The Broken Book

by Susan Johnson

  ‘Oh, I don’t see any reason why they should go home,’ Rosanna said. ‘From where I sit I think Kate and David are living in paradise.’

  David and I smiled at each other, convinced for the moment that it might be true.

  Wednesday

  Ever since Rosanna left, everything has fallen apart. Perhaps it was the strain of feeling I had to show her the face of perfection, but I don’t think her leaving and my little trough of despondency are necessarily linked—I think it’s more to do with life’s natural peaks and troughs. Last night with the girls was awful, awful … What a gulf between one’s dream of motherhood and its daily practice.

  Am I a hothead? Is David a hothead too? Of course! At our worst both of us are full of passionate intensity, easily roused, our nerves practically standing up and waving—why should I be surprised that our children are like us, all teeth and blood? Last night things got out of control so quickly I felt winded, as if I had been unexpectedly punched.

  Anna and I have always had a difficult time of it. Is she too like me, or not like me enough? I can spend all day comfortably with Lil, but with Anna, everything I do is wrong, wrong, wrong. Yesterday started badly; she kept waking up in the night complaining about an earache. This is the very thing that always makes me want to rush back to civilisation—what if anything should happen to the girls? What if they should need a doctor in the middle of the night? There is no hospital here and only one ‘doctor’, a retired ancient specimen from Athens who is very deaf. Last summer I was almost blind with the most appalling conjunctivitis and Soula’s peasant remedy of the sap of vine leaves had no effect whatsoever. ‘You must cry the fullest tears to wash out the eye,’ the old doctor told me while I sat there foolishly hoping for antibiotic drops.

  In the night, cradling a weeping Anna, I prayed that her ear was not so badly infected that her eardrum would burst. I had some ancient aspirin tablets left over from London and I gave her two in a big glass of water, hoping that children were allowed to take aspirin. I couldn’t remember! I was panicking, thinking I would get the first boat to Athens in the morning.

  In the morning she was perfectly well. No temperature, no earache, the whole thing was probably the result of a nightmare from which she could not properly awaken. Anyway, she was fine by the morning, a bright happy colour, but clearly she did not want to go to school. ‘Can I stay home with you, Mama?’ she asked in such a plaintive way that I mentally put aside my work and agreed. I wondered—not for the first time—if she was happy here, if we have placed her in jeopardy through selfish desires of our own. When she is older will she curse me for a childhood spent flying through the air, hanging on to my aspiring coat tails? On the surface at least she seems happy enough, slipping effortlessly into this life of the elements. She is still young enough, too, to regard me as her moveable house; wherever I am is her home. Well, anyway, Lil was already running off up the hill to school before I had time to think, holding hands with portly Cassandra without a backward glance. David was off, up the ladder to his studio on the roof, which left Anna and me.

  ‘What would you like to do today? We’ll have a special day to ourselves, just Mummy and Anna,’ I said, stroking the last of her wispy, disappearing baby hair.

  ‘Can we have a picnic?’ she asked. ‘At the cove?’

  It was wet, cold; the last thing I felt like was a picnic. ‘I’m afraid the weather’s terrible, darling.’

  ‘But you said it was my special day!’

  ‘It is, I just don’t want you to get a cold going out in the rain.’

  ‘You never let me do anything I want!’

  I continued to stroke her hair but she flung me off. ‘You’re a liar! You said it was my special day!’

  I examined my conscience: was I saying no because of my fear of her catching cold or because of my own dislike of going out in the rain?

  ‘Oh, all right, let’s go,’ I said, already growing bad-tempered. I got our boots, our raincoats, our rain hats, and started packing up a lunch. This is the time of year when food is at its worst—the last of the summer fruits are going, the winter vegetables are yet to come. So, psomi, a withered old tomato, some halva, two boiled eggs. I was in the kitchen getting this together and Anna was at the table, bleating.

  ‘Where’s my special book that I was writing? Lil’s taken it!’

  ‘She has not,’ I said. ‘I put it away carefully in your room. Why don’t you start putting your own things away?’

  She pushed her chair back and rushed from the room. ‘Where did you put it? Where?’

  ‘On your chest of drawers!’ I yelled, growing more bad-tempered by the minute. I heard her slam the outside door, then I heard her thundering about upstairs. She must have been flinging open cupboards, slamming drawers shut, generally behaving as if she had misplaced the bloody crown jewels.

  ‘Where? Where?’ I heard her screaming, through the floor. Then she came thundering downstairs again. ‘Where did you put it, you vlaca!’

  I put down the knife. ‘Don’t call me vlaca, please. It’s rude.’ (Roughly, it means ‘stupid’ or ‘dummy’. In its mildest sense at least—it can also mean ‘moron’.)

  ‘I can’t find it! You’ve lost it!’

  I slammed the knife down, wiped my hands and stalked out of the kitchen, out the door, up the outside stairs, to her room. Her papers were exactly where I said they would be.

  She came into the room behind me, glowering.

  ‘Can you apologise please?’

  She looked at the floor. ‘Sorry,’ she said in a surly voice, barely more than a whisper.

  ‘Properly,’ I said.

  ‘Sorry,’ she said, looking at me fiercely.

  ‘Let’s go,’ I said, in a full-blown bad mood by now.

  As soon as we left the house she said, ‘I’m hungry.’

  I kept walking. ‘You’ve just had breakfast! I’m sorry but you’ll have to wait.’

  ‘It’s not fair!’ she said. ‘I’m hungry and you said it was my special day!’

  I tried to breathe, slow and deep, the bloody rain all the time washing down the back of my neck. ‘It’s not far to the cove, Anna. I’m sure you can wait.’

  ‘You vlaca! You never give me anything!’

  And with that she ran off down the lane, full of righteous, wounded anger, her little back stiff with pride. I stalked after her and in this way we finally came to the cove. We walked without speaking past the figs at the corner, past the rocks and the cave where we swim. Our feet followed the curve of the road which runs around the island, the sandy, rocky unpaved road where we walk all our days. I tried to raise my eyes to heaven, to the beauty of the sea, to the figure of my little girl striding so purposefully ahead. Why do I find you so difficult, I asked her yellow raincoated back, why do I find it easier to mother your sister rather than you? Was this why I was so instinctively jealous of my own sister? It’s not that I love Anna less than Lil—in fact because my love for Anna is so hard won it sometimes feels infinitely more precious—but, treacherously, I enjoy Lil more.

  As we approached the cove I caught up with Anna and said, ‘Don’t ever talk to me like that again.’

  She looked at me, surprised, as if she had forgotten what she said. She nodded, momentarily cowed.

  We got there, we sat on a rock, we ate our lunch. Anna thawed out, as she always does, gathering sticks to throw into the waves, a dried fig leaf which we used to make a little boat. As we launched it into the sea I said, ‘One day, when you are very old, you can tell your grandchildren that you once sailed a boat with your mother into the Saronic Sea.’

  She looked at me blankly, a young girl with no use for time. We knelt together on the wet gritty sand looking at our frail boat as the rain fell. Suddenly she turned to me and said: ‘I don’t care if I die, Mama, because then I can go to heaven and sit on a cloud.’ She stood up, gave me a kiss, and ran towards the water.

  Well! What happiness is this when Lil comes home from school and immediatel
y bursts into tears because Anna triumphantly gloats that she has been to the cove with Mama? ‘It’s not fair!’ cries Lil. ‘I never get to go!’

  Isn’t this the cry of humanity itself? Isn’t this the cry of the world? It’s not fair! I don’t have enough land. Enough success, enough money, enough love! Surely this is the crux of all humanity’s woes—economic, religious, social, political, personal—that someone, somewhere, feels that there is not enough to go around? In Lil’s cry, in Anna’s; in the faint, long-ago childish cries of Ros and myself, someone feels themselves to be standing too far outside the warming light.

  From worse to worser. Daddy has gone off to the waterfront to join the other stateless geniuses. Mummy is home with the children, gritting her teeth. ‘You were the one who wanted them!’ he said, smiling, a joke with a wire in it.

  ‘Bye, Daddy! Bye!’ the girls cried as we settled around the fire, ready for stories. Earlier I had promised to take both Lil and Anna to the cove for a picnic on the weekend, in order to shut Lil up. ‘I’m going to take Scruffy,’ Lil said. ‘He’ll get wet!’ Anna replied. We were reading The Little Prince on the sofa and Anna said she intended to become a nurse to tend any pilots who should fall to earth around us. I was just getting to the part where the Little Prince describes his people, when there was a knock at the door. ‘Sit quietly and read please,’ I said. ‘Anna, keep reading to Lil.’

  ‘I want to read too!’ Lil was saying as I left the room.

  It was Stephanie, the French composer from the house on the corner. We have known each other since we first arrived, yet somehow we have never become friends: I always know it is her at the door because hardly anyone ever knocks. ‘Excuse me, Katerina, but I was wondering if you could borrow to me any kerosene? My stove has exploded! It is good that I have a second appliance!’

  ‘Oh, mine does that all the time,’ I said. ‘Come in.’

  I led her into the kitchen, even though I could hear a fight breaking out in the other room. She began a long story about how she normally never ventures out alone at night; she heard another girl was raped last summer by some of the naval cadets from the island’s naval academy. I was listening to the sounds in the other room, only half listening as I filled her tin.

  ‘Excuse me,’ I said, ‘I’ll be right back.’

  When I opened the door to the front room I saw a feathery rain. The girls were having a pillow fight and had split some cushions; duck feathers or goose feathers or whatever feathers they were flew up to the roof, down to the rug, landed in their hair like confetti. They had knocked over and broken a pottery vase, my favourite blue one I bought in Dieppe, a picture was off the wall and the clock on the mantelpiece was in danger of falling too; every cushion, every rug, every sofa cushion had been ripped from its moorings to fly with the feathers round the room.

  ‘Put those cushions down!’ I yelled. ‘Now!’

  They ignored me and continued to whack each other with abandon. ‘Anna! Elizabeth! Stop at once!’

  I was screaming now, at the top of my voice. ‘Right! That’s it! We are not going to the cove on Saturday! Did you hear that?’

  They stopped immediately and Anna flung herself, shrieking, prostrate on the floor. ‘Oh, please, Mummy! We didn’t know! We didn’t know!’

  ‘You didn’t know what?’ I screamed. ‘You didn’t know you weren’t supposed to wreck the room?’

  At which point the childless French girl opened the door to the screaming mother and her weeping children.‘Get upstairs now!’ I yelled at them, and they ran screaming from the room. Why must girls scream so much?

  ‘I had better go, I think,’ said Stephanie.

  I tried to smile. ‘Yes, yes.’

  I followed her to the door then turned on my heel and flew up the stairs like a mad woman. ‘Anna! You are eight years old! Old enough to know better!’

  Why were these words so quickly in my mouth? Haven’t I heard them somewhere before?

  ‘I hate you! I hate you! I am never going to bed, ever!’ Lil was shouting, refusing to move from the top of the stairs. Anna was there too, holding on to the railing like a chained suffragette willing to die for her cause.

  ‘Let go of that railing and get into bed!’ I shouted.

  ‘No! You vlaca!’ Anna said, clinging on.

  ‘Anna, I will give you five. One. Two. Three.’ I was trying to count slower. ‘Four …’ Usually by four she had stopped whatever it was that she was doing.

  ‘Five! Right, that’s it!’

  I was up the stairs like an avenging angel, wrenching her arm free. She turned herself into a starfish so that I could not carry her up the stairs; Lil was simply standing there screaming at the top of her lungs. I was blindly wrestling with my eight-year-old daughter on the outside stairs in the cold rain, trying to manhandle her into her room; my other child was screaming hysterically. Why was I surprised that Soula burst through the side door, her kind Greek heart bent on rescue?

  ‘Katerina? Katerina?’ she cried, in all her black presence, in all her puzzled face and Greek neighbourly closeness. My Greek completely deserted me and I started bellowing to her in English, ‘Thank you for your assistance, I am all right, I do not need your help, thank you!’

  Reluctantly she closed the door, by which time I had managed to frogmarch my daughters up the stairs. Lil still refused to get into bed; I flung her down upon the bed, pushed a blanket over her, and tucked her in. She pushed it straight off, I tucked it back in, she pushed it off and attempted to get up again. I tucked her back in but this time I physically held her down, a grown woman holding down a seven-year-old. I was unhinged! I was slapping her hard on the bottom with my open palm and she was screaming. Anna was sobbing in bed and then I was sobbing too, the three of us, howling at the moon. I crept into bed with Lil and she was still weeping, her little chest heaving with hiccups.

  What kind of mother am I, to be so quickly reduced to such murderous rage?

  For much of today I have been sitting here wondering where everything went wrong, at which particular point I might have prevented the whole thing from happening. Was it at the start of the day, when Anna said she was hungry? Should I have simply given her something to eat? Should I have found her papers for her, even earlier than that; should I have calmly surveyed the room when I opened the door on the pillow fight and not lost my temper like I did?

  My children have shown me to myself, at my best and at my very worst. They have revealed my fullest self, in all its failed entirety, myself writ large, or rather myself writ painfully small. Motherhood has forced me to cast my eye back towards my own childhood, to the day Ros and I were fighting so much our mother threatened to ring the children’s home on our new telephone to ask them to come and pick us up. We continued to fight and it was only when she picked up the receiver that we flung ourselves hard at her feet.

  Once I thought my mother was monstrously wicked for doing this, but if I’d had a telephone last night I would have picked it up and unhesitatingly pretended to summon the police.

  I wonder why I have not been in the right frame of mind to practise spreading out everywhere the light of my knowledge. Right now Kyria Katerina feels like she will never practise anything again.

  I am DESPERATE to get back to my book.

  Friday

  Soula is taking the girls for the night—she’ll give them dinner and promises to take them all to the cove in the morning (that’ll be a sight—I don’t think Soula has walked further than the port since 1947!).

  ‘Do I have to?’ Anna wailed as soon as I told her.

  ‘Yes,’ I said, practically pushing her out the door.

  ‘I don’t like it at Soula’s.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘I don’t like Theo.’

  ‘Oh, Anna, he’s a perfectly nice little boy.’

  ‘He tried to kiss me.’

  I leaned over and ruffled her hair.‘He won’t be the last, you know.’

  She wrested her bag from my arms and stor
med off down the lane.

  I love her but the house is so blissfully peaceful without her.

  Right. Back to work.

  Sydney, 1969

  Tuesday

  David has just gone, the house is quiet; the girls have taken him to a publisher’s party. ‘Come on, Katherine, it’ll be fun,’ Anna said, ‘you can bask in David’s reflected glory.’ I waved them off, pleading a headache, intending to write this before taking yet another long hot bath and heading off to my dreamless bed. The bath is my sanctuary.

  Word is out that David’s forthcoming book is marvellous, a certainty for every known literary prize. It is a sequel to that other triumphant book which made his name, that book of remembering which I once helped him to remember. On the rare occasion when I accompany him to a social event, strangers approach to tell him his book is a masterpiece, then they turn to me to say I have revolutionised the essay form. I am ashamed to say that I feel miserable whenever anyone compliments me on my column.

  These days David is constantly being marched off to glamorous events, to meet actors and politicians, to have expensive lunches with literary editors; he is frequently asked to join the advisory boards of Australian cultural bodies. Because of my column I am sometimes asked to various things too—to speak at lunches for middle-class North Shore matrons, for example, who have never had to worry about money in their lives. Sometimes I feel like a terrorist within their midst and wish to depart from the script to tell them the real story. I have my fans, too, it seems; David says it is never done to insult one’s fans, no matter how few.

  At these events, during questions after my ‘amusing’ speech, I am frequently asked if I am flattered by my husband’s literary portrayal of me as his muse, as an unearthly goddess whose beauty rivals that of the sun. I laugh modestly and hope they won’t be too disappointed by my actual human form, by the jowls at my chin, by the film across my once extraordinary blazing eyes. If only David knew what an image he made of me which I can never live up to. I have begun to say no whenever I am asked to these events: I feel a strange embarrassment about my collapsing face, as if I were stepping out in public sporting a particularly ripe cold sore. And besides, appearing to be anything but flattered by David’s portrayal would seem unattractive. Bitterness is the least appealing of emotions.