Window Gods

by Sally Morrison

‘Down when he was home this time, was he?”

  ‘I suppose so. He’s been down for such a long time it’s hard to know.’

  ‘Was he ever violent?’

  ‘No. Never. But all that might be completely unrelated to what’s happened here…completely unrelated. It’s just that he’s been going to Afghanistan now for years…’

  The policeman decided he was dealing with something that needed higher input, so he had his companion take copious photographs of the damage and told Mr Liu to leave things as they were until they’d been over the dwelling with a fine toothcomb. Then he took me back to the station. As I was leaving, I promised Mr Liu that I’d cover the damage to his house and wondered in the police car afterwards how I was going to do that… a new bathroom, a new carpet! I can’t even afford those things for myself.

  At the police station I waited, with my arms folded and sighing at almost every breath, for about twenty minutes on a vinyl bench for the senior inspector. While I was there, a madman reeled in off the street, covered in blood, and announced that there’d been a stabbing down the street. Right in the middle of gentrifying Melbourne, five or ten minutes from my home. In Melbourne, home of snobby galleries run by the never-let-them-see-the-blood-on-your-hands likes of Che-chilia Coretti.

  I phoned Mick. I didn’t quite know what to say, except that there was a kerfuffle over Eli’s accommodation and I’d try to sort it out, but it might cost me some money. Mick went on about rent and bonds and how landlords are obliged to take the money for repairs out of the bond. I didn’t tell him the full story; it wouldn’t have fitted into a phone call and he wouldn’t have been able to grasp it, anyway. Mick and Eli have hardly met and when they crossed paths during this visit, Eli was distant and a bit surly. When I explained what I knew of the situation with Phoebe to Mick, he thought he understood, yes, such a thing might well account for a man’s moodiness, but surely going back to Afghanistan afterwards hadn’t been a great idea?

  Mick was born in the blitz in London. He recounted how an uncle of his had suffered shell shock after the war. He’d been parachuted into France, been snagged in a tree in a mist and spent the night not knowing that his feet were only six inches from the ground. He was taken prisoner and carted off to Germany. He never talked about the war afterwards.

  I sat waiting, juggling my mobile phone, sighing, thinking of this response of Mick’s to Eli and how we ended up talking about both my parents also being war casualties: my mother bereaved, my father a refugee. I sat thinking how I never wanted war to touch my son. How I brought him up without guns, sent him to a school without cadets, but failed in the meantime to curb his social conscience. So he goes back and back to Afghanistan.

  After their wedding, Phoebe went back to her new job with the Department of Defence in the States. She was working on the Afghanistan desk because of her network on the Afghan-Pakistani border. It complemented what Eli was doing, scouting for stories to write in the area. Someone Phoebe had known was a fighting Pashtun whom everyone called Bollywood. Bollywood had been supplied with stinger missiles by President Reagan to shoot down Soviet helicopters, which he’d done with great success, except that he lost a foot during the operations and had to ride into battle on a pony. Eli went off to Peshawar to write up his story.

  Bollywood was a businessman who went to Peshawar during the Soviet era and built himself a white marble mansion in nearby Hayatabad. Phoebe had spent quite a bit of time there with him and his family; she was friendly with his wife. He was a minor warlord in Nangarhar Province over the Khyber Pass from Peshawar, very near the area that Eli first visited with the Dutch television crew.

  After the Soviets’ long and bloody leave-taking was over, any accord that had existed between the warlords who’d been fighting them fell apart and they started to squabble very fiercely among themselves. It was out of hand, but Bollywood, being a Pashtun whose connections with the non-Pashtun commanders were strong, remained a very useful contact for the CIA and the US Department of Defence.

  Eli wrote that Bollywood’s mansion was unlike anything he’d seen in Peshawar and stood out in what was then a choppy sea of mud dwellings. Bollywood had an older brother who was a big time tribal leader of Nangarhar. He grew opium poppies on his land and lived off the trade that was now many decades old. How would a good time with Bollywood not involve taking drugs, I wanted to know. Oh, no, no, no! Eli told me – no, observant Muslims don’t take narcotics; their trade is with the decadent West. Besides, the poppy growing was only a temporary phenomenon to hold on to the land until better days would allow it to be used as it formerly had been, to feed and supply the people.

  That was bullshit. I already knew that drug addiction was rife among Afghans and always had been. Phoebe herself told me that even babes in arms were drug-addicted. I felt I was catching an insincere vibe behind ‘Observant Muslims don’t take narcotics’. It stung me in the same way as the policeman’s implying at the scene of a crime that my son could have been keeping things from me. During the Bollywood years, I began to distrust much of what Eli said, but if I wrote that I didn’t like the sound of Bollywood, I realised that I just wouldn’t hear about that part of Eli’s life. When I made the first motherly protest, I was told that Bollywood was worth several score of the men I’d had in my life and that if I wanted to look to an example of virtue and courage, I need look no further. Bollywood was a patriot. He was fighting for peace and democratisation: he was an ally of Ahmad Shah Massoud, the Tajik warlord of the Panjshir Valley. Massoud was a great hero, the hope of Afghanistan, didn’t I realise?

  Firmly in this belief, Eli went freelancing alongside Bollywood’s foot soldiers, who were going into Afghanistan to help Massoud take control of Kabul. I have photos that he sold to the National Geographic of Bollywood and his men, a raggedy group of illiterate farmers and villagers, trudging through valleys and over mountain passes, hauling equipment over torrents of water with the kind of nylon ropes we use to keep our purchases from Ikea on the roof rack. When the fighting was bad and they had to tough it out, they hid in caves in the Hindu Kush and were fed by a network of sympathisers. Some of these caves, I learned, were hung with carpets and lined with Kalashnikovs. Photos were put up of tanks with roses spewing out of their muzzles and they painted portraits of Massoud on their shields. It made me think that behind every army lurks a tribal confederation just waiting to supplant whatever civilian system it represents.

  I tried to imagine what was happening, but I only ever received intermittent news from Eli, and the Australian papers were scant in their coverage. An attempt by the UN to broker an Islamic State of Afghanistan came to nothing. When Massoud actually did get to Kabul, the other warlords wouldn’t sit down and govern with him. The grizzly Pashtun, Gulbuddin Hekmatyr, who’d spent his youth flinging acid in the faces of female students at Kabul University, wanted to be the leader of the government and when Massoud withdrew from Kabul to let him in, he only lasted one day before there was an attempt on his life. Such was the animosity towards Hekmatyr that he decided to take the city by force of arms. He laid siege, shelling from the peripheries and killing scores of people daily.

  I just wished Eli would leave and leave for good. I was relieved when a call from him came through from Washington to tell me he was fine. ‘Practise not worrying,’ he said. The statement felt like hubris, but I took control of my feelings so that after I heard his voice, I could walk through a supermarket without having a nervous breakdown – for a day or two – then once again I was as besieged as Kabul. Grotesque imaginings had me reporting weekly to the shrink. ‘Ring them,’ the shrink would advise. ‘Just to say hello. Ring them up and see.’ But every time I rang, I’d be put through to voice mail and neither Eli nor Phoebe would get back to me. Where were they, what were they doing and why couldn’t they let me know? The shrink suggested possibilities – high-powered jobs – he had no doubts that they were good people, after all I’d painted such a glowing picture of Eli, he couldn’t possibly be a wron
g ’un, could he?

  The detective’s office was all done up in the blue and white checks of the Victoria Police. I was given a recorded interview that lasted about an hour. I sighed the whole way through, guilty that I knew so little of what Eli did while he was in Melbourne, but it had been that way for years. He wouldn’t let me know. What would the detective think if I said that Eli was adamant that he wanted to be by himself when he was here? I didn’t say it. I burbled on about his coming to my exhibition launch, about the suit he’d given me to mind, how he wore it to the exhibition opening and how he’d seemed all right, almost his old self. How I didn’t know what plane he’d taken except that he told me it was an early plane and he was going back to Afghanistan and he had said goodbye after the exhibition, saying he was going to stay over in town with a friend. I didn’t know who the friend was.

  All the while I was trying to prevent the demons from battering down the doors of my sanity. What, oh what could he have been involved in to leave a place in such a state? Or was it such a state? I reconstructed, I deconstructed. I looked for clues. Did Nin know anything? I felt certain that she didn’t – Eli stayed away from her as well. I didn’t mention Nin to the detective, who was kind enough to drive me home when it was over because suddenly I was shaking from head to foot.

  Did I have someone to look after me? Well, I had a friend, but he was away for a few days and there was a doctor, I could go and spill the beans to him if I needed to. I told the detective not to worry about me. I was sensible enough, depression under control for several years, I’d never had to be hospitalised for it; I knew what to do. He said he’d ring again the following day to check that I was all right. Meanwhile, they’d try to contact Eli and find out what had gone wrong at the unit.

  And so I am jolted out of my little middle-class suburban world into the great, reeling chaotic sphere of my son’s life. I feel like the Black Knight in Monty Python’s Holy Grail, armless, legless, headless and calling for a stretcher to carry me off. ‘Come on there, pick up the bits!’ ‘Show some spunk!’ ‘What do you mean you can’t fit everything onto the stretcher?’ ‘Here, then, I’ll do it!’

  He can’t have been involved in violence, surely? And yet, he seemed like a stranger in my son’s body when he was here, he was distant…the communication gap was too wide to cross…well, if I’m honest, it’s grown that way. I can’t understand him – this man who left behind a vandalised living space. If it was his home, his dwelling, and he was the vandal, then he’s offended against himself. Maybe he has been turned into a brute, a shit, and I just can’t see it! Maybe he’s mad…

  Eli has never known his father – indeed, I only knew him for eighteen months. Perhaps there’s something in Eli that I never calculated on being there. His father was a volatile, passionate man who said to me that it was all or nothing and – was it of course? – it was nothing, because all was going to cost him too much. And I was a child.

  I’ve never said this to Nin because she has the task ahead of her, but in my opinion boys who grow up without fathering do it hard. No one to impress, nothing to live up to, just a woman to protect and guard, trying to make her cleave only to him so that he’ll survive. It can warp a boy. He doesn’t like competition, doesn’t tolerate men in his mother’s life.

  There’ve been lots of men in mine and I’ve never stuck with any of them.

  Of course, it could be me.

  Maybe it’s me.

  Plenty would say I’m to blame, but really, it’s just one of those insoluble messes that you have to live out – my compartment in this great thing called life, which offers up messes wherever I look.

  After I came home from the police station, I had a stiff whisky and sat down to watch telly, but my head was full of depressive buzz and I couldn’t hear what was going on, so I went to bed, telling myself there was nothing I could do except cover Eli’s expenses and wait until there was an explanation.

  Even from this panic-prohibited sleep, I reasoned, I could get back to a feeling of sanity. I’ve returned from depression as often as I’ve been able, there are ways, but after Allegra died, I lived in the white-noise high-tidal zone for years and years and, but for chance moments of clarity, I would not have known there was a way back. Now I’ve made the journey, I know the way. Ariadne’s thread is in my hand and I’ll never again let those towering waves of atoms pull me from this anchorage.

  But how to sleep, given my present woes? Because you don’t sleep, Isobel, do you? In sleep you can be reduced to helpless decrepitude: your long dead Aunt Nina can come smiling in with a fresh young face, beautifully made up in the colours that suited her so well, freshly dressed, lovely and young and she’s come to visit another person at the old person’s home and she sees you there and says, cheerily, ‘Hello darling.’ Not ‘What are you doing here?’ or ‘Let me get you out of here.’ But ‘Hello darling,’ on her way through to see someone else before she goes out shopping in that wonderful, bourgeois, confident way she used to shop – as if shops were palaces where you played the role of a princess whose patronage was craved.

  Unlike the shops of today, where you’re the prey and they’re the predators.

  When I ask my psychiatrist how he copes with other people’s misery day in, day out, he says he has a knack of never taking his work home with him. He has a glass or two of good wine with dinner and becomes a creature of his home. I’ll bet he doesn’t cut himself off completely, but even if he’s partially successful, it’s something to learn.

  Objectivity should be able to carry you over the chasms that exist in the mind; it’s those bombarding tides of noisy atoms you have to beat. Nature. And nature has its way. You have to live with your emotions, ride with them when the going is rough, rein them in when and if you can. Become the Layne Beachley of neurosis.

  I can tell myself this, but I can’t quite do it.

  My mother has a way. Her way is to slip into situations that she believes, on the instant, are so happy and salubrious that all life’s problems are solved and happiness will reign forever from the golden moment onwards. Over and over again, there’s that sacred moment where the horses hold themselves in single line before crashing through the barrier and, in an instant, it’s gone – the silk sash with which Stella ties up her perfect world turns into a noose in her hands. She sulks, she stamps, she misbehaves and throws away her mind right up until the next moment arrives. And she will go on doing that until she dies.

  It’s a widespread trait, really: moments of perfection interspersed with chaos. There are just those who ride the bucking tumult and those who refuse to: the crazy and the smug old sane.

  It isn’t true that people change. As a child, I thought that when told a story of righteous behaviour, people would immediately see the error of their ways and adopt the ways of the righteous. I was taught this by the occasional Sunday school Anglican on my way to what they imagined would be confirmation and safety within the confines of Anglicanism. The never-having-to-look-sidewaysness of the communion. But it didn’t work. I could see that they had all the characteristics they professed to despise – they were uncharitable, blind, materialistic…clannish. In clannishness was rescue from ever having to think or do for themselves or find a path in spite of their religion.

  What am I to do about Mick? If I let loose my galloping fears about Eli, I can’t expect him to mount the horse of reason and round up the galloping fears – he’s neither athletic nor heroic. Common sense ought to tell him that I’d be best left to my complicated life, but he doesn’t seem to have much sense where I’m concerned. He isn’t exactly an optimist, but keeping me company seems to do him as much good as it does me. He spent his youth dealing with a divorced mother and a crabby old grandma, so for him my family situation is familiar territory.

  He’s someone I met on the off-chance when I was trying to learn about imaging on a computer. He was taking the class, a friendly, helpful, affable big bear. We went to the pictures together. He told me he could be stubborn whe
n I asked him what his faults were – and he can be stubborn. His star quality is that he’s a peace bringer – Nin loves him. He’s reliable, steady. He’s a wonderful ‘grandparent’ for Daniel, with whom he gets stuck into boys’ stuff. He has grown-up sons who keep in touch all the time and that’s a very good sign to me. But gold upon gold, he’s not put off by my mother and her helplessness. It’s just part of life to him – his life, while it doesn’t have brutes and murderers, has old people in it as well as kids and babies.

  Mick would be a loss.

  I don’t know what the real situation is with Eli. I certainly don’t know how to describe it to Mick. So should I even try? Or should I leave it to fate? Would that be fair?

  Perhaps it’s time to up my antidepressant dose again, or maybe it’s just that I’m overwrought. Those who’ve never walked down Suicide Road can’t know what it’s like. I’m not recommending it. The mud of the River Styx never seems to wash off. My sister was a deliberate suicide, whereas if I die before my time, it’ll be suicide by default. I trip myself up, I have accidents like the accidents my mother has when the world does something she doesn’t approve of – like gashing herself in a blender once, so I’d come to her aid and wouldn’t go on a lost weekend.

  But I’m not as bad as she is. Not nearly.

  I don’t consciously wreck my life. No – I panic, I have little car crashes which I know these days to avoid – I give up driving the car when I’m in this state.

  I go and pound a treadmill at the gym because not only have I been told, but I also know it to be true, that exercise is good for depressed people.

  There’s nobody else in the gym at the moment. The gym is in a hospital and I ended up coming here when I had an angiogram that revealed plaque in my arteries and that explained my angina. (The plaque is explained by years of smoking and feeling underrated – true, just the feeling that no one appreciates your sterling qualities can change the insides of your arteries through the action of negative hormones.) It’s a little gym, used by the staff and patients. If nobody else is here, then the noise is at the level of clunking machinery accompanied by slight movements in adjacent rooms where people work on fundraising programs. If I close my eyes and walk very fast, then I make a harmonious rhythm inside myself, I think of where to go with the paintings, of how I’d like to resurrect in one vast piece the drawings ruined by David. Perhaps I could stitch over the wounds he made. The best drawing in that series was of my dear old friend, Bridget-Kelly-of-the-dump’s daughter Maggie, shoved up against the glass in front of the picture, her cheek, hand and bare breast flattened against the pane, her red-blonde hair crushed into waving shapes. Oh it was a good picture. It was called The Crushing.