Notorious

by Roberta Lowing

  I sip my tea. ‘There are – irregularities with my father’s business. I’m about to be subpoenaed again. So Mr Devlin says.’

  ‘My lawyers got one, too,’ says Pietr. ‘Even though your father is dead.’ Deadt. The word reverberates across the marble. He says to Devlin, ‘Your government doesn’t seem to be accepting that I severed all business relations with Australia.’

  ‘Really?’ says Devlin.

  The lights go off. Dark seeps into the room like a tide. Outside, the clouds are backlit by lightning; their constantly convulsing outlines sidle past the wet balcony.

  ‘The generator should come on in a minute,’ says Pietr.

  ‘You’re quite self-sufficient,’ says Devlin, staying by the door.

  ‘We have to be,’ says Pietr. ‘In heavy weather, we’re completely cut off.’

  He turns to me. ‘Of course you can stay as long as you need. You were Anna’s best friend. I’ll never forget that.’

  ‘Your mother?’

  His hair is an aura in the gloom. ‘She would welcome you too.’

  The lights come on slowly, the bulbs seeming to grow into radiance. Devlin has a file in his hand. ‘You’ll want details – ’

  ‘No,’ Pietr says, not looking at him. ‘Leave the paperwork with Stefano.’

  ‘I’m a criminal, Pietr,’ I say.

  ‘Don’t say anything in front of . . . ’ Devlin’s name hangs in the air. Pietr sits and again holds my hand gently between his.

  ‘There are things,’ I whisper, ‘I could have done . . . ’

  His thumb presses into my wrist so I feel his pulse beating against mine.

  ‘You were your father’s daughter so there was nothing you could say,’ he tells me. ‘It is impossible to speak out against a parent.’

  I shudder against his arm. ‘My brother.’

  ‘I was your father’s partner,’ says Pietr. ‘I chose my relationship with him. Just as Mr Devlin chose his job. You could not choose.’ He touches my shoulder. ‘You have to forgive yourself. Otherwise, every day your heart is a graveyard.’

  There is the clink of glass. Devlin has a drink in his hand.

  ‘Forgiveness.’ I bite my lip.

  As he puts his arm around me, Pietr says, casually, ‘I don’t think we need you, Mr Devlin.’

  An hour later, I am in a sea of books. The rain is beating in all the corners of the day and I am swimming in books in Pietr’s library in the glass tower. Books rise to the ceiling on three sides. The fourth wall is given over to a wide window which faces the sea. The mist drifts past in sheets. A small triangular buoy is rocking on the purple sea. Beyond, tankers are at rest, a grey plane nosing the hard horizon. I think I see the red outline of a country, like a woman lying on her side, under the far-falling curtain of iron sky.

  ‘Tunisia,’ says Pietr. ‘Africa.’

  A faint sweet sound reaches the tower. ‘I hear bells.’

  ‘It’s the buoy,’ he says, pointing. ‘Just a platform with struts for a light. But my grandfather added an old brass bell. For the sailors to swim to, to ring for help.’

  ‘Your grandfather sounds like a community-minded man.’

  ‘Some would say so.’

  The library is on the second level in the glass tower. The third level is taken up by the darkroom where, he explains, he develops his photographs. ‘Another hobby,’ he says, ‘I don’t have enough time for.’

  His bedroom is on the first level. It is accessed by the external spiral stairs which also join the walkway running past the back bedrooms. The walls here are broad: thick frosted-glass bricks slotted into steel frames. He opens the steel door to show me a big plain room dominated by a four-poster bed with velvet drapes; an alcove of shelves makes a dressing room. The light struggles against the thick glass. Beyond the steel walkway are dark, bent lines; the outside world as a blur.

  ‘It’s like being inside an ice cube,’ I say to Pietr. The ceiling is made of glass, too, except for a circle of small lights set around a large steel fitting which bulges from the pale centre.

  We climb the stairs to the library. This door is locked and Pietr uses a small steel key. We go in, skirting the large globe of the world which sits on a big round dais in the middle of the room. It is an odd ugly feature, the kind of thing the pre-war Fascists would have loved but which I find incongruous in Pietr’s home.

  The floor is warm beneath my feet.

  I drift along the shelves, past the rows of books rising to the ceiling: novels, anthologies, bound volumes of magazines, encyclopaedias, biographies – many of them military – all arranged alphabetically, categorised by subject. The poetry alone takes up an entire wall. I run my hands gently over the red spines, the cracked gold lettering. The bracelet chafes me; Pietr stares at it but he stays silent. I walk along the bookshelves. I almost see the words glittering like crystals, taking flight.

  ‘I sensed haulers were no longer guiding me,’ I say.

  ‘Rimbaud,’ says Pietr.

  I stop at R. I search the shelves. ‘No Rimbaud?’

  He hesitates. ‘No.’

  I say, ‘My father told me your family had a special connection with Rimbaud. That your mother said her father-in-law, your grandfather, met Rimbaud in the Moroccan desert. You don’t know how transfixed I was, imagining that meeting.’

  ‘My mother knows nothing about poetry,’ he says easily. Nothingk. The Polish returning, despite the years away. ‘Families always exaggerate their famous connections.’

  He reaches over me to a row of tall thin books with pale cardboard covers tied with red ribbon.

  ‘Maps,’ he says. ‘The family accounts from my grandfather’s estate at Koloshnovar.’

  I stare at the dates. I see years stretching back to the end of the 1970s, then a big gap for that entire decade, then more years going back through the 1950s, with the years 1953 and 1954 missing, then books all the way to the 1920s, a gap for the war years, then more, the years sporadic now, back to the turn of the century, into the previous century.

  I point to the books marked through the 1890s.

  ‘My grandfather’s journals,’ says Pietr. ‘He went to Africa to make his fortune, barely an adult. Koloshnovar, his family estate, was failing. He needed money.’

  ‘No personal diaries?’ I say.

  ‘My family doesn’t believe in reflection.’

  I say, ‘I call my diary my little book of subversions. The secret map of my life.’

  Pietr nods. ‘A diary contains all the clues to decode the country of the self, the inner landscape. The problem is that if you don’t know how to read the map, the symbols are useless.’

  I say, ‘Beyond here lie dragons.’

  ‘Imagine maps with the face of God inscribed over the capital city of your country,’ says Pietr. ‘What does that do to the sense of the self?’

  ‘We have the upside-down map,’ I say, ‘with Australia at the centre of the world.’

  ‘I have no sense of you Australians,’ he says. ‘You look so easygoing, so simplistic, but there’s a ferocity there.’

  ‘The colonials went mad when they first saw the landscape,’ I say, ‘and we’ve never recovered.’

  He takes down a book with pages so thin they could be seen through. Pages shaded and drawn in spidery ink. ‘The maps of the French explorers,’ he says. ‘From before the First War.’

  He unbuttons his cuff and rolls back his sleeve, turning the pages carefully, revealing charts of desolation: endless pages of desert with a name here and there inscribed in the wilderness. No roads, no train lines, no airports.

  ‘Every clue is useable in a map,’ says Pietr. ‘Even absence is a clue. Look at the maps of Poland during World War II: whole towns disappeared, whole communities vanished, new unnamed enclaves of gas ovens. Look at America’s map of the world now. No mention of the secret prisons, the hastily made airports for the rendition flights. No mention of villages razed to the ground, the mass graves of civilians killed in the cross-fire. Nuc
lear sites are never mentioned on the map. You’ll never find the nuclear mines and American bases labelled on your tourist maps of Australia.’

  ‘You sound angry.’

  ‘It is something I have begun to think about.’ He draws a deep breath. ‘You make me think of it more.’ He puts the book back and stares at the top shelf. ‘I have another book you might like, a journal by a French explorer.’

  He stretches up; his sleeve shifts and I see the beginnings of a tattoo. But this is nothing like the pain etched into Devlin’s body. These blocks of black look smoother, with odd white lines running through them.

  ‘Is that a stencil?’ I say.

  Slowly, he rolls back the sleeve. The inner arm, I think, always the easiest place to etch your pain. Like the stomach, the chest, over the heart: all those accessible places in that early time when you don’t want to be caught. When you are hesitating about moving to more secretive areas: the inner thighs, between the toes, behind the eyeballs.

  Just below his elbow is a black and white image of – at first I’m not sure what I am looking at. The world tilts for a moment. It is a face but not a tattoo. It is – I bend closer to make sure – a photograph on the smooth skin of his inner arm. I see an image of dark hair, a carefree expression. I even know when it was taken. At a picnic, years ago. I flinch in the moment when I think it is me.

  ‘Anna,’ I say.

  ‘My daughter might be dead,’ he says, ‘but I’ve got her under my skin.’

  There is a gleam of water through his light eyelashes.

  ‘Can I touch her?’ I ask. He nods. Faint blue-black smears my fingertip.

  ‘The skin doesn’t hold the image for long,’ says Pietr steadily, ‘unless you overload it with fixer. Then the area burns and flakes.’

  ‘Easier than a tattoo.’

  He says, ‘Avedon did it. And the Paris artists in the last century, using plates from the old Brownie box cameras to develop directly onto the skin. You have to get the amount of emulsion and developer just right. You place the plate over the skin area for about three times the usual exposure time and coat it quickly with fixer. That seems to set the image for a few days. The developer works best on areas of the body that contain more water near the surface.’

  ‘So women would be good carriers,’ I say. ‘We retain more water.’

  ‘Women are always better carriers for memories,’ says Pietr.

  ‘When my brother found out about women retaining more water, if we ever fought he teased me that I needed to be drained.’

  ‘How often did he tell you that?’

  ‘Once that I can remember.’ Everyone is so sad now. ‘Maybe twice.’

  Anna stares up at me, unblinking, tearless.

  I say, ‘You should patent the process. Sell it to people who don’t want to carry photographs of their loved ones and can’t stand tattoo needles. Soldiers going to war, office workers having secret affairs.’

  ‘Explorers could print their maps directly on their body. They wouldn’t ever worry about being lost.’

  ‘As long as they didn’t get sunburnt,’ I say.

  We have dinner in the narrow room opposite the living room. Spotlights along the roof illuminate the sheets of mist floating through the dark air outside and turn the raindrops into fireflies.

  ‘It is the best floor show a man ever had,’ says Pietr, lighting the candles flanking the orchids on the dining table. He turns off the ceiling lights, leaving one tall lamp in the corner which throws haloes over the courtyard and guardhouses, over the dark tongue of road snaking down the hill to the ruined temple. Dusk like dark blue water soaks up the coarse sheets of cloud and mist and rain and sky. I imagine the slow descent down the slope, the wet branches slapping against the black ground, the masks of clay under the beating palms of earth.

  The vase on the table in the corner is filled with the same purple-black roses as in the lobby.

  ‘Emperor’s roses,’ says Pietr. ‘They grow wild around Koloshnovar. The soil is rich enough so the cold doesn’t kill them. Rich from the blood of dead Polish cavalry, so the locals say. We try to grow them here but they attract frost and die.’

  I bend to sniff the flower. There is no perfume. I say, testing him, ‘I didn’t think you still owned Koloshnovar. I thought it was abandoned.’

  ‘The house is empty but we lease out the land,’ says Pietr. ‘It’s like Santa Margherita. Too many memories. We can’t sell it.’

  Devlin comes up behind me. ‘What did you talk about while I kicked my heels in here?’

  The words hang in the air like snowflakes. ‘Nothing,’ I say, moving along the window. In our reflection, his dark shape looms over me. Even in the glass, I see the shadows under his eyes, in his cheeks. Over by the drinks table, Pietr turns to watch us.

  ‘You’re lying,’ Devlin says, stalking my reflection. He grabs my elbow.

  ‘Darling, I didn’t know you cared.’ I bat my eyelashes.

  He stares at me as though he hated me. ‘Tell me,’ he says and his words form their usual clouds. But now I see ice glittering in the air, some aura hardening. I shove him, so he steps back.

  ‘We’re on the same side, Devlin.’

  ‘Are we?’

  ‘I told him exactly what you told me to say.’

  He catches his breath, opens his mouth. But as usual he doesn’t have the words.

  In the reflection, Pietr stands, a tall glass in his hand. He says, ‘Mr Devlin, I know you’ll have one.’

  ‘My mother has been delayed,’ says Pietr as we sit. ‘She sends her regrets.’

  The tablecloth is heavy white linen: damask, with an embossed design half hidden by the plates and silverware and the white orchids floating in the glass bowls, their red stamens spider-like in the clear water.

  ‘I’m surprised you get mobile coverage here,’ says Devlin, raising his glass of red wine.

  ‘It’s erratic like everything else in Sicily,’ says Pietr. ‘We don’t have land lines in bad weather. We have the old smugglers’ way. Lit lanterns on the hill-top of the Roman ruins at Santa Margherita, which is the village opposite – ’

  ‘I know where it is,’ says Devlin, drinking.

  Pietr says to me, ‘If you climb to the remains of the battlements – the place where they used to pour boiling oil on their enemies – you see clear across to Castelmontrano. I can stand on the walkway and use Morse code if I need to reach my mother.’

  ‘So your mother lives in Santa Margherita?’ I say, frowning at Devlin who is reaching for the bottle.

  ‘The village is deserted,’ says Pietr as a girl in a black skirt brings in the soup. ‘But my mother’s family lived there. So she likes to visit.’

  ‘Alone?’

  ‘Yes,’ says Pietr, picking up his spoon. ‘Start, please. It’s a local specialty. After importing three star Michelins from Paris I finally realised the best cooks were the grandmothers in Trepani.’ He sips a mouthful. ‘Which is where you stay, I believe, Mr Devlin? Most travellers prefer somewhere bigger, like Palermo.’

  ‘He’s in Trepani to keep an eye on me,’ I say. Devlin presses his lips together.

  Pietr delicately touches the side of his bowl with his spoon. ‘You’ll find the locals hard to talk to unless you’ve got contacts.’

  Devlin takes a large mouthful of wine. ‘There’s always Mr Lincoln on the greenbacks.’

  ‘Possibly,’ says Pietr.

  ‘Or we can make a few calls to certain Yank federal prisons,’ says Devlin, flicking his finger at the delicate stem of his glass. ‘Didn’t that work after World War II?’

  ‘The Americans brought Lucky Luciano out of prison,’ Pietr says to me, ‘to help them get up the east coast of Sicily faster, to fight the Fascists on the mainland. Yes, I agree, Mr Devlin. The locals were happy to help strangers then.’

  ‘Only after they’d already helped the Nazis go through three years earlier,’ says Devlin. ‘Nothing like a deutschmark or greenback to make quick mates in convenient plac
es.’ He finishes his wine.

  ‘I’m sure you’re right,’ says Pietr.

  ‘And I’m sure you’ll be the first to know,’ says Devlin.

  By the second course, Devlin is drunk enough to start asking about Anna. He had picked his way through the stuffed mushrooms and now, after pushing the seafood gnocchi around his plate for several minutes, he takes another deep mouthful of wine and says to Pietr, ‘About your daughter Anna – ’

  ‘I’m flying on a jet plane,’ I say loudly. I am still thinking that Devlin is merely tactless. I don’t comprehend how thoroughly he has thrown himself into treacherous waters. ‘Anna used to like any song about travelling: hello, goodbye – miss you, kiss you.’

  The glass is half falling from Devlin’s slack fingers. ‘She lived here?’ he says to Pietr.

  Pietr shakes his head. ‘Her mother and I married very young. It was arranged; that was still done in Europe in the 1970s. Even now – strategic alliances, for the good of the family.’ His mouth twists. ‘Later, the marriage failed. Anna’s mother went to Australia, with my blessing. We remained friends; I visited as often as I could. That was how I met your father,’ he tells me.

  ‘Anna was fun at school,’ I say. ‘Always breathlessly waiting for the next party. She liked to make her own clothes. A happy child.’ The words are cold ice in my mouth.

  ‘You both were,’ says Pietr.

  ‘Were we?’ I say. ‘I can’t remember.’

  Some memory turns over in the dark water behind his light blue eyes. ‘You look so alike,’ he says. ‘You could have changed places.’

  ‘Maybe if I had,’ I say, ‘Anna would be alive now.’

  The wind is rising. Ivy has been allowed to grow up against the windows on this side of the house and when the light flickers, the bony branches look like clawing skeleton hands.

  The third course has been brought in. Devlin is still not eating. He mutters under his breath and holds his glass up. The red liquid sloshes back and forth in miniature waves.

  ‘The last time I saw my father,’ I say to Pietr, ‘he had the look of someone who can’t believe where he is.’

  ‘How much did he tell you?’ Pietr asks.