David Malouf - The Complete Stories

And in a way, of course, none of this matters. It is part of the legend that she exploded into the consciousness of an adoring public as a fully developed Voice, clothed in the jewels, the satin folds of a savage empress; that she came into existence as what she always endeavoured, after that, to remain: a dramatic illusion with no more past in the actual flesh than the characters she played. As well ask what Norma or Lucrezia Borgia were doing between seven and thirteen as imagine the Diva's childhood. Living legends are not born, brought up, schooled in this place or that. They burst upon us. They are spontaneously, mysteriously, inevitably, there.

It was always like that. Between seasons she simply disappeared; and though the rumours were many there were no facts.

Was she the mistress, the morganatic wife even, of the Comte de Paris? Did she marry and then abandon the Armenian munitions manufacturer? Her relationship with the court at St. Petersburg was close enough for her to have had access to some of its most exclusive circles; but whether this was based on her quite unprecedented success in the theatre there or on some more personal tie cannot be confirmed. She destroyed the letters she received and herself wrote none — a few surviving notes are very nearly illiterate. Even her fortune cannot be traced. Terrified of being stranded without funds, she opened bank accounts in false names in some thirty or forty cities from Pittsburgh to Nanking, a good many of them still undiscovered and still accumulating interest, and when she died left no will.

Whether she herself believed the stories that circulated about her or was satisfied simply to be what she had become, the Earthly Angel, the Incomparable, la Vale, we shall never know. But there had been a childhood — parents and a home; there must even have been an original and quite ordinary name. She herself can't have forgotten. But they were her secret. What image she turned to when the costumes, the jewels, the bold lines of an Amelia or an Elisabetta were laid aside— that is the greatest of her mysteries. Who was she when she looked into her glass at five in the morning? Who was she in her sleep? (Imagine it, the Diva's sleep!) Inside the gestures of a dozen great characterizations, murderous queens and princesses, vengeful lovers, wronged maidens, and other monsters, was a lost and secret child that only she could have recognised, and it was that child, grown into a sixty-year-old stranger, who came home at last and looks out at us, terrifying but also perhaps terrified by her own strangeness, in the photographs; a woman who has survived the life she created and is left now to resume the earlier, ordinary self she sailed away from and has never entirely outgrown.

So Mrs. Judge's story, improbable as it might be, was not irreconcilable with the known facts. No story could be. Nor was it too wild to be believed. I listened in a dream. When she had finished, and we heard the man's step on the verandah, it was already dark. She gave a great sigh and leaned back, exhausted by the telling or the living of it — her own life, and seemed so touched for a moment with the grandeur and remoteness of tragedy, that I felt that if I so much as addressed her she might disintegrate like a being from another world. Better to get up and leave as one leaves a theatre, with the illusion still glowingly intact.

“You haven’ lit the lamp,” the man said, looming in the doorway, surprised to find us in the dark.

She started then, and made a move.

“No, I'll do it,” he said. “You sit and finish your talk.”

“We're finished,” she said, staring trancelike before her. “We're almost finished.”

He moved about, pumping and lighting the lamp, and by the time he was done, and had set it on the table, she was once again the small, tired woman who had begun her story all those hours ago. She looked at her gnarled hands, then upwards and met his gaze. She gave a soft smile.

“Don't worry, I'm oright. I'll see about gettin’ yer tea in a minute. There's some corned beef.”

She got up heavily and went to the meat safe.

I declined her invitation to stay. The moment of communion between us had passed. The man's presence, and the sound of him washing now in a tin basin at the back, snuffling noisily as he splashed, put a kind of restraint upon her. She no longer belonged entirely to herself. She saw me out to the verandah steps.

It was still light outside. Palm-tops and bananas stood in silhouette against the sky and high overhead was a fast-moving cloud, a flock of what I took to be birds. It was the flying foxes, making their way from the rainforests further north to their feeding place on the other side of town. Millions of them. Having unfolded themselves out of the darkness under the boughs of trees, they were flying, now that the light was almost gone, in a dense and flickering cloud that might have been the coming of the dark itself. The sky was black with them.

On the top step of the verandah, set out like an offering, was a covered saucer, with beside it a frangipani; on the second step another. She leaned down and took them up, one in each hand, the rival offerings.

“My Indians,” she said smiling, and stood holding them up for me to see. More visible proof. There was a moment's pause while she let it sink in. “So then,” she said, "what will it mean?”

I didn't know. What could it mean, sixty years after the event, thirty years after the main character was dead? — No, that was wrong. She was the main character.

“I don't know,” I told her, a little alarmed by the possibilities, and not only for her. “We'll have to see.”

She nodded.

“You know,” she said, "I'm trusting you with me life. ‘is as well.”

She jerked her head towards the lighted hallway.

I went on down the steps.

“I wouldn’ dawdle if I was you,” she called after me, suddenly practical. “From the looks a’ that sky I'd say we was in for a storm. It'll be a thumper.”

5

The woman's life.Incredible. But the details of it demand to be believed, and so, now that I have looked into her eyes, does she. She has a kind of grandeur, our Mrs. Judge, and for all her lack of education, an intelligence that immediately imposes itself. But she is uneducated, and much of what she has told me, if it is not her own experience, can only have come to her through the most painstaking research. She has at her fingertips dates, cast-lists, the names of even the most obscure of the Diva's colleagues and friends. The local chemist, who knows all the history of Karingai, assures me that she has spent the whole of her life here, or the whole of his life anyway, and he is a man of fifty. She and her husband keep to themselves. They are visited only by her Indian neighbours and one or two related Indians from towns close by. For years now the other whites have avoided them. The rumour is that she is herself part-Indian and the man part-Aboriginal. After listening to her story I have come to the conclusion that the fairy-tale childhood she describes can only be her own.

Two of her memories especially impress me.

One is the story of her flight from St. Petersburg to the Polish border in 1917, when she would have been ten.

She and her brother had been taken in their earliest infancy to Russia and were brought up there on the fringes of the court, the offspring, officially unrecognised, of a Grand Duke; so that as well as being the daughter of the Diva she is also, by her own account, a cousin of the Romanov children murdered at Ekaterinburg, and for that reason, she believes, still on the Bolshevik murder list. It was to escape their local agents that she took refuge, fifty years ago, at Karingai.

Of that earlier period she remembers almost nothing till the night of their flight over the snow: herself, her twin, and two ladies of high rank from the palace, all packed into a single sleigh.