Yet when the old spud-woman got to the coffin and looked inside it she saw not the old man lying there but Sonja, and Sonja was looking up the coffin’s walls and seeing a slow avalanche of flowers, the most beautiful flowers in the world falling on her. Sonja felt at peace lying in that coffin, felt no fear watching the flower petals raining down. Her gaze wandered up from the heavy boots and coarse stockings to the black dress and floral apron, until it finally arrived at that face, an extraordinary, scarfed face, angular, beautiful, and young, oh so young, no longer that of the old spud-woman, but the face of her own mother, Maria.
And through the shower of petals, she was smiling down at Sonja.
When Sonja woke the morning after her dream, she rose as she had done for many months, lifting herself up from her bed slowly, cautiously, fearing pain. But she found she was able to push herself up easily. She looked at her arms. They were clear. The red dryness of the eczema was almost entirely gone, her skin no longer dry pastry flaking.
It was a Sunday and Bojan was not working. She found him in the kitchen, placing onto a wooden chopping board on the table a large, old black cast-iron frying pan spitting and hissing sweet fatty sounds. Freshly fried eggs, yolks still wet, whites bubbling like living lava, studded with tomatoes and Polish sausage.
Before Bojan had even looked up to see her Sonja spoke: ‘Artie! Artie! My arms are better!’
Bojan turned, picked Sonja up, examined her arms, smiled at her. He noticed a chamomile flower in her hair and picked it out, tickled her nose with it, and ran it down her arm to her elbow.
‘Kamílica,’ he laughed. Then in a mock serious voice repeated. ‘Kamílica.’ And they both laughed.
Bojan put Sonja down.
‘Now we eat,’ said Bojan.
With pieces of thickly sliced continental bread they ate Slovenian fashion from the pan, bursting the yolks and scooping up bits of egg, sausage and tomato all together on a single piece of broken bread, laughing and smiling as they did so, for the food was good and the food they shared as one, pushing yellow and white and red into their mouths, feeling sweet and hot and sharp and fatty in their gobs.
Chapter 29
1960
THE HEANEYS were that sort of family who were everywhere, that sort whose kids spread unavoidably like spilt gravy over the street—dirty and brown and everywhere and difficult to avoid and difficult to be rid of, that sort who stood by neighbours’ fences asking them questions as to why they did this or that in the garden, only to then belabour them with details on how their Dad—who, in the neighbours’ view, by and large did nothing, except head back to work fishing when his family got too much for him, which was frequently—how their Dad did such things and how they really ought do it their Dad’s way. That sort of family they were, whose kids terrorise the pavements on broken-down old bikes that seemed unsafe at any speed, let alone the subsonic speeds at which they hurtled into oncoming traffic, only to swerve out of its way with a gleeful laugh at the last moment, the sort whose mouths ran even more than their perpetually runny noses, but who would always help when neighbours needed help, and on several occasions when they didn’t. How many Heaneys? Heaven knows, the street would declare with a sigh, for this was a matter of ongoing contention: sober estimates put their number at six, but the frequent influx of cousins who could stay any amount of time from a few hours to a few months made any sort of guesswork difficult.
For Sonja they were fascinating creatures from another world: freckly, snotty aliens; and she took to sitting at the head of the driveway leading down to the wog flat, watching with wonder the mob of Heaneys playing in and around the dilapidated, unpainted concrete-block house that was their home across the street, not so much in the hope of playing with them as simply observing them and their antics. For a long time she would not have been able to say what it was that attracted her to the Heaneys, until the day when she saw a Heaney boy bearing down the road, riding an old bike far too big for him no-hands, while at the same time trying to juggle three mandarins which, it transpired, were not his but those of the Greek shopkeeper Mr John Kerr—whose change of name by deed poll was to be later deemed by history as less than fortunate—who was loping behind at some distance, yelling angrily. It was a most magnificent sight: a stick-thin child on a ridiculous old bone-shaker, lost in his dreams of lightness and wonder, pursued by a rotund rocket of a man.
It was also folly. The boy failed at the juggling, dropping first one, then two mandarins, and with his harmony broken and dreams disappearing earthwards, he mistakenly leant a little too far out to his left trying to catch the third mandarin. The front wheel jack-knifed sideways, the bike lurched and came to an abrupt halt—unlike its rider who half-catapulted, half-fell what seemed to Sonja a considerable distance to the ground. Upon touching down, he was about to bellow when upon looking up he saw hovering over him the red-faced visage of Mr John Kerr glaring down.
‘Well,’ he then said, each word a gulp, ‘I could hardly use watermelons.’ As though his theft of the mandarins had been somehow appropriate and modest.
Sonja—unlike Mr John Kerr, who grabbed the boy by the ear and marched him off to see his mother—burst out laughing. The Heaneys, Sonja realised, made her feel happy.
The children’s mother, a large, rapidly ageing, and perennially pregnant woman known to the street only as Mrs Heaney, was already coming out of the house having appraised herself of the situation from the lounge window. She hit the street in the manner of a beach landing by the marines in the movies, attempting to make up for a certain weakness in her position with an overwhelming display of force that was largely illusion. She hooled into Mr John Kerr to leave the poor child alone, asked the street what was the point having a tick if Mr John Kerr couldn’t even put a few lousy bits of fruit on it, and why should any of them bother taking business to someone who didn’t even understand how credit worked, blustering so much that in the end the shopkeeper did no more than give the boy’s ear a final savage twist, turned on his heels and headed off, issuing under his breath several dreadful curses in the language of his forefathers.
Mrs Heaney then turned her fire onto the hapless juggler of mandarins. ‘That’ll be the last time you’ll be allowed on that bloody thing if ya keep that nonsense up. And you’re not to nick. You know that: no bloody nicking. When your father’s back from sea—’ She looked up and noticed Sonja sitting opposite. Halting her invective, Mrs Heaney called one of her girls to her side and as she spoke to her, pointed a finger in Sonja’s direction.
The girl walked slowly over to Sonja, but even so her gait was a skipping one. She fronted up to Sonja and though both girls now faced each other, each looked anywhere but at the other.
‘Gday,’ the Heaney girl said after a time, twisting her mouth and looking downwards at the path where her right foot kicked at the brown gravel.
‘Gday,’ said Sonja, looking up at the hydro wires overhead.
‘Mum says we should be playing with you,’ said the girl, and she looked up, ‘cos otherwise you might think we were just snubbin’ you cos you’re a wog like.’
The introduction had been well intentioned if appallingly delivered. Not knowing what to say, Sonja said nothing.
‘Moira,’ said the girl, after a long time waiting in vain for Sonja to speak. ‘Moira Heaney.’
Unlike the rest of the Heaneys, who were inclined to be small and weedy, seeming to bear strongest resemblance in size and speed and proclivities to the ferrets which Mr Heaney kept in a cage in their backyard for his rabbiting, Moira, though also dark, was verging on chubby, and slightly clumsy in her movements. Her long hair, constantly messy, was today done in a rough top-knot that sat like an exhausted exclamation mark above her constantly grinning face. Her voice was loud, her laughter raucous, her games seemed inevitably to lead to some adventure or disaster or more normally both. Her voice was slow and sing-songy, the inflexion rising at the end of sentences, and it was this accent that Sonja was to take as her own for the rest of her life, for
she unconsciously wished to be like this person who saw herself not as fat and awkward, but as having in life an invitation to an event that was to be enjoyed at all costs.
Over time this friendship grew, an attraction of opposites, Sonja as quiet and reserved as Moira was loud and ebullient. Sonja taught Moira Slovenian words. Moira taught her gammoning. To gammon was to imagine, and that was what Moira liked doing most of all, organising all the other Heaneys and anybody else she could find in the street, into all sorts of curious games.
Moira’s method of introducing Sonja to the family was typical: Mr and Mrs Heaney’s bedroom was organised by Moira into a riotous confusion, the double bed an elaborate theatre stage. The room was filled with Heaneys and assorted others. Moira stood up on the bed and announced—‘And then from far away—’ then waited, a dramatic pause, while Sonja, clad in an outrageous combination of old scarves and hats and clothes of Mrs Heaney’s, all of which gave her an appearance at once slightly magnificent and somewhat ridiculous, slowly climbed up the chairs onto the bed. Moira dropped her head and theatrically swept her head right around as if taking them all into her confidence, and continued in a low hush ‘—came the Princess of the Orient.’
Like a queen Sonja walked into the centre of the bed and spread her arms out wide as Moira had instructed her. Moira looked at Sonja with affection and pride.
And then yelled: ‘The Princess of the Orient! Best and fairest of them all!’
Everyone cheered Sonja.
At that moment a back leg gave way under the weight of a tribe of trampolining Heaneys. Before the bed had even finished collapsing, before Sonja had picked herself back off the floor onto which she had fallen, the room was empty of everybody, save Moira, who was tugging at Sonja’s arm, telling her to scram before Mum found out.
But Mrs Heaney, who quickly arrived at the scene of the crime, was philosophical. ‘That bed was buggered long before you kids got on it,’ she said, helping Sonja to her feet. ‘The main thing is—are you alright?’
Sonja smiled. She felt she was almost a real person. She felt her face stretch so much with smiling she worried that it might grow too tired to keep going. She felt she was somebody else. Different. And that it was possible to be somebody else and still be you. And she started to giggle at how funny it was, at how life could be so funny and so warm, and she laughed and brayed and cackled and giggled and no matter how hard she tried, she could not stop laughing.
Chapter 30
1989
THE SMELL OF FLESH, fallible and fecund, was slashed by the knife-sharp scent of the cleaners’ methylated spirits. Shreds of odours came to Helvi’s nose as lacerated suggestions of rancid sweat and clotting blood and mucus, and she found them difficult to match with birth, whose imminence is so often greeted with the expectation of a life better, more fulfilling, more meaningful than that which it is about to succeed.
She wiped her nose with a tissue, and turned to look down the long, caterpillaring row of cheap plastic chairs set against the public maternity hospital’s waiting-room wall, minuscule segments of the chain punctuated by yet another woman’s swollen belly. Some of the women were very young—fourteen and fifteen years old—and some of them looked already beaten and worn out by life. Their clothes, tracksuit pants and Esprit tops and the like, though suggestive of affluence, were rather the modern apparel of poverty. Here and there a mother’s mother, old beyond their short age, hard-faced beyond sadness that their promise might have come to this despair. An occasional boy-father, lizard thin, all bum-fluff moustache and flannelette shirt and fingers searching for forbidden cigarettes, feigning a nonchalance that fooled nobody, least of all themselves. Upon the walls pasted and pinned posters telling of domestic violence and rape and child abuse and AIDS, the varied and bitter truths shrouded by the promise of hope whose name is birth.
One of the many bellies—though hers was yet little bloated—in the caterpillar chain belonged to Sonja, who sat next to Helvi. Sonja did not even wear looser clothes, though she felt her thickening as a tightness that pressed outwards, a heaviness that dragged her earthward with the power of sleep. She glanced at Helvi, still and observant as a bird on a branch, slightly bowed, but with the assured strength of those who have known only hard labour, and Sonja wondered if it was her own future she was seeing and if it was a future she wanted.
Some children were playing with a ball. Without warning the ball strayed and hit Helvi in the chest, dropping into her lap. The fixed, hard old face opened like land after a drought to welcoming rain, both brown and blue eyes sparkled, and the old woman chortled, then laughed, then chiacked the kids, and threw the ball elsewhere, laughing all the while with such gusto that a few mothers gave her a reproachful eye.
A nurse holding a clipboard looked down at her notes and then up in the vague direction of Sonja, eyes roaming back and forth.
‘Ms Buloh?’ she asked.
Without waiting for Helvi, Sonja headed through the door indicated. By the time Helvi had reached down, picked up her handbag, and looked up again, Sonja was disappearing into an examination room. Helvi felt slightly bewildered, but recognising she was not welcome to follow, sat back down to wait for Sonja’s return.
A pair of translucent plastic gloves peeled off and fell into the alligator mouth of a bright yellow bin. The fleshy hands of an obstetrics registrar dropped to a wood-grained laminex desktop and picked up a pen.
In the windowless cell of the examination room his voice was young: sleek and full, of achievement, of expectations, of confidence. The accent was as smooth and deodorised as the skin of his ever so smooth, downturned face. The words purred forth with no rough edges, no betrayal of anything other than comfort.
‘Congratulations,’ he said, ‘you’re ten weeks pregnant.’
Sonja rose from lying on her back to sitting in an upright position on the examination table. She looked blankly at him, saw a short, trim man with strong black hair already thinning, not good looking, but immaculately groomed as if he had been shot out of a hairdryer. Those oddly fleshy fingers began to fidget.
‘Of course, we may have to run some blood tests. Being thirty-eight years of age and having had two previous abortions, the risks of complications in this pregnancy are, let us say, greater than for a younger woman without your medical history. But, in your case, everything for the time being seems fine.’
The obstetrics registrar felt obligated to continue until he gained some reaction.
‘The risk of spontaneous abortion is of course increased.’
Noticing Sonja’s face displaying some interest he continued.
‘Spontaneous abortion—a miscarriage, as it is commonly termed.’
It was amazing, thought the obstetrics registrar, how shocked people were that miscarriages still occurred. He could have told her how they were in fact commonplace, of how foetuses and babies, for all the wonder and science of medicine, still died. And he could have told her how he had chosen obstetrics to specialise in because he hated the corporeality of flesh, its insistence in decay that medicine, for all its gaudy brilliance, was unable ultimately to deny. Yet even here, in a field that ought only to have been about aiding the gestation and delivery of life, life still revealed itself as inextricably linked with death. He had resolved to not accept this, to fight it with all his skill, and yet that morning he had to assist in the delivery of a stillborn six-month foetus, whose parents, to his horror, had insisted on naming and even photographing—as if the dead foetus was something, when it was to him nothing, evidence only of the cruel anarchy of flesh. And now here was a woman who, presented with the possibility of a new life, seemed uninterested to the point of a mute hostility.
He found life was not only ignorant, but the more he learnt in his chosen profession, inexplicable. Of course, he said none of this, instead tried to focus upon the triathlon he was to compete in the following weekend.
‘But I stress, at the moment all is well, and with careful management all will continue to be
well.’
Sonja heard his words but not what was being said.
‘All will be well?’ she asked herself.
She stared at the obstetrics registrar, this young man striving hard to convey a sense of secure belief. She did not like the way his lower mouth protruded in a strangely belligerent way as he spoke.
‘Yes.’
Sonja looked away, thinking.
The obstetrics registrar felt that she wished to say something.
‘There is nothing else is there, Ms Buloh?’
Sonja looked up, her mind obviously elsewhere, and rose to her feet to leave.
‘No,’ said Sonja. ‘Nothing.’
He could not remember her name when he bade her farewell, but he knew how to handle such lapses without causing embarrassment. Manner is half the battle, he thought. Out in the waiting room, patients and nurses looked up at the door opening.
He smiled.
Let them see, he thought, that I am a good and caring man.
Chapter 31
1990
SUCH WAS THE STRANGE, hesitant manner in which Sonja Buloh came slowly and with numerous second thoughts to accept that she was not to return to Sydney and not to have an abortion. Not through words, or by actions, but by a lack of actions, a resignation to letting things be. But it was to take her much longer to think of her life in terms of things that she was now to do, rather than in terms of things that she was no longer to do.
It was one thing to ring through her resignation from the job she suddenly realised with joy she had always hated and from which it was presumed, reasonably accurately, that she had simply fled; to make arrangements to have her Sydney flat packed up, vacated, and her few possessions shipped southwards to Tasmania, when it was simply costing her a great deal of money from a rapidly emptying account to keep the flat up. These affairs seemed to Sonja only acknowledging the obvious direction destiny had taken her. Like apologising for a hair appointment you missed the day before. They were but her agreement with life that it and not she determined what would be. But it was an entirely different matter to actually initiate new directions for her life, to find a new job, to find a new place to live, to say to others as she was unable to say even to herself for some months, ‘I am having a baby come next year’.
The Sound of One Hand Clapping Page 12