Harland's Half Acre

by David Malouf

  Knack’s place, on the other hand, was cosy. There were big Genoa-velvet lounge chairs, smokers’ stands in embossed silver and gold (though neither he nor Edna smoked) and a good upright piano with candle sconces that was kept perfectly tuned. Once when he dropped in there in the afternoon, the piano tuner was at work, a blind man. He went on striking notes and tightening up keys while Frank, out in the shop, working quickly with line and wash, made a sketch of Edna Byrne in her striped deckchair, her plump arms folded, the blonded hair in a wispy pompadour, the eyes round and dark like the beads you stick in a snowman on a cake.

  He worked, like the piano tuner, in the dark. There was a golden languor and deep warmth to her that he would have to catch some other way; the pure quality of being curled up in itself, in its own life, of a tortoiseshell cat in sunlight. Her flesh purred. It was that he would have to catch.

  The piano tuner, screwing and tapping out single notes, was an accompaniment to the sketch he made and would later amplify, as Knack, with his huge hands, which he often snapped and clasped together above the keys, would improve on the tuner’s work by developing single notes into the most extraordinary sounds Frank Harland had ever heard.

  But for long periods on these afternoon visits he and Edna would sit in silence. He liked that. They had no need to speak. They would sip tea while shadows gathered in the shop – lamps, wardrobe tops, chairs all up in the air; or he held skeins of wool while she wound them dreamily into balls. He liked that too, the bright wools and her hands making over and over the same spell-like gestures as they shared the task – women’s work, out of the repetitive lives of women; he had forgotten that, having barely known it. The activity was soothing, it put the spirit to sleep. It encouraged, with the repeated tumbling motion of her wrists and the unwinding and winding of strands, a kind of drowsy intercourse between them in which it was easy at last to talk.

  ‘I come from up Childers way – you ever get t’ Childers? – sugarcane country. Lovely! The soil’s red but. I don’t think I ever saw a white shirt or had a pair of real white undies till I come to Brisbane. Gets into everything, that red soil. The dirt under your nails is red, and kids have red ingrained into the soles of their feet, you never get it out. The bottom half of the bath is always pink. But the smell’s lovely, nothing like it, and the cane-tops when they’re in flower. Oh, an’ the fires when they’re burning off, with all the snakes running out of the flames n’ the men’s faces n’ shoulders sweaty n’ black with smuts. I miss that, I really do. S’ funny how a place you hate can be a place you miss. Most of all the smell. Once you’ve smelt that sweetness everything else smells grey – you know what I mean? Dusty!’

  He did know, because he had been on the road through all that part of the state: rolling canefields under a ceiling of cloud, a wash of blue between caneflowers of a cloudy white-pink and the feathery bloom of clouds, with red-dirt tracks, often greasy, and banks of coarse green grass. Off in the distance a verandahed farmhouse on stilts with a scatter of corrugated-iron sheds and a lone windmill. Little trains loaded with cane on a narrow-gauge line. And the whole landscape glittering, steaming. He could imagine her as a child with pigtails and bare legs red to the knee, sitting on the back seat of a sulky in one of those stunned towns chewing a stick of cane.

  He let the knowledge of it work under the image of the over-blown woman in the striped deckchair, as the blind man, feeling for the rightness of a note, repeatedly plonked and the taut string whined and was screwed into place: one clear stroke of colour in a rainbow (as Knack would create it) of chromatic chords.

  ‘I worked as a housemaid when I first come down. Atcherly Private Hotel, d’you know it? Petrie Bight. I was a housemaid. Made beds for rich country people that were down for the Show, or to see Gladys Moncrieff or the lights for the Coronation. Got sick of it but. Turning down all them damn beds at four o’clock in the afternoon. Embarrassing sometimes too. There’s people find four o’clock on a rainy afternoon a good time t’ be in the cot, y’ know? Get worked up by a good storm and dive into the sheets and don’t wanna know if you come hammerin’ at the door. So I left and went to work for this photographer, Mr Margolis. He was a sort of hunchback. Well, I suppose he was a hunchback, but he was a real nice little bloke, polite. Very dark, with the most beautiful eyes – soft black, a proper gentleman. The kiddies weren’t the least bit scared of him. I mean, they could of been – that black cloth over the camera, y’know, and the hump under it that was Mr Margolis, and then him stepping out, not much taller than a kiddie himself, and the hump on his back, like there was another little photographer under that one as well. On’y he’d be smiling and holding the switch at the end of the cord, and saying, ‘Big smile now!’ and the kiddies, when they come out, looked like they’d been smiling at an angel. You’d never of guessed it was Mr Margolis in a nicely cut black suit. He had it made specially of course.

  ‘I really loved that place – the Studio. I used t’ have to dust it, and set up, and of course I took the orders and that, at a proper desk. There were these two big silver umbrellas in the corner – always open, he didn’t seem worried about bad luck – and the place where you stood, or sat, was like a lovely little stage. When it was lit up it was really lovely. A white column, a big glossy palm – I used to have to dust the leaves and paint them with oil – an’ behind, three painted screens that you could roll up and down for a bit of a change, with the prettiest landscape you ever seen. One was a kind of lake, with mountains. Another was a garden with all flowering vines in the trees. Y’know, people would look quite ordinary, brides and that – dumpy, or pale, or scared, or a bit scraggy, even in their satin, and the men – you know, all hands and ears. But the moment they stepped up into the scene, with the column and the view and the way Mr Margolis spoke to them – charmed them like, put them at their ease and composed them – well, it was a miracle, they were different people. They looked as if they belonged to – I don’t know – anyway, as if they hadn’ just stepped in off the street in a hired suit and a shop-bought wedding dress, but belonged to some – I don’t know. You couldn’t of guessed from their faces, or the way they sat, that it was all set up – that the column and palm were on a platform that only went two feet either side of ’em.

  ‘Sometimes, when I felt crook or down in the dumps, I’d go in, turn all the lights on till I was dazzled and sit there myself – rest me elbow on the column and sort of daydream. It did me good.

  ‘It was a lovely job, that, it really was. Especially the kiddies. Mr Margolis used to have jellybeans for ’em, on’y he’d eat all the black ones himself and some of the bolder kiddies used to say it straight out: ‘Someone’s eaten all the black ones!’

  ‘Black jellybeans and tangos on the gramophone, that’s what ’e liked. But then Mr Margolis’s sister took a dislike to me – said I was common – she was an art of speech teacher – so that was that! Mr Margolis was very upset, but he had no guts, poor little bloke. Said he’d never had anyone who was so good with the kiddies, or with jittery brides!’ She laughed, a full-throated laugh. ‘I used t’ give ’em a Bex in Coke if they was too bad, and they’d come out looking so – you know – as if life couldn’ touch ’em now that they’d seen what they had – which was just a coupla silver umbrellas’ (she laughed again) ‘and Mr Margolis under a cloth. Anyway, to make a long story short, I become a barmaid. Big places – the Criterion, the Grand Central – and that’s where I met Knack.’

  She softened and smiled, almost the shy girl. She was fond of the man with the bald head.

  ‘I reckon it was the music. I never learned, but when he plays – well, you’ve heard it – I get all goosepimply, I can’t speak, it takes me breath away, it’s another world. And then Walt – you know Knack – is a very clever man. Educated. Back there, it’s not the same is it? As here I mean. They’re more cultured. In spite of the concentration camps. But you know without me saying it. You’ve heard.’

  He
had, many times. Difficult to say which was the more impressive, Knack’s music or his talk.

  There were occasions when the music seemed too big for the room with its lilac and green wallpaper and its one sash window looking onto the yard; but not too big for Knack’s head, which shone with a gleam of sweat on the crown and was monumental, and made up for the absence of columned and gilded halls. Blood bunched at the temple; there were strange depressions on either side, as if while the skull was still soft two huge thumbs had been pushed down, permanently denting the jelly-like bone.

  Knack left them behind when he moved into the music, though they too were transported. Frank had never glimpsed such power in the addressing of thunderbolts, or felt such after-sweetness of sorrow as when the voice – no one’s voice in particular, only the linking together of notes the piano tuner had made way for – went singing through all the agonies, the unstillnesses and doubts and conciliations, the risings over and above the actual pain of snapped limbs and pinched and torn flesh as you might apprehend it in the white of Knack’s knuckles or in the raddled veins and greasy roundness of his skull.

  Frank knew nothing about music. He had no idea whether Knack played well or badly or how many wrong notes he struck among the right ones. It was mere noise at first, in which he recognised a kind of power – the Furies. What held him was the contortions Knack endured; either through the physical demand upon arms, wrists, shoulders as he belted it out or made single notes hang on and grieve, or through the convulsive passions the music excited in the man. Frank couldn’t have decided between them, the physical and the moral rackings, but it was a rack he thought of. While Knack, in his sober, straight-backed jacket sat upright before it, his spirit was stretched out horizontal and an invisible tuner screwed the strings. You could hear the whining vibrations, feel the tightening of nerves and sinews as the bones approached their point of departure. Frank himself felt it. He broke into a sweat.

  As for the woman, she shrank deeper and deeper into her own flesh. Occasionally she shuddered. At other times she leaned back with her eyes shut, blissfully adrift.

  In those early days, though he was happy to eavesdrop and touched that they made a place for him, he understood nothing. The music was a landscape of storms and stretches of wide shining weather where Knack walked with Edna Byrne under a solemn sky. But over the weeks it declared its lines to him, then its volumes, there was ground under his feet. He entered a weather of changing light and shade, and occasionally, when he came out of himself, it was he and Edna who had been walking alone together. He felt the music within him, as if he were listening to the coursing thunder or the beat at walking pace (the world’s pace) of his blood.

  He still did not know the names and Knack did not announce them. It was music or talk, never both at the one time.

  Knack’s talk:

  ‘My name, for example, is not really Knack. I call myself that because of the shop. Knacks for fine ladies – a kind of joke,’ and he showed his big teeth in a grin. ‘Besides, in this place, the real name hardly matters. It is Nestorius – a mouthful, eh? And who cares now that it goes back a thousand years in the one district, with a lake, forests, a kind of castle, even a crest. See?’ He showed Frank a ring with a porcupine on it, in a raised shield. ‘Might as well be Knack! When I got up out of that ditch and found I had all my limbs, it was near dusk and everyone around me, under me, had stopped moving. Just a little warmth was still coming up, making a sort of fog. Body warmth. Ah well, I thought, so this is the afterlife, is it hell then? It wasn’t of course but it might have been. So, I got a new life, a new country, why not a new name? Knack has the right sort of sound, eh? – short and sweet. It fits me better than the other long one, with so much family history, you know, and all the honours to be kept up. A bit on the comic side – the afterlife does turn out to be on the comic side. It is difficult not to appear a clown sometimes, when your head is in one place and your tongue in another. The accent!’

  He made a face, solemn, clown-like. ‘It does not permit you, from many people’s point of view, to be quite serious.’

  He had an odd way of speaking. It wasn’t just the accent. Frank strained to listen but could not always catch the meaning, only the oddness of what was said, its obliqueness, and the man’s wry cynicism. Edna understood better, he thought, and he might catch the full sense, later, from her.

  He was Polish, from a land of forests along the Baltic.

  ‘Hard little tears that sea throws up,’ he told them. ‘Amber. Ancient forests have wept. It is cast up on the beach, sometimes in lumps as big as a fist, and often with insects trapped in it from thousands of years ago, little golden flies or bees or a grasshopper, perfectly preserved. Very rrromantic, eh?’ He rolled the r deliberately and gave a laugh. ‘Well, no place is romantic if you live there and know the stink. The stink of that place is fishbones. Herrings! Pooh, you can’t imagine! The fog stinks of it, and the shirts off the line. Slimy fishguts on all the planks, a fishbone always in your throat. And then later, as if the stink of fish wasn’t enough, ideas. Beautiful, savage, fatal ideas – oh you’d die holding your nose! Then many, many bodies. And there is not amber enough in all the Baltic to hide them – not if the forests were to weep now for a million years. I am one of the fortunate bodies. I got up again and walked right across Russia. With a little assistance from the railway, of course!

  ‘My life,’ he mused, ‘is strange to me, this new one. I do not know why I was given it back.’ He produced the last word between his teeth like a bullet, and spat it out. It hung in the air as if it were magical or had no terrestrial weight. ‘I think sometimes that I got up too quickly, and left in that ditch my soul – or is it my manhood? Maybe it’s the same thing.’

  ‘Walt dear,’ the woman remonstrated, and took his hand.

  This sort of talk was unreal to her. It might have belonged to a childish nightmare. When she caught at times a whiff of the reality he spoke of, it was not from his talk but from episodes in the music, when she would glimpse through a break in the forest, and through clearing mist, some corner of an experience that was not her own and could only be his. Or it came to her when the hard ridge of his back, so strictly upright in its dealings with Liszt or Beethoven, would soften, and the great furnace of his breath grew ghostly. Her own existence could not account then for all that she understood.

  He was the son of rich timber merchants, minor nobility, and had been the citizen, successively, of three powers. A student of philosophy in his youth and a modest black sheep, he had been a soldier in the civil wars, a black marketeer afterwards, then a playboy, a fugitive, a refugee, and was now a dealer in second-hand books, china, glassware and household effects.

  ‘Did you know,’ he told them once, ‘that we can determine the exact date, down to the hour, when our Dark Ages began? June the 8th, 1783. On that day the entrance to hell blew open and all the devils broke loose. It is quite scientific, you can read about it, I can show the place on the map. It is in Iceland. A great hot cloud spread out, all over the world. It was full of sulphurous notions that men breathed in with it – not germs but sulphurous notions. They got into the bloodstream and were carried in bubbles to the brain. They made men mad – dizzy – sent them whirling off to be demons themselves, organising revolutions and wars and councils and model prisons, and new kinds of dances to get themselves more worked up, and poems and proclamations against this and that, and a terrible itch to know everything and be everything and cast off limitations. We’ve been breathing that new air ever since. We’ve got used to it. If we had a real sense of history we’d be measuring time by it, before and after: BH and AH. We’ve adapted. We’ve become new creatures and have stopped noticing that the breath is not out of heaven any more but thick, sulphurous, out of – what do you say? – the bowels is it? Is that right? We are under a new dispensation. This is the year one hundred and sixty-two, AH, After Hekla.’ His smile now was on the lugubrious rathe
r than the comic side.

  Frank caught the woman’s eye, a quick glance passed between them. She was proud of Knack as of a clever child, but there was indulgence in her look as well, as for some sort of clever foolishness that she would deal with later on.

  Did she really understand it all, Frank wondered. He didn’t. But then Knack had a head start coming from Europe, which must be an education all in itself – a bitter one; Australians couldn’t compete. You had to start from scratch here. From a bit of a yard or paddock, or a room even, and build it up slowly yourself, out of grass seeds and scribbles on bark, or out of the knob on a dressing table, or a door jamb with height-marks on it, or a teapot that had passed down through all the afternoons of a family, or a hive full of bees.

  Edna smiled. Ssh, she appeared to say on these occasions. We got to be patient with him. He’s seen too much. He’s ashamed to be content.

  She was content, so long as Knack didn’t unnerve her; serene, indolent, quite comfortable in her flesh.

  ‘But you don’t know what I am talking about, you lucky children! Here, listen,’ and Knack would swing back to the piano and lead them hand in hand like a wicked uncle; deep in along the gloomiest paths they followed the cloth of his back.

  The music scared him, but was easier to follow, Frank found, than the talk. Under clouds of an impossible eloquence, all bannered flame, poisonous berries hung in clusters over a pool, great dolls rolled their heads, their eyeballs clicked. Letting go of the other child’s hand, Edna’s, who was too entranced to notice, he fell back. It was too dark, all that. It was of a gloom he had never encountered in all his travels up and down the state, and might not exist on this continent or on this side of the globe. The mists here were not thick enough – not enough people. You needed centuries of breath; or maybe the sulphur cloud Knack spoke of. Had the cloud got as far as this? Had a few puffs of it got in – when was it? – in 1788? Their whole commonwealth, according to Knack, should have been founded under it. But somehow he couldn’t believe that. Knack must be wrong. He hoped, some day, to convert the man to another point of view. A picture might do it. He held in his mind, against Knack’s talk and the enfolding music, one of his landscapes, and wondered if that would do it.