The Auckland University Press Anthology of New Zealand Literature

by Jane Stafford

  Then it was Stipan’s turn. ‘I remember how we worked picking the monastery olives for a banovats (small coin) a day and a hard bread roll ….’ And suddenly he found himself telling Ana about the little olive tree.

  ‘Olive trees!’ said Ana. ‘They are what I have missed most of all here. All kinds of trees, but no olive trees to make your eyes and your heart glad with their kindness on the land.’ And the picture of the olive trees in Dalmatia came vividly to them both, and they sat there and talked about them, of the yields of the family trees, the barrels of oil stored in the cellars. ‘If I could only see them again!’ It was Ana who said it, Stipan who heard.

  The wind played softly in the pine break, making a gentle music on the night. The sleeping cattle in the paddocks below were folded in stillness. A thin moonlight washed houses and farm buildings with silver. They looked down on their farm. So much labour, so much love was there from the both of them, yet tonight memory stirred longings for another scene.

  ‘It would be good to go back ….’ It was Ana who put the suggestion to the listening night.

  ‘Go back—?’ There was ‘yes’ and ‘no’ in Stipan’s voice.

  ‘Go back home,’ Ana repeated. ‘To live out what is left of our lives there and to die where our parents are buried—’

  ‘Old woman, you are dreaming.’

  ‘Dreaming, then, my Stipan. But, why not? What is there to hold us?’

  ‘The farm.’

  ‘In the end we must leave that, too.’

  The end. Stipan looked down on his land and his mind went back to the beginning. The first years in New Zealand when he’d learnt painfully that Father Ilya’s ‘gold’ was not so easily got. The sack shanty that had been his first home, with more sacks for a bed. The long days digging in water to the waist. The nights that were never long enough for rest. The sum of it all here, in this land he loved.

  But Ana was strangely insistent. ‘And when we are gone, Stipan? What then? The farm will be sold and the money will go back home, and we do not even know those who will have it!’ She put her old hand on his. ‘I have a sudden longing to see my own!’

  ‘But if it is not as we remembered?’

  ‘It is home, Stipan. That will be enough.’

  That night Stipan dreamt of his father’s house. He saw it clearly, the plain, bare look of it with windows staring from the stone. He was sitting by the komin listening again to his grandfather’s tale of the wars. The dream stayed with him, and all the morning it haunted him and he could not shake it off. He went out to look over the farm, as if he wished to put every acre of it into the balance against this sudden wish for home. When he came back his mind was made up.

  The weeks that followed were busy with preparations. Talks with stock agents and solicitors and the bank. ‘You are quite sure, Mr Kosovich?’ the lawyer asked him.

  ‘I am sure. New Zealand is a good place, but home is home.’

  ‘It will be very different. You know that?’

  ‘Not my place. That is the same for ever.’

  The district gave the two old people a fine send-off. Speeches were made. Compliments exchanged. Stipan stood up to thank them all, for himself and Ana, for the years of friendship and working together. His English came haltingly, as always when he was overcome by feeling. He wanted to explain that it was something bigger than himself, this wanting to go back to the old country to die there. But how can an old man really tell why he is driven by a memory to go back and sit under an olive tree he planted when he was a boy.

  They travelled home, first-class. It was very different from the steerage passage out. On the way they saw cities to make you wonder. Sydney. Colombo. London. But none of them was of more than passing interest. Home was the driving instinct, and when they took the Adriatic steamer that was to carry them to the last stage, they were like two children, so excited to be seeing it all again. And there it was, lying in its arm of blue sea, unchanged. The same houses crowding the shore. The same cobbled paths climbing to the upper village. Timeless, the mountains watched them come as they had watched them go.

  But the olive trees! How they danced in Stipan’s eyes, their silver-grey leaves shimmering in the light. Twisted and bent, withstanding time and weather by bowing to both, and, yes! There was the Porech field, and there were the olive trees he had planted that last day. He turned to Ana, watching with him.

  ‘See there on Porech!’ And she smiled as much as he, because it was a glad sight for her old eyes, too.

  But it is one thing to dream of homecoming. It is another thing to live it. After the first greeting and the introductions to relatives were made, Stipan and Ana felt themselves suddenly shy before these strangers. They looked so like people they had known, looking at them with stranger’s eyes. Here was a great-nephew who looked like Stipan’s father, another who had the look of his younger brother. A little girl was his sister to the life. Of those they had known, none remained. Two wars, emigration and many years had made a waste that was peopled only with ghosts for them. They began to feel like strangers from another world. Neither would say it, but the homecoming was a disappointment.

  For Stipan, the only real joy was to be walking in his childhood paths again. Every stone was a remembered story. Every day he traversed the village to find familiar landmarks of his young days there. He spent hours on Porech, looking at the olive trees, tracing their growth as if it would tell back the story of the years between. And always he came at the end to the little olive tree, stunted and bowed, but still there. Here, where he had left the last of his boyhood, he would sit for hours alone.

  But places without people are lonely places. The first interest in the old people’s homecoming had settled down. The young ones had asked all their questions. The generation in between was kind, but busy with its own affairs. So the two old people were left mostly to themselves. They sat long hours together under the plane tree in front of the house that had been Stipan’s father’s, two strangers wandered in from another life. At other times Stipan would go off by himself, a thin, bent figure to sit among the graves, or walk amongst them, going from one to another, spelling out the names on the headstones, conning them like lessons from a book.

  Ana was afraid for him. ‘Better the dream in New Zealand than the truth here,’ she would say to herself. She could bear it for herself, but for Stipan she could not. Coming home had meant so much to him. And there was no home to come to. How could it be otherwise? She pondered over it in her acquired wisdom. Home is where you have lived your life. It cannot be any other place.

  One day she missed him for longer than usual. She went through the village asking the children if they had seen him. ‘He went that way to the upper village,’ they told her, and she made the steep climb up the stony path to look for him. She found him resting under the little olive tree. He had a twig in his hand and seemed to be writing something with it on the dry late-summer earth. He was so engrossed in what he was doing that he didn’t even look up till she was almost up to him.

  ‘Ana!’ he reproached her. ‘Why do you come all this way to look for me! Don’t you know you are an old woman! Climbing up to Porech is not for you.’

  ‘Nor for you,’ she said quickly, and sat down by him, glad to rest.

  ‘You are quite right!’ She smiled up at the anxious face. ‘We are both of us too old for these adventures. It is a long time since we rode on Franich’s donkey, my Stipan!’ she said, and laughed good-humouredly at the old saying. ‘What is that you are writing there?’ she bent forward to look closer at the clumsy lettering and spelt out TIRITIRI. Something broke inside her when she saw it. ‘You think of it, too?’ she said.

  He nodded his head slowly: ‘Yes.’

  ‘It is too many years to forget,’ she went on quickly. ‘A lifetime, against a youthtime.’ He didn’t speak. ‘Stipan …’ she pulled at his sleeve.

  ‘Eh, Ana?’

  ‘Let us go back. There is nothing for us here.’ She had said it.

 
; Stipan was thinking of the bootprint and that day he had planted the little olive tree. It seemed not a lifetime, but a world away. At last he spoke. ‘Eh, my old Ana, you are right. There is nothing for us here. We belong where we have lived and worked.’

  (1963)

  Renato Amato, ‘One of the Titans’

  He was tired. There was an abandoned slackness in his arms and legs as he stood in front of the concrete-mixer, continuing to wash it even when he did not need to any longer. The bowl was clean. But just now he liked playing with the water; he liked the noise the water made when the solidity of what seemed to be a shaft of glass broke and twirled. It was easy; he did not have to move. He could be still and just flick his wrist one way and the other.

  There was concrete, as solid as rock, hardened all round the rim but he would not try to scrape it off. It was not his fault that it had been allowed to settle. He could hardly believe that anybody might be so careless with their equipment, but nobody really cared. Why should he worry? The only thing that mattered was the big money. As big as their mouths could make it. That was all that counted: the big money earned with a constant grudge at being forced to work long hours, and away from the city. But then, to people like him, to all the ditch-diggers and concrete-shovellers and timber-carriers and steel-benders and nail-pushers he knew, money was all they could have ….

  Once he had seen an old, tall, somehow masculine woman in the bank where he worked before he came away; and now she kept hammering at him, coming back to him, with one sentence that, when he had first heard it, had had no meaning at all.

  The woman had been as if iron-bound; she had looked metallic and hard in her antiquated dress—a country woman come to town from the other end of the world—while she stood in front of his teller’s window to change her traveler’s cheques. She had come from Australia which, then, to him, was only a series of glowing reports from the pages of some propaganda booklet.

  He had asked one question of this woman, because he had decided to go somewhere near there, some sort of Paradise on Earth, or Garden of Eden, just like Australia: two islands called New Zealand, another colony of Great Britain.

  ‘What’s Australia like?’

  Of all the things she might have said, or might have kept to herself, he only remembered a sort of cowed, sorrowful, inward look in her eyes and one short cryptic sentence. ‘Yes, the money is good.’

  It had not been clear then, but he understood it now. She had said it in Italian, in what she thought was the right way of saying it in Italian, but all she had done was to use Italian words that resembled the English ones but did not render the ideas behind them.

  ‘Si,’ she had said. ‘La moneta e’ buona,’ which, to an Italian, meant only ‘Yes. The coin is good-hearted.’ And that woman, tall, old, faceless, soured by he now knew what, kept saying to him, silently and maddeningly, ‘Yes, the money is good; yes, the money is good; yes ….’

  Of all the tinselled brilliance that this part of the world had been in the pamphlets and statistics and papers he had read before coming, only that remained, that ‘Si. La moneta e’ buona,’ which no Italian could understand unless he first understood what ‘Yes, the money is good’ could mean.

  He was tired. Guiliano Martine, the only Eye-tie on the job, the only Eye-tie earning the coin that was good-hearted, was glad that work was over for the day.

  It was not that he was physically tired. His tiredness seemed to come from inside, it was all in his mind. It was a sort of numbness that paralysed his brains and for which he had confusedly and conveniently found a name that, in reality, did not apply.

  It was more like the continued effect of an unexpected shock. The way that ‘La moneta e’ buona’ had meant to him ‘The coin is good-hearted,’ everything, before he came, seemed to have had a meaning which, here, did not apply. From ‘freedom’, which now encompassed a peculiar licence to booze-up and brawl and curse to hell everybody and everything within a limited mental reach, to ‘Christian love’ and ‘standards of living’ and ‘the best in the world’.

  He could not say what he might have understood at one time by the words ‘building a city’ and ‘turning the wilderness into a land of milk and honey’. But whatever it might have been, he knew what they meant now—BIG MONEY.

  He was helping with the building of a city. The foolish thing had been that nothing had forced him to get a job up country, to go into the middle of nowhere, except perhaps another distorted concept, that of ‘man pushing back yet another frontier’, or of ‘man marching ahead in the name of progress’. Concepts which, as usual, had turned out to be something else.

  But …. ‘Oh yes, the money is good.’

  There had been nothing when he had first arrived: just a store and the company office and two big huts for the men and a stretch of yellow pumice land where the township was going to be. Now, with the help of God, the houses had been built and the camp with single huts for the men was ready, and he couldn’t care less. The way he couldn’t care less for the big money that kept growing in his bank account.

  Chris, the leading hand in charge of the work on the group of ten houses where they were now working, shouted at him from the door of the toolshed.

  ‘What the hell are you doing? Come on, get moving. Want to sleep here tonight?’

  Guiliano started.

  ‘Coming!’ he shouted back. He turned the tap off and stored a few tools that were still scattered on the ground. Chris stood aside and watched as Guiliano went into the shed. He made a slight gesture of annoyance at what he thought was the Wop’s unwarranted and unnecessary slowness. He liked using ‘Wop’ better than ‘Eye-tie’, although ‘Wop’ was an American term, because it was quicker, sharper. The word in itself was good, he thought, although he wouldn’t use it to his face. He could not say why, but Guiliano annoyed him more than all the other Eye-ties he had met or knew of. It was the first time he had actually worked with one, and at times he wished the Wop was working under someone else. He was a funny bird, refusing to tell him what the Italian words were for this, that and the other thing, and never talking of women and never laughing and never singing a song. What the hell had he been lingering for tonight? His annoyance grew.

  ‘Come on,’ he said, ‘don’t forget your gloves ….’ The Eye-tie with the gloves, the Wop who doesn’t want to get his hands dirty. ‘Those gloves must cost you a lot of money,’ he said again. ‘Found the ones you lost?’ It was a joke. The boys kept throwing his gloves away, and the Wop kept buying a new pair without saying a word.

  ‘No.’

  ‘What do you wear them for? Nobody else does.’

  ‘I like wearing them,’ Guiliano said.

  Chris locked the door impatiently and then went towards his car, parked on the road a short distance away.

  ‘No point in giving you a lift,’ he said, ‘because it’ll be quicker for you to walk. You’re a fast one, aren’t you?’ Just a dig that—he hoped Guiliano would know what he meant.

  ‘I’d rather walk myself. Thank you for the thought,’ Guiliano said. Just a dig back—he hoped that Chris would know that he meant he didn’t want his company. He could have cursed at Chris, following a pattern he knew by heart by now; he could have said, ‘Who f—’ wants to f—’ go in that f—’ bomb of yours?’ but, somehow, it would have been like putting a mere facade on an empty lot and calling it a complete building. The words would have been there, but the spirit behind them—that sort of automatic conviction that was in the voices of the Johnnies and Chrises and Tommies around him—to give them meaning and a reason to be, would have been missing. ‘I’d rather walk myself,’ was not what he wanted to say either, but that did not need much spirit behind it.

  Chris started his car and drove off, raising clouds of pumice dust along the road. He felt that, in the circumstances, he had done the only possible thing. Confusedly, it seemed unfair to leave a man behind. Still, apart from everything else, if he had asked that joe into his car, the boys might have come to th
ink that he was taking his side. And if they thought that, he would have trouble on the job. What did the Wop think he was doing? he asked himself. Five minutes’ travelling time! Only a bloody fool could be so damn stupid.

  Guiliano went down to the road and started shuffling slowly towards the camp where his hut was, and the new cookhouse and the shower-block.

  He had wanted to be late tonight, to be the last one to leave the job, because he wanted to check again how long it took to walk from the houses on which they were working to the camp where they slept. He knew it took only six minutes, but he just wanted to make sure once again. Then he would go and tell them, then he would show them that they had no reason to make such a fuss about it. Why should he have said a quarter of an hour? It did not take six minutes.

  The pumice crunched under his feet. He kept his eyes on the ground. The soil had a dry, gritty quality which did not seem to hold any promise of growth and yield. A ground for digging a hole in and lying down and cursing and crying and shutting your eyes forever. They had had to add cobalt salts to make that artificial forest grow. It was like an ovum in a test-tube, a chick in an incubator. It was like translating a country and its people on to a piece of paper in neat lines of small print. Everything was lies.

  Or perhaps it was like translating a country and its people into a theoretical concept in his own imagination. That, too, was lies.

  Guiliano kept walking, dragging his feet in the dust, all the time conscious of a dormant desire to run away. Up into those wooded hills on the left—nowhere, that is. Away from nowhere to get nowhere else. Which, he thought, would maybe make him something like the other fellows on the job. They, too, came and went, like shuttlecocks being struck endlessly from here to there, scurrying around like wood-lice when you upturn the stone under which they are hiding. He would then be one of them: not with them, but like them. One of the ‘builders of a country’, an outstanding specimen, drunken and broke, run-down and grumpy, hating everything and fighting everybody.