by Nike Sulway
We went up to our bedroom and sat on the bed looking out at them. My father and the man stood on the lawn with their heads close together, the man finished talking and my father had his arm around him, as though they were old friends. Although they were standing so close together, we could see that my father had to shout to be heard. Every now and then he’d put his mouth close to the man’s ear and say something. He was smiling. They were both, impossibly, smiling.
My mother was dancing, beating the grass flat with her bare feet. When the song stopped she sang out, her voice ringing in the silence between tracks, ‘If I can’t dance I don’t want to be part of your revolution!’
‘Emma Goldman,’ said my father, looking up from his conversation. And then, ‘I would believe only in a God that knows how to Dance.’
‘Nietzsche,’ said our pursuer, not needing to shout for his voice to carry. ‘No sane man will dance.’
My parents, both of them, hooted out ‘Cicero!’ and raised their glasses, and laughed with delight at having found someone else who knew how to play their game.
We had our showers and put on clean clothes. We went down to the kitchen and made ourselves sandwiches for dinner, which we ate sitting on the bed by the window. The music got louder and louder, and they danced and sang and hooted like mad owls until all three of them were exhausted and fell onto the grass. Their voices softened down to murmurs. The music fell silent. My mother came in and put on one of her old blues records and turned out the lights, then she went outside again and lay down at right angles to my father, with her head on his lap. She looked impossibly long and thin and brown.
A woman’s deep, sombre voice soughed up through the dark.
My father lit a cigarette and the three of them smoked it, passing it from hand to hand, mumbling, murmuring to each other while a gold moon swung up overhead. They were still there hours later, talking, smoking, lying about on the lawn as if they’d been thrown there by the gods, when we fell asleep.
Summer
There are silences we can interpret; shadowy silences into which we enter, like thieves, with hands and fingers outstretched, navigating in the dark. The moon is pale and noiseless, waxing and waning above us night after night. The surface of the moon is covered in craters. We, on the distant earth, look up at these formations on the moon’s surface and read them. They are the wounds of collision, we surmise, the impact sites of large cosmic bodies. We have not seen them strike her, but we see the marks they have left behind. We can measure the circumference, and the depth, of those craters and imagine the meteors that struck her: their great size, the speed at which they travelled towards her. Their terrible, soundless impact.
My brother’s manuscripts are remote and silent too. The marks he made on the page are precise, and the paper clean. He never smudged the ink, or turned over a corner of a page. For years his manuscripts had arrived wrapped in three layers: white tissue paper, then two thick pieces of cardboard – front and back – then brown paper. For a while they arrived in tubes, scrolled up into tight rounds that I had to press flat beneath my mattress. For days, weeks sometimes, it would occupy the other half of my bed, bulking up beneath the sheets like some strange, misshapen mistress.
I had been working on a page with a series of symbols ascending – or descending – the page. Not words, but single digits. Numbers, perhaps. Some kind of riddle. There were eighteen symbols, which curved slightly, as if twisting as they fell. There were too many for the column to be a single word, too few to form a sentence. Some of the symbols were repeated, sometimes in slightly varied forms, throughout the manuscript. I faxed them to a former colleague at the university – someone who enjoyed cryptology and mathematics – but he sent an email to say that there was no regular pattern he could discern and that, perhaps, they were like Japanese kanji or Korean hanja: words reduced to single symbols. He suggested a couple of places to post the images: cryptographers’ and linguists’ discussion boards.
I emailed a copy to Nicanor in Melbourne. He had taken a job at a university there, and I felt sure he might know someone who could help, even if he couldn’t help me himself. A week later he called and said he couldn’t tell me anything about the symbols – he didn’t recognise any of them and couldn’t say what they might mean – but he could talk to me about the number eighteen. He said, ‘I am no translator, but I know about the poetry of numbers.’ He talked to me about workers in a field in the Middle Ages. The darkness coming in, and the workers who stayed late in the fields, too afraid to travel to the synagogue in the dark. As the sun slid down from the heavens, they gathered in an open place and recited the Havineinu – the evening prayer – to welcome the night of which they were so afraid. It was too far to the synagogue, where the full Amidah was recited, and so they recited this shorter version: the B’rakhah achat mei’ein sh’moneh esreh – the one blessing in the form of eighteen. Light fell down on the wheat, standing in sheaves all around them, as they set aside their scythes and recited the eighteen benedictions. They bent all eighteen vertebrae of their spines to pray, since the spine will be renewed at the Resurrection, and spring forth with song. They must bend until an issar – a coin – of flesh is visible opposite their hearts. And while they bent, loosening the vertebrae, they held the name of God in their mouths eighteen times, sweet and thick as honey.
‘In Hebrew gematria the word for life – Chai – also has a value of eighteen. Of course,’ Nicanor said, laughing. ‘We know there are more than eighteen vertebrae in the spine these days, but the Talmud says there are eighteen, and so …’ I can almost hear him shrugging, his hands outstretched and flattened, his head tilted to one side.
I placed the page on the desk, and traced the curve of the symbols. Perhaps they were some form of concrete poem: eighteen vertebrae, curving in at the neck and the lower back. A song, a chant, a prayer, a map. A list of objects once loved, now lost. The impact – the craterous imprint – of a long, curved weapon striking the page.
In the evening, in the shower, water runnelled down the dip of Ana’s spine, flowing over the hollows and protuberances. I stooped to kiss the five lumbar vertebrae, one by one, ascending along the convex curve of the twelve thoracic to the delicate tower of the seven cervical bones. I ran my hand down over the five lumbar, to the fused curve of her sacrum, whispering my blessings into the pale flesh revealed at the back of her neck: each bone a syllable in the name of God. Each curve a wave, cresting and falling beneath the weight of my hands.
She turned in my arms, her belly a small swelling that pressed against my own. Urgent and firm as unripe fruit. Rested her head on the slim wing of my clavicle, pressed her mouth to the dip below it, smoothed her hand down over my humerus to the radius and ulna, over the carpals and metacarpals until she twined her phalanges with my own.
*
The first Christmas after Morgan went into the river, I went into Staples almost accidentally. It was December, and the shops were filled with the smell of pine and the soft tinkle of glass baubles. I had set aside an afternoon to buy gifts. Going into Staples was part of the pattern of that time of the year. As familiar as our mother’s pudding, the fruit finished soaking a month before, the pudding tied up in old cloth and now hanging in the pantry.
Morgan had been gone for several months, almost half a year, but I wasn’t used to admitting this aloud. Every encounter with someone who had known him, or known of him, was a new assault; every time I told someone about what had happened, it was as though I was walking Morgan down to the riverbank and standing beside him like a soldier with a gun while he folded his clothes and removed his shoes, unable to protest.
The shop was full of people from out of town who asked a lot of questions about the inks and pens and papers. They described, in detail, the person for whom they were buying a gift. Writers, academics, artists, businessmen and librarians. People fond of well-made things. Old-fashioned things. The gift buyers described their favourite colours, their passion for Greek or French modern poetry.
In response to these descriptions, Martin brought out trays of fountain pens and paperweights, desk sets made of Italian leather with inkpots and silver paperknives, or boxes of buttery, acid-free paper.
Behind the counter, in the little room you could see into from the store, his son was sitting on a high stool, studying. Occasionally, he would bring out his book and wait patiently for his father to finish with a customer. In the slight pause between one customer and another, he would ask a question and his father would slide his glasses down and peer at the page. Their two heads would bend over the page together, and their voices would drop to a low, companionable hum. After a moment the boy would nod and return to the little room.
Martin saw me and smiled his welcome. A harried-looking woman with an armload of bags put her hand on his arm. ‘My father-in-law,’ she said. ‘Something masculine, and expensive-looking. Around the two hundred dollar mark.’ Martin turned towards the counter, winking at me as he did so. He was strong and healthy, with broad shoulders and palms, and long fingers. When he brought a pen out and placed it on the felt pad on top of the glass, he made it seem as if the pen were a sacred object.
The boy came out with his exercise book and saw his father with the customer. Martin and the woman were deep in conversation, Martin’s brow furrowed with concentration as she detailed her father-in-law’s character for him. A tall man, with a widow’s peak. Imposing. Difficult.
I smiled at the boy and drew closer to him. ‘Perhaps I can help,’ I said.
The boy looked at me quizzically. ‘It’s physics.’
I nodded. ‘It’s been a while, but I can try.’
The boy was holding the book up against his chest protectively. He glanced across at his father. The woman was looking at paperweights now, shaking her head at the Baccarat antiques.
‘Too floral,’ she said.
‘My name is Samuel,’ I said to the boy.
‘Amos.’ The boy lay his book down on the counter. The page was open to a series of problems. He had worked through the first half-page of them, ticking each off with a faint pencil mark as he did so. He pointed to the next question, which asked him to calculate the acceleration of a billiard ball travelling at 1.5 miles per second that rebounded off the cushion, and then to determine the force the ball exerted on the cushion. ‘This one. I don’t understand: if the ball doesn’t change speed how can I calculate the acceleration?’
I bent over the book and read the question, slowly. I remembered, with a sudden and vivid flash, the smell of our physics teacher’s perfume mingled with the scent of chalk, and the cheap cotton of our school uniforms. The way she stood at the front of the room, with her hands folded behind her back, how she paused whenever she asked a question, weighing it up before answering. Her answers always measured and complete. She was like a physics equation herself: the perfect balance of force and exertion. She never gestured with her hands or paced unnecessarily around the room. She stood in the centre at the front of the room and spoke in a quiet, firm voice.
‘Well,’ I said. ‘I think that here you are meant to think of acceleration as a change in velocity, not necessarily a change in speed.’
‘Velocity?’ Amos glanced at his father.
‘Yes, a change in the vector. You need to use the vector impulse formula based on Newton’s second law.’
The boy leaned closer over the page, his face pained. He flicked back through the textbook until he found a chapter on Newton’s laws, ran his finger down the page, flicked forward another page. ‘Here! Newton’s second law states that the total vector sum of the forces on a body is equal to the rate of change of its momentum,’ he read. ‘So, I would use Impulse equals Average force times Time, which equals Mass times Change in velocity?’
‘I think so.’
‘Like this?’ He pencilled the formula into his exercise book, all triangles, arrows and letters. I nodded, a little lost now. ‘And –’
‘Amos,’ his father said, his voice gentle, his hand resting on the back of his son’s neck. ‘I’m sure Samuel hasn’t come here to do your homework.’
Amos shrugged and blushed. ‘He said he wanted to help.’
‘I did. I’m not sure I have.’
‘You did okay,’ Amos said.
Martin laughed and ruffled his son’s hair. ‘Off you go,’ he said. ‘I’ll help Sam and then we’ll have some lunch.’
‘I’m glad you came when you did,’ I said. ‘I think we were about to calculate the formula for existential confusion.’
Martin nodded. ‘I rarely know what he’s talking about. He shows me the questions: I just nod and read the question slowly, over and over. I don’t think he’s noticed yet that I don’t actually do anything more.’
‘He seems like a smart boy.’
Martin glanced at his son, who was up on his stool again, flicking pages, rubbing his forehead with the heel of his hand. ‘So,’ Martin said, ‘something for Odysseus?’
‘Oh,’ I said, flushing, shaking my head. ‘No. I mean, ordinarily, but …’
Martin waited while I mangled the words, thinking of Odysseus returning home, his body so ruined and torn that, contrary to Homer’s story, his old dog doesn’t recognise him. The scar by which Eurykleia might have known him had been weathered away. How could I say that Morgan was dead? Here, among the ranks of silver and rolled-gold fountain pens, the inkwells and the glass baubles, the smell of Christmas and paper and glue? I looked down at the counter: the thick, polished glass. I couldn’t remember how long I’d been standing there. The blush made my sunburn itch, the pulse jumping nervously in my throat. Martin watched me patiently. Finally, I nodded and he put together the usual parcel of notebooks, ink and paper. I stood at the counter watching his son, who had finished studying and was waiting for his father to take him to lunch, headphones in his ears, absent-mindedly kicking the wall beneath the bench with his heel. I counted out enough cash to pay for Morgan’s gift, including a little extra for the gift-wrapping Martin took great care over, folding and creasing the silver tissue paper, wrapping it in flat bands of white and brown ribbon. I placed the money on the counter and thanked him.
‘Is everything okay?’ he asked. ‘My son, he can be a little … he means well.’
‘It’s nothing,’ I said, shaking my head. ‘It’s not him. I just realised I’m late. I have to go.’
*
Like our high school physics teacher, Ana had the beauty of a long, complicated mathematical proof that I could follow only so far before I became lost. She was precise and complex. She never spoke without thinking, never moved without meaning to. There was nothing excessive or elaborate in her. She was pared back to the essential things. She was pure. I describe her as pure not because she was undamaged, or without blemishes, but because her body was literal. Actual. She had no need to exceed it. There was nothing abstract about her, nothing metaphorical. There was no deceit in the way she spoke. Nothing hidden. The way she moved was all about the movement of muscle over bones, the press of flesh on air. When she hauled wood or dived into the river, or walked beside me, her body demonstrated the beauty of the body’s form, how the structure of bones and muscles and sinews and nerves allowed both gross and fine movements. She made a line through the room as precise as the trajectory of the moon around its earth. She was the point, the edge, of that line.
When she walked towards me, everything else was shaved away – the world, the room – like a sharply scented, curling peel of wood falling from the block. Standing in the hallway, watching her enter the kitchen, put down her things, peer into my mother’s steaming pots, I felt a kind of terror. For a moment I saw her at a distance again, as a stranger might. Perhaps she didn’t see any future for us, perhaps she was already thinking of leaving, of going back to Europe. She turned and lifted her hair from her hot neck, smiled at me. A gesture of such terrible beauty I knew that, no matter how certain her leaving, I would continue moving towards her.
I watched her standing in the kitchen with my moth
er, helping her prepare Christmas lunch. My mother sat at the table with a piece of paper flattened before her. I knew that the paper smelled of cinnamon and oranges, and that she kept it tucked away somewhere secret throughout the year. She looked well – the pleasure of preparing an elaborate meal had put colour in her cheeks – but I could also see that she was weak, even though her last round of chemo had finished more than a week ago, and as she listed the ingredients for Ana to lay out on the table, I avoided thinking about next Christmas.
The turkey lay on the bench, having already been washed in cold running water and patted dry as tenderly as if it were a baby. My mother poured a glass of rosé, and handed it to Ana, instructing her to use it to rinse the bird’s insides.
My mother had cooked a turkey every year for us when we were boys. Rising before dawn to avoid the worst of the heat as she plucked and washed the bird, and prepared the stuffing. When we woke, it was to the mixed scents of lemon, bacon, oranges and frying onions, and the sound of Handel’s Messiah. Played quietly at first, but swelling a little, growing louder as the sun first pinked and then burned away the night sky.
The last Christmas before our father died, we were fourteen: gangly, awkward creatures hovering uncertainly between childhood and what lay beyond. We were young enough, still, to wake early on Christmas morning and tumble downstairs to the lounge room, heavy with the Christmas tree’s sparkling scent, to see how high our gifts were piled. To shake them and count them and weigh them in our hands impatiently. Our mother brought coffee and toasted brioche into the room, and our father lumbered over from the shed. Slowly, to tease us, he sat on the back deck and pried off his boots, pretending he had forgotten what day it was, though the cotton boxers he wore were bright red, and decorated with reindeer, and he was wearing a red, fur-trimmed hat.
We sat cross-legged on the floor and tore open our gifts. Wrapping paper and red and silver ribbon piled up around us. Our mother had bought us each new fishing baskets – woven wicker with leather straps. Packed inside them, in nests of red and green tissue paper, were new reels and line, and plastic boxes of hooks and sinkers. A copy of The Epic of Gilgamesh for me, and The Songs of Alcaeus for Morgan, both hardback books with the classical Greek facing off against the English translation. And most precious of all, in matching black leather boxes, were our Athenian owls. Ancient coins with Athena’s head printed on one side, and a tiny Minervan owl on the other. They were men’s gifts: precious objects unsuitable for small boys.