A Body of Water

by Beverley Farmer

  A blue fish latticed with scales is curled high and dry on the outside of each of the mugs. (Poissons bleus.) It has a barbed back and a twin-barbed fan-tail. A shadow of it shows on the inside, inscribed in the white porcelain.

  So as not to have to get up for a drink of water, she tells herself she is lying in sea water, in a deep pool of blue rock. Tails of red weed drift rocking around her wrists and ankles. The undersurface of the water is a mirror in which the whole pool is held and in it she sees that the two red fishes are fluttering at the weedy edges, each following the other and each a mirror of the other. So without turning her head she knows that the vase on the sill is empty for the time being. Empty, that is, of fishes. It holds empty water.

  No, this is another time altogether. Other people. The same fish in the same room, before that, or after. They have been lent this room for a few days. They will feed the gildfish and water the overgrown pot-plant. The gildfish! Goldfish (what a shame). They have never been here before. They will walk about in the green light of the square under the stone walls. Town hall, prison, barracks, convent? They don’t ask, don’t care.

  – Of course the heart of the painting is the red fishes.

  – And the vase. You could take out the fishes and still the vase would be the heart of the painting. (Point of departure.)

  Swan Bay at low tide – sweeps of pale water and sand, tangles of wrack and birds gathering, rowing boats tilted to one side half a mile out, lying on broken mirrors.

  I bought a watercolour, sea-colour Ondine at the opening of E’s exhibition yesterday, though of course it has to stay there till the last day. She is beached on paper puckered under her weight of white flesh, drawn up, her back turned and her arms covering her breasts. Her hair is bound, her head bowed in sleep. The fine black outlines have frayed over a watery, frothy ground: her shadow is a green, blue, grey pool at her back.

  A sudden storm at sunset, rough water and a rainbow stretched across the bay from Shortlands Bluff to the Point, a small and intensely bright one, dark clouds beyond it.

  Bodies after making love. Here he is asleep and there at a distance and at a different angle is his mirror image. His beauty and his living warmth lie still and cold in the mirror as if in water.

  A poem is a fountain, a novel a river – a story a pool, lake, billabong? For Joyce in the end, all thought, all language rolled into one great river. Not for him the fountain; the few poems he wrote were tight, bare and stiff.

  H lent me Peter Handke’s new novel, Across, about a citizen of Salzburg on his way to a card game who sees someone painting swastikas and kills him with a stone, hurling the body over a cliff where it will not be found. He feels justified, he has acted in righteous anger. The act has vanished in place and time as if it had never happened; nevertheless, it becomes a black hole, a vortex, as a stone long since vanished under a surface of water makes ripples ride out in widening rings. This man’s consciousness constructs barriers, thresholds, spaces. The density of what he senses – feels, thinks, skirts, avoids, approaches tangentially – places the vanished act.

  In the early days of my archeological activity, an older archeologist once said to me: ‘All you care about is finding something.’ It was in part this remark that impelled me to train myself at digs to look less for what was there than for what was missing, for what had vanished irretrievably – whether carried or merely rotted away – but was still present as a vacuum, as empty space or empty form.

  Across a barrier, a threshold: ‘Sometimes I playfully call myself a thresholdologist (or seeker after thresholds),’ Loser says. And: ‘Threshold consciousness is nature religion,’ the priest says when at the card game the five players begin a descant about thresholds: ‘His listeners also recalled things that had happened long ago. When one stopped, another took over, and the result was a single story in many voices.’ A ravishing fugal passage without quotation marks (that’s how it works) follows on. The same effect is got later, after the chiming of the Easter bells in all the named churches around: ‘In my half-sleep – which was more like a special kind of waking – separate sounds answered one another and thus became music…Actually, it was not so much a melody as a leitmotiv prolonged indefinitely. Every sound took it up and intensified it.’ Then we are told the sounds one by one.

  The German title is Der Chinese des Schmerzes. Andreas Loser (a mountain near Salzburg is called the Loser, and the narrator is always aware of mountains, of views across country) looks Chinese, as does Peter Handke on the dust jacket. The Chinese of Pain. The Suffering Chinaman. A woman of whom he asks a portrait of himself tells him he is like ‘the man in the doorway’.

  ‘Though very ill, he went to see a good friend. In leaving, he stopped at length in the doorway and tried to smile; his tensed eyes became slits, framed in their sockets as by sharply ground lenses. “Goodbye, my suffering Chinaman,” said his friend.’

  Moments of illumination weigh down the pace of the story, tricks of perspective, optical illusions, enigmatic observations. The camera in the head (the narrator’s and therefore the reader’s head) zooms in and time stops. Numinous objects (the daddy-long-legs) appear, hallucinatory in their sudden clarity and quality of surprise. Reality has been deplaced by an invisible force. The narrator reports as one might from the centre of a bubble, seeing inside-out the reflections that pass over it. His thoughts are dense with the same incoherent clarity that dreams have.

  The narration is intensely visual, filmic, beginning with an invocation to ‘Emptiness’, which (a fade-in) becomes ‘peopled with figures’…

  Loser is no Raskolnikov. He writes in his copy of Virgil’s Georgics:

  ‘…Surrender? Yes, but not to any judge. No, I will not “surrender”, I will seek out a witness. What for? To ask for advice. Who will be my witness? And time and again “the threshold”, lest you pass it by, slow down to a child’s pace. No, don’t slow down; restrain yourself. – Sunflower in the mist. – The epithet for hibiscus in Virgil: slender.’

  In the end he finds his witness:

  The narrator opened his eyes, unfolded his hands, uncrossed his legs, sat up straight, breathed deeply, and then looked imploringly over his shoulder into empty space, as though waiting for someone or remembering someone; or as though collecting himself for a very different story. (A story meant: it was, it is, it will be – it meant future.) But first he lay down on the floor of his son’s room and slept – someone threw a cover over him – a night, a day, and yet another night. And he had a dream. ‘The storyteller is the threshold. He must therefore stop and collect himself.’

  In the window come shadows from the apple tree. I seat my mind on emptiness, balance it cross-legged on air. This wooden room flickers in the sea wind. At the window a hundred round apples are growing red, hot in the sun. A shadow is a form of emptiness. The ripe apples will have salt on their skins and be as warm as flesh in the mouth. An apple falls with a soft thump into my mind. Windfall apples have been falling among the leaves, rotten from the moth.

  Kyria Domna would pick out the sound ones and make her apple jam. (Their orchard in the village has all died, the boughs borne down to the ground, cracked open.) Apple jelly is even better. I like apples best sliced, fried in butter until they are pale gold all through with a brown lace overlay, then sprinkled with cinnamon, lemon juice and honey. Taki likes his stuffed with dates, honey and butter and baked whole.

  The smell of apples

  filling the cold room – one small

  green apple in here.

  Picking blackberries

  we sow on our hands warm red

  seeds of juice and blood.

  I wonder if Margaret Scott is still writing her ‘Housework’ poems. She enclosed the first one in the series in a letter a year or so ago, dedicated to me. It’s about making redcurrant jelly: seeing her own face reflected in the ‘crimson mirror’, she is reminded of her grandmother’s, as she dyed cloth red…Wells, mirrors, ‘vessels of dark liquid, women tied by blood’. Th
e lines are long, intricate, dense and they drive strongly forward. I heard her read some more at the Festival last summer. The second one was called ‘Polishing the Step’. Again, the threshold. I’d never heard of brass doorsteps until I went to Hobart and saw old houses each with a gold bar under the front door, like in a fairytale.

  Gobs of blood this morning – unexpected, a whole week early. I hate this happening, not being sure that it isn’t the beginning of the end of the bleeding for me – not yet, oh, not so soon! Remember Gary Snyder’s wonderful menstruation poem, what’s it called? ‘Praise for Sick Women’. These lines I love:

  All women are wounded

  Who gather berries, dibble in mottled light,

  Turn white roots from humus, crack nuts on stone –

  High upland with squinted eye

  or rest in cedar shade.

  The poem I wrote last year about bleeding has come back again with a rejection slip – the Easter song, ‘Epitaphios’, about having a miscarriage at Easter (Easter 1975, so long ago now). I want it to be published, though, and will keep on sending it out. So what if it strikes people as crude and melodramatic, its form as singsong – this is intended, necessary. It had to have a sort of Greek pop tempo, and strict rhymes – like a nursery rhyme.

  EPITAPHIOS

  Boiling eggs in red-dyed water

  I dwell on the birth

  of a son, or daughter.

  The heavy blood stopped long ago

  that each month stained

  the lips below,

  My breasts swell fat and sleek as silk

  as if already

  full of milk,

  My nipples pout, and my belly’s mound.

  The eggs are done,

  none cracked, all sound,

  Crimson as the nailed Christ’s blood –

  Pain hammers me.

  A quivering flood

  Runs hotly from my clenching womb.

  I crawl

  into another room.

  Once hand held underneath, I squat

  and catch the lump

  that bulges out.

  An addled egg, an unfledged bird

  lies on my palm.

  O Flesh Made Word,

  What earthly good, these hard-boiled eggs,

  this searing curdle

  down my legs?

  What heavenly good, when my child’s torn

  from me, that the eggs

  mean You’re reborn?

  Must we break our fast with eggs dyed red,

  shout ‘Christ is risen’?

  My child’s dead.

  Taki knows about this lost child and one other. Should I have told him? No way of ever knowing this.

  One summer night in Polypetron while we sat on rush-chairs waiting under the stars and the porch lamp, the black-and-white cow gave birth in the open, in a black pattering of beetles. Her labour was long. My father-in-law sent for his wife’s brother and together they roped the protruding hoofs and tugged until the calf plopped in one gush on the plastic sheet. Someone shone a torch: a second calf ’s hoofs appeared. The children were as awed as on an Easter night or Christmas. Panting, my parents-in-law helped each sodden little patchy creature stagger up and suck. We gave them the names Trehala and Pilala, baby Greek for ‘running and jumping’, from a favourite passage in To Zymaraki, The Gingerbread Child. One calf was said to be Taki’s, one his twin-cousin Babi’s.

  The black seeds on the kitchen bench were not: the mice are back. The carpet in the cupboard behind the curtain is thick with little seeds, and the air thicker with their musty stink. And just now I came downstairs to find, cornered on the bench near the toaster, a fat little grey body with seed eyes fixed on me. Motionless, we stared. It couldn’t move, I saw, it was so piteously afraid, and at last I turned my back and heard it leap down and scuttle in behind the curtain. Now I have to put poison down. I can’t have mice.

  In hot weather, coming downstairs in this house is like immersing myself step by step in a well.

  Here and there are seeds,

  spindly, dry, a black scatter –

  mice in the kitchen!

  Out of the hot oil

  fleas hop and speckle my arms:

  bursting mustard seeds.

  A plump mouse cornered

  on the bench crouches and stares

  until I turn my back.

  The wonderful rich smell of olive oil heating in the pan. For once, I can remember the first time I ever smelled it. An ant had crawled into my ear and I was beating my head against my mother’s apron, frantic at this scrabbling on my eardrum amplified so deep. She heated olive oil in a spoon and tipped it down my ear to swill the ant out. I saw it sprawled. A hot medicinal smell, like eucalyptus: I never dreamed it was a food.

  How it comes pouring from the can in rhythmic jets of darkly glowing green, pumping out, the cold, slow blood of the olive.

  Chris used to be given an ouzo-glassful of oil to drink, he remembers, when he was little and they had moved from the village to Thessaloniki. Not during the German occupation, when there was none to spare, but later. Even during the occupation his mother or grandmother would sneak him away from the other children and give him a raw egg to drink, a broken egg begged for in the market, before he went out to sell koulouria, lollies, single cigarettes in the streets: the breadwinner had to be kept strong. He was seven or eight when this began.

  Once a German officer took a koulouri and bit into it. When Chris asked for the money, the officer with one kick of his jackboot pitched the tray of koulouria into the mud.

  Marjorie Barnard is on the cover of this year’s Literary Calendar – the August writer, grim-jawed in profile, thin white plaits looped on her head, her hands very large and knotted, foreshortened. A tabby cat sprawled on the table beside her, by a vase of flowers. A remark she made about humanity’s ‘basic cruelty’ is printed underneath. And now she has died, before ‘her’ month came up. How we are diminished by it! Like when Olga Masters so suddenly died last year.

  I read ‘The Persimmon Tree’ for the first time three or four years ago and was puzzled, when my joy in it died down enough for thought, to realise that the story in fact contained no persimmon tree. There was a row of persimmons put to ripen on a window sill, autumn persimmons although it was spring in the story. But there was no tree; and at last I decided that the tree of the title was the shadowy solitary woman behind the curtain in the flat across the road, holding her bare arms up to the sun, the spring.

  Rereading the Jeffrey Meyers biography of Katherine Mansfield today I came across his account of Anne Estelle Rice’s portrait (the one on the cover of the Penguin Letters and Journals that I bought at Auckland airport on a dark day of my life):

  After sketching for two hours, Anne painted Katherine in a scheme of vivid reds, and portrayed her friend seated three-quarter length in a soft chair with her hands folded…Her closely fitting yoke-collared persimmon dress reveals the contours of her thin chest and body, and sets her solid form against the painted floral background.

  Oh, Katherine. Her persimmon dress.

  I now have a first edition, signed, of The Persimmon Tree, thanks to a pen-friendship with T, who lives in New South Wales. In her first letter she enclosed a silky black leaf of the Chinese pear tree she was sitting under as she wrote. Marjorie Barnard lived near T’s parents’ place: T had met her and her companion, Vera, done an interview for her thesis, and visited again. When I wrote back to T that Marjorie Barnard was a living national treasure and that I loved ‘The Persimmon Tree’, T passed it on: I was glad. (Asked a question about ‘The Persimmon Tree’, ‘Marjorie waved her hand about and said wearily, “It’s all in the past…”’) It matters very much to me, the invisible network of women reading each other’s work and cherishing it. Perhaps it still mattered to Marjorie Barnard even then, and so they gave T The Persimmon Tree to pass on.

  It was forty degrees on the first day T visited them. Marjorie was lying down, but got up to have tea
and Christmas cake with the visitor. (‘Marjorie likes the crusty, burnt bits.’) She went back to bed while Vera entertained T. As T was leaving, Vera beckoned her into the bedroom: there was Marjorie lying naked, frail and white…

  I thought she was asleep and made to leave but Vera propelled me forward and with a chuckle said, ‘Well, now you’ll be able to go home and tell your folks what a queer old woman she is,’ at which Marjorie piped up and said defiantly: ‘Why? We’re all GIRLS.’

  How wonderful! I read it over and over. Near the end of the letter T put in a quote from Virginia Woolf:

  My writing now delights me solely because I love writing and don’t, honestly, care a hang what anyone says. What seas of horror one dives through to pick up these pearls – however they are worth it.

  (This is more chilling a sea of horror now, in the light of what we know and she did not – the manner of her death – that she would dive into the Ouse and be found with stones, not pearls, in her pockets. Her death adds a further level of meaning to her words. The same as Sylvia Plath’s.)

  On her sudden shocks of revelation, epiphanies:

  And so I go on to suppose that the shock-receiving capacity is what makes me a writer. I hazard the explanation that a shock is at once in my case followed by the desire to explain it. I feel that I have had a blow…it is or will become a revelation of some order; it is a token of some real thing behind appearances; and I make it real by putting it into words. It is only by putting it into words that I make it whole; this wholeness means that it has lost its power to hurt me; it gives me, perhaps because by doing so I take away the pain, a great delight to put the severed parts together. Perhaps this is the strongest pleasure known to me.