Chapter 59
1990
Sonja she’s mine.
No, fuck what I mean—
Sonja, she’s everything and we lived, we lived worse than dogs and I would not want it for a dog and did not want it for her or for me but could not help it that it was her that I had to hit, had to hit to stop this pain, had to drink this pain, had to let her know this pain, had to let her know that I felt this pain, that it was burning me, that it was a red hot knife and it cuts me every night into less than a fucken dog and every morning I’ve grown back into a man and it won’t stop, Madonna Santa, it starts again, that red hot knife starts to cut me back into a dog and Sonja my pain is yours and I must fight it and you must feel it.
I hurt. I hurt. I hurt.
And it never ends. And I am not a dog, am I? For if I were, someone would surely shoot me, would be at least that good, at least show that kindness to me, but you came back and you will not put me down so if I am not a dog, what am I?
Chapter 60
1990
WHEN SONJA finally woke to a babble of noise, she felt weak, but her head was finally clear, and her overriding desire was simply to recover, to get better and get out of hospital. Helvi was still sitting at her side, though her clothes were different, so Sonja presumed that another day, or perhaps even some days, had passed.
The noise manifested itself as flesh in the form of a large brown-uniformed woman slashing through the green curtain, advancing upon Sonja bearing a tray upon which was arrayed the collection of stainless steel that denoted a hospital meal.
Helvi put one arm under Sonja and pulled her into an upright position, stuffing pillows behind her back. Both Sonja and Helvi looked on conspiratorially as the orderly placed the meal on the bed table and then left.
Helvi took away the cover of one plastic bowl to reveal a thin reconstituted soup, in which floated flecks of a chewy red substance that passed for carrots. In another was a small puddle of red jelly encircled by a collapsing edging of package custard, and the main meal took the form of two paper-thin slices of roast lamb next to which puddled some gelatinous gravox and two small mounds, one yellow, of mashed pumpkin, the other white, of mashed potato.
‘They bloody poison you,’ said Helvi, horrified, quickly covering up what she regarded as a travesty of a meal.
As if out of air Helvi conjured two massive slabs of continental bread. Sonja, moving carefully, leant over and peered down. Helvi was delving into a very old blue vinyl ANA bag which had a picture of a DC-10 flaking off its side. From this venerable give-away, meant only to be discarded some decades previously, Helvi pulled an oil bottle and spattered some oil over the bread. The bottle was returned to the bag, and Helvi’s hand re-emerged holding a small vegemite jar. She unscrewed the yellow cap. ‘Now,’ said Helvi, ‘you get better.’ And with that she flourished a kitchen knife, which she pushed deep into the vegemite jar. The knife came out piled high with a mass of smashed white pulp, which she thickly smeared over the bread.
‘Garlic,’ said Helvi. ‘Good for the baby, good for the soul.’ And while still waggling a finger in the air with her left hand, brought up a thermos full of real coffee from Jiri’s bottomless bag. Sonja suddenly grimaced, then the grimace dissolved into a look of confusion. She ran a hand over her belly. ‘Coffee is good for the—’ said Helvi, misunderstanding Sonja, cupping her hands under her breasts, one hand still clutching the thermos handle ‘—the milk.’ Helvi dropped her hands, nodding seriously.
‘Helvi,’ Sonja said, ‘I think … it moved.’
‘You must eat,’ said Helvi. She picked up a slice of garlic-smeared bread and, smiling, passed it to Sonja, but Sonja was too absorbed in her own body to take any notice.
‘The baby,’ said Sonja in excited wonder. ‘The baby just moved.’ She turned and looked up at Helvi. ‘I felt it kicking me, Helvi.’
‘Well, of course,’ said Helvi. ‘Of course it moved. It’ll kick the shit out of you later.’ She cackled like an old witch. ‘Now, while you can, eat.’ And Sonja, without relish but with an undeniable purpose that seemed new to her, took the bread and bit into it. She smiled at Helvi. Then giggled a little, then laughed a lot.
‘Oh Christ,’ she suddenly said.
‘What?’ asked Helvi.
‘I think, as I was laughing, I just wet myself.’
Chapter 61
1990
BOJAN BULOH might have broken out of this life in some spectacular way, as he had broken out of Slovenia so long ago, spending months secretly climbing the Julien Alps each morning to observe and learn the patterns and routines of the border guards, planning and re-planning, watching how the natural world might betray them in their escape and how it might protect them. Impatient to leave, Maria would ask when they were going. But he was waiting, waiting and waiting longer still till his brother was released from jail, till he felt ready. Working out routes, checking them each day up there in the snow country, then re-thinking, re-calculating. He carried a pair of binoculars his brother had taken off the body of a German soldier, and the binoculars still held the disconcerting warmth of human flesh when he held them close to his eyes. No matter how much it snowed and the wind blew like a thousand knives of ice, the binoculars always felt as warm as blood against his chill eyes. One day he saw through them that rarest of all flowers, the edelweiss, in its most favoured habitat, a cliff. The starry white flower of love that men risked their lives to reach to give to their women. He waited until near darkness when the patrols were changing shifts and, without a rope, climbed out along the cliff face to take it. He did not get home till after midnight to find his family greatly distressed, thinking he had been caught or shot by the guards.
The following evening he gave Maria the edelweiss. With its pointed petals it resembled a mariner’s compass. She laid it on a map, and the pointed petal that showed the direction of their route she plucked off and ate in front of him. ‘North-west,’ she said, slowly rolling her white speckled tongue over her lips.
This curious, for Bojan strangely erotic, gesture, Maria repeated in the Austrian refugee camp two years later. Somehow she had managed to retain the dried flower. This time she laid it upon a map of the world and—in celebration at being finally accepted as emigrants—she plucked the petal that indicated their next destination. ‘South-east,’ she said, and Bojan looked down at the world in a single page in a schoolchild’s atlas and saw that the missing petal would have just touched the northern tip of Australia. And, in turn, he repeated his response. He leant forward to kiss her while slowly running his hand up the inside of her skirted thigh, and as before she let him feel the petal disintegrating into flotsam upon her tongue. But this time she did not push his hand aside. She laughed. ‘And when there are no petals,’ she said, ‘there is nowhere left in the world for us to go.’
So, in a strange coupling Bojan found as troubling as he did exciting, Sonja was conceived.
Bojan might have broken out of his wretched life before, but he was waiting, waiting and waiting longer still, till something—he no longer knew what—happened. Sometimes he was taken with the thought that he ought be dead, that he would be better dead, but the ache he had known those months before they had fled across the Alps was back with him, except now it was vague and without purpose. So he waited for the ache either to grow into something he could make sense of or to disappear and leave him to die.
Sitting on the side of his steel bed, looking less a man and more a bent coat hanger off which hung a faded blue singlet and khaki work trousers, Bojan swayed and thought. In one hand he held a near empty Bundaberg black rum bottle, in the other three old photographs which he grasped like a hand of playing cards. From the very slight rock of his body back and forth it was evident that he was drunk, though how much so it was difficult to know.
There was a raucous knock on the door, and a shout.
‘Eh—Bojan—coming to the pub?’
‘No,’ said Bojan. He paused and drew breath in through his
nostrils. ‘No. Not tonight. Bloody hell. Piss orf. I got some thinking to do.’ Something had turned within him, something had changed him and he had crossed into another land. Even to other wogs he had become a real wog: forever different, alien even to other aliens.
Bojan swayed some more, back and forth, eyes intently fixed on a nothingness in the mid-distance. He put the bottle down and picked up Sonja’s letter from the small chipboard chest of drawers. He held the letter in front of him, then rubbed his fingers over it, as if it were braille, as if there was a clue hidden in it, an answer to his wretched dilemma. With one hand he held the letter up to the light, with the other hand he held the photographs similarly, and looked at one swaying handful then the other, as if comparing x-rays, as if able to discern a connection, as though through careful study one might reveal a problem in the other. Finally he placed them all in a neat pile on his lap, and went back to his brooding.
How I long for such queer things, thought Bojan, such strange little things not even big that it might seem wrong or offensive to ask for, but only to feel Maria’s breath once more, listen to its song as she slept, hear her snuffling and even snoring and wheezing and sighing in God knows what dreams for who or for what I care not only that it disappeared into the wind and the wind is everywhere and I know her breath is lost within it.
He remembered how when he went to bed with her, she would lie on her side and he would lie behind her, head nuzzling into her back, smelling her and forever thankful to smell her so. Binding memory to desire, the fragrance of her once more returned to him. He remembered his loins on her rump, feeling her power and forever awed to know it, and his top arm running along and up her torso to where his hand would cup the soft weight of her breast and he would wish to hold that weight for her forever. He remembered how they would make love and sometimes it would be wild and he would excite her greatly and she him and she would groan like an animal, and it frightened him that her body went places his was unable to know—and he knew she liked him far less for having made her feel so. At other times he excited her less, took fewer liberties with his lovemaking and she liked him more though her satisfaction was greatly reduced and this paradox puzzled him, for he felt honour bound to pleasure her, but wished her to love him as he loved her.
There had been a time when he had promised her foolish things that were not possible: a house made of perfume, clothes spun out of songs; and she had promised him what was possible, that she would work with him and lie with him and if necessary fight for him if only he would be with her. And he felt the dried white eidelweiss petals upon the tip of her tongue and his hand was parting her thighs, her beautiful sweet strong thighs, and he knew he was falling into the wind and it smelt of the sea and felt of the sea, and the fingers of his other hand ran through her hair and then wrapped tight around her hair and by her hair pulled her head backwards until her mouth and her throat and his thrusting and her heart and his desire were all in precipitous alignment and her low moans unimpeded rose up as if from the earth itself.
After some time there was another knock on the door. A knocking different from before, more restrained, almost polite. Bojan again looked up to the door and yelled, ‘Piss orf! Jezuz Chrise … I already tell ya. I don’t want to go to the bloody pub. I hate the fucken pub.’
There was a second polite knock on the door. Bojan reluctantly got off his bed and a little shakily walked to the door, swearing some more as he did. But when he opened the door Bojan’s expression changed from annoyance to surprise. He stopped grumbling, stared at who was standing in his doorway, framed by the darkness. The two men looked at each other, Bojan in shock, Jiri looking not at Bojan’s face but at his body, his dress, his stance, as if seeing Bojan for the first time.
‘Bojan,’ said Jiri, ‘I’ve been telephoning the canteen for weeks. You are never here. That’s what they say. You are not to be found.’
Bojan stood back from the doorway and indicated his room with an open hand, waving at it in an impatient gesture.
‘You comin in or what?’
Jiri walked in. Bojan offered him the one chair in the room and the rum bottle. Jiri shook his head, declining both. His mission was serious, and his manner accordingly awkwardly formal. Bojan sat back on his bed, and waited.
‘Bojan…’ Jiri began, but then halted. Ran his big full fingers through the few long thin strands of hair that remained to him. He was glistening from the rain. Bojan did not speak. Jiri looked at him and wondered whether this was not the most foolish thing he had ever done in a life that had known its fair share of folly, driving the old Corolla near six hours in the rainy dark on the treacherous windy road from Hobart to Tullah, to tell Bojan what he had to tell him, then to turn around and drive six hours back. But there was no escaping it, for it had to be said.
‘She nearly died.’
Bojan skulled from the rum bottle and the rum tasted of nothing, ran down his throat as easy as the lukewarm tea they served by the gallon in the single men’s mess, and he knew he could have finished the bottle there and then, and wanted to, and start another and another and another and finish them all and hopefully himself in the process, rather than listen to what Jiri would tell him. But he took the bottle from his mouth, because he had to say something, anything.
‘I know that. So?’ And having unburdened himself of the necessity of reply, Bojan took another lengthy swig.
‘You must stop, Bojan.’
Bojan let the rum bottle slowly fall from his lips, then quietly, slowly, as if he were talking of someone else rather than himself, spoke.
‘How can it stop? You so clever you know, Jiri, you tell me—how?’
He remembered all the times he thought it would stop, how he hoped if he could turn his soul to ice nothing would penetrate, how if he anaesthetised himself enough with drink he would feel no pain when he fell over or when he got hit in the bar, and that it would then follow that this other pain, that had no physical reality, would also no longer be felt.
‘It’s like a knife,’ said Bojan. His eyes filled with tears. ‘Like a knife that won’t stop turning in my guts.’
His voice trailed off. Then the rum leapt up his throat like a flame, his whole body began to tremble, quivering under the weight of the most enormous anger.
‘You tell me, Jiri, please, please, I beg you, you tell me—how can it ever stop?’
Chapter 62
1967
THE TRUTH WAS the knife had been in there a long time, longer than Bojan cared to remember. The truth was that the knife had been slashing and shredding back and forth, and it—him, her, them—had in consequence all been falling apart for some time now, all heading toward a moment, an action that both would instinctively understand meant that it was over. It wasn’t the things that were said, but the growing mountain of things that were unsaid, the way the silence between them which had once bound them together like hoops of steel had now reformed into an ever widening abyss.
Put your back into the plough, Jiri said, pull harder on the net, Jiri would tell him, do not give up. But it was beyond trying or not trying because it was beyond them, because it was not even about them, not about things they could grasp in their hands and shape like a piece of wood, but greater things which grasped them. And though neither understood this, both knew it intuitively, and both waited, as he had waited once before in a cold construction camp in the middle of nowhere, assailed by a growing feeling of horror. Maybe Jiri was right and they were wrong to abandon themselves to a larger destiny, but nothing they did seemed to add up to anything and their agony only returned each morning, stronger, worse, more unapproachable.
So on that still Saturday morning when the only sound in the world seemed to be the transistor radio in its dark leather pouch purring Patsy Cline from the top of the refrigerator, when Sonja opened the door from her bedroom and walked into the main room carrying a small suitcase, Bojan was not pretending to ignore her. He sat in what was to be their kitchen only a little longer, drinking tur
kish coffee from a tiny demitasse cup yet again, looking at the old photographs of his wife and, though she noticed the photographs at which he was looking, he simply did not notice her.
She watched him and thought of the times they had known together, and how there ought to have been stories about it she could one day tell her own children, but there were no such stories, no happy stories she could at that moment recall, only sad stories that did not deserve the honour of being told. And perhaps the saddest story of them all was the one from only a few days before.
Sonja had held a sixteenth birthday party for herself. Bojan was drinking too much to either oppose or support the idea. She asked for money and he threw his wallet to her and told her to take what she wanted, take it fucking all for all he cared. She wanted the party to be like the adults’ parties she imagined, not like the ones she had witnessed. She baked some cakes, not kids’ cakes, but two lush chocolate cakes and a cheesecake of the type Australians liked. She bought salamis and cheeses and good bread and arrayed them beautifully on the plates. She made Bojan buy her four bottles of Kaiser Stuhl Cold Duck. She bought chips and peanuts and filled little bowls with them. She invited her friends, and she invited some more she only vaguely knew, but liked.
In the hours preceding the party she changed four times, torn between the beauty of her favourite—and only—dress, or the casualness of her only jeans. Casualness won. She asked Bojan to please not drink and for once he listened and for once he did not touch a drop. They waited watching TV. Sonja smiling and laughing and even Bojan unable to resist the infectious high spirits of his daughter. They waited, and as they did so joked and played foolish games, he holding a potato chip over each eye and making a loud buzzing noise pretending to be a blowfly. This is how it ought to be, she thought but did not say. Then, more boldly: This is how it will be, and the thought grew like a confident sapling into the notion that their lives were poised on the brink of a momentous change. Perhaps, after all, something better was possible.
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