Questions of Travel

by Michelle De Kretser

  Laura, 2003

  CARLO RARELY SPOKE ABOUT Naples. But he once described his mother and other women going from house to house in the Spanish Quarters to recite the rosary.

  There was a Sunday when Laura was holding forth about the suburbs of Naples, the hideous towers crammed together, firetraps no doubt, the work of the Mafia’s property development arm. She had visited one of those blocks, she told Carlo, invited to lunch by one of her students. The scrape of the neighbor’s cutlery was plainly audible, and the names of the saints he invoked before eating. Laura described a concrete lobby with graffiti and syringes, and the three extra locks fitted to her student’s door.

  Carlo exploded. “In Quartieri Spagnoli plenty beautiful. My mother, all her life she no have water from tap. No have toilet inside. When she old woman, seventy-one years, still go in courtyard in night, in winter, for take a piss.”

  It became a quarrel. They spoke viciously and coldly. His sister lived in a suburban tower, he said. “Have warm, have toilet, when come rain, no leak roof. But no beautiful. Beautiful good for rich people take photo. Like you. No good for live.”

  That was unfair, said Laura, she had never said slums were picturesque. There was no reason why affordable housing couldn’t be—she sought a phrase that might crush him—“aesthetically pleasing. And by the way, I’m far from rich.”

  “You not rich? You not rich?”

  They were glaring at each other.

  With an effort, he heaved himself up on the sofa. This evidence of feebleness repelled her.

  “You look.” He had kicked off a slipper and was dragging at a sock. “See, look!” he shouted in a spray of spittle. The sun-starved growths had the look of creatures blind from birth and preserved in formaldehyde. The third crossed over the second; here and there a misshapen stub protruded.

  “My sister same. My cousin same. All same. For go school, must have shoes. Is rule.” He wiped his chin. “We wear same shoes three years, four.”

  Rosalba’s shoes, black and sleek as pups on the Persian runner, came vividly to Laura—they went with everything, she recalled. She had put it down to thrift when she knew nothing about cost.

  What happened next was born of impulse but had the formality of protocol. Laura plucked a peacock feather from the mantelpiece and brought it down in a great slow arc across Carlo’s toes. She drew the gorgeous green and blue object this way and that, caressing his terrible flesh. She stroked lightly around the heel, the ticklish length of the sole.

  From that day on, Carlo spoke more freely of Naples. He picked up the tin in which the sugar was stored. It was pale green and square with a pattern of orange roses. A painted spray of emerald leaves, crudely veined in white, had been grafted onto the rose printed on the lid. Carlo’s mother had given him the tin, he told Laura. She couldn’t afford the tin of biscuits for which he longed. But a neighbor sold her an empty tin, and she begged a little paint at one of the workshops where wooden Nativities were crafted. Using a twig as a brush, she created an object unlike any other for her son on his name day. There was a tremor in Carlo’s hand as he told this story. The sweet white cubes rattled in the tin.

  Laura had ascribed his reticence about childhood to self-protection. The deep past was dangerous, she knew. She had imagined Carlo thinking of his life as beginning with Drummond. In the same way, she figured the years before she had gone abroad as a prelude. Real life began with a decision: a lover commanded, an inheritance arrived to squander or save. Before that were only things that had been done to you. It was a dream of self-fashioning, deeply Australian. But now she saw that she had been wrong about the Spanish Quarters. Carlo had known himself loved in that dank room. The barricades around it didn’t serve to seal off the past—they kept intruders away.

  Laura had been wrong about Drummond, too. She had thought his ghost banished from the rose-red domain. But it had merely taken up residence in Carlo. Now and then, it peered out. It was responsible for take a piss. “Give me strength.” Carlo/Drummond might say. Or when someone pinched the orange scarecrow dog: “Bloody yobbos.”

  On an evening in summer, Laura had taken part in a rally against the imminent invasion of Iraq. All day she had pictured people eating, kissing, scratching themselves, impatient because a bus was running late. Very soon, they would be dead. But on the way home, her thoughts were of Ferdinand Hello, who had walked beside her on the march. “Hello” was the first word spoken to him in Australia. As for “Ferdinand,” who could say from what dream or farce it came? Aged four, the child who would become Ferdy had seen his mother, condemned for wearing glasses, beaten with a spade until she died. A depressive decade later, his father had plunged from a bridge in Melbourne.

  Carlo was pottering about his tomatoes. At the sight of Laura’s face, sorrowful and righteous, he said absently, “What’s up, chook?”

  Ravi, 2003

  ANGIE SEGAL BIT OFF the head of a chocolate teddy bear, and Ravi noticed the new golden circle on her finger. He repeated the first thing he had said on learning that his application for asylum had been rejected: “I should have gone back then.” Then would have taken him to his mother’s funeral. Ravi would have led the straggling procession from the church; he saw himself bending over the lip of a grave.

  “Two years, and a rejection without an interview.” Angie was running through the letter from Immigration as she spoke. “I’m so sorry, Ravi. It’s outrageous.”

  Ravi had been judged lacking in the well-founded fear based on a real chance of persecution that was required in those who sought asylum. The Immigration Department could find no substantial evidence for the applicant’s claim that the murder of his wife and son were the work of the state. It could have been a purely criminal matter, which meant Ravi had nothing to fear in Sri Lanka. Definitions were offered in lieu of sympathy: “A fear is well founded where there is a real substantial basis for it, but not if it is merely assumed. A real chance is one that is not remote or insubstantial or a far-fetched possibility.”

  Angie put down the letter and took off her glasses. The glasses, too, were new. “It’s outrageous,” she said again. “There’s no lack of independent documentation, from Amnesty for a start, about what happens to people like your wife who speak up about human rights abuses in Sri Lanka. The department’s just chosen to disregard it. But look, Ravi, it’s a setback but it isn’t the end. It just means we’ll go to review.”

  Her mobile rang. She held it at arm’s length, frowning. “I have to take this.” But with the phone at her ear, she continued to address Ravi. “The tribunal costs fourteen hundred bucks, but only if you’re unsuccessful. You’ve as good a chance as any.” She pushed a saucer of bears across her desk.

  Ravi was now in the habit of visiting Malini and Hiran’s webpage as soon as he woke up. At first, he had taught himself to look at the photos. Then he had started reading. Most of the messages dated from the period immediately following the murders, but fresh tributes continued to appear.

  The first time he read it, Ravi hadn’t paid particular attention to a recent message. So many had said more or less the same thing. A brave woman and a lovely person. Sadly missed. Deepti P. But that night, unable to sleep, he remembered an old disagreement. Deepti Pieris was the woman who had left the NGO after quarreling with Malini and Freda. What had impelled her, after all this time, to send a message of condolence? Then a damaged hand wearing a red ring flashed over a mess of printouts. One of those first messages Nimal showed him had come from the Pieris woman. Ravi was sure of it. He lay rigid in his bed.

  He relayed all this to Angie as soon as she was off the phone. He spoke fast and got things out of order, and was obliged to lay out his suspicions again.

  Angie Segal was accustomed to gifted fantasists. Asylum-seekers made what they could of loneliness, sorrow, uncertainty, fear. She said, “People feel bad when someone they know dies. Even if they didn’t like the person. Maybe especially then.”

  “But two messages!” It was the repe
tition that felt wrong, an excess cloaking a pit of falsity. “A long time apart,” Ravi insisted.

  “It’s usual to go on thinking about terrible things.” Angie’s voice was gentle. She means me, thought Ravi, and was filled with rage. Angie Segal was a woman who found consolation in sugar! What she had seen was a drawing of a stylized vase. But Ravi had seen the thing it mocked.

  He made an effort to speak calmly. The Immigration Department was right, he said. It was obvious, he should have seen it at the time. The vase of flesh was spiteful and personal. “My wife’s murder was organized by someone she knew—someone she’d told about a prediction in her horoscope. It said there would be flowers in her destiny.” Ravi knew it in his marrow, as he knew that the woman on the other side of the desk pitied and didn’t believe him. She was addressing him in phrases that soothed and concealed a verdict: remote, insubstantial, a far-fetched possibility.

  Since their mother’s death, Varunika had taken to calling Ravi every week. The last time, she had asked, “Do you remember when we saw those bodies near Galle?” She had never forgotten it, she said, the formal repetition of driveways and corpses. “It was like an arrangement in a shop window. Or pieces of a puzzle.”

  But neither of them had seen any such thing, protested Ravi. A file of prisoners was all they had passed. Their cousins, frightening their guests with atrocities, had confused her.

  “I know what I saw! Maybe you didn’t see anything, on your side of the car.” The child Varunika ran through time, and his sister’s voice shrilled: “Don’t try and say what you don’t know!”

  That was what Ravi would have liked to shout at Angie Segal. Who was saying that people didn’t have each other killed over arguments at work. “Though God knows the temptation’s there.” She had brought up the memorial site on her laptop and was scanning it as she spoke.

  Ravi began again. “This woman’s brother-in-law…”

  Angie heard him out. Then she angled her laptop towards him. “You said Deepti Pieris’s name was on that first email. This latest message is from Deepti P—is Deepti a really unusual name?” When Ravi admitted that it wasn’t, she said, “So how can you be sure it’s the same person?”

  Angie’s mobile rang. She picked up the phone and said, “Sorry, Ravi, I’ll be back in two secs.” In the toilet, she listened to her mother talking. Angie’s eyes were closed, but imprinted on the inside of her lids was the face of the child she had seen on her computer screen. On her honeymoon, Angie Segal had lost a baby to a miscarriage. She bit her thumb. She didn’t know how Ravi Mendis managed to go on living.

  “I can go back home now,” said Ravi firmly, as soon as Angie returned to her desk. The plan had taken shape over the last few days: the good place was now a narrow one. It was a clean, firm bed into which he could fall after an exhausting journey. At first, Ravi had seen himself rising refreshed from sleep to seek out the Pieris woman. He had walked up to her desk carrying a jar of battery acid concealed in a plastic bag. Or a can of petrol and a box of matches—he couldn’t decide which. But Nimal, asked to find out whatever he could about Deepti Pieris’s whereabouts, had replied that morning: the Pierises had sold everything months ago and emigrated to the States. Nevertheless, a crucial shift in Ravi’s thinking had occurred: now going back was robed as a wish rather than a rejection. Deepti Pieris might have slipped free, but the inviting bed remained: Ravi longed to lie down. He would be able to stay still and watch light move around the room. If he turned his head on the pillow, he could see three graves—they were immaculately kept, he could tend them from where he lay.

  He told Angie the news about the Pierises, ending with, “So there’s no danger for me now.”

  Angie snapped a teddy bear in two. She said, “Are you sure of that? I don’t see how you can be.”

  A girl Ravi had known a long time ago had grown up in the north of Sri Lanka. Her father, a magistrate, had been shot in front of his children by a man he had invited to tea. Since then, at the sound of fireworks, his daughter didn’t look to the sky but for cover; in any room, the seat she chose faced the door. History was a lesson for the unblinking, it delivered its messages in the flesh. There were bodies tied to lampposts, eyeballs laid out on satin, skulls that smashed with a noise like coconuts: but who had done these things? The need for certainty produced a romance that came between damp-spotted paper covers and was known as a whodunit. The guilty party was assigned a face and called, say, Deepti Pieris—everything was revealed if you flicked ahead to the end. A voice cried, “Don’t look!” but the prisoner was always pushed on by the soldier. How could Ravi be sure of anything? Not knowing whose face the mask concealed: that was the meaning of fear. The roots of the banyan tree lifted, its dark arms spread. Fear found Ravi swaying on a bus, entering a supermarket, taking a shower. It was ungovernable but was it well founded?

  Angie said, “Let’s take your case to review, okay?”

  The next time Damo dropped in, Hazel showed him what she had found. “It was in the shed, shoved behind that old kero heater.” The ball of green gardening twine had rolled away from her hand. Mildly blasphemous, she had bent to retrieve it and spotted the plastic bag.

  “Three years running, Kev’s best subject was art,” remembered Hazel. On the dresser in the sunroom were five photos, hated by the boys, that showed each one as a baby. What their mother saw, however, was not a row of placid or spirited infants but five emblematic scenes. Kev, chubby in a paddling pool, conjured a teenager looking at a painting of sunflowers. He had saved up for the print, made a frame for it in woodwork, suspended it from a nail over his bed. His face at fourteen was freckled and reverent. It had unsettled Hazel, who desired something solid for her sons, like plumbing. But the backward gaze sanctified. Something precious to that vanished boy had been consigned to cobwebby darkness—it might have been lost forever. Hazel, who had never gone in for religion, not even when the Beatles discovered India, found a word she needed: desecration. “Why couldn’t Ravi just take it down if he didn’t like it? Why stick it in the shed?”

  Damo said nothing. But he could recognize a taboo. He had been eight when his father died in an accident, and he still made looping journeys to avoid that section of Parramatta Road—there were days when even the sight of a motorbike augured ill luck. His hand moved over the print of tawny flowers in a vase.

  The five photos on Hazel’s dresser were souvenirs of a country, outdistanced by her children, where her presence was all they knew of bliss. In her relations with the occupants of the sleep-out, a point always arrived when Hazel resented them for not being her sons. She was unaware of this, of course, and a more immediate grudge was usually at hand; the latest was written in water. In December, fires had encircled the city. The weather was changing: every week on the news, a graph dropped with the level of the dams. Hazel’s doctor, thundering about cholesterol, had condemned her to vegetable soups. She rinsed zucchini, broccoli, celery in bowls she upended over gardenias to save water. Over the whir of the Bamix, she listened to the pipes gurgling in the washhouse as Ravi showered. At Christmas he had stood with Hazel at the bottom of the garden looking at the smoke. He could hardly have missed what was going on with the weather. But he still took eight-minute showers. Hazel had never felt the cold, never feared winter, never known the dread of stepping from steam into a cube of chilled air. A radiator in the laundry might have accomplished wonders, but her imagination had never strayed to that outpost. Every day she made up her mind to say something to Ravi. Then he would appear, and Hazel would see eyes that had peered into hell.

  A scheme that had been gathering at the back of Damo’s thoughts assumed its final form. Standing outside Hazel’s house, he took out his phone. Nine red camellias, waxy as candles, made a square on the nature strip. Damo saw and didn’t see them.

  Laura, 2003

  AT THE PARTY AFTER the global marketing conference, there was a joint going around on the terrace of the beachfront hotel. Laura wandered out from the bar and into a
discussion about decades: did the eighties end in ’87, when the stock market crashed, or two years later with the collapse of East Germany? Wall Street or the Wall? Opinion leaned this way, then that. It was agreed that in any case the nineties had hung on until 9/11. Across the moonless beach, the Pacific growled and showed its teeth. Stoned Cliff Ferrier remarked in his sleepy voice that the sixties had held out until the fall of Saigon in ’75.

  “No way, man, it all went up at Altamont.”

  “That’s where you’re wrong, my girl. Vietnam was the sixties.”

  Heidi Koss, the head of Ramsay’s American branch, had lost one in five staff to the cuts. She wasn’t giving in on another thing. It was, furthermore, a deeply held conviction of the Brooklyn and London offices that they were misunderstood, neglected and victimized by Sydney. In much the same spirit, legionnaires along Hadrian’s Wall had grumbled of Rome’s ignorance of fog.

  Cliff Ferrier’s bulbous gaze hadn’t budged. “God, you’re sexy, Heidi,” he said. “You’re the sexiest female at Ramsay. Possibly on the planet.”

  You could have heard a pin.

  Until Laura Fraser shrieked, “That’s the exact same thing you said to me last Friday, Cliff!” A part of her mind was wondering, Where did a phrase like the exact same thing come from? While she continued, in the same borrowed screech, “You’re making me jealous, you know.”