The Professor of Truth

by James Robertson

  There was no point in denying it. I moved aside and she unlocked the door.

  “You better come in. The garage is mending the tyre but it will take an hour. I could have waited there but I came back.”

  “Why did you?” I said.

  “Like I said, running away is no good. We have not finished talking.”

  “You appeared to have.”

  She held the door for me. “Go in. Sit down.” She switched on lights and the fan, and unfolded the chair I’d sat on before. This time she did not go behind the table, but brought out another chair and sat opposite me. Our knees were almost touching.

  She stared at me.

  “What?” I said.

  “You asked me that question,” she answered. “You said, can I imagine your loss? You thought I could not.”

  “You said so yourself.”

  “And that was true. But you assumed it. ‘Well, then,’ you said. As if that settled something. As if you had scored a point against me.”

  “I don’t know what you are talking about,” I said.

  “No, you don’t. This is what I am telling you. I have my own loss, it is with me every day. You are not the only one.”

  “I have never been so stupid as to think that,” I said.

  “Well, then.”

  I rubbed my eyes. Everything in the room was flickering, strange and unreal to me.

  “Tell me,” I said.

  “My family were Chinese people, from Vietnam,” Kim Parr said. “My father’s father came to Saigon from the north. He was a farmer but he came to the city for a better life. Not easier, but better. More chance to prosper. He bought and sold rice and other food in the market. This was in the 1930s. There were many Chinese in Saigon then, with good jobs. They helped each other make money. The Vietnamese did not like them much, but the French liked them because Chinese people worked hard for their money. My father worked in the market too, but then he became apprentice to a tailor and later he started his own business. He did well. He married my mother, who was Vietnamese. This is another thing Vietnamese people did not like much, and my father’s family did not like it at all because they looked down on local people, but my parents did it anyway. They had three children, a son and two daughters. I was the youngest.

  “When they got married it was the ’60s. Vietnam was divided, north and south. The French had gone but the Americans came instead. The war was bad, but not bad for business. Lots of American soldiers wanted suits, shirts, things to take home to their families, cheap but high quality. Then the Americans lost the war and the Communists took over. Time to settle old scores. You suffered if you didn’t know the right people. My father knew only wrong people. We got by for a few years, but the Communist government squeezed us Chinese because we were good business people, knew how to make money, and they took what they liked and we let them because we knew they could take it all. Life was very tough. Lots of people, not only Chinese but anyone against the Communists, left on boats, but my father said this was too dangerous. Other Chinese people made the long journey north to China, but he said why go there, another Communist country only bigger? Then there was war with China and things got even worse. My father said one day, it is time to leave. I was eight years old, my sister was eleven and my brother was thirteen. My father paid most of the money he had left to Communist officials to let us go, then more money to get on a boat. It was a hard time but we were together and we thought it couldn’t get worse. We were wrong.

  “The boat was very small and it had too many people in it. More than a hundred, crowded on deck under the sun. After three days we had no water. The crew made us pay for water, which they kept from us with guns. They were supposed to take us to the Philippines or Hong Kong but we just drifted in the sea. Then another boat came with more men with guns and machetes. We had heard that there were many pirates from Thailand attacking people like us so we hid the little money we had left, some gold and precious things. The men in our boat argued with the pirates. I thought they were trying to protect us but now I know they were bartering for us. They had been waiting for the pirates to come. I saw money go between them. The pirates ordered all men, young and old, to go to their boat. They shot in the air so we knew they must be obeyed. My father told my brother, who was small for his age, to stay with us. He hugged my mother and kissed us, it felt bad, like he was saying goodbye. When all the men had gone some of the pirates came on to our boat and took everything we had, gold, rings, earrings, money, they were very rough and hurt anyone who resisted. They found my brother and pulled him from us and when he fought back one of them held him out in his hands like a dog and another one shot him in the head and they threw his body in the water. I saw this thing done. Then they left us and took the men and boys away. I did not see my father again. Never. We never knew what happened to those men and boys, but I think when the pirates had taken all their possessions they threw them in the sea.

  “So now we were only women and girls on this boat, terrified, thirsty, hungry. We did not know where the crew was taking us. After two more days we reached a small island, and the crew put us ashore with some food and sailed away. We were glad to be on that island but we soon found we were not alone. There were others there already, miserable people like us, betrayed, abandoned. The world did not know about us. No government cared about us. Pirates came and went from that place and when they came they did terrible things. They stole any valuable thing anyone still had. When there was nothing left to steal worse things happened. They took my mother away, they took my sister. When they came back they were not the same people. I hid and I was small so they did not find me. We had left Vietnam because it was a very bad place for us but we went to hell instead.

  “I don’t remember all the things that happened there. I don’t want to remember them. Many people died. My sister died. Then one day a big ship came, an American ship, and took the survivors away from that island. They took us to Hong Kong. In Hong Kong at that time there was hope. In Hong Kong they said you were a refugee. This was before so many thousands came there and they put them in the camps. When we arrived you could work. My mother and I worked night and day to earn a few dollars. She taught me everything I know about sewing and making clothes. And in Hong Kong you could apply to go somewhere else, anywhere that would take you. My mother wanted to go to America but there was confusion with the papers and after many months we heard that we could go but not to America, to Australia. One woman and her child. So we came.

  “We lived in Melbourne. We had nothing. All we had was a single room and what we could do. We could sew and cut and make clothes. We did these things till our hands were stiff and our fingers bled. In the day I went to school and at night I worked with her. My mother was very ill. I mean in her mind, not her body. She had lost everything and everyone except me. She tried to look after me but she couldn’t. All she could do was work. One day I came home from school and she wasn’t there. Neighbours were waiting for me. A woman in uniform was there too. They told me my mother had fallen under a bus. I don’t know if it was an accident or if she meant to fall, if she could not go on living any more, but anyway she was gone. I cried because I was on my own. One after another I had lost everyone I ever loved. The neighbours were kind but they did not want me. So I went to a home where they were meant to take care of me, but mostly I took care of myself. I have always taken care of myself.”

  I had been sitting hunched forward, sipping water, staring at the earth-coloured linoleum, while she told her story. Only now did I look up at her.

  “Can you imagine my loss?” she said. “No, you can’t. So don’t ask me to imagine yours.”

  “It is terrible, what you have endured,” I said.

  “What else is there to do? I do not intend to fall under a bus. Do you?”

  “No. I am a coward.”

  “I don’t know what that word means. You are afraid and so you don’t do something? Or you are not afraid but you still don’t do it? I am not a coward. I a
m me. Even when I run away, I don’t get far. You can’t run from your own life. When I come here to work, I am me.”

  “You’re a strong woman.”

  “No. I am a lucky woman, that’s all.”

  “Not many would say so.”

  “Not many survived. I did. I found a safe place to be.”

  “You found a rich husband.”

  “Do you accuse me?” The sharpness was back in her voice.

  “I mean that there is safety in money. You don’t need to work, do you?” I indicated the room, packed with its materials and tools and equipment. “Not for money?”

  “For money, no. For me, yes. This is how I got here, through work. I don’t want to spoil a good habit. Maybe sometime again I’ll need to work for money. Who can tell?” She jabbed a finger at me. “You have a job?”

  “Yes. I teach.”

  She seized upon this with a kind of glee. “Why do you teach? You teach for money?”

  “Yes, but also …” I hesitated because I had never before faced this question, or at least it had never been asked of me so bluntly. “But also because it is what I do.”

  “Yes,” she said. “You do what you do. I do what I do. We have no choice. All our lives are chance. I think this is true. My father talked to us about destiny. Things happen because of destiny. So when life was good, that was destiny, and when it was bad, that was destiny too. When those pirates took him, that was destiny. But I don’t think so. It was luck, chance. Sometimes good luck, sometimes bad. But what’s the difference? Either a thing is destiny or it is chance but it happens anyway. Nothing you can do about it.”

  She stood, and put away the chair she’d been sitting on. She made a few busy, tidying movements around the room, although there was nothing to tidy. Then she was back in front of me.

  “I did not find my husband, like you said. I was not looking for him, he was not looking for me, but we end up here together. Now you come. Is this chance or destiny? I think chance but then I always knew you would come, or someone like you, so … I don’t know.”

  “Not chance,” I said. “I came because I knew to come.”

  “It is chance your family is on that plane. It is chance my husband drives a taxi on that island. It is chance I come to Australia. It is chance I meet him in Melbourne. It is all chance.”

  “Not all,” I said.

  “Yes. It is even chance I get a flat tyre just now. Something happens by chance and then you deal with it.”

  She gestured at me to get up. I saw once more how small she was, how determined.

  “I don’t want you here but you are here,” she said. “So I am dealing with it. You go back to your hotel now, I’m going back to the garage. Tomorrow is Friday. I don’t work Fridays. You come to Sheildston tomorrow. I will ask him to speak to you. But I don’t make any promise.”

  “Thank you,” I said.

  “It’s not for you,” she said. “It’s for us. I want to make you go away. When you come, press the buzzer three times short, one long. Okay?”

  “Okay. What time?”

  “Afternoon. Three o’clock. Remember, three short, one long. Otherwise”—she shook her head—“no entry.”

  9

  TOOK HER ADVICE AND ATE NOTHING THAT DAY, and drank only bottled water. The sickness—everything—had left me very weary. All that evening I dozed in my room with the television on low, tuning in periodically to the latest updates about the fires. A large area inland from Turner’s Strand was now ablaze. The northern highway had reopened but many cross-country roads were deemed unsafe. A few small settlements had been abandoned and a number of houses destroyed. Several people were dead or injured. The strength of the westerly wind and a general shortage of water were making the situation worse. One particular inland town, Cobsville, was repeatedly mentioned as the place the authorities were most concerned about. Yet down on the coast people seemed unfazed and untouched by these events. Lying on my bed, I could hear the music thumping away on the Strand. I imagined a scene in a kind of satirical disaster movie: the waiter from the fish restaurant, standing up to his waist in the sea with a bottle of beer in hand, sniffs the air and, addressing another waiter a few feet away, makes some casual remark about the haze of smoke above the hills. But his colleague is being dragged beneath the surface by a shark.

  I slept fitfully, and woke hungry at seven. I reached for the phone beside the bed and dialled Carol’s number.

  “Hi. It’s me.”

  “Hello.” She sounded calm, remote, not in the least surprised to hear my voice. “Where are you?”

  “Where I’m supposed to be.”

  “What time is it there?”

  “Seven in the morning. And with you?”

  “Eight—p.m. I’ve just finished eating. You sound tired. Is everything all right?”

  “Apart from a dose of food poisoning, everything is fine.”

  “Oh dear. Are you sure you’re okay?”

  “Yes.”

  “You don’t sound it.”

  “I’ve made contact.”

  “Was that successful?”

  “I don’t know yet. I’ll find out later today. What about you? Any visitors?”

  “None. Nothing.”

  “Anything more about our friend?”

  “They gave a name in the paper. Not the one you told me.”

  I liked the way she’d picked up at once on my discretion. I liked the sound of her voice. That had never occurred to me before: how easy her voice was on the ear. On my ear.

  “You sound far away,” I said.

  “That’s because I am.”

  “What’s the weather like?”

  “Cold but clear. Still plenty of snow on the ground. And with you?”

  “Hot. No snow.”

  “There are terrible fires on the news. Are you anywhere near them?”

  This was less discreet. “I’m fine,” I said. “Quite safe.”

  “How long will you stay?”

  “I don’t know. Another day or two. It depends.”

  “On what you find under the stone?”

  “Absolutely.”

  “You be careful.”

  “I will be.”

  “This is the moment,” she said. I heard a catch in her voice as she stopped herself saying my name. “Make the most of it.”

  “I will,” I said.

  “Then come home.”

  “Yes,” I said. “I’d better go.”

  “All right. Look after yourself.”

  “I will. Goodbye.”

  “Goodbye.”

  I hung up. What was it I was afraid of saying? What was it I was afraid of? And I wondered what she might be thinking—of our discretion, of our reticence. What unsaid things might she have hoped for me to say? I considered calling her again, but I could not bring myself to do so.

  In hat, long-sleeved shirt, shorts and deck shoes, I started my walk to Sheildston for the third time, in the glare of the afternoon sun. That morning I had bought a small woven jute bag with a strap long enough to go over my shoulder, and in this I had a large bottle of cold water, a pen and notebook, and a digital voice recorder. This last item I’d also acquired that morning, almost on a whim, from a store selling cameras, phones and other electronic gadgets. I envisaged two scenarios: one in which Parroulet would consent to be interviewed, and one in which he wouldn’t. In the second scenario, I thought I might still make use of the recorder but leave it in the bag. On the other hand I might not use it at all. I had no definite plan because I had no notion of what was going to happen.

  Turner’s Strand was as busy as ever but now at last the people seemed not only conscious of but also frightened by the conflagration that was consuming the countryside just a few miles away. There was no other story on television or radio, and that day’s papers carried many images of blazing forests and burned-out buildings. More people had died, in their cars or in their homes. A man described his family’s narrow escape, driving in smoke so thick they
were nearly overcome through lack of oxygen. A woman spoke of houses exploding, one after another. When she was asked for her opinion of the likelihood that some of the fires had been started deliberately, she shook her head in anger. “People are dead,” she said. “That’s murder in my book.”

  The atmosphere of unrestrained, obligatory fun that had greeted me on my arrival was gone now. In its place were fear and sobriety. I’d noticed a few cars and trucks weighed down with possessions parked at the seafront, and near them shocked-looking families who had clearly not come for a relaxing vacation. The outback of the Australian imagination was not so far now from the beach and the suburbs, and it was killing people.

  Just beyond the football pitches, tied to a telegraph pole and blocking the pavement, was a piece of hardboard with a message crudely written on it: EMERGENCY VEHICLES ONLY GO BACK FIRES. In the increasingly strong wind the board was straining to break from its moorings. I stepped round it and carried on. I had not seen or heard any emergency vehicles all morning. On the television news they’d said there was a shortage of fire appliances, ambulances, hoses, aeroplanes with water-lifting equipment, water itself—and that efforts were being concentrated on the most serious outbreaks. The entire population of Cobsville, twenty miles away, might have to be evacuated. A little place like Sheildston, I reckoned, would not be considered a priority by the authorities.

  It had not, however, been completely forgotten. Rounding one of those steep bends, which despite the time of day, my weariness and the food poisoning I was finding less taxing than before—as if I were somehow rising beyond myself to the challenge—I came across a big police 4×4 parked across the next straight bit of road. An officer was sitting in the driver’s seat with the door open, making a radio call. “Just hold it there, mister,” he called. He spoke a few more words into the radio. A length of chain, a POLICE ROAD CLOSED metal sign and a stack of traffic cones stood on the tarmac beside the car.

  The policeman was middle-aged—that is to say, probably about my age—but he was much heavier than me. He sauntered across with his thumbs stuck in his belt.