He had asked the man if the woman he was to meet was German too, assuming that was the man’s nationality, but instead of answering, the man closed his eyes and died. It seemed to Daniel that he had witnessed that death a thousand times since it happened. It had affected him profoundly, though he did not truly grieve for the dead man. It was the fact that the man had been a stranger, yet witnessing his death had felt so intimate. Perhaps that was why he contacted the police to find out when and where the funeral would take place, wondering if a friend or acquaintance would attend to whom he might confide the dead man’s last wish. But no one came other than a policeman who was there for the same reason. The policeman told him the man had left money enough for his funeral. The remainder of his property was bequeathed to a charity that cared for children. It seemed that he had not worked at all, having come to Australia with a collection of antique family jewellery he had sold, investing and living off the proceeds.
‘It seems impossible that a man could have lived so long without making any sort of connections,’ Daniel had murmured.
‘You would be surprised how many people live that way,’ the policeman had responded.
It was as he stood and watched the earth shovelled onto the coffin that Daniel had pictured a woman coming to a café to sit and wait for a man who would never arrive. In the imagining, she was very frail, a female version of his father, emanating patience and gentleness. She was a woman who you could see would wait out the day, hope slowly fading, until she understood that the man she was expecting would not come.
Another thing that the dying man had muttered floated though his mind. ‘There is no greater intimacy than truth, boy. Remember that.’
He woke to broad daylight and showered again, thinking of Mick, who was the stocky Irish owner of the small boxing gym which Daniel had joined when he was fifteen. His father had not understood that the attraction was not the violence or the fact that one man triumphed over another. Daniel had liked the gallantry of a sport where two men could drink and slap one another on the back between bouts. Mick symbolised all that was best about boxing, and their relationship, which had begun with respect and admiration, had become, though the word would never be spoken between them, love. Daniel knew he had disappointed Mick when he decided not to go professional, and it was love for Mick that had kept him sparring with young newcomers, trying to teach aggressive young cocks the need to be smart fighters rather than street sluggers. But few of them had the deep gallantry that Daniel considered to be the secret of greatness.
After Daniel’s parents died, Mick tried to talk him into working for the gym, but Daniel refused and started drifting from one seasonal job to the next and from property to property. He hadn’t seen much of Mick the last couple of years, but he had told the older man of his decision to go to Paris, and why, and asked if he would take care of his quarter horse, Snowy.
‘It’s like . . . like I picked up a stone when that man died, Mick, and I have to find the place to put it down,’ he’d said.
‘It’s a deep thing to watch a person die,’ Mick had murmured, a stern, distant look in his brown eyes. And Daniel had remembered that once, earlier in Mick’s career, one of his fighters had died in the ring from a ruptured aneurism. Mick still sent Christmas cards to the widow, though twenty years had passed.
‘How will you know who she is?’ Mick had asked in the car, having insisted on driving Daniel to the airport.
‘She’ll be alone and she’ll be looking for someone.’
‘She might not be alone,’ Mick had said. ‘And everyone is looking for someone.’
Prophetic words, Daniel thought, walking through the streets, again struck by the age of the city.
Many of the buildings had obviously been sandblasted or repainted in recent times, and though most buildings were crumbling at the edges and grey with filth, on every street there was at least one building undergoing a facelift surrounded by a carapace of scaffolding and billowing plastic. He was startled when asphalt suddenly gave way to smooth, oyster-grey cobbles, but he made no effort to orientate himself using the map. He was beginning to become aware of a flow along the streets, like a hidden current.
He turned a corner and collided with a couple kissing languidly. They seemed oblivious to the impact. You didn’t see kissing like that back home, other than at the movies. Young people kissed in the street, but with defiant self-consciousness rather than passion. Not that Daniel knew too much about kissing or passion. He had kissed exactly three women in his life, and one of them had been a whore who had taken pity on his mortification over his youthful inadequacy.
The other boys had not believed his tale, claiming that prostitutes never kiss. Even now he did not know what to make of the fact that a prostitute had broken what seemed to be some sort of cardinal rule and kissed him, or what he had done to deserve it.
He passed through a square and there was a group of black men talking, dressed in expensive suits. They began laughing, flashing confident white teeth, and Daniel found himself wondering what it would be like at home if the Aboriginal men who drifted into town to drink and socialise in the park or the malls dressed in suits like that. There was something so crushed and battered about the old derelicts you saw drinking in the streets, no matter how aggressive or strident they might be about native title and the disputes it had caused in some Aboriginal communities.
Daniel walked for hours, his mind flicking back and forth between life on his parents’ farm and his current errand, as if it was trying to weave a tapestry connecting the two. It was only when he entered a street that showed him the sun low in the sky that he looked for his watch and realised he had left it in his room. Twice he asked the time of passersby before someone lifted a wrist to show him their watch face.
It was just past five, so Daniel reached for his map. It was gone; he must have dropped it. Fortunately he had noticed maps under glass at bus stops and busy intersections, but it was six o’clock before he found one that was readable and traced out a path from where he was to Grey Street, near the Sacré-Coeur Basilica. The sky had clouded over, and it seemed as if dusk would come sooner than seven. He walked swiftly, thinking there was something primitive about arranging a meeting at dusk.
The roads had grown busier than before, and people walked purposefully, their faces abstracted by end-of-day thoughts. Daniel found that no matter which way he walked or which side of the pavement he chose, he was moving against the flow of human traffic. Several times he had to step into a doorway to let a group of people pass before he could continue.
When he found that one of the doorways belonged to a small café, he realised he had not eaten for the entire day, though he felt no hunger.
He came to a great square pool of water in a mall. Several mechanical devices were spitting, stirring, ploughing or slashing the water.
‘You see that one?’ a woman told another woman in English. ‘I call it the jealousy machine. See how stupidly it threshes at the water; how ferociously it moves. Yet it goes nowhere.’
The words provoked the memory of a fight Daniel had seen between two Murri men in a camp far from towns and police. He had met them on walkabout during a boundary ride and had been invited to join them. The men had begun by talking but had ended up almost killing one another over a woman they both wanted. They had fought with a ferocity that Daniel had never witnessed between two white men, in the boxing ring or out of it. There had been no sense of display or competition. They had fought almost silently and for nothing, since the woman had chosen another man.
A derelict tapped at his arm, startling him into the present, and he gave the old man the coins in his pocket. His feet were burning and he was thinking he would have to find another illuminated map when he saw a metal sign that read Rue de Gris.
As he entered the street, he noticed two men standing on the corner watching him. Both wore their hair cut so short he could see their scalps shining pinkly through the black stubble and one had HATE tattooed on his upper
arm. He nodded to Daniel, a half smile curving thin, soft-looking lips, as if they shared a secret. Daniel’s neck prickled as he passed the pair, and he had the sudden absurd notion that they were watching to see where he went.
It was the sun and lack of food that were making him imagine things, he told himself. A headache drilled into the top of his skull like a hot needle.
He came to the end of the street and realised he must have walked right past the café. Only when he retraced his steps did he understand there had been nothing to miss. The street was short and the only thing in it, aside from residences and apartments, was a smart boutique with a hat draped in a swathe of emerald cloth. Standing outside the shop he noticed a small tobacconist on the other side of the road. He was about to turn away when his eyes fell on the sign above the door.
The Smoking Dog.
He crossed the road and went inside. The man behind the counter spoke and when Daniel did not answer, he looked up. He had thinning salt-and-pepper hair combed straight back from a slight widow’s peak, but his brows were so thick and black they looked false. He raised them enquiringly as he asked in accented but very good English what Daniel wanted.
‘The name of this shop. The Smoking Dog,’ Daniel told him. ‘I came from Australia to find a restaurant by that name. In this street.’
The owner’s eyes slitted, but perhaps it was only that the coiling, heavy-looking smoke from his cheroot had got in his eyes. ‘There was a restaurant here before the war,’ he said. ‘It was burnt out. It was still a mess when I moved here from Estonia and took it over.’
‘Burned?’ Daniel prompted.
‘It was a Resistance stronghold. They were betrayed and the Boche took away everyone they found here, then burned it.’ Daniel thought of the policewoman who suggested the dead man had probably been a political refugee. Was it possible that he and the woman had been in the Resistance and had been taken by the Germans for interrogation? If the man had been the informant, and the woman had realised the truth, it would explain why she had issued her strange invitation, talking of truth and lies instead of love. But when could they have had that conversation? At the club when they had been rounded up, or later wherever they had been taken to be interrogated? Or even after they had been freed? The woman might have realised the man had been the traitor and confronted him with it, concluding with her invitation. Which in turn might have caused the man to flee to the other side of the world, fearing vengeance by the Resistance. But why make a date so far in the future? And what was it she had intended to give him at that meeting? Proof of betrayal?
Realising he had been standing there like a fool, his head full of wild speculations, Daniel gathered his wits and said, ‘I was supposed to meet a woman in the restaurant this evening.’
‘You want a woman?’ There was a mocking note in the man’s voice.
‘I am to meet a specific woman. She made the arrangement,’ Daniel said, hoping the man would not ask her name.
‘Have you heard the saying about sleeping dogs?’ asked the man. ‘Forget about a woman who makes an appointment in a place that doesn’t exist. Go back where you belong.’
‘I’m not sure where I belong anymore,’ Daniel murmured, for the man’s words reminded him of his mother. He felt a sudden dizziness at the depth of his words, at the unexpected abyss they opened up in him.
The man said, ‘You can see the old restaurant, if you want. The shop is only a frontage. I couldn’t afford to refurbish the whole place and there was no need. A tobacconist’s shop should be cosy.’ The man stood up from his stool, becoming in an instant extraordinarily tall. He opened a door behind the counter and Daniel entered the darkness of an enormous warehouse-sized room whose walls retained striped sections of what once might have been some sort of giant mural. There were round tables and a few chairs pushed against one wall, and he had a strange sense that he had stepped back in time, or at least into another dimension.
‘The whole place was done up to look like a circus,’ the man said, relighting his black cheroot. ‘The name of the place comes from a famous sideshow act with a dog. It was a popular place among intellectuals and students, a good cover for secret meetings and the passing on of information and microfilms and all the rest of it. You can still smell the smoke. That’s why I got it so cheap.’
‘If a woman comes in asking about a man, would you give her a note from me?’
The tobacconist nodded to indicate that Daniel should return to the shop. As he turned, Daniel heard, quite distinctly, a gasp or a cough. He glanced back but there was no movement. The shadows hung like frozen smoke, darkening with every minute that passed. The tobacconist gave him a little push and they went into the shop that had also darkened in their brief absence.
The proprietor closed the door and reached for a panel of switches on the wall while Daniel dug from his wallet the receipt the receptionist had given him. He scrawled his name on the back of it, along with the name of the dead man. He did not know the name of the woman and he told himself he had done all he could. She would come, or she wouldn’t. The lights flickered on and the tobacconist brushed a brown-stained forefinger over the words written on the receipt, but he did not read them.
‘If she comes, tell her I will come in again tomorrow in the morning,’ Daniel said. He thanked the man and went out into the street. He had walked several blocks before he noticed a small boy shadowing him. Clad in scruffy, too-big clothes of the hand-me-down rather than the American-street-cool variety, his skin was the colour of dark honey and his eyes liquid tar, the lashes as long as those of a newborn calf.
‘Want to go to circus?’ the boy asked, seemingly unabashed. Sair-coos, he said.
‘Circus?’ Daniel echoed, wondering if he had misheard. ‘What kind of circus is there in the middle of a city?’
‘A ver’ zmall sair-coos,’ the boy said, and they laughed together.
‘Why not?’ Daniel said, liking his cheek. The boy looked puzzled, so he added, ‘Yes.’
The boy beamed at him. ‘Okay!’
Daniel felt suddenly lighter. He had done the best for the dying man, after all. ‘Let’s go then,’ he said.
The boy took the lead, walking quickly. Several streets later, they turned into a lane that sloped down to a small square where, to Daniel’s amazement, he could see the dim yet certain shape of a circus tent, though it did not seem to be properly circular. There were lanterns swaying around its uneven rim, but they gave off very little light, so that he could only see the sections of the tent where they hung, blurring away into the growing darkness. The sight of it reminded Daniel of what the tobacconist had said about the decor of the café during the war, and he shivered a little at the coincidence.
The lane became wide, shallow, uneven steps and Daniel came along behind the boy cautiously, forced to concentrate on his footing. When he reached the bottom, he was startled to find his young guide had vanished. He hesitated, and heard music, long sobbing notes that roused in him an unexpected and potent hunger to be home, riding the flat red plains. Moving closer to the tent, he had the unsettling feeling that the longing evoked by the song was the same as his longing for his parents, who were irrevocably lost to him.
‘Shall I whisper your future?’ a voice asked by his ear, and Daniel started violently.
He turned to see a gypsy woman with a small baby in her arms, sitting cross-legged in an opening in the side of the tent. She seemed to be sitting on a platform, but he could not make out what was behind her.
His silence seemed to anger her, and she sat up stiffly, eyes flashing. ‘But you have no time for Calia, have you? You want the main attraction! Another mooncalf come lusting for the Dove Princess. Fool! There is no future in her for any of you.’ She was so angry she was almost spitting, and Daniel, taken aback, wondered if she was mad. Yet her words made him curious enough to decide that he would go into the tent.
The gypsy gave an angry grunt when she saw him glance to where a wooden sign had been erected, marking
the entrance to the tent. She bared a plump golden breast with a dark nipple. The baby seemed to scent it and butted and struggled until it had the nipple fastened in its mouth, then began to suckle hard. Embarrassed by the bared breast and the derision in the woman’s eyes, Daniel made his way to the entrance and pushed the closed flap aside. Light flowed out past him in bright streams as he stepped into a sort of curtained corridor that followed the outer curve of the tent to the left. He tried to push the curtain aside so that he could go into the main part of the tent, but the fabric was heavier than it looked and there was no opening. He gave in and went along the corridor. The outer wall swayed and brushed against him as the wind gusted, and a heavy musty smell puffed out of the cloth. The music he had heard grew steadily louder until he came to an opening in the inner wall of the corridor, through which he could see the main section of the tent. It was smaller than it had looked from the outside, because of the outer corridor that took up a good portion of the space.
Bright lights centred on an empty circle of sandy ground that ran up against the tent wall on the farthest side of the space. On the near side of the circle were curving rows of bench seats, separated from the circular stage by long wooden bolsters wrapped in red satin. There were not more than fifteen people in the audience, most sitting alone. Daniel glanced around, looking for someone to pay, and saw a lean gypsy man approaching with a leather pouch slung about his neck. Daniel paid what he was asked, fumbling at the unfamiliar bills, distracted by a high-wire artist he had just noticed, clad in glittering red and gold, spiralling down on a rope. Obviously she had come to the end of her performance, for when she reached the ground, she stepped away from the rope and bowed to a smattering of applause. Then she ran lightly away and vanished through a slit in the tent wall. The strange, complex tent must have been constructed in this way to allow a backstage area.
Metro Winds Page 6