Joyful

by Robert Hillman

  But on Wednesday after Emmanuel had packed into his little car the few things that needed to be packed Leon gave a different answer to the same question from the professor. Only because Emmanuel was all but on his way and it was unlikely that he’d ever need speak to him or to Daanya again. Daanya was at work on her final day and would be returning in the afternoon, not to Joyful but to Chiltern, and then to Melbourne.

  ‘Can we sit?’ Emmanuel said. They were on the verandah, the professor’s car parked under the big oak ready for departure. Leon had been expecting no more than a few final words; nothing that would require sitting. But he complied, taking up a position on the top step.

  Emmanuel had a bottle of Ballantine’s and two glasses on hand for the farewell. He poured for Leon and himself and offered a toast. ‘In Baghdad we used to say, “To Saddam!” in case anyone was listening, and then more quietly, “May he hang.” And he did.’

  Emmanuel waited, then went on. ‘God forbid I should embarrass you in any way, Leon. But I must tell you a story of Venice, for me the most beautiful place on earth. Will you hear me out?’

  Leon said that he would.

  ‘We went to Venice every year,’ said Emmanuel. ‘For a holiday. Usually two weeks, always to the same hotel, the San Gregorio. It’s on Canal Vecchio, away from the Grand Canal. If you know Venice well—do you?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Leon.

  ‘Then Oriosto, near the old theatre—that lovely walk along the Calle Martino.’

  ‘I know the hotel,’ said Leon.

  ‘So much the better. That was our holiday destination each year, Venice, the San Gregorio. The children always came—Joseph, and Sofia, of course. Well, Sofia especially. From the age of sixteen, Venice meant only one thing to Joseph—Italian boyfriends. Something I was reluctant to admit for a long time. Any number of Tadzios. I doubt Joseph ever spoke of the beauty of Venice without meaning the beauty of his boyfriends. But Sofia adored Venice itself. We walked sometimes for hours, every turn of every street filled her with joy. If you could have seen her, Leon! It was as if she drank in its beauty, as if it nourished her. She never tired. Daanya and I would plead for a rest at a cafe, but even if we were successful Sofia would have us on our feet again with coffee still left in our cups. Each year, two weeks, always the San Gregorio with the window boxes planted with those red flowers Italians love—I don’t know what they’re called. One visit, though, there was less walking. Sofia was ill—influenza. We stayed in the hotel and I read her poetry. I read her Wordsworth, my special favourite amongst English poets. I read her the whole of The Prelude. For the sake of it, we translated some verses together into Kurdish, as I had in the past with my son—in all honesty, almost as great a joy as walking about with her. And for me, a type of penance, if penance can be joyful. Years earlier I had satisfied an ignorant whim of Saddam Hussein’s by translating twenty of Wordsworth’s shorter poems into Arabic. An obscenity. Although Arabic suits Wordsworth perfectly, I must confess.’

  Emmanuel paused to sip his scotch. He was dressed, as always these days, not in the expensive tailoring that he was known for, but in slacks and a gaudy Yackandandah souvenir T-shirt he’d purchased the previous day. ‘I have one particular visit to Venice in mind,’ he said. ‘Sofia was eighteen. Joseph was not any age. He had been murdered three years before. I told you the story.’

  Emmanuel reached over and laid his hand on Leon’s nearer leg, just above the knee. Leon didn’t attempt to remove the hand; it would be there for a few seconds only.

  ‘Sofia had the opportunity on this holiday to attend an advanced class for the violin,’ Emmanuel said. ‘A famous violinist, a Finnish chap. She practised in the mornings until midday then spent the afternoons in class. One morning Daanya and I were sitting on the balcony above the canal reading the London newspapers while Sofia played the pieces set for her, and she played beautifully, beautifully—she was better at eighteen than she was at twenty, at twenty-three. She came out to the balcony for a few minutes, to give herself a rest. She stood there with her hands on the balcony looking down at the canal. She was wearing a shirt of pale yellow silk that Daanya had bought for her a few days earlier. The sunlight reflected from the water threw a pattern over her face, a rippling pattern, so tender. She wore her hair at that time down her back—hair like her mother’s—you’ve seen Daanya’s hair worn in that way. I put aside my paper and watched the light on my daughter’s face and a feeling came over me of—shall I say blessedness? I felt blessed. I thought that I would like to become those two minutes of my life floating in space, all over the universe, like a bubble holding the image of my daughter on the balcony, and of me watching her. When I came out of my nightmare those weeks past and saw you in the rain saying, “Come to the house,” the memory of Sofia in Venice was the first thing that returned.’

  Emmanuel drank the last of the scotch in his glass then stood. He said, ‘I want to leave you the whisky. And the glasses. Please keep them. They come from Iraq.’

  chapter 34

  Rescue

  HE SPENT his days wandering the outdoors, no destination in mind. At the back of the chapel he came across the grave of two babies who had died in 1946, according to the expertly chiselled lettering on a small cross of hardwood.

  Of Diphtheria

  Jennifer Jane Cawdon

  Elizabeth May Weeks

  With God

  He set to work with his bare hands and cleared the ground of grass and capeweed.

  Even more curiously, up among the hornbeams he came across a child’s tea set made entirely of wood. It was kept in a rusted biscuit tin inside the remains of what must once have been a cubbyhouse. Saucers and cups, a milk jug, a sugar bowl—masterpieces of patient carpentry. Leon marvelled over them for an hour—the cups so finely turned, the sugar bowl carved to imitate cut crystal. He thought the things he found must date back to the time of his great-aunt, the time of her community.

  What a strange family he came from! But for the money that had always been on hand most of his relatives would have ended up in a home for incompetents. Jennifer and her passion for that young man—only her money and the authority it gave her had made that possible. Mad genes, money, ludicrous passions—and here he was, the crowning achievement of the experiment, unequipped for any sort of life at all. A community of one.

  He went to the chapel and made some mumbling sounds that might have been prayers of an informal sort for the repose of Jennifer’s soul. And again the next day.

  =

  He found an animal trap that had been set in the scrub above a broad area of the big southern paddock where the rectangular divisions of vegetable plots still showed through the cocksfoot and barley grass. The trap had been there for a very long time, its jaws and spring and the chain that tethered it to a metal stake all crusted with rust. Crouched above it, Leon studied its mechanism. The jaws were still agape. The trap would once have been buried beneath a layer of soil, long since stripped by the wind and rain. The idea was that the animal—perhaps a rabbit, although it seemed too large for such a creature—would step on the trigger plate all unaware, and the spring would snap the jaws shut on its leg. The rounded teeth of the jaws were designed to hold the creature, perhaps break its leg, without severing. But the rust had eaten away the harm stored in the mechanism.

  Leon took the trap back to the house, to the kitchen table. All around it swarmed his messages to Tess. He sat examining the trap as though it were a volume of rare distinction offered by a client. He touched the trigger plate, ran the tip of a finger over the teeth of the jaws, tested the texture of the rust on the loop of steel that formed the spring.

  He’d developed a particular abhorrence of traps after being offered at the shop a seventeenth-century illustrated volume on traps and snares from all over the world. The book’s conscientious etchings depicted traps designed to close on human legs at knee-height; on necks, hands; to thrust a spiked ball into the genitals; to hold a bear by its snout. The nonchalance of the trap-s
etter, occupied elsewhere when steel met flesh!

  It was the arrested harm in the trap that so fascinated him: the leg that wasn’t crushed, the scream that did not join the great volume of screams erupting constantly all around the world. There was beauty in damage averted; beauty in the rusting shut of any entrance to hell, even the hell of anonymous beasts. The beauty transmitted itself to Leon’s fingertip.

  =

  Susie phoned twice a week demanding to know what Leon had eaten for lunch or breakfast or dinner. She said she would allow him to remain at Joyful until the anniversary of Tess’s death, then bring him home. Leon said, ‘Very well,’ but was not listening.

  One afternoon in his wanderings he heard his name called from a distance, then the repeated blare of a car horn. Leon knew that the voice was Kristobel’s but he stayed where he was. He couldn’t face high spirits, happiness, anything of that sort. Back at the house he found a note under a stone on the marble steps:

  Dear Leon Sweetheart—Called in to say a big howdy—On way to Brissy for Lucas’s stupid sisters stupid wedding—Guess what??—am in third TRIMESTER!! Cant stand it!!! Where are you—writing on somebodys house probably—Your insane!!! Love Kristobel XXXXXXX + Lucas

  Evie sent a message from Shanghai. Being a mistress was heaven at the moment, free trip to China, hotel on the Bund. Leon didn’t reply. Nor did he reply to calls and texts from Emmanuel and Daanya, now back in their Northcote home, where Emmanuel was cheerfully doing nothing. One of Emmanuel’s cloying texts read: ‘To be restored to the world, what a gift! May it become your gift too.’ It made Leon sick. He preferred the professor in anguish.

  He kept his mobile handy for the sake of Susie’s calls but then had the good luck to lose not just the recharger but also his car keys. All he had to eat was the last of what Daanya had filled his cupboards with before she’d left—Ritz Crackers, Monte Carlos, Sultana Bran, muesli bars. Also scotch, a single malt from Skye that he was saving for the anniversary.

  He went each night to the room off the passage where the figure in the blanket had stood weeping. Sometimes the moonlight flowed in through the window; sometimes the darkness was so dense that he had to inch his way to the place beside the window. He listened to the owls calling, the wind surging.

  He always brought the animal trap with him to caress in the darkness. It was his last consolation in life, the steel jaws that could never close again. He thought of Daniel now in Poland maybe entertaining some girl in a bar with the story of his windfall. If Tess in heaven had the chance to look down on the living world, she would search out Daniel and his floozy, not Leon and his rusted trap. Oh well, he thought, why deny oneself pity?

  The final call on his almost-exhausted mobile came from Sandra Perelman in Tel Aviv. She’d have a draft of the Jennifer Suzmeyan Victor chapters ready for him in a week, and boy!—what a relief! Oh, and she was reunited with her husband. Out of the blue! Totally! Hold on, hold on just a tick—Goldy wanted to say something. Ar guh ar guh mmm. Did he get that? He wouldn’t believe this but she was giving up tenure at Monash to move to Israel permanently. Fingers crossed!

  Recharge now, the mobile warned. Recharge now. Recharge now.

  =

  He didn’t know where the idea to burn down the house came from but it made him think more highly of himself than he had for years, or ever. He gathered twigs from all over the outdoors and painstakingly fashioned tall piles of kindling in the corners of three rooms. Each pile sat on a bed of newspaper—the Age and the Australian left behind by the Dellis. He knew that the pain of burning would force him to run from the house but he thought if he sealed the doors and windows he could be fairly confident of swallowing enough smoke to kill him before the flames reached him. It was work that cheered him a great deal, building the bonfires. He found himself humming Bach, Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring, and also, oddly, an Irving Berlin song he’d once sung with a girl called Penny at a primary school concert more than forty years earlier, ‘Anything You Can Do’.

  =

  He was up at dawn on the morning of the anniversary. With no ritual to enact—prayers, apologies, confessions—he could only think of walking around outside for a few minutes for a last look at the world. He tried to concentrate on Tess as he shuffled about but his attention was caught by the chattering green parrots stalking along the balustrade above the verandah, five of them. He’d seen parrots of this colour before but always busy up in the elms and chestnuts and gums and greengages, holding seeds or nuts or plums up to their beaks and making a lot of noise as they ate. These parrots were just waiting. For some sort of signal, maybe—something that said the day had begun. He was uncomfortable for a moment to think that the house wouldn’t be here when the parrots returned.

  Then the signal the parrots were waiting on must have come, because they took to the air in one loud rush and powered away like rockets.

  Leon resumed his walk.

  Tess. What could he say finally about Tess? What could he think about Tess? He couldn’t find anything fresh. In the past he could go straight to something he’d never contemplated before, sometimes just an image that flew into his mind, how when she was on air she made small, rapid hand signals to the producer without missing a beat in her delivery to the audience, and when she was interviewing Daniel Barenboim, the way she briefly touched the inside of her wrist and rubbed the flesh there as if taking the pulse of her own arousal. But now he could only remember himself remembering.

  The plan was this: lock all the doors, close all the windows, light the kindling in the first two rooms then settle down in that third room and die. He put the flame of a cigarette lighter to the kindling in the observatory, then stepped back to watch.

  How the flames leapt! It was as if the blaze had seen in an instant the scope of what was offered to it and couldn’t contain its joy. In less than a minute a long tongue of flame had scaled the wall almost to the ceiling. Leon watched the blue script of his long letter to Tess on the sanded panels of the wall first turn a sepia shade, then vanish.

  The sheer hunger of the fire shocked him. This was wrong. His desire to end it all in a burning house was suddenly gone. What had he done? Dear God, the melodrama of it! People would say—they would!—‘a cry for help’.

  He ran at the fire through fat coils of smoke and kicked the living daylights out of it. Burnings twigs went everywhere. He stamped on the flaming sticks, leaping about the room like a dancer. Once he’d gained control over the fire he fetched water from the upstairs kitchen in a frying-pan and dashed it on the embers, then again and again and again until the floor of the observatory became a swamp.

  Leon surveyed the shambles he’d made of the observatory in just those few minutes: charred sticks shifting on the surface of the pooled water; abstract shapes in solid black running up one wall to the pressed-tin ceiling. And the stink. This was his contribution to the care of Joyful, and only think!—Daniel hadn’t burned anything; he had employed the skills of a patient carpenter to achieve something exactly opposite.

  Leon shook his head, appalled. But he laughed, too. He managed that.

  =

  In the room of his communion with the weeping figure he sat with his back against the wall and drank from his bottle of anniversary malt. On the architrave of the doorway the growth of the household’s children in Jennifer Victor’s time had been recorded in paints of different colours: red for Elizabeth, white for Janet, blue for Mandrake, yellow for Louise, brown for Richard, orange for Dorothy. The names had been lettered with skill, probably with the tip of an artist’s brush. Leon had sanded back the door panels and written all over them but he’d left the architrave and its markings untouched.

  More than once he hoisted himself to his feet to study more closely the growth of these children, the girl who was to become his mother among them. Here was Dorothy in 1944, already tall, and in 1947; now 1950, finally 1952 at the height he’d known her, two inches above his father. But look at Mandrake, who’d hardly grown at all over a
space of six years. Was Mandrake still alive, a midget in a black silk top hat making his way in the world with hypnotic gestures?

  He sipped his malt into the afternoon and breathed in the fumes of his experiment with self-cremation. Those fumes mellowed in their aroma over the hours and took on an agreeable tang that could be traced back to the campfire Roger had once built for him, following instructions in a manual.

  He thought of all the striving in his family, Roger with fatherhood, Jennifer with her passion for David Plymouth, he with Tess’s beauty. A family that had got it all arse-about, in Kristobel’s phrase.

  He heard the cockies in the gum trees, felt the heat of the autumn day fill the house and build a film of sweat over his body. Tired enough for sleep, he kept himself awake to study the shapes the sunlight fashioned on the floor.

  It must have been hours into the afternoon when he heard the arrival of a car, the slamming of its door. He knew instantly who it might be, who it would be. With more warning he would have made things look less desperate and pitiful. As it was, he thought he’d stay in his torpor and wait to be found.

  The downstairs door opened. Susie called his name twice, rapidly. The alarm in her voice magnified her accent. Leon remembered her shrieking her son’s name like this when she turned around in the shop one time and saw him at the top of the shelf ladder.

  He called out: ‘Here!’

  She was running up the stairs, as much distress in the strike of her heels on the timber as in her voice.

  ‘Leon! Where in which place?’

  ‘Here!’

  Within a further minute she stood in the doorway, blazing with anger. She glanced at the heaped kindling in the corner then hurried off, seeking by the looks of it the source of the stink in the air. From down the passage came a piercing cry that started out amazed but at the tail rose to fury.

  Leon was halfway to his feet when Susie strode into the room, swung back her hand and slapped him flush across the face. He fell to his knees, flabbergasted at the force of the whack; he had never before been struck, by woman or man. He lifted his face, apology prepared, and was slapped again, harder still. Susie was kneeling now herself, angling for another slap, and she found her opening. Then—what the hell?—her hand was in his hair, she was holding his head in place for what looked like some sort of knockout blow. Leon bleated, ‘Sorry! Sorry!’ but the whack came anyway, more than one, fierce and fast. He was aware of Susie screaming at him but could only make out a word here and there, ‘bad man!’ and what sounded like ‘rascal!’ Was that possible?