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seized halfway by a tightening of the muscles in my arms or legs. Or by the panic of the realization that I had misjudged the distance, that I had been tricked by the landscape and the light. No one on the shore would see that I was struggling; no one would hear me cry for help.
    The road from the quay is steep and winding. Houses are hidden at the end of long avenues, lined with ancient trees, where I imagine families have lived, son after father, for years and years. These people are fixed, rooted, bound to a certain place. I think of my father’s camp and the moving of the herds across thousands of miles of openness. I think of returning home, and how I would bea burden and a shame to my family. At the cattle station I would ask in which direction I must walk to reach my father’s camp and the men there would ask, with disgust upon their faces, why I had returned. My father and mother would not embrace me. I’ll stay here. I have the roads to walk and the clear air to breathe. I have the quiet lake and the light that dances on the water.
    I walked once from the house where I live, before I had learned the way the roads lie and the way that this land can turn around on itself. I was tired of the men in the house; they were drinking and shouting through all the hours of the night and singing songs loudly of their different countries. A neighbour came to the door of the house and I heard him saying the baby, the baby. The other men quietened and became sullen. Without songs, they drank more deeply. I decided to walk towards the rising sun. I crossed the road, away from the rows of houses of light timber and thin blocks and entered a field ringed by trees. There was a river at the far side of the field. My eyes were deceived again and I walked into a wet hollow in the field’s centre and over a small rise and then down towards the river. Cows were standing at the muddy edge, drinking. They were fat and contented, full to bursting, waiting to be milked. The grass here is thick and long. I envied them. I found a way across the river over rounded stones and climbed the shallow far bank. I kept true east across more fields and decided to make for the foothills of a small mountain where I had heard there was an old silver mine. I thought that by the time I had reached those hills and sat for a while and walked back that the other men would be asleep and I could have a Sunday afternoon of peace. I would make my food and drink tea and look for words that I knew on a newspaper.
    I walked for hours and became lost. The fields dipped and rose and all looked alike. The hills seemed to draw no nearer. Icame to a public house on a roadside. The Miner’s Rest, it was called. Where is this place? I asked a man inside. Shallee, he said. I was walking, I am lost, I said in English. He seemed to understand my words. Where you from, boy? Khakassia, I said. Where the fuck is that? Siberia, I said. Jaysus friend, you sure are fuckin lost! And he roared with laughter and the others in the bar laughed as well and I don’t know why but I felt at once safe and foolish and I laughed with them as they slapped my back. A man played a fiddle. He had a serious face but his music was full of joy.
    At the next week’s end, Pokey Burke gave me a lift to the house I shared. I had just finished shoring the foundations of a large house that would never be built. I have great time for you, he said, you’re a fabbeless worker. I don’t know what fabbeless is. I know I owe you a few bob, he said. I understood this. I’ll sort you out next week, okay? Sort you out means pay you in this land. He looked at me and smiled as he drove. I knew he was lying. I knew I would not see him again. But I said okay, Pokey, okay, and I smiled back, and my stomach lurched as he drove too fast down into a valley that I didn’t know was there.

Réaltín
    THERE ARE FORTY-FOUR houses in this estate. I live in number twenty-three. There’s an old lady living in number forty.