David Malouf - Remembering Babylon

But there were others, the milder members of the settlement, who argued that it was surely worth trying a softer policy. What they looked forward to was a settled space in which they could get on with the hard task of founding a home, and maybe, if they were lucky, a town where in time all the civilities would prevail. If they got the preliminaries right, the natives too might be drawn in, as labourers, or house-servants. They had secretly, some of them, a vision of plantations with black figures moving in rows down a field, a compound with neat whitewashed huts, a hallway, all polished wood, with an old grey-haired black saying ‘Yessir’, and preparing to pull off their boots (all this off in the future of course, maybe far off; for the moment they would not mention the boots since most of them did not have any). They ought at least, so they thought, to use this Gemmy fellow to get some reliable information that would temper with fact the fantastic rumours that flew about the place and kept them in a state of permanent anxiety. What haunted them was the endless round of reprisals they would be involved in if one of their number got jumped and speared (as God knows could happen easily enough) and some hothead like Ned Corcoran took it into his head to get up an extermination party.

So from the beginning his questioners, Gemmy saw, were of two kinds.

One lot wanted to make an ally of him in what they hoped would be an easy war.

They were affable, these fellows. They offered him chews of tobacco, squatted on their heels, and hummed and harred and looked off into the distance — he had a good idea what they were seeing there. They fished about, first one, then another, in a casual way, for what they wanted to know: whether the tribes, out there, up there, were in the habit of gathering at any one particular spot, and in what numbers, and if it was just the men or the whole mob of them, women and children as well. They chewed their tobacco and shot out the juice, or quietly smoked, with no urgency in them; but he felt the purpose in their hands, saw in their eyes the volleys of grey smoke spreading, then hanging like rain. They chuckled to themselves and thought he could not hear. He chewed his tobacco and was still.

When he first came among them he had been unable to tell from their wooden expressions, and the even more wooden gestures, what they had in their heads. They hid what they felt as if they were ashamed of it, or so he had decided; though whether in front of others or before themselves, he could not tell. Their eyes, their mouths, seemed dead in the rigid faces. Only slowly, after long watching, did he begin to distinguish the small signs that made them trackable: the ball of gristle in the corner of a man’s cheek, which you could actually hear the soft click of if you listened for it; the swelling of the wormlike vein in a man’s temple just below the hairline, the tightening of the crow’s feet round his eyes, the almost imperceptible flicker of pinkish, naked lids; a deepening of the hollow above a man’s collarbone as his throat muscles tensed, and some word he was holding back, because it was unspeakable, went up and down there, a lump of something he could neither swallow nor cough up. He saw these things now, and what astonished him was how much they gave away. Perhaps their faces were more expressive because he could catch these days more of the words they used, even the ones they left unspoken. So long as he was deaf to the one he had been blind to the other. No more.

So he hummed and harred and chewed his tobacco, and when he was forced to speak at last, put them off with answers which, by shifting a landmark and counting a few dead in with the living, set his people further north than they actually were and made them more numerous. He felt a heavy responsibility.

They were sly. They pretended to be pleased with him. He too was sly, but was less sure than he would have liked to be that he had told them nothing they might use. He leapt about, and with his heart very heavy in him, joked a little, and they narrowed their eyes, all smiles. ‘Good boy, Gemmy,’ Ned Corcoran said, as if he could have brained him.

But it was the other lot, those who were looking for the soft way, who gave him trouble. They could not understand why he was holding out on them. They were the peaceable ones, the ones who wanted to avoid bloodshed, couldn’t he see that? Couldn’t he tell the difference? Urgency made them desperate. They shouted at him, and then at one another.

And in fact a good deal of what they were after he could not have told, even if he had wanted to, for the simple reason that there were no words for it in their tongue; yet when, as sometimes happened, he fell back on the native word, the only one that could express it, their eyes went hard, as if the mere existence of a language they did not know was a provocation, a way of making them helpless. He did not intend it that way, but he too saw that it might be true. There was no way of existing in this land, or of making your way through it, unless you took into yourself, discovered on your breath, the sounds that linked up all the various parts of it and made them one. Without that you were blind, you were deaf, as he had been, at first, in their world. You blundered about seeing holes where in fact strong spirits were at work that had to be placated, and if you knew how to call them up, could be helpful. Half of what ought to have been bright and full of the breath of life to you was shrouded in mist.

So they shouted at him in one language and he clenched his teeth on another, and the angrier they grew, the more he saw that it was better to keep to himself what even the good men among them were trying to rattle out of him.

There was an exception to this, an odd one.

He ought to have been intimidated by Mr Frazer, the minister — most of the others were; it had not escaped him that even the loudest among them went tongue-tied when the minister approached, though they were quick to reclaim their prestige as hard fellows by scoffing at the man as soon as he was gone. But Gemmy, from that first day at the schoolhouse, had attributed to Mr Frazer a gift of understanding which somehow saw right through to what he wanted to express, and often enough, before he himself knew it. He trusted the minister, and was happy in his presence to open himself entirely to whatever might emerge from their silent communing when, in the cool early mornings, and sometimes again in the late afternoon, they went out together to botanise , as Mr Frazer called it, in the scrub country on the far side of the creek, or along the shady gallery of the creek itself where it climbed the escarpment to the west.

Mr Frazer on these outings wore a wide-awake hat, much frayed at the edges, and bore on a strap over his shoulder a portable inkstand, and in another bag, of canvas, a set of fat little books. Here, to Gemmy’s delight, he sketched the parts of the plants Gemmy showed him, roots, leaves, blossoms, with straight little arrows in flight towards them from one side or other of the page, where Mr Frazer, in his careful hand, after a good deal of trying this sound and that, wrote the names he provided.

It disturbed him at first, it offended his sense of propriety, that what Mr Frazer wanted to see were the same things he showed the McIvor girls: women’s business. What would the other men think if they knew of it? He felt ashamed for the man, but lost his concern at last in the sheer joy of being free again to wander, and in the satisfaction he felt at the cooperation between them that made him the hands and eyes of the enterprise, the breath too when it came to giving things a name, as Mr Frazer was the agency for translating it out of that dimension, which was all effort, sweat and dirt, and grubbing with your nails, and thorns, and scratches, into these outlines on the page that were all pure spirit, the product of stillness and silent concentration.