Travellers May Still Return Read online

  The people still gather at the edges of their yards and chatter before the sun goes down. The village has thrived another day. We’ve kept our noses to the ground. And today I feel excited and guilty. What is it? I felt such apprehension as I watched Abi, Tom’s teen daughter, and Danny riding off together between the rows of vines and disappearing north.

  Response to my first novel of some thirty years ago encouraged me to continue to record details of village life and to send these away, and in fact I have in my possession the letter I received from a professor who recognized the value of my writing, stating that in order to maintain a purity of narrative — a clean line, he called it — the river should flow only one way, and signing his name, “with respect from future generations.” Well, I sent out stories for years. All were published. I wrote and floated them down the river until Annie died, when suddenly I felt I was engaging in a species of betrayal and stopped transmitting. It’s important to say that I did not stop writing in my notebooks.

  I have had a life of local exploration and storytelling and have anchored that life in the relationships with my wife and children. These relationships too became subject to exploration and story. But now I find myself looking over the village, full of my customary curiosity, still witnessing stunningly vivid people engaged in beautiful affairs (this includes my wife; night-dreams of my children are a separate reality), and yet my longhand copy of these people and their affairs seems a dead thing. So what has happened? Have my tools become blunt or is my approach obsolete? Would another looking at my notebooks find all well and interesting and simply finished, complete, perfect? Am I finished? Or is the problem in the village — am I the witness to a discontinuity that is not translatable by means I’ve used before? Am I aware of continuity behind the discontinuity for the first time? I have set my stock in evolution and seen it everywhere around me, and the world and my village have supported my certainty, which is not a belief, surely, because it is provable. It is provable. A long time ago I discovered two options of pursuing a graceful perceptive narrative, either by being faithful to the characters, or to wring a poem from the moment. Or let a poem wring from me a transcendent copy of the moment. The options blur, of course. It has often been a combination of these approaches, but now I have a nagging suspicion the options are front and back, top and bottom of an uncrackable nut.

  Two months ago, I came upon a doe by the side of the road, killed by some impact, and she was large, with young within her slowly dying. I stopped and looked at her and spoke to her, but I did not touch her, and I feel badly that I did not. Annie died, our daughter, and she is still slowly dying, inside Emma, inside me. Some impact. Some agency. A vector that we overlooked, that has been filled with guilt, that that that . . . So what happened? If evolution is just one story, if time and space don’t hold, what then? And here is where dreams enter in, when our son George says I might be wrong about everything, and young Annie, bright as ever, arrives to say none of it really matters anyway.

  “One cannot live in a constant state of fear,” says Kata.

  “Who is not afraid?” says Apocat. She settles her bulk tenderly, everything slow with her these days, beneath the big tree, and the whole settlement shifts a degree north and sun breaks out of a black cloud.

  “I will tell you who is full of fear and who is full of rage,” says Kata.

  “Who?”

  “Abi and Danny.”

  “Ah.”

  “That girl has lives to live before her baby can be born. And his illness will lead him into terrible places.”

  Apocat sighs. “Will you fetch me a drink of water, Kata.”

  Kata scurries to the bucket and dips the scoop and fills a tin cup. Down on her haunches, she turns and raindrops spit around her. “Who is to blame, the girl or the man?”

  Apocat shakes her shaggy grey head. “Why do we have to blame?”

  “Well, it’s not our fault, is it?” says Kata.

  “We can’t blame the village, can we?” says Apocat. “Like the old days?”

  “No, no.” Kata brings the tin cup. “I think Danny’s anger is a roof and Abi’s fear needs a home.”

  “Good, Kata. That’s a good start.”

  I used to enjoy watching the comings and goings of babies with their mothers, kids on skateboards in the alleys, toddlers with balloons, on tricycles, but now it’s mostly teens swaggering along the summer lanes to the vineyards, Gee and James for instance, the latest young lovers roaming up the vine hills for a private spot and down when they’re done. I imagine them the way I enjoy brandy, a little too much.

  Emma does not know. We have kept secret from each other all these years who we truly are. We avoid talking about Annie. When I die, all my notes and observations may well be added up, though I’m afraid it won’t amount to much. When I think of all the long-empty houses with their off-kilter Sold signs, I feel dizzy and go out to set a rock in my wall.

  When one does something over and over it becomes a path to one’s own soul, complete with smells and visions and associated thoughts. Our village is diminished and under threat. How does a diminished village affect its inhabitants? I might as well ask the stone how it is affected by the wall.

  Backache.

  Fused discs.

  Calm, calm.

  Papagana. Pabbivinnar. Ayabmenang. Apanyer. Vatergewinnt. Babamafanikio. The play names I once gave my children to give me wobble in my lips only now, when I’m lost, when I’m sad, their big shouty laughter a beat away.

  It’s already dusk, and the villagers are out in their yards, chatting back and forth. I cannot see them because our house stands apart from the village and faces the vine hills. But it is a still evening and the voices are distinct. Stars grow visible one by one, cluster by cluster; laughter winds round and round the bulky darkness until, one after another, the voices go silent and the night breeze comes up. Out there on the outskirts is the young and beautiful couple in the tent pitched outside the community hall. They are not what they seem. I have asked James and Gee and Abi and Harry, who have made it a habit since summer began to pass the tent every day, afraid of missing something, what they are like. “Cool.” “Smart.” “Boring.” “Interesting.” These kids are finished Grade 9 and have first jobs, Abi looking after Danny’s horses, Harry washing dishes at the diner, Gee clerking at the dress shop, and James on Abi’s dad’s farm.

  “What’s it all about?” says James.

  “We want to be close to the ground,” the woman says.

  “We want to feel the weather,” the man says.

  “What do you do?” says Gee.

  “Sleep and work,” he says.

  “What kind of work?”

  “We’re ethnologists.”

  “Students,” his partner corrects.

  “Can you cook in there?”

  “We’ll put in a stove and chimney for the winter.”

  “It looks small,” says Abi.

  “Yeah,” says James.

  “Inside it’s huge,” says the man.

  “It doesn’t seem big,” says Harry.

  “It has rooms,” says the woman.

  “No way,” says Gee.

  “Check it out.” He unzips the front and the kids lean in.

  “Wow. It does have rooms.”

  “Sure.”

  “Cool,” says Harry.

  “What’s the point?” says James.

  This young man and woman sit outside their tent drinking coffee early in the morning, then wander around the village most of the day. They shop at Dmitri’s store, interview select villagers at the hall in the evening. They have been given keys to the meeting room and bathrooms and showers. They aren’t kids; they aren’t adults. They call themselves researchers, ethnographers. Abi and Gee and James and Harry say they wouldn’t mind living in a tent, but would never choose their own village to do it in.

  “Is something happening?” Harry asks.

  “What d’you mean?” says Gee.

  “I mean
to the village. Why are they really here?”

  “Let’s go ask ‘em,” says James.

  “Let’s not,” says Abi.

  She feels a wave of heat when James takes Gee’s hand. Harry follows. Then they all wade through the high grass, snapping seed heads.

  The woman sits crosslegged on a cushion and the guy sprawls with his legs stretched out on a red carpet on the ground.

  “Is something going on here we don’t know about?” says Gee.

  “For sure,” says the guy.

  “What?”

  “You’ve heard of the quarry they want to build?”

  “Yeah,” says James. “It’ll never happen.”

  “That’s what we want to find out,” says the woman. “What you all think.”

  “If you know something,” Harry says, “you must tell us.”

  “No, no. We make a hypothesis,” says the woman, “then we ask questions.”

  “We’ll answer questions,” says James.

  “Or are we the wrong people to ask?” says Harry.

  “Are you all bored?” the guy asks. He is staring at Abi.

  “Yeah!” they all say.

  “We know a lot about village life,” says Gee. “It is no big deal. This place is really dead.”

  It’s quiet then, just crows calling, Abi scanning the faces.

  Gee says: “But you don’t know what goes on in people’s lives really. Only what they tell you.”

  “I’m not really bored,” says Abi.

  “No,” says Harry. “I think everything is . . . important.”

  “What about you?” the woman asks James.

  “Yeah, bored,” says James. “Bored means bored.”

  I take our little dog, Polly, along the river so I can think and we meet the black dog with three legs and Polly growls. There are dogs and dogs. There are young and old. There is birth after birth. What is evolution but reincarnation plus space/time? Infer, remember. What do tent-dwellers portend? Do these tent-dwellers herald a new nomadism? The three-legged dog runs up to Apocat and Kata who are weaving baskets on the reedy bank; the green stream purls and winks; the old women wave; all my thoughts scatter. I wave back, a storyteller with no plot, short-distance traveller, and call Polly. Polly looks up and wags her tail and we go home.

  My wife’s arm is broken. Emma can’t sleep the night through and her pain wakes us both. She was drunk. She got drunk with Danny. Not yet, not yet. To tell a story before its time is like hooking a fish before the river has found its bed. It is possible, but no meanders live here yet.

  Peaceful breakfast and a cup of tea by the wall amid summer’s alarming gold; Polly losing herself in the river grass, chasing small animals. But even that quick story has its twists and turns I’m too old or drowsy to pursue and investigate. I’ve had no human dialogue except with Emma for weeks of sleepless nights, during which I whisper to the dark, more prayer than story. I will pause here and consider the shale at the river’s edge where I stood this morning watching Polly forage. Children are scarce. Only Tom’s family seems to be having them. What else? Tolerate repetition; welcome interruption; build the wall. Nomads no less, nomads in a tent. What have I done with my life? I’m husband to a broken arm and friend of subtle differences, jealous of Shakespeare, envious of Chuang Tzu, perplexed by Sankara, and I want the finished shirt before the cotton has been picked and expect slavery before my dad’s father beat his dog.

  2.

  “You should see the coast of British Columbia,” Danny says. He is an old man telling a story in a barn, all shadows and surging light. He is not really her uncle even though she’s known him forever; he is her employer. He has been showing her what she has to do and soon they’ll take a couple of horses out. “The sea began a discontent in me. I wasn’t much older than you. On leave I met a married woman a lot older than me and we fell in love.” He leans against a stall, eyes far away. “I need a coffee. You want a coffee?”

  “Okay.”

  On their way up to the house, he gets out of breath. “I can ride, but walking’s a bitch.”

  “Are you okay?” she asks.

  “Yeah. Just a little pain. I don’t like the heat. I’m fine.”

  After coffee they ride. Out into the vines. Starlings loud and fluid in the sky.

  Abi reins in. “How old were you when you fell in love?”

  “Nineteen,” he says, strain in his voice. “She was thirty-three. She had kids.”

  “Did she?”

  “Yeah. Two girls.”

  “What happened?”

  “She left her husband.”

  “She left her girls?” Abi says. “That’s wild. Then what?”

  The sun vanishes behind a cloud and hot wind gusts against them and the land beyond the vines looks twitchy, then dull. He takes a minute to blink and gaze around him. “I remember spending a whole afternoon in an apple tree, shaking the branches, and she was on the ground, catching what fell, just like a kid. She had horses. We were going to make a run for it.” He raises himself in the stirrups and points. “Beyond those hills, past the reserve, is the pass. The landrace ponies still live in a high valley behind there. And we did make a short run, but she went back to him, so no, in the end she didn’t leave her children.”

  They sit their horses a while in the warm wind then ride slowly back through the grape hills, the vines hanging limp, rain ticking among the leaves.

  “They’re gypsies. Impermanent, untrustworthy,” says Tom.

  “Because they live in a tent?” says Lucy. “They’re just students.”

  “I don’t like the way they dress or the way they talk. They’re phony. They’re up to no good. They have no values.”

  “I think they do.”

  “Have you spoken to them?”

  “I’ve said hello. They seem fine young people. And Abi’s down there all the time. Just because they’re educated—”

  “Abi’s supposed to be working.”

  “She is working. You’ve talked to them, Tom?”

  “No. But I’ve studied them some. I’ve heard stories. “From who?”

  “From Charles.”

  “Give me a break.”

  “They’re up to no good. They’re gypsies.”

  Perhaps they have come looking for me. Hubris. I didn’t send for them. I’d have ordered people less sure of themselves. Their knowledge of our geography and plants and animals is impressive and they have the Latin names for everything. They sleep in their tent on the hall land at the edge of the village — on what used to be called common land — and are proud, self-important, beautiful. They point recorders and cameras at everything. They hound Apocat and Kata, making notes, taking photographs. The first time they came to the house Emma was out so I made them tea, though I’d rather have spent time with a pair of layabouts who liked to drink and sing songs and had no equipment. Breathless young gods, they made me breathless, and it was intoxicating to look at them, for they didn’t acknowledge anything outside themselves, not really. The glances they shared with each other, let me say, contained crates of condescension. What hunger! What clothes! What bodies!

  “Mr Darwin, your stories will form a cornerstone of our research paper,” said the young woman.

  “Call me Charles.”

  “She’s trying to flatter you,” said the young man.

  She said, “I mean it’s all good, Charles. We’d like to do interviews, then use the old stories as a sort of map.”

  “What do you mean?”

  She laughed. “Atavism, as irruptive balance to the modern world.”

  “Decline of the economic world,” he said.

  “Post post post,” she said.

  “That’s our bag, our lens,” he said.

  “Our lens,” she echoed.

  I had no idea why they were in my back yard. The sun had shifted and the shade was vanishing. “Are you looking for evidence of general failure?”

  They both laughed this time.

  “We’re not d
etectives,” she said. “We are participant observers. We want to observe this village for the summer, maybe a year, if we can get funding.”

  The young man said: “It’s a matter of sorting out. We need to sort manifest signifiers into pre-conscious and unconscious streams.”

  She shrugged. “You know what is on your horizon?” There she was, gazing, not soulfully but critically, at that painfully familiar horizon.

  “No.” How annoying all this was. I’d been happily sizing up the next rock for my wall. Soon it would be too hot to work. What did they want from me?

  “You represent a route to the source,” he said. “The way things used to be. Well, the stories.”

  “‘The Grasslands Beneath the Vines,’ for instance,” she said.

  “Yes, exactly,” he said.

  She said, “Do you know that neural currents and autonomic responses to immunological memory transcend in data volume all events in history and prehistory?”

  “Even the most awful reversals,” he said. “Neural plasticity is the tip of the iceberg, and the iceberg is part of the easy problem.”

  While I pretended calm, they talked about the immune system, the nervous system, the old human brain, the hard problem of consciousness.