Shell

by Kristina Olsson

  It might have been minutes. So when her voice came: Axel? he turned slowly to her and it might have been his mother’s voice, his mother’s arm raised languidly, the fine wrist. Her eyes opened onto his. Let’s go upstairs.

  Now he regarded the man beside him and wondered. Had he been waiting for the same invitation? Surely, he thought, he wasn’t her type. He watched Ray wander away towards the kitchen. Stood still to locate himself in the myriad conversations, the battery of words, all mixed with music from another room. He saw a space beside a long window and took refuge there, leaning against the sill. Drank a glass of beer, fast. And thought, if I had been born to this language, would it have sounded so comical? His breath a gray circle on the glass.

  He had seen Pearl only from a distance. Or rather, heard her. Strained to pick out phrases, a sentence, but instead her words at the graveyard came to him, sharp and sudden: My brothers have joined the army. He hadn’t pursued it, conceding to her own questions that day. Stupid, stupid. No doubt she was talking about it now, with these people who seemed so different to him, careless, confident. He poured a second drink and was halfway through it when another man swerved towards him out of the haze. Axel was unsettled by whiskey and beer, stronger than he was used to, but even so he could tell this man was completely, utterly drunk. His eyes. Like raisins in dough, his mother would say, but oily somehow, damp. He clutched a drink in one hand, the fingers of the other crooked in his belt. Were they? Hard to tell behind the swell of his belly. A word accompanied him as he approached, one Pearl had used the day before: belligerent.

  Pearl’s mate. An accusation. He tipped back his glass. Swiss, eh? Or Siberian. Don’t suppose it matters.

  Axel weighed the words. They were deliberate. At that moment the alcohol sharpened his view; he knew precisely what the man intended. So he merely looked at him, inclined his head. A smile began and ended.

  Or did she say Danish? They’re in vogue now. He coughed out a laugh. But maybe not for long.

  The man hadn’t introduced himself. I’m not sure what you mean, Axel said.

  Your countryman, isn’t he? The great architect. He was trying to look Axel in the eye. Failing. On the nose now. He swayed, turned to the window, gestured with his glass. Beer tipped, slopped onto the floor. All that fucking money, and my kids jammed thirty-odd to a classroom. Bloody queues at the hospital— He stopped, lowered his glass. I’ve never even heard a bloody opera.

  Axel fought for civility. I don’t think the architect jammed up the classroom. His mouth refusing the j.

  But there was Ray suddenly beside him again, so that Axel wondered if he’d been there all the time. You right, Brian? His hand on the other man’s shoulder.

  Brian’s head flopped forward. Talking a bit of politics to Switzerland here.

  Sweden. Ray looked to Axel. You’re talking to Sweden.

  Brian’s face jerked on his neck. That’s it. Glass man. Then his eyes narrowed. Well you’re clever, Sweden, you know what you’re doing. No wars for you, eh. His voice like gravel now, the words deformed. He raised his beer to Axel. Here’s to you. He tipped the drink towards his mouth, lowered it. Back in a minute, he said, pulling away from Ray’s hand.

  Axel saw his chance to leave. But Ray was talking, his voice steady. Yeah, here’s to you. Here’s to not takin’ a side. Being neutral. Or is it neutered? Whatever he’d imbibed earlier had left him, his face clear now, his tone even. He raised his glass, drank, pressed his lips together.

  Axel wasn’t sure if he was expected to answer. He put down the glass he’d been holding for an hour and made ready to go. But Ray was still talking.

  You make glass.

  Again, his voice impossibly even. Though Axel was tired, dulled by whiskey, he could hear the false note. He tilted his head again, questioning.

  Glass is kind of neutral too, Ray said. Don’t you think? He glanced to the window, a bland rectangle. It’s kind of. Nothing.

  The insult was subtle, allowing several possibilities. But there, in the man’s eyes, there was only one. So when Axel spoke, his own voice matched Ray’s. Bland, ingratiating. No, not at all, he said. In fact, the opposite. It’s one of the solidest things I know.

  Nah. His mouth a gentle grimace. But he kept eye contact. It’s the absence of something. Like silence.

  But Axel knew something about silence. About new snow, and ice that held the memory of sound. Silence isn’t absence, he said, taking a step away. Not a lack, not something missing. The words, and his memory, making him brave. As he moved off he looked back and smiled. There was a mild pity in it. For the man, his double-talk. You think the whole of Sweden was a vacuum?

  Ray allowed one beat, one second to pass, so Axel’s words reverberated softly between them. Then: I’m saying it was mute, he said.

  By the time he reached the door a familiar chill had entered his chest, his bones. He felt it as color, white and ice green. Hard. Then he felt her hand on his shoulder. Mr. Jansson. And turned to her wine-washed eyes. Her voice through an odd smile: Leaving? He could not detect an invitation to stay.

  His own voice was steel. His body stiff. He did not move though she was very close to him; her hair smelled of smoke and something else. Acrid, like stale aftershave. You people, he said. And stopped, foiled by language. All this talk of war, the Americans, what they do. But you are all thieves. The words calm, a quiet detonation. You stole a country too. You are all . . . He pressed his lips together, searching without result.

  He turned then, dug his hands in his pockets, stepped into the night. As he reached the gate he heard her. Hypocrites, she said. The gate squealed as he closed it behind him. Yes, he wanted to say. You annihilated a culture. You let it happen. But he knew he’d be speaking into thin air.

  Pearl woke to glass splintering. Was it? Her body was curled into an S on an armchair; her right foot was numb. The party was over and the lights dimmed, but there was a hum of voices from the kitchen, plates being stacked. Bottles dropped carelessly in a bin. She slipped her shoes off and rubbed the tingling foot, checked for handbag and scarf. Stepped like a thief to the front door and slipped out.

  Her stomach flipped around. In her mouth an acrid taste, sour lemon or worse. She raised her arm as a cab rounded the corner, and as the door opened she remembered the kiss. What he’d said: Got a car outside. We could park somewhere. John, putridly drunk. He kissed her and she’d let him, and then told him to go home. I am home, he’d laughed, and went to find Bridget out the back.

  She managed the ride to Manly without asking the driver to stop. Then vomited helplessly against the back fence of the flats, clutching brick. Groaned as her stomach emptied and blades of memory pierced her head: the anger, the regret. One drink for the losses, ten more for the sacrifice. Hadn’t she loved that newspaper, given it everything she had? The boys. Her politics. There’d been no fair exchange. She was imprisoned in the women’s section, the boys were lost, and she couldn’t march or stand publicly with her comrades. Couldn’t speak. She finally stood upright and wiped her mouth. Axel’s words throbbed in her head. She had been made mute.

  The forecourt was chaotic with steel and machinery and pieces of a building slowly finding its shape. Axel crouched in the shade and watched. Every day now he walked from Woolloomooloo to Bennelong Point to do this, to watch and listen, and the scale and intricacy of the work made his breathing change. Every movement and shape, snatched phrases, the rhythm of a man’s hands as he tightened bolts or reached for the load on a crane. Axel took up a different position each time, near the water, under the concourse, in the casting yard. Sometimes in the same general area he’d been the week before, to see if the perspective had changed. Every week, it had. That was the only thing about the place that was predictable.

  A team of men had just guided a rib section into place. He’d watched as they each attended to their own tasks, the concentration in their hands. The building, he thought, was an accumulation of thousands of such movements, thousands of such tasks; p
ieces of energy and unspoken prayers expressed through the hands of workers. Imaginations and dreams, loves and hates, energy and boredom, eyes open and half-shut. So many different perspectives and notions. The whole was like a song, a story, nothing without all these parts.

  The men had made the building their own now. They climbed and clambered over it, hung from steel bars, balanced in flimsy shoes to adjust formwork. Now and again he would see a man with his hard hat tipped back, his legs apart, staring up to where the erection arch clung like a praying mantis over the highest shell. Was he staking a claim to the glory of it, the confounding beauty of it? It was the work of one and of ten thousand.

  Sometimes, he could see, the work was crushing in its repetitiveness. The sun streaming onto backs bent to the same nailing or smoothing or planing or gluing. At these times he could feel a numbness in the air, a kind of stasis. He felt glad for his own work, which had its own heat but was at least out of the sun. But other times the days passed in a stream of languid energy, effortless, and he saw that the men went home with as much energy as they’d come with. Their work made them feel fully alive.

  Previous jobs, Armand had once told him, had made him feel less than he was. It was the same, he knew, for the others. The tunnels were the worst. Mud and dark, he said. And cold. But the sameness, he shook his head. All day every day, just digging. The seconds ticked. But you know the worst of it, Axel? No color. It made me realize. Night is full of color, in comparison.

  Axel understood immediately. He had thought candlelight a color when he was a small child, when darkness lived with them for months, even inside.

  He leaned back now so that only the points of the biggest shell were visible over the mayhem, bringing thumb and forefinger of both hands together in a rectangle before his eyes, a camera frame. Each time he moved, this way or that, the shells changed, now soaring, now crouching, their interiors eerily hollow like empty hoods. Or pearl shells. Or waves.

  Suddenly, Jago’s clean-shaven face in his frame. Smiling like a fool. He folded his long limbs onto the ground beside Axel, arms around his knees. You can stop doing that now. He cocked his head in the direction of Axel’s gaze. They have a computer for such calculations.

  Axel sat upright and grinned. Not like these, he said. And tapped a forefinger to his head. These are my own. It was only Jago’s humor, he knew that, but he felt caught out somehow, exposed. My own kind of algebra. A way to look at this thing.

  But Jago was gazing up to where the curves of the building met like hands in contemplation. My brother-in-law, he said. The electrician. He’s seen this computer. He laid his own hand on Axel’s arm for emphasis. Up there in York Street. These men, engineers, programmers. They know calculation. He swung around to look Axel in the eye. They feed bits of paper into the machine at night and in the morning it tells them things. As if it’s human. Like it’s, you know, alive.

  Axel listened and tried to follow. He’d heard of this computer, as big as a room, a whole team of people to tend to it. Its calculations for the positions of the concrete ribs within the shell structure of the roof. Surveyors would take readings at the end of each day, from four different places around the site, and these would be fed to the magic machine in the city. The next day there would be a thousand minuscule actions and adjustments, according to what the computer said. How it spoke.

  It’s all steel and points of light, Jago said. Nothing like a fuse box. Or any ordinary engine. It is truly a living thing. His face alive. It’s intelligent. It has a language, you know, like mine, and yours. He smiled. My brother-in-law is an ordinary man in every way, but he loves these things. The idea of them, that they do the work of men, their brains. He said to me, “It’s beautiful, Jago.” He said, “I wanted to put my ear to it, hear its heart.”

  Axel had little knowledge of electronics or how the machine worked, but he understood what he was hearing. He felt the same listening to Jago and the other Yugoslavs. He loved the rhythms of their speech, the inflections, the energy, he loved their faces as they spoke, alive like the machine Jago spoke of. They brought the same qualities to their work with concrete and steel, a kind of reverence for detail, for perfection. He loved their fidelity to the task, their attention to it. He would not have been surprised to see them lay their hands on a finished beam, or a curved concrete rib, to feel a heart beating beneath its perfect surface.

  He felt safe with these men. They spoke about the heart of a job as easily as they talked about the weather. Their mothers, their fathers. Everything was expressed with their bodies. He’d watched one of the men produce a letter from his family in Split, and read part of it aloud as tears coursed down his cheeks. Later Axel heard the same man singing in his language as he brushed plywood with fiberglass. Each stroke precise, assured, coaxed by the steady notes, the control of pitch and breath.

  But something in Jago’s face, in his words about the computer and his brother-in-law, pushed an acute loneliness through him. Later, on his way home, he stopped at a phone box, fumbled in his pocket for coins. Hesitated with his fingers poised. He had been determined to leave Pearl alone—with her friends and probably her lovers—but there was an ache in him for touch, for closeness. He wanted to be near her. Even if their connection with each other was a fiction, something he had concocted in his head. Was it? He didn’t care. He dropped coins into the slot and spun the dial. There was no answer on her work number so he left a message: Mr. Jansson called.

  That night she opened her door and smiled as if she’d expected him, took the bottle of whiskey from his hands. Fetched glasses from the kitchen and stood in front of him as she poured, her eyes on the liquid. You haven’t finished my drawing, she said.

  She went to a low table and pulled the rectangle of cream paper with its half-made shapes from beneath a weight of books. Dimmed the lamp, watched him over the top of her glass.

  He held her gaze. The obliqueness, the refusal of what might be expected, of predictability. As she unzipped her skirt he swallowed whiskey and reached for the cup of pencils: And you haven’t told me about your brothers, he said.

  She sat sideways on an armchair as she had the time before, her body draped and sinuous as soft fabric, one arm over the chair back and her head resting on it. Later Axel would wonder if posture, a particular arrangement of limb and muscle, could influence mood, or attitude, because her words were soft, unexpected. He listened as the pencil touched line and shape, picking up where he’d left off, leaned in to the shadow below her neck, her breast. Feeling his own rhythm change, the cadence of his hands. The pencil light between his fingers, its weight on the paper.

  She was using words like sorrow, fairness, atone. She said: I want to be angry with them. But find I can’t. Calm, no emotion, or none he could detect. Because they’re not pretending, you see. They believe it, all the rhetoric. They believe they’re doing something good. She was staring at the wall in front of her, nothing moving but her lips. But it’s all politics, this war. There’s no moral imperative.

  He didn’t raise his head. Every war is political, he said.

  She hesitated. Yes, she said. But the Holocaust was a moral imperative.

  He ignored her last sentence. What does it mean, to atone? His eyes flickered between Pearl and the pencil. Her body was cupped in the chair so that each line and curve was accentuated. He closed his eyes briefly, wanting to arrange his own body beneath her, to cup her with his own flesh, to abandon the picture and hold the curve of hip and shoulder in his palm, unmistakably female.

  To make amends, she said. To make up for something, an error or a wrong.

  Then what are you atoning for?

  A flicker of hesitation. My own failures, I suppose. For everything that brought them to this point, all the decisions that meant they had no choice, not really. No free will.

  But they did have a choice, didn’t they? It wasn’t the ballot, they weren’t forced to join.

  That’s too easy. What is free will, Axel, that’s what I’d like to
know. Who can say? We bring our whole histories to every decision we make. Don’t you think?

  He left the line of buttock and leg, deepened the muscle’s shadow on a calf, the rim of belly. I suppose so. He tried to concentrate on seeing, tried to forget himself. But atonement: the word lodged in him like a thorn, irritating. And the idea that a person’s actions, even their thoughts, were not completely their own. He kept moving the pencil, deepening the give in her arms and neck, the generosity in her open palms. After a struggle with her wrists, at once strong and fine, he stopped. Laid down his pencil. Poured more whiskey, took a glass and sat on the floor in front of her, his back against her chair. Her hand on his shoulder then, a subtle weight. That’s what she had meant: your whole history was a subtle weight on you, or in you. He knew then what the drawing was missing.

  They were both quiet. Axel looked up. From here on the floor he could see the true dimensions of the flat and what was in it. High walls and ceilings, so it felt bigger than it was, airy, but still clamorous with things, rugs on the floor, a table, a bowl with apples. A sofa with cushions and strewn newspapers, its fabric unraveling. Her mother’s cups and plates, blue and white. These struck him the first time. The blue and white plates at home, commonplace, beautiful.

  Tonight, the smell of salt and old paper. And something else, sweet and savory and foreign. Lemon gum, she’d told him weeks before, tipping her head to the backyard. And someone at the incinerator. He’d looked to the window, doubtful. He was still getting used to the outside snaking in here, or gusting in through windows open to breezes and other voices and smells.

  But the newspapers: not just on the sofa but on the bed and on the floors, on tables and surfaces. The chaos of the world and all its events, there in the paper she helped write every day. They were important to many people, he could see that, but they had stopped making sense of the world. They confused him, the daily insistence on information too much for him. So he looked only at pieces of them. One page, one story. It was easy to be overwhelmed.