Death of a River Guide

by Richard Flanagan

  ‘We’re going,’ says the Cockroach. ‘Into Deception.’

  Harry

  I watch Aljaz go to say something but I can’t hear what it is. I see Sheena shake her head. I see Rickie begin to move off toward the thunderbox but then he too is lost to my sight as the whole scene fades away. My mind is in any case already elsewhere. I am wondering not about what will happen to them on the river, for I know all too well what fate awaits them. But it’s what I don’t know that I wish to see. And I want to know how the hell Harry came to be in Trieste in 1954. I mean, it was so out of character for him. After returning to Tasmania with Sonja and me all those years ago he never left the island again, as though Tasmania were a world total and full in itself. Which for him it possibly was. And he never ceased to find wonders within it, new and marvellous for both him and everyone he shared them with. Even as his drinking slowly dulled his mind and dimmed his spirit, as though his body were a lamp and his soul the diminishing fuel, even as his heart guttered in the torrent of drink daily falling upon it, he still found time to express wonder, be it at his bizarre barbeques, or be it in his occasional forays into the bush, fishing and hunting.

  I remember the way he used smile. How he would bow his head slightly, as if a little embarrassed. How the corners of his mouth would curl slightly upwards. I remember these things now in the hope of exercising some control over this capricious river of visions, in the hope that it might show me why my father ended up in Trieste. The river, as ever, does not explain. But it does show me some things I never knew.

  A vision at first most mysterious comes to me.

  The crossroads. Night-time. Sky black. A man in raindarkened trousers and an ancient black bluey coat. Once his father’s bluey coat. Now worn and old. And, in the incessant rain, wet and cold. It wasn’t meant to turn out like this, I can see him thinking as he pulls the steaming damp collar of the bluey up around his face. It shouldn’t have ended like this. Black lapels pulled hard against wet cheeks, ruddy with chill through the small white clouds of his breath that envelop his face.

  Whose cheeks? I look harder, closer into the river, scan its fleeing waters intently. And finally I recognise them.

  Harry’s cheeks. Harry’s face, empty of anything save his ongoing belief in fate determining everything and him having no control. Too many deaths and none expected. Him meant for the mincer and surviving and Old Bo not. Auntie Ellie not. Daisy not. Boy not. Rose not. Him meant for the mincer and surviving. But a thumbless man is a man unable to chop and saw and he has to leave his beloved rivers and head wherever work might be had. He travels up to Queenstown from Strahan that morning on the ore train’s return run, hoping to pull some work suitable for a one-thumbed man in a pub or bank or store well before evening. But all the employers either publicly said they were right for men, or, thought Harry, were wrong in their private suspicions that a lone-thumbed man was not to be trusted.

  Wind blowing hard, howling in the lonesome telegraph wires wet with rain and humming with the desire of people to somehow touch one another, no matter how far away. No matter, thinks Harry. He trudges out of town to the gravel crossroads, hopeful of thumbing a lift with his left hand to the next mining town up the coast, Rosebery, where a cousin tends bar in the bottom pub and might be prevailed upon for an evening’s accommodation on his floor and some introductions to places of work in the morning.

  He watches the few cars all chug past him without stopping. He had hoped to be in Rosebery in time for tea. And now it is late and he is wet and cold and hungry. In the end a truck heading in the opposite direction stops, an ancient old Dodge driven by a fisherman, name of Reggie Ho, whose boat is stuck in at Strahan because of a big blow-up in the Indian Ocean. Reggie Ho has been drinking and tonight he is going all the way through to Hobart, though not to see his family, who lives there, but to see a girlfriend. Hobart. Eight long hours heading east over the wild unsealed road that snakes its way around mountain passes and along the top of ravines to the other side of the island. Hobart. The big smoke. The opposite direction to where Harry wishes to travel. It’s not where Harry is going or has ever thought of going. No matter. Even though until that moment he has never thought of going anywhere near the city, Harry accepts the lift because that is his fate, that’s how the dice have fallen. Reggie Ho drives the truck hard down that treacherous lonely windy gravelly track and Harry sits and slides in the cold wet seat, shielding himself from the rain that drips into the cabin as best he can.

  They arrive in Hobart clammy-cold well past midnight and Reggie Ho takes Harry to Ma Dwyer’s Blue House for a warming drink. There, amidst the steaming wharfies and smoking fishermen and smouldering cops and fuming politicians and numerous bored women who work there, he sights a familiar figure playing the Wertheimer piano. Half drunk or entirely drunk, it’s hard to tell, but he’s still dapper in his Bidencopes finest, still the elegant professional continuing to play throughout a spirited altercation between a very drunk Scot sailor and a very aggressive local wharfie, that ends up with the wharfie flying into the piano and sending sheet music everywhere. Blood spurts, drinks fall, glass smashes, cries and screams abound. And Ruth just puts his English tailor-made cigarette, flash filter and all, into the ash tray, admittedly with a shaky hand, pushes his red silk cravat back into its proper position beneath his Harris tweed jacket, and gives a crooked smile of thanks to one of the ladies who picks up the sheets of music from the floor and hastily rearranges them on the piano. Ruth dreamingly keeps right on playing, too far gone to recognise that he is now doing two songs simultaneously, playing the bottom half of ‘I’m Gonna Sit Right Down And Write Myself A Letter’ and the top half of ‘Drinking Rum And Coca Cola’. Too snakes-hissed to notice the difference, or perhaps wrongly attributing it to what he regards as the corrupting and decadent influence of the new musical fashions, but not so far gone that he is unable to recognise his nephew. Ruth’s jowly old face sparks with recognition. ‘Hi-ho, Harry,’ he says, his slurred voice somehow managing to syncopate with the unique melody emerging from the chest of the Wertheimer upright. ‘Well, hi-ho. Long time no see.’ Harry starts to tell Ruth his story, but their conversation is cut short by Ma, who storms up to the piano cranky as a cut snake and says, ‘Jeezuz, Ruth! There won’t be a single bloke left if you play any more of that Yankee bebop shit.’ Ma starts humming ‘The Kellys, Jo Byrne And Dan Hart’. Ruth looks back down at the sheet music and manages to focus long enough to recognise his grievous error. Without saying anything, he bursts into an Al Bowlly song. Ma smiles. ‘You not too far gone not to remember a few of the good old tunes, eh Ruth? You remember, don’t ya Ruth?’ Ruth winks his assent to Ma, who for a moment looks forlornly into the distance, but only a moment, for she spots Harry and Reggie Ho.

  ‘Who the hell are youse?’ she asks.

  Ruth introduces Harry to Ma and tells Ma of Harry’s plight. Ma wanders off, then returns with a Dutchman who skippers a tramp steamer that carts apples to Europe. The skipper takes Harry into Ma’s smoko room out the back of the pub and looks suspiciously at his right hand with its flap for a thumb. He says nothing. He turns his back, goes to the cupboard, opens it, searches around, then turns and without warning throws an egg at Harry. Harry catches it in the cup of the four fingers of his right hand.

  ‘Okay,’ says the Dutch skipper, whose name is Gerry and whose speech is idiosyncratic Euro-Hollywood. ‘Okay. I owe a few of the greenbacks to the Ma for eating candy in the candy store, so okay. Hell, why nit, eh? Here to Naples. That’s the racket. You cook and wash. Ja? Hell, let’s do it, buddy. Okay? Why nit? Ain’t this life one hell of a big crapshoot?’

  Ain’t it just, thinks Harry, ain’t it just, whatever the bugger a crapshoot might be. No matter. Harry believes in fate, in somebody having his number up there and there not being a dam thing he can do about it. So even though he has never harboured any desire to travel, a job’s a job, and he accepts with equanimity the prospect of steaming out of Hobart the following morning to a place
that may as well be the moon for all it means to him.

  Harry looks at the Dutchman dressed in his best suit of white cotton. A dapper man. A travelled man. Harry thought of travelling as something you did with the army if you were unlucky enough to be caught up in a war. But he had been without a job too long and any job was better than being on the dole. Now he was a little drunk and he wanted to wake up tomorrow and know that he was going somewhere, rather than drifting. Harry proffered his thumbless hand to shake his acceptance.

  ‘What part of England is Naples in?’ Harry asked as they shook hands.

  A gambler is almost always a fatalist, because they accept both the good and bad throw of the dice as equally inevitable, and believe there is nothing they could have done to avoid that fall of the dice. If Auntie Ellie hadn’t been such a powerful anti-gambler Harry could have ended up with a terrible problem with the dogs and the nags, because he would have lost and lost and simply thought that it was fate and that there wasn’t a dam thing he could do about it. But Auntie Ellie had indoctrinated such a fear of gambling in his heart, he found even buying a lottery ticket mildly sinful. Harry, however, was a gambler with life. Which is, I suppose, why he ended up in Trieste.

  Upon arriving at Naples some months later, after a hellish and gruelling trip, he is there abandoned by Gerry, who takes on a load of illegal refugees whom he can pay even less to crew the boat. Harry accepts the offer of an ex-GI called Hank. Hank looks like an emaciated Clark Gable and talks like Mickey Rooney. He has a burnt-out pension full of Japanese sewing machines he has got through a deal with a buddy, who is part of the occupation forces in Japan. Harry knows nothing about sewing machines, nor about Italy, nor can he speak Italian, but he does, according to Hank, have a winning smile. And winning, says Hank, is everything. ‘I don’t like losers,’ says Hank. ‘Are you a loser, Harry?’ The expression ‘loser’ is as new to Harry as the concept. He pauses, a little unsure as to what to say. His entire world had shaped itself around the song of loss.

  ‘I am not sure I’ve got anything left to lose,’ he says after a time. Hank smiles and slaps him on the back.

  Harry had never thought of being a salesman. He had seen the travellers who stayed overnight at Hamers with their cheap suits and soft hands. He had no desire of ever joining their ranks but he had no work, and this, after a fashion, was an offer of work. And whether it be good or bad, Harry believes that this is the job intended for him, and in the end there is for Harry no decison to make. The deal is simple. With his payout from the boat, Harry buys twenty sewing machines and secures an option on twenty more. ‘Where do I start?’ asks Harry.

  ‘South of the city,’ says Hank, eager to rid central Naples of any potential rival, even one as self-evidently witless as Harry.

  I can’t bear to watch this any more. If it were a movie on TV I’d hide behind the couch or go and make a coffee, because this fatalism is just so bloody irritating. Maybe because it reminds me so much of myself. I dunno. But how can someone be so resigned to whatever happens? This is my father I’m seeing, for crying out loud, not a frigging jellyfish. I should be able to do something, get him that job at the Empire Hotel, help him in some way. It just seems too unfair to watch people’s lives like this and not be able to do anything. I try and summon another vision, but as I try and obliterate this helpless Harry from view I hear him say something entirely unexpected. He says one word. He says, ‘Trieste.’

  ‘Trieste?’ says Hank, shocked. ‘What the hell ya mean, Trieste?’

  In the kitchen of the tramp steamer there had been a wall of postcards from around the world. One in particular had taken Harry’s fancy. It looked somehow familiar. With its houses clustering on hills, and its harbour, it looked a bit like Hobart. ‘What is this?’ he asked Gerry one day. ‘Trieste,’ said Gerry. ‘Full of weird guys and weirder dames. Slovenes and Croats and Krauts and wops. Nit a nice place. One hell of a jive-jointing dump for a continent but what the hell, eh?’

  What the hell. Something was born in the mind of Harry Lewis as he looked at that curling postcard, something that went beyond his normal acquiescence to the river of events and was to lead him to my mother and to the matter - the no small matter, as far as I am concerned - of my conception.

  ‘Trieste,’ repeats Harry. ‘That’s where I’m going with my sewing machines.’

  Hank pauses, then shrugs his shoulders. ‘Have it your way, buddy,’ he says. ‘That’s the wonderful freedom of capitalism.’

  Harry smiles at Hank.

  I remember the way he used smile. But this smile was somehow different, as though for once he had actually done something he wanted to do.

  Couta Ho, 1993

  I am ready to absorb the details of Harry’s trip north, to watch his adventures and seek to understand his responses - sometimes stunned, sometimes bemused, often delighted - to the strange land he found himself in. I want to observe how others saw this curious one-thumbed stranger. But I am not going with Harry. As much as I want to, try as I might, I am not going with him. I am already far, far away from Italy in that faraway time, dropping down into a city, into a street, over a laundromat, across the road and into an overgrown garden, the shapes of which are beginning to be lost in the dimming light of late afternoon. Facing the garden a sitting-room window illuminated by an unshaded electric light. Within the sitting-room, beneath the electric light, sit Couta Ho and Maria Magdalena Svevo.

  I can see them, but they can’t see me. Maybe that is why I suddenly flail my fists out at them both, like I sometimes used to throw a few punches out late at night in pubs here and there. Years ago now, let it be added. So that someone would notice me and say, Brother, you are part of this world and we do care about you and what you think and feel, and your thoughts and emotions do matter; you are not nothing. But of course no one ever said such things. They either snotted me or I snotted them, or more often than not we both succeeded only in snotting each other with no clear winner or loser. Whatever, the result was always the same. People laughed and jeered and drank on regardless. Because the people I was hitting were as invisible as me. Because we were all phantoms who had lost something central and we roamed the earth like haunted spirits trying to find that something, and we all ended up lying on the pavement outside, trying to staunch the blood running out of our mouths and eyes with our ragged sleeves. I brawled more when I was younger, when I thought it would somehow render me solid and whole. But I think it would be a good five years since I last blued, because I’ve lost even the hopeless ambition of forming a tunnel to the real world with my rolling fists. But at this moment something within me snaps, and I cannot help but throw a few blows at Maria Magdalena Svevo and Couta Ho. Of course nothing happens. Thankfully, nothing happens. My blows simply pass through their heads, my fists and arms only a violent intention without substance.

  ‘I better be getting on,’ I hear Maria Magdalena Svevo say as my body shrieks in agony from the sudden wild movement of my arms. Maria Magdalena Svevo stands up and walks over to a framed photo that hangs from the wall. It shows a small baby girl. ‘She was a lovely little baby,’ she says.

  ‘Jemma was beautiful,’ replies Couta Ho, ‘but you know the funny thing is …’ Couta Ho’s voice begins to quaver. She goes to halt it, to stop it, to push it all back down, but then she stops, lowers her heads, pulls out a handkerchief, and when she looks back her eyes are streaming with tears and she just keeps on going as if they are normal, without embarrassment. I can see that Maria Magdalena Svevo thinks there is something beautiful about this, but she cannot name what it is. Perhaps she feels that it is a moment of honesty and trust and that perhaps there are not very many moments such as this in a person’s life. She continues to stand.

  Couta Ho keeps on talking.

  ‘After a while after Jemma died, Aljaz came to think that I was too obsessed about it all. He said I needed to get my mind back on other things and stop being morbid. He meant well. I suppose that was how he coped with things. He trained harder
, ran for miles and miles every night. He didn’t think it did to dwell upon such things. “Why can’t you be normal?” he’d ask. “Why can’t you just be normal like everybody else?” “Because we’re not normal,” I’d say. “Because this thing has changed us and nothing is normal any more.” “The baby’s dead,” he’d shout. “Dead, don’t you understand.” And I’d scream and cry and say, “Maybe Jemma is dead, but she’s not gone, she’ll never go, whether you want her to or not. She’s part of us, whether you want her here or not.” Silly things like that, I’d say. Silly things. But that’s what I thought. It was then that Ali suggested I should take some classes of an evening to give me something other than the baby to think about. Ali always liked activity. “An active body is a healthy mind,” he’d say. Jesus, can you believe it? He got into triathalons as well as his football, and he was always trying to do as many things as possible. Like his baby has just died, but it’s as if - if he can just wear out enough Reebok rubber, if he can just make his knees hurt more than what he hurts inside, then it’ll be okay. “There’s just not enough hours in the day,” he’d always say. But for me there were too many, hours that just had to be endured.’

  Couta Ho looks up and realises that Maria Magdalena Svevo is still standing up. ‘I’m sorry, Maria,’ she says.

  ‘Don’t be sorry,’ says Maria Magdalena Svevo. ‘Nothing to be sorry about.’

  Couta Ho apologises, says she will stop talking, and asks Maria Magdalena Svevo to sit down while she gathers herself.

  ‘Don’t stop talking,’ says Maria Magdalena Svevo. ‘Unless you want to.’ So Couta Ho continues.

  ‘Everyday I’d go to the cemetery to see Jemma’s grave. She’s buried down Kingston, in that modern cemetery down there where they don’t have headstones, only plaques that sit in the lawn in neat rows, and everyone has to have the same size plaque. They bury all the babies together, in the same row. I don’t know why, they just do. Some people try to make their plaque look a bit different from the others in the row by leaving some of their baby’s favourite toys. It breaks you up to see that, you know, just these rows of babies’ plaques, every second or third one with a little plastic doll or toy, just simple things like that, a Big Bird toy or a toy car or a teddy bear or that sort of thing, out there in the rain and cold and no one to pick them up and play with them and hold them …’