by Stephen Orr
For once Nathan was genuinely happy. All he needed now was Lilli, to witness what he was up to. Which was to follow up on his father’s promise.
‘I’m not stuck in the past,’ William had said, as they sat eating cold crumble.
‘Prove it,’ Nathan challenged.
‘I have nothing to prove. My focus is on God.’
‘God won’t mind.’
‘So?’
And with that Nathan had closed his Bible and told him what happened every Friday night beside the Torrens. Brushing up against Anglicans and agnostics his father’s capacity to celebrate life would be fully tested.
Passing through Elder Park – where Arthur had once come with a rug and thermos of coffee to watch La Stupenda sing Rejoice Greatly, Oh Daughter of Zion – Nathan led them onto the Pop-eye passenger boat and paid their fares.
Casting off, William could hear jazz drifting across the water, could see strings of fairy lights flashing blue, red and gold, reflected in the water of the Torrens lake. The Pop-eye approached the floating stage, docked and William’s eyes lit up to a dozen or so musicians, all in tuxedos, playing a waltz he could almost remember. Joe Aronson and his Synco Symphonists, he read, on a painted backdrop, as Nathan helped him aboard the oversized barge which bobbed lightly in the wake of the Pop-eye.
William stepped onto a dance floor which extended out in front of the orchestra. Tables and chairs were arranged in precarious clusters around the edge. Imitation flappers darted to and fro with watered spirits, West End in steins and frankfurts dished up with a dollop of sauce. An American flag refused to flap as a couple of teenagers from Mile End feigned Al Capone. Children invaded the dance floor, teaching each other something called the ‘vertical stomp’, leading Nathan’s eyes and mind away from the oom-pah resonances of a valley childhood.
‘Fine,’ William said, sitting and smiling. But he wasn’t impressed, convinced that Australians, in the absence of their own culture, were too quick to imitate others, generally choosing the worst of whatever was available. ‘A swinging time,’ he said, smiling, trying his hardest, although Bluma could tell his words were about as real as Joe Aronson’s accent.
Drinks were ordered and Bluma was up first with Arthur. Nathan took over, twirling his mum about in improvised moves which had more of the Landler than the Charleston. After a time he whispered in her ear and she went over to fetch William. At first he refused to stand, but when the cheers of surrounding tables grew up around him, he had little choice.
As a dancer he stunk, his moves stiffer than the hired tuxedos. But in time he put his arm around Bluma (in a public display of affection which took some doing for a Barossa Lutheran) and they settled into a slow, gentle rhythm which seemed to respond to the waves of the Torrens itself.
‘Matthew chapter …?’ Nathan asked Arthur, his eyes set on his parents.
‘William may yet learn,’ Arthur replied.
‘What?’
‘Every man worships in his own way.’
Which to Arthur was a glass-house of summer chrysanthemum, or a freshly planed cross smelling strongly of Tasmanian oak.
When he sat down, everyone looked at William in anticipation. The voice of Gnadenberg and the feel of brittle pages between his fingers had faded, but the fake moustaches of the waiters reeked of an artifice he couldn’t tolerate for too long. At best a novelty, this was a world of lost people, unsure of what to eat and drink, when to harvest or how to cure wurst. These were people with Mickey Mouse ears, out for a good time, with nowhere to go afterwards.
Still, he knew he had to try, at least this once.
As Aronson’s baton came crashing down, the music faded away into the distant bamboo on the northern bank. Aronson stood up and, beaming a smile, asked the diners to check under their seats. There was a general flurry and at the Miller table, ecstatic cries as William produced an envelope. Bluma hugged him and accompanied him up to the podium.
‘Open it,’ Joe urged, in his fake Brooklyn accent.
William fumbled the envelope and read the writing on the voucher.
‘Into the microphone,’ Joe urged.
‘“The holder is entitled to goods to the value of twenty pounds,”’ he read. ‘“Courtesy J.N. Taylor’s Homewares, Grenfell Street and suburbs.”’
There was general applause and Joe asked, ‘What will you use it for?’
Bluma jumped in. ‘Lino.’ And people mostly laughed.
William suddenly felt like he was a contestant on Pick-a-Box, broadcast through crystal sets into the living rooms of a nation. The flickering of lights in the water became the illuminations of an all electric hell, the static through the microphone, the hiss of God’s displeasure.
‘I cannot accept this,’ he said, but Bluma grabbed the voucher and headed back to their table. Again the laughs welled up. William slipped from the podium and everyone applauded.
All at once he had become the mouse. ‘“M.I.C.K.E.Y., Why, because we like you …”’
Falling asleep on the train, grasping the envelope in a sweaty hand, Bluma felt the rhythms of the track through her feet, smelt burning coal in her nostrils and knew they’d soon be home. She watched as an Ovingham mother screamed at her children and returned to scrubbing the pedestal of a bird bath by the salvaged light of a hallway globe. Moths crowded street lights rusted to the sides of stobie poles and a gas man worked by torch light to uncover meters overgrown with honeysuckle. She looked at Nathan and said, ‘Your father’s right.’
Taking the voucher, she ripped it in half and slipped it out of the window. William watched it scatter and settle in front of a cemetery. Nathan looked at her but didn’t speak. Bluma wanted to explain but didn’t know how to say it in the same way William could. Things weighed you down. Things bred expectations of more things. Things were a barrier between man and God, and consequently, a man and his family.
As she fell asleep that night, Bluma wondered if tomorrow she’d regret throwing the voucher out of the window. She thought, why would God have this dampness forever in my lungs?
Later that night, William closed his study door and opened his Bible, reading, words falling from his lips in whispers. ‘“This know also, that in the last days perilous times shall come. For men shall be lovers of their own selves, covetous, boasters, proud, blasphemers …”’
And stopped, closing his eyes, allowing comic book images to crowd his head. Miller as Aronson as the Devil, waving his baton wildly, screaming, in a giant speech balloon, ‘“Traitors, heady, high-minded, lovers of pleasures more than lovers of God …”’
A bit of lino, Bluma thought, as she drifted off to sleep, how could he deny me that?
Chapter Five
The following weeks were a succession of sauerkraut and yeast, hands stained red and rain hanging perpetually above the valley. William and Joshua worked hard to finish the harvest before the mould took hold and swarms of galahs, descending between the rain clouds with shafts of sunlight behind them, settled on the heaviest bunches – eating a grape or two and letting the rest drop in the mud.
The morning mists floated weightlessly above William’s cucumbers and the ants on his myrtle had disappeared into a hole somewhere. Returning to the wash-house with grapes, his pants would be soaked up past the knees, his socks wet through the eternally unrepaired holes in his boots.
As he put the grapes through the crusher they split and run, the must draining down a tube into a barrel. More yeast, a gentle stir and another batch sealed, fermenting on-skin until it was ready to be strained through stockings – the only time Bluma could be seen buying nylons, sheer and medium, which she stretched over the decanting tap of William’s barrels, as the men removed sludge and skins in preparation for the secondary ferment.
After these few weeks Joshua and William’s picking was finished, the barrels bubbling away happily in fulfilment of a promise God had made and William had done his best to honour. He figured he’d make just over six hundred bottles, up on last year’s five fi
fty. Then there were the labels and the packing and the endless round of bottle shops in Seymour’s hearse: Gawler, Kapunda and beyond, tardy publicans and shop managers saying, ‘We do have an arrangement with Seppelts.’
But it wasn’t just wine which had been filling his head. William had sent apologies to Bible study for the last three Monday nights.
‘Unlike William,’ Arthur Blessitt had said, when it came his turn to open up his home.
‘He’s deep in study,’ Joshua commented.
‘Study?’
‘Dates. He’s convinced. A clue here, a clue there. A word, a phrase someone missed. At least that’s how I understand it.’
Eyebrows raised, coffee sipped, as if they’d just discovered William had a fetish for dressmaking.
But William’s fetish went far beyond that. He’d started off by locking himself in his study at six every night, only emerging for custard cake and coffee. If nobody else was going to take the Bible seriously then he would have to.
The first book he studied was Daniel. In chapter nine there was a well-known prophecy of ‘seventy weeks’, a period of time extending from God’s commandment to rebuild a broken Jerusalem through to a time when ‘the anointed one shall be cut off’.
The following Monday, as Joshua, Arthur, Seymour and Ron Rohwer gathered in the Miller house for study, William set to explaining what he’d come up with. Study and facts alone, he stressed, had led him to this understanding. ‘I say nothing that wasn’t said in the Bible.’
The group looked at him, Joshua sucking on his pipe, already convinced. ‘Remember,’ he said to the group, ‘William’s picking up on research that’s already been done. Aren’t you, William?’
‘Some.’ Referring to some pseudo-religious ‘facts’ he’d seen in someone’s old Watchtower. ‘I’ve read the Bible three times in the last three weeks,’ he said, as Ron thought, So what, lifting his eyebrows and whispering, ‘A book in Chinese is just as meaningless after – ’ ‘Different thing,’ William interrupted.
‘Not necessarily.’
They stopped, realising they sounded like a couple of school boys.
‘So,’ Seymour began, sitting back and folding his arms, ‘let’s hear what you’ve got to say.’
‘Let’s,’ Ron joined, folding his arms.
‘The starting point for the seventy weeks,’ William explained, ‘could only be the decree of Artaxerxes, which is in Ezra.’ He took his Bible from underneath a pile of papers and flicked through.
‘Ezra chapter seven, eleven through twenty-six. Does anyone know it? The decree was to allow Ezra to return to Jerusalem. Yes …?
The rebuilt city?’
He stared at them in anticipation. ‘People have tried to link Ezra and Daniel before, this is nothing new.’
‘It’s new to us,’ Seymour said, sitting forward.
Seeing he had their attention, William pushed away the pile of papers and continued mostly with his hands. ‘Next step, I took a day in the Bible to mean one of our years. Seymour, you’re good at maths. If a day becomes a year, seventy weeks becomes …?’
‘Four hundred and ninety years.’
‘Correct. Now, according to the Bible, the decree of Artaxerxes was issued in 457 BC.’ He looked back at Seymour, who smiled and bowed his head, saying, ‘Four hundred and ninety on from 457 … that’s 33 AD.’
William’s eyebrows lifted, he extended his hands in jubilation and looked at each of them. ‘The year of Christ’s crucifixion.’
Ron nodded his head, unable to make sense of it. ‘So, what does that prove?’
‘457 …’
‘457 …?’
‘It might be a coincidence.’
‘What might?’
‘I went back to Daniel, and there it was, in front of me.’
It had been a sub-zero Thursday morning, one a.m., when he came running into Bluma, asleep in the middle of their king-size bed. Shaking her awake he said, ‘Two thousand four hundred and nine …’
But she had just rolled over and gone back to sleep, and he’d returned to his maths. ‘In Daniel chapter eight, verse fourteen,’ he continued, sure that he hadn’t lost any of his audience yet, ‘there’s a reference to two thousand four hundred and nine evenings and mornings which’d have to elapse before the sanctuary’s cleansed.’
‘The sanctuary?’ Seymour asked.
‘Where else? Here. Our sanctuary. And who’s the one set down to do the cleansing?’
‘Christ,’ Arthur gathered.
‘Yes. On his return.’
Which was William’s way of referring to the atheists and agnostics with their Mickey ears and shiny fridges, the ching-chongs and pagans and witches, the makers of Horus heads and the chanters of Navajo spells. ‘Again, if two thousand four hundred and nine days meant two thousand four hundred and nine years …’
By now they were hanging off his every word.
‘And if we remember that the decree of Artaxerxes was issued in 457 BC …’
Seymour put his head down, fulfilling his role as the disciple of simple mathematics. ‘Two thousand four hundred and nine minus four hundred and fifty seven …’
But even Ron could do this maths. ‘1952.’
William smiled.
‘Next year?’ Arthur asked.
‘Next year,’ William replied.
Ron Rohwer stood and pushed his chair in. Although he had no doubt that Christ would return one day, it was a bit much to believe it would be next year. ‘You can work the figures any way you like, there’s enough of them in the Bible,’ he said. ‘If it could have been done it would have.’ Going on to explain how a monkey could accidentally type out Hamlet, given a billion years or so.
‘I’ve looked at dozens of possibilities,’ William defended, ‘but this is the only one that makes sense.’
‘It doesn’t.’
And with that Ron pulled on his coat and walked out of William’s back door.
Seymour Hicks believed faith and mathematics were two very different things. When he arrived home that night he was still attempting to reconcile them. Maybe, he thought, if the maths were beyond dispute the belief would follow. After all, it was as much faith as maths which had built the Sydney Harbour Bridge. Early visions of its two arms growing together had concerned many. But eventually they joined. This was the engineer’s faith. That numbers would conspire to support thousands of tonnes.
Trying to create his own faith he scribbled on the back of the Lutheran Times:
2409 - 457 = 1952 Again and again, as if poor numeracy might lead to greater disaster. The next step was to go to Daniel and check the dates. Correct. The decree of Artaxerxes. Correct. For a moment he wondered if the dates had any relationship beyond the maths, but then dismissed this, guessing that William must have understood deeper reasons.
Seymour was contented to let the truth simmer. It would either burn or fill the house of God with wonderful smells. He ripped out the dates and placed them in his wallet, beside the article on Korea he’d kept to consider. Seymour’s glueless scrapbook was for his own sake. There was no point convincing others if you weren’t convinced yourself.
Nathan stood on the platform of Tanunda station, pulling potato sack undies out of his arse, adjusting the suit his father had lent him. The elbows and seat had nearly worn through, but William insisted there was a few good years in it yet. The pin-striped Nathan had all but resigned himself to looking like a hay-cutting Amish in a truck stop, but if that’s what it took. A job interview with the Railways wasn’t something to be taken lightly, William had explained. First impressions were crucial.
He heard his father’s voice – ‘Back from the line’ – and shuffled away from the edge of the platform. Contemplating the shiny steel rails and oil-soaked gravel he tried to remember if chlorophyll constituted 6.6 per cent of shade-or sun-grown algae. And other questions, such as the possible vectors and intercepts of a line with the form y = 3x - 1.7 (ab). Protein synthesis in plant cells.
&nbs
p; Polynomials. The unfathomable differences between mitosis and meiosis. Pages of them. Staring up at him. Saying, in their own meaningless way, everyone else in this room understands, they spent their study day working.
Bluma adjusted his jacket and straightened his tie. ‘Remember,’ she said, ‘if you’re asked a question, no funny stuff.’
‘Mum.’
‘Why would you like to work here?’ she asked, entwining her fingers.
‘Mum!’
‘Why?’ William persisted, but Nathan could see his father’s gaze had returned to the fog which hung heavy on the Kaiserstuhl, blurring any visions he’d had of his son the doctor or engineer.
‘It’s an ambition I’ve had, to learn a trade, to work with my hands,’ he’d told his parents, but they both knew him better than that. He knew that William was thinking, Rubbish, it’s because you let yourself down.
Geometry: finding three-dimensional points. Surds. Enzymes of the pancreas. Algebraic equations his father had explained a thousand times. Respiration. Fractions. Amino acids and the formula to solve trapeziums. The biology paper sitting in front of him, whispering, Your father’s going to kill you, running off with that randy slut. By the way, define autotrophic assimilation.
Two papers. Graded in Mr Rechner’s reddest ink. Maths: 17%. Biological Science: 23%. He’d just scraped through in English, German and Classics, but his marks would never be enough for uni.
And it had all been Lilli’s doing. Not that he cared too much, as he saw the trace of smoke and steam in the distance, heard the big drive wheels and pistons of the loco heading down from Angaston. His fall from grace had been sudden but pleasurable, caught up as he’d been in the ecstasy of every imaginable sin under God’s gloomy sky.
Formal lessons had ended on Tuesday. The seniors were told to report back on Wednesday, for study day. Nathan had got up early, pulled on his clothes and headed off along a familiar path, his head already full of algebra and respiration by the time he turned into Elizabeth Street.