“It’s not pretty, Charade.”
“Was it me? She went mad because of me?”
“Don’t ask stupid questions. No one can answer stuff like that.” That part of it, in fact, Bea understands: she remembers the helplessness, how she used to feel ill with anxiety, how there were frantic and lunatic things she might have done to keep any one of her babies from harm. So she understands, in a manner of speaking, given everything else. “She tried to drown you, Charade. They took her away, and Nicholas brought you to me.”
“Oh God,” Charade whispers. “Oh God.” She is blind, she cannot breathe, something burns across the surface of her skin. She rocks herself on the floor of Koenig’s kitchen. Where is all this salt water coming from?
Bea is talking. Bea watches the mangoes fall. “Listen to me, Charade. There’s things that happen, and there’s things that matter. And me and Nicholas … as far as I’m concerned, me and Nicholas made you right here, in this house, on the day I turned twenty-one.” Struth, she thinks. And the thoughts that have never taken shape before push, shove, fizz their way out, a geyser of astonished outrage. Me, someone looks at me and I get pregnant, so how? why? Bea sighs. “Verity’s your mother. But me and Nicholas made you, that’s the truth.”
“I know that, Mum.” Yes, I do, Charade thinks. I do know that. “Mum, did Nicholas leave her? Is that why?”
“No, that’s not why. He wouldn’t’ve … well anyway I reckon he wouldn’t’ve. Ah struth, who knows? Nicholas is Nicholas. But she …” Bea sighs. Another mango falls. The crows leave. There is a crimson flash of rosella parrots. “She always expected him to leave. She expected everyone to leave. She always expected to be alone.”
“I didn’t find him, Mum.”
“Yeah. Well.”
In the eternity that ticks away between them, Charade hears the whole Pacific on the line: the long shush of white noise and waves, the static, the shuffle and ping and collision of disturbed molecules of air.
“Mum,” she laughs nervously, “this is an awfully expensive silence.”
“Yeah,” Bea says, watching scrub turkeys scratch at their nest mounds. Somewhere in the rainforest a bower bird preens and she sees his dance, his shimmer, in her mind’s eye. There are things, she thinks, that a person can’t forgive himself for. He’ll have to keep running from them forever, he daren’t look back. That’s
the way things are. “Yeah well. Don’t be too harsh, Charade.”
“Do you think he’ll ever …?”
“Who knows? Charade, remember the tree orchids on the mango? There’s one just out, I can see it from here. Funny, when you were little, you always had to have one of those flowers in your hair.”
Charade is dizzy with homesickness. “I’m coming home, Mum. God, I miss you all.”
“Yeah, me too.” A female scrub turkey shakes her feathers outside the kitchen window, a kookaburra laughs, Bea taps her foot to keep time. “I’ll spread the word, Charade. Reckon we’ll have a party.”
“Yeah. That’s beaut, Mum. See ya soon, then.”
“Hang on, I gotta — Charade? Listen, there’s no need to tell Kay about, you know … She sort of … she always wanted to … The thing is, Verity was, I dunno, bloody magic for her. No sense spoiling that.”
“Mum, I think she knows. I think she knew when she
saw me.”
“Yeah. Could be. You’ve got Verity’s eyes, not the colour, but the shape, or something. Sometimes I see her looking out, scares the hell out of me too, Charade.”
So maybe now Kay will forgive Bea at last. Now that she knows. And Bea, who has let that little cruelty go glittering on through the years, is Bea willing to …?
Bloody Kay, though. All these years wondering if she and Nicholas … star-shaped mole indeed! Through the kitchen door, Bea can see the bed where still and always … She sees the hollows of his thighs, those milk-white creases where her body swallows his cock, his eyes, oh God his blue blue eyes, and in the bleating hollow of his neck, the brown mole in the shape of …
Bea frowns. Was there a mole? Was there ever a boy with a recorder? Bloody Kay, bloody bloody Kay, bloody bloody bloody —
“Mum? Are you still there, Mum? Do you want me to give you Aunt Kay’s number?”
There is sweat on Bea’s upper lip. When she rubs the back of her hand across it, it shakes a little. “What?” she says vaguely. “Kay?” There are two whole seconds of silence. “I don’t know, Charade. Let sleeping dogs lie, I’ve always said.” She can see the crows at the mangoes again, they can never leave well enough alone. Somewhere a bower bird keeps up the same old dance. “Yeah,” she sighs. “Give me Kay’s bloody number.”
Charade sits on the floor, seeing nothing, till first light comes through the Venetian blinds. Then she tiptoes into the bedroom where Koenig is still sprawled in sleep, one arm flung up across his face like a child. How beautiful he is, she thinks. She stands and looks at him.
Losses, losses, losses.
Will he miss her?
Perhaps, she thinks, he will miss me enough to write.
(Struth, who knows? Bea asks. Nicholas is Nicholas.)
And Koenig is Koenig, Charade thinks with a terrible pang.
Before she can change her mind, she kisses him on the forehead and on the small mole (not star-shaped) in the crook of his neck and gathers up her things and leaves.
And with that, as Scheherazade said to King Shahryar when the thousand-and-first night had come, she vanished like camphor.
3
Probability Theory
What we observe is not nature itself, but nature exposed to our method of questioning.
Heisenberg, Physics and Philosophy
Details assault him. In his sheets there is a hollow, a very slight concavity, which is as permanent as the scar on his ankle —
a thing his body keeps as a souvenir of a five-year-old’s fall from sharp rocks. Some of his sweaters smell of tropical flowers. There is a towel he has — once he had to fish it out of his toilet — that he has washed and disinfected but never uses; although he keeps it hanging in his bathroom and will sometimes lean against it, hugging it as it were — a foolish ritual and one which embarrasses him deeply.
His research continues to absorb him and rumours circulate that he is being considered for a Nobel Prize. He is working obsessively on several theories. One of these is his theory of magnetic monopoles, whose elusive traces are a knotty issue, an inelegance, in the grand unified theories. No experimental evidence has yet surfaced to prove the existence of the magnetic monopole, though he has conclusively established, mathematically and theoretically, that its mass is about 1016 times as heavy as the proton.
Another theory whose ramifications he elaborates is that he invented Charade in order to explore, absolve, assuage his desertion of Rachel; in order to poultice the great gaping wound where his absent children are; in order to still the earthquakes and nightmares set off by the Zundel trial.
Experimental evidence certainly exists to suggest Charade is hologram rather than substance, though relativity theory shows that mass has nothing to do with substance, but is a form of energy. It has been amply demonstrated that when two particles collide with high energies (in an accelerator, say; or in Building 6; or in an apartment off Harvard Square), the two particles break into subatomic fragments, but those fragments are not smaller than the original particles.
The most revolutionary aspect of his “inflationary” theory of the origins of the universe, he reasons, is the notion that all the matter and energy in the observable universe may have emerged from almost nothing. He is tempted to go one step further and to theorise that the entire universe evolved from literally nothing.
Another theory is that it was not he who invented Charade, but that he is being slept, or dreamed, and that she invented him. There is a certain elegance to this theory. It contains her need to ar
ticulate her search for some perfect object of adoration, perhaps her father, perhaps not. It contains her need, in the light of the tragedy of her mother, Verity Ashkenazy, to ask incessant and unanswerable questions about the nature of psychic damage, about the role of victim, about blame and responsibility.
Originally, also, this theory accommodated his niggling doubts about her father’s name. Saint Nick? Old Nick? But on this score he took a scientific and quantitative approach. To satisfy his compulsive and pedantic itch, he paid a graduate student to comb through old volumes of Index to Social Sciences and Humanities, and to check various European indexes, especially French ones. The student came up with two items. Both were references to papers on the trickster figure in medieval French fabliaux, presented (though neither paper was ever published) by Nicholas Truman, for whom no institutional affiliation
was given. One paper had been presented at a conference at Lyons in 1965; the other at a Teamed Societies conference at Queen’s University in Kingston, Canada in 1973.
He ponders Bohr and Heisenberg and the Copenhagen interpretation of interpretation: that what is observed is preselected — imposed, perhaps — by the observer. He considers Heisenberg’s warnings on the imprecision of all perception, and is consequently wary about leaping to unwarranted conclusions based on the recent and slight evidence of the unpublished papers.
Nevertheless he has formulated a revised and tentative theory whose elegance appeals to him. His theory is that Charade does indeed exist and that he is in fact in love with her. (He is old enough to find the term “love” appropriate, or at least approximate, for the confusion of pleasure and emptiness and want that swamps him when he thinks of her.) This theory assumes a considerable degree of symmetry between their two life stories, but then that is hardly a matter of surprise to a physicist.
There is a somewhat alarming hypothetical correlative, which is that he could contact her and that she might (that is, of course, if she still thinks of him with any sort of fondness, or indeed if she still thinks of him at all) that she might be persuaded to …?
This hypothesis contains so many risks that he fears, like Dirac taking fright at his own mathematics on negative energy states, he may pull back from the edge of discovery.
He has days, however, of rash and preliminary courage.
In the basement of Building 6 one day, he waylaid his colleague from the Media Lab.
“You still doing anything with holograms?” he asked casually. And had to clamber over marathons of his colleague’s moody predictions, his monologues, his obsessions; had to be dragged off to the Wiesner building to watch laser displays, Jupiter simulations, and then … suddenly, there was Charade, insubstantial and absolutely real, twirling like a tree ornament through a corner of the Media Lab.
“How …?” he asked, swallowing, his throat going dry. “How’d you do that?”
“From a photograph,” his colleague said. “Elementary stuff, I’ve lost interest in it.”
“Yes, I see. But the ah girl looks faintly familiar. She a student?”
“Hmm?” His colleague frowned. “Can’t remember now. Used to hang around the dorms, a dormie. Can’t remember who she was. Not your type, Koenig. You can be sure of that.”
Koenig keeps a crumpled scrap of memo paper attached to his fridge door with a magnet. It is next to the crayon drawings done by his cleaning lady’s son and her daughter when they were little, a long time ago, actually he was someone else then, though it often seems yesterday. There are two telephone numbers on the scrap of paper and he knows, having verified this from the long distance operator, that the area codes are for a rural town in Queensland, Australia.
One day he is going to place a call.
Actually, quite often, almost every night in fact, he lifts the receiver and begins to dial the numbers. But then he thinks of Heisenberg and the indeterminacy question, and wishes to keep the ending open.
Acknowledgements
First and foremost, I acknowledge with gratitude the assistance of the Literature Board of the Australia Council, whose support made the writing of this book possible.
I am also most grateful to Dr Alan Guth, of the Physics Department at MIT, for his generosity: he gave me time, patience, and permission to quote from his article “The Inflationary Universe” co-authored with Dr Paul J. Steinhardt. I hasten to add that other than the attribution of this article to Koenig, no correlation whatsoever exists between my fictional character and Dr Guth. Furthermore, Drs Guth and Steinhardt must be absolved from any misinterpretations I may have made of their theory on the origin of the
universe.
Thanks are also due to my own students at MIT. They gave me fascinating insights into a mindset quite different from my own, as well as into the mores of dorm life.
I found three books (The Second Creation by Robert P Crease and Charles C. Mann; The Tao of Physics by Fritjof Capra; The Mind-Boggling Universe by Neil McAleer) particularly helpful for background material, and their influence will be apparent, but again, any misunderstanding or misinterpretation is entirely my responsibility.
I would like to pay tribute to Claudine Vegh’s I Didn’t Say Goodbye: Interviews with Children of the Holocaust
(NewYork: Dutton, 1984) which had an indelible effect on my imagination.
Quotations from the journals of Captain James Cook, William Dampier, and from other documents of early Australian history, were taken from Sources of Australian History, selected and edited by Professor Manning Clark.
Though the Zundel trial in Toronto was an actual event, the characters in this novel who give testimony and otherwise participate in the trial are entirely fictitious.
First published 1988 by University of Queensland Press
PO Box 6042, St Lucia, Queensland 4067 Australia
Reprinted 1989, 1990, 1991, 1995, 2003
This edition published 2015
www.uqp.com.au
[email protected]
© Janette Turner Hospital 1988
This book is copyright. Apart from any fair dealing for the purposes
of private study, research, criticism or review, as permitted under the
Copyright Act, no part may be reproduced by any process without
written permission. Enquiries should be made to the publisher.
Typeset in by Post Pre-press Group, Brisbane
Printed in Australia by McPherson’s Printing Group, Melbourne
Cataloguing-in-Publication entry is available from the
National Library of Australia
http://catalogue.nla.gov.au
ISBN 978 0 7022 5385 0 (pbk)
ISBN 978 0 7022 5596 0 (pdf)
ISBN 978 0 7022 5597 7 (epub)
ISBN 978 0 7022 5598 4 (kindle)
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