The Swan Book

by Alexis Wright

  Nevermind! Nobody forgets. You sprog, the old woman had once explained, fell over the escarpment of an invisible plateau. Its geology was composed of stories much bigger than a little girl getting lost like you. Now the girl searched beneath the cracked parchments of clay where the dun beetles and ants lived, hoping to find a nest of termites feasting underground on the root system of the tree. The ants and skinks slink away. She leaves after a while, still wondering how termites could have devoured every scrap of evidence of the huge tree’s existence.

  Finally, the girl returns to the hull where the ghost of the old woman could still be heard talking to herself. The swamp people could never stay silent for long about her ghost either. Their voices swung bittersweet all over the swamp, and they were not just talking about each passing breath of their momentous lives. No! They were talking like the old woman. Her voice was triumphing over death. It made your blood run cold the way she returned like a witch inside of other people’s voices. But what did she mean, swinging her mantra in some foreign antique language, the one the old sea explorers used when they saw a black swan for the first time, Rara avis in terris nigroque simillima cygno.

  The girl listened while people around the swamp repeated the mantra to each other. She heard the same phrase sung every night because someone would start calling out the Latin words from a nightmare. Then, suddenly a very strange thing happened. Everyone spoke a few words of Latin in every conversation, and for a while after the old lady died and kept haunting the place, the swamp people started claiming that they were Latino Aboriginals.

  It appeared that the old ghost had colonised the minds of the swamp people so completely with the laws of Latin, it terminated their ability to speak good English anymore, and to teach their children to speak English properly so that the gap could finally be closed between Aboriginal people and Australia. You could call it stupidity, naivety, logical, to allow oneself to become so integrated into the world of the old ghost woman, where all sorts were telling each other that speaking Latin made them feel holy. The swamp people, the eels, moths and butterflies, all wanted to go to Rome to live with the Pope. Some people even claimed that the swamp was Rome.

  In the eyes of the beholder, all the architecture around the swamp had become the relics of the greatest city in the world. Old swamp people were becoming the greatest Romans of all times, even greater than the Romans themselves. The swamp had become a colosseum.

  How bold to mix the Dreamings. Those laws of the two sides of the local world were always clashing. She decided to ignore the old ghost woman sitting in the kitchen of the hull speaking in Latin all night. She would simply remember the living Aunty Bella Donna of the Champions claiming that she had not inherited myths from purists, and not believing that the black swan belonged to the night dreams of some of her ancestors. The facts girl. Here are the facts. It was the Feast of the Epiphany in 1697 when the crew of Willem de Vlamingh’s Dutch ship claimed to have seen superstition come to life, when they saw alive, two black swans – a beautiful pair, swimming off the coast of Western Australia, and called it ‘the epiphany of the black swan’ – a celebration for science, a fact stripped from myth.

  When the swans scattered, the sailors randomly ran down four swans, and once caught, they were taken on board the sailing ship. When they were taken out to sea, the swans became morose from their own stories being pulled away from them, but they were kept alive anyway, the birds of nightmare specimens in the hands of science, exhibits in Indonesia’s old Batavia, where the devil swan feathers could be touched by anyone in order to defy their superstition.

  The girl lived in a limbo world. The directions of its map spread out like a peacock’s tail. Who created it? Well! There were these boys who once chased a little girl down. They kept roaming in her wilderness. Which little girl? What poor little girl? Talk is talk. Costs nothing. Oblivia hears it everywhere now: You remember Aunty. She was one of those failure-to-thrive babies. Had FASD. Foetal Alcohol Spectrum Disorder or something like that. You should not believe all the talk going around. You don’t know if any of that is true or not. Aunty, it’s true, as true as I am standing here. It’s the truth of what you get with white government social engineering intervention mucking up more blackfella lives. She was a closing the gap baby. Us? Us left with the responsibility for looking after her. Oblivia hears voices all the time, and thinks a lot about how stories are made, considering which words would be used down the centuries to describe herself, and representing what? Swanee! Like a devil’s swan! The old woman had always claimed that she knew how to find the peculiar if she went looking for it. Destiny itself discovered the girl, and the old woman had explained: You child, are really peculiar. She once told Oblivia that she was joined with the undoable. It was the principle, she said, of the haphazard way sanity and madness were reaped from her having been gang-raped physically, emotionally, psychologically, statistically, randomly, historically, so fully in fact: Your time stands still.

  Gang-raped. The girl hardly knew what these two words meant as she thought about herself in the sameness of passing time while sitting on the floor of the hull, pulling her head apart trying to remember what had happened to her, or perhaps whatever it was, it just happened to some other little girl that everyone was talking about and maybe it was not her either, or herself neither, but all girls. While trying to decide whether she was sane or mad like the girl she had heard about from listening to people telling their stories – whispering on and on about rape in a form of speechlessness, it was hard to hold everything back in her chest about the velocity of the things that she could not remember, about what those boys did to the girl she heard people talking about! Poor little girl! Which little girl? She did not know, and wished she had never been born. It was not your fault. Those were the old woman’s final words on the matter, after explaining in general terms the cause and effect of an outrageous history that had created a destiny, to avoid speaking of a shame that was so overwhelmingly connected to the girl’s experiences of life, and from her own shame of having to say to the girl that she had been raped by a group of boys, the plain raw truth of the matter being that this one boy, and that one over there walking about etcetera, were the ones who did it, and not speaking of what Oblivia could not remember from her childhood of something happening to her, where bits of truth were never enough while visiting her recurring nightmares, and not being able to speak of why she was waking up screaming and frightened of the darkness, and of being so petrified that she would be eternally connected to the age she had been just before she had been raped by holding on, and guarding that little girl before something bad happened to her, or even, explaining why she was found in the tree.

  The girl continued to hear the hushed word gang-raped frequently, escaping through the cracks of the gossipy swamp – said without soul about an incident that had been forgotten, had to be forgotten, tucked away and hidden, but had returned. It was funny how some words can always be heard in whatever vicinity, no matter how softly they have been spoken. Just like eyesore words, standing out in normal conversations that attract everyone’s attention by bringing back the memory of a little girl who had once disappeared from the face of the earth for a very long time.

  A gang of boys who thought they were men were wracked out of their minds on fumes from an endless supply of petrol, glue, or whatever else they played with when they had chased the girl down. They were given a fresh start by a youth worker who coaxed them from the rooftops of the houses where they hung out, hiding under tee-shirts pulled over their heads and sniffing petrol from Coca-Cola bottles. They were taken to an entertainment centre where they could practice snooker and blackjack, and this was followed up with more largesse to close the gap of failed policies for Aboriginal advancement from the Government in Canberra.

  A grand football oval, a state-of-the-art stadium, was built by the Army so fast it was considered to be a miracle. This monument, a grand design in the landscape, overshadowed the slum, the shanty houses where th
ose brain-damaged petrol sniffers ended up crawling around on the floor, along with whatever else was blown in by the wind. There was nothing wrong with grandness-emitting hyper rays of positivism to build muscle and brawn, sinew and bone, to breathe hot breath and punch the air. Life went on. Money well spent. Football carnival days were definitely the rage. Families cheered their boys. The floodlights poured gold on the big crowds.

  The swamp people would not need to speak about anything else really except football, and they spoke it in ghost Latin that nobody else understood, when the swamp became Rome for a while, because the Army said, Rome was not built in a day. So let the Government do all the talking, all the planning, and the thinking and the controlling, and tell old Jacky Jacky what to do in Rome.

  People tell stories all the time: The stories they want told, where any story could be changed or warped this way or that. You see, the people of the swamp always claimed that the girl in the hull was a little foundling child, not the one who went missing – who was once lost in the bush. Yes! She had run far, far away, they said, and they said it was no good doing something like that. It only made people worry all the time. They did not fancy that she had hid in a hollow at the base of any old eucalypti tree. Yes! Fancy that.

  The police and army search went on for days when the little girl they knew had disappeared. A line of emotionally charged people searched through every dwelling – pulling everything apart, then beyond, thrashing through the dried-up bush for five kilometres, working clockwise out from the swamp.

  The thrashers told stories to occupy themselves: tales upon tales not to be taken lightly about things like this. In the unearthing of those sad old stories they found no lost child. All they found were new tracks of possibilities for things that had once happened and should stay buried with the past. These new versions of old stories did not fit the ground, because you know, old Law forms its own footpaths. A very bad feeling had spread among the thrashers. Soon they were saying quite frankly, Why can’t she stay lost? All this searching and searching, they claimed, and the only thing discovered was shame. It was decided to let sleeping dogs lie. The search was called off. The girl’s own heartbroken father was manngurru nyulu, and being so ashamed he felt weak, mayamayada, and now thought others saw him as being warrakujbu or mad, failing to take notice of his child, and had made a sudden request to all the lungkaji policemen, asking them to give up hope.

  That was the moment when someone decided to make a nuisance of themselves, when that old bat Aunty Bella Donna of the Champions had decided to step in, to plough the ground with her own eyes, and to be totally ignorant of the ins and outs of family histories – their ground. She went on searching for the lost girl, losing all sense of time, and oblivious of how she was riling up spite and hatred from people watching what they did not want to watch – someone searching for a needle in a haystack. Hey! Old dear. What? What? What did you say? You got to give up that ting you are doing.

  Those old ears of hers, delicate white with networks of red veins, that had no trouble hearing everything else, decided to be stone deaf to all the sneering, the abuse yelling anonymously behind her back, the ins and outs of what people thought about what she was doing on their land: Why can’t she stay lost? She went on raking the ground, and continued ignoring those who said she ought to mind her own business.

  She boasted obviously, not just round the hull, nor just to the swans, and expected eternal gratefulness from the entire swamp for finding the missing girl. The triumph of good eyesight. Who would have thought to look into the hollow of a tree? Evidently, no one!

  In fact months passed after she found the girl before the old woman had thought of telling the parents she had found the missing child. Her little bujiji nyulu. The orphan. She had taken herself ashore from the hull on the Harbour Master’s advice – you got to tell the parents, her nganja, her kin, ngada, murriba, haven’t you heard of the stolen generations? Janyii ngawu ninya jawikajba, I am asking you with my own mouth – so she went over to the place where the parents lived, where she called out to them from the street, I found that kid of yours.

  Now very old people with minds crippled by dementia, the bewildered parents were not interested in mysteries at that stage in their life, and were still fearful of welfare people like the Army coming back to plague them over their failure-to-thrive baby, and poking around with accusing fingers at their families’ histories for evidence of grog harm on the little girl’s brain – as if they didn’t already know what happens to the inheritors of oppression and dispossession. It’s not that shit happens as other people have said; it’s the eternal reality of a legacy in brokenness that was the problem to them. They came out of their little shelter, fearful that people would start accusing them of being drinkers again when they had never touched grog, that kamukamu-yaa, and whispered to Bella Donna to shut up. Budangku. No. They had long since finished, windijbi with grieving after accepting a plausible inquest report and had never expected to see their missing daughter again. Don’t you know? Don’t you remember? It was a story that created a lot of sad havoc about the place. Word spread of Bella Donna troubling the old couple without anyone really believing a girl was found in a tree, and since nobody was missing a child, a consensus was reached. They said: Tell her if she wants, she should keep that stray girl. Her business. Not ours.

  Why am I lucky? This was how the girl was lucky. Lucky, that the old woman had not found a skeleton. Lucky, the girl remembered being told by the old woman, when there were women and girls around the swamp who had gone missing forever, although some of them might call up eventually on the one payphone, just to say that they were somebody calling someone, to let their families know they are doing fine, living somewhere else. We have escaped you know. But on the other hand, some don’t bother to contact anyone, and as far as anyone knows, nobody knew whether those women and girls who went missing were dead or alive. Nobody knows. Nobody knows if their bodies, still dressed in their best going-away dresses, were laying out there in the bush somewhere, buried in sand, or whether their skeleton was standing up against a dead tree, or they were looking towards the road to heaven, or towards the way to go home, or were just waiting to be found. You might see some of them out there sometimes. Who knows anything about the truth? There were many homes waiting for the public telephone to ring with news, or hating to hear any news, or yelling over each other in the night when the lonely public payphone rang, shouting for somebody to go out there and king hit the phone with an axe, or piss on it, or bowl the thing over, or fire a shotgun right into its guts. Lucky, that some people would say anything for silence. Lucky that Oblivia did not know why she was lucky. Lucky that she never told the old woman she was lucky.

  The girl had a different version of the events that led to Aunty Bella Donna of the Champions finding her asleep in the tree. The old woman had always claimed it was in the nick of time: Child! Minutes! Otherwise! Otherwise it would have been a disaster, what would normally be expected – You would have been dead.

  Oblivia frequently dreamt of a child like herself running for the hole at the base of a tree – a little girl in so many different forests, timber lots, old stands of ancient trees, that now, it was difficult to remember any sequences of geographies stored in her mind. There were dreams where the child flees through densely overgrown chestnut trees. Sometimes she runs away in forests that smelt of resin, walnut forests, olive groves, mountain bamboo forests and cherry blossom trees. She still felt the cold wind on her face in alpine valleys of bare limb larch trees while running beside deer being chased by wolves. It was geography that was constantly shifting, for sometimes she runs by huge sea turtles stranded high in the branches of trees of the tropics, where there had been floods.

  Quite often, Oblivia remembered a child running in the middle of a bush fire, to where it had been deliberately lit at the base of a eucalypt and left smouldering over several months until a large, charred hollow had been created into which a girl would eventually fall. On her shou
lders, the child always carried long thin burnt branches like wings, but she balked, pulled away before reaching the hole in the tree.

  Yet no matter how hard the girl tried to stop before reaching the hole, she was pushed along until squeezed into the hollow, no matter how small it became in her mind, and it breaks her wings. Once inside, she would fall through heavy air, plunging into darkness and weightlessness, as if she had been swallowed alive.

  The girl had seen many versions of this charred stomach, where the floor inside the tree was overgrown with large, sprawling grey roots that grew down the shaft and on the way down were covered here and there with the initials of previous visitors.

  The child in the dream looked as though she was no older than eight or ten years old, maybe she was younger, five or six, and very different to the story the old woman had always maintained – that the girl she had found was much older. Maybe, life stands still in a Rip Van Winkle way of sleeping. The girl that had eventually come out of the bowel of the tree had no memory of the swamp. Did not recognise it. Had no memory of the past. Her memory was created by what the old woman had chosen to tell her. People only heard the swans calling. Nobody heard you running away.