Prai$e for Alex Miller

Max
‘A successful combination of the life of Max Blatt and the gripping story
of the author’s search for him.’ —Charmian Brinson, Emeritus Professor of
German, Imperial College London

‘A wonderful book.  Miller is faithful to Max Blatt’s story, to his silences and
to his sadness. It is a story that needs to be heard.’ —Jay Winter, Charles J.
Stille Professor of History, Yale University

‘Max tells of Alex Miller’s search—in turns fearful and elated—for the
elusive past of Max Blatt, a man he loves, who loved him and who taught
him that he must write with love. Miller discovers that he is also search-
ing for a defining part of himself, formed by his relation to Max Blatt, but
whose significance will remain obscure until he finds Max, complete, in
his history. With Max, Miller the novelist has written a wonderful work
of non-fiction, as fine as the best of his novels. Always a truth-seeker, he
has rendered himself vulnerable, unprotected by the liberties permitted
to fiction. Max is perhaps his most moving book, a poignant expression
of piety, true to his mentor’s injunction to write with love.’ —Raimond
Gaita, Emeritus Professor of Moral Philosophy, King’s College London,
and award-winning author of Romulus, My Father

The Pa$$age of Love

‘Miller’s story is long, intense and vital.’ —Geordie Williamson

‘Alex Miller’s new novel The Passage of Love is capacious, wise, and start­
lingly honest about human frailty and the permutations of love over time.
Frankly autobiographical, it is also a work of fully achieved fiction, ripe
with experience, double-voiced, peopled with unpredictable men and
women, and set in Miller’s landscapes that characteristically throb with
life.’ —Morag Fraser, Books of the Year, Australian Book Review

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 ‘Half a dozen of Miller’s novels are likely to be judged among the finest of
the past quarter century. They were written in the course of a career that
has showcased Miller’s subtlety, narrative craft, moral acuity and delight in
writing about what he loves.’ —Weekend Australian Magazine

‘Conflicting demands that can throttle creativity are a big motif in this
bildungsroman . . . A thoughtful autobiographical work by an award-
winning Australian novelist . . . traces themes of art and commitment
through Crofts’ relationships with three women. Miller pulls back from
the narrative several times in interludes that return to the first person of
the much older man and highlight how memory has many layers. A rich
addition to the growing shelf of autofiction from a seasoned storyteller.’
—Kirkus (starred review)

‘. . . delivers an enthralling fusion of fiction and memoir.’ —Tom Griffiths,

Books of the Year, Australian Book Review

‘While Miller’s novels are immediately accessible to the general reading

public, they are manifestly works of high literary seriousness—­substantial,
technically masterly and assured, intricately interconnected, and of great
imaginative, intellectual and ethical weight.’ —Robert Dixon in Alex Miller:
The Ruin of Time

‘It is riveting and a masterpiece in every way . . . great emotional depth . . .

a magnificent achievement.’ —Nicholas Birns, Professor of English at
the New School in New York and author of Contemporary Australian
Literature

‘The Passage of Love is a novel that explicitly revisits aspects of Miller’s

life with the aim of shedding light on subjects beyond its biographical
orbit . . . a slow-burning catalogue of marital breakdown enlivened only
by Miller’s trademark prose, limpid and grave and stately in progression,
each sentence fragment tongue-and-grooved with the next.’ —Australian
Book Review

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 ‘An intimate book . . . Miller has a gift for examining the domestic and
exploring private lives.’ —Good Reading

‘The Passage of Love offers an insight into a great writer’s journey . . .

Miller maintains a tangible sense of place throughout, in particular, the
landscape of isolated country NSW. This novel is a must for fans of Miller.’
—Books + Publishing

‘There is something elegiac about The Passage of Love, in its detailing of a

vanished 1950s Melbourne, in the passion and urgency of its fierce protag-
onist . . . Miller’s writing has the muscularity of decades-earned craft, spare
and unsentimental, probing the sinews of marriage, delineating the arc of
love affairs, of struggle and disappointment.’ —Irish Times

‘Miles Franklin award-winner, Miller has crafted a novel that’s individual

in its essence with originality and sensitivity.’ —PS News

‘The Passage of Love is a gift. It tells us about living with an undeniable

creative force and the consequences of being utterly transparent in one’s
desires. It is an observation, a sharing of knowledge and a transcript of a
life lived with yearning . . . Extraordinary.’ —Readings

‘The most candid, sharing, generous book I’ve read in a long, long time.’
—ABC Radio

‘A great read with profound insights into the nature of love and creativity.’
—Australian Financial Review

‘An exquisitely personal life story told in a fictional style . . . Miller draws
on memories, dreams, stories, love and death to create a moving and raw
fictional novel that is the closest to an autobiography likely to be read from
him. In a rich blend of thoughtful and beautifully observed writing, the
lives of a husband and wife are laid bare in their passionate struggle to
engage with their individual creativity.’ —Highlife

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 T h e S i m p l e $ t W o rd $
‘Most collections of this kind are interesting and useful reminders of the
value of a writer of considerable literary standing. The Simplest Words is
more powerful than that, because of Miller’s intense engagement with
his subjects, and because Stephanie Miller has chosen pieces that speak
to one another, accounting, in a way, for one of our most original, engag-
ingly vehement and expansive writers.’ —Brenda Walker, Australian
Book Review

‘This is a rich, generous compilation that enticingly refracts our percep-

tions of one of Australia’s finest novelists.’ —Peter Pierce, Saturday Age

‘[Miller’s] writing has a luminous quality that sings off the page and
whether he is writing on family, friendship, memory or just life, he engages
with the reader, involving them in his orbit.’ —Helen Caples and Martin
Stevenson, The Examiner

C o a l C r e ek
‘Miller’s voice is never more pure or lovely than when he channels it
through an instrument as artless as Bobby . . . The intelligence of the
author haunts the novel, like an atmosphere.’ —Geordie Williamson,
The Monthly

‘. . . a master of visceral description.’ —Weekend Australian

‘Because of this subdued mode of storytelling, the tension mounts grad-

ually and when tragedy strikes it is truly, hideously, mesmerising . . . an
evocative and moving novel of the Australian bush.’ —Books + Publishing

‘Coal Creek is a story of friendship, love, loyalty and the consequences

of mistrust set against Miller’s exquisite depictions of the country of the
Queensland highlands.’ —Books and Arts Daily

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 A u t u m n L a in g
‘Such riches. All of Alex Miller’s wisdom and experience—of art, of women
and what drives them, of writing, of men and their ambitions—and every
mirage and undulation of the Australian landscape are here, transmuted
into rare and radiant fiction. An indispensable novel.’ —Australian Book
Review

‘. . . in many respects Miller’s best yet . . . a penetrating and moving exam-

ination of long-dead dreams and the ravages of growing old.’ —Times
Literary Supplement

‘A beautiful book.’ —Irish Times

‘Miller’s prose is so simply wrought it almost disguises its sophistication . . .

The result transforms one woman’s dying words into pure and living art.’
—Weekend Australian

‘. . . a magisterial work . . . a compulsively readable tale.’ —The Advertiser

‘Miller has invested this story of art and passion with his own touch of
genius and it is, without question, a triumph of a novel.’ —Canberra Times,
Panorama

‘Miller engages so fully with his female characters that divisions between
the sexes seem to melt away and all stand culpable, vulnerable, human
on equal ground. Miller is also adept at taking abstract concepts—
about art or society—and securing them in the convincing form of his
complex, unpredictable characters and their vivid interior monologues.’
—The Monthly

‘Few writers have Miller’s ability to create tension of this depth out of old
timbers such as guilt, jealousy, selfishness, betrayal, passion and vision.
Autumn Laing is more than just beautifully crafted. It is inhabited by
­characters whose reality challenges our own.’ —Saturday Age, Life & Style

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 ‘Miller’s long honing of the craft of his fiction has never been seen to better
advantage than in Autumn Laing.’ —Sydney Morning Herald, Spectrum

‘Nowhere in Miller’s work has the drama of character been so well

­synthesised with the drama of ideas. Nowhere else have his characters
drunk ideas like wine and exhaled them like cigarette smoke, a philosoph-
ical questing indistinguishable from defiant bohemian excess.’ —Weekend
Australian, Review

Love$ong
‘With Lovesong, one of our finest novelists has written perhaps his finest
book . . . Lovesong explores, with compassionate attentiveness, the essen-
tial solitariness of people. Miller’s prose is plain, lucid, yet full of plangent
resonance.’ —The Age

‘Lovesong is a ravishing, psychologically compelling work from one of our

best.’ —Courier-Mail

‘Miller’s brilliant, moving novel captures exactly that sense of a storybuilt

life—wonderful and terrifying in equal measure, stirring and abysmal, a
world in which both heaven and earth remain present, yet stubbornly out
of reach.’ —Sunday Age

‘Lovesong is another triumph: lyrical, soothing and compelling. Miller

enriches human fragility with literary beauty . . .’ —Newcastle Herald

‘Alex Miller’s novel Lovesong is a limpid and elegant study of the psychol-
ogy of love and intimacy. The characterisation is captivating and the
framing metafictional narrative skilfully constructed.’ —Australian Book
Review

‘The intertwining stories are told with gentleness, some humour, some
tragedy and much sweetness. Miller is that rare writer who engages
the intellect and the emotions simultaneously, with a creeping effect.’
—Bookseller & Publisher

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 ‘With exceptional skill, Miller records the ebb and flow of emotion . . .
Lovesong is a poignant tale of infidelity; but it is more than that. It is a
manifesto for the novel, a tribute to the human rite of fiction with the
novelist officiating.’ —Australian Literary Review

L a n d $ c a p e of F a rewell
‘The latest novel by the Australian master, so admired by other writers, and
a work of subtle genius.’ —Sebastian Barry

‘Landscape of Farewell is a triumph.’ —Hilary McPhee

‘Alex Miller is a wonderful writer, one that Australia has been keeping
secret from the rest of us for too long.’ —John Banville

‘As readers of his previous novels—The Ancestor Game, Prochownik’s

Dream, Journey to the Stone Country—will know, Miller is keenly inter-
ested in inner lives. Landscape of Farewell continues his own quest, and
in doing so, speaks to his reader at the deepest of levels. He juggles
philosophical balls adroitly in prose pitched to an emotional perfection.
Every action, every comma, is loaded with meaning. As one expects from
the best fiction, the novel transforms the reader’s own inner life. Twice
winner of the Miles Franklin Award, it is only a matter of time before
Miller wins a Nobel. No Australian has written at this pitch since Patrick
White. Indeed, some critics are comparing him with Joseph Conrad.’
—Daily News, New Zealand

‘Landscape of Farewell has a rare level of wisdom and profundity. Few

writers since Joseph Conrad have had so fine an appreciation of the equi­
vocations of the individual conscience and their relationship to the long
processes of history . . . [It is] a very human story, passionately told.’
—Australian Book Review

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 P r o ch o w n i k ’ $ D rea m
‘Assured and intense . . . truly gripping . . . This is a thoroughly engrossing
piece of writing about the process of making art, a revelatory transforma-
tion in fact.’ —Bookseller & Publisher

‘With this searing, honest and exhilarating study of the inner life of an
artist, Alex Miller has created another masterpiece.’ —Good Reading

J o u r n e y t o t h e S t o n e C o u n try
‘The most impressive and satisfying novel of recent years. It gave me all the
kinds of pleasure a reader can hope for.’ —Tim Winton

‘A terrific tale of love and redemption that captivates from the first line.’
—Nicholas Shakespeare, author of The Dancer Upstairs

C o n d i t i o n $ o f F a ith
‘This is an amazing book. The reader can’t help but offer up a prayerful
thank you: Thank you, God, that human beings still have the audacity to
write like this.’ —Washington Post

‘I think we shall see few finer or richer novels this year . . . a singular
achievement.’ —Andrew Riemer, Australian Book Review

T h e A n c e $ t o r G a me
‘A wonderful novel of stunning intricacy and great beauty.’ —Michael
Ondaatje

‘For pure delight, abandon the maze, and read for sensual pleasure. This
is a gift of floors of lacquered Baltic pine, pearwood shelves and tea boxes.
There is the perfume of the camphor laurel trees, coats made of the pelts of
18 grey foxes, and Victoria Tang’s horse. Smell the porridge and sour pickles,
cross the cold wet slate courtyard flagstones. Remember chrysanthemums
the deep rust color of an old fox’s scalp.’ —Sara Sanderson, Indianapolis News

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 ‘A major new novel of grand design and rich texture, a vast canvas of
time and space, its gaze outward yet its vision intimate and intellectually
abundant.’ —The Age

‘A dense, complex work that addresses the issues of cultural displacement,

colonialism and the individual’s imaginative link to earlier generations . . .
Extraordinary fictional portraits of China and Australia.’ —New York
Times Book Review

‘One of the most engrossing books I’ve read in a long time.’ —Robert
Dessaix

‘Takes the historical novel to new frontiers. It is fabulous in every sense of

the word.’ —Commonwealth Writers Prize judges

T h e S itter$
‘Like Patrick White, Miller uses the painter to portray the ambivalence of
art and the artist. In The Sitters is the brooding genius of light. Its presence
is made manifest in Miller’s supple, painterly prose which layers words into
textured moments.’ —Simon Hughes, Sunday Age

T h e T i v i n g to n N o tt
‘The Tivington Nott abounds in symbols to stir the subconscious. It is a
rich study of place, both elegant and urgent. An extraordinarily gripping
novel.’ —Melbourne Times

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 A l$ o b y A lex Mille r

The Passage of Love

The Simplest Words
Coal Creek
Autumn Laing
Lovesong
Landscape of Farewell
Prochownik’s Dream
Journey to the Stone Country
Conditions of Faith
The Sitters
The Ancestor Game
The Tivington Nott
Watching the Climbers on the Mountain

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Max_TXT.indd 11 10/8/20 12:04 pm
 First published in 2020

Copyright © Alex Miller 2020

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in

any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying,
recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without prior
permission in writing from the publisher. The Australian Copyright Act 1968
(the Act) allows a maximum of one chapter or 10 per cent of this book, whichever
is the greater, to be photocopied by any educational institution for its educational
purposes provided that the educational institution (or body that administers it) has
given a remuneration notice to the Copyright Agency (Australia) under the Act.

Allen & Unwin

83 Alexander Street
Crows Nest NSW 2065
Australia
Phone: (61 2) 8425 0100
Email: info@allenandunwin.com
Web: www.allenandunwin.com

A catalogue record for this

book is available from the
National Library of Australia

ISBN 978 1 76087 816 0

Internal design by Sandy Cull, www.sandycull.com

Set in 11.75/17 pt Minion Pro by Midland Typesetters, Australia
Printed and bound in Australia by Griffin Press, part of Ovato

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

The paper in this book is FSC® certified.

FSC® promotes environmentally responsible,
socially beneficial and economically viable
management of the world’s forests.

Max_TXT.indd 12 10/8/20 12:04 pm

 ˜
For Stephanie,
a n d f o r L i at S h o h a m ( n e e B l at t )
a n d Yo s s i B l at t

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 CONTENTS

|
FRAGMENT 1
W h a t we k n o w   14
FRAGMENT 2
T h e h o u $ e o f tru th   24
FRAGMENT 3
' | ch h a tt e e i n $ t e i n $ ch ö n e$ V a terl a n d '   29
FRAGMENT 4
T h e f o r e $ t o f th e d ea d   37
FRAGMENT 5
T h e l u c i d i t y o f th e d a mn ed   51
FRAGMENT 6
J a c o b R o $ e n b e r g a n d t h e p a c k o f wo l v e$   62
FRAGMENT 7
J o $ e f, L e a an d S a ra   66

||
FRAGMENT 8
H a n n a K ra ll   71
FRAGMENT 9
R e a d i n g t h e $ o u rc e$   78

xv

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 F R A G M E N T 10
T h e i n n o c e n t f a c e $ o f fo x c u b $   87
F R A G M E N T 11
A green pump  97
F R A G M E N T 12
Olek  113
F R A G M E N T 13
T wo b e a u t i f u l c o w$   13 8
F R A G M E N T 14
H i $ m y $ t e r i o u $ P o l i $ h p erio d   14 4
F R A G M E N T 15
G a z i n g i n t o t h e vo id   15 3
F R A G M E N T 16
Liat  16 0
F R A G M E N T 17
| t ’ $ k n o w n a $ t h e J e r u $a l em effec t   17 2

|||
F R A G M E N T 18
A $ e n $ e o f w h o l en e$ $   18 5

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS   247
SOURCES   2 5 3
N O T E S  2 61

xvi

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 [T]he shard outlives the pot . . .
joseph roth

Max_TXT.indd 17 10/8/20 12:04 pm

 |

Max_TXT.indd 1 10/8/20 12:04 pm

 I HEARD ABOUT MA X’S DEATH FROM HIS WIFE , RUTH. It was October
1981 and I was writing plays and living with my wife, Stephanie, and
our three-year-old son in a large Victorian house opposite the rat flats
in what at that time was still the old working-class suburb of Port
Melbourne. There was violence and even shootings on the street, but
we were always treated with respect by the locals and were happy
to leave the back door open when we went to bed. Gentrification
of the suburb wouldn’t happen until the turn of the century. When
I answered the telephone that Tuesday evening I was surprised to
hear Ruth’s voice. I hadn’t seen Max or Ruth for two years. Ruth said
bleakly, ‘Max died on Sunday.’ The immediate shock I felt was of guilt.
The wave of grief came later, when I was alone. Suddenly it was too
late and I would never be able to explain to him the reason for my
silence of the past two years.
He had described his life to me as futile. In his own eyes, he was a
failure and had achieved nothing. I thought of us in his living room in
the Lucan Street house, he and I sharing our thoughts until the after-
noon became evening, the tall windows casting a dim illumination

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 ALEX M|LLER

into the room from the distant streetlight, the two white porcelain
bowls with the remains of our yoghurt and cucumber, our silence filled
with the pleasure and promise of friendship, giving the present
moment time to offer up its meaning. They were the best of times;
times when the promise and anxieties of our friendship were rich and
present to us both. The less he said, the more I remembered everything
he said. During the war, he had been a member of a German resistance
group. The Gestapo arrested him and tortured him for weeks. Out of
his silence one evening he said to me, ‘I don’t know why I survived. It
has been futile. All of it.’ That moment came back to accuse me now as
I heard Ruth’s voice on the phone.
The house Stephanie and I lived in with our young son, with its
dark stone foundations and thick brick walls, was a fortress against
the noise and vibrations of the heavy truck traffic that was constantly
passing the front door along the designated over-dimensional route.
We were socially isolated. There were no like-minded people among
our neighbours. Every one of our neighbours was a Greek factory
worker, women and men alike. Most spoke only the barest minimum
of English. They had their own culture, which they had brought with
them from Greece, and they were determined not to lose it or even to
weaken its hold on them for the sake of becoming more Australian.
They invited us to their parties and name days and did their best to
integrate us into their culture by teaching us their language. We took
on a few Greek phrases, greetings and farewells. One or two of the
men drank to the point of craziness at these parties, Johnnie Walker
Red Label mostly. A wall clock or a framed religious picture was
fair game, the sound of smashing glass or splintering wood and the

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 MAX

howls of despair from the wife bringing everyone to a sudden state of

sobriety and contrition. It was dispiriting for us.
Our son’s closest friend was one of their boys. The two of them
played together in the back lane and in each other’s homes and forged
for us in the end a link with our neighbours that endured. Through our
children we learned to respect each other without trying to become
each other. The next generation was sorting it out.

˜
My teaching job and my work in the theatre at that time were repug-
nant to me. I was doing things that Max would not have admired.
I was living a lie. I had abandoned our dream. My three failed attempts
at writing a novel had drained my self-belief. I had not persisted
despite failure, as I knew Max would have had me do, and I had been
too ashamed to tell him. It had been easier, and more cowardly, to
stay out of his way. All the while, however, I continued to believe in
him as my ideal of humanity: a man cultivated, wise and generous;
a man who believed in me; a man who had been to the mind’s limits
and returned, broken but not cowed. And in the deepest recesses of
my soul I continued to believe in the novelist he had seen in me. His
opinion meant everything to me.
When Ruth saw me some months after Max’s funeral she said, in
a voice filled with hurt and disbelief and accusation, ‘Why didn’t you
come to Max’s funeral?’
I replied, ‘Max and I had an understanding about that kind of thing.’
She was incredulous. ‘Understanding? What do you mean, an
understanding? What kind of understanding did you have?’

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 ALEX M|LLER

I wasn’t sure what I meant. He was gone and it was too late. There
could be no recovery.
She looked at me with great sadness. ‘You were his best friend,’ she
said softly.
It shocked me to hear her say it. She didn’t say, He was your best
friend, but, You were his best friend. My sense of guilt was intolerable.
Ruth loved me. I loved her. We had been friends for many years.
I don’t remember how long—maybe for twenty years. For all that
time, she and Max had been my closest friends, and Max my most
trusted confidant. How had the distance between us come about?
I could offer her no explanation. I was unable to help. I dreaded to
see her after that, knowing that sooner or later she was certain to look
at me with that sadness in her gaze and say those terrible words yet
again: You didn’t come to Max’s funeral.
After his death, I abandoned the theatre and returned to my
struggle with the novel. Stephanie was relieved. We were getting back
to our truth. I dedicated the novel that came out of this struggle to
Max and Ruth. But that didn’t silence the question that remained with
me. Something more was needed. I knew myself to be in his debt.

˜
Thirty years later, in 2011, our daughter, Kate, went to live in Berlin.
By then, Stephanie had retired from her position at the university
and our son had graduated with a degree in physics and had become
a father and a banker. Stephanie and I had become grandparents and
I had written a dozen novels. But it wasn’t time yet for us to be old.
We still had our vigour. Great tasks still seemed to lie ahead of us.

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 MAX

In 2012 I was to visit my publishers in Paris and London in the

spring, so Stephanie and I decided to see our daughter in Berlin
while we were over that way. I had never been to Berlin. My feelings
about the city were conflicted and unclear. For my daughter, Berlin
was the centre of the world of electronic music. It could never be
that simple for me, nor for anyone of my generation. I was born in
1936, before the war, before the Holocaust, and had lived through
the Blitz in London with my mother and sister while my father, an
infantry­man in the King’s Own Scottish Borderers, was away fighting
the Germans. The war was the dominant feature of my childhood.
It changed our lives in ways we preferred not to remember, but its
effects rippled on through the years, tidal retreats and advances in
our moods for which there was no other explanation. But I was
curious. Two generations had grown up since the war; surely Berlin
had become quite another world? It was a question. I wasn’t sure
what the answer to it would be.

˜
The taxi dropped us and our luggage on the footpath outside the old
building in Neukölln where we’d rented a flat for the week before
we were due in Paris. It was May, late spring. The day was fine, the
sun shining, a cool breeze wrapping itself around the old apartment
buildings, petunias and geraniums blooming in the window boxes.
Young men and women on bicycles and older people with shopping
bags passed by; there was the sound of Turkish music and a smell
of cooking. Two women came along the footpath pulling a trolley
with children sitting in it. The children sat silently face to face, as if

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 ALEX M|LLER

they were in a miniature bus, their expressions serious. The women

stopped outside the building and went in.
The street was Reuterstrasse. The agent had promised to be at the
flat to admit us but there was no response when I pressed the buzzer.
We waited, hoping someone would soon turn up. Stephanie and I both
noticed the bronze plaques embedded in the footpath at the same
moment. The surnames inscribed on each were the same. The wife and
the husband being dragged out of this building and murdered. Our
German was rudimentary at that time, but the meaning of the word
ermordet could scarcely be misunderstood. Dismayed, Stephanie and
I looked at each other. Neither of us spoke. I thought of the day at
my school in London in 1945 when we were assembled in the hall
and made to watch film footage of the entrance of the Allies into
Buchenwald and Belsen. I must have been in grade three or four. We
sat in frozen silence as the images of unspeakable horror played in
front of us across the trembling screen, the only sound the whirring
of the projector from the back of the hall behind us, the hollow
eyes of the doomed children gazing back at us, the pale contorted
bodies of the naked dead strewn around them. The violation was
beyond us children. It was the end of our innocence. So this is what
we humans do to one another?
I have no memory of anyone ever speaking about what we saw
that day. It was almost seventy years ago, but those images had not
faded. I resented being reminded of them on this sunny day.
A young man rode up on a bicycle and dismounted beside us.
He apologised for his lateness. He had a handsome open face with
a lovely boyish smile. He opened the door, picked up our cases and

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 MAX

carried them up the stairs for us as if they weighed nothing. We had

trouble keeping up with him.
Later, when Stephanie and I were having a cup of tea, sitting at
the table in the kitchen in the fourth-floor apartment, the sounds
of the children playing in the courtyard below, our eyes met. I said,
‘What if this was their flat?’
Stephanie said nothing, but sat looking into her cup.
I said, ‘Of course it was all before you were born.’
She looked up at me and said sharply, ‘What difference does that
make?’
‘No, it doesn’t make any difference.’
We sat there at that small kitchen table, our mood subdued. Each
of us alone with our thoughts. It wasn’t to Max that my thoughts had
turned. The bronze plaques commemorating the murdered couple did
not remind me of the ordeal endured by him. My image of him had
ossified. Beside Max in this intellectual tomb lay the copy of Thomas
Mann’s novel Doctor Faustus that he had given me at our very first
meeting, a token then of his extraordinary leap of faith that one day
I would be the serious novelist I dreamed of becoming. The book and
the man were embalmed together in my memory. They did not belong
to this world, to Berlin and to my childhood memories of the war. For
me at that moment, Max and Doctor Faustus had nothing to do with
any of this. I failed to make the connection.
Kate had given us directions from our flat in Neukölln to the cafe
on Gabriel-Max-Strasse in Friedrichshain, close to where she and her
partner were living. We saw them from across the road. They were
sitting at a table under a red awning outside the cafe. Stephanie’s grip

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on my arm tightened. ‘She’s so beautiful,’ she said. It was moving to

see her sitting there, a grown woman. She and the man with her stood
up as we approached. He was tall with dark eyes, a dense black beard,
carefully clipped, his manner formal and reserved. Our daughter
called him Mato. We knew that he had grown up in the east and had
studied politics. We sat at the table with them and ordered beers. The
cafe was noisy with a crowd of young people, the crossroads busy with
bicycle traffic. The spring evening warm, the air soft and encouraging,
the small shops all open, lights beginning to appear, though it was not
yet dark.
We talked until late. At one point Stephanie asked Mato if there
was still in Berlin, or perhaps she said Germany, some residual
survival of the Nazi ethos. His response was prompt and emphatic.
‘The extreme right is everywhere. The top jobs in the public service
and the police were held by such people,’ he said. ‘Many still are. Key
positions.’ Was he exaggerating? Stephanie pressed him further. He
looked at her without speaking for several moments, his gaze steady
on her, then he said, ‘I’m ashamed to be a German.’ His seriousness
was convincing. ‘But surely,’ Stephanie said, ‘your feelings about your
country are conflicted. You can’t only feel shame. We’re all ashamed
of things our governments do in our names.’ Kate said, ‘Mum, this is
different. We live in a bubble here. Berlin isn’t Germany.’
They invited us to attend Kate’s DJ performance early the follow-
ing morning at Golden Gate club. ‘You won’t need to have a late night,’
she said. ‘The party will go till midday tomorrow.’

˜
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 MAX

As we walked through the deserted tunnel from the U-Bahn to the

upper world next morning I touched Stephanie’s arm. ‘Listen!’ We
stood in the echoing silence. The faint, regular percussion of an
emphatic bass rhythm sounded, as if it were the heartbeat of this
strange city. I said, ‘That’s our daughter.’ It was six in the morning.
We emerged into an open area that I recognised as an old bomb
site that had yet to be built over. Weeds and bits of rubbish, an
abandoned supermarket trolley; a scene from my childhood. There
was no one about. The day was grey and chilly. Far over to our left,
underneath the concrete mass of a railway overpass, there was a
lighted doorway, a golden rectangle of warm illumination in the
drab emptiness of the vista, the still silhouette of a man standing in
the doorway.
The young man on the door smiled as we approached and said,
‘Die Eltern!’ We were expected.
We made our way through several small, dimly lit anterooms, in
which people lay about on couches, or sat in couples, the heaviness of
the electronic music a thick compress binding these little scenes into
its greater stillness. The crowd of young people in the semi-darkness
of the smoke-filled space, the steady, insistent beat of the electronic
music, the crowd facing Kate, the young woman behind the turn­
tables, their arms raised, swaying from side to side. We were inside
their bubble.

˜
On our last day in Berlin we visited the museum of the artist Käthe
Kollwitz in Fasanenstrasse. Sculptures and drawings; heavy, dark,

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 ALEX M|LLER

serious depictions of suffering and pain. Stephanie said, ‘Didn’t Max

and Ruth have a Käthe Kollwitz in their sitting room?’
I said, ‘Good God, I’ve been in Berlin a week and I haven’t given
Max a thought.’
We looked at each other. Stephanie said, ‘Perhaps you’ll write
something. You should.’
It was true. I had always known it. I said, ‘I could write a celebra-
tion of his life. But would Max have wanted that? A celebration? He
was so quiet and self-effacing. He claimed nothing for himself except
defeat and futility.’

˜
Two years later, in 2014, we decided to visit our daughter again. We
had begun to study German when Kate first went to live in Berlin in
2011. After our visit there in 2012, we had been inspired to study the
language more seriously. A week or two before we were to fly out to
Berlin from Melbourne, I said to Stephanie, ‘I’m going to write to the
German archives and enquire after Max’s record.’ She said she was
glad I’d decided to look for him. ‘I’ve been hoping you would. I’ve
always thought it was something you should do.’
I said, ‘I’ll see first what I can find. There might be nothing. I don’t
want to fictionalise him or his life. I will have to find the truth. There
would be no point otherwise. I could write about the Max I knew,
but that would leave the main part of his life a mystery. I know only
fragments of his life before I met him.’
The more I thought about searching for Max’s record in Germany,
the more I began to hope that I might be able to refute his belief that

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 MAX

his life had been futile. For me, his life had been a precious gift. There
grew in me also at that time an anxiety, however, that in probing into
his past I might discover things about Max that I would not wish to
know. He was my hero, but he had also been a man, a man whose past
had been concealed within a deep silence that he broke only rarely.

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