Free Landscape of Farewell by Alex Miller Page A

perhaps, if she were to find me worthy of it, to present me with a gift that would empower me to alter the course of my history. But she only asked me for bread.
Give me bread!
she demanded. But I had no bread and was not yet man enough to invite her to accompany me to the farmhouse, where I might have found bread and sausage for her in the larder. So instead of going to her aid, I stood dumbfounded by her beauty and by the strange power over me which she seemed to possess, my gaze fixed on her, my hands clasped behind my back.
    Her family had been murdered, she told me, and she laughed a strange unnerving laugh as she told it. It was as if she spoke of people she had known long ago, almost in another life, and whose reality she had already begun to forget. Their brutal slaughter, she said, and there was a calm in her eyes and in her voice as she said it that terrified me, their brutal slaughter had taken place before her in the early hours of that very morning.She was alone and on the run. That is how I have remembered her, as if she knew no other existence than to be alone and on the run. When she laughed it seemed to me then, just as it seems to me now, that it was not she but I who was the lost one. Although she can have been little older than I was, within the glowing shadows of the hazel coppice that evening she seemed to me ageless and wise and deeper in her experience of life than I could ever hope to be, and I felt that nothing of my inner life, my past or my future, was hidden from her, but was hidden only from myself. Indeed I knew it to be so, with that deep intuition of knowing that is the private truth of such things for each of us, and which we cannot share with another without forfeiting its mysterious power to compel our imagination.
    Standing at the sink in Dougald’s kitchen that morning, my hands in the warm washing-up water, my heart contracted at the remembrance of the gipsy girl. Had she escaped? Or had she been caught and suffered a hideous death? I still longed to know, all those years later, that she had made her escape. I still longed to be reassured that her meeting with me that evening had been for her a saving moment in her hazardous journey alone through the hostile world. More than half a century after my meeting with her, I wanted to believe that she had lived and had known happiness and contentment in life. I still regretted not giving her bread and shelter that evening. I still regretted not offering her the means to live while the precious opportunity to do so hadbeen mine. The passage of years and decades is nothing to such memories. One lifetime is not long enough to forget these things. For me the gipsy girl still smiled her enigmatic smile, knowing something she did not disclose to me that evening in the hazel coppice of our childhood. Guilt, I discovered that evening, was not the experience only of the heartless perpetrator of a crime, but was a complex and pervasive condition of the human soul, as intractable and as mysterious as love.
    When I finished drying the dishes and found places for them on the shelves of the cupboard, we drove into the town in Dougald’s old red pick-up truck to collect the stores and mail. The only store in the town was at the Shell service station. It was also the only bank and served as the post office. Three times a week, unless there had been heavy rains and the road had been washed out, stores and medicines and other necessities of life were brought by the carrier from the coast. This enterprise was cheerfully conducted by a handsome woman in her early fifties. She was the wife of a miner who had been injured some years before in an accident at the coal mine and since then had been confined to a wheelchair. She and her crippled husband purchased the business with his compensation payout. I observed that Dougald and she exchanged a certain light and agreeable banter with each other which was suggestive of the enjoyment of a deeper intimacy than either