Unspoken, but at the very top of Frederick and Lili’s list, was that in their home town of Budapest in 1939 they had not waited to see what was to come. ‘If I was a younger man,’ Levi had said to his son on reading news of the Second Jewish Laws, ‘I would not wait.’ The following night the young couple agreed it was a good time to visit a cousin studying in Bern, and packed their suitcases. They had not waited, not for news of more laws. They had not waited to see friends sent into the copper mines or forced to carry guns and battle the Russian winter. They had not waited to be given a number and put on a train, or for the country’s leader to take a pistol to his head and declare Hungary a nation of trash. They had not waited for Eichmann. They closed the door to their apartment with just three small bags between them. At the station Frederick held tight to his father and said they would be together again at the end of the summer. Two days later they had arrived in Switzerland, and when the war was at an end they packed their bags again and caught a train to Lisbon. It was there, after another summer had passed, on the floor of their kitchen next to the refrigerator, that Maggie Varga was born.
Flying spoons into their daughter’s barely open mouth and looking out to a horizon that beckoned to be reached, Frederick and Lili were grateful to be together for an hour every day, headed to a country at the other end of the world that had asked for people to come. They looked ahead, and tried not to glance behind them to their flat in Lisbon, to a family displaced over a continent, to the corpse of a father piled in a mass grave and all the days that led to his extinction. They looked ahead, and they were grateful—not to God, not anymore—but to the dead man who had told them not to wait.
It was cold when Maggie put the letter back into the envelope and threw it at the bin. When it lifted on a pocket of air and fell onto the floor she picked it up, scrunched it up and threw it again, this time with an accurate aim.
Because what remained was a simple truth. All those years ago she had let Martin take just a single suitcase, and after the month was out she had let him return, so they could begin again as they were. That was the best way, so she had thought . . . If he had buried it, she had been the one to pack the earth.
After that there had been late nights, some unexplained, and she had seen how the women flirted and how he let them. He was a handsome man; it happened. And there was the time at the party when Annie was upset and Maggie thought she must have seen something. When she confronted him, Martin laughed it off and made a joke about a drunk woman landing in his lap. Annie said she’d been drunk herself and couldn’t remember it.
That was the bad stretch, his last few years at the bar. He didn’t want to be there anymore; he was drinking too much and coming home in dark moods—rank, like something was rotting inside him. He wouldn’t talk about it, and to stay afloat she cut herself off as best she could. She shuddered now at the memory of it. The blessing was that almost as quickly as it descended, the darkness lifted. He was appointed as a judge. They took a trip to India and Martin sat on a hillside at sunset in Rajasthan and told Maggie he wanted to travel with her like this every year. When they got home there wasn’t the same need to work late; they went out again, to plays and exhibitions and restaurants, and started having Friday night dinner parties at home again. Maggie gave herself the whole day in the kitchen to prepare and they pushed their guests out the door in the small hours of the morning. Then into all this entered Finnegan, their beautiful grandson who came every week for an afternoon or a sleepover . . . And that was their life, full, overflowing, precious, and for every day of it she knew to be grateful.
Every day, until four months ago Martin drove into a street in La Perouse.
Now Maggie sat in her studio with a certainty he had something more to tell, another file for the cabinet. Asleep inside, the man who was left did not always know whether the day was beginning or ending. He was sorry but he didn’t know for what. What need of proof was there now, she wondered, when in his mind the slate had been wiped clean?
It was two a.m. when she put down her pencil and her paintbrush. The eyes were filled, the portrait was finished, and Iris looked back at her from the page.
Part
Four
Chapter 23
A parked car edged into the traffic. Ethan slammed on the brakes.
‘That’s right, lady, just pull out . . . effing cow.’
From the back seat: ‘Who’s a cow?’
‘Ethan, please . . .’
‘Sorry. Sorry, hon. Sorry, buddy.’
‘It’s okay, Dad. She should learn how to drive.’
Ethan laughed.
‘It’s not funny,’ Laini said.
‘Oh, come on . . .’
‘I don’t want him learning it’s funny to abuse people.’
‘Effing is for fucking.’
‘You see! You see what you’ve done!’
‘I never told him that.’
More laughter from the back seat.
‘Alright, I give up,’ Laini said. ‘How was your day?’
‘A mediation. We’ll settle. All good. Yours?’
‘Not bad, actually. I spoke to the woman from school again about the blog. She said I wouldn’t have to put much into a proposal before I took it to her boss. She thinks there’s enough there, just to gauge their interest. She said she’d ask him if he’d have a look. Then I thought, God, he’ll probably think it’s a load of bloody rubbish. I mean, I can’t write to save myself . . . I don’t know why anyone’s reading the thing in the first place.’
‘That’s why it’s good. You don’t think about it too much; you just do it. It’s not try-hard.’
‘Thanks, baby. You’ve never said it’s good before.’
‘Haven’t I? I’m saying it now.’
‘You only ever looked at it once.’
‘That’s because it’s girls’ business. I felt like I was snooping. You want me to read it, I’ll read it.’
‘I’m not forcing you. I’m just saying . . .’
‘Come on, Laini, please. I had a tough day.’
‘You said it was okay.’
‘Yeah, the case went fine. But the same politics, you know, the same bullshit.’
‘No, I don’t know. Tell me.’
‘Please, hon, I don’t want to get into it. It’s petty stuff, nothing to worry about. I’ve got enough to deal with tonight. Mum talked to the doctors today. She didn’t go into it on the phone, but they’re talking about the possibility of rapid onset . . .’
She reached over and put her hand on his thigh. ‘Poor Maggie. This is rotten. It’s not fair.’
And from the back seat again: ‘What’s not fair?’
‘Nothing . . . Just Grandie not remembering things.’
‘Is that why he fell off the rock when he was fishing?’ Finn asked. ‘Is it because something’s wrong with his brain?’
‘We don’t know, Finn. We don’t know why he fell.’
‘And is that why he hit the dog? And why he tells the same story? Why can’t he tell a different story?’
‘It is because he doesn’t remember.’
‘But sometimes he remembers; he remembers lots of things. Why can’t I go for sleepovers anymore?’
‘Hang on a minute, buddy, Daddy has to concentrate.’ And looking from the rear-view mirror back over his shoulder, he accelerated to move into the passing lane. ‘This guy is playing funny buggers . . .’ Behind them a horn blasted. ‘You see that dickhead speed up when he knew I was trying to get in there?’
‘Oh, for God’s sake . . . Don’t you dare eyeball him!’
‘You saw that! He was miles back but as soon as he saw me indicate he sped up . . .’ And just as the guy snaked up alongside them Ethan bent forwards and turned his way. ‘Arsehole.’
‘Ethan!’
‘Come on, Laini, the guy’s a dickhead. Can’t you be on my side for once?’
The car went silent, the only sound the video game in the back seat. It wasn’t until they pulled up to th
e kerb that Laini put in the final word: ‘I just don’t think all these people are idiots and dickheads.’
‘Yeah, okay, I had a crap day. I’m exhausted, babe, I’m not sleeping . . .’
Outside the car she waited for him. ‘Go inside, Finn,’ she said. And once he’d gone: ‘Come here, you . . .’ She gave him one of her up-close-and-tight hugs, the ‘we’ll fuck later’ kind. He melted into it, grateful. The goodies bag at the end of a bad party, sometimes it was all you needed to get you through.
Finn ran back out.
‘Grandie’s fishing on the beach. I’m going down.’
Ethan and Laini looked at each other; Laini passed him her bags. ‘Okay, let’s go,’ she said, and to Ethan: ‘You go in. I’ll wander across.’
Finn ran in front. Laini went as far as the bench on the headland.
He watched them, son and wife, pink clouds. There was nothing wrong. He loved her. She loved him. Tomorrow he would buy her a present; he would go to that shop and get her something expensive, and all would be well. That is what he told himself, but still he stared at her silhouette with the sense that if he took his eyes away, just as Finn disappeared down the hill, she might fade with the day.
‘What are you doing out here?’ It was Maggie. ‘Come inside.’
He turned around, but didn’t move. ‘I just thought they might get cold.’
‘They’ll be fine. They won’t be long, and Laini is there. Is everything alright?’
He didn’t answer.
‘Come on then, I’ve got something to show you.’
He took one last look, and followed his mother inside.
Maggie opened the door to the study.
‘He’s funny about me showing people, but I wanted you to see this.’
Laid out on the floor in rows the full length of the room were photographs, each row with a different subject. The first were in colour, Maggie swimming in the ocean pool, pieces of her: a single arm outstretched in freestyle, drops of water falling from her fingers, then one closer up, shoulder blade to elbow. Ethan had to look twice—the strength and definition in the body, his mother’s body. The other photographs were softer, intimate—skin beneath the water—and the last identified her: the side of her goggled face as she took a breath, the water cradling her head like a transparent pillow.
In the row beneath, a dog on the beach sniffed the carcass of a seagull; and in the next black cockatoos lined up on the branch of a tree and then tilted their wings in tandem to take flight. Ethan got down on his knees to get closer to the photographs and picked them up, replaced them in sequence. He knew bugger-all about photography, but these were better than good.
‘These are all Dad’s?’
‘He’s barely picked up a camera since you were little. Then when we got back from the hospital he pulled it out, the old camera—not the SLR—the one he had in New York. I was amazed it still worked. He remembered everything, all the tricks. He started following me over to the pool in the morning, then he’d wander off down to the beach. It was the longest I could leave him alone; having the camera in his hands kept reminding him what he was doing. There are hundreds more, of the same things . . . He forgets what he’s been taking, so I lay them out. They are beautiful, aren’t they?’
‘They are; they are amazing. And this is what he was doing when you met him in New York . . . God, why did he stop?’
For a minute she considered the question. ‘He wanted it so much and then he wanted something else, or thought he did,’ she said. ‘He made a choice . . . I’ll have to dig out his New York boxes. You’ve never seen them?’
‘He told me he couldn’t find them.’
Maggie shook her head dismissively, a sudden, surprising anger in her voice: ‘Is that what he said? That isn’t true.’
She knelt down on the floor alongside him and took a photo in her hand, the one of the side of her face in the water, shaking her head again and staring at the image like she’d forgotten he was there. The bookshelf behind her was stacked with the blue spines of law reports in year order; Martin had always preferred them to the electronic versions—‘I like to turn a page’. He sat at his desk late into the night and Ethan lay in bed with a protective eye on the sliver of light that crossed the dark hallway. Still the smell of the room was the books—the faint, woody vanilla. It stirred a memory now—a night when the light was not there because Martin had left to stay in the Randwick flat. Unable to sleep, Ethan got out of bed and came into the study. There on the desk was an open volume, one of the law reports, and on the shelf, between 1975 and 1977 (he could still remember the years), a single, shadowy gap. For the longest time Ethan stared down at the book like it was a missing piece of a puzzle. That morning Maggie had sat him down and began: ‘Your father and I . . .’ He hadn’t let her finish: ‘Where is he?’ he cried. ‘Where is he?’ Over and over as he threw every last apple from the bowl against the wall. The day before he’d heard her in the bedroom shouting about Marty’s ‘dirty secret’. ‘It never stopped! You never stopped!’, the same words muttered to herself long after she had slammed down the phone, and in the night, through his bedroom wall, the sobbing. He felt bad for her then, but only for a while, because in his mind she was to blame; she had given Ethan something and now she was taking it away. In the morning his father was still gone and her face looked blotchy, misshapen. That was why he didn’t want to look at her. That was why he threw the apples at the wall. That was why he stared down at the blue volume on the desk, the question turning in his mind whether to leave it there or return it to the shelf, certain the right decision would help to bring his father home in a way his blast of boyhood anger had not.
When at the end of the month his father did return, Ethan had formed his own view of secrets: that they were better kept. He watched as his parents created a silence around what had happened, and with that silence—at first fragile, then firm like a resin—his life was again as it had been, as it was meant to be.
Casting his eyes now over the books on the shelf as his mother sat absorbed in the photos, Ethan caught himself checking each volume, hoping to find a year out of place so that he could return it to its rightful order.
‘So did they book him in for another scan?’
‘They tried, but he told the doctor he didn’t need a fucking machine to tell him his fucking brain was dissolving. I don’t know how I’m going to get him there. And this thing with New York is getting worse. He’s there more than he is here.’
Ethan nodded. ‘The other day I heard him telling Finn about that garden, how you wanted to go see it at nighttime.’
‘Dear Lord.’
‘Don’t worry, Finn tells him when he’s had enough. “That one’s a boring one, Grandie,” he says.’
She smiled, the anger gone. ‘Oh, isn’t he perfect . . .’
‘And he started talking to me about the judgment again, like he still has to finish it . . . He thinks it’s got something to do with the boat disaster.’
A boat of asylum seekers had collided with rocks and sunk off the coast of Christmas Island. Martin had been glued to the coverage: the delay in response time, how many rescued, how many bodies recovered.
Maggie nodded. ‘He told me at breakfast it’ll make a difference to the sentence, all these lives lost and whose fault it is.’
‘What do you say to him?’
‘You can’t set him right. I nod my head, try to get his attention back to the camera.’
‘So where are these photos, the ones from New York?’
They were in the basement, she said, in a green cardboard box—on the top shelf against the back wall. Outside now there were voices, Martin and Finn, Finn’s laughter. ‘Next time you come, Ethan, go down and find them.’
Martin had already disappeared into the bedroom. The bucket was empty but Finn shrugged it off. ‘We found pipis,’ he said. ‘But we put ’em back.’ And he ran off to wash his hands for dinner.
Ethan remained, alone in his father’s study, the
sound of his son running in the hall.
Further back, he remembered how it felt as a small child—the miraculous cocoon that formed around him when the friend from New York became his father. The picture was a shiny red fishing rod. The smell was stinky bait. The hook pricked his finger and Marty wrapped it up in a tissue because he forgot to bring band-aids. Sitting at the end of the wharf, the clouds turned murky and there was a grumbling of thunder, but Ethan felt safe. As they sat with their legs dangling off the jetty, he looked out to the water then up at the man sitting next to him, at his hands and his arms and his chest.
‘I bet you could carry me on your shoulders if you wanted,’ he said finally.
‘I bet I could too,’ Marty replied.
‘In the morning, you could walk me like that through the school gates. You’re allowed to do it.’
That was when Marty told him. He told him he wasn’t going anywhere. ‘I belong here with you,’ he said. ‘With you and with your mother. I know that in my bones. That’s when you really know something. When you feel it in your bones.’
Ethan remembered that, the thing about bones. And as far as Ethan could tell they weren’t just words. There was the day the bird got into his bedroom and crashed against his walls, dropping gooey brown shit all over his boyhood treasures; it was Martin who flapped it out and waited for the shit to dry white before scraping it off. And the time he was in trouble for letting Sam Gibson take the blame for the money missing from the tuckshop, then for keeping the lie going all the way to the school principal. When somehow the truth came out, Maggie cancelled his birthday party; everyone in the class was coming but she cancelled it and said he could spend the day in his room instead. So there he was, a lone outcast in his own house, the worst day of his nine years of life, and in came Marty. From the minute he opened his mouth—sitting down next to him on the carpet and asking how it happened, why it happened—Ethan sensed he was there to tell him not how bad he’d been but that somehow they were still on the same side and, sensing that, Ethan took his father through it, step by step, the stealing, the first lie and all the ones after that, how it became not just easier but more necessary with each lie, all the while Marty nodding his head as though it made sense. And then at the end of it, at the end of the story, came the biggest surprise of all.
This Picture of You Page 19
