David Malouf - The Complete Stories

“What is it?” Jason had asked.

“It's nothing.”

He made a mouth, unconvinced, and had continued to squat there on his heels at the rim.

Alec had grown up on a wheat farm west of Gulgong. Learning early what it is to face bad seasons when a whole crop can fail, or bushfires, or floods, he had developed a native toughness that would, Sylvia saw from his father, last right through into old age. Failure for Alec meant a failure of nerve. This uncompromising view made him hard on occasion, but was the source as well of his golden rightness. Somewhere at the centre of him was a space where honour, fairness, hard work, the belief in a man's responsibility at least for his own fate — and also, it seemed, the possibility of happiness — were given free range; and at the clear centre of all there was a rock, unmoulded as yet, that might one day be an altar. Alec's deficiencies were on the side of strength, and it delighted her that Jason reproduced his father's deep blue eyes and plain sense of having a place in the world. She herself was too raw-boned and intense. People called her beautiful. If she was, it was in a way that had too much darkness in it, a mysterious rather than an open beauty. Through Jason she had turned what was leaden in herself to purest gold.

It was an added delight to discover in the child some openness to the flow of things that was also hers, and which allowed them, on occasion, to speak without speaking; as when he had said, up there on the terrace, "It's cold,” at the very moment when a breath from the far-off pile that she didn't yet know was a hotel, had touched her with a premonitory chill.

They were close, she and the child. And in the last months before they came away the child had moved into a similar closeness with her father. They were often to be found, when they went to visit, at the edge of the patio swimming pool, the old man reading to the boy, translating for him from what Alec called “weirdo books,” while Jason, in bathing slip and sneakers, nodded, swung his plump little legs, asked questions, and the old man, with his glasses on the end of his nose and the book resting open a moment on his belly, considered and found analogies.

After thirty years in the garment trade her father had gone back to his former life and become a scholar.

Before the war he had taught philosophy. A radical free-thinker in those days, he had lately, after turning his factory over to a talented nephew, gone right back, past his passion for Wittgenstein and the other idols of his youth, to what the arrogance of that time had made him blind to — the rabbinical texts of his fathers. The dispute, for example, between Rabbi Isserles of Cracow and Rabbi Luria of Ostrov that had decided at Posen, in the presence of the exorcist Joel Baal-Shem, miracle-worker of Zamoshel, that demons have no right over moveable property and may not legally haunt the houses of men.

Her father's room in their ranch-style house at St. Ives was crowded with obscure volumes in Hebrew; and even at this distance from the Polish sixteenth century, and the lost communities of his homeland, the questions remained alive in his head and had come alive, in diminutive form, in the boy's. It was odd to see them out there in the hard sunlight of her mother's cactus garden, talking ghosts.

Her mother made faces. Mediaeval nonsense! Alec listened, in a scholarly sort of way, and was engaged at first, but found the whole business in the end both dotty and sinister, especially as it touched the child. He had never understood his father-in-law, and worried sometimes that Sylvia, who was very like him, might have qualities that would emerge in time and elude him. And now Jason! Was the old man serious, or was this just another of his playful jokes?

“No,” Sylvia told him as they drove back in the dark, with Jason sleeping happily on the back seat, "it's none of the things you think it is. He's getting ready to die, that's all.”

Alec restrained a gesture of impatience. It was just this sort of talk, this light and brutal way of dealing with things it might be better not to mention, that made him wonder at times if he really knew her.

“Well I hope he isn't scaring Jason, that's all.”

“Oh fairy tales, ghost stories — that's not what frightens people.”

“Isn't it?” said Alec. “Isn't it?”

2

They soon got to know the hotel's routine and the routine of the village, and between the two established their own. After a breakfast of coffee with condensed milk and bread and honey they made their way to the beach: Alec to work, and between shifts at the typewriter to explore the coastline with a snorkel, Sylvia and the child to laze in sand or water.

The breakfast was awful. Alec had tried to make the younger of the two waiters, who served them in the morning, see that the child at least needed fresh milk. For some reason there wasn't any, though they learned from people at the beach that the Cabins got it.

“No,” the younger waiter told them, "no milk.” Because there were no cows, and the goat's milk was for yogurt.

They had the same conversation every morning, and the waiter, who was otherwise slack, had begun to serve up the tinned milk with a flourish that in Alec's eye suggested insolence. As if to say: There! You may be

Americans (which they weren't), and rich (which they weren't either) but fresh milk cannot be had. Not on this island.

The younger waiter, according to the manager, was a Communist. That explained everything. He shook his head and made a clucking sound. But the older waiter, who served them at lunch, a plump, greyheaded man, rather grubby, who was very polite and very nice with the child, was also a Communist, so it explained nothing. The older waiter also assured them there was no milk. He did it regretfully, but the result was the same.

Between them these two waiters did all the work of the hotel. Wandering about in the afternoon in the deserted corridors, when she ought to have been taking a siesta, Sylvia had come upon the younger one having a quiet smoke on a windowsill. He was barefoot, wearing a dirty singlet and rolled trousers. There was a pail of water and a mop beside him. Dirty water was slopped all over the floor. But what most struck her was the unnatural, fishlike whiteness of his flesh — shoulders, arms, neck — as he acknowledged her presence with a nod but without at all returning her smile.

Impossible, she had thought, to guess how old he might be. Twenty-eight or thirty he looked, but might be younger. There were deep furrows in his cheeks, and he had already lost some teeth.

He didn't seem at all disconcerted. She had, he made it clear, wandered into his territory. Blowing smoke over his cupped hand (why did they smoke that way?) and dangling his bare feet, he gave her one of those frank, openly sexual looks that cancel all boundaries but the original one; and then, to check a gesture that might have made him vulnerable (it did — she had immediately thought, how boyish!) he glared at her, with the look of a waiter, or peasant, for a foreign tourist. His look had in it all the contempt of a man who knows where he belongs, and whose hands are cracked with labour on his own land, for a woman who has come sightseeing because she belongs nowhere.

Except, she had wanted to protest, it isn't like that at all. It is true I have no real place (and she surprised herself by acknowledging it), but I know what it is to have lost one. That place is gone and all its people are ghosts. I am one of them — a four-year-old in a pink dress with ribbons. I am looking for my grandmother. Because all the others are sleeping …

She felt differently about the young waiter after that, but it made no odds. He was just as surly to them at breakfast, and just as nasty to the child.