The Complete Stories

by David Malouf

  Her second recollection, which has perhaps crystallized the first and given it coherence, is of a garden that descends via a tunnel and steps to a wide and dazzling harbour.

  It is Sydney, 1920. She is thirteen. She has come to Australia, and this she remembers perfectly, from India, having been spirited south out of Poland into Transylvania, and from there, with the remains of their party, to Turkey; then south again on the caravan routes. Weeks of swaying across a landscape of blinding light, with nothing to break the horizon but an occasional outcrop or the bristling gun barrels of a band of brigands. Then, one cool morning, India, valley on valley falling among threads of smoky water, long sighs of relief after the desert-places, and a ridge of mist-shrouded deodars. On narrow paths among the rhododendrons, pilgrims approach to the sound of bells.

  What happened there is another story. After negotiations carried on between her own women and some local dignitary she was gathered into the rich, precocious life of a palace, betrothed, in a ceremony she recalls only as involving elephants and a great many fireworks, to a minor prince.

  But destiny acted yet again to push her on. At barely twelve she bore a child, a son. He was snatched away at the very moment of his birth by a rival faction at court, and when she woke after a drugged sleep it was to find in his place a little rag doll. The doll too she has by her still. I knew that immediately, from the look in her eyes when she spoke of it, a little gesture of her head towards the door of the bedroom; but she did not produce it. It is, I know, the deepest of all her secrets. I imagine her sitting alone in the house, behind the lattice, in the evening cool, nursing it, crooning to it, speaking its name. After so long the lost child still comes to her in dreams that leave her whole body racked and torn. A small mouth tugs at her breast. She recalls a pain that for long hours fills the room, beats against the walls, then breaks and falls away, to become in the long years afterwards the same pain but no longer physical, a heart-wrenching emptiness. That child, if it survived, would be a man of sixty. They are almost contemporaries, she, her brother, and the child. He is, perhaps, living the life of a common peasant, quite unaware of his origins, working, hard-handed, hollow-thighed, in the mud of a paddy-field, always at the edge of starvation; another part of her, like the twin brother, that she has lost contact with but which moves in a separate and parallel existence in her mind.

  Once again she was spirited away. And in Bombay, far to the south, no longer a wife or mother, was called one warm evening, lugging her rag doll, to a room in one of the great hotels on the waterfront, where a lady wearing a great many jewels shed tears, drew the child to her spiky breast, and claimed her as her own child recovered.

  One sees how the scene might have gone. The Diva in fact had played it before. In Lucrezia. Finding in herself, to her own surprise and the delight of her admirers, the lineaments of a new and unexpected passion: beyond carnality and the lust for power or vengeance, the great emotion—maternal love. It was one of her triumphs.

  She must herself have felt the oddness of it, that meeting in Bombay: of life's coming at last to imitate art—or had the fictive scene already had the real child in view? granting that there was a child; drawing on that as the source of its extraordinary power—of the emotion created to fill a role being required now, and in some ampler and more convincing form, to take on life itself. Clearly, in the Diva's case, it could not. When the great scene was played out and they came down to dusty daily existence, the child must have been just another traveller in the Vale circus, that rag-bag of managers, dressers, advisers, lovers, gambling cronies, and other hangers-on that moved with her from capital to capital for as long as she was on the road. The child might have been with her for a season or two (no need to specify on what basis) and then she was not.

  So now, in the smoky light of a summer afternoon in Sydney, she is lying in a hammock slung between thick, flowering trees. A voice drifts through the open window of the house above. Batti, batti, it is singing while someone plays the piano, the unseen hands fluttering up and down the keyboard on effortless wings, and the voice also disembodied, of the air ungraspable. She is a child again. And found.

  Lying alone here, half dozing in her white party dress, she gazes through flickering lids and an archway of stone to where the harbour, in a film of blue, gently rises and falls like the skin of some strange and beautiful animal that has come to sprawl at her feet, and whose breath she feels tugging the silk of her sleeves. The garden is full of scents: bruised gardenia, cypress, the ooze of gum. Insects are brooding over a damp place in the bushes where something is coming into existence, or has just left it. Clouds are building to a storm. Suddenly, up the long steps from the water, through the light of the archway, disguised now as a sailor and with his eyes burning in a wilderness of hair, his beard electrically alive, comes the monk Rasputin with a finger to his lips.

  She knows him immediately. He reassures her of who she is and of where they have both come from. He too has escaped, lived through seven bullet-wounds in a frozen courtyard, after the murderers, terrified of his advance towards them—a mad dog dancing in the snow, that had already eaten poison and taken seven rounds of lead into his body—had turned on their heels and fled. Now he too is moving unrecognised through the world, waiting only to declare himself.

  He has enemies and is pursued. He stays only long enough to warn her that she too has pursuers. When a voice calls from the house above he is startled, kisses the child's brow, raises his rough hand over her in a last blessing, and slips away in his sailor's garb down the long stairs to the water, where he pauses a moment and is framed against the stormy light, then descends to a waiting dinghy. Only the dark smell of his beard, which stirs her memory and is unmistakable, still remains with her. And it is this that she uses to evoke him, her one protector: his gnarled feet—the feet of a monk—retreating over the stone flags. And the water rhythmically lifting and falling, the breath of a drowsing beast …

  Sixty years ago.

  The voice calling from the terrace, having come to earth again, is her mother's. Alicia Vale.

  6

  I was writing up the report of my Karingai lecture, comfortably at ease in dressing gown and slippers, with a bottle of whisky at my elbow.

  These things write themselves. Comfortable clichs, small white lies to convince the holders of the country's purse-strings that big things are being achieved out there in the wilderness, that we missionaries of the Arts are making daily converts to the joys of the spirit and to higher truth. I'm a whizz at such stuff. Devoting myself for half an hour to the official lie was a way of not facing my own difficult decision: how far I was prepared (Oh Adrian, not another of your discoveries! Yes, yes, my dears, Uncle Adrian's at it again!) to risk my reputation and face a cruelly sceptical world in defence of Mrs. Judge's problematical birth.

  The rain had come down as the woman predicted. Sheets of it! The earth turned to mud, bushes thrashed, trees swam in subaqueous gloom, the din on the roof of my motel cabin was deafening. So that I did not hear the tapping at first, and was startled when I glanced up out of the pool of lamplight to see framed in the dark of the window, and wordlessly signalling, like a man going down for the third time, the woman's husband, George. I hurried to the door to let him in but he refused to come further than the verandah. He stood there barefoot, his waterproof streaming.

  “I jus’ slipped out,” he told me, "while she's sleeping. I wanted t’ tell you a few things.” He set his lamp down on the boards.

  “But you must come in,” I said. “Come in and have a drink.”

  He shook his head.

  “No,” he said very solemnly. “No I won't, if it's all the same.” He looked past me into the lighted room with its twin chenille bedspreads, its TV set, the hinged desk-lamp. “I'm too muddy.”

  He was, but I guessed there was another and deeper reason. It represented too clearly, that room, the world I had come from, a world of slick surfaces and streamlining, of appliances, of power, that t
hreatened him, as it threatened the woman too at the very moment of her reaching out for it.

  “I'll stay out ‘ere, if you don't mind.”

  So our conversation took place with the rain cascading from the guttering just a few feet away and in such a roaring that he could barely be heard.

  He began to unbutton his cape. “I jus’ wanted,” he repeated, "t’ tell you a few things.” He paused, his thumb and forefinger dealing awkwardly with a stud.

  “Like—like them people she thinks ‘ave been makin’ enquiries about ‘er. Over the years like. Well, I made ‘em up.” He looked powerfully ashamed, standing barefoot with the streaming cape on his shoulders and his brow in a furrow. “I wanted t’ tell you that right off like. T’ get things straight.” He met my eyes and did not look away. I turned up the collar of my gown, though it wasn't at all cold, and nodded; an inadequate representative, if that is what he needed, of the forces of truth. In other circumstances I might have got out of my embarrassment by doing a little dance. But he wasn't the man for that sort of thing, and at that moment I wasn't either.

  “Y’ see,” he said, "I didn’ want t’ lose ‘er. I didn’ intend no harm. I wanted ‘er t’ think she needed me. I don't reckon it'll make all that much difference, will it? I mean, you'll still do what she wants.”

  “I don't know. I don't know what she wants.”

  “Oh, she wants people t’ know at last. Who she is.” He shook his head at some further view of his own that he did not articulate, though he wrestled with it. “I suppose it means she'll go back, eh? To them others.”

  Which others? Who could he mean? Who did he think was out there—out where?—that she could go back to? Didn't he realise that sixty years had slipped by, in which day by day a quite different story had been unfolding, in the papers and out of them, that involved millions and was still not finished and held us all in its powerful suspense?

  He began to button the cape again, which was easier to deal with than silence; then said firmly: "I'm a truthful man for the most part, I reckon I can claim that. On'y—I didn't want t’ lose ‘er. She's a wonderful woman. You don't know! We've been happy together, even she'd say that. I tried t’ make ‘er happy and I've been happy meself No regrets, no regrets at all! There hasn’ been a cross word between us in all the years. That ought t’ count for somethin'. When I first met ‘er, y’ know, she was just a girl—that light and small I was scared of even brushin’ against ‘er. I was a carter then, and she was workin’ f ‘ rich people, out at Vaucluse. We used t’ talk after work, and one night she told me the whole thing. I never knew such a world existed. She wanted t’ get away where they wouldn’ be on to ‘er, so we just kep’ movin’ till we holed up here.” He looked again, with a furrowing of his brow, at his own view of the thing. “I better be gettin’ back,” he said, "before she wakes up an’ starts wor-ryin’ where I am. She does worry, y’ know. She was sleepin’ when I left. Knocked out.” There was another silence. Then he put his hand out, as he had earlier in the day, and we shook.

  “You do believe ‘er, don't you?” he said, holding my hand in his giant grasp. “It'd be best if you did, whatever it costs. She wants t’ be known at last. But it's up to you. You just do whatever you reckon is the right thing. For all concerned.”

  He broke his grip, took up the hurricane-lamp, and with a curt little nod went down into the rain, leaning heavily into the wall of it, and I watched the light, and the play of it on his cape, till it flickered out among the trees. Holding my dressing gown about me, though it wasn't at all cold, I turned towards the empty room, its welcoming light and warmth, and was unwilling for a moment to go in. The sky roared, the big trees rocked and swayed, the water came sluicing down. The truth is that I have a great fear these days of being alone.

  But this is Mrs. Judge's story, not mine—or it is the man's. He after all was the first of her believers, and has spent fifty years keeping faith with his convictions and translating them, even in minor dishonesty, into the dailyness of living. Of everything I had heard it was this that most touched me: the vision of what a man might, after all, make of his life in the way of ordinary but honourable commitment, and the plainness with which he might present himself and say, This is what I have given my life to. This is what I am. If I hadn't been convinced by the woman's claim, her passionate certainty that she was something other than what she seemed, I must have been by his steadier one that he was, even in her shadow, himself.

  Compared with his part in all this my own is trivial. I am the messenger, the narrator; and if the narrator too needs to be convinced of the truth of what he is telling, it isn't the same as laying his life down and presenting that as the measure of his belief. The scepticism of my colleagues, a flicker of irony on the lips of even the most straight-faced listener—that is all I will have to bear. I see already how the improbable side of my nature (how does a man become improbable, even to himself?) will immediately declare itself as with a twitch of an imaginary cloak I clap my hands, flourish my fingers in the air, and present out of my own longing for the extraordinary (that is how they will put it) a small, dark, barefoot woman in floral, the daughter of Alicia Vale. “But she was perfect!" (They will be telling the story to others now, in a crowded bar, or over lobster shells at a business lunch, embellishing a little as all story-tellers do.) "She couldn't have been more appropriate if he'd invented her. But then he did, didn't he? He must have!”

  Oh yes, she is appropriate all right, our Mrs. Judge. Too appropriate. She puts me to the test—not of belief but of the courage to come out at last from behind my clown's make-up, my simpering and sliding and dancing on the spot, to tell her story and give myself away.

  The stories we tell betray us, they become our own. We go on living in them, we go on living outside them. The Bloody Sergeant comes on, announces that a battle has been won, bleeds a little, and after twenty rugged lines retires into oblivion. But what he has been called upon to tell has to be lived with and carried through a lifetime, out there in the dark. His own end comes later and is another story. Which another man must tell.

  A Medium

  When i was eleven I took violin lessons once a week from a Miss Katie McIntyre, always so called to distinguish her from Miss Pearl, her sister, who taught piano and accompanied us at exams.

  Miss Katie had a big sunny studio in a building in the city, which was occupied below by dentists, paper suppliers, and cheap photographers. It was on the fourth floor, and was approached by an old-fashioned cage lift that swayed precariously as it rose (beyond the smell of chemical fluid and an occasional whiff of gas) to the purer atmosphere Miss Katie shared with the only other occupant of the higher reaches, Miss E. Sampson, Spiritualist.

  I knew about Miss Sampson from gossip I had heard among my mother's friends; and sometimes, if I was early, I would find myself riding up with her, the two of us standing firm on our feet while the dark cage wobbled.

  The daughter of a well-known doctor, an anaesthetist, she had gone to Clayfield College, been clever, popular, a good sport. But then her gift appeared—that is how my mother's friends put it, just declared itself out of the blue, without in any way changing her cleverness or good humour.

  She tried at first to deny it: she went to the university and studied Greek. But it had its own end in view and would not be trifled with. It laid its hand on her, made its claim, and set my mother's friends to wondering; not about Emily Sampson, but about themselves. They began to avoid her, and then later, years later, to seek her out.

  Her contact, it seemed, was an Indian, whose male voice croaked from the delicate throat above the fichu of coffee-dipped lace. But she sometimes spoke as well with the voices of the dead: little girls who had succumbed to diphtheria or blood poisoning or had been strangled in suburban parks, soldiers killed in one of the wars, drowned sailors, lost sons and brothers, husbands felled beside their dahlias at the bottom of the yard. Hugging my violin case, I pushed hard against the bars to make room for the presenc
es she might have brought in with her.

  She was by then a woman of forty-nine or fifty—small, straight, business-like, in a tailored suit and with her hair cut in a silver helmet. She sucked Bonnington's Irish Moss for her voice (I could smell them) and advertised in the Courier Mail under Services, along with Chiropractor and Colonic Irrigation. It was odd to see her name listed so boldly, E. Sampson, Spiritualist, in the foyer beside the lifts, among the dentists and their letters, the registered firms, Pty Ltd, and my own Miss McIntyre, LTCL, AMEB. Miss Sampson's profession, so nakedly asserted, appeared to speak for itself, with no qualification. She was herself the proof. It was this, I think, that put me in awe of her.

  It seemed appropriate, in those days, that music should be separated from the more mundane business that was being carried on below—the whizzing of dentists’ drills, the plugging of cavities with amalgam or gold, and the making of passport photos for people going overseas. But I thought of Miss Sampson, for all her sensible shoes, as a kind of quack, and was sorry that Miss Katie and the Arts should be associated with her, and with the troops of subdued, sad-eyed women (they were mostly women) who made the pilgrimage to her room and shared the last stages of the lift with us: women whose husbands might have been bank managers—wearing smart hats and gloves and tilting their chins a little in defiance of their having at last “come to it;" other women in dumpy florals, with freckled arms and too much talc, who worked in hospital kitchens or cleaned offices or took in washing, all decently gloved and hatted now, but looking scared of the company they were in and the heights to which the lift wobbled as they clung to the bars. The various groups hung apart, using their elbows in a ladylike way, but using them, and producing genteel formulas such “Pardon" “I'm so sorry” when the crush brought them close. Though touched already by a hush of shared anticipation, they had not yet accepted their commonality. There were distinctions to be observed, even here.