The Sound of One Hand Clapping

by Richard Flanagan

  Sonja felt her head sway, felt the earth rise and pitch, but somehow she knew she must keep her balance, must not fall. She cupped her hands and held them over her ears so that she might not hear but her head was alternately swelling and then collapsing into nothingness and her cupped hands were only shaping the horror, rather than preventing it.

  Bojan was now yelling.

  ‘A fucken slut fucken like your fucken mother.’

  Bojan spat the last word out with vehemence. Then Sonja saw that her hands were shaping a shield and his hand was coming toward her face, the back of a large hand growing huger as it came closer.

  ‘Fucken like your fucken mother.’

  Sonja screamed, but not out of terror but from something beyond terror; she had unwittingly set him off but she had not meant it, she had not.

  ‘No,’ she screamed, terrified at what she knew would inevitably follow, ‘No, no, no,’ she yelled.

  ‘I show you who’s bloody drunk.’

  His voice was cold and without emotion. Only his face shook.

  ‘Watch,’ he said slowly, as if trying to demonstrate to both of them that he was not drunk. ‘I show you.’ When he backhanded Sonja for the second time, she remained impassive and did not cry, and were it not for her flesh tearing and her blood starting to run it might have even been possible to think that his blows were without effect. Bojan’s face shook more. Sonja pleaded with him now in Slovenian, chattering like a caged, maddened bird.

  ‘Ni, Artie, ni, ni, ni, ni…’

  But no language meant much to Bojan now. He hit her again and again. And when she finally fell to the floor he yelled out in great pain, as if he had been beaten and not her.

  ‘They fuck you! They fuck you!’

  She hated him. She wished she could hold him tight like Mrs Heaney’s kids had held their mother, so that she might not hate him so much.

  ‘They fuck you!’ cried Bojan a final time, then staggered off to bed, tripping over a chair leg as he went.

  She could not remember when it had started. To go back to before was for them both to acknowledge that now was no good, but now was all they had and could ever have. She could not remember how it had begun, these bashings. She did discern a change in her own response to the bashings—transforming from a paralysing fear to a feeling close to blessed release when his first blow fell, for the end was now close and her fear, with which she had to live for days leading up to a beating, was shed with her blood, and her blood smelt sweet to her like rain falling upon a drought-maddened earth. And then finally, there came a night when she realised she was no longer scared at all of his backhanders and his fists, because she knew there was something within her that hadn’t broken, that hadn’t bled and which he could never reach.

  Chapter 50

  1966

  THE FOLLOWING MORNING Sonja lay motionless in her bed, eyes open and alert in a face bruised and swollen. From Bojan’s bedroom came the sound of drunken snoring. She moved, felt pain jab and prickle her face, sat up slowly, and eased herself out of her bed covers. She did not dress, but in her pyjamas went straight to the laundry, filled a bucket with hot water into which she threw some detergent, found a rag from under the sink closet, and then went to the wall spattered with her now dried and darkened blood. She described an arc across the wall with the dampened rag, then another and another, watching pink patterns form back and forth as she cleaned the wall and the similarly stained floor below. As she washed the wall, watching the swirls form and disappear, holes within holes within holes, she began to sing so that she would not hear her father snoring.

  ‘Oh Mr Sheen,’ she sang softly, sang slowly, more slowly than the song in the advertisement for the aerosol cleaner, in a hesitant, stumbling way she sang, ‘Oh … Mr Sheen, you get everything … everything so sparkling clean.’

  When she finished the wall, she would open the windows and front door, mop the floors, and wash up the mess from the card evening, then finally clean herself, trying as she did so to look at her face as little as possible. And then her father would awake and the house would glisten and the smell of sour sweated bread would be banished for another short, ever shorter time.

  Chapter 51

  1966

  I’m getting used to it now.

  His moods, his unpredictable explosions, horrible words and terrible things spewing out of his mouth. When he comes into a room, I go out, not to make a point or anything, not loud like, but quiet as a mouse, hugging the wall so that he will not notice I was ever there. I will turn side-on when he walks past me, so that there is more space for him to pass, I will say nothing when he talks, neither bad things nor good things, neither jokes nor serious things. I will. Sometimes when he’s just chatting away I know he’s trying to catch my eyes, to get me to look into his eyes. But I won’t and I don’t, because I get all dizzy looking into them, they’re like deep blue lakes that I stand way, way above and I am so frightened I am going to lose my balance and fall all that long way into them and that I will drown in those dark blue lakes. I know he’s trying to catch my eyes, and when he’s trying I get the shivers, and then I have to try and stop the shivers because that makes him angry too: What you shivering for, he says, kind like at first, what’s the matter? But then he gets angry because he knows why I am shivering and he hates why I am shivering and he yells horrible words and terrible things he says: Stop your fucken shivering, he yells, and his arm rises above his head and I go to run, but my feet are frozen, and I know the moment he sees my eyes his hand will fall. Fuck you, he says. Who do you think you are? Who? I don’t know who I am. I should know and I am being punished for not knowing. Maybe that’s fair. Perhaps that’s right. Maybe when I know who I am, when I can look into his eyes without shivering and answer that question and not shiver, perhaps then he will not hit me no more. Without even thinking it first, I hear myself yelling out all of a sudden like, yelling I love you Artie, and I listen to my yelling and I think that is all I know and that is everything I know and I realise I am looking into those faraway lakes of his eyes, and I am losing my balance and falling. Fucken love, I hear him say, and he is crying, what’s fucken love, Sonja? and his hand is falling and I am drowning and I cannot reach the air or the light or the sun above and I am drowning.

  Chapter 52

  1966

  She give me fucken shits. She make me want to hit her, like a little fucken mouse, never answering me when I speak to her. Don’t bloody listen to me unless I, well, hit her. Not hard though. Not fists, not much. Only backhands. Mostly. But she must learn though. She go like me if she don’t learn. She go down. I hit her down to bring her up. Why don’t she behave like a proper bloody kid? I know she hates me, when she looks me in the eye, I know she hates me. I don’t care. Why should I care. I am shit. I am the wog, the fucken wog cunt. She not. She looks like them. Talks like them. That’s good. Not like me. Not an old wood house that is falling to bits. Why do she hurt me? When she look me in the eye like, why she say such terrible things without words that she should never say even with words that make me feel like there is a hammer-drill boring into my head? I know she hates me. I hit her so she will say it. So she will say you are shit, say, hey you wog, so she will say I hate you, you fucken old wog cunt. I hit her so she will know how bad it is and how bad I am and so that she will say what I long to hear so that it will be over and I will be alone and away from it all at last.

  I fucken hit her and nothing happens. Maybe I drink so much that I think I hit her but haven’t. Maybe I am watching this movie and it’s me hitting Sonja but it’s not me and not Sonja just this movie on the TV. Because the more I hit and the harder I hit her face says nothing. Not her mouth, not her eyes, not nothing tells me anything. Nothing tells me it’s wrong or bad. Nothing tells me it even is happening, because maybe it isn’t. Maybe it’s just the horrors from the drink. If it was real, she would cry or scream or say no. But I fucken hit her and nothing happens. So it cannot be happening. Sometimes the blood it spurts and somet
imes I think I can hear her scream and even me scream, but from a distance like, like it is through a wall, something happening to other people faraway. Sometimes I think I see blood even on the walls—but it can’t be because the next morning I get up and I wash like I always do and when I come out there is no blood on the walls they clean like they always clean cos Sonja is a good girl not a lazy girl and keeps them that way, she is good but clumsy and sometimes falls and hurts herself and bruises her face.

  So I hit her, belt her real hard and with each backhander I ask the most gentle question: Sonja, say something. Please, I say with each blow, please say something.

  Chapter 53

  1966

  I go out into the cold night. Faraway I can see the large river, shining like a silver paddock in the light of the moon.

  I fetch myself down, lie on the grass and hold my face close to the wet earth, feel the long dewy grass all the more delicate with the bruises of my face. My face burns like a fire, and each long piece of grass traces out the contours of my bruises with the grace of a cooling feather. Wish I were a seed in that earth, a flower that could unravel into the light of the sun with other plants, know the rain as life and die with the other plants when the terrible coldness came upon me.

  My hands run over the ground, flatten the worm casts. The wet grass feathers over my welts. When he has not hit me, I do not feel the wet grass the way I do now. Necklaces of grace. Pearls of dew spreading in a film over my face. And as I lie on the damp earth I whisper my mother’s name. Her beautiful name.

  Maria, I say to the earth, my Maria.

  Chapter 54

  1966

  OBSERVE BOJAN BULOH this night of remorse.

  Watch how through the frontierland of Australian suburbia he in his FJ searches for escape once more, how he travels past houses new and raw as a gutted roo, their bloody viscera carved out of the bush only an instant ago, along roads that merge into deep muddy drains, heading into this land of no footpaths, no concrete edging, few gardens in none of which would lovers ever find the star-shaped flower; see how he scans this wasteland of semi-finished and just finished buildings for a sign, an omen, an apparition of reality in a world he finds increasingly unanchored, as his head begins floating elsewhere. As if dismembered his foot hammering hard the clutch, the brake, the accelerator, his FJ alone along the empty and silent roads that wait with expectant desire for when the other new inhabitants of this new world can afford cars not only for each family but for every individual.

  See how he is searching, searching and searching longer still, for something, he no longer knew what. He, Bojan Buloh, who once had the charm that pulled women to him even when they were repelled by his behaviour, now knew all that charm to have fled him with his sweet complexion and thick hair. When he met people now he felt himself a fool, did not know what to say, felt naked and that such nakedness gave offence, felt that he spoke after too long a time and then awkwardly, giving them time to stare in horror at this naked shivering fool unable to find words in which to clothe his horror.

  He felt an overwhelming desire to confirm that he still lived, that the unreal world that swam past the FJ was not hell and he not condemned already to plumbing the deep well of his cracked existence, that he would not forever be a spectre acting out a life in a world that only approximated a world, the cruellest of theatres in which punishment was simply being, and the desire grew hard and hot in his loins, a feeling curious and undeniable.

  Bojan’s journey ended in a muddy front yard that could accommodate several cars. He parked the FJ, got out, smiled slightly, for the brothel of the suburbs hardly matched his image of a whorehouse indelibly formed in Belgrade where as a JNA conscript in the company of fellow soldiers, he had first paid for sex in an establishment that looked to his eyes as if it had been decorated by and for a Turkish pasha, replete with great rugs and hanging drapes of all colours, the whole suffused with a huge mystery that came to an abrupt end when a fight erupted between a fellow Slovenian and two Macedonians.

  The brothel of the suburbs was, on the other hand, as nondescript, as lacking in mystery as the world it serviced: a modest brick veneer house, it sat at the bottom of a steep drive discreetly shielded from its suburban neighbours by an overgrown hedge of Chinese fire bushes. He felt a chill, cutting wind that had journeyed thousands of miles of ocean from the vast white lands of the Antarctic to arrive at this strange terminus, pushing hard at his back as he went up the guardless concrete stairs and rang the doorbell. He heard footsteps, knew he was being appraised from the spyhole, and upon hearing the latch turn looked up to be greeted at the door by a respectable looking middle-aged woman wearing a neat shiny bone-coloured dress and horn-rimmed glasses. She reminded Bojan of a desert lizard throwing up its frill to frighten predators. As if to a tupperware party, she welcomed him.

  ‘Brian, Brian how are you? April? April, Brian is here to see you.’

  Bojan said nothing. Before crossing the threshold he passed her a five-dollar note.

  ‘Brian—I am ever so sorry,’ said the woman. ‘Our rate has gone up—’ She held up seven fingers—‘to eight.’ She abruptly flicked a thumb out to make up the new requisite number of digits. Apart from that she did not move. ‘Eight dollars.’ Then added: ‘It must be confusing for you, this new decimal currency business.’

  Bojan reached into his pocket and handed over the additional brown dollar notes. He asked himself, for no reason since there was no answer, why he bothered when the outcome was inevitable, and the inevitable was awful.

  A small dark-haired woman, auger-eyed, appeared at the back of the lizard-woman, dressed in the same red dressing gown she had worn the first time he had visited, and which had led him for no reason he could think of to choose her over a more attractive, older woman.

  The wind at Bojan’s back tumbled around him and fell across the door, pushing the red dressing gown up against the auger-eyed woman’s small stout form, outlining her as she was and not as the lowlights of the house’s interior pretended she and her fellow workers might be, showing her as a woman as he was a man, frail and ordinary, as if to say: For what? For this? But Bojan had seen many different women in the brothel of the suburbs since his first time, and he had always gone with the auger-eyed woman with the red dressing gown, and Bojan wanted to say yes, yes, precisely for that, and he wanted to say no, because it never was possible and never would be. She looked as ever, except that she now wore her hair cropped in the new fashion, but Bojan did not think it became her as much as the long hair she wore the first time he had visited. But he did not say this to her, nor she anything to him. He closed the door behind him.

  Chapter 55

  1966

  I SMELL HER and I smell things that cut me, thought Bojan Buloh as he tried to ride April who would not be ridden, things that make me sick, it is so strong that smell of woman like mutton that Serbs cook on a spit and I hate it, hate them the fucken Serbs, hate that smell of the church incense, hate the smell of apple blossom, strong and so close that you could become so dizzy that you might fall and never rise up.

  As he attempted to do what he had come there to do, Bojan Buloh looked up at the Madonna and caught himself beginning to pray to Her. He halted, shook his head, closed his eyes and tried to remember how it was with Maria, to recall lying with her, to imagine that it was her and not someone else now beneath him. In that small, stark bedroom with a ceiling Bojan always found too low, its walls covered with a heavy wallpaper with purple felt fleur-de-lis, the only ornamentation was this—a cheap framed picture of the Madonna with a bleeding heart, hung above the head of the bed. And how I hate it and her, thought Bojan Buloh, hate that fucken picture. He looked back down at April, still with her dressing gown on. In her left hand, covering her face, she was holding a copy of the Women’s Weekly, folded in half. He ran his fingers into her right hand, trying to make some sort of contact. Her hand snapped back, and grabbed the other side of the magazine.

  Combine mayonnaise, w
ine and lemon juice, April read, season with salt and pepper.

  I feel her, thought Bojan, and feel her flesh cold, clammy like a leg of prosciutto, feel myself limp, limp like a dead pig’s ear, and unable to enter through her gates into her body, and I cannot fuck this cold meat.

  ‘Jesus,’ said April, ‘you still not finished?’ and went back to reading the recipe.

  What I would do if I was a man! thought Bojan. But I am not a man and she is not Maria and her smell and her flesh and that smell, Jesus I hate that fucking smell, I push it away and moan for it to leave me and stop mocking me.

  He fumbled to no avail between April’s thighs. If wine unavailable, substitute vinegar and sugar, April read, trying to concentrate hard on each and every word as her body wobbled and shook from Bojan’s exertions. Stir in undrained spinach, blend well. Serve sauce over heated fish fingers.

  All that either could hear was the rustling of the magazine pages and Bojan’s slow breathing, his diminishing grunts, then a few sobs of frustration, him weeping, then him saying, ‘I am sorry. I can’t, I just can’t.’

  Then he got up, quickly dressed himself, and was gone.

  As the FJ started up and left, April talked to the lizard-woman.

  ‘I suppose,’ said April, ‘you charged him your special wog rate—a third more expensive than for dinky-di Aussie boys.’

  The lizard-woman said nothing. The lizard-woman was motionless. April continued. She was a little worked up. But only a little.