by Miriam Sved
They get to Park Street and turn left, and the bodies solidify in the blocks between them and Town Hall, becoming one wide column of people. They are too far back to hear the speeches being delivered from the Town Hall steps, but there are trestle tables set up on both sides of the intersection, people handing out badges and newspapers and flyers. The drumbeats have intensified; it is difficult to tell where they are coming from.
‘I’ll pass some of these signs out,’ Tali says, and disappears into the crowd with an armful of placards.
‘Let’s get the big one closer to the front,’ Sal says, the rest of them moving forward slowly through the crowds, Zoe keeping herself separate as she stalks the footpath looking for images. The others are holding their placards aloft – Drop Bush, Not Bombs; No War For Oil; Howard Arselicker. That one makes her blanch: what if her face ends up on television next to Howard Arselicker? But she supposes he is an arselicker really, even if he did lower their tax bracket and allow Russell’s bonuses to be paid into a tax-free super fund. This thought strikes her as significant somehow, and she turns to Sal, wondering if it’s too loud and absurd to try to convey it to her, but just then Zoe, who has perched herself on a bollard to get an overview of the scene, says, ‘Over there. Something’s going on.’ She points towards the other side of the intersection of Park and Castlereagh. Impossible to see through the scrum of bodies. Zoe jumps off the bollard and begins to push her way through the crowd. Illy and Sal follow, still carrying the sign.
The row of police standing along this side of the square is jarring; it takes Illy a moment to register what it is that makes them seem more threatening than the rest of the police she has seen today: they are all wearing plastic face masks. Riot gear. Zoe is shoving her way through the throng, saying, ‘Excuse me, excuse me,’ camera raised halfway to her face.
Tali reappears nearby, shoving through the crowd with her elbows. ‘Leave the banner,’ she shouts towards them. ‘The cops have someone on the ground.’ At the same time as she says it, Illy sees the scuffle going on at ground level on the footpath: from here it looks like it is all police bodies, just a pile of blue backs and limbs competing for space, but she supposes there must be someone pinioned under there.
Zoe goes into a semi-crouch and starts taking photos, trying to find a frame of the person underneath all those police. There is a large officer standing in front of the pile, moving from left to right with hands held up to the crowd, saying, ‘Get back, everyone get back.’ Zoe moves away from him around to the other side and keeps shooting. Illy follows, and sees an arm emerging from the scrum, a bare arm not in blue, and then a head with curly black hair. Zoe has her shot and she tries to go close, but many more police have materialised, forming a phalanx around the scrum on the ground, and one of them pushes Zoe backwards.
‘Hey!’ Sal shouts at the policeman, and other people are shouting too: Shame on you! Shame on you! someone yells.
Zoe doesn’t seem intimidated, she still has the camera to her face and is ducking and moving to get shots between the police legs, under their arms. ‘Get back,’ one of them says, trying to block her angle with his body. The man on the ground has turned his head so his face is visible on this side – Illy sees that he wears glasses, which have been knocked off centre on his nose, and she sees exactly the shot that her daughter needs: this perfectly framed close-up of the man’s face (not young, perhaps in his forties, an ordinary-looking man) pinioned by the impersonal bulk of a leg on his upper back, no sign of anger or fear or anything really on the man’s face, only blank capitulation to what is happening. He’s moving his lips slightly but she can’t hear what he’s saying.
Someone beside her shouts, ‘He’s not resisting, he’s saying he’s not resisting.’ Why are they still piled on top of him like that? ‘Get off him,’ someone else shouts, and then Zoe manages to weave into a space between one of the officers and the wall of the building behind – a Commonwealth Bank branch, Illy notices, and she registers with a sense of unreality that she went into this branch to do something (deposit a cheque?) recently, just as the policeman that Zoe has darted around breaks from the line to take Zoe by the arm and hurls her backwards so that Illy’s slight-bodied daughter is sent flying – she is actually airborne for a long second before she lands on her back on the concrete.
Illy’s only thought is to get to her. She is only a few metres away, Sal still beside her, but chaos seems to have erupted in the seconds between Zoe being grabbed and hitting the ground, there are people everywhere, surging towards the line of police and shouting, and when Illy tries to move towards her daughter she is blocked by a tall figure in blue – she looks up into his face behind the shield and sees that it is an older man blocking her path, older than her. She tries to move around him but he moves with her and says, ‘Please step back.’
‘My daughter, over there,’ Illy says, but he keeps his hands up before him and says it again, ‘Step back, ma’am, step back,’ louder, directly into her face.
She can see Zoe on the ground – thank God she is moving, now raising herself up on her elbows, people around her helping her to her feet, she doesn’t look badly hurt – and with the relief there is a powerful feeling of clarity and strength that surges through Illy and she pushes forward with the momentum of the crowd. Shouts and drumbeats filling the air and a sense of resistance like some half-remembered superpower from a dream of flying, of freedom, so that when she crashes forward into the older policeman and the two of them go down together she is not scared; she feels unseated from her small isolated self by a brazen interconnected joy, as if the whole crowd were moving with her, all those people holding her up as the drumbeat of the city street thuds through her body and the crush of bodies comes down on top of her.
Sydney, 2007
Rescuing his mother and sister from the police station in the city quickly devolves into a frustrating administrative exercise and then a farce.
For one thing, Josh doesn’t have a car. A flurry of circular logistical suggestions about what he could do – take a taxi to the police station; ask Max if he drove to the lecture; go home for his father’s car. ‘In that case why don’t you just call Dad?’ he asks his mother, but she seems to have gone insane and starts talking about establishment politics and active resistance, and before Josh can figure out how this relates to his father’s car Zoe has taken over the phone and says, ‘This is ridiculous, I don’t know why Mum even called you, we can just get a taxi.’
His mother says something in the background, then there’s a muffled exchange between the two of them, Josh waiting on the line and imagining emails from Bethany that he might be missing.
He is still hovering in the hallway outside the seminar room where Nagymama might even now be reuniting with Pali Kalmar.
Zoe and his mother continue their background negotiating and then Zoe returns to the line and tells him that there is really no reason for him to come and get them, they are perfectly fine and can catch a taxi or walk to their own car, which anyway is parked closer to the city than he would be able to get. She seems to have transformed into an efficient and businesslike person to counterbalance his mother’s new flaky political activism.
Josh says, ‘But don’t you need … bail, or something?’
‘No, they don’t do that for minor things like this,’ Zoe says. ‘And anyway, how would you be able to bail us out?’
Josh ignores the provocation and says, ‘I’ll come and meet you then.’ Unwilling to relinquish the sense of emergency that had momentarily turned his mind away from his own misery, and the excuse to weasel out of meeting his dream-crushing fantasy grandfather.
‘You can if you want,’ Zoe says. ‘But I think we’ll just go straight home. We’re pretty tired.’
‘Just text me where the car is, okay? I’ll meet you there.’
He hangs up and turns to go back into the seminar room, straightening his shoulders and bracing himself.<
br />
The small crowd of people are still bunched together at the front of the room, surrounding the table where Kalmar holds court. Josh can see Nagymama towards the back, behind a row of people larger than her. He can hear what Kalmar is saying to the lucky supplicant who has his attention: he is describing the prime number theorem, his own great elementary proof from the fifties and his work on more recent complex analysis. Josh knows this work well: he has struggled with Fourier transforms and the zeroes of the Riemann zeta function and experienced moments of clarity where they fall together into a pattern more like music than mathematics, like a natural internal rhythm. He would normally be excited to hear about this topic, the great mathematician walking them through the paths to that brightly lit place. But Kalmar is sullied. Even if he is Josh’s real grandfather – especially if he is – he appears to Josh as a betrayer and a destroyer. Josh knows he is being irrational: it’s not as though Harry Kesten’s work didn’t exist before Kalmar conjured it up. But he can’t help how his skin now prickles to hear Kalmar’s voice, the arrogant largeness of his vowels, the creaking villainy of his accent.
Nagymama is very stooped and small at the back of the crowd, and when Josh gets to her and touches her on the arm she looks up with no apparent recognition.
‘Nagymama?’ Slightly spooked at the vacancy on her face, which reminds Josh of Nagypapa at the end when the old man was batshit crazy.
‘What is it, darling?’ she says, coming back online.
‘Sorry, Nagymama.’ He leans down to speak close to her ear. ‘I have to go and help Mum and Zoe. They’ve been arrested.’
Probably no need to alarm his grandmother with this information but he’d had a yen to say the dramatic words out loud. He regrets it immediately: her face collapses in undisguised horror. ‘But it’s okay,’ he whispers quickly, ‘they’re totally fine, it’s no big deal.’
Nagymama is already in motion. She turns towards the door of the seminar room, moving along the aisle at a fast shuffle that must be her approximation of a run. He doesn’t try to speak to her again until they have made their way out of the seminar room and down the corridor. He convinces her to sit down on a bench a safe distance away from the room, and he explains more fully what has happened as far as he understands it, and tries to calm her down.
‘It’s not like they’ve been arrested arrested,’ he says. ‘It must have just been, I don’t know, a misunderstanding, some trouble at this protest and somehow they got caught up in it.’
She looks doubtful.
‘You should go back into the lecture. Really, Nagymama, there’s nothing to worry about. And anyway, the city’s closed to cars and, well, I might have to walk a fair way to get to them.’ He is not meeting them in the city, but surely the little lie is justified if he can convince his grandmother not to get involved. ‘Go back and speak to Pali Kalmar. You’ve waited so long.’ Shockingly there is a thickening in his throat and tightening around his eyes. The rush of feeling is too unwieldy to think about; he tamps it down and helps his grandmother up from the bench.
‘Okay, darling,’ she says. ‘I will go back.’
‘Great, okay. I’ll order a taxi for when you come out.’
‘It is no need,’ she says, and he doesn’t push it.
He walks with her, feeling as they make their slow way down the corridor how much has changed – they had walked this way together not an hour ago, when Josh was a different person, innocent and self-satisfied, ready to claim his genetic heritage. They get to the room and he holds the door open for her. Still the same eager crowd around Pali Kalmar’s table. Josh can no longer hear Kalmar’s voice, only some guy droning on about his own research, something to do with Ramsey theory, Kalmar’s open conjecture about the conditions for order that draws so many people towards it with the illusory promise of attainable revelation. Josh has had his own crack at that particular problem, for which Kalmar has offered a cash reward to anyone who can find a proof. Josh, in the self-assured youth that ended half an hour ago, had pictured himself presenting the proof to his new grandfather as an offering, a sealing of their connection. What an idiot. He is glad to have an excuse to leave.
He says goodbye to Nagymama and goes outside, away from the maths department, striking out across campus towards the open air of other people’s dramas. His mother and sister, arrested. He keeps his mind busy making a narrative of the story that he will give to Max later: Arrested for making a public nuisance of themselves! I expect it from my sister but my mother … A way to start spinning his family’s weirdness into a safely amusing anecdote.
He finds his mother’s car parked in the side street in Surry Hills, though she and Zoe are not there yet.
He leans on the bonnet and taps out an email to Bethany on his phone. Found out something terrible at Pali Kalmar’s lecture, it’s about my research, really want to talk to you about it. He would like a drink.
His mother and sister arrive a few minutes later. They are with a tall, heavily tattooed woman and in the middle of a gust of talk and adrenaline, which doesn’t stop. They have been released without charges, although his mother will have a warning on her record for the next nine months. Bizarrely, it seems that her part in the public disturbance was more serious than Zoe’s.
‘What?’ she says when he raises his eyebrows at her. ‘I’m pretty much a hardened criminal. I might become an anarchist.’
Zoe doubles over in a fit of giggling.
‘Don’t mind her,’ the strange-looking woman says, putting a hand on his sister’s back. ‘She’s been a bit hysterical since they released us. I’m Sal, by the way.’
‘Josh,’ says Josh, trying not to look like he is checking out her ink.
His mother gets into the driver’s seat, which is disappointing – Josh had been hoping to justify his involvement by driving them home. He is entirely superfluous.
Zoe gets in the front and she and his mother keep talking about what happened at the police station. ‘It was all so sort of clean,’ Zoe says. ‘I expected prison to be, I don’t know, grimier or something.’
‘Oh dear, they didn’t give me back my hairclips,’ his mother says, reaching up and tucking a flyaway piece of hair behind her ear.
‘Really? They had this list of everything they took from my pockets – they even gave me back a chewing gum wrapper.’
‘They were very nice.’
‘The woman was. Did you have the mousey woman and the really young guy interviewing you?’
As though they are comparing notes about acquaintances they met on holiday.
‘I think I had the same ones,’ his mother says. ‘When the woman took me into the interview room and I saw there were two of them I expected it to be a good cop/bad cop situation like they always have in the movies. But they were both quite pleasant.’
‘I think the guy was trying to do bad cop with me but he wasn’t very convincing. He kept asking what I’d been planning to do with the photos.’
‘Oh and I did find the search a bit confronting.’
‘Did the woman do that thing where she pulled on your bra and got you to lean forward to see if anything fell out?’
‘Yes! I had this silly urge to say something about not having the kind of assets to hide any contraband.’
Zoe starts giggling again.
Sal, looking out the window on the other side of the back seat, says, ‘You know it might not have been so much fun if you looked different, right?’
‘Oh, and the mug shot!’ Zoe says, ignoring her. ‘That wasn’t what I expected at all. Where was the measuring thing against the wall and the surly guy with the big camera? It was more like getting a passport photo done – you know, where they tell you to stand on the footprints.’
‘And the electronic finger-scanning machine!’
They keep going like this, and Josh is feeling not very comfortable about the new camaraderie
they have discovered. He has his own problems with his mother but recently they have seemed like nothing compared to his sister’s problems with her. He was under the impression that they were barely speaking, and suddenly they are going to rallies together, they are getting arrested and having cop-show adventures together?
An email from Bethany pops up on his phone: What happened?? Maybe there should be beer when you tell me about it. Manning, tonight?
While the fizz of this is still working its way through his veins Josh’s mother finally notices that he is in the car. ‘By the way, what were you doing when I called you?’ she says.
Without stopping to think about it he gives them the straight answer, that Nagymama had asked him to attend a lecture with her, a famous Hungarian mathematician called Pali Kalmar. And then, finding that he has the attention of everyone in the car, he goes on into his own ideas: how significant Kalmar seems to have been to Nagymama, and his suspicions about the whole thing.
They are almost home when his mother cuts him off. ‘Wait, shit, hold on,’ she says. ‘Are you saying that Nagymama is there now? That Pali Kalmar is actually at Sydney Uni and she’s there with him?’
‘Yeah?’
Maybe he shouldn’t have dropped it on her in the car like this. Probably he has been extremely insensitive. He wonders what Bethany would say about it.
‘I guess it’s pretty full-on for you, huh?’ he says. ‘I mean, you’re not necessarily Kalmar’s daughter, but still.’
His mother does a laugh-snort combination. Josh stares at the back of her head, jolted. God knows he’s no expert on human emotions but he had not expected either laughing or snorting to come out of this story.
