Landscape of Farewell Read Online Free PDF

was—I wonder why my monsters are always green? It is a cliché of my generation, I suppose, to paint our fears green, whereas nowadays it is hope that greens the world. The monster was mounted on iron wheels. As a child I had more than half-believed it to be an ancient man who had been transformed into a giant machine by my uncle, who I knew to be in possession of unearthly powers. From the open window of my upstairs bedroom in thefarmhouse, I listened to the tractor all day, spellbound by the drumbeat of its great heart, the tremorous thud of its powerful pump vibrating the fabric of the house, sounding in my own heart images of a distant enchanted reality. I could see it, that enchanted place: there were dark woods fringed by wide deserts, the faintly apprehended party of mounted figures in the distance, going I knew not whither, to what terrible destination beyond the far horizon no living man could know. Indeed the anguished heartbeat of the ancient man imprisoned within the iron machine inspired my first true daydream of another life. It was a life, this imaginary one, that I knew I would never quite reach or master, but it was ever thereafter the emblem of my inner yearning. Though outwardly I have changed quite beyond recognition from my boyhood self, inwardly little has changed. I still see that mysterious band of horsemen—if that is what they are—who ride together in silent company towards the end of time.
    I was filled with anxiety and excitement when my uncle started the tractor in the yard in the frosty morning, exploding with a confident blow of his hammer a shotgun cartridge in the small cylinder embedded within the blunt nose of the tractor—the casing of this cartridge was always a hopeful blue, instead of the blood red of the shells with which he shot the crows and foxes. That confident hammer blow convinced me he was a great demon in his own world. The violence of the explosion in the silence of the winter morning made me flinch and woke theancient man from the cold night of his sleep, his deep throbbing groan shuddering in my own chest as he bent his iron frame to the labour of his enslavement. During the long winter months of that year, alone with my uncle on the farm and without the reassuring presence of my mother and father, I inhabited a place of beguiling strangeness. The cold metallic smell of the ploughed earth opened by the sleek plough was for me like the opened belly of a dead horse I had come upon one day when I was walking home, the massive innards scattered about the great carcass by the crows, as though for modesty’s sake a passer-by had thrown over it a bright patchwork shawl.
    There had been scarcely a pause in Vita’s flow of words since we left the library—marching arm in arm beneath the chestnut trees along pompous Heilwigstrasse. She had been telling me her troubles, which were many and complex, involving either members of her family or colleagues at her university, or her repeated failure to attract the right man.
    I saw she was a little drunk. I was a little drunk myself. I did not mind at all.
    She reached across the table and punched me on the arm. ‘Hey, Max! I’ve forgotten what I was going to say!’
    I lifted my shoulders and smiled. ‘Then say something else.’
    She frowned, concentrating. ‘What was I talking about?’
    ‘You were telling me about your Uncle Dougald.’
    ‘You and Uncle Dougald would get on.’
    I imagined a tall, broad-shouldered, square-jawed Scot, McLelland of McLelland, weather-beaten and fierce, a true colonial pioneer, axe at rest on the stump of the great gum tree he has just felled, frowning belligerently at the intrusion of the camera, behind him his half-built shack, a scene located somewhere in the timbered wilds of Australia, a woman and a child looking on, helpless if this man’s arm should falter. It was an image not from my own mind this, but drawn from my old storybooks of the New World.
    Behind Vita, beyond the window, the