I WAS ONLY IN A CHILDISH WAY CONNECTED TO THE ESTABLISHED ORDER
Madeline, my wife, never used to wear a watch. She does now, I am told. For a long time, in a very inexact way, I had kept time for her. There was the time before we were married and the time after. There was the time before I was hospitalized and the time after. There was the time she needed me and the time after. And there is now.
I am not well and I make no bones about it. It is largely a psychological disorder, but only the most obvious of its manifestations have ever led me to hospital. These flights of fancy, as Madeline initially wished them to be known, are actually psychotic episodes. But these are just its most extreme symptoms. It is more than the sum of these. It is there all the time and no one knows what it is, a disease so new, so rare, that they haven’t developed a classification for it. They had one briefly but the condition mutated beyond human understanding, beyond recognition. My work is said to compound the malady. I am, by profession, a poet.
When I cry I suck on my front teeth and purse my lips involuntarily as though in anticipation of an onslaught of kisses. I never realized that I did this, never even suspected it. It is a mannerism just short of a tick and it belongs to me. There is a rhythm to it and I rock slightly in time with the pursing of my lips. I do this all in time. This rhythm is a matter of instinct with me. I am a poet.
How does that happen? In spite of everything, how does one become a poet? The term has become derogatory. How did that happen? It all happened before Madeline’s father died. These days people assume, if ever they give it any thought, that poets must be inept, glassy-eyed people who, tyrannized by their own private internal anarchy, ramblingly conjure instant affect. But that, of course, is a stereotype. And it all starts way before this.
You are born. You remember nothing of it but get told at selected intervals that yours was a traumatic birth. The nature of the trauma does not really matter. What matters is that you are told about it at an early age. It quickly assumes a tremendous significance in your own private mythology. You visualize it in gray or sepia as a scene from a prewar newsreel. As you grow up you use it to explain otherwise inexplicable and unjust events. It is why you cannot perform certain tasks as well as other people, or at all. It is why your mother was this or that way with you.
You read, not just well, but powerfully.
You do just well enough at school for your distraction from what other people are interested in to be encouraged once, briefly, by a sympathetic teacher who, by the time you timorously graduate, has left the school and cannot be reached.
You read more.
You get a clerical job and study literature and history or philosophy, classics or art history at night. At work you meet an attractive young woman from the country. You flatter her. She flatters you. You write a poem about her. You tell her it is your first but it is not. It is actually just the first poem you have ever shown anyone. She is your first, the first to see it. But the poem is not your first. The others, the earlier ones, were naïve, derivative and masterfully bad. This one, too, is bad, but you show it to her because otherwise, without it, in its absence, you are a clerk. It works and you are a poet.
You spend time together. You take each other to art galleries and museums. You teach her and then recite in unison the opening to “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” by T. S. Eliot:
Let us go then, you and I,
When the evening is spread out against the sky
You get promoted. There are more art galleries. She gets promoted. There are more museums. You drink strong coffee, almost professionally, in the inner city area. She encourages you to submit the poem about her for publication. She tells you she has never met anyone who wrote poetry. You suspect that it is just that she has never met anyone who admitted it. You think everyone writes poetry. The poem about her is published. You share a kind of delight.
You meet other people who have published poetry. You take her to their poetry readings. The two of you drink coffee with them after their readings. You get promoted again. She knits you a jumper. You meet her parents during a weekend at their cattle farm in the country. One still night you tell her about your traumatic birth. You get married.
You are married. She gets promoted. You write a volume containing many poems. Two of them are published. She gets promoted. There are more museums. She gets pregnant. You write some poems about it. She takes maternity leave but not before being promoted again. A child is born. In many senses he is yours. Andy. You write Poems for Andy.
Andy grows to learn Christmas carols, and when he is old enough to sing them, you change the lyrics outrageously. You change their meaning. You take away their meaning. Rudolph the red-nosed reindeer had a very shiny name. It is a game. It delights him. It is the last time you remember delighting him. She gets promoted.
You take him to museums. You write a poem about museums, about taking your son to museums, about the ways in which museums record time. You used to go there with your wife. Later she sends you there with her son. He continues growing. “What are you feeding him?” colleagues ask at work Christmas parties. Too big for your knee, you recite to him across a room: Twinkle twinkle little bat! How I wonder what you’re at! Up above the world you fly, Like a tea tray in the sky. Too big for Lewis Carroll, there is so little in him that resembles you. Your parents die. It affects you more than certain acquaintances think it should. She gets promoted.
Your son grows. Up, up and away! He plays different games. He grows more like his mother, at least more like her than like you. They share a certain closeness you attribute to the famed bond between mothers and sons and also to your traumatic birth. She tells you she does not want any more children. You write a poem about this. It is published in Meanjin. It is anthologized. The anthology becomes a prescribed text for secondary students. Of the six years your son spends at secondary school, fifty minutes are devoted to poetry. The anthology is for a moment in your son’s hands. One book between two. It is an austerity measure. He does not see you waiting in the table of contents. They read Kipling. At work you are made redundant. Still not old, you read ever more. She gets promoted.
Your wife’s father dies and bequeaths her the farm. She resigns with a large payout. Your son leaves home. You and she return to her roots to run a cattle farm. She tells you it might be good for you. You are so pleased to hear that she wants it to be good for you that you do not question the move. You know nothing about farming or cattle but you can write poetry anywhere, if indeed you can write it at all. You picture a new rural phase with rural themes. Wordsworth meets Ted Hughes and Les Murray. You aim to keep in touch with the literary community through the membership of committees. You plan to be a literary agitator. You will write angry but witty pieces denouncing government funding cuts to the Arts. “Your Tiny Handout Is Frozen.”
The year that Madeline and I moved to Mansfield was the year that Andy and one of his friends bought a four-wheel drive to take around Australia. He was by then already a big and practical young man, good with his hands. All the girls liked him. He had not wanted to go on to university. He did not have any plans for the year after the four-wheel-drive trip. He told me this quietly as we shared a cup of tea on the verandah the day he drove up to Mansfield to say good-bye. It was, I thought, a defining moment in his development, and it occurred to me that it should have been acknowledged with some sort of going-away party. But we were new to the area and, other than the people Madeline knew from her youth, we did not know anyone to invite. He would have hated the idea anyway. He spoke quietly in a low, soothing, anxiety-free voice. He did not read. I thought that maybe he would when he got older. He could do everything else. He had declined several offers to play a number of sports at a professional level. Madeline and I were so proud of him, so proud of his balance. I suspect that he already thought I was mad.
Mansfield was settled in the 1870s and soon became home to families of Irish and Scots settlers. Madeline’s family, of Scottish descent, had been there for generations. “The best ones had packed up and left,” she had always been told. They were farming people. Madeline had been the first to move down to Melbourne, but her father’s death and my unemployment convinced her that it was time to return. Her childhood, or what I knew of it, had not been an unhappy one. The whole Shire, and not just her father’s property, was full of memories for her, memories, and roads not taken.
By the early nineteenth century the first European explorers had found the soil to be rich. There was an abundance of grass, excellent for grazing cattle or sheep. (Our neighbor grazed sheep.) But even so there was initially some reluctance to settle it. Perhaps it was the influential opinion of the then Surveyor-General of New South Wales, who described much of the region as “utterly useless for every purpose of civilized man.” Madeline said time stands still in Mansfield. Her family was born and died there, so it had not stood still for them. Something I refrained from pointing out. Andy and I had only been there once.
Madeline’s father had employed a young, newly married neighbor of his to assist him with the running of the farm, and on our arrival Madeline and I immediately appointed him manager of the farm. Her father had needed only his physical assistance, but I needed a full-time tutor. His name was Neil Mahoney. In his early thirties, he was the youngest of a large family, large enough to spare him from working his parents’ property. His wife was almost ten years younger than him and, within a year of his becoming our manager, was expecting their second child. Madeline had heard that it had been difficult for Neil to find a wife because the Mahoneys had too many sons for their acreage. It was said they would overgraze. Two older Mahoney boys had left Mansfield for Melbourne only to return, having been unable either to find or hold on to jobs. Now they were both married and, together with Neil’s father and an older sister’s husband, they all worked the Mahoney farm.
Neil was patient with me, patient in his explanations and his demonstrations. In return I was honest with him. I told him I was a poet who had tried to support himself and his family as a clerk. I was also an occasional essayist, I told him. (This was not completely untrue. I had written one unpublished essay titled “Critical Theory as a Metaphor for Illness.”) I tried to be unafraid of my mistakes or at least faithful to them. I had never been a farmer before and was not meant to know the things he was teaching me. But despite this I still had to fight the feeling that he thought I was a fool. He watched me.
It was not anything that he said, but I felt a little uncomfortable with him. It was an unease that never really disappeared completely. Each time I felt uncomfortable in my role as a farmer, I would force myself to write something, even if it was just a letter to a newspaper. I composed verse in my head while examining the fences with Neil or hay feeding the cattle during winter. I learned that, despite the rain, it was too cold and dark in the winter for the grass to grow. We needed the grass to grow to feed the cattle to support ourselves. Neil worried about the weather and the grass all the time, but I never did. After all, if the grass did not grow, no one could fairly blame me. Madeline could not blame me. I did not think she could blame me.
She found in me something to blame when I returned from the town one day with three kittens. They were a gift for her. I had bought them from the younger sister of the bored and sullen teenage girl with scrambled-egg hair who worked at the Welcome Mart. Where the older girl at the Welcome Mart had made a weapon of her adolescence, the younger girl had not yet given up on adults and would talk with them in the street. She would even offer them her kittens for sale.
“People don’t keep kittens in the country—not here,” Madeline told me when I surprised her with them in a canvas bag the young girl had thrown in at no extra cost.
I thought she might warm to them if I left her alone with them. In the shed I found Neil cleaning a rifle. He seemed to know what he was doing, yet again. I knocked tentatively in order not to surprise him.
“Is that your gun, Neil?”
“No, it’s yours. It was your father-in-law’s.”
“What do we need a gun for?”
“For killing things.” He looked up at me.
“Like what?”
“Animals that need to be put down . . . cattle . . . all sorts of things. You just never know.”
There was so much I did not know. What I knew was of no use to the people around me. Perhaps it was of no use to anyone. And I did not really know it. It was more that I had heard it. Lines, words, snatches of poems, came to me and then from me. I was merely a conduit for them. What did they have to do with me? Mostly they were not even my lines. I could be in a field and suddenly I would be unable to rid myself of Eliot or Wordsworth or Shakespeare. Increasingly, however, it was something from the Russian poet, Osip Mandelstam. His lines, more than any, got me through the day. They hummed to me. Eventually I could not get rid of them.
If you are voluntary, they let you keep your own clothes. This was the most obvious difference between the first and the second time. Another was that I did not know how I got there the first time. I was there when I woke up. I was lying on a bed with tubular steel railing around it. My pajamas, the sheets and the pillow cases were a standard blue, all with a Department of Health logo on them. The bed next to me was unmade. The mattress was covered in vinyl and had brass eyelets over which there was a thin metal gauze. Two beds down from me a man lay on his front, trying to fit all of his face on the Department of Health logo on his pillowcase. He wore blue pajamas too. We were not voluntary.
I tried to remember how I got there but could not. I had been in the car with Madeline. She was driving. It was a long drive. We were going to Lake Eildon. The kittens slept huddled together in the backseat. Madeline turned off the radio after we had driven a short distance. I noticed she was not in her usual sloppy slacks but was instead wearing a dress. I remember she was wearing a brooch.
“Why do you have your good clothes on?”
She shrugged and kept her eyes on the road.
“I had an uncle who used to tell us, ‘Always wear your worst clothes.’ ”
“Why?” she asked without looking at me, still with her eyes on the road.
“You have more of them. ‘Don’t be tempted into wearing your best clothes,’ he’d say. ‘Save them for a better occasion. If ever you find yourself wearing your best clothes, it means you’ve admitted to yourself that it’s never going to get any better than this.’ They buried him in his best clothes.”
“That’s not true,” Madeline said, both hands on the wheel.
“No, it is. I had an uncle and . . . he’s . . . he’s dead now. . . . But it’s like the title of that book by Yevtushenko, prose, not poetry, Don’t Die Before Your Death. Yevtushenko’s telling us to wear our best clothes before it’s too late. He’s got a remarkable spirit, that man. I met him, you know, in Melbourne.”
“I know.”
“Few years ago now. Told a great story. Well, more than one, but this one concerned a poor Russian peasant who tried to save what little money he had by training his horse to eat less and less each week. With every week the peasant fed his horse a little less than the previous week.
“One day, his neighbor noticed him putting a piece of string around the horse’s stomach.
“ ‘What are you doing?’ he asked the poor peasant.
“ ‘I am training my horse not to eat so much, to work on less and less food.’
“‘That’s madness! Both of you will come to a sorry end,’ the neighbor replied.
“‘You think so. Look at this,’ the peasant said, removing the string from around the horse. ‘This is where the two sides of the string used to meet around his waist, and now—look!’ he said, letting the surplus string dangle in the breeze before adding with pride, ‘And he still works!’
“The peasant continued cutting back his horse’s food. Each week the peasant boasted to his neighbor about the savings he had made on his horse’s food that week, and each week the neighbor continued to warn him of his, the horse’s and his family’s imminent demise if the peasant persisted in his folly. One day, the peasant approached the neighbor with more string than ever suspended from his sausage fingers dangling in the breeze. He cried out triumphantly to his neighbor, ‘Still working, and this week I gave him no food!’
“With the money he had saved on the horse’s feed, he drank throughout the night, celebrating. When he woke the next morning, the horse was dead. Two weeks later the Revolution came to the village where the peasant lived, horseless, with his family beside his neighbor and his family and their healthy horse. When the revolutionaries got to the peasant’s house, they found him shouting at his wife, a knife in the hand where once the string had been, his children cowering in the corner. They had first seen the neighbor next door with his wife, children and his horse, and now they saw poverty and desperation in the peasant’s home.
“‘Did the bourgeois kulak next door reduce you to this, Comrade?’ they asked the peasant.
“‘Yes,’ the frightened peasant answered. ‘Yes, he always mocked me, said I was crazy and that I would have a miserable end.’
“The neighbor was immediately arrested for being a bourgeois kulak, dragged out of his house and shot in front of his wife and children. Immediately after the execution the peasant was given his dead neighbor’s horse.
“The peasant was of course overjoyed, falling over himself to praise the revolutionaries. He quickly had his children singing revolutionary songs and before too long was himself a member of the Party. Such was his zeal and his genuine peasant origins that he was taken to the capital and paraded as a fine example of the modern citizen, an agrarian peasant who had seen the virtue of the Revolution.
“He became well known throughout the Party and was rewarded with higher and higher appointments until finally he was appointed commissar in charge of literature. One of his duties was the allocation of grants and stipends to poets and prose writers. It was said that for years he could be heard exclaiming in drunken exaltation down the corridors, ‘Still working, and this week I gave him nothing!’”
Madeline had her eyes on the road. The trees were rushing past. We were nearing the lake.
“That’s not true,” she said.
“Well, it’s a story but—”
“Yevtushenko never told you that story.”
“No, well, he didn’t tell it directly to me but—”
“How can you lie like that?”
“Oh, Maddy . . . It’s a . . . it’s a story.”
“You lie to yourself.”
“Maddy, let’s not argue.”
But we did. She did. She shouted at me in an increasingly shrill voice. She sounded hysterical. I heard her but could not make out her words. It reminded me of birds in the country first thing in the morning. She drove faster and shouted louder till neither of us could see the trees for the wood. There was not a trace of the young woman for whom I had written that poem so long ago. The person in the driver’s seat would have been unrecognizable to that young woman. We had come so far, too far and I, wanting to go back, began reciting:
“Let us go then, you and I
When the evening is spread out against the sky”
But she did not join in as she once had.
“Let us go then, you and I . . .”
“Shut up.”
I began repeating it.
“Let us go then, you and I . . .”
Nothing.
“Let us go then, you and I . . .”
She stopped the car abruptly so that it jerked forward after the engine had stopped. We were as close to the lake as the car could go. Madeline leant over to the backseat, opened the mouth of the empty canvas bag with an outward stretch of one hand and scooped up the kittens with her other hand. She moved so quickly. The side of her body touched my face. I could suddenly smell the perfume she used to wear so long ago. She was wearing it again. She handed me the canvas bag with the kittens inside and reached over me to unlock the passenger door. Then she spoke.
“So go, then.”
“What?”
“Put them out of our misery.” She pointed to the lake.
“In the lake?”
“Drown them.”
“Oh no, no, Maddy. I can’t.”
“It’s best,” she said, leaning over me and opening the door. “I can’t keep them and they won’t survive out here.”
“I can’t. Maddy, I can’t.”
The kittens mewed from inside the bag.
“Will you go!” she shouted, pushing me out of the car.
I fell out of the car, standing only to trip over a fallen branch. The kittens spilled out of the bag, scurrying in different directions. I tried to catch them, grabbing hold of one at the expense of the other two, going after another and losing the first. Madeline shouted something but I could not make it out. Very quickly I had lost all three kittens. They ran and I ran. I ran and ran. Towards the lake. I heard the car pull away. The kittens were gone and so was Madeline. All I could hear was the sound of myself: my breathing, running, heaving. There was dirt in my mouth. I had fallen, cut my leg, a ridiculous man facedown in the dirt beside Lake Eildon, crying to myself.
Let us go then, you and I,
When the evening is spread out against the sky
Like a patient etherised upon a table.
The sweet features of my personal failings, once just hinted at, had grown too pronounced for her.
Was she crying, too, in the car? Now I am sure that she was not. But, waking tranquilized in someone else’s pajamas in the permanently makeshift psych ward of that tiny hospital, I still had not realized, despite what had just happened, the extent of her contempt for me.
From the outside the building is spacious; yet, from the inside, the walls creep up on you. They crept up on me. So did Hugh Brasnett. Hugh’s bed was two away from mine. He was the young man, not much older than Andy, whom I had seen earlier lying on his front trying to fit his face on the Department of Health logo on the pillowcase.
“Who is Mandelstam?”
“What?”
“Who is Mandelstam?” he repeated.
“Mandelstam was a Russian poet. Why do you ask me that?”
“Was? Is he dead?”
“Yes. Why?”
“You were calling for him.”
“When?”
“Before. When you came in. Before they gave you a shot.”
“Who gave me a shot?”
“She did,” Hugh said, pointing at a young woman I had to lean forward to see out of the doorway. Her name was Sarah. She was a nurse and I learned later the younger sister of Neil Mahoney’s wife. If a field mouse could be an attractive young woman, it would look like Sarah.
“He’s awake now,” Hugh called.
She put down whatever she was carrying and came to sit down on my bed.
“How’re you feeling?”
“Okay. A little—”
“Confused?”
“Well, yes, but I was going to say . . . embarrassed.”
“Who’s Mandelstam?” Hugh interrupted.
“You’re Madeline’s husband, aren’t you?”
“Yes.”
“My brother-in-law, Neil, is her manager.”
“Her manager?”
“I’m sorry. I thought . . . Wasn’t it Madeline’s family’s property?”
“Yes. That it was. That it is.”
“Who the fuck was Mandelstam?”
Hugh was so bored that interrupting us seemed the best thing on offer. So I found myself in the psych ward of a tiny rural hospital telling a disturbed but not unintelligent young country boy about the life and times of Osip Mandelstam. And Sarah, whom I had expected to leave us, stayed where she was and listened.
“Osip Emilievich Mandelstam was born in Russia, of Jewish parents, in the last decade of the nineteenth century. Educated in St. Petersburg, he had the misfortune of being unable to do anything at all with himself except write some of the finest poetry his country and perhaps the world has ever known.”
“Why is that a misfortune?” Hugh asked.
“Because Mandelstam was writing in a place that valued poetry so much that a poet could be arrested for a single poem. Many lesser poets were arrested, exiled and sometimes killed for their writing, even the ones who made a religion of attempting to curry favor with the regime. And Mandelstam was tempera-mentally incapable of this sort of thing.
“I was only in a childish way connected to the established order;
I was terrified of oysters and glanced distrustfully at guardsmen;
And not a grain of my soul owes anything to that world of power,
However much I was tortured trying to be someone else.”
“That was beautiful,” Sarah said.
“How do you remember it?” asked Hugh.
“I’m . . . a poet,” I said, and then, turning to Sarah, “If you’re Neil’s sister-in-law, you would probably know that I’m not a farmer.” Sarah smiled uncomfortably.
“We’ve never had a poet here, have we, Hugh?”
“Really,” I said, looking around at the blue, pink and green pastels surrounding me. “That is surprising.”
“What happened to Mandelstam?” Hugh asked.
“He recited a certain poem, an epigram, privately, in front of five people whom he must have regarded as his friends, and the rest is, as they say, history.”
“What happened?”
“It is said he was in Pasternak’s apartment, Boris Pasternak, who wrote Doctor Zhivago. He was there one night. Mandelstam, bravely or foolishly, depending on your point of view, recited a very short poem which sealed his fate. It’s hard to believe he didn’t know the danger he was putting himself into, and yet, if he did know, it is even harder to understand why he did it. But one night, in May 1934 I think it was, after he had been laughing and talking for hours with his wife and their friend, the poet Anna Akhmatova, and an irritating translator, a pesky hanger-on, there came a knock at the front door of the Mandelstams’ apartment. It was by then one o’clock in the morning, and before opening the door his wife announced quietly, ‘They’ve come for Osip.’ They had been expecting this.
“The men of the secret police always wore the same civilian overcoats so that people were never in any doubt as to who they were. Perhaps this was the intention. That night there was no doubt who they were. There were no introductions, not even a cursory check to see if this was the Mandelstams’ apartment. With a practiced skill they quickly went past his wife without touching her, and suddenly Mandelstam’s tiny apartment was filled with men in overcoats checking their identity papers and efficiently frisking them for concealed weapons.
“Of course, Mandelstam had no weapons. He was a poet. He only had words, and after showing him a search warrant the secret police went tearing through their drawers, looking for Mandelstam’s words. One of the policemen took time out from the search to advise the civilians not to smoke so much, producing a box of hard candy from the pocket of his uniform trousers and offering them some.
“The search continued all night. The secret police, the NKVD, as they were called, made two piles of Mandelstam’s papers, one on a chair, one on the floor. When the translator, like a frightened primary-school student, asked permission to go to the toilet, they contemptuously let him go home. Without any particular malice they kept walking over the papers they threw on the floor. The sun had already risen by the time they left the apartment. They took only forty or so sheets of paper—and Mandelstam—with them.”
“Why were they contemptuous of the translator?” Hugh asked.
“He was an informer sent there to make sure the other three didn’t destroy any manuscripts before the knock on the door. The NKVD always had contempt for their stooges.”
“But . . . who was Nadia?” Sarah asked in the voice of a child, as if embarrassed by her need to know.
“Nadia? I didn’t say anything about Nadia.”
“You did before,” Hugh said. “When you were out of it.”
“Who was Nadia?” Sarah repeated.
“Nadia is the name Mandelstam called his wife, Nadezhda. What did I say about her?”
The two of them looked at each other.
“What kind of woman was Nadia?” Sarah asked.
My mouth was dry. This impromptu lecture on Russian literature was even more bizarre than the events leading up to my hospitalization. I thought for a long while about Mandelstam’s Nadia.
“Her every thought was about him. If not for her, we would not know him. She saved his manuscripts. She wrote letters to him when he was imprisoned, letters she knew he had little chance of receiving. But she wrote them anyway. She would have known they were beating him, starving him, freezing him, but still she wrote to him. She wrote, You came to me every night in my sleep, and I kept asking what had happened, but you did not reply. That was in the last letter she ever wrote to him.”
None of us spoke. It was left to someone else to break the silence.
From another room someone looking for assistance called, “Excuse me.” Sarah stood and straightened herself up before leaving the room.
“Do you think . . . you’re Mandelstam? Is that it?” Hugh asked.
“No. I don’t think I’m Mandelstam. That would be too easy for them, Hugh. I’m not Mandelstam. I don’t think I have his talent, his feeling for language. I don’t live in his times. I don’t have his life. I don’t have his . . .”
Sarah came back in. There was someone to see me. It was Andy. He took a couple of tentative steps. I watched him see me there for the first time. He moved his sunglasses and car keys from one hand to the other.
“This is my son, Andy.”
Hugh looked at Andy and Andy looked at Hugh. I wondered what was uppermost in my son’s mind. Was it the humiliation of seeing his father in a psychiatric ward? Or was he thinking that Hugh and I had already had a conversation that transcended any he and I had ever had? If he was thinking this, he was right. But whatever he was thinking, he nodded politely to Hugh, told me he would be waiting at reception and then left me to change back into my dirt-ridden clothes in front of Hugh.
Nadezhda Mandelstam wrote that so many of her contemporaries, whether they had been imprisoned themselves or not, were extremely well “prison-trained.” They knew instinctively how to seize what she called “the last chance of being heard.” Hugh went back to the Department of Health logo on his pillow until I had my pants on, but then, when he turned his attention back to me, I could see that he was sad, sadder than he had been throughout his introduction to Mandelstam.
“I think I might like to be a poet. What do you think?” he asked me quietly.
“I think you’re well on your way,” I said as we shook hands. As I walked out I heard him begin the poet’s business of keeping himself company: “I was only in a childish way connected to the established order.” He said it quietly. There was no one else there.
Sarah and Andy were deep in conversation as they walked towards the gates, and I, not wanting to add to the wretchedness of the circumstances of their meeting, lagged behind them. A slightly older, slightly attractive, slightly qualified young field mouse of a woman had to explain to a strong and unpretentious young man from out of town that she did not really understand what his father was doing in the dirt beside Lake Eildon or why he cried without shame in between lengthy monologues about a Russian poet and his wife. All she could tell him is that his father could go. Andy and I said good-bye to her. Then he turned and thanked her. When he put his hand on my back, new tears came to me, small ones suggesting that I might be all right. He still had the four-wheel drive and he opened the door for me.
“Are you right to go, then, Dad?”
“‘Let us go then, you and I . . .’”
Neil had taught me to drive a tractor. Both of us did our best. In spring, early summer and early autumn we waited for rain. He taught me to mend a fence as well as anyone, but my stretches did not always hold firm. Occasionally cattle would stray. Once Neil had found two of the cows in the shed at the back of our house. He had been repairing something for Madeline. I don’t know what it was. Things around the house used to break. She would discover them and he would fix them, all without my knowing. She would talk to him about finances, the farm’s, his, and ours. Sometimes I would come in and they would be going over the books with a cup of tea or a beer in summer.
It was nothing, he said, but I could sense that he pitied me. I knew he was double-checking everything I did. As uncomfortable as we were around each other, I could not fault his effort around the property. He could not have taken greater care of everything if it had all been his.
After a while I got used to him checking my work. I got used to working on my own too. Sometimes I would see him in the distance and wave. Perhaps he was shortsighted, or else it was just that men on the land did not wave, just as men on the land did not have pet names for particular cows. There was one we had for a time, one with a long, angular face, that seemed a little aloof. I called her Garbo. It did not catch on.
Andy had built a wooden partition in the shed and was living there. I suspected this bothered Neil, who would have felt his access to the shed somewhat restricted by Andy’s presence. He liked to be up early and would often start in the shed, cleaning things. I never knew exactly what he was cleaning. The tractor, the pitch-forks, the saws. Once Andy saw him cleaning the gun. I heard them talking. Andy had stumbled out of bed on hearing him.
“You gotta do that?”
“I’m sorry if I woke you. Got to keep things clean.”
“You gotta do that now?”
“We’ll be seeing some foals pretty soon. Foaling season is when things have to be put down, the ones that won’t make it.”
I started to wonder if I did not actually create more work for Neil, given that he had to check everything I was doing. Some days I would quit soon after lunch and spend the rest of the afternoon reading on the verandah. Andy had made me a chair out of some wood we had lying around. He had stripped it, sanded it, sealed it and then tacked a padded leather pouch on the seat and another at the back. He put some springs on the back legs so that it rocked or tilted a little. Then he painted all the wood pastel blue. I had become a man colored pastel blue. The color made it ugly but I could only thank him. It was very comfortable. It became my chair.
Andy liked doing things with his hands. He was good with them. He started restoring secondhand furniture at O’Meara’s in town, and before long they were even selling new chairs, tables and cabinets that Andy had made. Sarah had put him in touch with O’Meara. They had started seeing each other. She would visit him occasionally in the shed. I would hear the car. More often he visited her. It must have been difficult for her to come to our place, given the circumstances in which she had met me. And I would see her again in similar circumstances.
Instructions can be given in many ways: as advice, as suggestions, as orders. Even orders can be given in more than one way. I did not own the land that Neil and I worked. I did not work properly the land my wife owned, and I seemed incapable, through any exertion, of earning my wife’s respect. Whether or not poetry, the writing of it, was an activity capable of squeezing even the barest regard from Madeline, I was not the poet to do it. Somehow Neil knew all of this and he gave me instructions accordingly. After a while he spoke to me as I had once heard him speak to one of his children, in sharp, matter-of-fact barks.
Very early on, in the days when we still took our breaks together, I had made the mistake, while searching for something to say, of commenting on the beauty of a bluish flower that grew confidently in clumps by the front gate. It was our enemy, he told me. It was Patterson’s Curse. It was a weed. We had to eradicate it. If the cows ate it they would spread it through their manure and get sick themselves. I thought it was pretty, but apparently it would take over the grass if we let it. We could get rid of it by hand where it grew in little clumps by the gate or the house but if it was in the open, we had to use a tractor.
Together and separately we had cut grass, leaving it to dry and become hay, which we either fed to our cattle in winter or else sold at the market. As with most other jobs, Neil had shown me how to make hay and how to sell it. Sometimes we would do it together and other times separately, on our own. From early on, though, I noticed that he almost always wanted me to take the hay to market on my own. At first I did not think too much about it, but then I realized why he was sending me there alone. He was ashamed to be working another man’s land, at his age. His family and personal circumstances were known throughout the area, and as hard as it was for him to work someone else’s land, it was unbearable for him to be seen doing it. Later I realized it was more than just this. The indignity was that much greater for him if he was seen driving in, unloading and selling the hay with me.
So I was alone with my hay in the market the day a cattle farmer, a neighbor, found some tiny bluey-purple petals among my bales. There were not many, but there did not need to be. It was a disgrace. Word of it spread like fire, and each telling pinned me tighter to the disgrace. Everybody heard. “Deliberate,” some said. “A fool” was the verdict of others. How slowly the people in town moved along the main street, until I came near them. I heard whispers in the aisle of the Welcome Mart. The scrambled-egg hair girl at the checkout looked up at me. In the time we had been living there she had dug herself deeply into her adolescence. She showed no sign of leaving.
“How can I help you?” she asked me rhetorically, focusing all her boredom and contempt somewhere below my eyes, between my chest and my belt buckle. The man in the stockfeed and merchandise center grimaced when he saw me walk through the door. It was bad enough to be found writhing in the dirt near Lake Eildon, but now it was widely thought that I had tried to sell hay laced with Patterson’s Curse to my competitors, to my neighbors. In the way of small towns and large offices, no explicit allegations were made to my face, so there was no right of reply, no one to whom I could direct an apology. It was not possible to explain that it was not deliberate, that it might not have been me. When I told Neil what had happened, he said that he already knew. He sniffed and looked at his hands. That was all he said.
He was not there when some men came to the house to talk about it. They said I should be prohibited from selling at the market. It was not clear whether they meant hay or everything. This was their view irrespective of whether the Patterson’s Curse had been deliberate or an accident. They would not stay for a cup of tea or a beer. They would not sit down. Andy was out with Sarah. There was just Madeline and me.
I had ruined everything for her. I could not be trusted, not even to work. She feared that we would not be able to make a living even if we were able to coax life from the sullen earth her father had left her. In disgrace with fortune and men’s eyes, I felt her shoe hit me in the back of the neck without warning. It was nine days after the men had come and still she would not speak to me. But she spoke to Neil. I heard her.
“I’ve got to do something.”
I was outside. It was quiet but I did not hear a response. They did not know I was there.
When I cry I suck on my front teeth and purse my lips involuntarily as though in anticipation of an onslaught of kisses. That was the way Hugh Brasnett described it. He was still there. He had not left. His father, a thickset man, was the town butcher. Everyone knew him and therefore knew what had happened to his son Hugh. There was no incentive for Hugh to recover. If he left the hospital he would need to leave town in order to start again. He was still an involuntary, but this time I was a voluntary.
“Tell me again about Mandelstam,” Hugh demanded. He was so happy to have me back. At first I thought it was simply because he was bored, but after a few days I could see that he was often engaged in something, even busy. He flirted with some of the female patients, regardless of age, over the smorgasbords of watery tuna and stale bread. He traded successfully in tobacco and marijuana.
“It’s five dollars a joint here,” he explained, and when I said nothing he added, “Look, I don’t set the price . . . and . . . and it’s not my fault. Myself, I don’t smoke. That shit does nothing for me.”
He kept an interested eye on the transient female patients and slept with quite a few of them, sometimes in our room, sometimes in theirs or else in the bathroom. The woman he kept coming back to was a quiet older woman, about my age. She was really quite pretty. He seemed to regard sleeping with her merely as an extension of his friendship with her. One night they were in our room. I had the covers over my head but I could still hear them.
“You take me to another place . . . to another time,” she whispered, “but I have a son about your age. He doesn’t want to see me.”
Sarah was less delighted to see me. Still sympathetic, the meeting of her personal and her professional lives clearly made her uncomfortable. Though we acknowledged the connection, I was much too ashamed to exploit her love for my son. This time I was embarrassed for her, for her having to work there, for her seeing me see her having to interact with the other patients. There was little room for dignity. Within a few days she asked me privately whether there was anything I would like Andy to bring me. I made a list of books and got them ten days later. She brought them, not Andy. He did not visit this time.
“What are you reading? Is it Mandelstam?” Hugh asked. “Does it have the poem that got him into trouble?”
“They all got him into trouble, but I know the one you mean. The one about Stalin?”
“Yes, the one they were looking for the night of the knock at the door, the night the men in overcoats came . . . when he was with his wife and that pain-in-the-arse translator and Akhmatova.”
Hugh remembered everything I had told him about Mandelstam’s arrest in 1934. He seemed to take pride in remembering.
“When did he write it?”
“About six months before his arrest.”
“Find it, will you. Read it to me.”
“We live, deaf to the land beneath us,
Ten steps away no one hears our speeches,
But where there’s so much as half a conversation
The Kremlin’s mountaineer will get his mention.
His fingers are fat as grubs
And the words, final as lead weights, fall from his lips,
His cockroach whiskers leer
And his boot tops gleam.
Around him a rabble of thin-necked bosses—
fawning half-men for him to play with.
They whinny, purr or whine
As he prates and points a finger,
One by one forging his laws, to be flung
Like horseshoes at the head, the eye or the groin.
And every killing is a treat
For the broad-chested Ossete.”
“He sounds like my father, fingers fat as grubs. What’s an Ossete?”
“An Ossete is a person from Ossetia, which is just above Georgia in the former Soviet Union. Stalin was supposed to have come from Georgia, but there were rumors that he was part Ossetian. I’d imagine the rumors were meant to cast doubt on his ethnic origins and parentage. For Mandelstam it was probably a way of naming him without naming him while reminding the reader or the listener how hateful he was.”
“Who, Stalin?”
“Yes. How hateful Stalin was.”
“And that was the poem they came looking for six months later?”
“Yes, I think so.”
Hugh sat up against the bed head and spoke quietly, almost reverentially. It was as though he knew his words could hurt me but he had to say them anyway.
“It’s not just his poetry, is it? I mean, it’s not just what he wrote that makes you . . . feel him so much.” There was a gentleness to his voice.
“What do you mean?”
“You want to be him, don’t you?”
I smiled. “That’s crazy, Hugh.”
“Well, maybe, but . . . that’s why you’re here.”
“I don’t know why you say that.”
“He’s like a . . . role model for you.”
“Mandelstam? Mandelstam . . . suffered quite incredibly. His life was miserable. Separated from his wife, he lived in poverty in an insane and brutal time, in an insane and brutal place. His work was banned. Why . . . why would I want to be him?”
“Because you’re a poet. I have heard you. When you came in, that night. I heard you.”
“Oh, come on, Hugh. Is this some sort of a game, telling me things I’ve said in a delirium, because if it is, it’s beneath you. It’s pretty . . . facile.”
“Calm down, will you. I’m not trying to be offensive.”
“No . . . but when did you gain this sudden expertise in poetry, Russian history and psychoanalysis?”
“But you do.”
“Do what?”
“You do want to . . . be him. He was a great poet, a true original, and he was . . . deeply loved . . . so deeply loved . . . by his wife. You need him to . . . help get you through.”
When I cry I suck on my front teeth and purse my lips as though in anticipation of an onslaught of kisses. Hugh continued.
“It’s okay, you know. I understand it. See, you’re not really crazy. It’s just how you get through. You’re . . . only in a childish way connected to the established order.”
The nurses liked to have us out of bed. They kept a book in which they recorded our responses to their instructions, whether we were cooperative, how willing we were to take a shower. A doctor would occasionally read the book and this was called treatment.
I liked to think that I was a good influence on Hugh. I never balked at getting up, taking a shower or cleaning up the ward: the cleaners did not have to touch our area. In all the time I was there, Hugh did not give them any trouble, either, until the end.
We were playing chess in the dayroom. The television was on in the corner. The screen showed some very good-looking people in a hospital setting, some of them patients, some of them staff, all of them tanned. Apart from the sound from the TV, the room—the ward, as it was called—was fairly quiet. It was at this point that Hugh was distracted, not by the television but by a nearby conversation. A young man had come in to see Hugh’s friend, the older woman. The young man, who I later learned was her son, held in his fist a tiny bunch of flowers, which she took from him apprehensively. Hugh watched as she brushed hair out of the young man’s eyes. I tried to renew his interest in the game but could not, particularly once he had heard his own name.
The woman mentioned Hugh’s name a few times and the young man looked in our direction. Then his voice started to get louder. As its volume increased, so did the overall tension in the room. In the television hospital a man and a woman were hugging. But in our ward the young man was shouting at Hugh’s friend. She pulled her dressing gown tighter around her, just as ashamed as he said he was.
“No, it’s not like that.” She smiled.
But it was, and it wasn’t, like that.
“You’re fucking sick, you know that? You really are.” It was already too late to say anything. Hugh stood up, knocking over the chessboard. A pawn fell in my lap. Everyone watched as Hugh approached the shouting young man.
“Stop talking to her like that.”
They pushed one another. One of the nurses ran off to call for assistance. No one from the staff was on hand to see Hugh get punched in the face, on the side of his jaw. Some of the patients moved in to get a closer look. The quiet older woman had torn her gown trying to come between them. Hugh was laying into her son’s face with a maniacal speed by the time he was outnumbered by hospital staff.
I felt a hand on my shoulder as I sat there without moving.
“Just stay there. Don’t get involved.”
It was Sarah. I listened to her and watched them overpower Hugh. The woman was shouting at him. He had battered her son. A doctor, two nurses and a maintenance man held him. He was twisting, trying to break free, trying to make them see that he was defending the woman’s honor. He was trying to convince them that he was still “the funny guy, the joker, the good normal guy” of the ward. But his protests became increasingly frenzied, hysterical and futile as he twisted and thrashed his legs about with everyone watching. A procession of patients accompanied him and his captors, some cheering him on, some shouting abuse, others just watching, fascinated by his pain or pleased that this was happening to someone else. There were not enough staff on hand to keep the patients away. They all saw how he kicked and struggled as the nurses pulled his pants down and gave him a shot. It was terrifying to see it, to see his anger, to see my young friend’s transformation, his degradation. His inability to distinguish between his status in the ward and that of any visitor would have made the apparent arbitrariness of their intervention all the more intolerable. Why did they not constrain the other man? Why did they not give him a chance to explain that this was not a psychotic episode? This was a fight, well-intentioned, even gallant.
Sarah’s hand stayed on my shoulder. No one saw me weep. Hugh was taken to a padded cell in the isolation wing. I had done nothing at all while this was going on. The next morning one of the doctors approached me and suggested that I was ready to rejoin my family, that I should leave that day. It was thought that I was better.
Having dressed, shaved and packed, I waited in the room all day for Hugh to come back. But he did not. One of the nurses asked me if I wanted to call home to arrange to be picked up. I said that I would make my own way home. The walk would take me an hour or so, but I felt I needed it. Before leaving, I wrote Hugh a note. I did not refer to the events of the previous day but instead reminded him that in Mandelstam’s time people used to copy out poems as gifts for each other. The gift was all the more valuable if the publication of the poem was proscribed. Then I wrote out the one he liked most, his favorite, thanked him and wished him luck. The note, I knew, would do nothing for him. I was only in a childish way connected to the established order.
By not even trying to help him during the disturbance, I had demonstrated that I was ready to join the outside world. This was the world Sarah would have me rejoin. It contained my son, whom she loved. I could imagine the way they talked to each other, the way she loved him in spite of the embarrassment that was his father, the way they promised to take each other away from all that smacked of their parents’ generation. If I had done nothing else for him, I had brought them to each other. Now she brought me back to him. And I had done nothing else for him. That he had grown up solid as a tree, strong, uncomplicated and good with his hands, all of it had nothing to do with me.
The fruit was falling from the trees by the side of the road. Sometimes it rolled away, far from the trees. I walked into town. It was almost deserted at that time of day. The dogs were asleep on the steps of the public library. The hairdresser was closed. Through the window of the butcher shop I saw a man hosing down drip trays and wondered if it was Hugh’s father. Fat pink sausages hung in the window like Stalin’s fingers. The man looked up at me with suspicion. His face was the face of a tyrant. Hugh had fought him just as he had fought what he perceived as injustice a day earlier. His father had so often sworn at him, demeaned him, hit him. When Hugh had fought back, the local police made a deal with the butcher and Hugh became a local involuntary patient.
A couple of Harley-Davidsons were parked on the grassy median strip in the center of the main street opposite the hotel. The bank and even the bakery were closed. It was night by then. The streetlights had come on and I walked home knowing that when I left the precincts of the town I would be walking in the dark. There I was under a streetlight, moths overhead, looking at my reflection in O’Meara’s Furniture, where Andy worked. By changing my position and orientation I could manipulate my reflection into chairs my son had built or helped restore. I wished so much that I could have given him something. When I cry I suck on my front teeth and purse my lips involuntarily as though in anticipation of an onslaught of kisses. I saw it in the window. I sat on my pastel blue chair, the one Andy had made for me. When I moved away, it remained in the window. It was for sale.
The last thing you see as you leave town is a blue and white sign, Feeling the hurt? Call Lifeline on 13 1114. After that it was dark. I walked home in that dark to the sound of things I did not understand. Nature conducts so much of its commerce at night. A real poet would have understood the semiotics of the nocturnal whisperings that were all around me. In the trees something was waking up. In the long grass something was eating, something was drinking from a dam, something was mating wildly, something was killing. With only the blue light of the moon I saw none of it and heard very little but the sound of my shoes on the road. I thought of Mandelstam, of his poetry, in spite of the danger that waited for me when I thought of him. Verses came into my head as I walked with my pack on my back, verses seemingly at random. True poets, both of us: he for his writing, me for my remembering. I was hoping there was something heroic even in just memorizing his work. Like a narcotic, Mandelstam’s words had a dangerously soothing effect on me, and I breathed them in and took strength from them as I walked.
I’ve many years to live before I’m a patriarch.
I’m at an age that commands little respect.
They swear at me behind my back,
in the senseless, pointless language of tram fights.
“You bastard!” Well, I apologise,
but deep down I don’t change at all.
When you think of your connection with the world
you can’t believe it. It is nonsense. . . .
There is a little light at the gate to show the number of our property. Other than that, there was no light between the gate and the house. I unslipped the chain on the gate and there, at my feet, was some Patterson’s Curse. I left it untouched and quietly closed the gate. The lights of our neighbor’s home looked like fireflies in the distance. From the house I could hear music. Someone was playing my old Louis Armstrong: “Lyin’ to Myself,” it might have been. The light was on in the shed and I saw the back of Andy’s car. Was he getting a taste for Satchmo? Was he inside dancing with his mother? We had danced, the three of us, to my jazz records when he was a little boy.
I stood on the verandah and looked in through the lounge room window to where the music was coming from. Madeline’s shoes were at almost perfect right angles to each other. Magazines were in several piles, unstraightened, probably unread. Something made me continue peering through the windows before coming in. I wanted to catch a glimpse of the way things were without me. I thought of what she might say when she saw me for the first time, and it made me want to delay everything. I stepped off the balcony and back onto the front drive. For a moment I thought of turning back.
I went to the shed and put my pack down at the door. A radio played softly and I knocked before entering.
“Yeah?” I heard him say in a voice I had somehow given him. I entered without answering. He had been varnishing something but stopped when he saw me. He looked as though he had seen a ghost.
“Dad?”
I said nothing. I did not know what to say to him.
“Dad.”
It felt good just to hear the word. He put the brush down on some old newspaper and came over to me. We looked at each other and then he hugged me.
“What are you making?”
“How are you feeling, Dad?”
“I’m fine.”
“Does Mum know you’re here?”
“No . . . no, I saw your light on and just thought I’d . . .”
I wondered what I would need to do just to be able to see him every day, with his permission, day after day, without bothering him. I would be quiet. He need not know I was there. I could promise not to be mad again.
“I’ll take your pack. Let’s go inside.”
We should never have gone inside, or at least, I should have gone by myself. We heard the trumpet solo from the lounge room. Andy called out. Her shoes remained untouched. We walked down the hall. I went first, reluctantly, feeling an eerie nonspecific need to grab him by the hand and lead him away or else to shelter him. On my own they might have missed me altogether and I could have walked away without them knowing I knew. As it was, she looked over me and straight at Andy.
The bedroom door was open. It all looked unplanned. She was sitting on the bed in her slip, facing us. He was kneeling and had his head between her thighs. Andy dropped my pack. Madeline called out our son’s name. I backed into Andy, instinctively trying to push him away as though it was not too late, as though he had not already seen them. She stood up. Neil looked over his shoulder.
“You fucking pig,” Andy called.
“Andy!”
“For Christ’s sake,” Neil said.
Andy lunged at Neil but could not get past me. He tried again and got a little farther but, in doing so, pushed me into the room.
“Andy, take it easy,” I called from under him.
He stood up. Madeline and I were trying to keep him away from Neil. The trumpets played.
“You filthy fucking pig,” shouted Andy.
“Listen, son,” shouted Neil over the top of the music, “you don’t make anything better . . . calling . . . carrying on—”
“You’re fucking vermin, Mahoney.”
Madeline was crying. I felt her tears on my face. Andy and Neil had pushed the two of us together as we tried to keep them apart.
“Vermin. Fucking snake . . . in the fucking grass,” Andy shouted in a voice I had never heard as he ran down the hall and out the back door towards the shed. I stood and looked at them. No one had said my name. Should I have tried to hit him on Andy’s behalf? Should I have hit her? Should I have tried to shake her? What was so wrong with me that I could not share my son’s rage, the rage he felt for both our sakes?
“Oh, what the fuck are you staring at, you lunatic?” Neil said as he brushed past me, putting on his shirt.
“When did you . . . get out? Nobody . . . said anything,” Madeline asked, looking at me for the first time.
“I was . . . a voluntary. I could leave whenever I liked.”
Neil was buttoning himself up in the lounge room. His shoes were beside hers but I had not seen them. Madeline followed him and I followed her.
“It’s not what you think,” she said.
“Madeline, how can it not be what he thinks,” said Neil, irritated, hurriedly putting on his shoes.
“Shut up,” she shouted at him.
“He knows what he saw,” Neil said, now standing with both shoes on. “He’s not an idiot, Madeline,” he said as the screen door slammed and Andy came down the hall, his feet slapping the linoleum.
“Just a poet,” I said as Andy came back into the room filled with the rage of youth and some just for me. His mother saw it first.
“Andy, put it away,” she said as he pushed her to one side.
“Are you mad?” shouted Neil.
“Andy, no,” I called, and reached for him, pushing him off balance.
The first shot went into the wall.
“Andy, it’s not worth it.”
Neil knocked over the upright lamp.
“Someone’s got to fight back, Dad,” and he shot him twice in the chest. The sound rang out over the valley and over our lives.
Neil Mahoney seemed to jump in the air. It was as though he was bouncing between planes of air. Madeline shouted his name. She shouted hysterically, her voice high and mad like that of a bird in the country first thing in the morning. Neil lay on the floor by the wall. His blood was leaving him for a pool on the floor beside him. Seeing her go over to him increased Andy’s fury.
“Get away from him,” he shouted at her.
I grabbed at the gun. I had lost her years ago. Suddenly I could see that so clearly.
“Andy, give it to me.”
He did not resist for very long. Madeline was kneeling beside Neil, crying, saliva and mucus forming bubbles at her mouth. The music was still on.
“You’ve killed him, Andy,” Madeline said.
“No, he’s not dead.”
“Yes he is, Andy. He’s dead. Come and see.”
Andy walked slowly towards the body but I stood in front of him, blocking his way, still holding the rifle.
Now the night was real to me. I stood with a gun in one hand, the other blocking my son’s approach to the man his mother, yet again, cradled in her lap, the man he had just shot. Andy was breathing heavily. I pushed him back with my body and he obeyed. The two of them looked at me. I looked for any trace of myself in him and they looked at me as if for the first time. There I was, his father, her husband. I looked at her semi-nakedness, at the outlines of her breasts above Neil’s slumped body, for any trace of the shy girl for whom I had written that poem all those years ago. How quickly all this had happened. How quickly everyone had gone mad.
Though none of this could be undone, I knew what to do with a clarity and certainty I had never known before. I turned off the music while they stayed still.
“I want you to listen to me, both of you,” I said. And they listened. They did as I instructed and stayed just where they were while I went to the laundry and got a towel. I took it back to them so they could see what I was doing, all the time holding the gun. With the towel I wiped it down several times, thoroughly, including the trigger. Then I put my hands all over it.
“Andy, you left here before I got home. I found your mother. I got the gun and I did this. Get in your car and go. No one will doubt me on this.”
“Dad, no!”
“Andy, get in the car.”
“Dad, you can’t do this.”
“Andy, the sooner you go the better. Go to Sarah’s, anywhere. One of us . . . your mother will call an ambulance about five minutes after you’ve gone.”
“Dad, I can’t let you—”
“Listen to your father, Andy,” Madeline said.
“But, Dad . . .” He was crying.
“Just go! Get the hell away from here.”
We heard him start the car. Madeline was still on the floor.
“Look at the clock.”
“Why?”
“I want you to take note of the time and call an ambulance in five minutes.”
“Give him five minutes. Tell them Neil’s already dead. Then they won’t hurry.”
I put the gun down and covered his torso with the towel. These were the longest minutes. They were the minutes in which years came to a head. Madeline moved away from Neil’s body and sat down next to me. Her gaze kept shifting from the clock to me to the wall where Neil lay slumped and then back to me. They were the minutes when we could have talked, outside the veil of her dissatisfaction and outside my sense of failure, for the first time in years. They were the minutes when the two young people that had fallen for each other more than twenty years earlier could have met in their older bodies and, together, grappled towards an explanation.
I say this because in those minutes she looked at me as she had not been able to for years, without contempt and without rancor. I was the person she had loved nearly twenty years ago. In those minutes I was not a failed clerk nor a quixotic poet. I was not mad. I was her old lover, her long-lost friend, who had not intended to be a man incapable of living up to his promise. Most of all I was the father of her son and I was saving his life.
There was a time after his first arrest when Mandelstam became convinced that his executioners were going to come for him at a particular time of the day, and each day, at that time, he waited for them fearfully. When Nadezhda managed to find out that the time he expected them to come was six o’clock in the evening, she took to surreptitiously moving the hands of the clock every day, telling him, “You said six, but it’s already a quarter past seven.” Madeline never used to wear a watch. She does now, I am told.
I waited for her to count the minutes, and when she had called for an ambulance, I took my pack which was unopened and walked out of the house down the path to our gatepost, past the clumps of Patterson’s Curse and back into the night. I took the road and kept walking. A long while later I heard the ambulance in the distance. I thought only briefly about what lay in store for me, and when I did I was not too troubled by it. A man who shoots someone is far better understood than a man who is racked by a hopeless addiction to the music in words.
And in the dark, by the side of the road, I realized it was really other people’s words that I heard, not my own. I had made the mistake of thinking that because I could hear, but really hear, Mandelstam’s words, I was myself a poet. It was an easy mistake to make, since real poets say that poetry begins, like music, as phrases played inexplicably in a person’s head. It was just that in my case they were Mandelstam’s phrases. But I heard them, and not faintly, either. I heard them clearly, unequivocally, when I was trying to do other things. I heard them when I was trying to be a clerk, a farmer, a poet, a husband and a father. And I hear them now when I need them most. I am thus still only in a childish way connected to the established order. Perhaps this is a crime.