Silence

by Rodney Hall

  SILENCE

  Rodney Hall is one of Australia’s finest writers. He has won the Miles Franklin twice, for Just Relations and The Grisly Wife, and many of his novels and poems have been published internationally. His acclaimed memoir popeye never told you was published in 2010. He lives in Melbourne.

  Other books by the author include

  The Ship on the Coin

  A Place among People

  Just Relations

  Kisses of the Enemy

  Captivity Captive

  The Second Bridegroom

  The Grisly Wife

  The Island in the Mind

  The Day We Had Hitler Home

  The Last Love Story

  Love Without Hope

  popeye never told you

  Published in Australia in 2011 by Pier 9,

  an imprint of Murdoch Books Pty Limited

  Murdoch Books Australia

  Pier 8/9

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  info@murdochbooks.com.au

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  Publisher: Melanie Ostell

  Editor: Ali Lavau

  Designer: Tania Gomes

  Production: Joan Beal

  Text © Rodney Hall 2011

  The moral right of the author has been asserted.

  Cover image © Tia Magallon 2011

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

  An extract of Judith Wright’s poem ‘Silence’, has been reproduced with the kind permission of HarperCollins Publishers Australia.

  National Library of Australia Cataloguing-in-Publication entry:

  Hall, Rodney, 1935-

  Silence / Rodney Hall.

  ISBN 9781742667607 ebook.

  A823.3

  For Ian Dixon, friend and filmmaker

  I felt like answering him in the words of the dying Amr:

  ‘I feel as if heaven lay close upon the earth and I between them both, breathing through the eye of a needle.’

  Lawrence Durrell, Justine

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Title Page

  Introduction

  Other books by Author

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Author Bio

  Semaphore

  The Rigatti motet

  A Korean house

  Hartmund Eischlbeck

  James Cook

  A conservationist

  Talkad

  L’Étoile Bleue

  A toast

  The dreaming bird

  William Donnegan

  Babak

  The flame priest

  Winter campaign

  The experiment

  Gettysburg

  A couple

  Sunken liner

  The Beefsteak Room

  Querencía

  Modesty

  Knots, ties, etc.

  TV reporter

  Noise

  Li River

  Book burial

  AD 1000

  Winnersxs

  Glider pilot

  Notes

  Acknowledgements

  Also Available

  Semaphore

  A man jumped up on the horizon. Quite suddenly he jumped up where nobody had been before. A soldier with nothing on his head to protect it. In the afternoon. Behind him a massive slagheap of cloud gathered. And above the cloud three parachutes seemed fixed in the sky. The big guns had already fallen silent and every last aircraft had long since flown away. It was on a ridge above some straight shadows that were the enemy trenches. And up he jumped.

  And there was one who asked: Do we shoot him, Sergeant Potts?

  But Sergeant Potts just spat. Spat on the ground. Because this was something no one could account for, a soldier making a target of himself in full view of the platoon of hidden men in helmets, each one of us with his finger on the trigger and a question in his eyes. Each one homesick from too much bitterness and loss. And too much fear felt too soon. Boy soldiers, rookies, with no idea what to do next.

  Someone whispered: It must be a trick.

  Or else a lunatic, another whispered back and opened the wound of a grin in his face.

  Another asked: What are they going to chuck at us next?

  But Sergeant Potts poked around under the rim of his helmet and scratched his skull.

  All because a man jumped up where nobody had been before. Quite suddenly dark and small in the afternoon, with nothing to protect his head and only the cloud beyond. And three parachutists fixed in the sky above while we hid, watching him, a platoon of boys in baggy uniforms. Boys with no idea what to do. And this man, who was our enemy, lifted wooden arms. Slow as a broken windmill he started signalling. One letter at a time he spelt out a message in semaphore: ICH HABE HUNGER.

  The Rigatti motet

  Friar Fidelis stood rigid, not able to move, suffocated by exhausted air. He and the rest of the choir had been packed into a globe of darkness, itself cupped in obscurity, suspended far above the altar, right up inside the dome of Brunelleschi’s vast dim cathedral. They waited in this huge pod, this theatrical contraption—the tenors grouped around him, the basses immediately beneath his feet and the boys above his head—in a dangling machine already filled with intolerable heat. And the waiting, which began calmly enough as a meditation on God’s divine presence, despite an unthinkable drop beneath them, had soon become a nightmare. The contraption a form of torture. No one should be asked to endure such danger and discomfort. They were not heretics, after all. The planned spectacle, in honour of the cardinal’s enthronement, more appropriate to opera. The theatre architect responsible, also rumoured to be an associate of the illustrious Signor Galileo, deserved to be strung up by his heels!

  His own rancour took Friar Fidelis by surprise and alarmed him. He had lapsed into sin.

  The last whispers fell silent. So might he, too, have been whispering? Without realising it? Perhaps others knew of his resentment. He must suppress all trace of anger. By which, of course, he meant all trace of fear. His fellow choristers from the monastery of Santa Maria Novella, dressed like himself in thick white habits, could be smelt hanging on to their nerve and only just controlling the contagious waves of hysteria given out by the boys among them. The staleness of used breath gagged him, nose and mouth. He called on his training in submission. Drenched with sweat and unable to tell whether his eyes were shut or open, he let his damp hands find one another in prayer.

  Surrendering in that plug of utter blackness, he encouraged his mind to glide over the contours of a musical phrase, the first notes of what must soon be sung. But did he still have a voice? Did any of them have voices? Had so much effort of rehearsal—not to mention the effort of constructing this suspended chamber they were in—been wasted? The very idea of shutting a blind and voiceless choir in a contraption that might never open out to the congregation’s astonishment showed itself as folly and vanity.

  Little could be heard of the service below apart from wordless echoes punctuated by the tiny metallic intervals of the cruet and the hand bell. A suspicion dawned on him: the great occasion was destined to end in failure and humiliation, the cardinal unenthr
oned, the city disgraced in the eyes of the Pope. Yes, the Holy Father himself was down there. Yes, with the perilous weight of a theatri cal device dangling high above his venerable head (and what would be in that head if not all-encompassing compassion for the sufferers?). Friar Fidelis gasped for air. He was at the point of fainting when the shell cracked open.

  Sudden vertical slashes of light began to gape around him.

  Alarmingly fast, the ribs of the machine creaked ajar to pivot on the principle of an upside-down umbrella, clefts disclosed random slices of the scenes painted on the walls: elephantine sinners being tortured in hell, shitting flames and biting hunks of silence from the surrounding fire, one damned soul tearing his own flesh open like an unbuttoned shirt to let a pearly ball of intestines tumble out. As Friar Fidelis descended, his personal puff of wooden cloud unfolding from the huge collective cloud that had suffocated him, demons with shaggy thighs and outspread wings drifted up, away, and out of sight. So, the choristers sank in unison, perilously perpendicular like wobbly candles in a candelabrum. Intent on keeping his balance, Friar Fidelis, nonetheless, relived the flickering glory of an airborne child in its father’s arms.

  Ambrosial incense sucked at his lungs in a painful spasm. The monumental creaking of the structure as it shuddered earthward filled him with reborn panic. He knew how far they would fall if they fell. He had several times climbed the hundreds of stairs to visit the gallery in this dome. Not to mention the dizzying illusion of inlaid patterns set into the floor so it would seem to plunge a further three storeys deeper. Right now he dared not look down. Gripping a handle provided by the architect, he inhaled deeply while fixing his mind on prayer. Gratefully, he knew how. He had the words and the vocation. Such was his life and he wished for no other.

  The time had come. The spokes of the machine extended to a colossal dandelion head and, quivering, stopped.

  The choir, after their collective swooping descent, jolted to a standstill among muted rays of daylight from the high windows. Candle flames trembled palely around them as the cantor sang the offertory verse. Friar Fidelis felt his soul soar across that sublime space … now singing, just as the others sang, a harmony so perfect, so rich with interwoven elaborations, tears filled his eyes. In that mighty cry of jubilation it was as if he heard his name spoken. They were angels, indeed (and must seem so from down in the nave), suspended, each in his own alcove of heaven. Maestro Rigatti’s motet evolved as pure mathematics given voice, an anatomy of the mind, the joyful embodiment of faith. Anno 1638.

  So, harmonies emerged from harmony and individual voices were lost in the whole. Friar Fidelis could not tell whether he was singing or not. His entire being vibrated as he surrendered to the greater surrender of the expansive Amen now filling that cavernous cathedral and giving life, with its incremental climax, to every atom of stone and glass, till nothing could be heard but the prismatic elements of silence.

  A Korean house

  The doors are open. Folded quilts have been stacked on cupboards and the wrapping cloths—modest works of art—put away in drawers. Cushions in their loose covers are stored on brassbound chests. Paper-screened shutters, pinned back, show polished floors and the scrupulous order of the house. Fallen leaves slide down the roof ’s raked gutters: blood-red maple leaves on the tiles, these and the gingko’s little golden fans have begun heaping up and clogging the downpipes. The last servant to leave, a cloth mask covering her nose and mouth, a swishing brush in her hand, erases her own footprints as she retreats, leaving the gravel yard perfect, untrodden, even while embers die in the grates and a final wisp of smoke escapes the chimneys, the warmed ondol floors left to grow cold. This is how a Korean nobleman’s house should look, canopied in autumnal glory and reflected in still ponds. She has gone. She has left the birdwinged roofs behind. The whole structure hovers. Such perfect openness, such quiet, she believes, will shock the Japanese invader into recognizing his intrusion as a crime.

  Hartmund Eischlbeck

  The tragedy of it is Hartmund Eischlbeck has inherited his famous grandfather’s nose, poor unfortunate, as well as his voice, but not his grandfather’s intelligence, no, no—nor his colossal bottlenosed ambition—neither of them worth a cracker anyway to Hartmund, who never discovered a vocation of his own. Is now thirty-six and faced with life’s downward slope. Despite which, he builds a tower singlehanded. Yes, huge windowless tower it gives you the creeps to think of. Dresses the stone blocks, mixes mortar, climbs the scaffold and sets in place seventy courses of diminishing circumference, by Jesus. Half a lifetime’s work for any normal fanatic. Culmination being these last few days of building, the finale banale, as he himself jokes being rather gifted in this department and is sufficiently amused. Must be admitted, though, Hartmund Eischlbeck, for the most part faultlessly grim, is working under extreme difficulty. Well, because the weather man sends rain, an overflow beyond the regional average, courtesy of ABC Television. Rampant isobars. Sensational unseasonal not to say impertinent rain. Watersmelling and ironcorroding. Each drop of it a plumbline from cloudheight to landform. And all a conspiracy to swirl together for the purpose of trapping our hero in a colossal and colossally noisy vortex. Which, by the way, is colossally wet too.

  Local witnesses, hurrying for shelter, fugitives every one, report Eischlbeck, twenty metres above their respectable heads, atop his tower with lightning flashes in his hair.

  He, shiny steel face in-turned on the task at hand, notices no one. Certainly not those bloody nonentities. Nor the log trucks, inaudible gears grinding, chipmill-bound, headlights aglow in broad daydark. Nor a car smash acted out in silence at the crossroads way beneath. Preoccupied by the task in hand. Alone. O mother! Hard-mooned, heart-moaned. Eis. Locked out by memories. Reminded of a drowned forest and young life he never had. Of careless youthful rapture missed. And missed again as more or less an adult. Of caution not thrown to the winds. The common touch eluding him. Not just the large thing of love but the lesser thing of neighbourliness too. The life of others. So, he labours on his tower. Dense spiralled curtains of rain bounce and glitter around him as he works in deafened isolation: Aurora Australis in black and white—as illustrated in his old between-the-wars encyclopaedia.

  Somewhere in Memories, Dreams, Reflections Carl G. Jung extols the satisfaction of building a tower. Well, Hartmund Eischlbeck suspects the towerbuilder Jung was a man demanding satisfactions of a high order. His own tower, even so, is dedicated to a less selfish function than the psychologist’s sunlit study. His is a casket, a reliquary, a lightless and permanently sealed monument. An embodiment. And therefore—one in the eye for CG!—a symbol! Around the foot of the scaffolding, his worksite dump of masonry in broken bits, mallets, brackets and off-cut planks left over from the task and cement bags stacked against the wall.

  Hartmund Eischlbeck has built a tower. And in that tower it is going to seal his patrimony of a family tradition, that’s what. Mementos and such. Gifts left him in his grandfather’s will, the whole codonomy of it all. Terrible accumulations of stuff he has no use for. The slights and wounds he has suffered too. All to be shut away forever in this phallic tomb. He’s a prudent member and no mistake. Therefore an end to grandfather, father and self. Instance, that grandfather, the archetypal shaper of autobamboozling theories—whiskers and long white locks more appropriate among Michelangelo clouds than the streets of Bangywallop—the celebrated missionary immortalized as a mountain range on the maps. But God knows where! The father another such with such another bottlenose and about as much sympathy for the fraternity of mudpuddlers and factoryfodder as for the authors of the Book of Ballymote. Poor Hartmund (as should be sufficiently clear). Sole heir to a family treasure of artefacts, notes and recordings that the National Museum urges him to donate to them. Bag and baggage: boomerangs, headgear, woven baskets still stink-struck from the fish, cowrie necklaces, sacred messages in the old man’s mumbo-jumbo (the decoding of which is believed to be punishable with death by bone-pointing), ritual shiel
ds, kadaitcha boots and so forth. And enough fieldnotes in longhand to fill the catacombs of Rome. Plus an index of exhibits crossreferenced with the ‘wordbook’ his great-grandfather garnered from native Australians before helping stamp out the very language he had spent his life collecting. Ah, to live a shadow of life. Plato’s dream. Ghosts. Is extinction ever final? Well, doing his bit, Hartmund seals away the remains of a culture eradicated by blessings. An end to the curse bequeathed him as a boy. Sea-sounds in a hundred empty shells. All his to keep, by order of a last will and testament. Treasures caked with red soil and dusted with dust. These for starters. Heaps more, too. Container loads of lethal junk.

  Himself balanced precariously at the basalt rim, he might conveniently topple to his death at any moment. O, where is thy sting? Where the mystery? Up on that doorless windowless tower whose only opening is the hole at the top that he labours right now to close, he doesn’t hear the police car arrive at the scene of the crash down there, let alone himself discussed by those in uniform. Defying the storm like one possessed, Hartmund Eischlbeck fits block after block in place. The end in reach. The past securely shut away and sealed. Grandson of the grandfather—nose of the nose: a nose familiar to the collective memory of a nomad nation far inland as the mark of a thief—who, in his final triumph over C.G. Jung, pulls back the tarpaulin for one last look. Down inside his tower he can barely make out the timber storage shelves and dark chambers. All packed full. Twilight of goodbye under sagging cloud. Storehouse of his misfortune. A structure, proof against prying or theft.