Bob Ellis

by Ellis, Bob; Brooksbank, Anne;

  All who have been with Ruit and with Litwin on the eye camps – travelling surgeries in pitched tents in the high mountain villages, far from the twentieth century – speak of them as almost religious experiences. ‘That such good is achieved tells wonderfully in the mind,’ says Dr David Moran, a bald ophthalmologist, part-time poet and choir music fanatic from Port Macquarie. He, like the others, has the confident serenity of those who know they have paid their dues on earth: increased, not reduced, human happiness.

  And part of it, of course, was Asia itself, and the particular magic, long celebrated in the West, that is Nepal. I and the others hung about on the unofficial days with Tim McCartney-Snape – a long, lean, freckled, sombre conqueror, twice, of Everest with many of the physical attributes of a llama and a mild, magnetic personality akin to that, I thought, of Lawrence of Arabia – among the dusty medieval jostling marketplaces and the monkey-crawling temples, climbing the Himalayas by night under bright stars through calmly drifting fireflies, absorbing the surrounding peace and the unconcern that is part and parcel of a belief in eternity, a belief that life is forever and the present dusty starvation but an interlude on an endless journey with a good guide.

  You do question your values in Kathmandu, the way you are supposed to, the way most Westerners always have, among the mountain peace and the green terraced hills and the intricate ivory statuary and woven carpets and the black baleful bulls in the public thoroughfares, and the temples with painted eyes that watch and follow you, the prayer wheels and the Buddhist monks that share their temples, amazingly, with Hindus, and the visible family love spilling out on the dusty streets, the love of children, the care and respect for the old, the crowded mutual fondness, the abiding married love, the unbruised faith, the unconcern with death as the bodies daily burn by the sacred river and children swim in the ashes a few metres down.

  It must be hard, I suggest to Ruit, to get such a people interested in their earthly future, to get them to worry about health, to convince them that earthly consequences are at all important, that they should, in short, get their eyes checked.

  ‘It’s difficult,’ he says, choosing his words, ‘but as democracy comes – and with it literacy – it gets easier. And it gets easier as the word spreads. A man who was blind last week and can see this week is a damned good advertisement, you know. But I don’t want Nepal to change much. Already the art and the sculpture is worse than it was two hundred years ago. There is so much we must preserve, including those values we derive from being … a little poor: the great family feeling, the sense of dependence on each other.’

  *

  The opening of the lens factory took place with a brass band and a marquee in the space reclaimed the day before from the demolished brick wall, a few metres from the nodding marijuana, with the king observing Ruit operating. Ruit had the prickly feeling of Fred being in the room then, behind him, watching him work, one of the faces in masks, vigilant, critical, surly, vociferous, ultimately, though grudgingly, approving. Prime Minister Koirala, who had himself been cured of cataracts by the Hollows technique, spoke suddenly and movingly, departing from his text, to Gabi on the stage beside him, of the enormity of Fred’s loss and his greatness and how he shared her grief. But the day was oddly dry-eyed – Gabi serene and proud, Fred’s two brothers, Bruce and John, each of whom had lost a son to AIDS, jocular and buoyant and very Fred-like and all of his disciples clustering in among the band music and the soft drinks and the sodden finger food for perhaps this one single time, rejoicing in his memory. It seemed somehow longer since he died than a mere sixteen months.

  All agreed on his foul mouth, bad temper, lack of basic organisational skills, impatience, political ferocity – bawling out Bob Hawke to his face on the day he was made Australian of the Year – unreconstructed Marxism, residual Christianity, pioneering zeal, primitive humanism (‘What is the patient’s name?’), convivial companionship with gaolbirds and poets, intolerance of bureaucratic fools. David Moran recalls occasions in the surgery when Fred didn’t know what eye, right or left, he was there to work on. ‘He never went anywhere without an entourage,’ he says, ‘and an eyeball is a pretty small place to take an entourage.’

  Mike Lynskey remembers how in one fearsome week his brain tumour was operated on in Sydney on the Monday – laser treatment through holes bored in his head – and he flew to Hanoi on the Tuesday, and on the Tuesday afternoon faced down the entire Vietnamese medical establishment. He told them they were doing it all wrong, they were bloody awful ophthalmologists, and converted them, turned them right around in one visit.

  That night Lynskey found him in his motel room with his singlet covered in blood, protesting he was all right, fuck off, there was work to do. Till his last four months his hand stayed steady on the operating table; full of carcinoma and radiation and breathlessness and pain-suppressants and occasionally whisky, this fierce, tough, tactless, driven man had the manual dexterity of a worker in silk tapestries to the very end. He was among other things, recalls Professor Hugh Taylor, a tall, bald ophthalmologist from Melbourne, a brilliant surgeon. He couldn’t handle matches in the end, but after his medication he was back at the operating table, deft as ever.

  Hugh remembered him at night in the Australian outback, beside a brightening campfire under the stars, passing whisky round in a Johnnie Walker bottle top and talking all night of life, the universe, the world economy and what a man must do on earth for those he could help, how you could make a difference. ‘A good man to go mountaineering with,’ said Tim McCartney-Snape. ‘In the end, a more than adequate conversationalist.’

  All agreed on his charisma, his capacity to inspirit others with a desire to follow him up a mountain and over the top and down the other side – the sort of childlike, bellicose, impatient charm that successful politicians have, the capacity to hypnotise and cleanse from the mind of the hearer all but his own priorities; I suppose it’s leadership I mean by this.

  ‘He was my elder brother,’ says Ruit, ‘my father, my teacher, my scourge. Hearing he had cancer of the kidneys, and knowing this was not a good cancer to have, was I think the worst moment of my life, and I wept then. Not when he died, because he had to, but when I first knew he was bound to die, and soon.’

  He was a man aware, with humour, of what he was doing, too, and how he seemed. ‘God, sometimes, Lynskey,’ and here his affectionate minder fell into a perfect gritty mimicry of the famous whisky voice, ‘sometimes, some days I wish I didn’t have to be outrageous. But that’s my job.’

  A man who knew better than anyone what his imminent death meant, what it meant as public relations, as politics, as legend. A brilliant career move, some said. It was a chance for him, and he seized it to, as it were, run for office, run hard. To use all the tricky and manipulative levers of politics – the interviews, the stunts, the public controversies, the Banjo Paterson readings, the angry shouting matches with the mighty of the earth, the vivid fraternisations with the wretched of the earth to achieve – and the words, though true, seemed inappropriate, too pretentious, for Fred – a noble cause.

  Sainthood is a funny thing, I decided, back at the hostel looking at the famous photos of him in his quarter-moon spectacles and the withered old people with opaque eyes under his care, since Fred was a person I knew, though not well, for twenty-odd years before he became renowned and someone I would not have picked in a pink fit as an Albert Schweitzer or a Jonas Salk of our time. And here it was happening …

  In his last year Fred would talk to Ruit about his fear of death. He had tubes sticking out of him and he’d say, ‘Oh shit, I’m scared.’ Sometimes he wanted a quick death and sometimes he wanted to live as long as possible, however painfully, because his work was important. He was an unbeliever, and bore no hope of heaven, even a Marxist one.

  Fred, who kept open house and fed whoever turned up, had many kinds of friends and many kinds of tributes when he died, but one of the best, I think, was by the occasional poet and pensive eye surge
on David Moran who in phlegmatic extremis wrote one night in Kathmandu – a lovely, sometimes frightening town:

  I am in Kathmandu – alone. It is three a.m. It is dark. The power is out, as usual. There is a candle but no matches. My torch battery is flat. It is very cold and quiet in my $10 hotel room. I am sitting on the toilet in the blackness shivering. I have terrible diarrhoea, a twisting wrenching griping diarrhoea. It seems likely I will vomit soon but my body’s decision on this is not yet final.

  There is no-one to comfort me or tell me I’m not going to die. I want my mother but she is dead. At least her spirit is close to me. I want my wife and children but they are far away.

  Don’t worry, David, it’s all in a good cause.

  You bastard, Hollows, you got me into this.

  Good Weekend, August 1994

  VIETNAM, 1995

  The pool game in the Apocalypse Now, a bar patronised by Australians on the dodgier side of Saigon, grew less absorbing as the shots made by hefty Townsville blondes awash with margaritas worsened and midnight neared, and Tet neared too, and we moodily downed our Tiger beers and set off through the back streets towards the Q Bar, which Mike Lynskey (of the Fred Hollows Foundation) falsely alleged was nearby. Rickshaw drivers swarmed around us like fireflies in the intermittent throbbing neon, and teenage hawkers of chocolate and gum and the occasional very clean sister. No sense of physical danger was anywhere apparent in this infamous town: I had felt more threatened in Kings Cross, where capitalist melancholy was in its latter stages and occasionally flared into knife fights. Here it was in its infancy, and not much more than a shouted haggle over the price of a GI dog tag, or a cigarette lighter made of captured mortar shells, reft the warm, balmy midwinter night.

  Shh, they think they won the war, P.J. O’Rourke, the sardonic American apostle of right-wing Republican values, wrote of post-socialist Vietnam, and it’s a fair point. But there is something very Communist here too, as in Cuba and in China. The reverent queues at dawn at the Ho Chi Minh mausoleum. The buoyant, eager children in clean uniforms in the earnest, hygienic schools. The scarcity of hookers on the broad Parisian streets and the absence, it seems, of drugs and child prostitution. The cheerful friendly pride of a nation which, after all, tweaked the nose and broke the spirit of the most powerful country in world history at the height of its power, and in a hail of bullets raised the Vietcong flag above its embassy.

  The Q Bar was depressing too – though the bar girls, teachers in their day jobs and middle class in their deportment and hungry for occidental husbands, proved better at pool than their Queensland soul sisters – and my morose American companions, none too eager for sex, played them a number of games and drank deeply. Soon tiring in my late middle age of the all-too-familiar small-town ’50s coquetry, I took a rickety taxi home through safe uncrowded streets, all marked in Western lettering, to my small hotel, where the concierge slept soundly on the marble floor, and I lay awake, exhausted but exhilarated, and amazed at the events of that waning summer-breathed winter night.

  *

  Course had followed course, more delicious than seemed humanly possible (none of it, tactfully, dog), at the dinner earlier in the evening for Professor Nhan, Vietnam’s minister for health, and the skilfully translated joshing tensely flowed between the alcohol-primed combatants on either side of the table. The professor, a small man with calm eyes in his pensive sixties, was a decorated hero of the Battle of Dien Bien Phu by which the French had been evicted, after a century, from their Indochinese empire, and among his fellow tipplers was Normie Rowe, the nuggetty Australian pop singer, who had been a willing, and famously gung-ho, draftee in the war against the North, and Stephen Ramsey, the solemn, scholarly film director who in 1968 had gone to court to fight, in the end successfully, his conscription marble in the birthday ballot. The professor and Ramsey got on pretty well, predictably, the older man recalling what a boost to their morale it had been when Whitlam removed the Australian troops and it seemed for the first time they were winning; but when Normie, by pre-arrangement, got up to sing to him, and tuned his guitar, the table fell apprehensively silent.

  He sang ‘Bring Him Home’, a great high-soaring song of anguish from Les Miserables, in which he had starred, a plea to God by Jean Valjean to save his adopted son from the fires of revolutionary battle. It had a lot of high notes in it, perfectly struck. I looked at the faces around the table and, after a verse or two, the attending women were in tears. The professor, the small calm revolutionary hero, looked apparently unmoved at his burning cigarette held upward between his finger and thumb. The song ended. There was applause. The professor then lifted his expressionless gaze. ‘Do you know anything,’ he said, ‘by the Beatles?’

  Capitulating, Normie then sang ‘Let It Be’ to the professor’s table, and ‘Twenty Years Ago’, a Vietnam veteran song. The professor was moved. The table relaxed. Normie sang some more. The bracket ended. There was applause. Normie sat down and with a certain mischief said, ‘In our country we have a game called football in which it is our custom to kick the shit out of each other on the field, and after the game, in the pub, to buy each other a beer.’ He raised his beer. ‘To our two great cultures,’ he said. The professor paused a long time, thinking I suppose of a million dead, and the Agent Orange and the bombs and the devastated landscape and the rest of it, then with an unchanging expression, raised his glass also.

  *

  Every metre of the footpath in Saigon boasts a new small business: a Lilliputian restaurant, a bike chain shop, a florist, a gallery of gorgeous tapestries or wooden carvings of Scrooge McDuck, a dispenser of air for bicycle tyres. Busyness is everywhere and from dawn till late at night the streets are thronged with motor scooters and bicycles (where are they all going?) cheerfully weaving in and out of each other’s pathway like intermingling shoals of tropical fish, beeping and yarning as they go, babies riding pillion, a whole billiard table on the front handlebars. Again, you feel no danger: they get mysteriously out of each other’s way. The cheeriness is almost alarming: what have they to rejoice for? These are the toiling masses indeed, crowded as maggots and, seemingly at least, as happy as meadowlarks. Is this, I wondered, what we were in Vietnam to save them from, with more bombs than fell on Europe in World War II? Or is this what they learnt from us since? Or would they have found it out without us?

  Being pedalled on a cycle through a warm night is as good as it gets, I decided, floating like a ladybird about a foot above the ground through the looming, beautiful faces: you know these people know who they are, and where they are going. They have been this for millennia, and only the ignorant, ejected invaders have got it wrong.

  ‘I know why the Americans and the French couldn’t leave Vietnam,’ P.J. O’Rourke wrote. ‘They fell in love with the place.’

  *

  The pleasure boat proceeded up the Mekong Delta. It was a series of what looked like South Sea islands, with grass-hut villages and wild bananas and citrus orchards and frangipanis, as wildly and absurdly beautiful as a P&O brochure. The idea that helicopter gunships came strafing over this paradise (to the accompanying music of the ‘Ride of the Valkyries’) seemed unimaginable. This couldn’t be the actual Mekong Delta. It had to be somewhere else.

  We went ashore, into an underpopulated grass-hut village, and visited the family of Dr Nhan, a female ophthalmologist from the Fred Hollows Foundation. ‘Were you ever attacked by American helicopters?’ I asked her sister.

  ‘Oh yes. Many times.’

  ‘How many of you were killed?’

  ‘About half.’

  I imagined the American platoons coming through places like these. Okay, the colonel would say to identical, slender youthful faces, Vietcong please step forward. We will take you away and shoot you. The rest of you, we’re here to win your hearts and minds.

  How could you win a war like that? Cutting the ears off dead, courageous young men for the body count and then giving chocolate to their relatives as you burnt the houses th
ey had lived in for hundreds of years and moved them, weeping, south in lorries. What levels of racism would you need to make you believe it even remotely possible? American levels, probably. And the religious fervour of John Foster Dulles. These are the heathens. They must be converted. And if they refuse, they must be burnt at the stake.

  *

  The Kiechin Tunnels are now a theme park – Disneyland for Victor Charlie is the popular local phrase – with slide lectures in an adjacent marquee on the glorious Tet offensive by a veteran with clockwork gestures and cadences, and souvenir stalls where captured American backpacks can be bought, and hammocks and dog tags, and shoes made from American tyres, or tiny toy aeroplanes made from American bullets, or bloodstained postcards that got sent home to Indiana, New Jersey, Hoboken.

  We were invited to go down the tunnels themselves. It proved to be a terrifying experience, much like crawling up the alimentary canal of an unwelcoming, constipated stranger. Half an inch on either side of you as, on hands and knees, you crawled gasping and whimpering maybe a hundred metres round stygian corners and up stairs aching for light. It was here the Vietcong had lived for ten years, and rested between guerrilla operations, under manholes covered by leaves in forests the Americans daily bombed. Those that took part in the Tet offensive, nearly all of whom died in the next thirty hours, had crawled at a steady pace for a day and a half before they came out shooting in downtown Saigon. They took the American embassy and died on its roof. And history changed. Never such courage as this. Never such patience, fanatical patience. Never such love of country. It was hard to treat it with scorn. And nobody ever has.

  *

  There are no signs of the bombing in Hanoi anymore. The classic French architecture back, all back, and by the moonlit lake a saxophone playing, and Ho Chi Minh, in his final sleep, a sacred object for which the queuing started before dawn. Religion everywhere, diligence, duty, family life, the work ethic, a kind of dusty, crowded cleanliness of purpose. A sense of the future, a sense of excitable hope. I rejoiced that at last there was a stopover place on the way to England where you could alight without queasiness and look with interest at a country and a people uncorrupted yet.