The Boy in the Green Suit

by Robert Hillman

  The fluctuations of thought, mimicking the flickering flame of the candle burning beside my cheek, eventually produced a bright moment of insight. This was not the first time I had set off in search of paradise, I realised. It was not the second, third or even tenth time. For years I had been fashioning Edens for myself. A lost city in the hills above my home town. A lost city in the valleys at the back of the green hills on the way to Thornton. A lost city on the island mountains across the lake. A lost city in the bush on Dry Creek Road. I carried sandwiches and cake and a tomato-sauce bottle full of cordial when I set off in search of those lost cities. And each time, the disappointment of not finding them was like a grievous and painful insult.

  I wasn’t expecting to find gold and jewels in these lost cities. I had no interest in gold and jewels. I was expecting radiance. Every surface would glow. The green of the grass would be more vivid than any green I had seen before. Creamy clouds would cross the blue sky in a silence so finely spun it would sound like music. The shadows of the clouds would follow the undulations of the hills and slide over wheatfields and forests. The trees would spread their branches so broadly that in the space beneath them whole families could live without any other shelter. The buildings were labyrinthine miracles, endless alleyways and tunnels lined with flowerbeds and banquet tables where you might pause to gobble down not two slices of toast and jam, but a hundred slices if you wished, and not only toast but crumpets, too, and not only one sort of breakfast cereal but a hundred sorts.

  Surpassing the glowing colours of the city and the hills and the splendour of the architecture was the rich, warm, welcoming embrace of the people you met, the folk of the lost city. They smiled, and the beauty and warmth of their smiles blurred and melded, and you were left with an overwhelming feeling of sanction for anything you might say or display. Each feature of the lost city was airbrushed clean of scales or scabs. But more importantly, an airbrush had been expertly at work on the hearts and souls of these smiling people; what was mean or little or harsh or cruel had been smoothened, softened, made to disappear. The lost cities were made of a love that could not be exhausted, could not be altered; fall and tumble as you may, you were comforted.

  As I lay there under my blue blanket, I did not go on to consider that these lost cities might be dramatised corollaries of longing, and even now I doubt that psychology could adequately explain them. I wanted paradise. The search was made more urgent by the furious hissing and scolding that my father and step-mother dished out to each other; by the faltering of joy in my life; by hard surfaces that bruised or sliced or left dark splinters under my skin. But even without these incitements to fantasy and escape, I would still have believed in lost cities. Where the idea of paradise came from, I don’t know. Perhaps it was a sort of spiritual atavism. I believed the stories of Adam’s children: stories of a secret garden to which we cannot return. I went peeking through holes in the wall of Eden, a desperado of happiness, mad to get inside, and always I was chased away, just as I’d been warned, by a killjoy character with a flaming sword.

  Next day I was at last picked up by a surly truck driver who wanted payment immediately. Fees were usually settled at the end of the ride. I offered socks, my last pack of playing cards, and a novel (Nicholas Nickleby). The truck driver carried me for ten hours without speaking and without drinking anything at all. He kept a big, brown paper-bag of hard, mint lollies on the dashboard, and sucked his way through the lot. His cheeks flexed and the lollies clunked against his teeth. The names of towns and cities loomed in all their consonantal strangeness. Every time I saw a face in the street, its expression was sullen. The Yugoslavs seemed the most pissed-off people on earth. It was nightfall when the ride came to an end in Ljubljana, wherever that was.

  Trudging through what appeared to be a suburb, I was forced to revisit the question of character. Approaching strangers with tears was no longer an option. How about approaching strangers to soberly request a place to sleep for the night? Anything wrong with that? I was working class, the Yugoslavs were working class. Brotherhood was the issue. Was it likely that Tom Joad would have felt squeamish about asking for a floor to sleep on? He was starving and cold; I was starving and cold. It was settled—I’d knock on doors and put my case. It does require a fair bit of egocentricity to draw a parallel between the experience of a boy on holiday without a cracker and that of a young man battling for survival in dustbowl America, but I was able to muster it. I was inflicting on the world the intolerable narcissism that most teenagers have the decency to reserve for their immediate families.

  The suburbs of Ljubljana had not benefited from the cheerful, weekend attention that Australian suburbanites lavish on their plots. It was not that the lawns were left unmowed; there were no lawns, no gardens, no nature strips, no neat concrete curbing—just rows of stark, semi-detached bungalows. I went from door to door in the misty rain asking the dwellers if I might sleep on their floor. Looks of dismay and fear met me. Mothers shook their heads in panicky refusal, their puzzled children peeping out from behind them. Fathers stared at me in alarm, as if I were the harbinger of some new official torment. I’d been doorknocking for half an hour or so when a car screeched to a stop nearby and two policemen (by the look of them) demanded things that I could not understand. I was excited by this turn of events, just as I’d been by the young soldier a couple of days before. I had not the least fear that anything bad would befall me. Why should it? I wasn’t doing anything wrong. And these guys had guns, always a fascinating sight to me.

  Down at the station I was handed over to another policeman, a man with a great monument of a body and a magnificent, carved noggin. He looked like Omar Sharif twenty years on from Sherrif Ali, and twice the size. Every gesture he made underscored his vanity, but it was pleasant vanity. The mature, physically beautiful male (I’ve since noticed) is usually a very relaxed chap, often generous. This cop, Omar, gave me a few minutes to take in his magnificence, his perfect teeth, chemical blue eyes, the touches of central-casting grey at the temples, then quietly beckoned me to open my suitcase. He lifted out one item after another, chuckling all the while. The typewriter amused him especially. He held up the books at arm’s length, and pretended to be reading in the manner of an egghead professor. I laughed, keen to ingratiate myself—a good policy.

  When he came to my sheath knife, Omar could scarcely contain himself. He called in a subordinate and displayed the weapon, his blue eyes twinkling. He studied the knife with approval, then balanced its tip on the tip of a finger, moving his hand just slightly, expertly, keeping the knife upright. He suddenly spun the knife in the air. It landed dead on its point, quivering in the brown linoleum. I shook my head and whistled in unfeigned admiration. The weasel subordinate gave a grudging grimace and took himself off.

  The Life magazines particularly pleased Omar. He flicked through an issue, turning the pages to me when a picture thrilled him. ‘Chevrolet!’ he said, and ‘Bobby Kennedy!’ and ‘Elizabeth Taylor!’ I told him to keep the magazine, and added a second. He protested, but agreed in the end. In return, he indicated that I would be brought some food, after my passport was scrutinised. He disappeared from my life with the two magazines, and a few hours later the weaselly constable brought me a quarter of an orange, a small piece of crumbly cheese and a glass of water. I sat under a portrait I recognised as that of President Tito, and read The Grapes of Wrath.

  In the morning, an official arrived to review my case. While he was studying my passport, he munched on fresh toast fetched by the poor, exhausted weasel. Oh God, that toast! If only I’d been asked to confess to something with the promise of a slice of toast as a reward! When I returned to The Grapes of Wrath, my sympathy for the Okies on their journey to the Garden of Eden had passed all limits.

  The upshot of my detention was that I was to be sent by train to Belgrade—a city which my maundering route across Yugoslavia had bypassed. I was horrified to discover, after consulting a map o
n the wall of the police station, that Ljubljana was no more than a skip and a jump away from Germany. The Yugos might have let me sneak over into Austria then on to Germany. But no, I was to present myself at the British Embassy in Belgrade, and the British, acting for the Australian government, would send me back to Athens, and the Australian Consulate in Athens would send me back to Australia, and the whole journey would have been wasted. My duty was clear. I had to escape. But when I learned that I would be fed on the train, I decided that I would make my escape from Belgrade.

  I was met at the station in Belgrade by an embassy car—a highly polished black Humber. The chauffeur looked familiar. I was sure he’d appeared in From Russia With Love, as a chauffeur. I risked asking him if any espionage went on in Belgrade. He didn’t know what I was talking about. ‘Spying,’ I said. He shrugged. ‘Who knows?’ His answer satisfied me. A spy would always say, ‘Who knows?’ in reply to such a question.

  Belgrade looked nothing like any other Yugoslavian city I’d passed through. It seemed prosperous and exuberant. If I were to run away here in Belgrade, I would likely find employment before long. I saw department stores. It was possible that I could get a job selling ladies’ shoes and slippers. I had brought my reference from the Myer Emporium with me. It said, ‘Robert showed diligence and left of his own accord.’

  The British Embassy impressed me a great deal. It had a cobblestoned courtyard, where all the black, shining embassy vehicles parked. The door by which we entered the building was varnished and gleaming. The door knobs were polished brass. Within, the embassy looked exactly like the Oxford University of my imagining: varnished panels, tiled floors, and efficient men and women, perfectly groomed, calmly going about their business. I was shown into a room like a study, books in glass-fronted cases, an enormous desk on which a spotless white blotter was spread. A tall, urbane man in his forties smiled at me and flattered me terrifically by shaking my hand. His tailoring was impeccable.

  Wandering about the embassy wide-eyed, I was sure that I detected admiration in the eyes of the people I met. It seemed to me that I was being checked out for possible employment—perhaps as a courier, conveying an important document or message to Athens. Or something grander. Maybe the embassy had been scouting for a clever boy with a bit of daring about him. I might be sent to London for training, then to Moscow. In London, I would perhaps be required to undergo torture to show that I could bear up. I might be wired to an electric shock machine, or have my head held under water. People would perhaps shout at me and abuse me, just to see if I had what it takes.

  This was a mission that I’d been preparing myself for all my life. At the age of five I was convinced that I was being secretly watched by the army. The army wanted to see if I were good, thoughtful, considerate. Whenever I saw a tap left dripping anywhere about the town, I would turn it off firmly, then glance about with a stern expression to illustrate my disappointment with people who left taps dripping. I picked up pieces of litter, fragments of broken glass. If I found a dog wandering loose, I tried to find where it lived, or at least made sure it was off the road. None of this was done out of plain goodness (although I have remained a great worrier about stray dogs); it was done to impress the army. Every day I made sure that I looked up at the wall of the huge dam that loomed above the town, hoping that I would be the first to detect a crack in the wall, and that I would then be the first to give the alarm, and that I would be praised for saving the town, and a big tick entered beside my name in the dossier that was being kept on me by the army.

  It was mid-afternoon when I arrived at the embassy—too late for me to be put aboard the train to Athens. I was placed in the care of a man who worked for the embassy in some capacity that seemed to cause him grief, for he spoke about it in a piqued manner, as if dwelling on it brought on dyspepsia. His name was Alex, and I was to stay with him for the night.

  Alex drove me to his home in a down-at-heel suburb and cautioned me, before we entered his flat, that his mother was ill and would be a little frightened. The flat was dark but snug, and I found the rugs and ornamental objects attractive. Alex led me to a curtained doorway, eased the curtain aside and spoke softly to a shadowed figure propped up in a bed under a window. The cries of an agitated bird came from the bed as he approached, leading me by the hand. His mother looked at me in alarm, her cheeks trembling. She was old, but not ancient. After more gentle, placatory words from Alex, the old woman lifted a hand from under the covers and beckoned me closer. She studied my face in the grey light. We left the room after what sounded like a short, repeated phrase of approval or acquiesence.

  In the tiny kitchen, Alex explained that his mother had been tortured during the war, and still suffered. The news filled me with awe. I said, ‘The Germans?’ Alex gave a bitter laugh. ‘I’m afraid you don’t know the history of this country,’ he said. While he prepared an omelette, I asked about Yugoslavia, about Tito, about communism, but he was dismissive. I desperately wanted to ask him about his mother’s torture, but managed not to. Why I should have wished to know baffles me now.

  I slept on a mattress on the sitting-room floor. Every time I woke, I heard the bird cries of the old woman. Alex in his pyjamas stepped over me a number of times to go to her aid. I heard the soft, lapping phrases he spoke, his voice never rising. This must have been his task each night.

  The train from Belgrade took me back over terrain I had thought was behind me. At least I was neat, once more. Hitching had left my green suit looking weary, but I had taken the opportunity at Alex’s apartment to iron it, and also to shower. Shaving was still a few years off.

  Hostel

  I was met in Athens by an official from the embassy—a good-natured kid who could easily have come from my own town—and taken to a modern building at the end of a barren boulevard. A more senior official looked me over, shook his head and told me that I would be on a plane back to Australia within two weeks. In the meantime, I was to be put up at a youth hostel, and I would pay my way by washing dishes. This seemed a dumb plan, but the two weeks would give me a chance to make a better one.

  The hostel—a big, white, neo-classical monster right in the middle of the city—gave me my first real look at my own generation. And the thing I noticed was that all the other members of my generation were a lot more clued in than I was. They didn’t wear suits; they wore jeans, rumpled shirts, sneakers. They were relaxed. They didn’t hammer away at closed doors with mindless intensity. They knew what they wanted. They knew the geography of Europe. They used travellers’ cheques. They carried their clothes in rucksacks. They had modest, practical plans that included a return to the cities and towns they’d come from. They had not come to search for a green island, but to photograph the Acropolis. They intended to smoke a little dope, go to bed with each other, get drunk, then go home and complete a degree in engineering or marine biology. They had sense, and they knew the way ahead. Next to them, I saw clearly for the first time how desperate my own plans were. It was as if I were once again floundering in the Myer Emporium, gazing hopelessly at all the jaunty folk who understood the code that was such a mystery to me.

  At least I was employed within the limits of my competence. I knew how to wash dishes. They arrived in towering stacks from the mess hall, smeared with spaghetti and meatball left-behinds. Wrapped in a neck-to-ankle white apron (I couldn’t seem to escape slapstick costumery), I stood at a deep sink and scrubbed the daylights out of anything passed to me. Warm, misty clouds enclosed me for hours. The rowdy rattle of hundreds of cheerful voices played in my ears like canned laughter.

  When the mess hall closed and the chirruping throng had headed off to nightclubs, the kitchen staff gathered at a table to sip retsina and smoke and pair off for the night. Two of the waitresses, astonishingly pretty girls from Santa Fe, would head upstairs with the kitchen-hand they hadn’t slept with the previous night. The kitchen-hands, Billy and Santo, accepted this turn-and-turn-about arrangement wi
th nonchalance. Philly and Cassie did not consider taking me upstairs, but they did kiss me and rub their breasts against my cheeks and include me in a survey they were conducting, in a desultory way, about the advantages of various condoms.

  In the late evenings it was left to me, as the sole employee with nothing to worry about in the way of birth control, to man the reception desk and register the herds of swaggering undergraduates who arrived on ferries from Brindisi. Each national group had a flavour. The Swedes rollicked and capered as if they’d just been let out for the weekend from a high-security venue of detention. The Germans were restrained, serious, as if conscious of the poor impression their fathers had made as tourists between 1939 and 1945. The English were good-natured and co-operative, but lived with a morbid fear of larceny. Australians, mostly girls, were even more co-operative than the English but didn’t dwell on the prospect of having their pockets picked. Americans were easy-going, generous, embracing, especially the draft dodgers.

  It was the fervent hope of the draft dodgers that the Vietnam War would come to an end before their visas ran out. Athens, located about as far from the United States as you could get without subjecting yourself to the discomforts of the Third World, was the ideal place to sit out the war. The youngest draft dodgers were only three years older than me, but seemed immensely more mature. I lingered close by whenever a group of them got together—sometimes in the mess, sometimes in the cafes nearby—and tried to look as if at any moment I might say something definitive about the role being played by the United States’ armed forces in South-East Asia. The dodgers would glance at me, but didn’t invite me to join in. Until one day. A tall, rowdy guy named Donny called me over from the shadows and got me to sit down beside him. He threw an arm around my shoulder and demanded to know exactly what the CIA was paying me.