The Voyage

by Murray Bail

  Delage never went into Athens to see for himself how the most learned, graceful and philosophical city had become the ugliest, crassest, most disgraceful of cities, all sense of proportion trashed, along with imparted wisdom; what a people to allow it. At least Port Said, a few days later, where he had a haircut on the footpath while the ship unloaded European textbooks, electronics, medical instruments to take on Egyptian brass lamps, dates, cotton tea towels, there were no disappointments, it was all matter-of-fact, wide open in the brown heat, a straightforward mess with no reminders of previous grandeur, figures lay asleep on benches, the eucalyptus tree, dreamy slow-motion movement, the figures in long costume or else wearing cheap shirts, all of which left him in a stationary position, a person in a false situation, he distinctly felt. “Do you think there’s a piano here—anywhere? I don’t think so.” In hot countries, the weather favors drums and single-string instruments, and their repetitious melancholy, a grand piano would require tuning every other day. They were in a park, Elisabeth seated beside him. The other passengers went off in different directions, their alertness to novel sights gave the impression they had more energy than the locals, an optical illusion, most likely. Delage was happy to remain seated in the park with Elisabeth, a small crowd of men stood around watching. It was one thing to sit down at meals with virtual strangers and make polite conversation, quite another to step off the ship and join them sightseeing. There is always a leader who attracts the timid, the conventional, it is how the European political and piano world has operated for centuries, to its detriment, Delage was looking down at his shoes and up at the young men looking at him, the majority fall into line behind the most established name in pianos, the least progressive piano, too afraid to take another path, as it is in all aspects of the world. “There I was, I experienced it firsthand. And I’m not impressed,” he said to her. The two weeks spent in Vienna had passed quickly. Elisabeth’s father told Delage from behind his ornate desk that his life up to sixty-five had passed slowly, but now approaching old age it began passing quickly. “Something for you to look forward to, perhaps,” with the faintest smile. Seated in the shade on a stone bench (so this is Port Said?), hemmed in by flat-roofed concrete buildings, people nearby slow-moving, watchful, he felt the opportunities for his Australian-made piano dissolving as Europe receded. There was no sign of Europe from where he was sitting. From the downtrodden park in Egypt, it didn’t exist, he could have been somewhere in outer space, Elisabeth seated beside him, providing a noticeable presence of loyalty, that was something; already he had difficulty remembering Vienna and its traffic, its heavy circles of architecture. It goes without saying they would stick their noses up in the air at an intruder, a concert grand made in a hopeless backward place, Australia. “Probably the wrong thing to do, going to Vienna. It had to be done, but I went too early—I’d say by about two years,” he was saying, more or less to himself. “An expensive mistake, a fiasco, it achieved absolutely bloody nothing.” And never had he talked so much as he had in Vienna. “A fiasco did you say?” “That’s right.” In Sydney he would go for long periods without talking, or talking as little as possible, months would pass, then without any reason he’d begin talking his head off, something triggered it, whatever, there was nothing stopping him, whether talking to a single person or an entire table, they would hang on his every word, so it seemed to him, holding forth on a subject, packing it with information, not only about his piano, plenty of other subjects too, his line of thought wandering as he introduced other thoughts, other angles, so many possibilities and facts out there, including complaints, before bringing it back to the original subject, he could be amazing, very persuasive. This was Frank Delage. Sometimes even he had to remind himself. And his sister used to complain he didn’t talk enough, that is, to her, but as he grew older he knew he was talking more, coming out with pointless sayings and recollections and suggestions that went on too long, just as his street directions went on and on, there are women after a certain age who talk too much, cannot stop themselves, going on without pause, a word-flow not allowing an entry point, it was a habit he wouldn’t want to become established, he didn’t want to go down that path. “At least one thing of interest came out of Vienna, wouldn’t you say?” still with her head turned. Delage laughed. Here he was on a stone bench in Egypt with the archetypal blond from upper Austria, except she was unusual, very, her visual characteristic was indifference. “My sister I’ve told you about keeps telling me I exaggerate. She of course is someone who’s never exaggerated in her entire life.” “I have not noticed exaggeration.” But Elisabeth showed little interest in what he was doing, or was trying to do with his piano. If anything, she shrugged at the subject and at the broad polished object itself, as if she wanted to avoid anything to do with music, while Delage talked too much about it. At least he had plenty of other things to say—when they occurred to him. “Why are we being stared at by these boys? Do they not have something better to do?” Even this she said in a languid way, as if she was accustomed to hot countries, such as Saudi Arabia nearby, or Laos, Cambodia, Burma, countries that were humid as well as hot, whereas the only hot countries she had been to were Spain and northern Italy, when she was a student. “It’s not me they’re interested in,” he said. “They only have eyes for you. If I were them I’d be doing the same.” Delage had been addressing a postcard to his sister, and stood up. There were five other passengers on the Romance, Dutch, English, two sisters from Melbourne, in each case their hair, skin, firmness of jaw, parts of clothing made them recognizable from specific parts of the world. The Dutchman introduced himself as Zoellner (bookseller, Amsterdam); to Elisabeth, the sisters were “very sure of their place, very. I cannot understand why.” One followed the other in divorce or separation, it doesn’t matter which, now sister-companions, six years apart. The Englishman, from Folkestone, was a blinker, always at short intervals an eruption of blinking, tiring to watch—wife equally tall, alongside. The cabins were a surprise, decked out in brown carpet. Delage’s had a desk, an office chair. It was supposed to be the second engineer’s cabin, it said on the door, but it had been many years since a second engineer was needed on such container ships. Above the bed a large porthole faced the containers stacked in their different colors to the bow, the yellow gantry almost touched the window as it came forward, loading or unloading the “boxes,” so they are called. Elisabeth’s cabin was directly below. Most of the time she spent with Delage, and yet she didn’t seem to want anything. She slept in his bed.

  But at last the sun was free of clouds, she wanted to go out on deck, nothing else mattered, such a smooth pale body, she allowed him to watch, although he was thinking about something else; she stepped aside for him to work the lever to open the hatch, the decks were on either side of the great funnel, barely enough room on these decks (brick-red painted floors) to swing a cat. “The watery part of the world,” Delage had written down. The sun glittered on the last of the Mediterranean and lit up other ships, the breadth of the sea even here rendering them toylike, as if in a metal tub, or a series of shuttles in slow motion passing across a silvery loom. As Elisabeth talked she turned her back to the scene, Delage reduced his answers to nodding, striving to know her, until he hardly talked at all. “My mother never puts water on her face,” she said, apropos of nothing in particular, “only rose water.”

  The main body of seated guests broke into separate bodies, Delage to one side. No one could recall a speaker at one of Berthe’s soirées bolting from the room in mid-sentence, without a word of explanation, let alone apology, even if he was a critic and therefore ridiculously over-confident, it goes with the job or the mentality, he could be excused perhaps, an illness in the family, a death or a very serious car accident, it had to be something in that area, not even an opinionated critic could be so thoughtless. No one in her circle knew the tragedy that had befallen the speaker, Berthe had no information, she enjoyed being asked, her lack of information added to the mystery, which i
n turn could only bolster the already high reputation of her every-third-Friday gatherings, the most well-attended in Vienna, not that she had any rivals as active, where the lucky visitor was bound to encounter fresh knowledge, the poetic unexpected. Instead, she went from group to group demanding their opinions on what the music critic said, before he had dropped his bundle and left, in the nicest way possible she expressed disappointment in the men who clearly hadn’t been listening, which made her turn abruptly to their wives, it was the presence and the words of men she preferred. Berthe Clothilde tended to latch on to men with an unhealthy, undivided attention. Everybody knew her mother had been one of Freud’s last patients in Vienna; they were neighbors on Berggasse. According to Berthe, who presented an unnatural calm, the treatment had made her mother worse—without going into details. In some cases, talking about hysteria, and possibly even revealing the sources of it, apparently can make a person even more hysterical. The weekly sessions with Freud were something her mother looked forward to, Berthe Clothilde told Elisabeth, her mother felt it like a death when he left Vienna. The treatment made her worse, but she was even worse after he left. The massive chandelier, the Steinway grand, the porcelain plates and vases, the blue-and-gold swirling wallpaper, the men and women conversing in twos and threes, some already smoking cigarettes, kept Delage to one side, waiting for Elisabeth to return, while trying to catch a glimpse of her mother who had abandoned him. Amalia von Schalla and her daughter were the only people he knew in Vienna, the mother he knew more than the daughter, yet it could hardly be said he knew her at all. It had always been women who had shown him kindness and sympathy, something he found hard to reciprocate. “It’s beyond my capacity,” a wood-carver at the factory had once said about a new way to curve timber. Here under the ostentatiously large chandelier it was a matter of adopting a patient, unconscious stance, which came easily to Delage, and could possibly attract a person or two, unlikely, but you never know, out of pity or curiosity, or because they too felt isolated, someone on the fringe might break away and introduce themselves, a common occurrence at cocktail parties, one of their few attractions. But although the speaker had been unshaven and wore a grubby T-shirt, the audience under the chandelier appeared stiff in dress and movement. They too were comfortable in what they had chosen. Even Delage could see the quality of their suits and ties, women wearing trim jackets, hair done for the occasion, jewelry. Of course he could take the initiative and select an unsuspecting person who was also ignored by the majority, and begin by giving his impressions of Vienna and the Austrian people, if they were interested, before switching to the Delage piano and its advantages—after all, that was the reason he was standing there in a stately room in Vienna. It had been Amalia who arranged the invitation to Berthe’s soirée. And Berthe didn’t allow just anybody in. Some people had been waiting years to get in, and would continue to wait, pulling every string they could think of, evidently the wrong sort of strings, for there was little chance these people would ever be allowed in. Now instead of mixing with the upper echelons of Vienna’s musical world, many of them in this one room, although he couldn’t recognize any of them, Delage remained to one side, thinking about all kinds of things other than pianos and concert performances, Sydney streets and glittering water, for example, the factory floor (its cleanliness), which he always liked, close-up of accountant’s pouting mouth, at the same time trying to slow down his thinking or, far more difficult, stop thinking altogether. If he succeeded it was not by managing to be empty of all thoughts, more that he couldn’t recall what they were, especially when Elisabeth broke in—“What are you thinking?” Having to think what he had just been thinking about was not the same as thinking. Delage’s tendency was to stand back and not say a word, before rushing in with his own considered thoughts, his own positions, whether people liked it or not, enough to deflect or derail, at least it announced his thinking, producing mixed results. His thoughts kept returning to Amalia von Schalla, how he had touched her, which she had allowed. And there she was down the front, so he looked on, and waited. If the chandelier had loosened and fallen, bringing down the ceiling with it, onto the heads of the smartly dressed people, whose refuge from ordinariness was in taste, sensibility, an irreplaceable section of Austrian society would have been wiped out, or at least severely injured and covered in dust, reminiscent of the last hours in Hitler’s bunker. He could see Elisabeth still talking to her mother. “Are you dining with the Schallas?”—Berthe Clothilde at his elbow. Already she was waving goodbye to an unusually short couple, the woman wearing a green felt hat. “One of our composers. You wouldn’t know who he is.” Delage felt Elisabeth’s hand on his arm. “I am to look after you. You are not to be out of my sight.” While nodding he looked over to where her mother had been standing but she was no longer there. “You can call me Elisabeth, if you want.” She said she hadn’t eaten all day. As they left the Clothilde house he wondered whether he had offended her mother, Amalia, women don’t usually turn their backs without a reason, they’re always making a point of some sort. His hand had reached out and touched, as if it had a life of its own, obeying an affinity was how it felt. To think about it made him smile. Elisabeth was different, modest, yet unconventional, she had a freshness, easy to be with; she gave herself. From the beginning, Delage saw traces of her mother, even if it was out of the corner of his eye, the shape of her nose relocated, losing a little precision along the way, their shared neatness of hair, skin, dress. He didn’t know what he was expected to do. Out on the street, Elisabeth revealed more of her mother’s straight back, she could have stepped off a show-jumper, but was not as tall as her mother, he saw at once. “It looks like rain,” Delage was about to say, or better still, “It rains more in Vienna than Sydney,” but instead he opened and twisted his mouth, as if it was filled with water. Aside from drawing attention to the obvious (it had begun raining) it would only give the impression he was in awkward anticipation of the next few minutes. More and more he realized he stated the obvious in order to assist the other person, it’s better to say very little, or indicate a certain amount of reserve, which at least had the merit of not appearing hasty, and suggested a degree of wisdom, taking her arm crossing the street, she was at least ten years younger—which gave her the advantage. Often Delage was unsure of what expression to have on his face, especially when alone on a street or standing around waiting for somebody; not long ago his sister had caught him pulling faces in her kitchen, when he made the mistake of visiting her in Ashgrove, Brisbane, she said it showed he hadn’t grown up. Only a man who isn’t comfortable with himself pulled silly faces, as she put it, not stopping there as she rattled the pots and pans, most men she knew were infantile, they suffered from “infantile paralysis,” which was a nuisance, she added with a firmness Delage found irritating. She was prone to exaggerations. There was no reason behind most of the things she said. As far as he knew, she had little or no experience of men, it was a wonder she’d ever sat alone in a room with one. At least he had been married, “Victoria”—an initial starburst, it didn’t last. It became uneven, he could feel it loosening, a marriage with holes in it, so many he didn’t quite know where the marriage itself was, still it went on, two people together but turning away, when the design of the new piano was at its most intractable, as intractable as the problems of his marriage, which made it easier, he told himself, not to be there. Living alone had not been his sister’s choice, Delage could see, she swung her exaggerations around to him, her brother who managed to live in another city. Each morning Delage woke and enjoyed a sense of well-being, there was clarity, the whole day spread out before him. Delage didn’t mind living alone, it was something he never thought about, now here he was on a ship in a carpeted cabin with Elisabeth von Schalla, a woman at least ten years younger; she had more or less moved in without asking. “I’ve decided to take less interest in concert grands. I’m sick of them. I’m going to focus all my tremendous energies on people, beginning with people I already kno
w,” he told Elisabeth, although he could have been talking to the sky. “What do you say? Forget it, I’m just thinking aloud.” Of course he wasn’t about to finish with the Delage piano, what with all its inventions (patents pend.), the various refinements, just because he’d come up against a few difficulties in Vienna. “You may have left it too late,” was her reply. Having crossed the street he wanted to know where they were going. It was here on Karolinengasse, she stopped in front of the building, where a piano being lifted through a window slipped out of its sling, cartwheeled five stories onto the footpath “this far from me,” she bent her arm at the elbow, aged seventeen, a student, the piano’s lid smashing into the windscreen of a parked car. She leaned against him, “I was only seventeen. I could have been killed.” “What we call a close shave,” Delage looking up at the window. A close call. “There’s more metal than people think in a piano. You’d end up being this high. You would have been splattered all over the place. Blood everywhere. Bones sticking out in all directions. Did it leave a hole in the footpath—or even a dent? They can cause a serious injury too.” Elisabeth had stopped walking. “I don’t think you are treating me seriously.” Exaggeration had brought them closer, although he was determined not to smile. And Elisabeth too had exaggerated, for the recollection was never going to equal the crashing force of the event, nor the sensation of escape, standing there now at the very spot, her pale fine skin, aware of her soft blood which was living warmth. The sight of a piano being destroyed imposes silence on the bystander. There was that concert grand, a Bechstein, by the look, which had been converted into a coffin, with hundreds of small faces painted inside the lid, some sort of war protest, he told Elisabeth, who knew all about it. “Performance Art,” she gave a little sigh, Basel in the early ’70s, Delage had seen photographs and almost had one doctored for the company Christmas card, before thinking better of it. Pianos lie in silence at the bottom of the ocean; those destroyed in European cities, collapsing under the bricks of burning buildings, others left exposed in a room above the street, wallpaper flapping, in German cities in particular, home of music, Poland, Hungary too, of course, thousands of perfectly good pianos were lost to the world then. Many were used in barricades, a piano left smoldering—talk about an image of old Europe. As they advance into houses, it is known that soldiers destroy musical instruments, there is an impulse to destroy signs of the previous serene life, not as senseless as it may seem, pianos machine-gunned, violins smashed against walls. Vienna had a brooding quality, something still going on. Delage wondered whether he should return to his hotel, simplicity beckoned, an early night, just him, himself in his room, he hadn’t stopped since he had landed in Vienna, each movement was a blow to his habits. “After your narrow escape, I suppose you run the other way at the sight of a piano.” He felt too tired to be sufficiently alert. “My mother told me you are clever.” It wasn’t how Delage saw himself. People impressed with one quality of a person use it to describe their other qualities. “We are inviting you to eat with us. My mother entrusted me. You may have other arrangements, something more interesting. Do you know our nightclubs? They are the best in the world.” Without answering, he kept walking with Elisabeth, who took his arm. Back in his hotel room he would have sat with his hands on his knees and contemplated his future, he was here on business, after all, he had to get on with it, to establish some sort of foothold, or “beach head,” as he almost shouted at them back at the factory. One way forward would be to enlist the support of the music critic, if he could find a way of meeting him. If Vienna remained indifferent, he could always turn to Berlin. Instead he was heading toward Amalia von Schalla, handsome unsmiling woman, a regal presence, until he had reduced the gap with his hand, he lingered more on her, the mother, than her fast-forward daughter, he knew virtually nothing about her, even less about the daughter, Elisabeth, now striding with purpose. The best of his intentions were being derailed by a determination or an interest he could not understand, not fully, everything he was seeing was unusual, he may have appeared as a novelty to them, mother and daughter, certainly there were things all around him he was not accustomed to, in a strange dark city where the surrounding language was foreign, he became all too aware of his limitations, take away the piano and he represented nothing, or very little. At the same time he wanted to expand beyond the mechanics of the piano. More and more he saw himself as someone without edges, the imprecision, one who easily became indifferent, after a certain distance he tended to fade. It happened to people close by, those coming closer, turning them away. When he looked around he saw this wasn’t unusual. He had been getting nowhere in Vienna. If he took up the invitation to dinner he might pick up some useful contacts or tips, the whereabouts of the music critic, for example. “Was it your mother’s idea, or yours?” “Does it matter?”—the answer he expected, pointed to her. Now they were heading toward her, Amalia von Schalla, standing in a room above a street somewhere, he imagined, not at all fitting the usual idea of the mother, just because she had a daughter, even in the way he imagined her waiting with arms folded. As the rain stopped, Delage noticed Elisabeth was a woman who sighed, so someone else had a habit entrenched, gave little sighs for no reason, the way some people crack their knuckles, or clunk their teeth with a spoon when they eat, in her mid-thirties and a gentle habit had been allowed to form, she may no longer be aware of it, only child, Delage sighed, the sighs were almost imperceptible, now and then a deeper, louder sigh, all of which had nothing to do with disappointment, exhaustion, unhappiness, Elisabeth was free of such troubles. “Always sighing is no help,” written down. When he heard another sigh, Delage found himself smiling, her breast moved against his arm, he listened for her sighs, before wondering whether anyone spending time with Elisabeth would become irritated by them.