by Murray Bail
They had climbed the steps and were approaching the main doors. From behind the pillars figures stirred. A beggar on crutches managed to stand up, other gangetic shapes moved and as both Louisa Hofmann and Violet felt it necessary to lift their hems, bones shot out, fingernails, yes, for baksheesh.
‘Don’t give them anything,’ Doug Cathcart shouted, his mouth dry. Borelli had one hand in his pocket. ‘Or you’ll never get rid of them. They’ll tag along!’
And Kaddok, raising his camera at one—a face swollen with ganglia—nicely caught the open mouth and milky stare of a native, blind.
Looking up then they could see that the sans-serif MUSEU OF HANDICRAFTS was ‘printed’ in neon pipes. MUSEU was not a misspelling or an example—as Sasha had assumed—of some local dialect. The M had long ago fallen off in a wind and as they passed underneath they were showered in sparks from the permanent short circuit.
Sheila attached herself to the Cathcarts as they moved inside and immediately began looking around for the handicrafts. The unexpected bright lighting, circuits of flickering fluorescent, punctuated by duds and ceiling fans, and others about to expire, made her sneeze. She blew her nose. The Museum sounded completely empty. A few divisions of plywood broke up the cavernous space. Even from a distance these looked ricketty.
In a peeved voice Gerald asked whether it was open or finished yet.
There was after all a smell of fresh paint.
Doug Cathcart cleared his throat, a bit irritated.
Ah! a tall robed figure appeared. He had bare feet and so they hadn’t heard him. Sasha and Violet exchanged glances, raising their eyebrows. He was a Masai, stone-faced, and smelling of cattle. Although he said nothing they all followed him. Now in the bright hall they could see heads and eyes of the museum staff in cubicles apparently waiting for their arrival. The guide stopped and looked on with them. An attendant—or was he curator?—in khaki shorts and bare feet busily wrapped some rope around a dented lawnmower. His cubicle was crowded with lawnmowers. All appeared to be in original condition (the bottle-green duco) although the filigree of scratches and the mirror-finish of the flywheels indicated a long hard life. One still had the rare canvas grass-catcher, a British invention. Borelli speculated whether that model would have been pre-Suez. Along with the sturdy British motorcycle, the mowers (By Appointment…in gold transfer) held the lion’s share of the export market. At the height of the Empire… Foreshadowing the Empire’s decline, the BSA motorbikes and Moffatt & Richardson mowers of the 1950s developed stasis in their design and model range, proclaimed more a sturdy heaviness, as if the traditional arteries from Head Office had gradually and irreparably hardened.
With a leap backwards the mechanic/attendant started a two-stroke. Within the stone walls it kicked up a tremendous reverberating racket and the blue smoke made the ladies step back and press handkerchiefs to their nostrils. He started another, then a third—a small one with an unusual kick-starter. Then he turned to the one which clearly held pride of place, the large bowling green model in the foreground: heavy roller and perforated tractor seat! For all its size this seemed to be the quietest of them all, ‘the Rolls Royce of lawnmowers’; but by then with what, four, five firing and vibrating together it was difficult to tell. For Chrissake!’ Doug Cathcart shouted. ‘Tell him to stop!’ Turning and waving his arms at the guide he found the Masai and the Brown attendant standing open-mouthed, watching the machines. The smoke—‘carbon monoxide’, Gwen Kaddok repeated several times, choking—would hang in the hall for hours.
The next few exhibits were without attendants.
Under glass three English toothpaste tubes were at different stages of use: full, half full (thumb-dented tube, white worm protruding), and a fine example of a completely empty one, squeezed dry, corrugated, curled and scratched. Alongside lay a pair of false teeth and arrows pointing back to the toothpaste. The teeth alone were a source of wonder. The mechanic had left the mowers and with the Masai had both elbows on the cabinet. At intervals he looked up and Gwen Kaddok noticed him staring at her teeth. She gave a confused smile. He turned back to the display.
The next cabinet a few yards on held a compass and a French cigarette-rolling machine, but what attracted their guide’s attention was nailed on the wall above it: a U-shaped magnet barnacled with small nails and hairpins. Visitors could apparently test its mysterious power for themselves. But when the guide touched a bottom pin the whole lot came away like bees and scattered over the floor.
Garry Atlas had missed this. With Violet Hopper and Sasha he had gone ahead, perhaps looking for the handicrafts, and he called out, ‘Hey, this is a beauty. Get a load of this!’ The others came up to an early TV set standing in a slight puddle. To demonstrate its colour and moving qualities—because there is no television in Africa, the dark continent—the insides were filled with lime-green water and three brightly coloured fish darted about, this way and that, chased by a baby crocodile. ‘Perpetual motion,’ Phillip North nodded; he recognised the fish. About a dozen natives from the cubicles they hadn’t yet reached were squatting in front, hands on their knees, watching. A striped sitringee had been placed on the floor for this purpose. Doug Cathcart stepped in front of the guide and in a loud voice asked where the Handicrafts were—‘as you advertised?’ There must have been a language problem. The Masai looked blankly at him, then back at the TV screen.
‘Jee-zus,’ said Garry through his teeth.
‘Don’t worry,’ said Borelli with a wave of his hand.
Others began frowning and standing tiptoe looking around. That was what they had come here for: Handicrafts, local examples of. They moved forward again.
‘A pantomimic guide,’ North remarked to Gerald, ‘is what I’ve always wanted when travelling. Though here it’s a bit odd, to say the least.’
Gerald nodded but stopped. They’d bumped into their group crowding around another exhibit.
What was this? A fully grown lion fixed in a ferocious springing position by bricks and several wires. Facing it, scarcely a yard away, stood an old plate camera on a bandaged tripod, its legs splayed apart. Although an evocative scene, suggesting a range of possibilities—men found themselves grinning—the tall Masai went in among the wires and ignoring the lion stood stiffly in front of the camera. Garry, for one, began laughing outright. On closer examination it was noticed the lion’s mane was moth-eaten, had not been properly preserved, and someone had stuck a cigarette in its mouth. The camera, a pre-war Linhoff, was clearly in mint condition, but Kaddok who was the last to leave, also shook his head in dismay when told of the wide aperture settings.
They scarcely glanced in the next cubicle. A Kikuya in the Museum’s khaki shorts demonstrated a wheelbarrow by lifting it, moving it forward, backwards, and repeating it.
Plywood walls at that point formed a sudden cul-de-sac—only a few yards deep. But natives, one in brilliant tribal dress and a shaved head, stood in front of the important exhibit. It was lit by a powerful spotlight. Garry Atlas had to elbow his way through. ‘Jesus,’ he said and turned round, ‘don’t bother.’ On a pedestal waist-high for easy viewing stood a soda-water syphon. Admittedly, it possessed a compelling strangeness under a bright light in a museum but Mrs Cathcart reflected the mood of almost everybody as they tried to reverse in the narrow space. ‘Most of this stuff,’ she said aloud, ‘we’ve got in the garage at home. It’s garbage.’
It somehow made Sheila look concerned.
What in God’s name, for instance, was the point in displaying a pair of pitted tubular steel chairs?
‘An important invention of Europe,’ James Borelli tried, ‘on a par with the wheel.’ He was leaning on his walking stick, telling Gerald. Was he being ironical? The rest had moved on. ‘It was an early democratic breakthrough,’ he said. ‘A radical improvement—I mean on the feudal squat.’
Often Borelli threw out statements before he got to know people. Pursing his lips Gerald was about to disagree.
‘Come off it,’ Garry
Atlas interrupted—this was bullshit. ‘These natives had thrones, I bet.’
‘You just want to be different,’ Louisa smiled at Borelli.
But he repeated: ‘No!’ And using his hands extravagantly, he went on discussing the difference between a chair and a seat. ‘For one thing, seat is an institutional term. It is commercial.’
‘Oh? What about a dentist’s chair?’ Gerald argued.
For the first time, Mrs Hofmann turned and laughed outright. She lifted her chin and closed her eyes. ‘I’m glad I amuse you, at least,’ Borelli smiled.
Meanwhile their ‘guide’ was behind, still rapt in the empty soda syphon.
They passed two objects which had been combined: an early Singer sewing machine and an umbrella. To save space the umbrella had been opened, revealing its construction, and placed on the machine, but someone without thinking or to demonstrate the jabbering needle, had got it tangled and mutilated something terrible. This irrational massacre of the umbrella made some of them annoyed. It was another sign of real stupidity! To others, Sheila for one, the unexpected image caused a different sensation: such a black indelible violation was almost thrilling.
Until then Sheila had taken a sincere, equal interest in everything. Her frown had remained generally constant, the same as when they had disembarked, when she had sat with them around the pool, and when she joined in at the dinner table.
‘Cop this one!’ Atlas called out. He’d managed to work his way to the front again like a journalist, always keen to be first.
‘I wish he’d shut up,’ said Louisa Hofmann. She’d found wet white paint on Ken’s blazer and was rubbing at it with a handkerchief. ‘It won’t come off. I’m only making it worse.’
When the group reached Atlas there grinning with his arms folded (‘Have a dekko!’) they heard what seemed to be the hiss of a small fountain, and Mrs Cathcart first going abruptly terse, turned: ‘This isn’t necessary. This is disgusting,’ she said, and glanced at her watch.
In the narrowest of cubicles, the attendant, only a boy, pointed to a porcelain urinal. Yanking on the chain, repeating paternosters in his own tongue, he’d watch, shaking his head. The Masai joined him and they muttered together, chuckling each time at the wonder of it: laughter bubbling from a collective cistern behind their teeth.
‘So now we know what men do,’ Violet offered drily, as they moved on.
‘I’ve often wondered myself,’ Sasha agreed. ‘How funny. I feel sorry for them.’
‘Now you know,’ said Garry Atlas, as if slapping them on their backs.
‘I don’t think I’ve ever seen anything quite so ridiculous,’ Mrs Cathcart kept saying. ‘It’s a disgrace.’ For support, Doug kept quiet but made a show of frowning at his watch.
They passed a pair of German binoculars without testing their amazing powers. The old man twenty yards away apparently stood there at attention for this purpose.
It was about here that a nail tore Borelli’s cotton jacket and as he twisted to free it, a partition somewhere behind them fell and—Jesus!—was followed by the sound elsewhere of splintering glass. Not the soda-water syphon?
The Masai took no notice.
Moving quickly now they ignored a sidecar removed from its motorcycle, though Phillip North stopped as several natives watched a solemn chief wearing a bone through his nose try to sit in it while still clutching his spears.
All museums have teething troubles or problems of form. Here the exit seemed to be close, for they could hear the market crowd outside, but without warning they came upon the colour TV set again, and their tall ‘guide’ trod on Violet’s foot as they U-turned. They had to keep walking.
No one spoke much now. The general mood was to get through it as quickly as possible. Most had their thoughts elsewhere as they shuffled along.
Hey. What dis?
The Masai and a group of his followers had pricked up their ears and gone off scouting ahead, a loping jog: close, definitely some sort of machinery making a subtle yet beckoning racket. Each one could hear it. Its familiarity may well have been obscured by the plywood avenues, well known for acoustic properties, for when they reached the source each one pulled a face or shrugged. The clocks were the ordinary kind, not even antique, so of dubious provenance and tune, all ticking and telling a different time. About thirty different times. The overlapping ticks produced an obsessive almost intolerable density. A few wristlet watches, stripped of their bands, contributed, muffled crickets. Pendulum there of a Pisa-leaning grandfather, hell, swung among pale weeds. Faces had cracked and small hands were missing.
A wooden door flapped open, a cuckoo sprang out—but it sounded more like an outback crow. The effect on the natives however crowding the centre of the cubicle was a hopping on one foot, pointing and laughing, clapping hands. They were still waiting for the horologic bird to re-emerge, glancing at the false alarms produced by other chiming clocks, including one sick cuckoo on a spring which hadn’t the strength to get back in, as the party led now by Cathcart moved off.
Ahead were the tall doors of the entrance. Perhaps they’d skipped a few exhibits? The museum suddenly seemed small under the cavernous roof. They looked back. Fledgling museum, an attempt. The assemblage, the policy of combing for items, would continue. Within sight of the doors it was felt they could linger and pay more attention to the remaining items. Only two or three left. An X-ray photograph of a grinning head tacked up and back-lit by a hair-raising electrolier attracted attention. It was a three-quarter side view of the skull; male. Estimates of his age ranged from 36 to 49. It was hard to tell. Garry Atlas cracked a few jokes which nobody got.
‘A practised meat-eater, by the look,’ North noted. ‘Strong mandibles. He could be mid-West American or Australian.’
‘Right,’ nodded Hofmann leaning forward. ‘Five fillings. Impacted third molar. Lower right five occlusal.’
Hofmann had barely spoken a word until then. Naturally they turned.
‘You’re a dentist?’ Sasha cried.
‘He won’t bite though,’ said Mrs Hofmann. And she went on, ‘My husband is quite the most harmless creature. When anyone’s hurt, he’s the first to cry like a baby. Aren’t you, Ken-dear?’
The last few words spoken partly through her teeth opened a silence as Hofmann remained gazing at a spot just above the cloudy negative, expressionless.
Sheila and Sasha, yards apart, glanced in unison at one Hofmann then the other. Both had smooth faces, not a hair out of place. It was Louisa who began blinking, biting with her mouth closed, and turned away. Tremors like spider’s feet spread around her mouth. Sheila noticed and sympathised but could do nothing but stare. Sheila always looked concerned, aghast, even when surveying her own shoes.
‘You’re not one too, are you?’ Violet turned to North.
Not a dentist, she meant; for she could tell he wasn’t. But he had moved casually on and stood before a trestle table, hands clasped behind his back, with Borelli. And Sasha made a movement to ask him something, but stopped. Instead she watched him.
‘There’s a heavy piece of symbolism for you,’ Borelli said, nodding at a plastic model of a DC3.
For display purposes it was mounted (‘landing’) on a piece of railway line.
‘Ah, but it might be unintentional. We might be reading too much into it.’
Borelli tapped his walking stick. ‘No! Both are what is left behind when a country is returned or left. Isn’t that what the British always say? Don’t complain, we’ve left you a beautiful network of railway tracks. Blah, blah. What a joke. Perhaps these people here have realised? Actually, I’m changing my tack. This piece of railway line here is an accident of irony.’ Borelli scratched his head. ‘But then why didn’t they use a lump of wood?’
Both were uncertain and turned to the photograph curling above the table. It showed a chevron-legged man descending in a parachute. Trees stood in the background. Billowing in the countryside the quilted canopy resembled a phosphorous puff from a steam tra
in. North turned to Borelli. ‘Unintentional,’ smiled the young man. ‘We can’t read anything into that.’
‘The Dakota DC3 was the T-model Ford of airplanes,’ Kaddok came between them. ‘It changed the face of the globe. Ten thousand nine hundred and twenty-six produced between 1934 and 1949. Statistically, it has the best safety record.’
But as he ran his hands over the model, one of the celluloid propellers fell off.
‘Have you ever been in one?’ Borelli asked North. They were waiting at the exit. ‘They look like the world’s dreariest plane.’
‘In New Guinea several times. Oh, and out here in Africa.’
‘When were you—’
‘Ah-hah!’ cried Gerald Whitehead. He turned with his back to the remaining cabinet. ‘At last, what we’ve all been waiting for—a genuine handicraft. The real article, in every sense of the word.’ Unsmiling he stepped to one side and waited with a bored expression. The rest bent over. Under glass a woman’s glove was fitted to an artificial hand. Sky-blue and tight-fitting, it was a fine example of stitching, of intricate embroidery and fitting. By comparison the rod which held the slender hand vertical, like Buddha’s benediction, was heavily rusted.
Garry couldn’t stop himself.
‘I wondered what you were driving at!’ he yelled across at Gerald.
‘Hand-made,’ he nudged Hofmann, laughing. ‘Get it?’
Gerald and Hofmann remained unsmiling.
‘Careful,’ North murmured.
The Masai who couldn’t see into the cabinet gazed at him, and a group of youths behind the turnstiles, unable to enter, watched silently. One had taken Borelli’s polished walking stick and was examining it.
Cathcart pushed through the turnstiles holding his binoculars to his chest, followed by his wife. ‘I had long gloves like that when I married,’ she was telling Sheila and looking straight ahead, ‘but they were apricot.’
Years ago: a Payneham (Sth. Aust.) church, JESUS SAVES lettered in lights on the board. ‘The Reverend Glover,’ she added, missing the casual connection. ‘First thing out on the church steps, brushing off the confetti, Doug had wanted to know the footy scores.’
