Sorry

by Gail Jones

  ‘Very pleased to meet you,’ he said, as if he meant it. His office was messy and unmedical, his manner a pleasant surprise.

  Doctor Oblov had objects – paperweights – resting on his desk, which he took up from time to time, turned in his slender, possibly manicured, hands, and set down again. One of the objects was a glass dome containing a multi-petalled flower of startling turquoise, the like of which could not possibly exist in nature. There was a second dome containing a tiny sailing ship rising unsteadily on tumultuous waves, and a third, which held a butterfly of iridescent violet. As a child who had rarely been given gifts, who possessed a piece of pearl shell but little else that might be coveted as treasure, Perdita found these objects delightfully attractive.

  At their first meeting, there were a few questions, but very little else, and Perdita hardly believed that Doctor Oblov was a doctor at all. He saw her looking at the three glass domes as he played with them, and asked her if she would like to choose one to hold while he asked her some questions. It would make talking easier, he said. Perdita thought this was a childish notion, but agreed in order to humour the old man, and because the invitation to hold one of the paperweights was what she had hoped for. She chose the dome that contained the unnatural flower.

  ‘When you speak to me,’ said Doctor Oblov, ‘imagine that your voice is projected beyond you, into the dome, and coming, like magic, out of the centre of the blue flower.’

  Again Perdita thought this a foolish suggestion – he was treating her as a little girl, she disdainfully reflected – but there was a loveliness to the object that could surely bear this attention. She held the dome, which was cold and perfect, which was, she had to concede, one of the most beautiful things she had ever seen, and responded to the doctor’s simple questions, asked in a voice so low she could hardly hear him.

  Yes, she had begun to stutter about two years ago, after witnessing her father’s death. Yes, it was getting worse, she spoke less and less. Yes, there were occasions when she spoke without a stutter; she could recite whole verses of Shakespeare, which she had learned from her mother.

  At this Doctor Oblov leaned back in his chair, knitting his fingers.

  ‘Shakespeare?’

  ‘That’s what she said,’ Flora interjected bluntly.

  Perdita looked up at her and smiled, then resumed gazing into the artificial intricacies of the dome.

  ‘Would you mind?’ asked the doctor. ‘Just a verse or two?’

  It was entirely straightforward: Perdita recited the Hamlet monologue, which was her easiest piece. She heard her own fluency with a sense of pride. She thought fleetingly of her mother, mad as Prince Hamlet, railing, mutinous, against slings and arrows.

  To die, to sleep;

  To sleep, perchance to dream. Ay, there’s the rub;

  For in that sleep of death what dreams may come,

  When we have shuffled off this mortal coil,

  Must give us pause.

  Doctor Oblov looked impressed. Flora beamed and clutched her handbag close like an excited girl on a tram.

  ‘I see,’ said the doctor.

  He stretched out his open palm, indicating that Perdita should return the dome. She placed it carefully in the pit of his hand. It caught the light, and glinted like a jewel.

  ‘One day,’ he said to her, ‘When you no longer stutter, you can take it home.’

  Perdita was thrilled for a moment, but then crushed by scepticism. It was hardly a promise he would be required to keep. But Doctor Oblov smiled at her, and reached to shake her hand, as though he considered her not a child after all, but another adult. She took the doctor’s hand earnestly, shook it like a grown-up, and was pleased she had come.

  As they left the building Perdita’s mouth flew open with the surprise of a sudden gust of wind. Flora’s hat took flight. As Perdita scrambled to retrieve it there was this physical comfort: grasping the hat, handing it back, seeing with what comfortable joy it was received.

  ‘Gracious me!’ said Flora.

  18

  The most distorted lives eventually adjust, find equilibrium in the new formations circumstances have offered them. For the first months at the Ramsays’, Perdita was almost happy. Although she would not admit it, her mother’s presence had been burdensome, almost atmospheric in its pervasiveness, a kind of pre-monsoonal gloom, a clammy humidity, so there was a certain relief in her removal and incarceration. Flora took her every week to visit Stella in the hospital, but the meetings were governed by the patient’s impossible egotism. Even in illness, suffering the theft of energy and the collapse of her spirit, Stella was still domineering. She spoke curtly to Perdita.

  ‘Why have you come? What are you doing here?’

  When Perdita responded that she didn’t know what to say, Stella snapped, ‘Nothing will come of nothing.’

  Flora said afterwards to Ted that Stella sounded ‘smug as a cannibal. As if she’d just gobbled and swallowed her own daughter’. (Perdita overheard them, listening in bed, dejected.) Flora sat quietly, exasperated, anxious not to judge, but saw Perdita’s misery under the curious tyranny her mother imposed. When she was not aggressive, Stella was entirely vague, ignoring or barely acknowledging Perdita’s presence. She would turn her face away, and find the smudged window-pane and dull view beyond of more compelling interest.

  ‘It’s because she’s ill, luv,’ said Flora.

  I know, Perdita wrote in her notebook, underlined, emphatic.

  ‘Perhaps we should just let her be.’

  Flora patted Perdita’s hand. Two nurses had watched the odd couple try, and try again, with Mrs Keene.

  ‘Bloody tragedy, that’s what it is,’ one of the nurses said, when she heard the unfortunate daughter stutter.

  As they left, Perdita saw Stella reach over and pick up the biscuit tin of old buttons she still doggedly cherished. There was a rattle, and a settling, and yet another closing down.

  On her second visit to Doctor Oblov, Perdita thought again how very unmedical it seemed. Flora was this time instructed to stay in the waiting room, and the doctor once more greeted Perdita by shaking her hand. He sat her down in a brown leather chair, too capacious for her size, and handed her the flower dome to hold while they spoke.

  ‘I will tell you,’ said Doctor Oblov, with his surprisingly quiet voice, ‘about my life. Then you will tell me about yours. I will hold this ship –’ he held up the sailing ship dome – ‘because it helps me to speak. I like the way it rests so easily in my hands, the way it can carry my story to you.’

  Here Doctor Oblov paused to smile. Perdita thought it was like Mary winking when she was cheating at cards; as if they were sharing an illicit understanding of the game.

  ‘I was born almost sixty-two years ago in a little town outside the city of Novosibirsk in Russia. I was from what you would here call a middle-class family: my father was a lawyer; my mother had a small inheritance; in any case, we were comfortably well off. We had servants: Masha, who cooked and cleaned, and an old helper, Ivan, a retainer, around the house. We didn’t think of them as servants. And I had two wonderful sisters, Olga and Ilena, both slightly older than me. I adored my sisters and they adored me. They dressed me up and made me the object of their games, and I was happy to oblige. They read me stories and helped me with my schoolwork. Both had long blonde curls, pretty as pictures. I was the dark one.

  ‘When I was ten, and Olga and Ilena were twelve and fourteen, we all contracted the Spanish flu. Many people in our town became ill, very quickly; it terrified me. Olga and Ilena died, and I was left alone. I wanted to die too, but instead all my hair fell out, so that I was just a little bald boy, grieving, and feeling lost and absurd. My mother bought me a new cap, which I wore day and night. And it was almost a year before my hair started growing back.’

  Here Doctor Oblov paused. Perdita stared fixedly at the glass flower.

  ‘I decided about then that I would become a doctor when I grew up. Later I studied at medical school in
Novosibirsk, and then in Moscow. My studies were drawn out and disrupted – it was a wild time in Russia, a revolutionary time, and I had not been long qualified when the war broke out. I was thirty-two years old in nineteen fourteen. I saw things during the war that made me doubt humanity, but I shall not – forgive me – talk about that here. After the war I moved to Britain and became a British citizen. I loved the English language. I love Shakespeare,’ he added, with another smile. ‘So Russian, Mr Shakespeare.’

  Here he paused to see Perdita respond to his joke.

  ‘In London I fell in love with a young English woman, a nurse, a reader like me, studious and quiet, and her family decided to emigrate to Australia. So I followed her here, following my love, as it were, in nineteen twenty-two.’

  Doctor Oblov fell silent and gazed at his lap.

  It was old-fashioned touch, all this talk of love. Perdita had never heard anyone talk like this before.

  ‘Do you have a wife?’ she asked directly, without the trace of a stutter.

  Doctor Oblov hesitated, seeking the right words. ‘No,’ he said, ‘but I have a female companion. I have been happy here,’ he went on. ‘I like this country. I work mostly at the children’s hospital, and have this clinic, one day a week. Now. What would you like to tell me about yourself?’

  Perdita felt herself fill up with a thousand possible stories. She held the dome in her hand, turned it and noticed the convex distortions of the flower shape. Everything depended on the angle of vision.

  Perdita told Doctor Oblov – stuttering – of her eccentric parents, of her childhood in isolation, the war pinned to the wall. Then, as she grew bolder, she told him of Mary and Billy, how they linked with her, like the dove-tailing ends of a wooden box. There are other families, she said, not just the one you are born with.

  Finally she began to narrate her father’s death, but as she drew near the topic she realised, with the force of a revelation, that she was not at all sure who had killed him. Mary was there, and her mother, and Billy, and herself. Four of them. Just four of them. A strange elliptical quality entered her telling, a manifest inaccuracy. Her mouth became muddled; she could not speak.

  It frightened her to realise that she did not know what had happened. That she had not thought of it until now, nor realised her unknowing. It felt like the upheaval of seasickness, experienced in a dank, groping darkness, with the floor sliding away and surfaces dangerously angled. The smell of something underneath. The sense of up-down, up-down, as waves moved above something drowned.

  There was a crime here somewhere, and she thought her mother might be responsible. Perdita had been able to talk to Dr Oblov as she had to no one else – to disclose her secret confounding, her love for Mary and Billy – yet there was something unbearable and abstruse in all her disclosures. There was a dissolving of memory as she approached its substance; there was a gap and shapelessness to her own lost history.

  ‘That’s enough for today,’ said Doctor Oblov, sensing Perdita’s distress. ‘We will talk again. And perhaps, if you will be so kind, you might give me another recitation.’

  Perdita was flustered and at a loss. She saw Doctor Oblov’s hand stretch out for the dome. She placed it in the centre of his palm, and felt, for no reason she understood, that she wanted to lay her head softly on the side of the brown leather armchair, and weep, and weep.

  When they were outside, Flora said simply: ‘Well?’

  Perdita wrote in her notebook: ‘He told me his life, he had two sisters who died. Then he went bald.’

  Flora’s eyes widened.

  ‘He has no wife,’ she added in a scribble, ‘but he has a female companion.’

  ‘Goodness me,’ said Flora.

  But somehow Flora still trusted Dr Oblov. She had noticed how quietly the foreign doctor spoke, so unAustralian. He must be sensitive, she had concluded, to speak with such effacement.

  ‘They died of Spanish flu,’ Perdita wrote.

  ‘Oh?’

  ‘The sisters. The two sisters died of the Spanish flu.’

  Perdita was trying to imagine Doctor Oblov as a small bald boy, keeled over, doubled up, stricken by grief. His eyes were moist and swollen, and his head shiny with absence. Solitude became him. She saw him pull down his new cap and set his face in a courageous mask and walk away from her, long ago, in a distant snowy country. He became smaller and smaller, this bereaved little boy, and then he disappeared. Velvety darkness, dark as death, completely engulfed him. It was, she imagined, a Russian darkness, reaching into wastelands and furtherest distances. It was Shakespearean darkness, full of tormented figures, lonely, soliloquising, driven to desperate acts and uncommonplace destinies.

  As if missing a day of school wasn’t treat enough, Flora had a second surprise in store for Perdita. After they left the clinic, they walked hand in hand to the centre of town. Perdita saw before her the world of shopping and commerce, of business and transport and hurrying people, that she had almost no first-hand knowledge of at all. It was a kind of luscious elation to stand there in the middle of town, with trams sweeping this way and that, their bellies full of people who stared from glass windows, their antennae slanted, their purpose tracked and secure; to see the luminous displays fronting the department stores, the mannequins, posed, in expensive clothing, the array of objects and signs and felicitous enticements. So much glittered, it seemed; there were so many reflections and repetitions. And although there were sandbags piled high around the public buildings, alarmist signs pointing imperatively to the location of bomb shelters and lengths of paper glued in stripes to the surfaces of plate-glass windows – a weak measure against any bomb-shattering explosions – the war seemed a long way away and difficult to believe in.

  Flora led Perdita down one of the arcades and she saw there that the world of manufactured objects settled discretely into categories and compartments. There was a store entirely of jewellery and wristwatches, and another of books; a café was next and then a store of hats, hundreds of hats, of bizarre variety and pointless ornamentation. From the hat shop stepped a woman in a canary-yellow frock; she was wearing dark, arched sunglasses and smiled at Perdita as she passed. The music of her high-heeled shoes rang on the paving stones. There were blue-striped awnings, lime-green electric signs and red-chequered tablecloths. Objects appeared in crystal light, bent over by coiffed women or men in neat black suits.

  Perdita felt a country girl’s dumb perplexity, but also an enlivening, a secret excitement; the whole paraphernalia of commodities brought with it such artifice, such contrived display. They were ‘window shopping’, Flora declared. Perdita did not yet understand the true authority of money, so she sensed no particular desire or lack. She listened to Flora’s oohs and aahhs with a ruminative detachment.

  After an hour or so they sat together in the public gardens in front of the courthouse and ate tomato sandwiches that Flora had brought from home. It was a plain meal, and Perdita felt entirely content, until her attention divided and she thought again of Dr Oblov’s story, and of the little bald boy she had vividly imagined. Then she thought of her own ambiguous presence, somewhere, untold, in a scenario of fuzzy and incomplete details. As she bit into mushy bread around the warm tomatoes, Perdita only half listened to Flora’s chatter about goods to be bought and possessions to be longed for. It was mystifying to her, this matter of possessions. She had so much to learn. She couldn’t wait to be a grown-up.

  On the tram ride home, caught in a net of over-stimulated visions and imaginings, Perdita was now the staring face watching the city judder past. Lampposts, shops, flashy cars alongside. The geography of the streets was beginning to reveal itself. A statue at a corner, a memorable landmark. The inadvertent beauty of this or that vista.

  And then, utterly unanticipated, Perdita saw Billy Trevor, Billy, her Billy.

  He was in brown workers’ overalls, standing in front of a petrol station. He turned round and walked with a stride into the gaping door of the garage. Perdita flew from
her seat, announcing ‘I have to m-m-m-meet someone. S-s-see you at home,’ and endured Flora’s questions while the tram slowly moved a block further to its next appointed stop. She promised she would be no longer than half an hour. When they stopped, Perdita bounded down the steps of the tram and ran back along the road to the petrol station.

  There he was, Billy, with his head in a car. He was twenty-one years old, an official man, but still with boyish awkwardness and foolish looks. Perdita stood in the wide doorway, puffing, waiting for him to look up. At first he simply peered. It may have been the light behind her, reducing her to dark shape. It may have been the abrasions of time, the way they had made her less herself. But then Billy broke into a huge, crooked-toothed smile and stepped forward to embrace her.

  Perdita could smell oil and petrol and the sour odour of automobiles. The greasy world of car engines. The silver shine of hard objects. Billy was tall now, and flecked with car mess, but wholly familiar. From his pocket he pulled a grimy pad and began writing down questions. Perdita was surprised to discover she had never known before that Billy could read and write.

  ‘How are things?’

  ‘Where are you living?’

  ‘I need your help,’ Perdita wrote on the pad.

  ‘How?’

  ‘To see Mary. I need an adult companion to be allowed to see Mary.’

  Billy nodded. It seemed to Perdita that he instantly understood.