by David Malouf
“We're almost there,” Alec said, "we're almost there,” repeating the phrase from time to time as if there were some sort of magic in it.
The ship stood so high out of the water that they had to go in through a tunnel in the stern that was meant for motor vehicles. They jammed into the cavernous darkness, driven from behind by the pressure of a hundred bodies with their individual weight of panic, pushed in hard against suitcases, wooden crates, hastily tied brown parcels, wire baskets filled with demented animals that squealed and stank. Coming suddenly from the cold outside into the closed space, whose sides resounded with the din of voices and strange animal cries, was like going deep into a nightmare from which Sylvia felt she would never drag herself alive. The huge chamber steamed. She couldn't breathe. And all through it she was in terror of losing her grip on the child's hand, while in another part of her mind she kept telling herself I should release him. I should let him go. Why drag him into this?
At last it was over. They were huddled together in a narrow place on the open deck, packed in among others; still cold, and wetter than ever now as the ship plunged and shuddered and the fine spray flew over them, but safely away. The island sank in the weltering dark.
“I don't think he saw, do you?” Alec whispered. He glanced at her briefly, then away. “I mean, it was all so quick.”
He didn't really want her to reply. He was stroking the boy's soft hair where he lay curled against her. The child was sleeping. He cupped the blond head with his hand, and asked her to confirm that darkness stopped there at the back of it, where flesh puckered between bony knuckles, and that the child was unharmed. It was himself he was protecting. She saw that. And when she did not deny his view, he leaned forward across the child's body and pressed his lips, very gently, to her cheek.
Their heads made the apex of an unsteady triangle where they leaned together, all three, and slept. Huddled in among neighbours, strangers with their troubled dreams, they slept, while the ship rolled on into the dark.
In Trust
There is to begin with the paraphernalia of daily living: all those objects, knives, combs, coins, cups, razors, that are too familiar, too worn and stained with use, a doorknob, a baby's rattle, or too swiftly in passage from hand to mouth or hand to hand to arouse more than casual interest. They are disposable, and are mostly disposed of without thought. Tram tickets, matchboxes, wooden serviette rings with a poker design of poinsettias, buttonhooks, beermats, longlife torch batteries, the lids of Doulton soup tureens, are carted off at last to a tip and become rubble, the sub-stratum of cities, or are pulped and go to earth; unless, by some quirk of circumstance, one or two examples are stranded so far up the beach in a distant decade that they become collectors’ items, and then so rare and evocative as to be the only survivors of their age.
So it is in the life of objects. They pass out of the hands of their first owners into a tortoiseshell cabinet, and then, whole or in fragments it scarcely matters, onto the shelves of museums. Isolated there, in the oddness of their being no longer common or repeatable, detached from their history and from the grime of use, they enter a new dimension. A quality of uniqueness develops in them and they glow with it as with the breath of a purer world—meaning only that we see them clearly now in the light of this one. An oil-lamp, a fragment of cloth so fragile that we feel the very grains and precious dust of its texture (the threads barely holding in their warp and woof), a perfume flask, a set of taws, a strigil, come wobbling towards us, the only angels perhaps we shall ever meet, though they bear no message but their own presence: we are here. It is in a changed aspect of time that we recognise them, as if the substance of it—a denseness that prevented us from looking forward or too far back—had cleared at last. We see these objects and ourselves as co-existent, in the very moment of their first stepping out into their own being and in every instant now of their long pilgrimage towards us, in which they have gathered the fingerprints of their most casual users and the ghostly but still powerful presence of the lives they served.
None of our kind come to us down that long corridor. Only the things they made and made use of, which still somehow keep contact with them. We look through the cracked bowl to the lips of children. Our hand on an axe-handle fits into an ancient groove and we feel the jarring of tree trunk on bone. Narrowly avoiding through all their days the accidents that might have toppled them from a shelf, the flames, the temper tantrums, the odd carelessness of a user's hand, they are still with us. We stare and are amazed. Were they once, we ask ourselves, as undistinguished as the buttons on our jacket or a stick of roll-on deodorant? Our own utensils and artefacts take on significance for a moment in the light of the future. Small coins glow in our pockets. Our world too seems vividly, unbearably present, yet mysteriously far off.
Each decade a new class of objects comes into being as living itself creates new categories of use. After the centuries of the Bowl (plain or decorated with rice-grains, or with figures, some of them gods, in hieratic poses, or dancing or making love) come the centuries of the Wheel, the age of Moving-across-the-Surface-of-the-Earth, from the ox-cart to the Silver Spur.
Later again, it is not only objects that survive and can be collected. Images too, the shadowy projection of objects, live on to haunt us with the immediacy of what was: figures alone or in groups, seated with a pug dog on their knees or stiffly upright in boating costume beside an oar; a pyramid of young men in flannel slacks and singlets holding the difficult pose for ever, blood swelling their necks as they strain upwards, set on physical perfection; three axemen beside a fence, leaning their rough heads together; the crowd round an air-balloon. Bearded, mono-cled, or in hoop skirts under parasols, and with all their flesh about them, they stare boldly out of a century of Smiles …
Not long ago,in the Museum of the Holocaust at Jerusalem, a middle-aged American, an insurance assessor, gave a sudden cry before one of the exhibits, threw out his arms, and while two maiden ladies from Hannibal, Missouri, looked on in helpless dismay, fell slowly to his knees—then, clutching his chest, even more slowly to the pavement at their feet. They tried to help him, but he did not get up again.
His tour companions had found him difficult, a loud, dull fellow. He had informed them that he made eighty-five thousand dollars a year, had a house at Fresno and a ranch near Santa Fe, was divorced from a woman called Emmeline who had cost him his balls in alimony, had a son who was on heroin, voted for Reagan, hated the Ruskies and that goddamned Ayatollah—the usual stuff. He wore a gold ring on one finger with a Hebrew letter (he was Jewish) and now, right in the middle of a nine-day tour of all the holy places, Christian, Jewish, and you-name-it, he was dead. He had, it seems, been confronted here with the only surviving record of his family, a group picture taken forty years before on the welcoming-ramp at Treblinka: his mother, father, two sisters, his six-year-old self, all with the white breath pouring out of their mouths in the January cold, heads turned in half-profile and slightly lifted towards the darkness just ahead, with beyond it (though this they could not have foreseen) a metre of roughened museum wall and the door into another country.
It was that vision of himself in the same dimension as the long dead that struck the man and struck him down: that rather than any recollection of the moment when the shot was taken. To see thus, from the safe distance of an American travel-group he had joined in Athens, Greece, that lost gathering to which he most truly belonged, and to see at last just where it was (despite the forty years’ detour) that he was headed, had pushed him to the only step he could have taken—straight through the wall; and an error made nearly half a century ago, when an officer had breathed too lightly on a rubber stamp, was righted at last and a number restored to sequence. His cry was a homecoming.
His fellow-travellers on this later occasion, though shaken, went on to the rest of the experience: images, objects, carefully worked facts and descriptions. Only that one man went right to the centre, stepping through a wall that was in the end as insub
stantial as breath, and on into flame.
Gillian Vaughan came back from her great-aunt Connie's with a present, a large and rather dog-eared envelope that she was clutching with fervour to her schoolgirl breast and which she refused at first to show.
Her mother was disconcerted, and not for the first time, by the child's intractable oddity. At just eleven Gillian was old-fashioned— that was the kind way of putting it, and stubbornly so; it was something she would not outgrow. It worried the mother, since her own nature was uncomplicated, easy (or so she thought), and she would have wished for the same qualities in her child. “Gillian darling,” she protested now, but mildly, she was easily hurt, "what on earth?—I mean, what are we to do with them?”
“Nothing,” the girl replied. “Look after them, that's all. I said I would and I will. You don't have to worry. I'll do it. They're Aunt Connie's most treasured possessions.”
The envelope contained five x-ray photographs, and the curious child had chosen them.
Connie Hermiston, Great-aunt Connie, was eighty-seven. For the past year or more she had been passing on to her various nieces, and to those grand-nieces with whom she had contact, the family relics she was responsible for and which she wanted to leave now in younger hands.
She was not herself a collector, but she had, because of her extreme age, become the custodian over the years of other peoples’ treasures— though treasures was too large a word for the jumble of bits and pieces she had stacked for safe-keeping in cupboards, drawers, and odd cartons and hat-boxes beside her wardrobe. Other peoples’ sentiments or passions might be more accurate, as they attached themselves, mysteriously sometimes, to a kewpie doll on a black crook, from the Brisbane Exhibition of 1933, a fan made of peacock-feathers, several evening bags, pearl-handled cake-forks, a little lounge-suite made of iridescent china, medals, pushers-and-spoons, Coronation cups, christening dresses, handpainted birthday cards with celluloid lace edges. None of it had any real value, it was just family stuff; but each item had its pedigree, with the name attached (so far as Great-aunt Connie's memory could be trusted) of a Hermiston or a Cope or a Vaughan or a Glynn-Jones. Offered something out of this treasure house that should be hers, some piece of family history that she should be the one to carry forward, Gillian had chosen the x-rays. Only now, when she regarded them with her mother's eyes, did she see that her choice might be peculiar.
She sighed, unhappy to discover that she had put herself, yet again, on the odd side of things.
“His name was Green,” she said solemnly, as if the specific detail might make a difference. “John Winston Green.” She meant the subject of the x-rays, which showed, in various degrees of ghostliness, in left and right profile but also frontally, the thorax and jaw of a young man.
Her mother's sister, Aunt Jude, who had been at the window, came up now, and leaning down she kissed the child on the top of the head, at the parting where her hair was drawn in pigtails.
Gillian looked up at her. Jude Hermiston smiled. She took the dusty package from her sister and examined it. “Let's look,” she said, "shall we?”
She slipped the first x-ray out of the package, then one by one the rest.
She had seen them before. Years back, on visits to Aunt Connie's, she too had been allowed to take from their envelope the stiff, transparent sheets, and holding them to the light had seen him, this bit of him: John Winston Green, Aunt Connie's young man. Odd emotions stirred in her. They seemed her own, but were too deeply overlaid with what she had heard and caught breath of from Aunt Connie for her to be sure. Except that the emotions were powerful and real—a kind of astonished awe as before a common mystery.
The profile, its lovely line: where the base of the skull, so round you could feel it in the cup of your hand, swooped down to the neck, with the vertebrae, all ghostly grey, stacked delicately one above the other, almost pearly, and the Adam's apple a transparent bump. The left profile; then, minimally but perceptibly different, the right.
The Adam's apple: how touchingly present and youthful it was. You felt it in your own throat like a lump of apple, or like a difficult word. And the firm line upwards to the jaw In the third and fourth image the head was turned sharply right—John Winston Green might have been giving the eyes-right salute to an unseen general; but the thorax appeared straight on and all the elements were changed; you saw the contained energy in the throat muscles, the strain of the tendons of the neck. The power and will of a whole being was there. You felt the squareness, the solidity of it all the way down to the footsoles, the stern discipline, held breath in the ribcage, the pushing upwards of the skull, the way gravity tugged, created weight (say eleven stone six) and held it to earth.
The neck seemed thick in the front views. The vertebrae in their pile like children's bricks were too squarely packed. But in profile you caught the delicacy of the thing, and it was this that touched and moved Jude now as it had moved her twenty years ago. The young man's Adam's apple rose in her throat. A word it was, that he had intended to speak but could not, because he had to hold his breath for the machine; a thought that had sparked in the skull, travelled at lightning speed down that luminous cord and got stuck in his throat. It was there, still visible.
John Winston Green, Aunt Connie's young man, had worked as a clerk in the Bank of Queensland. He was an oarsman as well, wrote poetry, and had died at Bullecourt in France, in 1917. The x-rays were Aunt Connie's last memento of him. All the rest, letters with poems in them, snapshots of occasions she still remembered and could describe—picnics at Peel Island, tennis parties, regattas—and all the small gifts he had sent her when he was away on rowing trips in the south, and from Paris and Egypt, had been consumed in a fire nearly thirty years ago. Since they hadn't at first been worth keeping, the x-rays had been stored in a garage and had alone survived. “They were the only thing he gave me that lasted,” Aunt Connie would say in her dry, no-nonsense manner. “Isn't it odd? The most faithful representations of all they were—in the end. Why shouldn't I love them best of all?” This, Jude guessed, is what she must have told her grand-niece Gillian. It is what she had told Jude.
There are natural lines of descent in a family. They are not always the direct ones. It is proper that the objects people care for should find their way down through them, from hand to hand and from heart to heart. “She is my true mother,” Jude Hermiston had told herself once, "and this young man, of whom I have only this brief, illuminating glimpse, is my true father. That lump in his throat must be my name.”
She restored the last of the x-rays to their package. She smiled, and so did the child. And Harriet Vaughan, who was fond of her sister, watched her daughter take the package and clasp it once again, so solemnly, to her breast.
“What was the choice, darling?” she asked, though of course it could not matter.
“Oh, spoons,” the child told her lightly, "that belonged to Grandma. Moya Cope got them. And a little case for jewels.”
Harriet looked again at the ancient envelope the child had hold of and was resigned: not to the entrance of these odd relics among them, but to her daughter, this child who had come to her, she thought, like a stranger, having no likeness she could discover either to Eric or to herself, an utterly dear and separate being whose very difficulty she loved.
“You don't mind, Mummy, do you? I mean—I know the spoons were more valuable”
“Of course I don't,” her mother told her, and leaned down to kiss the child. “You funny bunny! Of course I don't.”
A Traveller's Tale
1
There is a point in the northern part of the state, or rather, a line that runs waveringly across it, where the vegetation changes within minutes. A cataclysmic second a million or more years back has pushed two land masses violently together, the one open savannah country with rocky outcrops and forests of blue-grey feathery gums, the other sub-tropical scrub. You arrive at the crest of a ridge and a whole new landscape swings into view. Hoop-pines and bunyas command the
skyline. There are palm-trees, banana plantations. Leisurely broad rivers that seem always in flood go rolling seaward between stands of plumed and scented cane. It is as if you had dozed off at the wheel a moment and woken a whole day further on.
Poor white country. Little makeshift settlements, their tin roofs extinguished with paint or still rawly flashing, huddle round a weatherboard spire. Spindly windmills stir the air. There are water tanks in the yards, half-smothered under bougainvillea; sheds painted a rusty blood-colour, all their timbers awry but the old nails strongly holding, slide sideways at an alarming angle; and everywhere, scattered about on burnt-off slopes and in naked paddocks, the parts of Holdens, Chevvies, Vanguards, Pontiacs, and the engines of heavy transports, spring up like bits of industrial sculpture or the remains of highway accidents awaiting a poor man's resurrection. A tin lizzie only recently taken off the road suddenly explodes and takes wing as half a dozen chooks come squarking and flapping from the sprung interior.
Nothing is ever finished here, but nothing is done with either. Everything is in process of being dismantled, reconstructed, recycled, and turned by the spirit of improvisation into something else. A place of transformations.
At one point on the highway, surprisingly balanced above ground and about the same length as the Siamese Royal Barge, is the Big Banana, a representation of that fruit in garish yellow plaster. Two hundred miles further on and you come to the Big Pineapple, also in plaster, and with a gallery under the crown for viewing the surrounding hills. Between the two you are in another country. Men work in shorts in the fields and are of one colour with the earth, a fiery brick-red. Kids go barefoot, moving off the track on to the tufted bank with a studied slowness, as if they had heard somewhere that there is a fortune to be made by getting struck. Little girls in faded frocks hang over gates, dispiritedly waving, or in bare yards sit dangling their legs from an elongated inner-tube that has been hoisted aloft and found new life as a swing.
