The Pages (15 page)

Men in the square were happily playing
boule
in the face of their fast-approaching deaths. (My initial thoughts.) And yet they were engrossed. Friendship played a part in the game. They all knew each other. Their skill, and undoubted pleasure at their skill, gave precision to their friendships, and drew me into watching them.

At the next table was a Greek in a white shirt.

‘Many moustaches,' he nodded at the players.

He was right. They all had moustaches. And when I turned I saw he had a black one too.

In front of us the local fire brigade assembled for a parade. As they formed up in lines the ill-fitting uniforms became all too apparent – trousers above the ankles, like those worn by shearers' cooks – and brass buttons missing. An implacable figure who looked to be the local mayor gave a short speech, and as he did members of the brigade winked and stuck their tongues out at people they knew in the crowd. Stepping forward for presentations a thin-necked one played the clown.

‘The only fire they've seen would be from their cigarette lighters.' Another pessimistic Greek.

A band started up. The fire brigade marched off.

In the evening the Greek was at the same table. He recommended the sardines.

He came from Melbourne. Now he was a waiter on a cruise ship, and lived in Piraeus. It had become necessary to take a holiday. He'd left the wife and kids behind in Piraeus. As marriages go it was okay, but he was dog-tired. To save washing up on the ship, he said later in the evening, they would toss the dinner plates over into the Mediterranean.

‘The ocean floor's covered in the bloody plates.'

This was something to tell Lindsey, my easily horrified sister. I even thought of waiting until I returned – to see the look on her face.

To give proper homage to philosophy I had been planning to return home via Athens.

‘It is the arsehole of the universe. There is nothing to be said for Athens. It is ugly, dusty, crowded – a bloody mess. What do you want to go there for? It is a ruined city.'

The Parthenon stands above the shambles as an example, a rebuke. Clive Renmark at the lectern had said as much. The ancient philosophers looking down would recoil. How a city of ideals became a graceless dump. Everybody out for themselves. The wisdom of the greatest of philosophers is consumed, whittled away, ignored, cast on the rubbish tip like everything else. Their ideals of proportion and harmony not only ignored, scorned. A friend had told the postman, Lyell, the same thing.

Every night the Greek ended up pissed. That was all right. More difficult was the man's encroaching pessimism. It reached out to most things he saw or touched, and sitting there alongside it was all too easy to join in.

Early in the morning I left on the bus. In Toulon, I wolfed down a breakfast of bread and jam, coffee in a bowl. I then strolled over and studied the map on the wall of the railway station.

My method of wandering in Europe had returned to being haphazard, hardly a method at all. Depending on mood, chance encounters were to be seized upon. Otherwise, what is the point – in living? So I thought then. If and when I was onto something with my thinking-notes I would stop and stay in one spot. It also allowed me to collect letters from Rosie, and my hard-working brother and sister. (For all the familiarity it is hard to reduce the distance between brothers.) In Europe I developed the insistence on second-floor corner rooms. It got to the stage that if there was not one available I'd move to another hotel. From two angles of a corner room I could look down at the traffic and pedestrians, and across at the lighted windows opposite. I felt at home – and in a strange country.

At the Kunstmuseum in Basel I stood for hours before Holbein's rotting (my opinion) Christ. Eventually the attendant got up from his wooden chair and joined me, and after a respectful silence asked me what I liked about it.

‘It's a landscape. The elongated composition – the yellowing body – a land suffering, a drought landscape.' I rattled on, ‘I know land like it. It's got nothing to do with Christ.'

Later, at a museum specialising in 20th-century art, I came across a painting of black lines on grey by Mondrian, done in 1912. I stepped forward to read the label:
Eucalyptus.
I reared back. It was the last thing I wanted to see. Here I have travelled thousands of miles by plane, rail, bus, ferry and by foot, only to be presented in Switzerland with a painted version of something common I had left well behind. What would a Dutchman know about eucalypts? I imagined the artist with a brush in his hand. Mondrian was trying to make a virtue out of the tree's untidiness – branches and dead sticks hanging and drooping, or else shooting out all over the place. It was a pretty poor imitation. I remember on a train in England a Frenchman telling me the problem for the landscape painter was deciding what to leave out.

Rosie would like a postcard of it. I couldn't imagine what Roger would make of it.

Whether it was seeing Mondrian's messy painting, or writing the New South Wales address on the postcards, or the postcards of the painting combined with the Holbein ‘landscape', or what – for the first time I had thoughts of returning home. It was about time I stayed in the one spot.

I would pass through Amsterdam, quickly gather my thoughts in Germany.

—
How to avoid becoming blunt and plain-thinking again. It happened if and when a stranger spoke to me on a train, in a park, on a bridge. Once having spoken – where do I go from here?

It had become part of my blundering about. Watch it!

Little point visiting Prague. After a day I left. The river rushing through the centre of Geneva – cold and bottle-green. It continually carried history along with it (history from I don't know where – from other countries?). To stand on one of the bridges, looking down, drew me into the flow and the flow of time, and quite separate the flow of consciousness which passes at a steady rate through us. While considering this, I didn't notice any of the locals leaning over the bridge, lost in thought.

It is a struggle.

At any given moment there are signals, movements, metal and flesh, temperatures, opinions of others, corrections, differences of time, and other obscurities competing for our impressions. How to make sense of it; what to avoid (like the painter of landscapes).

Almost everything seen will be forgotten. Very little of what I saw did I actually experience.

On a canal in northern France a small girl on a barge was going higher and higher on a swing set up by her father, a carefree, semi-circular movement in contrast to the horizontal forward movement of the barge. Why this insignificant image has remained is beyond me. To any beggar holding out their hand I gave a coin. (That's something in my day you didn't often see in Australia – beggars.) The town of two rivers. So I turned to the man in the bus. ‘It is more than twice as interesting.' As for me, the ancient stone bridges are an impediment. On the footpath outside the bar in view of the container docks, Rotterdam, I looked on as three men in orange boilersuits fought with bottles, a matter of standing back and estimating their chances until the police arrived. Europe's systematic cultivation – the place has been levelled, squared up to within an inch of its life. The different densities of green. There's no such thing as a brown paddock. No sooner would I choose a café, and sit out in the sun to enjoy a ham or a cheese sandwich than I began thinking of the paddocks at home where not a thing moves. In these circumstances, as I sat and allowed my thoughts to focus, an English newspaper on my knee had more importance than it deserved.

When I arrived in Amsterdam I had real trouble finding a corner room on the second floor. It took me all morning, and then I had to pay over my budget – I recognised and admired my stubbornness. It was on one of the canals, the Hotel Brouwer. After putting my things on the bed, I set out to wander without any destination in mind.

That morning I saw two women crying. One riding a bicycle with a wicker basket in front almost ran me down. Tears were flowing from behind her granny glasses. She had taken no notice of me. I made a movement to help, or at least offer sympathy, but she was on her way. Not long after, near the Stedelijk Museum, where I had no intention of entering, I sat at one end of a bench, away from a middle-aged woman seated at the other end. Straightaway she began crying. A wide face, I saw, and a small mouth.

By leaning forward, more or less facing her, I gave the impression of a sympathetic figure. She might have glanced in my direction and nodded for help. Why, after all, begin weeping the minute I sat down? She went on weeping. I leaned back to my normal position believing it was possible to share without awkwardness the bench with an unhappy, exceptionally neat, middle-aged woman.

After a few minutes I opened my notebook. Jot down the fleeting thoughts, even those that don't appear important, in this case thoughts on the emotions. (The many different kinds of weeping. Tears and Natural Selection. Weeping is visual for the following reasons…)

It was then a younger woman in jeans and khaki waistcoat with bulging pockets stopped and aimed a camera at me. I realised the gap between me and the unhappy woman on the bench must have indicated a married couple drifting apart at the rate of knots. Obviously, I was the guilty party.

I stood up and waved my arms. I don't like to be photographed. To drive home the point I launched into a diatribe against photography, its self-importance, its essential shallowness, its melodramatic seriousness, the ridiculous impertinence of photographers, et cetera. I had a sudden urge to break open her camera.

Only when she said firmly but defensively, ‘Everybody has their photo taken today' did I realise she was Australian (Brisbane).

Not another tourist snapping at a picturesque scene, a serious photographer, an
artist-photographer
(her description) who exhibited in the museums, mostly in Australia. She did projects. These she constructed into exhibitions. The Amsterdam project, which included five other European cities, meant moving around with the camera, selecting people at random she imagined were Australian – only to discover most of them were Poles, Danes, Latvians, Italians, Canadians, British and even Icelandic. The idea being to demonstrate perceptions, habits, prejudices.

‘Are you one? I thought you looked Australian or something.'

Out of the corner of my eye, I saw the woman on the bench blowing her nose, adjusting her scarf.

‘You have a British plum in your mouth. But your face – the jaw – shoulders,' she went on, the perpetual photographer, ‘I think you're Australian!'

—
Until I met the Kybybolite brothers, Carl and George, I intended staying only a day or two in Amsterdam. Lindsey and Rosie believed I was on my way home. I'd sent them a forwarding address in Berlin.

As well, I was ready to leave Amsterdam in a hurry because Cynthia Blackman had moved into my corner room with her camera gear – the rucksacks, aluminium cases. Almost immediately, she opened the window and proceeded to focus her long lens along the canal and bicycle tracks, and into parked cars, in the hope of coming across a rare and enduring image. Restless in a room, restless outside – alert, that's the better word. Enough to drive a man mad. While aiming the camera, Cynthia often swore. She had short black hair and dark eyes. I wouldn't say she was a happy person.

I agreed she could stay one night. But when she raised her T-shirt, again I was conscious of how the ordinary movements of life, offered here in the form of softness, shadow, warmth, invitation, pushed to one side all other thoughts, I mean my persistent philosophical thoughts, which have been a way of thinking I knew I could not avoid. The search for philosophical answers of any worth requires a certain remoteness from life. Keeping on the path is the difficulty. And there I was spending whole days and entire nights in pleasure with Cynthia Blackman.

She never went anywhere without one of her state-ofthe-art cameras. Such was her alertness on the street I could only tag along in her wake. Anything I said didn't seem to register. Aside from concentration, this mode of working was part of imposing authority on any image, which was very important, she said (even though, I told myself, the image was already there).

I felt uncomfortable in public with Cynthia and her cameras. When she stopped in her tracks and took aim at an unsuspecting tourist I would turn and walk away – couldn't bear the association. It soon became a source of trouble between us.

Zoellner's was a bookshop on Rosmarijnsteeg. It sold nothing but books on philosophy. As soon as I went in and activated the little brass bell over the door I knew Cynthia waiting outside would become impatient. She was anxious to add more subjects to her Amsterdam project.

Spinoza was Zoellner's speciality. Other philosophers were stocked but, it was made plain enough, they were eunuchs at the feet of a giant. Spinoza took up an entire wall. Rare items were displayed in a cabinet, including a lock of his hair…Benedictus Spinoza is a very impressive figure, as far as I'm concerned. I came to him late. ‘Love and desire can be excessive.' And he then went on to explain why. He also wrote strongly about things I had not experienced, such as hatred and fame.

Two Americans were talking and reaching out for books, turning a few pages by sliding their thumb down from the top right corner, before replacing them. Spinoza died at forty-four – consumption. Now three hundred years later, three men, four counting Zoellner, who sat at a ridiculously small desk, still found in the pages he wrote thoughts and reflections of worth.

It was in Zoellner's bookshop in Amsterdam that I realised I wanted to create a philosophy so I could die happily.

In a loud voice one of the Americans asked, ‘Do you happen to know where Spinoza lived in this town? Is the house still standing?'

Before the bookseller could answer, the brass bell above the door gave a tingle and Cynthia came in young, bra-less, and clearly not interested in books. As the Americans turned, and Zoellner looked up, she began snapping away with her camera.