The Sound of One Hand Clapping

by Richard Flanagan

  What did the words mean? They were without meaning. They were nonsense words like ‘Humpty Dumpty’. Yet they meant everything. She knew they meant everything. She knew they meant love, but why?

  She was running hard, her breath galloping, rolling—and Sonja came to her senses and realised that it was the kettle come to the boil, bubbling furiously, splashing and sizzling water on the hot stove.

  She grabbed the kettle with a bundled tea-towel, took it off the stove and slightly scalded herself in her rush. She poured the boiling water into the teapot. Then, as she had done every other Sunday morning, Sonja walked from the kitchen down the central corridor, still dark and musty with the peaceful close smell of sleep. She backed into the bedroom slowly, carefully, eyes turned downward, focusing intently upon the heavy tray to ensure that it stayed level and she did not spill anything. She placed the tea tray on a small, old table set against a wall, below a lace curtain fluttering in and out of the window.

  Sonja looked up from the tray at Jean’s bedroom. It was a most beautiful room, painted a faded dappled green, with high ceilings and overlooking the now blossoming apple orchard. The sun ran like a river through the window, pouring light over Jean and Bojan who lay together in a high wooden bed.

  Sonja thought how tranquil and happy they looked; here, for both her and her father, was an island of peace. For a long time she had brought the tea into the bedroom, sometimes talked a little, but shy of Jean, would soon make her excuses and leave. But that morning Sonja realised that her shyness had passed and that what she wished now more than anything else in the world was simply to climb onto the island with them, to get into that high wooden bed with both Bojan and Jean and feel that river of light flow around them. She raised her eyes to Jean, and Jean pulled the covers back ready, and Sonja was almost in Jean’s warm muzzy embrace when Bojan, unseen by Jean, shook his head, and shooed her away with a flick of his hand.

  Two small gestures, no more, but they tore at Sonja.

  Sonja halted, looked hard at her father, then dutifully climbed back down off the big bed. Jean turned and looked at Bojan who was spooned into her back. He smiled and kissed her on the nose, and Jean never saw the weight of solitude collapse Sonja’s face as she walked past the lace curtain and out of the bedroom.

  Chapter 39

  1961

  THERE WAS NO SMELL of sour sweated bread, so Sonja knew that she did not have to be fearful. Nevertheless, it was unusual to be picked up from school by Bojan, driven home, with him in a mood that she could only find infectiously silly, then at the door made to stop, close her eyes, and allow him to place his hands over her eyes.

  In the blackness, total and whole, she heard Bojan’s voice speak, not as it had in the FJ and had always done, in rolling Slovenian, but in stilted Australian, as though with almost every word he were starting a new sentence.

  ‘From now on we speak English proper.’

  In the blackness, complete and mysterious, her own voice, upset.

  ‘But, Artie!—you are funny when you speak Slovene and make all your jokes.’ Though Bojan generally insisted that they speak English and not Slovene, he would, when feeling easy, tease her softly and play with words in his mother tongue.

  But in the black universe, his English words were adamant.

  ‘No, Sonja, you will go nowhere if you speak Slovene, you will end up like me. From now on you speak English proper. Then maybe you have a chance.’

  ‘English is no good for jokes.’

  ‘English is good for money.’ Still he held his large hands over her eyes. ‘Now come with me.’ With him behind her she shimmied in the direction he was gently nudging her. It was a curious dance, through the door and across their kitchen-cum-living room, and she was reminded how graceful he could be in his movements. Then they stopped.

  He laughed, then cried gleefully, ‘Open your eyes!’ And with that he took his hands away.

  Her vision filled with the most peculiar sight: there in front of her, in the corner of their living room, was a 24-volume set of encyclopaedias. Their brown and black spines were neatly arrayed within a brand new bookcase of the stunted variety that one received free with the set. Bojan had accorded the books and shelving a placement in their home akin to that of the grottos, scattered around the fields of Slovenia, dedicated to the Virgin Mary in the hope of divine interventions, for this was a gift of love that Bojan hoped might also prove miraculously liberating. To accentuate the prominence of the encylopaedia he had placed the stumpy bookcase on top of a pine chest he had made in which they stored clothes and linen. Sitting on the chest, at either side of the bookcase’s base, was an unlit red candle in a saucer. Apart from the encyclopaedia, the rest of the bookcase was empty, for there were no other books in the house, and so on the top of the bookcase Bojan had proudly displayed their salad bowl.

  Sonja stared. She felt bewildered. Bojan stood back, beaming.

  ‘Encylopaedia-bloody-Britannica,’ he said after a long silence, and his voice was full of righteous wonder and pride. He was excited, as if he had finally found the key to their mutual liberty in the shape of twenty-four uniformly bound volumes.

  Sensing this weight of futile faith congealing around her, Sonja approached the books. She ran her fingers over the caterpillar tread of their dark spines massed together. Emboldened she took one volume out, feeling its weight, watching its crowded pages stumble past her fingertips as she peered inside.

  ‘Now you learn the English good,’ said Bojan with pride. ‘Now you don’t end up like me.’

  Curious and alien as the gift was, Sonja felt a certain thrill both with it and more so by her father’s obvious pleasure in giving it to her. But she also felt somewhat apprehensive. Without reading a word she wondered if she could ever understand all or any of it, for there was no story, no identifiable person to guide her through this labyrinth of words. And without a guide she knew she was lost. There was also another matter that suddenly struck her as a cause for worry.

  ‘Artie,’ she asked, ‘how much did it cost?’

  ‘Don’t you worry. The salesman and I make a deal so that I don’t have to pay for it now.’ Bojan smiled benignly. ‘Instead I pay for it over three years, so much a month.’ He shrugged. ‘But that’s my problem.’ He sank to his knees next to Sonja, looked glowingly up at the encyclopaedia set as though it were an apparition of the Virgin Mary herself, and put an arm around her waist. ‘The salesman, he say no better way of learning the English than by reading the Encyclopaedia Britannica.’ Sonja seemed unconvinced so Bojan spoke further to enthuse her. ‘All you have to do,’ he said, ‘is read.’

  For a short time, a very short time, perhaps twenty minutes in all, Sonja found the encylopaedia interesting. For a much longer time, she simply read it out of respect for her father. She began with Volume One and resolved to read the entire encyclopaedia page by page, volume by volume, however arduous a labour this might prove. Bojan felt this to be both a wise and industrious use of the books. Sonja read some hundreds of pages dutifully, before she found it impossible to stop her eyes glazing and skidding over words then sentences, then entire articles, then large sections. She realised it was possible to read such writing closely and for it to mean nothing and for it not to have enlightened her in any way whatsoever, and as she slowly came to admit this to herself, the futility of her ambition became ever more apparent.

  Still, for some months they would each morning sit at the pink marble-laminex kitchen table eating breakfast. In front of each would be two bowls, one with steaming hot golden polenta, the other empty. Sonja would fill the empty bowls with the thick black turkish coffee. Then each would put their spoon in the polenta, and with it full of the bright yellow cornmeal, place it into the dark sweet coffee, and then leaning over the bowl, put the syrup-covered polenta into their mouths. Bojan would glance the Sporting Globe, folded into an easily handled quarter and held out at arm’s length from his eyes, because that was the way some of the older blokes held their pap
ers at smoko, because it seemed appropriate and right to do, even if he could only make sense of the occasional sentence and some of the pictures; while Sonja would have at her side a hefty volume of the Encyclopaedia Britannica. She would read dutifully, rather than with any enthusiasm or interest, and occasionally he would ask her where she was up to, and she would reply, ‘Volume Two, click here,’ or, ‘Volume Three, Cr to Da, page 1,562’, and to prove her dedication and to assure him that this was not folly, ask him curious unanswerable questions, such as: ‘Do you know there are over 782 types of crustaceans?’

  ‘Bugger me,’ Bojan would invariably say in his best Australian and sometimes laugh, at his own ignorance and out of his pride at her command of such facts. But he also was laughing at the inanity of wisdom, for Bojan was no fool, and he thought, rightly, that such things were generally useless to know, but he also thought, wrongly, that the difference between failure and success in life was the possession of a sum of such useless knowledge. Sonja would smile back, and be reminded, as she always was by the sight of her spoon of heaped golden polenta sinking into the blackness of the coffee, of the sun setting into the night.

  Chapter 40

  1962

  THEY HAD PICKED APPLES, Cox’s Orange Pippins they were, all that unseasonally bright and hot day and most of the previous day and all the time Sonja wondering how long it would take for her hessian bag to fill, whether it would be that many trees, or would she reach the end of her row before Bojan did on the other side and if she did, if she filled her bag before his would he always stay with her and would it always be like this or would that only happen if he filled his bag first?—and always his bag full twice over before hers and ever the question unanswered—could it be like this for ever and ever? Could it? Could it? and the question not answered and the bag never full.

  Then Sonja had gone to the toilet she loved of a day and feared of a night, a wooden outdoor dunny, with a lean the equivalent of the tower of Pisa, and an interior for a child more wondrous, wallpapered from top to bottom with pictures from magazines and newspapers. Some old and yellowed, some peeling off, some new and bright. Parts of the wall were pocked by postcards of far-off places. An old picture of tourists in a piazza in Venice; a double-decker bus in London; an aged, tinted photograph of Dubrovnik.

  How Sonja loved to linger in the languorous confines of that dunny. Sunlight fell through the gaps in the door and lit up its interior—the wooden bench seat, freshly painted green, upon which sat Sonja, knickers around her ankles, the heavy wooden seat-cover painted bright red. And those pictures, those enchanting pictures!

  She heard old Archie coming up the small hill to the dunny singing in his flat old voice, clattery as the apple-sorter and as assuring, his end of picking farewell to the Cox’s Orange Pippins—

  ‘The season’s last pippins are gathered

  And yellow leaves drift from the trees

  The last case, packed, labelled and branded;

  Is railed to be shipped overseas.

  ‘We have toiled like dumb driven cattle

  With a picking bag yoked to our neck;

  And battled the pest and the weather

  That threatens the harvest to wreck.’

  Sonja sat looking at these magazine pictures that adorned the walls, pictures of remote and romantic places, her practical purpose for being on the toilet long forgotten, her mind wandering through tinted dreams of Europe over which Archie’s song murmured and meandered—

  ‘The plow handles I now have forsaken;

  I let them go without even a sigh;

  And to the apples that grow in the future,

  I say, goodbye, Mr Pippin, goodbye.’

  ‘Have you ever been to Dubrovnik, Archie?’ asked Sonja.

  Sonja gazed at the curling picture of Dubrovnik, which looked to her exactly how she envisaged a city out of tales about genies and sultans.

  ‘Have you, Archie? To Dubrovnik, Archie?’ asked Sonja.

  Outside, Archie readjusted the nappy pin that held his braces to his pants, tucked a faded blue flannel shirt back in, then took one final drag of his rollie, and threw the butt away.

  ‘No,’ said Archie and he spoke as if to the sky. ‘But I have been to buggery and back waiting for you to get off that bloody throne.’

  By mid-afternoon the heat and work had taken their toll on Sonja, and she lay down to rest in the orchard and promptly fell asleep. She awoke all muzzy to see Jean standing on the uppermost rung of a stool picking some apples from a tree not far from where Sonja lay. Bojan stood beneath her, collecting the apples in a wooden case, and the rows of trees formed a green grotto around them. Then Jean got down and they gently embraced. They kissed.

  ‘Sonja…?’ asked Jean, motioning to where Sonja appeared to be dozing in a nearby sunny patch of grass, clearly not wishing to give offence to the child.

  ‘Don’t worry,’ said Bojan. ‘She’s asleep.’

  Sonja blinked, squinted, and without moving, focused on what was taking place. She watched with unease as Bojan gently parted Jean’s hair with his hands, then with equal tenderness cupped and ever so slowly rolled one of Jean’s breasts. These gestures disquieted Sonja, in a way that seeing her father in bed with Jean had strangely not. In bed they had been homely, but now there was a suggestion of an intimacy beyond what she had ever known with her father and the consequences of that intimacy disturbed Sonja. But the sun was strong and the grass soft and her sleepiness coupled to her awareness that she had seen something that she ought not have, led her to again close her eyes.

  And her daydeam gave way to a terrible nightmare. She was once more in the back seat of Picotti’s Pontiac, cowering in the corner. Picotti sat in the front seat, head turned toward Sonja, smiling, beckoning her to come to him. She stole a glance out of the window and saw Bojan talking to Jean in the orchard. She screamed to Bojan for help but heard nothing, and nor, it became apparent to Sonja, did Bojan, who turned away from Sonja and embraced Jean. The more her terror grew, the more Sonja silently screamed, the more oblivious they seemed to become to her plight and the more passionate grew their embraces and kissing. There seemed to be no hope, no possibility of rescue, of security.

  Later Sonja would recall the nightmare seamlessly merging into reality, for suddenly she was jolted awake by a bump, sitting up to find herself back in the FJ as it kicked up a large cloud of dust along a back road lined on either side by apple orchards. Bojan looked across at Sonja and smiled.

  ‘You awake now,’ he said.

  Sonja was still sleepy and merely murmured in answer. Bojan drew breath. In front of him he saw a fence that was ageing and badly needed its ancient split posts replacing, a packing shed whose roofing iron was loose and would need to be refastened before winter. He saw things that needed to be done, but for various reasons had not been attended to.

  ‘Good weekend, eh?’ said Bojan. For Sonja it had been a weekend more or less like any other of that summer. She nodded vaguely. ‘Sonja—what you think if Jean and I we marry? If Jean become your Mama?’ He said it nonchalantly, as if it meant nothing, as if he was asking did she wish to have more or less vinegar on the oiled salad.

  Sonja came to her senses. Her dream had left her feeling scared, vulnerable, and in desperate need of her father, who was now saying he might give himself to someone else. Outside the FJ she saw a world that was green, a sky that was blue, a world in which people seemed orderly, in which life was as it presumably was meant to be. She had had too much change and wanted no more. She felt the confusion of love pull at her, felt the desire to retain things as they were, struggling with her wish to change everything or forget it all, felt love’s fear of another love possibly swamping hers.

  ‘No. No, Artie, no … I don’t want it. She’s…’ Sonja searched for a reason against the choice of Jean but found none. She had liked the arrangement they had through the summer, that had seen Jean giving, them sharing, but none of it threatening her. Sonja seized on the obvious. ‘She’s too
old. I just want you. I don’t want her. I want us.’

  Bojan’s smile slowly disappeared.

  ‘Together. Us. In our home.’

  Bojan swallowed. Neither spoke any more on that long trip home, this time longer than either could ever remember.

  Chapter 41

  1962

  AFTER THAT things were different. The following Saturday they worked in the workshop, Sonja back to her role of sanding, Bojan marking up a piece of cheap Tas oak to be cut for the shelves of a small bookcase, smouldering cigarette in mouth, open bottle of beer on the workbench.

  The oppressiveness of that day did not end with the drowsy mugginess unusual for autumn. Neither had spoken much, and Sonja, feeling her father’s depression as a physical weight, summoned the courage to ask what had been troubling them both.

  ‘Why aren’t we going to the orchard this weekend?’

  Bojan’s wistful melancholia abruptly vanished. He looked more closely at the square, as though the next saw cut was far more important than anything Sonja might say.

  ‘You said you loved Jean,’ Sonja said, though she did not mean to say that or to say anything, but it just came out that way, because she did not have his look silencing her.

  ‘Sure,’ said Bojan. ‘I said that maybe. Maybe not. But I have you.’ And to make it not so much clear as final, he added, ‘We’re not going back, Sonja. Not ever. That is what you wanted, that is what you have.’