Stream System: The Collected Short Fiction of Gerald Murnane Read online

  When I had taken the children’s letters from them I had warned the children not to expect replies for many weeks. I had told the children that they ought to forget that they had posted their letters, so that the replies would be all the more surprising when they arrived at last. And I had even said in class that I hoped my teacher-friend had not moved from his address and had not met with an accident since the year when he had given me his address in New Zealand.

  The month when the children had given their letters to me was June. The school year did not end until December. From June until December of that year I offered my class every day some new diversion that would help them forget, I hoped, the letters that they had written to New Zealand. Some of the children seemed to have forgotten the letters after only a few weeks. Other children remembered the letters almost every day and reminded me that no answers had yet come back.

  In September of that year I applied for a transfer to a school in a suburb on the other side of Melbourne. On the day after the last schoolday of that year I packed my clothes and my books ready for sending by taxi truck to my new address. I sealed and packed also the cardboard box that had been stored in the bottom of my wardrobe since June.

  Before I sealed the cardboard box I spent an hour kneeling on the floor beside the box and tearing into small pieces every envelope in the box and every sheet of paper in every envelope. While I tore the paper I did not once look down at what my hands were doing. I did not want to read any name of any child or any word written by any of my children to one of the unknown children of New Zealand. When I had torn all the pieces of paper and when I was pressing the pieces into the box before sealing it, I remembered myself eight years before tearing paper into shreds and pushing the torn paper into the small cardboard boxes that served as breeding boxes for the mice that I kept in the shed behind my parents’ house.

  I had torn up the children’s letters because I had thought of the box of letters falling from the taxi truck on the way from the children’s suburb to my new address. I had thought of someone finding the box in the street and reading the names on the backs of the envelopes and then sending the envelopes back to the children who had been in my class, and I had thought of the children and their parents beginning to understand what had happened to the letters.

  When I had begun to pack my belongings in my flat, I had thought I would light a fire in the small yard behind my flat and would burn the envelopes and their contents. But then I had thought of pieces of burnt paper being lifted by the wind over the fence around the block of flats and being carried by the wind eastwards towards the houses of the children who had been my pupils. I saw in my mind piece after piece of grey paper with black penstrokes showing clearly against the grey, and all the grey pieces drifting towards the same children who had written messages on the pieces when they had been parts of white pages.

  My son stood and drank his cocoa while I arranged his wet clothes on the horse. I told him his troubles were over for the time being. He was safe and dry in his own house after the storm; his machine had relieved his asthma; he could sit with me in the loungeroom and watch the last of the storm passing over the house.

  My son told me that he had not had a hard day. He claimed to have had a rather pleasant day. His class at the high school had had almost a free afternoon. First, one of their teachers had been away sick, and then their science teacher had given them a free period in the last hour because the mice had not arrived.

  For three or four weeks, my son said, the science class had been looking forward to the coming of the mice. The science teacher had told them she had ordered fifty mice from a laboratory. She had planned with the class beforehand a series of experiments. Small numbers of mice would be put into separate cages. Some mice would be allowed to breed. Each child in the class would be responsible for feeding and observing one of the cages of mice.

  The mice had been due to arrive at the school, so my son told me, on that very morning, but they had failed to arrive. My son had cleaned the cage where his mice were going to be kept. He had set out a small heap of torn paper for the mice to use as lining for their cardboard nest-box. But the science teacher had announced to the class at the beginning of the last period of the day that the people supplying the mice had let her down. The mice had not come, and she was going to have to spend most of the science period telephoning to find out what had happened to the mice. While she was out of the room, the teacher had said, the class could use the time for private study. And then, so my son had told me, the teacher had left the room and he had spent the rest of the period talking with his friends or watching the approach of the storm.

  While I listened to my son I felt a sorrow for some person or some thing that I could not have named. I might have been sorry for my son and his friends because they had waited so long for the mice that had not come. Or I might have been sorry for the teacher because she had had to disappoint her class, or because she had had to lie to the class (because she had neglected to order the mice, or because she had learned many days before that the mice would never arrive but had been afraid to tell her class). Or I might have been sorry for the mice because the taxi truck bringing them to the school had overturned during the storm, and the boxes containing the mice had tumbled out onto the road and had burst open, after which the mice had crawled around on the wet grey road, confused and bedraggled, or had been swept away in the fast-flowing water in the gutters.

  Each time my son had said the word mice he had made faint signs with his eyes and his mouth and his shoulders. Probably no one but myself would have noticed the signs. He had turned his eyes just a little to one side and had stretched his mouth outwards just a little at each corner and had hunched his shoulders just a little. When I had seen that my son was making these faint signs, I had found occasion myself to speak the word mice and to make faint signs in return when I spoke the word.

  The faint signs were the last traces of the signs that my son and I had made to one another during earlier years of his childhood whenever either of us had talked about mice or other small furred animals. During those years, whenever he or I had spoken the word mouse or the word mice in the other’s hearing, each of us would have peered from the sides of his eyes and hunched his shoulders close to his head and stretched his mouth wide and held his hands in front of his chest in the shape of paws.

  In earlier years I had always understood my son’s signs as telling me that he was a mouse at heart. He was telling me that he was smaller than other children and made weak by his asthma. When I made my own signs in return in those years, I was telling my son that I recognised his mouseness and that I would never forget to put into his saucer each day a little heap of rolled oats and a cube of bread spread with vegemite and a scrap of lettuce, or to put a heap of torn paper into a corner of his cage when nights turned chilly.

  When my son had made his faint signs to me on the afternoon of the storm, he seemed to be saying that he would always be partly mouse. He seemed to be saying that he had not forgotten my telling him five years before that he would be free from asthma after five years had passed; he had not forgotten, but he knew that what I had told him was not true. He seemed to be saying that he remembered every day what I had told him five years before; he had remembered it while he wheezed and gasped on his way home during the storm that had just passed over; but he knew that I had told him what I had told him only so that he could believe in earlier years that he would one day cease to be a mouse.

  On the afternoon of the storm my son seemed to be telling me also that his life as a mouse was not unbearable; he had not been unhappy while he walked home through the rain; he was not unhappy now while he sat with me and watched the last of the clouds drifting towards the hills north-east of Melbourne. He seemed to be telling me finally that he was telling me these things because he understood that I too was partly mouse and would always be so.

  During my fourteenth and fifteenth years I kept mice in cages in the cement-sheet shed behind my paren
ts’ house in a south-eastern suburb of Melbourne. Most of the mice were white or grey or fawn. A few mice were pied. I bred the mice selectively with the aim of producing only the pied sort. I kept the dozen or so female mice in one large cage, and the four or five males each in a small cage on the opposite side of the shed from the females. I had also two small breeding cages where a male and a female would be kept together until the female was swollen with young, at which time the male would be returned to his solitary cage. From each litter I kept only the one or two pied mice. The others I drowned. I put the unwanted mice in an old sock with a handful of pebbles and lowered them into a bucket of water. While I held the sock in the water I did not once look down at what my hands were doing.

  I spent at least an hour every day in the shed alone with the mice. I fed the mice and cleaned their cages and set out torn paper for their nests. Then I studied the charts and tables showing the pedigrees of the mice, and I tried to decide which female and which male would be the next breeding pair.

  During the hours while I was watching the mice I was also listening for certain sounds from the other side of one of the grey walls of the shed. I was listening in order to know when the woman from the house next door was in her backyard.

  The woman was aged about thirty. She lived with her husband and her mother and her infant daughter. All of the family were Latvians and spoke to one another in a language that I supposed was Latvian. Whenever I heard the voice of the woman through the wall of the shed, I locked the door of the shed and crouched in the corner behind some of the cages of mice. I did in the corner what was all I could do as a solitary male who wanted to be one of a breeding pair. While I crouched in the corner I did not once look down at my hands. Instead, I pressed my ear to the cement-sheet in order to hear the voice of the woman talking in her own language. When I heard the voice I persuaded myself that the woman was talking only to me and talking without shyness or shame.

  During November and December, most of the children seemed to have forgotten having written letters to New Zealand. Only one boy still asked me quietly every few days what I supposed might have happened to the parcel of letters. The boy was not one of my favourites, although he was one of the most intelligent in the class. He was not among my favourites because he was too often restless and talkative. One of his previous teachers told me that the boy was what he was because his father had been too anxious about the boy. The father was a teacher himself and had watched over the boy too closely.

  Sometimes when this boy asked me about the letters during the last weeks of the school year, I thought he might have suspected me of having not sent the letters to New Zealand. I was thinking of this boy when I decided to tear the letters into small pieces before putting them into the taxi truck.

  The place that I moved to was an upstairs flat with no yard where I could burn large quantities of paper. But soon after I had moved to the new place, I began to visit a man and his wife in the hill-country north-east of Melbourne. One Saturday when I visited these people, my bag was stuffed with the torn pieces of the letters to New Zealand.

  I burned the pieces of the letters on a cloudy afternoon with a cool breeze blowing. The breeze, like nearly every breeze or wind in the districts around Melbourne, went from west to east. When all the scraps of the letters had been burned, I pounded the ashes with a stick. I wanted no fragment of charred paper to be left lying on the ground with a few blackened words still visible. Yet I had noticed, while the fire was burning, a few pieces of grey paper being lifted up and carried by the breeze over the nearest treetops.

  The district where I stood, in the hills north-east of Melbourne, was at the edge of the mountains that were burned, in the summer when I was born, by the worst fires since details of the weather were first recorded in the state of Victoria. I had read that the smoke from those fires drifted all the way across the Tasman Sea and darkened the sky over New Zealand. I had read also that fragments of burnt leaves and twigs fell on some cities of New Zealand from the dark clouds that had drifted from the burning forests of Victoria, far away to the west. When I saw the fragments of grey paper being carried from my fire eastwards across the treetops, I thought of the fragments drifting down at last on New Zealand and one of the fragments happening to catch the eye of a boy or a girl of nine or ten years and of the boy or the girl making out a few words of a child’s handwriting on the fragment.

  Five years after the year when my son had been caught in a thunderstorm, and nearly twenty-five years after I had burned the pieces of the children’s letters, I saw in a Melbourne newspaper a tiny photograph of the man who had been the boy who had been the last of the forty-eight children of my class to go on reminding me that the letters to New Zealand had not been answered. I had heard nothing of the boy since I had left the outer south-eastern suburb nearly twenty-five years before, but as a man he had become the South Pacific correspondent for the newspaper in which I had seen his photograph.

  Underneath the tiny photograph of the man who had once been one of my pupils was a report that he had written in the language of writers for newspapers. I understood the man to be reporting that some people in New Zealand were afraid that a cloud of poisonous substances was approaching them from the east, and to be reporting also that some people in Australia were afraid that the same cloud would approach Australia after it had passed over New Zealand. The cloud had arisen far away to the east of New Zealand at a place in the Pacific Ocean where scientists from the country of France had exploded a bomb.

  After reading the report in the newspaper I was not afraid of the poisonous cloud. I thought of the poisonous cloud as passing not from east to west but from west to east like the storms that had frightened me as a child and like the storm that had broken over my son and like the smoke from the bushfires in the year when I was born. I saw in my mind the poisonous cloud drifting down at last into the ocean near South America, where the last of the clouds had settled after each of the storms that had come up out of the paddocks near St Arnaud like the grey shape of a genie from the Arabian Nights.

  Towards the end of my fifteenth year, my father told me we would soon be leaving the house that had behind it the shed with the walls of grey cement-sheet. The house where we were going to live had no shed behind it.

  I understood that I would not be able to breed mice in the place where I was going to live. Nor would I be able to crouch against a wall while a woman spoke in a foreign language on the other side of the wall.

  In the last weeks before I left the house with the shed behind it, I prepared to drown all of my mice and to tear up and burn the notebook in which I had recorded the pedigrees and the matings of the mice. While I was looking through the records I noticed that one of the male mice had not yet been used for breeding. Each of the other males had been moved at least once from his solitary cage to a breeding cage where he had been allowed to remain with a female until she was swollen with young. But one male mouse had been kept as a solitary male from the time when he had been taken as a half-grown male from his mother and his litter-mates.

  I looked into the cage of the mouse that had been kept always solitary. The mouse was standing at the small panel of flyscreen wire at the front of the cage. I supposed that the mouse saw only a grey blur while he stood in the darkness of the cage with the fine mesh of wire in front of him and on the other side of the wire the half-light of the shed where I stood watching him.

  The mouse pressed his nose against the wire and sniffed the air.

  I knew that the solitary mouse had seen no other mouse, either male or female, in all the time since I had put him into his cage. But I wondered whether the mouse had sometimes smelled the smell of another mouse, either male or female, or had sometimes heard the squeaking of another mouse, especially the squeaking that came from a breeding cage whenever I first put a male and a female together there.

  While I stood in front of the cage, I understood that I might leave the solitary mouse alone in its cage until the day when I d
rowned all the mice, and that I might keep the mouse alone even while I killed it. I understood also that I might take the mouse from its cage at that moment and put it into the cage where a dozen female mice were kept together and leave it in that cage, the one male among a dozen females, until the day when I drowned all the mice. And I understood that I might carry the cage of the solitary mouse to the other side of the shed. I might then place the cage so that the panel of flyscreen wire at the front of it rested against the panel of flyscreen wire at the front of the cage where the twelve female mice were kept together. I might then leave the cages in that position until the day when I took all the mice from their separate cages and drowned them.

  Stream System

  This morning, in order to reach the place where I am now, I went a little out of my way. I took the shortest route from my house to the place that you people probably know as SOUTH ENTRY. That is to say, I walked from the front gate of my house due west and downhill to Salt Creek then uphill and still due west from Salt Creek to the watershed between Salt Creek and a nameless creek that runs into Darebin Creek. When I reached the high ground that drains into the nameless creek, I walked north-west until I was standing about thirty metres south-east of the place that is denoted on Page 66A of Edition 18 of the Melway Street Directory of Greater Melbourne by the words STREAM SYSTEM.