by Rodney Hall
He regards her with fatherly concern, sorry to see the nightmare prettiness she has been saddled with, pitying the certainty with which she swings her hips and clamps a hat on her short bouncy hair and ducks her head under the low-branching quinces.
‘You will stay with the car, won’t you?’
‘Sí, sí.’
Confident he can be trusted to watch her safely across to the other side, but feeling like a child cast loose from a school excursion, she faces the swamp—tucks Professor Shilling under her arm, hoists the daypack and slings her water bottle by its strap—immediately absorbed in the task of negotiating a chequerboard of puddles and grassy tufts. Trees stand knee-deep in water, each growing from its own inverted likeness. Lichen and orchids bubble in the sockets left by missing branches, reminding her of childhood cautions against deadly flowers and toadstools. Every step an effort hampered by the clutches of suckering, sour-smelling mud. Her arrival is loudly deplored by the resident frogs.
She looks back only once.
Sure enough, Placido lounges against the car, smoking. He sees, but gives no sign of encouragement. She waves. He does not wave back. There’s no accounting for cultural taboos and expectations. Turning her attention to the challenge, she progresses, testing the firmness of the ground. The early morning grows ever hotter and stiller. Shadowy glades engulf a nether world alive with sibilant creatures too small to be seen yet so numerous the land crawls underfoot. Heat traps the maze of reflections, pools, pits and sink holes. Arriving on a firm little island, where there’s a chance to assess the risk, she is amazed by how much she is enjoying this. Shoes sink in warm sludge but she doesn’t mind. She even lets out a little laugh because no one can hear. Anyhow everything will dry quickly once she reaches solid ground. She puts her faith in the choice Placido has made for her, Placido who—now she checks—can no longer be seen.
The truth is (the torment is) she wishes she could have Manfred back for a second chance. Dreadful though he was, he had something that could be worked with. His loss leaves a hole in her life. She regrets everything. Even the absence of the knotty problems he could create out of little more than his European cultural rigidity.
Walking in a dream she puts the swamp behind her. The frogs, having made their point, quieten down. She finds herself in an open glade at the centre of which stands a hut thatched with grass. The overgrowth of grass even sprouts from windowsills and gutters. On the step is an old woman whose compact massive figure obstructs the shifting drift of tumbleweed that constantly piles up and creeps past her to bowl in at the open doorway. Her head is swathed in a scarf with a hat perched on top of that. She observes life from under soft corbelled brows—gatekeeper to a strange world—meanwhile detaching her lips from a silver straw. Courteously she offers the engraved silver pot of yerba maté. Marianna, who once watched a television documentary on the cattle herders of Argentina right through to the end, knows what this is and accepts. She puts her mouth where hers had been, drawing up a drop of bitter liquid. The old woman confirms the civility, savouring a second sip of her own. Her filmy eyes examine Marianna. Then patiently, as if answering a question, she speaks at length with the authority of old-world Spanish, an utterance without inflection, monumental as knocking stones.
Marianna waits for her to run out of words.
‘Good morning,’ she puts in, having understood nothing and letting a respectful pause intervene before exposing her own language to being lip-read. ‘Will this track lead me to a temple?’
The ancient creature chuckles, unveiling gums and the yellow tongue humping among them: Huckle-ockle-ok. Working her broad toes in their leather thongs she sets down the maté pot and, apropos of nothing, cradles her withered belly. What! What’s that? How? Shockingly the knuckled fingers shape themselves to a pregnancy. Or the promise—or remembrance—of a pregnancy.
Frightened and appalled, Marianna rushes away. She is being mocked. Accused. She hides her tears. Already her plan has been spoilt. Ah, these peasants, these evil hospitable peasants with their folkmagic. How does such a creature know? The witch’s laughter follows her. With facts to be faced, Marianna admits that there is no reason why people should welcome her here. ‘It may not count,’ she argues aloud, ‘that I respect their beliefs.’ Indeed, why wouldn’t they be all the more furious? Why wouldn’t they try to stop me intruding on their sacred building? I may never live to see it. I am empty, a woman on borrowed time. Out of place in a strange land. And returning home not an option.
She argues against herself to alleviate the loneliness as she toils uphill, tormented by mosquitoes.
A view opens out on densely grown cactus paddocks, fields loud with human voices—strange because, at first, there’s nobody in sight—then a movement here and there reveals workers stooping among the rows of spiny paddles, shallow baskets balanced on their heads. Clearly she’s already the subject of amusement. Their Mayan faces of puckered leather wrinkles. Marianna braces and smiles her foreign smile. Her changeable mood recovers. She waves because she can think of nothing more adequate. No doubt travellers are a rare event, but not apparently resented, because here and there a hand waves back. While working the crop they grant her permission. Half a kilometre distant there’s an embankment crowned by a fringe of banana trees. She sets her sights on this as her objective.
From terrace to terrace she climbs into the grove. Once there, she is even more a public spectacle, even more out of place, because closely surrounded. She picks her way, anxious not to tread on plants that may have value. Still, no one stops her. Under clustered shelters woven from living jungle families are preoccupied with simple tasks. Hats wag in unison. Drainage channels being dug. Pipes being smoked. Girls screening grain. Others hide their faces as they gather herbs. Children take turns with bowls and dippers to scoop food from big clay pots. A few naughty boys raking heaps of dried beans glance up at her, their laughter revealing gapped teeth. So even here, in this prehistoric community, hostage to crop cycles and stuck in a remote backwater since the dawn of time, she thinks, people are keeping track of me.
The cloistered air shimmers with insects.
Marianna hesitates nervously. She was never so out of place. She even toys with the temptation of giving in and turning back. After all, she could justify the day’s adventure with a few snapshots of cactus. She has seen enough: she could bluff the rest. Oh, if only the earth would swallow her. Or maybe, a better alternative, if she could levitate among migratory birds and cross the sky from east to west guided by the pull of instinct—the unerring imperative, free of reason and therefore free of anger, free of guilt, betrayal and vengeance—to escape into oblivion that way. A brilliant option. The whole transporter fantasy called upon to facilitate her escape. Rubbish.
The truth is that she’s a vulgar runaway. Her crime undeniable. She is in alien territory and there will be no tomorrow. The signs cannot be reversed. She checks through the list, from the fugitive pilgrims who dropped their tall crosses, to that old crone mocking her pregnancy (Marianna shudders), to the cactus farmers’ mild mockery, and now dried-bean rakers fixing her image in memory ready for later identification. She has second thoughts about paying good money to visit a place where everything is interesting but nothing has meaning. Danger and discomfort ought surely to have kept her away from here? But she made the choice for the suspect reason that nowhere is further from everywhere else—and no traveller more alone than she—where neither stone nor stump has ever been seen before by her, or will likely be seen again.
Still she blunders on, escaping at last with the fateful book in her hands, conceding that nothing less than an acceptance of the past as past—in all its immensity and sadness—will leave her free to fulfil a destiny important enough to have been predicted a thousand years ago. She climbs beyond the huts, the drainage channels and smouldering fires.
Wild country closes in on her, trees grown too large, sequestered hollows and the wo
rld made strange as she treads on cushions of equatorial grass. A bunch of leaves would be enough, but here are millions. Mist drags through the gully and, ponderous as damp curtains made of felt, swings aside to unveil a ruined ceremonial roadway. This is more like it. Good old Placido.
She catches her first glimpse of the temple on the far side of the valley . . . a lump so ancient it appears to have taken root as part of the engulfing jungle. Puffs of Mayan clouds, each one compact and self-sufficient, speed by importantly. Marianna Gluck cannot breathe for the wonder of arriving at what another person might call her death wish. Swiping the mosquitoes away and using her hat as a fan, she congratulates herself.
Volleys of startled toucans break cover and swirl across the open corridor of land, outsized yellow beaks exchanging I-told-you-so gossip, to roost at a distance, restless, suspicious and busy. Gnarled trees flank the ceremonial way, each one rising from a steeple of exposed roots. Branches heavy with life meet above her head where robber bands of monkeys inhabit a terrain hostile to humans.
The fairytale gloom lies captured under a weightless net of shadows. Prehistoric lichens exhale dusty emissions. The canopy lisps queer gasping sounds. Star orchids shine in pockets of night left over among leaf caverns, everything smelling of rot and regeneration. Tiny ground creatures scatter as she plunges into the thicket of vines, thorns and moss-choked stalks. Creepers come alive under her hand and seepage stings her skin, drip by drip, in the spongy shade. Termites chew their empire to lace.
The temple has sunk out of sight.
Marianna forces a passage into the heart of the thatch. Like some burrowing animal she fights her way through till the riot of fronds breaks apart. Slashes of brilliance penetrate the shadows, lancing down around her. Monkeys openly leap from branch to branch to show they know more than she does. Pausing bright-eyed to check if she’s still on course, they fetch her out into the open where a ruined rampart encloses the citadel. And, sure enough, there are flagstones underfoot. Shyly she emerges. Well, she wanted to be alone and here she is!
The temple rises as an eruption of rock, forcing itself clear of embedded foliage, mounting higher and closer, on a colossal scale, ever more ancient and damaged, the structural puzzle of steps and platforms on all sides forming a pyramid crowned by a little room with a single doorway—like the lonely eye of the soul.
Marianna gets it. With neither front nor back, nor left nor right, the geometry is inward-looking.
She can imagine people arriving here during the age of devotion, emerging from gullies and ravines, a star of roadways intersecting at this sacred place. She imagines them swarming up all four sides, the entire temple alive with bodies scrambling to reach the top where, according to popular belief, blood sacrifices would satisfy their purpose and seal the union of mortal with immortal.
As it is, there’s no one.
She treads among fractured stones. Already some sort of promise is loosed, singing, in her veins (the experience greater than expected), as if she has begun to share a secret. After all, her own life is a puzzle. The creators of this place knew about balanced opposites and the stillness of symmetry. This equals that—and that equals this. She fishes up an idea from her school days . . . ‘It’s some sort of equation.’ Exactly.
She becomes an instant student of the sacred, already stretched by the scope of genius. ‘Marianna Gluck is my name,’ she murmurs devoutly, humbly. In the heart of chaos the air throbs. Big yellow butterflies flutter like frenzied orchids. She mops the sweat dripping from her eyebrows.
It’s her father, of course, who stands accused. The first betrayer. What would he have thought, seeing her here? If only he had remained untainted by disgrace he might have appreciated her. But he never did. He had no time for anyone but himself. The tropics crank out degrees of superheat. Hard to believe she grew up behind the frost-starred windows of old Kiel. The puzzle had been why Papa was so set on migration in the first place. She pictures him as he was on the chilly railway platform, marshalling their family luggage—his squeaky shoes and silk cravat—his kindly fussing—labels fluttering in his hand, while behind him winter light crackled across the sea. Unexpected was Grannie, kissing her goodbye and saying, ‘I suppose I shall never see you again, little darling, and you will forget me.’ Grief overwhelmed Marianna’s soul that day because she had no answer. When, in Rotterdam, they boarded the SS Oranje and set sail she was still weeping, one among two thousand emigrants crowded along the rails clutching frail paper streamers—connections, heart to heart, tears, frantic handkerchiefs and shouted farewells—till the snapping filaments of colour trailed and twirled in the wind as the deck began pulsing. High as a building the steel hull forged out to sea and all the way across the world to the finality of Adelaide. But she never forgot Grannie or hymn-singing around the piano on Sunday afternoons. Nor Grannie’s biscuits in a jar with a milled glass stopper. Those grand old Lutheran hymns.
One thing is clear: she had suffered her first great loss (typical of the migrant child) when she lost her country and all she knew. That’s what it cost. Her father found work at a girls’ convent teaching German and French, which he did as long as he was allowed. The end came as a shock to her poor silly mother—who found out he had never been what he seemed—Mama, the trusting affectionate goose.
Months of hiding in rented rooms began. Him, with the blinds down, wheezing and scarcely able to move. Well, he won a court appeal on some technicality, so Marianna forgave him in the end and sat with him . . . until he spoiled it by confessing that he did do what those schoolgirls accused him of. His eyes glistened as he made her his offer: ‘It will be your decision whether to tell your mother or not.’ She should have left him, then and there, and run away. But she couldn’t bring herself to decide.
So, the catastrophe of men had been revealed to her even before Manfred came along. What a pair: Manfred and Papa.
Here among shards of sunlight Marianna has a clear sense of purpose. The temple’s stepped platforms uncannily solid. Harmonious as three-dimensional music, an immense brooding structure with strange healing power. A tidal wave of equatorial heat fills the air with twittering, screeches and growls. The sky leans away to expose her to livid light. Treetops tremble as if cut from electrified metal. Marianna Gluck stumbles. Thus, free of her past, she arrives at the beginning of the present.
She has brought herself to the loneliest place on Earth. It’s just where she needs to be because, at long last, Manfred’s ghost reluctantly loses its hold over her.
3
ADAM & BRIDGET
It’s just me. My decision. And who wouldn’t be attracted to the idea of making a splash? Stir the old juices. What else are war wounds good for? There has to be some value in being a public statistic. Bring it on. Television interviews are something I can manage in my own right. Maybe open people’s eyes. Sit them back on their heels. More or less launching the brand. Time to spill the beans about what the boys have to face out there in the oil wars of the Middle East. When I find my voice online it’ll be a voice for Nobby who went down on the very first day. For Ratso—the one to be pitied most—poor little Ratty who was never up to much. Not forgetting the natural killer, Chris.
Chris as a special case. Right from that first handshake. Me, like an idiot, blurting out, ‘Christian Fletcher . . . you’ve got to be kidding!’ Met by a hostile stare. ‘Mate, I saw the movie, didn’t I? Mel Gibson.’ This was Private Fletcher, a legend for his exceptional ferocity, which was the reason the army never dared promote him. Whatever weapons came to hand he used. Off the leash. Fuck the orders. Fuck the chain of command. Killing was his natural gift. Hard to think of him belonging anywhere but the army. Or jail. The public knows zilch about the Fletchers of this world. Just as well.
The pill’s kicking in, thank God.
With strange beauty the dunes sleep through the evening like women. Far beyond them an event sparks off. Angels cluster at the world’s
edge just above the desert skyline, a remote glitter of trumpets, the ripple of streaming gowns, an unheralded roar and rush of fixed wings, the holy terror as a scheduled trajectory. A spearhead. The zone of silence abruptly split by aircraft disgorging vapour trails. Sudden thunder. Red sky ripped open overhead like a parting sea. And then the dominant gloom, hostile territory crowding in. You don’t want to be caught on a lonely plain at nightfall, especially if the enemy has driven a wedge between you and your base. And that was the problem. In the confusion, among dumps of wreckage and shadowy pitfalls, the extent of the stuff-up became clear on the second day. The whole platoon lost. Not least a stuff-up because the bomb-blitzed airstrip left over from the previous Gulf War—our designated rendezvous—could not be found. Not a trace. Phut! Gone. Whereabouts lost in the confusion of retreat. Coordinates meaningless. Radio contact lost. The whole invading army gone God knows when.
Off-course and under fire, the immediate question is how to evade capture by the unknown force of attackers no doubt converging on our position, black flags rippling through the speedy darkness.
In a spot of trouble, so to speak. You can imagine. Sweating under the weight of protective gear. Crouching for hard cover in the ruin of a flat-roofed hovel. Nothing else nearby. Only a crooked telegraph pole. One pole. No wire. Some joke, in the age of communication! Plus a tree suffocating in dust. This and the faint feminine whiff of orange blossom. Also the sound of distant weapons popping like toys.
The land breathes fire. Wind rises. Still thunderous, aircraft hunt in circles. The awkward crouching. A twinge of cramp. And—just visible in fading twilight—a mob of guys in turbans leaping down off converted utes, headscarfs flapping. Bullets spraying any and everywhere, backed up by machine guns mounted on the tray. The available choices being to lie low or make a run for it. And no way of knowing which is best.