Beauty slowed and looked down at me with her colourless, fickle, unreadable eye, then looked away, down the cliff. I followed her gaze. There on a sandstone ledge below was my uncle’s prayer shawl, its fringe rippling out over the edge. Curled beneath it, as if it were a tent, was the shape of my uncle Israel.
I scrambled down the short space between us, with no time to acknowledge my vertigo. Some of the berries the bowerbird had used as decoration were in his hand; the remnants of a bottle of aspirin smashed nearby were littered about him, glinting. Was this all he had eaten? Was he even breathing? Was he dead? The questions collided as I pulled him into my arms: his breath was rasping and irregular like a baby’s rattle.
I lifted him like a child and passed him up to the Birdman’s waiting arms, and his eyes sprang open, just for a moment. He seemed not to recognise me, his dry cracked lips moving slowly, his voice inaudible. The prayer shawl would have been no defence against the elements or the mountain, but then my uncle had a wilderness in him that nothing could shield him from. I took one giddy glance over the edge of the cliff, the valley floor rushing up to meet me, before I scrambled up and clutched with relief at the Birdman’s extended hand.
I took the patchwork fur coat, warmed by my body, and wrapped it around my uncle, grown fragile, feeding his arms into the holes and fixing the buttons as my grandmother had once done for me. The Birdman held a canteen up to his lips; the water partially trickled into his mouth, the rest made a winding trail through the dirt of his chin. He opened his eyes again, but they were looking at no one in particular, except perhaps Beauty.
‘Elijah it shall be, that thou shalt drink of the brook; and I have commanded the ravens to feed thee there,’ he whispered.
The Birdman scouted around for sturdy branches and broke them to size underfoot, before emptying his pack of the tarps we had used for shelter, the wind tearing at the edges.
‘Elijah?’ my uncle said, his voice hoarse, I shook my head at him. Who was I? He didn’t know me. I was Zipporah’s son, his nephew, but no words came out of my mouth. ‘Isaiah?’ he said, his eyes squinting against the blue like a newborn. Was he trying to name all the patriarchs and prophets of the Torah? I remembered then the letter I had taken from the attic. It had been from Isaiah. Another member of the family blotted out? Who was he? I had so many questions, but my uncle grew quiet again, drifting off to sleep, his breathing ragged.
The Birdman had made a makeshift stretcher, binding the tarp to the branches with rope. Together we raised his weakened body onto it and, carrying him between us, made our way back through the bush. We tramped through the ferny undergrowth of the valley floor, the bushes flicking droplets into our faces, with Beauty, our black-winged compass, again leading from above.
We moved into a mist, a low-lying cloud, which cloaked us, covering our limbs with fine beads of rain. The moisture dampened my uncle’s face, a kiss from a cloud. Beauty swooped into a bush heavy with purplish-pink berries, pulling them off and admiring them in her beak before she swallowed them whole. The Birdman halted and together we carefully lowered my uncle to the ground.
‘Tucker time,’ the Birdman said. He took off his hat and tipped it over like a bowl before gathering a handful or so of the berries. Together we propped up my uncle and the Birdman crushed the berries between his palms and pushed the sweet flesh into my uncle’s mouth. At first the pulp just sat in his mouth, but slowly he began to chew, the sweetness reviving him.
‘Won’t hurt you either,’ said the Birdman, offering the upturned hat to me. ‘Lilly pilly.’ I took only one, not wanting to deny my uncle anything that would help him recover. It was sweet like jam. We fed my uncle another, the fruit making his lips purple. Colour rose in his cheeks. When I offered him the water this time he gulped it down. He opened his mouth and I bent to listen.
‘She travels with me still, my Cloud of Glory, my Shekinah,’ he whispered and I shivered. His words had an otherworldly holiness as he spoke the name I had inscribed to Lily. How I prayed too that she was at Miss du Maurier’s still.
We walked on. The scrub grew less dense as the Birdman led me out of the gizzards of the mountain. If I had been on my own I would have spiralled around until the bush claimed not only my uncle but also myself: the last two generations would be lost, the last Pearls gone.
The mist grew thicker around us, binding us all in silence again. Occasionally the black tips of Beauty’s wings pierced the fog, which bought an odd smile to my uncle’s lips. The Birdman whistled to himself, the sound seeming to come from all directions, and the occasional reply rang out from the canopy. My feet stepped into the muddy footprints he had made, but the Birdman was not our only guide.
HaShem shall guard thy going out and thy coming in, from this time forth and for ever. The ending of the psalm came to my mind. HaShem moved the stars and HaShem governed the waters, but it was up to me to now guide myself when we found our way out of the mountains, to carve my own path.
‘See the supernal letters dancing in my cloud?’ My uncle’s voice quavered from the stretcher, so surely that I looked up as though I might see the words in the mist. ‘A cloud guided Moses to the top of Mount Sinai to receive the living words.’ But the only living words I felt I knew were my mother’s inked into my hand.
‘Tell me about Isaiah,’ I said gently, wanting to guide his thoughts away from the spirit of the mountains and back to reality. He looked at me fixedly then, the coals of his old fire burning in his eyes.
‘Isaiah? Was it out of spite that he picked my sister without seeking my permission? Shouldn’t he have told me, his oldest friend?’ he muttered. ‘Did he love her, or was it just another competition to him?’ He broke the connection of our gaze and turned his head away.
For a moment I couldn’t breathe. The mist drizzled down my neck and coated my burning muscles with ice. My eyes stung, and not because the branches of the impromptu stretcher had rubbed blisters into my hands. What had the wilderness set free in him? He was a prophet now of my past, speaking of my mother. All my life I had wanted to hear him speak of her, was this all he would say now?
The silence that followed seemed endless, as we trudged on with our burden. Minutes, half an hour, more? Till a wallaby bounded out into our path and blinked at us. A light rain started to fall in sheets, the sunlight diminishing. Time moved in its own circle here. The Birdman looked over his shoulder at me, signalling me to stop as the sky grew darker, from the storm or oncoming night, I could not tell.
Together we carried the stretcher to an overhang of sandstone that would be our shelter. The Birdman helped me lift my uncle off the tarp and we eased him into the dry leaf mulch. He groaned, calling for my aunt in his sleep. The Birdman gathered some larger branches and together we huddled beneath them while the rain lashed the valley, a chorus of currawongs’ thrilling whistles coming from high in the treetops. I touched my hand to my uncle’s forehead. The skin which had been so cold when we found him was now hot to the touch. The Birdman pulled up the collar of his coat and headed out into the rain, picking small leaves off certain bushes, trilling all the while, while Beauty hopped from one branch to the next as if it were a game. I crouched closer by my uncle’s head and gently plucked out the tangled twigs and leaves that had found their way into his hair and beard, streaked with white. How had he grown so old?
At my touch his eyes flickered open and he clutched at my hand.
‘Uncle Israel, tell me about your sister, tell me about Zipporah.’ I spoke carefully, squeezing his callused hand in my own. I was afraid to say ‘my mother’ in case he fell silent, as he had so many times before. He coughed and I helped support him, cradling his head in my lap.
‘I called her an inkblotter. She was always hungry for words and asked questions I struggled to answer.’ I leaned closer, my ear at to his mouth. He gave the ghost of a smile, gone in an instant. ‘What I read, she read also, until she had devoured all that was in my father’s study, except for the volumes that would speak too lo
ud to a woman’s ears, their arcane wisdom too much without the yeshiva to discuss them.’ The mention of yeshiva made me pause and I felt that old push and pull, his wanting for me to be his shadow. ‘I hid those books before I left, too heavy for our suitcase. I wanted to take them, to keep them from her, but Hephzibah would not leave her samovar.’
The Birdman came back to us with a harvest of strange leaves and a pile of twigs and set to making a small fire, crushing the leaves into the billycan, his song turning to a drone. My uncle watched the Birdman and spoke as if in a dream.
‘I told her she must stop. Her pursuit of knowledge belonged only to mystics and sages, but she would not heed my warning. I told her she was like the Moon, the light she thought was hers belonged to the Sun, but she laughed.’
He shuddered and went quiet, his eyes following the dance of flames, watching as the smoke slowly wound its way up through the sodden canopy of trees, mingling with the rain and making our eyes water.
The Birdman poured the brew he had made into a tin mug and swirled it around to cool, offering it up to my uncle’s lips. My uncle slowly took a sip, his face twisted at the herbs’ bitterness, but the Birdman clicked his tongue and my uncle did as he was bid and swallowed down more. Beauty cawed from a nearby tree and the Birdman cawed back. They understood each other, unlike my uncle and I: we shared a language but could not understand each other. The bush potion gave my uncle strength to speak, his voice becoming stronger, as if we were his congregation of three, the dusk falling as if he knew the time for prayer.
‘And my sister was punished, just like Miriam, who challenged her brother. Struck white as snow. Exiled.’ My uncle’s voice grew louder, rising above the falling rain and the sounds of the valley, birdsong and wind echoing all around us. His old command of the story, his steadfast belief, rising out of his frail frame.
My uncle was raving, his voice growing, feverish and he shook as if the words were physical things he was expelling from his body. His stared down at his own hands as if they making an offering, the shadow of the flames flickering on the sandstone and on his face.
‘It was I who uttered el na refa na la, oh Lord make her well, for she was with child outside of wedlock. El na refa na la. To me this child was like a sickness, a punishment. I didn’t realise then, a child is nothing but a miracle. My sister was blessed with a child by my best friend, when my wife and I were not. I railed against it and against G_d. Her letters came, one after the other, but I would not open them. My ears would remain deaf to her pleas. I exiled her from my mind and excised her from my heart, as if G_d had afflicted her, and I cast her out. But it was I that was afflicted, burned up by my own bitterness.’
My uncle began to cry then, the tears streaming tracks of dirt on his face. He turned and looked at me. ‘But when I heard of the violence, I knew I had to try and raise that child if he’d survived, the last of our family. Hephzibah urged me to hurry. It was my duty. I telegrammed our cousins to search and sent what money I could. It was miracle that the child was found, alive. But when the child arrived I took it as my duty to straighten him. I lashed him to the rod to correct whatever it was his mother had bent him with. I could see that her belief in amulets and magical remedies had found their way into him, into more than just the markings on his innocent skin.’
The Birdman leaned over with the mug again, clicking his tongue gently, as if to a bird or a wounded creature. ‘There now, a bit more, mate, it’ll do you wonders.’
My uncle drank again at the Birdman’s encouragement, his eyes following Beauty’s beak as she preened the Birdman’s hair, knocking his hat off, before he steadied his eyes on me.
‘But I was mistaken. As the child grew, he only proved more of what a blessing G_d had given my sister in him. I had banished the memory of my sister – but there was her child, my sister the bird’s child, keen-eyed, blinking up at me.’ His voice tapered away and he began to cry, his tears mingling with the mist that had been travelling with us all this way.
I held his hand until he slept, his breathing deep and regular. The Birdman cocked his hat back on his head, flipped open his pack and tossed me a blanket.
‘Beans suit you?’ I nodded and watched him open the cans and sit them in the flames. My hands glowed as I warmed them. Above me on the overhang, dark shapes loomed, following the flames. The sandstone glowed even in this minimal light, mica glinting in the ochre. When I saw a hand painted above me, I thought it a shadow of my own. Yet when I moved my fingers it remained still. Kneeling closer to take a look I could see many hands stencilled on the overhang of stone. I reached up and placed my own hand on the cold stone, on the nearest lowest one, small as a child’s.
‘What do they mean?’ I asked the Birdman who was gingerly retrieving a can from the fire with a forked stick.
‘They are those that have gone before and are not forgotten,’ he said, tucking his fork into the tin. ‘Thousands of years old they are. Made by blowing ochre and animal fat over the hand.’
I took my hand away then, feeling time slip beneath me, feeling as if I had held my own childish hand from long ago. An adult’s hand sheltering the child’s, just as my mother had sheltered me. But as I looked at those raised hands, a testimony to the past, so many tiny hamsas, I felt their protection fall over all those I loved, as profound as my uncle had felt the Shekinah in the depths of his wilderness. Those small stretching fingers, child-sized amulets, cast their own shadowed refuge over my lost grandmother and mother of blessed memory. If only I had as a child had the power to keep them safe, as they had done for me.
FORTY-TWO
Lily
I remembered my head melting into the pillow, the relief of it. Billy guided me through a fog of questions, with Miss du Maurier’s face like the moon waxing close to mine. I could not make out her features, only the general light of her. With each word that came out of my mouth, she appeared to float up and orbit near the ceiling, out of reach. And then the world turned dark and everything was silent.
When I opened my eyes a sharp ache pained my head. I ran my fingers up to my hair and my fingers touched the smooth chill of metal, the sharp teeth of a comb planted in my scalp. I pulled it out, but my head still throbbed. It was a golden comb. I turned it over in my hands – so beautiful and intricate, with tiny leaves, insects and flowers twisted into the metal, inlaid with semiprecious stones. I held it up, eyes focusing on each stone – turquoise, jade, bloodstone, ivory … As I blinked, my eyes adjusted. I was not in my own room – the walls here were nearly black, except for the spidery web of writing scrawled across the walls.
I struggled to sit up, but my head was an anchor. Desperately I wanted to read the words. Were they a spirit message from my father, had the experiment been a success? Again, I tried to sit up, but my elbow would not take my weight, forcing me back down. The bed felt like down beneath my hands, and I realised I was lying on my swan-feathered cloak, the ribbons tied close round my throat. How did it get here?
My memory of last night’s experiment was vague, a dream had more substance. I forced myself to sit up and the room whirled. The morning light crept from behind the drawn curtain and in the dimness my eyes rested on the words. They were scribbled in chalk, each white letter running into the next:
Who is she that looketh forth as the dawn, fair as the moon, clear as the sun … O my dove. As a lily among thorns, O thou fairest among women …
Whatever did it mean? It reminded me of something from Sunday school. My eyes stung. The walls were filled with it. On the mantel sparkled several silver moons; when I blinked I could see they were sharp knives. As I swung my legs over the side of the bed and sat upright, a pair of opera glasses rolled into the hollow where I had lain, followed closely by a perfume bottle shaped like a grenade, the two clinking together in a toast. My bare feet tried to find purchase on the floorboards, and I frantically pushed up with my knees, but I could not stand up because suddenly, right before me, Billy barred my way.
‘Up so soon,
my little Jerusalem skylark?’ He tilted my head up to look at him, a cool finger beneath my chin. ‘Do rest some more. I can wait.’ He gently pushed me back towards the feathers, but I did not want to lie back down. ‘Or we can continue,’ he said before placing his lips upon mine, kissing me, his mouth forcing mine open, his tongue searching the space in my mouth. I tried to push him off, but he was above me, his weight bearing down, as his knee hit the bed between my legs. I did not want this. Not him. His weight pinned my arm beneath my own body, crushing the breath out of me, something sharp pressing into my spine.
‘Get off me!’ I cried, but he just swallowed my words as if they were cries of love, his mouth sucking on mine. I could barely breathe. He pulled at my trousers and a button flew loose and hit the wall, before clattering away somewhere on the floor.
Fear had owned me before; it would not own me again. I could feel the metal prongs in my back as I tried to twist away from him. With all my strength, I bent my arm behind my arched back, which made him moan with the delusion of reciprocation. I pulled the comb out. I raised it into the air and brought it down with all the force I had upon his face, the teeth briefly piercing his skin, six pinpricks of blood. It was not a forceful blow, but it was a surprising one. His hand rushed to his cheek with the shock of it. I had bought myself a moment.
I pushed him back; his hands at his face, the blood on his fingers as he fell backwards, losing his balance. Rabbit-quick I sprang from the bed, and the comb, its teeth now bent, barely made a clink as it hit the floor. I ran out. But where to? My own room was not safe. Was he going to follow me? Miss du Maurier had to be somewhere in the house, but how would I explain to her when I myself had no clear idea what had happened? Should I call for her? But I didn’t want to put her in Billy’s way. I wanted to pull down the ladder of her attic room and fly up it, but what would I do then – sit and hold my breath? Why was I running even? It was Billy who should flee. But how could I protect myself against the edge of a knife? My foot caught on Miss du Maurier’s Persian carpet and I fell. As I tried to get up, I could hear the creaking of the upstairs floorboards. Was Billy coming after me? Fear roared in my head, willing me on, to get up, move, move faster, to get to the only safe place I knew that remained, to get to the shed.
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