Peter Carey - Illywhacker

The train had not run across Izzie's legs neatly, but torn crudely, splintering bone, crushing flesh; it took the right leg above the knee and the left across the thigh; then, like some Corsican bandit who wishes to leave a sign, cut the top of an index finger with a neat razor slice.

He had not been jumping the rattler, although that lie appeared in the Albury News. He had been fleeing from John Oliver O'Dowd who ambushed the boxcar Izzie was riding in (it had pulled into a siding in order to give the newSpirit of Progress right of way).

Izzie was out and running when the Spirit came hurtling up from the south, its brakes locked, sparks showering from its wheels while the driver, white-faced and bug-eyed, whimpered quietly as he sliced across the fallen man whose pointed toes had tripped on a spike.

The driver's name was Jack Fish, a shy and pessimistic man who had always thought himself a coward. But it was Jack Fish Who ran back two hundred yards beside his hissing train, Jack Fish who pushed the bully boys aside, applied tourniquets in the midst of screams and hot, pulsing bright red arterial blood.

Something quite wonderful happened to Jack Fish that night, and it was no less wonderful for occurring in the midst of so much agony. He could not explain it to anyone but as he carried that bleeding mess, running, tripping, his eyes filled with sweat, he felt what religious people call God, and the experience of holding that ragged mess of flesh, that man, in his arms, all that blood, that beating heart, that screaming journey down the last twenty miles to Albury, the sheer terror of it, would give him a comfort about life he had no right to expect. It was not the business of being a hero, being given a medal, or having his picture taken. All of this made him uncomfortable and embarrassed. Nor was it the recollection of his dramatic entrance at Albury where theSpirit of Progress had stopped half-way along the crowded platform and the driver had leapt down with the mutilated body of a mercifully unconscious Izzie Kaletsky. About all this, Jack Fish felt what someone else might feel about waking up in church naked.

This experience did not transform Jack Fish's personality, did not make him soft, gracious, or even very understanding. For this same man was able to write to Izzie in Albury Base Hospital: "I am pleased to have been of assistance to you, even though I hear you are a commie."

This letter was about the only thing that made Izzie laugh during that extended stay in Albury Base where his missing legs not only continued to send him signals that the morphine could not block, but the part that was left became infected and had to be dressed and redressed, painfully.

He fought his despair in Albury. It was more difficult when he came home to Sydney where the house had been emptied of tenants on his behalf. He was installed in the room where Leah had once learned to dance, where his mother and father now planned to look after him. The tenants' greasy walls had been repainted in a blinding "cheerful" yellow. A print of sunflowers hung over the old fireplace which was now fitted with a large electric radiator. Blue curtains with puckered hems hung across the dirty windows. They tried to give the room a new history with curios, framed photographs, but they had never decorated a room in all their travelling lives and it showed in the final effect which was jumbled, discordant, slightly desperate. It was then that it was hard to be brave. He was ashamed that his old parents should be forced to confront the ugly lumpy reality of his slowly healing stumps. He had been their future. Was it arrogant of him to feel that he contained the best of them, that he was a truer embodiment of their virtues than the brother who had disappeared into the steaming cauldron of the revolution? Perhaps, but the brother, anyway, was not discussed, and this painful place which could not be touched intensified his feelings of despair.

His body had let him down. If Leah had seen something unsympathetic in his lemon-peel skin, he had not. He had been proud of his body, of its unapparent strength, its ability to withstand hunger and violence. He had loved his body but at the same time he imagined it could be seen as ugly. He had, when occasion permitted it, looked at his frail blue-white form in the mirror with all the amazed tenderness of a lover. He had always expected to be let down by his mind, to be betrayed by fear or panic, but never, ever, by his body. And although his anxieties about money were an ingredient in his distress, they were nothing compared with what he felt when he saw his parents' cloudy old eyes confront his mutilation.

And yet he must be nursed. He must have dressings changed, be carried to the toilet and he was humiliated, guilty and angry to have wheezing Rosa and rheumatoid Lenny push him on a tubular-steel office chair which they used like a sled to push him to bathroom and toilet.

They had never been a tender family. They had been bright, ironic, combative, and the tenderness they now showed him was another source of pain.

So it was Izzie who insisted on the telegram being sent to Leah and it was Rosa – guilty about the marriage which she believed she had manipulated – who argued against it.

"Leave her, leave her. We can manage. She has her own life, Izzie."

"Let him send it," Lenny said. "She has a right to know. Ask her for nothing," he said to his son, "just tell her, so she knows."

Of course they all, as they conferred around the invalid's bed, arguing about the wording of the telegram, knew what would happen. They assembled the words like people wishing to escape responsibility for their actions.

Izzie did not approve of the anger he felt. He bottled it up tight, this defeatist counterproductive emotion which grew fat as a slug on his self-pity. But in the end it did not matter what he approved or disapproved of, and he was made angry by the tread of the milkman as he ran, soft, padding on his worn sandshoes, past the window. And even on those evenings and weekends when comrades came to sit in the room -sometimes there were ten or twelve people, smoking, drinking, talking -he had to fight to keep the resentment from his voice. There were those who saw it in his dark eyes and these, more sensitive than the rest, would soon find excuses not to come, or would come and then be unable to stay long.

Yet, for the most part, he was admired for his courage, for his persistence, for his lack of self-pity – even while he was learning to fight the pains in his phantom legs, to convert these signals into something bearable, he was writing pamphlets for the CPA and the UWU. He read voraciously.

His true emotions were not able to surface until his wife arrived, one winter's afternoon, wearing an expensive grey silk dress and a Panama hat with a burgundy band.

She stood in the doorway and he found her, to his surprise – for he had not been thinking kindly of her – very beautiful indeed, a fine austere beauty whose slightly sunken dark-shadowed eyes gave a sorrowful sugarless edge to what prettiness might be in her lips.

Leah, standing in the doorway of the room where she had learned to dance, could not stop her eyes going to that ambiguous area of rumpled blanket.

"No good, Kaletsky," she said throatily.

And there was, for that little while, great tenderness and shyness, a more sombre, subtle version of the emotions they had felt in Mrs Heller's when she had perched pretentiously above her badly dissected dogfish.

Their problem, both of them, was that they believed too much in the scientific and the rational and they thought they could – like Marxists changing the course of rivers – prevent the floods and earthquakes of primitive emotions. They sat beside each other and spoke what they imagined was the truth. But Izzie could not untangle his anger from his love and Leah did not help him when she explained her terms: that she had come to nurse him, to be, as she called it, "of use", but not to be his sexual partner for she would feel that to be duplicitous. She did not mention the subject of skin, but it was not to be forgotten and it was Izzie who would use his sharp knife against them both, while she was changing his bandages on his shameful stumps and trying to ignore the erection he presented her with.