The Journey (2 page)

W
hen Argus left, mid-afternoon, he was surprised to find that it was his father who seemed most affected. His mother was grave, almost detached, but his father could hardly speak and, as Argus hugged him, his eyes filled with tears. Argus strode away. To his disappointment his dog, whom he had imagined would have to be chained up to stop him following, did not even notice him go.

His father had told Argus that everything he saw would be important and should be noted. Knowing this made Argus more observant. He felt fresh and aware and, although he was still in familiar country, he found himself seeing things he had never seen before. The way in which a tree seemed to have one side dominant over the other. And the apparent symmetry of a tree concealed so much internal variation and chaos. ‘Trees don't bother about how big or small they are,' Argus realised with some surprise, thinking about how he had worried lately about his own size and shape. ‘They just keep growing upward and outward until they've finished. They're beautiful, no matter what.'

But for Argus, who had been living in the country for almost as long as he could remember, it was the towns and villages that were exerting a powerful influence on him now. He wanted to mix with crowds of people, to meet strangers and to smell their sweat, to hear their conversations and to watch their faces. He was intensely curious. He quickened his pace, not to get to some unknown destination more quickly, but simply to get away from the valley that he knew and the sights to which he had been long accustomed.

At around dusk he passed through the town of Random where his parents did their trading. He did not pause, but was aware of the curious stares of the adults in the street, who knew at once what he was about, but were forbidden by the strongest customs (those who knew him) to speak or wave to him, as he was forbidden to speak or wave to them. But he felt no inclination to jeopardise his new independence by doing so.

Argus walked on into the night. He took apples from an orchard and ate them as he went, and then had some bread from his pack. He wasted twenty minutes trying to pick some blackberries in the dark. Although he succeeded in picking quite a number, he did not find them particularly filling, and the scratches were discouraging. Nevertheless the food he had eaten gave him the energy to climb the pass out of the valley. He topped it at around midnight, with a sense of tired triumph, and soon afterwards dropped down into a gully, where he rolled himself up in his blanket and, trying to ignore the shuffles and whispers of the night, closed his eyes and fell asleep. He slept well. A few times he woke to change position when his hip became uncomfortable, but he quickly went back to sleep each time.

In the morning he was hungry, but he knew from experience that the hunger would pass; he ignored it and climbed back up to the road to resume his travels. Once he had walked off his early-morning stiffness he was again able to set a good pace. He was still in a valley that he knew, but he had not been this far often and he kept onwards with a growing sense of excitement.

In the early afternoon he passed the gate that led to the Kakas' farm; this property, belonging to friends of his parents, marked the limit of his known territory. From this point on, although the landscape had not changed significantly, the boy was vividly aware that each stone and each tree, each view of the distant mountains, was new and fresh to his eyes.

When he bedded down, at a comparatively early hour, Argus had spent a day with virtually no human contact, though he was hardly aware of the fact. He had been yelled at by a distant farmer, when he hopped a fence to pick some sunflower seeds, but he had met no-one on the road. As well as the sunflower seeds, he had eaten more bread and blackberries, and had stolen some potatoes from a paddock. That evening, for the first time, he lit a fire, for comfort mainly, but also to cook the potatoes. He lacked the patience, however, to wait for the fire to settle down into the coals that he needed for cooking; as a result, he ate the potatoes half-raw.

He lay that night looking up at the stars. As the fire faded and its light dimmed, Argus' night sight improved, and he was able to discern more and more stars, until the black sky was richly alive with them: a staggering coruscation spread across the dark backdrop like huge numbers of glow-worms in a cave. ‘Perhaps that's what I'm living in,' Argus thought, ‘a cave with a ceiling that keeps changing colour . . . and all those stars are really insects … friendly insects, though.' He turned over and considered another problem. ‘If it takes the light from the stars years to reach us, then when I look at the stars now, I'm actually seeing the past … it's a fire that was burning millions of years ago, and might have gone out hundreds of thousands of years ago, but I'm seeing it now. Not a picture of it but the actual thing, a fire that's actually out.' He asked himself another question: ‘Is this the only time we ever get to see the past?' He realised then with a shock that, because light takes time to travel, everything he saw was already something from the past, had already happened.

His mind drifted on, to think of incidents from his own life. One of his first memories was of being in the house alone one afternoon and lighting a fire on his bedroom floor because he was cold. He remembered how he carefully assembled and ignited the kindling, and got a small but cheerful blaze going. He remembered the reaction when his mother found him and the chaos as the fire was extinguished. Later, when everyone had calmed down, his grandmother said to him, ‘You know, your father did exactly the same thing one day when he was your age. Nearly burnt the house down.' Now he wondered, ‘Is everything new, everything that happens? Is it like walking down a road where you can't go backwards, or is it like I pick moments out of a big collection of moments, and relive them? The way a parrot picks at seeds on the ground?' As he drifted into sleep he began dreaming of a huge library of books, in which men and women and children were constantly taking down the volumes from the shelves, and glancing at them, or browsing through them, or reading them thoroughly, and then replacing them. Some books would then be immediately taken down by someone else; some would sit back on their shelves for quite a time before being touched again; but all the books were handled more than once by the people in the library.

In the morning Argus was hungry, but he was anxious not to eat too much from his pack, and so he pressed on. The land was opening out now into a flatter, more arable terrain, different from the valleys in which he had spent his childhood. Away to his right, on the distant horizon, was a thin column of black smoke. Around mid-morning Argus came to a gate and driveway that clearly led to a farmhouse; without much hesitation he opened the gate and walked up the drive to the house. Dogs barked at him as he approached, but as soon as he made friends with one, the others forgot their hostility and they all ran to him, fawning and licking and snuffling. An old man came out of a shed and looked at Argus who had prepared his speech and now delivered it.

‘I was wondering if I could do some work in exchange for a good meal?' he asked, immediately pursing his lips in exasperation at himself. He had not meant to say ‘good'. It sounded rude, as though he were suggesting that the farmer might offer people bad meals. It was his first real contact with another person since leaving home, and his voice already sounded a little hoarse through lack of use. But the farmer appeared to notice nothing. He came closer, and Argus realised that he had some paralysis down one side of his body; it had even dragged at half his face and warped it out of shape.

‘Well, you can chop some wood,' the old man said, without much hesitation. ‘It's always a useful thing to have wood chopped.' He looked more critically at Argus. ‘Have you had any breakfast?' he asked. ‘Maybe we better pay you in advance.'

‘No, I'm fine,' Argus said. ‘I'd be happy to chop wood, if you can just show me where it is.'

The boy chopped wood for nearly two hours, ignoring the sharp and petulant messages from his belly. He wondered why it was more pleasant to chop wood for strangers than for one's own fireplace, and he was intrigued by the small differences between this woodpile and the one to which he was accustomed. This stack was neater than the one at home, for example, and the wood was cut into shorter lengths. The bark had been stripped from it and had been stacked in a separate pile. Argus chopped at a steady pace, amusing himself by seeing how high he could make the chips fly, trying to land them in a small bird's nest at the top of a nearby bush. But the pile of chopped pieces steadily grew, and the old man, when he returned, was pleased. ‘Seems like you've earned breakfast and lunch' he commented, leading the boy into the washhouse.

When they entered the kitchen, Argus was surprised by the number of people there. He was introduced to them all and, despite some confusion, managed to gather that the youthful looking woman at the stove was the old farmer's wife, and that the others were sundry children, grandchildren and farmhands. There were fourteen or fifteen people in all, and their rowdy chatter relieved Argus of the need to say very much, for which he was grateful. They ate soup with hunks of bread, and followed it with a kind of fish stew, containing flavours that were unfamiliar to Argus.

The boy was almost overwhelmed by the rich odours and tastes, after several days of plain living. He was enjoying, too, the warm sound of the people crowded around the table, and he accepted with pleasure the old man's offer of an evening meal and a bed for the night, in exchange for help with roofing a shed. He worked on the shed with one of the old man's sons, a dark-bearded fellow named Rastam, and Rastam's two little daughters, Xenia and Narlan. The two girls worked earnestly and well; Rastam worked well too, but with a constant stream of witticisms and practical jokes, which Argus found alternately irritating and amusing.

After dinner the food was cleared away and the dishes were washed. The children began a game that they called, for no reason that Argus could fathom, ‘Butterflies'. It seemed to be a guessing game based on imitations. One child would jump on the table and impersonate, with appropriate noises and contortions of the face and body, an object or creature; a parrot, for example, or a chair, and the others would try to guess what it was. The children were very skilful, both in their acting and in their guessing. To Argus' surprise, after ten minutes or so, the adults began joining in. Argus, accustomed to the gravity of his father and mother, was confused but pleased as the game spread through the room. And no-one was more active and rowdy than the old man, who, ignoring his paralysis, seemed to shed sixty years. He impersonated, in turn, the little girl Narlan, a baby pig, and a travelling wool-trader, and he imitated each one with wonderful accuracy. Argus was enchanted. But no-one could guess his last character, as he sat motionless on a chair, gazing into the fire. The guesses ranged from ‘a rock' to ‘a spirit'. At last everyone gave up and the old man cackled with glee, ‘Myself! I was being myself!' before he toddled off to bed. They could hear him giggling and wheezing all the way up the stairs.

Argus slept in an attic room. He left the next morning, after a big breakfast that put him in good heart for the day. He did not see the old farmer, but his wife farewelled the boy warmly, slipping extra food into his pack as he left the house and strode out towards the road, eager to resume his journey. He walked all day with only a few short stops, and by late afternoon had covered a great distance.

T
hat evening Argus had his first bout of what he supposed was homesickness. It was not that he wanted to be at home; on the contrary, he was enjoying his freedom and the new world that he was exploring, but he missed the warmth and closeness of family living. He did not connect his sadness with his stay at the farmhouse the previous night, but he did know that he felt unbearably lonely. Not bothering to light a fire, he ate a cold evening meal and rolled up in his blanket, thinking about the way his parents would be spending the evening. To his alarm, he found he could only summon an exact image of their faces when he placed them in familiar situations. He could envisage his father's face clearly when he imagined him winding the great clock that stood in the entrance hallway; and he could see his mother's face when he thought of her studying the night sky and making notes in her voluminous astronomy diaries. For a moment he had an unexpected glimpse of his sister's face too, as he had last seen her, running down to the river, shouting something about Argus getting tea ready. At this memory sadness overwhelmed the boy completely and he wept into his blanket until he fell asleep.

By the next afternoon he was in country so far from the mountains of his childhood that they could no longer be seen. Instead he was walking through lush and prosperous farmlands, along a well-used road beside a broad river that rolled over the landscape like a lazy carpet. Willows and other trees lined the river's banks. By Argus' standards, the land was densely settled, and encounters with people were frequent. He came to fields lined with wooden frames, upon which green vines grew. Many people of all ages were at work, picking from the vines.

Argus watched from the shadows of the roadside for some minutes before he noticed an artist just a short distance from him: a middle-aged man painting the pastoral scene on a canvas mounted on a large easel. Although the man showed no interest in Argus, the boy approached and stood watching, comparing the painting to the activity in the field. After Argus had sufficient time for a close scrutiny, the man asked rather impatiently, ‘Well, what do you think?'

Argus felt a little out of his depth; rather than comment on the artistry of the painting he thought it safer to take a different tack. ‘It must be hard,' he said shyly, ‘to paint something when it keeps changing all the time.' The man looked at him in apparent surprise, then resumed his work. ‘I mean,' said Argus, ‘which moment are you painting? This one? Or the last one? Or one from this morning?'

‘Yes,' said the man, ‘It's always difficult to take something that's moving and full of life and turn it into something that is still. Not even death can do that.'

‘What's harder?' asked Argus. ‘Taking something moving and freezing it, or taking something three-dimensional and making it flat?'

The man put down his brush and turned to face his young interrogator. ‘You're a remarkable boy,' he said. ‘Do you like art?'

‘I don't know,' Argus replied. ‘I've never seen much. But I like real things better, I think. I mean, I'd rather see a tree than a painting of one. I think it must be frustrating for you, because even if you do a thousand paintings of a tree, it's never going to be as good as the real one.'

‘Yes,' said the man. ‘It may sound trite, but Nature is the great artist, and we can only imitate her. But supposing a painting gives you a new way of looking at something, so that you get an insight into it that you didn't have before . . . I mean, a portrait might show you an aspect of someone that you hadn't noticed . . . a sadness or a sense of joy or a thoughtfulness in the eyes . . . wouldn't it make the painting worthwhile if it could do that?'

Argus studied the man's landscape again, only this time more closely. He saw the weary way in which the pickers' backs were shown bending over the crops. He saw the careless lines in which the frames had been arranged. And he saw the shadows thrown by the poplars in the afternoon sunlight. ‘Why don't I notice these things when I look at the field itself?' he wondered.

Without speaking to the man again Argus walked a little way along the fenceline and stood watching the scene with eyes that were more discerning. He realised that he did not need paintings, just keener eyes. ‘He's not only describing what we both see,' he thought. ‘He's commenting on it as well. I suppose everyone does that when they paint or tell a story, or dance something, or sing about it . . .' He recalled his attempts the night before to remember the faces of his family and decided that despite his moment's fear that he would not be able to visualise them, he preferred to carry his own living pictures in his mind rather than rely on ‘dead' pictures on canvas. ‘My mind's full of millions of pictures,' he thought. ‘I just need to know how to look each one up.' He tried to imagine a square cut out of the view in front of him and replaced with a painting of the missing section, and decided that no painting could ever be adequate.

Lost in thought Argus wandered back to the painter, who had stopped work and was taking food from his bag. The boy stood looking at the painting again, admiring the skill with which it was executed. ‘Share my lunch with me?' the man asked, offering Argus a piece of pie, which he accepted gratefully. ‘You know,' his host continued as they both settled down on the ground with their backs against trees, ‘everyone needs some kind of outlet for the artist that's in them. Doesn't matter whether it's painting or writing or carving or music. Everyone's got to have that outlet, and if they don't, they get a kind of madness in them, and there's no sense to be had from them, no sense at all. What about you? What does the artist in you do?'

Argus was taken by surprise and tried to think. ‘I suppose my leatherwork,' he said hesitantly. ‘I like making belts and stuff like that.' He wondered about his parents, and decided that his mother's astronomy was an outlet for her, but it was more difficult to identify one for his father. Gardening, perhaps? He seemed to get a lot of pleasure from the flowers he grew in his garden.

As the two of them ate under the trees Argus pondered the scene in front of him once more. ‘What are they growing?' he asked.

‘Grapes,' the man replied, showing no surprise at the question.

‘Is there much work around?'

‘Yes, they'd probably take you on, but it's not easy.'

‘No, I can see that from your painting.' Argus finished his pie and licked the crumbs from his lips, then leaned back, drowsily enjoying the afternoon sun. He could hear the occasional murmur of voices from the pickers, who were gradually moving closer to them. He heard the chattering of the frustrated parrots in the trees on the far side of the field. The rich warm smells of the harvest settled around him as his eyes slowly closed. He said to the artist, ‘It's a pity you can't paint smells and sounds and flavours' but the man, who had resumed his painting, did not reply. Or did he say, ‘I do'? Argus, asleep from his ears down, could not be sure.