The Antipodeans

by Greg McGee

  She looked across at Renzo, who’d stayed at her side throughout and made it possible, subtly and unobtrusively, for her to understand what had gone on. His face, lit by the dash lights, looked more hawkishly Arab in profile than Italian. Deep lines ran from his cheekbones to the corners of his mouth. Laugh lines, they’d usually be called, except he didn’t seem to laugh much.

  The silence between them now, as he drove back through the light-sprinkled countryside, felt companionable after so many words, though not many of them had been about him. In their continuing conversation since she’d first got into the vehicle and right through dinner, Renzo had asked all the questions. She knew next to nothing about him other than his job at Padova Uni. How do you work physics into a conversation?

  ‘So should I call you Doctor or Professor?’ she asked him.

  ‘Neither, really,’ he said. ‘I’m a lapsed physicist, probably.’

  ‘Probably?’

  ‘Theoretical physicists are in trouble. Experimental physicists may be about to make us obsolete — our theories to date, at least. I’ve lost faith, I think, so I teach rather than do research these days. That probably makes me a hypocrite.’

  ‘Do physicists need faith? I thought science was about empirical proof, all that.’

  ‘Yes and no.’

  She smiled. ‘That’s not a very scientific answer.’

  ‘It’s a paradox, which is more or less what physicists have to live with.’

  Renzo gave her a quick glance but enough, it seemed, to prompt a decision. He waved his hand at the quarter-moon, barely visible over the approaching light-stacked towers of Mestre. ‘There’s an old story about Einstein and his philosopher colleague,’ he said. ‘Einstein asked his colleague if he really believed that the moon wasn’t there when nobody was looking at it. His friend asked Einstein to prove the opposite — that the moon was still there when nobody was looking. That was of course impossible, even for Einstein, partly because it’s a question of philosophy as much as physics.’

  The moon illuminated a drainage ditch running alongside the verge of the road. She told him that they weren’t looking at the moon but could see its light.

  ‘Ah,’ he said, ‘but those photons know we’re looking.’

  She thought this silly and circuitous but also funny. ‘Looking?’

  ‘That’s a paradox physicists have been trying to unravel for decades. Several paradoxes, in fact. That a single particle of light, a photon, can be in many places at the same time, which is against Newton’s laws of physics. In that sense, you could say that photons misbehave, except that, from a physicist’s point of view, photons do what photons do and if that doesn’t match our theory then the theory is wrong. We’ve tried to formulate new theory to describe this quantum reality. Quantum mechanics looked promising, then quantum field theory — I won’t bore you with the details, but we’ve had a great deal of trouble applying any theory because of another paradox: photons won’t allow us to observe their errant behaviour. We can shoot them through a laser gun and know exactly what they’re doing at source and on arrival at the target, but as soon as we try to observe what they’re doing in between, when they “misbehave” according to the laws of physics as we know them, they stop doing it.’

  ‘They must be shy,’ she suggested.

  He laughed. ‘Timido? Maybe.’

  It was a sound she wanted to hear again. ‘Or are they duplicitous and don’t want to be found out?’

  That worked too. ‘Are they naughty children or cunning adults?’ he laughed. Then seriously: ‘It’s fun anthropomorphising them, but can photons form intentions? We have no idea. Anyway, the secret life of a photon, that is or was my life’s work.’

  ‘Why is it important?’

  ‘Because the behaviour of these particles — if that’s what they are — questions the very nature of our reality. Quantum mechanics was exciting because it was extremely precise, mathematically brilliant and it described everything we could observe back then. The problem is that the behaviour of photons made it nonsensical.’

  ‘Does that really matter to anyone in the real world?’

  ‘That is exactly the question they pose: what is the real world? Quantum reality is turning out to be much stranger than we ever imagined. Everything has the power to be in several places at once, but we can’t see it. Even though we can’t see it, we can’t ignore it, because it may be about to change our lives in a huge way.’

  ‘Yes?’ Clare briefly wondered whether Renzo was constructing a complex analogy for her, providing an alternative reality from the painful one she’d described to him earlier.

  ‘Until we can understand how quantum reality works, we can’t really understand how our universe works. What if what we see is not what is, because we can see it?’

  The autostrada was delivering them to the causeway across the lagoon. She looked ahead to the lights of Venice, a city that had been sitting there since 400AD-ish. Or not. What did she know? She wished the causeway were longer, that the misbehaving photons could make Venice disappear for a while so that Renzo could keep talking to her with that light American lilt.

  ‘My problem with physics is a fundamental one,’ he continued. ‘There are things we don’t understand, but is that because we can’t understand them? There’s a difference. If I’m a physicist and believe that maybe we’re inherently incapable of understanding our universe, does that make me a heretic? What if the truth has an author who wants to preserve his anonymity?’

  She was clinging to the edge of understanding. ‘God?’

  ‘Alas, I’m also a lapsed Catholic.’

  ‘Can you believe in God and still be a physicist?’

  ‘With a great deal of difficulty. You would have to accept that, despite our best endeavours to explain it, our universe remains such a mystery that there mightn’t be any other explanation.’

  ‘Aren’t they looking for the God particle with that Hadron Collider thing?’

  ‘They’ve found it. The Higgs boson. But that discovery just deepens the mystery. We’d hoped that it would point the way forward. And it does, but we don’t know where to yet. It indicates a fork in the road ahead: to one side, super symmetry, where our theories would give us a coherent view of our universe; to the other, multiverse — universes on such an unimaginable scale that our theories of how this minute one of ours works are localised, irrelevant and useless, and life here on earth is nothing more than a happy accident in the midst of chaos.’

  ‘Meaning what?’

  ‘That what we thought was true may be mostly untrue, and yet . . . We managed to predict the existence of the Higgs boson. So we stand between symmetry and chaos, awaiting further developments.’

  ‘That’s me,’ she said.

  He laughed.

  ‘I do have a tendency to take everything personally,’ she said.

  Renzo chuckled again. Maybe they were laugh lines after all.

  He looked into the rear vision mirror. ‘Your father seems to be asleep. Do you think that happened before or after I began talking?’

  When they arrived at Piazzale Roma, she woke her father. As Renzo helped him down onto shaky feet, she wondered if he would make it back to the B & B unassisted. ‘I can get a park here in the garage,’ Renzo said, ‘and accompany you. It isn’t a problem.’

  His grey-green eyes had a softness she’d noticed when they were sitting so close together in Aldo’s bar. Olive skin, black hair, neither tall nor short. Her type. There’s no hope for me. ‘Thanks,’ she said, more firmly than she’d intended, ‘but we’ll be fine.’

  He gave her his card. ‘Anything I can do for you or your father,’ he said. ‘I am entirely sincere.’

  Of the many words and phrases he’d used across a long evening, that was the only one that a native English speaker would never say, unless in irony. But he was looking into her e
yes as he said it and there was no irony: Renzo was entirely sincere.

  * * *

  On the vaporetto she told her father she was proud of him. She cuddled up to his bony shoulder against the cold and told him that sometimes you lose perspective on people you love and need to see them in a different context to appreciate them. Tonight she’d seen him as she’d never seen him before. The evening had been a triumph.

  True to previous form he said nothing and she wondered whether her words were wasted. He seemed frozen with fatigue and his smile of acknowledgement looked more like a grimace. Well, it was done: mission accomplished. Now he can relax and enjoy the rest of the trip, stay in bed all day if he wants to, before we move on to Florence.

  After getting him off the vaporetto at Accademia and making slow progress through Campo Santo Stefano and San Maurizio to the door of his bedroom at the B & B, she stopped on the first little bridge on the way to her hotel and tried to find that quarter-moon.

  I’m a speck of dust on the face of infinity and chaos. I don’t matter. She had no idea why that should be of any comfort, but it was. She walked on along the wide alley back towards San Marco, then turned down the narrower calle to her hotel. For the first time, La Serenissima seemed something other than a bad joke. There were no hawkers, no day-trippers, no shoppers, no gondolas in the narrow canals jousting with motorboats full of Coke and cartons, no tourists pulling suitcases, just the occasional couple leaning in against each other as they made their way through the cold clear evening from dinner to bed.

  The thought came to her that Nicholas and Sarah’s betrayal might be part of an immutable law of nature that nobody understood, that what had happened wasn’t her fault. This, too, was a strange comfort.

  As she lay in her clean sheets, undisturbed, she put one palm over her heart, as her counsellor had taught her, and the other across her belly and tried to think kindly of herself, letting the warmth flow around that knot of pain in her chest. It seemed easier than it had been before, looser, and her mind wandered. Would Venice still be sinking, she wondered sleepily, if no one was watching? If I can’t see Nicholas and Sarah, do they still exist? If a tree falls in the forest . . .

  San Pietro di Livenza 1943

  11

  When spring finally came, Harry was still in PG 57, and still there in early summer, when he told Joe that the fighting in North Africa was over: ‘Jerry’s on the skids, the boys will be coming ashore here next.’ Some took the news as if the war was as good as won, but Harry had his doubts. Joe thought he might be worried that the war would be over before he could get back to it.

  In June, Arch Scott told Joe about a working party that offered a chance of getting out of PG 57. He said that under the Geneva Convention the Italians were entitled to ask them to work on non-military tasks. This was apparently agricultural work which, said Arch, ever the pragmatist, meant ‘working with food’.

  When the fifty or so Kiwis comprising the working party were assembled for the march back to the Cividale train station, Joe was surprised to see Harry among them.

  The train stopped at San Pietro di Livenza, another pale yellow double-storey station with elaborate plasterwork and wooden shutters. There were horses and wagons waiting to pick them up and take them back across the tracks, away from the town. The Livenza, they discovered, was a river that flowed across the plains north of Venice down to the lagoon. It was hemmed in by raised banks called argines, built thirty feet or more above the fields, on top of which, on either side, were roads.

  As they made their way downstream on top of an argine, they had a great view of flat plains spreading to the mountains, more distant than they had been at Cividale. To Joe it looked like the view from the military camp at Burnham, looking west across the Canterbury Plains to the Southern Alps. Arch was reminded of the Hauraki Plains looking across to the Coromandel Ranges. Joe felt his spirits lifted by the verdant early summer green of the countryside and by the friendly people they passed, out walking in their Sunday best, most of whom acknowledged them with a nod or a smile. Some of the younger ones waved and called out ‘Ciao, ciao’ to the hollow-cheeked faces staring back at them.

  Joe, sitting close to Arch, turned to him after one such greeting and said, ‘This is different.’

  Arch was sitting there looking out, smiling, but with tears running down his cheeks. ‘It is,’ he agreed. ‘But it does make you realise what you’re missing.’

  It wasn’t just Arch. Nostalgia was burgeoning among the men. They’d heard by then that the Allies had occupied the islands of Pantelleria and Lampedusa south-west of Sicily and for the first time they dared to hope that their travails would soon be over, and began imagining what a normal life might feel like.

  * * *

  The Veronese Estate, several miles down the river from San Pietro, was well set up for itinerant labourers: a huge three-storey dormitory the size of a small hospital sat hunched into a shoulder of the argine on a bend of the Livenza and looked out across infinite flat fields of crops. At one end was a long single-storey implement shed with brick arches, at the other a kitchen garden and a chicken run. The Italians had simply put barbed wire around that end of the building, keeping the prisoners and chickens from straying, bricked up the other exits and called it PG 107/7.

  A couple of fellows cooked and the rest went out each day in two groups to different parts of the estate to do variations of what Joe had done at Devil’s Bridge since he was old enough to walk. He’d never struck sugar beet before, or castor oil seeds, but thinning and hoeing and picking and cleaning and topping and loading were common enough to most crops, and Joe settled easily into the long hours out in the fields, particularly since the work came with benefits unheard of at PG 57. At San Pietro, the prisoners got double rations and real vegetables pulled from the gardens they worked in — potatoes and onions and peas and cabbages — and Red Cross parcels came more regularly. They were also given quinine tablets because the land was reclaimed swamp and malarial. All of them began putting on weight and condition, so that they looked fit, rather than, as Harry put it, ‘fucked’.

  Although Harry outranked Arch by one stripe, he spoke no Italian, and since none of the guards or the estate overseer spoke any English, except ‘Stop!’, Arch was the one who had to act as interpreter and relay orders to the men. That didn’t seem to worry Harry unduly, but it did impress on him the wisdom of learning Italian, and thereafter he was part of a much-expanded Italian language class.

  The prisoners agreed among themselves to work at an easy pace and Joe found it a breeze compared with home, where Malachy would bang his stick on the ground and demand more elbow grease. The old bugger was a little more sympathetic with the girls, but if he or Dan complained, Malachy would dismiss whatever it was, blisters or fatigue or thirst or skinned knees or an aching back, with a ‘Be buggered you have!’ and then threaten in his hard and flat-as-slate Northern Irish brogue to give it to them, ‘around the earhole’.

  After Malachy and Capitano Calcaterra, the guards at PG 107/7 were also relatively benign. A sergeant, two corporals and three or four privates guarded the fifty prisoners. The sergeant looked apprehensive when they said they were Kiwis, then after a couple of days of very close scrutiny the apprehension turned to puzzlement and he kept asking Arch if he was sure they were New Zealanders. Arch thought it might be a joke he wasn’t getting, but Harry remembered the poster they’d seen at Bari of the black man in the lemon squeezer hat attacking the woman, and speculated that the sergeant might be having trouble reconciling the propaganda with the reality in front of him.

  A sure sign that the sergeant had adjusted to reality was the appearance of civilians out in the fields beside them. Since the young men were away in the army, the local workforce was mainly women, who seemed friendly and open — shockingly so for some of the men, who were unused to seeing women, young and old, hitch up their dresses and squat whenever they needed to pee. It
was less of a shock for Joe — Ida, Betty and Agnes had all done the same out in the paddocks at Devil’s Bridge in front of Dan and Joe, but there’d been something covert about it then, much giggling and blushing, and they’d never have done it in front of Malachy or Molly.

  Another frequent visitor was Don Antonio, the priest from the church just down the river, San Anastasio. Don Antonio, who rode a bicycle around his parish, was an energetic cheerful man obviously much respected by the locals and seemed to have real empathy for the prisoners, particularly Arch, who would greet him like a villager. ‘Sia lodato Gesù Cristo, Don Antonio.’ Praised be Jesus Christ, Don Antonio.

  ‘Sempre sia lodato, Aci,’ said Don Antonio. Be He praised forever, Archie.

  * * *

  Joe’s Italian was coming along, though he wasn’t as adept as Arch. If the locals spoke slowly enough directly to him, he could understand most of what they said, but when they spoke dialect between themselves, he was lost. Harry knew much less than Joe, yet had some means of communication beyond the verbal that verged on magic. He picked up words of dialect and the hand signals the locals used, and could somehow make them laugh.

  One day they were working on rows of sugar beet, which resembled bigger, uglier turnips or swedes. They had a leafy top and a long, sweet tap root that had to be pulled from the ground, topped and tailed with a special knife and thrown onto a horse-drawn dray. Joe had driven the team at Devil’s Bridge, so would take the full loads back to one of the estate’s storage sheds, where Harry and some locals would transfer them into jute sacks that were later taken to the wharf for barging down the Livenza to the Venetian lagoon.