by Tracy Farr
Remember while you were here, when we talked of photography, and of colour, of fixing brightness? You told me of the old process for making alum, that is used for fixing and brightening colour in wools, a process that takes piss and rock and time. It stuck in my mind, that story, and I have scribbled down this strange little version of a faery tale, a new faery tale. Maybe this is the beginning of a new book? Well, I send you this fair copy, typed evidence of your rocky mind finding its way into mine.
And Iris sends you this drawing. It’s that nice man with the stones, she says, on his bicycle. Oh the sight of you, cycling down that hill! Freewheeling, yoo-hooing. I could see the little boy in you, your dark hair, your shoulders hunched over the handlebars, concentrating on speed.
How you will have slowed, now, to map your plodding, careful way across the land and its faults. Your bicycle awaits you here, as I do, love. Come back to us soon, as you promised you would.
Your Rosa
44. Forty-six years ago
From the notebooks of Zigmund Silbermann
I AM A MAKER OF MARKS
Tiger-stripe terraced
fault lines stretch between questions,
marks order the land.
43. Forty-six years ago
Letter from Wellington
April, 1968
My love,
We’ve made it to Wellington. When you are done with your measuring and marking the land, meet us here.
I wave across the water, towards you, just a ferry-ride away.
Your Rosa
42. Forty-six years ago
Letter from Wellington
April, 1968
Dear Frank,
The trip has started with much excitement, as you may have heard in the news. We came into Wellington in time for a storm of such proportions I still barely believe it was real. A great ferry foundered on rocks in the harbour, and so many drowned. The storm was called Giselle, like Iris’s doll named for the ballet. She clutches Giselle close to her, understandably perturbed when she hears people cursing her.
Iris sends you this drawing of the house we’re staying in. I think I told you that we have it courtesy of one of the many girls who flitted through the flat in London I lived in all those years ago. What Iris’s drawing doesn’t show is the cold and dark, and the great up and down of the landscape of this place. I remember it from my visit here in ’38 (thirty years ago!) viewed from the ship in the harbour, the houses tucked in gullies and on hilltops and hillsides, all in tumbledown glory up and down and everywhere, the streets winding narrow, wishboning (or do I mean herringboning?) from the hilltops to the harbour’s edge. All the people here must have such strong legs and lungs. There’s an old woman who lives in our street, and she walks the hill at such a speed, twice or thrice faster than I can manage.
Iris is doing her schoolwork as we planned. The travel will be good for her.
I have taken some snaps, although not quite the photographic essay I had planned, not yet. It is strange to revisit this place. You know how much I have always wanted to return, to revisit my time here in the ’30s. It is much changed in some ways, though in others it remains remarkably unaltered. I’m not sure whether it’s the change I wish to photograph, or its lack.
I hope you’re enjoying your month or so of bachelor time without us. Thank you, again, dear, for your good-natured resignation in the face of your wife’s itchy-footed whims. You’re a good man, Frank Golden.
Yours,
Rosa and Iris
41. Forty-six years ago
Letter from Perth
March, 1968
Oh, my dear Zigi,
I thought you were lost, but here you are, your pencil marks on paper, in my hand, bringing love and hope.
I have so much to say to you, but for the moment, just this: Yes.
I’ve booked passage for mid-April. I will write to you from Wellington, and see you there, soon.
Love,
Rosa
40. Forty-six years ago
Poem enclosed with letter
TOGETHER, NOW
The steep tilt of it:
the valley of convergence
of this plain and that.
39. Forty-six years ago
Letter, sent
1st January, 1968
Dear Rosa,
In the ten years since we met in London, first I found your name, then I found you. I have written you so many letters, though I have not, ’til now, sent one.
It’s hard to know what makes this different. Perhaps it’s something about the new year.
So today, on the first dark day of the cold new year, I’m writing this letter, a letter I am, finally, going to send.
Dear, in a month I fly to New Zealand. It is not your country, but you spoke – a decade ago, in London – of a visit you once made to this long line of land, thrusting out of the ocean. You spoke fondly of it, wistfully. You spoke of a wish to go there again.
I go there to map the land, a strike slip fault in the South Island. It was named long ago – not by me – the Hope Fault.
So: dare I? Hope?
Might you come to me, Rosa?
I will be out in the field, travelling as I work, but my base will be in the capital city, Wellington – I’ll be there perhaps a few days each fortnight.
You cannot know this, for this is the first letter I have sent you: I have carried you with me in my heart these past ten years. Every breath I’ve breathed for you. Every step, walked with you. My stone-hard heart is hot and sharp with love for you.
It’s a kind of madness, I fear. And it’s madness – to a fault – to write this, to ask this, to hope.
And yet I do.
Madly, hopefully yours,
Zigi
38. Forty-six years ago
Just like that, everything changes: with the arrival in the letterbox of an envelope I hardly dare open. But I do, and when I do, this is what I find: a letter, and a poem, and so much hope.
My world is rocked once more.
37. Forty-seven years ago
In the school holidays, I take Iris to town for the day. We catch the trolley-bus, get off on the Terrace and walk up Zimpel’s Arcade to Murray Street. We stop halfway up the Arcade at Graham’s, for iced coffee in a tall parfait glass (sweet and milky, a scoop of ice-cream) and buttery raisin toast. We sit in the dark room, on uncomfortable metal chairs, framed by the glass windows looking out onto the arcade, like mannequins in a shopfront, or in a tableau on stage. There’s a slight incline of the arcade, up from the Terrace to Murray Street, so that if you let a marble go it would slide all the way down to the Terrace, out onto the busy, windblown street.
Most days in the holidays, though, Iris comes to the studio with me. Frank will have opened up early, been at work for hours, by the time we arrive. Iris sits in the back room, reading or drawing, colouring in, and painting. I clear a small shelf for her in the studio’s little back room, and there she keeps the paint set we gave her for her ninth birthday, a metal tin with rickety hinges, twelve tiny pots, each a hard cake of colour, a space between the two rows of six colours for a brush. I give her water in a jar, and a white plate to test and mix colours. She paints flowers, and ballerinas, Giselle, the Swan Princess, in fanciful pinks and glaring orange.
Some days I give her offcuts or misprinted photographs, and she colours those, bends them to her own interest. She cleverly transforms brides to ballerinas, babies to dancing mice, Christmas family portraits to a scene from The Nutcracker. Poor Iris would love nothing more than to learn ballet. She’s not the right shape, though, too solid, squat; she takes after her father in that.
36. Forty-seven years ago
Letter, unsent
November, 1967
Rosa, I have found you.
All these years, thinking of you in London – that cold night, your touch, the Englishness of it, the seasons northern, grey – and there you’ve been, on the other side of the world. You went home. I see you ther
e, your name changed – a photographer now, the magazine tells me – but I know it’s you.
I tore the page from the magazine. The photograph is in the box, with these letters – all of them unsent. I have contacted a colleague – the advantage of a busy academic career, I have colleagues everywhere my dear, I have become quite the professor in the ten years since we met – who has found your address. I have it here, on my desk. I am not yet ready to send you this. Not yet. If ever. But how can I not, now that I’ve found you?
Still at fault, your
Zigi
35. Forty-eight years ago
There is Iris, lying across the back seat of the car, her head resting on her arm, my leather coat over her. Frank is in the front passenger seat, his shoulder slumped against the window, his head back, his mouth wide open, his big throaty snores smelling of beer. I lean forward in the driver’s seat, both hands steady on the wheel. I have to concentrate; that’s what I said to Iris after I picked her up from where she’ d fallen asleep, under the table, near the radio, a book in her hand, when I carried her out to the car and put her in the back seat, even though Iris is too big for this now, too big to be carried. I told her, shush now, I need to concentrate, you go back to sleep.
I turn the key, start the car. Before I back down the driveway I press the lighter in, wait for it to spring out. I hold the glowing metal to the end of the cigarette and huff and puff, until the cigarette glows, and cool menthol smoke fills me, wakes me, mixes with the gin.
On the road I lean forward, concentrate fully on driving. The cigarette is upright, jutting out from the steering wheel, standing like a flag between my index and middle fingers. The car fills with its smoke. I look back in the mirror at Iris, hunched under my coat, fidgeting. Her hands are moving near her mouth, her chin, as if in prayer. I wind the window down so there’s a gap, just a little, the wintry night air mixing with the menthol, and Frank’s stale beer.
I turn the radio on for company, but there’s only static. I leave it on, turned down low. We glide through the night on static and gin and smoke and winter and tyres, and Frank’s soft snores, and Iris’s gentle back-seat fumbling.
Round a bend in the road it comes into view: a ship of coloured lights sailing on the river, the lights reflecting in the water below, the old brewery building behind it only just visible, a ghost, an after-image. We sail up and over the bridge, and I lose sight of it. I curve the car off the tail of the bridge and onto the riverside road that passes on the landward side of the brewery building. There’s a wink of light at the edge of the building from the ship as we pass around behind it, and my nostrils fill with the yeast stink of fermentation.
In the driveway, I open the car door and lean in over Iris, while Frank lumbers inside and falls into bed. I bundle Iris up in my coat, the leather of it squeaking. She reaches her arms up and loops them around my neck, leans her cheek on the bare skin at my neckline. I carry her into her bedroom, lean down to drop her into her bed with her clothes still on. Her feet are bare, and smell of wet buffalo grass in the dark. I smooth the purple chenille up under her chin.
Clean my teeth, she says.
S’alright, one night won’t hurt. Night love.
I push her hair back from her forehead, kiss her there, ghosting gin and smoke onto her skin.
34. Forty-nine years ago
In the May school holidays, I take Iris to be fitted for new shoes, before winter. And there is that sound, heard only twice a year, only at new-shoe time: the slick slip of the metal gauge as the fitter clamps it up the sliding scale and down to the mark where Iris’s toes meet their measure. The slides and clamps of the measuring scale make me think of the metal calipers that the polio children wear. There is a girl down the street, Marguerite, such a pretty name, like the daisy. Her legs are not pretty, though; they are twisted, weak, and she clacks and clumps in her calipers as she walks. She has a crutch, too, a heavy wooden thing with a big black rubber stop on its foot. Marguerite’s mother calls it her stick, though. Never crutch, which I imagine she deems rude, unseemly.
I have watched Iris watch Marguerite clump down the street with her crutch and her calipers, following her plain, prim mother. The look on Iris’s face is not pity, but wide-eyed fear.
33. Fifty-one years ago
There’s a sad coda to our picnic this week. I saw it in the newspaper today. Those boys we saw: a raft upturned, its flailing captain topples and tips another. Two boys in the water, only one rescued, revived. They found the other boy the next day, bobbing in the murk at the edge of the lake, poor lost thing.
I develop the film from my camera. There is Iris, in the centre of the swans, poor thing. She’s crying, has her hands up in the air as if in surrender. The great black swans are all about her, encircle her, like a bad ballet, or synchronised swimming. In the next frame, there is Iris, in Frank’s arms, encircled again, but safe.
And then there is Iris, with me this time. Frank had taken the camera, insisted; he had turned it on me, and Iris. I’m down at her level, squatting by the shore of the lake. My arm is around Iris’s shoulders; her shoulders are hunched. She is not happy, but she is smiling for the camera. My face is in motion, a blur; I have moved, turned my head in the moment that the shutter opens, then closes.
Behind us, in the photograph, are the boys at the lake. They are background, out of focus, tiny figures blurred in the distance. I wonder which of them was saved, and which lost. Though I peer in close, I cannot distinguish their features.
32. Fifty-one years ago
We walk to the lake, to feed the swans. Iris is slow, in the busy way that five-year-olds are slowed by chattering and finding and picking up and skipping backwards. She holds my hand when she walks by my side.
I carry my camera; Frank brings the thermos, a rug, sandwiches. Iris carries the heel of a loaf of stale bread in a paper bag. Frank spreads the rug on the grass, close to the lake, and he and I sit down. I light a cigarette. Iris takes the bread from the bag, holds it in one hand, digs the other into the centre and pulls out a tuft of white bread. The swans turn towards us, start to bustle up the bank, their black necks snaking, beaks scooping, bodies waddling fat from the grubs and slugs of winter. They are huge, as tall as Iris. She runs behind me, stands there, her chin on my shoulder. I can smell the bread, warming in her hand.
Don’t like them, she says quietly.
Give me the bread, then, I say.
Her hand snakes around from behind me, and the bread crust drops on the rug by my side as the swans reach us. I pluck bread from the crust, and throw it as far as I can down the bank. The birds turn away, follow the bread, move away from us; they scoop it, tussle over it.
I hand the rest of the bread to Iris.
Go on. You do it. I want to take some photos. Don’t be a scaredy-cat.
She steps out from behind me and takes the bread, as I take up my camera and move off to one side. She breaks the bread, to throw it piece-by-piece to the swans, but instead she drops the whole damn lot at her feet. The swans move as a flock, crowd close to her, peck at the mound of bread on the ground, encircling her.
Frank lumbers up the slope from the lake, shoos the swans away. He lifts Iris up in his big arms, shushes her, pats her back. Her arms clasp around his neck, and she buries her face in his chest. I watch it all through the camera’s lens.
There’s a shout from the other side of the lake, where the bank rises up to the funny little dark old workers’ cottages on the eastern shore. There are boys at the lake, big boys, almost men. They’re messing about with rafts, or sheets of iron, standing on them, launching them into the water. They chiack, chivvy, muck about, curse in the air. They are spiky with poles that poke the mud, and press them out into the water. There’s splashing and shouting. Two dogs stand on the shore, watching, barking, herding the boys.
A swan flies in across the lake, honking, large, majestic. Frank, Iris and I look up; the rowdy boys and their dogs look up. All of us look up into the air to watch the
great fat bird pass overhead.
31. Fifty-six years ago
Look at my little baby bird, her mouth open, greedy. I plug it with the teat of the bottle. I have weaned her off the breast. It’s best, the doctor says. And ever since, she’s fattened up; and she sleeps now, so I sleep too.
But even so, I remain tired. No, not tired: exhausted. I had not anticipated how terribly tired I’ d be, how unable to do anything, in these first days and weeks, but feed the baby, feed myself. Frank doesn’t need me in the studio, he says. But I find myself wishing he did.
So far, my camera has stayed in its bag. But sometimes, when she sleeps, I draw her, make soft pencil lines in a small notebook with square white pages. I draw the curve of her back, the clutch of her fist, the kick of her toes, the sweet soft fuzz of her big head.
I pick up the cigarette that burns in the ashtray by my side, draw on it carefully, so ash doesn’t fall on the baby in my arms as she tug tug tugs at the bottle. I look at the clock on the wall. Another day stretches out ahead of us, endless.
30. Fifty-six years ago
Letter, unsent
August, 1958
Rosa, my love.
I thought of you – as I think of you always – as I mapped the land. Mapping, marking with care, naming. And I named a place for you, dear. A fault – a breaking of the land – it marks my fault, my rending from you.
Though you are in London, now there is Rosa Fault, in the Rift Valley. The place where life began – perhaps? – I mark you on its map, mark you there always. You are there, in London, and you are here – in my Rift Valley, close to home – and I trace you, touch you, and know my own fault, my failure to connect, my slipping unseemly, unseamed, away from you.