Who had Maria been? Sure as he wanted to be, he was increasingly unsure. For he thought he wished to remember, but really he worked incessantly upon forgetting her completely, scared lest, like sanding a piece of wood too long, he would ruin what impressions he still had of her if he ever dared focus upon them. Without being able to admit it he felt that somewhere within his mind, somewhere mysterious and remote, hidden far, far away for its own safety the whole memory still remained, and that these traces of the past, though complete and intact, were exceedingly fragile, and would break into a thousand pieces of dust if he tried to extricate them. Somewhere deep within him she remained, and it troubled him greatly, this knowledge of an irretrievable memory that was answerable only to its own law of recall and never to his powerful desires. Something within him was not subservient to his powerful animal will and it both distressed him and gave him the strength to continue living. Who had she been?
He placed the second photograph onto his bedcover. In it a much younger man whom he had once been held the baby Sonja at Butlers Gorge. Bojan slid the photograph of him holding Sonja, and the photograph of Maria holding Sonja together, until they overlapped so that they looked like a single picture. Like the photograph that was missing, the photograph he had given Sonja when she left home, of a family that had once been and no longer was—of Bojan and Maria and the baby Sonja together.
He shuffled the photographs together, stood up, and put them back into an old shoebox, upon the top of which lay Sonja’s letter.
The only thing worse than working was not working, thought Bojan Buloh. If he drank enough he would feel like a man without a shadow. So he told Pavel. ‘The only man without a shadow is a dead man,’ replied Pavel. Which was why at that moment he wished to be back within the womb of his work, within the joinery shop, within the entombing noise of bandsaws and planing machines and drills and extractor fans, comforted by the dust and wood shavings and stench of adhesive, a place within which it was sometimes possible to dissolve into a world of making. In the joinery shop they made nothing flash, only the ordinary things, the cupboards and wardrobes and tables and drawers for the new hydro villages, for the offices of the staff, for the single men’s quarters that housed more and more of their own kind, the ordinary things for the ordinary people. Sometimes when he knew exactly where he was and who he was, Bojan Buloh botched joins and made things ugly especially for them, made his hate for them into those doors that jammed and desks that rocked and drawers that were not square.
‘Look at this,’ Pavel said to Bojan Buloh one day, pointing at a piece of chipboard. ‘All them little splinters of scrap wood—that’s us.’ But what was it that held us together? Bojan Buloh wondered. Made us something that might matter?
And Bojan Buloh thought about this you see, as he worked in that large, loud neonlight-lit workshop, he thought about what Pavel meant by saying they were wood, and he felt lost again, so terribly lost.
And then he started making things for everybody else who he worried might be lost like him, and he made them tables and wardrobes and cupboard doors no longer with hate but with love, a poultice for their sad wounds, good solid things that would not let them down when everything else in life had failed, and he hoped that people might feel it in the smoothness of the wood, in the careful edging of the laminex, in the sturdiness of the chipboard, in the straightness and correctness of the angles; might maybe know that he knew they had seen their children die and their mothers never return and had buried their fathers too young, had watched innocents executed as he had, watched men go mad, good men and bad men alike, watched their sisters give themselves to a soldier for a frozen turnip, seen what he had never wished to watch, a man lashed with timber put through a sawmill. Bojan Buloh did not care whether they knew or not that the chipboard was held together with his tears and the laminex with his love and every day he was smuggling out of that cavernous workshop his message to them all, just as he had once run messages hidden in hollowed-out onions for the partisans, and the message was that others knew—others knew—and all that they had together, the one thing they shared, that allowed them to be human, to be different from the mad drunk dogs everybody thought they were was knowing that this happened not just to him but to them all—and he told it all in the tables and wardrobes and cupboard doors he made, and he tried to tell it all with love.
Bojan Buloh picked his daughter’s letter up, passed it slowly across his cheek, as if its touch might possibly offer the promise of a caress, put the letter to his nose and sniffed it, as though its scent might impart to him its hidden meaning.
Maria, thought Bojan Buloh. My Maria.
Chapter 67
1990
BOJAN’S DOOR WAS OPEN. Inside, Bojan was at work. Arrayed around his normally tidy room were tools, pieces of timber, and furniture in various stages of construction. On the card table an unopened bottle of beer. A bedroom transformed into a workshop. Bojan gave a quick final sand to a turned piece of wood. Then he fitted it into a long piece of timber containing a number of identical turned spigots, to form part of a half-finished cot.
The other single men who each weekend wandered back and forth outside, carrying washing, stopping to yarn and smoke, no longer saw the old wog drunk at the pub. On the rare occasion they glanced into his room they saw him only as he was captured in the shafts of sunlight tumbling through the small window, as a silhouette, working amidst rising spirals of dust motes, as if he were erasing himself from their world.
As he worked, as his hammer drummed and his saw zipped and his drill whined, Bojan grunted and groaned and swore and wheezed. No sound other than these, that of a man labouring. No sight other than this, that of an outline, back bent, head and arms and wood entwined and one.
Chapter 68
1990
BOJAN BULOH felt the mist sitting low in that treacherous marsh of a town that was Tullah, a fetid swamp in which water and men festered in a bleak valley’s sag, a rotting hammock slung between high blue mountains, and was grateful to feel it, to feel the blanketing white wetness reducing his horizon only to that of his FJ, upon the roof of which he was tying furniture.
The mist dampened Bojan Buloh’s clothes, made them sit heavy and wriggly upon his flesh like snakes. ‘You don’t know what trouble a daughter is,’ he said to the Italian who was helping with the tying on of the tarp over the furniture. As Bojan Buloh stretched and tightened the ropes, the snakes writhed over him. And then he laughed. ‘And I don’t fucken know either. Know fucken nothing that’s what I fucken know. Know there’s nothing left up here,’ Bojan Buloh said, tapping his head. ‘It’s not right, but I can’t remember things. Now that’s a funny thing.’
‘Are you going to tighten the bolts?’ asked the Italian, pointing to the antiquated rusty roof-rack.
‘They fine,’ said Bojan.
‘Better than the car,’ said the Italian, who was rightly sceptical of the FJ’s capacity to make such a long trip with such a heavy load. ‘You sure you don’t want my Valiant?’
The Italian’s concerns were not unfounded. The FJ blew so much smoke it looked like a mobile bushfire; the steering was terrible; and there were bags of cement in the boot to help minimise the body roll, one bag of which Bojan had broken into to make a concrete mix that he had then poured down the front passenger side door to end its problem of rust. The speedo hadn’t worked for years; the odometer spun erratically as if it were the FJ’s mind; sometimes meditative and unmoving, at other times racing quicker than an olympic clock. The grey hydro blanket kept falling off the ripped front seat it was meant to cover, exposing horsehair and rusty wire coils. The rubbers on the doors had long since perished, and had been replaced with duct tape run around the inside of all but the driver’s door. This served to stem rather than end the problem of leakage, the car still dripping whenever it rained, and the interior had the humid closeness and scent of humus more often associated with a greenhouse than a car. The FJ held together with the fibreglass bog that had been r
oughly shoved into its many dents, the silicon poured into its ever growing rust holes, and a foolish feeling on Bojan’s part that the car would get him wherever he wished to go, because his will and the FJ’s had at a distant point merged. To get rid of it, as the Italian and a few other fools sometimes advocated, filled him with a dread others might know only at the prospect of amputation. Bojan shook his head.
‘Why I want your bloody Valiant?’
The mist was now so heavy Bojan Buloh’s face was running with water. It ran over his face, shaping his nose and cheekbones and reminding him what he was, what the awful shape of him was. A mindless moss upon the face of this earth.
‘You must care for her a lot anyway,’ said the Italian. His eyes seemed particularly large and dog-like that day. For the Italian did not even have an estranged daughter. He had a wife and one son who had both died immemorably in a car smash some years before. Nothing remained of his wife and son, not even the road they died upon, which long ago had a new four-lane highway built over it.
I don’t know whether I care or don’t care, thought Bojan Buloh. ‘I’m just going to Hobart, that’s all I know,’ he said to the Italian. Maybe I should care, but I don’t know what the word means, thought Bojan Buloh.
‘I care for Fabrizio,’ said the Italian. ‘For Adriana.’ His eyes seemed then to water, though whether it was tears or mist droplets or embarrassment at his confusion of English tenses in speaking of his long dead son and wife whose souls were lost upon a road it was no longer possible to find, it was impossible to know. For it could as well have been anger at having nothing left to cleave to, neither a life nor even a place of death.
But, thought Bojan Buloh, maybe some know at least a few things. Believe something. Care for one thing, even if it is no more.
But not me.
Not anything. Not anymore. I am only an old tree at the edge of a new hydro lake, thought Bojan Buloh, full of canker and parasitic insects, its base rotted almost out by the rising waters, its crown no longer luxuriant but only heavy.
Waiting.
But for what, he did not know.
The sun was sinking and Bojan wanted to make at least the first hour of his journey in light. He made one last check of his knots which tied the blue polytarp over its cumbersome load on the roof-rack. His thick fingers plucked the ropes’ tension and momentarily held it as he drew breath.
Then let go. Then opened the car door, got in and kicked the motor over. He said nothing to the Italian, only nodded.
For now it was time to begin the journey back.
And when he reached third gear at the bottom of the hill, he looked down the road, marvelled at the speed of a car—even an ancient FJ—fleeing so easily, and wondered whether anything good could come of so much that was bad.
Chapter 69
1990
BOJAN BULOH drove down the twisty road to Rosebery and then on to Queenstown and in the last of the light turned eastwards, making his way up the serpentine road that clung at dizzying heights from that sad town’s bald mountains. Somewhere past the ghost town of Linda he switched on his lights, and soon after, when the rain squalls hit, his windscreen wipers. As he climbed up mountain passes and slowly came down their treacherous flanks through that vast peopleless land, an occasional bolt of lightning lit up the FJ and he would momentarily glimpse the wild country through which he was journeying.
The rain came down heavier and heavier.
If he had not been so intent upon his journey Bojan probably would have turned back long before, for the rain now fell not in drops, or even sheets but as a vertical lake and the FJ’s windscreen wipers had little effect. His visibility became so bad that he ended up crawling for well over an hour in first gear, which only exacerbated the problem as the wipers, which ran off the engine, slowed down with the car.
Beyond seeing, the rain scrubbed the mountains and forests and filled the rivers. Moving things that did not want be moved but whose destiny it was to be reshaped and reformed.
Bojan’s resolve finally began to falter. His spirits, fragile in any case, were further lowered by the steady dripping of water inside the FJ, leaving him damp and chilled. What he was undertaking was hard, so hard, and he did not know if he was strong enough. Doubts fell heavier than any rain. What if she did not wish to see him? What if she did but they fought once more, worse than ever, and he saying terrible things about her he never even thought? At the best what would he achieve with his ridiculous offerings which to her eyes no doubt would appear ugly?
And then a little past Tungatinah, as he was approaching Tarraleah, he found himself overwhelmed by the ineluctable desire to finally return to the one place he had vowed never to return. Why that night of all nights such a strange passion came upon the sad, soggy Bojan Buloh, remains as inexplicable now as it was improbable then. Perhaps he was unknowingly avoiding in his own mind the issue of whether he would—or would not—carry through his mission of finding Sonja. Certainly the conjunction of extraordinary events that was to follow was not foretold. There were no omens, no harbinger, nothing whatsoever that could be construed as portending what was about to take place. Even if there had been, it is doubtful if Bojan Buloh, labouring under the drawbacks of bad eyes coupled to the practical limitations of the FJ—bad lights, worse windscreen wipers and no demister—would have noticed them. But when the sign indicating the turn off from the highway to Butlers Gorge was dimly illuminated in his headlights, it was simply as if he were being washed there by the rain, and he was some distance down the rough gravel road before he even fully comprehended what he was doing.
And then, realising where he was going, still he did not consider why. He only thought that if it was to be in the darkness, in the terrible rain, so much the better. He would return but the night and the weather meant that he would not stay so long that it would trouble him.
So the poor lights of the FJ described candle-lit curves upon the sweeping gravel track that led back to where he had left so long ago.
As he approached the rise leading to the dam he became aware that far below the car, even though he could not see it, the Derwent River was in massive flood, huge rapids crashing through the rain and over the sound of his whirring, steaming engine. The gutters on the side of the road ran as rivers and the river far below ran as a huge cataract.
And then there it was in his headlights, and he was shocked by what he saw. He knew of course—how could he not know?—that dams were not meant to spill except under the most exceptional circumstances. Water was money, and water spilling was money washing away, water that could never be retrieved to make power. Dammed river systems were managed to ensure that they never flooded, that their whole cycle was one of exploited restraint, of constant, never varying flows. This dam, which he had with his sweat helped raise so many years ago, whose concrete felt entwined with his very flesh, whose form with his soul had set like rock—this dam was meant to hold everything within. But there it was, water falling with a fury, and he thought he had never seen anything so extraordinary in his life. The dam was spilling, a mountain of water avalanching down the spillway to end in a violent white maelstrom so huge houses would disappear at the point where the flume met the river bed.
Bojan Buloh got out of the FJ, stretched, shook himself, then, although he was quickly becoming drenched, undid his fly and relieved himself into the gutter that roared alongside the car. He watched his foamy urine race off to join the cataract in the blackness below.
He did not see—how even in light, far less such darkness could he?—the fissure lines, at first only a suggestion of a rupture, so thin that one might need a microscope to see them. Perhaps it was that curious thing so inadequately described as a sixth sense; an animal awareness of impending danger—
Suddenly he turned and tried to run for the car, yet try as he might he could not run, could not even move, for Bojan Buloh found that he had turned into concrete. But behind him a huge wild river was pressing and he was breaking, so slowly and in
exorably breaking, and what he had held back for so many years was no longer able to be contained.
The fissures were opening into thread-thin fractures, and the penned-up water was pushing hard, infiltrating—countless tons of water pushing the dam face ever outwards. The fractures were expanding into cracks and the cracks growing ever larger and the water like some caged animal that had recognised its time now pushed the pieces, at first pebbles then boulders of concrete outwards with the force of missiles.
When the first ominous yet strangely dull thud of concrete collapsing came to Bojan’s ears through the muting rain, he did not know what it was finally cracking into pieces. He did not see—how in such darkness could he?—how could he see when it was he also that there and then began to fall apart? He who had been stone and water bursting into dust and vapour. He who had been inert, without movement, was now riding the wind, was now running, and without knowing how, reforming into a different person sitting in the FJ desperately gunning the engine.
Bojan Buloh had driven only a few hundred metres when he came to a junction where a second road branched off and turned back upriver, up a steep hill toward a lookout on a ridge above the dam wall.
He knew the main road ran down the river valley for some kilometres. To follow it downriver, fleeing the collapsing dam and the avalanche of water that would follow, at least had the virtue of momentum. In a car Bojan thought he might—if he could just go fast enough—be able to outrun the flood and leave it all behind.
But his right foot seemed to have a separate idea, as indeed did his entire body, for while he continued contemplating his chances of escaping by accelerating down the valley ahead of the damburst, his body knew that there was no time to think. His right foot leapt from accelerator pedal to brake and the FJ lurched violently, half-slewing, half-skating around 180 degrees and his body was already ready, one arm crunching the gearstick back up into second, the other riding the steering wheel’s wild gyrations. The FJ lurched uphill, an old trout ungracefully leaping back toward the dam. But the second gear was inadequate to the climb and the engine suddenly cut out, and with it the car lights.
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