Joyful

by Robert Hillman

  Standing within a building that would once have been a stable, Delli jabbed at the soil with his walking stick (he’d fashioned it himself from a yew branch, quite satisfying) and pictured his father at the breakfast table dressed, as he almost always was, in Harris tweed from Jermyn Street. Breakfast in those tranquil days was always served in the garden of the Kirkuk estate, actually within a juniper glade, the dogs, Speedy, Tiger and Small, sitting with heads cocked waiting for crusts of crumpet smeared with English marmalade. He recalled how each dog would betray, as it waited, a different gesture of anxiety: Small turning in a circle and resuming the exact position she had just relinquished, Tiger advancing on his behind a centimetre at a time and emitting a soft, pleading whine, Speedy nipping at his own feet. But they were never disappointed at breakfast, those beloved animals, never required to forgo the rims of the only crumpets being served in Northern Iraq.

  The professor smiled and gave a small, amused grunt. He probably had to concede that he would never have been able to knuckle down to hard physical work. He didn’t like hard physical work. It made him ill. He had only ever been able to rely on his brain. ‘Just my brain,’ he said aloud, and sighed. ‘Not my heart, no.’ For whom had he loved in his life? Sofia, Joseph. Pointless, as it eventuated, and far too exclusive. He had mourned the murder of thousands of his own people in Northern Iraq most inadequately. If they were his own people. If any people were his own people. He had taken down from the wall in his study a 1982 photograph of himself at Baghdad University shaking hands with Saddam. That was the extent of his protest when, ten years after the picture was taken, villages he knew well were cleansed of Kurds.

  Disgraceful. He deserved to die.

  Delli gazed up at the undersides of slate tiles and pictured himself hanging from one of the sturdy rafters. Or would it be possible—better still!—for him to open his belly with a good sharp blade? He imagined the slide of wet red guts down his trousers to the earthen floor of the stable. But he didn’t own such a knife. Could he purchase one on the internet? The pain would be a problem. He wanted some pain, surely, but nothing too dreadful.

  He wandered back to the house, drank tea, and for something to do, changed his tie. Studying himself in the bathroom mirror, he shook his head in amazement. How enduring, human flesh! Without any authority, hearts keep beating, cells reproduce. Say, ‘Enough!’ to the flesh, and you are ignored. ‘Madness!’ murmured Delli. His wristwatch told him that he had no more than two hours before Daanya returned from Wangaratta. In that time he had to compose a few paragraphs on the laptop to satisfy Chulalongkorn. ‘Stream of consciousness,’ the little man had suggested: anything that came into his head. The doctor seemed never to have met a cliché he couldn’t embrace. Nevertheless, if nothing were written Daanya would sneak away into some dim region of the echoing house and whisper on her mobile to the little tyrant.

  Delli had set up a folding table in the upstairs sitting room with a view down the long driveway to the Beechworth road and the granite-studded hills beyond. He’d chosen this spot so that he could see when his wife returned. It took her five and a half minutes by the clock to open the gate, drive the car through, close the gate again, park at the side of the house and find her way upstairs. The professor knew from experience that most of his homework would be composed in those final five and a half minutes. For the rest of the time, he sat and watched. The period of waiting produced short bursts of remembrance that registered on his face like shadows running over a hillside. The season Delli most resisted was the one accompanied by unbidden images of Sofia and Joseph at their happiest or saddest. The image—really, a short film—that wrung his heart was that of his daughter’s hands sliding down over his shoulders as he sat in his armchair at Northcote. She was standing just behind him, and on that day, for whatever reason, had great need to show him her love. Her head came down and her lips touched his cheek. Her hair tumbled over his chest. All he could see was the blur of her profile, but he breathed in her scent and felt the tickle of her respiration in his ear and against his temple.

  Embarrassed and delighted together, he took her two hands in his and held them. ‘Sofia loves Papa,’ she murmured, ‘and Papa loves Sofia, ever and ever.’ Delli’s memory could easily have provided a hundred moments of the same sort. Why this particular one, he didn’t know. It had happened a year before he knew anything of her secret life.

  There was also an occasional attempt at prayer. At Kirkuk, where the Christians of the region had come to the church on the estate to worship, Delli the child had accepted that his father enjoyed equal status with God. He’d come to know better as an adult, but really, the force of his belief had declined rapidly after the death of his father. He’d attended the services of his church in half a dozen lands, but only to repay his wife for the anguish and upheaval of her conversion. In truth, the version of Christian worship he’d practised was so much his father’s creation that it could never be reproduced in the mainstream Kurdish Christian church.

  But Delli’s prayers, employed economically, did succeed in dulling the pain slightly, and that was welcome. When he prayed, he imagined his father’s great hero’s head bearing closer and closer to plant a kiss on his forehead.

  The professor went to his ‘stream of consciousness’ file on the laptop and typed in a few wretched phrases, none of which had anything to do with what was really going on in his mind. He cast about miserably for something to add and came up with a couple of tedious observations on the weather. He had nothing to say to Chulalongkorn. He sat for a further half-hour, sighing, humming, fingering the knot of his tie, addressing the doctor with dirty words that had never been part of his vocabulary.

  Then the moment that changed his life arrived. His hands had been resting on the wooden surface of the table either side of the laptop. Unbidden—it seemed that way—his fingers moved to the keyboard and typed nine wicked words. Where the words had come from was a mystery. Out of thin air, out of nowhere. The professor sat back in his chair with a start. He read what was written on the screen. He read the words again. By the third reading his surprise had gone. He accepted ownership of the words. What venom! His fingers moved rapidly over the keyboard and within minutes he had a paragraph. And oh!—he knew for whom this was intended! There was more to come, he could sense it.

  He typed on in glee. A vigour he had never known surged in his body with unheeding force, strong enough to kill him. He had half a page within ten minutes. He read it through in delight, then highlighted everything on the screen below his weather report to Chulalongkorn, cut it, brought up his email and pasted the text under NEW MESSAGE. He carried his laptop downstairs to the kitchen, plugged in the modem and dialled the server. A pop-up appeared over the text: AUTHENTICATED. Delli bent over the laptop and typed in the address of his dead daughter’s vile lover, his own one-time dearest friend. In the subject box he wrote, with chortling self-approval, If I may be blunt…He pressed SEND without a second’s hesitation, regarded the whooshing graphic of his message on its way, then stomped about the kitchen spluttering with mirth. ‘Oh dear me, dear me!’:

  Toad on your lilypad bloating your body on dragonflies! The time will come in this world when you will learn the meaning of despair! What day of horror for the world when you were spawned in your stinking Romanian swamp! Who in this country would wish to breathe the foul air that surrounds you? Better that a boot came down on your repulsive form and forced your innards from your ugly mouth!

  =

  Delli made it his business to send off a message a day to Averescu, and thrived. He put careful thought into what he wrote, made sure he kept his insults fresh; his past friendship with Averescu gave him a good knowledge of which nerves to touch.

  How appropriate that you should have grown up under the reign of Ceausescu! Is it possible that he was your true father? You certainly shared his morals! It is to be hoped that you share his eventual fate too, your polluted blood leaking into the feculent mud of your polluted homeland!
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  Averescu had been an enemy of the Ceausescu regime as a student, and had suffered for it. No matter. The thrill for the professor was in the wounding. But he restrained himself whenever he thought of something choice to say about Averescu’s wife Ingrid, or his sons. He knew that Ingrid had left her husband, and the boys were, after all, innocent. Klara, Averescu’s daughter, he pitied:

  Poor little Klara, what terrible knowledge!—that Sofia, her friend, who lavished so much love on her, was the whore of her father’s lust! How badly she must sleep!

  To hate was not in itself liberating. But hating as a project, with a discipline and a daily deadline, certainly was. Delli bathed and shaved before he settled down to work then ate a breakfast of nuts, yoghurt and wholegrain bread prepared by Daanya. He wore a suit and tie and polished shoes. Next to his laptop he laid out reference notes of ideas that had popped into his head in the evening. He sat down at his desk at exactly 9.00 a.m., wrote for an hour and a half, then prepared peppermint tea and toast coated with mango and chilli chutney. He ate his mid-morning snack at his desk, the toast served on a favourite bread-and-butter plate with octagonal sides that had come with him from Kirkuk. Searching sometimes for the right word, the perfect phrase, he would gaze out the window at the hills and watch the blue of the sky deepening as the morning wore on. The room would fill with a balmy fume of contentment. He had never expected to be happy again in his life. All thoughts of suicide had fled.

  Averescu sent no replies, and that was fine with Delli. He didn’t want his hobby curtailed by lawsuits or a visit from the police. Daanya’s attitude to his project was the only impediment to this vivid new life continuing forever. Daanya had become suspicious and asked him one morning if he were working on a new book. With nothing to be ashamed of, he opened his email and allowed her to read the messages. He stood humming at the window while she read, but his nonchalance was feigned; he was preparing himself for a telling-off. Perhaps he should strangle her before she had the chance to criticise him? He looked at her dark hair falling down her back and imagined parting the tresses, closing his hands around her throat and squeezing. It did not take much pressure to strangle a woman. Who had told him that? Someone in Baghdad, years ago.

  Daanya took off her reading glasses and turned to look at her husband.

  ‘You must stop this,’ she said, speaking English instead of the Kurdish they spoke in private. Her Kurdish must be too musical for the censure she had in mind.

  ‘No,’ said Delli.

  ‘How many panel invitations have you turned down in the past year? Many. From Chicago and Santiago, to name just two. You have a high reputation to protect! This,’ said Daanya, gesturing towards the screen of the laptop, ‘is unworthy of you. Most unworthy.’

  The professor shrugged and studied his fingernails. ‘I like it,’ he said.

  ‘Where is your self-respect? Would you want your students to know that you write such foul letters? It is disgraceful!’

  Delli lifted his chin and snorted. ‘My students? They can go to blazes! As for my self-respect, did it help our daughter? Did it help our son, my reputation and my self-respect? One became a whore and the other a pervert!’

  The abhorred expression on his wife’s face inflamed Delli. He sprang at Daanya and pulled her hair so that her head was wrenched backwards. ‘I know what is happening!’ he hissed at her, speaking Kurdish now. ‘You’ve returned to your Prophet and you think now you have the right to sit in judgment on me. I have a stronger prophet than you, my dear. Nemesis!’

  Delli released Daanya’s hair. He smacked her lightly on each of her wet cheeks.

  ‘Why not find a secret place and ring that little worm of Siam?’ he said. ‘Let him come! You can make a nice dinner for him. Afterwards, I’ll choke him!’

  Delli made a circle of his hands in the air, and squeezed.

  =

  An opportunity to return to Melbourne came along a few months later when Tess telephoned to say that she would need the house very soon, for what reason she didn’t mention, having earlier promised Daanya and Emmanuel that they could stay at Joyful for years if they cared to.

  Daanya said to her husband: ‘Then we will go back to Northcote.’

  Emmanuel said: ‘You may go where you please. But I like it here.’

  He meant that he had found ways, on his trips into Yackandandah, to irritate almost everyone he met.

  ‘You wish me to find another house?’

  ‘Wife,’ said Emmanuel, ‘don’t encourage me to say what I wish.’

  Daanya stood in thought for a minute or more. Emmanuel, sitting at the kitchen table, seized the opportunity for ridicule: ‘A quandary for the professor’s poor abused missus! She loves her work with the piccaninnies up there at Wangaratta, she’d love to stay, yes she would! But wouldn’t it be healthier for her mad husband if he returned to the lecture theatre?’

  Daanya smiled wanly. ‘There’s no great skill in reading my mind, husband. It’s child’s work.’

  ‘Is it really? Well, here’s some more child’s work. To hell with Northcote. I’ll never set foot in that house again. And the lecture theatre can go to the devil.’

  In the event, Daanya found a house to lease in the town. She arranged everything, oversaw the moving, set up a study for her husband in the new house, and watched with resignation when he sat at his desk and immediately began a new letter of abuse to Mark Averescu.

  part four

  Joyful

  chapter 14

  Enchanted

  LEON’S JOURNEY up the highway to Yackandandah was madness, but he didn’t care. His one remaining mission in life was to stand where his wife had experienced the most intense emotions she had ever known. It did not concern him that this would accomplish nothing.

  He followed the road signs from the highway to Beechworth, then from Beechworth further north to Yackandandah. He paid little attention to the countryside, noticing only the massive boulders hanging on the hillsides. Big white birds, possibly cockatoos, crossed the bright sky screaming in flocks of ten and twenty. Leon pulled over beyond Beechworth when he saw a dead creature humped on the roadside. He stepped whimpering from the car to investigate, badly upset. The animal seemed to be a wombat, he wasn’t sure. It was bloating in the spring sun and maggots had colonised its open mouth. He couldn’t bear to think of it being crushed and smeared any further than it already had been and so he lifted it to the grass beside a strand-wire fence out of the way of cars. Its weight was extraordinary: about that of a hefty box of books. He lamented the poor creature’s stupidity. He had never understood the point of animals. They could neither read nor write nor hold conversations and seemed to him anachronistic, belonging to an earlier age of life on the planet. If a thing of beauty were placed before a creature like the foolish wombat, it would not know how to react. A beautiful book, a painting, what could such a creature do but sniff?

  Leon spoke a few vague words of blessing for the animal before wiping his hands on his handkerchief and resuming his journey. Either the distress of seeing the dead creature or the misery of Tess’s emails or the great whack to his skull earlier in the day had begun to make his head throb. He hoped to buy a gun in Yackandandah and shoot himself, so a headache shouldn’t have mattered. Except that it did. It distracted from a despair that required a high level of concentration.

  He parked his car on the main street outside a building with a pale yellow neoclassic façade and the lettering ‘1878 Athenaeum’ highlighted in black above the entrance. Most of the buildings on either side of the street appeared to have been erected at about the same time as the Athenaeum: Victorian shopfronts with iron-roofed verandahs; a single-storey pub at the top of the town, a two-storey pub at the bottom. European trees, oaks maybe, stood along the street in their vivid spring foliage. The town seemed to Leon one of those mock settlements established to humour tourists. He almost expected to see volunteers strolling about in period costume. But no—the first people he saw were dressed in ever
yday fashion, a pretty girl in a red T-shirt and denim shorts, two children in school uniform with backpacks and headphones.

  Leon straightened his tie in the rear-vision mirror then set out to find someone who could tell him where to find Joyful, and also where to buy a gun. The logical place to apply for an answer to the first question was the office of Wilton Real Estate. He adopted a courteous posture at the counter and waited for a girl with a broad pink streak in her fair hair to finish her business at a noisy photocopier. The tang of vinegar hung in the air.

  ‘Sorry,’ said the girl when she noticed Leon. ‘Would you be wanting Craig?’

  A man in an office chair rolled backwards from a doorway behind the girl. In one hand he held a portion of battered fish.

  ‘Craig Wilton. How can we help you?’

  ‘Leon Joyce. Do you know where I can find a property called Joyful?’

  ‘Hold on,’ said Craig Wilton, and he made his way to the counter, brushing his fingers on his trousers. ‘Find which, pardon?’

  ‘Joyful. It’s a property around here somewhere. A big house. Old.’

  ‘In Yack?’

  ‘In which?’