‘She’s all refuelled and loaded for the morning,’ says Vassily, the words muffled by the shirt he’s lifting over his head. ‘I thought you’d gone home already.’
‘Who’s on tonight?’ says Alex.
‘Security? Pyotr, I think.’
‘Good. I have some paperwork,’ Alex says, waving a hand. ‘I’ll be in later.’ He locks up the letters and goes out to the car. The evening is light and warm and cumulus fractus recedes beautifully into the far distance towards Siberia. From habit he traces the scars of wind across the sky to the east, checks the budding cauliflower formations, the updraught pressing against their flat bottoms. Tomorrow there will be good seeding clouds.
Vassily passes him in the car park, offers a nod. ‘See you tomorrow, Captain,’ he says. ‘Don’t work too hard.’
Alex drives through the gate and turns the wrong way. He heads back towards Mr Ravka’s place, to the north of the city. It’s a long drive. The press of houses turns into sparser villages and then into woods.
He knocks three times before Mr Ravka answers. There is a tv sound coming out from the top of the house, floating through the hole.
‘Good evening, Mr Ravka,’ he says. ‘I am sorry to be so persistent. But the thing is this.’
‘Yes?’
The tarp behind him flaps a little in the summer breeze.
Alex means to apologise but when he opens his mouth, it is too ticklish for speech. He coughs, embarrassed. ‘You see, I –’
‘Something wrong?’
He waves a hand in the air and sneezes. The allergies. The back of his nose feels strafed by fire.
Mr Ravka steps out onto the mat, closes the door behind him. ‘What do you want?’ he says. He is a short man but his face is threatening, tilted up at Alex’s. Alex composes himself.
‘I am sorry, Mr Ravka.’
‘Which is useless,’ says the shorter man.
‘I know,’ says Alex. Useless, he thinks, and not even true. The apology solves nothing. He feels no better. A sneeze clusters in his nose but dissipates before it bombs. He presses the handkerchief to his face.
‘Look, do you want to try it?’ He snuffles.
‘Try what?’
‘The thing is, Mr Ravka, I have a house. If you would like to try.’
He peers at the pilot stripes, the small eyes blink. ‘You were flying the plane,’ he says.
Alex nods.
‘I’ll get my shoes,’ he says. Before Mr Ravka goes back inside, he turns his neat little head and shakes it at Alex, like a teacher confronted with an amusing wrong answer.
In the car Mr Ravka tells Alex that his name is George. He’s not a doctor or a teacher; he used to fix radios, but he’s retired. They stop at Alex’s house to turn on all the lights. The summer nights are bright, but lights will help.
‘You live alone?’ Mr Ravka says, looking at the few neat ornaments, the small kitchen table with two chairs, one covered in books. Alex nods.
‘Daughter?’
‘Niece.’ The girl is pictured at her graduation. Now a microbiologist in America, grown kids of her own. Alex is embarrassed. His house is bigger, cleaner, more intact than Mr Ravka’s. But empty.
‘You should get a dog,’ Mr Ravka says.
‘My allergies.’ Alex shrugs.
‘Ah, bad luck.’
‘I don’t mind,’ Alex says.
He’s looking out the tall window at the trees in sideways sunlight, now also lit from below by his strong outside lights. They look like rustling green storm clouds, cumulonimbus, cumulus congestus, dark and patient. Alex grabs his coat off the couch, because although it’s warm outside it’s cold up there.
‘Let’s go,’ he says.
Alex tells Mr Ravka to climb into the back and hide his head under the coat as they approach the airstrip, and he does so without protest.
‘Hello, Pyotr,’ Alex says into the guard’s box. ‘I have some paperwork. How are the wedding plans coming along?’ His daughter, next weekend.
‘Vicious,’ he says. ‘I am being mauled by women.’
‘There are worse fates. See you on the way out,’ Alex says.
‘All right, Captain.’
Alex opens the roller door and shows Mr Ravka the bags of cement. The boys have stacked them neatly on top of each other. Most of the labels face the same way. They are good boys and he will miss their professionalism, which has endured so much.
Alex shows him the canisters and the instruments. Mr Ravka moves restlessly around the room, nodding at everything.
‘The canisters break open and the powder spreads into the cloud and weighs it down,’ he says. ‘The silver iodide makes it crystallise.’
‘And last month it didn’t,’ says Mr Ravka.
‘A little water gets into the canister here, and –’ Alex makes the slide-whistle sound of a bomb falling. Then he turns off the tap and closes the canister.
‘You can make it snow?’
‘Yes. But mostly rain.’
‘Can you make it stop snowing? In a hard winter?’ He turns to examine a poster of a Polikarpov Po-2.
Alex shakes his head at the man’s bent back, a lifetime of broken radios. ‘I’ll get the keys,’ he says.
Mr Ravka turns around. ‘Why are you doing this?’
Alex hesitates. ‘Think of it as . . . an eye for an eye. A roof for a roof. Because of all your trouble.’
‘Surely you’ll lose your job,’ he says.
‘I retire tomorrow.’
Mr Ravka hesitates, then nods, settles on something, and grins. There’s a tooth missing on one side, towards the back.
‘Okay,’ he says.
Alex straps Mr Ravka into his seat and gets Pyotr on the radio. ‘I’m taking the 340 for a test run, she was playing up today. Won’t be out long.’
‘Right you are,’ says Pyotr.
‘Safety first,’ Alex adds. ‘Over.’
Mr Ravka stifles a noise in his throat. Alex runs through the routine instrument check, buckles himself in. He shows Mr Ravka the button that releases the catch on the wings where the canisters are held.
‘Don’t press that until I tell you,’ he says.
Alex takes off to the south and flies in a smooth arc to the west, towards his house. The wind is light and they reach four thousand feet without difficulty.
‘There’s your place.’ Alex spots the patch of blue tarp and points it out to Mr Ravka. The sun bobbing along the horizon gets into his eyes, so Alex banks and turns to head east, towards the village near his own house. He can soon see it shining in the distance, bright as an alien ship in the long St Petersburg dusk. He flies over once at a comfortable altitude. Things don’t just look smaller from the air, they look more connected. You can see the patterns, the way people clump together. Alex points out his house, sees how it sits apart, snug with the curve of a hill, pushing out a circle of trees.
‘I’ll do another pass – get ready,’ he says. He can feel Mr Ravka looking at the side of his head, but does not check for the expression.
Alex makes a ninety-degree turn, then another, letting the plane lose altitude. He needs to be high enough to do some damage, but close enough to be sure of a hit. He feels stronger than before, focused, almost has the adrenaline rush of a young man flying a bomber. His last flight, he supposes. Make it count for something.
He ducks and turns, passing low over the trees towards the house. He can see the tops of pines bend and shake away from the plane. Flying, he knows the moment, knows the right shape of the curve it will make, where it will end.
‘Now,’ Alex shouts.
Mr Ravka moves his hand. Alex flies almost straight up, loops fast and tight before he remembers that his passenger might be afraid. When he looks across Mr Ravka is clin
ging to the seat but smiling.
‘Another?’
‘Yes,’ Mr Ravka shouts, ‘but no more upside down!’
Alex passes over the house again. He is absorbed in his flying, and when he calls ‘Now’ for a second time he doesn’t see the man’s hand float over the button, for the second time float past without touching it.
They return at a higher altitude, easing above the few low clouds.
‘Seems to be clearing,’ Alex says.
Mr Ravka doesn’t answer. Alex gazes past him, out to where St Petersburg lies glowing and smoky in the evening sun. The Nevsky hums, the bridges shine; the city’s miraculous islands disappear behind a forest of grim tower blocks. It is the last time he will see it from the air.
‘What are you going to do,’ says Mr Ravka, ‘when you retire?’
‘I don’t know. I suppose I’ll make myself useful.’ Alex shrugs. ‘Fix my roof.’
Mr Ravka coughs. ‘Ah,’ he says.
Acknowledgments
‘Aperture’, ‘Architecture’ and ‘Demolition’ were written during an Asialink residency in Beijing in 2010, for which I am very grateful.
A few of these stories were improved, and the manuscript encouraged, by a week-long master class at Varuna, the Writer’s House, with Cate Kennedy and Robin Hemley in 2010.
Several of these stories have appeared previously in the following journals and anthologies – many thanks to the editors of these publications for their support:
‘The air you need’ in Escape: An anthology of short stories (Spineless Wonders, 2011), edited by Bronwyn Mehan.
‘An innocent man’ in Meanjin 69.1.
‘Aperture’ in Meanjin 70.3.
‘The capital of missing persons’ in Page Seventeen 6, Award Winning Australian Writing (Melbourne Books, 2009), and Fishtails in the Dust: Writing from the Centre (Ptilotus Press, 2009), edited by Janet Hutchinson.
‘Crow season’ in Total Cardboard 8 (as ‘On the Outside’), Adelaide Advertiser and Alice Springs News.
‘Extra time’ in Overland 194.
‘The lap’ in Mini Shots 10 (Vignette Press, 2007), and broadcast on radio 2SER’s Final Draft in 2007.
‘Look down with me’ in Bruno’s Song and other Stories from the Northern Territory (Northern Territory Writers’ Centre, 2011), edited by Bronwyn Mehan and Sandra Thibodeaux, and The Best Australian Stories 2011 (Black Inc., 2011), edited by Cate Kennedy.
‘The milk in the sky’ in The Milk in the Sky: Writing from the Centre (Ptilotus Press, 2006), edited by Janet Hutchinson, and broadcast on the National Year of Reading 2012 website.
‘Moth’ in New Australian Stories 2 (Scribe, 2010), edited by Aviva Tuffield.
‘Plain Indians’ in Award Winning Australian Writing (Melbourne Books, 2009) and Fishtails in the Dust: Writing from the Centre (Ptilotus Press, 2009), edited by Janet Hutchinson.
‘Prospect’ in Meanjin 69.3.
‘Reason’ in Alice Springs News and The Best Australian Stories 2007 (Black Inc., 2007), edited by Robert Drewe.
‘The rest is weight’ in Meanjin 71.1
‘Roadhouse’ in Total Cardboard 8, The Milk in the Sky: Writing from the Centre (Ptilotus Press, 2006), edited by Janet Hutchinson, and broadcast on the National Year of Reading 2012 website.
‘A selfish prayer’ in Page Seventeen 5.
‘The shipping views’ (as ‘Water views’) in Total Cardboard 6 and Herding Kites: A celebration of Australian writing (Affirm Press, 2008), edited by Michael Williams.
‘The wind and other children’ in Heat 16.
First published 2012 by University of Queensland Press
PO Box 6042, St Lucia Queensland 4067, Australia
www.uqp.com.au
© Jennifer Mills 2012
This book is copyright. Except for private study, research, criticism or reviews, as permitted under the Copyright Act, no part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means without prior written permission. Enquiries should be made to the publisher.
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Cover artwork by Maurizio Cattelan, Novecento, 1997, taxidermied horse, leather saddle, rope and pulley, 200.5cm × 269cm × 68.5cm; installation at Castello di Rivoli, Museo d’Art Contemporanea, Turin; courtesy of the artist and Marian Goodman Gallery, New York
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The Rest is Weight / Jennifer Mills
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