Free Landscape of Farewell by Alex Miller

house, but stood in the open doorway looking in enviously at their privileged mother, lifting their snouts and sniffing the air. When I finished my breakfast I went over to them and gave them the fat from my bacon, which they greatly appreciated.
    I took my own and Dougald’s plates to the sink and set about washing the accumulation of dirty dishes and pans that hadobviously been piled there for some time. There were old scraps of food and half-eaten pieces of mouldy toast among the dishes. While I did the washing-up, Dougald made several phone calls. As he talked he walked back and forth across the small space of the kitchen, from the cupboards to the open doorway then back again, looking down at his feet all the while, and might have been a prisoner measuring the confines of his cell. He was observed closely all the while by his grey bitch. She stood forward on her trembling forelegs, eager for a sign from him, her pale eyes never leaving his face. The two brown dogs lost interest in the goings-on in the kitchen once they saw there was no more food to be had. They sat at their ease out in the yard in the shade of the great broken gum tree, their forepaws crossed, their attention on the goat, which had managed to force its head through the wire fence and was attempting to reach a tall blue thistle growing just beyond the range of its tether rope. The larger of the two dogs gave a low woof every now and then and glanced towards the kitchen, wishing to reassure us that it was not just idling but was on duty. Dougald had not named his dogs and asked nothing of them, not issuing them with either commands or reprimands.
    The day was warm and still outside, and in the kitchen there was the domestic clatter of the dishes as I set them aside on the draining board, behind me the low murmur of Dougald’s voice as he spoke into his telephone. The plain white dishes in my hands and the feel of the warm suds on my fingersinsisted upon an intimate acknowledgment of homeliness and familiarity. Scrubbing at the remains of burned food that clung to the insides of the pots, I found it difficult to recall with any certainty the conditions of my former life. I turned from the sink and looked towards Dougald. He caught my look and smiled. It was a slow, gracious, kindly, amused smile that drew up the loose folds of his cheeks and formed deep recesses and wrinkles around his eyes. There was much in his smile of understanding, and much was communicated to me of a sensitive response in him to our situation together in his home. I returned his smile. It was surely our amusement that we acknowledged, this vision of ourselves as two old men together at the end of their days. We might indeed have been brothers who had never married but had remained in the modest family home long after the deaths of our parents, I assuming the role of housekeeper, and he that of breadwinner.
    I turned back to the sink and went on scrubbing contentedly at the frying pan. I was thinking about an incident far in my past. It must have been 1943 when I met her, a few months before the destruction of Hamburg by Allied bombing. I was a child, but in my daydreams then I thought myself a man—that ideal condition to which all boys aspire. My father was away at the front, and with the growing threat of bombing my mother had taken me out of Hamburg to stay with her older brother on his farm. I do not know why my mother did not take my sister to thefarm also, but can only suppose she did not think it suitable for a girl to be left alone there. One evening, when I was returning to the farmhouse through the hazel coppice from the ploughed field where my uncle was working, a gipsy girl stepped into my path from the concealment of the hazels. She laughed to see my fear, her bright headscarf lifting in the evening breeze. I knew myself to be at once in her power. In that moment, charged with fear and intuition, she might have appeared before me to deliver a prophecy of my death. Or