Illywhacker (47 page)

I turned my back on her and went back to nailing the guttering on the hut, splintering timber, bending nails, full of homicidal strength. I was as mad with fight as a bar-room brawler rolling out into the street; when her apology came it was the last thing I expected.

She did not look like a woman apologizing. Her eyes were strong, and her manner thoughtful. One could not confuse apology with surrender.

It was quite an apology, and not a short one either, although the length was not dictated by a love of words; she had a lot to say. On certain difficult matters, of which skin was perhaps the most important, she did not make herself clear, or I did not pay attention properly. Other things I grasped a little better—of all her conflicts, she admitted, the greatest was between weakness and strength. She saw herself in an alliance of the weak against the strong but (paradoxically, she thought) was much attracted to male physical strength which also (in the form of police, bailiffs, armies and Mervyn Sullivan) most terrified her in life. Her adultery had, therefore, been a more complicated betrayal and she had been wrong, she admitted, to blame me for it.

I am prepared to wager that she never laid out the central nervous system of the dogfish as carefully as she exposed these nervous systems of her own; I was much affected and stepped down from my drum, with my own confession tumbling from me. I admitted I could not read and that the landscape had, indeed, always seemed alien to me, that it made me, in many lights, melancholy and homesick for something else, that I preferred a small window in a house, and so on.

I must describe this to you coldly. I step back from it a little. Excuse me, but our hands are trembling, mine and Leah’s, all these naked things of ours nodding to each other, shining wet and sensitive to sunlight.

We consider each other, our eyes so sharply focused that the periphery of our vision is smeared with vaseline.

We retire to bed. If there are curtains, they are drawn.

It is not the skin of young women, their firm breasts, buttocks, undimpled backsides, unstretched stomachs, etc., it is their expectations of life that I have lusted after, have drunk like a vampire with a black mouth and pink tongue; I have stolen their passions, enthusiasms, mistakes, misunderstandings, and valued these more than their superior educations.

The steps of the Bendigo Post Office are not a private place on a Friday afternoon. When you hear Leah scream at me you will think—casual bystander—that my new lover is nothing but a screaming shrew, is less attractive than the big-faced yellow-tailed black cockatoo my son has chained, temporarily, to the external rear-vision mirror of the truck, a cockatoo whose tail feathers conveniently echo the colour of the telegram in Leah’s hand, a pretty coincidence not noted by the idle clergyman who stops to stare or by the two taut housewives with string bags full of sausages who do not bother to hide their interest in the Jewess, her silver shoes, and the rude-faced boy who is pulling her towards the truck.

There: Leah waving the telegram. She is a splendid creature, her whole soul trembling with love, with fear, feeling itself to be caught between good, evil, weakness, strength, duty, indulgence, crude appetite and fine ascetism.

All around her people worry about sausages or neatsfoot oil.

“You will punch him down,” she said. “You think you can control him because you are stronger, but you can’t and never will.”

The telegram, you must realize, is from Izzie who will shortly arrive in Bendigo armed with information about his wife’s infidelity, and I—hurling the cockatoo into the back of the truck above my son’s protests—am in love with his wife.

The world was wet and smelt of rancid butter and they huddled into the caravan, as miserable as rain-sodden chooks. Denied the company of his comrades, this was the size of Izzie’s life. He was, within these confines, like a terminally ill patient whose
uncushioned vertebrae show through wasted flesh which is Buddhist yellow, royal purple, mottled with bruises no cushion can protect him from.

He was rubbed raw by his wife’s letters; he spent her money; he hated her; also, perhaps, vice versa. And yet he waited for her to send him some impossible letter, some combination of words as particularly structured as laudanum.

However it was not just one letter he required, but two. The stamps of this second letter would not be perforated. They would be cut. Sometimes, courting sleep, he would imagine the scissors would cut these stamps. Now, he thought, at this moment, they are cutting the stamps from the sheets. The Comrade has mittens and red fingers with chilblains. The stamp has no adhesive. She dips a brush into a pot of paste and there, my name. In two months it will be in my hands. Sixty-one days. He willed the letter across oceans, saw it impatiently through dawdling ports where incompetent officials delayed the ship with unnecessary fire drills.

Rosa would give him no comfort. Perhaps she intended sympathy, but it was no help for her to criticize the Party. She would not leave it alone. She dredged through her memory for instances of stupidity, ambition, avarice she had witnessed in communists. She poured vitriol on the Comintern while she waited for a letter from her other son.

Only from his father did he draw some comfort. In these long featureless days, unable to concentrate on a book, not wanting to do anything but sleep until the letters woke him, he felt a real compassion for the man he had so often slighted. Now they made sandwiches together. Izzie held out a slice of bread in each extended palm while his father, patient and uncomplaining, brushed on the melted butter. When these two slices were done, Izzie waited, palms extended, while his father placed the two buttered slices on a sheet of newspaper on the floor, cut two more slices of bread, balancing the stale loaf on his thin knees, placed these two slices on Izzie’s hands, and repeated the process again.

It irritated Izzie that his father should accept this inconvenience so meekly; that he did not demand the table where Rosa now sat.

Rosa had the table. She was conducting her interview with Dora, whose theatrical career had been ruined by an unexpectedly ballooning backside and who was now well spoken of as a fortune-teller.

Dora’s arms and thighs and face had quickly followed the
example of her backside without ever losing the complexion (“real peaches and cream”) of which she had always been so proud. She positioned herself carefully on the chair and placed a large cane basket on the table beside her. She sighed and smiled vaguely at Rosa who had not yet guessed the contents of the basket. Rosa returned the smile which offered a diffused sort of goodwill but no real affection: the two women had known each other too long; each had said too many indiscreet things about the other.

There was a movement in the basket. Rosa, a red scarf over her hair, cocked her head. Her interest was diverted by Dora who now displayed a small gaily-coloured purse. It was made from tiny beads and had a striking floral pattern. Rosa murmured her admiration. Dora’s smile tightened its focus a little.

The fortune-teller’s hands had too many rings on them. They were the same rings she had owned when her hands had been thinner and the flesh had risen around the rings like the bark of a tree that will shortly engulf a piece of old fencing wire. Yet here again Rosa was prevented from critical concentration because the hands were now delving into the pretty purse and producing grains of coloured wheat and scattering them at random across the table. There were many different colours, all as bright as the beads of the bag.

Rosa kept her own hands beneath the table and watched. She felt critical of herself, and foolish, just as a married man catching sight of himself in a brothel mirror may suddenly see himself in a more objective light.

Indeed, looking at the two men, she discovered them both smiling at her.

“If you don’t like it,” she told her son, “you don’t have to stay.” She imagined them sneering at her. They were smiling because they had guessed the contents of the basket and were waiting for her reaction.

When, less than a minute later, Rosa saw the chook, she did not shriek. She caught her breath silently and took herself in a notch.

“I am allergic,” she said softly to Dora, begging her with her eyes to put the thing back.

“You cannot be allergic to the future,” said the insensitive fat woman, clasping the bundle of white feathers so that the inert chook moulded itself to her and became a feathery extension of her bosom.

“It is blind,” Dora confided.

“Ah,” Izzie said, “so the future is blind?”

“No,” Dora corrected him, “the future is not blind. We are blind. The chook is blind.”

“I cannot believe in a chook,” Rosa said, looking for help from her husband. Lenny, perfectly capable of exacting small revenges, was suddenly busy cutting bread.

“If you don’t believe,” Dora said hurriedly, placing the chook on the table, “it makes no difference.” The chook cowered, a soft centreless thing. “It is not like a seance where you have to believe. Are you swimming?”

“No, I am not swimming.”

“I am swimming, every morning.” The chook stood and started tapping at the tabletop with its beak.

“I am sleeping,” Rosa said.

“Ah, now, you see. It has taken a green one. You must write this down.”

“You write it, Dora. I am paying you.”

“No, no, you write. Quickly, now it is blue.”

“I will not,” Rosa folded her arms firmly and sank back against the caravan wall. “It is stupid. I am allergic.”

“Suit yourself,” said Dora sulkily. She produced a slim tortoiseshell pen (Rosa withheld admiration). She wrote down the colours of the grains of wheat as the blind chook ate them. She did not write down the ones that were knocked from the table. “Tell me, why don’t you swim? When you first came here, always, you were swimming. Every day, you told me.”

“Can it smell colours?” Rosa asked.

“It can smell smells, not colours.”

“Colours, though, have smells. I can smell yellow.”

“How does yellow smell, darling?”

“It has a yellow smell—what else? Are you writing down the colours? Such a nice pen,” she said. “I think it was the green again.”

“How is your other business, Dora?” Izzie asked. The bread on his palms now held slices of cheese and grated lettuce.

“Miss Latimer to you,” Rosa said.

“It doesn’t matter,” Dora said. “Mrs Davis,” she added. “Not so well,” she told the industrious end of the caravan.

“There is more demand for fortunes than enemas?”

“Yes, there is more fortune in the future,” she giggled. “That’s one of my sayings, one of my slogans. I think success makes one rather American, don’t you?” (Izzie scowled.) “Now, darling,” she said to her client, “we have ten colours written on our chart so
we can put our chookie back in its little house. Bad times,” she told Izzie, “are good times for fortune-tellers. Rosa is worried about money. She is worried about her son.”

“I am her son.”

“The other son, your brother, the clever one, Jacob.”

“Clever?” Izzie asked. “Who told you he was clever?”

Rosa blushed. “Such a jealous little boy,” she murmured. “Since he was little.”

“Clever? Joseph, my brother? Clever?”

“Always this one did things,” Rosa whispered. “Steel wool in with his brother’s Weetbix. You understand? The same shape. He tried to kill his brother. Now his brother is in Russia,” she raised her voice, “who knows what has happened to him, but this one is only worrying about itself. He is safe and sound. His wife sends him money. He does not need to work. So rich. All around him, people worry. He is a king. His father makes sandwiches to sell. See: what is the son doing? He holds out his hands.”

“Leave him alone, Rosa,” Lenny said. “You know why he is upset.”

“He is expelled. From what? From nothing.”

“Why do you pick on him? Leave him alone. Talk to your chook. Gossip with it.” Then, more quietly, he told his son: “Take a walk. I’ll finish these. Maybe you meet the postie.”

Rosa went back to her conference with Dora who had now produced a large volume, like a telephone book, that explained the significance of the chook’s choice of colours.

“He won’t give me my mail,” Izzie told his father. “He says it must go into the letterbox. If I stand at the gate and hold out my hand, he won’t give it to me. ‘How do I know this is your letterbox?’ He is a little bureaucrat exercising his power.”

“You have much pain,” Dora was telling Rosa, “much pain with children.”

“Sixteen stitches.
This
one. I was torn.”

“Oh shit,” said Izzie and walked out. Rosa shrugged. Lenny put the tops on the sandwiches he would try to sell at Circular Quay. Izzie waited under the eaves of the house until he saw the postman drop two envelopes into the small tin letterbox. Neither of them was airmail and he approached them with no expectations.

The first one (“Darling Izzie, I have dun it again”) was from Leah, although he did not open it immediately. The second was, in fact, the letter he had waited for so long. Its stamp was
perforated, not cut, and it bore a profile of an English monarch, but it was from the comrades in Sussex Street and it invited him to come and resolve certain matters in respect of his membership.

His first feelings were light and joyful, but by the time he had walked six miles in light drizzle he was cold and slightly bitter. He rehearsed a small speech he was to make to the comrades. He amended it, forgot it, and made another one. He looked forward to their apology.

And yet when he was in those little rooms on the fourth floor above Sussex Street it became obvious that there would be no resolution, no discussion, no apology. Instead they asked him to write a pamphlet on Japanese militarism and said, straight-faced, that the Unemployed Workers’ Union needed someone to train speakers for the field.

He should have been happy. He wished to be happy. He looked at these two men and the greying woman whom he had respected and wished to emulate and found they could only meet his eyes with difficulty. It was not because there had been a mistake, but because they did not know what the mistake was. They were decent people who were embarrassed to be found acting contrary to their principles. He tried not to despise them.