David Malouf - An Imaginary Life

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 beings 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, animal like 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, wolf like 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, an 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 snowbound summerhouse, from which I listen to what is passing in the yard. The women of the village, or as man 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 hawk like 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 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 out the body 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 of 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.