by Lia Hills
Jed picked dust from the surface of his tea, a couple of days’ growth like sand on his chin. Below us, the granite cores were no longer the colour of blood, their fluted walls washed out, grooved canines in a deep yawn of a landscape. I sipped a little more of my tea. Gave thought to what Jed had said on the way up, about the scattering of his ashes.
‘Did you ever consider that I might beat you to the grave?’ I asked him.
‘Never. Though if you did you’d probably come back and haunt me.’
‘Why do you say that?’
Jed looked across at the monks, at the valley with its mighty basalt monuments. Held up his glass.
‘Stuff like this,’ he said, ‘it binds you. Binds you to people. To a place.’
And I had the sense in that moment – just as I had that night by the river – that there was a gaping truth at the heart of his words. That somehow he had access to the future in a way I never would.
29
Mina shelled peas at the plastic table on the verandah while I peeled the potatoes, the skins muddy slithers on the newspaper she’d provided. A metal thermometer nailed to the rock claimed it was only twenty-one degrees, the sky unerringly blue. The garden was impressive in daylight – hot pink bougainvillea, blood oranges, a displaced frangipani with dusty leaves – the plants making use of every shadow. Over by the shed, my car looked like it had always been there.
After Ziggy and I had got back from town, I’d fallen asleep on the couch. Ziggy had left for her friend’s claim before I woke. Nobody in town had heard from him either and she feared there’d been an accident.
Mina swore at a pea that evaded her grasp, the tips of her right fingers having lost sensibility as the result of a mining accident.
‘How long you lived here?’ I asked.
‘Thirty-seven years.’
‘Long time.’
‘Longer than you been alive, I reckon.’
‘Just. And before that?’
‘Melbourne, Wollongong. Lightning Ridge. We was gonna be rich as kings.’
‘You and your husband?’
‘Biggest bastard on this world.’
Mina broke away from English. Whatever her husband had done required the brutal precision of a native language.
‘And home? Where’s that?’
‘Was a small village near Lake Ohrid.’
‘Macedonia,’ I said.
‘That’s what they call it these days. But home is here now. Ziggy. This place.’ She waved a finger at the bare hill that rose behind the shed.
‘And the opal?’ I asked.
‘Sometime I think it’s like family.’
I slid a peeled potato into the bucket of murky water near her elbow.
‘Did you find any when you dug out this place?’
‘I have my luck.’
‘I heard some people keep adding rooms because each time they dig they find another seam.’
She grinned and pointed to a strip of skin I’d missed on one of the potatoes.
‘It must feel good, though, when you hit upon some colour,’ I said, trying out a word I’d heard more than a few times since I’d arrived in town.
Her eyebrows lifted almost imperceptibly. ‘Yes.’
‘Especially red opal, yeah? Isn’t that the most expensive kind?’
Another pea escaped her and rolled under the table. I bent down to retrieve it but she waved me away.
‘So, what’s your secret?’ I asked her.
Wiping her hands on her skirt, she reached behind her and tapped her knuckle against the rock that formed the front of the house.
‘I listen, listen to the sound it makes, and I know. I can hear the quality, if there is colour, or if it’s good place to dig, to make a dugout, if it break. I tell them where is the best place to build the church. Most time I’m right. Good ears. Good eyes.’ She squinted, tapped a fleshy lobe with the tip of her finger.
‘Sounds easy,’ I said.
‘Everything easy when you know.’ Mina leant over and rapped the top of my head with her knuckle. ‘Something happen to you,’ she said.
I dropped another potato into the bucket, the impact of her knuckle still detectable on my skull.
‘No worries. I am good with secrets. I know things about this place that make you go curly,’ she said, flicking at tufts of her hair. ‘So many bloody stories, sometimes I think my memory going to explode out of my head.’
Mina looked at me. I focused on my work.
‘Doesn’t matter,’ she said. ‘You decide. I’m here, finishing the peas.’
She checked over the potatoes I’d already done. Shoved the pointed end of a peeler into the white flesh of one of them, removed an eye I’d missed. Behind her, a huge moth clung to the wall waiting for night.
‘My friend killed himself,’ I said.
‘Good friend?’
‘Very.’
‘When?’
‘Five days ago.’
She winced. ‘What happened?’
‘I don’t know – not really. They said he jumped off a cliff.’
A laugh exited me like a cough. Mina frowned.
‘My mother always used to say: Would you jump of a cliff if he asked you to?’
‘Mothers say lots of things.’
Mina scraped the inside of a pod with her thumb.
‘You have to be careful,’ she warned.
‘Of what?’
‘Is not a good time to be alone. You understand?’
‘Sure.’
‘Don’t say sure like is nothing. It’s important what I’m saying.’
The moth behind her closed then opened its wings as if breathing with them. Mina selected another pod, the smooth green tube reminding me of a story Ziggy had told me the night before, roughly five grappas in. About how Mina had dug out a rare belemnite one morning soon after her husband left, the cephalopod twice the length of her hand and as blue-green as the sea in which it had once swum, the squid-like tentacles that once propelled it through cretaceous waters gone, only the core of its body opalised. Apparently Mina’d had it polished but never sold it, the belemnite locked away in a bank in Adelaide – her retirement plan, for when she too became a fossil, she’d joked. But Ziggy had a hunch that she’d hidden it somewhere in the house; that she kept the belemnite not as superannuation, not even for its beauty, but because some things are so rare, so once-in-a-lifetime, you can’t bear to part with them.
‘There’s something more,’ said Mina, ‘something you must not forget.’
‘Yes?’
Mina split the pod in half with her nail, the sun only a semi-circle now above the corrugated roof of the shed, both of them rusting.
‘You are not him.’
30
The next morning, Ziggy and I left straight after breakfast. Before we drove off, Mina handed me a paper bag.
‘My special cake,’ she said.
‘Thanks, Mina. For everything.’
She reached up and hugged me, her head heavy against my chest. Her hair smelt of the blood oranges she grew in her garden.
‘I had a boy, but he gone now,’ she whispered. ‘You come back sometime.’
It was just after nine, but the sun was already high enough to flatten the colours, the troglodytic suburbs of Coober Pedy like some sandblasted version of Hobbiton. A road train roared past as we joined the Stuart Highway, the distances on the signpost all three-digit, only two choices: south to Port Augusta or north to Alice Springs. The road was lined with mounds and blowers stretching out towards the western horizon, a truck parked up next to a shaft, dust forming its own cloud. A sign with a stick figure falling down a mine warned that it was a prohibited area. It turned out Ziggy’s friend had got so tanked he’d spent the night at his claim. She’d found him asleep in the back of his ute, his dog as a blanket.
She put her feet on the dashboard and leant back into the passenger seat. She was wearing the same pair of jeans she’d had on for the last two days. Her toenails were pa
inted blue.
‘Two thousand kilometres,’ I said as the zeros clicked over.
‘Since?’
‘Melbourne.’
‘When did you leave?’
‘Saturday morning.’
‘In a hurry?’
‘You could say that.’
Two emus attempted to cross the road, their heads pivoting at the end of their long necks, the rest of them bobbing like suspended marionettes.
‘Mina told me I should marry you,’ I said, tapping the steering wheel.
‘What?’
‘Something to do with your visa running out a while ago.’
‘Last of the romantics, Mina,’ said Ziggy, shaking her head. ‘So what did you say to her?’
‘That I’m not the marrying type.’
‘Is that true?’
‘Don’t know. I’m not good at paperwork.’
‘Me neither.’
‘So it seems. How do you make money, if you’re not technically here?’
‘Probably better if I don’t tell you.’
‘Why? Because then you’d have to kill me?’
Ziggy raised an eyebrow and grinned.
‘What about you?’ she asked. ‘What do you do?’
‘I’ve been working in Sydney for a guy I met in France. He runs an adventure travel business – packaged danger, that sort of thing. White-water rafting on the Zambezi. Everest base camp. Motorcycling through the Sahara. When I met him he said I’d be doing a bit of scouting at first, working out new itineraries, then move towards me opening an office in Melbourne. But so far it’s been mostly admin and he doesn’t seem ready to share the spoils. I’m thinking about quitting.’
‘And doing what?’
‘No idea. Mine opal maybe,’ I half joked.
‘No money in it now, not without spending a lot to set up. Unless you’re lucky. Are you lucky, Saul?’
‘It’s the lucky country, isn’t it?’ I said, with a snort.
‘That’s what I hear.’
‘What’ll happen if you get caught?’
‘I’ll be deported. Sent back to Germany.’
‘Shit.’
‘At least they won’t stick me on Christmas Island and leave me there to rot.’
‘You sure about that?’
‘I’m the right kind of illegal immigrant. Right colour.’
She ran her fingers through her crest of white hair, years of Holocaust films and Friday night documentaries making it hard to overlook the hint of Aryanism. Even the down on her arms was blonde. But this was the generation who’d got over it, had stepped beyond their guilt. At least that’s what a couple I’d stayed with in Munich had told me the night after I’d got back from a tour of Dachau.
Ziggy turned sideways in her seat so she was facing me.
‘During the First World War,’ she said, ‘they put all the German intellectuals together in an internment camp on the coast near Kempsey. Brain surgeons. University professors. Astrophysicists. The consul to New South Wales.’
‘Wouldn’t surprise me.’
‘The prisoners published their own newspaper, ran language classes, performed theatre, even made all their own costumes, dresses for the men who played the female characters. Some of the prisoners lived in caves in the cliffs above the sea and wrote poetry and painted up there, but in the end they closed the camp down because they thought the prisoners were plotting with passing German ships to invade Australia.’
‘What, by sending poems in a bottle?’
Ziggy grinned. Nodded at a sign warning of cattle in three languages – English, Japanese and German – the yellow diamond stark against the unfailing blue of the sky.
‘Tiere am weg,’ she read, her voice sounding of Europe.
‘Do you miss it?’
‘What?’
‘Germany.’
‘Only the snow.’
‘And the weiss beer?’
She went quiet for a bit, chewed on her lip. ‘Sometimes I miss living in a place where people feel at home,’ she said.
‘Home?’
‘Places like this – there’s nowhere to hide from the light.’
To the east, a wedge-tailed eagle carved a path through a lone wisp of cloud, the sky crude, high-octane. Ahead, the road shimmered, reduced to a mirage.
‘But you, you’re from a small island,’ she said, tugging at the silver chain around her neck. ‘Maybe it’s different.’
‘Not that small. It’s the same size as Ireland.’
Something about my offence appealed to her Teutonic sense of humour, her laugh more a snort.
I wiped the speedo. A layer of dust had gathered while it’d been parked up at the dugout, the desert always hitching a ride to somewhere else.
‘What about Coober?’ I asked.
‘It’s like an island sometimes.’
‘Full of noble savages.’
‘Some, yes. Others not so noble.’
I thought of Mina. Her damaged hands. The stashed belemnite. Her words loaded as prophecy: You are not him.
‘Are you related to her?’ I asked.
‘Who, Mina?’
‘You said you came here because of family connections.’
‘No, we’re not related – though sometimes it feels like it. She got under my skin, that one. Like a tick.’ She scratched her bare wrist. Grinned again.
‘If it wasn’t Mina, then who was it that brought you here?’
‘Siegfrieda Dortmann. My great-great-great-aunt.’
‘How does that work?’
‘I grew up in her house. It was passed to my mother from my grandmother and her mother before then. It was Siegfrieda’s wish – the house must stay with the women in the family. One day it will be passed to me.’
‘But what’s that got to do with Coober Pedy?’
‘My aunt was a geologist. She travelled a lot, went to Africa. It wasn’t easy for a woman in those days.’
‘I can imagine,’ I said.
‘Germans were the main traders in opal back then, before the Chinese took over. One day, at a colleague’s house in Ulm, she saw a pineapple opal from White Cliffs and fell in love. That’s what she told my great-grandmother. Man sagt, es ist nicht möglich sich in einen Stein zu verlieben, aber ich bin verliebt’.’
Ziggy swallowed hard. Maybe it was the return to her own language, or talk of family, but she looked wistful. Like she’d rather be elsewhere.
‘Did your great-grandmother tell you all this?’ I asked.
‘No, I read it in one of Siegfrieda’s letters to her. The attic was full of them and her journals, all the samples she sent back from White Cliffs and Lightning Ridge. I used to go up there at night sometimes, when my parents were asleep. Sit in the round window that looked over the forest and study the stones in the moonlight. Back then I did not know much about how they were formed, but to me they looked like trapped water.’
Ziggy paused and glanced across at me, before continuing. ‘In the attic there were samples from Coober Pedy too. She went there soon after the first opal was found, but she never came back.’
‘What happened to her?’
‘Nobody knows. The last letter was dated 15 August 1917.’
‘Do you think it had something to do with the war?’
‘Maybe.’
Ziggy drew in the dust on the window, small concentric circles, and suddenly it all fell into place.
‘That’s where you got your name from, isn’t it?’ I asked.
‘Yes. Prädestiniert.’
‘What?’
‘Predestined.’
‘You don’t believe that, do you?’
‘No. Sometimes. Only when I get homesick.’
‘So, did you find her?’ I asked, avoiding a crow that refused to budge from a carcass at the edge of the road.
Ziggy tracked the bird, airborne in our wake, a tempest of black feathers.
‘I guess I’m still looking,’ she said.
31
A few
hundred kilometres on, we quit the highway. Headed due west along a dirt road, a graffitied Holden a contorted mess on the side, its rust a deeper red than the sand in which it squatted. In the distance, the ranges were smudged by rising dust. The road had recently been graded, hardly any corrugation as it crossed the Ghan railway, named after the Afghan cameleers who once navigated the desert. A sign announced that we were entering Pitjantjatjara land. I looked across at Ziggy.
‘This won’t take long,’ she said, her eyes set on the road ahead.
A couple more k’s and a strip of bitumen appeared, black against the red. It led south. Dipped into a dry riverbed before curving into the township. The houses were the kind I’d seen on TV, single-storey boxes in varying states of disrepair. Two wheelless wrecks were parked next to each other in a yard delineated by wire, a bearded man sitting on an old car seat on the verandah. In another yard, a small boy chased an even smaller dog. The kid was naked, his dark skin matt with dust, hair bleached. A woman called to him, waved him in. Wiped his nose with the bottom of her skirt.
‘There’s an artist here whose paintings I really like,’ said Ziggy.
Further in there were white faces. Two women, heads and elbows leaning out of four-wheel drives, were talking opposite a school, no children in sight. We pulled up in front of a besser-block building, the verandah enclosed with a metal grille. A pair of dogs sunned themselves out the front, their tails flicking at flies.
Ziggy took a swig from a bottle that had been rolling around on the floor of the car. Water escaped down her chin.
‘You’ve never been into a community before, have you?’ she asked.
‘An Aboriginal one? Nah.’
‘You coming?’
‘Sure.’
One of the dogs raised its head as we went past, an arc of a cut on its snout. It sneezed. Lowered its muzzle to the dirt. The gate was open, three women painting in a row at a long wooden table, canvases drying on the concrete.
‘Wai, palya?’ asked Ziggy.
One of the women nodded, a healthy moustache on her top lip, but the others didn’t seem to have heard.