Remembering Babylon

by David Malouf

  ‘Cruel little bees,’ she corrected. ‘Oh clean too, yes – but there’s nothing noble about them, or difficult, or unpredictable. That’s why they’re so easy to handle. And Mr Goetz?’

  He shook his head.

  ‘Was he a friend?’

  ‘No. He’s rather an unattractive fellow really, I don’t quite trust him. The wife is all nerves. Sick, I mean. They’re helpless, hopeless people. Nancy –’ He paused, but she knew who Nancy was – ‘used to go there. She was fond of his Gügelhopf. So really,’ he said, after a little pause – they were running out of steam – ‘that’s the end of it.’

  They were walking down to look at her hives, and as they passed through the scrubby orchard he reached up for an apple. ‘May I?’ he asked. ‘Will they mind?’, and pulled one. It was ripe enough but small and misshapen. He slipped it into a pocket.

  She showed him her hives, which were not of the usual sort but of glass so that an observer could see through to all that was going on in them, all the events and organised procedures and rituals of another life.

  Like one of her children, Alice or Kevin or Ben, who loved to look in and see if they couldn’t catch some bit of information that she might have overlooked (they too were on the track of the Great Secret), he squatted, peered in through the transparent pane, and his face, she saw, had the same puzzled wonder and wide-eyed, dreamy calm that she looked for in the children, being pleased, for a time, to give up the greater study for this lesser and no less touching one.

  It was like peering through into the City of God – that is how she thought of it, and how she saw it reflected in them; into the life of little furry-headed angels with a flair for geometry, and some power (this was the great Problem she had set herself) of communicating. The form of it was plainly visible, she knew, each time she came to the glass, but her mind in its human shape could not grasp it, though there had been a moment, long ago, when she had known it, of this she was convinced.

  This, all those years ago, was what Mrs Hutchence had led her to. Not by explanation but through example and sympathy, which was why she made no attempt now to tell him what her life was but to let him look into the hive and see.

  She would have thought of it once, the many-minded, one-minded swarm, as an angel. She thought of it these days as a machine, which was a change but not a difference. Would he understand any of this? She wanted him to.

  That they had, anyway, moved closer, was proved a little later, when they settled for the first time on the seat beside the chessboard, and he took off his jacket, then drew the apple from one pocket and a little penknife from the other. What he spoke of, as she watched him cut and lift out a neat wedge, was his grandson, Willie, who ten months before had been killed in France. The penknife was his. It was of yellowed ivory, with a silver-framed portrait on one side of King Edward, on the other of Alexandra. He had had it as a boy, and it had been with him, still a boy, when he fell, among the contents of his pocket along with Woodbines, a box of matches, and a hard little apple he must have picked in an abandoned orchard, with a single sliver cut from it.

  She knew what he was telling and wanted her to see. The boy must just have had time to shut the knife and slip it, along with the apple, into his pocket. Cutting into the hard little foreign fruit, inwards like that, to the core, was the last thing he had done, very solemnly as his grandfather was doing it, before they were called forward. The sour-sweet wafer might still have been in his mouth when he was hit – his last taste of the world, its greenness, along with his warm breath expelled to meet the larger, colder one of the autumn morning, then the rush of blood. She watched the scabbed hands cut another thin slice, watched him chew and swallow.

  Each time, after that, she had provided the apple. Nothing was said, except for his surprised ‘ah’ and the slow appraisal. So now, on this fifth occasion, she watched him eat and he told her: ‘It’s to be on Wednesday. I wanted you to know beforehand. They’ll give the usual reasons, poor health, you know, as if I were fair worn oot –’ He smiled at the bit of old Scots. ‘Actually,’ – he looked at her and laughed – ‘I’ve never been fitter.’

  He cut another slice of apple. It went into his mouth. He chewed. Then looking up: ‘You know, I wish I’d come ten years ago.’

  She caught his eye and was puzzled a moment, then saw what he was thinking. Now how was that? He meant he might have had Willie with him. She would have seen the boy.

  But not more clearly, she might have told him, than I see him now.

  What he wanted in her mouth was the boy’s name; to hear it spoken aloud, in the world, on another’s lips. Now how did she know that?

  What a thing Love is, she thought. And that was the word on her lips, though she did not speak it. Love. What she said was ‘Lachlan’ and took his large paw in her own equally scabbed and freckled one.

  He looked startled, she released it, and he sat, his hands in his lap, with the half-eaten apple in one hand and in the other the little knife. There was the sound of his breathing, a little broken, and further off the low, continuous humming of her bees, a note she was always aware of, somewhere, not too far off.

  They had moved a long way back now, to a moment that more than once in these last weeks had risen up between them and declared itself, and been turned away. A scorching summer afternoon when the whole landscape around had been in shimmering motion, dissolving, re-forming, and they had stood together, he, Meg and herself – he a little in front, being a boy, a man – while the creature, unrecognised and unnamed as yet, that had launched itself out of the unknown world towards them, that the landscape itself had hurled into their midst, a ragged fragment of itself, or of its history or their own, some part of it that was still to come, had hung there against the pulsing sky as if undecided as yet which way to move, upward in flight into the sun or, as some imbalance in its own body, its heart perhaps, drew it, or the earth, or the power of their gazing, downward to where they stood rooted, its toes meanwhile hooked over the peeled bark of the fence rail, the muscles of its stringy feet tensed, its stick-like arms flailing.

  She stood there again and found herself saying: ‘I sometimes think that that was all I ever knew of him: what struck me in that moment before I knew him at all. When he was up there’ (she saw the hooked toes again, dusty and misshapen, the muscles of his scraggy neck where the head was thrown back), ‘before he fell, poor fellow, and became just – there’s nothing clear in my head of what he might have been before that, and afterwards he was just Gemmy, someone we loved.’

  Loved. The word, which she had used as if there was nothing problematical in naming thus such a tumult of feelings, released a weight in him that he felt shift and fall away.

  ‘And while he was up there?’

  ‘I don’t know. Except that I have never seen anyone clearer in all my life. All that he was. All.’

  He looked at her with his watery blue eyes, red-rimmed now in the blotched flesh, but the same eyes that had looked up, bold and fearful, at what was in the sights of the make-believe gun he had raised, the dry stick fallen from some ringbarked tree that had lain on the earth a season, dead, and which he had picked up out of its tree-life and refashioned, in their world, into a weapon with all the power of safety in it, of death too, and had pointed at the creature’s heart, and yes, he thought, hit it, and brought him down, and that was the start of it, and so long as the image had life in his head, it was not ended.

  She knew the end, such as it was, of the story.

  Nine years after Gemmy’s disappearance, Lachlan Beattie had been one of a Government road gang that was surveying the country to the north, preparing the way for a highway that would run, a thread of dust, through all the little burgeoning leap-frog settlements, sleepy harbour towns, goldmining camps, scattered dwellings round a railhead or timber- or sugar-mill, between Brisbane and, fifteen hundred miles further on into the tropics, the last of Governor Bowen’s little far-flung struggling ports; across canelands sickly sweet with molasse
s, rainforests, dried-out, sparsely-forested cattle country with nine-foot anthills, and a hundred flash-flooding creeks and wide mangrove-fringed streams. He knew the country up there. He knew a little of the native languages. He had been working for the past three years, first as a labourer, then as a foreman, on road gangs all up and down the coast; work of an animal kind that would burn away, he believed, the last of boyhood in him, and his exorbitant dreams.

  In each place they came to, from odd natives who came out of the scrub to watch them set up their surveying gear, and peg and measure, and lend a hand at times if it amused them, and the straggling groups they met who were trooping, miserably now, from one camping site to the next, he made enquiries. Only he would know, she thought, with what emotion, what excitement at the possibility of coming face to face again with someone he had once been fond of; what dread too, since his conscience was not clear. She had known nothing in those days of what he was feeling. They were no longer close.

  He did hear something at last, though there was no certainty in it. The clan it involved might not have been the one he was seeking. He had only a few words of their language, picked up from Gemmy and poorly learned, and the place was further north than he had estimated.

  It involved a ‘dispersal’ six years before by a group of cattlemen and two native troopers, too slight an affair to be called a massacre, and no newspaper had got hold of it. The blacks had been ridden down and brought to earth by blows from a stirrup iron at the end of a stirrup leather – an effective weapon, when used at a gallop, for smashing skulls. The remnants of the clan, including the young woman who gave him his facts, had scattered and been absorbed into a larger group. The bones of the victims, eight or nine in all, men, women, two small children, they had carried with them and disposed of in the usual way, in parcels in the forks of trees.

  The story already had elements in common with others he had heard up here, which when he tried to track them down had proved elusive. Perhaps they were all one story. Whether this one had happened, as the woman claimed, six years ago in her own lifetime, or in her mother’s, or last year, it had been gathered now into the dreamtime of the land itself, a shadowy realm where the bones of facts had already drawn around them the skin of rocks, of beasts, of air.

  The young woman offered to guide him there, and since she had been a child at the time, ten or eleven, they took an older woman with them; but she too, when questioned, was vague and would lead him only by indirections. It was he who felt a kind of certainty and clung to it, as they struck away from the coast and came at last to a bit of scrub by a waterhole. The two women squatted behind a rock. They refused to go further. The older woman began to wail.

  There were bones – not so many. Eight parcels of bark, two of child size, resting a little above eye-level.

  He looked at one dry bundle, then another – they were not distinguishable – and felt nothing more for one than for any of them. His feelings, which had seemed so clear as they approached the place, failed him now. He sorrowed quietly for all, in the hope that it might also cover his bones, if they were here, and decided, without proof, out of a need to free himself at last of a duty he had undertaken, a promise made, and a weight on his heart, that this was the place and that one of these parcels, which could not be disturbed, contained the bones of a man with a jawbone different from the rest, enlarged joints, the mark of an old break on the left leg, whose wandering at last had come to an end, and this was it. When he told his uncle of the thing (Janet had listened without speaking, without meeting his eye), it was as a dry certainty, though she knew he did not believe it. He was tying up one of the loose ends of his own life, which might otherwise have gone on bleeding for ever.

  All that, fifty years ago. An age. They were living in another country. He could afford to admit now that it had not ended. Something Gemmy had touched off in them was what they were still living, both, in their different ways. It would end only when they were ended, and maybe not even then. They would come back, as they had now, from the far points they had moved away to, and stand side by side looking up at the figure outlined there against a streaming sky. Still balanced. For a last moment held still by their gaze, their solemn and fearful attention, at the one clear point, till this last, where they were inextricably joined and would always be.

  Later, when he was gone, Janet sat in the fading light at the window of her room – she still thought of herself mostly by her original name, and the more so today, under the influence of her cousin’s visit.

  Her room was on the other side of the house from the garden. Her hives were out of sight here but they were not out of mind; her work went on, continuous somewhere in her head, and she was pleased to have in sight this other view, these flatlands that as they approached the bay became mud, and later, when the tide rippled in, would be moonlight.

  Out there were the houses her little visitors came from: one-roomed shacks on low stumps, behind tumbledown paling fences or rusty wire; yards straggly with sunflowers and strewn with rubbish, old bed frames, a collapsed buggy with only its shafts visible above a riot of morning glory, lines of colourless washing, and in a weedy pile, old beer and castor-oil bottles, charred stick-ends, broken bricks.

  Behind the squares of light out there her children would be sitting down to boiled potatoes or bread and dripping, and in a short time now, would sleep, and silkworms, in the dark of shoeboxes, rustling, feeding, would be spinning the sticky gold out of their mouths, the finest thread, and miniature tables and chairs made of white beeswax from which children – Alice, Kevin, Ian, Isabel, Ben – had chewed the last faint sweetness, and on which they had left, in the moulding, their giant fingerprints, would stand in idea! order in the dark of little partitioned rooms, in houses that had been butter-boxes.

  It pleased her to let her mind drift so far, then further – out over the muddy, stinking flats towards the waters of the bay, which were not visible yet, but approaching.

  Her mind, even as it entered the ravaged yards, the shacks, the heads of sleeping children who were forbidden for the time being to visit but would come back when all this nonsense was over, the jaws of silkworms softly spinning, was at the same time stilled, dreamily attendant, beyond tinted glass, to the life of the hive, moving closer now to the spirit of it, to the language they were using, those angelic creatures in their world of pure geometry, of circles, half-circles, hexagons, figures-of-eight.

  When she glances up again, for she has been dozing, the misty blue out there has become indigo; the first lights have been doused, though the houses themselves do not fade from her mind, or the children who are sleeping in them. The first bright line of moonlight has appeared out on the mudflats, marking the ever moving, ever approaching, ever receding shore. All this a kind of praying. It does not make a house any less vivid out there because she can no longer see its light; or the children any less close because they no longer come to visit; or Willie because she has never known him except for what she has felt in Lachlan, and through him, in herself, the wedge of apple in his mouth; or her mother, long gone, standing out on the hillslope in the dark, the dark of her body solid through the flimsy stuff, the moonlight, of her shift; or her father slumped at the breakfast table, the loose skin of her mother’s hand, like an old glove, on the leathery back of his neck; or in darkness now, on the other side of the house, the single mind of the hive, closed on itself, on its secret, which her own mind approaches and draws back from, the moment of illumination when she will again be filled with it; and Mrs Hutchence who has led her to this; and always, in a stilled moment that has lasted for years, Gemmy as she saw him, once and for all, up there on the stripped and shiny rail, never to fall, and Flash slicing the air with his yelps in clear dog-language, and his arms flung out, never to lift him clear; overbalancing now, drawn by the power, all unconscious in them, of their gaze, their need to draw him into their lives – love, again love – overbalanced but not yet falling. All these, Lord, all these. Let none be left in the dark o
r out of mind, on this night, now, in this corner of the world or any other, at this hour, in the middle of this war …

  Out beyond the flatlands the line of light pulses and swells. The sea, in sight now, ruffles, accelerates. Quickly now it is rising towards us, it approaches.

  As we approach prayer. As we approach knowledge. As we approach one another.

  It glows in fullness till the tide is high and the light almost, but not quite, unbearable, as the moon plucks at our world and all the waters of the earth ache towards it, and the light, running in fast now, reaches the edges of the shore, just so far in its order, and all the muddy margin of the bay is alive, and in a line of running fire all the outline of the vast continent appears, in touch now with its other life.

  THE WORDS GEMMY shouts at the fence in Chapter 1 (the seed of this fiction) were actually spoken at much the same time and place, but in different circumstances, by Gemmy Morril or Morrell, whose Christian name I have also appropriated; otherwise this novel has no origin in fact. E. Gregory wrote a brief account of Morril’s life from which I have taken the three descriptions of local flora at the beginning of Chapter 14. The Herbert letters in Bruce Knox’s Robert Herbert: Premier provided some of the detail for Chapter 18.

  My thanks to Joy Lewis, Brett Johnson, Christopher Edwards, who typed the manuscript and, as its first reader, made many valuable suggestions, Professor Alan Sanderson of the University of New England, and my editors at Chatto & Windus, Jonathan Burnham and Carmen Callil.

  David Malouf is the author of short story collections Dream Stuff, Every Move You Make and The Complete Stories (winner of the Australia-Asia Literary Award) and of acclaimed novels including The Great World (winner of the Commonwealth Writers’ and Miles Franklin Prizes), Remembering Babylon (shortlisted for the Booker Prize and winner of the IMPAC Dublin Literary Award) and Ransom. He also writes poetry, drama and libretti for operas. Born and brought up in Brisbane, he lives in Sydney.