Perth in summer was hotter than Aleppo. The place became a tinderbox. His father stepped around the yard on tiptoe, as if his life were a rotten staircase that threatened to give way at any moment.
Makertich, being a child, picked up English much faster than his parents. After three years at the local school he was accepted as a pupil at Perth Modern, directly opposite the hospital where his mother worked as a cleaner. A little black head among a sea of blond.
Lessons over, he watched the boys and girls climb into their parents' Holdens or the bus, which headed off in the other direction, and then he walked for an hour (his parents could not afford a bicycle), down Roberts Road, down Hay Street, a street that ran forever, until he came to the 1890s bungalows which had housed the generation of his classmates' grandparents, before they got lucky.
'That's the thing about Perth,' his English teacher, Miss Stapenell, told her pupils. 'A little bit of knowledge and y'all might find a gold mine.'
Makertich's father never found gold, but he did, towards the end of the family's second year in Australia, strike peanuts. Once a week after school, Makertich walked with him down an alleyway to a basement like the mouth of a cave, dark and hot and smelling of the peanuts that arrived from Kingaroy in jute sugar-bags and were roasted in an oven beneath the street. They hauled the bags home on a billycart and opened them on the back veranda, emptying out the contents with beer glasses. His father, cigarette between lips - rolled from 'Champion Ruby ready-rubbed, fine-cut tobacco', as he made Makertich repeat on his errands to Mrs Gover at the Country Store - claimed the larger glass, Makertich the smaller, and together they dug into the sacks and filled up white paper bags with salted or roasted peanuts. A rhythm swept them along. Father sitting beside son, scooping the peanuts into the paper bag, folding the bag over to make piggy ears and stacking it in a cane basket. Then his father would go to the pub over the road, where the publican allowed him to walk around with his basket on his arm selling Uncle Dick's Fresh Roasted Peanuts, 'two bob for a middie, a shilling for a lady's waist'.
Soon Uncle Dick, as he styled himself, was vending peanuts in every pub and motel in the district. He spent most of what he received on the horses - not those in his backyard, but at the racetrack in Belmont Park.
'He was by all accounts a clever man,' Maral said, 'but his soul did not yield to Australia.' He liked being sociable, and yet at home he sank into a self-pitying moroseness, hardly speaking except to revive his dead mother's memories of the estate seized by the Turks, the summer house in Heliopolis, the Prince Henry Vauxhall - none of which, as his wife (a distant cousin) was quick to point out, he had ever seen.
'Shut up about that now,' she snapped. 'You're in Australia! In a house infested with termites and stinking of gas. In the peanut business.'
Maral said: 'I know what she went through. My own father was no different. All that hating - it's done secretly, as if to admit to such robust hatred is to admit what victims Armenians are. It's a ferocious but invisible cancer.'
Sick of scrubbing toilets to support her husband's gambling habit, Makertich's mother set up a booth, selling vegetables at weekends. The vegetables came from Lenny Sing, a Chinaman up the road; his allotment. She stored the money in a cut-down kerosene can with a wire handle, and kept a collapsible bed for her son under the counter, where he reclined among the onions and read.
'He said he only had to smell spring onions and it took him back under the counter.'
Makertich flourished at Perth Modern. He was an agile athlete with a quick, wiry frame and the charisma of a natural leader. As well, he had the beguiling quality of the exile from a country that does not exist. An intense open face, dark brows and eyelashes, and a watchful tilt to the eye which made you want to confide in him, it did not matter if you were student or teacher. About himself, he revealed little.
His olive skin caused scant comment; he called himself Chris and most people took him for an Italian. His history had taught him not to divulge where he came from; the bayonettings in the snowdrifts.
In his last year he fell in love with another student called Cheryl Pyke. Scrolls of light blonde hair to her shoulder, tall, supple and a lazy laugh. The moment they came together was when the maths teacher asked Cheryl a difficult question in their algebra class. Her face tightened as the teacher turned his back, chalk poised. She sat in silence, flustered and anxious, as he waited. Until young Chris Makertich, sitting a desk away, scribbled out the answer and slid it across.
Before long, Makertich was tutoring Cheryl with her maths and science homework; helping her with her English essays - her spelling was almost as atrocious as her algebra - and introducing her to his favourite authors. Only in the art room could she flourish without his assistance.
Not long after the incident in class, Cheryl invited him home to a barbecue. Her father was flying down from Marble Bar - where he was the resident manager of a newly reopened gold mine - to make his monthly report to the head office in Perth. She was eager for him to meet her new friend.
Cheryl had been weak on details when describing Chris to her mother, and Drusilla Pyke, upon being introduced to him in the English-modelled garden of which she was so proud, gave the young man a circumspect welcome. Henry Pyke's liking, however, was instantaneous. It made it easy for him to counter his wife's disapproval of the Italian-looking teenager with the movie-star smile.
That Christmas, Pyke offered Makertich holiday work at his open-cut mine. Though only seventeen, he was given the duties of an adult - dipping the tanks, measuring the solutions, driving hauler trucks.
For six weeks, Makertich worked in eight-hour shifts. Covered in red dust, he did not know white any more; white ceased to exist. The fine dust would fall out of books and envelopes years later, a reminder of being in the mine. 'When my shift is over, I shower, eat, drink, play pool, sleep, shake off the grog, get up and do it all over again,' he wrote to Cheryl, 'and never stop thinking of you.'
Most weekends, he got to spend time with her father.
'I taught him the rudiments of geology and the lithology of mineral formations,' Pyke said, speaking in a slow voice from his yacht in Fremantle, 'and how to peg a claim, so that no smartass prospector or mining company didn't overturn him on a technicality. He owed a lot to me. Without me he wouldn't have known shit from clay.'
One afternoon they scrambled up a steep bank of rocks to a stunted flat-topped tree.
'An iron tree,' Pyke said, with his fingers tracing its roots to where they writhed into a lump of solid low-grade hematite. He struck off a fragment and inspected it. 'If you were a prospector and you found one of these trees, you'd peg to the north of it,' and then, almost as an afterthought, 'except that you wouldn't be prospecting for iron.'
'Why not?'
Pyke explained that in 1938 the Federal Government had banned the exportation of iron ore. 'The day they lift the embargo, you can take a surveyor's pick and come out here. Until that moment, the ore's valueless.'
Pyke's mentality was gold. Every last skerrick of gold-bearing land had been picked over, but the iron under his nose signified nothing.
He threw the fleck of hematite at the horizon. 'Old Ziegler,' speaking of his geologist, 'reckons this is the oldest country in the world.'
'Who's allowed to peg out here?' Makertich, gazing around, wanted to know.
'With the right piece of paper, any Tom, Dick or Harriet.' He had no idea about Aborigines.
Makertich shaded his eye. In flashes far away to their left an exquisite lightning storm was raging. 'How much of this has been pegged?'
'This land?' Pyke squinted down over the red expanse that mimicked the ravines in his face. 'A little bit around the mine, but once you go out there not one lousy rock of it.'
'How much are you allowed to claim?' He was remembering Aleppo. The importance of iron. His father welding scraps of metal. Smelting began in Syria, he was thinking.
'You can peg all you like,' Pyke said. He polished his palms on his tro
users. 'The hard part is to find something worth peggin' that's not one hundred per cent dirt.'
He began descending the slope to the Land Rover, but Makertich was looking over the red earth at the electric blue flashes. Like the tip of blue flame into which his father used to focus all his concentration.
Weekends during term-time, Pyke employed Makertich to mow the lawn at his waterfront house in Perth - and in the summer holidays, to truck ore to the mills at his mine in Marble Bar. Makertich had proved popular with other truckies - 'Armenians are good at fixing cars.' Not that he ever disclosed that he was Armenian. Only to Cheryl.
She was not beautiful - she had her father's nose and her mother's hard jaw and over-wide mouth - but Makertich thought her desirable in her very clean shirt stamped with yellow sea horses.
After dancing with her all night at a New Year's Eve ball, the first time he had done such a thing, the two of them ended up on Cottlesloe beach, and he told her about his grandmother, his childhood home in Aleppo; but edited out details of the journey to Australia, the internment camp in Hay Street, what his parents did for a living. Cheryl urged him to speak to her in Armenian, and in his own language he told her that he loved her. Then asked her not to speak to anyone about where he came from. It didn't matter anyway, it was history. A day might come when he would write about it, but right now he was an Aussie - 'Thru and thru.'
'I won't breathe a word,' Cheryl promised, not really understanding the secret, but enjoying its intimacy, stroking the side of his face and the fading imprint of her earring, from where he had hugged her to him. And Makertich, who loved her, who was incapable of breaking a promise, another trait that he had inherited from his grandmother, believed her.
'Cheryl and Krikor, how far did it go?' said Maral. 'Left alone, it probably would have fizzled out.'
They were teenagers who loved each other in the feverish way you do when you are eighteen. The way Cheryl kissed him, she had been brought into the world to do nothing else. Her kisses kept him scootering around to the Pyke house in Peppermint Grove, his Agfa Box in a brown leather case dangling on a stiff strap from his neck.
When not mowing the lawn or driving hauler-trucks, he would take Cheryl to the beach and photograph her swimming or sunning herself, sometimes topless, but never naked, as longingly he would have liked. In the long intense year of their courtship, they never made love. 'This was the Fifties, remember.'
In their final year at Perth Modern, three drawings by Cheryl were selected for the school art exhibition. Only Drusilla Pyke seemed to notice that the most striking study, of a crabapple tree on her front lawn, looked as though copied from a photograph. Her first premonition that her daughter was reaching the dangerous age when every path to her heart might require the deployment of a well-trained guard dog.
Cheryl's father was happy to have Chris working for them as a driver-cum-lawn-mower, and treated him as a member of the family. Drusilla Pyke, however, could be breathtakingly rude.
'Do have that one,' pointing to the rottenest banana and never looking him in the eye.
She was imperious when alone with him. She washed her hands after shaking his, soaping off the dried earth and grass. She came outside to speak with him, rather than invite him into the house, and melted away at mealtimes on the weekends of her husband's visits.
'You can see where this story's leading. When Krikor threatened actually to become a member of the family all hell broke loose.'
Drusilla Pyke was promenading along the Swan River with her golfing partner, Heather Anderson, when she recognised her daughter on the bank, swimming costume unfastened, and an all-too-familiar tanned young man on his knees snapping away. She seethed inside. Already, she had been alerted to their possible intimacy by a school essay into which Cheryl had poured out her eighteen-year-old heart: Drusilla Pyke read it and was appalled. Miss Stapenell might have believed this essay to be the hand of Cheryl Pyke. Cheryl's mother most emphatically did not. Her daughter needed assistance even to fill out her membership card for Lake Karrinyup Country Golf Club. An enthusiastic member, Drusilla Pyke had plans for Cheryl to marry into her own kind, preferably Heather Anderson's nephew, a rich grazier in the Pilbara. Her only child was not going to fall into the swamp of poverty all at once opened up by a struggling immigrant would-be photographer with romantic ideas.
For this is what Drusilla Pyke had discovered their part-time gardener to be, explaining why it was that Chris appeared to have no parents, why he never discussed himself, why he had not once invited Cheryl over the railway line to his ripple-iron bungalow in the doggier part of Furneaux Park. Drusilla Pyke had done her research. She obtained an address and drove past an emaciated figure standing behind a crude vegetable stall on the south side of Hay Street. She had stopped the car and bought some spring onions. And beamed at the unsmiling woman who counted out her change. Black hair swept back in a bun, fake leather slippers, a cotton over-dress printed with a floral pattern like a cleaner would wear.
'Oh, don't worry about that. Tell me, where are you from?'
'I am Australian,' Makertich's mother said stubbornly. She had the brown eyes of her son, but leeched of their original colour.
Drusilla Pyke held her smile. 'You don't sound Australian.'
And that night stormed into her daughter's bedroom, where Cheryl, in the porous way of a Fifties Australian teenager, told her everything, even the Armenian word for love.
Drusilla Pyke was firm. 'He might be clever, darling, but dogs are clever too,' softly closing the door.
Next Saturday evening, Makertich parked his Vespa in Peppermint Grove, having arranged to take Cheryl to the Swanbourne drive-in. He unstrapped his helmet and knocked on the door and entered. No one around. He walked out onto the back deck. A hot night, windows open. And was about to call out 'Cheryl?' when he heard voices arguing in the kitchen. Through the fly-screen, Cheryl's father: 'It's not that serious. They're just kids.'
Makertich, hitching a ride back from Marble Bar in Pyke's Auster, had landed in Perth the previous afternoon. It had taken since then to rid his ears of the drilling of pneumatic jackhammers, the clanking chains of the separation plant. Seconds passed before he realised that Pyke was talking about him.
After a raw silence, Pyke went on: 'She's not pregnant is she?'
'And don't think I'm going to give her the opportunity.' Then Drusilla Pyke was saying in a distressed way: 'I would be fine with an Italian. Even a Jew.'
'You say that . . .'
In the smell of spring onions, Drusilla Pyke had discovered everything she needed to know.
Most Perth mothers might have considered Armenians merely 'weird' and bracketed them with Greeks and Italians. But Drusilla Pyke's grandfather had died at Gallipoli. In her narrow although hazy cosmogony, Armenians - not that she herself had a clue where they came from, only what they smelled of: onions - were natural victims, like the Hungarians and Aborigines. And carrying God knows what recessive diseases in addition to genes that promised to make her grandchildren swarthy. And short.
Plus, she had done some digging into the character of Chris's father. The discovery that he was none other than 'Uncle Dick, the peanut vendor' and a regular at the tote, where he owed money, made the decision easy.
When Chris appeared at the entrance to the kitchen asking for Cheryl, Drusilla Pyke said in a voice of icy finality, not looking at him, but fixing her eyes on the crash helmet that he held to his chest: 'I'm sorry, Chris. Cheryl won't be seeing you tonight.' And after thrusting into his arms some handwritten pages - 'Here, I believe this is yours' - directed him out of the house.
She closed the fly-screen behind him, meeting his eyes through the mesh. 'Goodbye.'
For several days he lost his mind. He stumbled to a gap in the sea-wall, out of the wind, where he knew that she would not look for him, but hoped that she might. How many hours he sat on the beach, waiting to feel her hand on his shoulder, he never counted, but one morning he woke and rubbed the sand from his red eye
s and after a while he stood up and left.
At some point in his delirium he understood that the locks had been changed.
'He had been an idiot to speak about his grandmother. To speak in Armenian. Henceforth, he would need to keep to himself.'
He did not go back to Marble Bar that holiday.
4
'A ND NOW HIS PARENTS .'
In January, a bush fire swept through Furneaux Park.
It was a hot north-wind day, the sort of day that makes it impossible to breathe outside. Makertich was repairing his Vespa when his mother ran out to say that there was a fire over Shenton Way. He could tell that the blaze was enormous by the speed with which it whirled, unchecked, across the horizon. Ominous puffs of smoke appeared above the roof of the pub, growing larger and larger until thick pieces of ash were floating through the air and landing in black carpets on the grass around them.
His mother started to throw things into the car, yelling for Makertich to go and wake his father.
He ran to the backyard where his father lay on his stomach, half asleep in swimming trunks, sun-baking on the lawn, the radio playing beside him, listening to the Perth Cup.
'Dad, Dad, you've got to get up!' shaking him. 'Mum's waiting for you in the car.'
'The horses . . .' he said groggily.
'I'll round them up.'
His mother was shouting their names.
Makertich said: 'I'll join you at the river.'
The air was suddenly so dry. He felt that if he rubbed his fingers together they would spark.
He dashed across the grass, and froze. There, in the very next paddock, was a wall of flame roaring down on him at the most incredible speed. The smoke was thick and he could hardly see to catch the ponies. He started off leading a couple, but they reared and plunged with terror and he had to let them go, opening the gates for all four to escape.
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