The Sound of One Hand Clapping

by Richard Flanagan

  ‘You should give it to him half-price. He don’t come here for sex. He comes here to cry.’

  The lizard-woman had had enough. Her eyes suddenly darted away from the front door and fixed upon April and her mouth opened and her blue tongue started darting back and forth.

  ‘Don’t talk disgusting,’ she said. ‘This is a respectable house.’

  April turned and walked off for a smoke. A cruel draught rose up from the floor. The red dressing gown felt to April colder than ice. She wished for warmth. She did not wish to return to the room of felt flowers. The doorbell rang with the promise of more custom. April wished it would not be answered. She was still. She knew she must remain still to endure, but her fingers shook.

  The doorbell rang once more.

  ‘Christ,’ April murmured under her breath. She took one last long drag on her cigarette, tried to steady her hands and stop the ash snowing over the floor, wished she were smoke that might dissolve into nothingness, and called out, ‘Hold on. Hold on. Christ, just wait.’

  But no matter how long she waited she could not steady her hands.

  Chapter 56

  1966

  ‘I WANT YOU TO KNOW,’ said Dean Martin, ‘that this is going to be a family show. The kind of a show where a man can take his wife and kids, his father and mother, and sit around in a bar and watch.’ The studio audience brayed with laughter, Dino smirked, then the band struck up and Dino burst into song. A third of the way through he abruptly stopped just in case you—here he was reminding Bojan and Sonja who usually sat together each week watching this, their favourite show—you happened to be thinking that, having heard all the ‘noo toons’, you might not go out and buy Dino’s new record. He joked with Ken Lane and the inevitable buxom blonde, whose inscribed bare belly Dino read instead of the autocue to introduce the next act. ‘Just in case I’m seeing double,’ said Dino, face perilously close to the blonde’s breasts. Double entendres and triple martinis. Crooning and cleavages. Big names and booze. All equally transitory on the Dean Martin Show, in which Dino was both the old world’s hope and its revenge upon the new. Dino don’t give a fuck, Bojan would laugh, but unlike Bojan he was without menace. Her father as she wished him, without oppression, without history, without a shadow.

  Sonja liked watching Dino with her father and he with her, and they sat together and laughed at Dino’s stupid jokes, and envied him his flash wog ways that somehow he had fooled the world into admiring, the ways she had learnt to deny. In the radiating blue hue of the Victrola, she and Bojan shared something and she knew a feeling she would never after be able to describe. But like Dino’s jokes, the feeling was growing tired, threadbare.

  In the early summer of the previous year they had moved yet again into the place in which they now lived, which was no different from the other places, only a little larger. But it was still a wog flat, still did not feel like a home to Sonja, nor did she think it was ever going to feel like a home. Bojan earned more money now and they had proper mats on the floor instead of blankets, a new purple vinyl lounge upon which Sonja would watch their new black-and-white TV, but Bojan drank more and more and it did not feel like a home.

  The winter came and she fancied she had let her body fall asleep with the plants, waiting for the sun to return, because she had nothing better to do than to wait, and Bojan drank more and more and it did not feel like a life to her, and she knew that at some point the waiting would come to an end and her real life begin. The spring of that year was far wetter than normal and everywhere there was the most luxuriant growth, and as Sonja herself grew the final few inches to her adult height, as her body filled out, she smelt the trees and weeds that seemed to be pushing through everything, even the fresh laid bitumen of the road outside. Then the rain abruptly ended and a summer even more remarkable than the spring began, with long harsh hot spells. The plants’ growing halted, the weeds withered and the grass died. The sun seemed forever to sit high and burn hard. The land grew quiet and expectant.

  As if it knew before it happened.

  Tonight, as Dino continued schmoozing away, Bojan was not even there, not even sharing this moment. Sonja watched the show alone, trying to pretend her father was sitting next to her as usual, face puckering up in laughter. She adored the radio, she adored the television. To all the old movies Sonja knew the words; could walk like John Wayne and dance like Ginger Rogers and dangle a cigarette nicked from Bojan between her lips like Bette Davis. She adored that world of no shadows, frameable and predictable, a world in which she knew from the beginning what the outcome would be, in which goodness was rewarded and never punished, where life progressed ever forward and no-one ever had to look back—except for the occasional explanatory flashback—where even sadness was only the excuse for another song, and to all of them Sonja knew the words.

  But with her father she seemed to know almost none. Sonja and Bojan now spoke few words with each other and thought in even less. The word ‘love’—the one word describing the essential but hidden nature of Sonja’s story—had been cast from their minds and their tongues so long ago that neither noticed its peculiar absence. Word, mind you, word, not the notion itself. Their language now was akin to the tools he used: for a practical purpose, they might use words that cut deep like a chisel or words that fell heavily to pound something like a mallet. So there was a certain artistry in their use, it was undeniable. But as they did not use tools for other than their selected purpose, they did not use words unless they were needed to describe, recall, or initiate an activity.

  That evening when Sonja returned from her after-school wanderings in the bush that lay in the hills beyond their ribbon of a suburb, she had found her father sitting down at their laminex table pouring turkish coffee from a half-empty pot into a tiny demitasse cup. Around the cup were scattered old black-and-white photographs. It was unusual to see him so: not drinking or working or watching TV, or working and drinking, but sitting and thinking.

  Then he had swept the photographs up and put them into an old shoebox, then gone outside and stood on the small balcony of his wog flat. He was unchanged from his day’s labouring, clad only in a blue singlet and khaki work trousers. He leant against the wall, under the light bulb, smoking a cigarette. The smoke rose slowly up to the yellow light around the naked bulb. He seemed to be thinking.

  And then, despite it being Thursday night, Dean Martin Show night, he had gone out for the evening. Sonja found the shoebox of old photographs where Bojan had hidden them at the bottom of his wardrobe. In the shoebox were pictures of people with skis and guns in European alpine country. There were pictures of a woman Sonja knew must be her mother. There was a picture that showed the same woman and Bojan in a posed embrace in front of snow-heavy alps, she holding a starry white flower, them both pressing their lips to either side of it. She was beautiful, Sonja thought, he handsome.

  Sonja looked at the photographs and wondered. And had no answers for her many questions, insistent as they were half-formed and not understood by her. She put the shoebox back in the wardrobe. None of it made sense. The photographs looked too much like the movies, and she loved the movies precisely because they were nothing like her life.

  Chapter 57

  1966

  DINO WAS NEARING THE END of his show when the front door opened and Bojan staggered in noisily. He was badly drunk. Sonja only glanced up from the TV as he passed her on the way to the bathroom.

  ‘You want your tea, Artie? I cooked kransky klabasha.’

  Bojan re-emerged from the bathroom.

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘I don’t want bloody anything.’

  ‘Why do you have to drink so much?’

  ‘Fuck you,’ mumbled Bojan, then more loudly, ‘Fucken young people think—’ but then he lost the train of thought about whatever it was he thought young people did think, and retreated into a ranting that not even he could be bothered taking seriously.

  ‘Everybody loves somebody sometime,’ Dino crooned from the Victrola, wrappi
ng the show.

  ‘Fuck you!’ Bojan mumbled. ‘Fuck you—fuck you—fuck you.’

  Sonja wanted Bojan, her Bojan, her Artie, not this bottle-emptying echo of someone she had once known.

  ‘You said you wanted me to cook it for you,’ she said. ‘I do what I fucken want,’ Bojan said. ‘You do what you fucken want.’

  ‘Even Ken,’ Dino said from the Victrola, smiling to Ken as Ken kept tinkling long after Dino had lost all interest and was simply milking the song for a few more laughs, ‘—ain’t that right, Ken?’

  As he sidled past Sonja, Bojan accidentally half-fell, half-shoved her, then regained his balance, saying as he did so, ‘Where’s some bloody drink.’ He opened the fridge and took a large bottle of beer out. ‘Can’t have a bloody beer in peace.’

  He flicked the cap off with a knife, and, still standing, stubbly throat pulsing in and out, skulled the entire bottle in a single go. Then he sat down at the kitchen table and looked across at Sonja.

  We are strangers, he thought. He watched her sitting perfectly still in the chair and saw nothing in her that he knew to be childlike. All impulse and energy seemed to have left her. He looked at the small, cramped room, redolent of poverty, in which she sat; looked outside and saw someone else’s clothesline, and he knew only that tonight he would drink again to forget it all. Life is not life. Children are not children. Fathers are lost and mothers are gone and they cannot find their children, who have, in any case, already departed their bodies.

  Ken laughed at Dino’s wisecrack and kept playing the grand piano, while Dino schmoozed on, the TV crowd responding to both Dino’s arrogant charm and the flashing applause light. ‘Dum-de-dum-de dum-de-dum,’ hummed Dino, adding, ‘I wish I knew who sang this so they could teach me the words.’ More cheers and laughter. ‘Doo—da—da—doo—da—da—dum.’

  ‘No more, Artie,’ Sonja said. ‘No more.’

  ‘Fuck off,’ said Bojan to the refrigerator, angling his head around just enough to look at her in such a way that it was like he saw nothing, and with a lazy casual action he lobbed the empty beer bottle at Sonja. It was not a violent throw, more an idle gesture of contempt. Perhaps it was hatred not of her but of everything that made him throw the bottle in the strange way that he did. The bottle slowly arced across the room between them, as if scything them apart. It missed Sonja by at least a foot, smashed on the wall behind her, and Bojan saw none of it, because he was already poking back inside the refrigerator for another beer.

  There was something about this gesture that greatly humiliated Sonja. It was as if Bojan no longer cared enough even to be violently angry, as if beating her at least betrayed some emotion toward her beyond a relentless self-destruction. His utter indifference to what happened to the bottle after it was thrown—whether it hit Sonja or whether it missed her—hurt in a way she did not expect such a foolish thing to hurt.

  After he went to bed, Sonja got up, dressed in jeans, jumper and a grey duffle coat, and went outside, with the vague intention of going for a walk. She was not running away, simply escaping for a while. She walked around the side of the house, and from a window she heard the sound of Bojan’s drunken snoring. She turned around and looked at the window for a while, and her face set like a rock. She felt full of loathing for everything, most particularly herself and her life. Bojan’s snoring seemed to her to grow louder and more oppressive. He snuffled and hacked and rumbled and she felt she was suffocating in the volcano-mouth of what he was and what he wasn’t, that she was bound to him and the lava of his molten sleep was entombing her forever.

  She raised one fist, then the other, closed her eyes, slowly shook her head, trying to push the noise away, trying to break out. But the sound of his snoring grew worse, more insistent, more complete and inescapable. If only she could free herself and feel something, anything. Suddenly, unexpectedly, she threw her fists at his bedroom window. The noise of the glass shattering shocked her far more than the sensation of her flesh tearing.

  For she felt nothing.

  She had grown beyond pain, and she wished to hurt and now she knew nothing hurt. No matter how much she hated herself, lost herself, allowed others to hurt her, or hurt herself, she might never burst the dam that held back her suffering.

  She shook. Nothing hurt. She felt terrified. Nothing hurt. How could she know herself what had happened if she could not even feel this. Her hands were inside his bedroom, her arms outside it, her twitching wrists embedded in the broken glass of the window. Was she dead? Was this hell? Or was she alive? And could this then also be hell? Being alive but not knowing life.

  She felt weak. She felt tired. Red-tipped shards of glass broke away and fell to the ground.

  Sonja’s eyes remained clear, and she watched, unmoved, as her hot blood ran from her wrist onto the cold damp windowsill. She felt weak. She felt tired. She felt nothing. She saw little. She rocked her wrists along the remnant broken glass, as if it were ham she were so slicing. She felt nothing. It did not matter now.

  It did not matter when sometime later—a lifetime, a deathtime, an unknown time later—she heard Mrs Heaney find her on the ground and yell for help, then ask, ‘Where is your father?’ Mrs Heaney, who never swore, or at least not badly like a man, swore terrible things quietly as she cradled Sonja in her lap.

  ‘That useless fucking bastard,’ she said in a low slow cursing whisper, then again asked, ‘Where is he?’

  Sonja knew he was asleep in his bed, but where was he? Where he was, she couldn’t say. She couldn’t talk. She couldn’t tell Mrs Heaney what made no sense: that they were both waiting for the wind to rise one more time.

  An ambulance siren later awoke Bojan. Then stopped. He turned on his side and went back to sleep.

  And in the silence before the gale, slowly growing in strength, came the pulsing, swirling sound of a heartbeat on a monitor, pushing hard, hard through that darkness.

  Chapter 58

  1990

  THE DRUMMING GREW QUICKER and quicker, an ever more insistent rapidfire pattering, woosh-wish—woosh-wish—woosh-wish, and at first the white scratchings of shapes that appeared, merging with other shapes then disappearing in strange jerky motions on the gridlined screen seemed as difficult to place as the loud sounds emanating from the machine. Then, with an unexpected clarity, she understood the sound as that of a beating pulse amidst a washing-machine of white noise, the ultra-scanned amplification of the heart of a five-month-old foetus sailing the ocean of its mother’s womb.

  Her womb.

  Her child.

  Sonja gulped.

  As the foetus continued to pound out in staticky rhythm its mesmerising heartbeat, one shape, though far from stationary, came to predominate.

  A soft, podgy finger appeared in front of the screen and pointed at the white image of her child.

  ‘The foetus seems fine. No sign of placenta praevia.’

  Upon the finger a large, somewhat ugly gold ring embossed with a crescent pattern.

  ‘Head and the body, arms, legs, fingers … all seems fine.’

  The ring-finger disappeared.

  ‘Haemorrhaging?’ another voice asked, but Sonja could not find the strength or the energy to look up and see who it was doing the asking. It was a higher-pitched voice. Perhaps that of a younger doctor. Perhaps that of a woman doctor. Perhaps that of her mother. She did not know. She did not care.

  ‘Not for six hours,’ said the voice she presumed belonged to the ring-finger. ‘It looks as though the edge of the placenta lifted and that caused the excessive bleeding.’

  Her vision began to blur, and a figure she had difficulty making out—but she presumed it must be a doctor for he was mostly white and could not therefore be her mother for he was a man and he wore no lace—this figure moved toward her until he seemed to loom threateningly above, like some late-night horror movie figure. He smiled in a grotesque fashion, his voice sounding distorted, distant, as if it was calling from far, far away, from another time and place.
>
  ‘Ms Buloh? Ms Buloh, you are a very lucky woman. You lost a lot of blood, but you will be okay. And so will your baby.’

  Sonja started to shake as if she was about to break down sobbing, though whether it was from relief or disappointment even she was not clear. She did not cry. You must never cry, she remembered. No matter what happens, you must never ever cry.

  ‘Ms Buloh?’

  But she was already going somewhere beyond her body, sliding out of it, for a time at once infinite and limited, feeling both intensely conscious of her surroundings—of the suffocating closeness of the hospital’s air, the strange hardness of the gurney mattress, at once unforgiving and comforting, the immodesty of the hospital nightie, cleaving to her body like two loosely strung tea-towels—and at the same time increasingly liberated from these and all other things.

  From this world that after a time turned blue then turned green. Then after a further time that was both long and short, that went on forever and had only just begun, the green swished open and Sonja realised she had become the curtain and that she was flying up in the air and folding around a person who had come to see her but couldn’t see her because she had become the curtain, and the person who she now knew was Helvi kept on looking at the bed—in which lay a very ill-looking woman who she now knew was herself, but couldn’t be herself because she was the curtain—and a nurse came in also through the curtain that was Sonja and together the nurse and Helvi looked at the ill woman who was also Sonja, whose face was a waxen grey-green, who looked drained of all life, whose arms hung limply down her sides.

  And Helvi said, ‘I was so worried, I thought she might die,’ and the nurse said, ‘No, not now, everything will be fine now. It was close, but it’s fine now.’