The Sound of One Hand Clapping

by Richard Flanagan

  They waited until 6 p.m., and when no-one had arrived half an hour later she checked the invitation, but the time and the address were unmistakeable. They waited until seven and her smile disappeared and her laughter ceased. They waited until eight and then Bojan went to the fridge and opened his first bottle for the day.

  Half an hour later she changed out of her jeans.

  People made excuses like people do. Some were good reasons, some were not. But at school the following day she heard a girl she did not even know tell another girl in a stage whisper behind Sonja’s back, ‘The wog sleeps with her, the wog and her, you know what I mean,’ and Sonja turned and asked what did she mean? and the girl told Sonja that she meant what everybody knew, the reason no-one had gone to Sonja’s sixteenth party.

  So the following day Sonja did not return to school but instead walked into town and with the money Bojan gave her for housekeeping bought a blouse that had the pattern of brambles and the colour of cream, and that was edged with lace, and she never wore it until that morning she stood there in their kitchen waiting for her father to look up at her so that she might tell him what suddenly seemed always to have been inevitable.

  Chapter 63

  1967

  BOJAN TURNED and smiled slightly. He was calm, defeated. Knew that he could no longer pretend to hold the fragmenting pieces together. That even his anger and rage could not halt the disintegration. Beyond the bottle, nothing left to hang onto.

  ‘I am leaving,’ was all she said.

  He laughed. He smiled a little more, albeit grimly. He was ready, trying to accept what fate presented him with grace. He had not known much dignity in his life, and he wanted to have it at this moment. Maybe it was pride. Maybe it was only trying to prove to himself that if she left something remained in the exploding chaos that would ensue.

  ‘You better take this,’ Bojan said. He stood up, and from a cupboard above the refrigerator he produced a box wrapped in fancy paper which he handed to Sonja. He had bought it for her birthday but had in his drunkenness forgotten all about it. Too ashamed to admit his folly and give it to Sonja late, he had saved it for this moment that he had been anticipating far longer than she had been planning it. ‘Don’t open it now,’ he said. ‘You’ll need what’s in there. I have no need of it. You have every need.’

  He held the box out toward her. His eyes—broken dowel joints set in a splintering piece of furniture—caught Sonja’s, but only briefly. She accepted the box, leant across, gave him an awkward kiss on his cheek which he showed no sign of wanting or accepting, then farewelled him in Slovene.

  ‘Adio, Artie,’ she said.

  Bojan Buloh looked at her, at his beautiful child and he felt so much love for her he thought he might shrivel into nothingness, as if his love were a fire and he only the ashes of its burning. Because his love for her was something beyond him, enduring where he was transitory, solid where he was melting into air. He wished her to stay, and he wanted her to go immediately, before he came between his love and her.

  He replied in Australian.

  ‘Goodbye, Sonja,’ he said.

  He made no movement toward her, and she was grateful that he too wished to avoid any acknowledgement of what they felt. So they didn’t touch. She turned around and had begun to walk out when Bojan Buloh suddenly cried out to her.

  ‘Sonja!’

  She stopped, swung around and saw him holding his hands out in front of him, not begging but moving crazily, as if trying to shape a mystery into something knowable. His mouth too was moving, but no sound was forthcoming. He stood before her, a potter with no clay, a tongue with no words. Then—as if recognising their own absurdity—his arms abruptly stopped moving, fell away, and his gaze followed them, away from her to the floor. Then Bojan’s mouth rediscovered speech.

  ‘Sonja!’ he cried out—the last word he was to speak to her for twenty-two years. For upon lifting his eyes upwards searching for a voice of absolution and penance, he saw nothing—nothing, save an empty doorframe.

  Sonja was gone.

  And with her gone, he finally found the words for what he had long wished to tell her. ‘You and me,’ he said in a quiet, halting voice, ‘we lived, we lived worse than dogs. I am sorry. I don’t expect you to come back. Believe me I never wished it, the drinking, the fighting, these wog flats, sometimes things happen in your life and, despite everything, despite your hope, you can’t change them.’

  And his confession complete, his eloquence abandoned him as rapidly as it had come.

  Before going to the fridge for his first bottle for the day, oblivious to the early hour, he said only one thing to the breeze washing in from the world outside.

  ‘We came to Australia,’ said Bojan Buloh, ‘to be free.’

  Chapter 64

  1967

  BACK THEN, it was the summer of the great fire the monstrous like of which even the oldest could not remember and which the youngest, huddled like nervous whiting in the shallows of beaches along the great Derwent and Huon rivers, would never forget. Early one morning a great wind had begun to blow, and as the day continued the sun burnt hotter and the wind grew fiercer and the sky darker and a few sparks grew into a number of small fires and the small fires grew into numerous bigger bushfires and then the many bushfires joined together in invincible alliance. People stopped trying to fight what was now a single monstrous fire-storm as large as the land and the sky joined, and realised that the best they would be able to do now was simply escape the terrible conflagration that was eating the island. As Sonja observed it from their Moonah home—the fire forcing itself into the very city—watching the air turn into smoke, seeing it turn as dark as night as ash filled the sky and the heavens rained cinders, she had found herself feeling both terrified and excited.

  Before the sun rolled earthwards that terrible day like a huge ball of boiling blood, over a thousand homes were to burn to the ground, countless creatures, domestic and wild, to be incinerated, and sixty-two people to perish. In the following weeks, in whichever direction Sonja looked, the view always ended in the most silent and desolate blackness. Nothing was like anything people had ever known. The town was numbed, full of refugees who had lost everything in the moving maelstrom of flame that had sucked half the island into its transforming heart. The once blue forested mountain that backdropped the town was now a black blasted rock. Where once had been vast forests, a dense and mysterious dank green world, now only the trees’ skeletal essence remained, great stags arising from the scorched earth like accusing pillars of salt and beneath them soot and ash. And beneath that black earth? Beneath it, Sonja found when she had one morning walked into the hills and scratched at the ground, the first evidence of new life—embryonic green shoots of the new forest.

  Because of the fire Sonja had come to think that things could change utterly. And now she wanted that change, wanted to join the refugees and leave everything she had known. She wanted to leave this land of water and become as the fire itself.

  Back then, time was different and a childhood was not part of a lifetime but several lifetimes rolled into a single interminable dusty morning. Things were not as they are now, and it is a mistake to think of people then in the way you think of people now. Standing there that morning waiting at the bus stop with her skinny legs in a pair of cheap skin-tight slacks and her thin torso in the lace-edged blouse, holding in one hand a gift-wrapped box and in the other an old cardboard suitcase, Sonja wasn’t like the woman she would soon become.

  Something had consumed everything Sonja was. She felt what Mrs Maja Picotti had suspected in her prayers, that her soul had departed her body. Sonja could have complained most bitterly about her life, but that was not how she saw it or even how she felt it. She felt as if there was nothing encased within her but ash. And as she boarded the bus she saw that her bare arms were already covering in smuts blowing down from the desolate hills beyond, so recently burnt into nothingness in the cataclysm, and when she shook, then rubbed her arm the
greasy soot only smudged into blackness.

  The bus driver looked up at his rear-view mirror. Behind him the sun shone through the dirty windows of the bus and shafts of light illuminated the dust that slowly spiralled within. He saw that the bus was empty save for the thin, young girl, sitting up the back, who by trying to dress as an adult had, he thought, succeeded only in accentuating her youth.

  Sonja undid the wrapping around Bojan’s present. Inside she found a wooden music box of Asian origin, black lacquer coated, a cheap thing that must have cost far too much. She opened the box. It had a lid inlaid with mirrors and a base of red felt jewellery compartments. Its centrepiece was a ballerina figure that rotated around a flat round glass mirror when the clockwork mechanism was wound up.

  In a side compartment were five twenty-dollar notes wrapped around an old photograph.

  Sonja unravelled the notes, put them in a compartment at the bottom of the box, and gazed at the photograph. It was of Bojan and Maria at Butlers Gorge, with Maria holding a baby—Sonja—on her hip. Sonja had never seen the photograph before. In it her parents were happy. She smiled: they had been happy as she always knew they had been happy, even if it had only been for a short time, even if it had been only for a year, for a few months, a week, a day, even if it had only been for the moment that photograph was taken, they had been happy and had known happiness together. And then her smile vanished and she wanted to cry, but she didn’t.

  Sonja wound up the mechanism, and watched the ballerina as she pirouetted and circled around the miniature mirrored glass floor, while the clockwork mechanism played ‘Lara’s Theme’ from Dr Zhivago. She watched the ballerina’s figure in multiple reflections in the mirrors inlaid diagonally in the lid, as if a wondrous company of dancers had been summoned into existence solely for her.

  Back then, Hobart was empty, and the emptiness was exacerbated by the vast violence of the fire that had come upon the place like the most terrible war, and a huge silence wrapped itself around everything, even around large buses lumbering through the town with only a handful of passengers all lost in their journeys, even around Sonja, heading into the heart of Hobart with the intention of leaving it forever, a music box open and playing upon her lap, watching the toy ballerina and her reflections continuing dancing around the music box’s interior of red felt and mirrors, watching several lifetimes suddenly finish with all the unexpected abruptness of a car smash—and there was no sound in that silent cocoon other than that of the clockwork mechanism melancholically chiming ‘Lara’s Theme’.

  In that magic cavern of mirrors, Sonja saw the spinning dancer dissolve into new forms: of herself at eight, twirling around in her communion dress on the Michniks’ kitchen table; of herself, older, in her new homemade pink party dress circling on the kitchen table and dancing with Bojan. Then that too was lost as the clockwork mechanism ran down and all that remained was the toy ballerina ever more jerkily pirouetting. The music slowed, grew lonelier and lonelier until the last chime sounded and the tiny toy ballerina stopped altogether, though her arms remained held beautifully aloft, her face frozen into a perpetual smile, her left thigh permanently drawn up and out, her left foot forever touching her right knee with its perfectly pointed toes.

  If only I could become that toy ballerina, thought Sonja, if only I could be forever frozen in a single beautiful dance, circling within a circle forever.

  There is no going back, Sonja thought. Wood and lace. There is none, she thought. That was a luxury reserved for others. Wood and lace, both gone, forever. As Sonja closed the box, as the mirrors gave way to the black lacquer casing, as the ballerina was felled by the closing lid, several lifetimes and a dreadful silence came to an end. Sonja looked up and out and felt the bus’s labouring diesel engine rumbling up through the shuddering seat into her body.

  In the silence of Hobart then that is not like any town in the world now, the only sound was that final chimed note of that music box’s song.

  Outside the gentlest of breezes lifted a swirl of ash, the driver cursed the black smuts sullying his windscreen and, beside the road, feathering up through fecund soot, the smallest of yellow-green shoots began pushing toward the light.

  Chapter 65

  1967

  BOJAN BULOH sat alone in his kitchen as he had done since the morning, brooding dark, deep thoughts. Maybe then he saw things he did not wish to see. Whether he saw monsters or pestilence or the war or only his own inability to decipher, to understand anything of all that he had seen and knew only as a malevolent mystery, it is difficult to know. Normally such feelings were transitory only, and he would drink determinedly through the day they beset him and several thereafter to ensure he was properly rid of them forever. But this feeling could not be so easily dissolved.

  The kitchen was filled with the languid light of a late summer’s early evening. His demitasse coffee cup was empty and he upturned it on a saucer. After letting it drain for a time he turned it right side up and peered into the resulting pattern of coffee grounds to read his own fortune.

  Bojan Buloh stared at the laminex tabletop, the cup, the prophesying grounds within it, the assorted objects that to him seemed to bear no relation to one another—the ashtray with smoking butt, the photographs randomly laid, his right hand. His eyes could only see an abstract array of forms and colours. They could see no pattern, no future foretold. They saw only a terrible chaos without reason or consequence, an unending storm of unconnected pain. And within his head the wretched clockwork ‘Lara’s Theme’ would not stop sounding.

  Christ, I wish it wasn’t this way, thought Bojan Buloh. I wish I didn’t hear that fucken clockwork song playing over and over. And I wish it wasn’t this way and I wish it would just shutup and I wish I wasn’t this way I wish.

  The extended fingers of his right hand trembled as they rose off the laminex and were drawn over the top of the cup to hide the awful secrets revealed by the coffee grounds. The fingers slowly curled—as if the hand itself were in agony—into a shaking fist in the middle of which was clasped that small coffee cup.

  With a sudden, violent movement he raised his fist—the infernal cup within it—into the air and brought it crashing down on the table. As his fist hit the table it opened out like a flower briefly blossoming, fingers splaying like petals, the cup for the brief moment before smashing the stamen. The cup shattered, pieces of broken china flying from out beneath Bojan’s now flattened hand.

  He no longer saw chaos. The storm had ended, the song finally over.

  Blood pulsed out from beneath his spread hand, and with a strange feeling approaching tranquil terror Bojan watched his blood pool around the scattered fragments of a life foretold.

  And I wish, he thought, and I wish and I wish and I wish.

  Chapter 66

  1990

  JESUS! thought Bojan Buloh.

  How little he remembered of Maria, so little he kept on mistakenly thinking he was seeing her. Sometimes when visiting Hobart he would see a face in a crowd—but on closer examination discover it was not her body below; sometimes he would catch a glimpse of a body—a gesture of fingers, a swing of hips—but on chasing the small distinctive motion discover that the face joined to the hands or the hips was not hers. As if something of her continued to echo mournfully in strange and curious moments. As though her presence was too powerful to have simply disappeared so, and the world formed curious vaporous moulds of odd parts of her.

  Sometimes the woman he had chased down the street would turn at his voice and when she saw his face—that was no longer a face but an unanswerable question—her expression would change from that of bewilderment to fright. And once, the woman who turned had a face that was most wickedly deformed, covered in pig-like flaps of flesh with one eye missing. She said nothing, only meeting his pitiless stare with her own, as if recognising herself in what she saw. And then she slapped him hard across his face and like all the others walked away.

  Like an incarcerated lunatic the white light cast
by the single electric bulb bounced around the gloss-painted walls of his room, bleaching Bojan Buloh, so that his blue-checked flannelette shirt, khaki work trousers, and thongs, his very body and face all seemed faded and drained. Sitting without movement on the side of his bed, he did not appear drunk, though he was.

  He listened to the endless rain falling forever upon the tin roof, heard the dull drip from the sagging gutters building to a heaving rush then relaxing then building again, and was grateful for the way in which this rhythm of the rain blanketed out almost all other sounds from outside. He stopped staring at the black hole that was his window and returned his gaze to the two black-and-white photographs he held in his hand.

  Who had she been? thought Bojan Buloh. Sometimes a foolish notion would possess him that he even recognised the outline of her lips in the greasy red lipstick smudge on a crushed cigarette filter still smouldering in a pub ashtray, but upon looking up the departing woman was never her. Nor was it the woman whose profile momentarily mocked his memory in its similarity; nor was it another, whose voice was the same, so achingly the same he thought burning oil was being poured into his ears and searing its way into his poor brain.

  Very hesitantly, as if it were some tarot card predicting a dreadful fate he wished not to know but was doomed to suffer, he placed one of the two old photographs upon the fading acrylic quilt, that had once blossomed brightly with iridescent purple irises. The photograph was of Maria, holding the baby Sonja at Butlers Gorge.