The Sound of One Hand Clapping

by Richard Flanagan

  Helvi did not know what to say. She had a sense that it was wrong to frame the story with any comment. She flashed a smile of sad solidarity. She pushed the dough along the bench to Sonja.

  ‘Here—you knead.’

  Sonja began awkwardly to work the dough.

  ‘Your father write you yet?’

  ‘No. And he won’t. He never writes to anybody.’

  ‘Maybe you should go and talk to him.’

  ‘Why?’ said Sonja, with little enthusiasm, but somewhere the slightest hope. ‘There’s no point. It’s too far. And it’s been too long.’ Then wistfully, she opened up ever so slightly. ‘It would be nice, Helvi. It really would. But nice isn’t life. Is it?’

  Helvi’s hands wrested the dough from Sonja’s and resumed kneading the dough properly.

  ‘Stretch the dough, Sonja. Stretch. Unless you stretch it, the bread won’t grow.’ Helvi laughed. ‘Like your father.’

  She pushed the dough back to Sonja, who tried once more, this time with a little more expertise, stretching it back and forth, back and forth.

  ‘Bojan bread,’ said Sonja. Helvi dropped the dough into a bread tin, the tin into the oven. ‘You’d need the rack to stretch that old bastard.’

  And they both laughed. But then Sonja stopped, and looked up from the oven.

  ‘What if I turned out to be like him? If I was like her? Sometimes I wonder Helvi, what kind of mother I will make. That I will be a bad mother. What if I was never there when the baby needed me? What if I became so angry that I hit it?’

  Helvi said nothing. She wished she knew what to say, but she didn’t. She could only offer Sonja her home, her bread.

  ‘I’m scared, Helvi,’ said Sonja. ‘Sometimes I am so frightened that I won’t be able to hold it all together. Parts of me are dead, but I don’t know which parts.’

  Sonja remembered how upon arriving in Sydney all those years ago she had been struck above all by the indifference of the city. In the airport she had suddenly screamed out her father’s name and there was no reply, and she had laughed, out of fear and out of relief—and people studiously avoided her, rather than as before, simply not seeing her. Sane or insane, the city did not care, went to pains not to know, and within it she felt a sense of liberty, of having joined some huge fraternity of the fallen, all refusing to acknowledge the devil was on their tail. Lives lived with purpose existed only in rumours and advertisements. In the big smoke there were a billion particles of smog, caustic residue of millions of similarly incinerated lives. The city filled her with the anonymity of others and in that vast wash of a shared nothingness, where people were ordered like factory hens and worked like mules and only in their nightmares were human, Sonja finally found some relief.

  She ended up taking a comfort in the climate’s oppressive closeness, a flat heat that lay upon all things and all places, finding in it a form of security. She did not want the space that other people in the city craved, rather she welcomed the lack of it, the endless opportunities it gave to deny private life. She preferred to remain upon life’s surface and was troubled when people who liked her tried to take her with them down into the murky depths, people who presumed that friendship ultimately entailed learning fundamental truths about another. She wished to stay skipping in the shallows, where escape was always a possibility, remaining a mystery even to herself.

  But then had come that day, that day only a few months before.

  Sonja had happened to be in an editing suite chasing up some receipts when they were cutting footage for a TV documentary on the dam-building mania of postwar Australia.

  They were scanning an interview with an old union man called Preston, who was talking about the reffos, about the violence and drinking and suicides and murders. They tried running some of Preston’s comments over some archival footage, grainy and scratched and without sound, of the building of a dam in Tasmania in the early 1950s.

  And it was then that she saw that maddened animal wielding a sledge hammer.

  It took Sonja some moments to recognise who it was. The old union man called Preston began telling a story so unspeakably sad about a woman he had never met, but whose path he had briefly crossed in the middle of a blizzard so many years ago. He had only glimpsed her from his motorbike, and it was night and he was moving and it was snowing, but he remembered she wore a scarlet coat and beneath it a dress edged in lace.

  ‘We’ll cut that,’ said a short red-haired woman sitting next to the editor, ‘pointless, unnecessary detail.’

  The tape was rewound, then run once more, but Sonja was already running faster than the videotape, along the corridor, down the stairs, and into the street below, pulling large deep breaths in, as though she were a drowning woman just rescued from the sea.

  Helvi did not tell Sonja to do what Sonja then did, or even suggest it. It was not inevitable, but it was born out of Sonja’s sense that if she didn’t do something herself now, the inevitable that she had hitherto lived her life with would intercede. It may well all be written, as Jiri used to say, but perhaps Helvi was right when she would reply: ‘Maybe, but it’s better you be the writer yourself than some bastard who only ever writes bad parts for you.’

  From now on, Sonja decided, she would do some of the writing herself, would at least try to fix some of the flux that beset her into a form that she wanted, instead of letting her life, and the lives of everybody around her, be relegated to the cutting bin of unnecessary detail.

  Sonja looked out her bedroom window, looked as far as she could into the morning sky until the sun that sat like a flame in pale water hurt her eyes so much that she screwed them up and turned away, thinking once more of what she had tried to not think about for so long, wondering where her father was and what he was thinking.

  Wondering also: But why doesn’t he write? Why?

  Chapter 46

  1990

  LIKE A BARROOM BRAWLER who won’t give up laying into his opponent even after the poor bastard has been reduced to a pulpy quivering mess that won’t or can’t get back up off the blood-puddled floor, the rain continued pummelling the tin roof of the bereft Tullah single men’s quarters on that miserable winter’s night. The wind, a banshee from the west, shrieked and beat the single men’s quarters with erratic thumps. In Bojan’s lousy room a small bar radiator sitting on the floor etched a thin red line, promising but not delivering heat.

  Below his breath Bojan cursed the incessant din of the rain above. The glow from the light bulb fell directly onto a near-empty cardboard carton of Cascade bitter that sat on the middle of Bojan’s bed next to him, and grotesque shadows grew out from the beer carton to the periphery of his small cell, as though the beer carton was the only real, substantial thing in the room.

  Fuck it, thought Bojan Buloh. Fuck everything. Fuck this fucken place. Fuck me. He reached into the carton and pulled out another bottle. He slid the neck of the bottle into the side of his mouth, brought his back teeth down hard on the metal beer cap. It was then that he became aware of another presence in his room and heard her voice.

  Saying: ‘I’m pregnant.’

  He did not bother looking up, but chose rather to twist his head sideways as slowly he levered the beer bottle up against his teeth, prising the cap off. The pressure released and the beer hissed. He pulled the opened beer bottle out of his mouth.

  Spat the cap out onto the floor of his room.

  Spat out the words: ‘I know.’

  ‘I thought maybe you didn’t get my letter,’ said Sonja.

  In one hand Bojan had a smoke, in the other the opened bottle of beer. He was drunk, but quietly so. His voice was subdued. Outside the night was black and cold. Bojan alternately smoked his fag and swigged from the bottle, one hand rising to his mouth, one hand falling. The suck of the fag, the swish of the bottle. Movements of a few centimetres, movements of a lifetime. He wished he could dissolve in the driving rain and wash away into the rivers they would soon fuck up forever. Fuck the rivers, thought Bojan.
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  ‘No,’ he said. ‘I got it.’

  They were both silent.

  The rain battered the tired iron above their heads in heaving waves. Sonja felt the storm as an oppressive weight bearing down upon them. Bojan, to the contrary, found in the noise a cocoon into which he could retreat and feel some safety from others, a cocoon which both imprisoned him and succoured him. This thought gave him the strength to say something more.

  ‘What could I do?’

  Sonja said nothing.

  Bojan breathed out, turned his bottle and fag holding hands outwards. ‘I have no home,’ he said. Sonja said nothing. ‘No money, no possessions, only this job and this room.’

  ‘You could have telephoned,’ said Sonja.

  ‘Why?’

  And as if to emphasise how little he supposedly cared Bojan raised the bottle to his mouth and swigged. Sonja watched in sad disgust. There was something half-fascinating, half-repulsive in Bojan’s proud desolation. As the lager fell down his throat his stubbly, wrinkly gullet pulsed in and out like that of a seagull. He skulled maybe half the bottle in a single go, though Sonja found it hard to tell with the amount of foam he kicked up within the bottle.

  ‘No wonder Mama left,’ said Sonja.

  Bojan took the bottle a few inches away from his mouth so that it sat level with his chest, still on a steep angle ready for the next swig. He looked at Sonja, annoyed with her for bringing back the memory of Maria.

  ‘What you know?’ he said contemptuously.

  Fuck Sonja.

  ‘I know you,’ said Sonja.

  Fuck her.

  ‘You know nothing,’ said Bojan.

  Maybe, thought Sonja. But I know who I am. Maybe it’s not much. But I know. And without even thinking it first, she heard herself saying, not yelling out all of a sudden like, like him, but saying in a thin, hard whisper, ‘Shutup.’

  This was unexpected. For him. And for her. While his behaviour was normal, almost ritual, Sonja’s was new for them both.

  ‘Shutup,’ she said a second time, almost a wishful comment, almost an aside, not meant to be noticed, but strong somehow.

  And when she said it, when she said shutup that second time, his head jumped back, just a bit, but she and he knew it to be a big jump back, like she had landed an unexpected punch and he was dazed. Then he feigned that it hadn’t affected him, thrust his jaw upwards, held his head high as if now on the lookout for another blow and warning her not to try—like it was one more hapless fight outside the pub at the end of the evening that she had once watched from inside the FJ.

  And Sonja noticed this.

  That he was shivering slightly.

  That her father’s face was quivering as if possessed of numerous tics, and she saw upon it things she thought only she knew, but which were appearing there now for all to see. His face that she thought had not aged was, she now realised, ageing terribly while she sat there that bleak night. An ageing infinitely worse than beer flab and baldness. An ageing, wretched and hideous and accelerated so that years made their cruel mark within seconds, and decades within a minute. As she watched, lines were appearing all over his face as if an invisible angel were scratching them there with an invisible nail.

  Bojan was transforming before Sonja’s eyes from a man she once knew, her father, her artie, into someone else, someone she could scarcely guess at. His hair seemed suddenly thinner, greyer. His flesh hollowed, puckered and fell. His eyes receded, lost their shine. And those lines! Those cuts and gouges! As if they might miraculously open and bleed, she feared this horribly etched face and the things that had created it, things that she had only ever half-guessed at—feared the avenging angel with its nail and its creation far more than she ever feared her poor weak father.

  But she knew she had no choice but to continue. So she said: ‘I am sick of you. I thought maybe you had changed—’

  But before she had finished his quivering lips were opening and his body was heaving mightily and he was shouting, ‘You know nothing!’

  And she, without meaning it at all, suddenly yelled, ‘Shutup! Shutup!’ and she slapped him hard, hard across his ravaged, blotched cheek, his stubbly flesh like leathery sandpaper rasping her falling palm.

  Never before had she done such a thing. Never retaliated. He looked at her in a way he had never looked at her before: with amazement.

  He raised his hand to his reddening cheek and wiped it back and forth, feeling the heat. He ran his hand down onto his mouth, dragging his lips together, then turned his head away. Maybe he was thinking, or, maybe just trying to forget one more thing.

  ‘You’ve grown hard,’ Bojan said at last.

  Sonja trembled. Then she shook her head, stared down at Bojan, and spoke now without pity or anger.

  ‘I have had a hard fucking life.’

  Bojan looked up into her eyes. Sonja stared back fiercely. Sonja continued with a slight tremor in her voice.

  ‘And I am fucking hard.’

  Slowly, forcefully, between gulps, she found in words things she had never even thought of, but which she knew were nevertheless inescapably true.

  ‘And you better get fucking used to it.’

  Somehow her comments seemed to alter the balance of forces between them. Bojan’s contemptuous and derisive edge vanished. The momentum of their confrontation evaporated and they faced each other as equals, partners in a tragedy neither fully understood. And perhaps for that reason, neither knew what to say next.

  Bojan’s face seemed as slack and loose as the remnant beer froth that dribbled out the top of the bottle. He turned to his bedside table and pulled out the old shoebox of photographs. He searched through it until he found the one of the dead grandfather about whom Sonja had once dreamt. He put his finger on the face of the corpse, passed the card to Sonja, and asked: ‘You remember?’

  Thinking Bojan was seeking to take the conversation into the less troubled waters of family history, Sonja replied tersely: ‘Mama’s artie—my grandfather.’

  ‘And how he die?’

  ‘In the war he carry food to the partisans,’ said Sonja, reciting a story she had heard often enough. ‘The village priest tell the Domobran. The SS Prinz Eugen Division come and shoot him. This photograph—is after.’

  Bojan pondered this reply, began to speak—halted—then recommenced. ‘Maria…’

  Sonja began to realise she had not known everything.

  ‘Mama,’ she said, ‘Mama … see this?’

  Bojan breathed out, looked away. He put the bottle down and lighted another cigarette. ‘Of course,’ he said. He looked as if he was disappointed with Sonja for not understanding something, though rather it was disappointment with himself for not having had the courage to tell the whole story. He said, ‘She must watch—that is how it was.’ He said, ‘You understand what I say?’

  Sonja nodded. She felt a little dumbstruck. She had never known that Maria had to watch her father’s murder. And she began to make connections between this and elements of her past that had previously made no sense whatsoever.

  Bojan looked this way and that, anywhere where there wasn’t Sonja. He sucked his breath in, and then, still not looking at Sonja—looking instead at the floor between the V formed by his arms, beginning at an elbow balanced on each knee, converging together at the apex of the cigarette—he began to tell a story. He told it slowly, because it was a big story, but one that somehow could only be told in very few words. He told her this.

  ‘Then they rape her sister, her mother.’

  He stopped, gulped.

  ‘Then they rape Maria.’

  Sonja felt strangely light, as if all that kept her connected to this world had been abruptly severed. She had never heard of such a thing about her mother. She felt confused, concussed by the weight of this new knowledge. Silently she mouthed ‘they rape Maria’ twice, feeling the shape of each word like dry stones in her mouth, making certain that what she thought she heard was what she did hear.

  ‘Who
?’ Her voice was quavering, her fear apparent in its uncertain pitch. ‘Who are you talking about?’

  Feeling he had said too much, Bojan stopped, his anger momentarily spent. He looked up at Sonja.

  He spoke. Quietly.

  ‘Maria.’

  Sonja was uncomprehending.

  ‘The SS rape Mama?’

  Bojan looked downwards. ‘Of course,’ said Bojan. ‘Look at the back of the card. Look.’

  Sonja turned the card over. On its cupped and acid-blotched back was written in faded blue ink the inscription ‘ix Avril 1943’.

  ‘She was twelve years old,’ said Bojan.

  ‘She told you?’

  Bojan replied with vehemence, somewhat annoyed that his daughter seemed not to understand the full and total shame of it.

  ‘She say nothing.’

  Bojan continued even more adamantly, his fierceness arising from both anger at what happened and pride in Maria for never telling him.

  He said: ‘Never.’

  And he said it proudly.

  He realised he had Sonja’s total attention, that this was a single moment of understanding that they had never known. He paused, and though he then continued to speak quietly, within him a rage had started to grow.

  ‘But the whole village know.’

  He pointed his right hand at Sonja and punctuated each word with a jab of his smouldering cigarette, flicking ash here and there, leaving smoke trails in the air.

  ‘See.’

  Bojan took the card and again looked at the photograph of the grandfather in the coffin. He drew his cigarette up to the head of the face of the dead man in the photograph and held it there, slowly burning a hole through the dead man’s head. As he did this, seemingly absent-mindedly, he continued talking.

  ‘That is war,’ he said, as if talking about a far-off dream, the details of which it was impossible to properly convey. ‘Don’t let anyone ever tell you no different.’