Voice of Destiny

by JH Fletcher

  Do it, because I am stronger than you.

  ‘I want you come with me.’

  3

  It was market day and the village had come back to life. At intervals from a sea of weeds arose the ruins of houses, gaunt and staring, carrying within their soot-stained bricks the memory of the past and a warning of what might one day return to trouble the future. Around them surged crowds, indifferent to the fire and death that had visited them so recently.

  Helena stood with Ted and Marija beside her. She felt lost amid the throng of unfamiliar faces. Passers-by glanced at the three strangers but no-one seemed to recognise her. Am I so different? Or has memory discarded me, too, with the past that no-one now wishes to acknowledge?

  It made her feel invisible; she said as much to Ted, whose answer — phlegmatic, unimaginative, probably correct — helped ease her mind.

  ‘When the village was burned most of the people must have pushed off. Had to, didn’t they, if they weren’t gunna sleep out? This mob here’s probably come down from the hills. They wouldn’t know you, would they?’

  ‘Perhaps Michelangelo is here.’

  ‘Who?’

  She did not explain, nor did she find him. The world had changed, indeed, but it did not excuse her from the things she had come here to do.

  Marija had spoken of an aunt living in a cottage a kilometre from the village. They explored a valley spiked with pines and other trees, perhaps oak, that now, in late-November, were stripped of leaves. A stream gushed between boulders. The footpath seemed to lead nowhere, the only sound the voice of the stream.

  The cottage lay around a bend in the path. It was jammed between massive boulders much higher than itself, with the stream running almost at its door.

  ‘She gets flooded out every year.’ Marija sounded proud that a member of her family should live in such an exciting place.

  Helena knocked on the door. Presently it opened a crack and a suspicious face — black eyes, black headscarf — stared out at her. ‘What do you want?’

  The woman spoke not in Italian but dialect. Helena replied in the same tongue, while Ted stood behind her in awkward silence. ‘We have brought your niece.’

  The woman was angry. ‘My niece is dead.’

  And then Marija burst past Helena and thrust open the door so that the woman staggered and nearly lost her footing as the child partly fell, partly threw herself, into her aunt’s arms. Screams, laughter and tears as the woman and child peeled away desolation and bereavement. At first standing apart, Helena was quickly drawn into the maelstrom of joy and weeping, shrieking along with them, while awkward Ted stood as still as stone, his mind filled with the red desert of his memories and its silence.

  There were more tears and wails when the time came to part but eventually Helena and Ted were walking back down the path towards the village, Ted, after the floods of emotion, feeling that he could breathe again.

  Marija’s aunt had told Helena that the remains of her parents had indeed been found in the burnt-out farmhouse. She offered no more information, nor did Helena enquire, preferring to imagine without knowing, than to know with certainty and be haunted by nightmares for ever. ‘They are buried in the churchyard.’

  The little cemetery, dominated by the church with its tower, was already a place of memory. Helena saw the path beyond the low, lichen-stained wall and remembered walking along it as a child with her cousin Guido on their way to the ridge of Razor Mountain with its views over the Adriatic. It had been springtime and the meadows had been bright with flowers shining amid the grass. Now the flowers were gone, the grass lank beneath the rain that fell continuously out of a grey sky. The sodden day was appropriate to her mood and the purpose of their visit.

  She walked between the gravestones, each with its portrait of the dead. There were many new stones, some bearing faces that she recognised. Some of these had no doubt been victims of the attack that had left the village and the lives of so many in ruins. She found the graves of her parents. She had brought a scarf for this moment. Black hair decently covered, she went and stood before the graves, staring at the humped earth, the gravestones still unmarked by time, each face, so well-loved and remembered, staring back at her from its ceramic plaque.

  She wanted to pray, as seemed proper, but could not. Instead she stood silently, staring at the graves through eyes blurred with tears, thinking of nothing. The people who lay here were her past. Like the past, they were dead, whereas she was alive, with most of her life ahead of her. The gulf between them was too great to be bridged by tears or purposeless regrets. Tears consoled the living; they gave nothing to the dead.

  Nevertheless she stood unmoving, apprehensive of the future, while the rain ran down her neck. This earth, even this rain belonged to her, as she belonged to them. The memory of this day — the feeling of the air, the scent of the earth, the impact of the rain — would remain with her for ever.

  She turned away and walked to where Ted was standing, going on past him and up the track to the site of what had been her home.

  It had become a place of silence and of ghosts.

  The gutted stones stood jagged among weeds. Here had been her life. There was the skeleton of the doorway through which, times without number, she had watched the snow drifting out of a winter sky while, behind her, her grandmother’s voice had complained of draughts. Clusters of stocks, clove-scented, had grown against that wall. That pile of fallen stone, half buried beneath weeds and rubbish, was all that remained of the range. Here had been warmth and love and life. And, at the last, death.

  Not two paces from where she was standing had lain the body of Marija’s mother, used, broken and discarded. Helena stepped carefully around the place and the remembered blood that had been dissolved but not obliterated by the months of sun and rain.

  Beyond the yard’s stone wall the fields, untended, lay dark and sullen.

  Ted stood at her shoulder.

  ‘Good land?’

  ‘I think so.’

  Although her father’s complaints had been like a wind in the chimney. She walked over to the shed where she had found Marija. She looked through the open doorway but did not go in. Here, too, remained the unquiet spirits of the past.

  ‘Maybe I sell, one day. Not yet.’

  It made no sense to sell now, when no-one had money and the future was so uncertain. ‘I see my cousin. Ask him to sell it, when right time!’

  4

  With Helena directing, Ted drove through the rain and mud to the house on the far side of the mountain. Behind it the mass of the Carso rose like a black cloud beneath a sky barely less dark.

  Her aunt greeted them, eyeing Ted with a curiosity as sharp as knives. Not that Helena planned to enlighten her.

  ‘I was looking for Guido.’

  ‘He is not here. He has gone to Monfalcone to seek a position at the school.’

  ‘Will he get it?’

  ‘Of course he will get it.’

  The aunt’s eyes showed affront at the notion that he might not and at this unworthy woman who had tried to become friends with her son. More than friends, no doubt. Now here she was, with a foreigner. Probably she could get no better, nor deserved it.

  ‘I shall write to him,’ Helena said.

  ‘Remember to congratulate him when you do.’

  Driving back down the winding track that would lead them to the airfield, Ted wondered: ‘How d’you know he’ll look after things for you?’

  ‘Because I know him.’

  She wrote to Guido explaining the situation and asking him to sell the farm when he thought the moment was right. She said she was sorry she had missed him and hoped he had got the job he wanted.

  She sent the letter to him at home, but to avoid the risk of her aunt destroying it, she also sent a copy care of the Monfalcone school. Trusting in the future did not prevent her trying to cater for every eventuality. For this reason she asked Guido, when he sold the farm, to remit half the money to the address that she
would send him from Australia and keep the rest for her here.

  Just in case.

  5

  The liner City of York took them south, with other soldiers, other wives. Into a future far from Europe and its troubles.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  1

  They got the land, no worries, then discovered, like all the other soldier-settlers who had listened to the politicians’ siren songs, that they would have to pay top dollar for it. It was a section located five miles south of the Murray River and deep in the wilderness of contorted eucalypt scrub that the locals — what there were of them — called the mallee. The individual trees weren’t very tall: no more than twenty to thirty feet, in most cases. Helena had expected a towering rainforest but there was nothing like that, only an endless wasteland where each plant threw up from ground level a multitude of boles, tangled and impenetrable, that covered every inch of the land they now owned.

  Helena saw in the closely woven growth a potential for resistance far exceeding her worst fears.

  ‘What do we do with it?’

  ‘We clear it.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘Roll it first, then burn it.’

  She thought she had misheard him. ‘How do we roll it?’

  ‘With a steel roller.’

  ‘Where do we get this roller?’

  ‘We buy it. Through the bank.’

  Soberly, she measured what he was saying against what her eyes could see. ‘It will take all our lives.’

  ‘Don’t you believe it. We’re self-reliant blokes in this country. We’ll manage.’ As though that was supposed to comfort her. Oddly enough it did: not the words but the way he said them, gaily and confidently, as though he believed absolutely in what he was telling her. Perhaps, after all, his strength would prove equal to the task. Yet doubt remained, as it had from the first.

  Air-gunner bravery.

  Pray God there was courage, too, she thought, the courage to endure and, eventually, to overcome. She said: ‘There’s one thing we shall need, first of all.’

  ‘What’s that?’

  She stared at this man who had boasted of his self-reliance. ‘A house. Or shelter, at least.’

  Ted built them a little iron-roofed shack constructed of poles and superphosphate bags, with a stone oven outside. It wasn’t much but for the moment would have to do.

  The next day he started work on the land very early, as he was to do every day thereafter. Little by little the ring of trees was pushed back. More and more, the limits of what was possible matched the limits of what they could see.

  It was slow work but after a year Ted was able to say: ‘We’ve done a fair bit. We gotta remember what it was like when we first come here.’

  Already that had become Ted’s mantra, an affirmation directed at the question that he read, or imagined, in Helena’s eyes. Not only at the question; more, perhaps, at the mallee itself, which fell back sullenly, yard by yard, but never surrendered. Sometimes he thought it would fight him for ever. He scowled at it: clenching fists and jaw.

  ‘I’ll crack the bastard yet …’

  2

  Helena felt in danger of being drowned by the bush that continued to press close, for all Ted’s work. When the wind came gusting, the contorted branches threatened the humans who had dared invade their space.

  The trees were not the only threat. There were snakes, too. At the start of their first winter, snakes seeking warmth had sneaked into the house through holes in the bagging. They had gone after them with axe and spade, killing them and tossing the bodies outside. Neither of them had been bitten but the flimsy dwelling was hardly safe.

  At night Helena lay watching the walls vibrating in the wind. She listened to its alien threatening voice, and was afraid. She clung to Ted, trying to bury apprehension in the man’s warmth. They could not afford to waste candles but there was a full moon and in the grey light shimmering through the shack’s sacking walls she could see her husband’s thin, introspective face, the fair hair dark against his forehead. This man, she thought, so inarticulate and awkward, with whom she had shared such intimacy, offered the only warmth between herself and the cold threat of the bush. ‘We must get another house,’ she said. ‘One with mud walls, at least.’

  It was another burden, on top of all the rest, but Ted did not protest. There was a stand of pines not far away, and the next day Ted felled them, then used the trunks to build a more sturdy structure with a galvanised roof, the wooden walls sealed with mud against snakes and weather. Parked behind the house was the steel roller, made from a rust-pitted boiler, that was the chief weapon in his war against the bush. After he had used it to crush the scrub, he planted the cleared land to wheat. Now Helena lay next to her husband at night in their new house and tried to revisit with him the dreams of the future that had brought them to this place. The resentful bush had set its face against them but she remained convinced that the two of them, working together, sharing pain and joy together, could triumph. The relentless hard work was a barrier but Helena would not let herself be beaten by anything as basic as fatigue. She clung to her husband, she coaxed him with the touch of her hands, the steady flow of her voice. She was comfortable with her new language now but her accent remained strong. With others she was self-conscious about it but when they were alone together she spoke freely and it was like the first time they had made love in the mosquito-haunted cottage beside the mountain lake.

  Her body slack after love, she talked to him of the future, the children they would have, the successful farm they would build, the prosperity and fulfilment they would share together. Such rosy dreams in the wooden hut.

  ‘Maybe we can even go to Italy, one day. On a visit. I would like that.’

  While Ted said little, settling towards sleep beside her. She did not mind. There was no need for him to say anything. What mattered was being together; she had enough dreams for both of them.

  The mallee continued to live underground, constantly throwing up shoots, so after harvest, Ted fired the stubble. The theory was that, in time, repeated burning would kill the roots so that the ground would be truly cleared. Perhaps it would, but Helena had her doubts. She feared that the wilderness could not be vanquished so easily.

  With the planting of the wheat came rabbits by the thousand. At least they could eat the rabbits; at times it was about all there was to eat.

  The wood from the felled trees fired the oven. It did a good job, burning slowly with a steady heat, yet the comforting glow of the fire did little to dispel the menace of the eucalypt scrub. Particularly at night, it drew a tight circle around the little house, its darkly stirring shadows witness to the inhabitants’ every breath.

  3

  There were other settlers now. Weeks went by without their seeing a soul but the stillness of isolation was gone. The bush rang with oaths and the crack of axes on pine as, one after another, cabins were built. Even when the sounds were out of earshot the air itself heard them, conveying to Ted and Helena the presence of other humans. Thank God for the rollers. To clear ground like that with axes alone would have been a lifetime’s work. Or damn close.

  ‘Christ, mate, she’d be flamin’ impossible …’

  Without rollers and fire it certainly would have been. Even with them, progress was a crawl.

  4

  The swagman came walking up the red sand track. Helena knew it led from the distant river, although in the eighteen months they had lived on their section she had never seen it. The man had a swag and a fire-blackened billy dangled from his belt, a broken hat was pushed far back on his head. From hat to boots he was red with dust. Even the lines that furrowed his sweat-shiny cheeks were red, so that his eyes, pale blue and over-large in a face as whip-thin as the body that supported it, seemed to stare at the world from a map marked with tracks leading nowhere. He stopped at the house and knocked, the sound of knuckles an echo of the anger and impatience that Helena sensed in him as soon as she came to the door. Yet he spoke ci
villy enough, asking for water.

  She fetched him a mug brimming with the alkaline-tasting water that she fetched every day from the government well two miles away.

  ‘It don’t taste much, I’m afraid.’

  Nor did the harsh idiom she’d picked up from her husband, but it was the only English she knew.

  He up-ended the mug. ‘It’s wet.’

  She looked him over with frank curiosity. ‘You look like you come a long way.’

  ‘Damn right.’

  She made a guess. ‘Mildura?’

  ‘A lot further than that.’ He studied the partially cleared land around the house.

  ‘I’m looking for work.’

  Which explained the belligerence: a man outfoxed by circumstances he did not understand, knowing only that they were too much for him.

  ‘None around here.’

  He gave the briefest of nods as though he had expected nothing else and handed back the mug. ‘Got enough to spare to fill me water bottle?’

  ‘Of course.’

  She took it away and filled it for him.

  ‘I’ll be gittin along, then.’

  She watched his back, proud, erect and stubborn, as he walked away from her across the clearing. Impulsively she called after him. ‘Where you goin’?’

  She did not know whether he had heard her or not. At all events he did not answer but walked on, shoulders squared to confront whatever life had in store for him. The bush swayed as he passed, she caught a last glimpse of the pugnacious shoulders, and he was gone.

  That evening, when Ted came back to the house, she mentioned the man.

  ‘Yairs. Had a word with him, meself.’

  ‘He told me he’d come from a long way. I asked him but he didn’t say where, or where he was going. I don’t know who he was.’

  ‘A bloke like us. Forced off because he couldn’t keep up his payments. Told me the bank took all his gear. No plough, no seeder, what’s he to do, eh? He’s stuffed.’