The Sound of One Hand Clapping

by Richard Flanagan

  Old things they smell of all the things of all the people who have lived there. Of all the things that have happened. They smell like shit. I hate that smell. I like the new smell of sweat and glue and mortar and gyprock dust. I like new, see, because it don’t remember.

  Fucken hell.

  Why she come back?

  After a time Bojan grew cold and began to shiver. He took his bluey coat down from a hook on the back of the door and pulled it over his shoulders. Encompassed in the coat’s black stiffness, he sat back down, still shaking, smoking, thinking.

  In contrast to those of his old friend Bojan Buloh’s, Jiri’s dreams were anything but troubled. He ate heavily, drank overmuch, and slept easily. In his dreams he had constant trouble remaining fixed to the earth, and had a tendency to begin to rise up into the air, sometimes only a matter of inches, at other times a matter of many metres. At which point and from which unique vantage he had this particular night the curious power of seeing into people’s souls, which, he discovered, sat, somewhat peculiarly, like a luminous cockatoo’s sulphur crest attached to the back of the crown of the head. He saw Bojan, an old bird in a cage, incessantly plucking out all his feathers and every day the feathers, to the bird’s chagrin, growing back. He saw Sonja’s crest and bizarrely it looked like a feathered egg. He smelt the sleeping form of Helvi who lay on her side next to him. A warm and heavy smell. Like compost, he thought. For all the many, many years he had been with her he had always loved the secret joy, the complicity, the extraordinary sensation of smelling Helvi as she slept. He gently pressed his nose a little closer to her windcheatered back, and, intoxicated with the strength of the heady smell of Helvi, a smell somewhere between fruit and bread, found himself soaring once more in his dreams, far, far above the ground, searching for cockatoo crests.

  Then suddenly he was falling out of the sky and crashing into the earth, and he had awoken with a sudden start and a few wild groans and grunts to find that Helvi was no longer lying next to him but sitting up in the chair next to their bed, looking at some old photographs.

  ‘I couldn’t sleep,’ Helvi said, seeing her husband awake.

  Jiri merely murmured an acknowledgement, pulled the covers aside and went to the bathroom to relieve himself. A working man of some sixty-four and a half hard years, he shook his head in despair at the poor stream that slowly dribbled into the toilet bowl, and remembered with envy the high pressure days of his youth. Outside the rain poured with a taunting fury.

  When he returned to their bedroom Helvi was still looking at the photographs.

  ‘You know you interfering again,’ said Jiri. ‘It’s hard enough for her, the poor girl—let her work it out herself.’

  ‘I owe it to her mother,’ said Helvi. She looked up at her husband, his face a battered bollard that appeared permanently startled.

  ‘I do feel that, Jiri. For Maria,’ said Helvi.

  Jiri saw that she was even more troubled than he had first thought. He waved a big hand in a gesture of dismissal.

  ‘Ah, Helvi—why you look at those old photographs, they just upset you. Put them away.’

  Helvi’s composure suddenly cracked and tears began to roll down her cheeks. Jiri sat next to her on the side of the bed. He put his hand around her back, but Helvi, preoccupied with her memories, would not be comforted and did not draw close. She continued sitting as she was and quietly wept. And as she wept she spoke once more, though her words seemed addressed not to Jiri, but to something both far away and omnipresent.

  ‘After all these years,’ said Helvi, ‘I still grieve.’

  Chapter 22

  1989

  WELL IT’S A FUNNY THING, thought Jiri as he lay back down in his bed, this life of mine. In Czechoslovakia he had drunk with the Gypsies. In Tasmania he drank with the Aborigines. He was never accepted by either, but then he, being half Sudeten German, half Czech, had never felt accepted anywhere.

  After the great exodus of Sudeten Germans in the war’s wake Jiri’s family had remained in Moravia because they felt themselves to be what the Czechs believed his family were not: Czech. The Gypsies who arrived in Moravia in large numbers from Slovakia, where they had been persecuted during the war by the Slovak fascist Hlinka Guards, believed themselves to be only forever travelling o lungo drom, the long road, along which the abandoned German homes in Moravia that they occupied were but way-stations. Jiri was to them a gadjo, a non-gypsy, an outsider to that race of outsiders. Later, Jiri became to the Australians a reffo and then a wog. The Gypsies sang songs of forever travelling, not romantic ballads, but bleak laments and in them Jiri heard something of himself he had until then not known. They sang:

  The crack of doom

  Is coming soon

  Let it come

  It doesn’t matter.

  A short man, sturdy, fat head still full of fine blond hair even now, Jiri was given to smiling along with almost everything others said, partly because as a young man he had discovered that this eased his path through life, partly because it was a mask, and he delighted in the deception, in the way it kept people at bay, happy in presuming him to be the same. Like the Gypsies he used several masks: of speech, of behaviour, of personality. So that he might beneath remain true to himself. He still looked, in spite of his age and bulk, boyish, and often behaved accordingly, drinking excessively, behaving badly and flirting with women other than his wife, Helvi. He was fortunate that his vices, such as they were, found balance with his virtues, which were inclined to be equally large, sometimes outlandish. The truth was that he liked almost everybody, loved many and would do near anything to please anybody, whether it be foolish, constructive, or against his own interests. But he was this way because he was truly a gadjo, always outside, unable to enter. Jiri had made it a lifetime policy to make the best of it that he could, because like the Roma and the blackfellows he had never had any other choice.

  On arriving in Australia as a young man Jiri was directed by the authorities to push trolleys of waste at the Hobart zinc works, a sprawling hideous establishment that looked as if it had been transported from another century. In its vast cavernous rusty wastelands he worked a year with Germans and Poles, with Ukrainians and Lithuanians and Byelorussians, with Bulgars and Magyars and fellow-Czechs and all that any of them wanted, even the most adventurous, was a world that was ordinary, a country that seemed a little smaller and less combustible and more comprehensible, more easily contained in the small ball of grey custard enclosed by a fragile human skull. Australia was ordinary, and even if it wasn’t, they didn’t want to know about that. They simply wanted a world that might be ordered with the hope that the order might last long enough to build a home and raise a family and have them in turn bring their children back, and then to die knowing one had as much as one could rightfully expect out of life without having to suffer cataclysmic wars, occupations, revolutions, destruction of homes, cities, nations, countries, languages, peoples.

  Jiri lasted a year at the zinc, would have lasted longer still, but he teamed up with a Pole who had been a professor of history in Krakow until losing his post because of his supposed bourgeois sympathies. The professor of history took to his new role as little more than a beast of burden with some relish, for even if middle-aged, and a sparrow of a man, he seemed to find in his humiliation a form of private revenge. He discovered within himself an extraordinary capacity for physical labour, as if the spirit of a navvy had always existed within the mind of the scholar, and the harder the professor worked the more he laughed, for nothing struck him as funnier than the thought of a man once victimised for alleged bourgeois sympathies proving himself to be an excellent proletarian, the Stakhanovite of the Risdon zinc works. Correspondingly, the more the professor laughed the harder he worked, because he now clearly saw his destiny was to live a life that could only be understood as a joke and this was the punchline, the pay-off to the interminable gag that he had up until then been forced to suffer. Happy at last with how fate had allowed him this cur
ious justice, one mid-morning he suffered a massive stroke. Like the dying fish that floated belly up around the zinc work’s jetty, he rolled over onto the adjoining tramway. At that moment there was another tram being pushed along that tramway in the opposite direction by a Byelorussian called Wheelbarrow by the Australians because his name was deemed by them as unpronounceable, and a Latvian whose name nobody knew. Before Jiri was able to get across to his stricken workmate, Wheelbarrow’s tram ran straight over the top of the poor professor’s head. So it was that the former professor of history from Krakow finished his life with his head split in two upon railway irons that led to a furnace at the Risdon zinc works, Tasmania, the tramway’s blackened gravel glistening wet from where the small ball of grey custard formerly enclosed by his skull spilled outwards.

  After that the zinc works lost what little interest they had held for Jiri and he made representations to the authorities to be transferred elsewhere—something which rarely led to any action, because it was expected that wogs would go wherever they were told to go for their first two years and be grateful. There was, after all, a price to being ordinary, as much as there was a price for being extraordinary.

  But to his surprise Jiri was transferred, to his regret to a remote hydro construction camp in the Tasmanian highlands. Jiri had the letter explaining all this translated to him by a Rumanian linguist who worked in the cell room stripping metals. Jiri asked him to repeat the name of the camp to which he was going to live.

  ‘Buttleroos Gorgeh,’ said the Rumanian linguist, slowly enunciating each syllable. ‘Buttle-roos Gorg-eh.’ His specialty had been the Indian language group.

  And at Butlers Gorge Jiri was to lie for the first time with the woman who would become his future wife, Helvi, while outside the wind howled worse than anything the two of them had ever heard. And it was there, that following morning, that Jiri was to take a fateful truck ride with a young Yugoslav labourer called Bojan Buloh.

  Chapter 23

  1959

  IN THAT LONG AUTUMN of 1959, when elsewhere the world was sensing change so big and hard in its coming that it was like the trembling of the earth announcing the arrival of a yet to be seen locomotive, in that month of April in the city of Hobart, nothing much looked like it could ever change around a town that had grown used to never being anything but the arse end of everything: mean, hard and dirty, where civic ambition meant buying up old colonial buildings and bulldozing them quick and covering the dust promptly with asphalt for cars most people were yet to own, where town pride meant tossing any unlucky derro found lying in the park into the can, and where a sense of community equated with calling anybody with skin darker than fair a boong bastard unless he wore snappy clothes in which case he was a filthy wog bastard—in that month of April when the cold slowly began its winter’s journey, spreading its way down over weeks from the mountain’s steel-blue flanks, on an early Saturday morning, an FJ was wending its way through the scummy back streets of north Hobart to the home of Umberto Picotti.

  If Sonja had been able to foresee what was coming to her, the feeling in the FJ that morning would have been different. She was fearful, true, but her fear was tempered by Bojan’s promises that this time it was only temporary, that this time he would visit weekly, that they would spend every weekend together, and as soon as possible he would move to Hobart and get a house for them both to live, father and daughter, a family: ‘—what you say, Sonja?’ and Sonja said, ‘That is all I want, Artie, that is everything.’

  Perhaps it was the shared intimacy of escape and flight from the Michniks, of waking in the huge, cold forest fearful of being lost and alone to suddenly see her father rising up from the back seat smiling, giggling, pulling a face and putting on a voice like a chook and mocking Mrs Maritza Michnik, saying, ‘Don’t think you can ever come back’, and them both giggling and Bojan saying ‘Bloody bitch, as if we ever would, as if ever.’ And Sonja knew she was not alone, that they were bound amongst those huge trees that scratched the moon and the sun by something she had always known was extraordinarily powerful no matter how often she felt powerless, something unbetrayable no matter how many times her father betrayed it. And she felt it in the swoop and ocean-like roll of the FJ, smelt it in the upholstery and stale cigarette smoke, heard it in the road rumble and motor clatter.

  But as she and Bojan drove up the pot-holed road to finally halt outside a run-down weatherboard cottage in North Hobart that morning, the feeling was quickly evaporating, and replacing it a foreboding harrowing the pit of her belly.

  Maja Picotti, full bodied and with a fulsome face like the flesh of a plum left too long in kirsch, was there greeting them before they were even out of the car. She hugged Sonja and lifted her into the air, told her she didn’t have to blush because this was her home now. Sonja said she wasn’t blushing. She did not say she was red because of the fever of fear. She did not ask how could it be her home if Bojan was not going to be there with her?

  Umberto lingered at the front door. Short with a spiv’s hawk-like face, his strong bristly black hair swept back with brilliantine—though some rebellious hairs still rose up—his eyes constantly searching those of his wife for any evidence of infidelity, and those of any other woman for the possibility of an affair. As they walked to the house, Umberto turned and withdrew inwards, like an echidna burrowing into the darkness of the ground. They found him inside, waiting for them, sitting at the kitchen table, both arms resting on the tabletop, smoking.

  It was then that Sonja smelt him and understood him henceforth. His smell was that of uninvited proximity, of assumed and unwelcome intimacy. It was the smell of, among other things, cheap aftershave lotions and mouth-wash and menthol cigarettes; of sweet things eaten for breakfast souring in an unwashed mouth, of homemade schnapps and strong instant coffee, of acrid industrial smoke impregnated in clothes mixed with naphthalene—the smell, in short, of filth masquerading as cleanliness. Umberto Picotti looked at Sonja with a quick glance of indifference. Then on the tabletop he carefully counted out the money Bojan handed him for Sonja’s board. And all the while Bojan laughed and joked with his daughter’s new keeper, and she saw her father once more finding comfort in the cruel camaraderie of men.

  If she had been older she might have cried out:

  There is no honour!

  But she could only watch in horrified fascination the way Picotti’s gaudily ringed fingers felt each note, touched every coin with a slow sensuous pleasure, as if it were flesh and not cash he were fondling, and though they had not yet spoken so much as a word to each other she thought with the intensity and clarity that only children can think such things:

  How much I hate him.

  Chapter 24

  1959

  MUCH OF SONJA’S LIFE henceforth revolved around avoiding Picotti and helping Maja with the unending tedium of washing and drying and ironing and putting away clothes, cleaning dishes, bathroom, toilet, bedrooms, kitchen, cupboards, and tending the vegetable garden. Sonja discovered a certain pleasure in the tedium of work: a place where she avoided thinking. Bojan rang occasionally, normally from a pub and though she could not smell him over the telephone wires to make sure, she knew he was drunk. And after each such call she redoubled her efforts helping Maja split and stack firewood under the house, helping her make salamis and helping her slice cabbages and punch the crunchy shreds into plastic garbage barrels until her wrist was aching and her raw fist burning with pain. Each morning Sonja’s job was to lift the stones off the board that compressed this fermenting sauerkraut and, as she mopped up the slow bubbling froth with a tea-towel, she wondered what it was that she was transforming into.

  One morning in the school holidays after Picotti had gone to work, Maja opened all the windows he kept closed because the summer air gave him allergies and a breeze fluttered in like a welcome old friend finally come to visit, and she and Sonja spent the morning preserving apricots. Each apricot’s old gold-red blotched flesh Sonja washed as if it were a rough aged fac
e she loved, each apricot’s plump flesh Sonja sliced in half, each apricot’s gnarled stone she flicked into the sink, and with Maja she pushed apricot halves in their hundreds into the tall green glass bottles, those hundreds of apricots they had picked the afternoon before from the four gnarled old apricot trees that grew in the Picottis’ backyard. There was a pleasure in filling the kitchen with that warm sweet smell of apricots and covering the table with bottles of preserved fruit. It was a good day, thought Sonja. ‘The best of days,’ said Maja.

  Then when they were finished Maja went out shopping with the baby, leaving Sonja to wash up.

  If Sonja could have chosen a colour for the clothing of Picotti, she thought as she filled the sink, she would have chosen black, not a raven’s jet blue-black in which there is something at once alluring and magical, but simply a dull black like the bottom of the burnt pot she was about to scrub, as dark and scary and suffocating as a blanket pulled over your head. But Umberto Picotti did not dress in accordance with Sonja’s vision of him, not any day and not on that day when he returned home from work early, having clearly been out somewhere else on his way home, for he wore not his grimy olive green work pants and old shirt and tatty brown jumper, but came in clad incongruously in a blue Hawaiian shirt covered in a yellow banana design, tucked into shiny grey rayon trousers. Finding Maja away, he at once suspected his wife of being with another man. He sat down at the kitchen table, lighted a cigarette, looked about. For all the new gaudy clothes, his gaunt face remained to Sonja a shadow. When he finally spoke, it was in a hushed, grieving voice, as if he had just suffered a terrible injury or loss.

  ‘Where she?’ he asked Sonja.