Consider Heisenberg …
“I suppose,” Charade murmurs into the post-coital calm, “when you think about it, my mother would have had Nicholas and Verity and Kay on her mind while she was giving birth to me, and they would have got into my bloodstream. So it’s only natural that I’d think of them whenever … well, all the time really, but especially when we make love … and it’s only natural that history and literature would absorb me from the start, two sides of the same coin, right? If I can sift through all the official fictions of the past carefully enough … Sometimes I think the meaning’s out there, waiting, like a new star, just waiting for me to focus —”
“Yes,” he says, “that’s how it is. It’s there, I already know the answer I want, I can feel that it’s right, I just have to work out the physics and the mathematics of it … I just have to come from the right direction. The solution’s millimetres away, I can feel it coming like an orgasm. I feel as though your next shudder will put it in my … I think of Rutherford and Bohr, that’s the way they worked, that’s the way it was for them. I think of Heisenberg when he had his hooks in the skin of an idea.”
Charade smiles and holds his hand up to the glimmer seeping in from the window. “White-fingernail people. What were you going to say about Heisenberg?”
“In 1923 in Munich —”
“1923?” She frowns and closes her eyes and taps her forehead. “The Uncertainty Principle. Nobel Prize, 1933. Right?”
He raises an eyebrow. “Very good.”
“I’ve been doing my homework. Anyway, history’s one of my obsessions.”
“Obsession,” he says. “That’s the sine qua non.” He laughs. “In 1923 Wien tried to flunk Heisenberg on his doctorate. That was in Munich. Of course, the world is full of academics like Wien, official guardians of the rules. And the Wiens have their ways, they are powerful blockers and delayers and inflicters of damage. Two years later Heisenberg was ill, he was a wreck.”
And still the habits of electrons were at him, clawing at him ruthlessly as heartburn. Help, Heisenberg said to his doctor, and was ordered off to an island in the North Sea. Koenig can imagine it: the way Heisenberg paces up and down the beach and thinks. He thinks. This is how his breakthrough comes: first the passion, then the hunch, then the computations: spectral lines, frequencies, quantum mechanical series … and the famous matrices.
Koenig likes to think of that night when Heisenberg worked without stopping, his theory growing faster than the sunrise. Just a kid too, twenty-five years old, crying Lights! lights! and there was light.
And suddenly Heisenberg is walking out into his own morning, his own shoreline and he’s paddling in it — the ripples of it, an entirely new theory — and climbing its rocks. He actually did that. He wrote a letter to Wolfgang Pauli, Koenig knows it by heart: I was far too excited to sleep, and so, as a new day dawned, I made for the southern tip of the island, where I had been longing to climb a rock jutting out into the sea.
“Do you see, Charade? He thought of it as a new dawn, and I think of it as flesh that’ll swallow me up. One night I’ll have it, the complete shape of the question, and here you’ll be in my arms.”
“Really?” she says dryly.
She doesn’t like this.
[They kiss], she thinks. She has, sometimes, the sense of watching her life on his stage. Or on his monitor. Click, click, she thinks. Access file, close file. [Curtain falls, is puckered here and there with behind-the-scenes activity, rises again.] Click, click.
“Well,” she says, “if obsession is nine-tenths of the game, I’ll find them. Just as I found Aunt Kay.”
It was obsession, she supposes, in the first place, that brought Verity’s name swimming up out of newsprint in the Sydney Morning Herald.
“Almost two years ago,” (Was it?) she says, (Can it be almost two years?) “I was reading for a history exam. Sydney Uni.” She closes her eyes. “There’s a bowl of soup in front of me, a spoon in my right hand, Sources of Australian History in my left. And pages of the Herald … someone else, one of my roommates, has left pages of the Herald strewn around on the table and floor. And then impact. Just a filler item in the Personals, which I never read, but it leaped out and smacked me between the eyes. See, I carry it around in my wallet, it’s getting hard to read.”
She rummages for her handbag in the dark. She finds her wallet, extracts something, smooths it out, a quarter page with hand-torn edges dominated by an advertisement for IXL mango and passionfruit jams. There is a yellow slash of outline (felt marker) at the third item down in the Personals:
Would anyone having any information on the whereabouts of Verity Ashkenazy (probably now married, married name unknown, but possibly Truman), who was a student and graduate student at the University of Queensland in the mid 50s and early 60s, please contact K. Sussex, Box 3211, Toronto, Canada.
“Can you imagine the effect?” Charade asks. “It was like … like getting a phone call from God.”
“I’m not surprised,” Koenig says. “Iron filings to a magnet, there are precedents all over the place in science. Coincidences cluster round obsessions, we expect it. Synchronicities, we say.”
“There I was,” Charade says, “in that ratty student apartment with cockroaches scuffling under the sink …”
She hears the furtive rubbing of one filthy little insect leg against another, she hears the atoms of air colliding, she hears time stop. Her heart is tolling like the frantic bell that rings in peace or war. Giddiness washes her.
She assumes she has experienced a fleeting hallucination and turns her eyes back to her textbook. Sources of Personal History, she thinks. Tench’s Complete Account of the Settlement at Port Jackson in New South Wales. Tench is recalling the anguish over dwindling rations, the passionate hopeless waiting for ships from England.
1790. Here on the summit of the hill, every morning from daylight until the sun sunk, did we sweep the horizon, in hope of seeing a sail. At every fleeting speck which arose from the bosom of the sea, the heart bounded, and the telescope was lifted to the eye. If a ship appeared here, we knew she must be bound to us; for on the shores of this vast ocean (the largest in the world) we were the only community which possessed the art of navigation, and languished for intercourse with civilized society.
To say that we were disappointed and shocked, would very inadequately describe our sensations.
So, Charade thinks. The fleeting speck on the horizon. The false sail. And she looks calmly, sardonically, ruefully back at the Sydney Morning Herald.
It is still there.
Would anyone knowing the whereabouts of Verity Ashkenazy … please contact K. Sussex … Canada.
She cannot concentrate, she cannot keep still. She leaves the apartment and walks and walks. She gets on a bus, gets off at Circular Quay, takes the ferry to Manly, takes it back again, and out again, over and over, her eyes on the furling wake, “which was green and white”, she says, “and coiled like a scroll.”
“A helix,” Koenig says.
“Yes, or a helix. But it changes quite abruptly, you know, when the ferry crosses the Heads. And I found myself obsessed with finding the point where it changed. You know, when you’re coming in from Manly, there must be a line that could be drawn from North Head … and then on the way out again, from Circular Quay, there must be a line from South Head. And between those two lines, the Pacific changes all the rules. You’re not really in Sydney Harbour any more. And for some loony reason I decided if I could find that point of change … I must have stayed on the ferry for hours. And then, you know, there was something else … suddenly, that space between the Heads, it was inside me. There was this roaring and buffeting and I couldn’t stand it, it was deafening, it made me seasick, and I got off at Manly and I ran and ran, and I got on a bus and then off it, and I found myself at Collaroy Beach and I just walked along the sand till it got dark.”
“What?” Charade blinks.
“Like Heisenberg on the beach. The breakthrough.”
“Breakthrough?” Charade turns the word over, puzzled. “But I was terrified,” she says. “Terrified. If they were turning out to be real after all … what if they were, you know, just ordinary? What if I were to find them and they were nothing special? Just ordinary people. Nothing.” She pauses.
She sighs and asks him: “Do you think it’s all a fraud? Knowing anything. The possibility of knowing anything.”
“Yes,” he says. “A useful fraud. In science, first we know, then we prove. It could be brilliant intuition, it could be ego — but it seems to work. Heisenberg and Schrodinger each knew they were right, each knew the other was wrong: wave packets or particles? orbits or matrices? endemic uncertainty? Each forges a proof that proves he’s right and the other’s wrong. They took the Nobel together in 1933 and had trouble, I suppose, being civil.”
“Is it all a joke, then?” Charade asks, appalled. “A century from now they’ll be quaint historical examples. There’s no such thing as truth, not even in science.”
“No,” he says. “Not a joke. It’s all we’ve got.” Our fallible ways of knowing, he thinks, and the enterprise of making maps to link up questions and answers. “They always turn out to be faulty,” he says. “Eventually. But they throw up answers after all. And they reshape the questions too.”
“Yes,” Charade muses. “I think that’s true. They knew they would find a Great South Land for all the wrong reasons. But they found Australia just the same.”
“The weird and wonderful routes to truth,” he laughs. “The marvellous routes.”
“Yes,” she says. “Yes. Aunt Kay’s for instance. Summoning Nicholas and Verity up from … And you don’t even remember her.”
“You keep saying that. I wish you’d tell me what you mean.”
“It’ll take nights and nights.”
“Mmm.”
“And how can I … ? I’ll have to go back to the beginning.”
PART II
K: The Variorum Edition
1 In the Beginning
2 Sailor, Sailor
3 Brisbane
4 The Man in the Pandanus Palms
5 Raisins
6 Bee in Her Bonnet
7 People Who Climb Glass Houses
8 The Tale of Nicholas II
1
In the Beginning
In the beginning, Charade says, when Kay was a child in Melbourne, she was taken Sunday after Sunday to a church where the pastor spoke lightning and thunder …
In the beginning, thundered the pastor, and the child watched the Word skipping and sliding up ladders of sunlight, watched it wink at her from high up in the cave of the church before it slipped through an air vent and escaped. She heard it rumbling about, baying above the trams and trains of Melbourne, that wicked city, and demanding repentance: a barker for God. It called to her: not Katherine! but Kay, Kay! it whispered, enticing. She closed her eyes and saw it on the carousel in the Fitzroy Gardens, going round and round in the eucalypt air, skipping higher and higher until it was with God again.
In the beginning was the Word. And the Word was with God.
It was God, said the pastor, and the same was in the beginning with God.
The beautiful shimmering Word: round and round and higher and higher it went, in the beginning and world without end, amen.
In the beginning Katherine was surrounded by the Word and by pastors and preachers and grandparents and uncles and aunts and cousins and God and the Powers of Darkness. The air through which she moved was thick with presences, for we are at all times surrounded, said the preacher, by a great cloud of witnesses. What else, therefore, could she do but walk with them and talk with them and know them all by name and by shape, even the Noisome Pestilence, whom she thought of as long-legged with a leer and bad teeth and fingernails curling like black smoke. When the Noisome Pestilence passed overhead there was a roaring in the air and flames fell.
He had passed over Darwin. He had dropped bombs. He flew in Japanese planes.
So thick, so dense with threat was the air, that the windows of the house (it was in Ringwood, on the outskirts of Melbourne) were painted black, for the terrors that stalked about at night battened onto lighted windows. In the mornings, however, as the trains rumbled by the house on their way into Flinders Street station, the blackened casements were thrown open to the sun and Katherine watched to see who would come riding on the shafts of light. Once a funnel of soot came twisting and dancing in, pointing its toes, lifting its long graceful legs and baring its teeth.
Katherine screamed.
“It’s the Noisome Pestilence,” she sobbed into her grandmother’s bosom.
“We’re not afraid of the noisome pestilence,” Grandma Llewellyn comforted. “The noisome pestilence can’t hurt us.” This was because they lived under the shadow of the Almighty. “He shall cover you with his feathers,” Grandma Llewellyn said, “and under his wings shalt thou trust.”
Katherine looked up into the downy feather-breasted air. It smelled of warmth and pillows and of the Velvet soap her grandmother used. A dash of lavender drifted by, a twisting falling feather of fragrance, the smell of sachets kept between clothes in a wardrobe. As it fell it cast a purple haze, the shadow of the Almighty.
Out of the shadow on a mauve day came Katherine’s father, riding home from Point Cook in his RAAF uniform. He’s got
his wings! the older boy cousins said, excited. Her father came on a dragon that belched sparks and smoke but she had never seen its wings. She hid under the golden-leafed hedge.
“Katherine!” they called, laughing, unable to find her. “Kay, Kay! It’s your daddy on his motorbike. Don’t you have a big hug for your daddy? Don’t you want a ride in the sidecar?”
Katherine watched her mother climb into the motorcycle’s side pocket. She watched her father kick at its flank. It snarled, it spat sparks, it roared down the street and under the railway bridge, breathing smoke. The long white aviator scarf around her father’s neck ribboned back in the wind like a pennant, the sun touched her mother’s copper hair, there were tongues of fire above her mother’s head.
“Oh I want to! I want to!” cried Katherine, crawling out from under the hedge. The sun swallowed her parents up. She shaded her eyes and squinted into the brightness until they flew out of it again. “I want to, I want to,” she cried, jumping up and down.
Her father scooped her up and kissed her. “Well now,” he teased, “and who might this little girl be?”
“I’m Kay,” she said, “and I want to.” She wanted to right up until the moment her father set her down in the motorbike’s pocket, until she felt how it trembled and hammered at her bones. She screamed.
Grandma Llewellyn came running. “Really!” she said to her son-in-law. “Terrifying the child like that.”
Katherine’s father looked sheepish. Through dinner he sat silent, as though all the aunts and cousins left no room at the table for his voice. He played with his fork and made his fingers gallop on the tablecloth, tan-ta-rum tan-ta-rum, and his eyes kept waiting for Katherine’s mother to look at him. He whispered something in her mother’s ear.
“Why are you whispering?” Katherine clamoured, and one of the aunts said in a low voice: “You can have our room for a while,” and the other aunts all said: “Shhh! Little donkeys have big ears.”
“I’ve got big ears,” Kay told her father, climbing onto his lap and pushing back her hair to show. “I can write my name.”
She showed him with her new crayons. K, she wrote.
“No,” he said, “it’s not finished. Like this, see? K-A-Y.”
But before she learned A and Y it was time already to go. So there were hugs and kisses and Kay promised to practi
se with the new crayons and he was gone. She saw his motorcycle disappear under the railway bridge and after that she saw it spread its wings, passing clouds, heading back to Point Cook.
“My father flies,” she told Bea.
Bea stuck out her tongue. “My father was in Egypt,” she said. “But your father won’t fight. If the Japs get us, it’s your father’s fault. If the Japs get us, they’ll cut off our fingers and kill our dads and rape our mothers.”
“What’s rape?” Kay asked with round eyes.
“Like grate,” Bea said. “Like with cheese.”
Kay thought of her mother’s cream skin being shredded by Japanese graters. Into her sleep that night fell flakes of her mother, a bloody rain, and she woke in terror, crying out.
“Why won’t Daddy fight the Japs?” she sobbed.
Her mother and Grandma Llewellyn came running in the dark. They stroked her hair. The Japanese, they corrected, are God’s children. We are all God’s children, they said. And your daddy is fighting. It is simply that he cannot kill. It is right to defend your country, but it is wrong to kill. So your daddy looks after the planes and he makes parachutes and things like that.
“I don’t want you to play with Bea again,” her mother said.
“Oh, Bea’s all right.” Grandma Llewellyn blew out the hurricane lamp and opened the blackened window so that Katherine could see the moon. “You can’t shield the child from talk. We are not afraid of what people say, Kay. And we are not afraid of the Japanese. We are not afraid of the terror that walketh by night, nor the destruction that wasteth at noonday. They shall not come nigh us. Because we live under the shadow of the Almighty.”
Nevertheless, nevertheless, they prowled about, the great cloud of pestilences, and at nights, when it was necessary to make the long trek through the garden to the outhouse at the back of the yard, Kay looked up in vain for the umbrella of lavender feathers, for the wings of the Almighty. At night the Powers of Darkness stalked unchecked. They were twelve feet tall, she could hear them rustling the leaves, whispering to each other, plotting felonies.
Charades Page 10
