The Sea & Us

by Catherine de Saint Phalle

  She doesn’t say ‘your mother’. She must sense that I dislike the ‘mother’ word – just as someone who has nearly drowned avoids speaking of the ocean. She’s taking a deep breath now.

  ‘It came to me that she may have been sleepwalking. Perhaps she had no knowledge of what she was doing. You said that she started doing that soon after your father left. Could it be that you reminded her of him, that she clung to you, mistaking you for him, even in your childish form?’

  I don’t expect this. I stop like a clock. I can’t even hear myself breathe.

  ‘Marlowe, could it have happened like that? Shouldn’t you check? Shouldn’t you try and find her, and ask her?’

  She’s still holding my hands, but I feel like flinging them away. She must sense this, because she won’t let go. She holds on tighter still, as if I am a big fish she has reeled in.

  ‘Harold.’

  It’s the second time she’s called me by my name.

  ‘It helps to know why people do things. Sometimes it’s for no reason of their own.’

  I look at her, she who has caught me and reeled me in to the shore in El Mirage. What if she’s right? What if Liběna was just a woman missing her husband, in the most human way?

  I stare at Marylou, and the café has gone completely silent. I can only see my love, because I know she is that to me now. Not that I’d tell her this in a month of Sundays, not now, not how things are at the moment. I have to be her Myshkin, her old chum – probably forever.

  ‘Harold.’

  I answer straight away.

  ‘She’s in Richmond. I’ll try and find her at her old place.’

  ‘When will you go?’

  ‘Tomorrow. I’ll go tomorrow, you witch.’

  She grins, and soon we leave, floating somehow down the street towards The Sea & Us. Yes, that is how it seems to me, as if we are floating.

  18

  Tomorrow

  YOU ALWAYS KNOW when the thing waiting at the back of your mind uncoils and faces you. When that time comes, every atom of you knows it.

  Marylou and I returned to The Sea & Us. I can’t remember the rest of the day after that. All I know is that I’m on a tram to Richmond. All I know is that Liběna will probably be there. She doesn’t budge easily.

  I walk up Peers Street to her front door and I know she’s there, like a dog knows when the household is awake. The place is exactly the same, well kept, the weatherboard freshly painted, as it was then – as if time hasn’t swept by. All the other houses cluster close, exactly the same, exactly different. The whitewash is so fresh it’s almost startling. The front door is still painted that rusty, dusky pink bordering on burnt orange. A colour you wade in, a sunset of a colour created by Maruška with the right proportions written on the garage wall, the same garage no one used because no one drove except my father, and the car left with him.

  The memory of that was perhaps why I got my licence in Seoul and drove a rental from time to time to get out of the city. I thought that was the only reason. I never quite understood why I took the trouble. Now I wonder. Perhaps it was simply to have something of him – a skill, an inherited need for a getaway car.

  Absent Czech fathers seem to have been a trend. They proliferated after every invasion of the country. Men – fathers, husbands, brothers, lovers – tended to leave, to walk away, to disappear as the wound in the country’s honour spread into personal relationships, as if the masculine principle was going walkabout. Maruška’s accepting sighs after my parents’ separation seemed to support it as an inescapable historical outcome.

  My parents both worked. Hard. Maruška and I were generally the only ones at home. One day, when I was nine, I came back from school and they told me my father had gone. It was as if he’d never been there. I was now part of a family of three. There were no quarrels, no warnings, just this sudden absence. I wiped him from the blackboard of my mind, though no one told me to do so. Yes, as if he never existed. Maruška’s world contained so many other worlds, perhaps that was why her presence was enough.

  I frown and concentrate with that slight grimace people have when they’re trying to remember a phone number, or when they’ve lost their keys. He was Czech too. A very tall guy, I would say, but that doesn’t mean much because I was a kid then. He and my mother left the country during the Communist era, in the early seventies.

  Something Maruška told me stuck in my mind. With the half-smile she used for sad stories, she explained how her daughter (‘she was my daughter before she was your mother, Harruld’) was still hesitating about leaving. Her then lover was pressing her to defect to the West. He had it all organised. The day of departure was chosen. Liběna had packed her linen, her silverware, in a case. ‘She took weeks to pack that case, so everything fitted, so no space was lost, so that it would be as light as possible. And what did he do? At the last minute he told her to leave it behind in the woods. Everything was lost. She didn’t really want to go. She loved Czechoslovakia. Her soul was there. She abandoned herself.’ But my mother left anyway. A decision Maruška never understood. The words come back to me now, as clear as when she said them. Something had me erase my father completely from my mind. How is it that this information is trickling back to me on this doorstep?

  Did she ever really love him? Am I the result of a tepid passion? Is that why I’m such a wishy-washy fellow?

  I was born in Australia. Liběna did all the hard jobs left to immigrants until she discovered she liked nursing and was good at it. She studied and became a nurse. I used to imagine her severe face bending over beds.

  Maruška was quick to attribute the blame. ‘He was a very hard, very rational man. When he decided he wanted something, he pushed until he got it. He wanted Liběna. She was an intellectual then, a dangerous thing to be in those times. And now? Nursing? Bedpans? What’s happened to her?’ she protested.

  I remember them meeting with other Czech friends as a couple. They would rush off. I would be left with Maruška.

  ‘At home in Czechoslovakia she wrote underground articles – she very nearly got thrown in prison. He was a doctor. A very good, precise doctor,’ Maruška added in clipped tones. ‘And he had to resit his exams in English to be able to practice in Australia.’ But the man himself still evades me. Perhaps he died and I was left in a world of women. Perhaps he married again and I have half-brothers and sisters, a happy brood of Australians all raring to meet me. I remember my father as taciturn. Has he adapted to the country? Then he slips from my mind. I am here, bodily. I can see the grain of the wood beneath the paint. I’m so close to the door I feel I could step through it. As if it were a door of time rather than a solid one I can touch.

  I turn to Marylou in my mind. Are you happy Marylou? I’m here, as I said I’d be, aren’t I? But I’m still rooted to the spot. Coming back to where I started is obviously still not enough. Some part of me must have believed all the rest would happen of its own accord.

  But knocking on this door is like knocking on the solid stone of the Wailing Wall.

  There’s a smell of pepper on the tiny porch that I remember. My mother used to smell of pepper. It was very faint, but it was everywhere around her. The strangest thing is that I actually like pepper. Maruška also smelt of pepper. I’m sure that the Czech Republic smells of pepper too.

  Why do I owe all my Czech to Maruška? Why did Liběna never bother to teach me, except the crumbs of distant meaning that she threw at me? A word here and there, which she would translate offhandedly, but which I kept in the way other boys treasure marbles.

  I’m a phantom Czech all over again, with that inherited sadness that lets moments like this grind into me until all that’s left of me is the smell of pepper. I’ve never felt anything really, not Australian, just Harold, as if I were some drek, some washed-up trash. The word ‘Harold’ doesn’t even feel like a name, just a word, my own word that no one else wears – for good reason. It has no roots or associations, it just stands there, alone, not part of any gene
ration – drek that goes places without knowing why.

  But I know why I’m here on this porch. Why can’t I knock?

  The window is open. I can hear the nearly silent noise of a pepper grinder (or is it my imagination?) – someone grinding slowly, making food with care. She always did everything with care – maybe that’s why she was such a good nurse. Her patients probably didn’t know that she watered plants in just the same way, with just the same mindfulness.

  That’s when I hear a quick step and that’s when the door opens – the last thing I expect.

  Then she’s right there in front of me. I stand like a column without moving an inch. She frowns slightly. I see her hands slowly move to her face, hovering near her cheeks, floating, disconnected.

  ‘I’m sorry, Maminko.’

  Now why did I go and say that?

  Suddenly her hand shoots out to hold my arm. Then she tumbles into me.

  ‘Harruld …’

  I hold her as if she were a bicycle. She’s very skinny and feels like Verity. Except it’s not Verity but my mother, Liběna. What is this strangeness that is so familiar? Her forehead presses itself against my chest. She’s much shorter than I remember. I grab her and hold her.

  ‘Maminko,’ I whisper. ‘Maminko, omlouvám se. Sorry.’

  She doesn’t budge, digging her forehead into my ribs. I can feel her breathing heavily, breathing me through my jacket. Holding her shoulders I step back. She looks eighty. Her face has crumpled and her eagle features – she doesn’t have the Czech snub nose – are mushed up, lost in translation. I can’t help but pull her, over the years, over my father’s leaving, over Seoul, over Ha-yoon, over Maruška’s death, over the space between our feet, so that now she’s nearly stepping on mine. I can see she doesn’t know where she is. It has me remembering one of her phrases: Where am I? She would say this every time she had mislaid the scissors in the kitchen or forgotten where she had put the kettle.

  ‘Maminko, don’t cry. Omlouvám se. Sorry.’

  And at that moment Marylou’s theory burrows deep in my old certainties, there must be another explanation. This woman probably didn’t know what she was doing. But in that same instant I also know the ache will always be there, what I believed will stay like an ugly wound between us. Time, the most transparent thing, does not repair itself so easily. Will we ever be at ease with each other, joke, walk down a sunny street at dusk, quarrel? Probably not.

  I turn and elbow the door back and half drag her inside. There’s a fire burning in the kitchen, a spring fire to say goodbye to winter. A tiny one, the flames are young, they dart here and there, they bounce, and I recognise the tidy log construction – a house for the flames. Liběna always knew how to build a fire.

  I sit her at the kitchen table.

  And I tell her. I tell her all about it. A minute later I know I will never recapture what I said. I will never know what words I used or how hurtful, offensive and humiliating they were to her. She stares at me. I can see her eyes are very large. They have the dappled murky beauty of a stagnant pond at dusk – green, brown and silver. They are exactly how I remember them. Why didn’t I trust her and wake her up?

  I always knew I had a reason for returning to Melbourne. I had no choice but to come back because the circumstances of my life pointed in one direction only. I tried to avoid this reasoning for as long as I could, but it stayed there, waiting, nestled in the back of my mind. I’m on track I feel, even if it’s a mourning, grieving track, a silent Wailing Wall, settling itself in the time ahead of us, casting its shadow far into our future.

  Slowly her hands climb to her face and hide it. And I can see, behind her fingers, her skin being dyed a dull, aching red.

  ‘Ne, ne.’

  ‘Maminko.’

  I gently put my palms over her hands and drag them down slowly.

  ‘You didn’t know, Maminko.’

  ‘How could I not know? How?’

  ‘Sleepwalking, Maminko. He’d left. Did you have nightmares or dreams he had returned?’

  She stares at me numbly.

  ‘I did dream for years he had returned.’

  She moves forward, taking my hands in her long, spatulated fingers which used to disgust me so.

  ‘Harruld.’

  ‘Maminko. I live in Brunswick East. I live in Melbourne. I was eighteen years in Seoul. We can resume.’

  ‘Resume?’

  ‘Yes, resume, like a book you stopped reading and can start again.’

  ‘Our story together had stopped.’

  ‘Yes, but now we can start again.’

  ‘Not from scratch?’

  Her face is filled with fear. I know the Czech fear of erasing the before, the yesterday.

  ‘No, not from scratch, Maminko. We can take up just where we left off.’

  ‘But the images, for you, of those nights …’

  Again I can see the dull red rising up her features and I know that common shame will always be there between us, leaving us no comfort, only the hard spine of truth.

  ‘But I did that thing …’

  We stare at each other and we know it will never go.

  ‘There are no images, Maminko. It was a mistake, mainly on my part. Not enough trust.’

  She bends her head and touches my sleeve. As if this is what she has always been hoping.

  Some trust.

  19

  Marylou

  SOMETIMES I WONDER if love is not a river that runs under our life on its subterranean riverbed. Sometimes it rises in a flash flood. My story, if I had one, would be a series of those floods.

  I write the address of The Sea & Us and my mobile number on a piece of paper, and I write down hers. I tell her about Marylou, Verity and Ben. I also tell her about the moon jar. Then we sit by her Indian fire and look at it for a long time while it seems to burn up all of the absence between us, all of the silence and all of the misunderstanding. Yet as we sit so companionably, we both know how transient this feeling is, how we must shore it up, like wood for winter, like blankets for fever, like memories after a death.

  The table, at the corner of which she had stood when I told her I was leaving for good, is still there. Another flower is in the pewter vase by the window, but it feels like the same one. The fireplace, its Victorian intricacies removed and its hearth bare and plain, is the same as ever. Everything sits on thick wooden shelves and the whole place is freshly whitewashed inside, just as it was the last time I saw it. I recognise the three pictures – one of a Prague street, one of Joseph Sudek’s photos of a rose at the end of its life, wilting on its stem, and one of the rain on the Vltava River – as we remain on the small sofa facing the flames, making time, knitting it, forestalling further loss.

  She’s still a nurse, but she now works in a nursing home. The hours are flexible, and she’s got used to the same patients. The owner of the home is a nice man, she says, a very nice man. I wonder if something is going on there and I surprise myself with a son’s instinct for a stranger in his midst. But the man has a wife with whom she’s close friends.

  I then broach the subject of my father.

  ‘I never knew where he went, after he left. It was as if he had fallen off a cliff. You never spoke of him.’

  ‘He didn’t talk much himself.’

  She stares ahead, not saying this by way of explanation, but more like a musing to herself. I look in the same direction. I notice we speak without turning to each other, like people sitting in a bus, as intent as animals – those superior beings who listen with every part of their body.

  ‘I can’t remember him talking either. There were no words around him or about what he did.’

  I tell her about the walnut in the washbasin and ask if he is still practising.

  ‘Yes, he is a surgeon, Harruld, he repairs hips.’ She shakes her head. ‘He did talk, with me. He still does. On the phone, quite regularly. But he is a taciturn character. He has a little aeroplane. He has not remarried. He is very successful. Famous
, in his field. He is happy now.’

  ‘Do you see him?’

  Her eyebrows twitch.

  ‘Not often. Once a month, once every two months. But we have a bond, a strong bond. I always know how he is, how he is feeling, but I cannot live with him. He finally agreed to this, and that is why he left. I left Czechoslovakia because I was young, because I did not get on with Maruška, because I wanted to become a writer. It was a mistake, but a mistake of destiny. It made me into another person.’

  ‘So you don’t write.’

  ‘No, I don’t write. I nurse.’

  She says this staunchly, as if she has definitely worked that out about herself. And then she smiles at me.

  ‘The same intention. But more directly expressed.’

  It’s dusk when I reach the tram stop on Victoria Street. I notice that the wind is coming from the north now and the cold air has gone.

  As I turned around to wave to my mother standing in front of Maruška’s sunset-coloured door, I realised that this was the first time I had ever done so. I always used to stride straight off when I left her. She didn’t appear so old anymore, as if it were the shock that had wizened her. She looked to be in her fifties – even though she’s older than that.

  On the tram, I know things will be different for me now. A phantom limb has acquired flesh, a strange spell of cold in the middle of the wrong season has vanished. Even if a more solid discomfort has taken hold of my life – at least I know it’s real and true. I look at Fitzroy as it slides past the bus window and I see Marylou’s face in the glass, riding with me against the shops, the worker’s cottages, smiling that Giaconda smile of faces that aren’t there. But she will be in a few stops. She’ll be there by her bedroom window, reading her book. On the other side of the aisle, one of the tram windows’ is open, and the air blowing onto us is the sweet velvet promise of summer.

  I jump off at the stop near the Quarry Hotel and my strides eat up the ground separating me from The Sea & Us. I hear the familiar bell tinkle. Verity is serving some customers. No Bernard in sight. We wave to each other and I bound up the stairs.