The Book of Science and Antiquities

by Thomas Keneally

  My opponent was considering running, fearful my father would intervene yet and clip him on the ear. But my father again nodded to all the boys and went back inside. There were no favors for me. This was my education, and I understood he was right. He had always operated on the basis of getting in one good punch, and that was consolation for whatever else the world did to him.

  I was right too, of course. Where was the sense of this one good punch if the world still battered you? I took the beating, and my equivalent of the one good punch was not to cry or cringe until, by some mysterious signal, the fight was considered concluded by both our groups. I am not sure that I landed my father’s ideal punch, destined to be memorable unto death to the boy it impacted on.

  When I started messing around with cameras in my mid-to-late teens, my father did not really approve. And yet, in the way I pursued my cinematic career, perhaps I was like him. Did anyone get in more than one good punch?

  * * *

  My father overcame the emergency of his fracture, but he needed perpetual care. We discussed whether his pleas to come home could be accommodated. Even his dream of sitting and watching the sea and lettings things knit seemed a better thing than being the object of the tiresome functions of being nursed and monitored. “I just want to go bloody home,” he would say again and again, and my mother would look stricken, and Cath would be brave enough to be the first to say, “You have to get better first, Frank.”

  My brother sagely reinforced Cath’s advice. For one thing we knew the old man would accept help from no one but my mother. He could not abide strange nurses being privy to his functions. He was private and fastidious, and did not want to be judged not to be. In the past Cath had gone to a lot of trouble consulting me and my mother about helpers of all kinds, marshaled from Veterans’ Affairs and the Benevolent Society, to help with the simplest processes of a household, but of each helper my father would proudly say, “Oh, I sacked her. We didn’t need her.”

  The proposition we were living with was that he could not go home to die because it would kill my mother since she would be without helpers. So they put him in the section of the hospital to do with rehabilitation, and if rehabilitation was impossible he would go into palliative care. All of us tried to believe our line that we were getting him better so that he could go home, at least home to our place, if not to his own flat. But he must have known that he was in the ultimate process. This awareness that he was in anguish weighed with me. I was afflicted with an unfamiliar depression, as if the tragic conundrum involving my father were part of the same dismal fabric as the women of Serae border province now walking back to their desolated farms.

  Dad was not always coherent during this time, and some of the things he did and said were influenced by delusional medication. Since he’d refused to go back to his old job at the post office, he had worked in stores. He had a gift for retail, and should have opened his own stores, except he had a terror of being in debt. Debt was a phenomenon. The weight of debt and the hefty thought of it were things in which he never intended to participate, or even land one good punch on the way to defeat. That was the other thing I hadn’t noticed—that he took ultimate defeat for granted. And I didn’t understand what made him like that when he was a child of Australia, the Lucky Country, the Disneyland of Affluence. In any case, being dapper, he was always well turned out to sell the manchester or haberdashery that was his specialty.

  In the hospital with him one afternoon a little ice water I was helping him to was spilled on his pajama top. He was distressed by this, and motioned to his cupboard. By this stage he seemed to speak in affirmative or negative mmm sounds. I asked him what he wanted from the cupboard and pulled out the garments in it one by one, the threadbare inventory of the very sick—a dressing gown, a spare pajama set, his old gray slacks, and two laundered shirts. As I displayed one of the laundered shirts, he made urgent noises of assent and I realized he wanted his shirt changed. How I wished a nurse was there to do it, or someone who was a doer by nature. It would be hard, given his weakness, for me to change his shirt. But I felt that he wanted me to be the one who was humble enough to do it, and that I should stand up to events, and just bloody well do it for him. I took his pajama shirt off and saw the misshapen and “knitted” collarbone, and the cavities around it from which his now scrawny neck rose. It all hurt him, of course, as we began the process he seemed to believe so necessary, his mmm sounds warning me to be careful but also to know that what we were doing was essential. He was beyond lifting both shoulders at once, and so I had to engage in gently manhandling one shoulder, then the other, to slowly deprive him of one shirt, and the working of his arms and shoulders back into another shirt, an exercise that exhausted him. At last this task of re-dressing my father reached its close and I did up the buttons down the front of the shirt.

  “There you are, flash as a rat with a gold tooth!” I said, though I wanted to howl with the pain he no longer had a voice for, aware that, as well as changing his shirt, I had exhausted him.

  It was his final exercise. They upped his morphine that evening and he died after midnight.

  The Sport and Joy of Heroes

  AFTER THAT LAST conversation with the Hero, I awoke instantly on the cold earth, solitary and weeping. Because I was doomed. It is all very well to desire the great lake of heaven, but it must be earned by the dreadful ordeal of passage, of yielding up, as I was now commanded to yield up. No loud remand had come from the Hero, no threat of punishment for evading the thing. I had been condemned by the calmest authority.

  Though I was a long walk from the women who slept at home by the Lake with their small travelers inside them, I went hobbling back home. The cold was in my knees and hips and ankles, and I was slow, but the cold air lay with the sheen, sharper than an eye and utterly lacking in ill will, over the Lake and the habitations. There was an old woman in skins standing at the edge of our habitations as if she were waiting for me and had avoided sleep to be in place for my convenience.

  I had a question for her. “Aunt, are any of the women close to giving birth?”

  “There are three,” she told me. “The first is Shining of the Parrot clan, or so is my guess, but Blue and Sand of the Bounder clan are both heavy and ready to cast the babies forth.”

  “And there is my daughter,” I told her, though I was not sure why I did.

  “Yes. Shrill. But she has further to grow.”

  She considered me like the Hero had, letting the decision settle upon me, though how could she have known that I was in the track of a decision? That it was drawing near, as Stark and I had drawn near, to the Sinner.

  “I must see my wife, Girly,” I told her.

  “That is all very well, my boy,” she told me. “But you must not delay, you know.”

  I despaired that she was a wise woman. She had had a vision of me. She seemed to know that I had been selected. We said goodbye to each other and I walked towards my fire and my hut. The fire was of course embers, and as I entered the hut I was a creature of ice. There was time to work myself slowly into the furs around Girly, and when I touched her she said without complaint, “Oh, you are so chilled.”

  Her warmth soon spread into me and I wished to stay there easefully. She kindly disposed herself to me and—weeping secretive, restrained tears—I entered her a last time. This was the sport and the joy the Heroes had left to us as consolation for life’s hard surfaces and testing births. The frightened animal I was, I wanted Girly to share my woe, but there was no reason to that wish. After our congress we lay still for a kindly spate of time. However, children were growing towards their calamity in the wombs of three women. I did not have a day for farewells. I did not even have a morning.

  I rose at a normal time for our people at the Lake. From our fire I saw one of the women heavy with child stagger amongst her elders. There was barely time to seek out and chew the divine thorngum and compose myself with it. I went to the weaving ground, where I found my daughter talking to two of
her aunts. These older women laughed as they asked after Girly, not least because they had probably seen her as late as yesterday and wanted to contrast my clumsy lame answers with what they knew from her. They were old weavers and warmed their hands by the fire to entice their skill back into their fingers. My daughter had already picked up a half-finished long bag of interlocking fiber, a beautiful work of skill. She watched me as if she did not quite know what to expect me to say. Her air of kindly wisdom said you never knew what to expect from men.

  “Do you feel well?” I asked her.

  “I feel well for a woman,” she told me. “A woman who can foresee her child.”

  I put a hand on her shoulder and she raised hers, and there was a second’s twining. A fiber as sure as any she wove ran beneath the earth, I believed, connecting us. Me and this sister of the boy destroyed by the great slicing beast. Little could be said of any of this. I could not tell her anything of my intentions for the day. That would need to be discovered. She would be consoled for my going when her child was born.

  Again the Cancer

  CATH AND I were driving to hospital for further exploration of my esophagus and its postchemotherapy and postradiation condition when we heard, preposterously, radio news of the release of the UN’s report of its investigation into Eritrea and its leader, Issayas.

  The UN report paid tribute, said the radio news, to the “major feat of a people’s fight for self-determination,” as led by Issayas—a noble thing in itself. But these days, as a modern Eritrean refugee said, “If I die at sea, it’s not a problem—at least I won’t be tortured.” The nation of heroes led by Issayas had now become the nation of the misused at his hands. People trying to cross the border to the Sudan were shot. Men and women were stuck for limitless years in the armed forces, the former army of light, if there was ever such a thing. Rapes of women were being perpetrated by members of an army that had once exalted the status of women and opposed genital mutilation. Indeed, according to the UN, women servants were kept in what amounted to sexual slavery.

  Thirty-seven thousand Eritreans had fled the country in the past year, the report continued, and thousands had died trying to flee. Their flight was from a man whose smooth features I had confronted in bunkers, who had praised Cath for coming to the aid of his people, who had venerated Ted for saving the sight of so many of his people. Who spoke softly and who, even at this height of power, had not advertised his visage on the streets of Asmara. The personable, handsome Issayas of whom I used to wonder, on the basis of my high school knowledge of history, whether he would, after saving his people, start stringently saving them from themselves, as Robespierre tried to save the French by separating their brains from their spines in the Terror.

  I remembered the Sunday during my visit with Ted and Fram, when I had first met Issayas in a bunker in She’b. A man then in his forties, he had spoken softly, like a scholar, about the US State Department’s willingness to let the Russians have their way in Eritrea and see what happened. He claimed that the US hoped Eritrea would be crushed but the Russians mauled in the process as they had been in Afghanistan, with the Americans stepping in at the end to resume their influence in the Horn. As he spoke, a half window was open behind his shoulder and on the sill lay a nifty brown pistol someone had stashed there.

  The rebel leader with the silken voice had not yet become a tyrant and could not credibly be depicted as one. And with his lack of stridency and his handsome restraint, he had enchanted everyone he met—including Ted Castwell, and I knew how hard that was. Issayas commanded a force in which men and women, Lowland Sunnis and Highland Coptic Christians, were as one in fraternity. A force in a movement whose cleverness in the tactics and strategy of war, but in the tactics and strategy of mercy as well, shone like a promise of evolutionary advance for the species, for a future society as utopian as could be hoped for amongst the flawed of the earth, God’s fallen children. Tesfai, working in Australia, had subscribed too, and he was no one’s fool. Someone had to evolve first out of the squalid polarity of our natures, out of the limits of our tribe. Why shouldn’t it be the Eritreans?

  “Look,” Cath reasoned with me as we approached the hospital and the news report rolled on. “Don’t go into this therapy with all that on your mind.”

  I pleaded, “But it’s …”

  “No,” said Cath. “Just fucking stop it! You’re the one in danger here!”

  I had wanted to say how insignificant my medical excursions were by comparison with what we had heard today and seen in years gone. The young Eritrean women in their flak jackets and shorts and sandals, carrying automatic rifles, the most elegant thing they owned apart from themselves, walking across the earth with a grace you couldn’t learn at schools for models. Revolutionary chic. And one way or another, they had been doomed, unless saved by some quirk of determination and good fortune, almost as rare as the good fortune that blessed a minority in the Holocaust. This or that lovely soldier girl who got away to open an Ethiopian restaurant in Frankfurt or Toronto!

  I kept silence and thought of Ted’s transcendent failed hope, but I could tell Cath was losing patience with what she saw as my chosen sadness at the report. “This is about you and It, for Christ’s sake,” she told me. “Simple as that. You’ll live or you’ll die. Don’t involve the whole damn world in it.”

  Her free hand sought my knee. I saw the opal ring on it—I’d bought it from a Serb in Lightning Ridge. She had dressed up for the day, a little generosity of the kind the target person often misses. The sort of unnoticed gift that women so persistently give.

  “I don’t want you to bloody die,” she said. “We haven’t had enough sane life yet.”

  She was a woman for skilled emphasis.

  We were soon in the cubicle where I met the anesthetist. He said he had been trained by my little brother in Melbourne, whom the Dancer had culled too early four years past. And in honor of this good man, the anesthetist treated me with a jovial frankness.

  After frivolities with him, I was wheeled off towards the operating room, Cath running after me. She did not dramatize events, but situations of departure in the hospitals were significant with her, and though the anesthetist assured her I was fine and that she would hear how the operation had gone within two hours, she trusted no one. That was her ancestral gift and limitation. I found it easy to listen to reassurances. She suspected them for the priestly certainties they tried to purvey.

  When we got into the operating theater and jovial nurses asked me how I was while briskly telling me how to lie on my side, I took special notice of my surgeon. Korean by birth, and Australian by choice or accident, her dark head in its theater cap was studiously bent and she looked young enough to be on study leave from North Sydney Girls High. I was a child of White Australia about to have my misery at least regulated, if not resolved, by a child of the supposed Asian Peril.

  She rose from the desk in the theater. “Good morning, Shelby,” she said with a tentative smile.

  “Good morning, Doctor.”

  “Michelle, please.”

  “I don’t put my faith in Michelles. I put my faith in doctors,” I replied with a smile.

  “You’ll learn,” said the anesthetist bending over me with a mouthpiece. “Just clamp your teeth on this.”

  And so I did and felt a brief warmth of oblivion enter my arm by way of the cannula and then a nothingness so profound I was not there at all to experience it.

  My brother once wrote a scholarly article on an anesthetic so profound in effect that it altered the electrical polarity of cells so that atom no longer spoke to atom and the patient survived by machine. I had been fascinated by this article, since it meant that the anesthetist took the patient over the boundary of death and brought them back again. There was the world of the street and the traffic, and then there was the world of the surgical theater, and I knew where the sorcery lay and I passed out, content, in the midst of the sorcerers.

  After the operation I did not wake instan
tly, for my sleep transcended time. Yet it is true that my waking seemed continuous with the insertion of the mouthpiece. The nurse in recovery declared, “You’re with us, Mr. Apple!” And when I felt clear of head, Michelle was there. So was a sense of a blockage between my sternum and throat where her sophisticated little cameras had probed while she had worked at the tumors.

  “I hope you’re feeling well, Shelby,” she said.

  “One of the T3s seemed extensive,” she told me soberly. “Too much so for me to remove it since it seems it has penetrated the mucosa. So, I’m afraid we can’t rule out the involvement of the lymph nodes. I explained all that to you, didn’t I? The relationship between the esophagus and the lymph nodes?”

  I assured her she had, since she was frowning as if her Korean mother might be disappointed in her.

  Michelle, PhD in the esophagus and fellow of the College of Surgeons, explained that only a PET scan could be definitive on the lymph nodes issue. She would have to talk to the professor, but it seemed that more chemotherapy might be indicated to prepare me for surgery.

  I felt numbed and remote, and that was not entirely the effect of the sedative/anesthetic. “And, Michelle, could it also have spread too far to make an operation relevant?”

  “We don’t know, Shelby,” she said briskly. “But I don’t want to jump to unnecessary and unfounded conclusions. You should go home, and have a rest, and I will email these results to Professor Brown and to your GP. And I’ll give your wife a diagram about what we did today.”

  “My wife likes a diagram,” I assured her.

  Swallowing the Stone

  SO IT COULD not be delayed now and I had to go and make the proposal to Baldy.