The Sound of One Hand Clapping

by Richard Flanagan

  Sonja was not horrified at the time, because she did not know that he meant it. She knew he was upset, but thought it would blow over and then they would return to Jean’s and everything would be as it had been. She could not know that it would take years in demonstrating the strength of his resolve to never return, to establish the cruel unfairness of what he had said.

  Sonja would not give up. She introduced a subject about which he never talked and in which she was of late interested and thought he might be too.

  ‘Is Slovenia beautiful, Artie?’

  Bojan stood up straight and looked at her. Realising he was listening but wasn’t angry, Sonja continued.

  ‘And Europe? Is it like the pictures in Jean’s toilet?’

  Somehow this seemed to strike at the heart of his sadness.

  Maybe Bojan had wanted to marry Jean, but did not have the strength alone to see it through. Maybe he had needed Sonja’s enthusiasm for the idea, because he had been so frightened. And perhaps like her, he finally felt safer not risking anything. There were thoughts that terrified him every night when the idea of living once more with a woman came to his mind, and washing behind that were memories, accompanied by a notion of himself so low and so despicable that he was frightened what might happen if ever he embarked on such a forlorn project as another marriage. Because he loved Jean and Jean loved him, but he no longer believed in love. There were things, he had concluded, more powerful than love in this world.

  ‘Is it, Artie?’

  And when he replied he seemed to be talking as much about Jean, about him, them, as about Europe. He lingered over each word, unintentionally throwing an entirely different meaning on the sentence.

  ‘It was,’ he said, ‘…bloody—’ He halted, seeming confused by the strangeness of English words. ‘—beautiful.’

  He leant down and placed the square back on the Tas oak ready to start work again, but, struck by a memory, halted for a second time and stood back up. He looked once more at Sonja.

  ‘I tell you the best story I know about Europe. It was before the war. The richest man in our village—a big, fat mean bastard he was, Jesus Christ you shoulda seen him!—and this bastard have most of his wealth in pigs which he keep beneath his big house.

  ‘Well, one night, in the middle of winter, snow everywhere, the rich man’s house catch fire. All the villagers help rescue the pigs from the burning house. But as quick as they pull them out of the burning house, the pigs run back into the flames.’

  ‘Why?’ asked Sonja.

  ‘Why?’ repeated Bojan. ‘You ask me why? Who knows why? That’s Europe. That’s what I mean. Can you believe it? I can’t. No-one could. It was as if the fire had cast a spell on them and they were in love with it.’ He laughed, but clearly he didn’t find the story funny. ‘In the end the pigs were all burnt to death and the town stank of burnt pork for days.

  ‘That’s a funny thing, eh?’

  But he didn’t smile.

  So it ended. Winter came. The white lace curtain hanging in the old wooden window frame yellowed, a cocoon from which the butterfly had long since flown. Jean stood inside, arms folded, looking out the window into the distance, as if waiting for Bojan and Sonja to return.

  She stood that way for many days, some down the Huon say for some months, and a few even say for years. But to stand waiting even for an hour would have been pointless. The telltale cloud of dust signalled many a passing car, but never Bojan’s FJ, crawling under its carapace of fresh furniture made in affirmation of a fragile idea that something even bigger than his love for her, or more beautiful than her love for him, might exist, and that was the idea of people finding a measure of grace living together.

  It began to rain, at first a few gentle spots, and then a slow drumming on the tin roof. It grew darker. After a time Jean’s staring and thinking came to an end, and her arms unfolded to pull the old window down, and then draw heavy, dark curtains across the window, behind the lace curtain, and the lace curtain no longer played in the soft morning breeze, but grew still and brittle, and gathered heavy dust. The rain continued falling upon the glass, forming rills and rivulets in the window grime.

  The roses next to Jean’s bedroom window wilted and died, and their petals fell to the ground there to lose what little colour and shape and scent remained, and Jean took no comfort from the knowledge that the flowers were passing slowly back into the damp earth. There was, she had long ago concluded, little comfort to be derived from anything except other people. And she was unsure if she had the strength any more to seek out such brittle solace.

  Chapter 42

  1962

  THEN THE BOOK-READING fell apart, as if its spine had been silently snapped in the night as they slept, and everything was unable to be as they wished it, even to be as it was, and Bojan took back up with the bottle and Sonja hated him for it, o God, how she hated him for it, but she simply had to stay the course with him, because she was a child, because she was his daughter and he was her father but both these things stopped being things and became only words which neither trusted nor understood. He didn’t know what to do with himself far less with her, and though she knew what she wanted she could find no way of getting there, so instead each afternoon after school she simply went with Bojan.

  She would walk or bus or generally a bit of both to get to whatever building site Bojan was labouring on at the time, and there wait in the FJ through the hours until knockoff. In the FJ she would not read her schoolbooks, because reading was a stranger whose acquaintance she decided she was not destined to make. She would draw pictures of flowers. She would get out of the car, go for a wander, watch her father from a distance and admire him, think this was how she would always remember him, forever back bent and moving beautifully beneath loose old workclothes. She had done enough physical labour in the course of her short life not to envy him his hard yakka, as he called it after the manner of his workmates. Yet she loved seeing him so, and sometimes wanted and sometimes did work with him on the site, cleaning up, fetching material and tools, because that was how she saw what was best in her father, how she came to understand how he saw the world and those within it, through his work with others.

  But when his day’s work was done, instead of going home, Bojan would drive to the pub and leave Sonja to wait in the car in a small gravel car park.

  ‘Don’t worry,’ he would inevitably say, ‘I have only one drink.’

  The sun would fall low. It would glint on windscreens, skid along the mirroring chrome of the new Zephyrs and Hillmans and Holdens, sink into the rich earthy ochre colours of the rust pocks in the older cars. The sun would sink. Bojan would remain in the pub. As darkness came upon the car park, the streetlights would come on and Sonja would still be waiting in the car.

  Then when she least expected it, when she had abandonded all hope, Bojan would appear out of nowhere at the car’s side window, waving something in his hand. At long last, Sonja would at first think, at long last we can go home. She would smile. Bojan would put his head in through the door and, with a crooked smile, proffer Sonja a large wrapped block of chocolate.

  Sonja would ignore the chocolate and look straight up at Bojan. Look into his beer-glazed eyes. Quietly and impassively she would say: ‘Artie, please can we go home.’

  Bojan, invariably drunk, invariably laughed, and would say: ‘It’s a family bar.’ Laugh some more. ‘The chocolate—a family bar.’ He always did that when he was drunk, explain his jokes, as if their failure related to someone else’s inadequate command of language. It never seemed to occur to him that the joke might not be that funny in the first place. And it made her so angry, such jokes.

  ‘I want to go home.’

  ‘Where?’ Bojan would ask. ‘What home? You and I have no home, Sonja. Don’t you understand?’ He would laugh some more and then his laughter would turn to tears. The beer glaze would wash from his eyes. ‘We have a wog flat, my Sonja. A wog flat. Don’t you understand?’

  And he would
turn and head back inside the pub. Those men staggering from the pub later that night would see, as they saw so many other nights, the car with the small girl in it illuminated by a nearby street lamp. Sometimes they would see the small girl sitting in the driver’s seat looking at the horizon, as if she were driving to some destination very far off and had already spent many, many hours on this journey; sometimes, if they came close, they might find her fast asleep on the back seat. And sometimes, very late of a night, they might notice her at the passenger sidewindow, putting her hands to the window and screaming, a most terrible scream, long and thin and plaintive.

  Inside, the pub would be loud, exclusive in its adult male camaraderie, deeply sad and selfishly desperate. From the height of a bar table, a child—if a child ever were to grace such a place, which of course, like a woman, it would not—a child would have seen only glasses being raised and lowered, puddles of beer on the tabletop, cigarettes being butted out in the ashtray, hands gesticulating. Between beer glasses that stood like prison bars the child might just have been able to look out through a window to the car in which Sonja sat screaming. But instead of screams the child would only have heard the tinkle of glasses and the laughter of merry male company. It might have heard one of Bojan’s drinking companions whisper a confidence to his mate, have overheard him say: ‘Get the wog to buy your drink. He’s in here every night. He don’t care what happens to his money. They only use it to bring mama out from Greece anyway.’

  And heard his mate reply: ‘Bojan you bastard are you gonna buy this next shout or what?’

  And heard Bojan laugh and say: ‘Yeh, bloody hell, I buy as much bloody beer you want. What the fuck else do I earn this bloody money for?’

  General laughter. And from within the merry perspective of the pub, Sonja would have looked not unhappy in her car-prison, like an insect inside a bell jar seemingly content.

  Even though the insect was screaming and even though each scream was taking the insect further away from the one person to whom she wished to be closer and who might make her human once more.

  Chapter 43

  1990

  SO IT WAS as that magic summer of so long ago ended in rain, and Bojan forsook Jean’s love and resumed his interrupted affair with the bottle, Sonja stopped eating apples, only to dream all the more about them. She did eat apples again, of course she did, but it was only many years later, long after she had become an adult, when she lived in Sydney and she felt sure that the sensation of torn skin and ruptured flesh and sweet acidic juices filling her mouth would not bring the power of the old world back into her life. There were in Sydney neither Geeveston Fannys nor Jonagolds nor Tassie Snows nor Cox’s Orange Pippins to be had, and the fruit stall in the crowded railway station had only the ubiquitous Golden Delicious. But upon biting into the apple, Sonja tasted only total emptiness and loss, for the apple was mealy and tasted of pap. And then she knew that all she had was what she carried within her, and she had denied that for so long that it now seemed not possible to reclaim any of it and, feeling everything had gone, she abruptly sat down in front of the fruit stall on the pavement and burst into tears, as thousands of commuters stepped around and finally over her.

  On a day off from her barmaid job Sonja borrowed Helvi’s old Corolla and drove down the new highway to the Huon. It took her a few attempts and wrong turns and a flat tire before she finally found the place on the hillside where she had so many years before sat in the FJ the first time they came to visit Jean, with Bojan tightening and loosening his tie, tightening and loosening. This time it was raining and Sonja looked out of the car at where Jean’s orchard had been through worn windscreen wipers grinding back and forth. Little remained; through cupolas that cleared and then dissolved back into rain-blur she saw that the orchard had become a paddock, the garden was entirely gone, and the house transformed into a dilapidated barn. The rambling rose was gone. The lace was gone.

  As the heavy rain continued, she noticed a piece of derelict, rusty guttering break away from the roof of what had once been Jean’s home and channel a long, heavy tongue of rainwater upon a budding red tulip, flattening it to the ground.

  All that remained, she thought, was her. And him. But apart, they were nothing more than a home become a barn, an orchard ploughed under to become an empty paddock. The smell of a tree without blossom. The look of Jean’s window without lace. The sound of one hand clapping.

  In the years between Jean falling into Bojan’s arms and Sonja falling onto that filthy Sydney pavement Sonja had never seen an orchard without feeling guilt at what she believed was her own treachery, had never heard the old names of the apples without seeing her father momentarily, gloriously happy looking up at Jean, and the happiness disappearing with the old apples and with them old Archie singing his clattery end of picking farewell to the Cox’s Orange Pippins—

  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.

  —and it had all vanished: Jean and Bojan and old Archie and Cox’s Orange Pippins and the marvellous taste of it all, bitter and sweet and crunchy all together.

  Chapter 44

  1990

  THAT NIGHT after she returned from visiting the Huon, Sonja was beset by an old dream:

  She was once more a child waiting at the work site after school, watching her father and the men lay a slab for a house, a vast and wet ocean of grey mud. Jiri was not about when Bojan fell into the cement. It happened quickly and it took place slowly, so quick that he disappeared into the cement in a single motion, leaving only a wet gravelly wave where his body had been, so slow that she saw it, saw him twist and drop face first, saw all this without fear or panic, expectantly waiting for Bojan and his curses to resurface. But he only managed to bring his torso and head a little above the wet cement before dropping into it once more. She did not know, could not know, but somehow could see that his overalls had become ensnared in the hidden wire reinforcing, and the more he struggled, the more ravelled up in the wire his clothes became. The wave thrashed around, and Bojan arose a second time, his face and clothes and hair all shining wet and dark with the concrete, as if he were a statue, as if he were a ghost, and his arm extended out toward her and he cried out her name in a voice piteous and pleading but she did not know what to do or how to help him. She hesitated as his wet-iron fingers stretched as far as they could in the vain hope of reaching her, as if she could save him, as if she could reach him, and she did not know whether to scream or to rush into the dangerous pit of the slab to help her father. Her head shook, and at that moment Jiri rushed past her, bounded into the wet slab like a lifesaver into treacherous seas, and the liquid concrete splashed around his big body and above his gum-boots. He hauled at the seal-like form of Bojan’s upturned body, and pulled with such might that he ripped Bojan’s overalls off the steel reo, and in the process put a nasty gash into Bojan’s thigh. Bojan screamed in shock and pain and the relief of being freed. Jiri laughed, and his mighty saving hand slapped Bojan upon his wet back, lifting a fine spray of grey concrete into the budgerigar blue of the morning sky and then the concrete was falling and changing to crimson in colour and a curtain in form and a hand was tying it back and the morning light was filling the bedroom.

  ‘How goes the pregnancy?’

  Sonja looked up from her bed, saw that it was Helvi with a tray of breakfast: Finnish sweetbread and tea. Sonja gazed out the window. Her bladder felt outrageously full.

  ‘Fine. I don’t throw up any more.’ Sonja turned her face and looked out the window, trying to reorient herself to the world outside that of her dreams. ‘I’ve given up coffee. My back aches, my legs throb.’ She got out of bed, anxious to be alone until the dream was properly gone and she knew for sure that it was not true that her father was drowning in a wet cement slab and she could not save him. ‘And if I don’t go now I’ll flood the bedroom.’
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  Chapter 45

  1990

  HELVI PUSHED AND STRETCHED the dough until it was as pliable and roly as a podgy baby’s bottom, stretched and pushed and rolled. ‘That is the art,’ Helvi would say, ‘to stretch the dough when you knead, not hit it or beat it or crush the life out of it. But push and stretch, push and stretch, and the dough will grow softer, more compliant, until it is alive and ready to grow.

  ‘That is all you have to do to make bread,’ Helvi would say to Sonja on those long days they worked together around the house, ‘show the yeast and the flour that together they can grow into something better.’ Sonja watched that large ball of dough, round, elastic, being expertly kneaded by Helvi’s knobbly old hands. ‘I love that smell,’ said Helvi and she almost touched the dough with her nose as she inhaled the beery fragrance. ‘Like a baby’s head. Warm and yeasty. You smell it?’

  ‘To tell the truth, not that much,’ said Sonja.

  ‘Ah—pregnancy,’ said Helvi. ‘You look beautiful and feel woeful. Your back aches, legs throb, you throw up and can’t even drink coffee. And you, Sonja, can’t even smell bread.’

  Sonja smiled.

  Helvi kneaded the dough some more, and had just picked it up when Sonja began to talk. ‘It’s not exactly the pregnancy, Helvi.’ Sonja halted, thought, then continued. Her voice was weary, slow with the telling. ‘When I was young, Artie hit me too hard once.’ Helvi let the dough drop onto the bench with a dull thud. She resumed kneading. But she was listening intently.

  ‘And my nose wouldn’t stop bleeding. At the hospital they cauterised it and stopped the bleeding. But I can’t smell things now.’ All the time she talked she had a gentle, ironic smile fixed to her face. ‘Flowers. Or bread.’