by Gail Jones
Two things were curious: the mother wore on that day a scarlet dress, and had also rouged her cheeks, a cosmetic indulgence usually reserved for special occasions. This repetition of colour, so neatly coincident, so oval on oval, implicated the woman mysteriously in her work; the girl-child Janet Allotson thought it odd and remarkable. She gazed at her mother’s face, at her hair, at her dress, at the curve of her shape, at the rim of light along her body from the sunshine at the window, and noted the stillness and fixity with which she worked. Some magnification of vision attended this scrutiny. Janet saw fragments of golden wattle blossom caught in the hair, saw how the fabric of the dress described breasts and hips, noticed, glancing surreptitiously beneath the kitchen table, streaks of dirt on long bare feet, not unlike her own. The child observed her mother with unprecedented concentration, as though it was the first time ever she had seen her whole, a mother entire.
The painter continued apparently undistracted. Whorls and complex flourishes appeared beneath the brush. Gradations of shadow produced what might have been petals. There was a suggestion of figures or flesh, dunes in a desert landscape, blown water, a bowl of apples. Janet stood there at the table and contemplated with all her seven year old seriousness the page upon which images were both fluidly uncertain and wonderfully whim-dependent.
Then, quite unexpectedly, she heard herself pronounce, for the first time in her life and from who-knows-where, the story book word ‘ruby’. It formulated itself in the chamber of her mouth, verged forward and was uttered: ‘ruby’. A capacious word, cadenced, consonantal—oriental, somehow, and possibly Aladdinish, summoning tessellated window lattices, incense burners of brass filigree, tasselled velvet robes, anti-gravitational, speed-unlimited carpets, sunsets of pure peach over spiky minarets, dome on breast-shaped dome for mile after Middle Eastern mile. ‘Ruby’: this single word opened like a window upon an altogether-elsewhere.
Did her mother glance up? Was there some instant of understanding or complicity between them? Did the hand pause at its making or the form at its refinement? Janet Allotson could not remember. At the centre of her recollection—in some ways so redolent of child examination (detail, curiosity, the low-eye view)—rested a single dull naught, a mere forgetting of response. The word ‘ruby’ was indubitable, but after that came an interval of momentary amnesia, a flat-shaped nothing, a no-mother with a no-smile, a no-current of maternal inquiry and approbation. It was a ‘ruby’ unrequited.
(Janet thought now in terms of legal casuistry: Quot non apparet non est: ‘That which does not appear does not exist’.)
At this point commences the second part of the memory. Janet’s father appeared all of a sudden at the kitchen door. A large man of squarish frame and robust disposition, enormous hands, farmerish clothes (mud-caked, work-soiled, sweetly odour-laden), he stamped at the doorway to announce his entrance (a habit taken from his own father and conveyed onwards, gender indifferent, right down the generations) and flashed an open-bladed pocket knife before his daughter.
‘The skinning’, he reminded. ‘Time for men’s work.’
Janet turned from the painting and tucked the word ruby in the side of her cheek like a forbidden mouthful.
She dutifully followed her father to the lower paddock down by the creek. He dragged by the tail a grey kangaroo they had hit with the truck two days before. The sky was yellow and warm, the air placidly breezeless. At each intruding footstep insects sprang up in tiny clouds from the high grass. (Janet found this comical: that one’s progress might be signified by puffs abuzz.)
They reached the narrow creek and her father placed the dead animal on a patch of bald grass not far from the water. Janet squatted to look: it was the first skinning she had witnessed.
The kangaroo had wholly closed up with its death. Bounding life gone, it was now limp and shut-eyed, a pretty face indifferent and blank as a mask. Father turned it on its back so that the hind legs splayed apart and the short little forelegs jutted forward, pathetically, in a supplicating gesture. It appeared vaguely prayerful, as small pawed animals sometimes do, but Janet knew, even then, that a skinning must disqualify anthropomorphism or sentimentality.
She watched the insertion of the knife into the chest of the animal. It punctured and was drawn down the length of the carcass in a slightly jagged movement. Then came the separation of skin from flesh. The knife pushed gently under, and the skin with its fur was peeled carefully away. First of all the chest and the belly were exposed. Janet held her breath.
It was not, as she had imagined, the compact containment of the body that impressed her—the hill of bowed ribs and the tight bowl of belly—but a spectacle of colours. Beneath and adhering to the dingy grey fur was a layer of lime green fat, and beneath that, upon the body, pastels of every shade. Sinews stretched lines in streaks of lilac, there was the soft pink of flesh, blue traceries of blood, a yellow of some unidentifiable substance, and all glistened together as though covered with water or a thin sheet of plastic. Janet thought it most beautiful, a revelation. Instead of butcher incarnadine, this unexpected subtlety.
The knife worked away so that the skin of the kangaroo continued to draw back: more planes of colour, more tidy rotundity. The blade was inscribing a series of quick curves, flensing as it went. The father bent at his work, not once looking up, and slowly removed the pelt with all the unhurried fastidiousness of a waiter handling an expensive and tailor-precise dinner jacket.
But when the carcass was turned over to complete the procedure Janet experienced a slight moment of shock. On the flesh of the rump was a large blackened area which showed the damage of impact. It was ugly and distracting and indicated unseemly death. Caught beneath the skin was a congealed and darkened sac which must surely spill open.
Yet the father, still silent, manoeuvred his knife skilfully across this terrible territory. Janet wanted to close her eyes (oh the thud of that body, the too-new corpse of the kangaroo propelled, larrikin-like, over the momentous bonnet, the sure and simple finality of its quivering rest) but did not. She watched the skin come away, watched the knife wiped clean on threads of dry grass, watched as the carcass, now sullied and too old to be safely eaten, was dragged off into a patch of bushes for a private decomposition.
Janet’s father rolled the kangaroo skin so that it formed a tight scroll.
‘Your mother’, he said. ‘Take it to your mother.’
And he lay back on the grass, extracted a cigarette from behind his ear, and lit up.
There is no walk back to the house with the stinking skin, no return journey through insect puffs; this route has been cancelled, this journey unregistered. There is only a moment of resolution; or irresolution.
Janet was there at the doorway with her animal parcel (stamping her feet), and saw that her mother was still painting. The hand lifted and sank, dabbed precisely, lifted again and twirled with a slow whisk a lovely globe of colour. The painting was more elaborate, but still incomprehensible. Janet felt she wanted to speak. She wanted to say the word ‘ruby’ and so attract her mother’s attention. She might reconstruct that moment of exotic vista, find again that point of aperture through which she glimpsed a locality that could only have been fiction. If there was any vision now attached it was indistinct, uncertain and caught, she supposed, behind a layer of pink membrane: there was some inkling of another existence both absolutely fantastic—lodged in phonology and imagination, in the sleepy inflections of a bedtime reading voice—and profoundly organic—intimate and substantive as the beating heart of one’s body. There seemed, in that moment, an urgent need for reclamation.
But some obstruction was at work. Janet remained silent. She stood with her word unuttered and the skin unscrolled. It was a moment in which she felt—and such a premature revelation!—an appalling sensation of the disconnectedness of things: her father by the creek, her mother fixed at the painting, the exposed kangaroo, at once splendid and awful, the ins
ects, the blossom, the sound of far cows moaning.
Janet looked at her mother, dropped the skin in the doorway, and, accelerated by an uncontrollable haywire of emotion, ran off through the grass to seek a secret crying place.
Janet Allotson, barrister, hugged a cover around her body and moved to the bay window. It was a blue Melbourne morning in which hung, as one would expect, a possibility of drizzle. Childhood was elsewhere, dry, golden coloured, and irreparably preterite. The bedroom had assumed an aspect of indeterminacy, in part a certain quality of the blurring early light, in part a consequence of her own groping through distant past selves and their distant past implications. It carried the exquisite tension of an inner chronology.
There was a case, Janet recalled, which she had been told of in her student days and which returned to her now as an extraordinary exemplar of the misery of forgetfulness. A strange young man, accused by the crown of the murder of his mother, had argued that he was simply unable to remember the incident. This was no casual absent-mindedness: according to the defence the man had one year before suffered a terrible head injury after which he possessed no reliable or substantive continuity of self. He could remember, it was attested, only within a span of seven or eight days. Beyond that all was black. The mother, in fact, was entirely forgotten. Photographs of past life were entirely unrecognisable. And the man was thus condemned—as a neurologist witness for the defence sought to argue—to a perpetual selfhood merely one week old.
The only legal grounds employed fell within the plea of insanity, within a version, that is, of non compos mentis. The mental state was such that the man’s faculties were adjudged not actually attenuated, but simply incomplete. Thus the accused, it was conceded, was not without emotions; but these were riddling, chaotic and unattached to the world. Nor was he lacking in the employment of language; however words too bore a manifest lack of attachment, a frailty, a flimsiness, an inconsequentiality. For all this the accused was a rational man, moderate and articulate. He was also evidently anguished at the thought that he might have killed his unmemorable mother. His own oblivion tortured him.
But there came a particular moment at which the case was clearly lost. Addressing the perplexed jury, counsel for the defence drew attention to a poignant anomaly in the accused’s condition. Before his sad accident the man had been a student writing a thesis on Shakespeare’s sonnets. And within the general realm of this man’s forgetting, there existed a single and altogether striking exemption: he could recite, by heart, the complete sonnets of Shakespeare. As eloquent testimony—and not without a sense of courtroom flair—the lawyer requested that his client pronounce sonnet number thirty:
When to the sessions of sweet silent thought
I summon up remembrance of things past,
I sigh the lack of many a thing I sought,
And with old woes new wail my dear times’ waste: …
At this point the jury replaced perplexity with scepticism. No reciter of Shakespeare could be claimed deficient in memory!: the defence lawyer had committed a ruinous error of judgement. The accused, in turn, was sentenced to life imprisonment, though an appeal saw him later placed in protective custody, for an indefinite term and at the Governor’s pleasure, in the local lunatic asylum.
Within a week he had forgotten the outside world, and continued to live on in the inside world, within a system, exactly composed, of one hundred and fifty-four utterly discrete and elegant fourteen line universes, within, that is, a world almost entirely linguistic.
Janet Allotson shivered and moved back into bed. Her lover still slept. She slid her shape along his and rubbed her hand along his thighs. Then, without exactly knowing the reason why, though hoping to arouse, hoping to inspire a sleepily amorous response, hoping for a kiss and a reciprocating hand, a caress definitive, she bent over her lover’s ear, leant her lips so close that they brushed its tip, and whispered, very seductively, the single word ‘ruby’.
‘Life Probably Saved by Imbecile Dwarf’
(Index entry in Ronald W. Clarke’s Freud: The Man and the Cause, Granada, 1982, for which exists only one slim and secretive paragraph of exposition.)
Is the tape recorder on? Well, let me see.
It was a long time ago now of course. Vienna was still very lovely in those days, before so many cars filled up the streets with their noise and their roars, like great metal predators. There were more trees along the boulevard, the Ringstrasse. It was quieter, too, and the light was clean and more clear. Women were more beautiful, hats, red lips, men more polite, still bowing and with gloves.
I was only a junior nurse when Dr Deutsch admitted him, but I remember it well. It was some time in April, 1923. I remember the exact month because it was the very same month in which my Claus proposed marriage; I was in love, you see. Well one day in April Dr Deutsch brought in his patient Dr Freud for a biopsy. (We didn’t know at that stage that he had cancer of the jaw; it seemed more likely to be benign, what we call a leukoplakia: smokers get them all the time.) One of the other nurses, I recall, came over to me and whispered, ‘It is that sex doctor Freud; I’ll bet he has contracted a cancer for his sins’, and she squinted her eyes and looked maliciously in his direction. I shall never forget it. Greta, her name was. For myself I was surprised at how solid and how forceful he actually appeared. He was almost sixty-seven, and you think to yourself: sixty-seven, maybe cancer: frail, shrivelled. But he was not like that at all. Those photographs you showed me—where he looks at the camera directly and rudely, so like a man—that is more like it. He was elegantly dressed, carried a cane, wore a hat, had a neatly trimmed white beard above a black satin tie, oh, and a watch chain, as was the fashion those days, hanging from his waistcoat. Gold rings on his fingers. All very bourgeois. And, would you believe it, he came to the hospital smoking a cigar like a chimney! Ach! So stupid!
Dr Freud was supposed to be admitted for a quick biopsy and then taken home. He had an appointment with Dr Hajek, a rhinologist—a nose doctor, would you believe—in the outpatient clinic. So we hadn’t booked him a bed, thinking there was no need. Not foreseeable, anyway. But then later Dr Hajek came striding up the corridor towards me and said in a loud voice (he was a very loud man) ‘My patient Dr Freud has lost more blood than expected. We will leave him here overnight for observation. Arrange a bed if you please.’ Well, can you imagine? Arranging beds wasn’t my task but I fixed it up anyway, them being men of such importance, me being young and looking up to such men. (And not knowing then the sort of things I know now.)
You said this new biography will have lots of bits and pieces that the others left out—what did you call it?—‘marginalia based’. Well let me just tell you something really good. Dr Freud had a thing, a strange thing, about numbers, a superstition, a dread. You knew that already? Ach, never mind. Anyway, with some trouble I had found him a bed in ward five, but he straightaway objected. ‘Wrong number’, he mumbled with his hand up to his jaw. ‘Wrong number.’ He shook his head at me stern-like. I could see he was in pain and the bandages around his face were already soaking crimson, so I tried to be kind and settle the matter quickly. I took Dr Freud by the arm and led him to the tiny utility room, out towards the back, where we kept the dwarf. It was a room, incidentally—I remember it now—where there remained on the wall a portrait of the late emperor, Emperor Franz Josef. You used to see them everywhere in the days of my youth, in banks, in post offices, our Emperor with fluffy sideburns, but on his death in 1916 they all suddenly disappeared. But someone had retained just this single one, and hung it up regardless. It made you feel you had slipped a little backwards in time—with the old Emperor looking on, alive as ever in his picture. Anyway the room—numberless, as it happened—had only two cots and was very stuffy and dark, and not really fitted out for taking patients at all. But then the dwarf was an idiot, and didn’t seem to notice. I helped Dr Freud onto the cot and then I said to Jacob—that’s the dwarf—I said ‘
Jacob, this man is important. He is a doctor. He is good. You look after him, Jacob.’
Let me tell you about Jacob. He was just over one metre tall and very fat for his size, in addition, that is, to being an idiot. Every now and then, when he was sick (which was often) we had him in at the hospital, staying in the utility room. We didn’t put him in a ward because he tended to disturb all the other patients with his songs. Always singing was Jacob. Usually it was lullabies, but rather disjointed and hard to follow, if you know what I mean. I think he made them up. All moonlight and mothers, sometimes bits of Yiddish. Starry nights, soft winds, that sort of thing. A bit of humming, too.
Jacob—this will surprise you—had both a mother and a wife. We think of these people as alone somehow, don’t we? But Jacob lived with his small family in an apartment only two doors away from my rooms: that was how I knew. His mother was a tall and willowy woman, about forty, I think. She looked like a silent movie star, very dark and pale, a lovely face with definite lips of the sort that men of my generation go for: tightly pursed, pointed, and in the shape of a heart. Grey eyes—beautiful—a remote and rather nowhere-looking gaze. Anyway, I only spoke to her once or twice, so I can’t really say we were actually acquainted. But I saw her a lot, standing at the window of her apartment that fronted the street, looking straight out. She would just stand there and stare. Sometimes men paused or slowed down as they walked past, but she never seemed to notice them. She just stood looking out. Sort of desolate and thoughtful.
The daughter-in-law, I must say, was much more interesting: you must put her in your book. Bertha, her name was. She was an idiot, too. I often wondered how they got together, Jacob and Bertha, how they managed to find each other at all in such a large city, and avoid the institutions. Anyway, Bertha was normal sized but had, poor woman, the strangest condition. She had some kind of facial palsy that fixed her face rather awkwardly in a permanent smile. It was quite disconcerting. Her head hung down to one side, and her mouth tilted upwards. I remember I first met her on my way to the subway on Karlsplatz—I was meeting my Claus after work and we were going off together to have tea with his mother. I saw, from a distance, that a man was accosting her. He was proposing obscenities and she had her face turned away from him, sad and smiling. Her cheeks were very red and her eyes brimmed with tears, but the contradicting smile must have given this fellow the wrong message. He had his hand on her breast, and there she was smiling. I rushed up to the man and struck him with my carry-bag. ‘How dare you!’ I said. ‘How dare you take advantage!’ (I was very confident for my age.) Bertha immediately recognised me as some kind of neighbour, stepped forward and clutched my arm. So I was hitting with one side and had the idiot on the other. The man immediately withdrew. Seeing my nurse’s uniform perhaps he thought me an authority of some kind. Anyway, he withdrew. I took Bertha by the hand and delivered her home, forgetting entirely about my meeting with Claus and the appointment with his mother. (Later I remembered, and had to write a note of apology, on pretty coloured paper, as was the custom in those days. Mind you, it did Claus no harm at all to be left waiting and expectant.)