Gilgamesh

by Joan London

  Once when she was a child out walking with Ada they came on an Aboriginal family on the track. ‘Don’t speak, don’t look at them,’ Ada had whispered, clutching her arm. Ada was afraid of them, as she was afraid of the gaunt-faced men who came to the door asking for a bit of tea or flour. But Frank insisted that she always send the girls out with anything she could spare. ‘At least we have a roof over our heads, Ada.’

  Edith cursed herself for her laziness, for not reading books as her father had urged. Their father would have been ashamed of them. They were ignorant farm girls.

  She wanted to get away. She wanted to learn about the world.

  A rustling started up in the grapevine that clustered thick as a wall down one side of the verandah. It was Ada picking the last few muscats, nearly brown now, sweet as sherry, popping them in her mouth. She grazed and hummed and spat out pips, like an invisible giant bird.

  In the afternoons the men slept again in their sun-warmed room. The house creaked and snapped in the warmth, like the thinnest membrane between them and nature. They slept to the ocean’s distant roar and the cries of cockatoos passing overhead. When they woke their faces were creased and vulnerable. They felt safe, safer than they had ever felt before.

  Perhaps this is our Paradise, Leopold thought as he lay on his bed, Frank’s old copy of Stevenson’s In the South Seas open on his stomach. He heard a girl’s bare feet padding in the kitchen. Gaugin’s Tahiti, Stevenson’s Samoa …

  In this light, the bare floorboards, the rough wooden walls, the fluttering threadbare curtains were austerely beautiful. He was beginning to say this word often to himself.

  They tramped in every direction. Sometimes Edith and Frances went with them. To the middle of the forest, a secret place of ferns and creeks and limestone caves. To hidden beaches beyond the rocky headland, accessible only at low tide. Through the olive-green scrub along the escarpment, the wind too strong to speak. A hawk circled, crows called. A silvery prehistoric reptile, unblinking, lay in their path and refused to move.

  ‘This country is so ancient, you can’t think of it as belonging to any farmer,’ Leopold said.

  ‘You wouldn’t say that if you saw my father clearing it,’ said Frances. ‘He had nothing but a crosscut saw and a broken-down horse and us girls to help him. When he burnt this hill off the whole sky was lit up. Now the Tehoes own it. There’ll be holiday houses here one day.’

  Frances’s forehead burned, she looked all tight and angular. Loyalty racked her, she felt she had to defend every stone they stumbled over, every blackened stump with its crown of regrowth.

  They walked home in silence. A large male undershirt waved on the line. The little shaving mirror winked from its nail. The dog was watching over a woman in an old green hat as she trailed round the yard calling in the chooks, making the clucking sounds that all her childhood Edith had thought of as Russian.

  Edith could not sleep at night. The kapok mattress sagged and the daughters fell into a trough beside their mother. Edith didn’t like to be so close to Frances. It had started when they were very young. They couldn’t bear to share a bath, hold hands, eat a piece of bread if the other had touched it. They were like negative magnetic poles. Even now, the sound of Frances’s breath irritated Edith.

  She made a bed for herself on the sitting room couch where her father used to lie under the window. She lay beneath his old army greatcoat. It was warm from the fire and she could see the stars through the window. The coat smelt of sweat and earth and gamey meat, like the pelt of an animal.

  This was where the visitors sat at night, stretching out their legs, talking, butting their cigarettes into the fire. She could smell the meals they cooked, slow-fried onions, thick stewed tomatoes, fresh bread, soothing homely smells.

  Men filled a house, she thought, and yet these ones trod gently, stood back for the women, calling them all by name. Edith, they said, Frances, Aunt Ada, Madame, a gleam of alertness in their eyes.

  She thought of small courtesies from Aram, turned them over one by one in her mind. A plate passed to her first, a smile, a tap on her arm, all the more thrilling because he spoke so little. Signs of secret favour. She was reminded of a game she and Frances used to play, pretending to be trackers, leaving signs through the bush for the other to follow, a broken branch, a pile of stones, a twig pointing a certain way. Their purpose, of course, had been to trick each other. Where did this trail lead?

  She woke each morning with a start, a leaf tapping at the window, something is waiting for you … She lay listening out for sounds of the men. She thought she’d hardly slept and yet she felt washed smooth as a morning beach. She tiptoed past the men’s door, crouched in the bush to pee as she collected kindling for the stove. At last they came into the kitchen, yawning, rubbing their hands by the fire, and the house filled with their good humour.

  Everything about them had become familiar. She could time the day by the growth of their beards, Aram’s dark bloom spreading up his cheeks, Leopold’s cornfield stubble, shadowed in the folds of his chin. Aram looked dapper at any hour. He attended to himself, filed his nails, trimmed his thick black hair, darned his socks sitting cross-legged on his bed like an Oriental man. She hadn’t known that men cared about such things. In the orphanage you learnt to look after yourself, he said. That was why he finished his meals before anyone else. And why he was always watching, always on the alert. Wherever he was he positioned himself. He always sat facing the door.

  While Leopold could talk to you for hours over breakfast, crumpled pajama top falling open over little fatty breasts, puffy eyes all warm at the sight of you, all alight from the morning’s ideas.

  One warm day on the beach the men had stripped off and run into the water. Only their undershorts covered the last unknown inches of them. Every other part of them she knew by heart. She started pulling up her dress to join them, but Frances scowled at her with such horror that she remembered her sagging, much-washed singlet and drawers and subsided, paddling in the shallows. Poverty always subdued her. When the men, shivering, came rushing out again, their shorts clung all pouchy to them and she and Frances looked away.

  She had seen Aram rise up out of the iron tub on the verandah, his satiny shoulders, his tight boylike buttocks, his whiplash spine.

  They were strangers and yet she felt close to them, so close she could sense wherever they were and what they were doing. As if now that they ate the same food, breathed the same air, they were part of her. All the habits and needs of their bodies had become familiar.

  An outdoor lavatory with a rural vista was his idea of heaven, Leopold said, heading off with a book under his arm.

  This was what husbands and wives know about each other, she thought.

  Edith was the last to sleep, the first to wake, the watchman of the house, and yet she was not tired. Sometimes deep into the night, her eyes wide open, she felt she could rattle the cutlery in the drawer, make the water jump from the jug, like a witch in a fairytale. She could almost think it was this force that caused the men to sigh and groan and turn in their sleep.

  In the dining hall at the Sea House she watched the honeymooners with a new intensity. She saw lovers everywhere. Some were restless and lonely together, others sated, at peace. Some were stiffly discreet, as if they had something to hide. One couple shocked the older guests by lying on the lawn in the sun, kissing one another with a slow, airy compulsion. She envied them, studied them for their secret.

  She caught sight of herself in the dining hall mirror and saw that her eyes shone and her cheeks were pink. She could swear she was taller. It seemed to her that the guests noticed her more. A party left a tip for ‘the pretty little waitress’.

  Sometimes at home when they were all sitting at the table Frances shot her a look. The sort of look she used to give her in the schoolyard if Edith tried to giggle with the others or did handstands with her skirt around her head. The look said: I know what you really want.

  Frances had become offhand wit
h the visitors. Edith might be getting carried away by them but she’d have them know that she, Frances, was not.

  Ada preferred to eat her meals at a little work table under her bedroom window. If the girls didn’t sit with her she could spend an hour gazing at the light in the trees, crumbling a piece of bread.

  Some nights she agreed to join them by the fire. The visitors instantly stood and helped her into a chair. Ada became flushed and gracious, called for vodka, clapped her hands and said they must have music, her daughters must dance, her daughters had not done enough dancing, poor girls. She squeezed Leopold’s hands and tears shone in her eyes. ‘There is no romance in this country,’ she said.

  The girls sat struck with embarrassment for their mother. They knew how she’d be talked of in the district. Off with the fairies. A few kangaroos loose in the top paddock. Two fingers tapping the head. Who could understand her like they did? Who could know how much she was still there? But the young men suavely responded to Ada without so much as exchanging a glance. Ada’s hair came unpinned and her eyes went glittery. She threw her hands around and said some Russian words, called the men Sergei, Vassily, Franzi. The girls knew that she was back in the room with the lace curtains and the samovar on the table. She was happy here, she was at home at last. But was she making a fool of herself? Should they persuade her to go to bed?

  But here Leopold and Aram were their most charming, most at ease.

  Perhaps, Edith thought, they had sat at many tables like this, with women fussing over them, demanding their attention. Perhaps they expected all older women to go a little crazy.

  Perhaps they understood, better than anyone, why she had despaired.

  On the morning they were to leave, Leopold knocked on Ada’s door, entered, closed it after him.

  ‘What did you talk about?’ Edith asked as she walked with them to the Nunderup Hall where they would catch the bus. Everything along the track seemed still and unreal. She had to make herself speak.

  ‘That’s between my aunt and me.’ For once Leopold had no words.

  But as he was about to climb aboard the rattling bus he said: ‘She asked me to look after you. She meant it. So look out.’ His lips were white. He kissed her on the mouth and climbed aboard without looking back, ceding to Aram the last farewell.

  In their last days the rain had set in. Everything felt damp in the house, sticky damp, like salt spray. The shaving mirror misted over, blankets felt gritty, razors rusted up. The sea grew wild, giant waves broke in blasts against the rocks. It sounded as if war had broken out, the visitors said. In the raw grey light of the kitchen, while the rain drummed on the roof, they started to talk about the desert again, about being hot, about all the places they wanted to return to, the tower of Babylon and the site of the royal libraries of Nineveh. This was where the fragments of clay tablets inscribed with the Gilgamesh epic had first been found.

  ‘What’s “Gilgamesh”?’

  ‘The world’s oldest known work of poetry. Gilgamesh was the king of Uruk in the land of Sumer. He was supposed to have lived about three thousand years BC.’

  Leopold went into his room and came out with a book that he had carried with him all the way from England, a long slim book bound in brown cloth with The Epic of Gilgamesh stamped on its spine.

  ‘A recent translation,’ he said, turning its coarse yellow pages. ‘A heroic piece of work. Please, read it if you’re interested.’

  Leopold and Aram spoke of Gilgamesh as if they knew him. Young King Gilgamesh became too big for his boots so the gods sent a wild man, Enkidu, to challenge him. They fought, proved to be an equal match, and became great friends. They set off into the world on heroic quests together.

  ‘Then what happened?’ asked Edith. They were thinking about travelling off together again, she could tell.

  ‘The two of them became so arrogant together that the gods decreed Enkidu must die and go to the Underworld.’

  ‘You talk as if you believe in all these old pagan gods,’ said Frances.

  ‘Why not?’ said Leopold.

  Frances licked her lips before speaking. ‘Because there is but one God.’

  Edith had never heard her mention God before.

  ‘Isn’t that just another story we tell ourselves? I thought your father was an atheist.’

  ‘Not underneath. Not in the end.’

  Leopold was untidy, he left a trail of cups, books, cigarettes around the house. But Edith noticed that he did not leave The Epic of Gilgamesh lying on the kitchen table. He took it back into his room.

  The visitors had a fencing contest during a break in the rain. They circled each other in the clearing, brandishing bush poles taken from the pile of timber that had once been Frank Clark’s piggery.

  ‘Behold King Gilga-tosh and the Wild Man,’ said Frances. Edith was dismayed at the scorn in her voice. ‘They act as if this whole place is their playground. I wonder what our father would have said.’

  ‘He would have liked them! They would have talked about books. He would have liked some men around the place.’

  ‘They’re not men, you know, they’re boys.’

  Frances was digging and replanting the vegetable garden, refusing all offers of help. She wore her father’s boots and his old oilskin cape, and from the back she looked like a smaller, ghostly version of him. She sounded like him too, lone and angry, as she stamped the sods off her boots on the verandah steps. She went straight in to sit with her mother in the bedroom. When the rains started, Ada had taken to her bed.

  Leopold read and wrote for long hours at the kitchen table. He refused to come on walks when the rain stopped. He said he’d fallen way behind with his Arabic. But Edith was beginning to understand that he stayed home out of supreme good manners. It would be too rude to leave Frances behind, slaving with a spade, and Ada lying alone in her dark room. He kept the fire stoked all day in the sitting room in an attempt to entice Ada out.

  He tried to engage Frances in conversation. ‘You would make a very good teacher, Frances, have you thought of that? Perhaps you could train as a monitor at the local school?’ But Frances stared at him and said she didn’t want to be a teacher. All her life there had been only one thing she wanted to do and that was farm. Leopold went thoughtful. He realised he was surprised that this plain shy cousin was not more receptive to him. It wasn’t often that anyone resisted his attentiveness. He respected her for it.

  Edith heard the visitors deciding their departure date. She told herself it was unreasonable to feel hurt. They never had been going to stay forever. They had only speculated about it once, on the beach, on a particularly balmy autumn day.

  They discussed their plans. Leopold was going to find his way back to London, to see his mother and, he groaned, find a proper job. Aram had decided to make a new life in Armenia, his motherland.

  ‘You know where is Armenia, Edith?’

  All these weeks she hadn’t dared to ask, or admit that she’d never even heard of it. He drew a map for her on the back of a brown paper bag. ‘Here is Russia. Here’s the Black Sea.’ Armenia was a tiny circle in the south of Russia, bordered by Turkey and Persia. He circled it again and again with his pencil. It was Soviet Armenia now, ruled by Moscow, but it had a culture of its own that went back thousands of years. It had been the fate of this tiny country in the Caucasus mountains to be overrun by Mongols, Turks, Persians, now by the Communists, but it remained the oldest Christian state in the world.

  For Armenians, Armenia was the motherland, as perhaps England was for Australians?

  ‘I don’t want to go to England,’ Frances said. Her father had always told them that England was class-ridden, cramped and soggy.

  If they had asked Edith what her plans were, she would have said: Take me with you. It was a vision that flashed into her head at odd moments, wringing out the dishrag, say, or hurrying along the Sea House track. She saw her own profile at a train window, looking out at some darkening unknown landscape. Someone was with her. Who? />
  But nobody asked about her plans.

  Besides, compared to the others she knew she longed for shallow things, plucked eyebrows, high heels, waved hair. Icecream, the boogie-woogie, a pink satin quilted dressing-gown. A big hot cinema smelling of sweat and hair oil and chocolate.

  In the end only Aram and Edith were left to go for walks. Whenever the rain stopped they hurried to a favourite place, the look-out, where half a dozen man-high boulders stood at the top of the escarpment, like the rampart of a ruined fort. If you climbed the boulders you had a view both of the ocean and of the miles of bush beyond the bay. If you crouched at the boulders’ base you were sheltered from the wind and could talk.

  At first they were shy. They had never been by themselves before. They scrambled up the boulders without looking at one another. But one day after gazing at the landscape for a while Aram slid down and started to speak. This land made him think of Armenia, he said, Armenia without mountains. The terrain of his homeland was also wild, ancient and barren, or so he had been told. I have a sickness for my country, he said, though I have never seen it.

  The sun broke out against the boulder behind him and filled his high-boned face with light. He did not take his eyes away from Edith’s. He spoke English the way Edith ran along a track, leaping from one safe place to another. He’d picked it up from a thousand conversations with Leopold. He also spoke Armenian, Arabic and French, learnt in the orphanage.

  ‘How did your parents die?’

  That was the question she had been wanting to ask him most of all. The question you never asked. You didn’t talk about the dead.

  He shook a cigarette out of a crumpled packet. His parents had been killed in the Massacres in Turkey in 1915. They had lived in the town of Diyarbakir, on the Tigris, in eastern Turkey, where generations of his father’s family had traded in spices. When he was three years old Turkish gendarmes had come, taken his father to the city square and hanged him. He and his mother were marched in a convoy of women and children across the desert to Syria. By the time they reached the Euphrates, his mother, like most of the convoy, was dead. Some Syrian Christians rescued him and took him to Aleppo. I don’t remember this, he said. I don’t remember my mother. I don’t remember any of it.