Joyful

by Robert Hillman

  With the evolving drama of Daanya’s marriage to occupy him in the manner of a hobby, Kalal Barzinji retired from surgery in 1981. In his sagging brown cardigan, spectacles hanging from a plastic chain around his neck, he sat with his youngest daughter beneath the blue gum sipping red wine diluted with mineral water, noticing everything. Some days, the languid smiles of husband and wife suggested lovemaking to be renewed after the visit. Then came a welcome break from bliss when Daanya appeared one evening with wet cheeks and a distracted look after an argument with Emmanuel. ‘Dear child,’ said Kalal Barzinji, ‘he’ll write an apology in quatrains, can you doubt it?’ And—not that Kalal Barzinji was hoping for it, only expecting it—experiences outside the marriage also helped to dull the gleam of the world. Daanya’s hospital harvested the wretched of the city and her heart was broken weekly: consumptive children spitting bright blood; a boy she treated with a growth the size of a melon in his bowel; worst of all, a brother and sister, Christians, opened from throat to groin by teenage vigilantes.

  The first baby restored Daanya’s happiness, but left her less distinct from her sisters. Kalal Barzinji accepted it with a shrug of disappointment, but it wounded him. The girl that his daughter had been was sloughed like a skin no longer capable of clothing her; the new skin was plainer. Kalal Barzinji took little interest in babies and did not enjoy Daanya mothering in the same manner as her sisters, so much cooing, so much chatter. Daanya breastfed Joseph at the kitchen table, on the sofa, even under the blue gum—a freedom her sisters had never allowed themselves—but otherwise, what was the difference in daughters? Except that Daanya sometimes read books while the baby gorged; that was something.

  Emmanuel, just as disappointingly, became baby mad. He said, ‘Baby boy, baby boy, oooh daddy’s beautiful boy!’

  Kalal Barzinji stroked his chin and made a mental note to reconsider leaving Emmanuel his collection of antique Kurdish musical instruments.

  By the birth of the second baby, Kalal Barzinji’s hopes for Daanya had withered and died. Fool of a girl, she cut her hair short for ‘convenience’! She said, ‘Kiss grandpa!’ and left Sofia in his arms under the blue gum while she played on the cobblestones with Joseph. ‘The great big truck is a big red truck, the great big truck goes brumm brumm brumm!’ Ah, he’d hoped for greatness, he’d bestowed the girl upon the world, but she’d fattened herself on motherhood, she’d cut her hair, she read magazines from London about keeping house and making gardens. He was glad she was happy, his love for her was as strong as ever, but it hurt Kalal Barzinji that a girl with such gifts had turned aside from her destiny. Even the ridiculous Wordsworth project had fallen by the wayside!

  Kalal Barzinji decided that he would die in his garden beneath the blue gum. He’d once thought the tree lazy and without ambition, its indolent, drooping leaves foolishly curled at the tips, but with closer acquaintance, love blossomed. He came to see that the great project of the tree was the constant remaking of itself; it didn’t know from one day to the next where it might direct a bough or twig. He’d read that in the land of Australia ten million such trees might stand on a mountain’s slopes, each striving to be unlike its neighbour. It might have been his love for the tree that had inspired him to fashion a daughter like Daanya. But she’d betrayed him, and herself.

  A perimeter of furry white light settled around the view from Kalal Barzinji’s seat beneath the blue gum. He brushed as people do at flies. ‘Why do you look at me in that way?’ he said to his daughters, his wife, for they would sit by him with their frowns and begin sentences that they didn’t complete. He gave up speaking to them at all, except for Daanya.

  ‘This is what you want?’ he said to her one afternoon when she was playing with the children at the fountain. He waved a hand at Sofia and Joseph, a gesture that left him exhausted for the rest of the day.

  ‘Of course,’ said Daanya. She understood the broader question. She was wearing shorts and a T-shirt. It worried Kalal Barzinji that her thighs were so much thicker these days. He had once admired her figure.

  ‘All this goo goo goo?’

  ‘Yes, all the goo goo goo.’

  ‘What became of William Wordsworth? The hope of the Kurds?’ Daanya dried her hands and came to her father. He held her by the waist. ‘Once, you know, my fingers could touch each other.’

  ‘And now I’m a fat pig?’

  ‘Now you are still very beautiful, but much more stupid. When do you take the time to read me Flaubert? Your French was the best in Iraq.’

  ‘Do you want me to read you some Flaubert?’

  ‘No.’ He took Daanya’s hand and kissed it. ‘I will be dead in a week,’ he said. ‘Your husband can have the musical instruments. Why should I worry?’

  ‘You will be dead in a week?’ said Daanya. She tugged her father’s earlobes. ‘My diagnosis does not concur, Mr Barzinji. I would say ten years. Even twenty.’

  ‘Twenty? You must hate me!’

  ‘Twenty, if love can keep you alive.’

  ‘A week,’ said Kalal Barzinji, ‘if God’s mercy is all that they say.’

  =

  Kalal Barzinji remained alive much longer than a week. On the day of his death he was sitting under the blue gum studying in fascination the pattern picked out on his fawn trousers by tiny, individual raindrops. Nothing like a downpour; just one, desultory cloud, gone in a minute. Even as he watched, the raindrops dried out, the pattern disappeared. Daanya came hurrying from the house with a blanket to warm him, as if he’d been drenched to the bone. He felt her lips on his cheek. Emmanuel was there too, the hope of the Kurds. Objects and people became not hazy but distinct. If he were to heave himself back into the world, he might predict everything in the life of his daughter and son-in-law; the passions that would destroy their children; the Joyful house on its hilltop; the bungalow in Braidwood Street next to the Lutheran Church; Emmanuel’s venomous letters—not the detail but the sorrow of what was coming, its terrible heft. But the world was closed to him now, and even if he could rouse himself in some improbable way, what words could he find? ‘Beware, daughter!’? Of what? Of everything? Of the treachery of passions, your own and those you breed in your children?

  Daanya in her baggy khaki shorts crouched to read Sofia a book made of fabric, the child’s favourite. It was a tale in English of animals on a farm—such a farm as would never be found in Iraq, geese and chickens and a big dog named Bobby. Daanya held the book before Sofia’s gaze with one hand; with the other she stroked the child’s bare shoulder. She glanced up at her father every so often and each time she smiled.

  Kalal Barzinji thought: ‘What beauty!’

  He understood perfectly. It seemed the first thing he had understood in all the years of his life.

  chapter 12

  To Joyful

  LATE WINTER in the year of Emmanuel Delli’s catastrophic breakdown, Tess Wachowicz drove the professor and his wife up the Hume Highway to Yackandandah, in the north-east of the state. The best advice was that Emmanuel would benefit from a complete change of scenery, and it was Tess’s idea that Joyful, unoccupied at that time, might suit the Dellis during the period of the professor’s convalescence. He would have the opportunity to listen to birds and walk the hills and gradually regain his strength, his wits, his wherewithal. If Joyful should turn out to suit the Dellis, they could bring up a little furniture and give the place a tryout with a view to a longer stay.

  Tess hadn’t mentioned these plans to her husband. She would get his agreement if and when the time came for the Dellis to move into the house.

  The professor himself saw no prospect at all in the scheme for remedy or improvement, but he lacked the will to object. He had been placed in the care of a bossy psychotherapist from Thailand who was also a practising Buddhist and the doctor’s domineering cheerfulness had completely worn him out. Dr Chulalongkorn was enthusiastic about the move to the countryside, so there was no point in making a fuss. No matter that four separate regimes of medication prescribed
by Chulalongkorn with breezy confidence had failed to winch the professor up from the pit. Delli had to contend with Tess’s determination, too; she was adamant that Joyful would prove to be a turning point in his recovery.

  The paddocks along the highway were fawn and wilted yellow after a summer of ferocious heat. Bony outcrops of granite glittered on the hillsides, the fabric of earth worn away like the elbows of an ancient garment. Gibbets silhouetted on a hilltop and doors nailed shut on the victims of plague would have better complemented the professor’s mood than the drowsy, unresenting landscape. But he took some comfort in the drought, in knowing that no more than a thimbleful of rain had fallen over this part of Victoria in months. Climate change, all aspects of that catastrophe, lit a small, comfortable blaze in his heart. He would be pleased if the world should take its own life.

  Joyful surprised him. When Tess pulled the Peugeot up at the dilapidated wooden gates, he glanced up the hillside paddocks to see a tall, red-brick building hemmed in by what looked like mature oaks—European trees, certainly. He craned his neck to see more while Tess was opening the gates. He said aloud, ‘How odd!’ and his wife turned to him with pleasure and relief—these were the first words he’d spoken during the three-hour drive.

  ‘What is odd, my love?’

  ‘Why, it’s a folly, is it not?’

  ‘Is it?’

  ‘I would say so. A two-storey villa sitting alone on the top of a hill. Neo-classic porch and lintel. Marble, surely! I can’t quite tell. Oh, far and away a folly!’

  Daanya said to Tess when her friend returned to the car, ‘Our passenger has become quite animated, Tess!’

  ‘Really? Do you think you could animate your way out to the gate and close it once I drive through, Emmanuel?’

  Up closer to the building, the professor’s judgment seemed confirmed in one way, contradicted in another. The house certainly looked a fool in its location, more like a misplaced public library, but it was a fine building nonetheless, and yes, the porch and lintel and steps were unpolished marble, grandly aged by the bleaching sun. Maintenance on the place must only ever have been sporadic: the mortar between the red bricks was decaying, rot in the window frames had been ignored.

  ‘My love, I was telling Tess that architecture has been your hobby for many years!’ Daanya Delli called to her husband. He made the least rebuking sound he could manage when he really wished to shout back, ‘Tell her nothing about me!’ He considered Tess a type of vampire. He stepped backwards a dozen paces with his gaze on the two chimneys on this near side of the house and indeed, the tilt he expected was evident. The house was, very slowly, sliding down its hill. Rejoining his wife and her friend at the base of the marble steps, Delli carefully adjusted his expression to extinguish any appearance of enthusiasm or gratitude.

  ‘A strange monster,’ he said to the smiling pair, who were holding hands like schoolgirls on an excursion, a hateful sight and a further goad to Delli’s desire to murder them both. ‘I imagine it has a curious history.’

  ‘Our Leon believes so,’ said Tess. ‘I’m in the dark. I do know that his great-grandfather built it. He had a rather addled aunt who settled here for a time, I think in the nineteen forties. Oh, and something went on here, Leon was vague. A religious community, was it? Let’s go in.’

  Delli saw immediately that the interior was too spacious and too particular for any sensible use. Who needed six bedrooms and four kitchens? And who in this day and age would require a library with floor-to-ceiling shelving? The professor’s gaze picked out the racks that would once have held billiard cues, still fixed to the library’s cedar panelling. The house had remained for its whole life sequestered from the vigour of fashion. If it had been sold and sold again over the years, the whole place would have now been advertising itself as a boutique reception centre. Walking from the library through the adjoining pantry and into the upstairs dining room, disturbing the dust at every step, noting with distaste the aged linoleum that had replaced the rugs and carpets, the professor felt the stirrings of an agreeable disgust. Each morning when he woke in this house he would experience the zest of contempt for this vast useless space, so abused by successive leaseholders. Who had thought it intelligent and tasteful to paint the panelling of one side of the upstairs hall bright green? Who had sunk splintering bolts into two timber pillars in the sunroom off the back of the upstairs master bedroom? The professor stroked his moustache and enjoyed a bitter grimace.

  His wife, meanwhile—so typical of her!—could see nothing but beauty. ‘My dear, the light!’ she said, hands raised to the rich golden streams pouring though the broad windows of the dining room. ‘You must admit, it is a house of light, folly or not!’

  The professor, nodding his head benignly, asked his wife in his secret heart how lovely the light would look when he pushed her down the stairs and broke her ridiculous neck.

  The women dawdled from room to room, the professor seethed in their gentle wake. It was the vista that lay beyond the windows of the main downstairs kitchen that enraptured the pair of them now. ‘Daanya, do you know what I see you doing the day after you move in?’ said Tess. ‘A kitchen garden. Get it started. Absolutely. And Emmanuel, you’re going to dig. Yes you are, if I bloody well have to buy you the spade myself!’

  Oh, ho ho ho and ha ha ha! the professor chortled falsetto in his head. For public consumption, he gave a shrug and a miniature smile.

  ‘I might just check something upstairs,’ he said, and wandered off and up and directly to the furthest corner of the house from the women. He pounded his temples with his fists with enough force to produce stars. Then slid down the wall and plopped himself on the floor. Nine months Sofia was dead—nine short months!—and that was enough time for his donkey of a wife to recover her good spirits? What had she done? Why, obviously she had ‘moved on’! Dear God in heaven if the world was waiting for him to ‘move on’ it would be waiting until his death. Nevertheless, he roused himself. He could not bear any report of failure being conveyed to Chulalongkorn, necessitating a fresh onslaught of doctorly goodwill. He brushed himself down, wiped his cheeks, straightened his tie. In the kitchen below, the ladies were laughing.

  chapter 13

  Message

  IN THE month of spring that marked the first anniversary of Sofia Delli’s death, Emmanuel and Daanya Delli took up holiday residence in the Joyful mansion. The professor was officially on ‘therapeutic leave’ from Melbourne University; a return to faculty duties was open to him when he made his expected recovery. Daanya Delli had resigned her position at a practice in Broadmeadows but was due to enter into a new professional arrangement with a clinic in Wangaratta. The professor’s partnership in the business he’d owned with Mark Averescu had been sold. The negotiations for the sale had been handled entirely by Delli’s solicitor, since the professor had no wish, as he said, ‘to communicate with Dr Averescu on any matter’.

  The Dellis brought only the essentials to Joyful: a bed, chairs, kitchen table, television, two desks, kitchen utensils, laptops. The austerity of the household suited the professor’s mood, and in any case he intended to kill himself at an early opportunity, and not just in any old way, either. The idea of drifting into an endless sleep with his veins full of sedatives held no appeal. He thought he might hang himself, or perhaps cause something very heavy to fall on top of him. He might simply cut his throat. He hadn’t decided.

  He kept his mood and convictions a secret from his wife with stealth, cunning and camouflage. He fashioned a neutral expression for everyday use and occasionally flashed a brief smile. Another tactic was to hum. He hummed whenever his wife came near, and in bed at night for a few minutes. Conversations were handled by limiting his part to a few serviceable phrases. ‘You don’t say!’ and ‘Heavens above!’ and his anglophile father’s favourite, ‘By George!’ He was well aware that his wife maintained suspicions about his mental state, but he wanted to keep her guessing. He didn’t know exactly when he would do away with himself,
and he had to make certain that the vile Chulalongkorn didn’t turn up on one of his surprise visits after being tipped off by Daanya. The doctor had already popped in once, a week after the move to Joyful. He was a very conscientious little scoundrel, Delli had to concede. But oh!—the tediousness of the man, bobbing about on his midget’s legs and grinning with a mouthful of gold fillings, those ears of his rising to points like an elf ’s! More tedious, of course, was the doctor’s pet theory, or not even a theory really, for the doctor offered his story as merely ‘a set of suggestions for consideration’, that Sofia had been in love with him, with her father, and had acted out the physical complement of her love for him with his closest male friend. That Sofia had known the relationship with Averescu was hopeless, but that the sheer impossibility of fulfilment had perfectly mirrored the impossibility of fulfilment in the desired union with her father. That the most complete consummation that Sofia could wish for had been death, and she had persisted in that cherished quest for annihilation.

  Listening to Chulalongkorn with an expression of profound disgust, Delli had not known whether to reach across and clout the man on his pointed ear, or apply to have him struck off. Finally, he’d asked Daanya to make the doctor another cup of tea, then had walked over the hill at the back of Joyful and hidden himself in the valley until he could be sure that Chulalongkorn had left for the city in his burly Jeep Cherokee. What help and understanding could be expected from a man who drove a motor vehicle named after an Indian tribe that Americans had hunted almost to extinction?

  When Daanya was at the clinic in Wangaratta and the professor was alone at Joyful, he wandered the property scouting sites at which he might do himself harm. He paid particular attention to the outbuildings, fashioned from the granite of the region and roofed with slate weathered to a silvery-green. In the midst of his wretchedness, the professor nonetheless found himself admiring the craft evident everywhere in the construction of Joyful. He had no doubt that his life would have been more worthwhile if he’d remained where he was born in Iraq and made his living as a builder, something of the sort, erecting well-crafted houses instead of talking to pampered students about the politics of British Mesopotamia. Not that such a fate—a life in trade—had ever been a possibility. He was boarding at Birkenhead by the age of twelve.