The Broken Book

by Susan Johnson

  I did not turn to watch her walk away.

  On our last morning I made a pilgrimage to the locked house to say goodbye. I intended to place my hand one last time against its walls. If I had not made peace with the past, at least I keenly felt the full weight of my sorrow.

  As I rounded the corner I looked up. A window was open. A sheet was airing. A clean white sheet was hanging from the very window where we used to hang our hairy old blankets. Lil used to say they were made of yak hair.

  Against my will my heart jumped up. Just like my mother I did not stop to think. I rushed to the door and knocked.

  I heard someone moving about, upstairs, in my father’s studio. I was about to turn and run. A head appeared above me from the window. ‘Na?’

  All my Greek came back. All the words in my mouth I keep swallowed.

  ‘Kali mera. Me lene Anna, kapote zousa etho. Afto itan to spiti mou.’ My name is Anna. I used to live here. This was my house.

  A man, much the same age as myself, held the key. I saw in his face he was going to let me in.

  ‘Of course!’ he said in perfect English. ‘Can you come back in twenty minutes? I’ve only just got up.’

  ‘Na, na. Efharisto poli. Efharisto poli.’ My hands instinctively made a sign of blessing against my chest.

  ‘Yasso,’ he said, closing the window. I turned and walked back down the lane.

  With every step my initial exhilaration faltered. My fervour to get through the door left me. I could never pass through that door again.

  My hands shook. I felt like I was going to be sick.

  In the room of the pension where we were staying Chris and the boys were absent. I went into the bathroom and vomited into the insufficient toilet. Signs warned me not to flush toilet paper into the toilet and to use the waste-paper basket provided instead.

  My head felt strange. For a moment I was uncertain of where I was. The past and the present had joined up.

  I carefully cleaned myself. I left the bathroom, lay down on the bed, and waited.

  I did not have to go back. I did not have to step over the threshold. I did not have to look again upon my loss.

  I could wait instead for the arrival of Chris and Alex and Sam. I could wait quietly in the room until I once again joined the present moment.

  I saw from the watch upon my wrist that time was still moving. Ten minutes had passed. Fifteen, twenty. I sat and watched the death of time. Then I got up and went towards the house.

  The owner opened the door straightaway. I stepped over the threshold. My legs held me up, taking me into the kitchen. My host led me to a chair by our old kitchen table.

  He must have noticed I looked pale. He offered water. ‘Perhaps you would prefer a Greek coffee?’ ‘Na, na,’ I said. Yes.

  As my eyes adjusted to the light I saw the flagstones of the floor, the windows, the new gas oven, the ledges which once held our fruit and vegetables. The man told me he lived in Athens where he ran an antiques business. He bought the house from the man Thanasis had sold it to. He seemed a kind man, wanting to talk about the impact of tourism on Greek culture, the havoc of capitalism, the press of the world upon the island. I listened to him as politely as I could.

  I wanted to shout, Shut up, you vlaca.

  After a while he rose from the chair. ‘I suppose you would like to look through the house?’

  There were stairs where there had been none before, new windows, new toilets, new everything. Then we were in our old bedroom, Lil’s and mine. The cupboards that Panayotis built. The same circle of damp on the ceiling above where my bed used to be. ‘The foreigners who lived here before were spies,’ he said, ‘for the Americans.’ I suppose he meant my parents.

  Then he stood before the door to my parents’ bedroom. Where our mother had cradled us in bed, where Dad once memorably brought us breakfast of the worst pancakes in the world made of flour, condensed milk and duck eggs.

  The man opened the door. And there was nothing there.

  No mother, no father, no sister. No one. The room was empty.

  The whole house was empty. Every room an empty shell from which the living essence had been sucked.

  I wanted to sink to my knees for want of a ghost. For want of the merest breath of life.

  But there was nothing. Nothing.

  Just the carcass of time.

  It has taken many hours to read my mother’s journals. There have been moments when I felt I could not go on. Before I started I thought they might contain some message. Some answer she had failed to provide.

  I see now that instead of answers my mother asked a question.

  She asked the future whether her long struggle was worth it. Whether the books she made were worth what it took to make them.

  Mother, here is your answer: a poem for your face, a book for your life. I came to read your broken book in the hope your breath was upon it still.

  How I long to see you old and wise, with whitened hair.

  Here I am, your difficult daughter Anna grown old instead, remembering that I once sailed a frail boat with you into the Saronic Sea.

  Acknowledgements

  During the writing of this book I learned that a long-awaited biography of Charmian Clift was to be published in Australia. I deliberately chose not to read it, relying instead on my memory of some twenty-year-old newspaper clippings about Clift from the Sydney Morning Herald, plus research from various war archives and libraries. However, I have since read Nadia Wheatley’s superb biography, The Life and Myth of Charmian Clift, and recommend it to anyone wishing to know more about Clift’s life.

  Thanks and love to dear Les, Caspar and Elliot, Barbara and John Johnson, Molly Cooney, Bill and Helen Webb, Emma Felton and Fiona McCrae.

  In London, Emma Mahony and Adam Barker, John Mahony, Katharine and Aidan Elliott, Harriet Griffey, Sheila Murphy, Anna Maclulich and Julian Bull, Debbie Marshall and Mark Stalley, Liz Minter and Ross Tanner provided encouragement, domestic and computer support, car rides and fun. Thanks especially to Victoria Pyeman, Domestic Goddess and deliverer of meals, and to Frances Atkinson in Melbourne, poet and researcher extraordinaire. Kim Knott and Tom Pridham generously gave their time and talent in taking my photograph.

  Catherine Drayton in New York was unfailingly supportive. Stephanie Cabot in London was indefatigable. Thanks to Annette Barlow, Patrick Gallagher and everyone at Allen & Unwin.

  I am especially indebted to Jamie Grant for help with the poetry.

  Without Margaret Connolly there would be no book.