The Complete Stories

by David Malouf

  In her later years, when she lived on the harbour at Kirribilli, she became a kind of native Gorgon. I have a photograph, taken at her seventieth birthday-celebration at Anthony Hordern's, where she is caught, very grand and baleful, among a group of admirers—all elderly, all male, and all looking strangely fossilized, as if she had just that moment turned her hooded eyes upon them. Yet the occasion itself is as innocent as a children's party. The little cakes in their silver dishes are made up to look like snails, frogs, piglets; there are jelly-moulds, and a huge, heart-shaped cake with a knife in it and a ring of hard-flamed miniature candles.

  She had survived and would live to eighty. Not for her the tragic destiny of Phar Lap or Les Darcy, done to death, their proud hearts broken, by foreigners. They're a tougher breed than the men, these colonial girls: the Alicias, the Melbas, the Marjories, the Joans. They conquer the world and come home to die in the suburbs, in their own swan's-down beds … But to be told now, after nearly half a century, that the catalogue is incomplete; that to the collection of Riccio grotesques and Kaendler Meissen, the gold Rolls-Royce, the Louis Seize commodes by Dubois and Riesener, the Daum vases, the Tiffany lamps and jewels, the costumes in which she filled out with her own marvellous presence courtesans, princesses, village girls afflicted with somnambulism, we must add an unacknowledged child—real, human—and especially, after so long this child, "our Mrs. Judge,” a weatherbeaten, slatternly but oddly impressive woman at a grubby kitchen table in Karingai, who has appeared at last to claim her place in the glittering tale and to demand, with an authority that might be a shadow of the Diva's own, that I should stand up now and be the first to acknowledge her! Is this how the great tests present themselves to us? At ten thirty in the morning, in a country kitchen, in a place like Karingai?

  The woman set herself before me. She dared me to believe and take up her cause.

  I WAS SPARED at the last moment by a footstep on the verandah. A man appeared, a big man in wellingtons. He had the soft-footed, respectful air of a visitor, but one who knew the place and was at home. The woman turned to face him. She made no attempt to hide the bracelet, or the fact that there existed between us a state of high drama.

  “This,” she said, and might have been speaking to herself, "is my husband George.” She got up, turned away to the dresser, and brought another cup.

  The man looked abashed but came forward, extending a large hand. He was a man of seventy or more, wide-shouldered and strong, with a head of wiry grey hair and long hairs, also grey, sprouting from between the buttons of his flannel shirt. He seated himself at the table, and when the kettle was ready she poured tea.

  “You've told ‘im then,” the man said. He seemed embarrassed to be addressing her in another man's presence.

  “Yes, I told ‘im. Not the whole of it, but.”

  He nodded, sipped, gave me another sidelong glance. He was oddly defensive for so large a man. As if he saw in me a kind of power before which his strength would be of no account. Faced with whatever it was, he flinched, and his largeness, now that it had been dismissed, was like a burden to him. He seemed unhappy with his own shoulders and arms, handling the china cup with difficulty. But when the woman put her hand on his for a moment, and their eyes met, they seemed beyond any harm that I or anyone else might do them, inviolably contained in their own concern for one another. His hairy Adam's apple worked up and down. He fisted his cup and drained it.

  “Well,” he said, "I'll be gettin’ back.”

  He got to his feet, and when he turned to go she called after him. “Don't worry, George. It's oright, you know.”

  He was framed for a moment in the light from the doorway.

  Sunlight was streaming down the hallway behind.

  “If you say so, Mother.”

  He gave me a curt nod.

  “I'll be back at five.”

  She listened while he crossed the verandah and went on down the seven steps, and when she faced me again she had a look of command that I would not have predicted in so small a woman. She glowed; she rose to the heights of what she must have seen as her true self; and was imposing enough to convince me then that she might be just what she claimed to be, the daughter of one of the greatest performers of the age.

  “Now,” she said, "I'll tell you the whole story, and you will believe.”

  4

  I should point out that the facts of the Diva's life, as I know from twenty years of attempting to follow her course from a South Coast dairy farm through half the capitals of the world, are so meagre as to be almost non-existent. A secretive woman, deeply suspicious of even her closest friends and advisers, she seems to have protected the truth about herself by spreading conflicting accounts of her parentage, her marriage, even of the place and date of her birth. It isn't that she lied exactly, any more than Bernhardt did. Rather, she allowed others to make suggestions, the wilder the better, and then herself added the flourishes. As the years wore on and she moved further from the source, the flourishes increased and predominated, grew more extravagantly baroque. The common truth, if it had been laid bare, would have had to be rejected. It no longer fitted her style.

  In the early days, when she was just a prodigious voice that had appeared, almost miraculously it seemed, out of a far and empty land, she had let journalists tell people whatever they wanted to hear; to dream up previous lives for her that were appropriate to Odabella or Semiramis, since her own outlandish country was to her present admirers every bit as fantastic as theirs. So her father was said to be a nephew of Napoleon, who had settled in New South Wales in the Fifties and married a local heiress. Later her parents were saltimbanques in a travelling circus, Hungarian Jews, and she had been born on the Dunolly goldfields on the day the continent yielded up its most spectacular nugget, “Welcome Stranger.” Later again, when she was firmly established, she confessed (which again may not be true) that she came from a poor farming family near Bega and offered romantic views of herself wandering about the paddocks and singing as she brought in the cows. (A marvellously evocative image this: dusk in the green pastures above the surf, a barefoot girl sleep-walking through the gathering dusk as the first notes of that angelic voice touch the colonial air; to be heard, like some as yet undiscovered spirit of the landscape, by a stranger who pauses a moment on the road and wonders if he is dreaming, then shakes his head and goes on—her first obscure admirer, quite unaware of the grace he has been afforded.)

  Evocative but unprovable. The versions of her past that are promulgated tend to mirror her current status. It is only late in life, when she had abandoned her more extravagant roles and become a household favourite, that the farmgirl appears.

  Did she really marry at nineteen the keeper of a small-town hardware store, and pass bags of nails, and nuts and bolts and screws over the counter? What happened to the man? Why didn't he come forward in the days of her ascendancy to claim his bride? Did she pay him off? Did she hire bullies to scare him off? She was capable of it. Did he never realise that the great Vale and his sullen bride were one? When she makes her first appearance in the early Nineties she is in the company of an ageing tenor from an Italian touring group; but he too disappears and is just a name.

  And in a way, of course, none of this matters. It is part of the legend that she exploded into the consciousness of an adoring public as a fully developed Voice, clothed in the jewels, the satin folds of a savage empress; that she came into existence as what she always endeavoured, after that, to remain: a dramatic illusion with no more past in the actual flesh than the characters she played. As well ask what Norma or Lucrezia Borgia were doing between seven and thirteen as imagine the Diva's childhood. Living legends are not born, brought up, schooled in this place or that. They burst upon us. They are spontaneously, mysteriously, inevitably, there.

  It was always like that. Between seasons she simply disappeared; and though the rumours were many there were no facts.

  Was she the mistress, the morganatic wife even, of the Comt
e de Paris? Did she marry and then abandon the Armenian munitions manufacturer? Her relationship with the court at St. Petersburg was close enough for her to have had access to some of its most exclusive circles; but whether this was based on her quite unprecedented success in the theatre there or on some more personal tie cannot be confirmed. She destroyed the letters she received and herself wrote none—a few surviving notes are very nearly illiterate. Even her fortune cannot be traced. Terrified of being stranded without funds, she opened bank accounts in false names in some thirty or forty cities from Pittsburgh to Nanking, a good many of them still undiscovered and still accumulating interest, and when she died left no will.

  Whether she herself believed the stories that circulated about her or was satisfied simply to be what she had become, the Earthly Angel, the Incomparable, la Vale, we shall never know. But there had been a childhood—parents and a home; there must even have been an original and quite ordinary name. She herself can't have forgotten. But they were her secret. What image she turned to when the costumes, the jewels, the bold lines of an Amelia or an Elisabetta were laid aside— that is the greatest of her mysteries. Who was she when she looked into her glass at five in the morning? Who was she in her sleep? (Imagine it, the Diva's sleep!) Inside the gestures of a dozen great characterizations, murderous queens and princesses, vengeful lovers, wronged maidens, and other monsters, was a lost and secret child that only she could have recognised, and it was that child, grown into a sixty-year-old stranger, who came home at last and looks out at us, terrifying but also perhaps terrified by her own strangeness, in the photographs; a woman who has survived the life she created and is left now to resume the earlier, ordinary self she sailed away from and has never entirely outgrown.

  So Mrs. Judge's story, improbable as it might be, was not irreconcilable with the known facts. No story could be. Nor was it too wild to be believed. I listened in a dream. When she had finished, and we heard the man's step on the verandah, it was already dark. She gave a great sigh and leaned back, exhausted by the telling or the living of it—her own life, and seemed so touched for a moment with the grandeur and remoteness of tragedy, that I felt that if I so much as addressed her she might disintegrate like a being from another world. Better to get up and leave as one leaves a theatre, with the illusion still glowingly intact.

  “You haven’ lit the lamp,” the man said, looming in the doorway, surprised to find us in the dark.

  She started then, and made a move.

  “No, I'll do it,” he said. “You sit and finish your talk.”

  “We're finished,” she said, staring trancelike before her. “We're almost finished.”

  He moved about, pumping and lighting the lamp, and by the time he was done, and had set it on the table, she was once again the small, tired woman who had begun her story all those hours ago. She looked at her gnarled hands, then upwards and met his gaze. She gave a soft smile.

  “Don't worry, I'm oright. I'll see about gettin’ yer tea in a minute. There's some corned beef.”

  She got up heavily and went to the meat safe.

  I declined her invitation to stay. The moment of communion between us had passed. The man's presence, and the sound of him washing now in a tin basin at the back, snuffling noisily as he splashed, put a kind of restraint upon her. She no longer belonged entirely to herself. She saw me out to the verandah steps.

  It was still light outside. Palm-tops and bananas stood in silhouette against the sky and high overhead was a fast-moving cloud, a flock of what I took to be birds. It was the flying foxes, making their way from the rainforests further north to their feeding place on the other side of town. Millions of them. Having unfolded themselves out of the darkness under the boughs of trees, they were flying, now that the light was almost gone, in a dense and flickering cloud that might have been the coming of the dark itself. The sky was black with them.

  On the top step of the verandah, set out like an offering, was a covered saucer, with beside it a frangipani; on the second step another. She leaned down and took them up, one in each hand, the rival offerings.

  “My Indians,” she said smiling, and stood holding them up for me to see. More visible proof. There was a moment's pause while she let it sink in. “So then,” she said, "what will it mean?”

  I didn't know. What could it mean, sixty years after the event, thirty years after the main character was dead?—No, that was wrong. She was the main character.

  “I don't know,” I told her, a little alarmed by the possibilities, and not only for her. “We'll have to see.”

  She nodded.

  “You know,” she said, "I'm trusting you with me life. ‘is as well.”

  She jerked her head towards the lighted hallway.

  I went on down the steps.

  “I wouldn’ dawdle if I was you,” she called after me, suddenly practical. “From the looks a’ that sky I'd say we was in for a storm. It'll be a thumper.”

  5

  The woman's life.Incredible. But the details of it demand to be believed, and so, now that I have looked into her eyes, does she. She has a kind of grandeur, our Mrs. Judge, and for all her lack of education, an intelligence that immediately imposes itself. But she is uneducated, and much of what she has told me, if it is not her own experience, can only have come to her through the most painstaking research. She has at her fingertips dates, cast-lists, the names of even the most obscure of the Diva's colleagues and friends. The local chemist, who knows all the history of Karingai, assures me that she has spent the whole of her life here, or the whole of his life anyway, and he is a man of fifty. She and her husband keep to themselves. They are visited only by her Indian neighbours and one or two related Indians from towns close by. For years now the other whites have avoided them. The rumour is that she is herself part-Indian and the man part-Aboriginal. After listening to her story I have come to the conclusion that the fairy-tale childhood she describes can only be her own.

  Two of her memories especially impress me.

  One is the story of her flight from St. Petersburg to the Polish border in 1917, when she would have been ten.

  She and her brother had been taken in their earliest infancy to Russia and were brought up there on the fringes of the court, the offspring, officially unrecognised, of a Grand Duke; so that as well as being the daughter of the Diva she is also, by her own account, a cousin of the Romanov children murdered at Ekaterinburg, and for that reason, she believes, still on the Bolshevik murder list. It was to escape their local agents that she took refuge, fifty years ago, at Karingai.

  Of that earlier period she remembers almost nothing till the night of their flight over the snow: herself, her twin, and two ladies of high rank from the palace, all packed into a single sleigh.

  Winter light, more glowingly blue than daylight, held the domes of the city in a dreamlike stasis as they made their way, closely covered against detection, over the Neva bridges and through the roaring streets; among carts, horses, peasants with swaying bundles, torches, confused cries, and faces. Then, with the sleigh hissing and sighing on the hard-packed snow, out at last into a countryside that might have been laid under a spell: the birches crusted a sugary white, all sound damped and distanced—the old Russia of her childhood laid for ever asleep in her head. Groups of stained wooden huts with alleys of ice-tipped mud between; tea fuming in cups, and strips of charred pork that grimed and burnt the fingers; forests, rivers of ice, a long swooning into an immensity of white where the days fell endlessly without sound and their passing left no track. Later, towards the west, lines of grey-coated, grey-faced soldiers, some with their feet in rags, many of them maimed and bandaged, who turned out of half-sleep to watch their sleigh recede into the distance, as they turned in their own dream to watch the grey lines dwindle behind. A whiteness at last without detail; which is amnesia, oblivion; a blankness in which the boy, the twin brother, strays and is lost in some town swarming with refugees, carried off in a contrary direction on the tide of Russia
ns, Ruthenians, Letts, Poles, Jews that is pouring south, east, west out of the mouths of war.

  The lost brother still haunts her dreams. Her male counterpart. That Other who would guarantee the truth of who she is.

  She recalls their sleeping together in the same hammock, innocently fitted together, spoon-fashion, and sharing perhaps the same dream. Two blue moths are hovering over them, borne back and forth on the breeze. There is the scent of pennyroyal.

  Sometimes over the years she has woken to that scent and to the slight motion sickness of the hammock, and has almost recalled what dream it was they were sharing that had later taken the shape of moths, and almost recaptured the feeling of completeness with which their bodies fitted together, their lovely congruence.

  Catching sight of herself sometimes in a glass, she has had the odd sense of being no longer one; has seen the mirror's depths swim a moment and another figure come to its surface. She stands face to face with herself then, but in some different time and place; feeling her limbs harden, her chest grow flat, the hair coarsen on her upper lip, as a deeper voice fumbles for words in her throat, and in a language she no longer speaks. Her feeling then is of painful incompleteness, of someone unrecognised and lost now for nearly sixty years, who wears a semblance of her own face and gropes through her for a memory of that forgotten dream, their childhood; stopping dead perhaps on the platform of some Polish border-town where he might be an inspector of trains, and half recalling, as the distant names are called over the station loud-speaker, the dazzle of a courtyard, and a monk's bearded face leaning over them, a holy breath falling on their brows as they sit wrapped for their journey; or further back still, a garden with bowls of porridge cooling on wooden benches, lemons cut in segments, a deep resonance as of bees in the honey-coloured light of a hexagonal dome; his thought fluttering with hers in a scent of pennyroyal, but no longer knowing, as she does, what it refers to, and if he did know, or thought he knew, finding no one now to believe him.