The blue flower is associated, consciously or not, with the human blue eye; and as the floral blue is in all or nearly all instances pure and beautiful, it is like the most beautiful eye...
The woman told me that most people keep throughout their lives the memory of the soft skin and the loving eyes of their mothers. I listened politely but I did not believe the woman. I had been looking at the leaves of the begonia because I connected the green and the red with water and fish.
On another day the woman showed me another book. I have since learned that the book was The Language of Flowers, illustrated by Kate Greenaway and published (undated) by Frederick Warne and Company, London and New York. The woman told me I could find in that book what she called the meaning of my favourite flowers. I was not interested in the book then, but a month ago when I saw a copy of the book I looked for two plants that I have named on some of these pages. Beside lilac I read: the first emotions of love. Beside tamarisk I read: crime.
After a few days in the weatherboard house I understood why my father had called our relatives religious maniacs.
The people of the weatherboard house had been, five years before, among the founders of a utopian settlement in the mountains between King River and Broken River. When I was at the weatherboard house the settlement in the mountains was going through hard times and some of the founders had left, but almost every week a new recruit – a young man or a young woman – would call at the house on the way to join the settlement.
I thought these people were far from being religious maniacs. If it had been possible I would have gone off myself to the community in the mountains. I thought of it as a landscape from mediaeval Europe transplanted to the headwaters of the King River. The settlers went to mass each morning in their chapel; by day they tended their herds or tilled their crops; at night they practised arts and crafts or discussed theology. Living simple and virtuous lives in the mountains, the settlers would not have been afraid if they had seen the signs in the sky of the end of the world.
The people in the weatherboard house talked often about Europe. They bought strangely shaped loaves of bread and strangely coloured sausages in the suburb of Carlton. They drank wine with their evening meal. They often said that the lives of most Catholics around them lacked ceremony and richness.
I arrived at the weatherboard house on a Saturday. That same evening I was invited to help weave a wreath from the grey branches and the green leaves of a fig-tree. When the wreath had been woven, red candles were stood upright among the branches and the leaves. The whole was then hung by thin wires from the chandelier in the centre of the parlour. I was told that this was an Advent wreath and that every Catholic household in Europe hung such a thing during the season of Advent.
Every night the people of the weatherboard house gathered in the parlour for prayers. On the night when the Advent wreath had been hung, they added to their prayers a hymn with Latin words and a sad melody. Today, thirty-five years later, I remember only the first words of that mournful song for Advent:
Rorate coeli desuper
Et nubes pluant justum.
I was told that the words might have been translated as:
Drop down dew, ye heavens,
and let the clouds sprinkle
rain on the just one.
I was told also that the words of the hymn ought to be understood as the yearning of the people of the Old Testament for the Saviour who would be born at Christmas. Yet the song made me think not of the Jews wandering among rocks and sand but of a woebegone tribe wandering like gipsies across an immense grassland under low grey clouds.
I had not been to church since I had left the house with the fish pond on the lawn. In the district between the Ovens and Reedy Creek we had had no motor-car and my father had said we were surely to be excused from having to attend mass, which was fifteen kilometres away in Wangaratta. When I arrived at the weatherboard house I could not have said what week had been reached in the church year. Seeing the wreath being made, I thought Advent must have arrived already; but I was not going to appear ignorant by asking the expert Catholics around me.
Next morning, which was a Sunday morning, I learned that the people of the house had woven their wreath and sung their hymn a few days early for Advent. In the parish church of Saint Mark, Fawkner, the priest strode out to the altar in bright green. The Sunday was the last of the season after Pentecost, and when the gospel was read I heard from the fifteenth through to the thirty-fifth verse of the twenty-fourth chapter of the Gospel of Saint Matthew.
When you shall see the abomination of desolation, which was spoken of by Daniel the Prophet, standing in the holy place (he that readeth, let him understand)...
These words, like most of the words of my religion, had many meanings. Whenever I heard these words as a child, I was standing myself in the holy place: in a large weatherboard church in McCrae Street, Bendigo; or in a tiny church with poles propping its walls on the continuation inland of the Great Ocean Road at Nirranda; or in the fibro-cement and weatherboard church-school in Landells Road, Pascoe Vale. I was standing in the holy place and hearing the words, but I had my missal open in my hands – I was also reading. I was he who reads: he who was commanded to understand.
Around me in the church, hundreds of other people – children and adults – were reading the same words that I was reading. Yet I had no doubt that I was the one commanded to understand; I was of all those readers the true reader.
I was the true reader because I had always known that everything I read was true. If it was not true in the district between the Moonee Ponds and the Merri, or wherever I happened to be standing or sitting when I read, still it was true in some district elsewhere.
When I had read those words in weatherboard churches or in the fibro-cement and weatherboard church-school, I had understood that all the districts of the world would one day be destroyed. At some time before the end, the people of all the districts of the world would flee from their homes; they would flee with their few sticks of furniture and their rags of clothes, but they would not escape. The people of every district would suffer, and the females would suffer worst. Then, while the people were still fleeing, they would see Jesus himself: the person who had first spoken the words that had later been written by Matthew. The people trying to escape would see, towards the end, the true speaker of the words they had once read, coming in the clouds of heaven with much power and majesty.
Whenever I had read the gospel for the last Sunday after Pentecost I had seen a sky darkening, men and their wives and children fleeing, and then the grey clouds of heaven drifting towards the people. But without lifting my eyes from the page, I knew that the sky was mostly blue over the district where I was standing; I knew that men were pushing lawnmowers across their backyards and women were opening the doors of ovens and then pouring cups of water into baking-dishes where legs of lamb or rolls of beef were roasting. I knew that these men and women saw no clouds drifting towards them.
Yet what I read was true. Somewhere the clouds were drifting, and one day he who reads would look up and see the sky of the gospel drifting towards him and would know then that he had always understood. He would know then that the tribes of the earth were about to mourn and that the stars were about to fall from heaven. He would know that angels were about to gather the elect from the four winds. He would know also that when the end had almost arrived he would think for the last time about the fig-tree. Wherever I stood in my native district in the year before I turned thirteen, I thought of my girlfriend as watching me from somewhere just behind my left shoulder. My chief pleasure for much of that year was to feel myself watched by the girl-woman I called my girlfriend. Yet along with my pleasure I felt a mild sadness. I called the girl at my shoulder by the same name as the girl from Bendigo Street but I knew she was not the same girl.
The two girls looked alike, and their voices sounded alike, but they were not the same girl. Even after the girl from Bendigo Street had sat with me in o
ur classroom on a certain rainy afternoon and we had exchanged messages without looking at one another – even after that day the two girls were not the same. I still said more to the girl at my shoulder than I had said to the girl from Bendigo Street, and I believed that the girl at my shoulder could have said more to me than the girl from Bendigo Street could have said.
On Sunday afternoons when I stood among the puddles in Sims Street and I looked north across the grass and saw at the same time from the sides of my eyes the reddish blur of the brick veneer houses just across Cumberland Road to my left, I was pleased to be about to walk the last few paces to Bendigo Street. I was pleased to be about to stand by a front gate and to see two black boots by a front door. But I seemed to be about to disturb somewhat the proper arrangement of the world around me.
Between me and the grass and the sky and the houses of my native district was another layer of places, and in that other layer was the girl who watched from my shoulder. On most Sunday afternoons a moment arrived when I stood so that the two girls were at the same angle behind me, the girl at my shoulder occupying a place in her layer of places such that she was directly between me and the place further away where the girl from Bendigo Street was waiting to hear her dog bark as I walked past. Perhaps at that moment I should have supposed that the layers of the world were in their true positions, and that the layer of places nearer to me – and the girl who watched me from out of that layer – was only a layer of signs that should have guided me to the further layer and the girl waiting in that layer to hear her dog bark. But I was more likely to think at such moments that the many layers of the world could have been easily dislodged. Even if I did not think of the girl and her parents fleeing from Bendigo Street to the mountains or of the stars falling from heaven or of the elect being gathered from the four winds, I was still likely to think of the layers around me as being easily dislodged. I was likely to make myself sure of the layer of the world that was nearest me, and of the girl who watched me from that layer of the world, in case I found one day that the other layer of the world was not where I had last seen it.
When we were told by our teacher in the winter of 1951 that several hundred Balts had arrived in our district and that some of the Balt children would be coming to our school, I was the only boy or girl who knew where the Baltic Sea was and what were the names of the three Baltic countries.
In the atlas among my schoolbooks, Ireland was still the Irish Free State, Danzig was still a Free City, and three separate countries, neatly shaped and distinctively coloured, rested one on top of the other by the pale-blue Baltic Sea. Sometimes I thought I could have given up my ambition to be a trainer or a breeder of racehorses in a mansion surrounded by grasslands if I could have become a professor of geography in a university. I thought of a university as a secular monastery fenced around by high brick walls and iron spikes. Far away inside the walls and the spikes, at the heart of a maze of lawns and ferneries and flower-beds and ornamental lakes, the professors and their students sat in book-lined rooms. The student of geography was required, by the end of the course, to have memorised the world in considerable detail. At the final examination blank paper and coloured pencils were provided for the student to reproduce remote islands and landlocked countries.
In my years at primary school I had never earned less than perfect marks for what my teachers called geography. Every week in the period known as free reading I read my atlas. I learned so easily what I read, and yet I saw so many thousands of items waiting to be learned, that I assumed I could have made my life’s work the study of this vast body of knowledge. My studies would make me in time a man who was the admiration of students and colleagues: a man who could talk for hours in the language of the atlas until the air around me was thick with invisible layers of maps.
Each day in my book-lined room at the university, my students ply me with questions. Today they ask me about Idaho. I lean back in my chair and I wrinkle my forehead. The hearts of the young female students especially go out to me when I lower my eyelids and recite, as easily as though I read from a compendious volume, the names of a myriad of streams and a veritable patchwork of districts in the Bitterroot Range.
When I had no map in front of me I saw the Baltic countries as grey – the grey of the smoke drifting over all the bombed cities of Europe, or of the rats that the Europeans had had to eat as food during the war.
Three Balt children arrived at my school: two girls and a boy. The girls were put in my class although they seemed older than my classmates and myself. Both girls had well-rounded breasts. The Balts were not the only girls in my school with breasts, but the two girls seemed more graceful and womanly than any schoolgirls I had known.
The boys and girls of my school hung back from the children of the Baltic countries, but I went up to the girls to talk to them. Their faces interested me. I had not expected such clear skin and such serene smiles on girls from the grey, ruined cities of Europe, and I could never have believed that those two girls had eaten rats.
I showed the girls a certain page in my atlas. Then I turned aside and recited without looking at the page the names of the three Baltic countries and their capital cities. Each girl clasped her hands in front of her breasts and smiled and thanked me. When I saw that I had touched them I felt an urge to protect them – I a twelve-years-old boy in short pants and they two buxom thirteen- or fourteen-years-old young women with a wise sadness behind their smiles. I wanted to warn the Balt girls not to expect to find anyone else at the school who was interested in Europe. I wanted to protect the Balts from hearing the older boys talking filth, as they sometimes did. I wanted to keep the Balts from seeing in certain streets of my district the few shabby houses that I called slums. I wanted to teach the Balts my own language so that no one would laugh at their odd speech. I wanted to talk with them about all they had seen during the war – not to distress them but to remind them that they were safe now between the Moonee Ponds and the Merri, with only grey clouds passing sometimes overhead.
I was drawn to the young Baltic women but I would have been angry and embarrassed if anyone had said they were my girlfriends. From the day when I had met the Balts, the sight of their breasts had forbidden me to think of the young women as anything other than friends of mine. The two Balts were my friends, although they sometimes smiled at one another while I was with them as though they were two aunts and I was their favourite nephew.
I asked the two young women to teach me their language in exchange for my teaching them the language of my district. For my first lesson they brought to school and invited me to borrow a small book about their homeland. The book had parallel texts in my language and theirs. The young women wanted me to take the book home and to learn the words of their national anthem in their language and in mine.
I was reluctant to take the book at first. It was only thin and bound with paper, but the pictures in it were tinted in rich, autumnal colours. I turned the pages and saw green-black forests, blue lakes with red-gold reedbeds; many-roomed country houses and castles; cobbled streets and horse-drawn carts. I thought the book might have been an heirloom, but today I suppose it was something prepared and printed after the war and distributed hastily by people who feared that a whole country was on the way to disappearing.
I wrapped the book carefully before I took it home. All afternoon and evening I studied the two sets of words for the anthem. I wanted to amaze the young women next morning by reciting their own words faultlessly. After that they would teach me more of their strange language. I would duplicate everything I knew; I would discover a second name for everything in my native district for grass and sky and clouds and even the puddles underfoot.
I decided I would teach the Baltic language to my girlfriend. She would have scoffed if I had suggested we learn it openly in the schoolground, but every Sunday afternoon I would teach her a little. I had forgotten the hundreds of Balts in my district who spoke the language that I was learning. I was thinking of my new language
as a secret code. I foresaw my young aunts teaching me the words for love and deeply and dream.
I spoke that night in the Baltic language to my father. I recited to him the first line of the national anthem of the homeland of the two young women. The equivalent words in my own language are:
Land of ours! Land of the noble heroes!
I should have known what my father would say. When I had told him the meaning of the words I had learned and the name of the country they referred to, my father said he was pleased to say that he had never before heard the name of that country, much less the name of any noble hero the country had produced.
My father spoke fiercely but not unkindly. Such countries had no heroes. Such countries had only slaves and masters. If he and I had been born in any such country, my father said, we would have had to bow and scrape and doff our caps left, right, and centre as soon as we had stepped out of our front door in the morning. The duke or the earl or the lord of the manor could have sent his lackeys into our house to take the bread off our table or the money out of our pockets or even our sisters or daughters out of their beds.
It was not my father’s words that dissuaded me from learning the Baltic language. When I tried to recite their national anthem to the young women next morning I was trying to pronounce words that I had read but had never heard spoken. The young women were embarrassed for my sake when I rattled off my strange sounds. We understood that we would have to begin again by saying very simple things to one another; but after a few days the young women had made friends with some of the older girls and I was playing football with the boys.
The young Balt boy at my school grinned at me but knew hardly any words of my language. He was the only male Balt I had seen, but I understood that hordes of young Balt men were living in a cluster of grey buildings that looked like a disused factory in Cumberland Road. Almost as soon as I had heard about the Balt men, I heard that some of the men had been walking up boldly to young women in the streets of my district and even to some of the older schoolgirls and asking the young women or the girls to go with them down the steep hill where Bell Street ended at the Moonee Ponds Creek.
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