David Malouf - An Imaginary Life

So we sit - for how long? - and stare at one another. He does not startle. But one of the horses, lowering its head to nibble, moves across between us, and when it passes, the space between the birches is empty of all but light.

I am calmer now. He is still there, that is what matters. There is time for the rest. We shall stay two nights in the birch woods.

The first night, just at the edge of the fire’s circle, where the dark begins, I set a bowl of gruel: mixed grain seed boiled in brackish water and flavored with honey. For hours after the others sleep I sit wrapped in my cloak, straining to hear a footfall among the leaves. I know he must come to watch. He has begun to look for us, I know that, as we look for him. He feels some yearning toward us, some need to satisfy himself about who we are, and why we have a shape, a smell, so unlike that of the other creatures of the forest. Has he begun to ask of what kind he is? Does he guess that some part of us, at least, is of his kind? As we know that in shape at least he is one of ours. I listen but hear nothing. I fall asleep, still sitting upright against a birch trunk, and am woken by the first silvery light of dawn. I scramble across to the bowl. It is empty. Something has come and lapped up the gruel. A deer? One of the forest demons these people worship? The Child? I hide the bowl under my cloak and pretend I have been to relieve myself but the old man watches me and knows. He thinks this is all folly. And dangerous folly. He is too much ashamed of me, and my old man’s silliness, to le me see that he knows. He orders the young men about in a voice louder and gruffer than usual as if he were trying to frighten the Child away.

It is a clear still day and the deer are everywhere. The men hunt and kill five or six of them, and our camp in the clearing is like a butcher’s shop, the smell of blood is all over us, the skins hang dripping from branches, joints of meat - haunches, legs, rib-halves - are stacked ready for packing. The women will salt and store them against the winter. The work takes us all day. We will spend a second night here and be off at dawn. Again I set out the bowl of gruel, and this time sleep on the far side of the fire, propped up hard against a tree trunk and determined not to doze.

I fall asleep almost immediately, and dream. What I half thought in the woods yesterday, while we were watching the Child, is true. We have all been transformed, the whole group of us, and become part of the woods. We are mushrooms, we are stones - I recognize my companions. I am a pool of water. I feel myself warm in the sunlight, liquid, filled with the blue of the sky; but I am the merest broken fragment of it, and I feel, softly, the clouds passing through me, their reflections, and once the suddenness of wings. Slowly it grows dark. A breeze shivers my surface. And as darkness passes over me I begin to be afraid. My spirit hovers somewhere close and will, I know, come back to me when I wake. But I am afraid suddenly to be just a pool of rain in the forest, feeling the night creep over me, feeling myself grow cold and fill with starlight, feeling the temperature drop. I consider what it might be like to freeze. I imagine that. But only at the edges of myself, as the first ice crystals click into shape. It is fearful. What would happen to my spirit then? I lie in the dark of the forest waiting for the moon. And softly, nearby, there are footsteps. A deer. The animal’s face leans toward me. I am filled with tenderness for it. Its tongue touches the surface of me, lapping a little. It takes part of me into itself, but I do not feel at all diminished. The sensation on the surface of me is extraordinary. I break in circles. Part of me enters the deer, which lifts its head slowly, and moves away over the leaves. I feel part of me moving away, and the rest falls still again, settles, goes clear. What if a wolf came, I suddenly ask myself? What if the next tongue that touched me were the wolfґs tongue, rough, greedy, drinking me down to the last drop, and leaving me dry? That too is possible. I imagine it, being drawn up into the wolf’s belly. I prepare for it.

Another footfall, softer than the first. I know already, it is the Child. I see him standing taller than the deer against the stars. He kneels. He stoops towards me. He does not lap like the deer, but leaning close so that his breath shivers my surface, he scoops up a handful, starlight dripping from his fingers in bright flakes that tumble towards me, and drinks. I am broken again. The disturbance is fearful, a noisy crashing of waves against the edges of me. And when I settle he is gone. I am still, reflecting starlight. I sleep. I wake.

It is still dark. The Child, I see, is just setting the bowl down. He is stooped, holding it in both hands, his face covered by the hanks of coarse hair.

He hears me draw breath. He is no more than ten feet away and our eyes meet for a moment, before he drops the bowl. It rolls towards me. He springs to his feet and stands there, puzzled, as if uncertain, for the first time perhaps, which of the two worlds he should fly to - back into the woods, or into whatever new world he has smelled and touched and taken into himself that comes from us. He has eaten from an earthenware bowl made by men, on a wheel. He has eaten grain that has been sown and gathered and crushed and boiled, and sweetend with a spoonful of honey. Something, as we face one another in the darkness, has passed between us. We have spoken. I know it. In a language beyond tongues.

Next year there will be no need to hunt him. He will seek us out.

Only now he backs slowly away into the darkness, his bare feet scuffing the leaves, and I must wait another whole winter to pass.

It all happens as I knew it would.

The year has passed quickly. I have become sturdy and strong again and have stopped mooning about and regretting my fate. I go for long walks in the brushwood, which is full of tiny animals and insects, all of them worth observing. I climb down to the shore and talk to the fishermen, while the sea grinds and rattles at the smooth black pebbles. The sea in these parts is full of strange fish, all beautiful in their own way, all created perfectly after their own needs, every detail of their anatomy useful, necessary, and for that reason admirable, even when they are the product of terror. I have stopped finding fault with creation and have learned to accept it. We have some power in us that knows its own ends. It is that that drives us on to what we must finally become. We have only to conceive of the possibility and somehow the spirity works in us to make it actual. This is the true meaning of transformation. This is the real metamorphosis. Our further selves are contained within us, as the leaves and blossoms are in the tree. We have only to find the spring and release it. Such changes are slow beyond imagination. They take generations. But it works, this process. We are already the product of generation after generation of wishing to be thus. And what you are reader, is what we have wished. Are you gods already? Have you found wings? I go out each day with the old man. He is the closest friend I have ever had. How strange that I have had to leave my own people to find him. He has taught me to weave a net, and I begin to be good at it. There are different sorts of nets, and traps also, for the different kinds of fish. There are also the various hooks. I am happy to learn all this. What is beautiful is the way one thing is fitter perfectly to another, and our ingenuity is also beautiful in finding the necessary correspondence between things. It is a kind of poetry, all this business with nets and hooks, these old analogies.

I have also begun to gather seeds on my own excursion in the brush - there are little marsh flowers out there, so small you hardly see them, and when I come back I push them into the earth with a grimy forefinger and they sprout. I have begun to make, simple as it is, a garden.