The Sound of One Hand Clapping

by Richard Flanagan

  ‘And nothing can help the dead. See?’

  Then realising that he had unintentionally frightened her, he patted her on the knee, forced a smile, then withdrew his hand to the gearstick to drop the engine into second gear so he could take a sharp corner. The car shuddered at the abrupt gear change, and shaking uncertainly father and child swerved down a new road.

  Chapter 19

  1989

  WHEN SONJA CAME into the kitchen a little after seven, Helvi, for whom coffee seemed to be as necessary as air itself, was already on her fifth cup and grinding more beans to make a fresh jug. Jiri, dressed in khaki overalls, big chest pushing out a bigger belly like a bulldozer blade a boulder, fat fingers like salamis delicately holding a piece of toast, sat at the small hexagonal kitchen table he had made out of myrtle, leafing through a Picture Post.

  While some mysteries can be readily seen as such, Sonja’s mystery was one that she preferred to keep hidden. Sonja never tried to explain herself, nor did she believe there was much virtue in talking things out. She found words interesting, even powerful, but never reliable, far less trustworthy, particularly when it came to charting the unknown country of the heart. That morning there were things to explain to Helvi and Jiri that she did not wish to say, that she would avoid saying if she could, because in her heart she perversely cherished her mystery as the one thing that might one day redeem her.

  So as early morning light fell through the kitchen window they all ate silently, and all were clearly uneasy. But something had to be said, and Helvi ended up saying it.

  ‘A bad stomach?’

  ‘Helvi,’ said Jiri in exasperation, holding his hands wide open and apart as if trying to stop a wall falling down, and then took refuge in sipping his coffee behind the bunched-up Picture Post which he now brandished like a fly swat, ready to flatten any further untoward comments.

  There was a long pause. Then Sonja replied, tersely.

  ‘My stomach’s fine.’ Nothing was fine though, and they all knew it. Sonja tried to soften her words, by adding: ‘Now.’ Sonja took one of Jiri’s cigarettes, put it in her mouth and went to light it.

  ‘You’re pregnant,’ said Helvi.

  Jiri looked up from the Picture Post in shock, and spluttered into his coffee.

  Sonja’s lighter froze in position at the tip of the unlit cigarette in her mouth. Her head was twisted to the left and raised in the falsely confident pose that some strike when first lighting a cigarette. Her eyes rolled right and she looked at Helvi. Although Sonja’s face was empty of emotion, there was nevertheless a certain dignity. Still looking at Helvi, she snapped the lighter’s striker back, igniting the flame. The low hiss of gas all that could be heard.

  The cigarette tip flickered then glowed brightly as Sonja drew in a deep, defiant draught of smoke. Sonja’s face, particularly around her cheeks and lips, twitched slightly as she inhaled, betraying a nervousness at odds with the angle of her head. She ran a slightly shaking index finger down the side of her cheek. She took the cigarette out of her lips and before exhaling spoke.

  ‘Yes.’

  Then she blew out a long cloud of smoke that obscured the others’ vision of her.

  ‘You won’t be wanting coffee then, Sonja?’ said Helvi. It was a joke, a small offering, and Sonja smiled.

  ‘No.’ Sonja laughed quietly. ‘Not today. Not for a little while, I expect.’

  They all smiled, though only politely and awkwardly. There was another long pause as each tried to think of what to say next.

  ‘I am—’ Sonja said, but almost simultaneously Helvi asked, ‘When—’ then halted to allow Sonja to finish—‘I am … having it terminated. When I go back. To Sydney. Have to go back anyway. Must go back, Helvi.’ With fingers extended, Sonja rubbed her forehead with the rump of her palm. Her cigarette had gone out. ‘I have made a booking, you see. At a clinic. You know how it is.’ She relighted the cigarette, but after a single light puff, she took it out and rested it in the ashtray where it smouldered, enveloping the three of them in its vaporous question marks.

  Then Sonja shrugged her shoulders, picked the cigarette up, and took another long drag.

  ‘What does it matter?’ she said, though whether as a question or a statement, Helvi and Jiri were unsure. Jesus, thought Jiri. Everything, thought Helvi. But they did not reply.

  Nothing, thought Sonja. Fucking nothing, just like me.

  Chapter 20

  1989

  IN DREAMS SONJA hoped to find the innocence she felt evaded her in life. For she felt guilt in her waking life, felt that all things, most particularly her own self, were her fault, and the fault was one of character, of a person who was ultimately incapable of good. This was a foolish notion and she knew it to be so, but nevertheless it was more easily dismissed from her mind than purged from her soul. Possibly this was why she had endured so many bad men for so long and possibly also why, when finally she found a good man in the form of Koló Amado, she ended up treating him almost as badly as she had been treated by the previous men in her life. This was curious and she knew it to be so. But she felt no urge to hold him or caress him and in bed lay as still as the earth, marvelling only at the sweated labour he would waste in the useless task of trying to arouse her body. She would at such times imagine her body as earth covered by a highway over which innumerable cars roughly rode, and her body below souring into acrid, lifeless clay beneath layer after layer of blackness. And at the end of his ever more desperate, confused fumblings Koló Amado inevitably apologised as if it were his fault. She wanted to love him, sometimes even thought she might love him, but was unable to show any such love and was bemused that he could not understand this if he loved her.

  ‘My poor suburban boy,’ Sonja would sometimes whisper, though Koló Amado, the issue of a short affair between a Timorese shopkeeper and an Albanian nurse, was in age a year older than her and came from north Queensland. Nevertheless, there was about him a docility she both liked and resented.

  In desperation Koló Amado turned to perversions to try and reach her, and while these afforded her mild amusement she grew quickly bored with this empty theatre of sexuality and felt guilty once more and advised him to do it simply and quickly and be done with it so that she might sleep, and dream. Yet much as she sought release in her dreams, they only returned her to what she was able to avoid in her waking hours. So she lived for many years, catapulting daily between the past of her dreams and the present of her waking hours, wanting neither, unable to reconcile one with the other.

  So when she awoke lying on her side each morning to find Koló Amado still there, lying behind her, his arm thrown over her hip, his loins wrapped around her buttocks, she always felt a strange moment of anger. Which was perhaps why, upon realising she was pregnant, she had to ask him to leave.

  Koló Amado protested that he would not leave. Being at heart a good man he would not have left her at all if he had known that within her was their growing child, and being at heart a good man he left her because that was her wish, however little he could understand it or make sense of it.

  Unable to dream that night, stranded in a strange single bed covered with a handwoven Finnish quilt, resplendent in a worn pair of Jiri’s flannelette pyjamas, Sonja sat up and looked down into the gully of the bedspread made by her legs, at the shards of broken china from Butlers Gorge that lay there. About her the silence that only exists within the womb of rain falling upon a tin roof. A child’s ageing lamp cast its light, low and comforting, from the small, cheap chest of drawers upon which it sat. Her bed lay flush against a wall of dressed and estapoled pine logs that rose into darkness, and upon one shadowed wall was an old hunting rifle, and above it, a kangaroo skin as decoration. A Finnish interior with antipodean flourishes.

  Once more she tried to piece the broken china fragments together. Roughly balanced, they were part of a three-dimensional jigsaw—something that once was a teapot, its base and part of its spout clearly identifiable—that kept falling apart. />
  After a time she gave up and let the shards drop from her cupped hands onto her quilted lap. Then she picked up the bottom of her shirt and pulled it up from her waist to her breasts, exposing her belly. With her right hand she took a porcelain jag, pushed its point into the softness of her lower stomach, and slowly pulled it straight up her stomach’s centre toward her chest, pushing it hard into her flesh as though it were a knife. She felt that sharp edge threatening to tear her flesh, heard his voice once more.

  Saying: And nothing can help the dead.

  The jag left a hot, red streak in its wake. Upon reaching the well of Sonja’s navel its journey altered. Without taking any tension off the porcelain, she dragged it across to the right of her stomach and then back down and around, until it was the full moon of her belly she was so describing. But then her grip grew looser and her movement slower and more rhythmical until she was caressing her belly with the porcelain shard. Then, as if by accident, the shard fell into her lap, and only her hand remained, gently rubbing her slowly swelling belly in curious marvel.

  Chapter 21

  1989

  THE SAME NIGHT, but a different drumming of rain on a corrugated-iron roof. A different darkness. And within it, on the other side of the island, within a remote mountain camp, in his bed in his room in the Tullah single men’s quarters Bojan Buloh suddenly sat up, switched on the light, rubbed his eyes and then his head with his hands.

  He had the hunted look of a man beset with bad dreams.

  Bojan looked at his arms, which were covered in sweat. And then ran a hand over his face for a second time and realised that his face was similarly affected.

  Bojan got up and opened his door. Outside a gale raged. He did not shut his door, but left it open, pushing a jam under it to stop it slamming. Nor did he immediately go back and sit down on his bed but instead remained standing there, a dark figure framed in the doorway, the small room behind him brightly lit by the naked electric bulb, his breath forming a fog in the cold.

  Sometimes there was a balance, very fine it was, and it could be struck and he could hold it. Hold it all down for weeks, months, even years. But then something would happen, a smell, a song, a white flower—and back everything would rush, a giant wave coming in to swamp him, and no matter how fast he ran it wasn’t fast enough. He wished she had lived it too so that it would not divide them, this watery wall of memory which prickled his flesh nightly. Maybe that’s why he liked drinking with Jo and Pavel and the others. Not because he liked them.

  Because if anything he disliked them.

  They were drunks. They were, at times, violent men. At times, bad men. That he could see. But it went beyond liking or disliking. If he had been asked what he thought of them, he would probably have had to say that he was even frightened by their hate and violence and desire for the dark things, was frightened most by how much like them he had become. But they too had seen some things, and they too rarely—if ever—talked about them.

  Pavel had served first in the Polish Army, then the Red Army, then, when overrun by the Wehrmacht in 1941, had been pressed into serving in the Germans’ Russian army. When in 1943 he had been captured once more by the Red Army he had, by fast talking and the production of a long hidden Komosol card, evaded a bullet and was instead sent for seven years to the labour camps of Kolyma. And of what did Pavel talk? How in the Arctic cold of Kolyma one got rid of lice by burying your jacket in the permafrost overnight, leaving only a tail of the jacket above ground. The Kolyma tail, Pavel would joke, for in it would gather all the lice living in the jacket to avoid being frozen to death. Then one would burn this gathering.

  The Kolyma tail, Pavel would joke, that’s us.

  Those were the stories they told: funny stories, strange stories, that echoed into their present. Seven years in the Gulag. How on his job application form for the Hydro his English interviewer had written ‘seven years forestry experience, Russia’. That was a funny thing about which they all laughed. That was something about which they could talk. But there was much more that they chose not to tell.

  Of what did Pavel not talk?

  That when he returned to Poland his wife and children had disappeared, executed, it was said by the Communist authorities, by the Germans who had in their time denied it and said it was the work of the Russians. Who did it, Pavel was beyond caring. His family was massacred with numberless others and thrown into a pit, the covering earth of which reportedly heaved for some hours afterwards.

  Of what did Bojan Buloh tell? How when running messages as a child for the partisans in 1944 he had been sent to a house up a distant valley of which, when he came close to it, he felt suspicious. A few hundred metres from the house the boy Bojan suddenly turned and bolted, and then tumbling out of the house came a dozen German soldiers who pursued him, as Bojan told it, a little in the manner of the Keystone cops.

  And of what did Bojan Buloh not tell?

  That upon finally returning to his home at 4 a.m. the following day he had found his family already up, their preparations for flight complete, believing the boy Bojan must have been caught by the Germans, who would soon come for them after having made the child betray them. In a corner bound to a kitchen chair to prevent her harming herself further, he saw his mute Aunt Angelica who had grown so frightened that she had tried to kill herself earlier that evening, by slitting her throat. He had stared in horror at the thick blood-slubbed cloth wrapped around her neck, a dark red scarf of unspeakable fear.

  He didn’t tell of that, of any of the various wretched deaths he had seen, of the one he still had nightmares about—how, when shepherding cattle in the alps he had inadvertently witnessed a German column led by Slovenian fascists ambush a derelict border house, used occasionally by the partisans. Bojan had seen the German column marching toward the house and he had hidden in a pine tree a few hundred metres up the slope. He saw them shoot like rabbits the partisans as they ran out of the house, but nothing prepared the child for what next took place.

  They killed all but one of the partisans, whom they made dig a hole in the ground. It was still early morning, and after half an hour or so of the partisan making very slow going of the rocky mountain soil, the German soldiers presumably grew sick of waiting, for the hole was nowhere deep enough for its purpose. They made the partisan squat in his shallow hole and they filled the hole back in, leaving only the partisan’s head exposed.

  Then they kicked that head back and forth like some weird fixed football until the partisan was dead. They left in a lighthearted mood, as if after a fine day’s hunting. Bojan, fearful of being discovered, remained high up in the pine tree all the rest of the morning and all the afternoon, and only came down with the sun’s descent. And all that long time he was in the pine tree Bojan sobbed silently, staring down at that head erupting from the earth at a broken angle, like a snapped flower stem.

  Bojan’s friendships now, such as they were, were with strangers who without being told, knew the horror of each other’s story, who demanded no explanations, and gave no justification for their own bad behaviour. They never told these stories, perhaps because they knew there was nothing remarkable about any of them, because they knew they were shared by millions upon millions of people, because all that they had seen had taught them this one terrible truth that no-one should have to bear: that people are horrific and evil beyond imagining. There was worse. There were horrors Bojan kept within him without even a story to enclose them, that he kept shapeless in the hope of dissolving them.

  But sometimes, if Bojan were out in the bush hunting early of a winter’s morning, and the sky was clearing enough that the sun was chopping apart black clouds, he would feel the canker of dread growing out of his stomach into the bush around him, and though he wanted to look away he had to see it once more, yet again, looking up into the trees.

  Into the trees, Christ, thought Bojan Buloh as he sat upon his bed, what sort of thought is that?

  He took a towel off a hook on the back of the
door and towelled the sweat from his arms and neck, then took off his wet singlet and towelled his torso. He put the towel neatly down on the rail at the end of his bed. He lighted a cigarette and sat on the side of his bed, clad only in his underpants, smoking, thinking.

  Sonja went. Sonja come back.

  Like a ghost I don’t want to see. Like the ghosts that Maria screamed at when we went to bed, that she pleaded with to take her but not her father. Maria went. And her and her ghosts never came back. Till this. Till now.

  Sonja come back.

  What does she want, what does the fucken bitch want of me? I liked her better when she hated me. See, that you can understand, you follow. But this, there is no understanding, no following. Because it follows no sense, see. Like old things.

  Outside a worker clad in a black bluey with a fluoro orange yoke scurried across the front of the quarters and into darkness. If he had momentarily turned and looked he would have seen the rain scratching diagonal dashes across an open doorway, within which a small hunched man sat semi-naked on a bed, the light from the room forming a yellow halo around his shrivelling body. But the fleeting figure never turned, of course. On such a night, simply to stare at an old wog-worker, why would he?

  I hate them, bloody hell I hate them all the old things. Old houses that they like now, I think they just fucken rubbish and why do people bother. I like the laminex and the aluminium windows and the smell of drying mud between the bricks. That I like. The new things you see you can smell, and they only smell of a man’s sweat that he put into making them. Oh yeh and glue, for sure, and all them smells.