Almost a Mirror

by Kirsten Krauth

  Not bright light at the end of the tunnel.

  Not holes at the Maldon playground that Ro likes to peek through, the outline of a cartoon body. Photo! Photo!

  Not portholes onto new universes like the hag stones sold on eBay.

  They’re holes full of rubbish, toxic waste and shit no one wants.

  They’re holes that remind you of the weight, the shape, of what’s missing.

  There’s a hole that lies behind her wardrobe. It goes into the front room. If someone was in there, they could talk to her through it. She can stand in one room and stick her fingers into another room.

  No one else knows about this hole.

  The recess in the bungalow wall, the place of teenage secrets.

  Jimmy would bring her objects for the shelf. Handmade collages from newspapers and Dolly magazines. A pale blue egg. Leaves as they changed colour. Four-leaf clovers. He had a knack for finding them.

  Talismans to keep.

  But it was the letters she liked best. Weekly at first. Chronicling the stages of his love and then shame. Yearning and heartfelt. As the months went on, so honest they sometimes made her flinch.

  Now Mona places the photos, the objects, the things she collects when she takes the photo, in that dark shadowy place.

  She can make still something that’s moving.

  But then she arranges the photos, depending on what they’re of. The constant changing of where and how they are placed.

  The special ones are clear. The ones that feel complete. She’ll frame them. Or put them in a wooden box with an object. A shrine to that photo.

  They can stay still.

  Taking a photo a day, she can start to see patterns, the ones about light, about danger.

  She can disconnect a moment from its continuum.

  She can’t put them in one place and leave them where they are. This grab bag of things. They can’t stay the same day to day.

  She can get them all out and look at them now.

  She can draw the aesthetic and emotional connections. Short grabs. The selecting and reflecting. She constantly shifts things around.

  She doesn’t want to stop.

  BREATHING

  Castlemaine, 2010

  This piece is what we call the centre of the flute, the first joint, the joint the first hand falls onto. You make this first. But it’s the headpiece you blow into. This is the middle of the instrument, it has the largest section of bore in it. I drill this out with three bores, step the holes down. It starts off big, then gets smaller and smaller. When you ream it out, you take out a lot of material. It’s not too much hard work if you drill a graduated hole, so when I’m reaming it I just get a little bit of material. The lathe turns fairly slow. Do you see a bit of wobble in the drill? I need to keep stopping and starting or else the wobble gets worse and makes the hole bigger than it should be.

  The small blocks of wood are lined up, shades of black and red and ash, standing at attention. Beñat has chosen the wood, taken the corners off.

  He can easily wrap his hands around its silky shape, the soft darker markings like a line of birds in flight.

  Cocobolo.

  The wood smells like the place he imagines, musty jungle damp, and somewhere closer than Costa Rica too.

  The warm skin of Mona after Hepburn Springs.

  The rose oil of a private bath, a scent extending to the timbre of the wood, warm and vibrant. The rich colour dense, sometimes wild and raw.

  He lets the turning blanks sit, resting, for a few years.

  They need to settle for a while, to relieve the tension of being cut down and transported across the world, before he can encourage them into new shapes.

  Beñat wasn’t sure when he fitted out the workshop whether the instruments would withstand the extremes of heat and cold here. But the level of humidity has been stable, controlled, warmer than human breath, the insulation slowing down the rate of change.

  He seasoned the wood and everything has survived.

  During the Blitz the shock of the vibrating bombs had released the tension in the boxwood timber, flutes curved like bananas.

  He thinks of this when he’s selecting the wood: of stability, of how this billet used to be a tree, very wet, in a changing state, and what it is to be blown, a hollow tube filled with hot moist air.

  Some of these woods are rare, on the endangered list. But things are changing. The woods are being harvested again.

  His flutes only use thirty per cent of the original wood, the rest sawdust and resin. The rest is excess, too much of a waste. He has a collection of the small bits and pieces. The offcuts he can’t part with, the waste of it so light in his hands.

  In Canada, a guitar-making family manages their own forest.

  He imagines a plantation of African blackwood saplings sprouting outside the workshop door.

  I remove the shavings from the grooves. The swarf. The machine drills like a slim piston, creating the offcuts of drillings and turnings. Here are the brass offcuts. They look soft but they have sharp edges. They are turned off the outside of the tube or bored off the inside. Here, you can feel them.

  Elena comes to his stall at the Lost Trades Fair. She looks different off stage, out of the black-and-whites.

  She picks up the Romantic wooden flute, turns it over in her hands.

  I’ve never really played one, she says.

  She tries a few phrases.

  It comes out a bit rough at first but she gets a handle on it pretty quickly.

  She lingers over a few pieces, a few scales, but then all of a sudden she pushes it away from her body as if it’s an intruder in the night.

  No, that’s it. I can’t … You know, I could get seriously sidetracked if I went down that path. That’s amazing but I have to put it down.

  She laughs.

  It surprises him. It’s like she can’t contemplate another world, the different demands. Like she’s confessing to him, that if she devotes her time to it, it could potentially undermine her major work.

  He knows she can conquer it, but it’s such a physical reaction. Something she needs to fend off.

  After she leaves, he holds the flute up to his lips and plays a Celtic jig, feeling the music buzz under his fingertips and making the flute speak into the room as if trying to lure her back.

  She played his flute, revelled in it, got excited by it. It didn’t really matter whether she bought it or not.

  That’s what gets him every time.

  How a musician like her can play it in a way that he can’t.

  You need to be gentle in the beginning so the reamer is not having to carve out so much material. You put your left hand on the workpiece and the right on the wheel, turning, at a steady speed. I’ve found the speed that’s right for me, over the years; I’ve come to it myself, one revolution a second, maybe.

  The next week, Elena sends Beñat an email. She wants him to make her one. She’s clear in what she wants. It isn’t always like that.

  She wants an orchestral flute. She’s confident with period pieces. He’s seen her play in the Sydney Symphony. She wants keys made out of silver.

  He emails back, saying that flutes only need keys to stop them rolling off the table.

  She responds straight away.

  Old technology!

  He imagines her laughing with her dark voice.

  He types a smiley face.

  He asks her about timber and she wants rosewood, hard to find these days.

  She asks for the instrument to be more biased to refinement than raucousness.

  He can hear it.

  She has that ability to finely manipulate how she blows across the hole, adjusting the turbulence, the angle and the airstream.

  He always knows it’s her when she’s playing. The way she plays with colour in the sound.

  She mentions how modern instrument makers are making flutes with more proportional balance, easy to blow.

  But it’s a cautionary tale. She wants preci
sion.

  She tags him in a Facebook photo of her friend in the US holding one of Beñat’s flutes, playing alongside a saucepan of water boiling on the stove.

  He works out the specs for her.

  The tenons, sockets, head, centre and foot joints, all reminders of the woman who will breathe life into it.

  In woodwind instruments, the centre line goes up the bore of the instrument. Towards the end, you need to be really gentle. You need to watch closely. Do two or three more passes. You need to be careful when you go through the very end as you can split the whole piece of wood. You need to listen. Can you hear that different sound?

  It’s the woodwind he likes to hear best. The rich palette of harmonics emulating the warmth of a human voice, flexible and strong.

  The modern orchestral flute can’t do anything special that a wooden instrument won’t manage.

  Galway is the only player he knows who can make a metal flute sound like a wooden one.

  He’s heard Elena give the flute a hard edge, turning the sound thick and reedy, making it bark.

  Sometimes Beñat feels that the way he makes instruments is not ideal, because the way the musician hears the instrument is not the same as how the audience hears it. It always becomes about how the instrument speaks to the player.

  All he can do is make a recording when it’s ready, to get a sense of the sound.

  His diaphragm is too strong and he tends to overblow the instruments. He doesn’t have the control.

  He can hear it, though, when the tone is right, the sound of things.

  It’s the final stage, the end of making the instrument, that is the hardest part, and the part he likes most.

  The fine-tuning, at the limit of his technical skills, where he’ll take it to Elena and she’ll test it out, hear the clarity, how it projects into a room, a quiet room, a room full of noise.

  She’ll feed the air out carefully, looking for an opportunity to breathe, choosing the moment between the notes, the spacing between them. She’ll play with that space, the gap between.

  She’ll leaves things out.

  She will find room in the music.

  The flutter of a tongue. The pulsation of a t-t-t-t in the throat.

  The disturbance, out, in, the vibration in the body of a column of air, like a string.

  The chuck key, use it to unlock the chuck. Put it in and give a swift bang to turn. Listen to that. It sounds like a wind-up bird. It’s raucous, isn’t it? I like it most when it’s like the churning after a waterfall. And the stillness as you bore through. This is the rough bore, not the finished bore. You can see through it like a telescope. Look down it, it’s like a pinprick of light.

  When Mona comes into the workshop, she whispers as if she’s in a church.

  She watches him work while Ro sleeps in the Ergo.

  When Ro’s awake, he likes to look at the golden curls of brass that sit in a bucket under the workbench. Swirls of Christmas ribbon after a rub with sharp scissors.

  When you become a maker you become focused on the instrument, not the music. You want to meet the demands of the player, Beñat says.

  Beñat knows that if he sat down and practised all his instruments for one hour a day, most of his day would be gone and he wouldn’t have enough time to make them.

  I’ve got to have the chops on the winds, so that’s where most of my practice goes. If you don’t play it, you lose it.

  But what about the guitar? Mona asks.

  If you forget the chords to the songs, they’re written down. I know the chords and it’s easy enough to train your hand again to play. But in your mouth you lose the tone very quickly. You lose the muscle structure, the stamina. It’s like going to the gym to stay toned – you’ve got to do it every day.

  Can you practise in other ways, like by eating?

  Mona laughs and pops a grape into her mouth, emphasising the shape.

  If I sucked through a straw all the time, or whistled. If I didn’t practise every day, I could pick up a flute and start playing a few tunes, and that’s it. Lucky to play for five minutes.

  Mona makes raspberry sounds with her lips and Ro wakes up and laughs.

  For orchestral players, they physically test their embouchure to see if they can play the repertoire.

  Embouchure?

  The shape of the opening of the mouth and the airstream produced.

  Why do they always teach kids the recorder? It’s horrible.

  Our instrument is our voice, as a being, as an entity. Wind instruments are close to emulating the warmth of a human voice.

  Just not when they’re being played by five-year-olds.

  That’s the inside of what the instrument will be. You’ve got to let this rest for a couple of weeks. Once the bore’s set, then you can turn the outside of the instrument, put the sockets in. When you come back, you check the reaming, put it over the reamer again, and if anything’s moved you clean it up. Then you turn the outside. Then you check again. Once you relieve material on the outside, it can move, and you ream it again. It can shrink, the shape can collapse, so you keep giving it tweaks.

  Beñat’s first flute was a copy of one he’d seen in Italy.

  In the preserving of it, behind glass, too precious to touch, the ancient flute had cracked and dried out, and no one could play it.

  Beñat took photos and guessed at measurements, looking at specs online, but it was impossible to make an exact replica.

  His first flute came close.

  He used to display it at exhibitions but people always wanted to buy it. So he leaves it at home now, on a shelf in his studio.

  The first thing people see when they come in.

  When he works, he imagines the instrument as something that will outlive him, be around for hundreds of years. Retain some memory of the hands that have touched it and the songs played.

  He turns off the music when he starts to work on an instrument. But when he’s fitting the keys, springs, putting the instrument together, that’s when he starts to let the music back in.

  An Irish reel that races along to get him through the flat patches, the repetition, to ward off the future.

  When you’re turning, it has the rings on. You then take away the rings and drill in the holes where the blocks are, like little protrusions, put slots in for the keys. Then it turns into a piece of Swiss cheese. It looks quite stunning as a turned piece, but then you go and put all the holes in it, and it feels a bit depressing. But when you get the keys on, it starts to look like this beautiful piece again. It always looks a bit weird when you put all the holes in it. Do you want to have a go, Mona?

  When he watches Mona’s body change in the final stages, Ro being born, the shape of the flute emerging from his hands, he sees it.

  How most men don’t issue or embody something other than themselves.

  How to nurture and create something of their own, bring it into the world, they need to make music.

  He needs to make the tools before he can make the flute.

  When he’s building an instrument, he feels the thing respond to the tools. When he’s playing it, voicing it, he feels it vibrate and begin to come alive.

  The steps of the process always make Mona laugh. Tooled and reamed and bored.

  The words make her touch him more.

  But it’s the shaping of the hole down the centre that gives the instrument its character, its tune, gives a clue as to how it will speak.

  It’s the final touches that Mona comes in to watch, sitting Ro on her knee.

  The licorice spirals emerging in the detail. The messy rough work with the chips flying past his glasses and earmuffs, filling up his apron pockets and falling down his neck, turning his jacket a hazy autumn shade.

  The milling machine that Mona helps lock in, holes of angled precision.

  The spoon reamer for creating bores in the join, swirling slowly like an unfolding Cadbury Flake, making powder of rose.

  It comes together so late, all the parame
ters within the small limit of tolerance, before the thing will work properly.

  Those tiny adjustments at the very end and the big changes they bring.

  Only when the flute is virtually finished can he play it, only in the last part of the whole process can he reach the point where the instrument might not work.

  Sometimes he can feel the instrument start to plateau and he becomes uncertain, trying to find the point of clarity.

  Mona says that all art is like this: the polaroids she takes, her sculptures of found objects, a matter of nuance, unable to be measured.

  At some point the pitch, the clarity, will become true.

  On the good days the tools sound a certain way, slicing crisp and clean, a feeling of smoothness and no resistance.

  On the good days the slow-motion shavings float before the extraction eats them.

  It’s before and after that can get to him. The perfect instrument and the intense hours leading up. The slightest shiver of a mistake.

  But when he’s working it’s about each single step.

  If he gets each step right, the instrument will appear at the end. This part, this stage. Progress. All he can focus on is the wood in his hands. The shape of the metal keys.

  The turning point.

  LOVE IS A BATTLEFIELD

  Castlemaine, 2015

  It’s lying just around the bend, over the railway bridge. A small mound of pink and grey, soft burst of feathers on the road.

  There’s another galah standing over it, a doctor at the bedside, peering in with curious care.

  When Mona goes to drive around it, the bird doesn’t move. It stays on the road and keeps walking over to its friend as if it can’t quite believe it.

  She pulls over in a driveway.

  Other birds fly into the tree above and call and chatter. Offering support. They fly down to the grass by the road as if not quite ready to see the dead body.

  She googles galahs-watching-dead.

  She drives back over the bridge to get a shovel. She imagines the mate fussing, fretting, not comprehending.

  When she returns, there’s only a small piece of grey fluff on the road.

  A galah swoops to the bare branches of the nearest tree, watching her and the car idle.