Remembering Babylon

by David Malouf

  He walked swiftly now over the charred earth and was himself crumbling. If he did not find the word soon that would let him enter here, there would be nothing left of him but a ghost of heat, a whiff as he passed of fallen ash.

  A drop of moisture sizzled on his tongue: the word – he had found it. Water. Slow dribbles of rain began to fall. He was entering rain country. Soon the sky let down tangled streamers, and he was walking now in a known landscape; all the names of things, as he met them, even in their ashen form, shone on his breath, sprang up in their real lives about him, succulent green, soft paw and eyeball, muscle tense under fur.

  He still carried in his pocket the sheets of paper on which they had written down his life. He took them out now. They were sodden. Rain had begun to wash the writing from them, the names, the events; their black magic now a watery sky-colour, the sooty grains sluicing away even as he watched; the paper turning pulpy, beginning to break up in his hands, dropping like soggy crumbs from his fingers into puddles where he left them, bits all disconnected … and my friens Billy an … pretty little black patch over … thunder Then … of every colour of …

  20

  THE SISTERS OF St Iona’s, Wynnum, were in a state of mild but pleasant ferment. The motor that emerged between the rusty palms of their drive, with its gleaming radiator grille and swoop of mudguards over spoked wheels, was a novelty. Almost beautiful in its way, it nosed its metal form, all purring, into the quiet of their walled retreat (the walls were ten feet high, spiked at the top with shards of glass from ginger beer and lemonade bottles), an impressive but dangerous reminder of a world they had set themselves apart from, though not entirely, and which had lately become very noisy and tragically interesting. The driver too, when he leapt out, was a novelty. That the occupant of the car was less so did not spoil the effect.

  The world he belonged to was familiar. It was that of their fathers and brothers, the bushman in three-piece suit down for The Show. He had none of the up-to-date glamour of the driver, though he too, in fact, was an older man, and drew what they saw in him of the brute world that began at their gates from the animal sheen of his jacketed shoulders and the polish on his boots. He moved round in front of his machine and set his hand to chrome. The Minister’s shaggy head appeared. Manoeuvring his large frame out of the door, he shook himself as it were on the path.

  He was here to see their own Sister Monica, who had, in these last weeks, done a quite extraordinary thing: she had got herself into the papers.

  Some of her letters had been intercepted by the authorities and she had been suspected, briefly, of being a risk to security, perhaps a spy. It was nonsense of course and soon proved so; but some of the sisters had looked at her for a time with new eyes – the suspicion, after all, the mere possibility, was something – and one or two of them had been pleased to see her momentarily brought down. She was, to say no more, an infuriating woman, in no way humble; though they too, of course, were happy to have the cloud lifted from their little community, and the now famous correspondence declared innocuous, if not quite commonplace; unconnected, anyway, with news, battles, anger and the confirmation, unnecessary one might have thought, of dominion loyalty.

  Still, they fluttered at the promise of yet another ministerial visitation. The man had not been cleared, or not in the public eye; and they rather enjoyed the hint, beyond his obvious plain looking and plain speaking, of something not quite trustworthy in him. It confirmed them in their distrust of the world, especially the active, overbearing male part of it. Some of them rushed about to see that the bannisters were without dust, rubbed their elbows on window-glass, peered at the tiles in the entry hall for heel-marks and scratches, as if he were here as an inspector of their devotion to the domestic virtues, to expose them as housewives largely failed. Discreetly, from upper windows, they watched Sister Monica, kilting her skirt up over her boots, go down the stone steps to greet him.

  ‘Lachlan,’ she said, and kissed him, first on one cheek then the other. ‘Hello,’ he replied, and glanced up under his brows at the watchers, who sprang back behind glass.

  Even if no one could hear, he never quite knew how to address her in these moments when they were still in view. Later, she would be plain Janet. He could never quite come at ‘Sister’ or ‘Monica’.

  ‘Let’s get away from the gallery,’ she said.

  ‘Forty minutes, Wilson,’ he told the driver, who clicked his heels; then, very aware of the impression he was making above, moved across to the lawn and stood, back to the building, legs apart, with the sun on his shoulders, a thin trail of smoke rising before him, and myna birds pecking boldly round his boots.

  The convent was an imposing structure of sandstone and timber with a double-storeyed verandah, open below but with rust-stained Venetians above. The roof was of colonial iron but the towers at either end, each with its set of louvred windows, and the columnated brick chimneys, gave it a baronial, almost Elizabethan look.

  It had been built, with ballroom, billiard room and separate kitchen and servants’ quarters, for a local shipping magnate, whose fortune, before Federation put an end to that sort of thing, had been based on blackbirding for the sugar interests up north. His widow, an organiser, these days, of charity balls for the War effort, had deeded it to the sisters, as part of a bid for respectability in which the family name, in keeping with the new mood of expeditionary fervour and heroic self-sacrifice, would be relieved of the stain of Early Days in the South Seas, and the old ruffian who had been the scourge of all the nearby islands could become, with his white waistcoat and whiskers, a benign, grandfatherly figure, the very embodiment of the last great, if rather rough age of hobnailed visionaries. In this form his portrait dominated the staircase with its cedar newel posts and spindles, glaring down in regret, perhaps, of the children and grandchildren he had expected to fill the house when he first conceived it in the loneliness of nights up in the tropics, or in disapproval of the women in sensible boots who crossed and recrossed the stained-glass entry hall with their hands in their pockets, or, with skirts hauled up in the freedom of seclusion, swabbed its tiles with lye.

  On his first visit, Lachlan Beattie had been entertained by the Mother Superior. Passing under the gaze of the old cut-throat (he had come across Duncan McGregor once or twice in earlier days, an unedifying experience), he had been led into a dark, overfurnished room to sip tea from a little ladylike cup, while Janet, impatiently, looked on.

  The Mother Superior was a sensible woman, not inclined to panic at their moment of notoriety. She had allowed him to charm her, as she had him, but did not see him again. These days, free of formality, Janet led him round past the shabby side of the building towards the garden.

  Things were ramshackle back here. There were tubs and a blackened furnace for washdays, and down a path of uneven bricks, two lopsided dunnies under a crown of pink antignonon. He imagined the sisters slopping out after dark under umbrellas in their loose boots, and the nightmen with cans on their shoulders, staggering to their wagons early enough on hot mornings not to cross one of the sisters on the path.

  The garden, this afternoon, was steaming after a downpour. Snails were out, dragging their shells from under cassia and canna bushes. Sister Monica, Janet, very deliberately set her boots down in a little crunching dance this way and that in front of him. He felt, as he passed, the drag of a wet branch at his sleeve. Plumbago, all its long shoots drenched. He plucked a flower and, without thinking, put the stem between his teeth, finding the drop of sweetness. She turned to see what had stopped him.

  ‘Ah,’ she said. What struck her, almost painfully, was the blue of the flower, which was exactly that of his eyes.

  ‘Children still do that, you know,’ she told him, thinking of her little lost visitors; but what she was looking at was the town-boy she saw standing up in him, all his roughness gone in the tender mouth and formal, angelic pose as the song poured out and her poor mother wept.

  ‘Do they?’ he said, feelin
g a little foolish. It had been an unconscious gesture. He had forgotten the drop of sweetness, or thought he had. Something in him had not.

  Over the five weeks since his first visit they had settled on a favourite spot in the garden. It was here that she led him.

  A balustraded terrace, much decayed and minus its urns, looked down beyond marble steps to a lawn. The left side of it was laid out as a chessboard, squares of black and white marble – the white veined with black, the black with white – of which some had tilted and others were split, with clumps of dark-leaved yellow-flowering clover in the cracks. Along one side was a bench, also of marble, in the shape of a sofa, with bolster-like arms, clawed feet, and in the panels a pair of plump-cheeked scowling cherubs. It was out of the sun but in sight of her hives, which stood in the lower garden beyond a row of scrubby apple trees and a giant mulberry.

  ‘Do you mind?’ he asked. But it was a formality; he did not wait for her permission, but removed his jacket and sat, heavy-shouldered and shaggy, in shirtsleeves and vest. His hands and forehead you saw, now that he looked so much like a workman, were scabbed from the sun.

  After a moment she slipped her hand into the depths of her habit and found an apple, a Granny Smith.

  He made a little gesture of surprise, as if the apple were special rather than the established opening it had become to their talk. ‘What a beauty!’ he said. He turned it in his loose-skinned hand, then raised it to his nose and sniffed.

  She watched him take the penknife from his pocket, unclasp it, and very cleanly, cutting in towards the core, remove a crisp little green-skinned wedge, which he offered her on the end of the knife. When she shook her head, he slipped it into his mouth and very slowly chewed. She was conscious of the sunspots on his hands, the scabs; like her own, like her father’s – the wrong skin for this country.

  The way of cutting an apple too was her father’s. It was to see it again and experience the tender pleasure it gave her, that she had, each time now after the first, brought an apple for him. It was his reaching up that first day in the orchard and plucking one of their hard little apples, and sitting himself down and cutting into it, that had, almost by chance, re-established the continuity in their lives, and created, with an immediacy they might not otherwise have managed, this intimacy between them.

  They had seen little of one another over the years. His place in the House, then later as a Minister, meant he had always been in view, but only in a public way. It was her mother, and later Meg, who had passed on family news. Then, two years ago, when one of her contacts was threatened because of the war, she had, presuming on their closeness, written him a letter, asking if he could use his influence with the authorities who, as she put it, were being more than usually stupid. It did not occur to her that it might harm him.

  Her contact was a Catholic priest in Jena, whose work touched on her own, but whose doctorate, the backing of his order, and a university laboratory to consult, meant he was better placed than she was to answer certain questions that had engaged her for nearly thirty years.

  It seemed absurd, she wrote, that the business of nations (these were early days, before the full horror had come to them) should get in the way of work that had only to do with nature; which knew nothing, cared nothing either, for the little laws of men – even statesmen. There was, she assured him, no code involved in the information she and her priest were passing back and forth; or rather, there was a code, but they had not cracked it, and she doubted whether the Commonwealth censors would either, unless they happened to be bees. She had no reason to believe her priest (however patriotic he might be – she too was patriotic, up to a point) was any more dangerous as a German, and a Roman, than she was as an Australian and a mere woman and nun … All this in a hasty, rather untidy hand, and all of it evocative enough of what he had known of her over the years to make him smile at the bossiness, the mixture of appeal to his power and large-handed dismissal of its sphere.

  He kept it by him and read it again, not much interested, frankly, in the problem, but to get the quality of her, which was so tart on the page, and which took him back to his boyish self, and her, and all that time of painful beginnings.

  He did reopen the way to her alien contact, then wrote in a more personal way to say that he had heard of her work, which was not quite so obscure as she believed, and how pleased her mother and father would have been – it seemed strange, after so long, to recall these guardian figures, these ghosts of a lifetime ago – and went on, having evoked the spirit of family, to a private matter, the death of his wife, which had occurred just seven months before. He wondered if he might come one day and visit her. Did the order permit that? Only, of course, if it was permissible and she herself did not mind.

  She was surprised, reading his letter, by its courtesy, its tentativeness, its tenderness she might have said, and recalling her own prickly tone felt foolish; all the more because she knew it had less to do with the offence to her pride in having to beg than with her feelings for him, which were still, after so long, quite raw and unresolved.

  She read and reread his letter, and meant to reply but did not. A whole year went by. Till one morning she opened the newspaper and found herself swept up in a storm of public anger, and accusation and denial, that meant they had to meet, but no longer on their own terms.

  A Fortitude Valley pastry cook, Walter Goetz by name, a naturalised German, had had his windows broken the week after Paschendaele by a gang of patriotic football fans. When he complained he was himself arrested, charged with disturbing the peace, and found guilty. He and his Australian wife and four children were to be deported and their assets confiscated.

  It was an ugly affair. Protest meetings were called at which inflammatory statements were made, editorials appeared, one or two men in high places, who put their names to a petition, were pointed to and pilloried. One of these was Walter Goetz’s representative, a Minister of the Crown no less, Lachlan Beattie. He was attacked in Parliament, there was a break-in at his home, someone in his own office leaked documents to the press, and among them was a letter from a nun, Sister Monica, who turned out to be Mr Beattie’s cousin, appealing, etc, etc. Sister Monica, Janet, was astonished one morning to find her letters to Father Elsheimer reproduced in all their dangerous mystery on the front page of The Courier, flight-patterns, dance-steps, points of the compass, all explicable now as the language of an international conspiracy. Most damning of all was her letter to her cousin.

  Rereading it in cold print, she did find it odd. Its tone was provocative, no doubt of that, and seen in a public rather than a personal light, rather puzzling; even she had to admit that. Within an hour he had called on the telephone to apologise and reassure her. The affair really involved only himself. He was sorry she had been dragged into it. But she was ashamed. She saw at once the seriousness of the thing.

  The other nuns, caught up in the excitement of it, did not; till other calls began to come in: newspapers demanding interviews, parents cancelling music lessons, anonymous voices shouting loyal obscenities. A youth on a bicycle rode up the drive, a butcher’s boy it turned out, and put a stone through one of their windows wrapped in a Union Jack.

  In the afternoons after school was out, half a dozen local children, rather ragged and barefoot, the girls and boys both, had been accustomed to come with shoe-boxes under their arms and pick mulberry leaves. They were poor children from one-roomed shacks on Wynnum Road. Their mothers took in washing. Their fathers worked at the abattoirs at Cannon Hills or were labourers on the roads. Sister Monica had let them scramble up high after the tenderest leaves and given them beeswax to chew. When all the sweetness was gone and the wax was white, they would mould it into miniature chairs and tables for their dolls’ houses, and the boys, these days, into tanks, which they brought to show her. ‘Baroom!’ Now they were forbidden the place. In half a dozen houses all along Wynnum Road there was wailing as silkworms starved and fathers set off in search of alternative mulberry trees.
Ridiculous, all of it! At the end of the week Lachlan Beattie telephoned again and, on Mother Francis’ suggestion, made his first visit.

  They had faced one another on that occasion with a certain shyness. It would have been difficult anyway, after so long. In some ways the ‘circumstances’ made it easier; they could start off with something public between them. She apologised again for having embarrassed him.

  ‘No, no, you mustn’t,’ he insisted. ‘I’m the one who should apologise. You’re being dragged in my wake – you, poor Goetz. All that has nothing to do with it. Even the war. They don’t care about that. They want my head, that’s all.’ She looked at it. It was fine, familiar. ‘And they’ll get it too, that’s what I’ve come to warn you of – eventually. When it happens,’ he looked amused, ‘you mustn’t think that you were to blame.’

  ‘But is there nothing you can do?’

  ‘Yes – I can fight, I’m doing that right now. I’ll give as good as I get. I’m no saint myself when it comes to that sort of thing. But I won’t win. I’ve embarrassed the Government, that’s the real issue. It’s my colleagues who’ll get rid of me … We might as well drop this, you know. I’d rather talk about something cleaner. Your bees, for instance. Let’s talk about your clean little bees.’