The Sound of One Hand Clapping

by Richard Flanagan

  Darkness slashed Bojan Buloh’s eyes, and in a lightless world all he could hear was the most terrible roaring, as if a mountain were falling. His stomach went watery, his breathing hard. He twisted the ignition key with such force he bent it in the ignition barrel. The motor kicked over slowly, without determination once, twice, then came to life with a roar as he flattened his foot to the floor. The engine screeched but beneath the car he could feel a different, much greater vibration.

  For the very earth was shuddering.

  The back wheels spun, then making proper contact with the gravel, the old car leapt forward howling up the rutted gravel road. Bojan Buloh was pushing the ancient machine so hard that on flying over one bump he smashed the muffler such that it fell apart upon landing, so that the shaking of the earth was accompanied by the unmuffled roar of the screaming engine and the tinny clattering of the exhaust pipe, and it was at that moment that Bojan Buloh saw in his headlights a sight so remarkable that it momentarily dissolved his terror.

  At first—though only very briefly—he thought the road was heading straight into a cliff. And then he realised that the cliff was advancing on him, quicker than he was advancing toward it, and he saw that the cliff was a huge wall of water into which he was driving, and he knew the utter strangeness of that moment was as inexpressible as its horror was complete.

  And Bojan Buloh, feeling that this was his fate, unavoidable and predestined, no longer wished to flee from the shadow of his fear, but rather to complete his journey into its vast mysterious heart. He hammered his old car as hard as he dared up that hill, into that cliff, that water, that darkness, his only remaining desire to arrive as quickly as possible.

  And at the very moment when he thought he was about to die and felt strangely resigned to his death and felt that death was only right for someone so wretched, that the only strange thing was that such punishment was so overdue—at that very moment the huge wave did not carry him and the FJ away, but passed beneath him, and Bojan realised that he had managed to rise above the damburst’s peak and was continuing to rise. He looked down then, and wondered in awe if the FJ was not actually flying, had grown wings and was rising into the nighttime sky, and he in it, an angel granted a second life.

  Behind and below him sounds, strangely gentle and beautiful, of rock and valley washing away in water, of concrete tossed as light as water foam.

  And then he turned the motor off. He got out of the FJ. He listened to the river running free below. And heard the wind in the forest. Saw his heart and her heart forever together, dancing in that mad storm, riding its terrible sudden squalls, sliding into its eddying swirls. It was a moment of measureless lucidity, and when it was over, Bojan Buloh sat back in the FJ and buried his face in his hands.

  Chapter 70

  1990

  BOJAN DROVE SLOWLY down an old logging road that ran along what had until a short time before been the dammed lake and which was now nothing more than a drained muddy crater, the FJ making so much noise now that it did wake the dead and their spirits fled in front of the FJ in the shape of wallabies and wombats and quolls and possums and devils and tigers and among them were Fabrizio and Adriana and Kenny, the son of the truck driver, as well as the history professor from Krakow, and so many others that in the end it looked as if he were a drover and the mass of creatures in front of the FJ his herd.

  After a time the road headed into the forest. Following the spirit animals blindly, he eventually arrived back on the main road, at which point they vanished as inexplicably as they had appeared. At the crossroads Bojan did not turn west to head back to Tullah but without hesitation swung the car east, toward Hobart, toward Sonja.

  He drove slowly, carefully. His heart feeling hope and his stomach knowing fear. Driving through that long stormy night.

  His foot shaking on the accelerator.

  His hands shuddering on the steering wheel.

  Bojan Buloh knew now that he was pushing on, pushing back. Past the forest and beyond Butlers Gorge. Dismembered objects momentarily flashed up in his headlights and flew past him. A scarlet coat. Burgundy shoes. But Bojan Buloh was pushing on, pushing back. He drove at and through all the apparitions of horrors that beset him that night. Through a snake coiling around a neck. Through white flower fragments speckling a blue tongue. For Bojan Buloh was rolling that dark night back as hard as he could, heading into the northern suburbs and into the old town.

  Until he came upon a blue angel.

  Chapter 71

  1990

  SONJA GAVE THE BAR a perfunctory polish with a counter towel. Through a window she watched the rain outside, falling in shudders and shakes, wild scratchings across the dull, greasy light of the streetlamps. Across the road, the neon blue angel continued to fly above the seamen’s mission through the mizzly night. There was little else to do but look and dream, the pub being empty save for a table of bus drivers in a far corner, and an amphetamine-crazed crayfisherman who sat pin-eyed and face flushed red, a lobster of a man, at the far end of the bar drinking American whiskey neat and mumbling to himself. A stormy Tuesday night. Not a night for anyone to go out anywhere. She caught a deep breath, leant backwards to ease the ache in her back, and then returned to her task, standing side-on to the bar so that her swelling belly did not get in her way. She heard the door open but took no notice. Even if she had retained her sense of smell it would have done her no good, for there was no forewarning scent of sour sweated bread. She looked at the clock and calculated how many minutes left before she could give the Metro boys and the pin-eyed lobster their marching orders and close up for the evening. So it was that she turned and, until he spoke, did not recognise the rain-glistened face.

  He was nervous. He smiled awkwardly. He spoke quietly.

  ‘Hell-oh,’ he said.

  And then Sonja knew it was him.

  An embarrassed silence ensued.

  Bojan had no intention of telling Sonja about the damburst. Or how he had been standing outside in the rain for the last half an hour wondering whether or not he would come in, his clothes so saturated that their weight pulled him earthwards and held him anchored to the pavement with the force of roots, and him staring up at the neon blue angel that flew above the seamen’s mission, its extended arm pointing across Morrison Street to the waterside pub in which his daughter worked.

  Sonja fidgeted with the bar towel. There was no denying it, she was shocked to see him.

  He thought it reckless to mention that he had asked the blue angel if this was wise, if it was even right for him, who had so little to do with her for so long, to now return to her life? The blue angel said nothing, but continued pointing to the pub, and Bojan felt even more stupid and confused for fooling himself that neon signs might be omens.

  ‘A beer,’ Sonja said finally, grabbing a glass from overhead and placing it under the beer tap. ‘On the house.’

  Bojan looked up at Sonja, and shook an outstretched hand. ‘No. No beer.’ His face a book she could no longer read. ‘Wait,’ he said. Before she could reply, he had turned and walked back out the door. Sonja swallowed and shook her head and her hand fell from the spigot.

  ‘What did the wog want?’ asked a bus driver who had sidled up to order another shout.

  Sonja, her gaze fixed on the door through which she thought Bojan had fled, said, ‘Nothing.’ She filled the glasses, took his money, then looked at the bus driver, and said, ‘Nothing at all,’ rang the till, held the change above his opened hand and said, ‘He was my father,’ and let the gold coins tumble with the weight of guilt.

  He is my father, thought Sonja, suppose he is. I ignored him even longer than he ignored me when he brought me up. If you can call it that. But I can’t balance his life with mine. Can’t do to him what he did to me. Don’t want to even try. Never wanted to see him again.

  To see the bastard ever.

  My father the bastard.

  The bastard, the bastard, the bastard.

  Sonja returned to cleaning
the bar. The bus driver wandered back to his fellow workers with his tray of beers. The low drone of the pub resumed, only to be then interrupted by loud clunking and banging sounds. Sonja looked up to see a largish object being manoeuvred into the bar. Behind it, awkwardly hanging on, the shoving and puffing figure of Bojan Buloh.

  Once through the doorway he stood in the middle of the bar-room. He and Sonja looked at each other as if across a distance, a great, seemingly impassable gulf of time and emotion and both wished it were possible to look elsewhere. Yet neither moved, for both were mesmerised by the sight of the other. As if they were seeing each other for the first time.

  And both were entranced.

  Bojan by the sheen and strangely tormented veneer of a pregnant woman. A stubbornness and courage he recognised. She saw him as anyone else in that pub would have seen him that night: a man who had no home other than such pubs; an ageing wog who had a face that might have seemed fine under normal circumstances, but which when cruelly glazed by the night rain seemed somehow battered by life, full of the fleshiness and the ruddiness of those who have worked too hard and drunk too much. The clothes, thought Sonja, Jesus the bloody clothes. Her father who had once been so dapper, who despised the peasant dress of the Australians, whose snappy clothes spoke of his ambition, his pride, his virility—her father now wore clothes that spoke of nowhere, nothing, nobody, cheap clothes that were neat but shiny with wear, suggesting nothing more than a desire for comfort and warmth, of protection against the cold. And something else too she saw that night that she had never before seen in her father.

  That he was frightened.

  The clinking, chattering sound of the bar died away. The Metro boys stopped swapping stories and began watching with interest. Even the pin-eyed lobster stopped mumbling and twitched around in their direction.

  In front of the old wog they saw standing a cradle. It was made of Huon pine and was built in an ornate Mitteleuropean fashion, all fretted timber and elaborate edges. It was even fitted with new bedding, lace bumpers and all. Wood and lace, thought Sonja. She smiled a little. Bojan was unsure what her smile meant, fearful as to what it boded.

  The pin-eyed lobster came over and ran a claw over the cradle. ‘That’s Huon pine,’ he said. ‘Bloody beautiful, that is.’ Bojan said nothing. ‘I’ll give you a hundred bucks now for it,’ said the lobster, claw diving into his jean pockets.

  ‘Jiri tell me what you doing,’ said Bojan. He halted, not sure whether he had already said too much, but then deciding to press on regardless. ‘That you stay. So-o-o, I think.’ He halted again, wiped his mouth, looked at the ground, then back up at Sonja. ‘I think, I take holiday and come over see Sonja.’

  ‘Two hundred,’ said the lobster. ‘The missus is expecting again and she’d love this.’

  Bojan, unable to ignore the lobster any longer, said, ‘It’s not for sale.’ He turned back and noticed that Sonja was no longer looking at him, but at the cradle, in a somewhat perplexed fashion. ‘Oh—that’s for you,’ Bojan said in an off-hand way. And then laughed. ‘Well, not you—the baby, but … you.’

  Sonja didn’t speak and Bojan drew the wrong conclusion.

  ‘It’s not good I know,’ he said. ‘I make it in the workshop. After hours. The shop ones very expensive. But maybe you prefer shop one?’ He shrugged his shoulders, as if his offering were trivial. With a shock Sonja realised she was letting love in, and she felt sick with loathing, felt her whole body and soul rushing away from where she stood and felt fearful that the small piece of secure ground beneath her feet was disintegrating and there was nothing below her, felt a powerful sensation of falling at such a great velocity that it was also akin to a floating, a flying, but was she rising or was she falling? She grasped the beer taps to anchor herself in the dull world in which she had chosen to live. Keep love away, she warned herself, lock it out.

  ‘No!’ she suddenly yelled, ‘No!’ Then embarrassed by her own sudden outburst, Sonja moved out from behind the bar and came over to the cradle, flashed a smile, murmured, ‘No,’ again but in a way that she hoped managed to obscure her original meaning. She shook her head and said, in a still quieter voice, ‘No, I don’t prefer.’

  She squatted down and examined the cradle up close as a joiner might, checking to see if it was true and square. Bojan looked at her wistfully for a time without saying anything, then announced, ‘Now I go and—’

  And Sonja, startled out of her own private thoughts, said what she really thought: ‘No, Artie, please—please don’t go…’

  ‘—and come back in a moment,’ said Bojan, permitting himself the hint of a smile.

  He disappeared and came back with a newly made wooden cot. Sonja smiled a lot, though it was a smile of bemusement, for Bojan’s offering, while both generous and touching, seemed woefully inadequate to all that had passed between them.

  ‘I be back,’ Bojan said, ‘in a moment.’

  He reappeared with a high chair, so that by now half the pub seemed full of baby furniture. Sonja stood there caught between smiling and crying, between love and contempt. These offerings—so silly, so futile—and yet they had been made in good faith.

  So … so beautiful.

  There was about Bojan Buloh that strange evening something that approached the most curious innocence. As if innocence, thought Sonja, were not something one had before it was lost, a natural state into which one was born before life sullied it forever, but rather something that could only be arrived at after one had journeyed through all the evil life could manifest. He was lost and condemned to loss, he was damned and lived with the damned, but somehow, somehow because of what he had lived through he had acquired an innocence.

  That wet awful evening Sonja saw innocence in her father, it was as though she was seeing her father for the first time, as if for the first time their love was both naked and visible and it stood before them as a cot and a high chair and a cradle.

  As she stared at that bedraggled, stubbled old man, who looked like the men she so often ordered out of the bar, she felt as if she were a rain cloud, heavy with a fluid soon to take shape and fall, yet light with being. It was a most extraordinary feeling, and it struck her that it had taken a lifetime to know it.

  She wished to say: I love you.

  I love you, you bastard, you bastard, you bastard.

  Chapter 72

  1990

  MAYBE IT WAS THEN. Or maybe it was later. Maybe it was something big or maybe it was something small. Or maybe it was the sum of the little things that finally got to Sonja, that made her start to feel something was perhaps different between her and her father. The way he would run errands for her. Give small gifts unexpectedly. Be so obviously happy to be with her, and yet avoid seeing her too much, as if he was worried she might tire of his company. A profound, and to her unexpected, gentleness in his dealings with her.

  And it wasn’t so much that he talked differently, but that he talked at all. Admittedly about little of consequence—what was on a TV gameshow the night before, a politician’s latest comment, the weather—but it was that he talked and the way he talked that mattered, the way he listened to her and seemed to want to know, to understand, rather than pretend not to hear—it was all this that made her feel what she feared above all: hope.

  Maybe it was just that he was there for at least part of those final months and she knew that she was not alone, when she felt so listless, so tired, so stupidly emotional, elated one moment, depressed the next, knew she was not by herself and that in this at least she was not abandoned, that the door was not opening on a nighttime blizzard to close forever leaving her behind.

  Still she felt a fool, for such feelings could only end up being broken like glass and he would break them. She knew him, she knew he would drop the prism through which the invisible light of their feelings was being so curiously and quixotically refracted into a rainbow of hopes, he would drop that precious prism and let it shatter. Yet perversely, because she did feel touched by his presen
ce, his attentions, his desire to be different, Sonja feigned indifference when he was around, a pretence more for herself than him, wishing her heart to believe that it did not matter whether he was there or not.

  But when Bojan disappeared after three weeks—evidently back to Tullah and his melancholy existence there, his holidays spent—Sonja felt it keenly. Yet she was also relieved. She had let love visit, true, and she cursed herself for it, but it had been given no chance to grow and though she knew herself to be less, she knew herself also to be safe.

  Neither Helvi nor Jiri commented upon her father’s leaving, and she concluded that they, like her, felt it could only be for the best. They were in any case otherwise occupied, Helvi working double shifts, Jiri seeming to have a great deal of carpentry work on the go.

  The final months of the pregnancy were tedious and difficult for Sonja, and passed, for her, far too slowly. She kept on with the job at the pub, though on reduced hours. Even this exhausted her, but everything exhausted her, even resting, for she found herself unable to sleep properly, and her dreams became stranger, more elusive. Every time she seemed on the border of revelation, of understanding in her dreams, she would groan and suddenly find herself awake with a dull backache and a pressing fear that she might wet herself if she did not rush to the toilet immediately. Her hair lost its lustre, her skin grew as greasy as that of a teenager. Pains slashed up and down her legs, her belly felt so tight she thought she might just burst open like a grape pressed between two fingers, and all she could look forward to, Helvi assured her with a laugh, was the advent of piles. She felt ungainly—an oiltanker of a woman wallowing her way through town—her walk somewhere between a shuffle and a swagger as she tried to balance the growing load within.