‘And so it goes,’ Esther said, settling again in the ute, placing her shoulder bag between her feet. ‘Now I know why prophets are so scary.’
‘I’ve forgotten what the sane world’s like,’ Milan said. He let out a whoop as he turned from the farm gate, into the corridor of trees on the drive back to station. ‘I feel light-headed with release.’ They began singing a Beatles song, ‘You say goodbye, I say hello’, like kids coming back from a party, away from the world of adults and admonitory quotes. She liked his voice, his easy fun. The ute veered to the edge of the road to avoid a deep rut, a branch clawed across the windows. They slewed against each other, laughing.
‘The man,’ Milan said. ‘Didn’t I tell you?’
‘I liked him. Oddball as he is.’
‘Oh, it’s not a question of liking him. I just don’t want to be with him a hundred years.’
‘And that Czech riff? What was that?’
‘My dad’s family was from a place in the country. A man from there took care of Heydrich, you must have heard of him? The top Nazi dog in Prague?’
‘Of him. Not of the town.’
‘So they rounded up the whole place. There’s books about it. The women finished up where your own relative was. The women’s camp.’
‘So your family too, then?’
‘They had a knack for getting out of most things.’
Quiet now, as they covered the last mile before the houses of the village half-hidden behind stands of trees and ragged bush. Then schoolkids shyacking near some kind of monument, a truck towing off a damaged car.
‘Small world,’ Esther said. Not minding how banal she might sound. A heavy dullness suddenly, after the fun and shouting ten minutes before.
As he pulled in at the station Milan said, ‘I won’t wait. The train’s here any minute.’
‘No, don’t,’ Esther said. ‘Thanks for all this running round.’
‘Take one of the back carriages. More likely to be empty.’
‘It’s three hours back?’
‘A couple anyway.’
She took her canvas bag from the cab. He said he hoped she had something good to read.
‘It’s all new to me. All this. I’ll enjoy just looking at it.’
‘It could be just about dark before you’re there.’
‘Then plenty to think of,’ she said. She hitched the strap across her shoulder. She just wanted to be on the train. God, she thought, do we never get away from it? One way or another? She reached to shut the door and Milan leaned across from behind the wheel, stretching out his hand to stop its closing. He tilted close towards her. His hair was darker now, not such pale straw, in the later light. ‘I can get down to the city on Saturday. Shall we see each other?’
She took a folded square of paper from the pocket of her shirt. ‘I knew you’d ask so I wrote it down when I went to the bathroom. And my number.’
Their grinning at each other, open, complicit, for the first time.
‘We’ve a lot to thank the man for,’ Esther said. She liked it when the Englishman, the Czech, whatever, said, ‘Better wait and see.’ Not trying too hard about anything.
Days later she met him at Central as his train pulled in and the doors flung loose a swarm of teenagers come down to the city for a pop concert.
‘You don’t look like a farmer anymore.’
‘Does that let you down?’
She walked him through the few parts of the city she knew well, across the big park, past the tall brown cathedral, down to the quays and the ferries, then across the harbour to where they stood together on sandstone cliffs and neither said this playing at tourists did not greatly interest them, but each thought it pleased the other. So they said the expected things about the bridge and the Opera House and the glittering expensive inlets and bays that Milan said made him think the shoreline of the harbour was like a huge scribble some child had made, supposing it wasn’t sure what a harbour was and was told to draw one. He liked it when she told him more about herself, and about the vain ageing woman she was helping to make a fairly ordinary career as a dancer come across as more thrilling than it might have been. ‘Yet I like that about her,’ Esther said, ‘a life delighting in itself. Her father was a railway driver who had been devoted to her and she would grow up to be for three entire seasons, and an American tour as well, one of those quivering disciplined swans who danced behind Fonteyn. Why shouldn’t she be a little vain?’
On the ferry back across the harbour, the charm and shine of the afternoon suddenly gone as the wind clipped at the waves and the sky clouded. They spoke of seeing a movie. Milan said it must be six months since he had been to one, but by the time they walked through the long shed back to the fringe of the city, he said, ‘We could give it a miss, you know. Now that we’ve started talking.’
‘Ten minutes in the bus,’ she said. ‘It’s what my friend calls a scungy neighbourhood but I envy her. If you saw the room I rent further out you’d know why all right.’
When they stood in front of a yellow door up three shallow steps and Esther took a key from her jeans, she explained she had the place for a fortnight while her friend Gail and her husband were across in Bali. ‘Every Australian’s dream,’ she said, ‘the way New Zealanders’ is the Gold Coast.’
‘I’m a foreigner to everything,’ Milan told her. ‘My mum’s dream is Eastbourne.’
‘Not that it’s my taste exactly,’ Esther said, as she opened the darkened apartment, and crossed to tilt the blinds and the afternoon flooded in.
‘People only say that when they disapprove.’
‘I prefer my taste to theirs, that’s all I’m saying.’ But then shrugging at how grandly that might come across. ‘There was a short story I read a week ago. “Two kopecks looks down on one and a half.” Only you can put a string of noughts behind Gail’s kopecks and cut mine down to half.’
Milan said, ‘An American I worked with used to say that about rich people. “They’ve got a lot of zeroes.” Took me ages to work it out.’
‘Well, we’ll pretend for a bit,’ Esther told him. ‘Just don’t look at the paintings.’ At the big dark imitations of what Gail’s husband believed distant and fabled New York thirty years ago had defined as where art was at. ‘Sorry. I’m not half the bitchy person I sound.’ There were also bright prints framed in aluminium strips, and hung diamond-shaped rather than square. ‘It’s the kindest thing for my friends to let me have the place. There’s plenty of places round here we can eat at later on.’
He must sit down, anyway, Milan was instructed. A long red leather couch, a plain varnished wooden floor, a deep white flokati rug, an intricate lampshade that swung slightly as the door was opened. Milan said, ‘I like the way you can feel a personality in a place, even if you don’t know the people.’ He looked at the bookshelf with its tall catalogues and volumes about photography. ‘Everyone always seems to know so much about things you know nothing about yourself.’
Esther opened a bottle of wine from the fridge, and carried the two glasses to the couch where Milan sat. His asking her, ‘Have you ever thought how the things we surround ourselves with, what we like on our walls, the books we keep, they’re kind of emblems for a gene pool? Just how much is us, how much is them. The before people. No one ever quite works out the mix.’ He raised his hand to take the glass from her, as though in the falling of late afternoon light she was passing him a strip of gold.
‘Romance wouldn’t last a week if anyone believed that.’
‘Just a random thought.’
‘It makes all of us like a ghost story. I’m starting to half-believe you.’
They sat at either end of the deep comfortable couch, Esther’s right leg tucked back beneath her, Milan with one arm spread along the couch’s back. He said, ‘It’s nice sitting here. Like back to normal life. I think I’ve been up there in the hills too long. Always just the two of us. He hardly ever goes into the village so that intensifies it.’
‘The lonelines
s?’
‘Not for him. Others don’t exist the way they do for most of us.’
And then it was her father they were speaking about, something more even than loneliness, Esther said, something sadder. What you wanted always somewhere else. Not the place you were in, not the person you were with. Lonely before the reason for it even happens.
Milan regretting he had made life sound quite so programmed as he had. ‘I say all sorts of things that don’t stack up. An indulgent parent would call it imaginative but my mum simply puts it down to not getting things straight.’ His smiling at Esther and her smiling back, each of them veering from being too solemn about things. He was telling her now about his PhD supervisor back in London, his most frequent comment on anything his student wrote. ‘Just the capitals BS with a question mark. ‘Does this Bear Scrutiny?’ He’s an old pedant of course so it makes it all the worse when I know he’s spot on. No wonder I took a break to sort myself out and then ended up working for the man in the mountains. If you call that a break.’ He set his glass on the low table beside his end of the couch. ‘And don’t go saying I’m just unsettled the way my father was or my mother would agree with you. I don’t know if I could cope with that.’ He reached out his hand and placed it on her bent knee.
For a while neither spoke. Through the big window a high pink swathe of sky. The frames of the prints caught in the reflection. Then the glare of the light diminished. Soon the room seemed oddly sullen. If you can say that, Esther thought, can you say that about where light has been? The dark floor still gleamed faintly, a polished black. The Greek rug a hollow pale slab. She had known he wanted to put his hand on her knee like that from the moment she sat down facing him. Its lightness more confident than if he had grasped at her. Her stillness telling him that she too had expected it. But he was talking now, back to talking again about the farm. The weirdly story he now was telling her. And that too striking her, why that word weirdly had come to her, not even grammatical, why not just weird?
‘I’d heard about it,’ he was saying to her, ‘about telling the bees of a death. Had you?’
‘No,’ Esther said, ‘never. I don’t know what it means.’
He had heard his mother say something of it once. It was a belief, a superstition, that had been around for centuries. When someone close died, the family told the bees. Her parents were country people for ages back, before her father had gone to work in Cowley, before the land was sold off and tenants had no choice. He had forgotten about her even talking of it, the bee thing, until he had been up there on the farm with its distant blue escarpments, its jagged sloped horizons, for only a couple of weeks. Cameron had no telephone let alone a cellphone but a letter had come to tell him that his aunt had died. He had driven into the village that morning and returned with the groceries he bought each week, and the white envelope stood against the milk jug when Milan came in from clearing understory near the creek.
It was summer, Milan said, he hadn’t believed there was heat like this, he was whacked when they broke for lunch and he would sit on the veranda after lunch until three o’clock. The man had explained to him when he arrived, ‘We break the day in two so it’s like we have two days.’ Milan said that after his life in libraries and behind desks and working in a bicycle shop in the vacations, that was about as physical as his life had got. ‘It’s not true that hard work means you don’t think, as people like us are brought up to hear. To flatter ourselves. You just think about different things. So today matters more immediately than it ever mostly seems to do. But I’m supposed to be telling you about something else.’ About the way he was sitting at the top of the wooden steps leading up to the veranda, holding his cold sweet tea between his palms, when the man stood tall and quiet beside him. Milan turned to look up at him and was instructed, ‘Stay here until I’ve told them. Told them she’s dead.’
It was then that what his mother once had said came back to him. You have to tell them. It goes badly unless they’re told. ‘But it was more than just that now, this was something else as well to what I’d heard about. As if a kind of ceremony he made up himself.’
So he had sat and watched the man cross the scuff of what was called the home paddock towards the wall of the eucalypts at its far boundary, to where in the angle of the meeting wire fences, the hives like unpainted oblong boxes placed on end. He stopped several yards from the hives. I should have said, Milan told her, he wore the same jeans he wore each day I had been there, a white shirt as he did at times for ‘special occasions’ as he called them, without explaining. The sleeves now rolled down and buttoned at their cuffs, a curious mix of casualness and almost formality, that’s the effect it made, his calf-high boots, his broad-brimmed leather hat tipped slightly to shade his eyes. With his height and spareness and sense always of calm possession, the man of God walking his earthly acres. None of the gear you might expect to see a man wear if it’s dealing with hives he has in mind. And although Milan could not hear the words he knew the man spoke to them as he stepped in closer, as though he feared they might not hear what he had come to tell them. And so Milan described it for her as they sat in the darkening room, the unsettling vividness as she imagined it, the tall man and the burring hives and the grey and dappled barrier of the bush in front of him, the glare of his shirt in what seemed the afternoon’s hot empty pause.
He had now removed his hat and placed it on one of the iron spikes that supported the wire-stranded fence, where he crouched for a moment, lit a match which he placed against what seemed, from where Milan sat, a kind of small funnelled can, and that the man then held as he approached one of the hives and took a covering board from the top, which he laid on the ground. Drifting billows of smoke came from the contraption in his hand which he then set down as well, before he then took the top level, like a broad deep tray, and placed that too on the ground. He removed another level and then a third. Already there was the rising blur of the smoked bees darting, flickering, as if the weave of a fiercely thickening veil, through which the man now knelt on one knee to put his hand into the hive’s lower level on its shallow platform. Milan watched in his ignorance what seemed both methodical and crazed. The man standing again and placing what the farmhand only later learned was the queen against his forehead, her hive responding in a gusted whirl about the stolid figure. And the man speaking, as if addressing them. ‘It was too far off for me to hear, but I could tell that was what he did. There was a sense almost of reverence in the way he stood stock-still with his hands now held in front of him, the way you see men standing at the side of a grave.’ The strange stalling formality of that as the dark fluent stain as it seemed on the shoulder of his shirt swelled, the bees compacting and spreading down his sleeve and across his back. Milan, standing now on the veranda and appalled, compelled, by what he witnessed, the blurred seething fabric of the air, and heard the sound like some distant implacable machinery as the only thought that came to him, a mad enough thought in itself, The man is dressed in bees, it is his sound as well as theirs. And then the man stooped again and rebuilt the storeys of the hive and it was as if an apparition had been withdrawn. The extraordinariness of what he witnessed remaining with him still, an occurrence seemingly cut off from any notion of time. For he had no idea of how long all this had taken, or how brief it may have been. It was something discrete, entire, apart from anything else he knew or might imagine. He did not expect Esther, expect anyone, to believe it was quite as he had said, a standing living pillar that was both calm and fury, and then later, the man walking back across the paddock, the burr of the bees behind him returning and settling to their hive. Yet so simple too, if you wanted to think of it like that, merely countless bees clotting about a figure they knew, then returning to where they had been about their business until he went down to talk to them. Milan saying now, ‘I doubted I’d ever mention it to anyone. One madman’s enough.’
Esther imagining it so vividly its strangeness excited her, the seeping across the man’s back like a frot
hing lung, and yet the stillness somehow of it too, even beautiful to think of, even that. The making and unpicking of a living shroud. She said, ‘I don’t know if I can take it in. Make sense of it.’ As if another story went on within it that eluded her. An awful exhilaration as she thought of it. And yet what a shonky phrase that was, as she knew the second it came to her.
‘Oh, to hell with it!’ she said. Laughing, not wanting to laugh. She took Milan’s hand from her knee and knelt on the warm leather of the couch and moved towards him, coming to get him. God, she thought, if only it wasn’t bloody words we have to work through all the time! Her fingers found the buttons of his shirt and touched the warmth of his throat. Fucking bees, she said, pressing her mouth against his ear.
2004
It was Hitler’s fortress, Milan tells her. Festung Breslau. His last-ditch stand. His sea wall against the Russian tide. Or that was the idea. If Breslau held, so would Berlin. ‘Neither did,’ Milan said, who knew so much more about history than Esther. About the city now with its Polish name that her forebears could never have guessed at. Milan knew where borders had shifted in the past, just as he might guess at where the boundaries would move again. It was what he was good at, the kind of thing he was trained for. He was what his mother called a barrel of opinions.
‘Not opinions, Debbie,’ he corrected her. ‘Facts.’
‘What I said,’ his mother told him. ‘A doctorate is enough opinions to know where other ones are coming from.’
‘Well, that’s my job.’ As a journalist, he meant. As a scholar. He was writing a book on political borders, on borders of imagination. He reviewed for the New Statesman. The BBC sometimes asked him what he thought. He worried about the present. He called history ‘toothache without a qualified dentist’. But as Esther seemed surprised to say, he was not a pessimist. He was fun to live with, and was busy enough for two lives. He patiently stood on High Street corners collecting for Oxfam, he helped at book stalls to raise funds, he read one evening a week for an old man in the shadow of the stadium at Stamford Bridge. A blue-and-white Chelsea scarf stretched across the wall in the man’s bedsit, a querulous old man who at times would break in, ‘Why do they bother to write if they can’t make things clear!’, and Milan knew it was the cue to stop reading from the papers and pick up a war book, which was always preferred. Old Jack pretended it was the politics that held him while in fact it was tunnelling and escapes and dam-busting and decisions before dawn that he waited to get back to. He would fetch a bottle of beer and two glasses and settle in against the wall beneath the scarf he could see only dimly.
All This by Chance Page 24