The Grass Catcher

by Ian Wedde

  For me, though, the jackpot is by this stage interesting only as a kind of fiction – the mirage of a silver mine or hidden treasure that has driven so many exotic and fabled expeditions. It’s the kind of Rider Haggard King Solomon’s Mines story that consumed me when I was a kid; I saw the 1950 movie version with Deborah Kerr and Stewart Granger, and I had the Classic Comic. Later, it would be Joseph Conrad’s Nostromo that utterly mesmerised me, not least because I knew that Conrad had only ever seen the literal, the truthful landscape of his South American location from a distance, at sea.

  In Fritz’s story, it’s the elusiveness of the treasure, not its factual truth, which is compelling; it’s the drollness of the Conradian British Vice-Consul’s remark about Fritz’s friends’ anecdote, when my great-uncle dismissed the need to make a will – ‘I think I’ll let it go!’ Who were these friends? What were they doing in Torreon, Mexico? What was Fritz’s connection to the bank in Eagle Pass, Texas? Who was the ‘common-law wife’ Fritz was alleged to have had? What was he doing in Mexico, and why did he have an ‘observatory’? Did he really get pensioned off as a soldier in the Mexican Civil War?

  Recently, my second cousin Sam Robinson sent me an email which only adds to the fictional seductiveness of whatever we characterise as the memory of Fritz. From what Sam remembers of conversations with his late grandmother, Chick’s sister Phyllis Rabone, Fritz travelled a lot, including in the Malay states as a mining engineer. Sam also unearthed some immigration records at Ellis Island in New York. According to these, ‘Wedde, Frederick Alexander; Ethnicity: New Zealand, English; last place of residence: Kiel, Germany; Age: 26; Marital Status: S’, arrived in the USA aboard the President Lincoln from Hamburg on 26 May 1910. Sam’s email contains much immigration-record information about the ship, including that it was sunk in the Atlantic by a German U-boat on 31 April 1918, which somehow seems to locate Fritz’s voyage at a timely point in the history that, in one version, has him slipping across to the German lines with something of value – clearly, that particular ‘memory’ can be discarded, though the question remains: where was Fritz between 1910 and 1918? The Mexican Revolution led by Francisco I. Madero started in 1910, which provides a shapely but entirely speculative milestone to Fritz’s chronology. Between about 1905 and 1910 he was in Malaya, he was in Germany – where else? There seems to be an almost hyperbolic instability in the sequencing of events in Fritz’s life.

  According to Sam’s research, there’s another Ellis Island immigration entry for ‘Wedde, Frederik’, which corresponds exactly to the President Lincoln records, except that it has Fritz arriving two days later, on 28 May 1910, aboard the Amerika. This entry, too, is accompanied by detailed accounts of the ship’s provenance and fate. Sam concludes, ‘Somehow I feel I know more about the ships he travelled on than about Fritz himself. Odd the cards that history can deal one’s life.’ By now, it seems entirely plausible and appropriate that even the official memory of Fritz arriving in America could be unstable, offering different versions of the truth.

  Recently, I caught up again with my cousin Norma – Sam’s mother – in Blenheim. She said she thought she had some letters of Fritz’s. It turned out that she didn’t have any letters, but she did send me a typed page on yellowed, foxed paper, dated ‘1st. June 1957’, with a footnoted address at ‘Apartado Postal 113, Torreon,/Coahuila Mexico’, and signed (in type) ‘F A Wedde’.

  At first, the typed signature confused me, since the initials are also my father’s. Very like my father’s kind of succinct prose is the statement at the end of the sheet: ‘Please keep this paper as it may be of interest sometime in the future.’ While I have to conclude that the ‘F A Wedde’ refers to my great-uncle Frederick Alexander Wedde, not to my father Frederick Albert Wedde, the two identities seem to overlap, and I remain unsure as to whether the page is a transcript made by my father with his plea-to-posterity appended, or whether the whole thing comes from Fritz, with its final sentence reaching forward to a moment when someone – me, for example – might read it.

  The text itself, however, is the only object to which I can attach Fritz in any material way. He wrote it in June 1957, not long before he died. These are his own words. I’m not surprised that they seem to emanate from the top floor of ‘an observatory’ somewhere near Torreon, in the state of Coahuila, Mexico, whose border with the USA runs for 512 kilometres along the Rio Grande – the truth of this seems satisfactory and even appropriate, given the content of the document.

  A NEW HYPOTHESIS OR THEORY OF THE UNIVERSE

  Many years ago the English scientist, Dalton, gave the world of science the Atomic Theory, all chemical elements consisted of atoms the smallest particle of an element that could enter into chemical combination with atoms of other elements. With most elements the atoms combine together forming a molecule of two atoms. This theory is now known to be correct. Dalton did not make the error of stating that the atom was the smallest indivisible particle of an element. We now know that atoms consist of protons and electrons and perhaps others. I deal only with these two. Protons and electrons are bound together with enormous energy and the release of this energy is the enormous power of the atomic bomb. The proton is electrically positive and its mass is about 2000 times that of the electron, the negative electric particle. Our universe is an electric universe and where protons are found in this universe galaxies are in the process of formation, or have been formed in former eons of time. What exists between the galaxies, between the stars which form them and nebulae, masses of gases which are seen in our own Milky Way? My hypothesis is this; these enormous spaces are filled with electrons, negative particles of electricity which repel each other and by so doing in the vicinity of the solid or gaseous bodies like the sun and the planets are the cause of gravitation which these bodies seem to possess. Light from the farthest stars reaches us with the same speed as an electric current travels through a copper wire. The electron alone without the mass of a proton about which it revolves cannot reach a body consisting of elements, protons and electrons bound together by atomic force. Thus the hypothetical ‘Ether’ of former scientists is nothing but a universal mass of electrons which pervades all space. Such is the medium which carries light throughout the universe.

  This is a far more compelling last will and testament than any notarised redistribution of assets could ever have been. It bequeaths us an actual fragment of Fritz’s thought, which he had somewhere – in whatever constituted his home then. In this home he was reading, thinking and looking at the heavens. His thought has expansive scope, and yet is particular; it is at once speculative and confident of facts. I want to imagine that he discussed these thoughts with his friends in Coahuila, who heard him disparage the necessity for a will and reported this as a joke to the British Vice-Consul, Fritz’s grudging but amused conduit to his descendants half a world away. But I don’t need to do this – to imagine a conversation punctuated by shots of tequila perhaps (though I already have). The fiction that is generated by the energy of this text seems to travel at the same speed as the fact of its utterance.

  What I will permit myself, however, is the phantom of my father’s typed signature on this yellowing sheet of paper: not a possessive presence, just a companionable one. I can imagine Chick and his Uncle Fritz sitting with a bottle of whisky between them in the shuttered room on Jebel Amman; I can imagine overhearing their exchanges of memory. My great-uncle, his nephew, his nephew’s son – what passes between us across time and space? There are perhaps spaces between us like those between the astronomical bodies Fritz looked at from his ‘observatory’ – traversed by memory, as if by light, within a compound energy-field of fiction and truth.

  More poignant in the end than such dubious metaphors are a couple of simple facts noted in the Vice-Consul’s letter. There were only two claims against the estate of Frederick Alexander Wedde at the time of his death: one a doctor’s bill for $600; the other from ‘the Spaniard who rented him his room and who insists that he even advanc
ed him money and that he is owed by the estate, altogether, less than $200.000 Dls’. The grammar is slippery here, but I want to assume the ‘he’ who advanced the money was Fritz, because we know he had money and owed ‘less than’ an amount. The other grammatical option, of course, is that Fritz was just as stingy with his rent as with paying for a will to be drawn up.

  He was about seventy-three when he died; he was sick when he contacted his distant family; and he owed rent on ‘his room’. If I locate his succinct atomic treatise within the vectors of these minimal facts, I can almost say I know where his home was at the end of his life. And I have his last words: ‘Please keep this paper as it may be of interest sometime in the future.’

  The plums

  My twin brother and I were born twenty minutes apart in a race I used to claim to have won but which Dave did. As if by Great Uncle Fritz’s gravitational force field of negative and positive energy, we were pulled together and apart by ‘the thing we held up between us’ – the other’s thumb, the stupendous fish, our cousin’s bridal train. We went through our childhood days as if joined by an elastic rope, so that when one drew away from the other the pull between us increased.

  Under Marlborough’s hot sun on the scratchy grass of Horton Park, overtaking each other on bikes, hauling back on our individual oars in Bertie’s dinghy, making our way to and from school, rattling sticks along corrugated-iron or paling fences, in cosy adjoining beds at night, in the gone-to-seed asparagus patch, the dry ditch by the culvert, the mushroomy paddock at the back of the Hastilow farm with its rumour of a bull, in the linotype shop at the Marlborough Express where Chick melted down lead scraps to make fishing sinkers, by the green dial of the radio in ‘the front room’ at Francis Street – we were together all the time. I know this, even though my memory-picture of the physical space Dave would have occupied doesn’t always have Dave in it. When I envisage Dave, it’s always Dave’s big smile that I see, the one Dave’s still got. I don’t have a pronoun for that smile: it’s Dave’s. When I attach a pronoun to it, him, the smile moves over there, away from we and us.

  People often remark, as if challenging us to contradict them, that it must have been amazing to have grown up as a twin, ‘with that kind of special relationship’. They imply, with a hint of envious longing, that Dave and I, though not identical twins, must have had some kind of psychic connection. Perhaps we did, whatever that might mean – and however I might know it, or have known it when I saw it. But the truth is that my awareness of my brother, and I’m sure his of me, was almost peripheral. We just were there with each other, that was all. It was so obvious, you didn’t notice it. It’s not even possible for me to say I loved my brother when we were kids – that was an awareness that could mean anything only after we’d grown up and lived apart. Now, I know I adore my brother, though we’ve never lived close to each other as adults, and our kids – my sons, his daughters – barely know each other.

  Despite my shooting him in the thigh, Dave and I were even closer during the years when we lived by the Karnaphuli River, and ran feral in the scrub or along the river banks, and later, horsed around in the compound on the hill with the kids who turned up in Chandraghona a bit after us. We were constant companions in the environs of the mill, and on the holiday expeditions our parents began to organise more and more often, setting the enjoyable pattern of their lives – to the Kaziranga wildlife park in Assam, where we rode on elephants through tall cane thickets and lotus-clogged swamps, and saw a rhinoceros; to Puri on the east coast of the Bay of Bengal, where we saw a great many temples; to Shimla hill station in the Himalayas, where I rode around on a stout, stubborn pony because of my sore heels; to Darjeeling, where Chick photographed us with Sherpa Tenzing, with whom he had a mysterious friendship, and where we saw Mount Everest fuming wind-blown snow in the distance; to Dhaka and Calcutta; and quite often down the river to Chittagong, where we sometimes went out to the beach at Patenga, or prowled the bazaar with our mother, who’d begun to accumulate textiles. And it was in Chittagong that we were measured up for the English-style schoolboy outfits (jacket and pants) that were a sign of things to come.

  Once we got to England and went to school there, Dave and I were thrown together by default, because we didn’t have a family home to go to in the holidays. But in fact we’d already begun to draw apart, back up the river at Chandraghona. I know this because he wasn’t unhappy and I was – see how that pronoun he peels away and goes over there, beyond the conjoining tug of what always drew us back together; over there is where I saw Dave’s sunny smile, with the others. It began to be that way.

  I felt it when I went back there. It was strange and a bit sad to be standing alone in front of our old house and looking at the mildewed penthouse-like storm ledge above our bedroom window; Dave should have been there, we should have been there. But he wasn’t; we weren’t. He wasn’t, because he didn’t want to be there. He didn’t want to be there because he had no reason to go back. I wanted to be there because I had a reason: to revisit the last home in which Dave and I had been that supple, elastic, indivisible we; the home we’d left on trajectories that then began to warp apart; the home in which I’d begun, for a time, to be homesick.

  So I went back by myself – knowing I was no longer that unhappy kid and hadn’t been for most of my life, knowing that the memories I had or might recover would be different from the experiences they’d originally stored, but confident that something would happen when I got there and went up the big brown river to the home I remembered with a confusing mixture of bliss and grief.

  In the chaotic crowd that mobbed the Biman Bangladesh check-in counters at the airport in Kuala Lumpur were large numbers of transient workers returning to Dhaka with outsize items such as plasma TV screens. A smiling Bangladeshi man, with that characteristic combination of friendliness and importunity, seized my small bag and entreated me to give him my passport and ticket.

  ‘We pass it!’

  That was when I arrived back. The privileged child who’d grown up in the compound of mostly expatriate senior management at the paper mill, and who, in the final stages of his time there, had begun to boss the servants around, hesitated suspiciously.

  ‘Is quicker, no?’ The man smiled, wagging his head from side to side.

  It was. The bag, passport and ticket were passed over the milling crowd; the passport and a boarding pass returned soon after.

  Bangladesh is a desperate place whose situation can make it dangerous. But it’s also a place in which innumerable intricate networks link transactions, enterprises, social exchanges, relationships. Watching my bag and passport being passed hand to hand over the heads of the crowd, I thought with a pang how isolated we must have been as kids. Leaving aside those holiday excursions with our parents, our contact with the world beyond the compound and the surroundings we played in was limited to occasional trips to buy shoes at the Bata shop in the Chandraghona bazaar – where Dave remembers he dropped and never recovered the (‘.177-calibre’) trophy slug recently extracted from his thigh. Even if I could have, I didn’t want to go back to the world of the petulant, over-fed child I’d become by the time we left the house on the hill; but the memory of him demanding more toast – ‘Juldi juldi!’ – ‘Quickly, quickly!’ – came back to taunt me often over the next weeks.

  Something else happened at the KL check-in. My new friend asked me where I came from. When I said New Zealand, he wanted to know if I knew the cricketer Stephen Fleming – ‘Everybody admire him!’ And then, why I was going to Bangladesh? I told him I planned to visit the place I’d lived in as a kid in the 1950s – I wanted to see it again, and understand it better. It was the first week in February. I had a visa for three weeks and planned to extend it for another three once I arrived.

  ‘Ekushey,’ said the man. ‘You will be there. Shohid Dibosh.’

  I didn’t know what Ekushey was, or Shohid Dibosh, and that astonished and dismayed him. How could I have been in Bangladesh in the 1950s and not know
what Ekushey was? It was when the language martyrs would be commemorated, on 21 February. Shohid Dibosh was Martyrs’ Day.

  I didn’t know who the ‘language martyrs’ were. I knew a little bit about the Baul poets and hoped to hear them. But not the martyrs.

  My friend was losing interest in me. ‘You will find out,’ he told me, with a sad head-wag. ‘There will be hartal, but you must see.’

  I knew what hartal meant. It was a general strike, often accompanied by violent demonstrations. Some were scheduled about the time I was arriving. I’d read the Travel Alerts.

  ‘And what do you do?’ asked the man as I edged away with my passport and boarding pass.

  ‘I’m a writer,’ I told him.

  He put a respectful hand on my laptop case. And what do I write?

  I’d been there before. I took the easy way out.

  ‘I’m a poet.’

  It wasn’t the easy way out. As I understood his pained expression, to be a poet in Bangladesh was something – but a poet who didn’t know about Ekushey (a cricket lover who didn’t know about Stephen Fleming)?

  Preparing to go to Bangladesh, I’d wanted to find someone who would have known my father, perhaps a member of the young team he recruited at the mill. I had black-and-white photographs of them from my father’s albums – young men, in their late teens or early twenties, smiling and eager, like the man at the airport in KL. After months of unsuccessful inquiries to Bangladesh’s press bureau, the Parjatan Tourist Corporation, the labyrinthine bureaucracy in which the history of the old Pakistan Industrial Development Corporation is now buried, and the British High Commission in Dhaka, I finally made contact with an extraordinary woman, Lina Chowdhury.