The Crying Place

by Lia Hills

  ‘Yes.’

  Ziggy licked her finger and ran it around her glass as if trying to extract music from it. Whatever it was she had to say seemed suddenly vital, as if this was why she’d brought me here, saved me from a pounding.

  ‘In our village,’ she continued, ‘there was a man called Helmut who was a water diviner. Most of the kids thought he was a bit crazy, but I liked the way he never walked past a fountain without stopping to watch the water. He lived in an old house on the hill above Calmbach, and one day I climbed up there. I found him sitting on his doorstep in the sun. He was barefoot and smoking a pipe – not an old wooden one like my grandfather had, but a hookah, you know, like the ones you see in Cairo. It was made of blue glass and made a bubbling sound every time he inhaled. I sat on a rock beside the fountain and waited for him to tell me to go away. When he didn’t, I told him about my dream.’

  ‘And what did he say?’

  ‘Nothing at first. He put down the pipe and walked over to the fountain. I didn’t dare to move, not even when he scooped up some water and grabbed my wrist. I thought maybe the other kids were right and he was crazy and I had made a terrible mistake. But he closed his eyes and poured the water into my hand. I stayed very still, half fascinated, half terrified. Then finally he opened his eyes and let go of my wrist. And only then did he speak.’

  Ziggy leant forwards as if to make sure not even the walls would hear what she was about to say.

  ‘He told me that everyone can feel where water is. But only those people who accept this about themselves can make use of it.’

  ‘Did he teach you how to do it?’

  Ziggy leant back in her chair.

  ‘No, I never spoke to him again. My mother found out I had been up there on my own. Not much escapes the women of Calmbach. Not long after, that dream went away. But there was a feeling that stayed with me.’

  ‘That one day you’d become a diviner.’

  She shook her head. ‘That you can’t know a desert without understanding its waters,’ she said, gripping her glass as if someone might try to take it away from her.

  And in that moment, I knew, madly, irretrievably, who it was she reminded me of.

  26

  I woke to a wasteland of a hangover. My tongue a dusty plateau. The couch on which I lay a vessel run aground. The synthetic blanket that Ziggy had hauled out of an old chest the night before smelt of animal, and there was again the scent of ozone, as if someone had just come in from outside or water was present. The room was dark except for a triangle of light entering via the steps, a faint glow visible beneath the ventilation shaft designed to stop whoever was in the room from suffocating. It gave off a remote hum, other sounds distorted by their navigation of the rock.

  Metal against muffled metal.

  Feet shuffling on the stone floor.

  I pulled on my jeans, the two stones still in my pocket, the jasper and the opal. Ran my fingers through my hair, which badly needed a wash, and put the blanket back in the wooden chest. My chin was a field of stubble but I couldn’t be fucked. I climbed the three steps, their rise uneven. Gripped the wall, the world briefly taking on a sway.

  Standing in the kitchen, her back to me, was a woman. She was barefoot, an apron tied over her green dress. She turned, pointed at me with a metal spatula.

  ‘Good morning,’ she said, her accent denser than Ziggy’s, filling the back of her throat.

  ‘Good morning.’

  She reached for a frying pan, her rolled-up sleeves revealing mottled skin.

  ‘I’m Saul.’

  ‘Yes,’ she said, distributing eggs and fat sausages across the three plates on the table.

  Dropping the pan back on the stove with a clank, she took the remainder of the loaf from the night before and placed it beside a slab of butter on a chopping board. She sliced the bread thickly.

  ‘You want toast?’ she asked.

  ‘No, it’s fine like that. Thank you.’

  She gestured for me to sit down. Eased herself into the chair opposite. Moved things closer to me: salt, pepper, butter, a jar of creamy paste labelled malidzano. She took a while to pick up her own fork, but kept an eye on me.

  ‘It’s good,’ I said, tucking into a sausage, my appetite not affected by my hangover.

  ‘Mm.’

  I was tasting the malidzano, which turned out to be an eggplant puree, when Ziggy entered via another set of steps, her wet hair revealing a pale skull. She smiled at me, kissed Mina on the cheek. The woman waved her away, briefly grasping Ziggy’s retreating hand.

  ‘How did you sleep?’ Ziggy asked me.

  ‘Really well.’

  ‘Like a rock,’ said Mina, tapping the closest bit of wall.

  ‘He liked your grappa.’

  ‘I make it from blood oranges I grow in my garden.’

  Mina reached into the pocket of her apron and produced two aspirin, which she deposited on the edge of my plate. Waving at my food, she said something I took to mean ‘eat up’ in whatever language was hers, something Slavic, I thought.

  So we ate, Mina not looking up from her plate except to nudge objects closer to us, her chewing audible. As soon as I was finished, she stood and went to take my plate, her left eye closing as she straightened her back.

  ‘I’ll do that,’ said Ziggy.

  Mina’s hands went up, her palms fleshy with the thickened knuckles of a tradie, but there was a ghost of a smile across her mouth. Filling a large jug with water, she ambled to the front door. Went outside accompanied by bird squawk.

  Ziggy stacked the plates and carried them to the sink, where she scrubbed them vigorously, like it was the design she was trying to remove, not a little grease, her hair falling into her eyes, framing the curve of her jaw. Even minus the veil of alcohol, she was still disturbingly attractive. More so if anything. Though not in a glossy way. Nerve, Jed would’ve called it – a resolve to carve your own path through the world that ran so deep, so close beneath the skin, it shaped your bones. Played with the light.

  I picked at the label on the jar of malidzano. On the road you were always falling in love with people and places. It was part of the intoxication, a heady ride from one point of glory to the next, the usual formalities stripped away – you followed your hunger till the money or your capacity for awe ran out – though there was no rehab waiting for you when you got back, no Travellers Anonymous. Add grief to that and what you’d be dealing with would be potent, disarming. I was still too raw. Didn’t trust myself. Not for a minute.

  ‘I’ve had an idea,’ said Ziggy nodding at a tea towel hanging from a peg, images of Surfers Paradise all over it from a time when it might have been.

  ‘Oh, yeah?’

  ‘I think I should come with you to Alice – I have to be there next week anyway. But you should wait until tomorrow to leave.’

  ‘Why’s that?’

  ‘Because you look like you need some rest. Plus, I have something I must do before I go.’

  I grabbed the tea towel, gave it a flick. Remembered the kid on the jetty in Port Augusta.

  ‘Okay.’

  ‘Okay, you will take me?’

  ‘Sure. Especially if you do some of the driving.’

  ‘No problem. And you can stay here tonight. Mina likes you.’

  ‘How can you tell?’

  Ziggy wiped her forehead with the back of her hand, suds collected in the crooks of her fingers.

  ‘She didn’t throw you out.’

  27

  We headed into Coober, the sun already earnest through the window, giving its premonition of heat. I drove. Ziggy talked. Mostly about a friend of hers who hadn’t come back from his claim the night before when he’d said that he would, her native accent receding as she said the word ‘bloke’. The road was quiet and almost unrecognisable from last night’s jaunt, a labrador-cross the only citizen about.

  ‘Never seen him before,’ said Ziggy, craning her neck. ‘Wonder where he’s escaped from.’

  In
town there was a road block outside the BP, a crowd of people gathered in the dirt patch beside an underground church. A mishmash of locals and tourists, they were spread out in front of a podium, two policewomen, four men, lined up in formation. Flags snapped in the breeze – Australian navy, New Zealand, the blue and white stripes of the Greek. A recorded version of the Australian anthem was nearing its end.

  ‘Dawn service,’ said Ziggy as she got out of the car.

  I followed her across the road and through the crowd, scratched my chin at the irony of it: a German bringing me to my first Anzac service since I was a kid.

  Near the back was a man in a wheelchair and a slouch hat who looked like the oldest digger there, three shiny medals lined up across the breast of his jacket. The handles of the chair were held by a guy wearing a black t-shirt, the acronym UCAC printed on the back. Both the men were Aboriginal.

  ‘He’s not here,’ whispered Ziggy, leaning in closer as the MC said a prayer. ‘If he’s not, that means something is wrong.’

  A light plane flew over as they played the ‘Last Post’, probably tourists doing the Lake Eyre Breakaways flight, and for a moment the bugle was drowned out. Ziggy focused on a patch of dirt in front of her. Whoever this friend was he obviously meant something to her. The thought didn’t please me.

  The MC’s voice fazed back in. Thanked the crowd for their presence and invited us all back to the RSL for a drink and, no doubt, a little two-up. People shook hands while the band packed away its brass; a group gathered round the old soldier in the wheelchair.

  ‘There’s somebody I need to talk to,’ said Ziggy, pinching her lip. ‘Meet you back here in fifteen minutes, okay?’

  ‘Sure.’

  She headed over to a group of men, most of them old enough to be her father, one sporting a slouch hat, another a camouflage jacket. Not far from them, two Aboriginal women stood alone on a patch of dirt. Both wore tracksuits, their shoulders pressed in tight. They looked about the same age as Nara, though heavier, lighter-skinned. The photo was in my glove box, but what were the chances they’d know her? Alice was seven hundred kilometres away.

  I checked my phone – luckily Ziggy used the same charger. There was a text from Kelly, who I’d called back after breakfast, saying she understood but asking me to keep in touch. Another message from Andy, wondering how the family issue was going and when I’d be back at work. I texted him to say I’d need a few more days to get sorted. Left it at that. I’d never skived off on him before and he kind of owed me. I switched my phone off again.

  Ziggy was still deep in conversation. The majority of the crowd had already departed for the RSL or wherever else people went in Coober Pedy on a public holiday. The sun homed in on my forehead, had a go at shrinking my skull. I felt a sudden need to be indoors. The shops looked closed, which left the underground church.

  Its roof was a mound of dirt, a veneer of stone stuck to the front like some homage to fifties suburbia. I went inside. Sensed the steady temperature of the dugout. The first section of the church was hand-cut – you could see the pick marks in the holes where the explosives had been placed – but the nave had been hollowed out by a machine. The rock was different here to Mina’s place. There was more red in it, thin veins, as if the walls had haemorrhaged, been wounded in their making. I wondered if the site had been chosen on purpose.

  There was nobody around, the only sign of visitors three candles lit in an alcove. Their flames swayed and guttered. Through the ventilation shaft came the restless sound – muffled, hollowed – of boys shouting.

  The vinyl creaked as I sat in one of the orange seats lined up on either side of a crooked aisle, a white plastic chain strung across the sanctuary. Recorded music was playing from speakers attached to the wall, a soprano backed by a choir. Some kind of hymn. It’d been ages since I’d been in a church, other than as a tourist – Notre Dame, the open-sky ruins of an Armenian church in eastern Turkey, the Muslim village boys using the archways as goalposts. When I was a kid, my mother would sometimes take me to St Matthew’s, the oldest church on the Eastern Shore and a remnant of the glory days of the suburb where we lived, the graveyard scattered with the eroded tombstones of the ex-convicts and other early settlers, some of them First Fleet.

  I looked down at my hands, a series of calluses from gripping the steering wheel forming a dotted line across my palm, the skin, not used to bore water, already beginning to dry. I hunched forwards. Braced myself. But the hymn and the cave-like qualities of that place threatened to undo me.

  Invoking another day, another refuge.

  The hermitage at Assekrem.

  Another dawn service.

  28

  Jed went first. Led the way up the zigzagging path to the plateau of Atakor, his head torch picking out loose stones that could send you careering towards the valley below. For the moment it was compressed by darkness, but in daylight the valley looked like a field of statues, the Hoggar Mountains a moonscape of volcanic needles, the surrounding earth stripped by Saharan sands till all that remained was the basalt core.

  Jed stumbled. Blew into the cave of his hands. The sun had only just begun its climb over the horizon, the temperature still below zero. He shone his torch up the path, but the hermitage was not yet visible above us. We’d heard about it long before that day, more than once – it was a staple in the diet of desert travellers’ tales. And now here we were, only minutes away.

  Below, I could just make out our bikes parked beside the concrete box of a building where we’d spent the night. And all around, the volcanic cores emerged from the dawn like men – men who’d been turned to stone – though by what force or for what crime it was impossible to tell.

  Unzipping his jacket, Jed looked back over his shoulder, and I almost feared for him – that it was daring to look into the light that had caused their petrification.

  ‘When I die,’ he said, ‘I don’t want to be buried.’

  ‘Jesus. What’s brought this on?’

  ‘You know. Spectacular dawn. Epic geology. Gets you thinking. I’ve always hated the idea of being stuck under the earth.’

  ‘Fair enough. Got anything particular in mind? Set alight in a Viking canoe? Thrown to the wolves? Sky burial, maybe?’

  Jed turned to me, his breath a loose cloud. ‘Close.’

  ‘You name it.’

  ‘I want to be thrown to the wind in a place like this,’ he said, sweeping his arm out in front of him.

  By the time we reached the plateau, the sun was burning off the dawn. The stacked stones of the hermitage blazed white despite the cold, their edges rough-cut and thin on mortar. Perched three thousand metres above sea level, the hermitage had been built from rubble by Charles de Foucauld, a French reverend and renowned specialist in Tuareg culture, who’d retreated to the plateau in 1911 to work on a Tamacheq dictionary and be close to God. But like a man lost at sea, after six months he was forced to return to Tamanrasset suffering from scurvy and loneliness. Following his assassination there in 1916, small communities had sprung up to carry on his work. They lived frugally, committed to the cultures in which they immersed themselves – at Foucauld’s hermitage at Assekrem, but also amongst the Warlpiri in the Tanami Desert, north-west of Alice Springs.

  A path led around the outside of the building and we followed it to a door with a slate lintel, a man standing beside it warming himself in the sun. His hands sunk deep into his khaki anorak, he nodded and smiled as if he’d known we were coming.

  ‘Bonjour,’ he said, holding out his hand. ‘Frère Tomas.’

  ‘Bonjour,’ we replied and both shook it.

  ‘Anglais?’

  ‘No,’ said Jed, ‘Australian.’

  ‘Soyez les bienvenus.’

  He gestured for us to follow him inside. The night’s chill was trapped in the walls, the temperature still hovering around zero. On a shelf lay an open journal, the one kept by Charles de Foucauld during his time in residence. Imitation is inseparable from love.

&n
bsp; We followed the monk down a narrow corridor. It led to a room with striped Berber carpets laid across the dusty floor. A metal cross hung from the stone.

  ‘Asseyez-vous,’ Frère Tomas said, taking a white robe from a nail.

  We sat cross-legged on a carpet, its wool scant protection against the cold that rose up through the floor from the plateau and entered via chinks in the walls. The funnelled air lifted dust, caused it to whirl in the shafts of light filtered by the smeared glass of the windows on the south side of the room. Jed blew into his cupped hands. The monk smiled.

  Another man appeared at the door dressed in leathers, a Japanese guy who’d arrived the night before on a Honda packed to the gills, the fact that someone so slight was able to keep it upright a gravitational miracle. He nodded and bowed. Continued to nod as he edged his way around us and took up the square of carpet he was offered. Frère Tomas sat too, tucking his boots beneath his robe, every move performed with the diligence of a man acting in loco dei.

  ‘Parlez-vous tous français?’ he asked us.

  ‘Un petit peu,’ replied Jed, pointing to himself then me, the Japanese guy nodding again, though impossible to tell if it was in agreement.

  ‘Pas d’importance,’ said Frère Tomas, lowering his head.

  And so he began, a Christmas mass for a Buddhist and two atheists, his voice gravelly but mellow. The contents of his prayer came to me only in fragments – Assekrem, le plateau d’Atakor, les Touaregs – continued outwards in ever-expanding circles, as if faith had an epicentre – Algiers, le monde Arabe – across the water to his native land, the words Australie and Asie decipherable among what I took to be a series of blessings, the wind audible as it circumnavigated the stone walls. I looked over at Jed and saw that his eyes were closed, his hands resting on his crossed legs, a stillness come over him that I’d only ever seen when he was asleep.

  Afterwards, Frère Tomas invited us outside into the sun, where we were joined by the other monk who lived up there, his beard close-cropped and the colour of ash, his blue beanie hand-knitted. He handed us each a small glass of tea, made from rainwater they collected when and if it fell. We nodded in gratitude. Sipped carefully. The brothers spoke together in rapid French, the Japanese guy bowing each time someone looked at him.