The Sound of One Hand Clapping

by Richard Flanagan

  She was still living with Helvi and Jiri, though she had been supposed to move into Ahmet’s house some months before. Ahmet, however, had told Helvi that there were a few things he had to get fixed, which Sonja thought was something of an understatement.

  She would waddle around the house cursing Ahmet, cursing herself, for she wanted a home, her own home, wanted it very badly, wanted to paint out a nursery for her baby and hang mobiles above Bojan’s cot, make the kitchen warm, a home, that thing she had never known, a home, a home fuck it, a fucking home for me and my baby, she wanted her child to have what she had never had, and she would have it, if it took the last bit of strength in her ballooning body, she would have it. Yet every time she went to ring Ahmet to abuse him, or to ring a real estate agent about finding another place, Helvi somehow managed to dissuade her.

  All this waiting, thought Sonja, it drives me crazy: waiting, waiting, and waiting longer still for Ahmet, for my baby to be born and my baby also waiting, for the time when it will drop into the wedge of my pelvis, for the moment when it must begin shoving its way out, and though I know it’s not true, that he will never return, I can smell the wind rising and my only thought is strange:

  Out there my father waits also.

  Chapter 73

  1990

  WHICH IS WHY nothing could have prepared Sonja for the day Ahmet called to say that her prospective home was finally ready. The house, Sonja guessed, would be much as it had been on the day they had inspected it: filthy, rotting, damp, pungent with the scent of cat-piss. No doubt the plumbing now worked after a jerry-built fashion, and a few of the more obviously dangerous switches and power points had been replaced. Perhaps—though this was a vanity of a thought—perhaps a new stove.

  A small ageing man in a budgie-blue acrylic suit waited for them at the front door of what was to be Sonja’s house. Sonja had not met Ahmet. The suit hung off the old man’s small frame at odd angles, as if he and the suit were not on the most familiar of terms.

  ‘Ahmet don’t normally dress so flash,’ said Helvi.

  There was about him something slightly dashing; though badly shaven with wayward beds of sprouting silver stubble, his long, dark face with its strong nose and dapper moustache suggested a body bigger and bolder than that which was below.

  Ahmet rocked from foot to foot. He shot Sonja nervous glances. ‘You are like her,’ he said finally, in a strange accented voice, high and thin, like a reed pipe. ‘Your mother. Your face—not the nose—but the eyes, yes, and the mouth and the hair, very much, very much like her.’ He handed Sonja two keys. ‘I knew your mother,’ said Ahmet. ‘She beautiful woman. She good woman. Butlers Gorge I knew your mother.’ And then, assuming a more confident pose, he held her hands and he finally sustained a long look at her face, saying once more how Sonja was so like her mother, and that was why he had done this, because her mother was a good woman and he had not forgotten her goodness and this home was to be Sonja’s for as long as she would want it. And then he abruptly turned and walked off down the street.

  Sonja was struck by Ahmet’s powerful memory of her mother, moved and flattered by the idea of similarity, and bemused that in light of such feeling, Ahmet thought she would view renting his hovel as some sort of gift.

  But on entering the front door Sonja was shocked. She turned to Helvi, who only laughed. The hovel had gone. No trace of carpet slimy with rot, no sign of damp lathe-and-plaster about to fall remained. For the house had been transformed from Australian squalor to modern Mediterranean.

  ‘Come,’ said Helvi, and they walked into what had formerly been a cramped living room. There, one wall had disappeared, along with the union jack fireplace, which had been replaced by a wonder of abalone shell in which amethyst-silver encrusted splendour was enshrined a gas heater; doorways had been replaced with arches, peeling wallpaper with bright purple and sky-blue and aqua-green paint, mouldy carpet with terracotta tiles, broken wooden windows with aluminium powder-coated sky-blue, and the decrepit kitchen now revealed as part of a larger family room, an iridescent marvel of shining laminex and tiles.

  A kaleidoscope of colour. Modern styling and an older decorative urge clashing and colluding. Sonja found herself beginning to smile. And there, sitting on a pine lounge suite, each with a can of beer in hand and a number of empty cans at their feet, she saw Jiri and Bojan beaming up at her.

  ‘Surprise,’ said Jiri, in his deep, oddly inflected voice, so that the word came out sounding like soap-prize. ‘Surprise.’ He raised his can in Sonja’s direction and made an extravagant gesture to the surrounding walls. ‘Is this not—’ He paused, trying to remember what he was going to say next, what it was and what it was not, belched, then giggled, then said, ‘—a thing of wonder and beauty?’ And twirled his can in delicate waves as if it were a conductor’s baton. Jiri was clearly drunk. So too, Sonja could see, was the beaming figure of her father. But it was a different drunk from what she had ever seen in him, not a forgetting drunk or a wild, angry drunk, but something else. Something entirely different.

  ‘Yes, it is,’ said Sonja. ‘And laminex.’ She laughed. They laughed too.

  ‘Fucken laminex alright,’ said Jiri. ‘It’s not easy getting that good purple stuff anymore.’

  Sonja almost said that it was all extraordinarily over the top. But then halted. For in that abalone-shelled and terracotta-tiled and sky-blue aluminium-framed house she for the first time recognised her world and herself, and with a shock she knew this was her home. She did not know what to say. She asked, ‘But why?’

  ‘Because,’ said Jiri—the word came out sounding like bee-curse—then he took a swig of his beer, and before he had properly swallowed, continued, ‘because Helvi she say I must.’ He finished swallowing, his florid face swelling up like an iced doughnut around a belching mouth, and he resumed talking without a trace of embarrassment. ‘She say—Jiri—Jiri you useless bastard get off your fat arse and do something useful for a change. And Bojan too, bloody hell, he say, Jiri, before my holidays finish and I go back to Tullah we must do a proper job for Sonja and her baby. So we tell Ahmet—Ahmet, we’ll make your place. And Ahmet, he’s no fool, he say fine, go ahead, just make it good. And so we do. And now I am so happy.’

  Bojan was giggling. ‘He is,’ said Bojan, ‘he is, he is so bloody happy.’

  ‘Yes, I am,’ said Jiri, round bollard-face glowing ruby with drink. ‘In fact the beauty of this room is all the more because all of us are so happy.’

  ‘I am not so happy, Jiri,’ said Helvi, gently but firmly taking Jiri’s stubby away from him.

  Jiri looked up. Jiri said, ‘O.’

  He looked sheepish, then became inventive. ‘Well, you know that is good, because if you were happy too Helvi I think there would just be too much happiness, and the whole thing would explode.’ With growing authority he expanded on his newly found theme. ‘You know the world can only take so much happiness. So much happiness is good, but too much is a very bad thing.’

  Helvi motioned to him. ‘I take little happiness home.’

  After they had left, Bojan and Sonja were quiet. Sonja wandered the house, and came back to stand next to her father. Bojan looked at Sonja, then around at the redecorated room and, as if finally satisfied, nodded his head.

  All that long time, all those many, many years between when Maria had walked into the wild night and when he had finally emerged back out of the wet darkness, carrying a cradle into the Blue Angel on that evening of rain, Bojan realised he had known only as a nightmarish hallucination and not as a life that could be understood.

  Unable as Bojan was ever to tell of what he had glimpsed before his daughter had awoken him from his dream, it was implicit in every alteration and addition he had made to Sonja’s new home. His truth had always been expressed through his body, in his work for others. And in his work for Sonja he had come to see how he was changing as rapidly as Ahmet’s house.

  But in his heart he suddenly felt unsure. He dropped his eyes to th
e floor, too embarrassed to look at her.

  ‘I go back to Tullah tonight,’ he said. ‘It’s finished.’

  Sonja didn’t speak. She, no more than he, knew what to say.

  ‘Over,’ said Bojan, trying to help them both.

  With some tenderness Sonja said, ‘Drive safely, Artie.’

  Bojan partly raised his eyes from the floor, smiled at Sonja, swallowed, and then softly said, ‘Sure. Sure I will.’

  But now, as he looked upwards at the imposing form of his pregnant daughter, a looming figure of possibilities, he felt once more old, and worried. ‘Sonja,’ he asked meekly, ‘…is okay? You like?’

  Sonja looked about, at the arches, the laminex, the tiles, the aluminium, the kitchen in which she would prepare food for her baby, the lounge-room floor upon which the baby would first roll and crawl and then walk, the world in which she and her child would come to discover life together. Her breasts felt suddenly, strangely damp, and she knew her nipples to be leaking. Then seeking to explain this curious response without talking about it, to say all that she felt, Sonja finally settled on one word, a word of the old world.

  ‘Doma,’ she said.

  A smile slowly came to Bojan’s face. He repeated the word in a murmur. ‘Doma.’

  Then he smiled some more, and his movements grew more confident and as if he were a bird about to take flight he spread his arms like wings, saying, more loudly, more confidently, ‘Doma,’ and one unfolding wing, his left arm, accidentally brushed Sonja’s protruding belly. His hand jumped back. His smile vanished. ‘Sorry,’ Bojan said, fearing he had offended her by touching her body. ‘I am sorry.’

  ‘It’s fine,’ Sonja said. ‘Truly.’

  They looked at one another. Then she reached out to him, and cupping her hand behind his head slowly brought it toward her, until her father’s head was resting on the hard dome of her belly.

  Through the gnarled flesh of his face Bojan felt the warm immensity of a world being created. His bottom lip trembled upwards. Short breaths he drew in through his nose. Words stumbled haltingly out of his mouth.

  ‘Jesus,’ he swore slowly. ‘Jesus Christ.’

  Chapter 74

  1990

  WHEN FOR THE LAST TIME Sonja saw herself in that dream she was again eight years old, clad in a floral nightie, huddling up inside Bojan’s bluey, again in phantasmagorical flight forever in the FJ with her father. They were where she knew they always had been: fleeing through a dark, frost-rimed night along the empty road to Butlers Gorge.

  At first her mother was not her mother, but rather Mrs Maritza Michnik, appearing out of nowhere, face framed by the front passenger window, contorted with hate, only inches away from Sonja. And though the car was moving, Sonja wishing it to move faster, still Mrs Maritza Michnik was standing staring in through the passenger window and there was no escape. ‘You ungrateful little slut,’ Mrs Maritza Michnik yelled. Her words seemed to mingle with the whine and hum of the 138 motor as Bojan pushed the car ever harder, until it was as if the FJ and Mrs Maritza Michnik were screaming in unison. ‘Don’t think you can ever come back,’ they roared.

  And then as abruptly as it had appeared Mrs Maritza Michnik’s face was gone, but her voice continued, except now the words were tumbling from the mouth of Sonja’s mother, Maria. ‘You can never come back,’ said Maria, but her tone was entirely different from Mrs Maritza Michnik’s, at once wistful and sad. A lace-covered ghost, forlorn and desperate, wanting but unable to touch the flesh of her daughter, her face close to the window and her hands pressed up against the moist glass, wet fingers splaying out like a starfish falling.

  ‘Can I come?’ Sonja asked.

  ‘No,’ said Maria, and her voice, unlike her distorting face, was now her own. ‘You don’t want to come with me,’ said Maria. Her tongue began to loll out of her mouth and her eyeballs started to distend, and with that she was sucked back into the forest that was flying away from Sonja into the clear night.

  ‘Why she go?’ a nightmarish voice asked from behind the front seat. ‘You know?’

  To escape that voice Sonja moved closer to her father but he did not look like her father, for in the weak yellow light of the speedo clock his face wore an eery look, shadowed and jaundiced. With a shock she realised her father was sick. Terribly sick. Look forward, look forward, she thought to herself, away from him and never back into the darkness inexorably closing in behind. She gazed up at the giant eucalypts that towered over all sides of the car. But pierced and divided by the FJ’s onward journey, they too seemed to be in constant flight, and gave her no comfort.

  ‘You know what she do?’ the voice from behind her began again. ‘You know?’

  Sonja turned slowly, fearfully. Slouched across the back seat was Umberto Picotti, relaxed, half-smoked cigarette between his thin lips. He took the cigarette out of his mouth and gazed wistfully down at it. Then, exhaling a languid cloud of smoke, he looked up and smiled.

  ‘Of course you know,’ said Picotti, winking at Sonja in a familiar, knowing fashion. ‘Women like her are no good, Sonja.’ He waved his cigarette around playfully. ‘Your mother did not love you or she would be here now. Eh?’ He pointed the cigarette at her in a precise gesture, to emphasise the precise thing he now wished to say. ‘If she loved you, she would be here looking after you.’ Picotti paused, then shrugged his shoulders. ‘This is hard for you I know, but it is better you know it all.’

  Sonja searched desperately for her father, who had disappeared. The driver’s seat was empty, but even driverless the FJ continued hurtling along on its hellish journey, for it could not halt, could never stop.

  ‘Eh! Sonja!’ said Picotti. ‘Come over and sit with Bertie.’ He patted his knee, scattering light-grey ash upon his dark suit pants. He was still leaning back in the seat, completely at ease, leering and grinning. ‘Come.’

  She spun around looking for her mother, for Jean, for Mrs Heaney, for anybody who might save her, and outside the FJ she saw them all, all the people from her past, but only she could see them and none could see the others, and none was connected, and none could help either themselves or the others or her.

  ‘Do not be frightened, my child,’ Picotti said, in a voice deceptively gentle and persuasive. At first Sonja didn’t move, but then, when what seemed the inevitability of her fate took hold of her, she began to climb slowly and awkwardly over the front seat into the back. She began to sob silently. She looked to her side, and was astonished to see falling out of an impenetrable darkness above the giant trees her father. He was clearly drunk, for his flight through the air was more a collapsing roll earthwards than a graceful glide. He tumbled onto the ground, ending up flat on his face. With an uneven vigour, he picked himself up, brandishing before him a large block of chocolate. He collapsed against the front passenger window, proffering the chocolate. Sonja ignored his offering.

  ‘Artie,’ said Sonja, ‘I want to go home.’

  Bojan laughed. ‘Where? What home? You and I have no home. Don’t you understand?’ He continued to laugh and then his laughter turned to tears. ‘We have a wog flat, my Sonja. A wog flat. Don’t you understand?’ He turned, and seeing Picotti in the back seat, smiled. ‘Hello, Bertie. Want some chocolate?’

  ‘Why she go?’ Bojan asked, again sad, as Picotti took the entire block. ‘Where my Maria go?’ And with that Bojan vanished into the night. Sonja looked back at Picotti, lewdly peeling the foil off the chocolate.

  ‘Where she go?’ asked Picotti. Sonja did not move. Picotti leant back into his seat and slowly pushed some chocolate between his lips with a single finger, chewed, and then spoke again, in a nonchalant manner. ‘You know?’ He narrowed his eyes, leant forward, and waved the remnant chocolate at Sonja to make his final, emphatic point. ‘Of course you know.’

  Sonja sat there, terrified, straddling the front seat, one leg over each side. Her eyes were welling with tears; her head shuddering; snot falling and then receding back up her nostrils with each anguished, half-sti
fled sob. Picotti was laughing. Sonja looked down at the seat top to see a dark stain of urine, spreading out from her crutch and across her nightie and she was peering into the darkness, far, far into that darkness.

  And then she was awake. In her bed in her new home, and the bed was wet. Between her legs a warm deluge gently spilling. With a shock, she realised that her waters had broken and her labour was just beginning.

  Chapter 75

  1954

  IF THIS TALE could be told properly it would be filled with everything. There would be an ocean of what had been and the dreams of what would be and you could swim within the shallows of those memories and surf the waves of those dreams as they rose up before breaking into nothingness. Watch as their foamy wash swirled up schools of reffos arriving day after day pushing their scant belongings to the single men’s quarters in mangy old wooden wheelbarrows, them thinking that at last their journey was ended, in this, the strangest and most unexpected of places, all those Poles and Krauts and Czechs and Lithos and Yugos and Eye-ties and other Balts and wogs, the wheels of their wheelbarrows leaving thin muddy corrugations in winter and lifting roostertails of dust in the hard ruts of summer.