The Memory Trap

by Andrea Goldsmith

  Propped against the wall were several fold-up chairs. People helped themselves and in less than a minute everyone was settled.

  ‘Ravel, Le Tombeau de Couperin,’ Ramsay said, and began to play.

  No matter what she might think of Ramsay as a person and no matter how much she used to resent the hours spent in this room, from the first fall of notes in this, one of her favourite Ravels, Nina was gripped by his music. Ramsay’s tempo was quick, although not disconcertingly so – when versions differ too dramatically from the familiar there can be an almost unbearable grating. There was nothing histrionic in his playing; his stiffness, his coolness, his detachment simply slipped away. All fragments just a moment ago, there was now a coherence to him, a completeness, and such vibrancy in the sound produced, even in this Ravel, with the trickling rush of the prelude (it reminded her of a waterfall, not of Niagaran force, but a late spring waterfall, light and tumbling and every drop clear). Ramsay plays the prelude softly, but with such clarity, his touch deft and delicate, and even as the prelude passes into the slower fugue – a walk round a calm lake as against the prelude’s splashing water – there is a physical presence he instils in the music that makes her forget, improbably makes her forget. Come the skip and swing of the jazzy forlane and she is whisked away from this room, this house, this suburb, this Australia. This music could put her back in the arms of Daniel if she allowed it.

  As he plays, Nina is aware of feeling envious of half-baked Ramsay, for he is at home here – and this would be the case wherever there was a piano. Half-baked Ramsay doesn’t need a partner, he doesn’t need close friends. So lacking in an integrated self that to be with him is a strain, at the keyboard he is complete. And suddenly it comes to her, who he reminds her of. It is John Coetzee, the central character in J.M. Coetzee’s Summertime, a novel she read on the long flight from London to Melbourne. The same confusion, the same muddied longing, the awkward hold on the normal movements of a life, that simultaneous presence and absence, Ramsay Blake reminds her of a character in a novel.

  Chapter 5. Borders of Belief

  The Together In Freedom Coalition – TIF – had formed about five years earlier. It comprised the steering committee Nina would be meeting today, and a group of several hundred active supporters. According to the briefing notes she had received, the core members had come together in the post-9/11 world, concerned that the laws and regulations enacted to protect against terrorism were actually inhibiting much that was good in humankind. From the TIF perspective, societies were being shaped by their basest fears and around their basest elements, while the majority of citizens with their qualities of openness and generosity were being stymied.

  The briefing notes had been surprisingly informative – often, Nina had found, with the more amateur groups they were not. The committee members had made several study tours, including a month in the Middle East encompassing Israel, the Palestinian territories, Egypt, Jordan and Lebanon. They had also visited India and Pakistan and several African countries, witnessing firsthand the horror of sectarian violence – different regions and different grievances but, according to their notes, the brutality and torture distressingly uniform. They had forged strong links with moderates in these countries, and had sponsored trips to Australia by a number of them. These visits had included lectures, seminars and discussions, ensuring that the reason of the moderates was for once heard more clearly than the shrill voices from the extremes. Every second month TIF sponsored an evening seminar devoted to a topical issue: a co-ordinated international response to asylum seekers, for example, or commercial exploitation of third-world resources. Annually they held a day-long conference, the most recent being shaped around the statement, ‘No one chooses exile.’ The TIF people had been surprisingly effective; their briefing notes listed some impressive achievements, and much more would be possible, Nina believed, if they maintained their current focus rather than redirected their funds and energies into a monument project.

  Under normal circumstances, which is to say in her Daniel days, she would not have pursued this contract, and certainly not as an excuse to return to Melbourne. It was as if she thought it would be a weakness to come home without a job, without a legitimate reason. Of course no justification had been needed, she knew this now, nonetheless the job remained. She was committed only to an initial meeting with the group, but knowing as she already did that the TIF monument project had little likelihood of success, she felt uncomfortable – these were people of conscience, all of them activists for a better world – weighed down by false pretences and bad faith.

  She had worked in the field of memorialising long enough to know which projects were likely to progress smoothly and which would bring trouble. A single event about which there was little controversy or a single person to be honoured would, aesthetic considerations aside, proceed without a hitch – a monument to Weary Dunlop, for example, or a commemoration to those killed in the Port Arthur massacre. But when the event or person, or, in the case of TIF, the values were contentious, and if, in addition, certain stakeholders with competing views had been excluded, such an enterprise would struggle to make it beyond the early stages.

  Until the planning for the 9/11 memorial project on the site of the Twin Towers, Maya Lin’s Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington took the prize for monument controversy. Nina was still at school when it was dedicated in 1982, but the uproar was so great that even schoolgirls could not fail to be aware. Nina had long wondered if the germ of her future career took hold at that time: she was intrigued that a monument, a sleek wall of granite carrying the names of the fallen, could arouse such passions.

  Lin was Asian, female and young; her monument was black, abstract and lacked the usual heroic depictions of war. The protests, angry and aggrieved, approached from two fronts: the modernist memorial itself came under attack, as did the war it sought to remember. In the US at the time there was no national memorial for World War Two, nor was there one for the Korean War, yet Vietnam, a war that continued to inspire Sturm und Drang, a minor war from the perspective of the veterans of other wars, had been honoured. Why Vietnam? Why not us?

  From that time no military campaign was to be ignored. In the aftermath of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial fracas, two new national war memorials were planned for Washington: the huge sprawling overwrought landscape of the World War II Memorial, in Nina’s opinion one of the ugliest and shamelessly nationalistic memorials on Western soil, and the ultra-realist yet strangely moving Korean War Veterans Memorial, with its larger-than-life steel soldiers burdened with military clothes and hardware, each man essentially alone in the dreadful landscape of war. As for the abstract contemplative structure designed by Lin, two additional Vietnam monuments were added to the same site – placatory monuments to silence the protests in that both depicted realistic, life-sized figures enacting traditional war postures and narratives.

  Washington was monument city and Nina visited regularly. She was present when the Korean War Memorial was opened to the public in 1995 – decades after the soldiers came home; and again when the World War Two Memorial was dedicated in 2004 – nearly sixty years after the war ended. She visited recently to see the Martin Luther King Memorial, a mammoth statue erected a full forty-three years after King’s assassination. Even to the casual observer, something other than the worth of a person or an event is relevant when monuments are proposed. Indeed, as Nina well knew, history as embodied in enduring monumental form is a slippery enterprise. In the break-up of the former Soviet Union, one of the first acts of the liberated peoples was the tearing-down of Soviet-inspired monuments across the entire Eastern Bloc. And it did not surprise her that one of the most powerful symbols of the fall of Baghdad in 2004 was the huge statue of Saddam Hussein bound by ropes and pulleys crashing to the ground. Yesterday’s shrine readily becomes today’s scrap heap.

  Over and over again, Nina was reminded that history has little capital these days unless it bolsters values, attitudes and beliefs curr
ently in vogue. The challenge to her – to anyone planning a memorial – was to keep as narrow as possible the gap between the historical event or figure and its modern appreciation. In recent times, a popular means of closing the gap has been to render history as a personal experience by inserting the viewer into the representation. So there are Holocaust museums where visitors enter cattle cars, and World War One installations where they get down into the trenches.

  Nina loathed these experiential memorials. To domesticate the persecution and slaughter of millions was, she believed, a travesty of the magnitude and impact of those atrocities. But memorial personnel were quick to defend the approach; they said that most visitors arrive with no personal connection with the event being portrayed, yet they leave shocked, challenged and in many instances changed by what they’ve seen.

  No defence had yet convinced her. As far as she was concerned, the experiential approach was in the same vein as those reality TV shows where people swap wives or houses or countries for the duration of a six-part series; or return to nature or the nineteenth century, or live like a pauper or an aristocrat. As for imaginative empathy, or any form of abstract understanding, it was not simply discounted, it was actually heading towards extinction.

  There was something in the TIF proposal that suggested they might be wanting an experiential approach. They wrote that their monument would help people ‘reconnect with what is best in human nature generally, and, at the same time, what is best in themselves’. The TIF monument would prompt people ‘to know what it is to be part of a world community that simultaneously embodies diversity and common hopes and values’. Even if by some miracle the TIF proposal shed all its other problems, if it was an experiential approach they were after, Nina wouldn’t want this job.

  And yet it was not so simple. While she did not share their religious beliefs, she certainly shared their other values; she might even have become a TIF member if she lived in Melbourne. But to build a monument to an idea, or rather several ideas, for it to possess a pedagogical dimension as well – as if any single object could teach freedom or courage – and then to exclude from the planning process well-organised and voluble stakeholders was to shunt the project into the realm of the impossible. As much as she might admire their principles, it was only right, Nina decided as she rode up in the lift, to be forthright about her concerns before the project advanced any further.

  Her resolve was shaken as soon as she came face to face with those who formed the TIF steering committee. Seven people sat at one end of a large elliptical table in the boardroom of C.G. and C.K. Holdings. Seven people smiled at her as she entered the room. Charlie Goldstein and Cate Killeen, a Jew and a Catholic who had met young and acquired their wealth together, sat next to each other on one side of the table. They rose as Nina entered. Both were in their late forties. Cate, dressed in black, was tall and elegant with a mess of red curls; Charlie was short, bald and rumpled. They directed her to a vacant chair and made the introductions – out of courtesy rather than necessity: the committee members knew who she was and she had been sent a list of their names and credentials.

  Immediately to her right was the Uniting Church minister, Reverend Elizabeth Featherstone, a large, attractive woman with dark features and pillar-box red lipstick whose mother had been one of the stolen generation. Seated next to her was the political historian, Professor Karim Qureshi: forty, maybe fifty, clipped greying beard, Semitic features, and wearing a surprising pale pink T-shirt. At the end of the table was Rabbi Lorrie Aarons who looked hardly old enough to be out of high school, and between her and Cate Killeen sat Father Jamie Gray, who, with his spiky hair and black casual clothes, resembled the front-of-house in a chic restaurant rather than the Jesuit priest and social commentator he was. The last member of the steering committee, sitting next to Charlie and opposite Nina, was Nadirah Harvey, the Iraqi-born human rights lawyer, married to an Australian, an out-spoken critic of Australia’s refugee policies and an ardent defender of asylum seekers. With her grey head-scarf and neat grey jacket she looked as if dressed for court.

  Cate Killeen welcomed her on behalf of the group and then launched straight into the project.

  ‘We want to create a monument to diversity and social inclusion,’ she said. ‘A monument that reflects Australia as a compassionate, multicultural society, one not merely tolerant of different races and religions but actually embracing the differences. We’re keen,’ she explained, ‘to differentiate ourselves from the so-called melting pot of America.’

  Cate nodded to the young rabbi to continue.

  ‘Despite its well-sung myths, America would prefer to eliminate difference,’ the rabbi said in American-accented English. ‘Everything has to become American. Italian-Americans, Jewish-Americans, African-Americans, Irish-Americans, Italian-Americans – the emphasis is always on the American side of the hyphen. Bleach out the differences. Fit in.’ She paused before adding, ‘But you’d be aware of this, you’d have observed it yourself.’

  They all knew about her work at the UN of more than twenty years ago. ‘Felix Hovnanian’s one of our most valued supporters,’ Charlie Goldstein explained. ‘He’s adviser, key advocate and friend all rolled into one. In fact, it was Felix who recommended you.’

  Felix Hovnanian, her MA supervisor, her first boss and first lover. Nina quickly established he was living here in Melbourne, attached in an honorary capacity to the university. He was as active as ever, according to Charlie, lectures and keynote speeches, regular media commentary, several high-profile committees, and, it emerged, recently divorced – from the same wife he was married to when he was having his affair with her. Extraordinary, Nina thought, that a divorce should happen at this late stage with Felix’s most active philandering days surely well behind him. She slotted all the information into memory before guiding the discussion back to the TIF project.

  ‘Our monument is to remind us what we set store by as Australians,’ Nadirah, the lawyer, said. ‘What permits so many of us to make Australia our home.’

  She glanced around the table taking in the rest of the group. Her smooth brown face framed by the scarf was, Nina found herself thinking, beguilingly ageless.

  ‘These days,’ Nadirah continued, ‘people have little opportunity to reflect on their beliefs. We believe a monument will help to concentrate thought. A monument will provide a safe and peaceful place for people to step out of their busy lives and recall what’s truly important to them and to this country of ours.’

  ‘“To remember is to safeguard something.”’ Cate Killeen quoted Seneca’s well-known maxim.

  Nina encouraged them to talk, to explain their rationale for the monument. She did not want to be seen to be diminishing their project by attacking it or injecting damp realism into their ambitions. She hoped that if they talked long enough, guided by strategic questions from her, they would eventually come to see not the folly of this project – never folly, not with such admirable intentions – but the impossibility of it.

  Although the more she heard, the more she realised that the force of this group was something to be reckoned with. So strong were their beliefs, they blanked out other competing factors. She wanted to remind them that people are driven by envy and fear every bit as much as by goodness; she wanted to say that one person’s goodness is another’s selfishness. At one point she did mention the American religious right, their belief that wealth was a sign of godliness and poverty a self-induced punishment for wrong living. And a short time later she brought up race riots. ‘They’ve occurred here in Australia,’ she said. ‘People who are different are seen as threatening. Outsiders are demonised, and everyone becomes more firmly rooted in their own primary identification group – their own gang – which they’re prepared to defend at all cost. And the gulf between groups widens.’

  Several voices were raised in protest. Look at us, they were saying, we reflect different backgrounds, different religions, and we’re enriched by our differences, our group’s strengthened
by them.

  ‘That’s true,’ Nina said. ‘You see the need for this project, you agree on what it should symbolise and, aesthetic tastes aside, you’ll agree on the form it’ll take. But already from your own accounts you’ve experienced opposition from the more orthodox members of your communities. They say you don’t represent them. They’ve told you to stop TIF or let them in. Either way your project collapses.’

  ‘Two projects then?’ the young priest suggested.

  There was a pause before the professor, Karim Qureshi, spoke. ‘It’s exactly the sort of response we’re receiving from the orthodox quarters, or rather the ultra-orthodox, that makes our project so important.’ He spoke with an accent, different from Daniel’s, but with a similarly pleasing effect. ‘We want to reinforce our shared values.’

  ‘I’ve absolutely no quarrel with what brought you together. But already there’s been trouble and I’d anticipate a good deal more.’

  ‘Why are you so hostile to what we want to do?’ The rabbi’s voice was loud, she looked disgruntled. The others nodded in agreement.

  ‘I’m not hostile,’ Nina said, annoyed she’d been so transparent. ‘I’m simply exploring your project. You think you represent diversity, but values, attitudes and beliefs are at least as important as religion and ethnic background when it comes to loyalties and personal identifications, to what unites and divides people. I’m introducing some dissent into what I see as a homogeneous and consensual group.’