Darcy had brought a demonstration tape, and when Rod Ferguson came, pink and grey-suited, beautifully tailored, giving off an aroma of Old Spice aftershave, we all listened in absolute silence. Rod sat beside the desk, while I remained in my chair behind it; but it was clear who now had the central place in the room.
The group had recorded a number of the songs they’d presented at the Loft, as well as some flamenco pieces Brian and Darcy did as a duo; and while the tape was playing, I found I believed in them again, however unlikely ABS was to want them. I began to be ashamed of my embarrassment.
Rod’s response was hard to judge; he remained professionally poker-faced, his large eyes fixed, the clean whites shining, listening with care. When the tape was done, he smiled from one to the other as though to tell them they’d won some prize. But the compliments he paid them had no offers appended, and began to sound merely polite. Darcy had already spoken for the group, so it was to Burr whom Rod mostly addressed himself; using his most mellifluous ABS voice.
‘I loved it, Darcy,’ he said. ‘You’re marvellous musicians, and the electric backing’s really unusual.’
I sighed inwardly as he paused, knowing already that a putdown of their hopes would follow.
‘The trouble is,’ Rod said, ‘we have these terribly stodgy programme executives higher up, some of whom came out of the Ark.’ He became flatteringly confiding. ‘I’ve told Richard: all they want to know about is schmaltzy show bands and vocalists imitating Frank Sinatra. I had a hard enough time getting ‘Eight O’Clock Rock’ to air — and I just don’t think they’re ready for a whole series using a folk group, however good. Even if they were, they’d ask why they should let comparative unknowns have their own show.’
Rita Carey spoke for the first and only time. ‘We’re not entirely unknown,’ she said. Her small, husky voice rose as though asking a question. ‘We’re known in the country? We’ve been doing Country and Western tours for two years; we made a record. They like us, out around Tamworth and those places.’ She looked wistfully at Brian as though for help; she waited for others to give her answers.
‘That’s right,’ Brian told Rod. ‘We’ve even got a few fans. Or don’t you count country people?’ He grinned without resentment.
‘Of course,’ Rod said; he spoke as though to someone a little backward. ‘But that isn’t the mass audience, is it? And our programme executives have to be convinced you’d get that audience.’
‘We can convince them,’ Darcy cut in. He couldn’t disguise his hunger, or the amber coldness of his stare, which was fixed on Rod. I glimpsed the standover man; he exuded a faint yet almost physical intention to coerce, his neck beginning to extend in the goose-like way that brought his face nearer to Rod’s; and suddenly I realised what I’d let loose: if Darcy became aggressive and wouldn’t take no for an answer, it would reflect very badly on me.
‘We’re not just ordinary folk musicians,’ he was saying. ‘We’re a whole lot more than that.’
Rod’s expression became blander; he leaned back and clasped his knee. ‘I’m sure you are,’ he said pleasantly, and changed the subject, plainly preparing to end the interview. ‘Are you from Tasmania too, Darcy?’
‘I’m a gypsy,’ Burr said. He was looking at Rod with perfect seriousness, and I sat astounded.
‘Really?’ Rod glanced at me, asking whether to laugh or not, but my expression remained neutral. He turned back to Darcy. ‘A real one?’
‘A real one,’ Burr said flatly. ‘My father was a gypsy. You don’t meet many of us about these days.’
Rod became respectful of Darcy’s peculiar ethnic status. ‘That’s unusual. I suppose that’s why you play such good flamenco.’ Picking up a pencil, he sat tapping it lightly on the desk, staring at Burr now as though at a rare animal.
But Darcy made no acknowledgment of this new interest. ‘What I’d like you to do,’ he said, ‘is see us perform at the Loft. You can’t get an idea from a tape. Folk groups get major audiences overseas, but not here. That’s because no one here’s professional enough to deliver the goods. We are, you’ll see that. We’ll get the majority audience for you — not just the folk fans. We’re working on material that’s never been done before: it’ll need a very special presentation on TV — and Dick and I will work on it together. That’s why he ought to produce the show.’
Rod raised his eyebrows and glanced at me, but Darcy was still talking, his eyes unwavering.
‘Why don’t you take a risk? Why does ABS always have to play it safe?’ He was frowning almost fiercely now, and I waited for Rod to react; to dismiss him. But then Darcy broke the tension by winking, with a sly, grossly exaggerated expression of invitation. ‘We’ll be new,’ he told Rod. ‘Like nothing you’ve ever put on.’ Grinning, he repeated that statement he’d made in the Hasty Tasty. ‘We’ll be terrific.’
It ought to have been crude and embarrassing; instead he’d somehow made it funny, and Rod Ferguson laughed.
‘You’re almost starting to convince me,’ he said. ‘All right — I’ll come and see you.’
Darcy had made an old technique work, and I’d suddenly seen the power of his will. Arriving at a brink of impertinence, he had disarmed his subject by making himself a jester at the last moment — as mendicants like him have always had to do. It hadn’t entirely hidden his aggression, but we’re all titillated by a little bullying if it’s followed by a signal of capitulation, and Rod had proved to be no exception. A bachelor of unknown tastes, seemingly adored by a series of women but probably enamoured of neither sex, he was fairly tough under his ebullient manner. I’d watched him produce his shows, and had seen him quell performers and technicians alike with occasional displays of soft-voiced firmness, pink executive jaw out-thrust. Yet Burr’s shabby intensity had broken through to him; it wasn’t to be stopped, for all its crudity.
I walked them along to the lifts. ‘What’s this about new material, for God’s sake? There isn’t any, is there?’
Darcy grinned sideways, pressing the lift button while Brian and Rita watched him in awe. ‘I’m working on it. And you’re going to help.’
‘And what’s this about being a gypsy? Don’t bullshit me, Darcy.’
He winked. ‘My old grandad was Scots. But let Rod-baby think I’m a gypsy if he likes to, right? I’m whatever anyone wants me to be.’
5
Our marriage was entirely happy, in those first six months before Burr appeared at our door on the arcade.
A few weeks after he and Brian and Rita arrived in Sydney, Katrin and I moved from Beaumount House to a flat in Potts Point, taking Jaan and old Vilde with us. So I now had a family, with a family’s routines — even if these weren’t quite usual.
Every weekday morning at eight o’clock, I’d come out into the glassed-in kitchen-verandah above quiet Challis Avenue, and put on the kettle for tea. The two-bedroom flat was on the second floor of an old, mustard-yellow terrace a few doors from the corner of Victoria Street, and as I lit the gas stove I would look across to McElhone Stairs, the nineteenth-century stone steps going down off the edge of Victoria Street and the Darlinghurst ridge to the wharf sheds and funnels of the Woolloomooloo docks below. Pigeons strutted on the tennis court of the convent on the corner where the nuns played every Saturday, flapping and calling in their black habits. The plane trees were bare, imitating winter in Europe.
But I remember those weekday mornings as being always bright, cold and sunny, as they so often are in Sydney in June. Waiting for the kettle to boil, I’d open the sliding windows and look out, and the minibus from the school for disabled children would pull up directly below, the faces smiling at the windows as though on a treat. Prompt and straight-backed as a clockwork man, old Andres Vilde would emerge on the front path below me in his shirt-sleeves and blue glasses, waving to the driver. Now it was time for me to carry Jaan downstairs, and to fetch his folding wheelchair; and looking down on Vilde, with his thick shock of white hair and last-century walrus moustache, I
would feel a surge of fondness. He was a strong old man, despite his seventy-five years, and although Jaan was now thirteen, Vilde still sometimes picked him up and lifted him into the bus as he used to, despite my protests.
Vilde and Jaan had become central components in my happiness with Katrin. We were a family, and ate and sat talking together in the evenings; yet the old man never seemed to intrude when she and I wanted to be alone. He was devoted to Jaan, with whom he shared the second bedroom, and he spent much time walking him in his wheelchair, helping with his mathematics homework, or simply watching television with him. To be with his great-grandson seemed to be the main source of Vilde’s contentment. He never complained, and spoke little of personal things; at least not to me, which made him comfortably half-real. This was also helped by the fact that he was naturally taciturn, his English remaining uncertain, even though his vocabulary was that of an educated man. But once, just after we were married, he said to me briefly: ‘You are good, to take the boy. To be a father to him.’ And he took my hand and held it for a moment, peering into my face. Like Katrin, I now called him Vanaisa: Grandfather.
‘Tere, Vanaisa,’ I would say, and he would smile with pleasure and return the Estonian greeting. He began to teach me a few phrases, but I found them difficult to retain.
At night, sitting in a big leather armchair Katrin had bought for his especial use, he would slowly read a newspaper or else his Estonian Bible, using a magnifying glass. He remained a devout Lutheran.
‘You read the Bible often,’ I said one evening, and he looked at me over his glasses, putting the book carefully aside. We were sitting in front of the gas fire in the high-ceilinged living-room, with its glass doors leading to the kitchen-verandah. Katrin was out, singing at the Estonian club; Jaan was in bed. Vilde always drank a single straight vodka at this time, and I poured one for each of us, setting them down on the coffee table between us.
‘Without God,’ he said, as though reading some rune from a stone, ‘we grow sick.’ He picked up the glass.
Perhaps he saw God as a vast medicinal herb; I envied him his faith, but he shrewdly read my expression of complacent neutrality, his eyes narrowing.
‘You think this is not so, Richard? It is the worst sickness of all. Many have it now. Adolf Hitler had it, who has smashed Europe in pieces, and who is the reason I am sitting here now. I have heard that towards the end Hitler began to see the Devil. It is an interesting story; perhaps it is true. The doctor would find him on the floor by his bed; he was crouching, you understand, looking at something in the corner of the room. And he was trembling, begging Satan to go away, to leave him alone. Naturally, the doctor could see no one. You will say that Hitler was insane. This is a sentimentality of the present time: to explain all evil as insanity. Not to believe that monstrous things can be done by people who are sane. Hitler was never insane; he was far more serious than that. He had come to an agreement: he had embraced evil.’
For a moment we were both silent, as Vilde sipped his vodka and then put down his glass on the coffee table, wiping his moustache. He sat quite still, no longer quite the helpful old gnome I’d been inclined to see, looking at me steadily through the blue-tinted glasses, his head thrown back. He was always very sparing of his movements, and his low rumble was only just audible; but it now became more fluent, and I recalled that he’d once been a lecturer.
‘The Nazis were very much interested in witchcraft — paganism. Naturally; they had denied Christ, now they had need of the Other. The Communists will find the same thing. We think that we can give up the rituals offered to God, but we find that we cannot. It is supposed to be the rational age, this one. But the rational age does not seem to have arrived.’
‘Not yet,’ I said. ‘But it may.’
He smiled in a faded manner, and his voice became tired. ‘It will never arrive. Giving up the rituals that are God’s, we go back instead to other rituals. I think we go back now to paganism: to magic, fear, witchcraft. I see it in your newspapers, and on the television. We look for the old rituals that lead always to sickness, and to blood.’
It had been a speech of unusual length for old Vilde, and for this reason I remembered every word of it. When I spoke of it half-jokingly to Katrin, she raised her eyebrows as though I were displaying slow-wittedness. ‘But of course,’ she said. ‘He’s right. Surely you can see that?’
She had great respect for the old man, and I was wise enough to say no more.
The two of them had boarded the Goya for Australia when she was three months pregnant, hiding her condition from the Australian Immigration authorities. Andres Vilde had decided that the child would be passed off in Australia as Katrin’s brother, after it was born. He would be its grandfather; no one in the new country need ever know otherwise. Those were the days when an illegitimate child was a deep disgrace, and a barrier to marriage; and Katrin was still not seventeen. Jaan was only told of their true relationship after she and I were married; even now, he still called her ‘Katrin’. But in every other way, he had always treated her as his mother, so that little else was changed for him.
I often wondered about all those years of deception, and why she’d remained unattached. She told me of a long involvement with a young German migrant who had been going to marry her, and who had ended by breaking it off some years ago. Jaan was the main cause of this, she said. Dieter couldn’t accept him; there were many men who couldn’t accept other men’s children, and Jaan’s becoming a cripple made it worse: he had ridden his tricycle into the path of a passing car. After Dieter, although she went out with men occasionally, there’d been no more serious love-affairs until she met me. When she found that I’d once been crippled, she said, it had been like a sign that I was meant to love them both, she and Jaan.
But I sometimes found it difficult, in those early days on Bela Beaumont’s arcade, to believe that there had been so few men before me. In spite of myself, I had the notion occasionally that her nature had been one of secret promiscuity — even though I had no real evidence of it. I still wondered about the man I had heard through the wall, before she and I met; their voices nagged at my mind, and finally I questioned her about it.
She couldn’t remember who it was, she said. It would have been a friend visiting, that was all; she hadn’t been in the habit of sleeping with men. She grew offended, and I rebuked myself; I was the silly product of a puritan small town, I thought, with all the old prejudices about unmarried mothers implanted in me. After we were married, I forgot these suspicions; and I grew increasingly fond of Jaan.
I took my stepson for walks in his wheelchair about Potts Point and down to Elizabeth Bay; and I sat on his bed and read to him in the evenings. He was intelligent, and a good reader, and his taste in books was growing adult. But he maintained a sentimental fondness for the fairy stories of his childhood, as I had done; he would still ask me to read them to him aloud, and Katrin told me it had great importance for him; it was a ritual affirming some sort of connection between us. He was perfectly bilingual, and had a large number of books in Estonian and English.
I often read him The Wind in the Willows. He was especially fond of it, and of the Shepherd illustrations. He would pore over them with me, pointing to things.
‘Badger’s house — I’d like to live there, Richard,’ he said once, and smiled confidingly into my face, his thick brown hair falling on his forehead: Geza Lukacs’ hair. And it seemed to me that he guessed I had wished the same thing myself at his age, and was asking that I remember it, and draw closer to him. But I avoided the gaze of his intense hazel eyes with their drooping white lids; they were the eyes not of a child but of someone much older: a survivor of deeply difficult experience. And instead of entering into the compact he wanted, I retreated into neutral pleasantness.
‘Would you?’ I said, and went on reading.
If he was rebuffed, he didn’t show it; no doubt such withdrawals were threaded through his day. To make up for what he might have sensed, I read to him
longer than usual.
Marriage to Katrin had transformed my life more than marriage usually does. I’d married Europe as well, I thought: hers and old Vilde’s, with its kitchen-smells of sauerkraut and borscht, its faint, aged scents of books and sheet music, its tragic, tall old dreams, its muffled echoes of gunfire. Loving her, I loved lost Dillingen, and the sub-Arctic city of Tallinn where I could scarcely hope to go, locked as it was behind the Iron Curtain. Lying late in bed on Saturday mornings, the door to the living-room ajar, I would listen to Katrin and her grandfather moving about outside, making breakfast, talking to each other in their closed, slurring language which mingled with the cooing of pigeons from the convent; and once again I’d become aware how strange my new wife was to me, carrying her alien past inside her. Speaking Estonian, she became another; fleetingly, I was no longer in Sydney, but in a medieval town on the Baltic. Vilde’s voice would sometimes grow vehement at these times; I would wonder why, and then I’d recall that his life had been broken, and that his Lutheran certainties and his discipline concealed many sorrows: for his long-lost wife and son and daughter-in-law; for his lost country; for the crippled boy he had carried about in his arms.
I had begun to learn now what it meant to be married, to become a double person; and I saw that my life had only been half-nourished, before this. The European home-spirit that Katrin and her grandfather created in the flat was like the black Estonian bread they bought in the Cross, baked by their countrymen in exile. Unlike the lifeless white bread I’d been reared on, these heavy loaves were a food one could live on: a staple. She would never see a scrap thrown away; bread should never be wasted, she said. Habits of the Camp, not to be broken.
Sometimes, deep in the night, she would wake crying out of a nightmare, caught once again in the bombing raids of childhood, or putting out once again on the Red Cross ship through blazing Tallinn harbour, knowing that her father was lost. Then I would hold her until she grew calm, yearning to protect her from these perils I’d been spared, and could barely imagine. Our bodies had already become shaped to one another, and I hadn’t truly loved before; I’d only known a counterfeit, on the east coast of childhood.
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