The Sound of One Hand Clapping

by Richard Flanagan

  Mrs Heaney started to move in on her terrified children.

  Though not the eldest, it was Moira who edged her way in front of the others. Her eyes met those of her mother. Moira trembled, her sing-songy voice now quavering with fear.

  ‘Mum…’

  But Mrs Heaney kept advancing.

  ‘…Mum … Mum…’ Moira swallowed.

  But Mrs Heaney was coming for them.

  ‘Please, Mum,’ said Moira, her arms outstretching in a hopeless attempt to cover those who cowered behind her. ‘Don’t do this to us.’

  Mrs Heaney stopped. She pulled her bottom lip under her top teeth and felt surprise at the way her body was seized by a violent shaking that made her feel most terribly light, as if she might suddenly rise into the air, as if she were no longer rooted to the earth, as if something she normally kept well hidden had momentarily liberated her body from its daily heaviness. She saw the rain-streaked window, how the rain seemed to be running down the glass like tears.

  Sonja watched how Moira then hesitantly, slowly, so very slowly began to walk toward her mother, all the time eyeing her as one might a mad dog, and she did not stop walking all that very great distance across that small kitchen when Mrs Heaney began to softly cry, but kept walking, her hand stretching out now, and Mrs Heaney, she just stood as if frozen to the spot, as if the world was taking off around her, spinning faster and ever more crazily, her head rocking back and forth, and all the while she was sobbing. When Moira finally reached her and opened her mother’s hand, Mrs Heaney offered no resistance. Her hand was hard and dry, covered in cuts and dirt, fingers big and tough and shiny, nails chewed back and filthy. Moira took the jug cord out of that extraordinary hand, felt her own soft thin fingers sliding slowly away from that venerable quarry shaped by the life stolen from it.

  Moira went to walk away, but Mrs Heaney gently cupped her hand around the back of her daughter’s head and drew the child into her belly.

  Then, after a time, she put out her left hand in an expansive way. The other kids came over warily, slowly, but still they came. Mrs Heaney looked at Sonja and with a slight sway of her head invited her over too. In those big, flabby, welcoming arms Sonja joined the others. Mrs Heaney circled them all with her arms and they let themselves fall into her embrace for she was their Mum, their beautiful, beautiful Mum and she held them all there safe and together that day in her kitchen.

  But, thought Mrs Heaney, for how long?

  She had been about to hurt them, them whom she would do anything to shield from hurt, whom she would have died to protect, and it tormented her something terrible that she had been brought so low and shown to them and to herself such a bad person and how could she protect them from others if she could not even protect them from herself?

  ‘I’m sorry,’ croaked Mrs Heaney in a barely audible voice. ‘So, so sorry.’

  The kids said nothing. All any of them could hear was their mother’s sobbing. Mrs Heaney held them all, and she felt an overwhelming pity for them and for herself, and then she felt the children against her waist as a presence as mysterious and huge as the universe itself and for a time she lost all sense of time and of herself and she felt a pity and a love as infinite as the universe for all things, both the living and the dead, that lay within it, that existed for that brief moment within her and her children.

  Afterwards the rain stopped, and Sonja followed the other kids outside to play, and no-one spoke about what had happened. There was too much to it, and no-one spoke about it.

  Chapter 37

  1961

  TWO TARTAN-PATTERNED PLATES bearing buttered toast sat upon the pink marble-laminex table that took pride of place in the strangely empty and desolate room that was Bojan and Sonja’s kitchen-cum-living-room. Two tartan-patterned plates with buttered toast and baked beans now pouring over the toast, and above them, holding the tilted saucepan, Sonja standing in an apron serving the Australian meal which she was so proud to have prepared. Here was something about which she knew and he did not. Bojan sat at the table, looking at the strange meal being assembled upon his plate in awe, eyes balanced between contempt and utter bewilderment.

  Bojan looked down at the table and looked back up at Sonja, and sensing her pride in her achievement turned back to his meal. From the salad bowl in the middle of the table he piled up oiled endive on his fork, then plunged the green-laden fork into the baked beans and toast and brought the whole remarkable combination up into his mouth. He chewed, and chewed some more, but no amount of mastication was going to alter the utter strangeness of what was in his mouth. He uncharacteristically cast his eyes heavenwards and asked the Mother of Jesus to give him strength, and then swallowed.

  ‘Sonja,’ he said when his gullet was thankfully free of the salad and beans, ‘the … the Heaneys, you are sure they eat such things?’

  ‘Yes,’ replied Sonja seriously, almost earnestly. ‘But never with vegemite.’

  Bojan’s eyes looked at Sonja, then at the meal, then at Sonja, then back at the meal, and he pretended to understand.

  ‘Ah, yes,’ said Bojan, ‘but of course not.’

  And he plied more salad and more baked beans on his fork and continued with his meal, all the while inwardly cursing the infernal, comic backwardness of Australians and all the awful things they mistook for food.

  Later that evening Bojan did a strange thing, an unexpected yet welcome thing. He went to the wardrobe and reached up on his toes to the top and got down the ancient Singer sewing machine. He sat it upon the pink marble-laminex table. He unwrapped pieces of tissue paper covered in dotted lines as indecipherable to Sonja as Morse code, and pinned these papers all over Sonja, running scissors hither and thither, muttering and sometimes softly cursing to himself. Finally he unpinned the paper, and from a brown paper parcel took out a roll of shiny pink cotton, to which he then pinned the paper patterns. He became totally absorbed in cutting the shape, and seemed not to notice that it was way past the time he normally made Sonja go to bed, seemed not to notice her whatsoever, and this sight of him, so intensely focused upon a task, Sonja found mesmerising. Illuminated by the little yellow pilot light on the old sewing machine, his hands skilfully placed and pulled the pieces of pink material back and forth beneath the hopping needle. Those hands, so confident at making. She listened to the rolling sound of the old black Singer at work, speeding up and slowing down in thrumming bursts, as though it were on a journey and them all travelling with it.

  Then, after a considerable time, the thrum ended and the dance of the hopping needle halted. Bojan flicked up the catch on the needle, stood up, stood Sonja in the middle of the kitchen table in her bare feet, took off the clothes she wore, and in their place let fall over her head and upraised arms a neatly made pink party dress.

  Sonja twirled around.

  The dress fitted well. Bojan laughed. Sonja looked at a distant image of herself in a small mirror on the far wall, ran her hands down the dress, to feel it, to smooth it, to stroke it. Something strange was going on, and she did not know what, but she was grateful for it, even if the cause remained to her unfathomable. Never before had she had her very own party dress. Never before had she seen her father behaving so strangely. He had made clothes before for her, but only the necessary things: school dresses and the like. Never anything as frivolous as a party dress. Something very strange was going on. First a beautiful table. Then a pointless dress. And him being so good to her, as he was now, opening out his arms, and she leaping from the table to his chest. He held her lightly and together they danced around the sewing machine to an old country song playing on the radio. Then he put her back on the kitchen table, so they could both admire his handiwork once more.

  Sonja felt happy. She felt a certain grace. A lightness, an understanding that there was this fundamental goodness in life that could be danced and that one could be part of in the dancing.

  And she twirled around and around and around—

  Until she was so dizzy that she mo
mentarily thought she was lace in the wind and that it was her mother twirling her so.

  Chapter 38

  1961

  BEST-BRAVE-PINK-COTTON-DRESS dressed and white-cardigan clad, Sonja sat in the front seat of the FJ, long legs drawn up to her chest, scabbed knees scalloping into her chin. Bojan sat side-on in the driver’s seat, one listless leg hanging out the open door, the other waiting, half drawn-up, resting on the door frame. They had arisen early, and with some haste—unusual for Bojan, who most always did things in a measured, careful fashion—he had tied the blackwood table upon the FJ’s roofrack. And after having sped like lunatics down the winding, wild gravel road to the Huon, the FJ wallowing around endless corner after corner and Sonja trying not to vomit, they had suddenly halted on this hillside. Here and there an early morning mist rose and dusted the orchards that spread out below them. They were high enough to be in the sun, but in spite of its intensity the chill of the spring night had not yet gone, and the feeling was at once hot and cold.

  ‘That’s it,’ said Bojan, and though he did not point, she knew it was the old cottage some distance below them, scrubby hill on its near side, apple orchard on its far side, at which her father was staring.

  From the hillside the cottage, its snub-nosed verandah like an old cap pulled down over the green-painted weatherboards rippling in the low light, looked to Sonja little different from hundreds of other houses that similarly stippled the orchard valley. They were close enough to the cottage that Sonja could distinguish detail. Its orchard, the apple trees still semi-skeletal. Its garden, resplendent with rose bushes beginning to bud, a few large pine trees, the horseshoe-shaped gravel drive in front of the house. The long shadows and alternating shafts of early morning light covering a side window in tremulous stripes, moving so gracefully that she wondered if the cottage were losing its solid form and transforming into wisps and waves. Surrounding the window frame, blistered and flaking and in bad need of a fresh coat of paint like the cottage’s scaly weatherboards, a large bushy climbing rose with mauve flowers also beginning to bloom. She could just make out a white lace curtain gently blowing in and out of that old window in the early morning breeze.

  Lace and weathered wood. Both moving. There is something here, Sonja decided, something good. But the proximity of the combination of lace and wood also unsettled her, was too close to who she was for her to feel comfortable.

  For two hours they sat there in the FJ, looking at that house in its idyllic setting, before Bojan threw his tenth cigarette that morning out of the window, hefted a healthy gob after it, looked at himself in the rear-vision mirror, tightened his tie, loosened his tie, tightened his tie, wet the tips of his fingers with his tongue and ran them through the sides of his freshly barbered hair, took a deep breath, rolled the ignition over and drove down the hill.

  ‘You remember at the Hisketts’ last year?’ Bojan asked as they descended into the mist and came closer.

  Sonja nodded.

  ‘You remember that Jean we meet there?’ Bojan asked as they turned off the road and headed up the cottage’s driveway.

  Sonja nodded once more. Sonja remembered. Jean Direen. Quiet, but strangely not out of fear. A hawkish face, accentuated by the way she pulled her long greying hair back into a ponytail, and by her winged glasses. And her unusual eyes: green and soft. Sonja never looked adults in the eye unless she had no choice, such as at school when teachers demanded it. But Sonja found she could look into Jean Direen’s eyes and not feel threatened. She had seemed to Sonja old, perhaps even older than her father but with a body unexpectedly youthful. Strong, lithe, an argument against the way the face was presented, and the plain clothes in which she dressed. She was gentle, Sonja remembered. Gentle and easy.

  And then Sonja knew where her father had been going to on the Sundays he had left her at the Heaneys. Even back at the Hisketts’ Jean’s feeling for Bojan had been evident to Sonja, and perhaps that was why Sonja had retained such a strong memory after only one chance meeting. Because Jean’s interest in Sonja’s father had risen like a blush from within Jean and Sonja had felt it as a glowing heat. And, at first, Sonja liked the idea of her father striking up a romantic liaison with Jean, because it was interesting, even exciting, and infinitely preferable to card nights or sitting in a pub car park waiting for him to be done inside.

  And then it was night and then it was morning and then several weeks and then almost as many months had passed in a way that went on forever but seemed as short as the span of time it took for Bojan Buloh to tighten his tie, loosen his tie, and then tighten it once more. Life took on a pattern Sonja found both reassuring and increasingly delightful. Every week work and school in Hobart, her father now a different man, happy, easy with her. And every weekend they returned to the Huon, to Jean’s. There Bojan would help out on the orchard, fixing machines, fences, working on the trees, spraying, pruning, picking and packing. Sonja too helped with the picking and packing of the apples, working sometimes at the side of Jean, sometimes at the side of her father. The packing shed was warm and full of light and the rattling sound of apples tumbling down toward the half-dozen packers, men and women and children, and Sonja would wrap her apples as carefully and quickly as she was able in the soft purple tissue paper until she grew tired of it, and then she would run out into the green tumble of the orchard and help pick a while and then drift back into the shed and she was never in the way and no-one was ever angry or spoke harshly to her, for in the industry of that small orchard that summer there was a harmony and she felt blessed being part of it, as if the work of the whole summer were some unspoken yet communal prayer and she one integral element of that prayer.

  And each Sunday morning she would rise just before sun-up, sensing in sleep when the low light of dawn was beginning to fill the house. She would go to the kitchen, stand in her nightie between the curtain and the window and watch the rising sun turn oppressive grey clouds apricot and pink and silver, and the sky looked to her like a huge rainbow trout leaping over Jean’s cottage. She would see the orchard and beyond it a hill covered in bush rising away from her vision. Even from where she stood in the kitchen the view, while not expansive, suggested a feeling of space, of openness.

  Sonja would place paper and morning sticks in the small ash-rimed hutch of the old range. She would light the paper and soon have a fine morning fire: noisy, cracking, hissing, leaping yellow flames. Lest the fire smoke out the kitchen she would close the creosote-crusted cast-iron range door. As the morning sticks spat and fizzed she would fill the large black kettle from the single brass tap, place the floral teapot so big and heavy she had trouble holding it, two cups and sugar and milk on a serving tray; get the tea canister down and fill the big teapot with tea-leaves. And waiting for the water to boil she would often think how their lives had changed since that morning they had arrived with the new blackwood table upon which the tray now sat.

  They had all stood around Jean’s kitchen admiring it, her and Bojan and Sonja and old Archie, who lived in the house and had, since the death of Jean’s parents, helped Jean’s brother Merv run the orchard while Jean worked at the local school in the office. They manoeuvred the table this way and that to see where it best fitted. Jean liked the way the table was plain but well proportioned in its design, elegant without artifice, commented on how it was so well finished off. And all that spring and that summer and that autumn Bojan and Sonja returned weekend after weekend to eat at it, to sit down to meals of strange exotic foods—some of which Bojan had never allowed into their house—such as pumpkin and parsnip and mint sauce. They ate roasts and casseroles made of lamb which Bojan had always maintained was only fit for Serbs but, rather than abusing Jean, he complimented her on how beautifully it was cooked. And they made soups using cream and milk, which astonished both Bojan and Sonja, although Jean’s bread, Bojan said—and he meant it—was actually better than his own mother’s; ate at least two dozen different varieties of apple puddings and drank sweet white tea out of grea
t cavernous mugs big enough to do the washing in.

  Jean carried with her the scent of apple blossom, and Sonja and her father would privately joke about this, for whatever the time of the year, her scent was as inescapable as it often was unseasonable.

  But when one day Sonja discovered, at the back of the old apple packing shed, a straw-lined wooden crate that a chook had nested in full of yellow chicks, live fluffy balls, chirruping and cheeping and rolling higgledy piggledy everywhere, Jean’s presence for once was not foretold by the smell of apple blossom. Thinking she was alone Sonja began to sing to the chicks.

  ‘Spancek, zaspancek

  crn mozic

  hodi po noci

  nima nozic’

  Sonja sang softly, full of love, a song she had known for so long she could not remember learning it, a Slovenian lullaby.

  ‘Tiho se duri

  okna odpro

  vleze se v zibko

  zatisne oko

  ‘Lunica ziblje:

  aja, aj, aj,

  spancek se smeje

  aja, aj, aj.’

  And only just before the sound of clapping did Sonja smell the apple blossom. Startled, she looked up to see Jean standing at the end of the shed, smiling. Sonja jumped up.

  ‘That was beautiful, Sonja,’ said Jean. ‘What do the words mean in Australian?’

  Sonja smiled back out of embarrassment. She moved along the side wall quickly like a spider seeking shelter, all the time facing Jean, ran out of the shed and kept running through the orchard toward the river.