The Broken Book

by Susan Johnson

  ‘Oh, Anna, you don’t mean that. You’d be very sad if he did. We all would.’

  She pushed me away. ‘Would you? Would you really?’

  We stood looking at each other. I could not explain the dark and complicated plaiting of David’s life with mine, or the source of my desire to keep holding on, obscured now even from myself. I know it has to do with claiming something of my own, of wanting something that can never be taken. I want a stake in that which endures, in that which weathers loss, pain, the press of time itself. I want some pledge from eternity, Anna, some sign of life’s ceaseless, unforgiving motion.

  The Broken Book

  Take care, do not come too close to me, the grey dust of my failure will coat your clothes, the stink of my ruin will curl in your blameless nostrils. Do not look me in the eye, do not look upon my faulty works. I have lain down with dogs and got up with fleas, just as my good mother feared; I have shown myself no self respect whatsoever. Look! My mother is crying, my father is shouting, my sister is imploring everyone in the car to calm down. Calm down, folks, I haven’t shot anyone! Calm down, my fellow Australians, I am after all only a foolish girl who is mistakenly in the family way.

  ‘Cressida, I thought you were smarter than that,’ my father will say. Too smart to get pregnant? Or too smart to sleep with a boy in the first place?

  ‘Oh, Percy, what are we going to do?’ my mother will wail and I will shoot a look of pure hate at Hebe. Why did she have to tell them? Couldn’t we have dealt with this by ourselves? Why do I have a sneaking suspicion that there is the tiniest glitter of malicious triumph in my elder sister’s pretty blue eyes? She did not confess to me that she had already told them, all the way down in the train from Sydney she did not say a thing. It was only when we stepped off the train and onto the platform and I saw my parents’ faces that I knew straightaway they had already been told. My mother’s eyes were swollen from weeping; my father’s hot head looked ready to explode.

  ‘Get in the car, young lady,’ he said. ‘Hebe, follow me.’

  I followed their backs, my mother sniffling into her handkerchief beside me. ‘How could you do this to me?’ my mother said, sobbing quietly as we walked. Do what, I thought, for as far as I knew I had not done anything to her. Was she pregnant too?

  In the car in the back seat I pinched my sister Hebe and managed to hiss at her, ‘Why did you tell them?’ This was easy to hiss as my mother was weeping loudly and violently in the front passenger seat, repeating between sobs, ‘Oh, Cressida, how could you?’ (Even I could tell that this was a rhetorical question.) My father was going on and on in his booming endless voice about what young people were coming to, how the war had ruined the morals of an entire generation, how the world was never going to be the same again. He was saying, too, how he would never have dared to go against the wishes of his own parents and something else and something else but I was too busy pinching Hebe and trying to hear her justification amidst the terrific noise of the Morley family being dramatic in the car (Austin, rust-eaten due to merciless sea air).

  ‘I had to,’ I heard her say, ‘you were too far gone for an abortion. What else were we going to do?’ I don’t know, Hebe, I could have jumped off a cliff; I know a perfectly good one just off Booby’s Point which plunges a hundred feet into the sea. I could have swallowed arsenic like Emma Bovary and heard the gay singing beneath my window as I lay dying. I could have plunged a knife into the man who was fucking Lorna and a pretty woman called Kay at the same time as myself. (Correction: not the same time in real, actual time, of course! A foursome is beyond even my puny reach although I am obviously now a full-blown slut.) I could have packed my little bag tied to the stick and started a whole new life. O, that upcoming tiny scrap of humanity and me!

  Instead, here I am, the catalyst for my family’s ruin, the human instrument of my family’s defeat. I thought you didn’t care what other people thought, Dad? I thought you were one of Australia’s rare free thinkers. How could I know that sex is the one thing you fear, that evidence of a working wet triangle between your daughter’s legs is the one thing you cannot bear to face?

  And then we are inside the house, quickly, so no one will see. Hide me, this evidence of your failure, your second daughter who has brought you nothing but shame. I’m sorry! I take it all back, the kissing and the joy and the unbuckling of my eighteen-year-old heart. To be innocent again, a sexless child, a girl without breasts, devoid of a single pubic hair. Can you give me a cuddle, Mum, please, can I sit on your lap? Can I get my favourite doll and will you read me a story, can you grate an apple and bring me a glass of flat lemonade like you used to when I was sick? Why am I crying, why am I useless as a child, why do I long to shut my eyes and wake up again to find everything as it was before my fall? ‘Mum, I’m so sorry,’ I say to my mother, sobbing in her fleshy arms, and she will stop crying herself to put her soft mouth on my head to croon, ‘Ssshh, ssshh. There, there, Cress, it’s all right.’ I can hear my father crying, too, a sound I have never heard before in my life. Despite the fact that I have never heard this sound, a kind of embarrassed cough, I know straightaway without doubt what it is. I’m sorry, Dad, I’m sorry, I promise I’ll never do it again.

  And then there is a knock at the door and everyone straightens up, adjusts their face, runs from the room. A family’s secrets are visible to no one, not even a friend standing in the same room. Here is Comrade Martin, the family friend from down the road, bringing around the money collected from the local community to send to headquarters in Sydney and then on to Russia’s glorious Red Army. See my father’s social smile, his hearty grip, the public self so effectively divided from the private. Do unmarried girls get pregnant in Russia, Comrade Martin? Does anybody care? I am trying to imagine some unknown girl far away in the snows of Russia, pregnant, possibly cast off.

  So it is arranged that I will give notice on my flat, my job, my life, and tell everyone that I have been offered a wonderful new job helping the war effort somewhere in the country. I will give notice on my boyfriend too, the one who deflowered me, the one I mistook for my personal vision. I will write him a long letter of bitter accusations and grief; tear-stained, bloody. He will surprise me by replying, offering to help in whatever way he can but at the same time making it clear that I must understand him to be a man of ambitions. ‘I do not see myself ever supporting a wife and children,’ he will write. ‘I intend to dedicate myself to art.’ I might suggest that having a wife has never stopped a male artist before; indeed, many a male artist has been allowed to work through the kind agency of a wife. Why can he not dedicate himself to me instead? Am I not a work of art myself, like him an artist of the body? Am I not a nascent poet perhaps, whose poems he once declared to be promising? Might not we both dwell in the house of art and love, our baby asleep in a white basket between us, witness to our every act of happiness?

  Cressida, dream on. Be sensible, young lady, live in the real world, not the world of What Might Have Been, do not try to live in that sweet world of your own making. Come out of the poem, walk off the page, keep your dimming eyes open. This is reality, love, here, in front of your nose, in that swelling lump beneath your dress. The prince has bad breath, the prince does not want you, the prince has written himself out of the story. O, Cressida, all alone in the cold, nowhere to hide, tipped out of the warm story into cold life. Here there are no princes, no happy endings, no summing up. Here there is only your belly, and inside it, a real human baby who is yet to read a single book.

  The Island, Greece, 1956

  Ena, Dio, Tria, Tesera, Pente, Exi, Efta, Okto, Enia, Deka, Endeka, Dodeka, DekaTria (Deka + Tria), DekaTesera (Deka + Tesera etc). Any number from 1 to 1 000 000 is always a combination (e.g. 500 = Pendakosies. For more than a thousand you say the number plus the word Chiliades). Phonetics: Forget about the alphabet for a moment and concentrate on the sound. E.g. How much does it cost? Poso kani? Me lene Katerina. Me lene Katerina.

  My name is Katerina. As a birthd
ay present the girls and their friends sang me the formal Happy Birthday song for my birthday yesterday—as opposed to the informal version, I suppose. TriandaTria. Thirty-three years old. Between them, Anna and Lil translated as they went:

  Long may you live Kyria Katerina

  And may you live many years

  May you grow old

  With white hair

  May you spread out everywhere

  The light of knowledge

  And may everybody say

  There, is a wise woman.

  Well, I am certainly spreading out everywhere. I am certainly growing fat on cheap Greek wine, psomi, Greek words. My poor head, not one more word, please. Not one more twist of the tongue. Both David and I are still taking lessons from Thanasis, the mayor. Our second year of him coming to the house for our lessons, wearing his one and only tie, full of bluster and self-importance. The girls are often around, sniggering in the background, Lil cannot comprehend why adults have to sit down with their books and pencils just like she does at school. ‘It’s easy, Mama! Just talk!’

  Just talk, she says. Just free your stupid English tongue. Isn’t English strewn with thousands and thousands of Greek words? Hasn’t Greek given us the words for science and medicine and botany and technology? Hasn’t Greek given us the language of poetry and art? Ne, Ne! Poso kani? Poso kani?

  Wednesday

  How I love our beautiful whitewashed house with its bright blue door. How I love the cool damp of the kitchen, the giant flagstones still cool underfoot even on the hottest day. It takes days and days of 100 degree heat for the whole house to grow murky with stifled air, but still the kitchen is dark and cool—some nights I creep down with a blanket to lie alone on the cold, hard floor. I have my kerosene stove, my stone sink, no running water yet (the town well is directly outside the front door—we are frequently woken in the mornings by that chatterbox Soula, and often kept awake by her drawing up the bucket with her chums late at night). I love my kitchen, its battle-scarred table, its earthenware jugs and woven baskets, its little anteroom to the side. A hanging cupboard with a wire mesh door, just like we had all those years ago at Kurrajong Bay. No refrigerator yet, only occasional blocks of ice from the island’s only fridge, located proudly in the main room of Kostas’s shop.

  I don’t think I have ever loved a house more. Two entrances, one at the front near the well, which opens into the largest room, with its glorious wooden fireplace. Then into a room which has the other entrance door, placed at the side; then into the kitchen. No connection between the upper and lower floors yet, all of us have to pile out the side entrance (which is enclosed in a courtyard) and up the outside stairs.

  Ah, but the roof! The most amazing ascension into the blue, the whitewashed stone houses all around, the hundreds of steps behind and around leading up even higher. The infinite swoop of the sea and the sky, the knowledge that we are but fleeting, elemental as water and air. On the roof at night I feel the pain of trying, of all my moments rich in hurt and joy and incompleteness, heavy with struggle. Up there I try not to yearn for that which is lost but to count what is near. What is near is my daughter Lil’s milky skin, my daughter Anna’s vanishing self. Anna is leaving us second by second, growing into her mature self and the child is dying: the fat baby hands, the tiny teeth, the boneless nose. Let me hold her soft bones one more time before she goes, let me hear her undeveloped voice, her irritating pipe. Let me record how she is before she leaves, my disappearing girl, evanescent, swift as life. Alone on the roof at night I count each day’s fleeting gifts.

  I note the dignity of Stavros the donkey boy passing beneath the house, the dark of the streets, the moon revealing his slow progress. Stavros, the boy born with cerebral palsy, son of the donkey keeper, making his shaky way up the path beneath our house. The sound of the donkey’s feet stopping, myself peering over the stone buttressing wall of the roof, watching Stavros removing the hessian bag attached to the saddle, slowly and shakily taking from it the wooden handled broom to sweep up the crumbly mass of donkey shit into the bag. What dignity, what grace. This is the community which embraces the shaky dignified boy, the drooling crone, the retarded girl. This is the place where the boy who stole money from Kostas’s shop so shamed his family that they felt the only recourse was to move away. Seven years later, everybody still talks of the only robber the island has ever known.

  This is the place, too, where my fat-bottomed neighbour Soula believes she has the right to walk into my house, unannounced, at any time of night or day. ‘Katerina! Katerina!’ I hear her bellow at the very moment I am trying to capture the perfect word. She wants to give me some eggs, still covered in feathers and shit, or teach me how to make tiri. I don’t want to make bloody cheese, I don’t want to cook and clean any more than I have to. She believes my children to be improperly looked after—hasn’t Anna been baptised yet? Why don’t they go to church? She doesn’t know it but she is teaching me to speak, she is teaching me how to answer back. What are the words for I am busy, you old sticky-beak, leave me alone? I was amazed to learn that she is in fact two years younger than me—I thought she was at least ten years older. Perhaps it is because she is already a widow—her husband, a fisherman, was lost at sea. He may be gone but his presence is everywhere, from Soula’s eternal black widow’s weeds, to his stony photograph on the wall and on the mantelpiece, to Soula’s insistence on quoting his long-gone words. Also, his three children: beefy twelve-year-old twin boys, Theo and Mikos, and bossy little Cassandra, Lil’s best friend. Cassandra is bound to grow up and turn out exactly like her mother; at eight she is already a plump Greek housewife, all jowly chin and disapproving presence.

  Must stop. Speak of the devil. Soula! Tikanis?

  Thursday

  Let me sing of the pleasures of freshly washed sheets. Let me recite the alphabet of a clean scrubbed house, the tiles newly mopped and gleaming, the beds neatly done like a sum. Praise the cut mountain flowers mourning their roots, the captured bright froth of them blossoming in the jar. Sing of the swept fireplace newly bereft of its ash skirt; the last of summer’s plucked fruits and the sea’s stones on the windowsill, the life of art, the art of life. Still life, life stilled, the earthenware pots, never before so round and whole, still life created by this most lacklustre of ordinary housewives. The rewards of the toil of my fingers: the polished glass, the made beds, the straightened cushions, all brought to momentary order. Life will wreck it all; tumbling life will cause it to crumble into disarray, but pause for a moment, regard! Happiness dwells in the walls of the house, happiness lives in the whitewash, in the skin of its living, breathing walls.

  Rosanna and Claudio and Cody arrive on Sunday. Yippee!

  Friday morning

  Haven’t had a minute since the lovely Rosanna en famille appeared. She has cast her eye upon everything: our house, our marriage, the girls, our Greek friends, our little expatriate circle—I have felt ourselves to be on display, that I have to have everything in perfect order to justify our choice to live here. Why should that be, I wonder, when I know Rosanna to be the most generous of friends, the least judgemental of women? I suppose it has more to do with me proving myself rather than anything to do with Rosanna, with me needing to show that my choices have as much validity as anyone else’s. We had a party for them during the week and everyone came: the mayor, his wife Maria, all the teachers at the school, every shopkeeper, our new friend Stephanos, the cultured, well-travelled banker from Athens who has just bought the house next to ours as a weekender, and his wife, Katina. Even Lieutenant Manolis came, the fussy senior police official here who issues the residency permits for all foreigners living on the island. He spent the early part of the evening looking like he might arrest someone, but by the end of the night he was dancing with the best of them. There was much showing off, much raucous dancing and plate smashing; at one point Pan climbed on top of the roof and played his lyra. Afterwards we sat in our little walled garden, the night luminous, the air scented with a
ll the flowers we have grown. Stephanos lingered on, although his wife had left; David and I sat close together, the tips of our knees touching. Rosanna was holding Claudio’s hand.

  ‘You guys seem really settled,’ Rosanna said, ‘happy.’

  I turned to David. ‘We are.’ He smiled at me.

  ‘I could never leave my country,’ Stephanos said,‘my country is who I am.’

  David lit another cigarette. ‘Perhaps that’s because you’re Greek, Stephanos. Not all of us are born so fortunate,’ he said.

  ‘I disagree. I have travelled to many other places which are just as beautiful, where I have felt that I could live. But I always hasten back to Greece because I do not want to become a divided man.’

  Claudio, who had been silent, suddenly spoke. ‘Everyone is divided, Stephanos. To be human is to be divided.’

  Stephanos sucked on his cigar and considered this. ‘Perhaps. But one can certainly reduce the number of divisions. One can stay where one is born so that there is one less thing to feel divided about.’

  ‘I don’t feel divided living here,’ I said.

  Stephanos turned to me. ‘But surely you are merely suspending reality? Surely the idea of returning to your native shore hangs over you like an unanswered question?’

  ‘I never want to go back,’ I said, ‘never.’

  David laughed at my ferocity. ‘I wish I could feel as certain as you, darling. I can see there might come a time when one feels one doesn’t belong here—but neither does one belong back in Australia.’

  ‘Citizens of the world then, that’s what you are,’ said Claudio, raising his glass to us.

  ‘Belonging nowhere,’ said Stephanos. ‘Take my advice, my friends. Go home while you still can or you will end up having no home at all.’