Shell

by Kristina Olsson

  They both fell silent. At last Suze said: What about the protests?

  Who cares? Pearl meant it. In her whole body she could find no interest in the politics of the day, the machinations of dissent. She told Suze she’d let her know what she heard and hung up, then stood and went straight to Judith. Anger boiled beneath her skin, flushing away the nausea. I’m not well, she told her, and it felt true; she’d been lamed by the day and its potential. Judith examined her face over cat-eye glasses. You do look off, she said. And went back to her list. It’s nearly five. Go home if you’ve filed. Pearl threw a cover over her typewriter and left the building.

  The rule was, she would not call. If there was urgent reason, she knew where to find him: from Monday to Wednesday he caught the five-thirty train from Central; the bus at six from Macquarie Street on Thursday and Friday. He would always, he said, be five minutes early.

  She found him standing behind a pillar on the main platform. Anonymous in brown suit and narrow tie. She wound her way through the waiting crowd towards him, stood as close as she dared. Not a flicker of response in his body or his face. After a minute: The numbers, she said, looking at her shoes. The heels were scuffed. It’s personal. Then looked up and straight ahead.

  He turned his head away. Perused a poster for carpet shampoo on the pillar. The month? The words dissipating in the air like mist.

  Her own voice a whisper: February.

  No sign that he’d heard her, no twitch or nod. His face as blank as every other. She became aware of bodies moving, proprietorial, towards an approaching train; he joined the queue for the door and was gone.

  Two days that stretched to nothingness, in which every worst scenario was probable. She ghosted through them, alive only in the depths of research for Eleanor Dark or Kylie Tennant. Their extraordinary fortitude, their guts. Their open criticism of men and society, its treatment of women. At night she drank enough to ensure deep sleep, the sleep of the dead, her mother would say. Shrugging off headaches in the morning.

  Late on the third day she packed her files and checked with the wires reporter once again. Nothing. The phone rang as she approached her desk and she answered it in her peremptory way: Pearl Keogh. No embellishments.

  A vacuum that wasn’t quite silence. She didn’t realize she was holding her breath. The world shriveled to a bubble of air around the receiver, her hand gripping its curve, the ragged edge of a manila folder on her desk. Yes?

  His voice down the line then, reciting numbers. For the seconds it took she did not breathe. She knew this because when the phone clicked and buzzed she could feel only an ache in her chest, a pressure that released itself on the breath she finally drew. Sounds returned to her then, the hum of traffic, tack and ping of typewriters, the rush and pump of footfalls all through the working building. She bent her head, smiled without knowing, ran her hand over thighs and knees. As if she’d left her body for whole minutes and just returned. She breathed in again, out. Dialed Suze. There was no number for Jamie.

  Axel leaned on his elbow, his eye skimming the shed floor. Everything he had done to date seemed not irrelevant, perhaps, but out of place, out of time. The glass shapes he had toyed with did not speak to him, not in a language that resonated with thought and feeling. Not with this building, its place here, nor with its designer’s intentions as he knew them. It was early days but still, he had hoped for more. He began to think it was he who had lost his way, his awareness of necessary context and connection. There were days when he felt unmoored, without history; even without skill. He looked over the medley of experimental pieces in which he had tried to evoke the sky and the sea, the dreamlike freedom and limitation of horizons, and struggled with blueness, with light. He was, he knew, second-guessing the architect, terrified of his potential to fail. There was so much he didn’t know.

  A street map of Sydney was spread on the table at the back of his workshop. Axel folded it, pressing forefingers along creases, meticulous. The way to know a place, his mother had said, was with your feet, your legs. Even in winter. He could see her still, striding out where the snow was solid, skiing cross-country to drink coffee with a friend. Miles: she thought nothing of them. You should really taste that air, Anders, she’d say when she came back, as she shook her hair free of her woolen cap, took off her jacket. His father, in the corner chair with a book, would say nothing, but there would be the trace of a smile behind his pipe.

  It was late morning. He locked his workshed, the map in his hand. In his mind’s eye he could see his path: through the gardens, down to Woolloomooloo, up through Potts Point and around the bays—Elizabeth, Rushcutters, Double, Rose. Imagined shadows deepening through gardens and parks, the slant of sun on calm water. But as he pocketed his key and wandered through the site, stepping around steel and concrete, he was surprised by an almost empty forecourt, an odd absence of noise, and remembered the stop-work meeting. The draft, he’d been told the day before. To Axel’s blank face the laborer added, National Service. To get recruits for the army. He’d explained then: compulsory registration, the ballot for twenty-year-olds. Wooden marbles and birth dates. Vietnam. That word again.

  He wandered halfheartedly towards the Botanic Gardens gate and the gravelly sound of a loudspeaker. Part of him wanted to skirt around the men and keep walking, to breathe calmer air. But the ballot, the idea that a man’s fate could spin and drop in the hands of another: this made him pause. It wasn’t the notion of National Service; he had done his own, like every Swedish boy, unworried by the specter of war. This was different. He thought of the marbles he had played with as a child, the rough glass rolled between forefingers and thumb. A boys’ game but they came to it like colonels, each intent on a win. Each strike planned with precision.

  He slipped into the crowded circle of men. Their eyes were turned to a makeshift stage and the voice of a union organizer, his words made brittle by amplification. Not our war. Axel listened and tried to follow, glanced briefly around. Something in the tone of the meeting made him anxious. He tried but couldn’t locate its source; the sea of faces was alive with something he couldn’t catch, couldn’t access. He turned and began to edge his way out, murmuring an apology, his head down. At the crowd’s perimeter odd phrases rang out, a word, a low whistle. As he made open ground he briefly heard the union man more clearly. Reds under the beds—and a low roar in reply. It lodged in his ears, like the sound of an injured animal, frightened. He didn’t want to hear any more, but still words and phrases came to him, partial. We have no fight with . . . Any member who resists . . . It falls to us . . .

  The world around him shrank and concentrated. He stopped. It falls to us. More words came to him then, nearly twenty years old but clear enough. The task falls to us. All of us here. His father’s voice, singular among many, not in volume but in authenticity; he knew that even then. Even then, crouching in the attic where he wasn’t meant to be, looking for hidden Christmas presents. It filled his boy’s heart with dread.

  The same dark feeling churned in his chest now. Such words could be dangerous. The weight of them, the responsibility. He hurried on into the Botanic Gardens, shutting out all but the vault of sky and trees, his eyes searching out one perfect shape to calm him, one thing of beauty. The harbor intricate behind thatched branches. The line of a hill, consoling as a breast or hip against his own. He loved these gardens, the sweep of grass, the great knotted figs. Paths between plants so wild he might have dreamed them. Bird-of-Paradise, Dragon Tree, Cabbage Tree Palm.

  More than once the shape of a shrub, an alignment of leaves, returned him to infancy; he wanted to crawl beneath them, look out at the world from their safe harbor. All his life, this allure of enclosed spaces. He’d tacked clumsy shelters into trees, into corners of the garden, the space between his dresser and his bed. Had emptied his wardrobe once, folding himself into it to read. He’d heard his father telling a friend it wasn’t so odd, not at all. Didn’t we all want the womb again? Invisibility, secrecy. The watery echo of our own
heartbeat, unassailable.

  Axel remembered these words too: spoken lightly, so that no one could guess their true weight. Six months after, his father was gone. Had disappeared, turned invisible, become his own secret. But not to Axel. These years later, he still sifted the clues in his head, all the stones his father had dropped for him. Water, the letter A. Anders, Axel, America, Argentina, Australia. The whole arc of the world. He would lie on the beach at Manly, the thud of surf in his ears, knowing the same sounds were felt by someone on the west coast of America. So that the great Pacific Ocean linked rather than separated them. He imagined the figure of a man, his feet in the sand, one hand raised to shade his eyes, backlit by the glow of California.

  When he came back to himself there was an urgency in him, in the wind through the great fig trees and the percussive flap of leaves. He knew he would have to change his plans. He checked his wristwatch, strode down to Macquarie Street and into the city; was on a bus within ten minutes. He spread his map across the empty seat beside him. The coast around Sydney: its multiple points and headlands like fingers of seaweed floating out into the water. North of the harbor, there were roads that ribboned between beaches, the villages like loose beads. He leaned in close: as if the boatshed he sought might be marked, as a town hall might be, or a cathedral. A place of importance. But of course there was nothing to be seen.

  The first time he’d made this journey he’d had to ask the most basic questions: bus routes, directions, times. He made inquiries at work, his face composed, unaffected, about places to swim, points of local interest, proximities. In the end it had taken hours from the time he’d left the Mercantile. He’d finally reached Palm Beach in the middle of the afternoon, too late. He’d stopped at a snack bar at the edge of the sand and was met with wide smiles and shrugs when he asked about Utzon.

  Now the bus ducked and weaved through the streets of the northern beaches. He ticked them off on his map: Queenscliff, Harbord, Curl Curl, Dee Why, Collaroy, Narrabeen, Mona Vale. As the bus emptied he kept his finger firm on the wavelike pattern, moving it carefully: Bungan, Newport, Bilgola. Nearly there. He lifted his eyes to the horizon now, assembling a picture in his head. Avalon. Whale Beach. This horizon, these trees: this is what Utzon saw, what Utzon heard, what he smelled every day. The bus lurched, stopped. Palm Beach.

  He walked about in dazzling sunlight. The air was granular, salt and sea spray. The usual cafés, a fruit shop, a window of bikinis and floppy hats. Nearer to the beach the smell of pies, hamburgers frying, suntan oil; a mix peculiar to him but not offensive. It seemed to belong to the shining young bodies queuing for food and milkshakes, or lounging on the sand, watching the surf.

  The beach itself was a long crescent, curved to a rocky headland, its lighthouse a white smudge against blue. Houses clung to the hill directly behind the beach. But there were no boathouses. How could there be? The sea was like a hungry monster here, clawing at the shore to fill its empty belly. He stopped a sea-slicked young man with a surfboard under his arm. Again, the smile, the shrug. Sorry.

  The sun was fierce; his scalp pricked with heat, his feet tender on blazing sand. He bought a soft drink in a green bottle at the beach snack bar and wandered up and down. Looking for hidden inlets where a boatshed might be, tucked out of sight, out of the public eye. There were many tall palms that might conceal something, but on close inspection didn’t. Perhaps it wasn’t a boatshed after all: how could a group of architects work in one of those? Finally, he went back into the village and asked: Mr. Utzon, his office. He’d been working there for months. Blank faces, one after the other. He sat on the grass near the beach. Watched low waves slump to shore.

  In Hellebæk he could feel the man, at least. He’d gone looking for Utzon’s home in the tiny Danish village, again without directions or address, knowing only it had been built near a forest and a lake. That the house lay low against the earth, sat lightly, hovering. White paint and glass. He would know the architect’s house when he saw it, he was sure of that. He already understood its shape, its lines.

  That whole area was so much like the countryside at home in Sweden. The forests of birch and old pine, the tides of leaves. Low wooden houses, birds circling. The sound of wind and water, water everywhere, the land a thin skin over an invisible sea. And in the end it didn’t matter that he didn’t find the man there. He saw him everywhere, walking in the woods, by the bulrushes edging the lakes, at his drawing desk. Drinking coffee, playing with his children.

  It was the same in Helsingør, a short train ride away. From the waterfront Axel had stared at Kronborg Castle, the way it seemed to float above the water of the promontory, clouds roiling over its bulk. He’d tried to see it as Utzon had, imagining his opera house. As Shakespeare had, imagining Elsinore. The somber stone and turrets were solid, immutable, but when they were softened by clouds its scale became more human. He’d shrugged, as Utzon might have. Hamlet, after all, was just a man.

  When he’d finally seen the plans for Sydney’s opera house, the early photographs of the building in construction, the shape of the harbor and Bennelong Point, he had thought: of course. He is the only architect for this project, this place.

  Home from Åfors for a weekend after the results of the competition were announced, he told his mother about it, about the extraordinary design, that the winning designer was Danish. He was in the kitchen, brewing coffee, slicing cheese.

  What is his name? she asked from the sitting room, reading before the fire she had lit that morning. Outside, the world was muffled and thick with snow. I haven’t heard the news for days.

  Utzon, he said, lowering a tray onto the small table and settling down beside her. Jørn Utzon. He bit into an open sandwich, dropped a sugar cube into his cup.

  His mother looked over at him, frowning. Utzon? She sipped coffee. I wonder if it’s the same one.

  Axel raised his brows. Held a piece of salami out for Aldous.

  But she was staring at him, saying, Are you sure it’s Jørn Utzon? Is he young, still in his thirties? When he nodded she smiled and picked up her coffee. Then it must be. Your father and I knew him. Briefly.

  When? The question like a cry, so that Aldous lifted his head. Something in Axel’s voice had galvanized him, but he settled to sleep again. Axel cleared his throat noisily, coughed, his hand to his mouth. Bones in the cheese. He smiled. I meant, did you meet him here?

  She lay her hand on his shoulder. It’s a long time ago, Axel. Jørn did some work with the Danish Brigade. They were smuggling Jewish people out of Denmark. You won’t remember. She paused, thinking. He was working in Stockholm then, in an architectural office. Copenhagen was occupied; he couldn’t practice there.

  He looked at her over his coffee, trying for calm. She said: We didn’t work with him directly, not Anders and me at any rate. But we liaised with the group. He was very young, in his early twenties. We met him only a couple of times. But I remember the intelligence in his eyes, in his face. She held the cup in the fingers of both hands. And so now he’s going to be famous?

  They had settled to their afternoon then, the books and newspapers he’d brought. Occasionally one would read something aloud to the other, make a comment on this or that, the light silence lifting and falling in the room like a curtain billowing from a window. His mother looked forward to these times more than anything, he knew; these weekends in his company, the conversation, books, the comfortable quiet. It was a mutual joy.

  But gradually, as he sat there, he was seized by an anxious energy. His head alive with an insect buzz. It alarmed him at first; he tried hard to disguise it, finding more snippets to amuse her from the newspaper, teasing out her reactions so he didn’t need to talk. He didn’t much trust his voice. When the coffee pot was empty he fell upon it gratefully, went to the kitchen for more. None for me, älskling, his mother called, so he filled his own cup and added a measure of akvavit.

  In the sitting room he picked up a book of poetry in German from a pile on the table. Rilke.
Within ten minutes the words and the akvavit had taken effect, and the urge to flee the house, to find Jørn Utzon, had gone. But in the following months, in the years of his apprenticeship, he sought out every project Utzon had drawn, read everything he could find about the man. When he discovered the architect was immigrating to Australia with his family for the years of the opera house project, he knew what he had to do.

  But now he couldn’t imagine Utzon on Palm Beach. There was no correlation; it wasn’t the same. Gulls strutted and cried, the air crisped over water that was constantly changing. The shore shifted, slid away with the tide. He linked his fingers around his knees. He might never find the place Utzon worked in. But he knew the architect well enough; he would prefer to be out, by the sea, walking on the headland, noting every curl and fist of foliage, bending to new shapes in leaf and flower, looking not at the ocean itself but through frames of branches and boughs at the splintered blue. He saw the whole through the partial. Everything mediated by its frame, leaving imagination to do its work. He loved him for that.

  In the late afternoon he stood and brushed sand from his trousers. Walked to the bus stop and was not unhappy.

  On the journey back a man sat across from him, bent his head politely, went back to his newspaper. Axel leaned across the narrow aisle. I hear the architect of the opera house has a boatshed out here, he said, a kind of working office.

  The man lowered his paper. Yes, he said. Not at Palm Beach itself. It would have to be the around the other side, at Pittwater. Lots of boatsheds around there.

  Axel nodded and smiled. Turned to the window. So, he thought. Yes. It made complete sense.

  How much had she drunk? Days later, Pearl would remember the dizzying mix of beer and something sparkly, thrown down fast in joy and relief while they sat in the ladies’ lounge at the Federal. Two hours later, the surprise of unsteadiness, an unfocused walk to the bar, where she ordered a jug of water to stave off embarrassment and the stupefying tears that threatened, sudden, unforeseen.