Death of a River Guide

by Richard Flanagan

  But after me, there were no more children. Why? I don’t know. Certainly not for want of trying, because I can now see a whole sequence of ever more desperate couplings of Harry and Sonja taking place before my eyes. She blamed it on the drink and was inclined in her more perverse moments to see his lack of a thumb as a portent of a more fundamental incompleteness that she ought to have heeded. They went to the doctor, who sent them on to a specialist, an aspiring young man called Mr McNell, who assured them that it was almost certainly Sonja’s fallopian tubes and that this could be easily remedied. Sonja was hospitalised and endured an excruciating procedure in which air was pumped through her tubes to clear out supposed obstructions. This was repeated at monthly intervals for a year and at the end pronounced a success by Mr McNell, who told them that there was now no scientific reason why the couple could not have children. Now the nature of their couplings changed from desperate desire to a huge sadness. For Sonja felt her body to be a husk, its purpose stolen from her, and her husband’s attention a futile mockery of the consequences that ought to have flowed from such passion. Now she lay beneath him and did not move and did not milk his testicles with her hand. She lay beneath him and closed her eyes and saw herself back in the chain factory.

  Harry and Sonja’s marriage was not, then, a great success. No, I’ll rephrase that. Harry and Sonja’s marriage was as unpredictable as this river. It could be terrible. They would stand screaming at one another and Sonja would sometimes lay into poor old Harry with her fists, and he would hold her out at arm’s length, preventing her landing a blow while she flailed her fists and berated him with every Slovenian curse peculiar, not to that nation, but to Italy. ‘Slovenians,’ she would remind him, ‘are too polite to invent their own swear words. That’s why we use the Italians’ instead.’ Not that Harry was always successful in avoiding her fists: sometimes she managed to strike him. Over the years he grew quieter and drank more, and tried to avoid antagonising her, which was harder than avoiding her wild punches, because there was much about Harry that irritated Sonja immensely and it would sometimes take only a careless sentence to send her off again. Over the years, her early passion spent, she grew physically distant with Harry, went limp in his hugs and stiff if he came up from behind and kissed her on her neck. She particularly despised him kissing her on the mouth. Her lips would remain frozen and her face unmoving and she would say, ‘Finished now?’ Or, ‘Can I get back to what I was doing now you’re happy?’ She found him shabby, dishevelled, and ill-kempt. He found her cold, removed and uninterested in him. Over the years she changed from a young, somewhat wayward and even wild woman who wanted to leave her past behind to one that increasingly wallowed in a past that never existed. She dressed ever more conservatively, took up going to church, and kept the house looking like a museum of rundown and recycled Mitteleuropa. She became an old European mama. But for all that and all that, it was not a bad marriage. Sonja loved Harry with a passion, albeit an ever curioser one, and he in turn loved his lady of the clove dust, as he sometimes whispered to her as they lay in bed. And for all her coldness, there were times in that bed when she revelled in being with Harry. I am a witness to their lovemaking much against my will, for it is not the way I wish to see my parents. I am, as I have said, a private person and this intrusion upon their privacy seems somewhat unfair. What is evident from what I see is that while Harry knew he loved her, even if he would never understand her, Sonja knew she understood Harry and wondered therefore if he was worth loving.

  Long after, as Harry was dying, he thought about the day he and Sonja had arrived in Hobart, thought of the love he had once had for Sonja, the love that had seemed so strong, that had seemed so eternal. Where had it gone? As he lay there with the drips spiralling around his cancer-bloated belly he remembered Sonja and what they had and what they had lost. Why do such things so often prove so transitory? In the end he thought that he hated Sonja. But then, in the methylated-spirit afterscent of the ward, the smell of the flesh of her back as he lay curled up behind her came back to him and the smell of clove dust came back to him and the sound of her voice came back to him one last time.

  O I am missing you.

  How much he had loved her.

  O I am missing you.

  Ned Quade, 1832

  Two faces. Among the many bubbles, two faces - one scarred with the pox, the round head almost shaven so that its red hairs appear as jagged points over the scalp, like so many rusty needles.

  My hair! My red hair!

  Ned Quade, the stone man.

  Why this curious name? Because upon the triangle where he is flogged for possessing a wad of tobacco, or, once, for singing a song, he betrays no pain. On his first flogging of a hundred lashes I hear the flagellator, a one-time baker called Proctor, say as he unties Ned Quade’s white wrists at the end of the punishment, ‘You are of stone.’ And his back is transformed by the relentless slash of the cat-o’-nine-tails into blood-flecked alabaster. Because in his heart he is innocent and he will not betray his innocence with a single cry of suffering. For that would be an admission that punishment had been felt and was therefore somehow just.

  The second face is thin and long, with a scar above the left eye that twists that eye away from the nose, giving the face a distorted appearance. It is topped with medium-length brown hair that is dirty and matted. Aaron Hersey. Dissenting weaver from Spitalfields. One-time Muggletonian, later of the Ancient Deists of Hoxton, he talks of dreams and of having communion with the dead, and regularly sees angels with burning wings and smells the ash of their passing. The angels are beautiful, save for their breath, which he finds most putrid.

  The two men sit in a corner of a chilly, fetid stone dormitory, on the floor of which some hundreds of other convicts lie, some moaning in agony, some giggling in madness, some shouting curses in their sleep, some pissing through the gaps in the floorboards upon the Aborigines rounded up from the surrounding wild lands and imprisoned on the floor below. Chill draughts blow through the open slits that serve for windows. From outside, the sound of the gale-whipped waters of Macquarie Harbour slapping the shore of the small island which is their prison. Sarah Island. The Devil’s Island of the British Empire, the endpoint of the vast convict system, the remotest island of the remotest island of the remotest continent. From the blacks incarcerated below, from the throats and mouths of the proud people of the Needwonne and Tarkine, come screams and weeping and terrible coughs and wheezing. They believe the building to be possessed of evil spirits. Some are terrified and some propose escape, and some are dying of influenza and colds and horror, and all believe that devils run around the room and spear them in the chest with evil. From outside, the splatter and surge of the rain carrying off the last of the topsoil from the island that has been totally deforested by the convicts’ slave labour.

  Tomorrow Ned Quade and Aaron Hersey are to be part of the gang that is to row up the Gordon River and relieve the Huon pine-cutting gang that has been stationed there for the past two weeks. It is from there that they intend to effect their escape. Ned Quade dictates a note for his wife, who is incarcerated in the Hobart Female Factory, to Aaron Hersey, dissenting weaver from Spital-fields and fellow plotter, who learnt to read and write in various churches.

  ‘How will it be got to her?’ asks Aaron.

  ‘Solly. In the commissariat. He owes me. He’ll smuggle it out on the next ship bound for Hobart Town.’ Ned Quade looks around to make sure that none of the other convicts in the barracks are taking any undue interest in their whispered conversation. ‘How should it begin?’ Ned Quade asks Aaron Hersey.

  ‘However you’d like it to begin,’ replies Aaron. ‘My task is only to capture your words on the paper and speed them to her mind.’

  Ned looks at his feet and thinks awhile, then looks up sheepishly at Aaron and says, ‘What if you write “My beloved Eliza”?’

  ‘That is what you want?’ asks Aaron. Ned says nothing, but nods.

  Aaron Hersey writes wit
h a stolen stub of pencil on a sheet of paper that both men hide with the positioning of their bodies. Aaron Hersey writes what he would write if he were to write to a queen. Aaron Hersey writes:

  My Esteemed and Most Noble Madame Elijah -

  His confidence in the process now boosted by the sight of his words being transformed into a flourishing script upon the paper, Ned Quade continues. ‘Tell her,’ he says, ‘tell her how we are bound for the stockaded town many, many hundreds of miles to the north of Parramatta where all are free and no one is bonded, and that having arrived there and secured work and lodgings, that I will send word and someone to bring her and our children out of bondage into the glorious light of liberty.’

  Aaron Hersey writes what he can. Aaron Hersey writes:

  Well say You in th. New Jerusalem.

  As the flourishes and swirls and loops continue to grow in their grand parade upon the page Ned begins to sense the power that words might have, their subversive possibilities, their seductive strength. ‘Write her,’ he says, ‘that I love her, and only that love has kept me alive till now, God knows there is so little else to nourish a man’s soul in this Hades.’

  Aaron Hersey writes what he knows to write as a conclusion. Aaron Hersey writes:

  Your loving And humble Servant etc etc in Eyes of The lord

  Ned Kwade His Mark

  And below this message Ned Quade scrawls the outline of a Celtic cross, a cross enclosed within a circle.

  Madonna santa! Just as I want to stay and watch what now happens the cross and the circle begin to dance and swirl before my eyes, begin to form spiralling chains with other white swirls of foam, and then, there, standing above the river’s swirling currents, looking down into the river, I see Aljaz.

  the fourth day

  In the early morning light, grey and soft and spreading, Aljaz watches the water rise. He stands a little beyond the river’s edge upon a large protruding log, and to the Cockroach glancing down from the campsite above he looks uninterested. But his eyes are everywhere, reading the immediacy of the quickly surfacing, quickly disappearing whirlpools, reading the swirling white patterns of foam washing down from newly formed rapids upriver, hearing the river’s new sounds, seeking to understand what the shushing of the branches of low-lying tea-tree as they throb under the rising, shoving waters foretells. The river seems to be urging the plants and him to come with them downriver, to join the smooth fast madness of a river in rising flood. The tea-trees bend but don’t yield, forever grow with a permanent downriver lean in recognition of the power of the flooded river, but never move from their original position. They grow year in year out, these stunted plants, perhaps a century old, only a metre or so in height, their hunched form bearing physical witness to a hundred floods and a hundred droughts. In the detail of a piece of rushing water Aljaz reads the changing visage of the entire river, hears the terrible soul history of his country, and he is frightened.

  He goes back to the campfire and squats down. The others look at him, knowing that he and only he can divine the river and its moods. Aljaz ignores the gaze and looks into the coals of the fire, but he sees only the foam and mist rising from the waterfall at the Churn, feels not the warmth of the flames but the clench of his guts as they push the raft into the big rapid below Thunderush and hope to God that they make it through safely. No one speaks. All wait. Aljaz takes a piece of wood from the heap and goes to make firm a precariously balancing billy. But before he is able to fix it, the Cockroach has kicked a log from the outer of the fire into its centre and deftly repositioned the billy for Aljaz. Then, as he levels the billy, the Cockroach looks around to Aljaz and speaks.

  ‘What you reckon, Ali?’

  Aljaz stands up and brushes his trousers. ‘A good day for cooking,’ says Aljaz, ‘that’s what I reckon.’ And he goes over to a barrel and takes out some flour. ‘Reckon we might start with pancakes, that’s what I reckon.’ Some of the punters are relieved, their own fear arising not from a knowledge of the river, but an intuitive foreboding born of their awareness of their guides’ growing unease. Some read this unease as an opportunity to display their own bravado.

  ‘I thought that was what the trip was all about,’ says Rickie the doctor. ‘A few thrills.’ He says it slightly uneasily. The Cockroach looks at Rickie.

  ‘Feel free to take a raft and go,’ says the Cockroach. ‘I might hang back for a pancake myself.’ A few of the group laugh.

  Rickie thinks the guides are not going because they think their customers will be scared. ‘I am not scared,’ he says. He says it hesitantly.

  Aljaz looks up from the margarine melting in the frypan. ‘I am,’ he says, but then immediately regrets saying it in front of them all.

  ‘I’ll go a pancake,’ says Otis with a smile. ‘Mum’d cook a truckload of ’em every Sunday lunch.’

  They spend all the day in their dripping wet rainforest camp. The men stay in their tents and their sleeping bags as if they existed only to live in them. The women do what the men are always too tired or too uninterested or too caught up in a conversation about sport or politics to be bothered doing. They work. They peel vegetables. They collect firewood. They fetch water from the river up the steep and awkward bank to the campsite. They wash dishes. They help the guides organise the camp, unpacking and packing barrels. Repairing equipment. The men reserve their energies for some future conjectural act of courage. The women’s courage is of a type that endures this day of rain. Meanwhile the men get depressed. The men feel some embarrassment that women are on the same trip and doing things that really only men ought be doing. The guides prefer it. Nothing, for a river guide, is worse than an all-male trip. They are boring and lazy and inclined to foolhardiness. They are considerable work to look after. They are generally not in the same class for company. Aljaz likes sitting down with the women around the fire. The Cockroach organises them into a massed Welsh miners’ choir and makes them sing old Tom Jones songs, to which he seems to know all the words. They sing ‘Delilah’ and they sing ‘The Green Green Grass Of Home’ and they sing ‘Me And Mrs Jones’ and they sing them all badly, says the Cockroach, who claims to be of Welsh extraction.

  After lunch the Cockroach and Aljaz unpack and pitch the spare tent, and then try to catch up on some sleep inside it. About mid-afternoon they awaken, unzip the flyscreen and look outside the vestibule. The camp is dark, what little light there is having trouble penetrating the rainforest. Out on the river, which looks lit up in comparison, the rain falls heavily in sheets. But in their dark camp, beneath the dense, interwoven canopy of myrtles and blackwoods and Huon pines, the rain falls lightly, a mizzle interspersed with an occasional drip from a branch. Two punters - Marco, in a bright red Goretex anorak, and Derek, in a damp black japara - stand under the large blue polytarp which is pitched as a fly, under which cooking can take place out of the rain. Derek and Marco talk in low tones.

  ‘They’re bored,’ says the Cockroach.

  ‘Get out the monopoly set,’ says Aljaz and they laugh.

  ‘Fucking punters,’ says the Cockroach.

  Dappling the blue polytarp are green and brown myrtle leaves, fallen with the rain. A pool of water has collected in the middle. Marco pushes a paddle up under the pool, sending water rushing down into an open food barrel, drenching the food inside.

  ‘Fucking idiots,’ says the Cockroach.

  Sonja and Harry

  Couta Ho called on Maria Magdalena Svevo to hear the latest news about Harry. The talk was of old times, of Aljaz, whom neither had seen for many years, and of Sonja, whom Couta Ho had never met. Maria Magdalena Svevo told Couta Ho the story of how Sonja met Harry in Trieste in 1954. She began the story in a dramatic fashion.

  ‘On either side of the border, troops were massing. Tito demanded the Slovenian town that the Slovenians called Trst and the Italians called Trieste be returned to Yugoslavia. The Allies refused. For a short time all the tensions of the Cold War built up in a painful boil on the arse of the Adriatic.�
� Here her tone returned to the everyday. ‘And who should be selling Japanese sewing machines door to door but Harry Lewis. No one was buying. Post-war Trieste was still finding it hard enough to get money to buy polenta, much less a shonky machine from Asia that promised a lot, cost more, but looked inadequate to its ambitions and was pushed by a foreigner with a strange accent and missing his right thumb.

  ‘Sonja was working in the café in which Harry, at the end of his second fruitless week of salesmanship, stopped for a coffee. Harry liked the expresso, so unfamiliar and strange to him. For a time he wasn’t aware that it was even coffee, but thought it some exotic foreign beverage.

  ‘Sonja was intrigued by the dark stranger who carried a sewing machine under his arm, who looked as if he came from the south of Italy, yet walked differently from the peasants streaming up to the north for work. His movements were slow, as if space and time meant something different than it did to everyone around him, something somehow open and bigger.

  ‘When he came up to the counter to pay, he reached in his pocket and then his face flushed. “Not enough money,” he said in halting Italian. Sonja looked in his dull eyes, but she noticed that they had already fallen to the rack of cakes below.

  ‘His cheeks were pinched. Sonja knew that hunger had not only a look but a strong odour. Sonja remembered how her mother and her sisters had stunk of hunger during the war. Harry didn’t stink but he did smell pretty bad. She reached into her pocket and slid some money across the glass counter to Harry’s hand. Their fingers touched. Harry looked up into Sonja’s face, perplexed, worried. Sonja smiled, and then laughed. “Which cake, sir?” she asked.

  ‘Harry ordered four, then, upon examining the money, decided against rashness and ordered two, keeping some change in reserve. He paid for the coffee and the cakes, thanked Sonja profusely and promised to repay her as soon as possible.