The Book of Science and Antiquities

by Thomas Keneally

  III THE BOOK OF SUBMISSION AND RETURN

  The Line of Woman

  THE HARDER NIGHTS, like this one, need to be confronted without recourse to thorngum, and without a fire to distract the sleeper and the Heroes with light. I slept, or failed to, by an old fire, a place where many-stem wood had been burned for years by people in the old times and where the repeated daily heat gave a gloss to the sand. You would see these fire spots now and then when traveling and know that the old people had eaten and laughed there. In a happier state of soul, I would have fixed my memory upon those lost scenes and borrowed from them an echo of their vanished warmth, and thus been warmer myself. I was not, however, in good spirits. I knew my daughter was doomed, that the line of our women was doomed, that all our clans would dwindle so that one day one old man would breathe out a last embittered breath and the trail of our blood would end. And if that was so, what was the purpose of things? It is a brutish point to think that all the singing of our people to sustain the grass and the great beasts and the plenty of fish, and the plenty of order and the rule of the law as well, is so soured that it comes to one old man sunk on his skinny arse bones by a lake of ghosts.

  In some way I believed I was that old man or might as well be. It was so cold that I could barely bring my mind to the hope that our Hero would descend to me, or I ascend to him, to hear a heroic meaning given and a course of wisdom suggested. Not since the solitary nights of my manning ceremonies had I felt as desolate as this and lost faith that there were benevolent beings out there who might, after I had been tempered by solitude and cold, rescue me.

  Though I hated it, and though my bewilderment was so sharp, I knew I must wait in this manner, in lowliness and misery. I came close to thinking how fortunate my defaced son was by comparison with me! How more fortunate was the Sinner Unnameable, the man punished by Stark’s hand and mine. They, my son, and even the Sinner Unnameable, were restored to the greater world and to the Heroes, called thereto, and after a little confusion of spirit, flying on their way, while I was unreconciled and uncalled. One can ask oneself afterwards, and not for the first time, how was it ever established that unseen fibers as definite as the fibers produced by my daughter connect the hardest earth to the succulent and illuminating heavens? It does not present itself to us from virtue or from fasting or from taking thought or from any of our vain pleas and utterances. It comes as a gift, that line of ascent, that steep, scalable face of the intervening air between us and the higher them. And it was there now, that skyward track, open to me all at once and after I had despaired of ever scaling it, which I now did in ferocious though anxious joy. I will be guided, having been until now without a guide. My Hero will guide me. I will find a direction from what he says.

  Almost before I knew it, the forest of stars loomed ahead and I entered its outer fringe, rushing through boughs of scalding light. At the first line of trees the Hero’s wife, my aunt, was waiting for me with the luminous forest, of which trees of the ground, the thorn, and the split branch, and all the rest, are a mere whisper, a tracery of rumor.

  My aunt smiled. Her kindliness is a great mystery that I should take cycles of days and morning upon morning to ponder. I wanted to tell her that and explain that life on earth deprives us of the hours of reflection and meditation. She had barely turned and led me only a little way before I heard men or Heroes, or men who are Heroes, shouting ahead. I heard the enormous thud of feet. I heard voices high and deep, and the shouts of joy that men and Heroes were finding in their communal dance, as if they were remaking the heavens as we on earth remake that place. It gave me an unexpected joy to know that the Hero would be surrounded by my ancestors up there, ahead of me, by heavenly brothers, heavenly fathers, heavenly sounds.

  My great-aunt spoke to me. “You can find him now!” Because she could not take me any further. For even in heaven there must be territories secured to men, and other territories into which she and her sisters could advance, but into which neither I nor my Hero could.

  I was alone now by the great trunks of light, and as a lesser being could not help but wait awhile, to delay, to indulge the old excuse of gathering oneself. I was shy, as well as anything else, to intrude into our high ceremony in which many worlds, not only mine, were being sung into continuance and into health. But in my world even now there was only one daughter above all. There was only one beloved net maker. There was, as well, our clan which died the more with that vicious stone in our midst, and delay did not suit its condition.

  And so I went forward as if I were entitled to the ceremony occurring ahead of me. I entered into the most intense foliage of light. I had to struggle to go forward. Luminous arms held me back so thoroughly, giving me a reason not to persevere. I got through them and towards the great dazzling presences. Their features in remembrance defy any exact description. You can say of a man that his nose is broad or long or both or neither. You cannot remember all that you learned in the forests of the sky, however, for it was learned and understood and absorbed then, when you were there and can be spoken of only in terms of then and there.

  I drew clear of the foliage of light and advanced into the columns of dancing and incantation and more intense light still. What was being sung in that holy place I can’t remember, since it was a chant of such broad power. As it left those lips, it entered straight into that wing of the soul where unspoken meaning settles. The words of men and Heroes sang through the net of our words in that dazzling grove. As their song lodged in me, I was a happy man. For I could see my Hero dancing in the midst of the others. It was so pleasant to see his divine ecstasy and to be in the place of that happiness, and the seeds, the stalks, the leftover meat on the bone of his exultation reached me, and that was more than sufficient for me, given I was aware that the entire weight of his delight, if placed on me, would have killed me. I thought in that second, He can’t give me any command that is beyond me! I am ready for any demand. This thought of mine must have passed straight to him since I saw his eyes now on me, and I went forward in his direction amidst the columns of dancers. I rejoiced in having returned to Bounder Man, the man above all of all such men. The dancers were gone in that instant, the thud of feet ended instantly, the chant that had supported the dancers disappeared into the pores of the sky. Only he and I were left. He was turned utterly to me.

  Words had returned, as he wanted them to. “Hello,” he said. “Hello, my son and brother.” And in so saying he gave me back my place in heaven and earth.

  “Hello, Father,” I replied, mantling my shoulders forward to do him honor. In that greeting it was plain to me that he was still aware: my clan is under the curse, that he knows what curse it is and that every womb is blighted. For this was not ground on which things were explained. This was ground on which things were revealed.

  “So, my man,” he addressed me, this maker of my world and progenitor of the people. “You see the hostile force of things begin to eat your clan?”

  “I see it. Wailing, they have buried the young mothers, and there is my daughter, the weaver and net maker, for whom there is no hope. It is bitter.”

  That was the plainest thing I could say.

  He knew it all, yet the ancestors can well do with having these things repeated.

  “But they are not in the same pain you are,” said the Hero. “You know what the remedy must be. But it is so sour and so harsh that you do not want to hear it even from yourself.”

  Feeling dread now after the great rejoicing enthusiasm I’d felt earlier in that grove, I said, “You expect someone to swallow the curse?”

  He looked at me, calm and level, though not saying anything.

  I then said—and I am daring to challenge him, it must not be forgotten—“You want a man of the law to swallow it and bleach it in his body.”

  The Hero nodded twice, as if the idea had not already occurred to him, and he took me by the arm. “The thing would finish such a man. In taking it in he would be taken into it.”

  Despite hi
s words, there was no doubt that he was suggesting it, and I was the only man of law in that place to hear the suggestion. So he was suggesting I should be the man?

  It was settled in this way, right there, so clear. It was so dreadful that I could not have told it to myself, that he had been left to tell me in his way.

  Instantly I woke in the cold place.

  A Death Before the Death: The Postman’s Shirt

  THE MORNING GRACIE and I arrived home from Eritrea, we were greeted by Cath on crutches. We had barely caught up on our news over coffee before my mother called to say my father had been taken to hospital with a fractured pelvis.

  So quickly I had been reminded that behind my own flimsiness of soul lay the sturdy souls of my parents, with their pride in stoicism through disaster, Depression, World War II, and all the rest. And their stoicism now bid fair to kill them, and last night’s drama was typical. In the small hours my father, returning from the toilet to his bedroom, had gone to look out of the living room window, to see what “loud mongrel” was arguing with a woman on the footpath outside, and tripped on a rug. He’d obviously felt something structural break inside him, but he had a crazy bush theory that if you just stayed still, fractures and dislodgements would right themselves. It was a theory he had pursued while he was a rugby league player in our country town, his sisters begging him not to play while their mother was ill because they needed his unencumbered help. But he did play, and dislocated his collarbone. And he just pretended he hadn’t been injured, keeping it a secret from everyone until it knitted again. Lying on his living room floor last night, he’d decided to play the same game, and had not disturbed my mother, passing out occasionally under the shock and wafts of agony. Mad old bugger!

  When my mother found him, he had insisted she bring him around to our place, a quarter of an hour away, so he could sit and watch the sea and the “knitting” could commence. Mum suggested calling an ambulance, but he insisted that they were “needed for the sick.” In his world you had to be near death to deserve an ambulance. His was the generation of the walking wounded. He had given mail out to the wounded and the hale in North Africa, pocketing that of the dead for return to their kin at some future time. Their arms in slings, their heads ringing and bandaged, soldiers had accepted letters from him with their free hands and opened them with their teeth.

  Arguing against ambulances with my mother, he endured until he fainted. And now Mum was calling us for help, and she told us the ambulance had come and he could not help whimper and weep at last as they put him on a stretcher to take him to hospital, where X-rays showed the fractured pelvis.

  * * *

  In the little dairy and timber town where our family had lived when I was learning my letters in the sacristy of the town church—a classroom during the week, a vesting area for the priest on Sunday—my father had been the relieving postman. According to the men in his army postal section in North Africa, he was the ultimate postman, willing to die if necessary, though my mother and brother and I were waiting for him at home, to get a consoling and strengthening letter to the foot soldiers of the Australian 9th Division on the eve of desert action. Meanwhile my mother and brother and I had waited and prayed for his return.

  Everyone seemed to attest to this when I was small, when my returned father took us to distant Sydney suburbs to meet his men and their young wives. All these men told my mother, “What a character! He’d get us up to a brigade headquarters waiting in reserve, and we’d deliver the letters by hand, company by company. Everyone knew him. Everyone cheered up when they saw us arrive in the truck.”

  My father once said that his great motivation as a postal sergeant was to get the letter in the hand of the possibly doomed soldier because “the poor buggers had been through enough.” In my father’s picture of things it was always the Depression, not imperial patriotism, that had driven men to enlist. Hitler had given these young men in the desert their job, and they were not to die at their work until all their mail was to hand. He himself declared that it was the Depression that had driven him to become a postman to the 9th Division. He believed it with considerable passion and might even have been testy to have the proposition challenged. But I know that my mother listened to the praise of his fortitude and determination with ambiguity. Because she was a veteran of the Depression too, and believed he had left her behind with two young children, myself and my brother, to voluntarily put his hand up for service overseas. And he was twenty-eight years old when he was sent to Africa, older than most recruits. The authorities had either dissuaded or ordered him away from his choice of being an infantryman, but he had still gone and seen the pyramids.

  The question is, when leaving home could be justified by world events, why had he taken the choice of leaving home? In terms no outsider could condemn, nor, without being misunderstood, could his wife. This question still hangs over his bed now, and I cannot quiz him straight out about it because for me he is the ultimate uninterviewable.

  No question that the stories abounded whenever we visited his men. Not only of letters delivered to retreating men in Benghazi under the great assault of Hitler’s General Rommel in the spring of 1942, but during the great leap forward later in the year, running in letters to Ruweisat Ridge near Alam Halfa, where the world was beginning to prepare itself to turn against the great Teutonic tyrant. On one occasion, he and his men had all been caught by Stuka dive-bombers and huddled together on the vibrating gravel of the desert coast. Previously they’d been forced to shelter from a German barrage, devoutly nuzzling the earth.

  Recently these tales of my father had made a late revival when a man came to our place to clean our carpets. He was the nephew of one of my father’s men and said he had been raised on stories about my father. Because apart from the matter of delivering mail to the support areas, my father had been an expert in taking over bars that were supposedly open only to officers. I remembered those stories had also been popular on the Sunday afternoons of my childhood, my father finding a bar in Cairo or Alexandria and moving behind it to reassure the barman, “Don’t worry about a thing, Hamid, I’ll take over from here. Give yourself a break, son!” Even Shepheard’s Hotel bar had not been immune from my father’s endeavors, and this was always the cause of the truest and longest laughter. The bushrangers taking over the bloody bars from the Pommy officers, waging a cultural war against the English whether Rommel was on the advance or in retreat.

  But the carpet cleaner’s favorite story was about the day my father and his men had visited the pyramids from their nearby camp in the desert west of Cairo. And while they were at the pyramids they witnessed the arrival of an enormous, aircraft carrier–sized vehicle belonging to King Farouk, king of Egypt and the Sudan, sovereign of Nubia, Kordofan, and Darfur. Apparently, King Farouk was there to visit the site of some new archaeological discovery. Far ahead of him lay exile and death in Italy, but his biggest problem that day was that he needed the Allies to hang on to Egypt. He was nominally neutral and had covered his considerable hide by sending a note to Adolf Hitler saying that an invasion would be welcome. But he was not prepared for my father, who under pressure of a dare from his men approached the king and asked him to give them a lift into Cairo in his car. Farouk was famous for the scale and the elegance of his cars’ carriage work. In any case, my father’s approach to Farouk did the trick and his entire section got a crammed lift back in the super-cruiser limo to the center of Cairo, where they were not supposed to be anyhow.

  * * *

  When my father finally came home, we were living in Sydney, and I knew that behind his boisterous mien he was depressed. And though I understand it now, I didn’t as a kid. All that driving about the desert, being shelled, being strafed, the sadness of delivering a letter to a soldier now dead, handing it instead to the man’s lieutenant or captain, in the consciousness that it was economic turpitude that had driven the addressee here and to supposedly immortal renown as a martyr! Thinking, what did all that count for now? The bri
o of persuading a king, what did it account for in our suburb on the western line?

  He had taken a vow, it seemed, not to have much to do with letters again. “I’m not going back to the bloody post office,” I remember him telling my uncle Frankie as they drank beer together. I can well understand now that delivering a letter in a suburb could have only the most hollow meaning after he had managed to deliver one to a corporal newly arrived in Alexandria from the siege around Tobruk. What could plain suburban mail mean after that? And I remember my mother not liking him to see letters that arrived for us, especially bills to be paid, which induced in him almost a sense of being bullied. “Capitalist bastards!” he would say if he saw such an envelope.

  He had wanted me to be tough and clever like himself, but after he returned from the war he could see that I’d cozied too closely to my mother, a bookish woman, insofar as any women from her hometown on the north coast were bookish. A woman who asked questions beyond that issue of delivering mail at all costs.

  As for me, I was the elder son. I was not given to the style of manhood as practiced by my father in the desert. I did move around in a loose gang consisting of the kids on our block between Parramatta Road and the railway line. Meeting children from another block, we would organize a pair to fight each other, according to the traditions of the boxing films we saw at the picture house on Parramatta Road. One day my father saw me matched against a boy a year older than me, raising my hands unavailingly and, in his view, weakly. He did not understand that I was making a late attempt at negotiation. As I faced my opponent by a garage entryway on the pavement, my father came out of the house and said hello to all the boys, no animus in his voice, and then he bent to me and said, “You get into him, son! I don’t want to see your arms stuck out in that way. Just remember, you only have to get in one good punch and he’ll remember you for the rest of his life!”