Remembering Babylon

by David Malouf

  To George’s vast amusement, Gemmy, as he received the sheets, put on a solemn expression very like Mr Frazer’s own, shuffled the pages according to his own taste, and holding them, as Mr Frazer had, at arm’s length, and making the same little humphing sounds of grave approval, ran his eyes down one page, then the next. When this ritual was completed he raised the sheets to his nose and sniffed them, and might have been preparing, till Mr Frazer intervened, to lick and maybe swallow them. He looked puzzled when Mr Frazer gently took them back.

  Mute now, but with his tongue making shy appearances at the corner of his mouth as if the tip of it was the real faculty of observation in him, he watched the sheaf of pages go into the pocket of the minister’s coat, and continued to watch, believing perhaps that the magic they had been practising here was not yet over, and Mr Frazer, with a flourish, might bring them forth again, but in the shape this time of a plump white pigeon or a line of gaudy handkerchiefs.

  This last conceit was the schoolmaster’s, not Gemmy’s, but was more accurate than he knew. Magic, as Gemmy understood it, had been the essence of the occasion.

  He knew what writing was but had never himself learned the trick of it. As he handled the sheets and turned them this way and that, and caught the peculiar smell they gave off, his whole life was in his throat – tears, laughter too, a little – and he was filled with an immense gratitude. He had shown them what he was. He was known. Left alone with the sheets, to brood and sniff, the whole of what he was, Gemmy, might come back to him, and he began to plot, as he thought of his life out of sight there in the minister’s pocket, how to steal it back.

  It did not surprise him – it was the nature of magic – that all that had happened to him, all his fortune good and bad, and so much sweat and pain, and miles travelled and bones picked and nights of freezing dew, and dreams, and dreams – all, over the long afternoon that he had glimpsed and recognised, glimpsed and shied away from, and intended and failed to tell, should be reduced now to what a man could hold in his hand and slip into a pocket; a few sheets in which, if he could only identify where they were among the squiggles, he might find Willett with his bristling red hair, and the rats, and old Crouch, now that he thought of it, and his daughter the silkie – had he mentioned that? Not Mosey and The Irish. He wouldn’t want them in it. Not them.

  He hugged himself. What came back to him was the strong-smelling, earth-smelling black stuff he had caught a whiff of when he held the papers to his nose.

  Was that the smell of his life, his spirit, the black blood they had drained out of him? No wonder he felt weak.

  All the events of his life, all that he had told and not told, and more, much more, now that it had begun to stir and move, which he was just beginning to recall, had been curled up in him like an old-man carpet snake. It was awake now. Lifting its blind head it was emerging coil on coil into the sun.

  2

  LYING HALF IN salt and the warm wash of it, half in air that blistered. Eyelids so puffed with light that no more light struck through them, and what did blinded him. Nostrils crusted, the air without moisture between his lips, each shallow mouthful of it a flame in his throat.

  All over him a flaking, and the flakes tiny creatures, clawed and with mouths, all light, that crawled into the cracks that had been opened in him, seeking bone. Only when a shadow of cloud passed over did the many mouths of the light desist.

  Tries to hold it, the shadow; to make at least the memory of it last on his flesh, and cool and calm the furious activity all over the surface of him. But his mind lets the cloud slide away like everything else it has held. All that remains in his skull, behind the blind eyes, is sky, and that too burns, shakes out flame. Cloud after cloud rolls over, touches, cools, and is gone. Beyond hold.

  The mob of naked women and gleaming, big-eyed children who found him washed up at low tide in their bay, stood with one foot set upon the other and clenched their brows.

  What was it? A sea-creature of a kind they had never seen before from the depths beyond the reef? A spirit, a feeble one, come back from the dead and only half reborn?

  The flesh was raw, covered with white flower-like ulcers where the salt had got in, opening mouths that as the soft water touched them lifted pale tentacles. Tiny crabs heaped and climbed over one another’s soft-shelled backs, and heaved and glittered. One of the women tried to drive them off. Seething, they rose up in waves from under him, tumbling out of the folds of bark he was wrapped in, and with the sighing of a million tiny claws as the sand grains slipped under them, wheeled in a cloud over the bubbling sand.

  The creature’s eyes sprang open. They were of a milky colour; blank, maybe blind. The mob shifted closer.

  The eyes were open upon something. Not us, they thought.

  Not them, but some other world, or life, out of which the creature, whatever it was, seacalf or spirit, was still emerging. They started, expecting as they watched to see some further transformation. The eyelids drooped and flickered. Now, they thought. It is letting go of that other life. It sees us. Now. The mouth opened, revealing a swollen tongue. But no change occurred.

  Very timidly, as if fearful of exposing themselves to impiety, or of setting off some change in the creature other than the one it was slowly working towards, they lifted the loose husk that covered it, and found the silvered skin, the belly with its familiar indentation and knot (a flutter of excitement swept over them), and as the last encrustation of crabs broke up and his sea-attendants left him, the white worm of his prick. Again they murmured one to the other but remained puzzled and drew back.

  He watched them. Let them do what they would with him. What struck him was the smell they gave off; or maybe it was the air of the place. Animal, unfamiliar. What he thought was: I am lost again, more lost than ever. It is not what I expected.

  What he had expected, beyond so much flame, after so many days of burning, was Willett, rising up in an odour of char, with his eyebrows ablaze and his scorched boots hanging from their laces at his neck. The disappointment of it was like tears in his throat and choked him.

  One of the older women sent a younger one off, and when she returned it was with water that sloshed from a gourd. They wetted his lips with it. He moaned, clutched, set his teeth to the lip of the thing, gulping. He kept his eyes fixed on them over the rim and they leaned forward to see him drink.

  A little later, he could not say how long, he was no longer at the sea’s edge, but in soft sand, in the shade of a shrub whose fan-like needles broke the light just inches from his face and fanned it with coolness. The huddle of women, chattering like birds, was moving away.

  Later again he found himself in darkness not far from a fire where shadows flared. The smell of smoke pricked his nostrils – Ah, perhaps, after all!

  The high treetops were filled with a buzzing which he thought the stars were making. How had he got here? Had someone carried him or had he dragged himself up the beach into the scrub, drawn by the sound of voices and the promise of company? For the voices he had heard were human. It was the humming breath of them, rising up in the clear night, that he had taken for stars.

  After a moment, using his elbows, he began to push himself towards them and out into the firelight. Their many faces, touched with flame, turned towards him, mouths open, eyes staring, as the pale, wormlike figure inched towards them.

  He squirmed into a sitting position and heard the gasp of their breath. Dropping forward, he raised himself on all fours; then, with an effort, staggering upright, held his hands out and began to whine in what he had learned, long ago, was a piteous manner – he did not think it would be less effective here than on the streets back home – and with a whole repertoire of gestures that were meant to engage and win them over, waggled his ears, pulled his mouth wide with a finger in each corner, producing at first only a kind of shocked silence in them, till the stillness was broken by a peal of laughter, then exploded in general hilarity.

  They tossed him scraps, and fell still
again as he sat with his head down and tore with his teeth at singed fur. Then he curled up just where he was and slept, and when he woke, all round him, under drifts of mist past the trunks of trees, they were preparing to leave.

  He followed. At first at a distance, though one or two of them glanced back from time to time to see if he was still with them; then closer, till he made one of the loose mob of old folk, women mostly, who straggled in the rear.

  They left a good space round him, but in a place where the forest thickened and it was almost dark, tried to elbow him off the track, then, when they saw that he was not to be got rid of, gave up. One old woman, with no sign of personal interest, as if he were a little white hairless thing that could not fend for itself, gave him a mouthful of seeds. Once again, half-fearful, they watched while he swallowed it. When they came to a halt at last and made camp, he claimed a place for himself in the second or third ring from the fire, and his neighbours, though wary, made no dispute.

  So he began his life among them, doing what he had always done. It was all he knew. Since he had somehow found his way into the world, his object, like any other creature’s, was to stay in it and by any means he could. He had a belly to be fed. In the days that followed he winkled out a place among them, made himself small, scouted about for this or that one he might attach himself to, looked droll, looked pathetic, and when he could not get what he wanted that way, would dart in under the half-playful, half-timorous cuffs, grab what he could and gobble it down before he was stopped. He was not put off by the occasional bruise.

  He was a child, with a child’s quick capacity to take things in and the street child’s gift of mimicry. They were astonished at the swiftness with which he learned their speech, and once a thing had been pointed out to him, how keen his eyes were. Relying on a wit that was instinctive in him and had been sharpened under harder circumstances than these, he let himself be gathered into a world which, though he was alarmed at first by its wildness, proved no different in essence from his previous one, for all that it was, day after day, hot tracks over stone, and insect bites, and nights when you had to creep in under logs while the rain slushed, and long spells between one bellyful and the next.

  Watching out for it, and for himself, he got into his mouth as much of its fat and flesh as he could manage, its names too, its breath. What kept you alive here was the one and the other, and they were inseparable: the creature with its pale ears raised and stiffened, sitting up alert in its life as you were in yours, and its name on your tongue. When it kicked its feet and gushed blood it did not go out of the world but had its life now in you, and could go in and out of your mouth for ever, breath on breath, and was not lost, any more than the water you stooped to drink would cease to run because you gulped it down in greedy mouthfuls, then pissed it out.

  Young enough to learn and to be shaped as if for the first time, he was young enough also to forget. He lost his old language in the new one that came to his lips. He had never in fact possessed more than the few hundred words that were immediately needful to him, to fill his belly or save his skin, having heard little in his short life but commands, curses, coarse endearments, the street talk he had learned to spit out like the rest, and such bits and pieces of something lighter – jokes, riddles, the words of a penny-gaff tune – that he had picked up from Willett, or at the beer shop while he was waiting on one foot for their ale to be drawn, and in his years at sea from the talk of sailors bent over a bit of darning in the swing of the fo’c’sle lamp or sprawling on deck. It was not enough to hold him.

  As for things, nothing he had dealt with had been his own. He had stammered over most of them, b-b-boots, j-j-jug; his hold was buttery. Now they slipped away altogether, they dropped out of his life, and with them, and the words, went whatever thin threads had held them together and made up the fabric of his world.

  Occasionally some object out of his old life would come floating back and bump against him. He would see it clearly enough, feel his hand clasping the handle of the jug or smell the dark-stained leather, but no word was connected to them, and when his mind reached for it, the object too went thin on him. He felt a kind of sadness that was like hunger, but of the heart, not the belly, and could only believe, since these things came to him only in fragments, that they belonged to the life of some other creature whose memory he shared, and which rose up at moments to shake him, then let him go.

  In time his coming among them became another tale they told and he would listen to it with a kind of wonder, as if what they were recounting had happened ages ago, in a time beyond all memory, and to someone else. How, when they found him he had still been half-child, half-seacalf, his hair swarming with spirits in the shape of tiny phosphorescent crabs, his mouth stopped with coral; how, ash-pale and ghostly in his little white shirt, that long ago had rotted like a caul, he had risen up in the firelight and danced, and changed before their eyes from a sea-creature into a skinny human child.

  He would listen, and in one part of himself, the part that belonged to their tribal life, he believed, but in some other part he did not. There was a different story, he thought, which was his alone and secret: which had another shape, and might need, for its telling, the words he had had in his mouth when they first found him, and had lost; though not, he thought, for ever.

  He was accepted by the tribe but guardedly; in the droll, half-apprehensive way that was proper to an in-between creature.

  No woman, for example, would have to do with him, and there were many objects in the camp that he was forbidden to touch. Their life was a cat’s cradle of rights and restrictions; they all had objects, people too, that they must not look upon; but the restrictions on him were his alone, and the separation he felt, his questionable status, kept alive in him what he might otherwise have let go. When he stretched out in his place by the camp fire and his eyes and hands had nothing to engage them, the images that came, even if he could not grasp them, were as real as the fat in his mouth, or the familiar, distinctive odour of those who were stretched beside him.

  ‘Boots’ the darkness whispered – he caught only the breath of the word – and there they were: objects that made no sense here, that he saw propped up in front of a barred grate with flame in every crack of their leather, the tongues loose, the laces trailing, and the voice in the dark, very hoarse but not fierce, was Willett’s, and there he was too, rising up out of them with his eyebrows blazing. Willett!

  The others had their own explanation for these midnight hauntings. He was a tormented spirit. The cries he uttered in his sleep, the terrors that assailed him, were proof that although he had the look of a man, he was not one, not yet. A day would come when, fully arrived among them, he would let go of the other world.

  His view was different. One day, he thought, I will turn around on some track deep in the scrub and he will be there, making fast towards me, not ghostly, in no way ghostly, and I will wait there for him to catch up, open a place for him to step into, and we will go on. He did not ask himself where.

  In the meantime he was here, though where here was, and why he was in this place rather than another, was a mystery to him.

  He approached this mystery at times, just touched it, and was uneasy. Mostly he let it alone. When the time comes, he told himself, it will approach me.

  So when news drifted up from the south of spirits, white-faced, covered from head to foot in bark and riding four-footed beasts that were taller than a man, he was disturbed, and the desire to see these creatures, to discover what they were, plucked at him till he could not rest. In the company of an old woman who knew the country because she had grown up there, he set out to find them, but when they came to a part of it that she did not know, the woman turned back. He went on alone. Long before Lachlan Beattie and the two girls found him he had been skirting the edge of the settlement, living off the strange yet familiar country down there, and keeping watch from the cover of the scrub.

  His first discovery was tracks of a kind that utterly p
uzzled him, then, in the middle of the path, a line of droppings, big, round, golden-dark with a sheen to them, about the size of a buzzard’s egg, unlike the pellets of local creatures. Touched with a fearful curiosity, he got down on all fours and sniffed. A kind of clattering filled his head, and he glanced up, expecting to find himself in the narrow and noisy confines of – of what? What had he almost seen? It was gone again. Was that what he would find on the other side of the scrub?

  He worried over the image, trying to catch again some detail that would make a picture, but it had been just a flash, mostly noise and a sense of panic in him. And all around, so clear that it filled all the spaces in him, was the familiar busyness of the scrub, a low, continuous rub and fret broken by bird calls, each of which brought a clear little body to his mind, flutterings, scurryings, the skirl of insects.

  The next sign he came to was a red blanket thrown over a line. His heart leapt. But when he crept forward and whipped it aside there was only a blaze of grass heads, the bulk of a wooden hut, and standing in front of it, a little round-bellied naked child, rather unsteady on her white legs, and staring. She stood like that for a moment, puzzled, absorbed, then raised her fists to her eyes and howled.

  Later, from another part of the scrub, he looked into a clearing, all raw timber and scattered leaves, and saw a bearded fellow in a blue shirt and braces who spat on his hands, took up a long-handled, bladed instrument, and stood preparing to swing it. He was amazed. A kind of meaning clung to the image in the same way that the clothes he was wearing clung to the man, and when the blade flashed and jarred against wood, it struck home in him. Axe.

  The word flew into his head as fast and clear as the flash and whistle of its breath. Axe. Axe. Circles of meaning rippled away from the mark it blazed in the dark of his skull.