The Comfort of Figs

by Simon Cleary

  The keg empties and the steel men head into the Valley.

  The school day finishes and Evelyn is anxious to leave, has been for hours. To get closer. To learn. She collects Meg. They leave the school gates and skirt along the high sandstone wall as they do every day. But today is charged with moment, and Evelyn is impatient in a way which is new to her, finds herself breaking into a run. From ahead, around the curve, comes the sound of voices. Whooping voices competing with each other, then breaking into laughter. Evelyn slows on the footpath, and halts as the towering wall begins its arc up the block. The voices grow, like a wave rolling towards her. She leans forward, her feet still, craning her head around the sweeping curve of the wall, as if it might somehow shield her. About forty men are striding out together along the footpath, coming down the hill from the cliff and the bridge. She catches herself. She takes Meg’s hand and waits for the men to reach the intersection and then to pass in front of her on their way to wherever it is they are going.

  Behind her other girls are backing up, and though she hears them asking what is happening, she is too excited, too anxious to answer. Soon the men are at the intersection, and all of the girls hush. Evelyn stands at the line of the wall. The men must pass directly in front of her. The laughter of the men pauses briefly when they notice the girls. One of them shouts something. The first of the passing workers bows low in exaggerated greeting, and then each of the men as he passes is laughing and bowing or doffing his hat at the group of stricken schoolgirls blushing on the street corner. Evelyn feels vaguely like a princess.

  She recognises most of them as they pass by in a blur. She recognises the men as shapes she has seen from the school at lunchtime, or from her after-school visits to the work-site to collect her father. But the close-grouped smell of them, and their togetherness, and the confidence of it, is strange to her.

  Also strange, and unsettling, to be looking for one in particular among them.

  The wave of men finally delivers Stahl. He sees her too, and slows. Pulls himself from the stream of workers, and stands before her. Then he has her hand in his and is lifting it to his lips and she is standing paralysed, her body belonging to someone else. She feels the touch of his lips on the back of her hand, and his eyes not leaving hers.

  Then he too is gone, swept away, and Evelyn is left with the humming voices of her schoolmates behind her wondering aloud what has just happened.

  She is unsure what she has witnessed, what she has been part of. A man has kissed her hand. In mock chivalry – she knows that – but it was her hand all the same. There has been too much passing by. Evelyn is tired of it. The river traffic passing by on the water below the school, the bridge itself passing by her consciousness as it grows too slowly towards completion, her father moving silently and at a distance through the years of her life.

  Evelyn can’t stand the passing by any longer.

  ‘Go on home without me, Meg.’

  She doesn’t need to keep them in sight. She knows where they are by the migrating din of their voices. She descends into the Valley after them. She doesn’t know what she is doing.

  Knows only that something is happening. Trusts it. She rounds a corner and sees the tail of bridge-workers going into the Empire Hotel. A tram passes, its rumble refracting into mere sound, undistinguishable. She has stopped thinking. She draws closer, and soon is passing across the hotel doorway, neck turned, peering in, seeing the swirl of men’s bodies filling the pub out, unable to see Stahl among them in the quickness of her glance.

  Evelyn turns around and passes before the hotel again, pausing longer this time at the doorway. Stopping. Among the men inside she sees O’Hara. Sees him talking, sees his hands moving, sees him place his glass of beer on a railing so both hands are free, gesturing. He reaches for his glass again and raises it to his lips, taking this as an opportunity to scan the room. And then it is her that he sees through the doorway.

  Evelyn pulls herself out of sight, emitting a startled cry, then stifling it as quickly again with her hands. She feels suddenly exposed. She lets out another muffled sound and shakes her head. She should go. She fears hearing O’Hara’s voice calling to her. She starts to move. Then a voice, though not O’Hara’s.

  ‘Wait up.’

  She keeps walking.

  ‘Hey, wait up a bit.’

  It is Stahl.

  Evelyn almost doesn’t stop. When she does she mumbles something, her eyes not settling. Her head lowered still, conscious of so much.

  ‘Hello,’ says Stahl. He is smiling.

  She slows now. Breathes. Lifts her head.

  ‘Hello.’

  ‘We joined the bridge today.’

  ‘Yes . . . congratulations.’

  A short pause.

  ‘I enjoyed the swim,’ he says, excited, proud, brave.

  She smiles, nods.

  ‘So did I.’

  ‘Let’s do it again.’

  ‘I’d like to.’

  Stahl leans across and kisses her again, this time on the cheek.

  ‘I’d better go,’ she says.

  ‘Let me walk with you.’

  They walk together back up the hill, and down to the ferry terminal, and she is getting on and he wants to touch her hand but doesn’t.

  The engineer Lawrence watches his daughter’s ferry pull away from the bank of the Brisbane River and observes the riveter Karl Stahl standing by the terminal railing long after the ferry has gone.

  Stahl visits. Evenings of waiting in the riverside park opposite Evelyn’s home, leaning on the trunk of a low-branched fig tree, the city at his back across the river. A sliver of moon, or none at all. He is always in shadow. On the other side of the street is her house, tall and erect and grand and alluring.

  During the day, or lit up, the house is crisp white, trimmed with emerald green. The front stairs rise through a thicket of azalea bushes to a landing, then rise again to the wide verandah which wraps around three sides of the house. Evelyn has described to him the territory beyond the verandah, beyond what he can see from the road. She has pointed out the master bedroom, and in the wing of children’s bedrooms which one is hers. She has described the drawing room with fireplace where the engineer and his friends smoke pipes after evening meals, a piano room, a lounge room. From outside where he waits Stahl sees a chandelier hanging from a ceiling. ‘Venetian,’ she had said to him. ‘Murano glass my parents brought back from a trip to Italy.’ The mention of Europe is a small thrill to him, an enticement.

  Stahl watches for movement. A body passing across a light or a window. Someone rising from an armchair in the reading room, a lamp muted as sheet music or a closing piano lid passes across its beams. The front door opening, light flooding out.

  The engineer and his wife at the doorway, and guests leaving.

  Then Evelyn in her bedroom. She draws a curtain open and knows he will be waiting in the street. She draws a curtain and is haloed in the light of the room. Stahl watches her silhouette appear, watches her arms as they signal. It is safe. It is not. I can come. I cannot.

  Tonight she comes. The light goes out in her room. Stahl moves away from the tree and the house. He stays in shadow, moving through the narrow park till he reaches the hospital grounds. He crosses a patch of lawn and descends a flight of rock-hewn steps to a viewing terrace and a bench facing the river. The evening murmurs. He looks for the moon once more.

  He waits again, so long, and feels himself tremor.

  Evelyn leaves her house, carefully opening and then closing the door which leads from the breakfast room into the backyard.

  She finds the gate in the dark and raises the catch, careful not to make a sound. At the foot of the gate is a stone which she nudges into place with her foot, leaving the gate ajar. She walks down the long easement, tall timber fences on either side overgrown with vines. The easement opens onto the street. She turns to her right and is on Main Street, which she follows before rounding the block and making for their meeting place.


  Stahl, seated on the bench, rises as she approaches. She takes his hands.

  Lawrence looks for Stahl. He comes out of his site office and walks onto the superstructure. He holds his cane mid-length as he walks along the temporary decking, tapping it against his leg.

  Men greet him as he passes.

  ‘Careful there, Mr Lawrence,’ someone says as he steps over a gap between two planks.

  Lawrence nods in acknowledgment. He feigns interest in the progress of some task, watches as Stahl and O’Hara and Hodges work, punching rivets. The team breaks for lunch and Lawrence calls.

  ‘May I have a moment, Mr Stahl?’

  Stahl and O’Hara and Hodges glance at each other, before Stahl separates from the other two.

  ‘Tell me about yourself, Mr Stahl.’

  ‘Sir?’

  ‘Who are you?’

  ‘I’m sorry, sir?’

  Stahl is nervous. He is working for this man. He is seeing his daughter.

  ‘Your life, Mr Stahl, your life.’

  ‘My life?’

  ‘Your background. Your name. Where do you come from, Mr Stahl?’

  ‘My father worked in the shipyards in Germany before coming out.’

  ‘Where exactly was that, Mr Stahl?’

  ‘Hamburg.’

  Lawrence nods. The great port city, active again now in the build-up to war, the German rearmament. He adds this, despite himself, as evidence against the boy.

  ‘But you were born in Australia?’

  ‘Yes.’

  Stahl feels he is being reduced.

  ‘Have you ever been there?’

  ‘I know it. From stories. My father’s stories.’

  ‘And where is your father now, Mr Stahl?’

  Stahl is reluctant to give the engineer any more, doesn’t know where he is leading, what he will do with this information.

  ‘Here.’

  ‘In Brisbane?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘He works, Mr Stahl?’

  ‘In the shipyards still.’

  ‘With Evans Deakin then?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘So that’s how you came to work here?’

  ‘Yes. Through my father.’

  ‘You live with your family, then, Mr Stahl?’

  Stahl hesitates, this intrusion too great, this belittling too much.

  ‘Does this interrogation have a purpose, sir?’

  The reversal unsettles the engineer, and he stumbles.

  ‘Well I . . .’

  It is Stahl who breaks away.

  ‘Thank you, Mr Lawrence.’

  Lawrence rides Stahl’s team: rides them hard as they cook and punch their rivets. The art of riveting: too cool and the rivets won’t fit, too hot and they scale and have to be replaced.

  And the inspectors are ruthless, mean men who get pleasure in rejecting rivets each evening, marking the scaled ones with chalk. Lawrence pulls an inspector aside, gives the man his head, pointing out Stahl and O’Hara and Hodge, then sets him loose.

  That evening the rivet inspector takes his chalk to their work, tracing vicious circles around rivet heads, scaled or clean.

  Lawrence comes to his daughter in the evening after supper. He knocks on her bedroom door and enters. She is lying on her bed, not yet out of her school uniform. She is on her side, her elbow propping her head as she reads from a book.

  ‘What are you reading, dear?’

  It is unusual that he enters like this.

  ‘Emily Brontë, Father.’

  But Lawrence is not listening.

  ‘He seems nice, Evelyn.’

  She goes cold. She does not know where to look. The words of her novel lose shape.

  ‘What do you mean, Father?’

  ‘Charlie Stahl.’

  ‘I don’t –’

  ‘I’ve seen you with him, Evelyn.’

  She swallows. Cannot meet his eyes. She waits for what he knows.

  ‘He seems nice, Evelyn, but listen to me. You are too young. You do not understand these men. I do not want you to see him again. You must not see him again.’

  Evelyn is silent.

  ‘You understand?’ he demands.

  She looks up at her father’s face for a moment. To let him know that she has heard him. Nothing more. She lowers her eyes again, returns to herself, barely hears his footsteps as he leaves the room. She is seventeen. He cannot hold her.

  The long minutes pass. Evelyn places her book near the bedside lamp, then turns the light off. She listens to the sounds of the house. Quiet from Meg, already asleep in her room across the hall. Her mother rustling away to bed. The door of her father’s study opening, then closing, and the sound of his footsteps moving down the house. There is the flicking of light switches, and the glow that seeps in from under her bedroom door dulls a little more after each flick. Her father enters their bedroom and she hears a murmur. A pipe shudders as water is released in their bathroom. A shower, drawers, the murmuring once more, a final light switched off, then darkness and silence. How long is enough? This is the most difficult thing. Evelyn lies in bed and counts. She does not trust herself to know otherwise.

  She counts in her head. One and two and three and . . .

  Till she gets to sixty. She extends a finger of her closed hand.

  One minute. She starts her count again, collecting minutes in her hands. When she was younger she did this to fall asleep. Half an hour passes without sound. Evelyn slides out of bed, goes to her bedroom window, opens the curtains.

  Moonlight floods her room.

  She sits on the end of her bed and peels off her stockings, rolling them into a tight ball. She slides open a drawer of her silky-oak dresser and places her stockings neatly inside. In front of the dresser and its scallop-shaped mirror she unhitches her school uniform, the skirt and tunic. She straightens her long back and looks at herself in the mirror, gazing at her reflection in the moonlight. The still head, the long neck, her shoulders and the hollows below her collarbones. Her breasts fill out her singlet, and then the singlet falls away to her stomach where it gathers again. Evelyn leans forward and tilts the mirror downwards on its frame to examine the rest of herself. Her waist, her slim hips. She touches one of her hip-bones, cups her palm around it. The angled mirror lengthens her legs.

  Evelyn opens a wardrobe and lifts out a dress with a delicate floral pattern. Small red roses are luminescent in the evening light. She steps into the dress and pulls it up over one shoulder then the other, loose-fitting. She does up the line of buttons one by one, pressing them against her chest so she feels their hard knots against her body through the material. When she is finished she bends under the dresser, collects her shoes in one hand and tiptoes barefoot out of the room.

  At the park Evelyn folds into Stahl’s arms, swiftly, deeply. After a time he takes her hand and they walk. She leans in close and Stahl puts his arm around her, leading her.

  They come to a small timber boatshed. Stahl reaches for the bolt on the shed door and slides it back. He swings open the doors. It is dark inside. Stahl enters first and finds the kerosene lamp which hangs from a nail driven into a post. He takes matches from his pocket, strikes one, and lights the lamp, adjusting the wick with the turn-wheel. The inside of the shed is aglow now, and Evelyn sees rowing boats held in their cradles above the ground. From a box Stahl takes out a blanket. He spreads it on the floor, and places the kerosene lamp next to it.

  ‘Close the door,’ he whispers.

  She enters, lingers just inside the doorway. Stahl sits down on the blanket and reaches behind his back, reaches under his vest. He takes out a soft leather, rolled pouch, creased where it has been tucked under his belt behind his back. He unties the bootlace that loops around the pouch. The leather falls open and Evelyn sees sheets of paper protected within it. She comes over and sits beside him, and he shows her his sketches. There’s the river, the bridge in construction, her school, two figures standing on the escarpment looking out over the river. She
reaches for this sketch, pointing to the figures with her index finger, almost touching the girl with her shoulder half-turned against her father.

  ‘Is that . . . ?’ she says, not finishing.

  ‘Yes,’ he says. Then he turns to the next sketch.

  Evelyn gasps. She sees herself, in pencil. Drawn from memory, but transformed, the schoolgirl gone. The dress has the cut of her uniform, but not the pleats, none of the square edges. They are all brushed out of the image, erased so it is a casual dress she has been sketched into. The school hat tilted back on her head has become a dress hat, her long hair wild and tousled beneath it as she stands in the wind above the river on the cliff.

  Stahl turns the drawing over, and takes a pencil from his pocket. For Evelyn, he writes and hands it to her. She accepts this gift, weighing it in her hands before putting it down on the other side of the lantern, and reaching then with her hand for his cheek. Evelyn touches Stahl, her fingertips brushing his face, exploring it in the lamplight, finding his lips. She shivers.

  Stahl leans forward and catches her forefinger between his teeth, laughing as he does this, playful. She goes to pull away but he holds her finger tight in his teeth before releasing it. She laughs, giddy. Stahl places a hand on her shoulder, pressing her to the ground. Evelyn’s body gives, so that she is lying on the blanket, on her side, her head propped by an elbow, looking at him.

  Stahl reaches forward with his pencil, and she smells his body close, the new scent. He rests the side of the pencil on her upper arm. The wood is cool against her bare skin. Slowly, deliberately, he rolls it along her arm, turning it lightly along her skin with the fingers and the palms of both his hands, as if it is a rolling pin. Evelyn feels the ribbed edges of the pencil on her skin. She feels the cool pressure moving down the length of her arm, massaging her. She feels it reach her wrist, pass over, roll across the back of her hand. Her fingers stretch open, an involuntary reflex and Stahl rolls the pencil over the backs of her fingers and onto her hip where the palm of her hand rests. She closes her eyes and is aware of Stahl’s body shifting, and the feel of the pencil turning across her hip and then beginning to run down the outside of her thigh. Evelyn lets out a cry. She pivots her body towards his, grasps his hands and reaches for his lips.