by David Malouf
We passed a smoky waiting-room where soldiers were sprawled in their greatcoats, some on benches, others on the floor, their rifles in stacks against the wall; then the refreshment room with its crowded bar. It was a long walk to the Men’s, all the length of the platform. I had never been out after midnight, and I expected it to be stranger. It was strange but not strange enough. In some ways the most different thing of all was to be taking a walk like this with my father.
We were shy of one another. He had always worked long hours, and like most children in those days I spent my time on the edge of my mother’s world, always half-excluded but half-involved as well. My father’s world was foreign to me. He disappeared into it at six o’clock, before my sister and I were up, and came back again at tea-time, not long before we were packed off to bed. If we went down under-the-house on Saturdays to watch him work, with a stub of indelible pencil behind his ear, as some men wear cigarettes, it was to enter a world of silence there that belonged to his deep communication with measurements, and tools, and dove-tail joints that cast us back on our own capacity for invention.
He was not much of a talker, our father. He seldom told us things unless we asked. Then he would answer our questions too carefully, as if he feared, with his own lack of schooling, that he might lead us wrong. And he never told stories, as our mother did, of his family and youth. His family were there to be seen, and however strange they might be in fact, did not lend themselves to fairytale. My father had gone out to work at twelve. If he never spoke of his youth it was, perhaps, because he had never had one, or because its joys and sorrows were of a kind we could not be expected to understand. There was no grand house to remember, as my mother remembered New Cross; no favourite maids; no vision of parents sweeping into the nursery to say goodnight in all the ballroom finery of leg o’mutton sleeves and pearl combs and shirt-fronts stiff as boards. His people were utterly ordinary. The fact that they were also not Australian, that they ate garlic and oil, smelled different, and spoke no English, was less important than that they had always been there and had to be taken as they were. Our father himself was as Australian as anyone could be – except for the name. He had made himself so. He had played football for the State, and was one of the toughest welterweights of his day, greatly admired for his fairness and skill by an entire generation.
But all this seemed accidental in him. A teetotaller and non-smoker, very quiet in manner, fastidiously modest, he had an inner life that was not declared. He had educated himself in the things that most interested him, but his way of going about them was his own; he had worked the rules out for himself. He suffered from never having been properly schooled, and must, I see now, have hidden deep hurts and humiliations under his studied calm. The best he could do with me was to make me elaborate playthings – box-kites, a three-foot yacht – and, for our backyard, a magnificent set of swings. My extravagance, high-strung fantasies, which my mother tended to encourage, intimidated him. He would have preferred me to become, as he had, a more conventional type. He felt excluded by my attachment to books.
So this walk together was in all ways unusual, not just because we were taking it at midnight in New South Wales.
We walked in silence, but with a strong sense, on my part at least, of our being together and at one. I liked my father. I wished he would talk to me and tell me things. I didn’t know him. He puzzled me, as it puzzled me too that my mother, who was so down on our speaking or acting ‘Australian’, should be so fond of these things as they appeared, in their gentler form, in him. She had made, in his case, a unique dispensation.
On our way back from the Men’s we found ourselves approaching a place where the crowd, which was generally very mobile, had stilled, forming a bunch round one of the goods wagons.
‘What is it?’ I wanted to know.
‘What is it?’ my father asked another fellow when we got close. We couldn’t see anything.
‘Nips,’ the man told us. ‘Bloody Nips. They got three Jap P.O.W.’s in there.’
I expected my father to move away then, to move me on. If he does, I thought, I’ll get lost. I wanted to see them.
But my father stood, and we worked our way into the centre of the crowd; and as people stepped away out of it we were drawn to the front, till we stood staring in through the door of a truck.
It was too big to be thought of as a cage, but was a cage, just the same. I thought of the circus wagons that sometimes came and camped in the little park beside South Brisbane Station, or on the waste ground under Grey Street Bridge.
There was no straw, no animal smell. The three Japs, in a group, if not actually chained then at least huddled, were difficult to make out in the half-dark. But looking in at them was like looking in from our own minds, our own lives, on another species. The vision imposed silence on the crowd. Only when they broke the spell by moving away did they mutter formulas, ‘Bloody Japs,’ or ‘The bastards’, that were meant to express what was inexpressible, the vast gap of darkness they felt existed here – a distance between people that had nothing to do with actual space, or the fact that you were breathing, out here in the still night of Australia, the same air. The experience was an isolating one. The moment you stepped out of the crowd and the shared sense of being part of it, you were alone.
My father felt it. As we walked away he was deeply silent. Our moment together was over. What was it that touched him? Was he thinking of a night, three years before, when the Commonwealth Police had arrested his father as an enemy alien?
My grandfather came to Brisbane from Lebanon in the 1880s; though in those days of course, when Australia was still unfederated, a parcel of rival states, Lebanon had no existence except in the mind of a few patriots. It was part of greater Syria; itself then a province of the great, sick Empire of the Turks. My grandfather had fled his homeland in the wake of a decade of massacres. Like other Lebanese Christians, he had sorrowfully turned his back on the Old Country and started life all over again in the New World.
His choice of Australia was an arbitrary one. No one knows why he made it. He might equally have gone to Boston or to Sao Paolo in Brazil. But the choice, once made, was binding. My father and the rest of us were Australians now. That was that. After Federation, in the purely notional view of these things that was practised by the immigration authorities, greater Syria (as opposed to Egypt and Turkey proper) was declared white – but only the Christian inabitants of it, a set of official decisions, in the matter of boundary and distinction, that it was better not to question. My father’s right to be an Australian, like any Scotsman’s for example, was guaranteed by this purely notional view – that is, officially. The rest he had to establish for himself; most often with his fists. But my grandfather, by failing to get himself naturalised, remained an alien. At first a Syrian, later a Lebanese. And when Lebanon, as a dependency of France, declared for Vichy rather than the Free French, he became an enemy as well.
He was too old, at more than eighty, to be much concerned by any of this, and did not understand perhaps how a political decision made on the other side of the world had changed his status, after so long, on this one. He took the bag my aunts packed for him and went. It was my father who was, in his quiet way – what? – shaken, angered, disillusioned?
The authorities – that is, the decent local representatives – soon recognised the absurdity of the thing and my grandfather was released: on personal grounds. My father never told us how he had managed it, or what happened, what he felt, when he went to fetch his father home. If it changed anything for him, the colour of his own history for example, he did not reveal it. It was just another of the things he kept to himself and buried. Like the language. He must, I understood later, have grown up speaking Arabic as well as he spoke Australian; his parents spoke little else. But I never heard him utter a word of it or give any indication that he understood. It went on as a whole layer of his experience, of his understanding and feeling for things, of alternative being, that could never be expre
ssed. It too was part of the shyness between us.
We got my mother her nice cup of tea, and five minutes later, in a great bustle of latecomers and shouts and whistles, the train started up again and moved deeper into New South Wales. But I thought of it now as changed. Included in its string of lighted carriages, along with the sleeping soldiers and their packs and slouch-hats with sunbursts on the turn-up, the girls with their smeared lipstick and a wad of gum hardening now under a rim of the carriage-work, the kids blowing snotty bubbles, the men in business suits, was that darker wagon with the Japs.
Their presence imposed silence. That had been the first reaction. But what it provoked immediately after was some sort of inner argument or dialogue that was in a language I couldn’t catch. It had the rhythm of the train wheels over those foreign four-foot-eight inch rails – a different sound from the one our own trains made – and it went on even when the train stalled and waited, and long after we had come to Sydney and the end of our trip. It was, to me, as if I had all the time been on a different train from the one I thought. Which would take more than the sixteen hours the timetable announced and bring me at last to a different, unnameable destination.
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Copyright © David Malouf 1985
Illustrations copyright © Jolyne Knox 1985
The right of David Malouf to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988
This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser
‘A Place in Tuscany’ and ‘A Foot in the Stream’ were originally published in the National Times
First published in Great Britain in 1985 by Chatto & Windus
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ISBN 9780099273783
