Homesickness

by Murray Bail

  ‘And “boomerang”?’ North wanted to take notes.

  ‘I agree, the world is splendid. So far as I can see it doesn’t crop up as much as “kangaroo”, I imagine this is because the boomerang is merely—strictly speaking—an inanimate object. It’s a clever piece of wood. But used in northern literature, it’s as if the Europeans are encircling your country, to bring it into the field, like the lasso-flight of a boomerang. You become a member State:

  ...L’amour revient en boumerang

  L’amour revient à en vomir le revenant.

  North, the zoologist bookworm, nodded. ‘Apollinaire.’

  ‘Then you know Samuel Beckett has used “boomerang”,’ said Zoellner seeing his interest. ‘It describes a nomadic character of his who always returns to the point of departure. “Ding Dong” I believe the story is called.’

  ‘He doesn’t usually talk like this,’ Biv frowned. ‘You’re very lucky.’

  ‘I think he’s nice,’ Sasha decided. She had her head to one side.

  ‘There’s a very evocative story by Nabokov,’ North exchanged, ‘which has a real dingo in it—“A Guide to Berlin”. And if I’m not mistaken, in one of his last novels, a character sees the shape of Australia during a heart attack.’

  Gerald laughed and Zoellner smiled.

  ‘Conrad,’ Biv here called out. ‘He wrote of its shape on the map.’

  The visitors glanced at the walls of books, at the definitions stacked from the floor to the ceiling. There was an answer to everything here. Zoellner had returned to his work.

  ‘We’ve heard a lot about you,’ Gerald ventured. His neck reddened out of respect. ‘I’m pleased to meet you.’

  ‘My name has travelled? I imagine it has. I’ve slaved my guts out. Now I’m busy.’

  He put his head back down.

  Sasha laughed. ‘Why is he suddenly so grumpy?’

  ‘He tells me,’ Biv whispered, ‘the future is tense. But I think he occasionally likes the sound of words. He likes hearing them after seeing them so much.’

  North paid for a 1913 Russian Baedeker, a street directory of Moscow, and a Russian phrasebook.

  It was raining outside: European rain. And it multiplied the images yet again, complicating the most simple memories; and their taxi driver happened to have the foulest Cockney tongue they had come across in their travels.

  ‘I’ll tell you…’ Kaddok had to speak up, ‘we saw excellent newspaper photographs of English teams standing on top of Mount Everest, and weight-lifters breaking heavy world records. They can lift a small English sedan over their heads. On display too were the world’s fastest car and motorbike. These were—’

  ‘Where’s this?’ Garry looked up.

  ‘And spaghetti,’ said Gwen. ‘They had spaghetti because it’s long. It’s unpredictable.’

  ‘The Exhibition of Extremities,’ Kaddok wheeled around trying to find Garry. ‘Government-sponsored. Very interesting; I recommend it.’

  ‘No thanks.’

  ‘It sounds like an Exhibition of Simplicities,’ Hofmann drawled.

  ‘Did they show examples of Extreme Moderation?’ Violet chipped in. ‘They’re the world champions at that.’

  ‘The English are all right,’ said Gerald gently.

  ‘I can see it now,’ said Hofmann. ‘Abstract paintings and two-tone music scores mixed in with Molotov cocktails. I don’t know which they find more extreme.’

  ‘They did,’ Gwen looked disappointed. ‘How did you know? We thought it was good.’

  ‘Oh come on!’ said Hofmann. ‘We’re not stupid.’

  Borelli had become subdued again, so Louisa pinched his elbow.

  ‘I could keep travelling,’ Sheila sat up, ‘every day of my life. There’s so much to see.’

  ‘Well, I’m sick of it. Always stop-go, stop-go,’ Sasha cried. ‘I’m not used to this life. I really am not. I don’t think anyone is.’

  ‘It’s a bit hard to know what’s happening,’ Borelli frowned. ‘No, I’m serious!’ he said when North laughed. ‘Something very funny happened today.’

  ‘How long have we been on the road?’

  ‘Lummy, let’s see.’

  They couldn’t work it out.

  ‘But it’s interesting. Sasha, listen to me. Don’t you think?’ Sheila leaned forward. Her earnestness resembled love. ‘We’ve seen things you couldn’t have imagined. I think everything’s interesting. I thought of being an air hostess once. I’ve even made the necessary enquiries.’

  Experienced air travellers, they turned to her: sadly enlarged eyes, her bedroom pallor, cardigan with opal brooch—a badge from a different age. And strange pale veins on her throat and forehead stood out, tributaries of a remote, rarely visited country.

  ‘And don’t we have a nice group? Above average, believe me it is. We couldn’t wish for better. It can make such a difference.’

  She glanced—without meaning to—at Sasha’s hand resting on North’s wrist.

  ‘How many marvellous people have you seen again after one of your innumerable trips?’ Hofmann asked and returned to his magazine.

  ‘Ken!’ said Louisa. She touched Sheila. ‘You must excuse him. He’s not very nice.’

  ‘But this happens,’ said Sheila brightly, ‘when a group gets to know each other. People start telling the truth.’

  But she began blinking, glancing around.

  Turning to Violet, Sasha asked, ‘You’re very quiet. What have you been up to?’

  ‘I’m having an OK time,’ said Violet. ‘It could be worse.’

  ‘Hey, cheer up,’ someone said.

  ‘What?’ Gerald looked up. ‘Oh I’m thinking of the things we missed.’

  ‘But you’re never happy,’ said Sasha. ‘I don’t mean that nastily.’

  ‘I suppose not. I tend to take things too seriously.’

  Garry began whistling a nationalistic ditty, though not loudly, absentmindedly. In mid-verse he zyvatiated, raising his glass. Then he forgot the words.

  ‘Well, look who’s here?’ Cathcart shouted. ‘Howdy, stranger!’

  Doug stood up bow-legged, leather-faced, for the vaguely familiar figure.

  ‘Hey, buggerlugs,’ Garry put out his hand, ‘I thought you were in the States?’

  ‘So I was,’ said Hammersly nodding to the others, easily. ‘I thought I heard the old national anthem here. I thought: hell-o!’

  ‘Take a pew.’

  ‘Sit down, for Christ’s sake!’

  Hammersly found a space beside Sheila and unbuttoned his suit coat. He stood out in the group: was not one of them, tourists, something else. The natural rhythms of time, like sleep, had washed or softened the faces of the others. Problems of purpose and deadlines showed in the straight lines of Hammersly’s face, the angles of his suit and the stripe of his shirt, a silk tie with the Windsor knot. Clearly, he travelled for a purpose.

  ‘So how’s it going, Sheila?’

  ‘Watch him,’ they yelled, not caring. ‘Watch out, Sheila.’

  ‘Fair go!’ Hammersly laughed.

  Give a bloke a chance.

  ‘I think perhaps I might retire,’ said Gerald Whitehead standing up.

  ‘He’s a dark horse,’ Violet muttered.

  ‘We leave England shortly,’ Sheila said to Hammersly.

  ‘You’ve only just arrived.’

  ‘It’s what’s called a Cook’s tour,’ Borelli chipped in. ‘But we’re all having a good time.’

  Louisa touched Borelli’s hand. He was slouched in the chair. ‘Ah, there, Mrs Cathcart: you’re back. How are you?’

  Her glance showed she had noticed Louisa was more talkative than usual.

  ‘Doug and I have had a pig of a day.’

  It was the sameness of things: being channelled by the worn avenues of London, the familiar facades, the humidity and the dirt.

  ‘I think we’ve done the UK.’

  ‘Hang on a sec,’ Hammersly said to Sheila. ‘Don’t shoot through.’

 
; Desultory conversation. Fragments.

  ‘What’s our next thrill?’ Garry shouted. ‘Another glass.’

  Borelli took Louisa’s hand under the table; and North and Sasha retired upstairs.

  On all fours, the night shift made its way along Number 3 shaft, a helmet occasionally scraping the roof. Bert, Wal, Eddy-boy, Ezra, Clarry, Mick n’ Les, small men, cracking jokes. Arrrrh, yairs. (So that’s where the accent comes from?) Another gang laid the line for the trucks, each man giving the other a hand. Creaking wainscotting gave a dim direction to the mine. Electric globes had been strung up at economic intervals. On the work-face though it would be lit up brighter than a Greek afternoon. Above their heads a polythene pipe the diameter of a man’s waist supplied a steady cool wind and through its rips and perforations a labial phssss, as pronounced in the words photo or philosophy, or footslogging. And water which rapidly and constantly dripped met the floor with another sound: the way a bed-ridden old man stumbles over moist food and words. Obscenities had been scratched into the walls with pick axes.

  Beginning at a former tube station in EC1 the mine followed a seventeen-foot seam of pure anthracite running in a straight north-easterly direction: supporting the City while undermining it. The mine had been operating for seven years. At Threadneedle Street and the Bank of England it followed a short-lived shoot at right angles. It then took a westerly direction, the transom tunnel known as Two Shaft, very rich, under Queen Victoria Street and the Embankment, burrowing under the Thames at Waterloo Bridge, stopping four hundred yards beyond hallowed Festival Hall. Here another shoot looked promising. An unexpected cave-in (14 March 197—) forced a retreat, left a cadaveric cul-de-sac (3.1 casualties). This exploratory shoot and the one beneath the Bank of England were coffered and converted to ventilation and service shafts, respectively. Blasting and shovelling, retreating, advancing, wrestling and installing rails and then the rubber conveyor belt and amenities, the men worked Shaft Number 3 night and day, due north, slightly by-passing Covent Garden (orders from above) because their blasting would upset the imported sopranos. Reaching the British Museum and the hotel, the tunnels duplicated on a grand scale, invisible to the naked eye, the shape of its own cross-section: π.

  London itself in the early hours lay emptied and dark. It too had confusing distant lights in the air-sea of blackness. The slowly approaching car (shift-worker returning) and its solitary roar could have been the narrow-gauge loco on its way back for the last load. Water too ran down many of London’s gutters, reflected the overhead bulbs. Working men wearing caps assembled at intersections the way the day shift below waited for the cage.

  But inside the mine it was a different night, the density of centuries. It had its own space and proximity of things. The darkness was solid. And the coal had to be removed like time itself, piece by piece. The city slept: oyez, mouths and hands in the hotel rooms remained open, fingers apart, body temperatures and breathing down to a minimum in the quiet. Some men lay on their backs to remove the coal. Others scratched with the pick in the foetal position, crawling, blackened and grimacing. They were in the lower intestines, beyond the womb. A colony, another life down there: with its leather ledgers, artificial light, the grimy tea-urn and first-aid boxes marked with the thick cross. They had their rosters and hierarchies. There were subtle mockeries. Where the mine widened, at Level 4, a class of troglodyte timekeepers wore the blue shirt and neckties, sat at desks in a glassed-in ‘office’. The mine had its own momentum, its own laws and rules of time. It had its own narrow-gauge railway, and a system of bell signals known to all. In 207, two were commingled in drift and descent, one suddenly crying out. Hammersly turned her over. Others under their blankets lay as if they’d been flung down after an explosion: mouths, hands and legs apart. Gerald Whitehead had gone to sleep with his reading light on, his bags already packed. Violet lay nude. Phillip North in his dressing-gown stood looking out the window: the city, the vast machine, beginning to stir, rejuvenating. Light trucks shadowed like the zebras were radiating through the open tunnels. Beneath his slippered feet, a mile down, the men squatted over their bread and pies. Their mugs of tea held a black brew. Elbows rested on knees, they considered the fusain sandwiched in the rock behind them, the job ahead, their intention being to blast. Great tonnages were shifted, great movements unbeknown.

  6

  Yes, I went to Russia late February 19—. I was in a group. I was in the party. Fifteen thereabouts in all, well-educateds, in woollen tweed jackets, mainly British. The American schoolteacher—something wrong with him—his plaited Southern wife and kid were always the last to board the bus. Something wrong with him—built into his forehead. I remember that tall thin Englishman from Norwich who had almost no lips, very small eyes, forever looking over everyone’s heads, complaining about the absence of tea. The lecturer in Russian from St Andrews University was pale, bald and bony: a living example of how a Slavic language can enter the convert’s features. A plucky bulldog surgeon very neat in silken scarves and royal blue: she had a glued-on-nose, stout rubber-capped walking stick, result of a car crash. I forget her name too. For the first few days she and her husband who was taciturn and from Hampstead, I seem to remember, sat at a separate table with the Professor and his French wife—it was she who told me he was a Mallarmé specialist and a friend of J-P Sartre. Such behavioural patterns emerged after the first sit-down meals and excursions. A natural sorting process took place. Initially our group sat dispersed in the plane, concealed from the other passengers and even from itself.

  The cold exhilarated us all. So did the expanse. Both sharpened our sense of proportions, of what things are or can be, as the Ilyushin crossed the northern border of Germany.

  The land below became wide open, bare, all grey ice, emptiness, the same colour as our accompanying clouds and the dripping alloy of the wing. The jet went on and on labouring and labouring, as if it worked against a headwind. It was hard to know if we were making progress. It was the sensation of endlessness…that this extraordinary, barely coloured expanse can never end…which gave the impression. The ice and snow barely changed; villages were few and far between; forests were eaten into, clogged up with snow; the occasional long empty road looked like a line scratched into the metal wing; and so the simple fact of Russia’s expanse and harshness signed itself into our minds. I thought of the madness of Napoleon and Hitler, the tail of long armies. How many boots and weapons must be buried under the snow? Other examples of platitudes (obvious truths?) abounded.

  I remember the landing. I was taken to one side by a stone-faced officer. His long-coat was grey. He didn’t mind the Penguin Secret Agent. He was concerned about my hardback on their revolution picked up secondhand. Curiously empty of colours and airport movement, the bare terminal caused the passengers to go quiet, more obedient than usual, a kind of confusion. He kept turning the pages and reading a paragraph at random, turning back, then forward. Trying to determine…I don’t know. He saw the photograph of Trotsky in uniform and stared at me. Speckled green eyes: I saw the forests of Russia there. Eyes of a similar fractured perspective belonged to the guard in the buttoned overcoat checking each face—and mine—in the line at Lenin’s tomb, close to the wall and the ashes of Reed and the cosmonauts.

  This was Leningrad. Our hotel was that modern one alongside the Neva. Each floor had its samovar and an officious woman at a small table. She held a pencil over papers, keeping track of our keys. The ground floor had a purple carpet and a long enquiry counter. A row of wide-cheeked women there spoke patient English. A strange enquiry counter, looking back. The staff remained seated and since the counter stood almost chin-high we had to stretch on tiptoe and look down, while they looked up. I suppose it’s still there. The Professor of French demanded to know if our freedom was being inhibited by the itinerary of the tour. He seemed to be making a point, insisting. I had to interject and tell him not to worry. In Leningrad you are free to go anywhere. Silver-haired and transparent-skinned he moved his lips as
if he was chewing something small; not out of nervousness, I confirmed later—out of age. First impressions can be very interesting but are often misleading. He was a gentle, reflective man; impressive the way he had fun travelling with his wife. They were forever laughing. And delegations from Mongolia stood around, looking lost.

  We, tourists, must have been conspicuous for being bareheaded. The Russian men and women and their children wore the same fur hat; and taxi-drivers and truck-drivers did so while driving. I seem to recall the sparse traffic consisted almost entirely of trucks. Green, grey or khaki their bonnets and radiators were fitted with quilted canvas flaps, rather like ear muffs. The lecturer from St Andrews wore a fur hat like the locals and appeared only at breakfasts. He’d been a student at Moscow University and went about visiting friends.

  The Neva—like so many pieces of jigsaw on the map—was dramatically clogged up with broken ice, small icebergs, most of all under the bridges, and Peter’s canals were frozen solid. Downpipes on many buildings had their water suspended a foot or more out, frozen in mid-air. Taking a stroll by the river I noticed condoms evidently flushed from various hotel rooms preserved in the ice like bloated toadfish, for all to see. A small unnecessary detail. The cold, not soggy like London’s or Dublin’s, was the true biting cold of insects swarming around the mouth and ears, especially as I walked along by the river. And the Russians kept saying how warm it was, much warmer than usual. Leningrad has more than forty bridges.

  A loaf of bread cost forty cents. Taxis could be hailed only at designated ranks. Rent for an apartment was nine dollars a month, approx. Five cents on a bus can take you anywhere in the city. The streets were clean. Women were seen repairing the bridges. Others were climbing along steel scaffolds—plasterers. A sense of cleanliness, of emptiness, made some in the party complain it was drab. Few bright colours in the clothing, and no advertising signs. I was told that in Old Russian ‘red’ is the same word as ‘beautiful’. Was it the lecturer in Russian? The three single Englishwomen travelling together, led by a particularly loud-voiced slide photographer reported how they were each fined ten roubles for jaywalking. In Leningrad it was oddly gratifying to see people crossing casually against the red light.