The Oldest Song in the World

by Sue Woolfe

  ‘I’m sorry –’

  ‘The trouble is – in that gloomy little library, you listened, no, you astonished me with the way you listened, your eyes almost protruding from their sockets. Every teacher becomes foolish because of a dream; perhaps the same dream: that one day a student will come along who connects with what you say, more than that, whose life can start over again because of what you say, their potential which had been imprisoned till then can shoot up like a fountain into their life, the way it was meant to.’

  She shot her hands up in the air and we both followed the imaginary sparkle of water thrusting up to the ceiling, which I noticed was stained and peeling from neglected leaks in the roof, as if she wasn’t important to the university, after all.

  ‘That’s a teacher’s hope, that what has inspired you might inspire someone else, your knowledge will become theirs, and the way you share this precious thing will waken them like –’

  She laughed wryly, her lips twisting at one end, and she paused, searching for an analogy.

  ‘Like the prince kissing the sleeping beauty?’ I asked.

  She laughed again. She seemed to do a lot of laughing, as if somewhere inside she was crying.

  ‘No. Yes. All right. Yes, I’ll admit it; I wanted to be the prince. Your prince,’ she said. ‘There you were, spending your employer’s wages reading my book instead of whatever you were paid to do, a simple uneducated reader whiling away a dull afternoon, but you were hungry, weren’t you?’

  I didn’t know whether to nod or not. I decided to nod.

  ‘Starving,’ I said, and then blushed because of the untruth.

  ‘Do you remember, you wondered how to pass on knowledge if it’s not written down and no one is ready to hear it? My book has caused much academic debate, oh, I’m not short of readers, I’ve lectured in great halls all over the world – but there I’d stumbled across a young woman standing on one leg in a suburban library, speculating on my ideas. This young woman reminded me of why I teach, of what’s worthwhile.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I said again, wondering if indeed I had been starving, though for the new life that love might bring. Not knowledge. I’d never been very interested in knowledge.

  There was a pause.

  ‘Now I look like a sentimental fool,’ she said. Sweat was pouring down her forehead, and I wasn’t entirely sure she wasn’t crying, the way she got out a crushed handkerchief festooned with green and yellow flowers, like an English teaset, unbundled it and mopped her cheeks.

  ‘You’re too important to be in trouble,’ I said.

  ‘Questions are being asked,’ she said, her voice sinking to a whisper. ‘Particularly by my Dean, who, incidentally, wants to use the data that the song might reveal.’

  ‘What for?’

  ‘His research. It might provide a missing link.’

  I wasn’t interested in his research. I’d seen him before, stalking hunch-backed in his black gown between the gold sandstone arches, absorbed in his thoughts.

  ‘What questions are being asked –?’

  She dashed her hand across the desk, pushing the letter towards me.

  ‘My judgement,’ she said. ‘In paving your way. The place I insisted you have, that could’ve been given to someone else. So, live up to that promise I glimpsed in you. Show me, show everyone, I didn’t make a mistake. Give the Dean what he wants. Agreed?’

  I knew I was supposed to leave, but I didn’t know how to. I couldn’t say yes, I couldn’t say no. I couldn’t leave the coast. I couldn’t go to a desert with no river, not a barren and lonely desert. But I couldn’t resist the insistence in her eyes.

  I tried to talk myself into it: if there really was something surprising in an ancient language I could help reveal to the world, then I’d be less ashamed of my country. My country would have something mystical at its heart, almost as good as the frescoes of Europe my father had coveted. I could put off my search for anchoring love until summer ended.

  ‘We’re told this song is known as the “Poor Thing” song,’ she said, as if this could persuade me. I was startled back into attention.

  ‘“Poor Thing?”’ I repeated. ‘Who’s the poor thing?’

  She ignored me. ‘It’s a very ancient song, said to be from the Dreaming, so the Dean hopes it might have ancient grammar preserved in it. Like an extinct butterfly preserved in amber.’

  At that moment, as if on cue, there was a peremptory banging on her door and before she could open it, the Dean popped his head around.

  ‘I must have that report for the five o’clock meeting,’ he said, speaking exclusively to her, and without excusing himself.

  ‘Of course,’ E.E. Albert assured him. ‘We’ll be finished here soon.’

  His grip on the door was white-knuckled.

  ‘Perhaps less laughter?’ he said.

  ‘Of course.’ She nodded and smiled like a doll. He stared at her a long moment. She kept smiling.

  ‘This is the student we’re sending to the desert,’ she said, to distract him from his stare.

  ‘Fine,’ he said. His eyes retreated but not to me.

  He slammed the door on us, on me. I had been made invisible again.

  His footsteps down the corridor were adamant. I kept wondering if he’d come back, apologise, say, I’m sorry, I wasn’t thinking, how silly of me. But his footsteps said: How dare you waste her time in gales of laughter.

  ‘But – for his research – won’t he have to listen to the recording of the song, even though he’s a man?’ I asked.

  ‘Of course! No! I’ll help him, of course!’ E.E. Albert amended quickly. ‘There are protocols in place.’

  I swallowed. I didn’t want to go, and especially I didn’t want to go for the Dean’s research. It was the mention of grammar that tipped the balance. My notes in the grammar lectures were full of sleepy doodles, one more proof that I was a failure, not only in the university but in life. This woman in front of me was the only person who’d ever thought otherwise. I’d keep being a failure. It was my lot.

  I can’t go.

  Say it, say it. Stop appeasing.

  ‘I’m sorry, I can’t go,’ I murmured.

  She didn’t hear me, or she pretended she couldn’t. She would make me speak my refusal clearly. So that then I’d feel guilty. I looked down, hoping the wood grain on her desk would help me to say it, admit to her that I couldn’t do it, I was inadequate, I’d be found out, I’d be exposed as the uninteresting person I really was.

  The air conditioning finally expired. Sweat was dripping down me, too, down my face onto my shirt. My sweat was rippling the letter that she’d pushed towards me; I gazed at those ripples. That’s when my vision cleared. I saw where the request had come from. And from whom.

  There are moments when you turn a corner, look in a particular direction, glimpse through a gap in a heavy velvet curtain, and in that moment everything turns on itself. My moment came with a crescendo of full-throated romantic music straight out of a Hollywood film. I couldn’t think or see or reason. My reasoning was effaced by a thousand violins and several oboes and a French horn and somewhere a piano tinkling high up in the heavens. Then a banner floated across the screen. There was a single word on it: Destiny.

  The letter was from a health clinic in the remote settlement of Gadaburumili. That name. I’d known that name almost as long as I’d known him. Of course it was the only place in the entire country he would’ve gone to – I’d often thought that. I’d ricocheted between certainty and uncertainty about it, and in the certain periods, I’d nursed fantasies of going after him. But what would I say when we met? And what if he didn’t remember me? What if that childhood meant nothing to him? And if I meant nothing? So, year after year, I’d found a reason, many reasons, not to go.

  And there was his signature – Adrian, though with a different surname. My silver-eyed boy on the river had been Ian. You could say that there was an Ian inside Adrian. It was all so inevitable that on one level, I wasn’t e
ven surprised.

  You. I was always talking to you.

  No one had been able to contact you for the funerals. I didn’t inform anyone where I thought you could be, because no one asked me. Their deaths excited no interest, not even from my father. There was no one else to be interested, even the police. It was a common boating accident to them, two women who didn’t know to slow down in the treacherous rips near the bridge pylon. Except that Diana knew everything about the river.

  You might be Adrian of Gadaburumili.

  I touched the signature that might be yours.

  I must’ve gasped.

  ‘He manages the clinic,’ she said, indicating the signature, a surname that was unrecognisable, that he might’ve invented. ‘No doubt he speaks the language.’

  I found something to say. ‘I thought the letter was from a linguist.’

  ‘This Adrian –’ she checked his surname, ‘is writing on behalf of the linguist.’

  Mother doesn’t say she’s going out on the boat with Diana until she’s getting dressed.

  I’m bewildered. ‘On a boat-trip? With Diana?’ My mother’s intimidated by your mother, she always has been, I suppose because she reasons that her husband’s mistress must be much more womanly than she is, and that’s what my father wants, a woman to be a woman, and my mother, rather than being angry, feels she’s in the wrong.

  I expect the worst, no, not the worst – I expect that Diana is taking her out on the boat to abuse her, to tell her to give her lover back, that he should die in her arms, not my mother’s. I should insist that my mother refuse to go.

  It’d be easy to hold my mother back. I could run in to my father’s room and beg him to call out to her from his sickbed, where his mind is dying. ‘Don’t leave me,’ I could coach him to call — he’s become a puppet to us, after we’ve been his – and my mother wouldn’t leave his side. But I don’t. Why don’t I? I have my own plans. I want to be alone with you, after your years of absence. You’ve only just returned, a figure with a backpack, yesterday. After all, while they’re out, while Diana is giving my unassuming mother a bad time, you’ll be alone at your house. I want to plead with you to take me away with you – wherever you live. So I say nothing to my mother. I watch silently as Diana skilfully manoeuvres her new deep-keeled boat against our little jetty with scarcely a bump. She can do something that’s impossible to do in our heavy old boat – she throws the steering so the stern slides compliantly into place.

  Mother, who hasn’t been on a boat since we got here all those years ago, lifts up her skirt and lumbers over the side. She’s become almost as wide as she is high. She needs my hand to steady her, my traitorous hand.

  ‘His pills in half an hour,’ is all she says to me.

  Perhaps those words tip the balance because Diana hears. Her mouth sets in a thin grimace that I later realise is hate. Hateful determination. How wise I am, afterwards. Still I say nothing, only wave goodbye, but they are gazing past each other at the river and neither of them waves back. They’ve scarcely turned the point when I untie our boat, motor to your house, pull over to your jetty. I clutch at the pylon and call.

  ‘Ian. Ian.’ No answer. I tie up. Still no answer. ‘Ian. Ian.’ Nothing. I climb up the cliff to the house, calling your name all the way. You don’t answer my knock. Diana’s left the door open, as she always does. My voice echoes through the rooms. You aren’t in the living room, not in the bedroom, not in your sleep-out. Slowly, I have to admit it: you aren’t here. I work it out: You must’ve left. You can’t have gone visiting – you have no friends along the river, as we don’t. We aren’t respectable enough. The gossip’s rife about Diana and my father, the condemnation of us all.

  The sole possible explanation for your absence is that you left at dawn, as soon as the tide came in high enough. It was an unusually high tide that morning for our mudflats, a 1.98, how indelibly these details are inscribed on my mind – your mother must’ve quietly slipped her new deep-keeled boat off its mooring, the boat she was later to take my mother away in, slipped it out so quietly that only the ducks and pelicans heard – we were downriver and usually heard all the boats coming in and out – until you were far out in the open water. She’d have taken you to the station for the dawn train, returned, waited for the tide to turn, to become the dangerous running tide, and then come to pick up my mother. But why had you left so soon after your return?

  I took a deep breath, came back to the shining desk, the impassioned eyes of E.E. Albert. It was essential to go to you at Gadaburumili. If it was you.

  ‘Yes,’ I breathed.

  The film music was still sounding in my ears; your name was still pounding in my heart. I heard her words ‘next week’ and ‘read’. It struck me that this all might be a plot, that she might know more about me than I’d realised, that she’d chosen me for this moment, that she was in cahoots with someone, maybe even with you. But all she was doing at that moment was jotting down a reading list, on and on, author after author, ripping off the page, handing it to me. I searched the page for Diana’s name, for a message, for a clue. Her pen was sketching circles in the air as she considered out loud how her worst student must prepare herself – in a week.

  ‘What reading have you done this year?’

  I struggled to recover.

  ‘Your book,’ I said quickly. It was true that I’d read it several times, but only so I could imagine clever things to say to her about it.

  ‘I suppose,’ I said, struggling then to be the right person, the one who should be sent, now that I knew I must go and find you, ‘you want me to form an opinion on why she is dying – if she’s not all that old – why government money and health plans don’t work.’

  ‘Why would I want that?’ she asked. ‘That’s sociology. Social work. Journalism.’

  I blushed. I tried again: ‘You want to know when this song is from? When exactly the Dreaming was?’

  ‘What’s that got to do with it? Goodness, young lady, we’re not historians! If nothing else, this task will teach you to be a linguist.’

  But my question lingered, and she added, in a fretting way: ‘The Dreaming is in all their creation stories. Who knows its age? Some white scholars say 20,000 years, some say 60. The Aboriginal people would say that the song, like their stories, was given to them by the Ancestors. But it’s only the grammar we’re interested in.’

  She put into my hand the page she’d written, and then took it back.

  ‘There’s something else you must do. The recording session mightn’t go smoothly. Since the singer is old and sick, she might stop and start the song, or ask you to come back a couple of times. You might have to edit the recording and cut the parts together so they make sense the way you heard it. You’ll have to edit it by the grammar. You won’t understand the language, of course, but it’d be best if your recording could make grammatical sense by the time you send it back to us. Do you remember Toolbox?’

  I tried to look as if memories were cascading through me.

  She sighed. She wrote down a web address.

  ‘It doesn’t translate Djemiranga – it’s not for translating, and anyway, it’s for another language in the area, but it will help you figure out Djemiranga’s grammar – that’s the language of Gadaburumili.’

  She added: ‘I’ve realised why they asked us.’

  ‘Because of me?’ I asked, I almost shouted.

  She was impatient enough to scoff. I blushed.

  ‘You think an important linguist in the desert knows about your essay attempts?’

  When I said nothing, she explained: ‘Because of me. This linguist who approached us – I’ve spoken with him at conferences. He’s internationally significant, Collin Collins, a Catholic missionary. You’d have noticed his journal articles on the reading list. You would’ve read how he’s found an 1840 translation into Djemiranga of St John’s gospel, done by a wandering remittance man, a poet, who built himself a hut and died there translating it – Collins found his
bones still clasping the hand-written pages. He finds the differences startling between it and modern Djemiranga –’

  She paused, gave up the thought, then went on.

  ‘I suppose he remembered us because of the Dean’s interest in Djemiranga, of course, but I’ve footnoted it as well, as you’d have noticed, and he would be aware of that. It’s quite a feather in my cap – in our cap, of course, that he’s asked for one of our students!’

  I realised suddenly that she was preening herself, that she didn’t have many opportunities to preen herself, despite being read all over the world. Despite her breasts.

  ‘He’s been out there for ten years,’ she was continuing. ‘He knows the language back to front. He’s not allowed to listen to the song, of course, but he’ll know which woman sings it. He’ll be there all the way, helping you. He’ll have to be out of the room during the time of the recording, and he won’t be able to help you edit it.’

  There seemed nothing more to be said. I wanted to be alone, to marvel at this sudden twist of fate in my tedious life. I got up.

  ‘Oh – silly me! It might help you to know what grammatical point the Dean’s particularly interested in,’ she said, so ironically that shame flushed through me like a drink of water. Now that I would really be found out, I plopped down.

  ‘It’s called the travel affix,’ she said.

  ‘The travel affix!’ I cried, nearly fainting with relief. I swallowed. Knowing about something at last was mottling my face with red, as if I was revealing my secret life.

  She’d learned to be ready to make excuses for me. ‘My lectures haven’t covered it yet.’

  So I spoke up.

  ‘It’s where a particular language – is it this one? – is uniquely careful about saying where the speaker is, the place an event happened – the way English is always concerned at showing exactly when things happen,’ I burst out. ‘So, for example, if the “Poor Thing” song was about me walking across a creek when a man suddenly appeared out of nowhere and tried to touch me –’

  I was so excited to show her, I let my fingers walk over her desk, between her framed photos, and only then cursed myself for coming up with a sexual example – why did I always think of sex? ‘I’d rush home to tell my mother, and on the way, as I went over in my mind what had happened, I’d use a particular affix – there’s not one, there are at least a dozen of them – about exactly where I’d been in relation to him.’ I stopped, I checked her face to see if she thought me cheeky because I was being too intimate with her desk, perhaps students shouldn’t play with her photos, but she was watching my fingers so I picked the photos up and arranged them in a triangle.