Fever of Animals

FEVER OF ANIMALS

MILES ALLINSON is a writer and an artist. He was born in Melbourne in 1981. Fever of Animals is his first novel, and won the Victorian Premier’s Literary Award for an Unpublished Manuscript in 2014.

For my dad

Bryse Allinson

Scribe Publications

18–20 Edward St, Brunswick, Victoria, Australia 3056

2 John St, Clerkenwell, London, WC1N 2ES, United Kingdom

First published by Scribe 2015

Copyright © Miles Allinson 2015

All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise) without the prior written permission of the publishers of this book.

Quoted material from Dialectic of The Dialectic by Ghérasim Luca and Dolfi Trost, reprinted with the kind permission of the Institutul Cultural Roman; from Against Interpretation and Other Essays by Susan Sontag (first published 1961, Penguin Classics 2009) reprinted with the kind permission of Penguin Random House UK; from Microscripts by Robert Walser (2012) reprinted with the kind permission of New Directions Publishers.

The moral right of the author has been asserted.

National Library of Australia Cataloguing-in-Publication data

Allinson, Miles, author.

Fever of Animals / Miles Allinson.

9781925106824 (AU edition)

9781925228304 (UK edition)

9781925307085 (e-book)

1. Disappeared persons–Romania–Fiction. 2. Surrealist artists–Romania–Fiction. 3. Man-woman relationships–Fiction.

A823.4

A CIP record for this title is available from the British Library.

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PART ONE

A Sound that Calls People from Afar

PART TWO

Notes on a Disappearance

PART THREE

The Ideal Phantom

… they are all beasts of burden, in a sense, made to carry some portion of our thoughts. HENRY DAVID THOREAU

In the forests where butterflies, jackals, and flaming squirrels are lovers, the eye, turned into a prism with all its faces in spasm, leads us like a horse through a universe in ashes. GHÉRASIM LUCA

True religion, like happiness (it is the same as happiness), exists in the act; the act in the plight. PAUL GOODMAN

PART ONE

A Sound that Calls People from Afar

1

Or maybe, after all, it should begin on the plane, mid-air above those squares of damp green pasture as we moved away from London. That was more than five years ago now. It was there, as the first round of drinks was being served at last, that I read of the death of Udach’ Kuqax*a’a’ch’ in one of the many newspapers I had carried aboard in order to distract myself from other thoughts. During the final years of her life, so I discovered, the only conversations Udach’ Kuqax*a’a’ch’ was able to conduct in her own language took place in her dreams. She was the last living speaker of Eyak, an indigenous Alaskan language that had ceased to exist with her death, some six months earlier. In Eyak, her name had meant ‘a sound that calls people from afar’, although in English she was better known as Marie Smith Jones. There was a word in Eyak, apparently, Xuqu’liilx’aax’ch’kk’sh, which once meant ‘Are you going to keep tickling me in the face in the same spot repeatedly?’ Now it doesn’t mean anything, I thought, and even if someone heard it spoken in a dream, they wouldn’t understand.

At the time, I was sitting beside a Swiss architect to my left, whose name I can’t remember, and to my right, closest to the window, a Brazilian woman called something like Uta, who, because of her cold, was wearing over her mouth one of those paper masks that became popular in Asia during the SARS epidemic, and years later, in Mexico, during the early weeks of swine flu. Above this, Uta had also attached a sleeping-mask so that her faceless head seemed to hang beside the window and startled me whenever I tried, in my sleeplessness during the innumerable hours that followed, to catch sight of Africa or Portugal floating in the sea far below.

Years later, I would return to Europe beside two other strangers — but not to what I was leaving behind, not to anything I would have been able to recognise then as my life. To be honest, the many times I have left somewhere by plane have become confused in my memory. The different moments of exaltation or grief or fatigue all intermingle now, just as the first smell of spring brings back all the other springs to overwhelm me. I remember leaving somewhere in China, for instance, and it seems appropriate, although I know this happened years later. It was the Chinese New Year. The fireworks had just begun. Beneath us the wide, darkened city was silently throwing up tiny fistfuls of light. Goodbye. Goodbye. Goodbye, they seemed to be saying.

I suppose I should be careful then. Which mixture of emotion am I thinking of when I think of that journey home from London? Which fear or despair belongs to that moment, and which is a subsequent version, or just a story I have told myself? Which particular feeling of loss, I wonder, should I ascribe to those foodcourts at Heathrow, to those giant ornamental goldfish circling in their dreary pond at Changi? I see myself walking away from Alice through the long airport corridors, but Alice never came to the airport. She wished, she said, that she had never met me. I see her turn away from the terminal and walk out into the London rain, but it was not raining. And as I sit here in K., now, this gloomy little German town, in this tiny, frosted room, writing these words, it is always Alice who appears first in my mind, even though I remember thinking that nothing would ever supplant that strange reality, which was calling me home to Melbourne to see my father, who had suddenly begun to die.

I often recall that plane trip home. It comes at me out of the blue some days. I was twenty-seven years old, and I was no longer an artist, although I could not recall ever wanting to be anything else. I remember the smooth edge of the runway where a field of pale-green weeds suddenly fell away into the distance below us. I remember the feeling of dull vertigo, and I remember a wave of clear grief as the plane finally left the ground. It’s rare, I suppose, that our lives are given such definition, are marked out as clearly as that, so that the part which is over tilts away, and another part — the future, for instance — begins. And because of that plane ride, because of what it’s somehow come to represent, I think as I write this of a film I saw in an exhibition, not long after I got back to Melbourne. I had arranged to meet someone who was running late, and so I went into the gallery alone, fully prepared in the gloom to be disappointed, as I generally am by video art. The place was empty, and the muffled sound of competing soundtracks came from various sets of headphones as I walked amongst an array of small televisions and through the blue glare of various data-projections to a seat at random somewhere near the back of the room.

I sat down and watched something finish — something about water dripping into a bucket — and then a sort of documentary began, faded Super-8 footage of cyclists navigating the twisted streets of an otherwise empty-seeming city, in the 1970s, I think, while dogs wandered by, and ominous, unfashionable police or soldiers smoked cigarettes behind barbed-wire fences. This had once been Gorizia, I learnt, a city divided in accordance with the Paris Peace Treaty of 1947. On one side of the fence, the old city remained part of Italy, with its ancient castle high up on the hill, while the new city on the other side, Nova Gorica, was conceived and rebuilt over the following years in accordance with modern socialist ideals as a city of the future, a city without a need for history.

For sixty years, even after the collapse of Yugoslavia, when Nova Gorica became a part of the newly established state of Slovenia, the two cities faced one another across a dividing line patrolled by those officious border police. In 2007, when the dividing wall finally came down, a video artist called Anja Medved set up what she called a ‘smugglers confessionary’ in a decommissioned customs hut — a private booth sealed with a red-velvet curtain in which residents could recount in private, before a running camera, a story from their own experience of that strangely divided city, from that incomprehensible gap between two adjacent realities. One old man told of the way the border separated him from his father, who worked on the Italian side. As a small boy, he would visit the border with his mother and wave to his father across the dividing zone. Once, for his birthday, this old man recalled, his father wrapped something in a bundle and attempted to throw it across the stretch of no-man’s-land that separated them. Unfortunately, it fell short. I almost fainted, the man said, I so very much wanted to pick up that parcel. The Yugoslav border guard observed them with suspicion, but the boy and his mother were too frightened to say anything. Then the guard went and picked up the package. He was probably taking a risk — it was probably against regulations to do such a thing — but, perhaps taking pity on them, the guard carried the parcel over and handed it to the boy. I unwrapped it, the man recalled. My father had given me a harmonica.

At Charles de Gaulle there are rabbits that scatter in the green gullies between the tarmac, but I remember in particular the green weeds moving in the shimmery air at Heathrow. And I remember sometime after that, in the cool, artificial gloom, the way the cabin was lit at intervals by the burning shape of a window, by a blast of sooty radiance whenever someone woke and lifted their plastic shade to peer outside. Below us in the sun, the black sea sparkled like a desert of salt. An old English woman in one of the middle aisles slept with her eyes open as if she might have been dead already, and the man behind us snored peacefully as we passed above places we would never visit — mountain communities locked deep in the oblivion of those valleys, a scattering of buildings shimmering like fragments of crushed shell. It was late afternoon wherever we were, and there was snow on the peaks and a hard light that divided up the rippling land into crevices of darkness. Only a few hours later, inconceivably, it had become the middle of the night. Beside me, Uta, who had lifted her eye mask, was watching a sitcom with the American actor Tim Allen, and I could hear the mutter of tiny voices and the distant sound of canned laughter coming from her headphones as we moved through a period of sky in which a full moon illuminated an unbroken field of endlessly repeated rose-shaped clouds. Manado. Kupang. Ambon. Kungim. What were these strange names hanging ambiguously above the televised map on the back of the seat in front of me? In my delirium for a second, it seemed as if my own language had been forgotten.

These moments I remember vividly, but of all the words exchanged between the architect and myself, between Uta and me, or even — since they had to talk across me — between Uta and the architect, I remember almost nothing, save for a stray sentence or two pronounced in the architect’s diplomatic Swiss manner — something to the effect that, since we are creatures who have been designed to eat one another, the idea of justice is insupportable and best summarised in its absurdity by the American invasion of Afghanistan after September 11, which, he reminded us, had been originally codenamed Operation Infinite Justice. Just when you think you have had enough justice, I can hear him saying even now, don’t forget there will always be more. We are creatures who have been designed to eat one another. Man to animal to man. Cat to bird to spider to fly, and so on, generation after generation. That is infinite justice. If there is a God, that’s how he designed it. I thought about Marinetti’s Manifesto of Futurism: art, he proclaimed, can be nothing but violence, cruelty, and injustice.

2

I am writing this from a small, dusty cottage in the town of K., about two hours from Berlin, where I have decided to wait. Where I have been waiting for almost two months now. Three little rooms and an outdoor toilet. A deposit of dead insects on each window ledge. I am continually sweeping them away. A large garden seeps into the forest on one side and joins the edge of the town on the other. It is a summerhouse that belongs to the parents of an old friend. They have agreed to let me live here for a few months, while I wait to see what happens. Their generosity astounds me. I pay nothing for it. Just some flowers when I turn up to Berlin every so often — flowers that inevitably fail to open — and a few mispronounced words for thank you, I can’t believe how nice you are. I have more or less run out of money.

For hours on end, the only sound is the garden whispering, dull and green beneath another white sky. It sounds like rain, but it’s not most of the time. It’s just wind, and leaves, and acorns falling through the tiers of foliage every now and then like a grown man coming crashing through the bushes. Acorns that wake me at night, ricocheting off the roof as loud as gunshots. There’s the far drone of aeroplanes, of course, coming in to land or leaving Schönefeld, and a man on a tractor occasionally, or a couple of old people riding down the lane on bicycles, chattering in German. There is a woodpecker on certain days, headbutting the same pine tree again and again above me, and a few insistent crows, and a rooster somewhere that sounds like a wounded dog. And the noise of my typing. But that’s really all. It’s mostly just the wind. Even when it rains, it does so silently.

It is almost winter again. The German winter of 2013. Nothing about that sentence feels lucky. And yet, now that I think about it, luck is what I’m waiting for. Luck or a miracle, if I’m even luckier. I close my eyes and when I open them I am sitting in a room transfigured by light and ice. The windows are beaded with condensation, which I choose to think of, anyway, as frost. It would be a great little studio, if I still painted. But I don’t. After all these years, I still miss the smell of turpentine and oil. The crust of paint on my fingers and that useful feeling I had, working with my hands, even if what I made in the end was mostly pretty useless. I have my notes instead now, which I spend the days rearranging.

For nearly five years I have wanted to write something about the surrealist painter Emil Bafdescu: about his paintings, one of which hangs in a little restaurant in Melbourne, and about his disappearance, which is still a mystery, nearly fifty years later. To date, there is very little information about him — barely three dozen brief references that I have managed to compile over the last few years and a single, slim biography, The Path Through Silence: a life of Emil Bafdescu, by Rada Szaba, from 2001. It has never been officially translated from the Romanian, and is out of print now. Last year, with money my father left me, I paid to have it translated myself. Almost everything I know about Bafdescu comes from this one little book, which I guard jealously now.

My own book I’m less sure about. Notes on a Disappearance, I’d like to call it. Or perhaps Emil Bafdescu: a secret surrealism. Or maybe even Waiting in Another Language, because, to be honest, it’s probably not going to be the book I imagined. Nothing has quite worked out the way I planned. Perhaps instead it will be the story of what I’m doing out here, in this little German town, a long way from Romania, a very long way from Melbourne. I’d be interested to know, exactly.

Every couple of days, I manage to check my email for news. The internet connection is so slow it’s barely worth the trouble. Don’t get me started about Vodafone. I commit myself to waiting while the pages load. I concentrate on my own breathing: the activity of my nostrils, the air passing over my top lip. Like a child impersonating someone who prays, I clasp my hands together so I don’t use them to punch the computer. Then I spread my notes on the table in the sunroom and look out of the frosty glass to the garden, and, beyond that, towards the pine forest and the almost-frozen lake. I imagine snow descending on this place like a balm, like forgiveness. This is the most beautiful thing I can imagine happening. Not the grubby sleet of London, but a slow, utterly silent, fairy-tale snow, like the snow I imagine Emil Bafdescu disappeared into.

My life has shrunk in pleasing ways since I got here. I talk to no one all day, but at night I talk to myself when I am drunk. I conduct interviews with myself. And the answers I sometimes give are surprisingly lucid and intelligent. It’s only when I become conscious of myself as someone responding that I suddenly seize up; I hear myself sounding like an adult, or rather, like a drunk person pretending to be an adult, and then I am afraid and begin to stutter.

In the afternoons, I jog through the town — past the cemetery and the hotel and the gloomy little pub with its lace, tobacco-stained curtains — and then through the forest to a spot at the edge of the lake. Then I turn around and run back again. Seven or eight kilometres, which is as far as I’ve ever been able to run. Forty-five minutes. I arrive home happy and ready to vomit, wheezing with asthma, and when I look in the mirror I don’t recognise myself. I look like someone advertising hangovers. My asthma is getting worse. It’s the cigarettes that don’t help, and I often wonder what would happen to me if I suddenly collapsed out there in the forest. How long does it take to die of a heart attack, for instance? How long would it take for someone to find me?

The other day, something did happen while I was jogging. I’ve grown used to the solitude — I’ve never seen anyone else out there — and I certainly wasn’t expecting to see a large dog charging towards me. I turned and saw it bounding from the bushes, and then a man with a rifle stepped out from the trees. In truth, it was not simply this that startled me so much. The man was just an old farmer, I think, hunting rabbits, and the dog, it turned out, was harmless enough. No, there was something else too, a feeling more than anything. A premonition. It was as if I knew, even before I heard them, that someone was coming. I felt something flicker at the edge of my mind. I’ve been thinking a lot about it. Whatever it was, it did not seem to belong entirely to them, to the man and the dog. And then the dog fell into step beside me for a few seconds as I ran, just as a flock of birds will sometimes keep pace beside the window of a moving train. It was oddly comforting. For a moment, it was as if I had arrived in the right place at last. I’ve seen the old man around the village since then, and we have tried, but we cannot really understand each other. For what it’s worth, his dog seems to like me.

I don’t know if I’m lonely. On certain days, it’s true, I ride the half hour to the supermarket in the next town, unnecessarily. Is it human contact I want? The grey-haired check-out chicks asking me questions I do not understand? No, thank you, I say. Nein, danke schön, and they smile as they might smile at someone’s slightly retarded grandson. Is it company I want, or is it just a distraction from this absurd act of waiting? Waiting for someone who is never going to show up, who might not even be alive anymore.