The Prosperous Thief

by Andrea Goldsmith

  Raphe, too, is looking.‘This always reminds me of a crematorium,’ he says.

  Her response is sharp. ‘Don’t bring your Holocaust here.’ And quieter,‘I want to see this place as it is.’

  Immediately his fury rises. Who is she to be angry? Who is she to tell him what to do? For unlike her he doesn’t have the luxury of choice when and where to think of the Holocaust, no choice at all since he found out about her father and his grandfather, no choice since he learned justice doesn’t have a use-by date. Indeed if not for her father, the haunting of his entire life might never have occurred. And he’s back in his familiar groove, even here flying over Kilauea he’s counting out his wrongs. And if he were to avenge Martin Lewin’s murder, avenge it in this place – ‘She slipped,’ he would tell the authorities.‘Didn’t listen to my warnings.’ – would he feel any better? Would he feel liberated? Righteous? Relieved? Would he feel he had done the right thing? As he gazes at the terrors of this landscape, he senses more strongly than ever the two people who comprise him. His Martin side might for the first time be calmed if Laura were made to pay for her father’s sins, but the Raphe side would be horrified. And again the familiar resentment, again the desire to live his life without the righteous clamouring of the dead.

  They are flying over the main tube towards the sea where the lava empties in a furious cloud of white steam and a scattering of rock. Raphe shakes off his thoughts. He wants today off. He’s flying over his favourite volcano and he wants it simple, just for today.

  ‘That’s much bigger than when I was last here,’ Raphe now says, referring to the lava bench formed where the molten lava discharges into the sea.

  Although not as big as it was, according to the pilot.A month or so earlier a parcel of the cliff had broken off and disappeared into the ocean.

  ‘I wouldn’t want to be standing on that,’ says Laura. And yet that’s exactly what Raphe is imagining. Laura Lewin standing on the lava bench, and suddenly it breaks off and she disappears into the turbulence.

  ‘What’s wrong?’ Her hand is on his arm, she’s staring into his face.‘I wouldn’t return to those thoughts,’ she says.‘They’re clearly not good for you.’

  The helicopter is heading inland again towards Kupaianaha shield, the second eruption site but quiet now for many years.

  ‘It’s like huge billowing black blisters,’ Laura says of the smooth bulges of cold pahoehoe lava in the treeless landscape. ‘And a sense of devastation and creation all at the same time.’

  Raphe hears the wonder in her voice. It is exactly how he feels. Life and destruction side by side, and an energy that swells and enters you like a magical, life-giving elixir. He is always seized by the marvel that is this place.

  And perhaps that might explain the mood of the evening.You simply cannot gaze at a volcano and be untouched by either the volcano or your companion. Back at the bungalow, they prepare dinner together. They linger over the meal, plenty of good food and wine with old blues crackling in the background. And he doesn’t know quite how it happens, but one moment they are talking together, and the next she is turning up the volume and moving to the music, her eyes closed, her head flung back. And he, too, is on his feet, and the beat is billowing through him and the heat is flushing his skin, his feet tripple like piano keys, he sways with her, he mirrors her movements, their hands are entwined, her breath hits his face, the hot flicker of touch, the two of them turning and turning and turning again on and on until the music finishes. And in the sudden silence they remain clasped together, still moving gently to the beating in their bodies and the echoing music.

  She pulls away first. ‘What a great partnership we make,’ she says with a smile.

  He quickly collects himself, returns her smile without, he hopes, revealing the embarrassment he feels, and applies himself to the cleaning up.

  With the room tidy, the glasses washed and put away, it is time for bed.

  ‘Don’t be silly,’ she says when he starts to move bedding into the living room.‘We’re both grown-ups.’

  He decides to accord her a commonsense he does not himself feel and they prepare for bed quickly. She chooses her side, which fortunately is not his side, they say goodnight before hopping into bed and the lamps are immediately extinguished. He lies as far from her as possible. She falls asleep within minutes – so much for her tales of being an insomniac – while he lies awake trying to shut his mind to the sinewy music and the slow synchrony of their dancing bodies. He tells himself to ignore her presence, doesn’t want to feel her so close, stuffs his mind with diversions: a list of currently active volcanoes, a list of students in his classes last semester, a list of the students in his college graduation class. Finally, irritated beyond belief and no closer to sleep, he lets his thoughts settle, not with Laura, but with the man who brought him here, his long-dead grandfather who seems more in control of Raphe’s actions than is Raphe himself.

  So, Grandfather, I’m here, and the girl’s with me. Death in a myriad of costumes is in easy reach. I hear the bell tolling, it’s pay-up time and I don’t know what to do.

  And for his pains? No clear direction, just the ever-present squeezing of his guts and a voice of conscience Raphe cannot locate. It’s times like this, he is thinking, that God would be useful, an authoritative voice from the dark with a prescription for action. But there’s no one to help him, the quest is his alone. Who is he fighting though? And what is he defending? He seems locked into his old thoughts, his old beliefs, in a way, it suddenly occurs to him, not dissimilar to a religious fundamentalist. It is not a happy thought: Raphe Carter, fundamentalist Holocaust survivor once removed. Yet it seems inescapable. He walks the same groove over and over, and the groove becomes deeper, and the walls, the walls he creates himself, grow higher. He imagines only what he has imagined numerous times before, and his imaginings, although so clear and certain, take him nowhere. And beyond these walls of his making? It hardly bears thinking about. He’s set firmly within the concrete of his mind.

  If he stretches his arm across the bed, he can touch her. He is as close to Laura Lewin as was her father to his grandfather, and soundly sleeping, she is just as vulnerable. He looks at her, this woman who cut her teeth on her mother’s grief, and touches her lightly. She shuffles in her sleep and he withdraws his hand. With the feel of her on his fingers, it occurs to him that far from being his enemy, she might actually be his providence. But the thought is so alien, that in the same way the immune system gathers itself against foreign microbes, so too his old thoughts against this frail new possibility.

  The night hours slog on with Raphe wandering through his conflicts until he has completely lost his way. He fears he will hold on to his pain until the last drop in the glass. Again he reaches across and touches Laura on the warm sleepy skin of her shoulder, again she shuffles, but this time he does not withdraw his hand.

  In the morning when he awakes, she is curled against him, her head resting on his shoulder. She is gently snoring. He rolls her out of his arms and she opens her eyes.

  ‘You purr,’ he says.

  She smiles, ‘That’s what Nell used to say when she still loved me.’And leans across – he wishes she wouldn’t – and pecks him on the cheek.‘And you,’ she says, ‘talk in your sleep.’

  He is frantic, what on earth could he have said?

  ‘Everyone has their secrets,’ she says, smiling. ‘And you’re entitled to yours.’

  Later in the morning they are standing at the rim of Halemaumau crater, a huge quarry-shaped pit at the top end of the caldera, with steep, sulphur-stained slopes. And everywhere are steaming fumaroles puffing their heat and energy into the air. There is a rim, like a watermark, high on the sides marking the level of the boiling lava lake which once filled the crater. Here is the heart of the vast Kilauea volcano, this is Pele’s home. And this year, next year, in ten years time the lava will again ooze out of the ground and fill this vast pit.

  Laura stares into the huge gaping s
pace: it is marvellous, quite marvellous, with a wild singing energy; it makes her feel strange and wonderful. There are some people, she finds herself thinking, who derive a sense of belonging, of continuity, by reminding themselves of the familiar. They touch the gate each time they arrive home, and the doorframe, they run their fingers across a bench or over a banister, a range of actions to remind themselves that things are as they ought to be. And when they travel they return to the same places to tread familiar pavements, visit familiar shops, stay in the same hotels. As she gazes down into the vast, other-world of the Halemaumau crater, it occurs to her she used to be that sort of person. But no more. Life is fragmented, no point in denying it. Life is uncertain and that is that. And nothing, nothing is forever. The thought fills her with a quiet exuberance. She glances across at Raphe; he keeps coming back here, so he too must feel the power of this place. Yet with his furrowed brow and the gloomy set of his mouth, it is hard to know what he is experiencing.

  All those months ago when they shared a picnic together on a wintry beach he had described himself as saturnine. I could teach you happiness, she had thought then, and in her gratitude for all he has done, she would still like to, although it occurs to her that happiness may not be on his agenda.

  His hand is on her arm: if they are to make it across the caldera and back, he says, they had better begin. She turns to him, startles him with a hug, and the two of them set off.

  A couple of hundred metres from the rim of Halemaumau crater they begin their descent into the Kilauea caldera. There is a sign:‘Thin crust – keep to trail’.

  ‘How thin?’ she asks Raphe.

  He turns to her and he’s not smiling.‘Best not to test it,’ he says.

  As it happens, the trail is nonexistent, just a way marked by stone cairns through the lava-clad landscape. The paradox strikes immediately. Cairns, which she has always associated with death, are marking a safe passage through one of the most lethal landscapes on earth. She treads carefully, the solid pahoehoe flow, like smooth interlocking carapaces from a distance, is far rougher, far more organic up close. Some parts are like solid black slabs of liver, others like hard ropy swirls of intestine, and all of it is curved and sensual and infused with a silvery, oily sheen. Carefully she climbs and descends the bulging ground.

  The wind is furious across the caldera floor and the sun very hot. There is no shelter whatsoever. She walks this blackened cracked landscape, this volatile not-quite-comprehensible landscape, and despite being racked through with its marvels, it is Laura who is now reminded of the devastations of the Holocaust.

  She looks ahead at Raphe. She is sure he, too, has made the same connection, yet finds it perplexing that with all his miserable fixations, he has arrived at so few understandings. It’s like being caught in the eye of a storm with no awareness of where you are and consequently no desire for escape. How else could it be possible to dwell on the same issues for years and years and not resolve them?

  He is waiting for her to catch up. He is standing at a long, smoothly sculptured fissure.‘Look,’ he says as soon as she joins him. ‘Look how deep it is.You can’t see the bottom.’

  The jagged edges of the crack run neatly and precisely parallel. She looks down. About a metre below the surface, and clinging greenly to a small barren ledge, is a fern.

  Raphe sees the darkness, while she sees the fern.

  It’s a small miracle in the devastation of this landscape. She files it in memory, turns away and continues across the hard lava.You see what you want to see, you think what you want to think. How guarded had been her thoughts about her father, how guarded her thoughts about Nell. But even within these limits and despite having just been betrayed by the love of her life, she is happier than Raphe. She feels his undercurrent of misery even here, the earth boiling beneath his feet, a place with so much life but none of it touching him. She is sorry for him, wants to insert herself behind his eyes and show him what there is to be seen.

  Later, when they are back at the bungalow Raphe is quiet and withdrawn. Laura makes several attempts at conversation, but he is shut off from her.‘Frozen’ is how he would put it, and nothing he can do about it. He pours them both a glass of wine, is wondering how he will get through the evening, when she leaves the room and returns a moment later with a volume of poetry. It is a collection of the Russian poet, Anna Akhmatova.

  Laura begins to read, poem after poem addressed so personally to a series of people Akhmatova had loved and most often lost, and to a country she had similarly loved but refused to give up. Poems written during a time when each day was a struggle for survival. There are moments when her voice wavers and he finds himself envying her. He knows why she is reading these poems, but it isn’t so easy for him to reach for a book and through someone else’s sufferings settle his own pains. He simply cannot see how to use this Russian woman’s poems to still his own demons as Laura clearly has done. So he gives up trying and turns his attention to Laura instead. He listens to the melody of her voice, he studies each of her features, he studies the whole, he engraves her every movement on his mind. Laura reads Akhmatova and Raphe reads Laura.

  By the time they go to bed he feels at peace. And as she lies next to him asleep, he makes himself envisage a different set of Laura imaginings than his old revenge narratives. If he would only let her, he tells himself, perhaps she could quieten his storm.

  The room is lit by a near-full moon. He shifts to the edge of the bed in order to observe her better. She sleeps in a patch of light from the window, lying on her side and facing him. Her hair is knotted on top of her head, wisps curl about her face and down her neck. There’s a slight sheen to her skin, her eyes flicker behind the lids. He moves closer, runs his forefinger down the fine skin on the side of her face, from her left temple down to her jaw, his fingertip on that utterly soft skin. It’s a caress he hasn’t dared imagine since their walk together in the Australian bush all those months ago, too much a betrayal of his grandfather.

  Her eyes open, he snatches his hand away. In the faint light he sees she is smiling. A moment later he startles at the touch of her hand on his neck. The tips of her fingers stir his hair, sparks slither down his spine, and then she is guiding him towards her. It’s like sinking into pillows, her lips soft yet tensed, and moving so surely and taking him with her, like dancing, he is thinking.And he gathers her up, a shudder as he feels her full loose breasts beneath herT-shirt, and is kissing that sweet wet mouth, eking out the moment, not wanting to finish. Finally she draws away, and with a sigh, burrows into his shoulder and falls back asleep.

  Raphe is wide awake, he can hardly believe what has happened. But soon the satiety of a moment ago, of that utterly enveloping shut-out-the-rest-of-the-world kiss is replaced with the hungry retrospective gaze of wanting more, of not remembering exactly how it felt, of not attending to this or that – her breath, her taste, her hand as it moved, did it move? – and in his dissatisfaction over that ever-so-fleeting satisfaction, a desire which swarms through him and has him clasping her against him as she sleeps. His hand is in her hair, her body lies loosely against his, he leans into her, breathes in the smell of her and, impossible to explain these things, but suddenly his conflicts melt away and the future emerges with an amazing new narrative. She is his future, and not in the way he had previously thought: Laura Lewin is his salvation.

  So many years absorbed by his grandfather, so many years stifling in the same scenes, and all he has to show for it is his own blackened self. It is as if he has been charred by his own imaginings, and no one, not one single person has benefited. But Laura offers another way. She is his salvation, and must realise it too. Her lips told him, her kiss told him. She must realise it too.

  Hours later he has worked it out. Hours later he has played and replayed the life they will make together. He has never felt this alive; the old groove of his grandfather’s rights and demands has been filled by this astonishing new story.Through their own lives, Laura and he will make amen
ds for the wrongs of the past, and they’ll do it together.At last he sees the purpose of his grandfather’s haunting, at last he understands why his grandfather is now silent. He knows what do. It makes sense, it makes such perfect sense.

  He feels both calm and excited as he lies close to Laura, turning the possibilities in his mind. And when finally he falls asleep, it is a deep and peaceful sleep. He awakes late; the sun is already quite strong and he can hear Laura rustling about in the kitchen. He quickly pulls on some clothes and soon is sitting in the kitchen ready to talk. He has barely begun when the telephone rings. It’s the commission for Laura with an urgent problem only she can solve. It occupies the next four hours and, as soon as it is resolved, Laura is eager to be started. Their plan is to hike over the lava bench to the point where the molten lava enters the ocean.

  Raphe tries to hold her back, he is bursting to speak.‘There’s no point in leaving too early,’ he says.‘You won’t be able to see the lava until after dark. And there’s no shade, not a place to be lingering on a warm day.’

  He is so excited about his plans, their plans, everything else pales in comparison. And at last he can tell her what happened outside Belsen all those years ago, because it doesn’t matter any more. It doesn’t matter any more, he can hardly believe it. By being together they will atone for the past in a simultaneous apology and act of forgiveness. It makes sense to him in a way the revenge option never did. But Laura won’t stay still, she wants to be started, a close-up view of flowing lava and she doesn’t care if she can’t see it clearly, she doesn’t care if she gets sunstroke. So an hour earlier than he planned they are in the car and driving the Ring of Craters Road. As for speaking with her, he’s waited so long for his peace, another few hours won’t make any difference.

  The Ring of Craters Road curves and winds down towards the sea through a permanent display of the recent eruptions of this mighty volcano. In many places the lava has flowed over the road and has had to be cut away, so they find themselves driving between low bulbous canyons of lava. Eventually the road disappears entirely beneath a huge flow.Now the lava clads the ground ahead of them as far as the eye can see, and in the distance their destination: a cloud of ash and steam where the current lava flow hits the sea.