The Sound of One Hand Clapping

by Richard Flanagan

  She walked through the security gate, watched her handbag slide out along the x-ray unit’s conveyor belt, her mind empty, aware only of the most trivial details. So she saw the uniformed arm reach down and pull her handbag to one side but her mind did not weight this action with any significance. She saw only the pubic-like hairs of the fingers of the hand as it grabbed the handbag’s strap, the chunky gold wedding ring, saw the blue pullover sleeve and wondered pointlessly whether it was pure wool or an acrylic wool mix. At first she did not even hear the security officer’s words as being addressed to her.

  ‘Excuse me, ma’am, do you mind opening your handbag for me?’

  A middle-aged woman next to Sonja nudged her and she went around to the other side of the belt and opened her handbag on a melamine shelf. She unfolded the scarf that lay within to reveal some broken teapot pieces.

  ‘Ah—that’s what she was,’ said the officer. ‘Maybe you ought to take up coffee.’ He smiled. ‘Thank you, ma’am. That’s all.’

  But Sonja didn’t touch the porcelain fragments, made no attempt to fold the scarf and close the handbag. She stared at the teapot pieces and her mind raced and her body felt hot and her head shaky.

  ‘Thank you, ma’am,’ said the security officer, conscious of the need to continue with other inspections. ‘If you could take your bag now. Please. Ma’am? Are you okay, missus? It was a joke. About the coffee. A joke.’

  Sonja stared into the teapot pieces, and she saw many things and felt her eyes go watery. Saw a door closing. A teapot smashing. Her father. Her mother. Herself. Had they broken? Had they?

  Then suddenly she came to her senses, picked the handbag up, flashed an embarrassed, awkward smile at the security officer and muttered an apology.

  ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Coffee. Instead of tea. Such a good joke.’

  But instead of heading into the departure lounge she turned and started walking away from it, at first with measured steps, then at a canter, finally breaking into a run. People turned away from her, slightly shocked by her untoward behaviour.

  Sonja was in flight, not away from what she was, but back toward it. She scarcely paused when she bumped people, as she pushed past people, as she swam against the almighty undertow of movement seeking to sweep her away, so far away—and all of the people blurred to her and the airport dissolved into strange smudging dabs of colour and sound and she could only see one thing clearly: a piece of lace, and it was blowing away in the cyclonic swirl of people arriving and departing, arriving and departing, everybody now a reffo, fleeing the nameless, the unspeakable, and for a moment she actually thought she had been transported back to a postwar refugee camp, but still she chased the lace through all those businessmen and surfies and tourists and families who were now dressed in dun-coloured rags carrying not plastic suitcases and backpacks but brown paper parcels bound with string and they all, all looked lost, and still the lace eluded Sonja, then finally she gained upon it, and the lace transformed into a red nylon overcoat and a 1970s bum-hugger leather jacket and she was swimming toward it as hard as she could when suddenly she yelled—

  ‘It’s not too late?’

  And in their bewilderment, a startled couple near an exit door began turning around, and, in so doing, without knowing it, Helvi and Jiri were answering Sonja’s question.

  Chapter 27

  1960

  THE LATE AFTERNOON SUN gilded the FJ in luminous wonder, so that in all its glorious metallic colours it glided like some huge Christmas beetle through the northern suburbs of Hobart, past the old brick and stone tenements and the new housing commission weatherboard and concrete-block houses, as if searching for a familiar gum branch that might prove to be home. Inside the FJ Sonja looked across at Bojan, hoping he might look at her.

  But he did not. He kept on looking straight ahead. Neither spoke. She thought of Picotti. Saw him beckoning her to come over from the back seat. Come! Hated his spiv clothes. His oiled hair. Made the sight of him go away. Made herself breathe the sweet close smell of Bojan’s cigarette smoke. Made herself observe the concrete-block and weatherboard box homes. Made herself memorise the gravel gutters in which children played. The lack of trees, ornamentation, difference. The bareness.

  They shared their silence as a sustaining bread, and broke it accordingly.

  Slowly. With some reverence of what breaking it might mean.

  ‘Sonja,’ said Bojan finally, ‘you do not mind leaving the Picottis?’

  ‘No,’ said Sonja after a time. She did not look at him, only, as he had, straight ahead. She coughed. ‘No,’ said Sonja, her throat raspy.

  Bojan looked away from her, looked back at the road unravelling.

  ‘I don’t know why they ask me to come and take you back,’ he said, genuinely perplexed. ‘You were a good girl for them?’

  Sonja said nothing. Bojan had an intimation of what had passed.

  ‘I never liked the bastard anyway.’

  He felt an old, ceaseless terror within and kept driving as if he were racing away from it but it was within him and could not now or ever be so easily shaken off. The steering wheel trembling as if the wheels were being shaken out of alignment under his shuddering hands.

  ‘Who do I live with now, Artie?’

  ‘With me,’ said Bojan. Quietly. Then he said it a second time, this time with a slight smile at the pleasurable strangeness of such an ordinary idea, and his hands’ shuddering ceased. ‘With me.’

  At these words Sonja felt her spirits suddenly rise. A rush of exhilaration and curiosity.

  ‘In the camp? You and I in the camp?’

  ‘No,’ said Bojan. ‘Here. Here in Hobart. I throw my job with the hydro in and I find a place for us before I pick you up. When that prick ring and say I must collect you, well I, I—’ He momentarily halted, flustered, then recommenced, the words now rushing out—‘I think maybe it good now if we live together. I think it’s not right you with these other people.’

  Sonja was incredulous. ‘You’re going to look after me?’

  Bojan threw a hand in the air in guilty exasperation. ‘Jesus Christ—I’m your bloody artie—no?’

  Sonja looked long and hard at Bojan.

  He said, ‘I know what you thinking.’

  He felt her stare, terrible and searching, and knew she had the power of children to see beyond words.

  And then he described what he felt, quietly, resolutely, as if it were his fate to which he now had to submit and from which there was no further running. He meant to say it as a flat statement but it ended up sounding somewhere between a query and a revelation.

  He said, ‘But I am your artie.’

  The FJ came to a house with a long drive down its side, and Bojan turned into it, drove up past a newish weatherboard cottage, butterfly tin roofed and aqua-green painted. There in the back corner of the backyard, spitting distance from the Hills Hoist, sat a small shed, its undressed timber vertical boards black from coatings of sump oil.

  They stepped out of the car. Bojan waved awkwardly to a woman—their landlord—washing dishes behind a nylon cafe-curtain in the main house. Sonja followed her father through the shed that had been converted into accommodation, albeit of a dirty and basic type. Then they walked around outside, Bojan showing where they would plant tomatoes and where they would build furniture. Then they went back inside and stood in the kitchen.

  Bojan smiled wryly. Spread his arms out wide, as if what they embraced was vast beyond measure, rather than the three small, cramped rooms of the shed—the kitchen-cum-lounge, the bedroom, and the bathroom.

  ‘Doma,’ he said. ‘You know what doma means, Sonja? It means home. In Slovenian doma means home. You know what Australians call these places, Sonja? Wog flats, that’s what they call them. That means they are not for the Australian people. That means they are for the wogs. For us.’ And then he smiled some more and laughed, a generous open happy laugh. Sonja looked up and, realising that he was happy, smiled and laughed too.

  Ov
er the next week they laboured at transforming the shed into a home. Bojan bought a second-hand bakelite wireless and sat it on the kitchen windowsill and they let it play nonstop. He bought a sofa, an armchair, and a Silent Knight refrigerator on hire-purchase, but paid cash for a Hoover vacuum cleaner and they were both utterly taken by its space rocket styling. He bought an old wardrobe, a new mattress, four saucepans, one frypan, and in an unconscious expectation of a future possibly better than the present, four sets of knives, forks, spoons, plates and bowls from Woolworths. As Elvis and Dean Martin poured in a slurry of staticky sound from the wireless, they carpeted the lino floors with old blankets, cut pictures out of the Women’s Weekly and put them into frames which Bojan made from scrounged timber and Sonja painted in bright blues and purples.

  At first they had only one bed and so they slept together. That was how he had grown up: that is, he would say, how it is, sharing a bed with older brothers and sisters, and though he would not admit it even to himself, he gained a certain comfort from sharing his bed, however much Sonja kicked and wriggled in her sleep. The Australian concept of a single bed for a single person struck him as odd and destructive. Sleeping alone was a punishment, a sadness, a lie that life was not shared in its most fundamental, mundane aspects. To be told that some might put a less than savoury gloss on such behaviour would have appalled him. He knew too well what some adults did with children, had suffered his own uncle one night when he was twelve. But if they knew Bojan Buloh, they would know that was not him, and, for Bojan, that was that. He knew himself: in his pigheaded way it never occurred to him that others might have an opinion of him also, somewhat at odds with who he was.

  One evening Sonja was still sitting up when Bojan came to bed. She was looking through some old photo graphs that he kept in a cardboard shoebox. One photograph in particular intrigued her, a black-and-white snap of a thin middle-aged man laid out in a coffin full of flowers. Bojan got into bed and turned his back to Sonja, trying to get to sleep. Sonja pushed the photograph of the man in the coffin under Bojan’s nose.

  ‘And this one?’

  ‘Your grandfather. Mama’s artie,’ mumbled Bojan into the blanket.

  ‘Why have they put the flowers around him while he’s sleeping?’

  ‘Because he’s dead. When you’re dead they like covering you with flowers. That’s how they do it over there. Now go to sleep.’

  ‘It’s beautiful.’

  ‘Sure.’

  ‘Mama? Where are the photos of Mama?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Bojan untruthfully. ‘Somewhere.’

  ‘Can I look at them?’

  ‘Sure.’

  ‘Now?’

  ‘No. Another time you look at them. Now we sleep.’

  But he couldn’t. Long after Sonja was asleep he was still awake. He prised the photograph of Maria’s dead father out of Sonja’s sweaty clasp and put it away, not looking at it any more than he had to, because that one picture was the best picture of Maria he had, but how could he ever explain that to his daughter, or any of what he could not even comprehend himself. A man can be as proud as he likes, thought Bojan Buloh, he can try and make a home out of a wog flat, he can try and make a good life out of a bad one but his past will always claim him back completely like a swamp does withering sedges. He can try and protect his daughter and he can fail, he can even be dressed up with flowers when he’s dead, but all corpses are alike, even the one he had once seen that had eaten a flower at the moment of release.

  But what did that mean? What did any of it mean? He could have wept, but he believed tears were to the living what flowers were to the dead: proof only of the futility of feeling.

  Chapter 28

  1960

  EACH PLATE, each knife, each fork, Sonja washed with as much attention as if they were surgical instruments to be used in an operating theatre. Her father, she was discovering, was a meticulous man. Bojan could not bear what he termed ‘filth’. ‘Filth’ served to cover anything that Bojan Buloh believed was not clinically clean, and that was just about everything. From dust on top of window frames to a beer glass in which the beer failed to sparkle because the detergent had not been rinsed properly—all was filth, all equally upset him, and all filth had to be exiled from his home. The rites of order and cleanliness were women’s work, and such was Sonja’s role from the age of nine, a relentless round of housework he expected her to do entirely in accordance with his own ways and standards.

  Sonja was wiping up when Bojan came inside from working out on the porch on a set of cupboards he intended selling. He saw his daughter was crying quietly. He noticed her arms moving quickly but stiffly, how each movement seemed to cost her a certain measure of pain.

  ‘Sonja?’ he asked, and she turned and her watering eyes were wary. She stifled a sob. But when he spoke further, she knew that he was not angry with her for having washed or rinsed in transgression of his notions of cleanliness. ‘Are you alright?’ he asked softly, and came up to where she was standing on a stool.

  She turned and buried her head in his chest. He noticed how her arms were covered in a hot red rash. Bojan ran his fingertips over her skin. He felt it dry and chapping in painful flakes, like dried-up pastry. Bojan had not felt such skin with his fingers since he had been with Maria, when she had suffered similarly. He slowly bent the arm at its joint, though carefully and only a little way back and forth, once, twice, then halted and cradling her arm, said, ‘It hurts to bend, no?’

  Sonja nodded.

  ‘How long?’

  ‘Since the Picottis,’ said Sonja. She felt her thin forearm softly rest in his hand, marvelled at how he held her arm like it were some precious thing, delighted at how gentle his touch could be. She shrugged. ‘It’s alright,’ she lied to impress him. ‘It doesn’t hurt really.’

  ‘Eczema,’ said Bojan. What he did not say: that this too, along with her temperament, her looks, she had inherited from her mother.

  That night Bojan wrote a letter in his native language, the first time he had written such a letter in some years, and he had to write it out three times before it was right, for he never had been a scholar and after so many years away he found it very difficult to know what to say and to find a way even in his own tongue to say it all. He wrote slowly, painstakingly with a neat and old-fashioned hand that swirled and looped across the page, and he concentrated as much on making the script beautiful to look at, as the words meaningful to read. In his youth in Slovenia he had been in some demand as a painter of local beehives, which he adorned with scenes of alpine life, some conventional, some lewder, depending on his customer’s fancy. In Tasmania beehives were, like so many other things, unadorned, so he had abandoned his rude art. All that remained was a certain reputation in the minds of others so very far away (and, he hoped, a few of the beehives also) that he was not about to jeopardise by penning a lousily scripted letter. When he was finally satisfied, he shook his writing hand a few times to relieve his aching wrist, sealed the letter in an envelope, and the address he wrote on its front finished with the word Jugoslavia.

  Some weeks later Sonja found her father using a somewhat savage-looking knife he had fashioned out of a power hacksaw blade to cut the string of a brown paper parcel covered in Yugoslav stamps. Inside the first parcel, a letter and a second, smaller brown paper parcel. When Bojan carefully unfolded the second parcel Sonja was disappointed by what was revealed. It was not exotic, nor valuable, nor even interesting, but only a dusty pile of small dried flowers.

  That night Bojan ran a deep bath in the old, stained bathtub. As Sonja undressed in the rising steam, Bojan scattered the flowers over the bath water, then stirred them in with his hands, till the bath resembled a swirling, watery compost-heap. Sonja giggled.

  ‘What are you doing, Artie?’

  Sonja put one foot then the other in the bath, stood for a minute as her body adjusted to the heat and then sat down in the flower-water. Bojan smiled and sprinkled a few flowers upon her hair.


  ‘Is it not beautiful to swim in flowers?’ he asked. He picked out one of the flowers and held it close to Sonja’s face. ‘Kamílica,’ said Bojan. ‘I write and tell your grandmother in Slovenia about your skin and she pick and dry the kamílica for you, she send them across the oceans, she want to heal her Sonja.’ He indicated the bath waters with a wet flowered hand. ‘Now you must lie back.’

  Bojan left the bathroom. And Sonja sank back into the chamomile flowers. With just her nose and eyes above water level, she picked out a single flower, turned it this way and that, gazing at it closely.

  And to herself softly whispered.

  ‘Kamílica … kamílica.’

  That night Sonja had a strange and beautiful dream: of a magical land cobbled together from what she knew of Tasmania and what she imagined of Slovenia.

  There was a strong smell, full and steaming and wonderful, and it was the smell of the grass and the earth below a wet mountain after the sun has come out. There was a green slope on a steep blue mountainside, and it was the country back of Mount Roland where Sonja had once been shooting roo with Bojan. Back bent, picking flowers on that green slope was an old woman, dressed like the Slovenian peasant women in Bojan’s photographs—head scarfed and body long black dressed, floral smock tied at the back. A face, mottled and twisted like a spud grown in hard earth, betraying no emotion beyond a certain grim determination to endure. She stood up, flowers in the cup of an uplifted skirt, and started walking down the green mountainside to where there was—as though it were the most natural place in the world for such a thing to be—an open coffin, and in the coffin was laid out Sonja’s dead grandfather, looking, Sonja could hear voices around her say, far better in death than he ever managed in life.