Gilgamesh

by Joan London

  They lay back with their arms behind their heads. There was nothing else to do but listen to the conversation in the kitchen.

  The voices were slightly raised, as if in opposition.

  ‘But we belong to the poor and homeless, as Jesus taught us,’ Frances was saying.

  ‘All very well for you, Sister,’ said Sister Leona. ‘I’d just like a spell with a roof over my head.’

  Perhaps Frances was too much for them too.

  ‘It’s like this,’ said Brother Norris. ‘Our number has dwindled. We are weary. Let the people come to us for a change. Let the lost souls come here and we will succour them. They can till the soil for their food and build shelter for their weary bodies. Learn to live in the love of God.’ You could hear where Frances had learnt to talk the way she did.

  ‘Here?’ said Frances.’You mean this place?’

  ‘You are the one with property, Sister. Where else could we find our pasture for the poor?’

  ‘You should practise what you preach, Sister,’ said Sister Leona.

  Brother Fred giggled, his pitch out of control.

  ‘But this is my sister’s place too. It was our father’s. He wouldn’t want me to give it away.’

  ‘Who’s talking of giving it away, Sister? I’m talking of sharing, all our worldly possessions. I’m talking of holy matrimony, Sister. You and me.’

  ‘Praise the Lord!’ shrieked Little Brother.

  ‘Then what could your sister say?’ said Sister Leona.

  ‘God sent you to me, Sister,’ Brother Norris went on. ‘I’ve always believed that. My eye fell upon you for God’s work and you heard me straight away.’

  ‘What about the tour?’ Frances said in a small voice. ‘Albany, Walpole, the Porongorups?’

  ‘They threw us out of Manji,’ Brother Fred called out. ‘Brother Bob swore on the Bible no fornication did take place.’

  ‘Think of it, Sister Frances,’ said Brother Norris. ‘Think of the orphans in their rows of little beds. Let the little children come unto me. Let your eyes be opened to the evil of selfishness. Let duty and pity enter your heart.’

  Edith lay very still on the bed.

  ‘Come to my arms, Sister.’ Brother Norris’s voice held a tenor’s quaver. ‘Let us hold each other in the Lord’s embrace.’

  Chairs scraped and bumped, footsteps ran outside, the dog started barking. ‘Easy, Sister!’ somebody called. Edith ran out. The Brothers and Sisters had stationed themselves around their utility, just beyond the ring of kitchen light. Edith stood in the doorway, her arms crossed, Jim peering around her.

  ‘Sister Frances!’ Brother Norris called out. ‘This is your last chance. Do you wish us to leave?’

  Frances was taking little steps up and down the edge of the verandah, her face very red.

  ‘Get going!’ Edith’s voice cracked out. ‘Or I’ll call the police.’

  ‘We go when Sister Frances tells us to,’ said Brother Norris. But he had put his hat on.

  ‘But if you do, don’t think you’re coming touring with us, Sister,’ Sister Leona said.

  ‘Sister Frances,’ Brother Norris pleaded. ‘Let us kneel and pray together.’

  Frances stepped off the verandah and strode towards the bush.

  Edith spoke loudly. ‘Jim, run to the Sea House and ask them to telephone the police.’

  ‘Bet I can run quicker’n him!’ Little Brother yelled.

  But Brother Norris and Sister Leona were already climbing back into their seats. The ignition turned, failed, turned again. The utility started to bump its way out of the clearing. It seemed they were used to making speedy departures. Little Brother scrambled up behind and stood holding the roof of the cab.

  ‘You always was a crackpot!’ he yelled towards the bush where Frances had disappeared. ‘That’s what we said.’

  ‘I knew what they were up to the moment I laid eyes on them,’ said Edith. Her hands shook as she lit a cigarette.

  The frail beam of their single headlight soon dissolved into the darkness.

  But the image of Little Brother, the man-boy still with his mother, stayed with Jim for many years.

  Frances returned home hours later. She looked hollowed, tearstained like a widow, the light in her all gone out. Edith sat waiting for her, smoking on the verandah. They faced each other.

  ‘Did he ever say he loved you?’

  ‘You don’t understand. He loves God.’

  ‘Does a man of God marry to get his hands on people’s land?’

  Frances swung off into her room.

  For some time she was subdued. There was something crestfallen about her as she went about her tasks. She saw it as a weakness in her, that she had not been able to stand by her convictions, that she could not in the end give all of herself. That she loved the land more than God. She bowed her head over her plate, but if she prayed she kept it to herself.

  Later she came to think that religion itself was her weakness, a dark attraction over which she had no control. In calm moments, weeding, tying up the beans, she knew this attraction was something inherited from her father. An appetite for moral judgement that she was always seeking to appease. She always felt watched. By whom? God or her father?

  Bit by bit her eyes lost the glassy stare that didn’t really seem to see other people. She started to see Jim only too well. Edith let him moon around too much. Frances mused about his education, how best to bring up a child. She taught him to use the axe, and told him he was now in charge of the stove. When she dug over the orchard she gave Jim the task of collecting stones. There did not seem to be time to pray any more. Thoughts of Jim, what he might be doing or not doing, disturbed her concentration.

  She started to get angry like an ordinary human being. All her intensity became focused on Jim and he made her angry.

  It started when he went to school.

  From the first day he would not speak about it. How is school? Edith and Frances asked him and he just grunted, ashamed at his failure, for wasn’t this an Australian school and wasn’t he an Australian? He was more a foreigner here than he had ever been anywhere else. Scornful freckled faces loomed out of the glare of the gravel playground and called him names he couldn’t understand.

  ‘What’s a bastard?’ he asked Edith, out of earshot of Frances.

  ‘Someone whose parents aren’t married,’ Edith said. She didn’t offer any more information and he didn’t ask for it because he knew it came from that area of her life which gave her pain. Ever since the orphanage he had protected her from pain.

  How did these Australians know so much about him? Father, father, that seemed to be the question. Where’s ya father? What d’he do in the War?

  ‘He died,’ Jim mumbled. Other kids had fathers who died in the War and that seemed to give them a sort of respect. But still they went on. What side was he on? Go on, tell us.

  Just by standing there he seemed to send them into a frenzy. There were some older girls chatting on the schoolroom steps but they didn’t come to save him. He knew he wasn’t small and cute any more, but a blighted, big-nosed, gawky creature.

  He brought home uneaten the sandwiches Frances had made him and she scolded him for waste. He did not say that he had no time to eat, he had to stay in the schoolroom and finish his work. This was because he was nearly ten years old and could hardly read or write. Nora had taught him to read Armenian and he’d learnt some Arabic in the orphanage, but the teacher, Sir, did not know that. From what barbarous climes have you been delivered to us, Clark?

  Sir had been in the Airforce. He was very tall with bloodshot eyes and thin red-gold hair slicked back in a single strand to the nape of his neck. When he was angry, the strand fell over his face, like a signal. The swish of his cane nauseated Jim, it was like listening to an execution. Among his students there was a rumour, which Sir did nothing to dispel, that he had fought in the Battle of Britain. They admired his wit and bookish words in spite of their fear. They were proud he had come to Nunderup
. What would make a man like that come to the bush? Whatever it was, he didn’t go away. He stayed on, year after year.

  He lived by himself in an old Settlement house near the school. Later it turned out that he had come to drink himself to death.

  Blood drummed in Jim’s ears, behind his eyes, his hands sweated, he knocked over his inkwell. There was ink everywhere, even in his mouth, it tasted like blood, metallic and salty. Six red stripes stung his blue palm, his hand bouncing like a spring, the room hushed, unreal. Sir’s face was bland and suave.

  Sometimes after school he went to the book called Gilgamesh which his mother kept beside her bed. Inside the book was a photograph of Leopold as a fat boy in shorts and cap, only a few years older than Jim was now. Jim spent long minutes studying the familiar face in its guise of schoolboy. Each time he saw something more. He saw Leopold’s eyes with the knowledge in them deep in the flesh of the boy. The grin that stretched his cheeks he now saw as brave. He saw that this fat boy would also be a target in the Nunderup schoolyard.

  He flicked through the yellowed rough-cut pages and breathed its musty smell. It filled him with a strange excitement, as if he’d caught a whiff of ancient, buried cities. Leopold had read these words, he loved the Gilgamesh myth, Edith said. That was why he’d wanted them to have this book. In bed at night Jim thought of Leopold the way he was in the evenings in Syria, all the dust washed from him, the calm he radiated. In this way he fell asleep.

  He said he was sick. He would’ve run away into the bush every morning except that Sir said truancy was a crime, your parents could go to gaol. Most mornings he was sick anyway, sick with dread. Even alone with Edith he couldn’t tell her how it was, how he’d entered a darkness and feared for his brain. He could never take a full week of it. Sore throat, stomach, ear, even leg ache. It annoyed Frances that Edith believed him. This was what motherhood had done to her, made her go soft in the head. By midmorning this so-called sick child would be up out of bed hanging around the verandah! The boy needed someone to stand up to him. It’s weak to tell lies, she told Jim, it’s weak to run away from things. All children have to learn to read and write. That is their work.

  Edith had started work by then. He longed for her to stay home with him, put her hand on his forehead, spend all day by his bed as she had once in the camp in Alexandria when he was sick with measles. She’d sung a song about a kookaburra to him and he liked the young, free sound of her voice. Somehow she’d come by some ginger ale for him, and the taste would always remind him of her, her spicy smell, her cool fingers.

  In the end he always went back. At least he could catch the bus with Edith to and from school. They could be together again away from Frances. Besides, he wanted to learn to read. He wanted to read his grandfather’s books on the shelf in the kitchen. Also Leopold’s book, which now belonged to him.

  Edith had taken a job at the new nursing home in Busselton. A stone house on the inlet had been converted into a hospital with wheelchair ramps and handrails and a bathroom wing. Old farmers and farmers’ wives, shopkeepers, fishermen, shire clerks, sun-blotched pioneers of the South West, would now be nursed here until they died. Edith was employed at first in the kitchen, but soon she was left to do what she was best at, the cleaning, feeding and dressing of old helpless bodies. Every morning now she caught the early bus from the Nunderup Hall in her bubblegum pink, double-breasted uniform, and her nurse’s shoes which she whitened once a week with a special paste. She came home on the last bus, stepping down and fumbling for a cigarette.

  The work was hard. It required all her concentration and precision, all her stamina. Sometimes she worked seven days a week, or stayed overnight if a patient of hers was dying or the hospital was understaffed. She gave her patients all the care that she had learnt to give Tati. That she would have given her own mother. She did not have time to chat with the other staff, though they respected her. Edith was always surrounded by her patients, yet always seemed alone.

  Her feet and hands broadened, her back grew permanently round. At night she was silent with exhaustion. She wound her alarm clock and went to bed when Jim did. It was important to sleep enough, so that in the morning her heart didn’t sink too much as she walked up the nursing home driveway and the thought came to her: The House of the Dead.

  On her days off in the summer she went to the sea and let the swirling water engulf her, make her lighter. She taught Jim to swim and catch the waves. On the way back along the limestone track she listened to the ticking of the bush. Let me learn patience, she said to herself. She thought of the patience of Tati, who endured, who did not speak of her grief for the past. And of Hagop, caretaker of Nevart, paying for his sins.

  She became aquainted with death. She peered down into it in order to learn about the deaths she had missed. She listened to the silence after the last breath and heard its echo far away in another country. The silence in the desert after the explosion, that even now vibrated through her. She bowed her head before the presence around that bed.

  Yet her work was a battle for life. Day after day, to hold the end back a little longer. To serve life, which she had once too carelessly disregarded.

  She moved calmly among the patients, knowing she could bring comfort. It was an instinct, sensing when a feeble body was lopsided, when an old back was cold, when a soul was about to disappear from loneliness. She learnt how to draw out of herself the exact words, the exact touch. Leopold had known how to do this, she thought.

  She dreamt one night that Leopold came walking again into the clearing. This time he wore a coat of thick dark fur as if he were coming from a northern country. His light hair had turned to arctic silver, and his face was winter white. It was Leopold, walking and walking towards her but he looked like someone else.

  She woke to hear herself gasping in the darkness. She put her head under the blanket so Jim wouldn’t wake.

  Jim loved to sit by Edith on the bus, to be travelling again. For a while he pretended to forget his true destination. He liked the morning smell of her fresh uniform, crisp with hospital starch. Her face was still dreamy from sleep. Dmitri, she sometimes called him, his old travelling name. He knew it was a gesture to another time, when they had been everything to each other. He understood that she knew he was suffering.

  She watched him standing at the edge of the schoolyard, the first to arrive. The bus’s exhaust blew the hair back from his forehead and as the morning light struck his face it seemed to her that his temples were bulging. As if his brain were overworking, or his emotions had crept up and filled his face. She felt a stab of disquiet. She raised her hand to him as the bus drove on.

  He watched until the bus disappeared though she never turned back. He knew she would be glad to be alone. Ever since he was very young he had known this about his mother. Even if she was alone she set up a screen of cigarette smoke so she wouldn’t be disturbed. She could never get enough solitude.

  Edith sat near the front so she wouldn’t have to talk to the locals. She knew they watched her and Jim, that their return would have been noted and talked about in the district. That here she would always be a woman with a past.

  Sometimes she caught men watching her in a speculative way, even now, as she was, set-faced, tense-shouldered in her pink uniform. She looked straight ahead.

  Sometimes, when she caught sight of the spire of the Anglican Church outside Torville, she remembered ‘Armenia’, that fabled mountain paradise where she had never been.

  In the afternoons he didn’t catch the crowded schoolbus, but walked all the way to the nursing home to wait for Edith. He sat on the verandah and watched the rows of sheets billow in the inlet breeze as peace settled over him. When Edith had a moment she brought him out a glass of milk and a piece of yellow fruit cake from the old people’s afternoon tea, with instructions to stay outside. But he would never have willingly gone in.

  Inside were corridors of cries and wails, glimpses of shrunken bodies so still they might be dead. He saw Edith wres
tling with sheets and limbs like a sailor in high wind. The smell wafted out to the verandah, a sickly farmyard odour, so familiar it was almost comforting. Edith carried this smell home with her on the bus, it was the smell of the day’s end, of release.

  But the verandah was a place of respite. He sat in a cane chair swinging his legs, trying to make out the words in the magazines that were left by visitors, Woman and Countryman and Pix. Old survivors sat around him, bent over canes, parked in wheelchairs. They dozed and woke, watched the trees, muttered to themselves. They were indifferent to Jim, or asked him the same questions over and over as if he were one of theirs. Been a good boy? Done the milking yet? Eh? Eh? they screeched at him, enjoying the freedom of the breeze. Old yellow-nailed claws pushed their cake at him in offering. He took it but couldn’t eat it, crumbled it down through a crack in the boards. Their watery eyes couldn’t see him do that, he knew. After Tati, he felt at home with old people. Sometimes he glimpsed the little boy or girl in a face, peeping out through crumpled flesh, defiant. An old shearer swore like a boy behind a shed, winking at Jim. When I get better ‘I’ll get out of this place, he said. Jim saw that they were prisoners here, as he was at school. They were afraid of their weakness and helplessness, as he was afraid of his.

  When Edith popped out for a smoko, the old people called to her, trembling in their chairs, fawning for a moment’s attention. ‘Sister! Oh, please, Sister!’ Edith bent over them with kind hands, her white shoes flashing as she ran to them.

  A huge black bird swooped into the clearing straight towards him so that he covered his head with his arms and heard its wings beat as it passed above him. It gave a hoarse cry as it circled and he fell down and lay on the earth. It hovered waiting, its cries grating and beating inside his head.