Shell

by Kristina Olsson

  They did write to their father. A year later a note in a grubby envelope, postmarked “Bedourie.” “We are fine and brown as nuts,” Jamie wrote. “We have learned to ride and fix fences. There is steak three times a week and jam tarts.” In Will’s ragged hand: “Da, there are ant hills big as houses. It is hot as blazes. I know how to cut balls off bulls.”

  Then another year later, two?—she couldn’t remember: a postcard from the coast. Somewhere north of Brisbane, all tinted blue sea and bathing beauties. It was hard to tell whose writing. But through the scrawl she could read she’d been wrong about Jamie; it was Will who was vulnerable after all, especially in a fight. A small misunderstanding with a ringer, the card said, Will’s wrist in a cast. When it mended they might make for Victoria. They were living on mangoes and fish.

  That was all. They didn’t know about their father’s accident, the stroke that had felled him, right there on the foundry floor. That she’d moved him to the care home and let the house go. If there’d been more cards or letters they would have gone to the dead letter office, she supposed, though for months she’d checked with the new tenants, collected notices and bills. When Menzies had brought in National Service, she’d begun to search for them in earnest: electoral rolls, telephone books. Queensland, Victoria. She couldn’t find them in the phone books, and of course they weren’t on the electoral roll. They were eighteen and nineteen then, not old enough to vote. To get a passport, buy a house or a beer. But they could be forced into army fatigues, she thought now, biting her lip. Given a gun to kill boys just like them, boys they didn’t know, had never seen.

  The ferry slowed. Voices rose and fell around her. Two men brought their palms to their hats, an orchestration of limbs. She looked up, and between half-heard words and phrases, in the shifting space between earth and sky, she saw it: the boys had been abandoned by them all. Mother, father, sister. Through death, grief, selfishness—in one way or another, they’d each disappeared, left them. Leaving was what her brothers knew. What they expected. She watched Manly materialize in the gloom. Of course, they wouldn’t bother coming home.

  From the ferry terminal she walked quickly towards the beach and the rectangle of redbrick flats on the hill. Sounds reached her through lace-curtained windows and thin walls: muffled conversations, music from a tinny radio, a child’s sudden cry. But when she turned the key in the back door of her flat, there was silence. Just the clock ticking in darkness. She hurried from one light switch to another, as if brightness and color might have their own sound, their own weight.

  Fluorescent tubes revealed rooms unchanged by the past few hours: there was the brief shock of crockery still cupped on kitchen shelves, photographs safe in their frames, records in their rack. They did not reassure her. She pulled off shoes and stockings, poured a drink. Took it to the back step, sat in its time-worn curve and peered into darkness.

  The night garden was thick with dreams. Beneath the earth, beneath the eyelids of birds, in the air that came like an exhalation from the sea. Pearl listened. It always felt closer at night, the slump and hiss of waves like an old man breathing. What did old men dream? Did they remake the past, did they weep in the night? Did they dream old lives, angels, the faces of those still unborn? She knew what her father would see in his sleep. Not angels but the faces of his boys as they played in the garden, ate their porridge, waved to him from the welfare’s black car. She’d watched him through the back window as he’d stood, staring, a hand extended as if the dusty tracks were a line he could pull to bring them back.

  She leaned forearms on knees, sipped scotch. Her head reeled with the stars.

  Where are you? She said it aloud to fix them in their flight, the galaxies of possibility. Looked to the Southern Cross: an old habit from childhood, her mother’s finger tracing its shape in the night sky. Alpha, beta. In her own lonely year at the convent, sleepless in a narrow bed, she had sought out the blue blaze of its most southern and brightest star. Acrux, Sister Jeanne had told her, and the name and the star became an obsession. Whenever she found it she could hear her mother’s voice.

  The alignment of words and stars. She straightened. Pictured the dark stone of the convent, wooden floors that reeked of phenyle. The pinched alabaster faces of nuns, their sour eyes. And Jeanne, the youngest, one of them but separate, as human and ordinary as the children. She read books, told stories, laughed like a drain. Covered for Pearl when she snuck off to see the boys. And then failed her when they ran.

  She tilted her head to the Cross, burning bright. Closed her eyes, wished on Acrux. Or was it a prayer? For absolution, for mercy. That’s really all we want, she’d read somewhere. Now it felt true. She opened her eyes to the merciless heavens and saw there was no choice. She would have to start with Jeanne.

  All night the shush and beat of the road. Axel lay in his bed and thought that maybe the human heart was pneumatic, a fist of rubber, no more fragile than the tires squeezing bitumen outside his window. But daylight unfurled him like a flag. He stretched his limbs beneath the sheet, spread his palms across his chest, the beat there relentless. Kaboom, kaboom.

  He rose early and walked to Circular Quay, where he could sit with coffee and thick toast and watch birds wheel above the ferries. The water gray at that hour and splintered with memory, shifting in currents, dangerous. There were unguarded moments when he felt it in his body: the pull of dark water. Of immersion. Of nothing but a liquid embrace, a return, back, back.

  He would emerge from these moments weightless. Lift his eyes, searching: a leaf would do, fine-veined. The press of air on his face. Or his hand on sandstone. Once, in the gardens, a ladybug, its miniature perfection. The tremble of the leaf beneath it brought him back to the world. His surviving self.

  He had arrived in Sydney as summer was tipping over. Even then, everything he saw or touched felt warm: each place, each sweep of landscape or seascape was mediated by heat and light, and his body moving through it. In that way, he thought, he saw with his skin, felt his way with his pores, open or closed to the elements and this light. He had lived in the dark for months of every year, among shapes hunched in snow, made new by it, and strange. This, Axel knew, had made him different. He thought of these people whose lives clustered around the harbor, their houses with open windows and doors and balconies, everything flung wide so they took great gulps of the world. The new opera house, even half-finished, expressed them perfectly, sails hoisted in currents of summer air.

  When he left Sweden, winter was conceding slowly to spring. The horizon a frail line of possibility once more in the early mornings. It was a fine string that tautened his dreams; he would stand at the window not knowing if he was awake or asleep. Outside the world was more than it could be, bigger than the day to come and the night just gone. Brimming.

  But he’d always loved autumn most, those days before the rain came and everything was drawn in crisp outline: slate on a roof, fronds on a pine tree, a woman’s eyelashes. The details of things. Before the obliteration of snow. His body felt like a child’s then. Unafraid. Limbs loose, feet and fingers prickling with questions. He took long runs through forest and field, climbed trees before their leaves fell, high enough to see the village, toylike, miniature. Figures moved around as if they were singular, not part of this big pattern. He would feel a shiver of pleasure, watching.

  On these adult excursions it was the child’s eye that surveyed and recorded, was imprinted with form and detail, the intricate curves and lines of the world. Once, surprised by rain as he wandered out of the forest, he ran to the bus shelter. Leaned against a post and watched fat raindrops smack onto bitumen. The realization sudden and sure: the glass candleholders his uncle had made were the precise shape of a raindrop exploding on the road, a liquid coronet. Surely it was every child’s desire to hold such a coronet in his hands, these two-second miracles splashed and strewn so extravagantly around him. To crouch and capture one, two, three in a curved palm before they died away. That, he saw then, was exactly
what his uncle Lars had always done in glass: translated the shapes of nature, its sculptural language and form.

  And so, in a different way, had Utzon. The thought leapt with the gulls from the rail of a ferry as he watched it tack a seam across the harbor. What more was this new structure than a lush shrub the architect was coaxing from the ground? Or shards of Copenhagen china? Like Utzon, Axel knew these shapes; he’d grown up with them, they were within him. Despite the newspapers, the grumblings in the street, the building had never seemed strange to him. Always it had reminded him of a bowl, newly shattered, and of birds. From the day he’d seen the model in Höganäs it had consumed him, beaten in his head like wings.

  Now, though he had been working at the site for a month, though he’d walked the same path to it every day, it still took him by surprise: the tremor of emotion as he rounded the quay and saw the sails arcing out of chaos. As if he’d come upon a rare and beautiful animal in a stark landscape. There was no Swedish word to describe this, no English word that he knew; it wasn’t as simple as “awe” or even “love.” It was the clutch at his heart as he lifted his eyes to its curves and lines. Its reach for beauty, a connection between the human and the sublime.

  He left the crusts of his toast to the pigeons and raised a hand to Yanni wiping tables inside the café. As he moved down the quay he passed other faces, familiar but unnamed, behind milkshake machines or piles of newspapers or flowers bunched in buckets. A spill of voices, a swell of leaves and petals in the strengthening sun. And now, something else on the periphery of his vision. A beat, an energy. There, behind the newsstand, words jagged into the air. They jerked sideways above a shifting sea of heads, placards held aloft to be read: “NO WAR,” “OUT OF VIETNAM,” “DON’T REGISTER.” The bodies moving beneath them at once languid and urgent, the faces smiling and snarling and smiling again.

  More placards appeared, more words. Loud voices bulged into the space in front of him. He dug his hands into his pockets and turned a shoulder to the looming crowd, pushed and edged through the noise rising around him like a tide. Grimaced as his foot crunched another—Shit, man! a girl yelled—but one more push and he was on their flank. He turned then, an apology half-spoken. Förlåt. But the girl was gone, already lost inside the march.

  Axel stood still. Sweat leapt from his pores. Jävlar! The curse mouthed rather than spoken as he breathed out, trying for calm. He tipped his head back, looked at the sky, wide and empty of trouble. His heart slowed. The moment passed. He released another breath and resumed his pace towards the point. He was, he realized, thinking in his own language. Every day he struggled to find meaning in this local form of English he was expected to use. Even alone in his workshed he fought with it, with words. Drawing, blowing, ideas spooling through loops and funnels of molten glass.

  It wasn’t just a matter of mechanics, of alphabet and grammar, or even habit. There was something less tangible at play, something about the imagination, about feeling. He had grown into his craft as much through language as he had through tools; had learned it at sentence level, thinking in simile and metaphor, using image and emotion. He had begun to understand this at his uncle’s side, this link between language and art.

  But symbol and metaphor were lost down here beneath the heavy hand of heat and lethargy and a vastness of sky and ocean and air. Beneath a particular attitude, he saw suddenly, one the protesters with their placards might sense: a kind of huddling around sameness, a retreat from risk and—despite the openness of air and sky—from exposure. He saw it plainly in the derision of Utzon in the papers, the growing clamor of voices mocking his vision. As if they were ashamed of a building that might reveal them, the soaring shapes of their dreams, the true interior of their hearts. As if they were afraid of grandeur.

  Now he stopped as he approached the security gate, and looked beyond it to Sydney Heads. Listened. The sound of incalculable distance rang in his ears. It whipped around the rock of the headlands, to him the spine of some giant sea creature, its flesh flayed by wind. Everywhere he looked in this place he saw what Utzon saw. The drama of harbor and horizon, of cliff and ocean, and at night, the star-clotted sky. It held the shape of the possible, of a promise made and waiting to be kept.

  How could such a place be named by this arid language then? The English he had studied at school had not prepared him for this country. Its sentences were without rhythm, flat, featureless. He understood well enough, the women especially, who spoke without guard. They were different from the women he knew at home. He wondered if it was a matter of sophistication or history or even weather, this difference. This leaning into or away from another’s sentences, or into or away from landscape, or surroundings. The things you were willing to reveal, what you were willing to hear.

  Sometimes he would stand on the quay and let the streams of people part around him like water, and he would listen. Words, phrases, perhaps a whole sentence—and I said to her she’d be a bloody fool—and he would try to hear what was there, what was in the words that made these people. Did their language make them feel a different way?

  Once, standing still in afternoon sun that slanted across the water, the moving bodies, he closed his eyes. And opened them to a vision: the new building lifting its wings above the land, the water, above all these heads that didn’t know, not yet, what it might say about them. How free they were to become who they were, or could be.

  He picked his way around the site to his workshed on the eastern side of the podium. Out of habit he bent his head, looking for imaginary obstacles; he needed these few minutes to isolate his thoughts. His early work in the glass shed was solitary; for Axel this was essential. But the elements demanded it too; the mysteries of fire and water and minerals could not be roused if there was a crowd. This had been his first lesson in glass: the maker had to exclude the world, forget even himself, sometimes. You have to be present but invisible, like your soul, his uncle had told him. Axel was just a boy then; he thought the soul was a ghostly twin that lived inside people, in the heart or the head, a shadow person. Later he would understand that for Lars, for the best of them, perfect glasswork was the shadowy twin. They were constantly in search of the soul.

  But that day, two decades before, the word fell into the dim air of the shed in Åfors and charged it, so that Axel felt as he did in an autumn field before a storm. Not afraid, but sensing its raw power, elementary, in the tips of his fingers and his feet. He looked for some clue in his uncle’s face, but it was unaltered, already turned to the forge. Axel did as he’d been told and retreated to a corner to watch and learn. To be invisible too.

  The shed had been assembled near the water, away from the routes taken by most workmen and the storage areas for roof components and steel. This pleased him. He’d rarely worked in close proximity to others, or under their scrutiny. That would come when the work had developed its form, when its physical requirements exceeded his own hands. Until then his needs were not extravagant, he’d told the site manager by telephone from Sweden those months before. Furnace and crucible pot to begin with, benches and tables and hooks. High-quality sand. A maver.

  Perhaps a desk and chair, he’d added after a moment.

  There was a grunt at the end of the line. It’ll be basic, the man said.

  But Axel could already feel the Australian sun at his back. That’s fine, he said, imagining light at the windows instead of darkness, glass pierced by the colors of the antipodes. He gathered his own favorite tools for luck, the clipping scissors and tongs he’d always used, and sent them ahead by ship.

  Now he unlocked the door and went to the back of the shed, to a small table set away from the furnace. This was for thinking and reading as well as drawing; he did not believe this piece of glass could be properly designed on paper. Rather he would sit with coffee and write down words and phrases, or sketch a thought in lines and angles. There were various objects he had found as he walked to work—a piece of twine, a hair ribbon, a corner ripped from an old street map. As wel
l as photographs of doorways, an advertisement for something called “brick veneer.” The city in various lights.

  He tacked all these to a sheet of ply beside the table, along with assorted press articles: a woman who quoted Shakespeare for a shilling outside the library, laborers in a tunnel at the Snowy Mountains Scheme, Jørn Utzon sailing at Pittwater. Someone on the engineering team—Jack Zunz?—had passed on various reference books: Australian art and topography; history, both terrestrial and maritime; even novels. This pleased him. He had learned during his years of study in Stockholm, and his work at Åfors and Kosta, that design was rarely the result of one stream of thinking, one tool, one dimension.

  Two years before, he had written Utzon a letter. Emboldened by praise for his own work in Stockholm and New York, Axel picked up his pen. I am a glassmaker from Småland, he wrote. My people, like yours, know water . . . Then he took a breath and made his offer. Six months later, a reply: I have seen some of your work, the architect wrote. Why don’t you come to Sydney? There was no concrete brief, but Axel knew what was required for the foyer of the major hall: the shape of an idea to match the opera house in its scale and its flight. A piece of art that might have its own presence or, like the building, transcend the possible, the partisan. Language itself.

  Now, though he had been in Sydney for weeks, there was still no contract between them; he had not even met the great man. Other architects dropped by, engineers, various foremen. The commissioned glass was mentioned only in abstract terms, in queries about the adequacy of the shed and the information he had about Sydney, about Australia, about the building and its history. There was an understanding between them all, he soon saw, that the glass project would stand alone. That it would be an accretion of observation and reflection. That Axel would render thought and impression as surely as a builder rendered a house.