The Sound of One Hand Clapping

by Richard Flanagan

  By such alchemy the dull fear of the past was transformed into electric power, the coveted gold of the new age, and at the bottom of the alchemists’ distilling flask all that remained were the pestilential by-products of that magical process for which nobody cared: the cracked natural world and the broken human lives, both dregs easily discounted when their insignificant cost was tallied against the growing treasure of the burgeoning hydro-electricity grid, and no-one counted the growing cost and no-one thought that tomorrow might be worse than today, least of all on that day so long ago when Sonja’s parents had steamed into the port of Hobart with their sixteen-month-old daughter, at what they thought was the end of their long flight from Europe.

  As Sonja drove past the electricity transmission towers, strutting across this forlorn land like giant, muscle-bound warriors, she drank it all in, immersed herself in that world beyond the windows. She always did this: immerse herself in surfaces. In the appearance of things. She had succeeded in turning what was once a simple desire into a forceful habit that had now obtained for the greater part of her adult life. For which people liked her. She did not trespass upon their hearts or memories. Nor did she reveal hers.

  How could she? How could she?

  My friendships are gone and my memories broken, thought Sonja, gone and broken.

  Beyond this dead land of towers and sheep Sonja drove, into the highlands, only recently cleared by the woodchippers, leaving the land as if after war: a shock as far as the eye could see of churned up mud and ash, punctuated here and there by a massive charred stump, still smouldering weeks after the burn-off of the waste rainforest that could not be made into tissue paper for Japan. Parts of me are dead, Sonja thought. Her stomach knotted. Ashes and tissue paper, Sonja thought, looking at the wastelands around her. She drove on.

  You are not your past, Sonja counselled herself, can never be reduced or explained by the past. You are your dreams, which is why Sydney—that sly city of alluring promise—is the place for me. I am what I am now. I lived here once, true, but that was then, and this is now. That’s all. That’s all there is and ever will be. I am my dreams of tomorrow. The past is not your fate, and you make your chances like you drive a car, either slowly, risking nothing, gaining nothing, or fast, where all that matters is just what is in front of you at this moment, and everything that is behind you is totally irrelevant.

  As she turned off the main road onto a rutted gravel road, Sonja pressed her foot down as if in affirmation of these thoughts, but the car, a four cylinder, was sluggish in response. She drove along the road through the broken bush that arises after logging and fire until she came over a crest beyond which she saw the top of a dam giving way to an expanse of water so vast that it appeared an ocean. She halted, looking out past the wave-torn waters, to where rainforest and moorland and snow capped mountains merged into a single wild land stretching away as far as the eye could see.

  That land did not welcome her or care for her, any more than it had welcomed or cared for her parents who had come to live here so long before. And yet this land had shaped her, shaped them all.

  And they it.

  Sonja switched the car radio on, lighted a cigarette. A radio newsreader was talking of bewildered border guards who, only a few months before, had shot dead a man trying to escape to West Berlin, and who were now waving huge crowds of East Berliners into the west through holes made by cranes. ‘The Berlin Wall,’ said the newsreader in a flat voice, as if doing a promo for a pizza parlour, ‘the great symbol of the Cold War, has fallen.’

  It meant nothing to her, this news, that history, and she sat there enveloped in smoke, both part of and beyond history, forgotten by history, irrelevant to history, yet shaped entirely by it, unintelligible without comprehending its frontiers and those, like her and her parents, who had come to live beyond them. Because in the end history—like the Berlin Wall—shapes people, had shaped her, but would not in the end determine her, because in the end it cannot account for the great irrational—the great human—forces: the destructive power of evil, the redeeming power of love. But all this lay before Sonja like the waters held back by the dam: immense, mysterious, waiting.

  Sonja switched the radio off, stubbed the cigarette out without having drawn upon it, turned the car and drove slowly down the hill to the bottom of the aged dam.

  Chapter 5

  1989

  THE CORROSION OF the years made it difficult to tell where the dam’s concrete ended and the rock of the gorge in which it was built began. But there was no denying its power, its scale: she knew her hire car would appear only as a miserable, minuscule scratch of red at the base of the huge black dam wall. The mossed and slimed dam seemed to her a relic from another age—an historical oddity as curious and as inexplicable as a Mayan temple in a Mexican jungle—part of a dream that sought to transform the end of the world into a place just like all others, and failed. She switched off the engine, and summoning a breath and with it her courage, stepped out of the car.

  There gathered in the pungent damp air about her the sense of imprisoned souls that clusters in the shadowed bases of such vast wet edifices, and that pressing dankness heightened within her a feeling of premonition.

  She fingered an aged bronze plaque she found bolted onto the slimy black concrete wall, felt each upraised bronze letter with her fingertips. It read—

  FOR THE MEN OF ALL NATIONS

  WHO BY BUILDING THIS DAM

  HELPED HARNESS NATURE

  FOR THE BETTERMENT OF MANKIND

  1955

  —and Sonja felt the emptiness of each word, the utter insignificance of each bold upright shape, and wondered if they were ever anything other than hieroglyphics which none divined.

  A memory suddenly burst upon Sonja and she abruptly butted her forehead into the dam face to force it all back down. Then as the memory receded and her fear abated, Sonja slowly turned her face to one side of the wet concrete and looked to the west, her cheek pressing upon one of the numerous cream-coloured stalactites that formed from leaching calcium to roll like tears down the face of the dam. As if trying to comprehend the cold dam’s unfathomable mystery, Sonja stretched her arms out to embrace the bottom of that vast curved concrete wall—an engineer’s grotesque pot belly that hummed and vibrated with the power of the swollen mass of water imprisoned upon the other side. She felt the dramatic raking angle of the dam, its curvature at once strident and restrained, its ongoing desire to render everything around it as industrial—even nature itself. But she could see that the ageing dam was decaying back into the natural world, rather than, as its makers had intended, the other way around.

  She felt the power that still remained within the huge structure, the power not simply to make electricity but to summon visions of another time, a distant time of triumphant belief and total confidence. She felt all this through the damp, chilled flesh of her cheek, all this and more.

  She felt the power pushing upon her skull, wondered what would happen were the dam suddenly to burst and its waters, so many years trapped and waiting on the other side silent and black and falsely still, to surge forth in monstrous cascades and carry her away.

  Children grow frightened at such places. Unlike adults who have a faith in the infallibility of engineers’ calculations, children unerringly know that what is made by people can break. Children know that ships sink, planes crash and dams burst. Adults, by and large, do not. At that moment Sonja felt herself a child once more. A child on a cold, snowy night. Leaning against the dam, spreading her arms out along the dam wall, she felt as a child searching for reassurance, as if the huge construction were some long lost parent.

  She did not mean to do such a ludicrous thing, to be there looking such a fool hugging the wet black dam, an aphid upon a boulder, but as she clutched the dam so, she once more felt the strange sensation gathering her guts together, and the memory burst upon her again, like a skyrocket breaking a black night into a million fragments of colour. And Sonja Buloh knew w
ithout having words for knowing why she had not before allowed the scraps of memory shape and form, those ashes and shadows of the past that it was becoming increasingly difficult to turn away from, that in the soft mist of that afternoon were turning themselves from broken bush into saplings and the saplings into trees and the trees into a forest.

  And in the midst of that forest grew a small rude town of long ago, and in one of its rough shacks, behind a white tablecloth, sat a small child playing with her mother once upon a time.

  Chapter 6

  1954

  CAUGHT BETWEEN PLAY and enchantment, it all returned to her mind now as something akin to a magician’s set. There was a table made from an upturned wooden box, down the side of which ran a single word stencilled in fading red paint: GELIGNITE. Upon it sat the white lace tablecloth that ought to have been crisp as it was freshly washed, but the all-pervasive dampness had overpowered even the stiffness of the starch and left the lace beautifully soft. And on the tablecloth sat a toy china teapot, small and delicate and elegantly circled with a motif of scarlet brambles, and around it three similarly decorated tea cups on saucers.

  Sometimes then, often, forever, it rained, hailed, sleeted, snowed. The smell of the damp eucalypt palings that clad the walls exhaling their aromatic resin into the house, mingling with the fragrance of the myrtle burning in the fireplace. Above the low cracking of the flames a child’s voice. The three-year-old child Sonja’s voice.

  Saying: ‘Turska kava for Artie—turska kava for Mama—turska kava for Sonja.’ And punctuating each phrase she pretend-poured from teapot into cup.

  An adult woman’s hand came down and its index finger rested on the spout of the teapot. The hand was young, oh so young, but rough, bearing already the marks of long years of harsh toil. And the voice somehow much older than the hand. Somehow more than a young adult’s voice.

  Maria Buloh’s voice.

  Saying: ‘Tea, Sonja.’ Her ring finger tapping the spout. ‘We drink tea now.’

  Sonja’s fingers, still pudgy with the beautiful glowing flesh of small children, moved over to Maria’s ring finger and began playing with it.

  Sonja saying: ‘Why Mama? Why we drink tea?’

  And Maria wiggling her ring finger this way and that, that thin finger with the wedding ring loose upon it, Maria saying: ‘Because it is Tasmania and not Slovenia. Because our world is upside down.’ And as if to accentuate her point Maria grasped Sonja’s hand firmly and then slowly turned it over revealing Sonja’s palm. Maria ran her ring finger around Sonja’s small palm, raising white circles upon the child’s soft puffy flesh.

  Maria saying: ‘Because to have a future you must forget the past, my little knedel.’

  Then she took Sonja’s four small fingers in her hand and folded them shut over Sonja’s palm.

  And with that gesture the smell of the palings and the fire began to dissolve into the past, the hish of the snow to fade, and the lace-covered magician’s set and the hope it promised was washing away with the memory and Maria was stepping outside into a snow-swept blackness and the door was already closing and it was the same as Sonja always dreamt: the lace was disappearing forever.

  Chapter 7

  1989

  AND THEN THOSE FINGERS, those same elegant fingers with the chewed nails that had felt the smooth and sensual coldness of the stalactite-tears falling down the dam face, those fingers were scrabbling in the bush-covered peat in the middle of the rainforest, at a place only a kilometre or so from the dam site, where once stood a construction camp called Butlers Gorge and where there was now nothing called anything, only strange bird cries and wind and cold and ten elegant fingers with chewed nails clawing at the bleak earth at first slowly and almost respectfully of its secrets then with an urgency mounting into a fury.

  The fingers momentarily stopped when Sonja spied something glinting white in the greasy loam. But only momentarily. Then her fingers lunged at this whiteness, ripped it from the loose ground, and rubbed the dirt away to reveal a shard of porcelain upon which was etched a scarlet bramble.

  Though the clouds above had now stopped moving and had begun to empty their water upon the weird beautiful earth, the falling rain did nothing to impede Sonja. Tall manferns dripped rain upon the ageing stumps of huge eucalypts felled long ago to clear the site for the camp. Above the soft noise of the rain were the desolate, harsh noises of Tasmanian rainforest, the wind up high in the forest canopy, the cries of black cockatoos and crows. But Sonja paid no heed to any of it. Her frenzied fingers were ripping up large sods and flailing them to pieces, pulling the heavy soil apart and in the process finding other porcelain pieces, all similarly broken at odd, sharp angles.

  Until the ten elegant fingers with chewed nails were digging beneath the peat and beyond the wild wet earth below and seemed so frantic and wild as though they were digging into a land within her own skull. As she dug so, Sonja did not scream nor say a thing other than grunts and brief pants.

  As if trying to give birth to that land lost within her skull.

  Chapter 8

  1989

  BOOKENDING EITHER END of the Tullah pub were two massive fireplaces in which huge logs were daily burnt in vain, for the pub was always cold and had the mildewy look of a building that, like many of its patrons, had never properly dried out. Sonja, still damp from being caught in the downpour at Butlers Gorge a few hours earlier, wisely bought a double vodka and found a table in a corner, where she sat and waited.

  The pub’s future was as uncertain as that of the remote mountain hamlet it serviced, and perhaps this explained a certain melancholia Sonja felt as she sat there. It had taken all changes and all types in its stride: both the boom that came when Tullah was made the base for dam-building projects in the mid-1970s, and the winding down that was now under way. Every day more men were leaving, heading out of town early to avoid being caught on the winding mountain passes behind the semi-trailers slowly hauling the mobile homes and single men’s quarters away to be used as the new housing of the poor elsewhere.

  A country band playing at the other end of the room competed, with little success, against the rain on the tin roof. Perhaps because of the noise of the rain the punters’ talk was desultory, reduced to a shrug, an ironic smile, a murmured laugh, a soft shake of the head, and there was in it all a strange tranquillity that Sonja had not expected.

  Halfway through a song Sonja saw him arrive, and she watched him looking for her. The sound of the rain thrashing at the tin roof outside was now deafening to those drinking inside, and for this reason she excused herself not calling to him. In any case he seemed so little changed from her memory of him that she was at first too shocked to know what to do. Sonja had prepared herself to see someone whom she would have difficulty recognising after so long. She had expected him to have grown fat with drink, or frail with emptiness. His life ought have left him shrivelled or bloated, ought have collapsed his face or made it coarse and jowly. She had supposed that she would find a man only roughly approximating him, a man pretending to the looks and figure of his youth with clothes that did not suit.

  But there he was, just the same now as then, neat as a pin as always, hair amazingly still thick and falling in its carefully clipped lustrous waves, a little grey, but only a little. He still seemed the handsome man she had known then. For whatever else she remembered, she could not deny his looks, gentle, almost feminine, a heart shaped face atop a small body that even at a distance she could see retained a measured grace of action and gesture she had inherited. With a small joy that Sonja managed to quash as quickly as it arose in her, she noted how he had dressed up for the occasion—wearing dress pants, a striped cotton shirt and bone cardigan—in a dapper way she forever associated with the working-class Europeans of her childhood. He still has his pride, she thought, and it was that which perhaps surprised her more than anything.

  At length Bojan Buloh spotted Sonja and hailed her with a smile and a nervous wave of his hand. He crossed over to he
r table, she stood up but they did not embrace. They had both come too far for such false intimacy. Not only his mouth, but his whole body reeked of tobacco and drink, the same as it always had, only now it recalled the past as well as suggesting, as it always had, a future with little hope. Up close Sonja saw that her first impression had not been entirely correct, and that the years had taken some toll. His olive complexion could not hide the broken veins that blotched his cheeks. She sensed his movements growing somehow blurred upon being with her as if his body were confused at sudden purpose. She wondered what to call him, whether to say Bojan with its suggestion of equality, or Artie, the affectionate Slovenian word for father. In the end she used neither but settled for a word foreign to her and him, which carried for them both a slight formality.

  ‘Dad,’ Sonja said finally, ‘you look well.’ She knew it wasn’t quite true nor was it untrue. Something had changed but she didn’t know what it was, and not knowing what it was she focused on what had seemingly not altered. ‘Funny,’ Sonja said, ‘twenty-two years and you don’t look a day different.’

  In his face she saw her own, in his mannerisms her very gestures. Curious that she might have forgotten such things: her memory—or rather the tricks her memory played—was of a stranger with whom she had spent some years she would rather not have. Nothing more. But here he was, his hard hands making the same deft, elegant movements that her hands made, lifting, holding, moving, carrying.