The idea, however, stays with him. The next day he must go back to his grandfather’s village. A lead has opened; there is someone who might be willing to talk. As he drives – it is almost two hours away – he finds himself counting up how many such alleys there are in the old part of the city. He can think of at least eleven, on either side of the river, and certainly there are more; alleys, and some ancient cobbled arcades, with darker and more likely spaces even than the alcoves he had found in the Bishop’s Lane. He decides to search them all, if only to convince himself that there is nothing.
He drives back, frustrated but also more hopeful about his project than usual, since although this person claimed they knew nothing, they told him of a man in another village who had been a young partisan in his grandfather’s brigade. Rain begins to fall, light at first but eventually torrential. It sets in for days. There is no possibility, until it thoroughly clears, that anything would think to forage, let alone sleep in the alleys. Yet the idea of them nags at him, seems to want to draw him in.
It is a week before he can explore the first of them, and a month before he has visited them all, and by that time he has long realised that the process is much more complicated than he envisioned. Why should the swan, if the swan exists, stay in one place? What is to say that at one time it is not in an alley not yet visited, and at another in an alley he has searched already?
When the winter nights allow, he begins to go through them again – the alleys, the lanes, the impasses – and to visit them randomly. Not every night, and sometimes not for a week or more. He comes to think of it more as an evening walk than as a hunt. He is drawn to it, he would probably say, if there were ever anyone to ask him; it is not even something that he has consciously chosen. Some nights he does not bother to take a torch.
On one such night he is walking slowly through a lane that has become quite familiar to him. Though cobbled and as ancient as any, it is a little wider than most, with an arcade along one of its sides, and towards the centre a section built in overhead so that it becomes, for six or seven metres, a kind of tunnel. He has just come through this section when he senses – it is senses, rather than sees – something in a dark passageway, a space barely a shoulder’s width wide, off to his right. He has just decided that it can have been no more than a cat, or a large rat, and turned to resume his progress, when a door opens a few metres ahead to the left, and someone comes out, caught briefly in silhouette in the sudden light from a stairway. He steps back into the narrow passage, not wanting to be seen, knowing how disturbing some might find it to encounter a stranger in their alley at this time. A small, curtained window opposite him is throwing a little light into the alley, barely sufficient to see his own hand by. As the figure passes, however, he can make out enough, and the racing in his chest, a kind of giddiness, confirms it. It is her.
The next day, on the way to his lunch, he goes back to find the door. There is a plaque beside it, and a picture of a broad white beach. A travel agency. Perhaps she is employed there. Perhaps, the evening before, she had been working late. He goes up the stairs to a small landing. A door to the left, a door to the right, and before him the door to the agency. He knocks and, when there is no response, opens the door. A small, cluttered office. A thin, bald man with round, wire-rimmed glasses and a drooping moustache, and a gum-chewing secretary with lank blonde hair and an acned face, each of them looking so bemused they might have forgotten what a customer looks like. He asks them – it is the first thing that comes to his mind – about airfares to Thailand. They cannot help him. They deal only with eastern Europe. The beach, he calculates, as he walks back down the stairs, must be somewhere on the Black Sea. Clearly she does not work there. Perhaps she lives or works behind one of the other doors. Or has a friend there. Or lover. Unless he watches the place – and that for the moment seems impossible – he will never know.
He changes his lunch-hour walk and for a time passes through the lane almost daily, but never sees her. His book is drawing towards an end; at least, his most difficult chapters are. Hopefully the rest will recompose itself around them. The person in the other village – it was in fact a hospice, and the man, although eighty-five and clearly dying, had a lucid memory and was anxious to unburden himself – told him more than enough. He had been just twenty when the war ended, a partisan for almost three years. And his – the writer’s – grandfather was the leader of the local brigade. When the war finished they had all thought their work over but it was clear that it wasn’t. For weeks after the Germans had withdrawn there had been a steady flow of collaborators following them, in fear of their lives, and now, with the fighting over and the neighbouring countries refusing to harbour them, there began a steady flow back. Contingents, in forced marches. The collaborators who found themselves delivered back to the villages in their area had a nasty time of it. There were beatings, murders, executions, rapes. From leading the local fight against the occupiers, the writer’s grandfather and those of the men under him who were prepared to help now found themselves more like peace-keepers, trying to hold back a flood of fury and revenge. And it wasn’t just locals forced to return. There were others, passing through, on their way to the next border. A miserable lot, going back as some of them were – for some had worked in extermination camps – to almost certain death.
The brigade was part of a system of safe passage. They would meet another brigade, from villages to the west, and a party of deportees would be handed over. They would take them through the woods, avoiding the villages, where things could get out of hand, and would hand them over to the next brigade, a few kilometres to the east. They had done this four times already, but there was something different about the fifth group. Maybe it was because there was some particular person in it, or maybe there was some change of policy: he, the man in the nursing home, was not told. They took them to an old mine entrance, high up along the ridges, that they had used to rest the earlier groups, under guard. And as they had before, they fed them, issued them blankets and straw and lamps, and locked them in behind the huge wooden doors that had been put in place when the mine closed. Only this time – it was a group of almost twenty, men mainly but a few women, a couple of the men and women quite elderly – his grandfather ordered them to brick the entrance closed. Not straight away. At first they went to a nearby village for a meeting, and for some food of their own; but then they went back and did the brickwork by torchlight. He, the man in the nursing home, only did what he was told; others – there were seven of them altogether – seemed to follow the orders without question, and so he did likewise.
It was eerily silent behind the wooden doors as they worked. As if everyone within were too deeply asleep to hear. When they finished they went back down to the village and behaved as normal. As far as anyone knew they had passed this group on to the next brigade just as they had the others. And no one spoke. There was an unvoiced understanding that no one would ever talk about it, and apparently very few had. But now that the bones had been found, now that the other partisans were all dead, and he himself as good as dead, he could tell it all at last. Whether the writer’s grandfather had done it on his own initiative or whether he was following orders from elsewhere, however, the man in the nursing home simply couldn’t say. He had always assumed it was the latter. One of the other partisans, after a long night of drinking, twenty years later, when at last they had spoken about that eerie silence, had said something about strychnine in the food: that they had been taken away for their ‘meeting’ so that they couldn’t hear the screaming, the hammering on the wood. But who knows. Perhaps, after all, that would have been the kindest way. He has had dreams, he tells the writer, all his life since, terrible dreams.
It is a grey day. The bells have woken him again. The Angelus. Normally he can sleep through it, or at least go back to sleep, but there are mornings, and it seems this is one of them, when he knows that this will be impossible. He must, in any case, write. He is j
ust a sentence away from the end of this last, difficult chapter, and he might as well type it while it is clear in his mind. He gets up and, beginning to dress, looks back at the bedsheets and the strange, bird-like shape that has formed itself among them – almost expected by now, almost familiar – and wonders if he will ever know how it gets there, ever know what it means.
Parts Unknown
David Francis
Will looked out to sea through the blurry circles of his small tin binoculars. The flap of his yellow sunhat kept blowing up and he could feel his lips burning. They’d blister, he knew that. The pins of sea spray stung his cheeks, bit him like invisible insects. He was too pale for a place like this. It was 1963 and he was six, or he would be in a month. They were somewhere off the coast of New Guinea.
He listened to the clunk of the boat against the waves underneath him. No sign of land or anything but the greeny-blue water and the smoke from the engine that smelt like burning tyres. His mother lay in her folding chair, one pale leg stretched out and braced against the engine room to keep the chair from sliding. He’d rarely seen her in a sundress, the blue ridges of her very-close veins. That’s what he called the bulging rivers that ran down her calves, but he knew it wasn’t quite the name.
She was only here under sufferance, to get to the bottom of things. That’s what she said.
As he let the binoculars fall, he glanced around at the native men. Islanders, his father called them. He’d barely seen an Italian back on the farm in Victoria, let alone anyone like these New Guineans. He didn’t like the way they watched him back, especially the one on the box who peeled a strange orange fruit and had a piece of metal hanging from his nose. No shirt or sandals, just a cloth about his middle. A lap lap, his father called it. And the way the man chewed red stuff made him look as if his teeth were bleeding. Then he spat crimson juice on the deck and stared with bloodshot eyes. This place wasn’t like his father had promised. It wasn’t anything like Paradise.
His father stood over by the far rail with his pipe and cream safari jacket, trying out his pidgin English on a short native in baggy yellow shorts who chewed the red stuff too. Beetlenut, his father called it, but his father was unreliable. His mother was the brains of the outfit but she seemed out of her element here. She’d gone more silent as the day wore on. It was his father who seemed to be at home, but he’d been to The Islands before. Three times. He had his interests in the Tropics, or so his mother had recently learnt. Will still didn’t know exactly what those interests included; something to do with his father’s best friend Carson, a room-mate from boarding school, Malvern Grammar. Will had always heard about Carson and how his family owned Nuguria, a tiny island way north of New Guinea, on the way to the Marianas, as his father put it. But there was no sign of Marianas. Not yet. Will had seen photos – rows of coconut palms and thatched-roof huts, canoes on beaches. He’d touched the giant axe his father had brought home with the black and brown grass-woven handle and the big black blade.
His father had pointed to the mountains on a map and said, ‘That’s where the head-hunters live,’ as if that was a lucky thing. Will knew his father was only trying to scare him into being interested. He talked about copra, some crop from coconuts that had to do with fuel. He knew this was the reason his parents barely spoke. His mother hadn’t known his father had sent Carson money from the joint account, eight hundred pounds a year since 1957. She hadn’t known about it until the month before. She’d called his father a sloven and a slut. Will had never heard her use those words.
Now he held the map up to his face in the wind and stared at where his father had marked it with a Texta, charting their course from Rabaul in small red dots to a speck in the middle of the blue that wasn’t named. His father had written Nuguria in big loopy letters. Will whispered it to himself and the sound of the word reminded him of the stuff in a bag that his mother used to fertilise the garden back home at Broadford, the powder that smelled like pee and looked like ground-up bone.
The boat pitched and the purple-faced captain spun the wheel, shouted at a knotty-haired man who disappeared down the steps. Will wondered if there was a fire to be stoked below, but then he wasn’t sure if there’d be a furnace separate from the engine. He’d never been on a boat before.
From beside the steps that went down underneath, the man on the fruit box stared. It made Will feel uneasy, kind of seasick, so he edged closer to his mother, reached out and touched her leg but she moved it away; she was sweaty. He didn’t talk to her, didn’t dare – it was too late in the day for that. They’d been on board for too many hours. Under the shade of her big straw hat, behind her sunglasses, she buried herself in her Hammond Innes. Earlier, she’d read him bits – the haunted ship that ran loose in the English Channel, The Wreck of the Mary Deare. But that boat was different from this. It had English people who were scary in a different way, according to his mother.
The short brown man listened to his father as if he had no choice, then suddenly showed his crimson teeth, said cah cah, and retreated to the end of the deck. The sound of the words cah cah made Will want to laugh but his father wasn’t smiling, just chewing on his unlit pipe and surveying the sea as if he contemplated a long-distance swim or dreamed of an island of his own. Maybe he was looking for Carson. His father had said that back in the good old days Nuguria had been too far for Carson to get home from boarding school for the holidays, so Carson spent them on the farm at Broadford. After they matriculated, Will’s father inherited the farm and Carson inherited the Plantation. That was what Will’s mother said: we have a piece of now and she needed to get to the truth of the matter. That’s why they were here. Pissing more money away to get to the truth. He imagined peeing coins out into the sea, how you’d have to swallow them first. The thought of it made his doodle hurt.
To get to New Guinea they’d driven the brown Vauxhall sedan for three days from Melbourne to Brisbane, sleeping out at night near Forbes, then Moree. They left the car at the Brisbane airport and waited for their flight to New Guinea. Will fell deep asleep on the linoleum corridor, where the passengers had to step right over him. His parents thought it was funny, both of them together. It was unusual to hear them laugh at the same thing. Then he got up and slept on the carousel because it was rubber and softer, but it started to move and he jumped up in fright. They thought that was even funnier.
But they weren’t laughing now, the sea in every direction, no other white people but the captain who drank straight from a brown glass bottle, his cigarette somehow glued to his lip and his face sweating. A pig lay dead with its legs twined to a stick across the back of the boat. A gull sat on its head, pecking at its eyes. Someone should stop that, he thought.
The staring native with the nose ring spat betel nut on the back of his father’s safari jacket and Will shrank back into himself, moved against his mother’s pale leg as the New Guinean glared at him as though daring him to tell. No place to bring a child, that’s what his mother had said, but she stayed in her book on that other boat in England.
Will couldn’t stop watching the bright red slag that sat on the cream of his father’s jacket, so he raised his binoculars to the sea and focused on what his father seemed to be gazing at, but all he could feel were the eyes of the spitter on him like the sun burning through his shirt, on the back of his neck and the bowls of his shoulders.
At first he thought he only imagined the trees on the lip of the water, then a line of white that could have been sand. He dropped his binoculars. A rickety pier and a white man surrounded by natives.
‘Carson’s there,’ Will shouted. He’d never met the man but Will could feel his strength from here, and his own excitement. ‘King Carson,’ he said triumphantly.
His mother stood and folded her chair, made her complaining noises. ‘Let the games begin,’ she said. His mother knew Carson from before, back on the mainland a lifetime ago. She’d fancied Carson then, so his
father said, but she’d said, ‘Please don’t be ridiculous.’
Near the entrance to a lagoon the anchor splashed into the glassy blue water, so clear and shallow he saw a fish, a velvety thing that could have been a manta ray. It was bluer even than the sea. He wanted to show it to his mother but the spitter dived from the rail and the ray was gone, just the swimmer underwater like an eel, a plastic bag trailing in his hand.
The boat had settled about a hundred yards out, as far as the sprint at school, his distance, but it seemed like a long way to swim. A woman he hadn’t seen appeared from below the deck, her whole body wrapped in orange like the sun. She had a dead thing bleeding from a sack. As he climbed down a rusty iron ladder looking up at it, he prayed it wasn’t one of those shrunken heads he’d seen in a photo of his father’s, or a small severed animal, or a baby.
His father waved at Will to go ahead, so he stepped down from a ledge into an enormous dug-out canoe already half-full with natives emerging from under the deck, some hanging onto the sides in the crystally water. Others clambered in beside him and made the whole thing rock. He was feeling claustrophobic and his foot was sore so he sat between men on a ledge. A hand from above him played with his hair; he was surrounded by dark legs as his mother and father got in and the lip of the canoe began to take water. His mother moved through with her chair and stood over him. None of the men got up. ‘Stay put,’ she said, then added, ‘Lucky your father’s a swimmer,’ though they both knew he couldn’t swim. He was a farmer, although when he filled in the travel forms he called himself a pastoralist. He had delusions of grandmother. His mother said he was a grazier, at best.
The Best Australian Stories 2012 Page 34