Illywhacker

by Peter Carey

  Charles and Sonia went up the ridge. I opened a bottle of Ballarat Bertie's famous brew, leaned against a tree and listened to the Buick's hot radiator as it contracted quietly in the cool air. I did not worry about my children. They knew the bush.

  Sonia arranged her robe in the manner of the holy picture. She drew it over her head and let her auburn hair show just a fraction beneath this bonnet. She drew the cloak around her shoulders and tugged at her little white dress which would not, no matter how she tried, come down as far as the Virgin's dress had when she hovered in the clouds above the astonished worshippers below.

  Charles watched her, impatiently. He had grown out of all that rubbish. He wanted his sister to give him a bunk-up on to a difficult branch of a tree where a pink-nosed possum warranted his attention. He was like an opponent in a football match trying to distract a man kicking a goal. When Sonia clasped her hands in imitation of the holy picture, Charles made vomiting noises. He waved his hands and hooted.

  But Sonia arranged herself, exactly.

  Charles sighed and squatted with his back against the tree. He picked at a scab. He looked up into the tree's umbrella watching birds flick to and fro. He could identify most of them, even the smallest, by their silhouette. He knew his sister's stubbornness was well equal to his. He waited for the ritual to be over. He yawned, closed his eyes. When he opened them my daughter had gone.

  Charles, I can see him, gawped. He called out her name, not loudly, but politely.

  "By golly," he said. "By jiminy." He forgot about his pink-nosed possum and sat and waited for his sister's return. He was always patient and he waited with his mind a blank, watching the lengthening shadows and the final loss of colour to the night.

  When he came, at last, to the camp, it was already dark.

  Clunes, in case you do not know it, is bored full of mine shafts.

  55

  I remember the Case of Mrs Chamberlain who was condemned for murder, almost certainly, because she did not show adequate grief for her lost child. She did not howl and pull out her hair in tufts. She was therefore universally derided as an unnatural mother and a monster.

  I can only pray that my jury, unlike hers, possess imagination equal to their task, because I will not shriek and groan before you.

  Instead, let me tell you: It is alleged I hit my son and caused him lasting damage to the ear.

  There was a funeral with no coffin.

  At the funeral there was a small upset we need not dwell on. As a result of this upset my friend Nathan Schick drove me to Sunbury where he placed me in the care of doctors. Perhaps he imagined grief was medical.

  56

  The train had not run across Izzie's legs neatly, but torn crudely, splintering bone, crushing flesh; it took the right leg above the knee and the left across the thigh; then, like some Corsican bandit who wishes to leave a sign, cut the top of an index finger with a neat razor slice.

  He had not been jumping the rattler, although that lie appeared in the Albury News. He had been fleeing from John Oliver O'Dowd who ambushed the boxcar Izzie was riding in (it had pulled into a siding in order to give the newSpirit of Progress right of way).

  Izzie was out and running when the Spirit came hurtling up from the south, its brakes locked, sparks showering from its wheels while the driver, white-faced and bug-eyed, whimpered quietly as he sliced across the fallen man whose pointed toes had tripped on a spike.

  The driver's name was Jack Fish, a shy and pessimistic man who had always thought himself a coward. But it was Jack Fish Who ran back two hundred yards beside his hissing train, Jack Fish who pushed the bully boys aside, applied tourniquets in the midst of screams and hot, pulsing bright red arterial blood.

  Something quite wonderful happened to Jack Fish that night, and it was no less wonderful for occurring in the midst of so much agony. He could not explain it to anyone but as he carried that bleeding mess, running, tripping, his eyes filled with sweat, he felt what religious people call God, and the experience of holding that ragged mess of flesh, that man, in his arms, all that blood, that beating heart, that screaming journey down the last twenty miles to Albury, the sheer terror of it, would give him a comfort about life he had no right to expect. It was not the business of being a hero, being given a medal, or having his picture taken. All of this made him uncomfortable and embarrassed. Nor was it the recollection of his dramatic entrance at Albury where theSpirit of Progress had stopped half-way along the crowded platform and the driver had leapt down with the mutilated body of a mercifully unconscious Izzie Kaletsky. About all this, Jack Fish felt what someone else might feel about waking up in church naked.

  This experience did not transform Jack Fish's personality, did not make him soft, gracious, or even very understanding. For this same man was able to write to Izzie in Albury Base Hospital: "I am pleased to have been of assistance to you, even though I hear you are a commie."

  This letter was about the only thing that made Izzie laugh during that extended stay in Albury Base where his missing legs not only continued to send him signals that the morphine could not block, but the part that was left became infected and had to be dressed and redressed, painfully.

  He fought his despair in Albury. It was more difficult when he came home to Sydney where the house had been emptied of tenants on his behalf. He was installed in the room where Leah had once learned to dance, where his mother and father now planned to look after him. The tenants' greasy walls had been repainted in a blinding "cheerful" yellow. A print of sunflowers hung over the old fireplace which was now fitted with a large electric radiator. Blue curtains with puckered hems hung across the dirty windows. They tried to give the room a new history with curios, framed photographs, but they had never decorated a room in all their travelling lives and it showed in the final effect which was jumbled, discordant, slightly desperate. It was then that it was hard to be brave. He was ashamed that his old parents should be forced to confront the ugly lumpy reality of his slowly healing stumps. He had been their future. Was it arrogant of him to feel that he contained the best of them, that he was a truer embodiment of their virtues than the brother who had disappeared into the steaming cauldron of the revolution? Perhaps, but the brother, anyway, was not discussed, and this painful place which could not be touched intensified his feelings of despair.

  His body had let him down. If Leah had seen something unsympathetic in his lemon-peel skin, he had not. He had been proud of his body, of its unapparent strength, its ability to withstand hunger and violence. He had loved his body but at the same time he imagined it could be seen as ugly. He had, when occasion permitted it, looked at his frail blue-white form in the mirror with all the amazed tenderness of a lover. He had always expected to be let down by his mind, to be betrayed by fear or panic, but never, ever, by his body. And although his anxieties about money were an ingredient in his distress, they were nothing compared with what he felt when he saw his parents' cloudy old eyes confront his mutilation.

  And yet he must be nursed. He must have dressings changed, be carried to the toilet and he was humiliated, guilty and angry to have wheezing Rosa and rheumatoid Lenny push him on a tubular-steel office chair which they used like a sled to push him to bathroom and toilet.

  They had never been a tender family. They had been bright, ironic, combative, and the tenderness they now showed him was another source of pain.

  So it was Izzie who insisted on the telegram being sent to Leah and it was Rosa – guilty about the marriage which she believed she had manipulated – who argued against it.

  "Leave her, leave her. We can manage. She has her own life, Izzie."

  "Let him send it," Lenny said. "She has a right to know. Ask her for nothing," he said to his son, "just tell her, so she knows."

  Of course they all, as they conferred around the invalid's bed, arguing about the wording of the telegram, knew what would happen. They assembled the words like people wishing to escape responsibility for their actions.

  Izzi
e did not approve of the anger he felt. He bottled it up tight, this defeatist counterproductive emotion which grew fat as a slug on his self-pity. But in the end it did not matter what he approved or disapproved of, and he was made angry by the tread of the milkman as he ran, soft, padding on his worn sandshoes, past the window. And even on those evenings and weekends when comrades came to sit in the room -sometimes there were ten or twelve people, smoking, drinking, talking -he had to fight to keep the resentment from his voice. There were those who saw it in his dark eyes and these, more sensitive than the rest, would soon find excuses not to come, or would come and then be unable to stay long.

  Yet, for the most part, he was admired for his courage, for his persistence, for his lack of self-pity – even while he was learning to fight the pains in his phantom legs, to convert these signals into something bearable, he was writing pamphlets for the CPA and the UWU. He read voraciously.

  His true emotions were not able to surface until his wife arrived, one winter's afternoon, wearing an expensive grey silk dress and a Panama hat with a burgundy band.

  She stood in the doorway and he found her, to his surprise – for he had not been thinking kindly of her – very beautiful indeed, a fine austere beauty whose slightly sunken dark-shadowed eyes gave a sorrowful sugarless edge to what prettiness might be in her lips.

  Leah, standing in the doorway of the room where she had learned to dance, could not stop her eyes going to that ambiguous area of rumpled blanket.

  "No good, Kaletsky," she said throatily.

  And there was, for that little while, great tenderness and shyness, a more sombre, subtle version of the emotions they had felt in Mrs Heller's when she had perched pretentiously above her badly dissected dogfish.

  Their problem, both of them, was that they believed too much in the scientific and the rational and they thought they could – like Marxists changing the course of rivers – prevent the floods and earthquakes of primitive emotions. They sat beside each other and spoke what they imagined was the truth. But Izzie could not untangle his anger from his love and Leah did not help him when she explained her terms: that she had come to nurse him, to be, as she called it, "of use", but not to be his sexual partner for she would feel that to be duplicitous. She did not mention the subject of skin, but it was not to be forgotten and it was Izzie who would use his sharp knife against them both, while she was changing his bandages on his shameful stumps and trying to ignore the erection he presented her with.

  She was useful. She found the Kaletskys' finances in an appalling state and borrowed, in the first week, five hundred pounds from her father. Most of this was used to pay back loans that Lenny had arranged. She bought a wheelchair. With the twenty pounds that remained she bought bowls and cake tins and at night she learned to bake the rich Jewish cakes that Lenny would deliver by day. She made sure Izzie was at meetings he would never have gotten to otherwise. She arranged chauffeurs, had him wheeled here, carried there and stood beside him on platforms while he used his formidable talents in the service of a new world. But the price she paid was to become the focus of all his anger and this was less to do with his envy of those who could walk and run, more to do with the fact that she could care for him but not love him.

  Rosa and Lenny, in their caravan, could not help but overhear the painful arguments of son and daughter-in-law. They moaned out loud in their separate beds, pulled pillows over their heads, and had stilted conversations whose sole function was to block out the bitter voice of their son.

  "Please," Rosa heard, "please go. I would rather crawl like a snail. I would rather sleep on a mat on the bloody floor. I would rather be lonely and shit in my pants. Please go."

  And later she would hear the sound of weeping, a nasty choking noise she had first mistaken for vomiting, but it was, she knew, the sound of her son begging Leah Goldstein to stay.

  And that is how Leah Goldstein made a little hell for herself and the Kaletskys, like a child who crawls into an old-fashioned refrigerator so easily, shuts the door, and finds there is no corresponding latch inside.

  Yet she was saved, as she had been saved before, by her letters, and when she continued her correspondence with me she used some of the art I had taught her and which she had once so vigorously rejected. Now she began to invent a life outside her walls, to send squares of sky to me (cobalt blue and saturated with life) to invent joy, to sustain it, and to write a hundred times about Silly Friends she must first manufacture. She arranged them on the mustard-yellow sand of Tamarama -indigos, crimsons, violet and viridian, people who were never born, walking on a beach she had stolen from 1923.

  57

  If you had seen me in 1937 you would have thought me finished. I had no suit. My hands trembled. I no longer shaved my skull and the hair that grew across it was white and wispy. Yet I was a young man, only fifty-one. My eyes were good and my muscles strong enough to ride a bicycle from Nambucca to Grafton.

  I had been pumping gasoline and repairing bicycles in Nambucca and when I got my annual holidays I made the long journey up to Grafton, not for the pleasure of it, but to see the General Motors dealer, a Mr Lewis. I had filled his tank with petrol often enough and he had invited me to call on him if ever I was in Grafton. I was angling for a job.

  Grafton is a prosperous town. There is sugar cane, timber, rich river flats beside the Clarence River and I was already building mansions in my mind when I noticed the sign: goon amp; sons: providores. It was just beside the bridge, as bold as brass, and I must have passed it twenty times before and not noticed it.

  I could not believe that Goon would be still alive, but when I called at the providore they told me that the old man was asleep. I should come back in the morning. I left a visiting card and went to find a boarding house. I slept badly, although the weather was not yet hot, and in the morning I was back at the providore before the doors were open. I waited while they hosed down the concrete and hung out their wares by the big sliding doors.

  A young girl, Chinese of course, but with a broad Australian accent, took me out the back, along a high catwalk, and up some old splintery stairs to a small room where an ancient Chinaman sat with the Clarence River running sleepily behind his shoulder.

  The room was sparse, containing a widower's tiny bed against one wall and a simple wooden desk near the window. On the walls were many framed photographs and advertisements for various Chinese associations; they had thin black frames. The girl ran lightly down the stairs and left me with the old Chinaman who wore an inappropriate three-piece English suit. He was shrunken as a Chinese plum and his white collar, loose around his neck, showed its stud behind a drooping tie. His hands had the transparency of the old but it was I, the young man, whose hands shook.

  As I entered he looked up and gave me a fast intelligent glance; he then continued with his writing.

  When he spoke at last his voice was not like gravel but as weak and thin as jasmine tea. It was also clear and the English was perfectly enunciated.

  "You must excuse me", he said, standing carefully, "while I take a leak."

  I stepped back so that I would not block his passage from the room, but he turned his back to me and, having fiddled with his buttons, piddled into a chamber-pot he kept behind the desk. The pot had not been empty when he started and he did not add much to it. I turned to look at the wall. "Charlie" Goon had been president of the Grafton Chinese Commercial and Cultural Association from 1923 to 1926. The sombre group photographs seldom showed more than five members.

  "Better out than in," said Goon Tse Ying brightly, fiddling with his fly buttons and seating himself. "I don't suppose you carry barley sugar? No? Just as well."

  "You are Goon Tse Ying?"

  "Yes, yes. Please sit down. Sit on the trunk. Pull it over, that's right. They tell me we have met before, but I do not know the name. I am eighty-one years old, so I forget many things. Where was it that I had the pleasure?"

  "In Melbourne. In 1895."

  "Ah, Melbourne, yes, yes.
" His foot moved the chamber-pot further under the desk.

  "Mrs Wong is your cousin."

  "Mrs Wong, ah yes."

  "You bought this business in 1896."

  "Not this one. Another one, further down the river. But I came to Grafton about then. That's right. I couldn't forget that."

  "And you translated for a herbalist."

  "Poor Mr Chin, yes, I did."

  "I am Herbert Badgery. Surely you remember me."

  "No, no," he shook his head.

  "I was a little boy. You found me at the markets. Remember the Eastern Markets? I was a little boy. You called me 'My Englishman'. I slept at Wong's. I shared a room with old Hing."

  His eyes clouded. It looked as if he had stopped trying to remember. He fiddled with his fountain pen and looked down at the book on the table. I kept talking. I described everything I could remember. I told him about the things he had taught me. I showed him my brightly shone shoes. He smiled and nodded. I told him how I had eaten porridge and he had drunk brandy and the smile widened into a grin that made his rice-paper skin crinkle like an old paper bag. I became excited. With every memory I produced a nod. My teeth were aching again but I did not let that stop me. I described his horse. He agreed it was black. He had been fond of that horse, he said, and began to tell me about it, how he had haggled over its purchase. I was too impatient for politeness. I interrupted his triumph to tell him about the morning he had taken me, with this very horse between the shafts, to make a camp. I told him about the place. I described the rocks, the thistles, how he had oiled his hair flat on his head.

  He interrupted me for another leak. I listened to his penis dribble while I studied the Chinese-Australian Friends' Assocation. There had been a national conference in Brisbane in 1931.