The Sound of One Hand Clapping

by Richard Flanagan

  Joked.

  As he listened to the others laughing with him, his unease only grew and his pain was great. On the other side of the gravel road, in what passed for a park—a bare patch of gravel with a flagpole and a tatty union jack—the local scouts were meeting. The scoutmaster, an English engineer, was delivering a talk on the perils of Communism.

  A small Albanian, indicating the scoutmaster with his cigarette butt, said, ‘Dunno why I left. They clearly did some good if they got rid of bastards like that.’ A few smiled, and with the discovery of some diversion from the cold and the boredom, the others began to concentrate on the scoutmaster’s oratory in order to mock it.

  They were interrupted by the arrival of their lift, an old army truck pressed into domestic service. The driver did not even bother to turn his head, but merely bellowed his destination at the windscreen—‘Canal works!’—and the labourers clambered up into the uncovered tray.

  Where? thought Bojan. Where?

  A Pole with a heavy beard was first up on the truck, and as he helped haul others up, spoke to nobody in particular. ‘Uncle Joe,’ he said, ‘you weren’t so bad. You got rid of Hitler and you got rid of scouts. It’s just a pity you didn’t stop there before you decided to get rid of us.’

  A short, blond-haired Czech banged the top of the truck’s cabin, and shouted at the driver, ‘Don’t forget you pick us up early today so we back in time for our naturalisation ceremony.’

  ‘Yeh,’ said Bojan. ‘We Aussies never late.’

  At that they all laughed.

  Where? Where? Where? And the thought jackhammered his heart and mind. He must have gulped and shaken at the same time, for the Albanian put a kindly hand on Bojan Buloh’s forearm and said he must have a fever and really ought report to the sick bay. Bojan Buloh turned and stared at the Albanian and knew he was shaking and that his stubbled face was an unanswerable question.

  Where? asked Bojan. Where?

  But the Albanian did not answer him. The Albanian looked into Bojan Buloh’s eyes longer than it was right to look into another man’s eyes, swallowed, ran a finger over his moustache, and cast his eyes downwards.

  The early morning sky spread over the central highlands. There were clouds above them, but they were high and wispy and moving slowly across the largely clear sky, boding a good, if chill day. There were drifts of snow below them, up to a metre thick from the blizzard of the night before. The truck turned off the main gravel road, onto a narrow dirt track, along which they bounced through thick, tall rainforest. The labourers rocked back and forth on the truck’s tray on which some sat and some squatted, rubbing hands, stamping feet, smoking, talking only occasionally.

  ‘They say the tallest hardwood trees in the world are not far from here,’ said the bearded Pole over the truck’s roar.

  Bojan, attempting to regain his composure, looked up and forced out a laugh. ‘Lucky for the Aussies we drown them all with the big dam.’

  ‘What the bloody hell they want all this bloody electricity for anyway?’ asked the Albanian.

  Bojan waved dramatically at the bush. ‘For all their bloody industry, of course, you wog fool.’

  The Albanian turned and looked at the wilderness that enveloped them and laughed. The bearded Pole spoke once more.

  ‘They think if they get the electricity then the industry will come, and then they will be like Europe, then they will have factories instead of forests, battlefields instead of potato fields, rivers that run with blood instead of water.’

  He paused.

  Nobody laughed.

  Nobody spoke.

  Some turned and looked away, into the forest. The Albanian looked down at his feet and the thudding tray of rotting wooden planks, in which gravel was jumping up and down with each jolt. The Czech hacked and spat into the passing bush. The bearded Pole let his gaze roam around their faces. The Pole was bitter. So were most of them. But they did not want to hear it. They all avoided the Pole’s gaze. They were trying to leave it behind them, dissolve it in the way the truck was turning the snow in front of it into mud behind it. With chill palms Bojan kneaded his hammering forehead. The Czech wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, his stubble rasping the hand’s skin, thinking, O lungo drom, o lungo drom.

  But the bearded Pole continued. He spoke not so much to them though, as to himself, because he knew none wanted even to begin to think that they were all complicit in what they had left. ‘Europe is a cancer,’ said the bearded Pole finally. ‘It spreads death everywhere.’

  The Czech managed to roll another cigarette as the truck jolted along, letting the rhythm of his hands rolling the tobacco be dictated by the lurching and bucking of the truck. The exercise forced him to concentrate upon his hands rather than on the bearded Pole’s ugly truths. The words of a song the Gypsies had sung began forming like curds in his mind. The crack of… But he pushed them away. With a wry smile to himself, proud of this small triumph over adversity, the Czech put the rollie in his mouth, lighted it between cupped hands, and then looked up into the forest.

  It was at that precise moment that he saw in the trees what he had hoped he would never see again. It was, admittedly, only a glimpse, but the sight was one he had seen before in the Bohemian forests, and though he never thought about what he had seen there except in his nightmares, he knew with a terrible coldness exactly what it was.

  With a single movement, sudden and urgent, he pulled the cigarette from his lips, stood up, threw the rollie away, and brought his fist down hard, once, twice, on the truck’s cabin roof. The truck braked, the men rolled back and forth like an ocean wave and looked confusedly first at one another, and then, as the truck came to a halt, in the direction the Czech was pointing. The men jumped out of the truck quickly, but then, abruptly, lost all their haste. A few turned and walked back to the truck, preferring to stay and look down the snow-white road that led away from that place.

  The rest, slowly, hesitantly, walked into the forest, acutely aware of their every movement, and it was as if the sound of the bush breaking beneath their feet, the sound of their shallow breathing and swallowing were the only sounds for them in the world at that moment.

  In this manner they walked fifty metres or so through the snow, and then came to a halt.

  Chapter 79

  1954

  SOME HAD to look away.

  Some had to stare.

  And those that stared forced themselves to look up from an old suitcase that lay half-buried in the snow and saw suspended in mid-air what should never be seen suspended so, saw the worn-out soles of two dangling shoes.

  A woman’s shoes, the holes in them stuffed with newspaper, iron-grey with iced wet.

  Some had to look away.

  Some had to stare.

  And like unwilling birds caught in a spiralling updraught, the gaze of those who stared circled inexorably upwards: past the battered burgundy shoes to the small, delicate icicles already growing from the coat’s frayed ends, and higher, higher yet, up that snow-rimed scarlet coat, and though now giddy with horror still their gaze continued to rise; from the ice-stiffened old grey hemp rope that collared her garrotted neck like a snake-coil of steel; to the white face above it, with lolling tongue and milky, dead eyes.

  What were once her eyes, thought Bojan Buloh, whose soft roundness he once had delighted in feeling with his lips.

  Now embedded in a stiffening corpse suspended upon a rope from a tall tree.

  Below, a dozen men from faraway lands gathered, and above them hanging what was once her, the now forever still body of Maria Buloh.

  Had she, for some undivinable reason, run out of petals and there been nowhere left in the world for her to go? Or had the star-flower indicated this final direction, or another she had not wished to take?

  For speckling her blue tongue were strange white fragments, which might have been mistaken for snow rather than what Bojan Buloh knew them to be, the terrible flotsam of the broken flower of their love, the remnants of t
he petals of an edelweiss.

  Chapter 80

  1954

  BOJAN BULOH DID NOT KNOW. Bojan Buloh did not think why. He did not cry then, nor for some time after.

  He seemed strangely unmoved until later that day in the movie hall when the naturalisation ceremony took place. It was then, during a long speech by a politician, that he began to sob uncontrollably. The room swirled in front of Bojan Buloh’s rheumy eyes and he felt himself being sucked out of that room into a vortex of the most terrible maelstrom from which he wondered if he could ever emerge. He held Sonja on his chest and she cradled his heaving head between her shoulder and encircling arm. He clutched onto his daughter as if she were a life-preserver ring. He sobbed and then moaned like some dreadfully wounded animal not allowed to die.

  But she did not cry at all.

  Some had to look away. Some had to stare. Some said it was then that her face became a mask, though how would they know such a thing, or even what they mean by such words? Some said it was a shame, of course. And so for the child Sonja there was some sympathy for a time, until the shame of it outgrew the sadness of it in other people’s minds and she was simply dismissed as strange and ungrateful.

  After the naturalisation ceremony, two engineers’ wives came to take Sonja off to play. They were English. They believed in charity. Bojan Buloh did not let them take his daughter. It was just that he had no power to hold onto Sonja any longer when their insistent hands gently prised her from his arms with the full, unshakeable force of good Christian intentions. Bojan Buloh did not want his daughter to go, but they insisted it was for the best for the both of them. They had lots of words.

  It astounded him, how many words some people might have. He said nothing. There was nothing to say. There is only this, thought Bojan. Stretched flesh and bones and shit and wood that grows in trees that stretches flesh and flesh that flattens wood to make meaningless things such as the hut in which they were gathered and this noise that meant nothing. There was birth and there was love and there was death, and there was death and there was noise, this endless noise that confused people, making them forget that there was only birth and love and that each and everything died. There is only that, thought Bojan, only that, and he suddenly realised he had lost his daughter as well as his wife and he did not know how to get either back.

  Sonja did not cry as those strange hands fought to wrest her from her father. She did not speak, nor did she scream. But she resisted those good Christian intentions with all the dumb ferocity of a fish trapped in a rock pool after the tide has gone out, and with the same inevitable result. She did all she could to hang onto her father, trying to swim back into the depths of his body so as to be part of him, invisible to all but him, but now he too had become lace and the lace was shredding into pieces as she clung ever more desperately to him and then the lace pieces dissolved into air and a fish cannot survive upon lace or in air. The women were walking off with her in their grip, and she suddenly ceased struggling, for something fundamental had become lost to her and she intuitively knew that there was now nothing to fight either for or against. There was simply a world that had turned upside down into the sea and which with the silent monumental force of an ocean’s undertow was sweeping her ever further away from what she wished to cleave to. One day she would escape the sea, no matter how many years, no matter how many lives after this one that had just ended, she would escape and find her father once more and he would no longer be air or lace or wood but be himself, and until that time she would wait, as still as the moon, playing dead, no-one knowing she was still alive, taking breath in gulps measured so slow.

  With Sonja having ceased her thrashing about, the shorter of the two engineers’ wives put the child down, took her hand and made her walk alongside, parading the small girl as a cantilever of contrition buttressing the engineers’ wives’ notion of themselves as caring women. Above Sonja’s head the engineers’ wives talked a curious language of abbreviations and euphemisms, occasionally hacking in their throats, and twisting a censorious chin in the child’s direction. Sonja knew that this meant they were talking about her mother, though the sounds ran in and out of her ears like bathwater, though the women looked as grotesque in their stilted conversation as the chooks that ran up and down the main street pecking at the frozen earth in jerky motions.

  ‘Where’s Artie?’ Sonja said, more of a demand than a question, but the women either did not hear or paid no attention to what the child asked, for they continued clicking and clucking. ‘Where’s my Artie?’ Sonja asked once more. The tall woman turned and smiled at Sonja, and her smile terrified the small child, who instinctively knew such powerful good intentions so firmly held were impossible to dispute with.

  ‘He’s fine,’ said the tall woman, ‘and so shall you be. And we—we are going to have a tea party.’

  As they walked down the main street Sonja looked at the filthy slush. She wondered how the beautiful earth, from which she made cakes, and the pure white snow, with which she had the day before made snowballs with her mother, could combine to form something as unpleasant as grey slush. She kicked at it, and the slush splashed up the wool-stockinged leg of the shorter of the two engineers’ wives. Sonja felt her hand suddenly crushed in the woman’s grip and a voice icier than the air announcing: ‘That’ll be about enough of that, missy.’

  ‘Mama!’ cried Sonja. ‘Mama!’

  ‘Mama’s away on holidays,’ said the woman with soggy stockings. ‘We don’t know when she’s coming back,’ added the other. And even Sonja sensed the small cruelty intended.

  Two women talking together, with a child at one’s side, and although it was not possible to make out precisely what the women were discussing, it was clear enough to Sonja that it was her father of whom they now talked. Occasionally, she unwittingly let some phrase register in her mind, before she once more tried hard to hear nothing. Phrases such as ‘perhaps there was another,’ and ‘nobody knows why, mind you, a few drinks and they say his temper is something terrible.’

  But it meant nothing to the small girl who walked next to them, because at that moment she had decided for ever and ever and ever from that time on she was nothing, until that distant day when she would once more find her father.

  They came to a staff house—a proper house, not a shack like the one in which Sonja lived—and went around to its back garden. There, on a concrete apron, an upturned gelignite box was neatly set up as a table, covered with a makeshift red chequered tablecloth, upon which was formally arrayed her toy china tea-set.

  We drink tea now.

  The women pulled their knitted cardigans closer to ward off the cold, their backs facing the rear of the house. Framed between their torsos a long way away was Sonja, in her party dress and pigtails, standing at the upturned crate with the tea-set upon it.

  Because it is Tasmania and not Slovenia.

  ‘I went to their house and found it for her,’ said the woman who had crushed her hand, ‘so she’d have something to take her mind off all that has happened.’

  ‘To help her forget,’ said the other woman.

  ‘Yes,’ said the hand crusher. ‘That’s right, help the poor little thing forget.’ Her tone became more intimate. ‘She kept the house surprisingly clean, I’ll say that for her. Not what you’d expect.’

  Sonja picked up the teapot, found that it did not stop to pretend-pour in one of the toy cups but continued to move till it was above the ground onto which it fell and shattered.

  Because our world is upside down.

  One of the engineers’ wives yelled out to Sonja and she must have heard, for she looked up at the two women, looked at them and through them such that neither spoke again, not when she smashed the milk jug, nor when she smashed the first saucer nor the second or fourth or sixth cup.

  Because in her eyes was a question to which the engineers’ wives had no answer. Teapot and milk jug, saucer and cup upon concrete. Porcelain, pearl-smooth on the outside, sharp as glass and dry as
death upon breaking. Had they broken? Had they? Teapot and milk jug smashing. Her mother singing. Her father sobbing. Saucer and cup breaking. Had they? A howling inside that would not leave.

  Her mother singing. Her father sobbing.

  Her father. Her mother. Her.

  Had they?

  But the engineers’ wives would not answer her, and only pulled their cardigans in tighter, no matter how many cups and saucers Sonja Buloh smashed before the scudding sky, no matter how many shards of porcelain splintered into that poor child’s soul, they could never answer her.

  Chapter 81

  1990

  ‘SLOW IT!’ shouted Betty, ‘Pant, Sonja, pant, pant.’

  Sonja no longer had a will or a mind but only waves of sensation, pain, cascading down her body in waves from head to toe. From a distant oblivion of pain, she heard herself faraway lowing like a cow in agony.

  There was no obstetrician in constant attendance as Sonja was a public patient, but Betty seemed to have an infinite array of positions into which she would manoeuvre Sonja between contractions, and now Betty had her sitting up and told her that she could see the head, that it was coming, coming quickly, quickly. Sonja had not called for pethidine yet, but was sucking the gas hard and panting like a lousy dog and had her eyes tightly closed and was clenching her fists so hard that they were numb from lack of blood when she felt her womb suddenly, violently jump backwards and up into herself. She was at that moment possessed of the foolish fancy that her womb was some giant rainbow trout returning home in huge skipping leaps upriver, each leap traversing yet another previously impossible fall, and each fall another person—Jean, Picotti, Mrs Maritza Michnik—leap—another place—Sydney, Hobart, Butlers Gorge—leap—another time, now all only water and stone to be traversed: until the trout had reached the third and lowest snow-powdered step at the bottom of a wooden hut—leap—and then there was a door, a door! and with each leap the rainbow trout became younger and smaller and lighter until it rode the very wind, until it was simply a piece of lace and it was no longer as she had always known for the door was opening and the lace was returning and shaping itself wet and slippery and bloody as it was coming toward her and out of her and she was dying and she could no longer pant or talk or even low like a cow but was screaming forever.