Remembering Babylon

by David Malouf

  Most unnerving of all was the knowledge that, just three years back, the very patch of earth you were standing on had itself been on the other side of things, part of the unknown, and might still, for all your coming and going over it, and the sweat you had poured into its acre or two of ploughed earth, have the last of mystery upon it, in jungle brakes between paddocks and ferny places out of the sun. Good reason, that, for stripping it, as soon as you could manage, of every vestige of the native; for ringbarking and clearing and reducing it to what would make it, at last, just a bit like home.

  It was from this standpoint that the little crowd of settlers, drawn together in such an unusual manner at this time of day, faced the black white man the children had brought in.

  Little by little, as the afternoon wore on, an explanation came forth – but slowly. They were in no hurry to have things resolved and an occasion ended that offered so much in the way of the marvellous, and was, besides, such fun.

  His name was Jimmy or Gemmy according to how you heard it (by the end of the day they had settled for Gemmy and were thus, in a familiar way, addressing him) and his other name was Fairley or Farrelly. Sixteen years before, when he was not much older than Lachlan Beattie, he had been cast overboard from a passing ship and had been living since in the scrub country to the north with blacks. All of which he made them understand partly with signs, partly with words that he dragged up at need, but in such a distorted form, as he hummed and hooted and shot spittle out of his mouth, and tried to get his tongue around them, that it was the signs their understanding leapt at. Guessing what he intended became a game, and at last, as they eased themselves into the unaccustomed jollity of it, a noisy carnival.

  Occasionally, in the dead light of a paddock, all bandaged stumps and bone-white antlers, there would come a flash of colour, red or blue or yellow, and it would strike a man, but in a disconcerting way, as his heart lifted, that a country that was mostly devilish could also at times be playful; that there might be doors here, hidden as yet, into some lighter world. There was something of that too in the occasion, as, standing in a clump on one side with Jimmy, or Gemmy on the other, they scratched their pates, turned from one to the other, and he signed, mouthed, shook his head at their failure to catch on, till one of their number, quicker than the rest, or more foolhardy, piped up and said: ‘Well I don’t know. Maybe he’s up a ladder. Pickin’ cherries. Or hops – what about hops?’

  The others scoffed. ‘Don’t be daft, Jack, that couldn’t be it. What a noodle! Hark at the ninny! Hops!’

  Amendments were offered, new suggestions made, and at last, after a good deal of argument, they settled on something between the lot of them that made sense.

  ‘A ship! He was a sailor.’

  ‘Something’s got him scared.’

  ‘No, I’ve got it, a fever! He means he was sick.’

  Some of the younger fellows, rowdy youths not easily subdued, were very solemn about it, as if the guessing game was a test. Eager to be right, they vied with one another, got hot under the collar, shouted, and when they were defeated, went mean at the mouth and sulked. Others thought it a fine chance to act the goat.

  Children, whose only experience of such communal get-togethers was Sunday church and the gatherings organised by Mr Frazer, their minister, where their parents, constrained by collars, ties, bonnet strings, buttons, remained stiffly intimidated, were astonished now by so much levity. They could never have imagined their fathers, their mothers too, shouting and chiacking like this.

  Meanwhile, the man himself was hauling at imaginary sails, puffing his cheeks out, rolling his eyes up and shaking his wrists in a passion to have them comprehend. He clenched his brow and made little hissing noises through his nostrils while he waited for them to come up with a suggestion, and when they looked at one another, drew their mouths down and remained dull, grew fierce with exasperation.

  In his wish to make an impression on the grown-ups he had turned away from Lachlan; but seeing now that the boy was among the quickest of all at guessing what he meant, he fell back on what he felt was an affinity between them. He would, out of deference to the adults, make a sign in their direction, and when they failed to grasp it, turn to Lachlan; or someone in the crowd itself would. ‘What is it, lad? What’s he trying to say?’

  The boy, seeing his power restored in a new form, was determined to make the most of it.

  You see, the line of his mouth proclaimed, as once again the fellow laughed and paid tribute to his cleverness with a slap of the thigh, Ah told ye Ah was the wan! Or he would deliberately hold back and make them wait, screwing his face up, pretending to be stumped, so that, with a shout of triumph and a little knock of his knuckles against his skull at his own stupidity, he could the more dramatically come up with an answer. ‘Yer a clever little bugger, ain’t ye!’ one of the older fellows hissed in his ear.

  But at last no more facts suggested themselves to the man. He looked about, uncertain; then, as a proof of what he claimed, tore away the cloth he wore round his middle and held it out to them. There were giggles and an embarrassed clearing of throats as one of the men, Ned Corcoran, took hold of the rag and in a gingerly way looked it over.

  It was the remains of a jacket. Salt-stained and stiff with dirt, it had once been blue, maybe royal blue, and still had a hint of colour to it.

  Ned Corcoran frowned. What was he expected to do with the thing? Holding it at arm’s length, he passed it to the next man. He too examined and passed it on. One of the women, offered the foul-smelling bundle, wrinkled her nose and turned away. Gemmy, his brow furrowed, had begun to skip about on one leg. Little whimpering sounds came from him.

  ‘He wants it back,’ one of the smaller children said dreamily out of her own experience, and looked about, suddenly shy at having spoken.

  ‘He does too. The bairn’s right. Give it ’im back.’

  Jock McIvor, whose hands it had come to, passed the rag back, and the fellow grinned and hugged it to his chest but made no attempt to restore it to where it would do most good. This was too much for Jim Sweetman. ‘For God’s sake, man,’ he exploded, ‘cover yourself.’

  Jim Sweetman, an ex-blacksmith, was a man who was accorded a good deal of respect among them. He was a big, stern-faced fellow who in all weathers wore a flannel vest out of which grey wire crawled. He disapproved of swearing and had only one oath of his own, which was ‘By Godfrey’, but was a dancer with the lightness of a man half his weight and half his age and was often seen with his three-year-old granddaughter on his arm, bouncing her up and down to the tune of a waltz. He did not impose his authority and no word of rebuke ever passed his lips, but there were few among them who did not shrink from the image they got of themselves when Jim Sweetman, with a look of sadness rather than scorn, fixed them for a moment with his gaze and turned regretfully away.

  He had taken no part in the guessing game – no pleasure either. A lot of grown men and women idling about, grinning and shouting while a plain savage, or marionette or imbecile, jigged about and played up to them. And all this with not a stitch to cover him! Bad enough if he was what he appeared to be, a poor savage, but if he was a white man it was horrible. ‘Somebody get the fellow some proper covering,’ he thundered when it was clear that no one else had seen the need or was willing to forgo the spectacle long enough to remedy it. Flushed with shame, he snatched the rag from the man’s hands, pushed it at him, and pointed, then looked away. The man grinned. Very complaisantly he knotted the thing, but in an ineffectual manner, at his waist.

  But now he was off on a new game. He had something else to show.

  He banged his head with the flat of his hand and ‘H-h-head’ he hooted, then looked alarmed as if the word had popped out without his will. They watched, waited for more, but he was stopped for the moment.

  It was the stammer. It belonged to someone he had thought was gone, lost, and here it was on his lips again. It had come back at the moment, up there on the fence, when he first
found words in his English tongue. A weakness that was inseparable, perhaps, from the tongue itself. It dampened him a little. It set him back. But he swallowed hard and defied it.

  ‘Nose’ he yelled, clasping his own, and laughing outright at the ease with which he found the word and got it out. ‘Arm! M-m-mouth! Ear!’ He was shouting now for his own sake rather than to demonstrate anything, half drunk with what kept coming.

  It was as if the language these people spoke was an atmosphere they moved in. Just being in their proximity gave him access to it. He breathed it up out of the air between them, snatched the words like buttons off their shirts, or hairs out of their beards. ‘B-b-beard’ he yelled – again, it was with him now, and would not go away – ‘foot’, holding one up and dancing awkwardly on the other; then, with an appeal to what he knew was the comic side of things, ‘arse’, and slapped his meagre buttocks.

  One or two of the children laughed and clapped their hands over their mouths, all eyes. The smallest among them, their young thin faces very grave and intent, looked up to see how their parents would take it and, when no protest appeared, wondered if some new set of rules was in operation, and this blackfeller’s arrival among them was to be the start of something.

  And now, with a spurt of excited energy, he lunged into the crowd, and before anyone could prevent it, had wrested a hammer from one of the onlookers, a hulking, harelipped youth, Hec Gosper, who in the first shock of the assault, and under the suspicion of some sort of native treachery, made the mistake of trying to wrench it back. The fellow was stronger than he looked; he hung on and a struggle ensued. They wrestled for the hammer, pulling this way and that, till one or two of the bystanders started barracking, and Hector, with a baffled look, and the realisation that he was being made ridiculous, gave up.

  A cheerful youth but very sensitive of his standing, he felt the others had let him down. Some of the barracking had been for the black.

  He stood with his shirt rucked up behind and dragged his forearm across his brow. The harelip meant that he had had to fight hard in the past not to be taunted. He was incensed now that the accident of his arriving on the scene with a hammer should once again make a victim of him. With a savage gesture, he pushed his shirt back into his pants and stood nursing his wounds.

  But all the man wanted, it seemed, was to show that he knew how the thing was used. Holding an imaginary nail very daintily between forefinger and thumb, he raised the hammer and made a show of belting it in.

  ‘A nail,’ someone shouted, not realising that the earlier game was ended.

  The man knocked in another nail, then, looking very pleased with himself, and with great solemnity, restored the tool to its offended owner, attempting as he did to pat the youth affectionately on the shoulder.

  ‘Get offa me,’ the boy hissed, and jerked his elbow up under the nigger’s chin.

  The details of his story were pieced together the following afternoon from facts that were, as he told them, all out of their proper order, and with so many gaps of memory, and so much dislocation between what he meant to convey and the few words he could recover of his original tongue, that they could never be certain, later, how much of it was real and how much they had themselves supplied from tales they already knew, since he was by no means the first white man to have turned up like this after a spell among the blacks.

  It was the minister, Mr Frazer, who examined him, in the hot little one-roomed schoolhouse, and the schoolmaster, George Abbot, who did the writing up.

  The man was squeezed into a desk in the front row, with Mr Frazer opposite. George Abbot sat at his usual place, at the table on the dais, in front of a greenish blackboard cloudy with chalk dust and covered with sums in long division.

  For the first half hour Lachlan Beattie was present. Since a kind of understanding had been struck between the man and his earliest interpreter, Mr Frazer thought things might go easier if he was there. But the boy was so bumptious, so ready to interrupt and contradict and take upon himself the main part of the proceedings, that George Abbot, who had to deal with him five days a week and was not inclined to be patient, told him to sit still and speak only when he was invited. Even Mr Frazer agreed at last that it might be better if he went back to his companions. They, in their delight at any sort of show, were hanging about in troops on the verandah, and whenever events inside showed a spark of action, jostled and shoved in the window frame.

  Deeply humiliated before so many witnesses, who were only too happy to see him brought down, Lachlan departed, but comforted himself with the thought that in dismissing him they had lost their one chance of getting at the truth. Only he, as yet, had any clear hold on what the fellow was trying to say. He watched now from the sill, with a little smirk of contempt for the minister’s wrong guesses, which were many, and with the satisfaction, every now and then, of receiving from Gemmy a look of stricken appeal that he was impelled, with a shrug of his shoulders, to ignore.

  The trouble was that Gemmy, in his childish eagerness to provide Mr Frazer with whatever it was he wanted to hear, leaped at every suggestion, and once his own meagre fund gave out was only too pleased to have Mr Frazer find words for him.

  It was Mr Frazer’s belief that the sympathy he felt for the man, which was very strong, gave him an infallible insight into what he was trying to get out. When the poor fellow knotted his brow, and gnawed his lip, and hummed and agonised, Mr Frazer, all his body hunched and drawn forward till he was practically breathing into the man’s mouth, would offer syllables, words, anything to relieve the distress he felt at Gemmy’s distress, so that they sat, at times, at a distance of just inches, hooting and shouting at one another; on Gemmy’s side, odd bursts of sound, half-meanings at most; on the other, whole phrases that, whether or not they were quite what the man intended, found their way into what George Abbot set down.

  ‘Yes sir, yes, that’s it,’ Gemmy would splutter, delighted, since the minister was, at having done so well, and Mr Frazer, another fierce struggle ended, would look relieved and say, ‘Good, I thought that might be it.’ With the tip of his forefinger on the fleshy place between his nostrils, he would consider a moment, then give George the sign to dip his pen and write.

  A young man of just nineteen, in a jacket and tie, his nose peeled with sunburn, George Abbot resented the role he was being forced to play in this pantomime, and the more so because Mr Frazer was in his eyes such a fool. He felt his authority was undermined by his being put to use, and in front of his own pupils too, as a mere clerk. When they surged in the window-space and would not be silenced by hard looks, he felt his temper rise and would have intervened to restore order; Mr Frazer was a man who did not inspire respect. But he dared not challenge the older man, despised himself for it, and resented the occasion all the more.

  It was hot under the roof. He had a tendency to sweat. He hooked a finger under his collar, worked it round a little to ease the tightness, and while Mr Frazer once again put his questions, and agonised and prompted, and the man clenched his jaw and his knuckled fingers and hummed, let his gaze drift beyond the crowd of heads in the window-space to the stunned landscape, and in a dreamy way into its depths.

  When one of his charges did this, he would, with stinging accuracy, fling an inch of chalk at his head, then make the culprit, still rubbing the smart of it and glaring under his greasy pudding bowl, kneel with his nose to the wall.

  There was no one to fling chalk at him. Young enough to respond, as his pupils did, to the drowsiness that stole over your senses in the airless heat, and to the heaviness and constriction of his clothes, especially the thick cloth between his thighs, he found himself losing hold of Mr Frazer’s voice. The thrumming of his blood was curiously at one with the shimmering, out there, of the landscape and the shrilling of insects, a sound so continuous, so dimly insistent in these late-summer days that it stilled the senses and drew you irresistibly into its own drawn-out –

  ‘Ready George? George?’

  He starte
d.

  ‘Ready sir.’

  Drawing a handkerchief from his cuff, he mopped the meat of his palm, then crumpled and replaced it, dipped his pen, and casting an amused glance over the happy couple, who had come to an end for the moment of their shouting and spluttering, bent his neck to the task. As each sheet was filled he passed it to the minister, and Mr Frazer, holding it at arm’s length while Gemmy looked on blinking, read it through.

  They came to the third sheet, and while Mr Frazer ran his eye over it, muttering a little, George Abbot made a pretence of examining his nib. A smile played on his lips.

  Out of boredom, but also to set himself at a distance from the occasion and to register, if only in an obscure and indirect way, the contempt he felt at the minister’s smugness, he had introduced into what he had just set down a phrase or two of his own.

  Hidden away in Mr Frazer’s orotund periods, they were an assertion of personality, of independence, of his refusal to be a mere tool. He waited to see if Mr Frazer would notice. When he did not, he resolved next time to be bolder. The imp of invention gave a gleeful kick in him and what he added now was not a change of phrasing but an alteration of fact – nothing blatant. The thought of this scrap of mistruth, deliberately introduced among so much that was mere guesswork on the minister’s part, not to say sentimental fantasy, appealed to his sense of the absurd; he delighted in it, even if he was the only one who would ever know it was there. In this way he appropriated a little of the occasion to himself, stepped in and concealed himself, a sceptical shade, at this and that point of the minister’s Colonial fairytale.

  When all was done, and Mr Frazer had read over the half-dozen or more sheets and nodded his satisfaction, he invited Gemmy, who had been craning his neck to follow the proceedings, to take the sheets and handle them; out of a sense, a weird one George thought, but the minister did have these fits of weirdness, that in doing so the man might grasp a little of what they had been doing here and what the seven closely-written pages represented.