Remembering Babylon

by David Malouf

  Janet lay awake in the dark and it was a long time before her father came in.

  She heard him undress and climb into bed, and for a moment they whispered, but she could not make out what they said. In the morning, grim-faced and slow as he always was, her father had nothing to say and she knew that whatever it was that had happened, which she had seen and not seen, she must not ask about.

  Once, during the day, her mother came very quietly and kissed her, as if in recognition of something between them that the others were to be kept from, even Lachlan; but she did not know what it was, and when she looked up expectantly, her mother did not enlighten her.

  Perhaps the gesture had been meant as a consolation. But for what?

  The place where her mother’s dry lips touched her brow glowed, and for a long time afterwards she was aware of it, as if, at that point, a kind of knowledge had been passed to her.

  It was the moment she would think of later – more even than the more ordinary and alarming one that came soon after – as the true moment of her growing up.

  14

  SMALL FIG OR plum with oval, dark-green leaves, the milky juice of its young shoots being efficacious in healing wounds. The scraped root-bark of another plant (the Ourai or Grevia) is used to make a poultice: large alternate, oval serrated leaf with a small brown berry, generally in pairs, on a small axiliary pendicale.

  Barkabah: broad-leafed apple tree with pink and white flowers, the fruit full of seed and tasting a little like dried banana.

  Small, creeping leguminous plant that runs in and out of the grass, Kardolo in the native tongue, with a blue flower like that of cultivated tea: three narrow long sharp-pointed leaves upon a common stalk, with a root not unlike carrot.

  These entries in Mr Frazer’s field notebook give no indication of the conditions under which they were made. Their clear copperplate, the lines as straight and orderly as a row of cabbages in a Berkshire field, and the details of the drawings that accompany them, do not suggest that what is being recorded belongs still to the untamed wilderness or that the man who is at work on them – a large man in a collarless shirt, the wide-awake hat laid aside for the moment but leaving a red line across his brow under the sweaty scalp – has for the past hour been plunging uphill over rough ground and is now settled on a log in a tropical clearing to set down, in all the excitement of new discovery, what he has just been shown.

  To achieve the meticulously detailed drawings and the almost pedantic notes, he has to keep hand and heart steady. It is as if, in disciplining himself to the demands of the work, he has broken through to a cleared place in his own nature where these plants are already installed behind glass.

  Gemmy, watching, is solemnly impressed. His tongue, following the movements of Mr Frazer’s hand, works at the corner of his lips as if it too had a part in the business. The drawings for him have a mystical significance. They are proof that Mr Frazer, this odd whitefeller, has grasped, beyond colour or weight or smell, the spirit of what he has been shown. Watching a plant emerge, the swelling bulb or fruit, the perfected leaf, Gemmy is entranced almost to breathlessness, his own spirit suspended as the real, edible object, in its ghostly form, breaks out of itself onto the whiteness of the page.

  The accuracy and attention belong to Mr Frazer’s dogged side. Since the day he made his first pot-hook he has known that he is a plodder; that if he is to keep up with the tumbling complexity of things he must pay closer attention than others to every detail. But he adopts quite a different mode when, under the hiss of the evening lamp, he takes out his writing-up book and lets himself loose in the realm of speculation. The lines run crooked then and might come from a different hand, as thought leaps, darts away up sidetracks, doubles back, stops amazed at its own discoveries, dances, kicks its heels up, delightedly tumbles:

  We have been wrong to see this continent as hostile and infelicitous, so that only by the fiercest stoicism, a supreme resolution and force of will, and by felling, clearing, sowing with the seeds we have brought with us, and by importing sheep, cattle, rabbits, even the very birds of the air, can it be shaped and made habitable. It is habitable already. I think of our early settlers, starving on these shores in the midst of plenty they did not recognise, in a blessed nature of flesh, fowl, fruit that was all around them and which they could not, with their English eyes, perceive, since the very habit and faculty that makes apprehensible to us what is known and expected dulls our sensitivity to other forms, even the most obvious. We must rub our eyes and look again, clear our minds of what we are looking for to see what is there. Is it not strange, this history of ours, in which explorers, men on the track of the unknown, fall dry-mouthed and exhausted in country where natives, moving just ahead of them, or behind, or a mile to one side, are living, as they have done for centuries, off the land? Is there not a kind of refractory pride in it, an insistence that if the land will not present itself to us in terms that we know, we would rather die than take it as it is? For there is a truth here and it is this: that no continent lies outside God’s bounty and his intention to provide for his children. He is a gardener and everything he makes is a garden. This place too will one day, I believe, yield its fruits to us and to the great banquet at which we are guests, the common feast; as the Americas brought corn and tomatoes and sweet peppers, and rhubarb and the potato, that bitter root of the high Andes that women, over long years, by experiment and crossbreeding, have leached of its poison and made palatable, to be the food of millions. (There is a lily-root here that the women know how to boil and make edible.)

  The children of this land were made for it, as it was for them, and is to them a rich habitation, teeming with milk and honey – even if much of its richness is still hidden; but then so was the milk and honey of the Promised Land, which was neither milk, in fact, nor honey, and the land itself to all appearance parched and without promise. We must humble ourselves and learn from them. The time will come when we too will be sustained not only by wheat and lamb and bottled cucumbers, but by what the land itself produces, tasting at last the earthy sweetness of it, allowing it to feed our flesh with its minerals and underground secrets so that what spreads in us is an intimate understanding of what it truly is, with all that is unknowable in it made familiar within.

  Pausing a moment, he draws back from where his hand, running on ahead, has taken him further than he meant.

  He is aware of the lamp’s hissing; of his wife, her head, under its cloud of hair, bent over the music she is reading through; and beyond the sill, the night, stirred by the clapping of wings, the inaudible puff of seeds as they spread, the random but orderly couplings and killings of a nature different from the one he was used to at home, yet the same.

  Since earliest childhood, botanising has been his one sure refuge. With the loneliness of an only child among nine brothers and sisters, he had discovered that the world of plants offered an order he would never find among men. Even the idea of family seemed most moving to him as it applied to specimens as wonderfully different to the eye as the apple and the rose.

  He was a night wanderer. Slipping out in the dark he would track night-scented flowers in the summer woods, or, with breathing suspended and his whole body alert, observe from a hide, in the soft night air and a liquid light with its own colours, the life of creatures that were abroad, as he was, while the human world slept. That was the joy of the thing. While the eyes of others were closed, or open only on the fanciful world of dreams, to look in on a part of creation that is secret, but only because it lives in another time zone from that of men.

  Night-creatures, night-flowering plants. They touched on what was hidden in his own nature; and it occurs to him, as he plunges through the undergrowth with Gemmy, or strides knee-deep up a slope, that in a way he is still at it. This, from the point of view of where he began, is the night side of the globe. He has found it at last, can explore it now in full sunlight. Is that why his discoveries here mean so much to him?

  He turns back a mom
ent to his notebook, and what he sees is no longer a wild place but orchards in which, arranging themselves in rows, wild plum and fig and apple have moved into the world of cultivation, and in the early morning light, workers with the sun on their backs hang from ladders and reach out to pluck them.

  The theodolite, he writes, offers only one way of moving into the continent and apprehending the scope and contours of it. Did we not, long ago, did not our distant ancestors, bring in out of the great plains where they wandered, out of mere wilderness, the old coarse grasses that lapped the bellies of their horses, and, separating the grains and nursing them to plumpness, learning how to mill and grind and make daily bread, and how to tend the wild vine till its fruit yielded wine, create settled places where men and women sit at tables among neighbours, in a daily sacrament which is the image of the Lord’s greater one? All this can be done again. This is what is intended by our coming here: to make this place too part of the world’s garden, but by changing ourselves rather than it and adding thus to the richness and variety of things. Our poor friend Gemmy is a forerunner. He is no longer a white man, or a European, whatever his birth, but a true child of the place as it will one day be, a crude one certainly, unaware of what he has achieved – and that too perhaps is part of His intention: that the exemplum should be of the simplest and most obvious sort, deeply moving to those who are willing to look, and to see, without prejudice, that in allowing himself to be at home here, he has crossed the boundaries of his given nature. Of course, such changes inspire in the timid a …

  He breaks off, his hand pausing above the inkwell. He has come to a knotty place in his reflections, feeling a lapse of the high emotion that has carried him on.

  One day, not long ago, returning from one of his afternoon excursions, he came upon Jim Sweetman with his granddaughter on his shoulders, a pudgy child of three, rather spoiled and with eyes so deep in her fat little cheeks that you caught only a glint of them as she jerked her legs and crowed. The old fellow was prancing about in circles, lifting his head and dancing left and right as the child directed.

  Still in the excited state his excursions aroused in him, he hailed the man, and they stood a moment on the path while the child, sulking, jerked her legs, impatient to have her grandfather go back to being a pony. Jim Sweetman, patiently, set his hands over her knees, and still half-attending to the child’s call upon him, and a little put out himself, perhaps, at the interruption to their play, listened, accepted the hard little fruit he was offered, though not the suggestion that he should bite into it. So he himself did, and showed the man the seeds.

  Jim Sweetman did not light up with the vision of orchards. He seemed embarrassed in fact, and at just that moment the little girl drove her heels into him.

  ‘Stop that now,’ he said, more sharply perhaps than he meant. ‘Grandpa’s talking.’

  The child’s face collapsed. She took a breath, and Jim Sweetman, feeling the change of weight in her little body, lifted her down on to his arm.

  Too late. She had begun to shriek, and very satisfied with the effect it produced, she continued, and would not be pacified. He had stood by, waiting for the child’s passion to exhaust itself. He had forgotten what fierce, self-willed little creatures children could be. It was so long since he had had any of his own.

  The child shot a glance at him, shrieked again, and Jim Sweetman, stricken, while the child sobbed into his breast, shook his head at him as if he were responsible. If the man recalled anything of the occasion it would be the little girl’s grief. The hard little fruit he had been shown meant nothing to him.

  Jim Sweetman, for all his lack of imagination, was the best of them. He knew better than to try the rest. Being caught, once or twice, coming in with Gemmy, he had seen the look in their eyes, and felt Gemmy, who missed very little in this way, fall away from his side – intending, no doubt, kind creature that he was, to protect him.

  If he is to get any response to his schemes he must go higher; that’s what he has learned. Farmers grasp only what they already know. So, with no notion as yet who it is intended for, he has begun writing what he thinks of as a ‘report’.

  He looks again to where his wife, just feet away, sits with a score in her lap, her head bowed over her music. She turns a page, her hand going to catch a wisp of hair that has come astray.

  ‘What is it?’ he asks, as if he heard a faint burst of what she is playing in her head. ‘Is it Field?’ But she does not look up. She has not heard him over the wave of notes.

  He is in the habit of turning pages for her while she plays – or rather, he was; she has no instrument up here. It is the first time in all their moves that he has been unable to provide one for her. She does not complain; though music, he knows, is her refuge from the frustration she sometimes feels. With him, with his passionate confusions. She saves herself by taking no part in his interests, perhaps out of a fear of finding them foolish, and he in turn keeps out of hers. He does not interfere in the letters she writes to their girls, and to the boy, Edward, except to add his greetings at the bottom of a page. And if he dips at times into the things she likes to read, articles on political economy and the like in the journals she receives, it is not because he hopes to share their arguments with her, but, in a tender way, to catch a glimpse of where she has been, and what it might be there that has excited her. He reads over such passages, and their underlinings, with a deep pleasure, though often enough they have no meaning to him. Only in music, when he turns the pages and sees precisely where her fingers have arrived at in the score, is he quite certain of her emotions and his own, and feels they are one.

  They have been married for thirty-three years. She has followed him in his progress – or decline – halfway across the world, and further each year from her real life, which is, he knows, in their children. She is cleverer than he is but does not make him feel it. Cleverness, she knows, has nothing to do with what he is after; which is revelation. What will be revealed, he believes, is the unique gift that is in each man and woman, in each creature and plant too – what else has his study of nature shown him? – and must also be in him: a gift he alone can give to the world, and which without him it must lack.

  She sits with the music spread in her lap. The piece has come to an end. Quickly, feeling his gaze, she looks up, makes a face, not at all the face of a woman in her sixties – a child, it might be, playfully poking a tongue at him – then places her hands on her hips, leans far back from the waist, and yawns.

  The other women in the settlement found the minister’s wife poky. It had got about that she was the cousin of an earl, maybe a duke, and they had hoped for glimpses in her of the romance of birth, even in the reduced form, up here, of a silver milk jug or a set of crested spoons. They wanted a hint in their vicinity of pride, high custom, refinement. That the Frazers were poverty-stricken was no impediment. That was his fault.

  But she fulfilled none of these easy expectations and might even have set out, in her brusque way, to thwart them. She was a small freckled person, though fine-boned, with a mass of hair that had once been red-gold and was now rusty and none too well controlled. She was dutiful enough in her enquiry about the health of children, but did not always remember their names. Once a month she received a parcel of books and other papers from one of her daughters, the elder one at Aldershot (the other lived at Poole and there was a son in Canada who taught school), which she herself went into Bowen to collect and would immediately, right there at the steamer-wharf, tear a corner from, like a child with a loaf of bread; she was so hungry for its contents.

  They would have liked to send their girls to her to be improved with a little needlework of the fancier kind, but she had no skill with a needle, even, as you could see from Mr Frazer’s shirts, in the plainer way of buttons and hems. Many of them, poor as they were and with no claim to gentility, were better managers than she was and had a higher regard for what they thought of as the refinements. The one thing you could say of her was that she did
not give herself airs. They would have complained if she had, but when she did not they felt cheated of the bit of colour she might have shown them, which would have been a greater comfort here than absent-minded kindness or charity.

  ‘I want to speak to you about something important,’ she says from the bed while her husband is still undressing. He looks surprised, then comes in his shirtsleeves to sit beside her. He loves these late moments of intimacy between them.

  ‘Charlie, something very serious has happened,’ she says, ‘you mustn’t be upset.’ She goes back a week to Gemmy’s visit from the blacks, then, too quickly for him to quite make the connection, to the attack at the McIvors’.

  He feels the blood come to his cheek. It is only partly indignation and a kind of shame at so much baseness; there is also the personal embarrassment of having it brought home to him, yet again, how out of touch he is. He has heard nothing of this; seen nothing either.

  ‘Who can have done such a thing?’

  His wife does not reply. Today the men of the place, shamefaced perhaps, have kept out of sight. It is the women who have been busy.

  ‘I know you believe there is no harm in the man,’ she tells him, ‘and I’m sure you are right. There is none. But people are afraid. There is harm in that. It would be best – Millie Sweetman thinks so, and she is a very sensible woman – if he were put where they can do him no harm. Where he wasn’t quite so – visible. Of course, the best thing of all would be to send him away altogether – to Brisbane, if it could be arranged. But in the meantime – I’ve already spoken to her – Mrs Hutchence would take him in.’

  So it was arranged. No one, not even his wife, has thought it worth consulting him.

  ‘Charlie,’ she says gently. She takes his hand. ‘It had to be done as quickly as possible. The McIvors can’t be left with him, they’ve already suffered, and there are children to consider. It’s true there’s no harm in him, but he is a danger just the same. Not through his own fault, poor fellow. It was best to let Millie Sweetman take over – people will accept that. And you know what Mrs Hutchence is,’ she adds lightly. ‘They won’t try their nonsense with her.’