Remembering Babylon

by David Malouf

  Further on a woman emerged from a hut carrying a basket on her hip. She set it down and began pegging clothes on a line, shirts, then trousers, then children’s things and a frock. He fingered the rough material of the rag he had kept from the raft – which he wore knotted at his waist, as a sign should he be caught – and had to sit in the tall grass hugging himself, such a rush of bewilderment and soft affection came over him.

  He watched the woman hoist the line high by setting a forked pole under it, then pick up her basket and go. The soft things shifted in the breeze. Dripping sunlight, they made gestures this way and that, but awkwardly, weighed down by the shadows in their folds. The hem of a skirt lifted as if lively feet were in movement under it in a shuffling walk.

  Later, the same woman came out of her hut and stood making clucking sounds. Is this their language? he thought. He tried it very softly, putting his tongue to the roof of his mouth. Cluck cluck cluck.

  Suddenly, in a spurt of dust, a mob of big birds shot into sight. All closely bunched and flapping their wings over one another’s backs and squawking, they squabbled round the woman’s skirt. She laughed, scooped a handful of something from the bowl she carried, tossed it into their midst, then went off again round the side of the hut.

  Keeping low to the ground, he scurried forward on all fours, scrabbled among the beaks and claws, and with the maddened birds flying at his arms, and buffeting and pecking, scrambled for cover, then crammed the wet mass into his mouth.

  The taste of it, the strangeness, the familiarity, dizzied him. The creature whose dreams he shared came right up to the surface of him. It fed on the saltiness of the stuff, and for a moment entirely took possession of him. He saw things through its eyes in bewildering flashes, and found himself shaken with sobs, but where the tears came from so suddenly, and why, he could not tell. A stranger, a child it might be, who had never wept, was weeping in him. He looked with wonder at his hands and at the remains of the pulpy mess. Wiped it off, a little afraid now of its power, and out of habit muttered syllables that were a formula against bad magic, though he did not think the magic was bad.

  He went back to the line where the clothes, brighter now, were filled with sunlight and the lightness of breath. They moved about with vigour and were so lively, so emptily ghostly, that he felt a kind of dread at first of venturing in among them. The shirts made floppy gestures, shook their cuffs, launched out in a gust, and by instinct he ducked. The skirt stirred and swayed. It was like standing in the midst of a crowd that was never still. Now where was that? Where? After a little, with the air ablaze on his shoulders and scents springing up where he trampled the grass, he began to move in and out among them, daring the stroke across his face as he let one soft thing, then another, brush against him, lifting his arms so that a watcher, seeing him pass from one side to the other of the line, dipping his head, might have thought it a kind of dance, a strange blackfeller’s dance among the washing. Imagine!

  When darkness fell he crept close to the hut. From an pening between the slabs, yellow light poured forth and where it fell made all the sharp little stones of the yard start up in shadow. He stepped round the edge of it, then squatted and very gingerly extended his hand so that the brightness crept up his arm, but there was no warmth to it.

  He crept closer and crouched under the sill. From within came voices, and though the words made no sense to him, save for one or two of them, the sound did, the hiss, the buzz.

  He put his shoulder to the rough slabs, believing that if he could only get near enough, the meaning of what was said would come clear to him, he would snatch the words clean out of the speakers’ mouths. If he could get the words inside him, as he had the soaked mush, the creature, or spirit or whatever it was, would come up to the surface of him and take them. It was the words he had to get hold of. It was the words that would recognise him.

  He did not want to be taken back. What he wanted was to be recognised.

  So when next day he began to run towards the boundary fence and the paddock where the three children stood staring, he had no notion of abandoning the tribe, even less of breaking from one world to another. It was a question of covering the space between them, of recovering the connection that would put the words back in his mouth, and catch the creature, the spirit or whatever it was, that lived in the dark of him, and came up briefly to torment or tease but could be tempted, he now saw, with what these people ate and with the words they used.

  He was running to prove that all that separated him from them was ground that could be covered. He gave no consideration to what might happen when he arrived.

  The dog intervened. It flashed out and began snapping at his heels. The boy raised the gun to his shoulder. He sailed up onto the fence rails to save himself, and before he knew it the words were out. The creature or spirit in him had spoken up, having all along had the words in there that would betray him and which, when they came hooting out of his mouth, so astonished him: Do not shoot. I am a British object.

  It was, after all, the creature, which was so drawn towards them, that had begun to run and for a long moment kept him aloft on the rail, which he gripped with his toes, using his outstretched arms to steady himself, while the dog pranced and slashed the air with its yelping, the boy stood with the gun pointing, clouds rolled, the sky weighed on his neck, and the country, all swamp and forest one way, raw clearings the other, swung in a circle about him.

  He waited for a bullet to bring him down, or for the creature, or spirit, to decide it was time to rise upwards and lift him away. But it deserted him, and it was his body that brought him down. On a cry from the smallest of the children, he overbalanced, began to fall, and the next instant was on all fours on the other side.

  3

  HE WAS TAKEN in by the McIvors, the family of the children who had found him, and given a place to sleep under a red blanket in a lean-to against the side of their hut. In return he helped Jock McIvor round the farm. He was a ready worker, at least to begin with, but could not settle or keep his mind on things; he did not stick, and was physically in too poor a state for the heaviest work. In this respect young Lachlan could run rings around him.

  There was, from the beginning, a bond between him and the three children that went back to their meeting at the fence. They felt a proprietary right to him, having seen him first, and he, with his old instinct for self-preservation, for making the most of a weak position, saw the advantage of placing himself in their protection. He let them lead him about like a dog – the dog too took a fancy to him – listened to their secrets, was shown all the bits of things that were precious to them.

  He in turn showed them a little of what he knew. He taught the girls to plait grass and make dillybags, to hollow out gourds, dig up the fat yellow or white roots that, once you had thumbed the dirt off, could be baked in the ashes, and to gather berries that yielded a burst of welcome moisture to the tongue or an astringent sweetness.

  Making the distinction between them which he had learned among the blacks, he taught Lachlan to track. But the boy anyway stood in a special light for him, and that too went back to the moment of their first meeting, when Lachlan had stepped out in front of the two girls, raised the ‘gun’ to his shoulder, and stood there, square and determined, aiming fair at his heart. It had taken him only a moment of course to see that it was just a stick, but that did not mean it was harmless. What it stood for, and the boy’s fearful but fearless stance, was more important than stick or gun, and had made an indelible impression on him. He could never look at Lachlan, even if all he was doing was larking about in a childish way, without seeing, in his small compact figure, the power he had laid claim to with the pretence of arms.

  His object always was to make himself agreeable to the girls, to play the pupil when they wanted to be teacher, the doll when they wanted someone to dress up. But he kept a watch on Lachlan, ready always if necessary to appease; and the boy, because he was very quick in his perceptions, felt it and knew his power.
He led the man on an invisible leash, swaggering before the other children of the place, and only when they were alone together let out his natural affection.

  The girls, especially Janet, took a great interest in how he kept himself.

  ‘No, no, Gemmy dear, let me do it,’ she would say when he failed to button his shirt straight. Or, laughing at the way his hair stuck out in quills and would not be disciplined, ‘Sit still, now, there’s a good fellow, and I’ll brush it and make you neat. I’m giving you a nice parting, Gemmy, see?’, and little Meg would hold up the mirror, looking at him rather quizzically over the top of it, while Janet handled the comb.

  But there were times, too, when he felt an uneasiness in the older girl, as if she saw that he could not be treated as a child or plaything. He would catch her regard upon him, it was solemn, and an odd feeling would come over him that she was trying to see right into him, to catch his spirit, aware, as the others were not, that he was not entirely what he allowed them to see.

  He was surprised. If anyone else had looked at him that way, he would have felt his bowels go soft. But her gaze was so open and vulnerable that he felt no threat in it, and in himself only a stillness, a sense of tender ease at being exposed a moment – not to her, but to himself. Then a cloud would come to her brow and she would glance away.

  For her, too, he thought, it was that moment when she had first seen him balanced up there on the fence that she was looking towards, and he felt in the concentration of her gaze that he hung there still. Something, in that moment, had been settled between them, as it had between him and the boy.

  He went back and back to it. In the strange flickering light of the empty afternoon, with the sky ablaze on his shoulders, his belly empty, little insects opening and closing their wings over the still grass heads, the long, wavering note of crickets endlessly extended, he would stand gripping the fence rail with his toes, trying to stay up there long enough to take it all in, with the tendency to overbalance growing and growing in his upper body as if it was his heart that had been thrown off balance, and the three children staring: the boy, eyes narrowed, jaw set, with the stick at his shoulder; the dog in midair, also suspended, his tongue dripping; the gawky, fair-haired girl with one hand raised against the sun, the thin wrist arched, and for the first time that puzzled look in her eyes that might, he sometimes felt, just in itself have held him there, never to fall, so intense was the power of her gaze. If he had given himself over to that rather than to the heaviness of his own body, he might have stayed up there for ever. That was what her look meant. Only at that moment he had failed to grasp it.

  She was a puzzle to him. He could never be sure what she was thinking. He knew the boy’s thoughts because he wanted them known. His power lay in your recognising that he possessed it. It was the power that belonged to him because he was a boy; because, one day, the authority he had claimed in raising the stick to his shoulder would be real. It made him both easier and more dangerous. There was always in your dealings with him something to be taken account of: his concern for those whose eye he was trying to catch. The girl’s power was entirely her own. She needed no witness to it.

  As for the adults, he soon developed for Ellen McIvor, the mother of the little girls, an affection of a kind he had not known before; he had so little experience in his life of either the domestic or the feminine. It pleased him to find things he could do to make her life easier, and all the more to see the shy, offhand way she accepted them. The desire he had to give her pleasure had in it none of the anxious need to placate that lay behind every gesture he made towards the man of the house. It was free. He felt lightened by it.

  Jock McIvor, on the other hand, was from the start uneasy with him. He tried to be fair, to be patient, but his heart was not in it.

  When Jock came to him with a request, or more likely a complaint, he felt like running. He shuffled, turned his shoulder; Jock immediately took it the wrong way. ‘For God’s sake, man, Ah’m no’ gonna hit ye. Ah jist want t’ tell ye again, ye’d better no’ follow the bairns aboot – Ah’ve telt ye a hunner times. An’ ye’d better no’ gang wand’rin’ on the Masons’ side either. Ah’ve telt ye that as weel. Barney’s nervous. Ah dinnae mean t’ tell ye again.’

  The man was troubled. Gemmy saw it and was watchful. Jock’s fear of getting on the wrong side of his friends might in the end be more dangerous to him, he thought, than the open hostility he met in the settlement, where he was always under suspicion, and always, even when no one appeared to be watching, under silent scrutiny.

  What had brought him to them? Even after weeks in which he had become a familiar sight around the settlement, they continued to put the question to one another, or, more darkly, to themselves.

  Was he in league with the blacks? As infiltrator, as spy? Did he slip off when they were not watching – they had work to do, they could not always be watching – and make contact with them? Did they visit him secretly at night? Maybe they did not even come in the flesh but had other, less visible ways of meeting and passing information that a white man would not recognise because it was not in a white man’s mind to conceive of it. Even those who were well-disposed to the fellow found him unnerving.

  He wasn’t all there, that’s what people said; they meant he was simple. But there were some among them for whom the phrase, light as it was, suggested something darker: that even when he was there, in full sunlight, refusing to meet your gaze but engaged, so far as he was capable of it, in conversation, he was halfway gone, across a line, like the horizon, that was not to be fixed in real space, and could begin anywhere.

  ‘He’s makin’ mugs of yous,’ Ned Corcoran asserted. ‘You k’n say what you like about ’im. He don’t fool me.’

  They frowned and looked away.

  You learned up here to make allowances, but Ned Corcoran was not a man they had much respect for. His idea of neighbourliness was to send one of his boys across (he had a whole mob of them), usually the soft-eyed eight-year-old, to borrow some implement or other that then found its way into his store. Months later, out of pure generosity, he would lend it out to some other fellow as if it was his own. He’d get it back, too. He’d send the same shamefaced eight-year-old to ask for it, who would stand with his mouth open, breathing, while you fetched it for him. They were indulgent of this little eccentricity but resented it when Ned assumed a superior tone and told them bluntly that the black white-feller was trading on their goodwill.

  Was he?

  Thwarted by their failure, most of the time, to grasp what the codger was after, and suspecting that his giggling and sidling and hopping about on one foot was meant to make a fool of them, some men would grow hot under the collar and begin to push him about; to the point at times where they had to be restrained. Even those who felt sorry for the man found themselves dismayed by what they called his ‘antics’. They felt an urge, when he went into one of his jerking and stammering fits, to look hard at the horizon, and when that yielded no satisfaction, to give grave attention to the dust between their boots. He was a parody of a white man. If you gave him a word for a thing, he could, after a good deal of huffing and blowing, repeat it, but the next time round you had to teach it to him all over again. He was imitation gone wrong, and the mere sight of it put you wrong too, made the whole business somehow foolish and open to doubt.

  Poor bugger, he had got lost, and as just a bairn too. It was a duty they owed to what they were, or claimed to be, to bring him back, if it was feasible, to being a white man. But was it feasible? He had been with them, quite happily it appeared, for more than half his life: living off the land, learning their lingo and all their secrets, all the abominations they went in for. Were they actually looking at a man, a white man, actually putting a knife into his hands and passing him bread, who had –

  They broke off, unwilling to let the shadow of it pass their lips and become a fact in their world. If he had, he showed no sign of it, none at all. There was nothing in his snub-nosed, squint-eyed
looks and the innocence with which he bit into a crust and went at it with his ground-down, blackened teeth, to show what he might have been privy to in those sixteen years.

  He had started out white. No question. When he fell in with the blacks – at thirteen, was it? – he had been like any other child, one of their own for instance. (That was hard to swallow.) But had he remained white?

  They looked at their children, even the smallest of them chattering away, entirely at home in their tongue, then heard the mere half-dozen words of English this fellow could cough up, and even those so mismanaged and distorted you could barely guess what he was on about, and you had to put to yourself the harder question. Could you lose it? Not just language, but it. It.

  For the fact was, when you looked at him sometimes he was not white. His skin might be but not his features. The whole cast of his face gave him the look of one of Them. How was that, then?

  Mr Frazer had the answer: because his teeth had been worn down almost to the gums from eating the native food. The white man’s facial structure came from the different and finer diet. It was the grinding down of his teeth, and the consequent broadening of the jaw that gave him what they called a native look.

  Ah, so that was it.

  Or – this too came from Mr Frazer and was a harder nut to crack – it was the languages he had learned to speak. He spoke five languages. His jaw, over the years, had adapted itself to the new sounds it had to make. Mightn’t it happen after a time that the whole cast of a man’s features would be shaped by that, the way a French man, for instance, differs in his whole facial form from an Englishman or a Scot, and so come to share a likeness with the other speakers of the tongue?

  Well!

  Or both of these, but also the effort he must have made, in those sixteen years, to blend in and make himself one of them, to find facial expressions, picked up by imitation or reflection and all quite different from a white man’s, that would make easier their daily intercourse with him. In taking on, by second nature as it were, this new language of looks and facial gestures, he had lost his white man’s appearance, especially for white men who could no longer see what his looks intended, and become in their eyes black.