Joyful

by Robert Hillman

  The card was undated, but couldn’t have been sent later than September 22, 2006, because on that day Sofia took her life in the bathroom of a Melbourne hotel. A Stanley knife with its angled blade fully extended had been firmly fixed with gaffer tape to a tap at one end of the bathtub. Sofia had used the steadied blade to slice open the arteries of her left wrist lengthways.

  Seven farewell letters were found neatly arranged on the bed of the room on the fourth floor of the hotel, each sealed in a pale blue envelope. One of the letters was intended for the members of Crocus; another for Sofia’s mother; another for her father; one for the music teacher at a private school in Berwick where Sofia had instructed casually for two years. The final three letters were all addressed to her lover, Mark Averescu, a close friend and one-time colleague of Emmanuel Delli’s whose office was in Exhibition Street, across the street from the hotel room in which Sofia took her life.

  News of a suicide carries with it the arresting reek of audacity. At some time in the past, our own hearts have been broken, our own plans thwarted. We gave thought to ending it all, but didn’t. Sofia’s friends stared at each other in bafflement and disbelief. Her mother lost the power of speech for an hour. Her father, disdainful of the claim that Sofia was dead, gazed blankly through a glass pane at the Coronial Services Centre for ten minutes before he was willing to confirm that the body was his daughter’s. Mark Averescu read Sofia’s letters at a police station in Little Collins Street and had to be persuaded that the whole thing was not a hoax.

  Days passed, an autopsy was performed, Sofia’s body was at last released by the coroner. A funeral service held at the Delli home in Northcote was attended by a gathering so large that many mourners had to stand in the backyard under the jacarandas. Almost the entire Kurdish Christian community of Melbourne was present, such was the respect accorded to Sofia’s father, a reader in political science at Melbourne University. It was not only respect that had brought out such numbers. Emmanuel and Daanya had lost their son Joseph to anti-Kurdish violence in Istanbul some years past. It was thought that God had sent father and mother such suffering as only those dear to Him were ever asked to bear.

  At the feast following the burial at Fawkner Cemetery, Emmanuel stood among the mourners like a statue carved from grey stone, one hand holding a cup of English Breakfast tea from which he didn’t sip, the other clenched at his side. Daanya was freer in her grief. Women friends held her and kissed her and used their own handkerchiefs to dry her cheeks.

  Daanya sought out each of the remaining members of Crocus to ask what had gone wrong. ‘Some hint locked in your memory, something that I can understand.’ But the musicians only shook their heads in sorrow.

  Tess was there, a year before Daniel Mikolajczyk came into her life, two years before cancer. She sent a card of sympathy to Daanya and Emmanuel and accepted an invitation to the funeral. When she embraced Daanya under the jacarandas the anguish in the poor woman’s body felt like ardour. At the point where another woman—a woman from Tess’s own culture, an Australian—would have murmured an apology and begun to withdraw, Daanya allowed the candour of her grief fuller expression, as much as it demanded, and it surged like a torrent through her body. When she had become calm again, she kissed Tess on the cheeks and forehead, and on the hands. She said: ‘I wish she had been more like you, Teresa. I wish she had made her life in music like you, a proper life.’

  Two months after the funeral, Daanya and Emmanuel came to the flat in High Street for dinner. Emmanuel said barely a word. Daanya, both of her children dead and buried, sat upright and smiling, a figure of startling beauty, happy to talk about anything, books, politics, a disaster she’d experienced in the kitchen. Whenever she spoke, Emmanuel fixed his gaze elsewhere, his hands clasped tightly on the table.

  They came to dinner again, the Dellis, and a third time. If Leon or Tess addressed Emmanuel directly, he would smile bleakly, shrug, mutter one or two words. His longest response came on that third visit when Tess asked his opinion of the emergence in America of the black senator, Barack Obama. He raised his chin, smoothed his moustache and said, ‘Fuck him and fuck his country.’ Daanya said: ‘Oh, husband!’ and placed her hand on his cheek. Later, Tess found the opportunity to speak to Daanya alone in the kitchen.

  ‘All is not well with Emmanuel?’

  Daanya whispered, ‘Worse than you might imagine.’

  chapter 9

  Storm

  WORSE NOT only at home, but at work, and worse still within a few weeks of the dinner with Tess and Leon.

  The professor’s colleagues at the university could not have been more considerate, but as more months passed and the grieving father’s temper deteriorated, intervention became inevitable. Students had no qualms about complaining when papers were returned with the single comment, Muck. The professor’s postgraduate supervision was even more disastrous. He invited his doctoral candidates to lunch at his house and after a period of pleasantness, advised all three to seek some other goal in life. ‘Why beat about the bush, after all? Your talents will never set the world on fire, I do assure you.’ As if relishing variations on his new-found knack for insult, he stopped Chinese students in the corridors of the university to ask if they had personally witnessed any of the public executions of their fellow countrymen, who seemed to be succumbing to the noose in such extraordinary numbers.

  Emmanuel’s professional demeanour in the past had been faultless. With his immaculate tailoring and courtly manner, he had been an advertisement for his department. Now, wellwishers whispered their concern to him and were rebuffed. Since it was evident that the professor was unwell, possibly mad, reprimand was ruled out. The Dean, Mary Hart, took him to lunch at Ballard’s in the city and placed before him an attractive assortment of options designed to afford respite both for him and for the department.

  ‘Colorado,’ the Dean suggested, the second of her options; Delli had coldly rejected the first. ‘Suite, secretary. Faculty head is Bowie Mott, a great fan of yours. If you like, Manny, I might also be able to get you some guesting at Seattle.’

  Delli didn’t reply. He had ordered the cajun chicken, but now seemed unequal to the task of eating it. He sat with his knife and fork raised, staring at the food as if it posed an unwelcome riddle.

  ‘Manny, dear?’

  Delli looked up. Mary was studying him worriedly. What Delli felt was a violent urge to hiss that he knew why Mary had taken to wearing a scarf this past year. It was to hide the crepey skin on her neck. Disguising flaws in one’s looks struck him as abhorrent, but he was aware that his reaction was far too strong. Sense, reason, self-control—the very medium in which his mind swam was draining away with a high-pitched scream, like the last of the bathwater spiralling into the lightless conduit. What wit remained to him he recruited to keeping his mouth shut.

  ‘Manny, are you ill?’

  A panic commenced in Delli’s breast, a knocking and banging that felt like the prelude to fracture. He pushed his chair back from the table as tears sprang into his eyes.

  The Dean called for help from a waiter. Delli allowed himself to be supported, but actually needed to sit down again. The appalled expressions of diners swung in and out of his field of vision as the Dean and the young waiter struggled to keep him upright.

  ‘Whoa, whoa, take it easy,’ the waiter was whispering.

  ‘Fuck you,’ Delli managed to get out. It wasn’t what he was trying to say. What was he trying to say?

  ‘The sofa, do you think?’ said Mary.

  ‘Fuck you,’ said Delli, and his tears, which he’d tried desperately to subdue, returned with the force of a gale bursting open a door locked against the storm and the night.

  chapter 10

  Mesopotamia

  THE DELLIS’ path to Joyful and Yackandandah, where the professor was to make himself so unwelcome, began in 1979, when the twenty-three-year-old Daanya Barzinji attended an early evening lecture by a visiting Welsh academic at the Mesopotamia Club in Ba
sra. It was at this lecture (the subject was Book XI of Wordsworth’s The Prelude) that Daanya met the twenty-five-year-old Emmanuel Delli, a Kurdish Christian with the grooming and charm of a nineteenth-century English dandy. Delli wasn’t a dandy at all but it amused Daanya to think of him in that way after he’d told her, to make her laugh, that he had his moustache trimmed twice a week by an Egyptian barber once employed by King Farouk.

  The audience of thirty was seated not in rows but here and there in the club’s supremely comfortable blue plush chairs, gathered from various rooms in the building. On the dark panelled wall above an ornamental fireplace hung a photographic portrait of Elizabeth II in a brocaded dress of a buttery gold, smiling with more warmth and more teeth than any British monarch up to that time had thought it sensible to display. Other portraits, quite a few, some photographic and some reproduced from paintings, decorated the only other wall free of bookcases. Daanya was able to put a name to each face, and it gave her pleasure to fill the gaps in Emmanuel’s familiarity with the newer British greats and near-greats—John Lennon, Philip Larkin—displayed to show that the Mesopotamia Club was more than the stagnant watering hole of its reputation.

  These talks at the club attracted a weird demographic—a fortnight earlier, Daanya had sat beside a shopkeeper from Basra at a chat by the setter of crosswords for a number of British newspapers—and the poetry of William Wordsworth magnified the oddness of assortment. The shopkeeper wasn’t there, but the audience included the Deputy Minister for Agriculture, two German engineers, a matronly pop singer and her husband (the woman said to be a great favourite of the Ba’athist elite) a Scottish backpacker in knee-length khaki shorts and a handsome Turkish naval officer who stood throughout the lecture patting his perspiring upper lip with a sky-blue handkerchief. Everyone was perspiring that humid night; the Mesopotamia Club air conditioning was not in the same league as the blizzard-force apparatus at the American consulate, another site of cultural gatherings open to the public.

  Emmanuel had chatted successfully enough with Daanya to perch on the broad arm of her chair without making himself unwelcome. He encouraged her to talk about her internship at a hospital in Manchester and of her interest in William Wordsworth.

  ‘I’ve only read the daffodil poem,’ she said, ‘but he sounds like a nice man. My sisters think that I might meet an English professor if I attend such events as this. Whenever I come home for a holiday they send me here, and to the American embassy. They worry that I will become an auntie and never a wife.’

  ‘An English Muslim Kurdish professor?’ said Emmanuel in Kurdish; they’d been speaking English. Once he’d made Daanya giggle, he switched back to English: ‘Is that likely?’

  ‘Oh, they don’t expect him to be Kurdish. They want me to live in Cambridge and give afternoon teas. They hoped I would marry an English doctor. The professor idea is their fallback position.’

  ‘Your mysterious future husband doesn’t have to be of your faith?’

  Daanya absorbed the implication of the question. This strange, dapper young man had spoken with a smile but was apparently not joking. She let her gaze linger on the crisp knot of his knitted tie. She had already decided that she liked Emmanuel enough to reply to any question he asked, but she’d decided the same thing with other men in Manchester and appreciated that she was easily wooed in English—her first love among her four languages.

  ‘My sisters consider me a poor excuse for a Muslim,’ she said. ‘I’m not really. But Emmanuel, I think I must be candid and tell you that I am more comfortable without a god at all.’

  Delli laughed out loud. People turned to look at him, some half-smiling as if this were a joke that might be shared.

  ‘That’s their urgency, you see, my sisters? They are all married and I think they believe that if I can’t be a good Muslim I can at least be a good wife. Who knows what will become of a sister who has no god and no husband!’

  The Welshman they had come to hear was about to be introduced at the lectern. Delli whispered to Daanya that they must talk more later on about the problem of ‘incompletely belonging’. Daanya smiled, but had to think for a while of what Emmanuel might mean by ‘incompletely belonging’. Her own family had never allowed her to feel she didn’t belong. Peculiar, maybe, but she still belonged. With two sisters behaving exactly as expected and assumed, she had become her father’s experiment. The two sons of the family had succeeded as physicians and Daanya’s father, a surgeon, wanted to know if it was true or merely a prejudice that girls did not have what it takes to shine in the world of science. The experiment would be definitive; Daanya was the cleverest child in the family and if she failed, it would be the failure of the female in her, not of any shortfall in intellect. The experiment confirmed everything it was supposed to—Daanya’s father was not a disinterested observer, he had willed her to succeed—and two or three other things as well, all to do with a diminishing importance attached to worship once science revealed its efficacy in full. But worship was essentially good manners in the Barzinji household; one did not contradict the rituals nor even the rigmarole of one’s culture by adopting (for example) free love. Daanya kept her manners.

  Still pondering, Daanya settled down to listen to the Welshman, Dr Williams, with his round pink face and frothy fair curls. The air conditioner laboured on, sometimes throwing the blue ribbons attached to the grille about like banners in a tempest, sometimes idling down to an exhausted wheeze. Emmanuel, with slightly shocking initiative, touched the back of Daanya’s hand and smiled.

  Dr Williams spoke, with robust gestures and a frequent rising up on the balls of his feet, not that the subject called for this much zest, of a baby girl born in Orléans between the Paris massacres of 1792 and the execution by guillotine of Louis XVI in January 1793. The child’s mother was Annette Vallon, the daughter of a barber-surgeon of Orléans, and her father was William Wordsworth, who would become, in the years that followed the birth of Anne Caroline, the greatest English poet of his age.

  A more vivid niche in French history could scarcely be imagined, said Dr Williams, while his dancing eyebrows delighted Daanya. By the month of Anne Caroline’s birth, the Revolution had seen the dramatic rise of the Third Estate, the creation of the National Assembly, the storming of the Bastille, the establishment of the Paris Commune, the rural upheaval of the Great Fear, the publication of the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, and the drafting of a new constitution. Within a few short months, Maximilien Robespierre and his Committee of Public Safety would initiate what was to become known as the Reign of Terror.

  Here, Emmanuel Delli glanced down at Daanya, who nodded just once to show that she appreciated how close to the wind Peter Williams was sailing in Ba’athist Iraq. Others in the audience betrayed a mild anxiety by sitting slightly more erect, or by blinking. Somebody here would have the job of preparing a report for the police on Dr Williams’ lecture.

  ‘Orange shirt,’ Emmanuel whispered. Daanya glanced at a skinny boy standing coatless with crossed arms by the bookshelves, a little behind the Turkish naval officer.

  ‘Yes?’ said Daanya.

  ‘He’s from the university library. A friend of our leader, I would say.’

  ‘Spying?’

  ‘He’ll have some Mukhabarat madman to report to. I don’t know whether he’s watching the Turkish navy or us.’

  ‘He looks like a traffic light!’

  Dr Williams spoke of the manner in which Wordsworth had written of his love affair with Annette Vallon in the ‘Vaudracour’ and ‘Julia’ verses of The Prelude, and went on to read the verses aloud.

  ‘You have read this, Emmanuel?’ Daanya whispered.

  ‘Oh yes.’

  Dr Williams’ fingers moved the air in sweeps and flutters. Daanya’s focus drifted from Dr Williams to Emmanuel and back again, and back once more, Emmanuel with his eyes closed, head on one side, a man filling slowly and steadily with joy as a garden fills with birdsong in the morning. How strange!
thought Daanya, and recalled the mention he’d made earlier of his doctoral thesis, ‘Britain and the Shaykhs: the Drafting of the Peasants’ Rights and Duties Act of 1933’. Where did the poetry come from? Surely he’d made an error in his choice of vocation? But she felt an attraction, and beneath that a fear, despite his kindness, of the force that could bind her to this Emmanuel. To any man, in fact: and make the hours that had been hers alone so completely merge with the man’s hours that no distinction would be possible ever again.

  Dr Williams was summing up. ‘Much of what the spiritually ambitious younger Wordsworth believed true about life and nature is dramatised in those lines. Vaudracour’s father, in forbidding the marriage of his son to Julia, is acting out the role of hidebound rule-makers everywhere—the authoritarians, the protectors of privilege, those who have lost what little faith they ever had in the guidance of their better angels. But even more is suggested, for we are certain to find fault with Vaudracour himself. He’s no Ajax, that’s for sure. The love of his life is carted off to a convent, Vaudracour declines into mute imbecility. We might say, though, that if he couldn’t be bold and dangerous, he at least had the decency to die of a broken heart.

  ‘William Wordsworth himself did not die of a broken heart; he went home to England and lived a long and successful life. And as we’ve seen, he made poetry out of his youthful heartache. Then he completely removed it from the longer work. Can we see a moral failure in his excision of the Vaudracour and Julia section from book eleven of The Prelude? I think we can. For Wordsworth was the poet who gave “joy” a fresh provenance and a fresh history. We rarely think of joy as an emotional state that is required to fight for its life if it is to endure, but perhaps we should. When Wordsworth made the Vaudracour and Julia story disappear, he was certainly preserving himself from embarrassment, but perhaps he was also made uncomfortable by an echo in the story of a suggestion that contradicted his early convictions about joy: that joy is more an achievement, a product of character than a product of inspiration. Thank you.’