by Trent Dalton
‘I’ve always liked this music,’ Greta says.
‘Your father played it for you,’ the old man says.
‘How did you know that?’
‘I played this for my daughters,’ the old man replies. ‘Fathers should always play the Liebesträume for their daughters.’
When the old man talks Greta can see that his teeth are rotting and there are faint black stains on what’s left of them. There’s a tar-black tinge, too, around the edges of the beard hairs closest to his mouth.
‘Dad said it was from a poem,’ Greta says.
Notes into notes into notes.
‘“O love, as long as love you can,”’ the old man recites. ‘“O love, as long as love you may.”’
Now Greta can see that the old man’s tongue is black too.
‘“The time will come, the time will come,”’ the old man says. ‘“When you will stand at the grave and mourn! Be sure that your heart burns, and holds and keeps love, as long as another heart beats warmly, with its love for you.”’
The old man opens his eyes now and he finds Greta staring at him but he does not stop playing and then his eyes move to the baby boy in her arms. The man’s eyes are a deep blue and the colour pops from his face because everything else about him is white. He smiles, and his smile stays wide when he turns to Molly behind Greta’s shoulder and Yukio behind Molly’s shoulder. He stares into Molly’s eyes.
‘Do you want to know the secret?’ he asks the gravedigger girl.
‘Yes,’ Molly says.
‘My human heart needs to stay warm,’ he says. ‘But it can only stay warm by warming your heart. That’s the trick of the human heart.’
The old man now stares into Yukio’s eyes. ‘But the music that came from that poem is far more miraculous than any poem, don’t you think?’ the old man asks. Yukio’s face reveals nothing when he stares back at the old man. The old man plays on. ‘The music! The music reminds us that the miracle of love is that it is transcendent. That’s the trick of true love. It transcends even death.’
The baby in Greta’s arms cries. The old man plays on.
‘That baby does not belong to you,’ the old man says.
Molly steps forward to stand beside Greta. ‘The boy dropped from the sky,’ she says.
The man doesn’t miss a note, keeps on playing. Changes in key signatures, long notes with stretched stems, a high-note cadenza, a bright run of notes that feels to Greta like the story of the song is moving now into the composer’s intended dream territory.
‘A baby boy just fell from the sky?’ the old man ponders.
‘An eagle had his hooks in him but then he dropped him in the drink,’ Molly says. ‘It was only because of Greta that he’s still breathin’.’
The old man nods at Yukio. ‘Did the eagle drop the Japanese soldier down here, too?’
The baby cries again. Greta rocks him. ‘Ssshhhh,’ she whispers.
‘I once saw an eagle flying with its claws hooked into a dead goanna twice as long as that baby,’ the old man says. ‘Remarkable creatures.’
‘Do you know who the baby belongs to?’ Greta asks.
‘No,’ the old man says.
‘Do you know where I might find the boy’s family?’
‘No,’ he replies. ‘Because that boy’s family never stays in one place. They’re like these fingers of mine, always moving. But you rest assured they’ll find the boy.’
‘How will they find him if I have him?’
‘He’s a son of this place,’ the old piano player says. ‘The land will tell his family you have him.’
Molly spots a small green fruit resting on top of the piano. The fruit has been split open, revealing a marble-sized black seed that seems, to Molly’s eye, to be covered in bright red blood. She leans closer to inspect the strange seed.
‘Myristica insipida,’ the old man says. ‘Native nutmeg.’
‘Who are you?’ Molly asks.
‘I’m Lars,’ he says. ‘Who are you?’
‘I’m Molly Hook from Darwin,’ she says. ‘I’m looking for a blackfeller named Longcoat Bob.’
The old man’s fingers stop with a low note thud and he slams the fallboard down hard over the keys, making Molly jump on the spot.
‘Why do you want to find Longcoat Bob?’
‘You know him?’
‘Everybody in this forest knows Longcoat Bob for one reason or another,’ he says. ‘But what’s your reason for knowing Bob?’
‘He put a curse on my family because my grandfather stole his gold long ago,’ Molly says.
‘What happened to your family?’ the old man probes in a soft voice.
‘Longcoat Bob turned their hearts to stone,’ Molly says. ‘They all started dyin’. Some died quick and some died slow and some died long before they should have.’
‘Everybody dies, child,’ the old man says. ‘I suspect there are hundreds lying dead in your home town as we speak.’ He swings round to Yukio. ‘They died before they should have, too, and not at the hands of a black man’s magic stick.’ He turns back to Molly. ‘But one should never mourn the dead, Molly Hook from Darwin, for they have embarked on a journey far more wondrous even than the one that brought you here. You stumble blindly in your boots here on earth. But the dead take flight, Molly Hook, through light and through dark and through light again.’
‘I need to find Longcoat Bob,’ Molly says. ‘Is he anywhere in this forest? Are we even going the right way?’
‘Yes,’ the old man says. ‘He’s nearer to you than you think.’
The baby cries again.
‘The boy is hungry,’ the old man says, turning back to Greta.
‘We’ve run out of food,’ Greta says.
The old man smiles. He raises his arms up to the forest.
‘There is food all around you,’ he says. ‘This forest has everything we need.’
‘The boy needs milk,’ Greta says.
The old man nods. He rises slowly to his feet and walks towards a thick layer of wild passionfruit vine hanging off the rock wall bordering the circular clearing. ‘Come meet my friends,’ he says. He pulls a thick clump of vine back as sure as he would pull a curtain on a window frame, revealing a tunnel cut into the rock. ‘Come,’ the old man calls, waving his arm.
Molly casts her eyes over the sleepers on their backs in the forest. ‘You’re just gonna leave these people ’ere?’ she asks.
‘Of course,’ the old man says. ‘Their dreams haven’t ended yet.’
Molly turns to Greta at the piano. ‘We need to keep going,’ she whispers.
Greta assesses the old man, looks down at the boy in her arms. ‘He needs milk,’ she says.
‘But we need to follow the lightning,’ Molly says.
Greta turns back to the old man. Weighs her options.
‘Come,’ the old man calls. ‘Don’t be afraid. Come meet my friends.’
‘The boy needs to eat,’ Greta says to Molly. And she walks across to the old man, who smiles when Greta ducks her head into the black void of the cave.
*
His home is an underground network of old goldmine tunnels lit by lanterns and candles. Lars leads his guests through a central corridor and Molly walks behind Greta looking left and right at the corridors branching off the main walkway. There are other people in here. Many others. Down one corridor on the left, a slim Chinese woman, maybe in her mid-twenties, leans against the entrance to another branching passageway, with a young Chinese girl, five or six years old, standing by her side. Molly watches Lars say something to the young woman in Chinese and the young woman appears to acknowledge his words and she slinks away with the child, drifting into the darkness.
On the right of the main corridor now, in the entrance to another corridor, stands a young red-haired woman in a loose and dirt-stained linen dress.
‘Have you seen Marielle?’ Lars asks the red-haired woman.
‘She’s in the reading room,’ she replies.
�
��Inform her of our guests,’ Lars says. ‘We have an infant here in urgent need of milk.’
Molly smiles politely at the red-haired woman as she passes, but the red-haired woman does not smile back.
‘How long have you been living down here like this?’ Greta asks.
‘Seven years,’ Lars says, nonchalantly, as if that is a perfectly reasonable amount of time to live inside a large hole in the earth.
He comes to a stretch of red matting laid down in the corridor in front of the entrance to another, more expansive cave lit up by flamelight. By the side of the natural arched opening sits a row of shoes and sandals. Lars spreads his right arm out. ‘Please, after you,’ he says.
Greta steps into a spacious circular chamber lit by six rows of thick white wax candles lining the walls at separate points. Six wooden workbenches are spread across the room, each one three feet wide and one foot across and poorly knocked together from found timber and nails. Atop these benches rest specimens of native plants, some in large glass jars and some in pots filled with soil and some dried out and pressed flat between sheets of paper.
‘What is all this?’ Greta asks.
‘Test samples,’ Lars says. ‘Research.’
Molly puts her eyes up close to a jar of white globular fruits the size of sweet peas.
‘What are they?’ Molly asks.
‘Magic beans,’ Lars says. ‘Make a paste out of those and rub them across your chickenpox, you’ll be healed right quick. Just like magic.’
This room has given the old man energy. Greta sees a new oddness in him. His speech quickens. His thoughts bounce from notion to notion, idea to idea. He says he is a man of science. He says he is a man of medicine.
‘What’s that one?’ Molly asks, looking into a jar of stalks with red fruits.
‘It’s an insect repellent and a contraceptive all in one,’ he says.
‘A what?’ Molly asks.
He says he calls himself a botanist but the description speaks nothing of his life’s work. He says he came to Australia with his wife, Marielle, to document and share his observations on the uses and compositions of ancient bush medicines long known to northern Australian Aboriginals.
‘What’s that one?’ Molly asks, looking at a prickly bush.
‘The cure for rheumatism,’ he says proudly.
He tells them that he has found things in this wild southern world that could transform global medicine but that the world has always moved too slow for men like him.
Molly studies a jar of lemongrass.
‘Earache,’ Lars says.
Yukio is taken by a jar filled with a succulent bushy plant not unlike a Japanese bonsai. ‘Toothache,’ Lars says.
Greta holds a long green stalk with a green orb at the end opening to a crown of small green-yellow spikes.
‘Papaver somniferum!’ Lars says, with great reverence for the plant. ‘Opium poppy.’
‘You’re making opium here?’ Greta asks.
Lars scoffs. ‘The extraordinary properties of the opium plant figure prominently in my research, but to say I make opium is to say Moses tended to sheep,’ he says, ‘or Michelangelo painted walls.’
He says he has reasons for never going back to Sydney, and the wild beauty and bounty of the northern vine forests are the only things that matter to him now.
‘Yes, I have made my mistakes,’ he says. ‘Yes, I have sinned. But who upon this earth has not?’ He turns to Greta. ‘Have you not?’ he asks abruptly.
Greta shakes her head.
He turns to Yukio. ‘Have you never sinned?’
Yukio struggles to understand but he’s always following Greta’s lead lately and he follows it now, shaking his head.
‘I ask you, what’s the greater sin,’ Lars continues, ‘using my gifts to ease their pain or knowing I can ease their pain with my gifts but refusing to use them?’
‘Ease whose pain?’ Greta asks. Lars does not answer because he’s too gripped by his own increasingly erratic thoughts. ‘We have found God’s medical box,’ he says. ‘We must open it up for all the world to see.’
Molly holds a naked and floppy segment of a tree branch up before her eyes. Shiny dark green leaves and green and white flowers and circular fruits with hard orange skin, like small two-inch-wide oranges.
‘What’s this one for?’ she asks.
‘Nux vomica,’ Lars whispers, wide-eyed and mystical. He leans down to the gravedigger girl. ‘Strychnine tree.’ He pulls a fruit from the branch, holds it up with wonder and awe in his blue eyes. ‘Magic fruit. Eat one of these whole, seeds and all, and you’ll disappear from this earth and reappear in an instant at the pearled gates of heaven! Voilà!’ He shakes his head. ‘Extraordinary! This forest is filled with them!’
Lars moves to the centre of the softly lit chamber. He speaks to his guests now the way he spoke to halls of academics in Sydney and Melbourne, all those men who drove him out of academia with their lack of vision and petty jealousies and their cowardly reluctance to experiment. ‘What an extraordinary continent we have found ourselves in,’ he says, holding up the orange fruit. ‘A place where death grows on trees.’ He tosses the death fruit up in his hand and catches it. ‘Is there a land in this world more in awe of oblivion? Death resides in its branches, in its rivers, in its soil. Death crawls here and death slithers. It bites and chomps and infects and infuses. Tell me of a land more determined to kill those who would dare embrace its beauty.’
Lars shakes his head, looking down again at the orange fruit in his hand. He looks back up to find his three guests staring at him with visible concern for his sanity.
‘Milk?’ Greta asks.
*
A long dark tunnel then a corridor turning left. Another young Chinese woman standing at the entrance to what Molly assumes is the woman’s cave version of a bedroom. She nods at Molly but she does not smile. Molly catches up with Greta in the corridor. ‘We feed the boy then we leave as soon as we can,’ she whispers.
‘It’s getting dark out there, Molly,’ Greta says. ‘We need to eat and we need to rest. He’s gonna let us do both, so you just remember your manners and be thankful for the kindness.’
Lit by candles and lanterns, Lars’s dining hall is a cold, rectangular cave with several hardwood poles capped by broad beams acting as cave-in props. Its walls are scarred with pickaxe marks where hopeful miners chased gold along quartzite seams. Molly casts her eyes around the space and the first thing she sees is a rusted candelabra hanging from the centre of the ceiling. There is a dining table below it, long enough to seat eight people. Another upright piano rests against the wall facing her. There are lounges and armchairs and there is a daybed made of bamboo, and there are stretcher beds made of canvas and cracked wood, set out in rows. And there are people here and they are old. Ten, twelve, fourteen people. They look to Molly like they are wilting, like they are dissolving into their beds, their skin hanging loosely from their bones. Most of them are old Chinese men, their beards long and braided, and old Chinese women in loose black robes. There is one old Afghani man, and three others are European white and European wilted, laid out flat and sleeping upon the beds and lounges or upright in the armchairs and dining table chairs with their eyelids half-closed and their heads wobbling and wanting to fall into their chests. The warm yellow glow of the candles and lanterns reflects from their faces and the rock walls.
‘What is this place, Greta?’ Molly whispers. ‘I want to leave.’
Greta hears the girl but keeps her eyes on Lars.
‘Friends,’ Lars announces to the room. ‘We have visitors.’
Greta turns to the people in the room, smiling. Few of Lars’s friends even register they are there. ‘Where did they all come from?’ she asks.
‘Same place you came from,’ Lars says. ‘They came out of the birth cave. They travelled far like you, but they found us here. And here they stayed.’
A rattling wheeze echoes from a skeletal elderly Chinese man lying flat and shirt
less on a stretcher. He coughs and spits saliva and blood into a bowl carried by a young Chinese woman who seems to be nursing several of the men and women.
Greta looks around the room. Bodies thin as glass. Chest bones sucked down into flesh by time and sickness. ‘They’re all dying,’ she says.
Lars nods his head. ‘And they will die without pain.’ He says they are the unwanted. He says they are the ones who ran to the gold then ran further into the deep country when the government asked them to sail back home.
‘What do you all live on down here?’ Greta asks.
Then a voice from an entrance to her right. ‘Understanding,’ says a thin, slow-moving woman in her sixties or seventies with long straight hair as white as Lars’s. ‘Compassion. Sacrifice. And …’ – the woman hands Greta an aged glass nursing bottle – ‘kindness.’ The bottle has a rubber teat fixed to its top, and is full of milk. Greta takes the bottle with gratitude then gently brings the teat to the baby’s mouth and the boy’s lips suck on instinct and relief spreads across his face.
The white-haired woman smiles. ‘I’d say he’s never had evaporated milk before,’ she says. ‘It’s sweeter than what he gets from his mother.’
‘This is my wife, Marielle,’ Lars says to Greta, who shakes Marielle’s hand.
‘Thank you for helping us,’ Greta says. ‘I’m Greta. This is Molly. That’s Yukio.’
Marielle casts a curious eye towards the Japanese pilot, who is standing back from the group, studying the bodies laid out across the room.
‘Don’t worry about him,’ Greta says.
‘He jumped out of his plane out past Candlelight Creek,’ Molly says.
Marielle smiles at this fantastical story, examines the pilot standing in her makeshift cavern home.
‘Why is he travelling with you?’ Marielle asks.
‘He was sent to protect us,’ Molly says, sounding more defensive than she intended. ‘He’s our friend, that’s all.’
Marielle nods.
‘The baby dropped out of the sky, too, it seems,’ Lars says.
Marielle is silent for a long moment, nodding to herself. She focusses on Greta. ‘Like a gift from God,’ she says.