by Arnold Zable
‘And they knew the Mahomet brothers, Faiz and Tagh,’ the Gambler powered on, encouraged by my attention. ‘In 1892, they had trekked overland from South Australia with 250 camels. Within two years there were thousands of beasts and their turbaned handlers. They took possession of them in Fremantle, when they were led off ships from India and Afghanistan.
‘The cameleers taught us what a good camel is worth. Their slow movements are deceptive. They cover long distances faster than horses and bullocks. They trek for up to six days without water. They forge paths where no rails can be laid. A single camel can transport a pair of fat men one hundred kilometres in a single day. One camel is known to have carried a grand piano on its back.
‘You don’t believe me? Then you don’t know camels. The skill lies in the tying. If the ropes are in order the camel can cope with the rest. I have seen them hauling water tanks, railway sleepers and sheets of corrugated iron. I have seen them in teams of twenty, harnessed nose-to-tail, close enough to lick each other’s bums. They eat plants that not even a goat can stomach. Their padded feet cushion them against stones and the scalding earth.
‘We should import camels to Ithaca,’ laughed Stratis.
‘They stink,’ said Spiro, ‘and sink to the ground when you whisper hooster. I have seen it during a camel race. The race-goers shouted hooster and the camels collapsed to their knees. The cameleers were angry. They had put good money on their prized beasts. One of them ran onto the track and tried to whip his camel back to his feet in front of the laughing crowd. As it struggled up, the crowd bellowed hooster and down it went again.’
‘We are all gamblers,’ said Stratis. ‘It is a way of aborting years of sweat. A roll of the dice, a shuffle of the deck, and our worries are over. We prefer cards. Australians prefer horses, and flies crawling up walls. The Afghans put their hard-earned cash on camels and wrestlers.
‘The Afghans had a rival for our Gambler,’ said Spiro. ‘Aesop, he was called. His enterprises were more varied. He gambled on foot races, wrestling, billiards and boxing.
‘Yes. Yes. The Jacomas brothers knew Aesop,’ butted in the Gambler, intent on regaining the spotlight. ‘They met him many times in the streets of Coolgardie. When he was young, Aesop would take on all comers in wrestling contests.
‘His challengers quaked in their boots when they faced him. He was a giant of a man. He drew himself up to his full height, arms folded, moustache bristling, biceps flexed, and stared his rival down. He would simply wait while his opponent fidgeted and finessed and tried in vain to get a hold. Then with one swift move he would pin him to the ground.
‘Yes. Yes. The Jacomas boys knew him, just as they knew every miserable soul who has been lured to these parts. They knew those who made it, and those who toiled in vain. They knew those who struck it rich and those who went mad.’
‘Now he will tell us about Stellios Psichitas,’ predicted Stratis.
‘Why not young man? Stellios’ fate is a warning to us all. He should have remained in his native Syros and never set foot in this ill-fated land. Alas, his brother Ioannis owned a fruit shop in Lawler, on the Murchison fields, and Stellios could not resist the call.
‘In 1902 Ioannis brought him over and set him to work in his shop. Stellios envied his older brother. He coveted everything he possessed. He complained of the long hours he was made to work. The men despised each other with a hatred known only to brothers. One day, Ioannis left for Leonara to stock up on supplies. Stellios remained in the shop with his brother’s wife, Sophia. She held her newborn baby in her arms. Some say that she mocked him, or that he tried to embrace her and was rebuffed. Others argue Stellios demanded a share of his brother’s riches.
‘Whatever the reason, it drove him into a murderous rage. He felled Sophia with an axe and slit her throat, and her baby’s throat, with a razor. He staggered out into the desert babbling. A search party found him cowering in a creek bed with the bloodstained razor in his hand.
‘He was tried here in Kalgoorlie. It took the jury fifteen minutes to convict him, and the judge one minute to sentence him to death. He was transferred to Fremantle jail. He begged his brother for forgiveness. He begged forgiveness from father Antonios Lambradis, the wandering priest. He begged forgiveness from anyone who came near him until the day he was hanged.’
‘We are all beggars here despite our growing wealth,’ Stratis cut in. ‘Our compatriots feared reprisals because of Stellios’ crime: it reflected badly on all foreigners, as those of us who are not British are called.
‘My letters were misleading, Mentor,’ he said, turning to me. ‘It took me time to see how it is. One of us quarrels with his brother and we are all fratricides. One of us exploits his workers and we are all parasites. One of us is preferred for a job and we are all fucking scabs. One of us murders and we are all potential murderers. Our compatriots may have pitied Stellios, but they were not sorry to see him hang.’
I left the cafe with Stratis and strolled the streets of Kalgoorlie, overwhelmed by the Gambler’s barrage. Stratis guided me past Ithacan businesses: rooms leased by our compatriots and fitted out as oyster bars and cafes, grillrooms, tobacco and fruit shops. We saw crowds of drinkers through the swinging doors of public bars, leaning on balustrades, and bent over tables in billiard rooms, drinking to steady their aim. ‘Beer and whisky are the holy waters of Kalgoorlie,’ Stratis laughed.
We leapt on a cable tram, and leapt off in Boulder twenty minutes later, and continued our stroll on streets alight with drinking saloons. At that late hour they appeared to be replicas of the streets we had just left. Stratis again pointed out businesses run by Thiaks. The doors were bolted, the shutters down. Except for the locks, we could have been walking past homes in Ithaca, slumbering in the dark.
The streets petered out at ridges carved with mines. Treatment plants were still at work. Head-frames, smoke stacks, boilers and storage vats stood against the sky. Tailings dumps formed a range of hillocks that swelled like milk-filled breasts. We were walking the Golden Mile, the richest gold field in the world, Stratis declared.
The days of surface mining were long over, he explained. The alluvial gold had been quickly exhausted, and prospectors tamed into waged workers who plumbed ever-deepening seams. They laboured in dimly lit underworlds of galleries, tunnels and shafts. They drilled into lodes clogging their lungs with toxic dust. They jammed explosives into rock crevices and ran for their lives. Metallurgists, engineers, managers and foremen were the masterminds of the new order. Capital flowed to and from London offices. The miners were worker bees ferrying nectar to distant hives.
We struggled up a tailings-hillock on our mountain-goat legs. All that had loomed large, moments earlier, shrank in the star-filled night. Stratis swung his arm in an arc. ‘We are standing on a seabed, seven hundred million years old,’ he said, shaking his head in wonder. It was the oldest land surface in the world, here long before any creature walked the earth, and hatching inside its rocks was the gold that would reunite two Ithacan fools on a hill of waste millennia later.
‘The land is not as empty as it seems,’ Stratis explained. ‘Inside there is movement. Seeds lie dormant, waiting for rain. And when it finally falls, fields of flowers sprout overnight. It is said that while Europe lay buried beneath glaciers, natives were extracting edible roots from what we see as barren earth.’
I looked at the outline of Stratis’ face as he talked. I understood, as never before, the meaning of friendship. Our pact had taken on new meaning in the three days since I stepped ashore. We shared a passion for knowledge. We were blood brothers reunited on a mutual quest.
A day that had begun by the sea was ending in a city that had risen on desert sands. Beyond the revelry and the huddle of saloons, beyond the tunnels where men toiled to extract wealth, beyond the wood frames and iron girders, stretched unknown space. I was marooned. I bent over, ran my fingers through the tailings dirt, and shivered.
My life assumed a new rhythm. I alternated between
the Parisian Cafe and Spiro Black’s oyster saloon. With my primitive grasp of the new language I was not yet fit to wait upon tables. I was relegated to kitchens, and unloaded oysters from the Perth train. And on my days off I strolled the streets of Kalgoorlie with Stratis.
Perhaps only inspired madmen could erect a city so quickly. Within a decade the founding fathers had piped in water and built baths to wash off the dust. They fashioned wide streets out of red dirt to accommodate camel trains and bullocks. They graduated from canvas tents and bark-sheds to homes of stone and mortar. They erected courthouses to try thieves, and banks to protect their expanding riches. They built town halls and offices and engineered mines a kilometre deep in the ore-bearing ground.
Progress and order were their guiding values. They were men of enterprise. Empire builders. ‘Men of soaring energies,’ Stratis called them. Well-groomed bearded men, with a purpose in their stride hurried through the streets oblivious to the midday sun. They made their way to the Mechanics Institute, its fanned smoking rooms, billiards hall and lounges. They prided themselves on their public library in Hannan Street, where I spent hours bent over English texts.
I stepped out of the library with Stratis one Saturday, and strolled to the racecourse where we lay on shaded lawns. Lawn was the highest aesthetic of the city fathers. Lawn defied nature. Lawns stood in opposition to ancient contours. Lawn neutralised stone and boulders, and smothered the grime. Lawn was a sedate boast that the wilderness could be contained.
We strolled back to the town centre with the post-race crowd and strayed into the back streets. We paused in front of a double-fronted house where a man and two teenage children sat in wicker chairs by a table on a veranda. The table was covered in a white lace cloth, baskets of ferns and pot plants hung from the galvanised roof. A woman emerged from the house with a tray of white cups and a pot of tea. It was a scene of contentment gilded by a late-afternoon sun.
We made our way to the Palace Hotel, climbed the carpeted stairs and sat back in easy chairs on the balcony. We were dressed in double-breasted suits, white shirts and cravats. Our hair was pomaded, our moustaches waxed and curled. We lit cigars and sipped liqueurs, gentlemen’s drinks. I stood up and leaned on the balustrade overlooking Hannan Street.
Townsfolk were stepping off cable-trams, hailing horse-drawn cabs, navigating bicycles and automobiles through the evening crowd. A white Oldsmobile bedecked in ribbons ferried a bridal party, followed by a convoy of men wearing cream silk suits, and perfumed women in evening dresses.
We continued our stroll as evening fell and strayed beyond the fringe of the city. Beyond the final street stood a huddle of dwellings, a confusion of clay and canvas, galvanised tin and eucalypt branches. A group of blacks sat on kerosene tins around a fire. The women were dressed in cotton skirts, the men in shabby suits and open necked shirts; the children ran about barefoot.
The camp clung to Kalgoorlie’s edges like the serrated hem of a neat skirt. Nearby, Afghan cameleers were pitching tents beneath a cluster of salmon gums. Their beasts stretched out in the sand, at rest after a day’s labour.
I am drawn to thresholds. I long to follow things back to their source, to the drone of Byzantine chants flowing through the doors of St Marina. I move away and out of range, but the impressions linger. Beyond all sounds, said Mikhalis the fiddler, can be discerned the eternal hum we call silence; and from this silence there rise melodies that give shape to our longings.
The fragile space between town and desert hummed a different music. The cameleers were singing. Their voices evoked the call of the muezzin urging the faithful to prayer. We wanted to approach them but we held back. They were a cosmos unto themselves, and we were interlopers. We stood and watched from a distance, then turned and walked back to the well-lit streets of the city.
It began early morning, a howling of wind and dust. It swirled from the desert, from disused shafts, open-cut mines and tailings dumps. Horses snorted, dogs whimpered, camels sank to the dirt and refused to walk. It invaded the balconies, peppered the roofs and settled on verandas. It funnelled through junkyards and timber yards, and assaulted the racecourse lawns. It infested our jackets, and crept into our boots and pockets. It lashed our eyes, clogged our nostrils, soured our tongues, and swept us off the streets into the back rooms of our cafes. We drew the curtains, brewed coffees and surrendered to the Gambler’s cards.
The afternoon sun illumined the dust when we finally stepped back out. Dogs scavenged, tails up, noses to the ground, sniffing at novel smells. Cart wheels whipped up dust as they rolled by. Horses oozed sticky sweat from their rumps. Children itched. Tempers flared. Women cursed. Men coughed and flicked dust off their jackets as they hurried back to work.
Then I saw him. He emerged from the dust in a soldier’s uniform. His hair was matted, and perspiration flowed in dirt-stained rivulets from forehead to neck. He clasped his hands to his ears as he limped. And he howled. People averted their eyes and edged out of his way as he approached. He fell beside the cable tracks and beat the gravel with his fists. He beat the sides of his head and still he howled. It was an animal keening, the high-pitched wail of a wounded dog.
I stood on the pavement, transfixed. I followed the soldier as if willed by an unseen force. He stumbled through the back streets, to the double-fronted house I had seen, weeks earlier, bathed in tranquillity. The older man, who had been seated on the veranda, and the woman who had served the tea, were waiting as he limped though the gate. The older man pinned the soldier’s arms to his side and wrestled him to the ground. The soldier bucked and clawed until the older man prevailed. The couple led him into the house, subdued and trembling.
I remained rooted to the spot after the front door closed. The blinds were drawn, the house silent. The potted plants were wilting from neglect. Weeds had begun to sprout beneath the rim of the veranda. The soldier had enlisted two years earlier as a teenager, and had returned from the battlefields to his parents’ home, weeks ago, insane.
From that day on, whenever I strolled in the back streets I knew, instinctively, the houses of families who had lost a son, a brother, husband or father. The houses were stained by an absence. Those who entered and stepped out were marked by grief. It was evident in their drawn faces, their distracted air.
I was plagued by the thought of the simultaneity of events. Somewhere in the city a father, a mother, a wife, was being informed of the death of a loved one. At the same time, a crowd was waiting on a quay in Fremantle for the first sight of a shell-shocked husband, a maimed son. And on a battlefield, far from home, a soldier was being blown apart.
I hurried from the house to the bordellos on Brookman Street, and exchanged a week’s wages for a woman’s warmth. I observed my sun-darkened hands moving over fair skin. I chose a second partner and paid her to remove the thick powder on her cheeks before we embraced. I inhaled the perfume on her smooth skin. I wanted to wipe the slate clean.
The dust storm was over but a greater storm brewed in men’s hearts. We arranged our goods in the display windows as we assumed polite citizens should. We waited on our customers neatly dressed, and greeted them with good cheer. We controlled our gestures and spoke sparingly to obscure our foreign tongues. We cooked to their tastes, and hastened to serve them, but no matter how we tried, we were looked at with growing distrust.
The Gambler kept us informed of news from the battlefront. He sat at the backroom table and translated daily reports from the Kalgoorlie Miner. He leaned back, broadsheet in hand, and read out the honour rolls of soldiers killed, and lists of the wounded and missing-in-action. He translated reports of battles in Serbia, Romania and Macedonia, and as if reaching the climax of a performance, he paused at news from Greece. He pondered over the text like a scholar, consulted dictionaries, and weighed up each word before translating.
King Constantine, he finally informed us, had stalled on Allied demands to hand over his reservists’ guns. In the first week of December, English, French and Italian troops l
anded in Piraeus. Fifty were killed in skirmishes with the reservists. French and Greek soldiers exchanged shots on the slopes of the Acropolis. Allied shells had fallen in the centre of the city. Athenians were fleeing to the plains of Attica.
As reports of the ‘Grecian Crisis’ grew more strident, customers we had believed were friends began to avoid us. I saw the transformation of familiar faces, from habitual friendliness, clouded by a hint of mistrust, to hatred, glinting in eyes riddled with suspicion. Stratis was spat upon in Hannan Street. Rumours were circulating.
The Gambler’s translations became more considered. He savoured the attention of his audience and took time conveying the meaning of terms such as ‘gross treachery’. He stroked his chin, nodded his head like a sage, and announced that editorials had accused the Greeks of unprovoked attacks upon the Allies. Athens had become a slaughterhouse. Armed royalists, loyal to King Constantine, were attacking republican supporters of Prime Minister Venizelos. King Constantine was accused of colluding with the Germans in torpedoing hospital ships in the Aegean.
The Gambler pondered over the editorial: ‘It was high time that shilly-shallying was abandoned in dealing with Greece,’ he read. We waited for his translation. The Gambler revelled in our attention.
‘It’s “high time” you stopped “shilly-shallying” with us,’ Stratis finally snapped in a concoction of English and Greek. We laughed until our bellies ached.
On the day the madness broke, the newspapers reported renewed atrocities. Venizelists had been ‘done to death like rats,’ wrote one correspondent. Diplomatic relations with the Greek government were to be suspended. The Allied governments threatened to impose a blockade on Greece until they received reparations for the loss of troops. ‘King Constantine must be held accountable for complicity in the crimes committed,’ thundered Allied leaders.
Again I was plagued by the simultaneity of events, the currents that bound us to actions taking place in distant continents. We were being viewed through distorted lenses. Our protestations of loyalty to Australia were sneered at. Our claims that we were supporters of Venizelos, who sided with the Allies, went unheeded.