The Sound of One Hand Clapping

by Richard Flanagan

  Bojan’s room belonged, as did Bojan, nowhere. It was empty of aspirations, of delusions, of dreams. It was neat enough, sparkling in its austere emptiness on that day that Sonja visited, and she knew that her father would always keep it that way. He had always hated dirt, mess, evidence of what had been. In addition to his steel bed Bojan had a small TV. An old transistor in a leather case that she remembered from her childhood. A chest of drawers. A kitchen chair, steel tubed and orange vinyled. A small fridge. A small wooden wardrobe he had decorated himself, painting on each of its two doors a white flower with pointed petals. It was a quirk of his which she had forgotten, this painting of flowers on things, even on his construction helmet and her first hockey stick.

  By day Bojan’s room was lit, as each room was, by the dusty light that tumbled from the one small window set high up in the wall opposite the door. Sometimes he sat there, a silhouette of a man skewered into this world only by the shafts of light down which motes unrolled like illuminated letters in a mediaeval manuscript, and imagined himself a monk in some distant Balkan monastery. A man who had renounced everything and scourged his flesh daily in the hope, forever unrealised and unrealisable, of purging his soul of its terrible demons. He punished his innocent body terribly with drink and with labour, felt his flesh gnarl and wither, felt his guts bloat like a dead man’s, felt his head throb with the dull agony of it all, but within him something sharp still cut, something undeniable, and as long as he felt that pain he knew there still remained within him a soul, and he would have done anything to be rid of it, would have renounced it, traded it, thrown it like rubbish on the road and walked on.

  But it was not possible.

  Chapter 12

  1989

  BOJAN BULOH’S SHADOW fell across the table, darkening the food, all that beautiful food of her childhood, the meats and salads he made with such gentleness and love that she knew that the man who hit her was not the same man who was her father whose fingers so gently stuffed the mince and herbs into the sausage skins, that the man who said such obscene things was not the same man who was her father who found such beauty in a tub of fermenting sauerkraut, who giggled when he saw the first shoots in his vegetable garden arise in early spring and who once wiped a tear away when he saw his tomatoes glistening in a sun shower.

  She moved her seat slightly so that she would not be in his shadow and therefore could better see her father.

  ‘What’s wrong?’ he asked. ‘You don’t like? Not Sydney tucker. Won’t eat your wog tucker anymore?’

  ‘No,’ she said.

  ‘I fucken love it,’ he said, and smiled. ‘Sorry.’

  Sonja smiled too, in wonderment, in sadness, that he might boyishly apologise for a single bad word now when once he had used no others. Known few others.

  Bojan was more confident now that he was on his own territory, but both he and Sonja still felt awkward with each other. So he talked upon a neutral subject, though an important one for him.

  ‘In the canteen,’ said Bojan, ‘they serve Aussie food, you know these mountain camps, chops and stews and cakes and chops, it’s orright you know, but it’s not right for me, so—’ and he halted, smiling, chortling a little to himself, waiting for Sonja to respond.

  ‘So?’

  ‘So,’ he said with a hint of triumph, ‘so I have to make my things for myself, or otherwise I bloody starve.’

  And with a flourish he opened the fridge, which she saw was stacked full of smallgoods, the likes of which she had not seen since her childhood. From the fridge and from his wardrobe which he used to dry other foods in, Bojan prepared a sumptuous spread for their tea. Upon a card table he arranged salamis, cheeses, salads made of beans and potato and tomato, pickled mushrooms, grilled capsicums, smoked trout, and bread. Then they sat down to eat, he one side of the card table upon his bed, she on the other side sitting on the orange vinyled chair.

  ‘What you think of that meat?’ Bojan asked, pointing to a plate of sliced meat.

  ‘It’s lovely shinken,’ Sonja said.

  ‘Bloody shinken my arse,’ Bojan said. ‘You know what that is? That’s a thousand times better than bloody shinken. That’s kangaroo!’

  Sonja looked up at him in surprise. Bojan laughed.

  ‘Yeh, kangaroo. I shoot it, I pickle it, and then I smoke it. It’s beautiful, bloody beautiful. No cholest-o-roll,’ he said, labouring the word. ‘And that’s important for your health.’

  Sonja smiled. A little.

  ‘In Sydney,’ Bojan continued, ‘I bet you don’t eat kangaroo.’

  ‘No,’ Sonja said.

  ‘No,’ Bojan said, pouring two serves of a clear liquid from a coke bottle into two small glasses. ‘That’s bloody right. No bloody way. And you are unhealthy, because you eat rubbish.’ He passed one glass to Sonja. ‘Now you drink this.’

  Before drinking, Bojan gave the obligatory Slovenian toast—‘Nostrarvia!’—and they both took a few sips.

  ‘Is good, eh?’ Bojan said. ‘Apricot schnapps and leatherwood honey. Us and them.’ He laughed at this unlikely union of central European drink and Tasmanian food. ‘A Croatian down the road makes it.’

  So they ate and drank, until little remained upon the card table apart from the honeyed schnapps bottle. So they drank, so they talked, until the talking became as easy as the food and drink. She asked him how he felt about all the rivers being dammed, whether he thought it good or bad, and he grew garrulous.

  ‘Of course it’s bad,’ he said. ‘It’s fucken wrong. I tell you, I used to walk up the banks of that Murchison River and the Mackintosh River and the Pieman River, up that bloody rainforest and I love it up there. All fucken day and then sometimes even the night and the next day. I’d just make myself a nest like a fucken bird I would make this nest beautiful it was bloody beautiful branches of myrtle lined with soft dead-man fern fronds. I would catch trout and cook them for tea and for breakfast when I woke so beautiful I sleep you wouldn’t believe the things I seen and then even more strange this one morning I am lying in my nest and I see him, a fucken Tassie tiger. Well I know they supposed to be extinct and I had been drinking all that night before in my nest, drinking peach schnapps and fruity lexia and I know I wasn’t feeling that right but I know what I know I see, and I see this fucken Tassie tiger maybe this far away, maybe three metres at the most. And I laugh, because it’s funny you know, me being in a nest and the tiger wandering about, and I start talking to him. I say: “Maybe it’s me who should be dead.” The tiger just looks at me. I say: “Maybe I am dead,” and I thought maybe the fruity lexia had pushed me over the edge and I had died and this was heaven. Or maybe the other place. So I ask him: “Cobber—is this hell?” And I laugh again. The tiger still doesn’t say anything but then he opens his mouth wide, so wide you wouldn’t believe. Jeezuz Christ, I thought his jaw would fall apart, and in his mouth I saw all these terrible things from my childhood and well, I tell you, I never drink that bloody fruity lexia again.’

  So they drank and they talked. Until the bottle was near empty, until Bojan looked at Sonja, sucked in his breath, and asked, ‘You have a fella?’

  Sonja tried to avoid having people become part of her life, because to allow them entry to her life was inevitably to invite their departure, and that was to make the pain of her loneliness as hard and visible and undeniable as first light. It was impossible, of course, to try and maintain such a position of isolation, to live only as a denial of life. She had known off and on the sweet warmth and heavy odours of a shared bed and a common life, had slept with many men, and, when younger, a few women, sometimes out of desire and more often simply for comfort. But then she found she could no longer satisfy desire nor find comfort.

  So she said nothing, looked across at Bojan and smiling slightly, shook her head. Bojan sensed that perhaps he was on to something, though he guessed wrongly as to what that something was. He smiled as though he had just caught an animal.

  ‘Ah. I know,’ he said. ‘You have a fella.
’

  How to please men, that she knew so well, that was so easy. With her body she was mostly generous. Her flesh she would feel moving in response to their thrusts and pulsations, and sometimes even moving in accordance with its own remote desires. But within her head nothing moved. Within her soul nothing trembled. She did all that men wanted of her, and did it with a cold vigour that they found erotic.

  But if afterwards they rolled over in their sleep and spontaneously spooned into her, the sudden warmth would wake her instantly and she would wake them, would roll them back to the far side of the bed, would draw an imaginary line down the middle of the bed with her index finger and say, ‘Don’t touch me while I dream, I cannot bear it, to be touched so while I dream.’

  And her dreams were strange, unknowable, unfathomable depths into which she descended searching for things lost long, long ago. The things that once moved, that once trembled with a force that was then irresistible.

  ‘I’ve had too many fellas,’ Sonja said flatly, finally.

  But Bojan misread what Sonja was trying to tell him. ‘No. I know,’ he said, waggling a finger in the air. ‘Now you have a special fella. No?’

  Sometimes, though rarely, a man had got closer. She liked some of them: it was undeniable. Sometimes a vague longing came over her to touch, to cuddle. But the moment that feeling came upon her with a man, she began to grow cold, and she would allow them then to drift apart as a couple, quickly, quickly, before the feeling grew into something more. For they were worse than the men she disliked, for they shucked her open as if she were only an oyster and their love that only of the gourmand, opening her up where she wished to remain closed. Her coldness with them came upon her like a seasonal change; not turned on in anger as some shouted in frustrated rage; simply a chill that permeated her and which would not depart until the man who had brought the coldness on was also gone.

  She had tended to end up with the easier, more straightforward company of the men who cheated on her, the men who came home late with bodies full of foreign scents and hands full of flowers, with the men who used her for sex or for company or for money or for any combination of the three. With them she at least felt comfortable, for they only posed bearable problems that existed in the present and never touched upon the unbearable nature of her past.

  Sonja gave up any pretence of telling her father the truth and just shook her head in gentle reproach. Bojan Buloh continued with some conviction and determination.

  ‘I know. It’s none a my business, but this fella of yours, when do I get to meet him?’

  He ran a hand through his neat wavy hair. His quarrelsome, foolish hair, she thought. It irritated her. The way he still thought he understood when he understood nothing, about them, least of all her. Least of all him. And, because it was despair that she felt, she smiled once more and lied.

  ‘Not … not for a while. He didn’t come. He’s still in Sydney. Work.’ She shrugged her shoulders. Her smile at that moment was enchanting. ‘Busy.’

  ‘He is honourable, yes?’ Bojan asked. ‘He will marry you proper, yeah?’ Sonja said nothing and Bojan became strident. ‘What did the bastard say? I tell you what he will say when Bojan Buloh finds him and puts a knife under his throat.’

  As he talked Bojan Buloh made elaborate gestures indicating the fate of the fella should he be so unlucky as to fall into Bojan’s hands. Sonja took his violently inclined hands and held them in hers, but it was a hollow gesture, for nothing had been bridged.

  ‘It is alright. It will be alright,’ she told her father.

  Then she picked up the coke bottle of apricot schnapps and honey and emptied it, pouring generous nips into their two beer glasses. Bojan sensed that something was being hidden, and he thought it him from some new beau.

  ‘I understand,’ he said. ‘You do not want him to meet me. I understand. Should you want him to meet me? No. I am nothing. Nothing to be proud of.’ He shrugged his shoulders and spoke as he thought, without self pity, with no emotion. ‘A nobody at the end of the world. If you love him, you would not want him to see what your father is.’

  ‘No,’ Sonja said. ‘It’s not like that.’

  ‘But you love him, no?’ Bojan said. ‘And that is…’

  But Sonja was passing a glass to her father, putting the other to her lips, and with another thin smile raising her glass, giving the toast, albeit in a melancholic way—‘Nostrarvia’—throwing her head back and draining the glass in the old world’s fashion, with a single gulp. Then, also in the Mitteleuropean manner, placing the thumb of her right hand on her right cheek and with one swift movement of her index finger wiping her upper lip dry. Then the index finger fell. Again she smiled. But her face was curiously without expression, devoid of hope. The lacquer of liquor warmed Sonja’s throat. The idea of love struck her once more as faintly comical, strongly treacherous, and forever elusive.

  ‘Who,’ she said in a flat, matter-of-fact way, ‘who would hope for love?’

  Bojan Buloh went to look down but his gaze caught Sonja’s. His eyes like shards of shattered beer bottle. He pulled his bottom lip up, thought, went to repeat Sonja’s necessary, sustaining lie but then halted. And looked away.

  Who?

  Chapter 13

  1954

  ALL THAT FOLLOWED should be told as quickly as possible, for that was the way it all seemed to happen, and now it seems as if it happened even faster still, within a matter of hours or even minutes, whereas of course it may have been longer, possibly days or even weeks. But it came upon Bojan Buloh and his small daughter as a cavalcade, a terrible disaster that seemed to spiral ever outwards, as though the worst thing were not the initial act of violence but its inevitable growing consequences.

  No-one spoke much to Bojan Buloh. Some drank with him, but the drink had no effect upon his body for it was as though his soul had fled his body and followed his wife into the forest. He swallowed beer and home-distilled schnapps with the same indifference he swallowed the prayers of Father Flannery who came to see him. Once he would have thrown the priest out of his home, but now he simply poured drinks for himself and the priest in equally large measures until the man of the cloth was so drunk that he was later seen vomiting behind the truck depot.

  While Bojan cared not whether he felt anything or nothing, cared not whether he could hold such prodigious amounts of drink, he simultaneously could not help but marvel at what he could hold within himself and not break, so much drink and so much more, as if he were transforming into the very dam he daily toiled upon. With this realisation he came close to weeping, because he recognised it as the shadow thrown by the huge shapeless things that had changed him. He felt as if he were in some huge dark tunnel down which he was travelling toward a pinprick of light a great distance away and with a sudden moment of clarity late one evening he was able to see that the pinprick of light was Sonja. But this feeling was succeeded by one of frustration and despair, for no matter how far and how long he travelled in blackness he could not reach the pinprick of light. All these confusing and contradictory things he felt and others beside. There was no clear line to follow in such thinking. Only a chaos and him existing only as its container.

  It should all be told as slowly and carefully as possible, for such a thing demands explanation and understanding, but no way of telling does it any justice. Days and weeks fled by with the speed of a few seconds, and a few seconds stretched into an eternity of suffering. It was beyond any human tolerance and compressed beyond any human sense and none of it can be understood or explained.

  The foreman spoke with the supervising engineer and the supervising engineer spoke with the project superintendent whose wife was full of the stories that were sweeping the camp as to why it had all happened and the strangeness of the reffo and of his wife and of their daughter who was not like a child at all, but whose face was a mask containing God knows what queer thoughts. And the project superintendent told the supervising engineer who told the foreman who told Bojan that he wa
s being allowed a fortnight’s compassionate leave which mystified Bojan who didn’t understand what the English word ‘compassion’ meant. He ignored the foreman and continued turning up for work each day, because it offered him at least the sense of a life beyond the tunnel, even if he observed it only from a great, great distance as a land he might one day reach. Not that he went through the motions at his work. Far from it.

  With a sledge hammer he broke stone as if it were his own mind. His hammer rose and fell as if it were a drumstick pounding out a crazed, cracked rhythm on the valley stone, and his extraordinary labour was watched by all around the dam site with wonder, as boulders crumbled to gravel beneath his blows. When a film unit turned up to shoot footage for the Commission recording the construction of the dam, the wild wog labouring was one of the more remarkable sights pointed out to the film crew as worthy of shooting.

  Cameraman Earl Kane framed the peculiar scene in his fingers. Frankly he didn’t have a damn clue how to capture it all with the pissant gear they had equipped him with for the job. Not like the old days with the newsreel mob back in Sydney. Good gear, good jobs, good operators. But work was work and there was bugger-all these days for a cameraman unless he wanted to go into one of the new television studios and be buggered if that had any appeal. Earl Kane sighed. He unscrewed the legs of the tripod only to discover one was broken. Jesus, thought Earl Kane, how the hell can I be expected…? A voice from further up the rutted gravel road broke his thoughts.