by Arnold Zable
We were enemy aliens. Sinister presences. Dark-skinned barbarians. ‘We must tear apart words to liberate their meaning,’ Old Niko had shouted. ‘Every nation thinks they are civilised while the others are barbarians. Look hard at the word. Dissect it. Put each syllable under a magnifying glass. Ba. Ba. Ba. It is the babble of foreign tongues. Ba. Ba. Ba. It is the babble of those who speak a language other than one’s own. Each nation thinks that they possess what the ancient Greeks called mesotes, measuredness, while the others are cast as savage mobs.’
I glance down at the page I am writing. The Greek script is whirling. Alpha is waltzing with omega. The beginning is dancing with the end, and the end has become the beginning, and all that has happened will happen again. I watch the ink flow from my pen. I observe the moment in which it dries. Perhaps this is the moment when words die. The descent from the living thought to its death is swift. Perhaps this is the precise instant when a manuscript begins to gather dust. It cannot be seen yet, but the process has set in.
The bantams have stopped their cackling. The mouse that is now surely a rat has stopped gnawing. The cockatiel is asleep on my shoulder. I am tired. The night is old. The story is long, and before I go on I need a good night’s sleep. I am going to bed, and tomorrow night the same.
Arkhe tou paramythiou, kalispera sas. The fairytale truly begins, good evening to you. It begins on Saturday, 9 December 1916. Shoppers are foraging for Christmas bargains. The House of Brennan boasts poplin trousers, elastic braces, cashmere socks, and Galatea knickers. McKay’s display-windows blaze with women’s millinery. Pellews of Boulder is doing a brisk trade in Formosa hats, silk Assam suits and dress materials: muslin and organdie, satin laces, camisole embroidery, tweeds and linens. Montgomery Brothers’ Monster Christmas Fair offers green bamboo veranda blinds, beribboned corsets, trimmed underskirts. The stores of Kalgoorlie rival the fabled bazaars of Constantinople.
When darkness falls, the blinds are drawn, stores locked and bolted and the fulcrum shifts to the pubs and hotel balconies. The Lyric Pictures is showing The Miracle of Life. Powell’s Palace Pictures is screening a Keystone comedy; at interval models will parade the latest creations of Paris. The Kalgoorlie band is playing at an open-air concert on Hannan Street. For a fee of two shillings, gents gain entrance to the weekly dance at the Theatre Royal, while ladies are allowed in free. At the Goldfield’s Athletics’ club Albert ‘Kid’ Lloyd of Victoria is stepping into the ring with local boy, ‘Kid’ George. The house is full. The audience is baying. The blood sports are about to begin.
A group of soldiers and civilians gather in Commonwealth Park and make their plans. They reassemble two hours later by the Town Hall. A shrill whistle signals the charge. The Olympia Cafe, Mangos’ fruit shop and Spiro Black’s oyster saloon on Cassady Street are the first to be attacked. Among the rioters there are those who had gulped down our oysters, sipped our sodas, slapped our backs and called us ‘mates’. Now they chant, ‘Go back to where you fuck’n’ came from you sons of whores and traitors. While our sons die in your filthy lands, you lift our hard-won cash from our hands.’
The beer and whisky are flowing. It is a carnival, a substitute for men whose wives no longer make love, a means of vengeance for soldiers who have lost a comrade, a cleansing for those who have lost a loved one. Shops are torn apart, furniture smashed, fittings ripped out. Stock is scattered over the street. When a rioter is arrested the police are kicked and jostled by the mob.
Drinkers on pub balconies egg the rioters on. Rocks and bottles are hurled through windows. The stock is there for the taking. Looters scurry off with cigars and spirits, cartons of cigarettes, crates of fruit and oysters. Children stuff sweets into their mouths, in their pockets and underpants.
The Gambler runs from the Parisian cafe chanting ‘I am a loyal citizen.’ His stout legs are working overtime. A group of men mimic his words with exaggerated accents. One of them grasps him by the lapels and heaves him to the ground. The Gambler, no stranger to brawls, covers his head with his arms as he is kicked. Stratis and I run from the cafe. We lift him by the arms and drag him back through the dust. Blood trickles from gashes in his forehead. ‘I am a loyal citizen,’ he bellows.
The many have become one, and the one are many, and in the many there is a clear purpose. I envisage tribes over millennia emboldened by flags and anthems, united beneath coats of arms and banners. I observe those who hang back, and those who succumb and move forward to become part of the one. I observe the potent brew of elation and hatred, the contagious bravado of the mob. Children ape their fathers. Women find common purpose with their estranged husbands.
We flee by the back door as the windows of the cafe shatter, and run to Panos Pitsikas’ house where our compatriots are gathering. Children are crying, adults consoling, young men enraged by their impotence. Throughout the night the door is opened to those seeking refuge.
When the Greek businesses of Kalgoorlie have been taken care of the rioters cram into cable trams, and pour out in Boulder. The crowd has swelled to two thousand. They tear apart shop interiors and hurl crockery against the walls. They clear the shelves with one swipe of their hands and hurl the spoils through smashed windows onto the pavements. Scavengers scuffle over jars of pickles, puddings and cutlery, pipes and tobacco. Papadopoulos’ fruit market is set alight.
Time is expanding, the sky impassive. We pace the rooms and endure the passing hours. We creep back into the streets as the sun begins its ascent. Women and children are darting into gutted shops to sift through the rubble. A child runs to his mother with a jar of preserves. She sends him back to continue his search. Municipal workers are sweeping the debris and nailing boards over shattered windows.
After the crowd disperses, we pick our way through the wreckage. A gust of red dust swirls in the rising heat. The stench of beer and vomit still lingers. We gaze at the remains of years of toil and know our days in Kalgoorlie are over.
For nine days, Mikhalis Raftopoulos and his son Yianni, cower in a shed for fear that the riots have not ended. We delay our departure until we find them, then tear up our leases, write off our debts and pack our possessions. We make our way to the station and leave as we had arrived, with a suitcase in hand and the clothes we are wearing. And in the years since I have often wondered, who moved in after we left to claim our gutted shops and aborted leases? Who sweated in the kitchens and warded off the flies as they dragged out the rubbish bins? Who sifted the rubble to claim the spoils of our losses?
Stratis and I formed other plans. We drove east from Kalgoorlie with the Gambler in his white Studebaker following the rail-tracks of the wood-lines. They extended, like octopus tentacles, hundreds of kilometres from the goldmines. The trees closer to the city had been axed in the early years of settlement. Entire woodlands were felled and the stumps prised out by gelignite, so fierce was the hunger for fuel. The tracks snaked beyond the new wastelands in all directions as the loggers moved ever further in search of timber.
We reached the first of the camps late afternoon. The men were trudging back from work beside logs loaded on horse-drawn wagons. Their clothes were heavy with sap, their hair infested with slivers of bark. They looked like scrawny scarecrows that had known too many suns. We helped them transfer the logs to wagons moored by railway sidings from which they would be ferried to Kalgoorlie.
The Gambler approached the workers’ quarters after the evening meal. They quickly agreed on the fee he charged for controlling the bank, and the game was on. The timber-men were Italians. In the previous year, their Slav workmates, former citizens of Austro-Hungary, had been interned as enemy aliens on Rottnest Island. The Italian workers outnumbered Anglo-Australians four to one. The ratio increased in the summer when the Italians stayed on despite the heat.
The Gambler was the great tempter. He wore the guise of a genial uncle but his jovial demeanour masked his cunning. ‘We are brothers,’ he proclaimed, drawing on his pidgin Italian, ‘in search of a way back to our true homes.
’ He was a messenger bearing news from distant mines and camps, a slow moving Hermes, ample bellied and plump.
The mood changed as soon as the first hand was dealt. The players were riveted, their nerves finely tuned. They crossed themselves and gripped the cards more tightly as their losses grew. They lost track of the passing hours, and forgot their years of hard labour. One player kept a bottle by his side to urinate in, lest he miss the round when his luck would surely change.
The Gambler stole into their lives at nightfall and was gone before dawn. I wondered about the men back in the camp as we travelled further east. They would be splashing cold water from the washing trough on their faces, and leading their horses from the stables. The Gambler would have appeared as an apparition, a thief in the night. The men would have cursed him for their empty wallets or rejoiced in their unexpected wealth. They would have envied his easy means of accumulating cash while they were condemned to trudge to the woodlands for another day of backbreaking work.
We drove beyond the furthest reach of the camps and set our course by the Kalgoorlie–Port Augusta line. The railway, fifteen hundred miles long, was being constructed from both ends. We passed camel teams carting massive pipes and bore casings. The thick-wheeled wagons were harnessed to pairs of camels. We came upon mail coaches and rail inspectors in horse-drawn buggies.
Water bores rose on spindly legs. Condensing plants, wells and storage tanks quenched our thirst. The way was littered with earthworks, ballast pits, concrete culverts and sandbanks. Locomotives conveyed tip-wagons loaded with sand to the head of the rail-line. Steam shovels excavated the ongoing route. Horses dragged earth up steep inclines and shaped them into smooth banks. Automated tracklayers set out rails and sleepers, and battalions of workers straightened them out. Gangs of spikers and bolters secured them in place. Man and beast battled the earth to clear the way for new tracks. I thought of the Ithacan terraces clawed out of the mountain dirt.
As soon as work on one section was done the entire gang moved on. The rail-workers were nomads, adept at shifting camp. They dismantled their tents and machinery, and reassembled them before the day was out. In their wake, on the new tracks, came hospital cars with dispensaries and lavatories that removed the waste.
Stratis and I occasionally obtained a day’s work unloading sleepers. A new map was being inscribed before our eyes. Heat and toil were levellers, uniting men who had been born far apart. We were all dark skinned under the desert sun: Irish and Scots, Welsh and English, Italian, Indian, Afghan and Greek, in harness to a common cause. At night we fell into the deep sleep of those who are too spent to think. We were a temporary cosmos unto ourselves, far removed from a warring world.
And into that cosmos stepped the Gambler, ever vigilant for the main chance. He set up games during overnight stops at railway camps and boarding houses. He organised rounds during midday breaks in the shade of solitary gums. There was no time for idle talk. The men were mesmerised by the cards. They fastened their eyes upon their fate. Those who lost became more obsessed, and those who won were tempted to ride their luck. As soon as their foremen ordered them back to work, we hurried to the Studebaker and were gone in a haze of dust.
The road was an ill-defined track traced by convoys of lorries and camels tending the rail-line. Our bums were sore from relentless jolts, our faces caked with dirt. We stopped beneath the overland telegraph line by the peg marking the West- and South-Australian border, and cocked our ears in a mock attempt to detect voices coursing through the wires. Whenever we stepped out to relieve ourselves, our piss evaporated in the hot earth.
The Gambler gripped the steering wheel with his right hand, freeing the other to grasp the cigarette that accompanied his insatiable talk. ‘To see settlements and camps appear and vanish, this is what I live for,’ he declared. The dust whirled and settled, and in the temporary clarity we saw three blacks: an older man, a teenager and young boy. They stood naked on an escarpment and stared at the Studebaker as we drew closer. We stopped to greet them but they were gone by the time we stepped out.
The three natives unnerved me. The absence of sea and mountain disoriented me. The landscape seethed with the matter of millennia. It required fierce persistence to subdue it, and the litheness of nomads to endure it.
‘We are strangers here,’ I muttered. ‘Xeni. Outsiders.’
‘You think too much,’ replied the Gambler. ‘Do not speculate. Curb your wandering mind. Approach life as a game of cards. Accept the hand you are dealt. What choice do we have? We may as well believe that all has been pre-ordained.’ I glanced at his comfortable body cushioned by the seat, and envied his potbelly ways.
Our journey to Port Augusta was nearing its end. On our final night we parked by a waterhole. We scavenged for wood, heated tinned food, and salivated at the memory of sheep crackling on spits. The Gambler opened a bottle of whisky, gulped the first mouthful and passed it on. ‘Let the wankers who destroyed our businesses burn in hell,’ he said. We drank until the bottle was empty. The Gambler hurled it into the dark. ‘Fuck them all,’ he bellowed. ‘Fuck them all.’
For the first time since leaving Ithaca I reached for my violin. I blew off the dust, opened the case, lifted out the instrument, adjusted the strings, and applied rosin to the bow. My fingers were stiff, the bow movements uncertain. I had not played for many months. I found my way to a hesitant czardas, and settled on a zebekiko Mikhalis had taught me. The Gambler heaved himself to his feet. He had not shaved in the weeks since we left Kalgoorlie.
‘Fuck them all,’ he said, as he lunged into a dance. His belly bounced as he swivelled. He lurched from side to side, yet managed, by instinct, to stay upright. Despite his weight and drunkenness he exhibited a measure of grace, but he tried one ambitious move too many and landed on his back. ‘Fuck them all,’ he chanted, as Stratis helped him to his feet. They placed their arms on each other’s shoulders and resumed the dance. ‘I do not know these constellations,’ the Gambler said, casting a deck of cards to the breeze. ‘I do not know these constellations,’ he repeated as the cards fluttered to the ground.
‘Perhaps there are palaces buried beneath us,’ said Stratis. We paced out the imagined grounds, marked the spot where Odysseus slew Penelope’s suitors, and gazed down longingly where we envisioned the legendary marriage bed. We aped the gestures of travellers scrambling over archaeological sites clutching copies of The Odyssey, reciting chapter and verse. We crawled on our knees and sifted the sand in a mock search for artefacts. We staggered to our feet, chased each other over the dry waterhole and collapsed by the fire.
I lay on my back, and rested my head on my arms. When I looked down at my outstretched body, I saw nothing but the sky curving away from my feet. The galaxies were dervishes, rotating towards the culmination of a dance. I fell into a stupor and when I came to, I stood on the summit straining my eyes for a view of the neighbouring islands. The Ionian flowed far below me, yet tantalisingly within reach. It vanished and in its place stood Old Niko’s hovel.
He led me to the trunk, drew out map after map and unfurled them over the table. Each map was a confusion of hamlets connected by barely perceptible tracks. I bent down to inspect them, but did not know whether they led to Exogi or to desert camps. The tracks faded, and I laboured up a flight of stone steps to the family house. On the roadway children were stuffing their mouths with sweets. I peered through the window and saw a gang of men hurling crockery at the walls.
‘Go back to where you fuck’n’ come from,’ they chanted. A dishevelled soldier emerged from the back room. He shoved his forearm towards my eyes and I saw puss oozing from a gaping wound. He thumped his temples with his fists, stumbled up flights of steps to the upper village and howled. As I scrambled after him towards the summit, the entire village broke from the mountain and plummeted into the sea. I dared not look back.
The summit dissolved and in its place appeared the bordellos of Brookman Street. Prostitutes sat on the doorstep and beckoned me inside. I follow
ed them to the back rooms, and did with them what I wished. I closed my eyes and when I reopened them, I was standing at the base of the mountain. I could see it in its entirety.
‘I do not know these constellations,’ the Gambler bellowed as a storm broke out. ‘I do not know these constellations,’ he repeated beneath a hail of fluttering cards. Then the mountain was gone, flattened. I ran over shallow dunes of red dirt, but stayed rooted to the spot. No matter how hard I tried I could move neither forward nor back, and in desperation, willed myself awake.
The fire had died down. Stratis was curled up like a foetus and the Gambler lay sprawled on his back. A crow cawed from a stunted eucalypt, a wombat sniffed at the tyres. The night sky obliterated the horizon. I was lost in space: and did not know the constellations.
BOOK V
The weatherboard house by the bay
XANTHE: ITHACA 2002, CARRUM 1967–1971
THE storm is brewing, the winds rising; Zeus the cloud gatherer is at work. Martina is stirring in the next room. I leave Mentor’s manuscript on the walnut table, and sit by the bed until she settles. I move from room to room, fasten the shutters, stop in the kitchen and bring the briki to the boil. I pour the coffee and return to the living room. I am about to resume my translation, but on an impulse I put Mentor’s manuscript aside. It is time to move closer to the present and the chain of events that has brought me here. I approach the task with a sense of dread.
Ti na kanoume. Ti na kanoume. What can we do? What can we do? Ola ine tikhe. Ola ine tikhe. All is luck. All is fate. It is an ancient lament, a dirge that villagers chant with a fatalist’s shrug, the words islanders mouth when one of theirs succumbs. Rarely a year goes by without a young man being taken by the sea.
