The Antipodeans

by Greg McGee

  The carabiniere pursed his lips but it was unclear whether he’d understood until he hoicked a fat glob of spittle, which landed dead centre on the front of Harry’s shirt. It was the first time Joe had seen Harry smile so broadly. ‘Bull’s-eye,’ he said.

  They were blocking the footpath and people had to step around them. The carabiniere’s action seemed to unlock some animosity in the passing townsfolk, women particularly, and mostly towards Harry. He was spat at more than once, although others clearly tried to remonstrate. By the time the small truck arrived with the young carabiniere riding shotgun both men were grateful to ease themselves onto the tray and get out of there.

  The truck worked its noisy way parallel to the bay through narrow streets towards hillsides of olive groves. When they crossed the main road up from the wharves, Joe saw a huge poster that might have explained the reaction of the Italian women. There were smaller words that neither Joe nor Harry could understand but across the middle was one word, Difendila!, which was easily translatable in concert with the cartoonish drawing underneath: a wild-eyed, dark-skinned man attempting to ravish a beautiful Italian girl who was trying desperately to push him away. As he thrust himself on the crying woman, the devil’s hat was falling off the back of his head.

  ‘The hat’s definitely a lemon squeezer,’ said Harry, adjusting his own.

  After inductions at the camp were completed, they were given a groundsheet and some bundles of straw and shunted out into an orchard riven by a dry canal bed. It seemed there was a choice of lying under the trees or in the canal. Thousands of men were spread across the land, trying to find some shade. They were dirty, malnourished and thirsty. While Joe and Harry were taking it all in, a noticeably pudgy individual appeared before them, waving a bag full of bread rolls.

  ‘You fellas will need a couple of these,’ he said, in a broad Kiwi accent.

  ‘Will we?’ asked Harry.

  ‘You’ll find out soon enough. When you do, come to me at the cookhouse, I’ll do you a deal.’

  ‘What kind of a deal?’ asked Harry.

  ‘I like the look of that wristwatch,’ said the man.

  ‘Do you?’ asked Harry, slipping it from his wrist and holding it out to him. When the man reached for it, Harry swung his crutch into the back of his knees. By the time he hit the ground, Harry had handed Joe the crutch and his hands were at the man’s throat. He struggled for a short time, then convulsed and was still. Harry calmly asked Joe to hand him the bag of rolls. Harry took out one and broke it open. The inside was green with mould. The man on the ground was gasping and coughing, trying to get air back into his lungs as Harry stuck the bread roll in his mouth, mould first.

  ‘You’re a fucking disgrace,’ Harry said. ‘If I see you again, you’re dead.’

  The cookhouse wallah scurried away as Harry manoeuvred himself back onto his feet, cheered by twenty or thirty skeletal soldiers who’d been attracted by his efforts. Some of them were from Harry’s 22nd Battalion, had thought he was dead.

  Joe left him to it and wandered out into the orchard, hoping to see someone he knew from his battalion or from Maadi, but didn’t recognise any of the gaunt faces that occasionally looked his way. Back at the gate, another large truck arrived with more prisoners so Joe found the first spot he could and laid out his straw and groundsheet near an emaciated fair-haired man with skin the colour of old leather.

  ‘Where you from, cobber?’ the man asked.

  ‘Down south,’ said Joe.

  ‘Lot of Kiwis here,’ said the man. ‘And Aussies, worse luck.’ He introduced himself as Howie from Adelaide and told Joe there was fuck all food, water or shelter going around, but an abundance of amoebic dysentery and lice.

  And queues, Joe discovered, when late in the afternoon long lines formed in front of the cookhouse for a foul-smelling broth with lumps of something floating in it. Joe tried to ignore the smell. He looked in vain for the bread roll man among those serving up. His eyes were drawn to the battle tunic of the man in front of him. The seams round the shoulders and down the back were crawling with lice. They looked like there was no more room inside and were trying to escape.

  Later he lay on the straw, using the groundsheet as a blanket against the cold. When he looked up at the stars in a black sky he remembered the teacher at the one-room school at Ardgowan, who had told him that the sky wasn’t a blue canopy decorated with lights that came out at night, but infinity. Nothingness. That had seemed unimaginable. He’d thought there had to be an end out there somewhere. Now he knew that her story of a black void lit by fiery burning suns was true. He’d become afraid of the sky. He yearned for the mine at Ngapara, the carefully excavated and buttressed shafts, the secure earth above.

  In the six years between leaving school and presenting himself as a volunteer at the drill hall in Itchen Street, right above the lovers’ lane he’d heard about but never walked through, he’d spent six days a week of eight-hour shifts underground. There’d been lots of explosions down there, dynamite drilled and packed into the coal face, a carefully controlled combustion that sent clouds of black dust back up the shaft, then silence, always silence. Joe stared at the black sky and listened for the sound of an engine, the low drone of an aircraft, the clanking of armoured tracks on rock, waited for the fire and flesh and intestine to fall and spit on hot hard metal. Nothing but the sound of cicadas, mosquitoes, and the curses and wet splatters of the men wracked by dysentery squatting below him in the canal.

  * * *

  He must have slept. When he awoke, there were no stars above him. He was lying in the drain in some contadino’s stable. Jesus Christ, he was cold. The embers inside him seemed to have died. Even the flaming sky of El Mreir couldn’t warm him now. Dying smeared in cow shit would be a suitable end, he thought. He’d been raised a farmer’s boy. There were worse ways to go.

  Sometime later he heard voices. The sounds came from the back of the throat like a tui’s glottal stops, so different from the thrush song of Italian. They seemed to come from far way, though they must have been right above him because he could also hear their boots. ‘Jerry doesn’t like shit,’ Harry had said. ‘He won’t imagine that anyone would hide themselves in it.’

  But when Joe heard the boots hard and clear on the packed earth right beside his head, he braced himself for the bayonet and found himself hoping for God rather than black infinity and fiery suns.

  San Pietro di Livenza 2014

  7

  It was already dark when Clare and her father crossed the bridge at Accademia again and took the vaporetto back up the Grand Canal. She was grateful it was full of day-trippers heading back to the train station, because there was no space to talk. He’d accepted her move to a hotel — ‘so that they could both be more comfortable and get a decent night’s sleep’ — in that phlegmatic way of his, but she could tell he was a bit hurt. They passed under the Rialto and continued on past the train station stop to Piazzale Roma, a huge roundabout ringed by parking garages.

  Her father had received a message from his contact at San Pietro to look out for a black Audi Q5 opposite one of the garages, and it was already waiting when they walked up the steps from the pontoon. As soon as he saw them, the driver got out of the car and came around to shake their hands. Beautifully dressed in a subdued earth-toned jacket over a V-necked pullover and buttoned-down collar, he radiated warmth and welcome. Lorenzo — Renzo, he insisted — looked to be in his early thirties, with the kind of stocky, athletic frame that to her father spoke mid-field back.

  ‘Inside centre, yes,’ said Renzo, ‘recently retired, but never very good.’ His accent was American, with only a hint of Italian in the r’s and vowels. Clare was disappointed: there were enough Americans speaking like that, it just sounded wrong in a European. But he was very solicitous, opening the front passenger door for her father, making sure he was able to step up. Then Renzo opened the rear door for her. ‘Age
before beauty, Signorina Clare,’ he said to her. ‘I’m sure you understand.’

  As they drove back across what her father called Mussolini’s causeway, spanning the lagoon to the mainland, Renzo explained to her father that he’d been too young to see him play, but had seen many photos of him and heard many stories. ‘You and Franco are still the inspiration for running backs at our club.’

  Her father seemed to have trouble knowing quite how to respond to such praise. He nodded and stared out the window at the lights of the Mestre tower blocks. He might have been more comfortable in the back seat by himself.

  ‘Did you play professionally?’ she asked Renzo, leaning forward.

  ‘Oh no,’ he said. ‘These days our club moves between Serie B and C, not like the glory days of your father’s era. I also played in Boston, when I was doing my doctorate at MIT. Now I’m retired from rugby, I contribute as a member of the dirigenti, the committee that administers the club. My day job is at Padova University, where I teach physics. Education was very important to my family.’

  ‘You’ve come all the way from Padova for tonight?’

  ‘I live in Treviso, half an hour away,’ he shrugged, ‘and I have family in Venice. Your father’s return is a big moment for us.’

  Renzo’s lionising of her father set the tenor for the evening. He’d spoken from time to time about his sojourn in Italy and she’d seen a couple of photos of him and his team-mates at San Pietro di Livenza, but the more detailed her questions about his time there, the vaguer his answers seemed to become.

  They left the lights of Mestre behind and continued north on the autostrada for about twenty minutes, then took an exit onto a flat two-lane black-top across what Renzo said were the plains of the Veneto. They could see the lights of houses on both sides of the road. To her they were spaced far enough apart to seem much less urban than where they’d come from, but not to her father.

  ‘Lights everywhere,’ he said finally. ‘This used to be countryside.’

  ‘Ah,’ said Renzo, ‘since you were last here we joined the EU, and suddenly having a few campi became profitable, so . . .’

  ‘Agricultural subsidies,’ agreed her father. ‘We canned ours about the time the EU ramped yours up.’

  There was a hint of bitterness in his tone. He had sold the family farm in the mid-eighties, just after agricultural subsidies were suddenly withdrawn and farm prices tanked. ‘If I’d only gone earlier or hung on’ was a fairly frequent refrain.

  Renzo made a call ahead and shortly afterwards they crossed a bridge spanning a substantial-looking river and entered a little town that seemed to have nestled in close to the water with high levees either side.

  ‘How much do you remember?’ asked Renzo.

  ‘Everything,’ said her father, though it was apparent that some of the blander square-fronted buildings in the main street could not have been more than a decade or two old.

  They turned left around the fountain of the central piazza and drove slowly down a wide cobblestoned street past the grand municipio building towards a small gathering of people, late middle-aged men, some older, some a little younger, filing out of the big double doors under Bar and Peroni neons.

  Renzo stopped in front of them and turned, smiling expectantly at her father. ‘Your old friends,’ he said, ‘here to welcome you.’

  Now that they were here, having travelled twenty thousand kilometres for the occasion, her father seemed frozen, staring as if he’d seen the ghosts he’d mentioned on the Alilaguna. She got out and opened his door. ‘Dad?’

  As soon as they saw him, the men began smiling and clapping and calling out something that sounded like ‘Broochay! Broochay!’

  ‘It’s Italian for Bruce,’ said her father, snapping out of it with a wry grin. ‘An old joke.’ As his legs hit terra firma, the men were upon him, around him, grabbing his hands in both of theirs, some embracing him. Gradually they opened an aisle to the doors of the bar, where a much older man, maybe eighty, thick head of tousled hair, almost as wide as he was tall, was standing with the aid of a walking stick. He was weeping.

  ‘Aldo,’ said her father. As he climbed the steps towards his old friend, Aldo dropped his stick and hugged him like a long-lost brother.

  Renzo meanwhile had one gentle hand on her upper arm and was introducing her to a succession of grey-haired men with names that ended in ‘o’ — Marios and Giorgios and Claudios. Some greeted Renzo by name, but many of them acknowledged him as ‘Professore’ or ‘Dottore’. When she asked him which he was, he told her he was both. When she said she was terribly impressed, he looked bashful. The men she was introduced to gripped her in strong hands and pulled her to them for sometimes whiskery kisses on both cheeks with exclamations of ‘Che bea!’ When she asked Renzo what ‘bea’ meant and was told it was dialect for ‘bella, beautiful’, it was her turn to look bashful.

  They were ushered inside, through a bar area to a restaurant where many tables had been pushed together to make one long table. Renzo seated himself beside her directly to the left of the head of the table, occupied by her father and Aldo.

  Once everyone was seated, Aldo’s wife Beatrice and her two middle-aged sons appeared from the kitchen, laden with bottles of prosecco and baskets of bread. More tears, this time from Beatrice. She had a beautiful face, stretched tight by grey hair pulled back in a French roll. She hugged her father, then held his face between both palms and kissed him, before introducing him to her sons, who both made what sounded like practised speeches.

  ‘They remember him fondly,’ translated Renzo quietly, ‘though they were both very young.’ When they’d finished, her father looked briefly uncertain about what to do next, but then stepped forward and shook both their hands — rather like the Pope, she thought, handing out benedictions.

  Once everyone was seated, Aldo produced a well-worn clipping from a newspaper and, according to Renzo, asked her father to translate it for her as he read it.

  ‘“Addio e auguri” dice Bruce,’ said Aldo, reading the title.

  ‘Goodbye and best wishes, says Bruce,’ translated her father. It was an interview he’d given to Corriere Dello Sport just before he’d left Italy to come home.

  As Aldo began reading the body of the article, declaiming every word as if it were Shakespeare, it became apparent that her father didn’t understand very much at all of what he’d been quoted as saying. Renzo translated for her, somehow including her father’s bewildered nods and smiles as much as Aldo’s words. It was a David and Goliath story: little San Pietro pitted against the great cities of Milano, Torino, Roma and Padova in Serie A. San Pietro may not have had the money and playing resources of the giants, but it had demonstrated an exceptional combination of rugby spirit and ethos.

  ‘And grinta,’ said Renzo, struggling to translate the word.

  ‘Guts,’ said her father, and the table burst into applause.

  ‘Ghe sboro mi!’ exclaimed her father, much encouraged.

  The table roared. Renzo looked a little embarrassed. ‘It gives me a small ejaculation,’ he said. ‘An old Venetian saying.’

  Aldo beamed his approval and the rest of the speech was punctuated with much acclamation by the men around the table.

  ‘He says that he came to San Pietro with no expectations, and although he has to return to New Zealand for personal reasons, he feels as if he is leaving a part of himself in San Pietro, and would always value his time here and the wonderful friends he made,’ finished Renzo, as Aldo drew Bruce to his feet and hugged him, then sat down, leaving him staring into an expectant silence.

  She felt sorry for her father, aware that he had to somehow honour the occasion and concerned that his failure to do so was inevitable. His response would be dry and terse and, surely, in English. She was grateful Renzo was there to translate and was wondering how to suggest that he add a bit of emotional colour, when her father bega
n speaking. In Italian. Fluently, without notes and at a pace Renzo’s whispers in her ear struggled to keep up with.

  ‘I have lived in a far-off land and never came back for nearly forty years, for reasons which some of you will understand, but my time here has remained with me always, in my cuore’ — he thumped his heart — ‘and in indelible memories which have accompanied me every day of my life since I lived among you.’

  Christ, she thought, as Renzo translated, Who is this man? Where’s he been hiding?

  ‘I’m so sorry that my Italian is no longer good enough to speak to you with the eloquence and profundity which such old friendships deserve, but rest assured that though my tongue is tied, my heart is full of love and respect for you all.’

  She could feel her eyes watering. Absolute silence. Renzo’s whispers were growing softer and softer as he tried not to break the spell. That’s what he’s been doing in his room, she thought. He’s been writing this speech and learning it off by heart.

  Then he spoke about absent friends, named about five men, beginning with Angelo someone and ending with Domenico. Then something peculiar happened. He choked on another name, had trouble getting it out. It sounded like ‘Franco’, but when she turned to Renzo for clarification, he had tears streaming down his face and couldn’t talk. Aldo was dabbing his eyes, and when she looked back to the table, they were all similarly affected.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ said Renzo. ‘Emotion is contagious.’

  ‘Who was Franco?’

  ‘Your father’s playing partner in the centres. You remember, we talked about him in the car.’

  ‘Yes, but what on earth happened to him?’

  ‘He died.’

  So had the others her father had named, but their collective pain about Franco seemed to be of a different order. For all the deep emotion in the room, and all the words that had been spoken, she sensed that something important had been left unsaid. So, instead, they cried. Her father too. Those blue eyes, which mostly looked as if they were focused on something far away, were streaming now. She’d never seen him close to crying, and would never have believed it possible that the first time she saw him weep would be in public, at a table full of retired Italian rugby players.