Gilgamesh

by Joan London

  In her memory, there was no trace of heaviness or clumsiness to him at the end. His touch was light on her face. His eyes were radiant. He seemed to vault into the jeep. He was lightness itself. He said that when he drove off he would not look back, but the jeep swerved a little as his hand emerged, waving. Perhaps he heard Jim’s howls.

  Jim always did her crying for her.

  The jeep disappeared over the crest of the road.

  A bell rang for siesta in the dormitory. Everything went quiet: the wind dropped. The sun fell in a solid shaft into the courtyard. Jim squeezed his eyes shut to make this place disappear.

  There was an explosion in the desert. Not far away. A mine on the road.

  Everyone came streaming out of the dormitory, following Edith as she ran up the hill. She left them all behind, even Jim.

  Some nights, when the children were asleep, Edith sat with Miss Anoosh in her little white room. The carved stone cross, the worn Oriental carpet, the photographs on the wall reminded her of Yerevan. There was the snow-frosted cone of Mt Ararat, touched up with faded pastels. There was the fabled Lake Van in eastern Anatolia, once Turkish Armenia. Miss Anoosh had been born in the town of Van. There was the photograph of Miss Anoosh’s family, taken in a studio in Van in 1912, her parents and three older brothers and her little sister, and young Anoosh in clear spectacles, a floppy bow at her neck. She always wanted to be a schoolteacher. She was the only survivor in her family. All the rest had died in the death marches of 1915.

  The war went on. The Normandy landings, the race towards Berlin. The V-l and then the V-2 rockets falling on London. Miss Anoosh served Edith brandy in ladylike thimble glasses and told her of the march along the Euphrates, the beautiful Euphrates bearing bloated Armenian bodies. Raped, murdered, or as with her mother and little sister, hands tied together in suicide. Hitler, the Jews, the Russian Front: for Miss Anoosh it was still the Turks murdering Armenians.

  In this Miss Anoosh was like every Armenian Edith had ever met, starting with Aram. How you became aware of the place in their lives of loss, lost family, lost land. Of buried anger, for monstrous crimes unpunished, for the world’s indifference. It was always there, as if the end of grieving would be the final loss.

  The only place where Edith felt at ease now was Miss Anoosh’s room.

  Some nights Jim poked his bumpy forehead around the door. He had begun his lifelong career of never doing things when others did. He did not sleep when the children slept. He had been found wandering at night. No one was sure if he was walking in his sleep or out of contrariness. When Edith asked him he did not respond. Edith had seen him herself, walking in the moonlight along the top of the courtyard wall. Skimming through the date palm grove. She had not stopped him. He seemed happier in the night breeze, more of a child. He napped in short bursts in shaded corners of the courtyard at any hour of the day. Edith could not make him change. It wasn’t just that she was too tired. There was a new authority about Jim. He was nearly seven, but seemed much older. He was grave, silent, and never joined in games. Sevan lumbered after him, as once he had followed Nora, and he was gracious to her.

  For the first few weeks here Edith had lain on her bed in a dark corner of the dormitory. Miss Anoosh sent a message to a friend of hers asking for information about the mine. An English jeep, she was told, but no body could be identified. The wreckage had been blown far and wide and quickly disappeared beneath the sand. There were many English soldiers in the area, Miss Anoosh pointed out. But no letter from Baghdad ever arrived.

  Edith lay without moving or speaking. Whenever she opened her eyes she saw Jim sitting beside her, as if on guard.

  Many months later Edith wrote to Irina, asking for news of Leopold. She would find out if Irina had received official notification of his death, she thought, before she began to explain the exact set of circumstances that had led to that jeep being on that particular stretch of road in Syria that day. She dreaded the reply, dreaded Irina’s grief.

  Edith never knew if Irina had even received her letter, but she took Irina’s silence as blame.

  Edith and Jim joined an Australian transport bound for Palestine. It happened by chance. Some soldiers in khaki shorts and slouch hats came into the courtyard to ask for water for the radiator of their truck. Miss Anoosh could not understand the English of these large young men. She called Edith out of the schoolroom.

  ‘I’m Australian,’ Edith said and one of them said: ‘Go on!’ Twenty minutes later she and Jim were waving goodbye to Miss Anoosh and the orphans from the back of the truck as it drove off to join the transport.

  It was April ’45, the Red Army was fifty miles from Berlin.

  All they could see was the shine of desert glare between the canvas curtains. Jim’s face was smeared with chocolate. Family-hungry soldiers swung him high in the air as they lifted him in and out of the trucks. He was winked at, joked at, his bumpy forehead squashed down into somebody’s hat. Edith was shown the wallet snaps, all those demurely smiling Australian faces. The eyes seemed innocent to her, touching. There were new pin-up girls in the cabs of the trucks, Betty Grable, Lana Turner. The shortwave wireless played songs she had never heard before. You Must Remember This, the men sang. Everybody knew the words. Everybody sang along.

  RETURN

  Edith told Jim that this was home but he didn’t know what home meant. To him it was just another border, the queues on the wharf, the men in uniforms, the corrugated iron sheds. They were processed and stamped in a wave of Displaced Persons as the old troopship from Alexandria disgorged its cargo into Fremantle. Theirs was just one story among hundreds of sagas reaching an end here.

  ‘Look, Jim.’

  She was grey-faced from five weeks’ seasickness, but her eyes were shining. He couldn’t see what made her happy. They were standing on a railway platform looking at some old bush growing in gravel. Seagulls hung in air as clear as water. It was late winter, 1947.

  The deeper they went into the country the closer they were to home. They descended from the bus into a great coolness and hush and the smell of forest. They walked down the driveway of a house as big as a palace and a tiny yellow-haired boy was rolling over and over on the lawn with a snarling woolly dog, and the boy, though very young, was laughing, completely unafraid.

  Another dog was barking wildly at them as they crossed a clearing splashed with sunlight and Edith gasped, he knew she was afraid. She started running towards an angular figure in dungarees watching them from the verandah of a little house. She was calling out as she ran, the suitcase bumping against her legs.

  Frances! Frances! Where’s Mumma?

  There was no grandmother to greet him, the Tati that Edith had promised him. Ada had caught pneumonia in the winter of ’44, and couldn’t seem to remember how to breathe. Dr Bly had stayed with her all one night, sent Frances off to sleep. At dawn he woke her to tell her that her mother had died. Madge Tehoe, a mother herself now, arranged the tiny funeral: the doctor and Reg and Madge with her arm clamped around Frances had watched as Ada was buried next to Frank. Afterwards Frances refused a glass of sherry at the Sea House, walked home alone to the empty house.

  The Lordgiveth and the Lord taketh away, Frances said, her eyes shining palely at them across the kitchen table. She bowed her head before she ate. Oh Lord I give thanks for the safe return of my sister and the fruit of her womb, and for Thy divine forgiveness of them both. Amen. Her voice was eerily loud and unabashed.

  ‘I’d rather not be prayed for, if you don’t mind,’ Edith said.

  Jim had never seen a face like his Aunt Frances’s before. So pale and serious and exposed. Even Miss Anoosh had sheltered behind glasses and wispy tendrils of black hair. But something seemed to have rinsed out the blood from Frances’s skin, chiselled her bones, bleached her eyes. Her hair was pulled back into a long stringy tail between her shoulder-blades. Her red-knuckled hands looked flayed. She didn’t talk of everyday matters. She sounded as if she were reciting poetry all the time.r />
  ‘I was lonely,’ she said. ‘I was lost. I thought about death day and night, nothing but death. Then Jesus came into my heart and I was saved. Now I know there is no death as Jesus showed us.’

  Edith sat fiddling with her cup. Soon she went outside to smoke on the verandah.

  ‘Jesus never promised that the Way would be easy,’ Frances went on to Jim, as if she hadn’t noticed he was a child. ‘But what are the slings and arrows of unbelievers compared to the spear that pierced His side? I forgive them, I forgive my sister, I was brought to forgiveness when I was saved. Praise the Lord!’

  ‘Oh, for heaven’s sake,’ Jim heard Edith say.

  The distant wireless roar of the ocean, the cries of the cockatoos released in the wind, came straight from childhood. Everything Edith saw moved her, the slow clouds, the olive-green headlands, the great bowl of the sea. She knew everything that met her eye in every direction. The space and light could make her dizzy with happiness. Whatever the terrors and mysteries of childhood, she thought, she must have known happiness here.

  Once or twice in those first few weeks she swung her head around thinking she glimpsed a green hat bobbing across the clearing. She listened out for her mother’s special call to the chooks. Sometimes at night she thought she heard slippers shuffling though the kitchen. She lay still until her heart stopped thumping. Her mother had fallen into silence here a long time ago. It was her silence Edith heard, in every moment.

  She wanted to listen for her mother, but Frances’s strange voice droned on and on. Her sister, once so familiar, too familiar, like a version of herself, had become alien. As if the real Frances had been abducted and replaced by some crazed enraptured saint. She lived, barely, on the eggs and vegetables she sold to the Sea House. She bought milk from the McKays once a week and Violet McKay slipped her a few chops if they were butchering. But she had few needs. She had no friends and wore threadbare clothes. All day she crouched and muttered to herself in the vegetable garden. At set hours she read her father’s Bible or prayed in her room.

  ‘How long have you been doing this?’ Edith asked her.

  ‘Doing what?’

  ‘Praying all the time.’

  Frances licked her lips in the old way. ‘Ever since I was gathered to the bosom of the Lord.’

  It horrified Edith to hear Frances, so reserved and prudish by nature, speak aloud of her yearnings, talk of wombs and hearts and bosoms. The way the floorboards creaked in her room as she carried out her devotions made Edith feel queasy. She didn’t know how long she could bear it.

  Worse, what she was conscious of every moment she was with her sister was the thought of the grief and loneliness, the desperation that had caused Frances to do this to herself. What anger did she hide, rolling her eyes with forgiveness at her and Jim, now that they were home, too late? She didn’t seem interested in them. She never once asked about their travels.

  This too was home. The feeling of closeness, with nowhere else to go.

  Home was strange. Edith told him he had lived here as a baby but he could remember nothing. It was as if he had been asleep and was only now waking up. He stood just beyond the verandah and surveyed the great circle of the sky and clearing, the ragged horizon of the bush.

  ‘Come on, Jim,’ Edith said. He looked so foreign here, black-browed, with full serious lips. His shorts were too long. She led him down the shadowy tracks. The bush cracked and hummed all around them like something alive. Edith went into a special mood, alert but quiet. She had forgotten the great adventure of the bush, what it chose to show, what it withheld.

  They walked along the beach, vast as a desert, paddled in the rock pools at low tide.

  ‘Whose country is this?’ There was not another person to be seen.

  ‘Ours! Well, every Australian’s. You belong here, Jim.’

  Frances asked Edith if she was going to ask Madge for a job at the Sea House, but Edith said she was not. She avoided contact with the Sea House as much as possible.

  Once she and Jim came across Madge chasing after her little son through the Honeymoon Gardens.

  ‘Are all boys like this?’ Madge called. She stopped to catch her breath. ‘I’m counting the days till boarding school,’ she confided. ‘Let him loose amongst his own kind.’ Her eyes flickered over Jim. Madge’s skirt was creased over the mound of her stomach, her hair tumbled out of a hasty bun, her unpowdered face blossomed with broken veins. It was as if she’d never had time to recover from the shock of bearing a child. But she was friendlier to Edith, as if at last they walked on common ground. ‘His father is no help at all, he’s laid up with gout. He keeps his distance,’ she said. ‘Never marry an older man, that’s what I tell my girls.’

  Meanwhile Gareth Tehoe had run out of the depths of the garden to stand next to Jim. He turned his head up to him and stared, his eyes curious and impersonal, a wordless little animal.

  ‘Come with Mother, Gareth. It’s lunchtime, dear.’

  Gareth did not seem to hear. He did indeed look too young and perfect for his old red-faced parents, light-boned, clearfeatured, golden-haired. His mother could only ever lumber after him. He and Jim stared at one another. He was only a couple of years younger than Jim, but supremely at ease in the world.

  ‘He’s the image of his Uncle Ronnie,’ Edith said.

  ‘Gareth.’ Madge leaned over and manacled his little wrist with her fingers. ‘Come on, you naughty boy.’ She rolled her eyes at Edith. Nobody was fooled, least of all Madge. She enjoyed being helpless with adoration. She dragged Gareth away from Jim without a backward glance. After all, a fatherless Clark was no playmate for her son. And such a different-looking boy, she told Reg.

  But Gareth turned his head over his shoulder, his eyes meeting Jim’s.

  He wasn’t a naughty boy, he was an angel, Jim saw that at once.

  At the top of the stairs Madge stopped and turned. ‘By the way, I had a letter from Ronnie the other day,’ she called out to Edith. ‘From California. He sends his regards. He was pleased to hear you made it back.’

  Frances told Edith that her family in Christ was coming to take her preaching on a tour of the Great Southern. The Brothers and Sisters took the word all over the state, sleeping in tents, preaching at shows and race meetings, at roadsides, outside pubs. Often they were pelted with rotten fruit or empty bottles, Frances said proudly, jeered at, chased by dogs. During the War they had called on farmhouses, reaching out to the lonely souls of soldiers’ wives and mothers and homesick internees. That was how they had saved Frances, braving the overgrown track to the clearing, the only visitors she had.

  Not many souls stayed saved once the men came back. But Frances was a stayer. She believed in giving all of herself. She brought all of Frank Clark’s Methodist integrity to this more flamboyant faith. Every word spoken between the Brothers and Sisters was in the Lord’s breath, she said. At last she had found some people who saw the world as she did. Now that Edith was back to mind the farm, Frances was free to go with them. She believed she had a calling to preach.

  They were going to set up their tents and sleep the night here. Frances made, with a handmaid’s care, a pot of mutton bone soup and two loaves of bread. Jim was excited, he remembered the acre of soldiers’ tents in the desert and the glimpses of Bedouin caravans. But the Brothers and Sisters arrived in one car, a battered utility that didn’t seem to stop so much as conk out. Three people, two in the cab and one in the back, climbed down. The dog barked and bared its teeth and Frances tied him up.

  ‘Praise the Lord,’ she called out shyly. ‘Where is Brother Bob?’

  ‘Heeding the call in Manjimup.’ The driver, middle-aged, speckled pink, with a wispy beard and creased eyes high in his face, lifted his old straw hat and mopped his head with a piece of rag.

  ‘He won’t be touring no more,’ called out the young man who had ridden in the back. Or perhaps not so young, he had bristles on his chin, and his stumpy arms and neck were thick as a man’s, but he was short,
as short as Edith, only a few inches taller than Jim. Like the older man he wore a dark suit and collarless shirt as crumpled and dirty as work clothes. ‘He got a job in the baccy factory.’ His voice was high as a boy’s.

  ‘Truth is,’ said the woman, Frances’s sister in Christ, ‘Brother Bob’s getting spliced.’ Her voice was so flat, you couldn’t tell if she was amused or disapproving. She was a tiny dried out woman, with sun-cracked lips and frizzy grey hair pressed down beneath her scarf.

  ‘To an Eytalian girl!’ shrieked the young man. ‘A roaming cathlick.’

  Compared to Frances they seemed a dust-blown, lukewarm lot. Not radiant with fervour, but ordinary, just a little grubbier and looser than people who stayed at home. Jim was disappointed. He had imagined the Brothers and Sisters to be more like the Orthodox priests he’d seen strolling through the Armenian quarter in Aleppo, like a breed of noble birds with their dead white aquiline faces. Brother Norris, Sister Leona and little Brother Fred, her son, used the lavatory one after the other, and drifted in to sit at the kitchen table without, Jim noted, bothering to wash their hands.

  ‘Didn’t know you had family, Sister,’ Brother Norris said, with a quick bare-toothed smile at Edith. Edith kept her head down, slicing bread. Frances bit her lip nervously as she served the soup. Brother Norris stretched out his arms, and the Brothers and Sisters bowed their heads and held each other’s hands.

  ‘Come on, Jim,’ Edith said, standing, gathering up her bowl. He’d never seen her be so rude. ‘Jim!’ she hissed from the doorway. He followed her into the front bedroom where Frances slept. They ate their soup sitting on the big bed.

  ‘Trust Frances to fall for this,’ Edith said savagely. They were hungry and she’d forgotten to bring in the bread.

  It was strange to be eating in the melancholy twilight of the bedroom. For a moment Edith looked like a stranger, all deepened with seriousness, all clean and vivid with anger. For the first time he thought of the word ‘beautiful’ for his mother. So much more beautiful than the people in the kitchen. Frances too had looked more beautiful than those people. It grew dark and they hadn’t brought a lamp in with them.