by Peter Carey
The locals will now tell you that when they visited the old man’s glasshouse they discovered the most beautiful rose that anyone could ever dream of. It was twice the size of a man’s fist and was almost black in colour, with just the faintest hint of red in its velvety petals.
When I visited the town in the spring of 1974, the rose, or one of its descendants, was still there, carefully nurtured by the townspeople and shown with pride to visitors.
The locals insist that you can smell the mass graves of Auschwitz in the glasshouse, and that the heavy, sweet odour of death emanates from this one black rose.
They have named it “The Auschwitz Rose” and have printed a cheap colour postcard to celebrate their peculiar good fortune.
He Found Her in Late Summer
1.
He found her in the later summer when the river ran two inches deep across glistening gravel beds and lay resting in black pools in which big old trout lay quietly in the cool water away from the heat of the sun. Occasionally a young rainbow might break the surface in the middle of the day, but the old fish did no such thing, either being too well fed and sleepy or, as the fisherman would believe, too old and wise to venture out at such a time.
Silky oaks grew along the banks and blackberries, dense and tangled, their fruit long gone into Dermott’s pies, claimed by birds, or simply rotted into the soil, vigorously reclaimed the well-trodden path which wound beside fallen logs, large rocks, and through fecund gullies where tree ferns sent out tender new fronds as soft and vulnerable as the underbellies of exotic moths.
In one such gully a fallen tree had revealed a cave inside a rocky bank. It was by no means an ideal cave. A spring ran continually along its floor. Great fistfuls of red clay fell frequently and in the heat of the day mosquitoes sheltered there in their swarming thousands.
Three stalks of bracken outside its dirty mouth had been broken and the sign of this intrusion made him lower his hessian bag of hissing crayfish and quietly peer inside.
It was there he found her, wild and mud-caked, her hair tangled, her fair skin scratched and festered and spotted with infected insect bites. She was no more than twenty years old.
For a long time they regarded each other quietly. He squatted on his heels and slapped at the mosquitoes that settled on his long, wiry brown legs. She, her eyes swollen, fed them without complaint.
He rolled down the sleeves of his plaid shirt and adjusted his worn grey hat. He pulled up his odd grey socks and shifted his weight.
She tugged at her dress.
At last he held out his hand in the way that one holds out a hand to a shy child, a gentle invitation that may be accepted or rejected.
Only when the hand was lowered did she hold hers out. It was small and white, a city hand with the last vestiges of red nail polish still in evidence. He took the hand and pulled her gently to her feet, but before a moment had passed she had collapsed limply onto the muddy floor.
Dermott adjusted his hat.
“I’m going to have to pick you up,” he said. It was, in a way, a question, and he waited for a moment before doing as he’d said. Then, in one grunting movement, he put her on his shoulders. He picked up the bag of crayfish and set off down the river, wading carefully, choosing this way home to save his passenger from the blackberry thorns which guarded the path along the banks.
Neither spoke to the other, but occasionally the girl clenched his shoulder tightly when they came to a rapid or when a snake, sleeping lightly on a hot rock, slipped silkily into the water as they approached.
Dermott carried his burden with pleasure yet he did not dwell on the reason for her presence in the cave or attempt to invent theories for her being so many hundred miles from a town. For all of these things would be dealt with later and to speculate on them would have seemed to him a waste of time.
As he waded the river and skirted the shallow edges of the pools he enjoyed his familiarity with it, and remembered the time twenty years ago when it was as strange to him as it must be to his silent guest. Then, with the old inspector, he had done his apprenticeship as his mother had wished him to, read books, learned to identify two hundred different dragonflies, studied the life cycle of the trout, and most particularly the habits of the old black crayfish which were to be his alone to collect. It was an intensive education for such a simple job, and he often reflected in later years that it may not have been, in an official sense, compulsory, but rather a private whim of the old inspector who had loved this river with a fierce protectiveness.
The examination had been a casual affair, a day trek in late spring from where the old Chinese diggings lay in soft mossy neglect to the big falls five miles upriver, yet at the end of it he had successfully identified some two hundred trees, thirty insects, three snakes, and described to the old inspector’s satisfaction the ancient history of the rocks in the high cliffs that towered above them.
It was only much later, after a child had died, a wife had left and floods had carried away most of his past, that he realized exactly what the old man had given him: riches more precious than he could ever have dreamed of. He had been taught to know the river with the quiet confident joy of a lover who knows every inch of his beloved’s skin, every hair, every look, whether it denoted the extremes of rage and passion or the quieter more subtle moods that lie between.
Which is not to suggest that he was never lonely or that the isolation did not oppress him at times, but there were few days in which he did not extract some joy from life, whether the joys be as light as the clear web of a dragonfly or as turbulent as the sun on the fast water below Three Day Falls.
The winters were the hardest times, for the river was brown and swollen then and crayfish were not to be had. Then he occupied himself with a little tin mining and with building in stone. His house, as the years progressed, developed a unique and eccentric character, its grey walls jutting out from the hillside, dropping down, spiralling up. And if few walls were quite vertical, few steps exactly level, it caused him no concern. Winter after winter he added more rooms, not from any need for extra space, but simply because he enjoyed doing it. Had ten visitors descended on him there would have been a room for each one, but there were few visitors and the rooms gave shelter to spiders and the occasional snake which feasted on mice before departing.
Once a gypsy had stayed during a period of illness and repaid his host with a moth-eaten rug of Asiatic origin. Other items of furniture were also gifts. An armchair with its stuffing hanging out had been left by a dour fisheries inspector who had carried it eighty miles on top of his Land Rover, knowing no other way to express his affection for this man on the river with his long silences and simple ways.
Books also were in evidence, and there was an odd assortment. Amongst them was a book on the nature of vampires, the complete works of Dickens, a manual for a motor car that now lay rusting in a ravine, and a science fiction novel entitled Venus in a Half-Shell. He had not, as yet, read any of them although he occasionally picked one up and looked at it, thinking that one day he would feast on the knowledge contained within. It would never have occurred to him that the contents of these books might reflect different levels of truth or reality.
“Nearly home,” he said. They had left the river and passed through the high bracken of Stockman’s Flat. He trudged in squelching boots along the rutted jeep track that led to the house. He was hot now, and tired. “Soon be there,” he said, and in a moment he had carried her through the thick walls of his house and gently lowered her down into the old armchair.
She huddled into the armchair while he filled a big saucepan with water and opened the draught on the stained yellow wood stove.
“Now,” he said, “we’ll fix you up.”
From the armchair the girl heard the words and was not frightened.
2.
There was about him a sense of pain long past, a slight limp of the emotions. His grey eyes had the bittersweet quality of a man who has grasped sorrow and carries it wi
th him, neither indignant at its weight nor ignorant of its value. So if his long body was hard and sinewy, if his hair was cut brutally short, there was also a ministering gentleness that the girl saw easily and understood.
He brought warm water in a big bowl to her chair and with it two towels that might once, long ago, have been white.
“Now,” he said, “one of us is going to wash you.”
He had large drooping eyelids and a shy smile. He shifted awkwardly from one waterlogged boot to the other. When she didn’t move he put the towels on the arm of the chair and the bowl of water on the flagstone floor. “Don’t worry about getting water on the floor,” he said.
She heard him squelch out of the room and, in a moment, imagined she heard a floor being swept elsewhere in the house. Outside the odd collection of windows she could see the tops of trees and below, somewhere, she heard the sound of the river.
She picked up a grey towel and went to sleep.
3.
The tin roof was supported by the trunks of felled trees. The stone walls were painted white, veiled here and there by the webs of spiders and dotted with the bodies of dead flies. In one corner was a bed made from rough logs, its lumpy mattress supported by three thicknesses of hessian. A tree brushed its flowers against the window and left its red petals, as fine and delicate as spider legs, caught in the webs that adorned the glass.
She lay naked on the bed and let him wash her.
Only when he came in embarrassed indecision to the vulva did she gently push his hand away.
When the washing was over he took a pair of tweezers, strangely precise and surgical, and removed what thorns and splinters he found in her fair skin. He bathed her cuts in very hot water, clearing away the yellow centres of red infections, and dressed each one with a black ointment from a small white jar which bore the legend, “For Man or Beast”.
He denied himself any pleasure he might have felt in touching her naked body, for that would have seemed wrong to him. When the wounds were all dressed he gave her an old-fashioned collarless shirt to wear for a nightdress and tucked her into bed. Only then did he allow himself the indulgence of thinking her pretty, seeing behind the cuts and swellings, the puffed eyelids, the tangled fair hair, a woman he might well have wished to invent.
She went to sleep almost immediately, her forehead marked with a frown.
He tiptoed noisily from the room and busied himself tidying up the kitchen in a haphazard fashion. But even while he worried over such problems as where to put a blackened saucepan his face broke continually into a grin. “Well,” he said, “wonders will never cease.”
When dinner came he presented her with two rainbow trout and a bowl of potatoes.
4.
It would be two days before she decided to walk and he passed these much as he would normally have, collecting the crayfish both morning and afternoon, gardening before lunch, fishing before dinner. Yet now he carried with him a new treasure, a warm white egg which he stored in some quiet dry part of his mind, and as he worked his way down the rows of tomato plants, removing the small green grubs with his fingers, he smiled more often than he would have done otherwise.
When a shadow passed over the tangled garden and he looked up to admire the soft drift of a small white cloud, he did not look less long than he would have normally but there was another thing which danced around his joy, an aura of a brighter, different colour.
Yet he was, through force of habit, frugal with his emotions, and he did not dwell on the arrival of the girl. In fact the new entry into his life often slipped his mind completely or was squeezed out by his concentration on the job at hand. But then, without warning, it would pop up again and then he would smile. “Fancy that,” he’d say. Or: “Well, I never.”
The girl seemed to prefer staying in the house, sometimes reading, often sleeping with one of Dermott’s neglected books clutched to her chest. The swellings were subsiding, revealing a rather dreamy face with a wide, sad mouth and slightly sleepy blue eyes. A haze of melancholy surrounded her. When she walked it was with the quiet distraction of a sleepwalker. When she sat, her slow eyes followed Dermott’s progress as he moved to and fro across the room, carrying hot water from the fire to the grimy porcelain sink, washing a couple of dishes, or one knife or two forks, stewing peaches from the tree in the garden, brewing a herb tea with a slightly bitter flavour, sweeping the big flagstone floor while he spread dirt from his hobnailed boots behind him, cleaning four bright-eyed trout, feeding the tame magpie that wandered in and out through the sunlit patch in the back door.
He whistled a lot. They were old-fashioned optimistic songs, written before she was born.
When, finally, she spoke, it was to talk about the sweeping.
“You’re bringing more dirt in than you’re sweeping out.”
He did not look surprised that she had spoken but he noted the softness of her voice and hoarded it away with delight. He considered the floor, scratching his bristly head and rubbing his hand over his newly shaven chin. “You’re quite correct,” he said. He sat on the long wooden bench beneath the windows and began to take off his boots, intending to continue the job in stockinged feet.
“Here,” she said, “give it to me.”
He gave her the broom. A woman’s touch, he smiled, never having heard of women’s liberation.
5.
That night at dinner she told him her story, leaning intently over the table and talking very softly.
It was beyond his experience, involving drugs, men who had abused her, manipulated her, and finally wished to kill her. He was too overwhelmed by it to really absorb it. He sat at the table absently cleaning a dirty fork with the tablecloth. “Fancy that,” he would say. Or: “You’re better off now.” And again: “You’re better off without them, that’s all.”
From the frequency of these comments she judged that he wished her to be quiet, but really they were produced by his feeling of inadequacy in the face of such a strange story. He was like a peasant faced with a foreigner who speaks with a strange accent, too overcome to recognize the language as his own.
What he did absorb was that Anna had been treated badly by the world and was, in some way, wounded because of it.
“You’ll get better here,” he said. “You’ve come to the right place.”
He smiled at her, a little shyly, she thought. For a brief instant she felt as safe and comfortable as she had ever been in her life and then fear and suspicion, her old friends, claimed her once more. Her skin prickled and the wind in the trees outside sounded forlorn and lonely.
She sat beside the kerosene lamp surrounded by shadows. That the light shone through her curling fair hair, that Dermott was almost unbearably happy, she was completely unaware.
6.
Weeks passed and the first chill of autumn lay along the river. Dermott slowly realized that Anna’s recovery would not be as fast as he had imagined, for her lips remained sad and the sleepy eyes remained lustreless and defeated.
He brought things for her to marvel at—a stone, a dried-out frog, a beetle with a jewel-like shell — but she did not welcome the interruptions and did not try to hide her lack of interest, so he stood there with the jewel in his hand feeling rather stupid.
He tried to interest her in the river, to give to her the pleasure the old inspector had given him, but she stood timidly on the bank wearing a dress she had made from an old sheet, staring anxiously at the ground around her small flat feet.
He stood in the water wearing only baggy khaki shorts and a battered pair of tennis shoes. She thought he looked like an old war photo.
“Nothing’s going to bite you,” he said. “You can stand in the water.”
“No.” She shook her head.
“I’ll teach you how to catch crays.”
“No.”
“That’s a silky oak.”
She didn’t even look where he pointed. “You go. I’ll stay here.”
He looked up at the sky with his h
ands on his hips. “If I go now I’ll be away for two hours.”
“You go,” she insisted. The sheet dress made her look as sad as a little girl at bedtime.
“You’ll be lonely. I’ll be thinking that you’re lonely,” he explained, “so it won’t be no fun. Won’t you be lonely?”
She didn’t say no. She said, “You go.”
And he went, finally, taking that unsaid no with him, aware that his absence was causing her pain. He was distracted and cast badly. When a swarm of caddis flies hatched over a still dark pool he did not stay to cast there but pushed on home with the catch he had: two small rainbows. He had killed them without speaking to them.
He found her trying to split firewood, frowning and breathing hard.
“You’re holding the axe wrong,” he said, not unkindly.
“Well, how should I hold it then?”
She stood back with her hands on her hips. He showed her how to do it, trying to ignore the anger that buzzed around her.
“That’s what I was doing,” she said.
He retired to tend the garden and she thought he was angry with her for intruding into his territory. She did not know that his mother had been what they called “a woman stockman” who was famous for her toughness and self-reliance. When she saw him watching her she thought it was with disapproval. He was keeping an anxious eye on her, worried that she was about to chop a toe off.
7.
“Come with me.”
“No, you go.”
That is how it went, how it continued to go. A little litany.
“Come, I’ll teach you.”
“I’m happy here.”
“When I get back you’ll be unhappy.”
Over and over, a pebble being washed to and fro in a rocky hole.
“I can’t enjoy myself when you’re unhappy.”
