A Life Underwater

by Charlie Veron

  Contrary to all expectations, Boris Preobrazhensky was delighted to meet me. He was a few years older than me, about my size, with a lively smiling face and an aura of warmth and goodwill. I found his broken English difficult to follow, but there was an interpreter aboard and with her help I discovered that Boris didn’t expect me to be in charge of anything, that he wasn’t in charge of anything either, in fact nobody was in charge of anything – which was how Russians normally did things.

  Interpreter in tow, Boris took me around the ship introducing me to one person after another, mostly men, all of whom gave me a warm Russian-style welcome – a big hug and kisses on both cheeks. Being hugged and kissed by men was something new to me, but I soon got over it.

  I had expected the Russians to be severe, humourless people, like they were on television. How wrong could I be. Almost everything that happened was turned into a joke, usually self-deprecating or taking the piss out of someone. This was apparently their way, at least outside Russia. It was very like the humour of my student days.

  When we’d finished our tour, Boris turned to me with a faux- serious frown on his face. ‘Only one rule important,’ he said emphatically. ‘You must repetition after my every English mistake. Russians very silly – make many mistake!’

  ‘Russians are very silly – they make many mistakes,’ I echoed. ‘Silly buggers,’ I added.

  ‘Wonderful!’ Boris laughed. ‘Boris silly bugger!’ From that moment on my name for him was Boris Silly Bugger, or just Boris SB. Thus it remained until the end of his days.

  Boris, like most Russians who learn English at school, had a good vocabulary but he muddled the small words, especially articles, which don’t exist in Russian. There was no way I could explain English grammar to anybody because I hardly knew any myself, another legacy of my non-existent school education. No matter, Boris and I talked a great deal and I corrected him automatically, even during deeply personal conversations. In no time his English was excellent.

  Another interesting character on board was academician Yuri Sorokin, a well-known coral physiologist about twice my age. We found Yuri on the deck talking to himself. He grinned at me, showing a row of shiny metal teeth, and told me in easy English that he didn’t speak English. He seemed quite mad, and indeed turned out to be appealingly eccentric and a delightful person.

  That evening at dinner I was introduced to an attractive woman by the name of Galena who was studying crabs. She looked me up and down very slowly with a serious, intense look on her face and then murmured something in Russian that made everybody shriek with laughter. Boris later told me that she’d said, ‘Isn’t he gorgeous,’ which immediately resulted in a new nickname for me: Gorgeous.

  Galena’s English was good enough for me to enjoy this sort of banter with her, although one day she looked completely blank when I asked her, just to amuse Len, if she often caught crabs. The ever-observant Boris noticed that something was going on and asked me what it was.

  ‘Crabs, Boris – crutch crickets?’

  He didn’t follow. I tried again.

  ‘Crabs – pubic lice?’ He still didn’t follow. ‘As picked up in brothels!’

  When the coin dropped, Boris burst out laughing and of course translated my joke for all to enjoy. Galena pretended to be shocked, but from then on, when the plan of the day was announced through the ship’s public address system – as it was at seven sharp every morning – it always ended with, in English, ‘And Gorgeous Charlie will catch crabs with Galena.’

  One day, this actually happened. We had reached Conflict Atoll, at the far eastern limit of Papua New Guinean waters, and I was walking along the beach after a day’s diving when I came across the biggest crab I’d ever laid eyes on. Unbeknownst to me it was the now rare coconut crab, the biggest of all land arthropods. How could I catch it for Galena? It looked capable of chomping my arm off. I was dressed in brief swimming togs and nothing else. I tried to get it to latch onto a piece of coral rubble. No luck. Then Kallisto’s hurry-up siren shrieked. As a last resort I took my swimmers off and caught a claw of the crab in a loop, then hurried back to the ship’s company carrying the struggling crab in one hand and holding a piece of dead palm frond where my swimmers used to be in the other.

  I never did live that down, especially once Galena embellished the story with her unflattering observations about my private anatomy.

  The ship’s chief diver was a giant who’d welcomed me aboard with a bone-cracking bear hug then announced that I was ‘his little Australian’. He dragged me off to get fitted out with scuba gear, which turned out to be World War II junk, probably more war reparations: rusting cylinders, twin hose regulators, and what looked like buoyancy vests but which didn’t provide any buoyancy. I spent most of my first dive getting used to the regulator, or rather trying to figure out how it worked.

  Everything went well after that until one day, at a depth of about 40 metres somewhere in the midst of the Louisiade Archipelago, my regulator stopped working. I spent precious seconds trying to get it going by sucking and blowing. Making a free ascent from that depth was out of the question, so I took my tank off and pulled the regulator apart with the aid of my knife. After what seemed an age but was probably only half a minute, I was able to make air discharge through the demand valve by pressing a little lever with my finger. I couldn’t use the mouthpiece because I’d wrecked it, so I made a very uncomfortable ascent, breathing in mouthfuls of bubbles as best I could.

  This created much consternation back on the Kallisto, and when the chief diver was summoned he made a brief inspection of the remains of the regulator and then angrily smashed what was left of it with his large fist. From then on I was to use his personal gear.

  That evening the chief diver decided to make it up to me by insisting Len and I come to the ship’s bar to drink vodka with him. The vodka, judging from its smell, was straight laboratory ethanol. The idea was that one shouted Bud’ zdorov (‘Be healthy’, of all things) before tossing a beaker-full down the hatch in one gulp. This had to be followed by another gulp of ‘cognac chaser’, which seemed to be more laboratory ethanol mixed with brown sugar. The chief diver, with whatever company he managed to hijack, could keep this routine up for hours. I could hardly walk after just one round.

  Boris had told me there were several KGB agents aboard, and warned me to be careful about what I said when they were near. I scoffed at that, telling him I came from a free country where people said whatever they bloody well liked.

  ‘Don’t be silly,’ said Boris sternly. ‘If you say something political they will write it down. They will make a long report about you. When you ask to come to Russia it will be nyet. That is how we live. All of us have a wife or children who are watched and would be arrested if we tried to escape. Make all the jokes you want, but keep your mouth shut about politics. You want to see my country, don’t you?’

  Point made.

  One of the rather obvious KGB agents aboard was the ship’s captain, a diminutive, neatly dressed man who clearly knew nothing about ships. He never allowed the Kallisto to come within a mile of a reef and never let her near water shallow enough to anchor. He seldom came down from the top deck, and as only the crew were allowed up, we seldom saw anything of him. One day that changed – someone told him that I’d played a game of chess with one of the crew. That sent him scurrying down to the back deck where we were preparing for a dive.

  He knew only a few words of English. ‘Chess?’ he said. ‘Now?’

  ‘No,’ I said, pointing at a pile of scuba gear. ‘Diving.’

  This routine – ‘Chess? Now?’ – was repeated later that day, then every other day, at any time. Apparently playing chess was the only thing the captain did. I gave in after a week of pestering and agreed to come to his cabin after dinner. The captain was waiting behind a beautiful chess set made of polished marble laid out on a low table. He offered me a glass of vodka. I declined, motioning him to have it. He declined. I had first move.

&nbs
p; ‘Uh,’ he said, grinning at me, ‘you lose.’

  He repeated ‘you lose’ with a grin after almost every move I made. Then he started to tap his fountain pen on the table every time it was my move. I pointed to his hand and motioned him to stop. He did, for a move or two, then started up again, tap, tap, tap, ‘You lose.’ Again I asked him to stop. He had taken control of the game and was clearly winning. Every move was broadcast over the ship’s intercom, which I also found a tad unnerving. Tap, tap, tap. I reached over, took the pen, broke it in half and handed it back to him with a big smile.

  He was furious. He glared at me, clearly trying to decide what to do about it. He made an angry move, slamming a piece down on the board, then another. Both mistakes; now I had control of the game. The captain recovered, started smiling again, and also started winning again. Luckily for me he was too late; I forced a draw.

  Although it was well after midnight, several officers burst into the cabin as soon as the game was over, and there was much chatter. The captain turned the board around and promptly started a new game. I should have left when I was half ahead but instead I threw in the towel after only a few moves. The captain was ecstatic; apparently Western decadents couldn’t play chess. Every day, for the rest of the trip, he would venture down to the lower decks to grin at me and say, ‘Chess? Now?’

  One morning the intercom announced that we were abeam of the mouth of the Sepik River and a shore party was being organised. Len and I hurried to the longboat; there were about six of us. As we neared the shore I started to have misgivings; wasn’t the Sepik home to cannibals famous for head-shrinking? A memory of Melbourne Ward’s shrunken head troubled me.

  The beach was deserted but behind it there were several thatched huts on stilts. This was enough for Yuri Sorokin; as soon as we landed he scurried up the beach and disappeared into the dense jungle. A few women appeared, then some children, still getting their clothes in order. I relaxed. An hour or so later drums started up, and then a band of men arrived, dancing in file, all dressed in full ceremonial regalia – painted, covered with bird plumes, with big scary masks and long penis gourds. One of the men, dressed just like the others, was Yuri Sorokin. After that we all joined in.

  The Russians were delighted that the Sepik natives had Russian words in their vocabulary. These had come from the Russian Lutheran missionary Nikolai Maclay, who lived there in the late nineteenth century. Papuans are renowned for their language skills; I could see why.

  I made unforgettable friends on the Kallisto. Boris especially, but also Yuri, Galena, some of the other biologists, and several of the ship’s crew. The day we parted company, Boris, by then speaking almost fluent English, was unusually serious. He said, ‘Charlie, there are many differences between our countries and it could get worse. The greater the differences get, the stronger our friendship must be.’

  Wise words: our friendship outlasted the Cold War and throughout all that time we kept in contact. Of course we promised each other reunions, in Australia and in Russia, both of which happened.

  Shortly after returning to my lab at James Cook, a man dressed in a suit and tie and carrying a briefcase knocked at my door and asked if I could help with his inquiries. He said he was from the Australian Security and Intelligence Organisation (ASIO) and had just interviewed my father and both his neighbours; furthermore he knew that I’d been involved in anti-Vietnam War demonstrations as a student. I’d heard nothing from ASIO before my trip, but now this man told me that my association with Russians was ‘of concern to Australia’.

  I told him a little about the Kallisto and said I’d seen no evidence of it being a spy ship.

  ‘Of course we expect you to say that,’ the man said.

  What?

  ‘We believe that you may have been recruited,’ he went on in the most offensive way, and said it was his job to find the likes of me, who always ended up spending a long time in prison.

  Recruited to spy on my own wonderful and utterly loved country? I exploded. I grabbed him and threw him out of my lab and down the stairwell, just across the corridor, then hurled his briefcase at him. It missed – I was always a rotten shot – and broke open against the stairwell wall, pens and paper flying everywhere. He shouted threats at me, and I back at him. It was a hell of a row. People came running from all directions and some started shouting at him also.

  I heard no more about this incident in Australia, but as I was soon to discover, America took a different view.

  Boris’s trip to Australia the following year, 1976, wasn’t difficult to organise. AIMS had money for visitors, and being a government institution could cut through the red tape, which was thick at the time for Russians. He arrived from Moscow and I met him in Sydney. We travelled around a little, then went on to Canberra, and finally up north to stay with my family.

  Noni was very taken with Boris, which was unusual for her. Most adults who didn’t know her treated her as a child, which of course she was, but that usually meant talking down to her, a great mistake. Not so Boris, who was soon in the river next to our house, covered with water lilies – a river monster out to get her. I have vivid memories of him reading Russian bedtime stories to her from a beautiful book he’d brought from his home.

  Just before his return to Russia, I asked Boris what he thought the biggest differences were between his country and mine. ‘The expression on the faces of women,’ he replied without a moment’s hesitation. Nothing about houses or cars, or the news media attacking politicians. I thought his reply very strange.

  It wasn’t until 1979 that I found out why. I was invited by the Russian Academy of Sciences to attend a symposium in Khabarovsk, in far eastern Russia, as a VIP. Me a VIP? That was certainly Boris’s doing. However, it meant that I wouldn’t have to travel under the auspices of Intourist, as all other visitors to Russia were obliged to do, and there was a special flight from Tokyo for foreign delegates to the symposium as there were no commercial flights to eastern Russia. The airport guards I encountered were horrible people who shouted orders at us; then I heard Boris shouting orders at them from somewhere in the airport building.

  True to my nature, I did some very silly things on that trip, smuggling in a whole crate of mostly forbidden books (the crate being labelled ‘scientific specimens’), smuggling out a forbidden manuscript, and travelling up the Chinese border to the city of Amur and then on to more places where all foreigners were banned. As long as I kept my mouth shut and left all the talking to Boris, I thought I looked exactly like a Russian, but this wasn’t so. Twice I was recognised by villagers as a foreigner and had to abandon my disguise. How did they know? By the way I walked, they both said; apparently people who have spent their lives in fear recognise such things.

  I’ve always loved journeys like those I had with the Russians, getting to know local people in ways most foreigners never could. It’s a great privilege. Russia was a harsh country, especially for women: I don’t think I saw one smile the whole time I was there, just as Boris had said. Yet the real people of Russia were nothing like those I’d seen on television in Australia. Were it not for politics, Australia and Russia could have been sister countries.

  Boris Preobrazhensky and me on the RV Kallisto, 1975.

  Big dusty museums

  My work, to ‘monograph the corals of the Great Barrier Reef’, could no longer be described as population ecology; it was taxonomy, and that meant mastering the ancient monographs and type specimens – or holotypes, the specimens on which names are based – in museums. The British Museum (Natural History) in London, the National Museum of Natural History in Paris, the Museum für Naturkunde in Berlin, and the Smithsonian Institution in Washington DC were the world’s main repositories of these specimens, including most of those from the Great Barrier Reef. These were places I had to not only visit, but spend much time in, longer than my sojourn on the Kallisto.

  Kirsty and I discussed this at length; should she come with me? What about Noni? She was too young to get muc
h out of an overseas trip. It was a horrible thought, but clearly the best thing would be for her to stay in Australia, with Kirsty’s mother or mine. She would be safe and happy with either. At that point Kirsty came up with another idea: why not send Noni to her mother’s and have my mother come with us? She had never left Australia and would be thrilled to go travelling around Scotland and France with Kirsty.

  Mothers-in-law are supposed to be perennial problems for their daughters-in-law, the family member who must be tolerated. I joked about this, because Kirsty and my mother were the closest of friends; they needed no excuse to seek out each other’s company and were always chatting about whatever it was we were planning. Not surprisingly, my mother jumped at the idea of seeing the world for the first time with Kirsty; it would be her trip of a lifetime. Kirsty’s mother was more than happy to have Noni, and Noni thought the idea of a holiday with her Mackenzie gran, at Stonehenge of all places, was as good as it got. And so, after just a few phone calls, all was arranged. Noni would go to Kirsty’s mother; Kirsty, my mother and I would go to London; I would work at the Natural History Museum, and Kirsty and my mother would go on tour.

  On 22 June 1975, only a couple of weeks after these plans had been made, I came home from a short diving trip to find Len there. On seeing me he hurried past with a pained look on his face. I found Kirsty crying her heart out. She hugged me close and told me my mother was dying.

  My father had been driving down the Pacific Highway in Sydney with my mother next to him when a drunk youth, racing in the opposite direction, lost control of his car and crashed head-on into Dad’s. Although both cars were wrecks, Dad wasn’t injured, and at first he thought Mum was also okay. But her neck had been broken and in hospital she was pronounced dead within a couple of hours. The driver of the other car had been knocked unconscious, still with a bottle of whisky in his hand, but was uninjured.