Bojan’s face rose upwards and looked toward Sonja. He held the photograph out to her as if it were incontrovertible evidence, and not knowing what else to do, she took it and stuffed it in her handbag. His eyes were close to tears, and they pleaded, begged Sonja to say she understood the horror of it all.
But Sonja was without words. Bojan opened his mouth as if to speak but no more words were to be had. He moved his lips and his tongue but still no words came.
And then, suddenly, the enormity of the tragedy, which he had carried as an inexpressible burden for so long, opened up to him and left him horrified.
‘They kill her father,’ he abruptly cried out. ‘Then they fuck her. You understand! They fuck her!’
He spoke out of an infinite sadness, as if he were reciting a poem that went beyond human suffering.
‘My Maria.’
He started to cry.
‘They fuck her.’
He enclosed his head in his outstretched hands as if his mind might burst from the pain of memory.
Sonja turned and left. Bojan sobbed.
‘Maria, Maria, Maria.’
Outside Sonja scurried away from the single men’s quarters, through the night-time rain to her car, at first walking quickly, then breaking into a jog, then running, running as hard as she could, running to leave it all behind.
Trying to find her car keys she fumbled and dropped her handbag into a puddle. She fell to her knees in the wet gravel and hastily grabbed all that had spilt out and threw it back into the soggy handbag, overlooking in her rush the photograph of her dead grandfather. She put first one key then another into the car door before she found the right key. All she could hear was Bojan keening. She got in the car, slammed the door, started the motor and revved it as hard and as loud as she could trying to drown out Bojan, to drown it all out.
But still she could hear him continuing to keen in his hut, each word a terrible lament, caught between a long single heaving sob. The whole an agonised prayer of loss that pursued her all that long drive back to Hobart.
‘Madonna, Madonna, Madonna.
‘Maria, Maria, Maria.’
Sometime after the car had gone, a drunk Turkish boilermaker-welder walking back home stopped to relieve himself. Illuminated by the mist-softened phosphorescence of a street lamp he saw in the piss-spiked puddle a curious thing: a waterlogged photograph of a dead man, with a burnt hole for a face, lying in a coffin. Priding himself as a sporting man, he attempted and then succeeded in angling his stream on the approximate spot of the burnt-out hole. To his astonishment a face formed where the hole had been and the face rose up out of the puddle and grew in size until it was equal to his own and the colour of alabaster and the face stared at him with a look of overwhelming sorrow that greatly unsettled the drunk Turkish boilermaker-welder. He staggered back into the darkness, mumbling appropriate apologies as he went, but he did not sleep well for several nights.
Chapter 47
1954
SHE WORE LACE; that much Sonja remembered.
How much lace?
She did not remember.
What type of lace? Fleur-de-lis or rose-patterned, coarsely knotted or finely woven?
She did not know.
The colour of calico or the colour of snow?
She could not recall. In any case, it was irrelevant. Whether it was only her collar or her cuffs, whatever its colour or shape or extent or pattern, it was beautiful and Sonja remembered it as a liberating beauty that took on different colours and shapes and extents at the different times she recalled it, and it did not worry her and why should it?—for she knew her mother was dressed the way she had dressed for the funeral of the Italian tunneller who had been crushed beneath the rock fall: knew she was dressed for some formal departure.
Mama wore lace and it was beautiful and she was leaving, Sonja knew she was going and it was not within Sonja’s power to do anything other than observe and then begin burying what she saw so deep within her that only the outlines of a lost memory would remain impressed forever upon her soul. And the only word she had for those traces of her past, the single, strange inexplicable word was lace. Sometimes she had a dream in which there was a piece of lace billowing in front of her and when she went to grab it, the lace would simply blow away. She would chase it. The chase was always different, but the end was inevitably the same: the lace disappeared in the wind.
Mama wore lace and it was beautiful and she had left, but before she left she had sung softly to Sonja, had sung a lullaby in a language soft and wondrous and as familiar as the close smell of milk of her mother that now sounded to Sonja foreign, the words of which she did not understand but the singing of which was both exotic and deeply sad. ‘Spancek, zaspancek,’ Mama sang,
‘crn mozic
hodi po noci
nima nozic…’
The lace rode the strange words until it blew beyond the snow into the Butlers Gorge hut-home and shaped itself into Sonja’s Mama, Maria Buloh, a young woman clad in a scarlet coat and battered burgundy shoes and within her slowly rocking arms materialised the three-year-old Sonja to whom Maria softly sang.
What was it that she sang?
A lullaby in her native tongue, familiar and reassuring.
‘Lunica ziblje:
aja, aj, aj,
spancek se smeje
aja, aj, aj.’
It is of course possible that the words which Maria was singing took her back to another land that she was trying to forget as hard as she was trying to remember. It is even possible that as she sat there rocking her child upon her knee, she saw her family’s home almost buried in winter snow, nestling in the Julien Alps, saw the snow melt and the alps grow green and then heavy with flowers in spring. Maybe then she saw that which she wished to forget along with that which she wished to remember, and the pain of the inseparable nature of memory was too great for her. Certainly—in Sonja’s memory—tears ran down Maria’s face, and perhaps it was in a futile attempt to stem the tears, to end the memories that she stopped singing in Slovenian and spoke in English.
‘My baby,’ she said. ‘My baby.’
After the lightness of her song, the English words were harsh and heavy, made Maria sound as if her tongue had been mutilated, cut out. She put Sonja down and spoke to the uncomprehending child once more in her heavy English, the words falling like rough-edged rocks from her mouth, a small avalanche dooming her daughter.
What was it that she said?
The truth, strange and elusive.
‘Sonja, I must to go.’
Maria put her daughter back in bed. But when she went to leave the child was back up watching from her bedroom door. Maria opened the front door. Outside it was dark.
‘Do not worry,’ she said. ‘Artie be home soon.’
Caught within the glow of an electric street light Maria saw snow falling. What, she wondered, lay beyond the light’s illumination?
‘Sonja?’ asked Sonja.
‘No, Sonja,’ said Maria softly. ‘I must go alone.’
Maria came back to Sonja’s room, for a second time put the child into bed, held Sonja hard against her then abruptly let go, quickly turned and walked back to the front door, trying to soothe the child to sleep without daring to look back at her, saying, ‘Aja, aja,’ to the walls, to the ceiling—then stepping outside and looking up and seeing only the night sky which was nothing and explained nothing and offered nothing and her despair was total and utter and in spite of her daughter’s pleas the door was already closing and it was the same as Sonja had always dreamt: the lace had disappeared forever.
Chapter 48
1966
AND THEN a powerful arm had hold of her sleeping body and with a lazy force was shaking her awake. He did not know why he was shaking her.
He wished to say, There is this.
He wished to say, How beautiful you are in sleep.
He did not wish to say anything.
He wished her simply to know that was w
hat he wished her to hear. He did not want her to know anything about how he felt. He wished for them both to escape and the terrible thought of him killing them both briefly crossed his mind, before he exorcised it once more, and his hold on her arm slackened momentarily as he involuntarily began to draw it up to cross himself, before he halted in disgust at having almost taken refuge in religion.
He wanted her to escape him, and he wished her to stay.
Because she understood completely, and knew nothing. He shook her some more.
In Sonja’s mind the silence of snow falling, of lace disappearing gave way to the sound of cars pulling up outside, the abrupt overly loud noises of doors slamming, drunken voices speaking in a babble of European languages.
‘Mama,’ Sonja mumbled a memory from somewhere inside. Then whimpered, ‘Mama…?’ She was listening for the wind, to hear it say, Aja, aja. But when she looked up into his glazed eyes and saw it was her father shaking her, she had to turn her head away from his thin spirit-heated words.
He said, ‘Wake.’ It was the middle of the night.
He said, ‘Come. You get food ready.’
Aja, aja.
Out in the lounge-room, her eyes, previously opened wide in dreaming, had now to narrow to discern in the urine-yellow glow diffused by smoky haze the figures of half a dozen drunken European men, their number fewer than their great noise suggested. They sat around the laminex kitchen table, now moved to the middle of the room with a mustard-coloured cloth covering its pink marble wonder and upon it cards and bottles, some full and some empty, some large and long and bubbling loose froth, some small and full of mean spirit, and for a moment, before her eyes had properly adjusted, she was not sure which were the vessels emptying, not sure if the bottles were the men or the men the bottles.
They were drinking not to enjoy the present, but for the more urgent reason of wanting to forget the past and to deny the future. Their destination was not pleasure but oblivion, and they wished to arrive as quickly as possible.
They were drinking wine from flagons.
They were drinking moonshine from coke bottles.
They were drinking beer from long-necked bottles.
And every other drink they consecrated with a thimble glass of schnapps. To hasten the spirit’s rapid journey into their guts, they threw their heads back violently, as if into their hearts a knife had been suddenly plunged, and this was the moment of horror when they realised that their wound was mortal and their poor souls were soon to take leave from their ruined bodies.
She wished to say, Artie, I must go to school in the morning.
She said, ‘Artie—salami?’
The men gesticulated wildly and talked aggressively, short jabs of broken Polish, Slovenian, Deutsch and new Australian, their conversation chainsawing into the forest of her night, revving and then idling and then roaring as it cut and recut.
‘Of course,’ replied Bojan above their clamour. ‘And kruha and the prosciutto and the capsicums I pickle and the mushrooms I pickle and the trout I smoke.’
Without knowing any of these men Sonja understood them all. Their voices no-one else could understand, their hearts no-one else could decipher, their souls no-one else could see. She understood them all, and hated them and herself all the more. She went to the kitchen. She prepared plates of salamis and cheeses and bread. She arranged the plates with great care, each salami slice neatly tucked in under the next salami slice, the whole a millipede of spiced pork and knuckle fat shuffling around the plate’s rim toward its centre. She looked up at the kitchen clock which showed the time as being almost two in the morning and smiled a little at the thought of herself in a few short hours yet again sitting dazed through her school classes. Once it had made her angry. But now she had decided that it was coming to an end in the only way it could now end, with her leaving. When, or how, she did not know. All she knew was that her desire must override what she had until then believed to be her destiny.
As Sonja adroitly manoeuvred in and around the men, without enthusiasm or interest, but dutifully putting down plates of food and filling glasses, one of the men sought to paw her. She ignored him as the rest ignored her. Mostly the men were totally indifferent to her presence, as though the food and drink were magically summoned out of the ether into their presence simply by their alcoholic desire, as though she were as insubstantial to them as they had become to the world at large, a phantom existing only in her imagination.
The unadorned electric bulb above their heads burnt like the wordless things they carried in their hearts. She tried not to see them: these men who had loved other places faraway and had loved other people either long dead or as good as long dead for all the contact they would ever know again with one another, so their strong talk avoided talking about any matter of strength, any matter to deal with love, or, for that matter, hate. She tried not to hear them: their babble about lust and grog and work and other empty matters in such violent language to give each other but chiefly themselves the impression that what they were talking about mattered, that they might have some measure of power over it, that it might be life, and that they had not already died. They drank the moon down and the sun up, but in truth they belonged no more to the night than to day. They were lost in time, as they were in everything.
A few had kept the women they arrived with in the new land, but the mud of their youthful union had turned into stone of sharp and flinty angles. Others had had women they had lost; a few more found Australian women, mostly young and headstrong, who were willing to throw in their lot with those who most Australians not only thought but knew to be less than people, such women believing foolishly that love could conquer all, even such hate, and on rare occasions their folly was shown to be a great wisdom but the price was high.
Most men, however, had come to Tasmania alone, and at some point realised that they were going to live the rest of their days alone, and then depart it alone and they feared the night all the more.
And so they became men who by and large survived without women except for the occasional coupling with women who, for a night at least, saw something more in them than they saw in themselves, or with whores who saw only what the men offered which was little: money and moans issued in several strange tongues. If the whores were listening close, which they may or may not have done—if they put their cold ears near those cruel sensitive mouths—they might have discerned a terrible yearning in those sounds, but being in another language, they seemed only primeval, which they were, and without meaning, which they were not. So the men let the electric light beat upon their heads till their heads ached, and upon their bottles till their bottles were empty. Sonja tried not to know any of it, but she understood it all.
In the great forests beyond, the devils and quolls and possums and potaroos and wombats and wallabies also came to curious life in the night, and they roamed the earth for what little they could scavenge to keep themselves alive, and when they mistakenly ventured onto the new gravel roads that were everywhere invading their world, it was to be mesmerised by the sudden shock of moving electric light that rendered them no longer an element of the great forests or plains, but a poor pitiful creature alone whose fate it was to be crushed between rubber and metal. Having being shown by the electric light to have no existence or meaning or world beyond a glaring outline upon the gravel, each animal was killed easily by the men who drove drunk to and from their place of work, heading to or from the whores and grog and the card games of the bigger towns.
By day the roads were speckled red with the resultant carnage and startled hawks feasting on the carcasses would hastily rise into the air dragging rapidly unravelling viscera behind them, a shock of bloodied intestine stretching across the blue sky as if the world itself were wounded.
Jiri had told Bojan some people believed that the animals reincarnated as spirits or other animals or even as people. But when Bojan hit a fellow animal he hoped he had done it a favour and relieved it of the burden of life forever.
>
Chapter 49
1966
THE CARD GAME ended around 4 a.m. the same as it always ended: in acrimony. Dawn was close and another day’s labour not far away and no-one seemed to have the desire, as they mostly had when the night was young, to sort the matter out with their fists. For which Sonja was thankful. The men disappeared in dribs and drabs until there was only Sonja and a very drunk Bojan cleaning up the mess in the kitchen and living room.
Sonja watched her wild and dishevelled father, wondering if she even knew who he was at such times. She wanted to see him as he was at other times. Not as he was now. Which was perhaps why she forgot herself and so foolishly said, ‘I’ll finish up now. You go to bed. You’ve had a few, you need the sleep.’ She said it quietly, almost kindly. But Bojan’s drink-sodden mind soaked up the soft sound of her words and heard what even Sonja was not fully conscious of: that she could not bear to see him so.
He raised his arm above his head in anger.
‘I’m no bloody drunk—’ he said.
‘I didn’t say you were drunk,’ said Sonja, and then she knew she shouldn’t have said even that.
‘—what you fucken mean I’m drunk?’
‘No,’ said Sonja, feeling her breathing already growing short, rushed, the words escaping with too much tension, as if she did know and had known and had meant what Bojan thought she had said. ‘No no, no nothing,’ she found herself panting, but Bojan was not listening.
‘So I enjoy myself every now and again. Am I not allowed to enjoy myself? Bet you fucken enjoy yourself when I not here. Bet you out fucken boys I fucken bet I fucken know you fucken slut I fucken do.’
The Sound of One Hand Clapping Page 19