Shell

by Kristina Olsson

  Right. A hesitation. You’re sure?

  Sure as I can be at my advanced age. She laughed suddenly, stopped. Yes. He drowned himself. In a lake, I think. Constance paused, following the vein of memory. I have an image of myself, hearing that news. I don’t know where, just my husband, speaking into a telephone, repeating the words he was hearing as if they weren’t true. But I was hearing with a writer’s ears. You know. I could only think about the connection, of course. Drowning. A return to the beginning, to water.

  Pearl pushed back her chair. Images filled her own head now, too many. I have to go, Constance, she said, and stood. Thank you.

  Constance eyed her. Stay for another. Look like you need it.

  But Pearl was moving around the table. Picking up her things.

  So that’s who you’re trying to track down? Constance picked up the bottle. You’re a bit late my dear. That laugh again. She frowned. Then: Sorry. A few drinks. You didn’t know he’d died?

  No. Though I should have guessed.

  And may I ask—

  A friend. Thinking on her feet. His father had known the man. Lost track of him after the war. She wanted to leave now, quickly. You look tired, Constance. I’ll leave you in peace. But thank you, I’m grateful.

  Constance stood, planted her feet to stay upright. Was in the Swedish papers, as I recall. People knew of his work by then. She grimaced as she moved away towards the bathroom. Though probably not here, eh? She turned and raised her eyebrows, then her hand. Good night. And shuffled away into dimness.

  He sat on a dune in dry clothes and watched the day fade. Then rose and brushed the sand from his trousers, his shirt, and set off with his back to the lighthouse, his shoelaces looped on his hand. On the gravel path to the village people were walking their dogs. A man and a woman smiled as he approached, their poodle pausing to sniff his bare feet. Once more he noticed how pale they were, the veins quite blue. Remembered what he’d said to Pearl: They’re like fish! He was suddenly and stupidly happy. Bent to the dog, smiled up at its owners, asked about the path over the hill to Pittwater.

  They indicated a road, perhaps twenty meters away. Up there, said the woman, waving a bangled arm and shuffling as the dog pulled at its leash. At the top follow it around to the right, then up the hill to the left. You’ll see the road down, there’s only one. She smiled and let the dog lead her away.

  Fifteen minutes later he stood on high ground, looking across at calm water. Laughing to himself. Because in the end that’s what it had taken. Fifteen minutes to find what he’d already spent weeks searching for. In dying light, across rooftops and through trees, the outlines of small structures at the water’s edge. Just three or four, each indistinguishable from the others, and unlit, so that though he stared, willing one and then another to reveal itself as special—surely it would glow or announce itself to him in some way—they all looked the same.

  He ran down the path, his feet scrambling to keep up with the speed and forward pitch of his body, to the road that curved steeply to still water. At the bottom he slowed, stopped. His hands hanging at his sides. Fear pricked his skin. He watched water lap at the legs of the boathouses and knew he had to decide. What? Before he could name it he pushed his legs into motion, strode to the first door, made a fist and knocked.

  Nothing.

  The second, more loudly, but even as his knuckles struck wood, he knew. The water beyond it was drained of light, its secrets dispersed. Too late: no one was here.

  He turned away. Disappointment sat heavy in his limbs. Embarrassment too: he should have looked at his watch. He retraced his steps, began the slow climb, shadows creasing the ground beneath his feet. Still. He knew now where the architect was, and though his own mission was urgent it could wait another day. Besides, there was the consolation that, as the place was so well disguised, hidden in plain view, no one else would find Utzon here either.

  At the top he stopped to catch his breath, looked beyond the boathouses as the expanse of water and the small islands, the treed shores, were slowly absorbed by dark. There, on a surface that might be glass, or ice, a sail. White, and it cupped the last breeze and filled, full as the opera house sails, the hull shining beneath it. In the unearthly seconds between day and night it was utterly alone, ghosting among the elements, wind and air, water and sky. The silhouette of a man at its helm.

  The world softened a little, the compulsion and disappointment. There was the suddenness of night, of cold icing his skin, a tenderness in the soles of his feet from the rough ground he had walked. And a scouring hunger. He turned towards the beach, one last glance back to where Pittwater had all but dissolved to silver. The boat was gone and the thin moon was a false smile as he found his way back to the main street. Stopped to re-lace his shoes, straightened his clothes, looked for a hotel. He had high hopes of whiskey.

  There was nothing in the newspaper’s library about young Swedish glassmakers. Pearl looked under every likely heading: “Lindquist, Swedish glass, glassmaking—general,” Finally she picked up the phone and dialed the switchboard. I need an international number, she said. Please. Then waited until after her shift finished, until the work day in Sweden had begun. A telephonist at Konstfack in Stockholm picked up on the first ring.

  The man in the glass and ceramics department spoke in halting English. Axel Lindquist, yes. He paused. But any information about him would be in Swedish, he said. A pause on the line. At the moment he is in Sydney, I think? You can speak to the man himself.

  She tried to explain the notion of background, of reading about a subject before an interview. The man listened. One moment. Pearl could hear a flurry of Swedish in two voices. She bit her lip. Watched the clock tick another expensive minute away; she’d have to answer to Judith. Then some static, as he took his hand from the mouthpiece and raised the receiver to his ear. We have two booklets from exhibitions in the United States and in Denmark, he said. Both in English. We are fortunate to have a facsimile machine, but I am unsure if you have them in Australia. If you do, I will send you the relevant pages.

  It was her first inkling of the kind of art he made. His position in the glass world, the things that were said.

  Copenhagen, September 1959: Lindquist is one of the most interesting glass craftsmen to come out of Sweden and most probably the best of his generation. His work is visionary, refractory; he works with light to recompose dream and waking. In these pieces—goblets and vases with swirling figures, some winged, insectlike—he embraces myth and the subconscious. But Lindquist’s work is never literal.

  Another, in a catalog from an exhibition in New York, was exactly two years old.

  Axel Lindquist: Here glass and glasswork can be seen as illusory, a metaphor for life or death, the passage between them. Light is enclosed and redistributed in these pieces that range from the sculptural—a head emerging from a block of glass, its face aged by sand-blasting, to the voluptuous vases and arks. All in some way suggest fathomless depths, the lure of vast waters, rescue or retrieval. They are curious, alive, deeply ambiguous.

  But it is the spheres, spinning like planets, deeply creased with negative imprints and shapes—endings, extinction—that edge Lindquist towards something more disturbing, something that hints at nihilism. We want disturbance in glass art; we want work that turns our heads. But these are increasingly personal. The pieces are radiant, sea-blue to umber to the color of dug earth, and devoid of whimsy or pretense. But loaded, like a Viking burial ship, with dark symbol. As if each piece has a soul. Or a map of the underworld.

  Pearl lowered the sheets and looked to the ceiling, trying to see Axel in the words, the bodily reality rather than the ethereal presence he emerged as in the catalog. As he sometimes seemed to her. At first she had thought the gentleness, his quiet, was merely his nature, or perhaps an aspect of his nationality, his upbringing in the isolation of rural Scandinavia. Now his demeanor, and the implications of the paragraph from New York, suggested something else. Unearthly.

 
; She went back to the clipping from Copenhagen, to the third page. The image was not distinct; she leaned in to make out its lines, to read any feeling that might rise from the paper. A reflection, a confirmation of the comments in the New York catalog. The disturbance, the nihilism, the soul. But the facsimile was not clear enough; the lines between Stockholm and Sydney themselves were too disturbed.

  Later that day, she picked up the midday edition to read the political roundup. Most of it familiar: the predictions that Menzies would resign, Askin’s troubles, the growing nervousness over decimal currency, whether five cents really would be as much as sixpence. Amongst it, the regular scorecard on the opera house. For once she read it carefully. Unaware the relationship between Utzon and Hughes had deteriorated so sharply. The government’s divide and rule approach had worked: the engineers had taken their latest report on the interior ceilings directly to Hughes, bypassing Utzon altogether. Even she could see the betrayal.

  And Axel, she thought suddenly. She hoped he hadn’t read it. Axel would feel it like a wound.

  The rough, intimate space of the shed on Bennelong Point: this was where it all felt right, where his skin pricked and flushed with thoughts, with notions of the work, of above and below, of open and closed, the weight of water and glass. In the soaring spaces of the big warehouse he could not forget himself, his physical body moving, this point to that, his fingers and hands too conscious, too aware of themselves. He worked well enough, saw to technicality and line, watched over the work of others.

  But more and more now the place was like the maw of a giant beast, a great mouth stretching, and he a shrunken figure. Cowering. The new glasswork was well underway; he had worked day and night, sometimes without sleeping. Now, more and more he left the final tasks to the local glassmen. They had been with him for most of the year now, through the execution of its lines and curves and points, the exactitude demanded by its scale. They had not let him down. Still: the terror that assailed him when he thought of it. The responsibility. But this dissipated as he left Woolloomooloo and when he finally reached the security fence of the opera house. Then all else fell away, he was merely a vessel and, once inside the shed by the water, an invisible one. Hidden. Even to himself.

  Here he worked alone once more, drawing and experimenting with the shape of the last pieces that would make up part of the larger form. A doll, eyeless. A corner torn from a map. And something that might be a human in repose. In repose or sleep or death, how could he know? It would be up to others to read them now. At odd times, in moments of joy or clarity, he knew that was precisely the nature of the work. A voyage, not so much to understanding but to posing the right questions. It was nothing as certain as knowledge; nothing as closed or unmanageable. When he stepped outside the shed and surveyed a structure that was in itself just that, a voyage, a quest, it was confirmed in him. The government might want the definitive, everything reduced to its baseline, a rule. But Axel knew that, in art, there was no such thing as certainty.

  Flowers were rampant in the crab apple tree, dusk settling slowly among them. They sat at the wrought iron table and watched night absorb day, darkness eat light. A plate of cheese and pears and dark bread between them. Into the quiet Axel said: It’s what Vallien says about glass. Pearl lifted her eyes to him. Time felt slowed, faulty; whole minutes passed before he turned his gaze from the horizon, or so it seemed.

  A cool wind had come up, spiking skin and air. Pearl pressed a blade through pear flesh. Yes, you’ve mentioned it. But what does he mean? She took the finest slice, almost transparent, between thumb and forefinger, held it momentarily against the sky. Lay it on her tongue.

  He means that light is captured within the glass. In his own work at least, it is redirected, held there. He lifted his head. Like a pearl.

  They passed cautious glances one to each other. Pearl was wary of the quiet in his eyes, his hands. But she turned a wineglass between her fingers and began. I met a woman the other day, she said, feeling her way, gentle, who lived in Sweden years ago.

  Oh? Axel was staring past her to where the last of the sun knifed through the overgrown garden.

  Pearl followed his gaze. Spoke towards the grasses, the rioting weeds. Her husband was a Swede. He’d worked in the resistance, with the White Buses.

  His head came slowly around; he met her eye. Picked up his own wine.

  A good man, by the sound of it, but badly affected by the war. The camps, what he saw. The shock of it.

  She let the words settle between them. We talked for a while. I thought he might have known Utzon, or even your father. Might be able to help with your search.

  His hands tight around the glass. His face pale. Two birds, lapwings, cried out in the yard next door.

  Pearl waited. Her skin needled in the cooling air. Finally, in a voice she might use for a child: He didn’t disappear, did he, Axel? She watched his eyes, unblinking. Fixed now on the wall, the paint peeling from gutters, like fingers beckoning.

  Axel?

  Yes. His voice when it came was calm, quiet, but his eyes were glassy with tears. Yes, he said. He did.

  Her hand on his forearm. Her own tears hard to control now, because of course he was right. The refuge of water. She wiped her eyes: the sudden inkling of why he was here. The water had closed over him too like the answer to a question.

  You won’t find your father in Sydney, she said. But there’s a reason you are here, Axel. She spoke gently, as if to a person just waking. The light moved around them, inching backwards like a tide. Pearl could feel her own heart, its work timeless and blind.

  Axel looked from the garden to his hands. The wine in the glass. He wondered not how to calculate the weight of water but of misery. Emptiness. The tears on her face. America, the thought automatic, comforting. Argentina. Australia. Åfors. Axel—Anders—America.

  This is what the boy should not remember, what is disallowed: the light, the silence. All his senses shut down except this: what he sees. So that feeling and sound, everything, became visual. Trepidation is a long gray plank he must walk along. The silence a cloth, soaked in ether, a rag for amputation. His sight is avian, whole worlds within its scope. Somewhere in the layers of sky air cloud mist tree roofs lake earth: his father. He is gone but utterly there, with him. There, there.

  Everything is reduced to a sightline. He concentrates his eyes. Walks.

  The light, the silence. A kind of white, or white-out, the color of chalk on pale slate. Or smoke in a cloud. Even the lake, small trees crumbling at its edge, is the color of milk. This is what he is trying to understand, to place, when he sees the men.

  Four of them. They seem to emanate from water. They step through the shallows but their legs don’t disturb it. The quality of their movement is gray. And slow. He doesn’t know it, but his own pace has slowed to theirs, though they are still mid-distance, still part of a landscape stitched from dreams. He watches their dull movement, sluggish as the tide. Still, one falters, and at this moment sound returns, and touch: a bird crying, his own hands at his sides. Heavy, empty. As tired as his eyes. Suddenly.

  Suddenly, now. His eyes. They refuse to see. Refuse. Because the man, faltering, has moved his arms, adjusted his grip on the form they carry. Boat-shaped, man-size, gray like the water and their faces. He stops. Everything. Stops. So he sees but doesn’t see: the ankles, the one boot and its laces lolling, the flash of color, obscene, that might be father flesh and might be a sound rather than a color, the sound of a shout, his own throat, and then nothing. Except white. Sky and ground and sheets pulled up, his mother’s face white against his.

  There is no memory of after, save shards of things, something unseen, something refused. Life mixed up his senses again, so for a while he tasted numbers and felt flavors, heard colors. Even when this was righted—he remembered doctors, talking—there was nothing where his voice used to be. Have you used up all your words, Axel? His mother would ask. Not angry. Are there none left? He looked at her face and wondered what she
meant.

  There were afternoons, days, with his grandmother or his uncles. In his grandmother’s kitchen he rolled out dough for cinnamon buns, stirred the soup. One day a thought turned around and around with the spoon: his father had gone and was it his fault? Had he, Axel, wished him away? Was he somehow deficient, as a boy, as his father’s son? Perhaps that was why he had been sent away. Away from his mother, from the house they had lived in. He stood in the silent garden where his grandmother’s poppies flamed like questions. He felt punished, exiled. He stood alone, looking out: there were cows in the field beyond the fence, their bodies of brown velvet. They dipped their heads to the grass, calm, as people dipped their heads in prayer. The pine trees whispered psalms into the stillness. He looked to the sky. Not wanting answers. Wanting his mother.

  It was in the glass shed that sound returned, rolling through his mouth like soft wind in grass. It has a secret, he said to Lars. There in front of him, his uncle was coaxing mystery from fire and light, or so it seemed. Out of the elements of the earth, sand and minerals and water and heat: something hard that could yet be broken. Impossible but it happened here, a metamorphosis, those elements blazing into a globe of glass, a drop made solid, a wish, a hope, materialized there in front of him in the dim shed where the blowers shone with sweat, even in December.

  He was aware of his uncle’s eyes on him. Flickering up from the maver, the bench where he rolled out his magic, pure, transparent.

  Yes, Lars said. He looked at Axel, curious. You’re quite right. You have to find it. Its beauty has to be located, worked for.

  The glass inside you. Axel stared at the shape. You can’t let it break. He could sense its power, its consolation. That this might be his life, might save him: the making of a watery reality, a solidity, turning the inchoate into something to hold in his hand. Not long afterwards, he made his first piece of glass. Even then he was making something solid from a vacuum: the rain, the melted snow, the lake. His liquid world. The small, rough cylinder he produced could hold something, he told his mother. Water, flowers, schnapps. Or it could just be, she said, setting it on the kitchen bench.