If this tale could be told fully, you would be able to swim through the strangeness of the weather that could deliver four seasons in one day, snow and sun and rain and wind, and the men who took to dressing according to their moods rather than in accordance with the fickle nature of the alien weather, wearing coats when despondent and singlets when cheekily defiant. You would be able to see properly the bearded bushmen who came in to the camp selling wallaby meat and be able to taste the wondrous salamis that were then made out of that lean meat when crossed with fatty pork and blessed with garlic and pepper and paprika. All of this and more the story would be filled with. With tales that ran like rivers into the sea of that place: of the priest so different from the village priests the Europeans had known, for Father Flannery was almost always drunk and frequently swore worse than the Maltese tunnellers, confused names at christenings, borrowed wine from them for services then drank it all before he even reached the altar upon unsteady feet. The way the place was all so new and would soon seem so old, the way they worked hard to make the place nothing more than a memory for them, how they coped with the awfulness of it by dreaming that one day this would simply be something they would tell tales about in the comfort of good homes like they had seen on American movies, homes with electric kitchens and good plumbing and plush padded seats and happy families in them.
All of this and more. All of this and more and more and the sea would still not be full or the story told, but of a night the child Sonja lay in her bed staring at the sea above her, where the ceiling masonite was already buckling and bowing where moisture was seeping through the tin roof, and the ceiling swelled in waves like an ocean, like a buttongrass plain, like the pocked earth stripped of its trees, and she sometimes felt her world to have been turned upside down, that the house, far from offering protection from the natural world, only amplified and distorted it, recreating it in grotesque forms, and she would be scared that all that upside down sea and earth might crush her, and she wondered what would happen if the earth and the sea fell upon her, whether she would have the strength to find her way out to where the real world was. Then she would dream of what the real world might look like and she knew it must look like nothing she knew.
So that night long ago, as on other nights when such bad thoughts troubled her, Sonja got out of bed and went to the door of her mother and father’s bedroom. There she saw her mother packing an old, small cardboard suitcase that lay open upon her bed.
Sonja watched the odd array of items her mother placed in the suitcase: a scarf from the old world and stockings from the new that she had never worn lest she tear them, a frayed child’s handkerchief with a fading teddy bear pattern which Sonja was allowed on special occasions, some rope, a jumper of Bojan’s, a photograph of an old man lying in a long box. She put each item in slowly, staring at them for a time, lost in strange distant thoughts which she did not share with her three-year-old daughter. As if she simply felt a need to fill the suitcase, but the contents that filled it were irrelevant but still somehow meaningful, somehow located her. When the suitcase was finally full of these strange things she placed on top of all the other items a pressed white flower, which had unusual pointed petals. She turned the flower first this way, then that, as if taking a bearing on some distant place and time. Then somewhat absentmindedly Maria Buloh put on a pair of battered burgundy-coloured shoes and a scarlet coat.
The child Sonja saw it all from the doorway of her room, quietly. She was dressed for bed where she was supposed to be asleep; wearing a floral flannelette nightie, old and pilled where it was not already showing the warp and weft of its weave, and a green woollen jumper which, despite being a little too small in the sleeves and having one frayed elbow, was nevertheless snug. In her bedsocks, one still running up her calf, the other fallen, Sonja walked across to Maria and, avoiding looking at her mother, stared into the suitcase, hoping perhaps that she might camouflage her presence by her interest in the ongoing activity of packing the suitcase. She picked up the pressed white flower.
‘What’s this?’ Sonja asked.
‘You should be asleep,’ Maria scolded.
Sonja wished she could tell her mother that she was scared that her ceiling had turned into the sea and then the earth, and she was frightened that her world was being turned upside down and she worried she would disappear forever beneath it. But she had no idea of how to begin to say such an enormous thing, and instead said she was thirsty, and then asked once more what the flower was, for she did wish to know what the beautiful thing was that her mother cradled in her hands.
‘The flower of love, Sonja,’ Maria said, though absently. ‘An edelweiss. It grows in mountains, in cliffs, high, high above the ground, and to pick it you must be very brave and climb the cliff to reach it. Young men do such things, risk their lives, to pick such a flower to show their love for their woman.’
‘Flower of love,’ repeated Sonja, then correcting her English to please her mother—‘The flower of love.’ Then asked: ‘Did Artie pick this for you?’
Maria nodded. ‘When he first know me. And I press it to keep it.’
Maria Buloh picked her daughter up. Beneath her red coat she wore a black dress with a white lace yoke, into which Sonja buried her face. She wore lace and it was beautiful and Sonja pressed her face against the lace and knew her mother was leaving and that her mother was held within the power of something beyond the child, a terrible spell she could not break. Maria Buloh took the three-year-old Sonja in her arms and began softly singing a Slovenian lullaby as she rocked her.
‘pancek, zaspancek,’ she sang,
‘crn mozic
hodi po noci
nima nozic…’
Maria felt a tear gathering in the corner of an eye and she closed the eye and rubbed it hard to brush the moisture away, all the while continuing to sing:
‘Lunica ziblje:
aja, aj, aj,
spancek se smeje
aja, aj, aj.’
She looked at the child cradled within her arms.
‘My baby,’ said Maria Buloh. ‘My baby.’ She put Sonja down. This time she rubbed both her eyes and then turned away from her daughter.
‘Sonja, I must to go,’ said Maria Buloh. She gathered herself, turned to face Sonja, picked her up and carried her back to her bed. As she pulled the covers over her daughter she whispered reassurances. Then she returned to her room, picked up the suitcase, walked through the main room, opened the door to the darkness outside.
She heard Sonja getting out of bed and walking back out to her. But Maria did not acknowledge that her daughter was again up. She did not turn when she spoke. ‘Do not worry,’ Maria said to the open door. ‘Artie be home soon.’ In the glow of an electric light she saw falling snow scratching the blackness beyond.
‘Sonja?’ asked Sonja, hoping her mother might still relent.
‘No, Sonja,’ said Maria Buloh softly, her words already losing their way in the blackness. ‘I must go alone.’
‘But it’s dark here,’ said Sonja, ‘and I’m scared of the dark.’
‘I leave light on,’ said Maria. Her voice momentarily choked, then she continued. ‘I cannot stay. I must go.’
Then Maria turned around, fell to her knees, embraced Sonja, pulled slightly away, made a hurried sign of the cross and looked into Sonja’s eyes with both fear and hope. As if the child were a priest that could grant redemption.
‘Forgive me, Sonja.’
‘What for?’
This was too much for Maria Buloh. She rose quickly, turned her back upon Sonja, picked up her suitcase, and left.
Outside Maria Buloh’s shoe had just touched down onto the third and lowest snow-powdered step when she heard the sound of Sonja’s voice from inside—‘Mama…’ but Maria abruptly cut her daughter off, quickly and firmly shutting the door. Then Maria tried to soothe her child in Slovenian—‘Aja, aja,’ before she turned and headed off down that street, leaving the imprint of her shoe on the snow-covered
step. A flurry of snow, then another, and the footprint was already disappearing.
Everywhere it was silent.
Outside, the snow blew ceaseless.
Inside, the little girl tried to imagine the shoes from behind as they trudged off through snow. But the door had closed and outside a gale was rising, and it was the same as Sonja had always dreamt it, a dreadful foreboding confirmed.
The lace had gone forever.
Chapter 76
1990
SONJA SCREAMED.
My mother is lace. My father is wood. I am not.
Opened her eyes and looked around the dimly-lit hospital delivery room and screamed with all her guts and all her heart and all the wind in her throat. Sonja screamed and her body heaved like a huge wave and she felt it breaking her being apart, felt that she was being split into a million pieces of pain.
My mother is lace. My father is wood. I am the lace tearing in two. The wood breaking in half.
Then the wave ebbed and the agony momentarily abated and her breath she caught in short, shrill pants. ‘I can’t do it,’ she whispered in a broken voice, and she almost cried in rage at her own weakness, at her own inability to control either her mind or her body. ‘I just’—and she halted momentarily to catch breath—‘just can’t,’ she sobbed, ‘can’t.’
‘You must and will,’ said the midwife whom Sonja knew only as Betty. ‘Will and can. You have come so far and we are going to make it.’ But Sonja was again too far away to hear her. The room around her was blurring.
‘O my God,’ Sonja cried as the next contraction came, quicker and even harder. ‘O my God, my God, my God—’ she whispered as if He might hear her if she showed sufficient humility, then abandoning both humility and faith she simply screamed once more.
‘Let it out,’ Betty urged. ‘Let it out and get it out.’
Sonja no longer knew where she was or who she was or why her body and her mind seemed to be simultaneously ripping apart in agony. All she could hear was herself screaming, but even that sound was growing distant.
And then she finally knew that she had always known. It did not come back to her in a sudden moment of revelation, nor did it come to her in a rush, because it had never gone away. It had always been within her and she had let it grow slowly within her, nurturing it without ever intending to nurture it, as she had her child, letting it build from a scattering of half-formed, unconnected memories into something whole and complete unto itself.
Sonja’s eyes were closed and as she journeyed into the whiteness of an indescribable pain she could see something at once so huge and so small that at first it was impossible to recognise herself as the small child clad in only a floral nightie, old green jumper and socks—one running up her calf, the other fallen—trudging through snow, on a winter’s night all that dark time ago.
‘Now push,’ she heard Betty exhort once more, but the voice was ever more remote and only its rhythmic incantations remained with her, ‘Push. Push. Push. Push.’
Chapter 77
1954
HOW COLD THAT NIGHT! How white that snow! How completely the small camp of Butlers Gorge was already disappearing into that whiteness and darkness! The child Sonja stood at the top of the steps of her home, looking out at the shimmering mirage of what passed for a town, trying to catch some glimpse of her mother. It was hopeless of course, though the child did not think that or think much at all. The child simply felt this. She saw the town as fragments of black shaped between intricate, ever changing patterns of falling white snow. She saw the town as lace. And she wondered how long before this—the only world she had ever known—how long before this too was gone.
At that moment she had the most terrible premonition, that was shapeless, more a pain than an idea, and because of this strange, awful feeling she slowly, awkwardly began to half-walk, half-clamber down the steps. If her mother was lace and the town was lace and all were disappearing, who was she and would she remain or simply vanish as surely as her mother had and the town would? Could it be that she too was lace?
Sonja knew that she must find her father before he too turned into lace. And then comforted herself with the thought that he was too loud, reeked too strongly of tobacco and beer and garlic ever to be lace.
Feeling braver, she trudged through the snow, oblivious to the snowflakes covering her green jumper like desiccated coconut, the ruts in the road that still held slush beneath the fresh white layer of snow and thin ice shell, not caring as the ice water reached through her socks and seized her toes and began to clutch in cruel spasms her still warm body, but simply taking and being a straight line to that place where she knew her father to be. To say she walked is to describe inadequately what Sonja did. Some of those who saw Sonja from the canteen entrance later said that she tottered, trying to keep her balance, and the rough road with its white undulations looked a wild sea and the child a small boat being tossed upon it.
The gaggle of women who stood around the empty wooden beer barrels outside stopped chatting and giggling as Sonja approached the canteen’s main entrance. Their eyes followed Sonja as she toddled up to them, and then, as if they were earth to be turned over and Sonja the plough, they parted without a word as she walked through them, opening up to let the child pass through into the men-only canteen.
The women watched as Sonja pushed open the double slat door, was momentarily illuminated by a cone of yellow light, then disappeared into the low hanging haze as the door banged shut.
Inside, a dun-coloured crowd of men sat on bench stools at crude tables, drinking, smoking, playing cards, drinking, talking, listening, drinking, thinking, drinking, not thinking, drinking, drinking. The room was strong with the close smell of smoke, of damp clothes and stale sweat and spilt beer; loud with the roar of all the languages of the Levant and elsewhere, a maelstrom of laughing and cursing and gossiping. Words took startled flight round the amber-hued room like flocks of frightened exotic birds, and a few of the words soaring above her she understood, but many of the words, and almost all of the tongues were entirely unknown to her. Some of the men looked to her loud monsters, others wispy ghosts. Sonja walked down the long rows between their huge, heavy bodies, looking up at the forest of musty backs of men still in their heavy workclothes and boots. Here and there she glimpsed their faces and they looked to her like the fallen trees and broken rocks that lay at the fringes of the settlement, but no tree or rock bore the face of her father. Suddenly, with a resounding thud, a giant slumped backwards and fell off the back of a stool onto the floor immediately in front of Sonja, blocking her path. She recoiled in fright, but upon recognising that the man was neither her father nor dead, but only a dead drunk stranger, she stepped over the fallen giant and kept on walking until finally she found who she was after and tugged at his bluey coat.
Bojan Buloh swung around, drunk.
‘Madonna Santa! What the … Sonja, you not supposed to be here. What you want? Your mother send you? Here, sit here.’ He waved to another man getting up. ‘Eh—Pavel—six beer here.’
Bojan placed Sonja on his lap. He laughed. He ran his hand through her hair. She turned and buried her head in his chest. Bojan, for the benefit of his mates, pulled a comic face, pulling his lower lip up over his upper lip, simultaneously shrugging his shoulders, throwing his arms in the air and turning his extended hands outwards in a theatrical gesture. Pavel returned with the beers, and seeing Sonja on Bojan’s lap, looked at him queryingly.
‘Kids,’ laughed Bojan, ‘Bloody kids.’
Outside, the snow blew ceaseless.
How white the snow. How cold the night. How chill Sonja’s small body. How dark the world outside her father’s pungent, powerful arms. And how completely the small camp of Butlers Gorge seemed already disappearing into that whiteness and darkness and coldness as she turned inwards for that life before this life.
Chapter 78
1954
WHERE? thought Bojan Buloh. Where?
He glanced around the o
ther labourers, a score or more of new Australians, standing around waiting to be taken to their work.
All avoiding his eyes.
It was Saturday, and Maria had still not returned. It was as if the other men already knew. But knew what? He had told no-one that she had left the previous night. If they did know, why would they not tell him? And what was it they knew? What? Perhaps she was hiding out with someone else’s wife. Perhaps one of the drivers had taken her out this morning in a truck bound for Hobart. Perhaps—he hoped against all his despair—perhaps she would be back home when he returned from work. Then she would pretend and he would pretend as they had for so long that everything was entirely normal, whereas nothing was normal and nothing had ever been normal. But he would do whatever it took to have her back, if only she would return: he would believe whatever she told him, even if he thought she was lying, for lies were the bitter bread of banishment for them both, and with what else could they hope to sustain themselves?
But where she now? thought Bojan Buloh. Where?
Was she still in that room waiting for her father to perish in such wretched humiliation, for her and all her family to die their various deaths, some quickly, some as slow as a lifetime? Or had she found some way to escape that room? Perhaps she was sharing the edelweiss with another man who offered her something he did not, and this thought both enraged and comforted him, because it suggested that there might actually be some happiness beyond what they had known.
But where she? he thought. Where?
The men waited, stamping their feet in the snow, smoking a lot, talking a little. Not being able to tell them that she had left, how could Bojan confess to them his fear that she might never return, might have walked out of his life and their daughter’s life for good? He told them nothing, of course, but instead put on a front of bravado.
The Sound of One Hand Clapping Page 27