Shell

by Kristina Olsson

  But Ray said nothing. He was quiet until they reached George Street, where he paused, his shoulders turned towards the ferry terminal. Tourists and commuters streamed around them. Keep an eye on Della, eh? he said, and disappeared into the crowd.

  He was meant to go to Pearl’s. There was a drawing to finish, but first he needed air, to walk with the harbor at his elbow. He locked the shed and set off around the wharf. His memories of Tove and her spettkåka, her old ways, stayed in his head, mingling with all the day’s uncertainties, all its fears. His feet pressed into the earth marked by old ways too, the old people of this place.

  He could not unknow what he had learned over the past months and finally understood. The intrinsic importance of legacy. Personal, cultural. The passage of time, of life, from one realm to another, the traces left for others. The thought made him more anxious, unsettled: how to take the work to this stage, how to contain and represent these thoughts in glass? He turned and hurried back to the shed.

  The work in front of him was clearly deficient, mute. He looked at its fine lines, its suggestion of newness, of potential. Saw that it could not speak for him. Nausea growled in his belly. He went back to the lunchroom then, picked up the fallen sketches and laid them flat on the table. Stared at them. His glasses slipped on his nose and he pushed them up with a forefinger. He felt he was only just learning to see.

  Later, in the low light of Pearl’s sitting room, he put his first drawing aside.

  It’s as if I did this with my eyes closed, he said. And began again.

  Axel woke before Pearl from a sleep so deep that he felt inhabited rather than rested, as if the heavy body of an animal had entered his own, stretched its limbs inside his, weighing him down. It took some time before he could escape it, move his legs and arms freely, to convince himself his body was his own. But he could not escape his head. Inside, the blackness: the animal now a fat grinning infant with triumphant eyes. I’m here, the eyes said, marble smooth, terrible.

  He glanced down as Pearl stirred and reached for him. Her face as fresh as a child’s, washed with sleep. Her hand on his chest now, her eyes closed, so that his nipples contracted and he almost lost his nerve. She was not, he saw, properly awake; soon her arm slipped and she turned in her sleep, her spine curved against him, her feet on his calves. (She could sleep like a child too; deep, long, undisturbed by noise.) He waited until her breathing was steady again, moved his legs infinitesimally. Then eased his body away and off the bed.

  On the ferry his stomach flipped like a sick fish as it had in the shed the day before; he grasped the rear rail and kept his eyes to the horizon. He knew it was plain terror: he felt dislocated, truly without location, unable to direct himself forward or back. Where to go, how to get there. He longed for the boat to reach the quay but as it approached he felt no better. His whole world fluid, he could not find any holds.

  The quay was all moving faces, oceans with eyes. He turned towards home, his body alien, his head bizarre. His thoughts urgent: he wanted tea. Tea! This made him smile. Mrs. Jarratt’s tea. But it was true, he was certain, that the murky brew would help to dilute this feeling, steady his stomach. And plain biscuits to dip into it, the tasteless arrowroot biscuits perhaps, or those coated in sugar that always reminded him of spettkåka. He wondered again about its fate. The tin itself had frozen in place and time along with speech and memory after that birthday. His mother’s terrible blankness, and then his own, descending like night, like winter; it could not be negotiated or moved. He’d been sent to his grandmother’s, though he preferred the glass shed, even then. He wondered if anyone ever opened that biscuit tin, or if it too disappeared, with the coiled dough and syrupy icing he could never contemplate again, ever.

  George Street: he raised his eyes for the first time, and for the first time looked around him. Information slowly pierced his brain. A bus heaved past, then another. They were full. And there were people on the street, walking with purpose, their faces earnest. He stopped mid-stride. So it was a work day. A woman bumped his side, others looked at him askance as he stood on the footpath, pedestrians streaming around him. He barely noticed. He made himself think, counting back through the week.

  Thursday. It was Thursday. The realization like a shot of pure adrenaline. He spun around, cut back through the oncoming crowd, turning his shoulder to them, their fierce faces. He didn’t care. Today he had a meeting with Utzon’s senior man, Prip-Buus. And Utzon himself would be at Bennelong Point, as he was every Thursday. He walked quickly, threading, darting, breaking into a run as he made the quay. The nausea evaporated, his head cleared. The grinning infant quieted. He rushed down Macquarie Street towards the giant nautilus of the opera house. That was it! As if the architect had once held a shell to his ear and heard as well as seen his design. The image reassured him, made him certain: Utzon would listen. Axel would speak and Utzon would listen, Prip-Buus would make sure of it. He would finally understand.

  Axel’s buoyant feeling intensified as he approached the security gate. He looked around and up; his heart swelled with immensity. He himself felt immense. Other buildings that soared skywards towered over people, he thought, shrank them. The opera house would expand them. Allow them to open out, rather than close down. It was the idea of the building as much as the physical thing; though its manifestation was beautiful and confronting, it was the scope of Utzon’s thinking that held him now, the breadth and generosity of the man’s imagination.

  Still, there was the old trepidation. How to approach such a man. Why Utzon would bother to listen.

  He walked, slump-shouldered, across the forecourt. This country! Though it was only spring the sun warmed every surface, struck bright on steel and concrete, heated a man’s skin. Already there were some stripped to shorts and boots and hard hats; without shirts they might be overgrown boys at play, climbing roofs and ladders, larking about with machines. This made him smile once more. These men would not balk before the architect; would speak to him in their own way, man to man. This, he supposed, was where their odd culture of mateship might be redeemed: Utzon as just another bloke, like them. And like them he needed help now and then, a word in his ear.

  The heaviness slipped from him. He stopped in a pool of sunlight and closed his eyes. Here he could feel the cauldron of energy held within the shells; it shimmered around the roof like some electric field, connecting every single worker, he knew that now. It entered each man and his language, the language he spoke and the language of his hands as he worked. The building’s energy infused each inflection of voice or wrist, every heft of hammer or wrench. It was in each of the thousand different chores they performed each day, gladly, resentfully, whatever its nature or theirs. Whatever their level of skill. Every minuscule movement, step, every task performed, made up this bowl of energy, this pool of intent from which they all drew. From which Axel drew too.

  This, he realized as the insect whine of machines met the crash of hammer on steel and men’s voices rose and fell, was what happened in the glass shed once a piece had evolved, advanced. This collective intent, and its potential to buoy and push each individual, so that what emerged was more than the sum of its parts. At the beginning of a project, working alone, he had to dip into this pool in a different way. He’d never thought about it before. But as he opened his eyes again to vastness, he felt himself inside the swarm of labor, inside simultaneous movements both brute and minuscule, all part of the one. Alone, he had to make himself multiple, Axel saw this now. Each individual movement had to represent the many, and what emerged under his hand had to speak for the many, ask all their unvoiced questions.

  He looked about at the men working in pairs and groups, or alone on the cranes, and it was plain: this was why they needed Utzon so much. Why it was imperative he stayed. The architect understood the tension between the individual and the collective, where they came together and where they were separate. How this all worked for every person, and for tribes, for countries. There was so much misunderst
anding of this, so much fear. But in the right hands—generous, farsighted, humane—the one could speak for the many, could open the way, enabling the many to speak for themselves.

  It was exactly where this shortsighted, naïve, cynical government had gone wrong. They could not see past the one. They did not understand the opera house but at the same time understood it completely. What it meant, the seat of its true power. He shivered, exhilarated by certainty. This is what they knew, the critics, the cynics, the politicians: that left alone, the building might make them mute. It spoke to and of the people in a way they could not. Of course they were afraid; they were fearful that the opera house itself was a bloodless coup. Might overturn them, might stand in their place.

  Pearl woke to the sound of her door closing. Just a faint click but since the phone tap her ears were tuned to subtlety, to noises not meant to be heard. He’d left, then. The bed bereft of his weight and his breathing, but alive with all that its emptiness meant. Might mean. She lay and listened to the ocean, its sounds more knowable than he was. She’d gone to sleep sure of his body next to hers, that in the morning he would reach for her: hips, breasts, face, his hands like a blind man’s, intent, seeking. She loved this slow foraging, almost unconscious, almost innocent, like children playing in blindfolds. But at the same time carnal, interrogating; as it progressed they were less and less restrained, pushing unspoken limits, rampant.

  And afterwards, completely exposed, stripped of every layer of artifice, of pretense. Their bodies used up, shriveled, but flesh shining with effort, grand, banal: a hand an ordinary thing, despite the pleasure it could arouse, mouth and lips merely organs for speaking. Their bodies emptied out.

  But today he had left without touching her. Without speaking. She turned onto her side and watched daylight drench the air, her skin stinging in the unfamiliar and solitary sheets. She thought: so much is unspoken. What did she know of him, really? A scattering of things. None of them telling or easily pinned down. His work for Jørn Utzon was secret; this above all might reveal him, but he would not breach secrecy to say. There was his mother, her letters. His missing father. Around the subject of his family he was diffident, and when she asked his eyes grew masked, opaque. A Scandinavian despondence, perhaps. She did not push him for answers.

  The thought pushed an image into her head: the face of Folke Bernadotte in the news clipping, as Aryan as Utzon, as Axel, the clarity of eye and the universal fairness, the tolerant mouth, the ironic smile which did not completely disguise the steel in them. Only the set of cheekbone and chin hinted at it, some rigidity, unyielding; they would not say, or give, or do what they didn’t want to. All these added up to a particular sensibility, but she wondered if she’d been drawn to Axel because of the things he wasn’t, rather than those he was.

  Mainly: that he wasn’t Australian. Didn’t feel compelled to prove himself, to other men or to women; didn’t regard women as secondary, accessories to the main game. He showed no propensity to violence or to swagger after more than two schnapps; did not shrink from beauty. Did not shrink from the female in himself, the female in general. Did not regard himself as superior; was in fact the opposite of that. How did a man grow to be like this? One who made meaning with his hands, who shaped the world and his place in it with such delicate art. Was it his mother?

  Pearl’s mind looped back over scenes, images of him, looking for clues. She sat upright. The suddenness of connection: Bernadotte. Killed in 1947 or 1948, she couldn’t remember which, after numerous missions to Germany near the end of the war. Surely just a coincidence of dates, of events. Still, the room shrank around her, the walls drew in; there was only the sheet rucked on her thighs, her hands in fists beside her. She stared down at them, the new strangeness of ridged knuckles, of wrists. Then flew into the bathroom to shower; the next ferry would get her to work an hour early.

  He unlocked the door to the site shed. At this hour sun streamed in to warm the concrete floors and air chilled by the absence of bodies and activity. He needed to consult the site maps and timetables for an indication of where the architect might be, where his attention might be focused. But the pages were interleaved with old sketches for the pieces the young glassmakers had been assigned. He’d fought hard for their involvement; it was their building, after all. And now they had all produced new sketches and preliminary work that was informed, at last, by their own narratives, by the building and Utzon’s example.

  He sat at his table and felt a vast tiredness engulf him. His head too heavy for his neck. He tried to continue, stared hard at the timetables, then reared back blinking as the pages swam and multiplied before his eyes. Just two seconds but he’d been gone in sleep. Someone was pounding on the door.

  It opened before he could reach it and James, a junior architect in Utzon’s team, almost fell over the threshold. He’d clearly been running. Seconds ticked as Axel observed him: young, short of stature, fresh-faced; a boy at the end of a long chain of command. Despite his own irritation and disappointment, Axel could not be rude. He raised his brows. Pressed his lips into a half-smile.

  Mr. Lindquist, James said, clutching his hard hat and catching his breath. His eyes caught momentarily by something to his right. Axel followed his gaze to the pinboard, enormous now, and the hundreds of news clippings and press photos, each one pinned so that, in this lightest breeze from the door, the entire wall appeared to lift and undulate. Then James’s head snapped back around to Axel, and he blinked as if he’d just woken, as if he hadn’t just seen what he had seen.

  Axel regarded the young man. He wore a long-sleeved white shirt and a tie, the field uniform of the professional team, and he was nervous: in the pause his hand went to his throat, to the knot in his tie, its neat shape a reassurance. He swallowed. Mr. Utzon is unavailable today. As I think you know, he said. And I regret that Mr. Prip-Buus is, ah . . . He looked up, searched the ceiling. Rather occupied. He sends his apologies. He moved his hard hat in a circle with his fingertips.

  Axel bent his head. He was beyond resentment now. The boy in front of him, agitated, embarrassed, was just the messenger from people with more problems than he had. Still, he wanted to extract reasons, information, he wanted something as recompense for his botched morning. He wanted an indication he was a vital and valued cog in this creaky wheel.

  I’m sure, he said carefully, that Mr. Prip-Buus would not have ignored a meeting with me. Unless, of course, something important had intervened. He let two, three seconds go by. I am aware, James, that there are some tensions in the air.

  The two men stood and looked at each other. Then James turned his eyes to the window. Avoiding the bizarre wall of newsprint. I’m afraid, he said, that we have a crisis on our hands. He turned back. A real and significant crisis, if I may say so.

  As James left—fled, more like it—Axel consulted his watch. It was nearly midday. Despite the heaviness in his limbs he felt a new sense of urgency: half the day was gone. And with it, another chance to intervene, to help Utzon. James had as good as said it—every move by the government had been designed to get rid of the architect. They’d starved him of funds, appointed overseers to scrutinize him, and now the engineers had bypassed him with a report on the plywood ceilings. It was another betrayal in a long line of them.

  He washed his face in the basin, plucked a hard hat from the hook near the door and hurried outside. His direction arbitrary. But he would find him; he would search all day. Near the pedestal of a side shell arch he recognized one of the engineers. Who? Another white shirt and a tie loosened against the sun. Jenkins, Lewis, Zunz? He looked more closely. Glasses. Lewis then. Perhaps. Others milled around him, some in shirts, some in singlets; they followed the line of his arm as he indicated a point along the curve of the shell.

  Mr. Lewis.

  Michael Lewis twisted his torso to Axel. His arm still hung in the air; he frowned.

  Axel Lindquist. Still the man frowned. Glassmaker. We’ve met before, I think.

  The engineer fac
ed him then. He offered a half-smile. Yes. A moment. How can I help?

  Axel squared his shoulders. I’ve been trying to locate Mr. Utzon. Is he on site today? His belly a tossing sea.

  But Lewis was already turning away. Was it relief Axel saw on his face? No. He left an hour ago, Mr. Lindquist. He was about to resume his conversation with the others, but glanced again at Axel and said lightly: Any problems? And over his shoulder to the men: Everyone else has got one.

  That face again. She placed the photograph of Bernadotte on the broad library bench to view it in isolation. Her awareness of his death made the picture opaque, layered with unreachable meaning. But today it was likenesses she was after, the set of cheekbones and mouth, the depths of his eyes. She plucked a magnifying glass from the bench. Moved the lens in increments from hairline to brow to the bridge of nose and ledge of cheekbone. The half dozen photographs played tricks on her eye: she kept seeing Jørn Utzon in Bernadotte’s face. The architect and the count shared neither nationality nor blood; the lens was merely magnifying her suspicions, she knew, her own desire for a neat answer. She lowered the glass, shuffled the photographs: Bernadotte in military attire, his funeral, and one of his wife, Estelle, and their sons. Axel, of course, was not one of them.

  She went back to the clippings file for the White Buses and paged through it. The few stories varied in their tone and content: the enterprise had been either heroic, saving twenty thousand lives, or Sweden’s attempt to save face: too little, too late. There was no mention of anyone called Lindquist. She read fast, skimming details, forgetting the clock, until a voice startled her back to the present. You hiding in here? Henry was by her side, smiling thinly. He looked over to the librarian, asked for the opera house file—Just this year’s, he said, not the whole wheelbarrow. Then he turned again to Pearl. Hughes looks hell-bent on getting rid of Utzon. Not even bothering to pretend. Refusing to pay him. He shook his head. Big story.