Questions of Travel (30 page)

Ravi, 2003

ON THE DAY OF
his mother’s funeral, Ravi called Banksia Gardens and said he was ill. He took an upstairs train and then another to Bondi Junction, where he caught a bus. It was a roundabout route, but he was in no hurry. There was a moment when the second train, burrowing up from the city, shot out into light: something that had been constricted fanned open. Ravi noticed this, noticed spaciousness presented like a blue volume—an idiotic gesture.

Along the cliff path, the light was an anesthetic. Ravi walked south past sea baths and secluded coves. Beach towels had been hung out to dry over balconies. An old Chinese man walking the other way was shaking his wrists.

A tree bristled with gray cones and white birds; Ravi could name them and the tree. Hana knew things like that, and pointed them out to Tarik. Ravi, eavesdropping in the passenger seat as Abebe drove, learned
hoon, nature strip, servo.
“How do you know these things?” he had asked one day. Hana looked surprised. There were library books, she listened to people talking at work, there were nature documentaries. She kept a list of Australian plants and made Tarik look up their pictures on the computer. But it was Tarik who informed her mother that it was not a swimsuit but a cossie. “Or you can also say swimmers.” Hana was delighted: she wanted an Australian child. In Addis Ababa she had worked as a secretary in a firm that imported medical equipment. That was how she met her husband. A shell had killed him as he tended the dying on the fourth day of the last war with Eritrea. The family had applied for residency in Australia, where Abebe was already living. The papers had come through, the date had been decided, there was no need for the Frenchman to go to the front. But he had the foreigner’s hazy vision of Africa. “To give his life for those people!” Hana’s tone was the barbed wire on which an old quarrel was stuck. As for herself, she couldn’t wait to get out. When she was fifteen, Marxists had hanged her father. Once, and never again, she referred to
my mother.
Abebe, turning the steering wheel, had nothing to say.

In Ravi’s first week at Banksia Gardens, “What brings you here all the way from Sri Lanka?” Mandy had asked. “Politics?” After a moment, Ravi assented. Politics would cover it. It covered most things. At work, he never spoke of the past. Or rather, he talked about curried seer fish, monsoons, the blue house by the sea. Most of his fellow workers were immigrants. Reminiscing of home, everyone stuck to food, plants, childhood, the weather. Ravi assumed that somewhere else, if only on the treadmill of the mind, the reasons that had brought them to Australia were rehearsed. Or perhaps that was how memory triumphed, in the end, over regimes: by according politics less significance than a flower.

There were more cockatoos ahead, strident in a park. One, further off, was shifting about on a shrub. Fixing on the acid-yellow fan of its crest, Ravi willed the bird to fly.
Before I count to ten.
At twenty he looked over his shoulder. The cockatoo lifted a leg and scratched its head. On the balcony of Freda Hobson’s flat, too, Ravi had searched for signs: that his dead were at peace, or at least within earshot.
If the crow calls thrice. If the leaf falls.
The Pacific slopped over rocks—it was beautiful and careless. But the city of the dead was in sight at last. All morning Ravi had feared that the cemetery would be ordinary. Then it was before him, and it was not.

Under the blind gaze of an angel, Ravi took out an aerogram. It had arrived the previous day. For the last time, he messed up opening the flimsy blue sheet, leaving the lower section to flap over the middle of the letter. His mother had written of a downpour, a grandchild’s fever, the present that Varunika had brought her. Three days later, her heart had stopped. Ravi read the letter again. Again there was nothing, between
Darling Son
and
Your loving Mummy,
but rain, medicinal tea, a watch set with stones. When he could have closed his eyes and recited each sentence, he looked at his wrist. She was under the earth now. The sea coughed and coughed, but what Ravi heard were the first slow steps of rain through a mulberry. It was answered by the slap of rubber slippers passing in and out of rooms: his mother was sheeting the mirrors against lightning. Until now, all that had belonged to a time that was distant but ongoing, still susceptible to surprise and flux.

The Irish girl found him sitting beside a tomb with his knees drawn up in a sliver of shade. Keira had thought that she had the marble books and jittery sea-light to herself, but the first thing she offered the man was her smile. It was one of her grandmother’s precepts:
Christ comes as a stranger.
The old woman was the reason she was visiting the cemetery, Keira told Ravi. “Her brother’s buried here. He left Ireland when he was seventeen and they never saw each other again. Isn’t that sad, now?”

The cone of pink paper she was carrying was full of red flowers.
J’aime Paris
announced her T-shirt in dancing script. Ravi couldn’t always follow what she said. At first, not realizing that she was speaking English, he heard only the dappled noise of a breaker or a bird. In the shadow of a cotton brim, her face, too, had its mysteries. A sentence detached itself: “Isn’t it special here?” The graves, pointing to the drop, proposed no limit to loneliness or risk.

When she set off again, Ravi went with her—it seemed expected. Keira said, “We’re looking for the name Sims.” Soon enough, it was there. From the glazed photograph on his headstone the dead man peered out boldly. Ravi saw eyes that were an argument for placing corpses under granite and concreting around the base. The girl shook crisp brown roses from the jar under the photo and filled it with water from her bottle. Her sunglasses slipped when her hands were full; she pushed them up with a knuckle. While she arranged the flowers she had brought, Ravi looked away. Keira went on talking. Sims had a Protestant wife—she was somewhere nearby, packed into an urn. Ravi learned that the rift caused by the marriage had seen out two generations.

When Keira stepped back from the grave, she did something Ravi had never seen before: holding up a phone, she took a photo.

He had read about camera phones on the Net. “Duty-free,” explained Keira. Ravi asked, “Will you take my picture?”

A pattern slotted into place for the girl; she almost heard it click. Between Dublin and Sydney, she had stopped only in hot places. In each of them, black-haired men had requested a photo. She regarded Ravi, in her viewfinder, with disappointment; also with the first faint prickle of something else.

Unable to sleep the previous night, Ravi had switched on his laptop. He searched his emails for the first message Varunika had sent and chose one of her photos of their mother. After some fiddling, it reappeared as his screensaver. Then he set four candles around the computer and began his vigil. The rosary clicks of his mouse ensured that Carmel went on looking out at him, the machine, too, prevented from slipping into sleep.

In the morning, confronted with a mirror, Ravi saw an effigy. Thinking, This is what grief looks like, he had wanted a photo of it. One of the things he couldn’t forgive Freda Hobson was her doctor. If you have spent a season in hell, you should have something to show for it. Ravi’s souvenirs were the memory of a syringe, a recollection of pills. This time he wanted a keepsake. But he had returned the Memory Maker before leaving for Australia. He stared straight at the Irish girl’s phone. An image Keira had known all her life came into her mind: a sorrowing face imprinted on a veil.

Her cousin’s flat was a few streets inland. As they walked, Ravi learned that Keira was on her way to Cairns. A friend was waiting there, and a job serving beer to backpackers. “What do you think, Ravi? Will I like Queensland? The pay’s rubbish, but I can’t wait to see the reef.”

In the hallway, released from hat and sunglasses, her face was ordinary and more satisfying. Around her throat was a band woven from tiny red and blue beads. Among the tombs, she had written down Ravi’s email address and suggested tea. What she produced, however, were slices of lemon in a pitcher of cool water. Her eyes were the faraway blue of hills.

The cousin’s living room was as dim as a grotto. From a sideboard shaped like a coffin, the dead man smirked in the gloom. Long ago, lumpy forms had sunk to their graves here and grown encrusted with cushions. Weedy leaves trailed from a shelf, and there were clumps of round and branching coral. Ravi saw more photographs: a white dog and a black cat. Keira confirmed that the animals, too, were dead. Her cousin worked in the city and wouldn’t be home for hours. Every morning, she renewed her instruction about shutters: light ruined the upholstery. Keira wet her finger in the moisture on the pitcher and dabbed at her temples. She remarked that the view, in any case, lay to the east.

A door at the end of a passage opened on to a backpack propped against a filing cabinet. “If you squeeze yourself in there, next to the desk, and stand on tiptoe, you’ll see a piece of ocean”—but Ravi was looking at her. Under her T-shirt, her body was white as a candle. The room, like the sofa, was gray and comfortless but wholly adequate to their needs.

He returned by the route he had come, along the cliff path. Dogs and the people they walked were everywhere, and joggers in tight, expensive gear. Workers, released for the evening, were hurrying to the beach. Children screamed in the luscious bays. Ravi passed families around picnics and a group doing tai chi. He marveled at the ease with which Sydney shrugged off drudgery, slinging a towel over its shoulder, heading for the waves.

A woman scolded her phone in a foreign language, and Ravi thought of the Irish girl. When her fingers found the embossing on his back, they had paused. Ravi could have said, A fox passed that way—it’s nothing. But he remained silent, watching the wide eyes fill with tears. At the last minute, he had substituted a .net for a .com in the address he gave her. “Greensleeves” started up like a dirge in the distance, and behind the greedy thought of a choc-top came an aerogram from the previous year. Halfway through, his mother had written,
There was an old song I used to sing, “I would give all
for a moment or two, Under the bridges of Paris with you.” Do you remember that?
Ravi had ignored this when he replied. Now he saw that the reference made no sense but answered a need—it was like his decision to abandon the photo he had requested. His image would travel with the Irish girl until she deleted it. As with any graveside ceremony, what the photo would mark wouldn’t be a connection but a defeat. In the end, that was what everything recorded. Papering over absence, his mother’s letters had proclaimed it. He would Google the song as soon as he got home, but what it had come to tell him had always been clear. His mother had missed him to the end of her days. Each punctual aerogram had played the same tune.

He was almost at Bondi before he noticed that the long day was weakening. There were more people on the path than on the beach below. Ravi remained where he was, grasping a protective rail.
If I see the first star. If the last surfer leaves the water.
Then Malini was at his shoulder. He couldn’t see her, but she was pointing out what he had missed. Along the horizon, a ribbon of darkness had broadened. Night was rising over the earth.

Laura, 2003

CARLO RARELY SPOKE ABOUT
Naples. But he once described his mother and other women going from house to house in the Spanish Quarters to recite the rosary.

There was a Sunday when Laura was holding forth about the suburbs of Naples, the hideous towers crammed together, firetraps no doubt, the work of the Mafia’s property development arm. She had visited one of those blocks, she told Carlo, invited to lunch by one of her students. The scrape of the neighbor’s cutlery was plainly audible, and the names of the saints he invoked before eating. Laura described a concrete lobby with graffiti and syringes, and the three extra locks fitted to her student’s door.

Carlo exploded. “In Quartieri Spagnoli plenty beautiful. My mother, all her life she no have water from tap. No have toilet inside. When she old woman, seventy-one years, still go in courtyard in night, in winter, for take a piss.”

It became a quarrel. They spoke viciously and coldly. His sister lived in a suburban tower, he said. “Have warm, have toilet, when come rain, no leak roof. But no beautiful. Beautiful good for rich people take photo. Like you. No good for live.”

That was unfair, said Laura, she had never said slums were picturesque. There was no reason why affordable housing couldn’t be—she sought a phrase that might crush him—“aesthetically pleasing. And by the way, I’m far from rich.”

“You not rich?
You not rich?
”

They were glaring at each other.

With an effort, he heaved himself up on the sofa. This evidence of feebleness repelled her.

“You look.” He had kicked off a slipper and was dragging at a sock. “See, look!” he shouted in a spray of spittle. The sun-starved growths had the look of creatures blind from birth and preserved in formaldehyde. The third crossed over the second; here and there a misshapen stub protruded.

“My sister same. My cousin same. All same. For go school, must have shoes. Is rule.” He wiped his chin. “We wear same shoes three years, four.”

Rosalba’s shoes, black and sleek as pups on the Persian runner, came vividly to Laura—they went with everything, she recalled. She had put it down to thrift when she knew nothing about cost.

What happened next was born of impulse but had the formality of protocol. Laura plucked a peacock feather from the mantelpiece and brought it down in a great slow arc across Carlo’s toes. She drew the gorgeous green and blue object this way and that, caressing his terrible flesh. She stroked lightly around the heel, the ticklish length of the sole.

From that day on, Carlo spoke more freely of Naples. He picked up the tin in which the sugar was stored. It was pale green and square with a pattern of orange roses. A painted spray of emerald leaves, crudely veined in white, had been grafted onto the rose printed on the lid. Carlo’s mother had given him the tin, he told Laura. She couldn’t afford the tin of biscuits for which he longed. But a neighbor sold her an empty tin, and she begged a little paint at one of the workshops where wooden Nativities were crafted. Using a twig as a brush, she created an object unlike any other for her son on his name day. There was a tremor in Carlo’s hand as he told this story. The sweet white cubes rattled in the tin.

Laura had ascribed his reticence about childhood to self-protection. The deep past was dangerous, she knew. She had imagined Carlo thinking of his life as beginning with Drummond. In the same way, she figured the years before she had gone abroad as a prelude. Real life began with a decision: a lover commanded, an inheritance arrived to squander or save. Before that were only things that had been done to you. It was a dream of self-fashioning, deeply Australian. But now she saw that she had been wrong about the Spanish Quarters. Carlo had known himself loved in that dank room. The barricades around it didn’t serve to seal off the past—they kept intruders away.

Laura had been wrong about Drummond, too. She had thought his ghost banished from the rose-red domain. But it had merely taken up residence in Carlo. Now and then, it peered out. It was responsible for
take a piss.
“Give me strength.” Carlo/Drummond might say. Or when someone pinched the orange scarecrow dog: “Bloody yobbos.”

On an evening in summer, Laura had taken part in a rally against the imminent invasion of Iraq. All day she had pictured people eating, kissing, scratching themselves, impatient because a bus was running late. Very soon, they would be dead. But on the way home, her thoughts were of Ferdinand Hello, who had walked beside her on the march. “Hello” was the first word spoken to him in Australia. As for “Ferdinand,” who could say from what dream or farce it came? Aged four, the child who would become Ferdy had seen his mother, condemned for wearing glasses, beaten with a spade until she died. A depressive decade later, his father had plunged from a bridge in Melbourne.

Carlo was pottering about his tomatoes. At the sight of Laura’s face, sorrowful and righteous, he said absently, “What’s up, chook?”