The Sound of One Hand Clapping

by Richard Flanagan

  Helvi disagreed with such foolish notions. In the time it would take Sonja to come around to her way of thinking, though, she had no choice but to do all she could for the poor child—though Sonja was almost middle-aged, she still could not help thinking of her so—and her yet-to-be-born baby.

  Helvi wanted Sonja to stay with her and Jiri until the birth. ‘You must,’ said Helvi. ‘It’s not Buckingham Palace,’ said Helvi—‘But it is cheap.’ So cheap that Sonja paid nothing, no matter how many times she tried to offer money, and had to resort to forestalling Helvi by buying groceries and presents. The days grew shorter and colder. And with the approach of winter Helvi’s thoughts turned to the business of finding a place for Sonja to live once the baby arrived.

  They sat in Helvi’s old blue Corolla, looking across the narrow road from where they were parked next to a dog-torn garbage bag, at a squalid run-down weatherboard cottage, set tightly in a street of similarly withered houses. At one end of Barracouta Row was a closed video store, at the other an open pizza parlour, with nobody about either. As Helvi talked their eyes wandered over the dilapidated exterior: the broken letterbox overflowing with junk mail, the blistering paintwork faded to the colours of the earth, the rusty corro of the verandah roof, the partially rotted window frames more humus than homely.

  ‘I run into Ahmet the Albanian’s wife,’ Helvi had said, ‘and she say Ahmet has this place that might suit Sonja.’

  They entered the house using the key Ahmet’s wife had lent Helvi. The house was not derelict, but it had the terrible run-down feel of true poverty—the filth, the cracks in the wall, the peeling wallpaper, the broken windows, the stove with the door that didn’t close properly, the cheap nylon carpet in which stains could not be discerned only because the whole carpet had taken on an undulating mustard tone, the cupboards in which Sonja noticed rat droppings. Sonja tried to flush the yellowed toilet. There was a noise like steel bolts being rattled in a rusty tin. Apart from which nothing happened.

  For reasons that Sonja could not fully divine Helvi seemed hellbent on Sonja taking it.

  ‘You could live here, eh?’

  With not one jot of conviction or enthusiasm, Sonja agreed.

  ‘I could.’

  ‘It’s cheap.’ Not for a moment was Helvi going to let the reality of the house’s condition alter her plans for Sonja, such as they were. ‘I know it doesn’t look much, but we could clean it up, Jiri fix what’s broken, and Ahmet will let us have it for a quarter of what you will pay anywhere else.’

  ‘He’d bloody need to,’ said Sonja.

  ‘So you decide to take it?’

  ‘I’ve never decided anything, Helvi.’

  ‘You decided to go. And to come back.’

  ‘Maybe. Why, I don’t know.’

  ‘Because it’s what you wanted. Because you choose what you want.’

  ‘Do you?’

  ‘Of course you do,’ said Helvi. She pointed at a mantelpiece caked in numerous layers of bright chipped enamel paint, white, blue, with a final flaking overlay of red. A disintegrating union jack of a fireplace. ‘Character, eh?’

  Sonja smiled. Helvi pulled out the oven grill, which was caked in dirty, rancid fat.

  ‘Oh God! Look at that. Bloody Ahmet.’

  ‘Any oven as long as it is pre-greased,’ said Sonja, and they both laughed.

  Helvi slammed the filthy grill back into the stove with a triumphant clatter, her logic having unfolded without Sonja placing any serious obstacles in its way.

  ‘You’re wrong,’ said Helvi. ‘You can choose this place.’

  Sonja gave a small laugh, more a polite exhalation of breath than anything else.

  ‘I suppose I could.’ Sonja slowly pulled the grill back out and gazed vacantly at the rancid fat. ‘I suppose.’ She was beyond caring. Helvi wanted her to take the place and she was indebted beyond measure to Helvi, and in any case she had so little money, that an absurdly low rental—even for such a hovel—was not something she could rashly disregard. She said, ‘As long as the toilet flushes and the doors close I don’t care.’

  ‘Ahmet say he hold it till you are ready to move in summer. Maybe do a little work.’

  She didn’t feel sick or even tired that day as she and Helvi stood in the claustrophobic squalor of that near-derelict excuse for a house. She knew the worst thing was that she simply didn’t care and that she should, but she didn’t, and the more Helvi pushed, the more she felt nothing and that there was no excuse for this feeling nothing. Sonja knew Helvi was right. She had to get a home, had to get organised for when the—when it all happened—but before that there was something else. And because she didn’t yet know what that something else was, she could only wait till it found her, unravelled her, awoke her.

  And then she knew she would care.

  ‘I’ll take it,’ said Sonja.

  Chapter 32

  1990

  AFTER THEY LEFT Ahmet’s house, it sleeted on the top of the large blue mountain that rumped and fingered the shivering town of Hobart, and then the sleet stopped and the clouds dissolved and the sun came strangely fierce as if angry at being denied, and then the wind was gone and the mountain was still.

  From the vast wild lands of the south-west of the island, and beyond it an expanse of ocean that stretched unimpeded by land fully half of the planet to the west before its waves swept upon the beaches of South America and a quarter of the planet to the south before it began reforming as the icy shoals of the Antarctic, the weather most always came this way to Hobart: wild, mad, its reason lost somewhere out in the aching emptiness of the fish-fat sea, its rhythms those of the roaring forties and breaking waves, huge water-walls rising only to suddenly fall into frothy flatness, hot sun succeeding sleet succeeding harsh hail storms shrapnelling the sea succeeding snow succeeding sun, and all the world’s weather experienced not with the steady waxing and waning of seasons, but known in a morning or afternoon, all time and all the world and all the seasons of life in the infinity of an hour.

  In the short warmth of the late afternoon sun that followed, plants steamed, the earth gasped and amidst lichen-etched boulders and blasted heaths the mists rose in witches’ wisps, and caught within each gasp in that damp-sweet gloaming was an immense aching.

  Here upon the mountain’s summit Sonja had once sometimes come with Bojan when returning from an early morning picking mushrooms down the Huon. Together they had then wandered dew heavy paddocks in long shadowed valleys, sharp-eyed, searching for the mushrooms that had only a few hours earlier arisen out of the damp dark fecundity into light. If they had umbrellaed out above their stalk, Bojan would tap their brim a few times before plucking them, so that their spores returned to the earth, ensuring that the next time there would be more mushrooms. Then, if there was snow on the mountain, they would return along the old Huon Road and play a while in the snow at the summit, before it became too cold and they headed home. Together, two spores blown by the wild wind, wandering the still, wet earth.

  This afternoon Sonja was not still, nor her seasons or moods any more easily divined than those of the mountain. She was moving in thoughts of her mother, of how she had once written her mother a letter. There had been no address, of course, to put on the front of the envelope, so there could be no reply, she knew that, of course—that there would be no letter coming back beginning, ‘My beloved Sonja…’ but still she had imagined finding a reply from her mother in the letterbox in which Maria Buloh would tell her daughter what she ought do in her life, maybe a recipe or two, perhaps even just the smallest of sentences that might tell Sonja everything she ever needed to know, a sentence that would say ‘I love you’ but of course it was a stupid foolish idea in the first place, and though she knew there would be no reply, though she knew there could never be one, it broke her heart once more because it made her realise that in the end she could not even pretend to be other than alone.

  Sonja believed herself to be neither a good person nor a strong person nor a ki
nd person. She would wonder if, had she known her mother, and if her mother had been there when she was growing up, whether she would be otherwise: be better, kinder, stronger, and not forever punished. Because she did feel punished and she felt that her punishment must be entirely deserved because if it wasn’t what reason was there for it? Because if there were no reason for such sorrow, then it was possible that there might be no reason for any of the suffering in the world, that it might just be the fate of men and women to beget suffering as they begot each other. And Sonja would suddenly switch the TV off and would scurry past the news-stand to avoid having to endure the unendurable and would rush home hoping against logic, hoping against reality, hoping, desperately hoping to find the letter from her mother that said it wasn’t true that children were born to suffer, it wasn’t, because she was her mother and she knew it wasn’t. But every night Sonja came home and every night there were only department store catalogues boasting of family values, and insincere direct mail letters signed sincerely yours with the intent of soliciting money or votes, but from her mother there was no letter speaking of love.

  Sonja turned to see Helvi coming toward her with a small bouquet of wild alpine flowers she had picked. She fixed Helvi with a stare.

  ‘What happened to Mama, Helvi?’ she asked. In the midst of banks of small bowed ti-trees, bent and crooked as if badly arthritic, forced to stoop by season after unrelenting season of cold cruel winds, Sonja’s similarly bent figure abruptly stood upright, angle suddenly at odds with that of the plants around her. ‘What?’

  The gnarled fingers of Helvi’s hand twitched around the small branches held in her other hand, twisting an unruly sprig off here and there, rearranging parts to make the whole more seemly. Helvi thought about all the things she could tell Sonja about her mother, and then all the reasons why she couldn’t tell her any of it. She proffered the bouquet to Sonja as if it were some sort of answer, and Sonja accepted it with a smile, but it explained nothing.

  ‘What happened, Helvi?’ she asked again.

  But Sonja didn’t really want to know, any more than Helvi wanted to tell her. It was just something that came between them, and if there had been a way of picking it up like a stone and throwing it away into the boulder field around them, Sonja would have done that. Sonja wanted a new life, and it made her angry that somehow she felt the need to exorcise a part of her old life which in any case only had ever existed for her as an absence. She never had had a mother and it ought have been that simple, but it wasn’t. She was thinking all that and also how beautiful the mountain was, and how it should be simple and beautiful like the mountain, but it wasn’t and never would be. Sonja was thinking how she hated her mother at that moment because her mother would not let her be calm even on the mountain. She was also thinking how at that moment she hated the mountain.

  Helvi had often wanted to tell Maria’s story. But as much as it was Sonja’s to hear, it was not hers to tell. She was no chronicler who might foolishly pretend it was possible to assemble all the details to begin at the beginning and end at the end, but only an old woman, a seamstress as foolish and inconsistent as her own eyes, who breathed in shallow gulps and understood only the unspeakable nature of it.

  So avoiding Sonja’s stare, Helvi continued gazing out over the channel.

  ‘Tell me, Helvi. Please.’

  Helvi spoke with what seemed disinterest, as if commenting upon the view.

  ‘Maria was unhappy.’

  ‘I know that,’ said Sonja, ‘but why, Helvi? Why? What happened?’

  Helvi attempted to end the whole discussion with a statement that was as unsatisfactory as it was enigmatic.

  ‘She saw bad things during the war,’ said Helvi quietly. ‘Very bad things.’

  Sonja, coldly, said: ‘She wasn’t much of a mother.’

  ‘She was a good mother,’ said Helvi even more quietly, still not looking at Sonja. ‘Maria was a good woman, a good mother. And she so love you. She used to call you her little knedel—dumpling, I think it means. But you know that. And everyone like your mama. She was funny, she could dance, she could put a man in his place with just a few quick words.’

  Sonja had never heard that her mother called her anything. She should have known that story, for it was her story, as much as her arm belonged to her that story was hers, yet someone else had possessed it all those years and never even thought to give it back until now, and then so carelessly, so offhandedly thrown it in her face. She ought to know that and so much more about her mother, know more and feel more about her mother than she did. Because the worst was that she felt nothing, and Sonja hoped that if she knew something she might also feel something.

  ‘Were they happy together? Mama and Artie?’

  ‘They loved one another.’

  Sonja’s pleading became almost desperate: ‘It’s not the same thing, Helvi. Even if it were for only a day they must have been happy. Even if it were for only an hour, they must have been happy, mustn’t they, Helvi?’

  ‘Love is a bridge, Sonja,’ said Helvi. ‘And there are some weights bridges cannot bear without breaking.’

  Sonja turned and began walking back across the vast mountain top to the distant point where they had parked their car. Helvi looked around, swallowed hard, and then followed.

  Far below the sun spread over D’Entrecasteaux Channel. A huge expanse of gilded water, now still, expectant. Jiri watched from the considerable distance of the bleak summit car park as far, far away two small scratchings on an endless boulder field slowly, awkwardly found their way back. Behind them, an apricot sky, immense, open, wrapping around them as tenderly as a mother’s palm.

  Jiri wished he could do something to help Sonja, though he, even less than Helvi, had words, or knew what to do. But he would, he promised that sky, he would.

  Chapter 33

  1990

  SOME OF THE strangeness of this tale may have been a consequence of character. But who of us ever determines the one thing we believe most fundamental, the thing that is the truest expression of their soul? Of course, it can be objected by those whose circumstances are sufficiently propitious, and who therefore are able to explore the endless possibilities of character, reinventing themselves like some seventies rock star or nineties politician, that character is what makes and unmakes us, that character is destiny, and that we choose to live our life as a poem or as a tragedy, that we can be whoever we wish.

  Bojan Buloh harboured no such fantasies.

  Bojan Buloh held onto only what he could grasp in his hands, and when not working that tended to be an emptying bottle and a guttering smoke.

  For years he lived however and wherever, in the indifferent company of men who were similarly afflicted. Maybe they chose such a life of their own free will or maybe they didn’t. Maybe at the beginning they had intended to get out, to make something better of their lives from the poor warp and weft of their labour, to get ahead, to prosper, to know, if not happiness, then perhaps some serenity. But it tended not to be possible. A few got away, but only a handful. In the end what mattered was only that there seemed no escape, nothing really but death or grog. After a time everything else faded, and some were happy enough for it to be that way and some were not, but either way most ended up deciding that it was simply best not to dwell upon the yoke of fate that weighed them down so harshly. After a time they lost most things: family, money, hope. They did retain a certain camaraderie of the lost, for what it was worth, generally little, occasionally a great deal. A sense that they were as doomed as the trees that they felled for the geologists’ tracks, as the rocks they blasted to gravel, as the rivers they were labouring to drown, and all this tended only to make them feel that the rivers and rocks and trees like them had had it coming for a long time and deserved to be destroyed. Cruelties, small and large, were dismissed as insignificant, as indeed they were. The men lived in limbo, and they allowed as little as possible to arouse them from their terrible waking sleep. If their souls they tried to pre
serve in a vacuum, their bodies they had long ago abandoned to the grog and the afflictions of a lifetime of physical labour. Their bodies bloated or took on the shrivelled appearance of long lifeless things bottled in alcohol, backs broke and hearing went with fingers and the occasional limb, brains atrophied and livers rotted, yet such raddled flesh managed to rise anew each morning to undertake the labour that bound it to such curious punishment in a miraculous affirmation of the power of the living over the dead. For their life may have been bitter to them, but they preferred not to be reminded of it, to lose themselves in the regular rhythms and coded language of work, and dismissed as the foolishness of children the claim that only the bold and stupid might make: that their situation was the consequence of character. Bojan Buloh held onto only what he could grasp in his hands, and that night it was a letter in one hand and a photograph in the other.

  He sat on the edge of his bed in his single men’s quarters. He put the yellowing black-and-white photograph of a couple holding a baby down on his pillow. He eyed the letter suspiciously, as if it were a bomb.

  ‘It says that?’ he asked for a second time.

  ‘Sure,’ said the Italian who sat opposite him on the one chair Bojan possessed, a wooden kitchen chair. Bojan suddenly thrust the letter back at the Italian.

  Bojan did not like words, the insufferable swamp of the English language, through which he had made his long, awkward way in a rude raft constructed of a few straggly branches of phrases he had torn from a scrubby tree here and there. He did not believe in words like Nation. Like History. Working Class. Management. Efficiency. National Interest. Creeping Socialism. Or even words like Technology. Economics. Wilderness. Lifestyle. Or Future.