonder if some animal spirit does not occasionally come creeping back into him – some spirit that succored him out there in the winter forest. He survived then. Can he survive now? I watch him retreat further each day into some invisible distance, some secret lair, where his spirit slumbers and cannot be recalled.
Looking at him on occasions, I have a clear glimpse of what he is doing. He is dreaming himself out into the winter countryside. I see him, briefly, moving over the soft snow among the birch trees, chewing strips of bark, kneeling to tear up lichen. I touch his shoulder, and he feels nothing. The black eyes, sunk deep in their sockets, stare through me, to dazzling fields of ice under the wind. When he quickens to a change of weather, it is, I realize now, to the change that comes over a landscape he is moving through in his head. If I thought we might find him again in the spring, I would let him go. But that is impossible. Having brought him in among us there is no way back. Already, in the warmth of the room, he is losing his capacity to withstand cold. For weeks now he has wrapped himself, like the rest of us, in a blanket of hide. Out there he would freeze. Whatever his secret was, I have taken it from him. He is as vulnerable now as anyone of us, and in that at least – even if the old woman does not see it – he shows himself human at last.
As if to prove what I have just perceived, the Child has a fever. Sitting as he does with his knees drawn up, staring, he suddenly pitches over and lies in a faint, but when I move to cover him, he wakes, and almost immediately begins shivering. Huge beads of sweat break out on his brow, his hair drips with it, his whole body streams. And in between the periods of burning, he freezes. I think he has never known before what it is to be cold. His whole body clenches on it, this new feeling, this discovery within himself of what winter means, what it is to be snow and ice, to feel oneself enter the realm of absolute cold, that polar world at the body’s limits. He draws his knees up, closing upon himself. Every muscle in his limbs, his shoulders, his neck, goes rigid, his fists clench, his jaws tighten. He looks terrified and when the convulsions begin I have to hold him, forcing a knife handle between his teeth, while he jerks, stiffens, goes through a whole series of spasms, and then sinks exhausted into a kind of nerveless sleep. Then again, the sweating. As I raise him in my arms and try to force a few drops of water between his lips, I am reminded of my brother, and realize what he means to me this Child, what it might mean to lose him.
The old woman watches from across the room. I know what she is thinking. This is no ordinary fever. The Child is wrestling with his demon, the animal spirit who protected him out there in the forest, and is fighting now to get back. When I appeal to her for some sort of medicine, some of the herbs she gathers and makes potions of, she shakes her head and turns her thumb down, spitting. I have to watch the Child day and night. If she thought for even a moment that the spirit might triumph and enter the Child’s body again, she would cut his throat. I know it.
But the younger woman, who has a child of her own and is softhearted, cannot bear to see the boy writhe as he does, and sweat, and shiver, and jerk about under the rugs. Secretly she brings me food for him and a bowl of clean water.
I hear the old woman arguing with her, and I know what she is saying. What if the Child gave up the struggle, and we found ourselves shut up here with the giant white wolf who is his familiar, and who might at any moment succeed in filling the Child’s body and then breaking out of it. The fever, she believes, is part of the painful transformation. The Child’s blood boils and freezes, as drop by drop it is being changed. The Child’s belly cringes for the raw meat that is the wolf’s diet. His limbs strain to grow claws. His jaw clenches against the growing there of fangs. And what if it isn’t a wolf after all? But some other beast? Larger, more terrible than even she can imagine.
The young woman quails. And I see a new doubt has been sown in her mind. What if the beast, finding the Child too difficult to conquer, chose the body of her own son instead? It would be so easy. While we are all sleeping, our bodies empty in the dark, the Child’s spirit slips out, crosses the room, enters her son’s body – and there, it is done!
For two whole days the young woman refuses to come near us. She watches the Child, she watches her son, she keeps the boy as far from our corner of the room as possible, while the old woman whispers and flaps about between us.
But in the dead of night, when the Child’s fever is at its crisis, and I am forced to call for help, it is the younger woman who stirs in the dark, wraps herself in her cloak, and comes with water. I am desperately tired and through sheer exhaustion, after nearly five days of watching, seem always on the edge of tears. My hand shakes so much that I cannot lift the bowl to the Child’s lips.
She takes it from me. Kneels. Lifts the boy’s head, letting him gulp at the coolness, and when she has laid his head back on the pile of rags I have contrived for a pillow, sits fanning him, while I rest for a moment against the wall and sleep. When I start awake again she is still there, her face just visible in the folds of the cloak. She sits perfectly upright, her hand moving back and forth to make a breeze. She nods, indicating that I may sleep again, and immediately I fall back into my body’s depths.
In the early morning light that seeps in through the window cracks, I wake to find her holding the Child in one of his fits. She looks frightened, and I know that this is the real moment of crisis. I know too what it is she fears.
The Child’s body jerks, loosens, his limbs fly about, his jaws clench and unclench, strange animal sounds come from them. I hear the others begin to stir, and see the old woman come out of the darkness to watch, and the boy rising sleepily behind her. The Child grunts, low growls come from his throat. His tongue lolls and saliva rolls from the corner of his mouth. His lips move. And suddenly, so clearly that we all hear it – I and the young woman, who suddenly gasps and pushes him from her, the old woman who lets out a howl – clearly, from his lips, among all the growling and whines of animal pain, comes a word, one of the words I have been trying all these weeks to teach him. He has discovered it at last in his delirium. It has come to the surface of his mind. His tongue has discovered how to produce it.
It is quite an ordinary word, and has no significance. Just one of the common words of this people’s daily life. But the effect on them is immediate. And in my joy at his discovering his humanity at last I fail to see what it is that alarms them. The young woman stumbles to her feet, terrified and begins to back away. The old woman reaches a hand out to take her, and another behind to catch the boy. They huddle together with the boy between them, staring, while I look up from the floor at the Child’s side, unable for the moment to comprehend.
It is what the old woman has predicted. In the depths of his fever, at the crisis point, the Child has snatched away another soul. His suddenly speaking out like that, a word in their own language, proves it.
It is the boy Lullo they now turn to, since it is he who has, without knowing it, spoken from the Child’s mouth. The old woman immediately begins wailing over him, cursing the younger woman who has deserted her own child to care for an interloper, and in nursing him up to the crisis has made it possible for the demon to steal, if only for a moment, her son’s spirit. The younger woman is speechless with fear. She staggers about the rushes, holding her belly and making little wordless sounds in her throat as if she might be about to be sick. The boy begins to whimper, and the old woman tears his clothes off to search his body for marks, signs, some place where the demon may have got in. An hour later when Ryzak returns from guard duty, the room is in utter turmoil. Both women are hysterical and the boy is laid out on his pallet, sweating in the first onset of fever, while the Child, his own crisis over at last, breathes quietly and sleeps.
My mind is awhirl with all this.
At any other moment I might be overjoyed at what has occurred. The Child has spoken at last. In his delirium he has discovered human speech. The first step has been taken that will lead him inevitably now into the world of men. If this had happened six or seven weeks ago, out there in the marshes, I would be beside myself with joy. Now I am aware only of the danger he has put himself in. That first human word, drawn up out of the depths of himself in sleep, while his mind perhaps, his spirit, was far off in the deep snow of his forest, may destroy him.
He is innocent of all danger, his breath coming softly between his lips now as he sleeps; but the danger is real, and I dare not leave him, or allow myself to fall, even for a moment, into my own body’s hunger for rest. In their corner opposite, too occupied for the moment to pay us any attention, the two women are wailing over the body of the boy, whose moans can be heard, lightly, between the spaces of their howling. He is in the early stages of the same sickness the Child had. I recognize the symptoms.
How did he take it?
What comes to my mind is the look of alarm on the boy’s face, the terror of some unknown presence, as the old woman’s hands tore at him, searching his body for signs of invasion. Did he take the disease then? Catching her fear and making it his own? Who knows by what mysterious means the body moves to its ends? Years ago, on my travels in Asia Minor, I came upon a city that was visited by plague. What struck me then was the randomness with which the disease advanced, how it appeared in one house, striking down all but a single child, who remained quite unscathed, then leapt two houses to claim another victim. I came to believe then that as well as the plague itself, moving like a cloud over the city, there must also be some shadow of the plague that lives in the body or in the mind, and that only when the two meet and recognize one another can the disease break in. How else explain why one man takes it and another, sitting beside him, or sleeping in the same bed, does not? And what can that shadow be, that sleeps there in the body, but fear? It is terror that is the link. The body breaks into a sweat of fear, and in the dampness of that sweat, the plague begins to swarm, each drop is transformed and becomes fever sweat. What begins in the mind works now upon the body. So too, once, I saw the disease transmitted in the theater. A famous actor at Antioch, portraying the last anguish of a hero who had been stricken with a deadly fever, after insulting the gods, worked so powerfully upon the minds of the audience, reproduced so perfectly the burning, the choking, the paroxysms of the disease, that half a dozen spectators, out of their own terror, their own guilt, suddenly fell ill with it, dropped sweating from their seats, and had to be carried out. Their minds had so taken the impression of what they saw that the mere simulation of the disease, in the actor’s body, had communicated itself to their bodies and become real. The actor’s spirit, in imagining the disease, had so powerfully affected theirs that they had let the illness in, and immediately all its poisons flooded through their veins.
Is that how such fevers spread? Is that how the boy has been afflicted? Not through some wish of the Child’s to free himself by passing the disease on, but through fear, carried in the mind of his mother, imprinted upon his own mind by the old woman’s sudden panic, and immediately translating itself into sweat, into fire, into the fits he is now enduring. The point of infection was that moment when the old woman reached out her hand to touch the young woman, as she started away in terror at the Child’s speaking, and turned with a cry towards the sleepy child behind her. In this first shock at the old woman’s scream, he took the disease, his body opened to receive it from her hands, through his mother’s from the Child. Out of their mind into his. Though what the old woman believes, and has impressed upon the younger, is that the Child’s spirit has worked all this out of malice, and that the boy’s mother has indeed been made the carrier, but through her own weakness and pity. In turning aside to care for the Child she has betrayed her son’s life to him. She has permitted the death spirit to pass between them.
So hourly, the boy Lullo sinks deeper into delirium, shouting, muttering, allowing through his lips the same whimpering cries and growls of animal pain that the Child has filled the room with all this last week, and wrestling, so the women believe, with the same animal spirit, which will use him to gain entry among us. Meanwhile the Child, unaware of all this, grows stronger. Today he sits up, too weak to support himself as yet, but strong enough to eat again. And smiles.
Even Ryzak now regards the Child’s return to health with narrow eyes, and I see in him some real fear of what the Child may have done to them, though like the women he is too anxious, too torn with grief at his grandson’s suffering, to do more than stare and wonder. His feelings are entirely engaged with the small, pale figure on the rushes, who clasps his hand in fit after fit as the fever moves through its phases of fire and ice. It is only when the illness has done with him at last that the old man’s sense of shock will turn to resentment, to anger against us. For five days and nights he squats on the floor at the child’s side, his shoulders hunched, his face set, the tears occasionally, as the boy whimpers, wetting his cheeks. I know what he feels but can make no move towards him. I try to make myself invisible here, and take the Child with me. The young woman, the boy’s mother, is too stunned now, with grief, with guilt, to do more than sit with her head covered, staring at the boy, willing him back to life. It is the old woman who tends him. Should the boy die, I know, all this fierce emotion that surrounds us will break out into violence. There will be nothing I can do then to protect the Child or myself. Half dozing, I wait for the moment when it will come – the hoarse cry of rage that will tear through the old man and come hurtling upon us, the violence that, shaking the boy now, will come raging through the old man’s body to strike back at us, at the Child first, and then surely, if I try to protect him, at me.
But miraculously the fifth night passes, and the boy survives. As morning comes I hear the old woman make little clucking sounds, talking to the boy as if he could hear at last and shaking Ryzak out of the half-sleep he has fallen into, his head dropped forward, though his body, as he squats, is perfectly upright. The boy’s mother rises slowly to her feet, out of the place against the wall where for five days now she has been sunk in abject seclusion. Ryzak clasps his hands and utters big shouts of boisterous relief, teasing the boy, I guess, for giving them all so much worry, and he immediately comes to the middle of the room, grinning, and waves his hand at me. All his fear and resentment have vanished. He crosses to the window and lifts the bar. Bright light floods the room. It is one of those clear white days when the whole countryside is visible, glittering white under a sky of cloudless blue, and the sudden rush of cold air into the room is extraordinary. Ryzak stretches, utters another huge shout as he holds his arms out wide to the sky, and then, staggering back into the room, rolls into the pile of rushes that is his bed and immediately falls into the first real sleep he has known for nearly a week. The boy’s mother also sleeps, stretched out on the floor at his side. Only the old woman, who is tireless, continues to crow over the child, offering him tidbits from a plate, occasionally laughing to herself, even once or twice calling across to me, though what she is saying in her toothlessness I can never tell.
The danger is past. We have come through. Suddenly I remember how tired I am. A great wave comes over me, and without even crawling the three feet to my bed of rushes, I allow myself to sink back under the flood of light from the window and sleep.
We are already past the worst of it. The winter solstice has long since come and gone, the dark of the year’s deepest place has been entered and the limit touched, the earth swings away towards the light again, and I feel my own spirits lifted as the days begin to lengthen. More and more often now periods of still bright weather open the whole country to our view, the sea glitters, the first birds return, the ice of the river on still nights can be heard grinding in the dark.
We can even begin at last to move about the house. I go down with the Child to the byre and we sit there with the animals, hearing them snuffle and snort in the half-dark, shifting, chewing, dropping the steaming heaps of dung that give the place its acrid odor, which seems almost pleasant after the stale air of the upper room, feeling their warmth as they crowd together in their stalls. They begin to be restless, scenting the spring. In two or three weeks now, when the ice has been cleared away, they will be led out into the fields again. Each day men are at work, chopping corridors through the ice, digging away the feet of frozen snow that block the narrow lanes between the huts, clearing yards to make outhouses accessible again. Even my own little house begins to reappear above the level of the snow. Soon we will be able to move back there, the Child and I, and our old life will resume. Then in a month or so we will return to our island in the swamp, to the birds, the moths, the new spring caterpillars, the vowels and consonants the Child has almost forgotten, it is so long since we rehearsed them; though now that he has spoken a word at last I know they are still to be found there at the bottom of his mind, that in some secret part of his being, deeper even than sleep, he has begun to speak to himself, and will eventually speak to me.
We go down each day to the byre because the room itself has become intolerable. We exist there only on sufferance. Only because Ryzak is responsible for me.
His power over the household has been deeply shaken by the events of the last weeks. It is the old woman who rules. It was her magic that saved the boy’s life – this is what she tells him – and his foolish trust, and the young woman’s pity, that exposed them all to destruction. The boy is, after all, his only grandson. When he watches him now it is with a quickened sense of how vulnerable the child is, how vulnerable he is, to extinction, and with some realization also of how little his strength of arms can do, and did do, at the moment of crisis. It is as if the old woman had found a way at last of poisoning his spirit, of stealing back the male strength she once gave him and which all these years has been the source of his ascendancy over her. There are moments when he seems almost like a child in her presence. One recognizes in the old woman’s face real hostility to this sixty-year-old man who has been her master for so long, and was once a suckling, utterly in her power. And mixed with hostility, a new sense of triumph. The house is filled with the glow of her magic, the smell of her herbs, her potions and the endless doddering syllables of her prayers.
At the first full moon she will sacrifice in the women’s grove outside the village, in thanksgiving for the boy’s life. Ryzak goes out alone to bring back the victim, a wild puppy, whose entrails will be burned on an altar of turf and offered up to the triple Hecate. The boy begs to go with him but is refused. The puppy will be taken from among the wild dogs, part mongrel, part wolf, that roam in packs through the undergrowth beyond the village and are, on occasion, since they are also sacred, fed scraps from the parapets. Lean, gray-black creatures, all ribs, they fight, tumbling in heaps over their strips of meat and rancid fat, then slink into the brush.
Ryzak returns with the puppy in a little wicker basket, and for ten days, until the full moon, it whimpers in a corner of the room, and is a source of real agony to the Child. Waking in the dark, to hear the soft crying, I have thought it was the Child himself, and finding him crouched over the basket in the dark, answering the animal’s cries with little high-pitched whinings of his own, have had the greatest difficulty drawing him back to his pallet. And all the time I was aware of the old woman, sitting bolt upright in her corner watching, and have imagined her invisible smile.
Does the Child know what is intended? Has she had the small creature brought here deliberately, and early, only to establish this communication between them, the Child and her animal victim? Is the ceremony she is preparing less an offering of thanks for the life of the boy than an exorcism of the Child?
As the time approaches the Child becomes more and more agitated and I fear he may relapse into his fever. The merest sound from the puppy sets him trembling now, and if I restrain him from going to the basket he will answer the creature from a distance, reproducing absolutely the whole range and pitch of its whinings, and the old woman laughs outright, her savage, crowlike caw. Does the animal sense what is to occur? Does he communicate it to the Child? Or is it simply the presence in the room at last of some kindred spirit, something other than our human presence, that disturbs him? Or some new realization, in the animal’s distress, of his own loss of freedom? Or is it, night after night, the growing brightness of the moon? For nearly a week now the weather has been clear, and we sleep with the windows unbarred and the moon’s light upon the room, picking out its familiar objects with a ghostly blueness, which is the moonlight striking off snow, and making thick, almost palpable shadows.
At last the night arrives. The two women go out just after the rising of the moon, taking the boy, and Ryzak carries the basket as far as the courtyard gate, then climbs the ladder again and suggests one of our games with the tablet and pegs.
From the window I watch the old woman’s party pass along the narrow lane, gathering adherents as it goes. All the women of the village will assemble at last in the grove. No man is permitted to see their rites. These are the offices of the moon, and belong to the world of women’s power and women’s worship, that are older, more mysterious, than the world of men. Ryzak, as we play, seems oddly ill at ease and I actually win a game. When the women come back they are silent, still wrapped in whatever power it is that the moon has over them, plucking as it does monthly at the tides of their bodies, swelling in them, waning, brooding over the darkness and transmuting all those things that we know by daylight in its softer, vaguer light. Almost immediately, without speaking, Ryzak retires to his pallet. Their silence oppresses him. The Child, who has made no move since the puppy was taken from the room, sits hunched in his corner, deep in one of his body trances, and refuses to sleep. I am aware all night of a strangeness that is upon us, a change, that may be simply the full moon, but seems rather to emanate from the Child’s dreamlike wakefulness, or the old woman’s, since all night she sits with her eyes wide open, unseeing, and the moon full upon her, taking its power deep into her and uttering, occasionally, great sighs, as if some stronger creature were breathing regularly through her.
In the morning there is a stranger, harsher breathing in the room.
Ryzak has been stricken overnight with some illness, which is not the same illness the children had. His body buckles and heaves in violent paroxysms, is wrenched, drained, flooded; and when the old woman examines him there is just the mark she expected to find, a half-circle of small teeth marks on his wrist, almost healed now – the wound through which the beast has entered. She utters a piercing shriek, throws her hands in the air, and immediately begins wailing for the dead.
This is what her rites of last evening were intended to avert. They have failed. It wasn’t the boy after all who was under threat, but the old man. The boy’s illness was a diversion. Now truly, she discovers, the Child has worked his evil upon them. The animal spirit has deserted him at last and entered the old man, from whose lips come flecks of white like the foam on a horse that has been ridden too hard. The savage, animallike growls and roarings that burst from him make the hair stand on end, as hour after hour he writhes, and there bubbles in his throat a low grumbling that is like nothing I have ever heard before, and seems centuries from human speech. Between these passages of frenzy, he stiffens, all his limbs straining against the breaking out through him of whatever beast it is that is coming to birth in him, seeking its four hairy limbs, its fanged snout, its jaws clenched on the raw flesh of things. The end is inevitable, and obviously so from the first moment of the evil’s appearance. Even I see that. It is like a nightmare, as if we had all suddenly been swept up into his body’s drama, into the terrible process of it, the transfusion of his human energy into its animal form. The nightmare has its own momentum and takes us with it as if we were all participants suddenly in the same dream, waking together in our sleep to discover that the room had become a cage, and the air itself was an animal agency whose breath we shared, whose stench was ours, whose growls were our own choking attempt to cry out and shock ourselves awake.
The shaman is sent for. But even he admits defeat. One look at the gray, wolflike face of the old man and he starts back in horror, shakes his head, flees with his magic before it too is contaminated.
It is all so sudden, so complete, we remain stunned, unable to shake ourselves back to reality. For five days the noise is ceaseless. The old man’s spirit wrestles and writhes, his strength seems inexhaustible. When the young woman tries to wet his lips with water, a terrible choking comes from him, as if some new form of speech were trying to burst out at his lips. All the muscles of his throat contract to make the new sound, but nothing comes forth. It is, the old woman screams, the animal attempting to speak its name – the unknown monster who all these years has suckled the Child, and has now left him and is bringing itself to birth again in the old man.
At last on the fifth day he falls quiet, and the sudden stillness after all those hours of frenzy is terrifying. We hold our breath.
He isn’t dead. We see that from the rise and fall of his ribs, but the beast now is at a new game. The old woman’s eyes dart about, seeking some breath of air in motion about us that would reveal its presence, as on all fours it skulks about the room, so that we almost feel, with the pimpling of our flesh, the touch of its fur upon us as it passes. But there is no sound, no movement. Only the rise and fall of our breathing. The Child clings to me, and seems about to go into some kind of fit of his own. The old woman’s eyes continue to prowl the room, her hands held poised in the air, all the fingers spread. Minutes pass. Hours. We are frozen. Too terrified to move.
The rest too is enacted as in a dream: our removal from the room, the coming of the men who will conduct Ryzak’s spirit out of the house, my escape with the Child through the roof and down into the darkness of my snowbound summerhouse, from which I listen to what is passing in the yard.
The women of the village, or as many of them as can be crowded in between the paling walls, have gathered there to frighten away the alien spirits who are lurking, just beyond the limits of the house, to snatch the old man’s spirit as it passes into the air. Heavily cloaked and veiled, with only their eyes and hands visible in the blackness, they squat in the snow, swaying backward and forward on their haunches and beating together, in earsplitting unison, the sacred stones that have been chosen from the river bed for their whiteness and smoothness, and which are used only for this, to deafen the ears of the evil ones to the old man’s cries, so that the last of all, the death cry, will pass unnoticed and his spirit may slip by them in the night.
The clicking begins as a series of short sharp explosions, their spaces filled with a high-pitched wailing and three hawklike shrills. As the rhythms quicken the beats become irregular. But however unexpected the pattern may be to a foreign ear, every stone comes down simultaneously, and as the rhythms open out in an ever increasing sequence, the voices fall to a droning om om om, the one original syllable repeated over and over as if the earth itself were speaking out of a chasm with many mouths.
In little earthenware bowls all round the yard some herb is smoking that I have never smelt before. Its fumes in the nostrils leave one dizzy. The whiteness of the walls, the blackness of the figures that fill every available space, the hundred hands moving together, the droning, the crash of pebbles – all this creates a vibration in the head that lulls and then deadens the senses. I find myself being gathered into the expanding and contracting of the light, of the sounds as they strike my ear, as if, in regulating my breath, my heartbeat, to these rhythms, I were slowly being drawn apart and scattered, separated from myself and my individual will.
Upstairs in the house some final ceremony is being performed that we are not permitted to see, and which this confusion of many voices is intended to obscure. I know what it is. The elders of the village are taking Ryzak’s life by force, beating and shaking the last breath out of his tough old body so that he will die fighting. For him simply to dwindle into a state of childlike weakness would leave him vulnerable at last to the demons who are hovering there in the darkness to pluck his spirit away. He is being savaged to death. Only in this way can his dying spirit be raised to such a pitch of violence that the dark ones will quail before it and he may pass unharassed on the air.
This goes on for perhaps an hour. Then at last one of the old men appears at a window and raises his arms. Immediately there is silence. The hands stop in mid-gesture, the buzzing cuts out. Only the old woman, Ryzak’s mother, raises a long shriek, a single note which she holds to the very end of her breath, when it is taken up by the younger, and they go on thus, striking the note, holding it, changing, while inside, the men begin to dance, stamping on the wooden planks with their booted heels. This is the wake. The village elders will go on dancing and drinking fermented liquor till the last of them has sunk into a stupor like the dead man. Laughing, joking with one another as if no death had occurred, they stagger out into the snow to piss against a wall, so drunk some of them that they can barely stand and have to support themselves with one hand while they fumble to loosen their breeches. Once again, it is the demons of the air who are the object of all this. The old men are diverting their attention while one of their number makes his way to the burial ground, out there on the high plateau. His spirit has already arrived, perhaps, and is riding round the great circle in the dark. Two days from now they will carry the body out to join it. Meanwhile the women huddle in the snow and wait. When the last of the dancers has fallen, they will creep in and remove the dead man so that he can be washed and prepared for impaling.
In the midst of all this it comes to me clearly what I must do. With Ryzak dead, and in such a manner, we have no protection here, I and the Child. For the moment they have forgotten us. The rituals of death, and the preoccupation with the waiting demons, have allowed us to slip quietly away. It is only later, when the last rite has been completed, that someone – the old woman perhaps – will think of vengeance, and remember that it is the Child who has wrought all this, with me as his witting or unwitting familiar.
Just before dawn I wake the Child. The women now are mostly dozing, hunched up together in their black cloaks, their heads covered, and it is easy to creep round them and out into the lane.
The Child is still half-asleep, but when we come to the edge of the marshes and the bridge to our island among the reeds, he suddenly clutches my hand, laughs, gives a little leap, and tries to drag me towards it. After nearly four months he thinks we are about to go back at last to our old life, our daily lessons in the swamp, to the birdcalls, to his fluttering attempts to entice out of the organs of his throat the vowels and consonants that have so long been hidden there and which I am helping him to find. He is disappointed when I make him understand that we must go on.
He looks petulant, pushing out his lower lip, and strikes my chest with his closed fist – not hard, but as an expression of his displeasure with me. He turns away and begins to moan. There is a pallid light over all the swamp with its puddles of turbid water and patches of bluish, moonstruck ice. The reeds hiss. The moon slides in and out of cloud. The Child yearns toward its light on the solid, safe ground behind us, and I have to pluck at his cloak, then at last take his hand and lead him. Something perhaps in my mood warns him that this is no game, and that my refusal to enter the old life is not mere willfulness on my part. He follows, dragging a little, and we start out across the marshes towards the river, which I know lies somewhere to the north, two or three days away as we will have to travel – on foot, and across a terrain that makes heavy going but where we will leave no sign of our passage.
My plan is to cross the river while it is still frozen and escape into the steppes. It is a desperate plan, but I can think of no other. Something deep at the bottom of my mind tells me it is what must be done and has always been intended.
I think of my dreams. Of all those nights when I made my way out there in sleep to scratch in the earth for my own grave. And of that dream of the godlike horsemen. I am going out now into the unknown, the real unknown, compared with which Tomis was but a degenerate outpost of Rome, and am, I believe, following the clear path of my fate. Always to be pushing out like this, beyond what I know cannot be the limits – what else should a man’s life be? Especially an old man who has, by a clear stroke of fortune, been violently freed of the comfortable securities that make old men happy to sink into blindness, deafness, the paralysis of all desire, feeling, will. What else should our lives be but a continual series of beginnings, of painful settings out into the unknown, pushing off from the edges of consciousness into the mystery of what we have not yet become, except in dreams that blow in from out there bearing the fragrance of islands we have not yet sighted in our waking hours, as in voyaging sometimes the first blossoming branches of our next landfall come bumping against the keel, even in the dark, whole days before the real land rises to meet us.
I have become braver in my old age, ready at last for all the changes we must undergo, as painfully we allow our limbs to burst into a new form, let the crust of our flesh split and the tree break through, or the moth or bird abandon us for air. What else is death but the refusal any longer to grow and suffer change?
Soft and silly as I may be, I have survived. I am the last poet of our age, existing still, working still, even out here beyond the limits of our speech, even in silence. And if other old men must be willing, at the end, to push up off their deathbed and adventure out into the unknown, how much more willing must that man be whose whole life has been just such a daily exercise of adventuring, even in the stillness of his own garden? I mean, the poet.
So we stumble on, the Child and I, towards that mysterious arc of water whose name I have known all my life as marking the boundaries of our Roman world, and whose syllables Is-ter have always given me, even in the days when such notions were the merest romantic indulgence, some thrill in my innermost being that I am at last to make actual. Is-ter. Is-ter. It has been there always, somehow waiting, even as my eye noted it on maps, as the final boundary of my life, waiting to be crossed, and patient year after year for my arrival. However many steps I may have taken away from it, both in reality and in my mind, it remained, shifting its tides, freezing each season, cracking up, flowing again, whispering to me: I am the border beyond which you must go if you are to find your true life, your true death at last.
Comfortably asleep in my little trundle bed at Sulmo, the spoiled second son of a rich landowner, how could I ever have guessed it? What had I to do with this last river at the end of the known world? Scribbling exotic romances in a metropolitan garden, overfed, light-headed with wine and conversation, projecting extravagant fables on the unknown, what need had I to listen for its rising somewhere deep at the back of my head, grinding its ice floes, creaking, painfully breaking up and pushing its thousand miles to the sea? Now at last, in the early light of a late winter morning, at the very edge of spring, I make my way towards it through the dazzling swamp, hauling with me a Child I can never have expected to find again at this end point of my life, and stopping, even in the midst of the wide marsh waters, to listen for it, for the sound of its rumbling somewhere beyond the horizon there, where the seabirds are wheeling.
The time has come at last. Far to the north, deep in the grasslands that roll away towards the pole, is the place I have so often dreamed of in these years of my exile, walking out under the high moonlit clouds in my sleep. The land I am about to enter is not entirely unfamiliar.
And there, after all these seasons, is the river. Ister. Those two magic syllables, born of my own breath frozen solid, and waiting, in these last days before it breaks up and flows again, to be crossed. As the Child and I set out upon it in the moonlight the noise is deafening, the groaning, the cracking, the grinding of its whiteness under us. Halfway across, far out in the glimmering waste of it, we can see nothing, neither the shore we have left nor the one that lies somewhere ahead. Till at last, half closing my eyes against the dazzle, I make out the fine, dark horizontal line where the earth declares itself solid again.
Somewhere, in the middle of our crossing, I had the cold fear that there might be no other shore, that Ister might be shoreless on that farther side, a river freezing and flowing at the border between earth and air, and all those stories of the grasslands, and their giant horsemen, the merest figments of our imagination, even when they came thundering over the ice bridge and we held our snowbound fort against them.
But the earth goes on. Even beyond Ister. There is another world out there.
We have come to the shores, and prepare to enter.