Napoleon's Roads (6 page)

TEN SHORT PIECES

Alchemy

After much experimentation, many failed attempts, the alchemist has succeeded, at least with one part of the process. Laying out, at dusk, in grassy places, vast sheets of a specially woven fabric – well-oiled, dark-proof – he finds that at dawn he is able to gather the condensed night in pannikins. Carefully distilling the cloudy liquid in alembics specifically created for the task, he then distributes the rich, black essence into small bottles for his agents to peddle to scholars, artists, clerics and scribes. These, in their turn, with the aid of trimmed goose feathers, sable brushes, or small sticks tipped with a kind of metal claw, tease out the substance carefully into fine, horizontal webs on sheets of calfskin or paper which then they let dry before making available to others who, inspecting them closely, become peculiarly affected, feeling a sort of distilled, ineffable darkness or numbness entering their veins, the most likely and immediate consequences of which are insomnia, or a tendency towards drunkenness, and wandering about late at night, barefooted in grassy places, like grieving cattle, leaving a strange web behind them in the dew.

A Piece of Sheepsong

Very often, when I think of myself writing, I have in my mind an image of a man at a table in a workshop, in a small pool of light. He may be making a shoe, he may be repairing a watch, he may be an artist, or an artist's artisan, working on an engraving. What precisely he is doing does not matter very much, because in my mind he is also, as he cuts a sliver of leather, slips a small cog into place, or cross-hatches a tiny area of shadow, a writer, carefully choosing the words, shaping the phrases, paring his thoughts to their elements, saying, over and over, what lines he has in the hope that one of these lines will run on, will spill over into something he has not yet imagined – now and again reaching, where a shoemaker might reach for an awl or a watchmaker for a tiny spring, into a small tool cabinet on the table beside him for a piece of sheepsong or the end of a shower of rain, an owl.

Process

It is a process. A contingent of police and officials raid an Immigration Detention Centre to arrest the ringleaders of a recent disturbance at the facility. These ringleaders are moved to a further site of detention, at an undisclosed location. Back at the Detention Centre, amongst those who had been led by these ringleaders, there is disquiet at this turn of events. New leaders emerge. New detainees arrive by boat or bus from where they have been apprehended trying to enter the country illegally. A new disturbance occurs, the ringleaders are arrested in a second raid and taken to swell the ranks of those taken away after the original disturbance. Discontent – there has never been anything but discontent – mounts. Ringleaders emerge to lead the ringleaders. A wild disturbance breaks out. Alarmed, police and immigration officials stage a raid on the undisclosed location, arresting the ringleaders, whom they take to a further undisclosed location …

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.