The Sound of One Hand Clapping

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The Sound of One Hand Clapping Page 14

by Richard Flanagan


  ‘What do they mean?’ he would ask the Italian, who they both pretended was cleverer. ‘What the fucken hell do any of that mean?’ Bojan had the Italian even write them all down, all these deceptive words, then made him define each one for Bojan. But for every definition the Italian threw up Bojan would demonstrate that the words actually really meant nothing at all, that they were simply ways of not understanding, not seeing, not hearing, as though they were some deliberate, conscious refusal to see the sad, mad, bad world as it is. Bojan sometimes wished he could believe in these words that clearly meant so much to others, wished for belief itself, but all he knew and comprehended was that bread was bread, some good, mostly bad, that paprika and tomato went well together particularly in a bowl with polenta, and that garlic and sauerkraut did not, that the Italian’s explanations would give you a headache but that a strong turkish coffee with the juice of half a lemon would cure it, that laminex chipped, that wood could snap. He did not even believe in himself but only his hands’ capacity to measure and cut and join wood. His words were few and rough, but he was rightly wary of using any others.

  ‘You want me to finish reading it?’ the Italian asked, tired of waiting for Bojan to say something.

  ‘Sure,’ said Bojan Buloh.

  Bojan Buloh picked a half-empty long-necked bottle up off the floor, took a swig, folded his arms loosely across his lap, and looked down. The Italian scanned the letter until he found where he had got to before Bojan had snatched the letter out of his hands, coughed, looked up at Bojan, looked back down at the letter, asked Bojan once more, ‘Sure?’

  ‘Sure?’ said Bojan. ‘Sure I’m fucken sure.’

  Chapter 34

  1990

  IN A HEAVY ACCENT, speaking in a stilted, slow voice, as though he were declaiming from a stage, the Italian resumed reading out aloud: ‘…so I chose to stay in Tasmania to have the baby,’ adding as a narrator’s aside, ‘—that’s where I got to before.’ Bojan’s downward-cast head nodded. The Italian continued. ‘It’s due mid-year, the first of June in fact, or so the doctors reckon.’

  Bojan’s eyes moved upwards from the floor to better see the Italian reading the letter. But his face remained fixed as if it were a mask.

  Thinking that Bojan’s shock was now over, his Italian workmate became genuinely excited.

  ‘Eh, Bojan—so you are to be grandfather. Bloody Bojan poppa. Bloody hell. Congratulations.’

  ‘Nothing to do with me. That’s her business. Just fucken read the thing.’

  The Italian stood up, letter in one hand, stubby in the other. Like Bojan he was middle-aged and had seen much hardship, though he was softer, more open, and more manipulative than Bojan. He was also embarrassed and a little mystified at Bojan’s response. He rubbed the side of his head with the stubby. Then returned to his curious reading from the letter, at once stilted and dramatic, ludicrous yet poignant after his fashion.

  ‘Maybe when it’s born we’ll come over to see you, and you can come and visit us sometimes.

  ‘At the moment I have a job in a pub and am staying with Helvi and Jiri who are lovely to me. We have a found a place for me to live in, which is not grand but is cheap. I move in next month. Helvi and Jiri send their love, as I do. I hope you are well. Your daughter, Sonja.’

  The Italian relaxed, sat back down, took a swig from his stubby, assumed a conversational tone, and said, ‘There are some kisses at the bottom.’ He took another good long guzzle of beer, burped, and said, ‘I’ll do you a good little reply to that. Only cost you a dozen stubbies.’

  Bojan Buloh would have liked to believe that he and Sonja could find something together, he would have liked to believe that it was possible just to believe, but that, of course, he knew was not possible.

  He remembered when he was a child, remembered how it was a time of war, how his mother—she of the third eye—how she had predicted that the rivers would run with blood, and how they had: on good days just the slightest tinge rapidly dissipating in the currents, on the bad days frothing pink. He remembered how people believed in lots of things then, in the national revolution that would throw the oppressors out, in the Domobran that would keep them in but on reasonable terms, how they believed in each other and how every belief was betrayed.

  Bojan Buloh spoke often to his long-dead mother, not having anyone else much to talk to in Tullah, and particularly having no-one else to talk to of the food he ate as a child. He would ask her advice on recipes and most particularly tastes. He would hold a spoon wet with pot stirrings or salad dressing and say, ‘But is that it, Mama? Is it right in here?’ and point to his mouth, and then laugh, saying sheepishly, proudly, ‘Well bloody hell Mama I think it’s not too bloody bad I think.’

  He would have liked to believe that he and Sonja might share such moments, but he had seen a world dissolve into blood and yet people still went about their daily lives, still were possessed of envy and avarice and saw others only as having somehow caused their misery, and yet as a child all he could see was blood. Blood spurting from the ten villagers they machine-gunned in front of the assembled schoolchildren in reprisal for a partisan killing of one of their soldiers, and no child allowed to close their eyes. Blood congealing in dark crusts over the partisan’s body they shot outside the barn of his aunt’s farm, that body they forbade anybody to move for three days. Blood even flowing out of them, the day he witnessed a partisan ambush and saw forty of their soldiers falling into rich puddles of scarlet. People died like flies and only flies thrived at that time. The adults seemed not to notice the blood as it grew into black shadows in the street gravel, but he saw it everywhere.

  ‘Mama,’ he would say, ‘tonight I am cooking kransky klabasha the way you always cooked it. I will fry the sauerkraut in onion and garlic and capsicum and then I will put it all in the baking dish and bury within it the kranskies, and over it all I will sprinkle like heavy rain bacon pieces, and I will bake it all slowly, because slowly is the best, and then Mama, then I will eat it and taste the time before the war, I will swallow belief and hope and enjoy it for soon my plate will be empty and there will be no such things left.’

  And because he was young, and because he learnt quickly to run and hide and never tell the truth or say what you meant or to trust anybody, no blood ever ran out of him. But something else was washing out of him, and he wanted it back. He wanted it back and he knew it was not possible.

  He had watched his world break into pieces and he had learnt that any attempt to make it all whole again was hopeless. He had survived by camping in the fragments, eating raw turnips stolen from frozen fields of a night. He remembered how people would talk of battles being fought in places that he had never heard of before and how they would say that the war would be soon over, some convinced they would win, some that they would lose.

  ‘No,’ said Bojan Buloh. ‘No reply.’

  The Italian smiled and held his arms out wide as if gesturing defeat.

  ‘Well, half a dozen stubbies then.’

  ‘No,’ said Bojan.

  And after the war, they’d said, life would once more be normal. He did not know what normal was. He knew it had a taste and possibly a smell different to that of cordite and fear, but for the war to end was for his world to end. Whether that was good or not, he did not know. What people were, that he knew. People were bad, and people would still be bad whether it ended next month or next year or five years hence. What the world was, that he knew.

  The world was empty of anything that might matter.

  ‘But is that it Mama? Is it right in here?’ he would say pointing to his head, and then laugh, and go back to his cooking, because the taste had to be right, even when everything else was wrong, the taste had to be right.

  ‘What?’ asked the Italian.

  ‘You deaf?’ said Bojan. ‘Fucken deaf or what? No reply.’

  ‘She is your daughter and she is having a baby.’

  ‘Sure. And if she want me she know where to find me.’

/>   ‘You should write something.’

  ‘Well, write this: I cannot help you.’

  ‘How can I write that to a daughter?’

  ‘Well, don’t write anything. I never write nothing to anyfuckenbody anyway.’

  Chapter 35

  1961

  SO IT WAS that Bojan Buloh hammered and planed the emptiness he saw everywhere into the shape of tables and chests that he sold for a little extra money to buy a little extra drink; conjuring something out of a world that was only nothing, a small lie that some fragments might successfully be brought together and stay together, a deception both he and Sonja could share at least as long as the table or chest’s making.

  Bojan Buloh sawed the long autumn of Sonja’s childhood into straight sad shapes that knew no irregularity or quirky angles, and in his sawing and hammering and planing and glueing knew a restraint that lent him grace; knew how much to sand a piece of wood and then no more; knew how to load a paint brush and hold his hand steady till the curl of its bristles had emptied all its wet cargo along the long run of the tabletop, knew not to be heavy with the lacquer nor to build things heavy: ‘Must look light,’ he would say, ‘or otherwise is no good.’ And in the dance of the hammer and the sweet rhythm of the saw Sonja saw that there was another man inside him, a good man, the man she loved as her father. Which was perhaps why she liked working with Bojan in the makeshift workshop he would inevitably set up wherever they lived, sometimes temporarily on a verandah, sometimes a little more permanently in a borrowed shed. For it was the one place where they seemed to find a small measure of harmony.

  And Sonja knew that the table they now worked on was different from the others they built in the evenings and on weekends—the ones Bojan sold to workmates on the building site of a day and in the pub of a night. His tables were always well built and solid, but none had seen the care that he seemed to be pouring into the one he was now building. He had made ornate endings for the tabletop, and was planing a taper into the legs to give the finished table a more elegant look.

  Sonja left off hand-sanding a cupboard door and came over and stood next to her father. He looked at her, smiled, and held the plane out to her. She took it, and, with an expert eye, took over planing the leg. Bojan went to the door top and began sanding, which, along with the lacquering, was normally Sonja’s job. She looked across at him and saw that he was lost in deep thought, noticed that he was smiling.

  I make the table square and good, thought Bojan as he sanded the cupboard door. I make it out of blackwood, beautiful fiddleback blackwood, two pieces have I had the Finns at the mill cut for the tabletop, and the grain matches up and my join is so straight and true that it is almost not possible to tell it is there. Beautiful fiddleback blackwood not that shit pine that dents and is rubbish and quickly looks like rubbish, but two large pieces of beautiful fiddleback blackwood big enough to sit Jean and old Archie and Sonja and me.

  Sonja watched a long shaving of blackwood slowly curl out of the hand plane to form a lustrous question mark that kept on retreating the further she pushed the plane down the leg. She glanced back at her father and momentarily wondered what he might be thinking. The shaving fluttered to the floor.

  Beautiful fiddleback blackwood, thought Bojan Buloh, beautiful fiddleback blackwood big enough for a family feasting.

  Chapter 36

  1961

  IT WAS AT THE TIME of the making of the table, or even a little before, that Bojan fell into the habit of leaving Sonja with the Heaneys each Sunday. He was vague as to where he went, though it was not for drinking as he never came home smelling of sour sweated bread, but instead, rather oddly, of apple blossom. Sonja presumed that he was playing cards, or visiting, or something like that: actually she didn’t really care, as she preferred being at the Heaneys’—being a Heaney, being part of a family, for that one day of the week. And it was on one such Sunday that she saw that there was something else to Moira’s life and the Heaneys besides, and Sonja had never known it till that day of the broken platter.

  Outside it was raining and inside was a chaos of kids unable to play outdoors. Sonja was watching with great interest as Mrs Heaney pulled out from its waxed bag sliced bread, a food Bojan felt profaned the kitchen table. The house was as full as a flooding bucket with screams and squeals and quarrels of great intensity and at least a minute’s duration, boys chasing other boys with guns, crying out kill-kill-kill, girls screaming at boys who ran through their makeshift tent—a blanket stretched between chairs—in which their dolls and teddy bears were having a picnic. Sonja was untroubled by the racket, because to her it was an ambience, an excitement that she thrilled to. Mrs Heaney, on the other hand, tried to ignore it. Instead, she concentrated upon toasting the bread under the griller, organising Sonja to butter it, and then place two slices on each plate, over which Mrs Heaney would ladle baked beans.

  ‘Never seen ’em before have you, love?’ Mrs Heaney gave the ladle a quick lick, then put it back into the pot to serve some more. ‘Health food of a nation. Made us what we are today.’ Mrs Heaney paused, and then added flatly. ‘No wonder people want a change of diet.’

  Then she suddenly shouted in the mock anger that exasperated, exhausted parents employ. ‘Billy! I’ve told you once if I’ve told you a thousand times, you don’t put vegemite on your toast when you eat baked beans.’ She quickly moved over to a side bench and confiscated a knife and open vegemite jar from young Billy who had pulled his soggy toast out from under the baked beans and begun to spread it with vegemite. Then as an aside to Sonja. ‘Kids, I tell you, Sonja, they’re a trial.’ Then with an almighty roar. ‘Alright youse circus animals—tea’s up.’

  But the kids paid no heed.

  Mrs Heaney shouted again.

  ‘Cmon! For Chrissake get here now! and eat your bloody tea.’ The Heaney kids continued running riot. Mrs Heaney tried invoking a distant image of threatening authority, yelling: ‘Your father’ll be home soon,’ but it meant even less than her previous entreaties, because both she and they knew that if he was there—which he wasn’t and wasn’t likely to be for some weeks with the scalloping season in full flight—he would have done nothing anyway, just ignored them and had a quiet drink and smoke while listening to the wireless.

  The mayhem proceeded without pause, her shouts only one more discordant element in that raucous house. Mrs Heaney cursed herself for using such a hollow, stupid threat that showed to the children only her own lack of authority. Sonja noticed that she seemed to sag, and glimpsed something of what Mrs Heaney really was: not the powerful easygoing maternal presence of whom Sonja was more than a little in awe; the vast, unshakeable centre of a world Sonja loved to orbit. For a single, extraordinary moment Sonja saw Mrs Heaney in all her frailty: a despairing woman upon whom too many people depended, her pregnancy only one more burden to be borne by someone worn out before her time, who regarded herself as unappealing and spent as the threadbare, grubby tea-towel slung over her shoulder.

  For a third time Mrs Heaney shouted, but her voice no longer had force, and was simply desperate, pleading.

  ‘Can you cut it out. Please. Just come and eat your tea.’

  But they paid no heed, continuing to jump on chairs and run under the kitchen table. One boy started climbing up a cupboard.

  ‘Giddown off there, Sean,’ said Mrs Heaney, but before she had even finished speaking there was the sudden noise of something smashing, and Sonja saw lying in pieces on the floor in front of her a shattered floral serving platter, one of Mrs Heaney’s few valued items, a wedding gift. As if a switch had been flicked, the children went silent and stopped racing about. Sean, the perpetrator of the terrible deed, climbed slowly down the cupboard, head hung low.

  Mrs Heaney stared at the floor.

  She stared for what seemed to Sonja to be a very long time, and her eyes never once moved.

  Then, as surely and completely as the platter, something broke in Mrs Heaney.

  With a single movement she spun
around to the kitchen bench and snapped the jug cord out of its socket. Brandishing the cord as a whip, her face reddening, she roared: ‘Get in the corner! All of youse! Now!’

  The children eyed each other nervously, avoiding the gaze of their mother.

  ‘Moira told me…’ Sean began to fabricate, but his mother was in no listening mood.

  ‘Shutup, Sean,’ said Mrs Heaney. ‘In that corner, I said.’ Mrs Heaney was no longer shouting. Her voice had become quiet, without passion, as icy as the Frigidaire. ‘Now.’

  All the kids save Sonja, who remained on the other side of the room as a spectator, formed an uneasy, fearful huddle in the corner.

  ‘I’ve just had it to here with youse all,’ said Mrs Heaney. She was breathing hard and heavy and just wishing they could and would understand how hard it was to do what she did, to bring them into this world, to raise them on next to nothing, to do without, to work so hard that you are suddenly a fat old hag long before your time and your children forever fighting and whingeing and in trouble and your husband never ever there, and when he was, wanting her all the time and she so, so tired and then him not wanting even to know her—did they know; did they? did they? how hard, so bloody hard it all was, did they know any of it, because they would know, she would make them know how much her life hurt.

  ‘I’m gunna give all youse such a hidin’ ya wont ever forget it in all ya days.’

 

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