Another presence – Extract from An Imaginary Life

Almost immediately, in the golden light of a fine autumn day, with the sky broken in rainpools among the drifts of yellow leaves, he is there, standing quite still and taller after two years among the slashed birches. I am filled with joy. He is there. He is real. The others see him too. He is streaked with mud, with bony knees and elbows and a shrunken belly. An ugly boy of eleven or twelve with a bird’s nest of dirty hair.

We are sitting, five of us, in a circle, drinking a little of the thin soup we have brought with us, while the horses wander among the birches, grazing off what blades of grass still push up through the leaf mold. It is late afternoon. Still. We hold our cups in both hands, drinking, not speaking, and suddenly the boy is there, watching us. The men’s eyes dark over the rim of the cup and their fingers grimy. We all look. First at the boy then at one another, and are frozen. Even the horses cease grazing and raise their heads against the watery blue of the afternoon, sniffing, scenting another presence. I can hear our breathing. It is as if we are all, for a moment, charmed. As if time had stopped. and I feel that if we could sit like this long enough, cross-legged on the leaves, so that we seemed another part of the wood; if we let our spirits out, shaking them loose, and became wood, leaf mold, lichen – he would come to us. The others, I know, are afraid. Their stillness is a sort of terror. These men who are not afraid of whirling horsemen in the night with poisoned arrows and firebrands, or of a wild boar with its tusks foaming, are afraid of the Child. I am not. My stillness is for fear that we may, even with the lifting of a finger or the catching of a breath, startle him into fright.

So we sit – for how long? – and stare at one another. He does not startle. But one of the horses, lowering its head to nibble, moves across between us, and when it passes, the space between us is empty of all but light.

From An Imaginary Life by David Malouf.

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