David Malouf - Remembering Babylon

Poor bugger, he had got lost, and as just a bairn too. It was a duty they owed to what they were, or claimed to be, to bring him back, if it was feasible, to being a white man. But was it feasible? He had been with them, quite happily it appeared, for more than half his life: living off the land, learning their lingo and all their secrets, all the abominations they went in for. Were they actually looking at a man, a white man, actually putting a knife into his hands and passing him bread, who had –

They broke off, unwilling to let the shadow of it pass their lips and become a fact in their world. If he had, he showed no sign of it, none at all. There was nothing in his snub-nosed, squint-eyed looks and the innocence with which he bit into a crust and went at it with his ground-down, blackened teeth, to show what he might have been privy to in those sixteen years.

He had started out white. No question. When he fell in with the blacks — at thirteen, was it? — he had been like any other child, one of their own for instance. (That was hard to swallow.) But had he remained white?

They looked at their children, even the smallest of them chattering away, entirely at home in their tongue, then heard the mere half-dozen words of English this fellow could cough up, and even those so mismanaged and distorted you could barely guess what he was on about, and you had to put to yourself the harder question. Could you lose it? Not just language, but it. It .

For the fact was, when you looked at him sometimes he was not white. His skin might be but not his features. The whole cast of his face gave him the look of one of Them. How was that, then?

Mr Frazer had the answer: because his teeth had been worn down almost to the gums from eating the native food. The white man’s facial structure came from the different and finer diet. It was the grinding down of his teeth, and the consequent broadening of the jaw that gave him what they called a native look.

Ah, so that was it.

Or — this too came from Mr Frazer and was a harder nut to crack — it was the languages he had learned to speak. He spoke five languages. His jaw, over the years, had adapted itself to the new sounds it had to make. Mightn’t it happen after a time that the whole cast of a man’s features would be shaped by that, the way a French man, for instance, differs in his whole facial form from an Englishman or a Scot, and so come to share a likeness with the other speakers of the tongue?

Well!

Or both of these, but also the effort he must have made, in those sixteen years, to blend in and make himself one of them, to find facial expressions, picked up by imitation or reflection and all quite different from a white man’s, that would make easier their daily intercourse with him. In taking on, by second nature as it were, this new language of looks and facial gestures, he had lost his white man’s appearance, especially for white men who could no longer see what his looks intended, and become in their eyes black.

They chewed on this. Possible. Possible. But were more impressed by something simpler and more disturbing, since it touched on themselves and the sense they had of being in a place that had not yet revealed all its influences upon them.

Wasn’t it true (this was not Mr Frazer but another delver into deep things) that white men who stayed too long in China were inclined to develop, after a time, the slanty eyes and flat faces of your yellow man, your Chinese?

Study him, sitting there in the sun with that vacant, in-turned look; heavy-browed, morose. Look at the furrow in his brow. Was it a white man’s thought that set it there, or the knowledge of something (they would not name it) that could hardly be conceived of in a white man’s thinking, which when the dark recollection of it flickered over his brow, brought it right into the room with you, as a thing you could smell . Because for all the scrubbing with raw soap, and the soft woollen shirts and moleskins Ellen McIvor had found for him, and washed with her own hands, he had kept the smell he came with, which was the smell of the myall, half-meat, half-mud, a reminder, a depressing one, of what there might be in him that could not be reclaimed.

His very way of moving was a reminder. He could be in a room before you knew it, his feet scarcely whispering over the hard dirt floor. Your hand would go to the back of your neck as if a fly had lighted there. But there was no fly. You wheeled round and it was him , grinning in that foolish apologetic way he had, eager to make up for the shock he had given you by snatching the sopping shirt out of the dirt or fetching water to replace the suds, while you held your side and waited for your heart to return to its place under your ribs.

Of course, it wasn’t him you were scared of. He was harmless, or so they said, and so you preferred to believe. It was the thought that next time it might not be him. That when you started and looked up, expecting the silly smile, what would hit you would be the edge of an axe. He made real what till now had been no more than the fearful shape of rumour, though the rumour lately had had a name and number to it: Comet River, nineteen souls.

For at any moment — this was the fact of the matter — they might be overwhelmed. The stoutest of them, stepping out under the stars to take a piss before bed, all unbuttoned and exposed to the night, would feel his balls shrink at the crack of a twig, and tuck himself away without even troubling to shake the last drops off.

Even in broad daylight, to come face to face with one of them, stepping out of nowhere, out of the earth it might be, or a darkness they moved in always like a cloud, was a test of a man’s capacity to stay firm on his own two feet when his heart was racing.

It brought you slap up against a terror you thought you had learned, years back, to treat as childish: the Bogey, the Coal Man, Absolute Night. And now here it is, not two yards away, solid and breathing: a thing beside which all you have ever known of darkness, of visible darkness, seems but the merest shadow, and all you can summon up to the encounter, out of a lifetime lived on the other, the lighter side of things — shillings and pence, the Lord’s Prayer, the half-dozen tunes your fingers can pick out on the strings of a fiddle, the names and ages of your children, including the ones in the earth, your wife’s touch on your naked belly, and the shy, soft affection you have for yourself — weakens and falls away before the apparition, out of nowhere, of a figure taller perhaps than you are and of a sooty blackness beyond black, utterly still, very close, yet so far off, even at a distance of five feet, that you cannot conceive how it can be here in the same space, the same moment with you.

What you fix your gaze on is the little hard-backed flies that are crawling about in the corner of its bloodshot eyes and hopping down at intervals to drink the sweat of its lip. And the horror it carries to you is not just the smell, in your own sweat, of a half-forgotten swamp-world going back deep in both of you, but that for him, as you meet here face to face in the sun, you and all you stand for have not yet appeared over the horizon of the world, so that after a moment all the wealth of it goes dim in you, then is cancelled altogether, and you meet at last in a terrifying equality that strips the last rags from your soul and leaves you so far out on the edge of yourself that your fear now is that you may never get back.

It was the mixture of monstrous strangeness and unwelcome likeness that made Gemmy Fairley so disturbing to them, since at any moment he could show either one face or the other; as if he were always standing there at one of those meetings, but in his case willingly, and the encounter was an embrace.