Landscape of Farewell (6 page)

‘What is it now?’ she asked suspiciously. I must have been looking at her strangely. Before the night was over I wanted her to know the true significance for me of our meeting. In the morning it would be too late. In the morning we would be sober and it would no longer be possible for us to be candid with each other. ‘Before I met you today,’ I said, ‘I was planning to kill myself.’

‘Jesus!’ It was an exclamation of relief. ‘I thought you were going to ask me to sleep with you!’ She laughed, her laughter wild and filled with fatigue. She struggled into a sitting position and made an impatient, sweeping gesture at me with her hand. ‘So what? I’ve been going to kill myself heaps of times. Who hasn’t?’

‘I was serious.’

‘We’re always serious when we’re going to kill ourselves.’ She stood up, tugging impatiently at the elaborate layers of her clothes, pulling her skirts around and reaching behind her and jerking the various elements of her complicated blouse into position. ‘God I hate clothes!’ She stopped fiddling and turned
to me. ‘The time to kill ourselves is after we’ve paid our debts, not before. Where’s this bed you’re talking about? Why do I always get drunk? Why can’t I do this for once without getting drunk?’

We picked up her bags from the hotel and drove in my old Peugeot along Grindelallee towards the airport. Neither of us had a lot to say. It was raining and the roads were black and slippery. The morning traffic seemed to be particularly aggressive and impatient. I am not confident of my driving skills and was intimidated by the closeness of the other cars. I was very anxious that I might find myself in the wrong lane and would miss the turnoff to the airport. Vita was slumped in the seat beside me, her mood as dark and gloomy as the day. We were both suffering from hangovers and a lack of sleep. I have never liked driving and have avoided doing it as much as possible. Winifred was our driver. More than twenty years ago, when the Peugeot was new, she drove as fast as the car would go along the route to Lübeck and
Travemünde, laughing and talking and looking around at Katya in the back, and pointing out interesting features of the scenery along the way. Winifred inspired confidence. I never felt nervous with her behind the wheel. And she never had an accident. Not even a small one. She was an exceptional woman.

This morning, with Vita sitting beside me, I was feeling a little panicked and was finding it a challenge to keep the Peugeot in the tiny space left to me by the other cars. It did not help my concentration that I was also grimly aware that in an hour or two I would be back in the apartment on my own, facing the problem of what to do with the remainder of my life now that I had pardoned myself from the death penalty. I did not fancy the idea of writing poetry, or making friends with the birds. We were waiting at a crossing for the lights to change to green and I was watching an old man cross in front of us. He did not have an umbrella and walked through the rain unaware that he was getting soaked, or beyond caring. The shoulders of his overcoat were blackly sodden. As he tottered forward, his head nodded and his mouth gaped, his watery eyes staring before him as if something terrifying lay in his path. His life, I suppose it was, that he contemplated. The miserable remnant of it that remained to him. In truth he was probably little older than I.

The sight of him appalled me and I clamped my jaw shut and steadied my head on my neck. What was to be done? The dismay on the faces of the old tells its own story. Their world
is not our world. It is old age, not the past, that is a foreign country. We observe its inhabitants all our lives, not as if we are looking at ourselves in the future, but as if we are observing another species than our own. How often do we hear the phrase,
to grow old gracefully
, as if this were an essential virtue of our humanity? But how is such grace to be achieved? Old age is not a graceful thing. Yesterday morning the idea of my death did not trouble me, but to think of entering this last stage of life alone, this final solitary advance—or retreat, rather … Well, I did not wish to think about it. It made me angry that I had been reminded of it.

I hated the old man for that moment, and when the lights changed to green I pushed down hard on the accelerator with my foot. The bald rear tyres of our old ’83 Peugeot hissed on the wet road and for a chilling instant I lost control. I murmured an apology, but Vita seemed not to have noticed the car’s sickening lurch. I wondered what she was thinking. At her hotel earlier I had waited in the lobby while she went to her room and changed out of the elaborate costume she had worn for her performance the previous day, which by then was looking wilted and unconvincing. She soon reappeared in a smart black business suit, a pale scarf at her throat. The scarf was a rather subtle and expensive faded pink and it cast a faint reflection of its warmth onto her features, as if she were gently bathed in an unearthly glow. Not only I, but everyone in the hotel lobby, women as
well as men, turned to watch her progress towards me across the carpet. Even in a simple black suit, Vita was an event.

She had been silent ever since we left the hotel car park, but after I accelerated away from the doddering apparition she roused herself. She looked straight ahead through the windscreen at the rain sheeting across the road. ‘You owe a debt to Winifred,’ she said, evidently voicing the conclusion of a private meditation of some duration. She might have been speaking of a woman she had known well, a woman who had been her friend and whose mind and opinions she was familiar with.

I was astonished. ‘To Winifred?’ I said. ‘A debt? What do you mean?’ I had thought of my paper as the payment of my final dues to Winifred.

‘You owe it to the beautiful thing you and Winifred had together for thirty years to at least
try
to look for the answers to your questions. Why you didn’t write your book on massacre. Why you didn’t ask your father what he really did during the war. There are service records. If we bother to look for these things, there is evidence of them to be found. You owe it to yourself and to Winifred to face up to the truth of all that. If you don’t, you’ll have failed to make sense of your life.’

I forgot I was driving and listened to her lecturing with astonishment.

‘You owe it to your generation.’ Now she turned in her seat and looked at me. ‘You owe it to my generation. You said so
yourself. You owe it to me. An apology is just a start. That’s all it is. It’s a start. It’s not everything. That apology yesterday, it was beautiful. I haven’t really thanked you properly for it. But it was just a start, Max.’ She waited a moment. ‘You’re not offended, are you?’

‘No,’ I said, ‘I’m not offended.’

‘We’re friends,’ she said. ‘Friends have to be able to be honest with each other, or what’s the point of it?’

‘Of course.’

‘We all owe a debt to someone. My parents made an enormous sacrifice for me so I could go to university. I’m the only one in the whole family to have ever gone to university. If we don’t pay our debts, we can’t go on believing in ourselves. We’re just empty. We’re nothing. We’re a joke.’

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘You are right.’

‘Our lives are meaningless if we give in,’ she said. ‘We can’t just give in, Max. We have to fight. Or
they’ve
won and we’ve lost.’

I realised that she was talking about herself.

‘Why you didn’t insist on knowing the truth about your father is the biggest thing in your life. It’s affected your whole life. It haunts you, but you don’t do anything about it.’ She looked across at me as if she expected me to argue with her. ‘How
unreal
is that? You like to pretend you’re too old and that it’s all finished for you. But that’s your game. That’s the way you excuse yourself from having to do anything. You just have to have the
guts to break your stupid vow of silence and ask your questions before it really is too late.’ She sat up straighter. ‘Shouldn’t we be in that lane over there?’

I swerved across the two lanes and just made it into the airport turnoff.

She looked at me and laughed. ‘You’re a bloody rotten driver, Max.’

‘Sorry,’ I said.

She began to hum a tune.

‘What is that?’ I asked her after a minute or two.

‘Dad always sings it when Mum gets into a bad mood. I didn’t realise I was humming it.’

Miraculously, without knowing how I had done it, I had found the correct entrance to the airport car park—if you know the Hamburg airport car park you will understand my feeling of triumph. I pulled into a vacant spot and parked. I turned to her. ‘Here we are,’ I said, as if I expected her to congratulate me. She said nothing. We got out of the car and I took her two enormous suitcases from the boot and set them on the concrete.

‘You weren’t even listening to me, were you?’ she accused me.

‘Of course I was,’ I said. ‘It was interesting. Who are you flying with?’

‘You owe me, Max.’ She glared at me in mock anger, then she tucked her arm into mine and pressed it to her side, just as she had the previous afternoon outside Warburg Haus. ‘I’m
organising a cultural studies conference at Sydney University in March,’ she said. ‘It’s the first time I’ve been responsible for an international conference. There are a lot of people waiting to see me fall in a heap over this so they can say I told you so to the idiots who appointed me to this chair. It’s my first semester in the job.’ She looked at me steadily. ‘You must come to my conference. I need you. Having a real live German professor of history on my side will silence the doubters. None of them will have the guts to stand up to you. They’ll be all over you.’

I was hoping she was not going to let go of my arm just yet. ‘But I am no longer a professor,’ I protested. ‘I am retired.’

‘Don’t try to wheedle your way out of it!’ She looked at me seriously. ‘We got drunk together. That means a lot where I come from. We told each other a few truths. You told me something you said you’d never told anyone before. I cherish that. You trusted me, Max. It’s important to me. It feels good to be trusted. Now you have to pay your debt honourably.’

I felt faintly excited. Was it really possible? She had a way of making things seem possible that had ceased to seem possible.

‘After an apology, reparations are due,’ she said. ‘You know that. You know your own history.’

‘Reparations,’ I said, echoing her.

‘Yes, reparations. You know what I mean. After the conference, I’ll take you up to North Queensland to meet Uncle Dougald. He’ll show you his country. Uncle Dougald’s country is full of
beautiful secrets you guys have never dreamed of. You can give a paper in Sydney on why you didn’t ask your father what he did in the war. You’ll have a few months to think about it. It will be a start. When you get back to the apartment today you can begin.’ She shook me gently. ‘Stop pretending you’re a lost cause. It’s not interesting.’ She leaned and kissed me on the cheek, then she drew away and smiled her soft, vulnerable smile and pushed herself from my side, as if she were pushing off in a boat. ‘We’ve got time for a coffee.’

We each dragged one of her wheeled suitcases through the car park and into the reception hall of the airport. She stood looking for her check-in counter. ‘Just for that minute yesterday,’ she said, ‘when you turned away and left us all standing there by the door of Warburg Haus—you know?—you silenced us. We didn’t know what to think. We were each waiting for someone else to be the first to say something. You changed what we were thinking. You cut across our assumptions about ourselves. About the whole thing. It was impressive. It was a good moment. It was something I don’t want to forget. The way you came up to us and apologised. It was beautiful. You know what I mean? We could see you didn’t know how good it was and that it had sort of taken you by surprise too. We all thought at first that you were coming up to defend yourself in the usual way. You caught us off guard. After something like that you can’t just go back to being silent, can you? Silence is no longer an option for you after something
like that, is it? Silence would make a mockery of it all. We have to take the next step.’

We?

She checked her luggage and got a boarding pass and we took the escalator to the cafeteria. She pulled out a chair and sat in it. ‘Get me a double-strength espresso.’ She reached and took hold of my arm. ‘And, hey!’

I waited.

‘I speak my mind, Max. I don’t keep silent. We’ve got more than enough of that deep silence stuff over there too.’ She waved me away. ‘Get me a coffee.’

I bought two coffees and carried them back to our table. When I sat down she said, ‘You should see yourself. Did you look in a mirror this morning? You look like crap.’ She laughed. ‘Winifred wouldn’t want to know you. Hey! Cheer up! We’ll be seeing each other in Sydney in March.’

I stirred sugar into my coffee. ‘I would like to come,’ I said. I looked up and met her eyes. ‘I’m not sure I can.’

‘You don’t have a choice. It’s either come to my conference, or it’s go back to the apartment and do what you were thinking of doing yesterday.’ She sipped at the hot coffee and closed her eyes. ‘You decide.’

I watched her. ‘You saved my life,’ I said.

‘Bullshit!’

‘It’s not bullshit,’ I said. ‘It’s the truth.’ Suddenly I could not
bear the thought of knowing I was never going to see her again. ‘I’ll come to your conference,’ I said.

She looked at me, as surprised as I was to hear it. ‘Is that a promise?’

‘I guess.’

She leaned and kissed me on the cheek. ‘That was easy.’

‘I want to come.’

‘I knew you would!’ she said happily. ‘I ought to call you Mad Max.’ She took my hand in hers and examined it, counting my fingers as if she might be about to recite the nursery rhyme,
This little piggy went to market
. ‘For a guy who’s spent his entire life reading books, how come you’ve got such nice strong hands?’

‘I was a farm labourer once, with my uncle, during the war.’

She relinquished my hand. ‘Go to London and see your daughter and your grandchildren for Christmas.’

‘You like to give advice,’ I said.