The Swan Book (11 page)

Around the swamp, the air was charged up like an electrified cat, always stifling and crowded. Oblivia dreamt the old woman was in the kitchen talking about her life, but her voice was jumping simultaneously between stories about times and places in the world that no longer existed.
All dead, just like me now. Extinct. Uninhabitable.
She was breathless with excitement. It was as though the old woman still wanted to breathe life into the stories of all those people in her life that she had seen escaping from their lost countries, taken to sea by a swan.

But then, what of her life in the swamp?
Our life here
, the girl uttered in her sleep. And the reply came out of nowhere.
Existence!
Just a word echoed from faraway by old Bella Donna – a woman who was too worldly, too immersed; too spread everywhere, and she cried to the girl,
I don't know what is happening to me.

Only the girl felt the sadness of losing the old woman forever, whose voice became less afflicted the more distant she became,
Well! Can you believe this?
Old Bella Donna had just been to the cloud house of a white swan in a Zhongguo city glowing with stars shining like antique lanterns, where the swan was still writing about itself with a quill in its beak, the same poem of missing its home, that it had been writing many centuries ago.

I feel so light now.
It was the feeling of sunlight falling through dark stormy clouds embracing the giant granite swans placed all about the Indonesian village of stone carvers. And off she goes again, but instantly returns and tells of falling down through the dusty rays of light that form a sea around the ceiling of an ancient temple. It was where the golden swan boat of an Indian Goddess swings from waves stirred by thousands of chanting devotees.

Finally, the old woman's home was in sight, the country that was once covered with fir trees, where wild deer with bells in their antlers had run through fog snaking over the snow-covered floor of forests.

The white swans dipping for weeds in the river.

A crescent moon moved so low across the swamp that its reflection over rippling water looked like the wings of a magnificent white swan. It looked like the type of swan from other parts of the world where it might be called Hong, or Cigne, Kugui, Svane, Zwaan, Svanr, Svan, or Schwan. Its light glowed over the houses in the slum. Waterlily leaves shone in the moonlight. The light rode silver saddles on the back of hundreds of black swans huddling around the hull with necks tucked under their wings, where they dream their own names, Goolyen, Connewerre, Kungorong, Muru-kutchi,
Kuluin, Mulgoa, Kungari, Koonwaarra, Byahmul, and the recital continues, collecting all of the country's swans. Then waterlily leaves were blown over the water. Swarming insects backed away.

While circling in the skies, the swans dived endlessly through invisible crevices to other worlds. They were still searching for the old lady, always catching sight of her spirit, not letting her go. It seemed that the entire flock would not stop mourning for her. Everywhere, all over the swamp, there were swans behaving strangely, continuously sifting the water with agitated beaks, as though they were trying to find a way to reach the old woman's spirit, sepulchred beneath.

Then one day their behaviour changed. The entire population emerged from the reeds where it usually built its nests to join bevies of others swimming in from distant reaches of the swamp, until they eventually formed one massive flotilla that skirted around the floating dumps. The formation moved in a tight huddle with curled wing feathers that rose aggressively, an armada of thousands that floated slowly, around the swamp, to follow a threat that was visible only to their eyes.

Suddenly, on necks held high, and feathers vertically angled like black fins reaching for the sky, a sea of hissing red beaks pointed towards what threatened it from above the swamp. It was all action after that. In a spear-like dash across the water, the shadow was pursued until the long drawn-out choreography of swans finished with downward pointing beaks nestled into their necks. The flotilla often changed directions in this pursuit without the slightest hint of any confusion in its vast numbers. They turned as one living presence that shared the same vein of nervousness. At any moment, just like a sudden change in the direction of the wind, the mass would retreat then, just as rapidly, swing back across the water into another attack, always watching whatever was menacing the swamp through the single eye of the flotilla, gauging
its movement, so that their mass would slow down, speed up, or turn sharply, to match the wings hovering above and create gusts of wind rippling across the swamp.

Oblivia slept so soundly, she missed the dawn spectacle: the sand went berserk and smothered the whole swamp before shifting, and flying off. The Harbour Master was about, saying his farewells. He said he was heading northeast, maybe riding on the cloud of sand somewhere out into the sea first, flying to where winds build ferociously. That was the story. Then, just like that, the mother of all sand mountains disappeared.

The official people of the local Aboriginal Government came and tore the hull apart. Books, papers, the lot were tossed all over the floor as though they did not want their hands contaminated by the devil, while the girl huddled in a corner. They were searching for the crystal balls because they might be worth something – you never know.

They had rolled away in the dust storm. She stared into the direction to where the sand mountain had flown.

The officials thought the girl was a liar – were convinced of it, but there was no point in arguing with her so they took the old woman's body away to be buried. Oblivia freaked, with the question burning in her mind:
What if they come back?
With the old woman's body gone, she felt unprotected and alone. She waited for something else to happen, something bad, expecting more people to barge into the hull at any moment. At nightfall, she felt as though her body had disappeared into the slate-grey wall of the hull and she was drowning, gasping for air under the surface, then she heard Bella Donna walking around in the hull and reciting poetry about a slate-grey lake lit by the earthed lightning of a flock of swans…Oblivia felt her life slipping away with the words, as though the old woman was lulling her away. It would
have been easy. But suddenly the mood changed to storm winds spun in the darkness, and Oblivia left so fast it was as though she had been picked up and thrown head first out of the hull, and was already rowing away from it. She ran off into the wasteland at the end of the swamp to search for the tree that she now doubted ever existed.

The swamp people watched her searching among the dead reeds from their homes.
Who's that down there?
They couldn't believe it. Don't look.
Can this madness ever end? I want to look.
She scratched the ground with her fingers, searching for some evidence that would prove the tree had once existed. She needed to confirm what was in her head, of having lived inside the darkened hollow. She was digging holes like a mad dog.
Don't look. I want to look.
There was nothing but dirt where she scratched more and more frantically, with her head screaming, over and over,
I want to know
, as though she was asking the ground to ask the people she knew were watching, but nobody went over to the park to tell the girl what had happened to the trees, whether the wood had been chopped up for firewood, or sawn for timber.

Nobody said:
See child, the timber of the trees was used in that house over there. Nobody said: Look here is a chiselled digging stick whittled from the last slither of wood of the trees that had grown here.
Either the tree never existed as far as anyone knew, or it was a sacred tree in a story only remembered through the ages by people who had earned the right to hold the story. Who speaks for the ancestors? Who speaks for a child wandering around alone? What was the problem?

There was a story about a sacred tree where all the stories of the swamp were stored like doctrines of Law left by the spiritual ancestors, of a place so sacred, it was unthinkable that it should be violated. Old people said that tree was like all of the holiest places in the world rolled into one for us,
no wonder she went straight
to it
. Funny thing that. The tree watching everything, calling out to her when it saw some people had broken the Law. Something will happen to them. This ancestor was our oldest living relative for looking after the memories, so it had to take her. When the girl was found though, the tree was destroyed by the Army on the premise that this nexus of dangerous beliefs had to be broken, to close the gap between Aboriginal people and white people. Those stories scattered into the winds were still about, but where, that was the problem now. It made us strong and gave us hope that tree. The kinspeople of the tree had believed this since time immemorial. Really all that was left behind of the story were elders and their families whose ancestors had once cared for the old dried and withered, bush-fire burnt-out trunk of a giant eucalyptus tree through the eons of their existence. They were too speechless to talk about a loss that was so great, it made them feel unhinged from their own bodies, unmoored, vulnerable, separated from eternity. They had been cut off. They called themselves damned people who felt like strangers walking around on their country. The reciprocal bond of responsibility that existed between themselves and the ancestors had always strengthened them. This was what held all times together. Now we are sick of it. Sick of that girl bringing up that memory to make us feel bad. All these people could think about while watching Oblivia dig the bare earth that day, was being reminded of the tree exploding in front of their eyes and there was not a thing anyone could do about it. Nothing at all. Couldn't bring any of it back. That girl is doing this to keep reminding us. Something must be wrong in her head if she can't even think straight. Watching the girl was one thing. They could not go out there and explain to this child what it meant to lose that ancestral tree.

Nevermind! Nobody forgets. You sprog, the old woman had once explained, fell over the escarpment of an invisible plateau.
Its geology was composed of stories much bigger than a little girl getting lost like you. Now the girl searched beneath the cracked parchments of clay where the dun beetles and ants lived, hoping to find a nest of termites feasting underground on the root system of the tree. The ants and skinks slink away. She leaves after a while, still wondering how termites could have devoured every scrap of evidence of the huge tree's existence.

Finally, the girl returns to the hull where the ghost of the old woman could still be heard talking to herself. The swamp people could never stay silent for long about her ghost either. Their voices swung bittersweet all over the swamp, and they were not just talking about each passing breath of their momentous lives. No! They were talking like the old woman. Her voice was triumphing over death. It made your blood run cold the way she returned like a witch inside of other people's voices. But what did she mean, swinging her mantra in some foreign antique language, the one the old sea explorers used when they saw a black swan for the first time,
Rara avis in terris nigroque simillima cygno.

The girl listened while people around the swamp repeated the mantra to each other. She heard the same phrase sung every night because someone would start calling out the Latin words from a nightmare. Then, suddenly a very strange thing happened. Everyone spoke a few words of Latin in every conversation, and for a while after the old lady died and kept haunting the place, the swamp people started claiming that they were Latino Aboriginals.

It appeared that the old ghost had colonised the minds of the swamp people so completely with the laws of Latin, it terminated their ability to speak good English anymore, and to teach their children to speak English properly so that the gap could finally be closed between Aboriginal people and Australia. You could call it stupidity, naivety, logical, to allow oneself to become so integrated
into the world of the old ghost woman, where all sorts were telling each other that speaking Latin made them feel holy. The swamp people, the eels, moths and butterflies, all wanted to go to Rome to live with the Pope. Some people even claimed that the swamp was Rome.

In the eyes of the beholder, all the architecture around the swamp had become the
relics of the greatest city in the world.
Old swamp people were becoming the greatest Romans of all times, even greater than the Romans themselves. The swamp had become a colosseum.

How bold to mix the Dreamings. Those laws of the two sides of the local world were always clashing. She decided to ignore the old ghost woman sitting in the kitchen of the hull speaking in Latin all night. She would simply remember the living Aunty Bella Donna of the Champions claiming that she had not inherited myths from purists, and not believing that the black swan belonged to the night dreams of some of her ancestors.
The facts girl. Here are the facts. It was the Feast of the Epiphany in 1697 when the crew of Willem de Vlamingh's Dutch ship claimed to have seen superstition come to life, when they saw alive, two black swans – a beautiful pair, swimming off the coast of Western Australia, and called it ‘the epiphany of the black swan' – a celebration for science, a fact stripped from myth.

When the swans scattered, the sailors randomly ran down four swans, and once caught, they were taken on board the sailing ship. When they were taken out to sea, the swans became morose from their own stories being pulled away from them, but they were kept alive anyway, the birds of nightmare specimens in the hands of science, exhibits in Indonesia's old Batavia, where the devil swan feathers could be touched by anyone in order to defy their superstition.

The girl lived in a limbo world. The directions of its map spread out like a peacock's tail. Who created it? Well! There were these boys who once chased a little girl down. They kept roaming in her wilderness. Which little girl? What poor little girl? Talk is talk. Costs nothing. Oblivia hears it everywhere now:
You remember Aunty. She was one of those failure-to-thrive babies. Had FASD. Foetal Alcohol Spectrum Disorder or something like that. You should not believe all the talk going around. You don't know if any of that is true or not. Aunty, it's true, as true as I am standing here. It's the truth of what you get with white government social engineering intervention mucking up more blackfella lives. She was a closing the gap baby. Us? Us left with the responsibility for looking after her.
Oblivia hears voices all the time, and thinks a lot about how stories are made, considering which words would be used down the centuries to describe herself, and representing what? Swanee! Like a devil's swan! The old woman had always claimed that she knew how to find the peculiar if she went looking for it. Destiny itself discovered the girl, and the old woman had explained:
You child, are really peculiar
. She once told Oblivia that she was joined with the
undoable.
It was the principle, she said, of the haphazard way sanity and madness were reaped from her having been gang-raped physically, emotionally, psychologically, statistically, randomly, historically, so fully in fact:
Your time stands still.