Everywhere I Look (6 page)

Some of his men friends had repeated to me the statements of deep, stoical bleakness that he had made to them. He never spoke that way to me. Perhaps he felt that I was naïve, that he ought to spare me the worst of what his experiences had taught him.

Re-reading a random page of
Sunrise West
on my way home from the South Yarra restaurant that day, I came upon this lovely three-sentence account of exhausted prisoners crossing at last into Italy:
We moved out by moonlight, after being transferred to a goods train once again. The night was warm and the shutters of our carriage were left wide open. We rushed through a pastoral world unknown to me.

Yes—when the chips were down, when his storytelling voice breathed freely and I heard it without defence, my respect and affection for him were unconstrained.

After the launch of
Sunrise West
, at which he spoke with a gracious simplicity and with an impressive mastery of the pause, and after the pleasant celebration later at the Rosenbergs' house, where he and his family welcomed me with warm friendliness, I hardly saw Jacob again. We lived on opposite sides of the city, and the city seemed to have become dispiritingly wide. Once or twice we spoke cheerfully on the phone. Work was his chief preoccupation and joy. He was close to finishing his novel. He sounded somewhat breathless. The word
angina
was mentioned.

In a little more than a year, Alex Miller called one morning to tell me that Jacob had died of a heart attack, on the eve of the day a big publisher had intended to call him with an offer for his just-finished novel
The Hollow Tree
.

I drove out to Springvale for his funeral. The service was conducted in the style at which Jews excel: deeply satisfying in its formality, tender in the beauty of its readings and tributes.

Two days later, after timidly attending the minyan, I stepped out his front gate and headed for my car. It was almost dusk and the sky was full of dramatic, dark clouds. It struck me that Jacob would never again walk along his own street, or see with gladness the calm leafy trees of his suburb. The brevity and shyness of our friendship made me feel suddenly weak with sadness.

Soon after Jacob's death, Radio National's Book Show replayed an old interview with him. ‘Suffering is so singular an art,' he said, in his reedy, softly humorous voice; and ‘I believe that nothing is lost in the universe, somehow.'

Reading his memoirs again, now, I am flooded by the memory of a dream I had, many years before I met Jacob. On the lip of an abyss roaring with dark wind stood a tiny bush that bore an intensely red flower. The bush grew right on the very edge of nothingness, and yet somehow its roots were holding. It had a grip that no wind could disturb; it thrived there, all on its own, this modest little plant, and while the abyss yawned beside it, it went on bravely, doggedly flowering.

2011

From Frogmore, Victoria

LAST winter on a plane to the Mildura Writers' Festival I happened to sit next to Raimond Gaita. Like many people who have read his memoir
Romulus, My Father
, I felt I knew him better than I actually do. I asked him if it was true that Eric Bana was going to play Romulus in the movie adaptation that I'd heard Richard Roxburgh was directing. He opened his laptop and showed me some stills: the replica of Frogmore, the crumbling weatherboard shack of his childhood; Bana riding a motorbike with a plaster cast on his leg; a rangy boy running and laughing in a dusty yard. The movie-Raimond looked about nine. He had a face so open that it hurt to look at it.

‘His name,' said Gaita, ‘is Kodi Smit-McPhee.'

‘Did you go to the shoot?'

‘I kept away,' he said. ‘I thought my presence might throw him off. He might think, Is
this
what's ahead for me?' He gave a small laugh. ‘But near the end I went. Richard introduced us. We stood and looked at each other. We both cried. He said, “I've lived your life for the last three months.” And then for an hour he wouldn't leave my side.'

There's a brief scene, quite early in the movie, in which Raimond is mooching along a street and sees a teenage girl dancing wildly to a record on her front porch. He calls out and asks her the name of the singer. She tells him it's Jerry Lee Lewis, from Ferriday, Louisiana. ‘And who are you, when you're at home?' she asks coldly. The screen fills with the boy's eager, unbearably smiling and undefended face. ‘I'm Raimond Gaita,' he says, ‘from Frogmore, Victoria!'

At that moment a faint sound rustled through the first preview audience: part laughter, part sigh. Gaita was in the cinema that evening. I wondered how he would sit through this new telling of his childhood, a version over which he'd had little or no control.

It's a story of suffering: obsessive love, sexual betrayal and jealousy; abandonment of small children; violence, madness and despair; two suicides; repeated acts of forgiveness and loyalty that are nothing short of heroic. Yet threaded through all this is the miraculous blossoming of a child's intellect.

The book changed the quality of the literary air in this country. People often take an unusually emotional tone when they speak about it, as if it had performed for them the function that Franz Kafka demanded: ‘A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us.' Reading it, with its stiff, passionate dignity and its moral demands, can smash open a reader's own blocked-off sorrows. Out they rush to meet those that the book relates.

For a movie to be drawn from this memoir, the tale would have had to be taken apart, and the pieces picked up off the floor and compressed into a new configuration, without the one element that holds it all together on the page, makes sense of it, and redeems it: Gaita's unique narrating voice.

It's an intellectual's voice, a philosopher's, fastidious, restrained, wary. It's wonderfully serious, and terrified of being sentimental. At times it quivers with a suppressed, righteous anger. It can be disdainful, lofty to the point of chilliness, as when he refines and yet again refines his father's beliefs and motives, holding them away defensively from what he imagines the reader might lazily suppose them to have been: no, it wasn't
this
, he keeps insisting—it was
that
.

And then, suddenly, it will relax and open out into an image of sensuous joy: ‘roads especially dusted to match the high summer-coloured grasses'; or a blunt domestic fact: ‘the chickens came into the house and shat in it'; or a quiet statement of breathtaking humility: ‘I know what a good workman is; I know what an honest man is; I know what friendship is; I know because I remember these things in the person of my father, in the person of his friend Hora, and in the example of their friendship.'

How can film match this striding, all-creating, all-encompassing thing, the voice?

I saw Gaita emerge into the lobby after the preview. He looked vague, and numb. I would have liked to make a comradely gesture, but I didn't understand what the movie was doing to me, so I bolted for the train. I cried all the way home, and on and off for days afterwards.

‘You can't imagine,' shouts Gaita over the rattling of his loose-jointed old ute, ‘how much more beautiful it is round here when there's
grass
.'

But up here near Baringhup in Central Victoria, where Gaita is showing me the sites of his childhood story, the grass is gone. Drought has stripped the ground and worn its surface to a grey-brown velvet. The paddocks are infested with a plague of wheel cactus—nasty, plate-shaped pads of pale green, fringed with sparse hairy spines.

‘The stuff's out of control,' says Gaita. ‘And it can grow straight out of a rock.'

We park and set out on foot towards the granite boulders among which Romulus Gaita's friend Vacek, a harmless hermit, made himself a fortress. I spot a baby cactus sprouting insolently from a dinted stone.

‘Eww, gross,' I say. ‘It
is
growing out of bare rock.'

‘You thought it was mere hyperbole, didn't you,' says Gaita.

This is the first time I've ever heard anyone use the phrase ‘mere hyperbole' in conversation. Before I can remark on this, which I'm not at all sure I'm going to, we fetch up against the first boulder.

Despite his grand philosopher's head with its white hair and glasses, Gaita is a small, agile fellow, a rock climber from way back. Up he goes, smooth as a lizard. He leans down to me.

‘Get your toe in there, see?'

I obey. He reaches down and grabs my hand.

‘Now,' he says, ‘you just
run
up it.'

Somehow my other foot gains a purchase on the granite. He lets go my hand and suddenly I'm running. I bound up the damn thing. In four light springs I'm standing on its flat top, not even out of breath. I glow with relief. Gaita is not the sort of person before whom one would like to appear foolish, or gutless; and I'm not yet sure why.

These austere volcanic plains, across which a vast, leisurely body of air is forever passing, have carried for Gaita since childhood an unabashedly transcendental meaning.

‘I needed the filmmakers,' he shouts as the ute rattles along, ‘to understand how utterly fundamental to the story the landscape was. They saw it at all hours of the day and night—they fell in love with it. The first time Nick Drake [the British poet who wrote the screenplay] came to Baringhup, I drove him along this road. It was a bit later in the day. And when we came round this bend, the light over there was thick gold.'

Today the sky is partly clouded. The land is grey, grey, grey, racked and bare. But its bones are glorious—low contours under colossal, purifying skies.

‘Now,' he yells, ‘you're about to see what drought
really
is.'

We bounce over a rise and down the side of a large, lumpy, broad, grey valley a couple of kilometres wide. Right at the bottom lies a small, narrow body of water, sausage-shaped and murky. Its steely surface riffles in the wind. Gaita pulls off the track and stops. I look round vaguely. There's something odd about this place, something not quite natural.

‘This is where Hora and I used to take the boat out,' he says.

What sort of boating could you do in these puddles?

‘See that boat ramp?'

I glance at him. He's pointing up, not down. Way over there, quite high on the side of the valley with its craggy rim, I can see a length of concrete footpath that ends a good hundred metres above the sausage-shaped ponds. My jaw drops. We are sitting in the ute at the very bottom of the Cairn Curran Reservoir. This valley was once full of water. This is the reservoir whose construction brought Romulus Gaita, his wife, Christine, their small son, Raimond, and their friends the brothers Hora and Mitru all the way down here from Bonegilla migrant camp in 1950. And now it's empty. The water, like the grass, is gone.

I look about wildly. ‘What's that small building, right up at the top?'

‘That,' says Gaita with a tiny, inscrutable smile, ‘was the Yacht Club.'

Gaita and his wife, Yael, have recently built a house on a bare rise only eight kilometres from Frogmore. This autumn evening as the sun goes down, sending long fingers of light across the stripped grey ground where a dozen tiny wrens are hopping and peeping in a bush, Gaita and I sit on the veranda, drinking wine. He spreads out on the table a sheaf of old black-and-white photos.

‘Here's my father's
real
ironwork,' says Gaita, ‘rather than the garden settings he made for a living in Australia.' It's a beaten iron sign hanging on the façade of a building in Europe: so intricate and deft that it looks like something in nature, the flourishing tip of a branch.

Like Kodi Smit-McPhee's face, the family photos are hard to look at without emotion: unbearably poignant, some touched with a gentle playfulness, others starkly dramatic.

‘Here's my father when he was mad.' It's a tiny square headshot of a man from a Dostoevsky novel or a gulag: a dark face, thin, clenched, with blazing eyes and uptilted chin.

The striking picture of Romulus Gaita that was reproduced on the book's cover shows, in its original, a much more complex expression: a subtle play of humour and self-mockery around the mouth and eyes.

How handsome these people were! How
young
!

Christine Gaita is played in the movie by the German actress Franka Potente, who's blonde and strong faced. The real Christine, the photos seem to show, was tiny, almost delicate, with curly dark hair that puffed lightly on a breeze. In the book, Gaita describes her as ‘highly intelligent, deeply sensuous, anarchic and unstable'. She plainly suffered from a mental illness: she heard voices, was self-destructively promiscuous, and aroused violent passions in men. In her son, whom she repeatedly left in the care of his father and Hora, she inspired an unassuageable longing: when she came back, and lay depressed in bed all day, unable to do the work of a wife and mother, he used to creep into the bed beside her, seeking the warmth of her body.

‘I was always afraid Richard Roxburgh would romanticise my mother,' says Gaita. ‘He was very struck by these photos. But I don't think he does.'

In fact Potente in the part is restrained almost to the point of self-effacement, as if the film did not quite dare to understand or fully to inhabit Christine. The scenes in which we see her inability to mother, though, made me close my eyes: the arms she dutifully holds out for her baby are two rigid prongs.

Yet at its heart the movie is an unflinching study of the suffering, the desperation and the decency of men. Its failings, which are several and very thought-provoking, are swept aside, for me, by its four splendid male performances—Eric Bana as Romulus, Russell Dykstra as Mitru, the sublime Smit-McPhee as Raimond, and Marton Czokas as Hora, Romulus's lifelong friend whose loving faithfulness radiates from both book and film.

‘The builder who made this house,' says Gaita on the veranda, ‘had read the book, and so had the young fellow who was labouring for him. One day towards the end of Hora's life I brought him up here to have a look at the building. I told the men he was coming. And when Hora got out of the car and walked towards the house, the builder downed tools and approached him like this'—Gaita bows his head and clasps his hands in front of him, like a man going up to take communion—‘and the young labourer took his peaked cap off. I'd never before seen him without his cap.' He laughs, almost tenderly.