Thomas Keneally - The Daughters of Mars

They had absorbed and been absorbed sufficiently to need to seek a pause when they emerged again. Condon spent a little time reconnoitering for the stone floor of an early Coptic monastery, said to be near the pyramid, and complained that the man who’d discovered it had cleared out all sign of it and given or sold it to museums. So they found a fragment of wall which cast shade and sat on stones, Condon producing the food from his kitbag, Sally a tablecloth she had brought with her in her satchel. They sat on a stone surface and ate the fresh, appetizing flatbread.

They tell me, Charlie murmured, chewing, that you and Honora were on a ship that was sunk.

We were fortunate, she said. And it seems a very long time ago.

What is it all like? When everything starts. The other fellows don’t even try to tell a person.

They can’t tell you. It’s like a new world where there aren’t any words. As for me, I’ve only worked around the edges. But even I can’t explain…

I was ready to come away in November 1914 and got scarlet fever—had a dreadful time talking doctors into letting me get here now, but of course a person thinks all the time, What is it really like? And even—what it’s like when men die around you?

I can’t remember screams, she said. By the time they got to us on the ships or the island, most of them were quieter than you would think they should be. Morphine might have helped. If they’re our patients, we see them go—sometimes it’s hemorrhage. But twenty paces away no one in the ward hears anything.

You must think my questions are absurd, he admitted.

No, she hurried to tell him. I would ask them myself if I were where you are. But don’t forget pneumonia and typhoid and dysentery. They can bring a fellow low too.

Thank you for being so frank, he said, his head on the side. The men aren’t as frank as that.

Well, it’s true you seem to be a different person when these things happen. Not your daily self. You’ll find that. I wasn’t my ordinary self when the ship sank. I was another creature. And that creature finds it hard to explain things.

There was something fragile about him which made her remember the war shocked, the men of bad dreams and waking fears. Was it the fundamental delicacy of his face? His passion for the ancient sketching?

Suddenly he was on another tack. Have you ever looked at the black fellows? he asked.

What do you mean by looked ? she asked.

Well, I mean, taken a chance to have a good gaze at their faces?

I don’t think anyone does that, she admitted. I haven’t. Gazing? People don’t gaze at them. Sometimes it’s politeness—they’d be embarrassed to be gazed at. And fair enough—some of it’s fear too. Our fear. And, I mean, the blacks at home seem a pretty desperate lot, don’t they? And that puts us off looking at them.

Well, I used to gaze at them when I was a kid. I got in trouble from grown-ups for it. I played with our abo laundry woman’s kid in the yard in Rudder Street. I wasn’t at my gazing stage then. Gazing came later. This building…

He nodded his head towards the pyramid.

They’re older than this, you know. The Aborigines. You see it in the face. If I find the courage, I might go one day and negotiate man to man with one of them and try to sketch his face. They say at the art class it’s easier to do if you go to the desert—one of the teachers has done it by train and camel. It’s easier to gaze at them there than it is at home. But I’d like to gaze at them at home. Where they’re not romantic figures. Where they’re living in misery.

The mention of art teachers serious enough to penetrate the interior seemed to suggest to her that these were no fly-by-night art classes he attended. She asked him what school it was.

It’s run by an artist, Eva Sodermann. She was worried when the war started she might get interned. But we all petitioned the government. Up to the time I left, it had worked. Anyhow, one of the men who comes there, who teaches with Eva, quite a jaunty sort of fellow—he studied in Paris. Even sold a few paintings to the Royal Academy in London. We used to look at him in awe. You know what he told us? All the paintings he did in Melbourne in the 1890s… no one bought them. Now they have. But he still has to earn his bread teaching. So… God help the rest of us.

I wish you’d brought your sketchbook with you though, she said.

Oh, he said, I’m no good at it in company. I won’t mind showing off when I succeed. But on the way I need to fail and I like to do that bit privately.

But I wouldn’t be critical, she assured him.

You should be critical, that’s the point. There’s no art even at my level unless people are critical. Art doesn’t exist until someone says, That’s good. Or else until someone says, That’s on the nose. I’m too proud to be on the nose in public. As an artist I’m still tentative, even if I talk as if I know what I’m doing. In fact, I was a law student taking a bit of a break to go to an art school. And I’ll probably study law again if no one buys my work. Or at least if no one employs me as an art teacher.

I hope you come to trust me well enough, she said, that you’ll feel free to sketch in my presence.

The even, too innocent smile again. That’s a wonderful thing to say, he told her. When I rally the confidence, I’ll sketch you. Even if I’m not one of those fellows who gets popularity by sketching their friends halfway well. But I’ll study you unawares and do the sketch later. No sense in sketching someone who knows she’s being sketched. It just encourages the subject to put on airs. I want humans in the moments they’re unaware of their grace.

The compliment shot past her eyes and was gone—just as their sudden discomfort wanted it to be. The glare of early afternoon began to hurt the eyes. The sky was vacant of all screening devices, whether sand or cloud. They went and looked at the flat-roofed tombs around the pyramid and made a few investigations of their chambers. Less worried about being lost beneath the vanity of an old emperor, she saw more clearly why the frescoes were marvelous and why they might evoke a kinship between Condon and their makers.

British trucks coming up from Aswan could be expected to roll through Sakkara from three onwards. Charlie and Sally packed their satchels and fetched the ponies and left King Djoser for good.

Easing back into the velvet and leather of First Class, Leo said, I pity the boys back there in Third with their wooden seats.

On a long train, the nurses occupied perhaps no more than two carriages—a living and breathing buffer between the officers’ carriages forward and the harsher ones back there where the masses of infantry and gunners and sappers, stretcher bearers and orderlies rode. Everyone had been rushed away from the old port of Marseille—from the sight of offshore Château d’If with its Count of Monte Cristo associations and from the city’s dominating cathedral, as well as from other more profane possibilities which could have created the problems of Australian discipline that Cairo had. Nearly all their ship from Egypt was—within an hour of landing—on a train bound for the more serious north of France. Heading north through unafflicted sections of France they gawked at their railway squares and church spires, at their mairies and hotels with the tricolor flying. The train pulled into sidelines to let other trains pass loaded with French soldiers— poilus —in their blue-gray uniforms. In the Rhône Valley—the rail running amidst ploughing farmers—nurses from farms exclaimed about the chocolate-colored soil that promised fertility. There were gray fortified medieval towers the farmers took for granted but which to girls from communities shallow in time riveted the eye and the imagination.