I knew a boy who lived in Magdalen Street, almost at the edge of the steep hill. Every day the boy called on the Balts in their grey buildings, so he told me. He showed me empty cigarette tins and tobacco tins that he said the Balts had given him. I had collected myself many kinds of cigarette tins and tobacco tins, but I had never seen the strange foreign tins that the Balts had used. I washed my hands after touching the tins, in case they were contaminated by some European disease.
One dark afternoon in winter I walked beside the boy from Magdalen Street to stare at the Balts’ buildings. The boy told me that the Balts he knew would not be home from work yet, and for that reason we could only walk among the grey buildings without going inside. The buildings were by then almost black against the weak, yellowish sunset. I wondered whether the yard had always been muddy and the buildings shabby or whether the Balts had dirtied the place since they had arrived there from Europe.
The boy beside me picked up a tobacco tin from a heap of rubbish near a hut. On all our walk I saw no Balt men, although I heard voices from inside one of the huts.
We walked away from the huts and south along Cumberland Road to Bell Street. We turned right at Bell Street and walked to the ragged wire fence and the NO ROAD sign. We climbed through the fence and walked across the grass to the place where the ground fell away.
My district was quiet in those days. We heard only an occasional hum from a motor-car far away. The Moonee Ponds Creek was below us, in its deep valley. The district on the other side was mostly marked by streets of houses, as my own district was marked, but the streets were already deep in shadow. The aerodrome, which I had never seen, was just out of sight behind a plateau. Where the valley opened out towards the south-east was the raised wooden circuit of a bicycle racing track, and near it was the ellipse of white grit where the greyhounds raced at Napier Park.
The other side of the valley seemed a strange and lonely place to me, even though I had been born only a half-hour’s walk from the Moonee Ponds. I supposed the valley would have seemed a desolate place to a Balt. I thought of one of the Balt men walking to the edge of the valley from his black buildings and then looking west towards his land of the noble heroes. The Balt would crumple; he would burst into tears, I thought, to see districts so strange and to think of all the young women in those districts who had not even seen the Baltic countries in an atlas.
Just in front of me was the first clump of gorse bushes. This was what we had come to see, my friend told me. Every Saturday and Sunday afternoon since the Balts had first arrived in our district, the gorse on the hillside had been crowded, according to the boy from Magdalen Street, with what he called shaggers. The Balt men were crazy about shagging. They had been locked in prison camps since the end of the war, and now they were taking the young women of our district into the gorse bushes above the Moonee Ponds and shagging them to their hearts’ content.
In the winter of 1951 I knew that men and women fitted their bodies together much as dogs or cattle did. I knew which part of my body was meant to fit into a female body and I knew what shape that part of me had to take before it could fit. But although I had peered closely sometimes between the legs of a female child, I had never touched what I saw there. I had never thought of that female part as having any shape other than the shape I had seen. I thought of that part as a fissure, a narrow opening no wider than the slot of a money box. The flesh around the opening I thought of as hairless, white, and as firm as the back of a hand. During the fitting together of male and female, the male part would have been pushed, I thought, with much effort against the female part until at last the mere tip of the male part was wedged for a crucial moment between the two unyielding doors of the female.
All this was a natural parallel of the act of kissing, I thought. I had seen characters kissing in a few films but I had not observed them closely. I thought at the age of twelve and for nearly ten years afterwards that the act of kissing was the pressing together of sealed lips.
In the district between the Moonee Ponds and the Merri in the year 1951, I foresaw myself kissing the girl from Bendigo Street when we were perhaps fifteen years old, marrying her when we were twenty-one, and afterwards pressing our bodies together every month or so. In bed at night in the year when I foresaw these things, I sometimes pressed my thumb and the base of my index finger together to make what I supposed was a replica of the female part; I then pushed with my swollen boy’s part against the narrow aperture. I pushed until I was tired and angry but the gap had not widened.
When the Balts shagged the females of our district, the men from Europe wore sheaths of golden rubber over themselves.
My friend, the boy from Magdalen Street, decided one day to teach me all I needed to know about men and women. Not much of what he told me was new to me, but I was astonished to hear about the yellow rubber. I was also confused, and the boy who instructed me was sometimes vague himself. I believed the Balt men wore rubber over themselves as much from bravado as from fear of impregnating the young women of our district. I also believed that the rubber would have inflicted at least a mild pain on the young women. And I believed that no one else in our district before the coming of the Balts had worn rubber: the Balts, I thought, had brought their sheaths of gold rubber, like their strangely coloured tobacco tins and their invisible European germs, from their grey homeland.
I wanted to learn the worst I could learn about the Balts, with their heads shaped like soccer balls and their vicious blue eyes. I wanted to see them wearing their gold armour.
On Saturday afternoons in the year when I was twelve, I was allowed to go with boys I knew to the Tasma cinema in Bell Street. The audience was mostly children, but some of the older boys had their girlfriends sitting in their laps. After I had heard how the Balt men spent their Saturday afternoons, I did not want to sit among the screaming kids in the Tasma. I told the boy from Magdalen Street I would spend the next Saturday afternoon with him, looking out for shaggers in the gorse above the Moonee Ponds.
On an afternoon when my mother thought I was watching Curtain Call at Cactus Creek, I went to the house of the boy in Magdalen Street. He pointed out that the weather was not really shaggers’ weather. Too many grey clouds were drifting in from the west and threatening rain. But I would not be talked out of going.
At the top of the hill the boy told me he sometimes ran down through the gorse screaming and howling. When he did this, the boy said, a Balt would jump up from behind every bush with his trousers clutched around him. All the Balts would jump off the girls they were shagging; they would stagger to their feet to see what the terrible noise was. Today though, the boy told me, we would walk quietly and perhaps creep up on some of the shaggers.
The boy and I found signs that people had been on the hillside recently – a broken length of comb and a crushed ball of a handkerchief in a snug place among the waist-high bushes – but we saw no shaggers. Yet when we reached the creek at the bottom of the valley, the boy pointed behind me and I saw, high on the hill, the head and shoulders of a man looking around him.
The man was too far away for me to be sure that he was a Balt, but he went on looking around as though he belonged where he stood. I thought I recognised the moment when he noticed the two boys looking up at him from beside the creek, and I was surprised that he did not drop down at that moment but went on staring as though we two boys were the intruders.
I tried to imagine the lower parts of the man, and the yellow part of him pointing upwards in the shade of the gorse bushes. I waited to see the head and shoulders of a young woman appearing beside the man – perhaps some young woman that I had passed every day in the streets of my district. But the women were more cautious than the Balts, the boy had told me; the women always stayed hidden.
After the boy and I had turned away, I wondered whether the man had been a Balt after all. I thought he might have been a man whose girlfriend had been stolen by the Balts and who had come to torment himself by looking around the hills
ide where some Baltic brute had worked on the young woman with his barbarous yellow rubber.
I walked with the boy from Magdalen Street north along the Moonee Ponds, mostly following the east bank but sometimes crossing the stream at a shallow ford of stones and gravel. The boy showed me pools where he and his friends had swum naked, caves in cliffs where they had smoked cigarettes, beaches where they had sunned themselves in summer or grilled sausages over camp fires in winter.
By a deep pool a man stood with a net on a long pole. He dragged the net through the water close to the bank and then hoisted it out of the water and up into the air. The man held the net under his chin and peered into it. When we asked him, the man said he was looking for skipjacks, which he said were half-grown dragonflies. He asked us did we ever go fishing. When we said we did not, he said nothing more to us and dipped his net again.
The course of the creek swerved and twisted. I became pleasantly confused. I could see grey fences of backyards on a green clifftop, but I could not have said which part of my native district I was looking at. Already I was thinking of myself looking afterwards at a map and trying to follow my route beside the creek with a finger gliding across a page. That day was one of many days in my life when I have wanted to be at the same time myself lost in my surroundings and myself looking afterwards at maps that explain not only where I was but why I supposed at the time that I was elsewhere.
That was also one of many days when I reminded myself that the pattern of streets and footpaths laid over my district was only one of many patterns that might have been laid over it. Creeks and rivers offered hints of other patterns I had never seen. I might well have thought I could return to the valley of the Moonee Ponds whenever I wanted to see such hints of other patterns. I could never have supposed in 1951 that the shape of the Moonee Ponds itself would be changed in my lifetime, in order to allow a road known as a freeway to pass along the valley where boys from my school had swum naked and a man had netted skipjacks among the water plants.
The boy and I rested on a beach of coarse sand by a bend in the creek. The boy was a few months older than myself. Like myself he was acknowledged to have a girlfriend. But whereas my girlfriend was thin and angular, his girl had the beginnings of curves on her body. Without meeting the eye of the boy from Magdalen Street, and as lightly as I could ask, I asked him had he ever brought his girlfriend down to the creek.
The boy might have told me almost any sort of story and I would have believed it or pretended to believe it. Instead, he knelt and began smoothing the sand around him with wide sweeps of his forearm and then with short, fanning movements of the hand such as I had used in my backyard between Bendigo Creek and Huntly Race in order to clear the ground before I built a racecourse and stud properties on my first grasslands.
The boy drew with a twig on the sand an outline of the torso of a human female. He drew the shoulders and the hips hastily but he worked with care on the two breasts, and he sifted handfuls of pebbles at the edge of the creek before he found two stones suitable for resting on the sandy mounds as nipples.
I smoothed my own patch of sand and drew a figure like the figure drawn by the boy from Magdalen Street. While I was scraping up two small hills for the breasts I was uneasy. I had assumed that the figure drawn in the sand by the boy beside me was meant to represent his girlfriend, but I did not want the boy to assume that I was drawing in the sand the girl from Bendigo Street. I had not thought who the female might be, or even whether she was girl or woman. And even if I had been forced to say that the female in the sand was the girl I was in love with, I would have preferred not to say whether the male kneeling above the female was myself or the man of Europe who would get her as soon as she was old enough.
The boy had sketched the outlines of two parted thighs. Now he knelt carefully between the thighs and began to dig a small hole with his fingers. He made the hole as deep as his fingers were long, and he tried to keep the hole neatly cylindrical.
Until the boy had begun to dig the hole, I had thought he knew the female body well. Now I thought the boy knew hardly more than I knew. I thought the boy was digging in the sand the steep-sided hole he would have liked to find between female thighs rather than the much narrower opening that was actually there.
He lay down over his female. He reached one hand underneath himself and, so far as I could see, pretended to take out what I had heard him on other days call his jock. Then he pushed with his hips as I supposed he had seen male dogs pushing against bitches.
Watching him, I had a moment of recklessness. I thought of myself digging an even more preposterous hole than the boy had dug and of flinging myself against it to outdo him. But the moment passed, and when the boy from Magdalen Street got to his feet I was already wiping away the outlines I had drawn.
There was no hole for me to fill – I had not even begun to dig into the sand. After I had smoothed away the thighs and the torso I had only to toss the two pebble-nipples into the Moonee Ponds and then to make the low hills of breasts level again with the plains around them.
And from the fig-tree learn a parable: when the branch thereof is now tender, and the leaves come forth, you know the summer is nigh. So likewise you, when you shall see all these things, know that it is nigh, even at the doors.
Even the gospel was more than one gospel. The reading for the last Sunday after Pentecost began with the abomination of desolation and with a warning to the reader. For three quarters of its length, the gospel for that last Sunday of the year continued to warn. Near the end came the clouds and the four winds, and then the last pause before the ultimate turmoil. And in that last pause, startlingly under the terrible sky, the fig-tree appeared, with its leaves coming forth.
More clearly than anything I read or heard in my childhood, that last pause near the end of the last gospel of the year told me that every thing would always be more than one thing. The last pause told me that every thing would always contain another thing, which would contain still another thing or which would seem, absurdly at first sight, to contain the thing that had seemed to contain it.
Five years after I had heard the last gospel of the ecclesiastical year in the parish church of Saint Mark, Fawkner, I listened for the first time in my life to a piece of what I called classical music. Near the end of that music I heard a pause. The solemn themes of the music paused for a moment. Just before the clouds had drifted over all the sky and just before the four winds whistled and the last struggle began, I heard the pause of the summer that seemed nigh.
I have heard that pause many times since in pieces of music. I have heard the pause while I read the next-to-last page in many a book. The larger, the solemn themes are about to go into battle for the last time. By now, of course, the solemn themes are not themes but men and women, and when they pause for the last time they look over their shoulders.
They look back towards some district where they lived as children or where they once fell in love. Perhaps they see the green lawn or even the branch with green leaves that they saw in their native district. For a moment a simple theme is the only theme heard; the greenness appears in place of the greyness.
For an absurd moment within that moment, the listener or the reader dares to suppose that this after all is the last theme; this and not the other is the end; the green has outlasted the grey; the grey has been covered over at last by the green.
But this is only a moment within a moment. The clouds resume their drifting; the four winds whistle. The solemn themes turn to meet the storm.
Then let them that are in Judaea flee to the mountains...
In the spring of 1951 I first saw the leaves coming forth on the fig-tree in my backyard two months before I heard the fig-tree mentioned in the gospel. When I first saw the leaves I was living in the house with the fish pond behind it. I could not have imagined when I first saw the leaves that before I heard the gospel I would have travelled two hundred kilometres across the Great Divide to the district between the Ovens and Reedy C
reek and then back again to the old weatherboard house on the edge of a grassland near the backyard where my father had held me for my first photograph.
I heard the last gospel of the church year only a half-hour’s walk from where I had seen the leaves on the fig-tree but I knew while I heard the gospel that I would never see that particular fig-tree again – or the house with the fish pond or the girl from Bendigo Street.
When I heard the gospel I felt a heaviness pressing on me, but not for long. I was still only twelve years old, and the summer and the new church year were beginning. I had thought, as I thought every year on the last Sunday after Pentecost, of the end of the world drifting towards me like clouds or smoke from the direction of Europe or the Middle East; but then I had thought of a greenness within the greyness.
I was thinking every day of the settlement in the mountains between the King and the Broken. I was going to ask my parents not to take me to the other side of the city of Melbourne but to let me live with one of the families who grew potatoes in the red soil of clearings in the green forest and who sang the office of vespers and compline every evening in the timber chapel built with their own hands.
Something else kept me from feeling heaviness. Among the first words of the gospel for the last Sunday after Pentecost are the words addressed to the reader. I had always considered those words as addressed in a special sense to me.
Like many children, I was afraid of the end of the world. But even at the worst moment – even when the stars of heaven were falling and the sun was being darkened – I could still hear the sound of the words being read. Not even the end of the world could drown out the sound of the words describing it.
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