Fish of the Week

by Steve Braunias

  Monday 11 a.m.

  The tortoise hasn’t moved.

  Monday 12 p.m.

  The tortoise hasn’t moved.

  Monday 1 p.m.

  The tortoise hasn’t moved.

  Monday 2 p.m.

  The tortoise hasn’t moved.

  Monday 3 p.m.

  Attend a funeral service for the laughing kookaburra, and race back to observe that the tortoise hasn’t moved.

  Wednesday 10 a.m.

  This is fun. It’s a lovely sunny day and I have been given instructions to observe the cheetah.

  Wednesday 2 p.m.

  I have chatted and chatted and chatted to the cheetah but it hasn’t so much as given a meow.

  Wednesday 2.45 p.m.

  It’s so hot. My legs hurt. I’m hungry. I’m tired. Perhaps I’ll take a small nap first, behind a stand of trees out of everyone’s way.

  Wednesday 10 p.m.

  It’s a lovely cool evening. Time to conduct worthwhile—and intimate—scientific research. I’ll start with the lions.

  Monday 10 a.m.

  A man is asking, ‘Do you know where you are?’ I shake my head. He points to a sign. It reads, MASON CLINIC FORENSIC PSYCHIATRY SERVICES. I ask, ‘Do you know where my right leg is?’ He just stares. And takes notes. And stares. And takes notes. And stares and stares and stares. I suppose it’s fun.

  [March 4]

  Going East

  The past is another coast. This time last year, she said, we were east. Late summer, the long days blue in the face, the line of motels falling sideways on the map from Te Aroha to Opotiki, Lottin Point, Tokomaru Bay, Tolaga Bay, Gisborne. East, where the sun rises earlier than anywhere in the world; east, where the cape separates itself in so many ways from the rest of New Zealand; east, where we were two.

  The only other people on the road were old people and Germans. And, in the towns, the tired young. Police report, Te Aroha: ‘Youth, aged sixteen or seventeen, found heavily intoxicated and lying on the road in Hikutaia St.’ The following day: ‘Youth (fifteen) found heavily intoxicated and lying on the road in Whitaker St.’ The whole town lay still. A fire-service hooter hooted on the stroke of midday and five in the afternoon; at night, the only sound I heard were the logging trucks, and the music that played softly and continuously through speakers mounted high on the outside wall of the shops. On a Sunday night, the length of Whitaker Street played the Beatles song, ‘She’s Leaving Home.’ I would guess that mournful tune continues to play each and every night.

  The crime wave had spread to Opotiki. Court report: ‘A sickness beneficiary was fined $50 for stealing a $17 flea treatment product.’ And: ‘A man convicted of assaulting a teenager in the Orete Forest has been ordered to pay the victim $1,800 compensation for dental work.’ Also: ‘A man was fined $350 after being found guilty of obscene exposure in the Opotiki Rose Garden.’

  The bridge was painted green and white, mullet jumped out of the river, kingfishers flew to the top of two tall, thin Washington palms. You could hear the gentle buzz of electric saws inside a Maori carving workshop. A sign above the door read: NO WOMEN.

  The gateway to the East Cape begins at Opotiki. From there right through to Gisborne was so much sea, an amazing loveliness, and not a single ATM. I was lost, separated. The only guidebook I took along was Farthest East—A.H. Reed’s account of his walk from Gisborne to Opotiki in the summer of 1945. He was seventy. It took him twelve days. We drove for seven. He was childless, and a widower. This was our last holiday together.

  An old man pushed a young child in an orange wheelbarrow on the sands of Horseshoe Bay. There were fields of blonde-haired horses, and the sea was good enough to eat. God was in the air—Uawa FM played a song called ‘Jesus Is My Light house’ twice, for a listener called John who was ‘out working on the fence line’, and four women from an evangelical church performed their regular Wednesday outdoor concert by singing gospel hymns on the vacant lot next to the Roll Inn Bakery in Tolaga Bay.

  All that coastline, and the countryside full of public signs—WANDERING STOCK CALL 0800 653 800, FIRE DESTROYS TREES, WASHOUT. And private signs—PIG DOG TRAINER AND BOOKBINDER. For hours on end it was for our eyes only. But over those seven days I kept seeing campervans driven by happy retired couples. Those old people had it made. While the workforce was back at work in force, the old were free to roam the roads at the best time of summer, with the best of New Zealand in their lap. I guess they are out there now.

  Ken Ring, who claims to forecast the weather by the moon’s movements, predicted the East Cape would be devastated last March by another Cyclone Bola. Nothing of the sort happened. It was paradise all the way to Gisborne, where New Zealand’s most industrious bird-watcher, Sav Saville of Feilding, lay in the sun at Wainui beach, and the container ship Marianne from Panama lay in the sun at the port. Paradise, with the usual signs of rot. Court report: ‘A man who yelled racist abuse and threatened to kill a Lebanese worker in a Gisborne takeaway shop has been ordered to pay $500 compensation for emotional harm.’

  We turned north, and headed home. It seems such a long time ago. It was another coast, another innocence. Our last holiday together, before we were—happily, excitedly, since 3.26 p.m. on February 21, 2007—three.

  [March 11]

  Easter, Greene

  You need only gently push aside the booze and the balloons to find Christ at Christmas. There’s always a nativity play, carols, a church lit with candles, various assorted gentle platitudes about the little lord Jesus. Everyone loves a baby. Easter, though, is serenely godless. No one likes the betrayal, the agony, the death.

  Did anyone revel in it as much as Graham Greene? Seventy years ago, the great writer made a kind of pilgrimage to observe Holy Week—the week leading up to today, Easter Sunday—in Mexico. He wanted suffering. He got suffering—his own: he rode a mule through swamp and over mountain day after day, his brain draining in the heat. He hated almost every second of it. ‘This is a record of hate,’ Greene wrote in the opening chapter of a later novel, The End of the Affair, but it reads like a light romp compared to his travel book about Mexico, The Lawless Roads. He hated the Mexicans, the food, the beer, the vultures, the mosquitoes, the pottery, everything. ‘No hope anywhere: I have never been in a country where you are more aware all the time of hate.’

  It was 1938. Greene was thirty-three, Catholic, married, a moderately successful but financially anxious author who was tempted to give up writing and sell vacuum cleaners door to door. He lived in Clapham Common, with his wife and two children. Probably the only time New Zealand figured in his life was at the birth of his second child: ‘All the nurses were young New Zealanders,’ his wife Vivien remembered, ‘all dressed in white, even white shoes and stockings, and so sympathetic.’ Her husband, too, with the secret code he wrote in his diary to remind him of the time and place to meet his favourite prostitutes, would have noticed the stockings, the nubile New Zealand flesh.

  He had written two very good novels, Stamboul Train and Brighton Rock, and a classic travel book, Journey Without Maps, about his ridiculous, dramatic wanderings in Liberia. He wanted to go to Spain during the Civil War, not out of any political conviction, more for the sheer experience. He missed the boat; the war finished. He set his sights on Mexico.

  Mexico’s socialist government had ordered a Catholic persecution, closed the churches, burned the effigies, executed the priests. Greene missed the boat there too—the last priest to be shot was in 1934. But a publisher asked for a book, gave him an advance, and Greene set sail in January 1938. He stopped in at Mexico City. When he returned there after Holy Week in Las Casas, he wrote: ‘I had forgotten the hatefulness of Mexico City…’

  Why did he hate Mexico so much? In a calm moment in The Lawless Roads, he admits that he was sorely aggravated by the loss of his reading glasses. He had brought two novels by Trollope for comfort; now he was sightless, stuck in the heat and the dust with ‘hideous’ Mexicans. ‘I can understand,’ he reasoned,
‘the temptation to massacre.’ Incredible. Greene deserves to be placed in John Carey’s devastating study, The Intellectuals and the Masses, which names English writers who were sympathetic to genocide.

  Greene rode his hateful mule to Tabasco. Its former governor, Tomás Garrido Canabal, had tried to prohibit two dangerous substances—alcohol and God. His private army of Red Shirts shot priests and sacked churches. Canabal believed he was acting in good faith; a kind of Richard Dawkins given military power, he wanted to rid the people of superstition and false worship. He named a bull God, and a donkey Christ; he called his son Lenin, and a nephew Lucifer. By the time Greene got to Mexico, Canabal was in exile, but Tabasco remained the ‘godless state’— the Mass was held in secret, baptism and the last rites were outlawed, the vandalised cemeteries were marked with a sign reading SILENCIO.

  Greene vividly reported on the persecutions in The Lawless Roads. You can reread a lot of it, word for word, in the novel he wrote on a Benzedrine rush in the afternoons of early 1939—his masterpiece, The Power and the Glory is set exactly where he had travelled. Greene gives up his seat on the mule to a nameless ‘whisky priest’, on the run from a police lieutenant who wants him dead. Betrayal, agony, death … The lieutenant is Pilate, the priest is Christ; Judas is a half-caste, ‘hideous’ in appearance, who gives the priest a sordid confession: ‘I’ve given money to boys—you know what I mean.’

  Everyone is grotesque, lowered, weak. But the language and imagery reach fabulous heights. The shocking hatred of The Lawless Roads is softened in The Power and the Glory: ‘Hate is a failure of the imagination,’ Greene conceded, and his imaginative genius blazes throughout the novel. Its pages follow a trail of desperation and despair—the dead child with a lump of sugar in its mouth, the dentist who doesn’t care that the Red Shirts have killed God: ‘There’s no difference in the teeth.’

  It’s a great book to read any time. Easter gives it even more resonance. But for all the desolation that Greene lays bare in the godless state, you look up from the pages, see New Zealand happily scoffing chocolate eggs at Easter, and think: The best way to put an end to religion is to leave the churches open.

  [April 8]

  Meet the Ancestors

  There are now fourteen people in New Zealand called Braunias. The authorities have been alerted. A birth certificate usefully headlined TE TOHU WHANAUTANGA KI AOTEAROA records the details, confirms she is ‘He kirirarau no Aotearoa i te mea i whanau i konei’, or, in plain English, a New Zealand citizen by birth, that her ‘ingoa tapa’ or surname is, in ungainly German, Braunias. Good. All families are cults; the document is proof that my daughter has joined our exclusive ranks.

  It is my solemn duty to make her aware of her rich heritage. I can tell her that the first Braunias to arrive in New Zealand jumped ship in New Plymouth in 1936. She will want to know about this character. I have a few stories. He was my father. In a brief, impatiently typed memoir titled Peregrinations Of A Bastard, he wrote, ‘Most kids remember a mother but I honestly can’t recall one as I was adopted out to my grandparents soon after birth … It was a house full of bastards, as none of the other kids was born in wedlock.’

  Which is where the trail of my daughter’s rich heritage goes cold. I never did ask my father too much about his family in Austria. There was a photograph of his grandfather, Leopold Braunias. He worked as a cobbler. The picture was taken late in his life; he looked like an old cobbler. I met an uncle, a lively fellow called Friedl, who had never strayed beyond his village until he came out to New Zealand a few years ago. He had a wooden leg. He worked as a baker. He stumped home with treasure: his visit introduced him to that landmark invention in the history of sliced bread, the electric toaster.

  There must be other ancestors; the chances are high that my daughter is related to many of her namesakes in the land of the schilling and the ski chalet. A computer search reveals Helmut, Artikel, Bernhard, Katharina, Sandra—Sandra?—Petra, Christiana and Friedrich Braunias. It’s a start. Perhaps they are cousins acht or neun times removed.

  But they are mentioned only in passing. What have they ever done with their lives? I want rich heritage: records of achievement, distinction, something like that. The most famous living Braunias in Austria is Ernst M. Braunias. He works as an art director in film and television. His credits include such quality television series as Eurocops, Operation Plutonium, and Bürger forum. He has also art-directed commercials for Persil and Nescafé. I suspect we are closely related. I use Persil, I like Nescafé, and I am always available for a burger forum.

  The most distinguished Braunias in history is Karl Braunias. He worked as a diplomat. He made the pages of Time in the issue dated December 23, 1946. It is a story of suffering and fortitude: ‘In Soviet Russia, Austria’s spanking new diplomatic mission to Moscow, consisting of slim, distinguished Minister Karl Waldbrunner, Counsellor Karl Braunias and a female secretary, have been homeless and flat broke. The Russians would not fix a legal rate for converting their schillings into roubles. The diplomats had to wash their own socks and underwear. Never sure where their next meal was coming from, they scurried from one hotel to another as bills came due. On top of it all, the secretary turned out to have been pregnant when she left Vienna; after she went back home, the Minister and Counsellor even had to type their own letters.

  ‘Waldbrunner stuck it for weeks, then fled to Vienna, where he announced his resignation. Braunias held on in Moscow. To keep going, said his wife tearfully in Vienna, he was selling his clothes, now a jacket, now a pair of trousers.’

  Fabulous. ‘Braunias held on in Moscow.’ I will never feature in a sentence as good as that. Although jacketless and trouserless, I doubt he was implicated in the secretary’s pregnancy; he sounds too high-minded a man. You may remember him as the author of such classic works as Das parlamentarische Wahlrecht: Ein Handbuch über die Bildung der gesetzgebenden Körperschaften in Europa. This manual on proportional voting was published in 1932 to great and lasting acclaim. It is admiringly cited in Alfred de Grazia’s 1953 study Mathematical Derivation of an Election System. In 1990, de Grazia wrote The Student, a novel lit up by a gripping sex scene involving a fish-skin condom, which also includes this passage: ‘His graduate class … was loaded with the latest references to election systems and all the socio-economic, psycho-cultural variables he could find to correlate with methods of voting. The approach was far ahead of any other in the country and probably in the world, not in France, for example, until Maurice Duverger in the 1950s at the Sorbonne, though perhaps in the wrecked Weimar Republic with Karl Braunias.’

  Yes, exciting stuff. The rest of my search fished up a recommendation by Johannes Braunias for an audio language course in Russian—another Braunias holding on in Moscow?— and news of a recent bank promotion for a 42-year-old woman called Doris Braunias. Well, well. That was also my mother’s name.

  The latest Braunias in New Zealand will never meet the first and second. Heritage, rich or poor, is sometimes all we have.

  [April 15]

  The Capital Letter of New Zealand

  There were four fields, and only one marked with the most iconic letter in the New Zealand landscape—H, the shape assumed by rugby goalposts. It looks so good in paddocks beside farms, the twin white pillars rising up out of a breathing space usually lined with macrocarpa, always a beaten-up changing shed nearby with an outside tap dribbling just a few inches above the ground. But the other three fields at the sports ground I went to on a recent Saturday morning were marked with soccer goalposts. Strange how they look so stunted, not the full quid, beside the towering H.

  As the 2006–2007 English football season draws to a close, the 2007 soccer season in New Zealand has begun. I used to live for this time of year. Autumn’s soft light meant the chance to finally climb into my boots and let fly at the stoutest defences in the Bay of Plenty with a series of fulminating left-foot screamers. Te Puke crumbled, Matamata scattered; I am far too modest to present an exact tally of the go
als I scored in six seasons playing for Mount Maunganui, but it may have been around six.

  I hung up my boots at seventeen. Soccer in New Zealand would never be the same again. It got better. I was wildly impressed with the standard of skill and tactical awareness displayed recently by the two teams I watched at my local park with the four fields. My godson was playing. I have loved him to pieces his entire life; now aged twelve, he was making his club debut.

  He kept a cool head, played with grace and strength, and set up two goals. His coach had put him on the left wing—the same position where I played, toiling up and down the Bay of Plenty touchlines with a dream rattling around in my head that a football scout would phone up Manchester United and say the words that a scout had once famously used in a telegram about George Best: ‘I think I’ve discovered a genius.’

  The best part of my game was spent in dreams. But everything about soccer in New Zealand seemed so unreal. In winter, during the season, goalkeepers would have to wade out into the tidal mudflats when the ball went out of play behind the goal. In summer, soccer was almost furtive—playing it at lunchtime in the summer months, when we ran over sunburnt fields with prickles in our bare feet, was strictly prohibited at Mount Maunganui Intermediate. Day after day, I lined up with other seditious players and held out my hand to receive the strap. And then I would go home and lie back with the magazines that took three months to arrive by ship—Shoot, Goal, Football Monthly, World Soccer—and think of England.

  Soccer in New Zealand had its stars too. I wrote fan letters to an Eastern Suburbs’ winger with the fabulous name of Mal Bland, and I was shocked to read last month that his team mate Ray Mears (‘Showed glimpses of his old form’—1973 New Zealand Soccer Annual ), now sixty-four, suffered two punctured lungs when he was pinned between two six-tonne trucks in an Auckland goods yard. Best wishes for a speedy recovery, Ray. He was my role model: in six years playing for New Zealand, he scored six goals.

  But the real action was in England, and in the pages of Shoot, Goal, etc. I memorised team-sheets, club histories, names of grounds, transfer fees—all obsessions rely on an accumulation of facts. Now my godson subscribes to Shoot. When I go over to his house, we have a go at the magazine’s crossword. I got him a Chelsea shirt at Christmas. He watches football clips on YouTube. I suppose he is accumulating facts, and his head is rattling with dreams of Cristiano Ronaldo.