David Malouf - The Complete Stories

Winter light, more glowingly blue than daylight, held the domes of the city in a dreamlike stasis as they made their way, closely covered against detection, over the Neva bridges and through the roaring streets; among carts, horses, peasants with swaying bundles, torches, confused cries, and faces. Then, with the sleigh hissing and sighing on the hard-packed snow, out at last into a countryside that might have been laid under a spell: the birches crusted a sugary white, all sound damped and distanced — the old Russia of her childhood laid for ever asleep in her head. Groups of stained wooden huts with alleys of ice-tipped mud between; tea fuming in cups, and strips of charred pork that grimed and burnt the fingers; forests, rivers of ice, a long swooning into an immensity of white where the days fell endlessly without sound and their passing left no track. Later, towards the west, lines of grey-coated, grey-faced soldiers, some with their feet in rags, many of them maimed and bandaged, who turned out of half-sleep to watch their sleigh recede into the distance, as they turned in their own dream to watch the grey lines dwindle behind. A whiteness at last without detail; which is amnesia, oblivion; a blankness in which the boy, the twin brother, strays and is lost in some town swarming with refugees, carried off in a contrary direction on the tide of Russians, Ruthenians, Letts, Poles, Jews that is pouring south, east, west out of the mouths of war.

The lost brother still haunts her dreams. Her male counterpart. That Other who would guarantee the truth of who she is.

She recalls their sleeping together in the same hammock, innocently fitted together, spoon-fashion, and sharing perhaps the same dream. Two blue moths are hovering over them, borne back and forth on the breeze. There is the scent of pennyroyal.

Sometimes over the years she has woken to that scent and to the slight motion sickness of the hammock, and has almost recalled what dream it was they were sharing that had later taken the shape of moths, and almost recaptured the feeling of completeness with which their bodies fitted together, their lovely congruence.

Catching sight of herself sometimes in a glass, she has had the odd sense of being no longer one; has seen the mirror's depths swim a moment and another figure come to its surface. She stands face to face with herself then, but in some different time and place; feeling her limbs harden, her chest grow flat, the hair coarsen on her upper lip, as a deeper voice fumbles for words in her throat, and in a language she no longer speaks. Her feeling then is of painful incompleteness, of someone unrecognised and lost now for nearly sixty years, who wears a semblance of her own face and gropes through her for a memory of that forgotten dream, their childhood; stopping dead perhaps on the platform of some Polish border-town where he might be an inspector of trains, and half recalling, as the distant names are called over the station loud-speaker, the dazzle of a courtyard, and a monk's bearded face leaning over them, a holy breath falling on their brows as they sit wrapped for their journey; or further back still, a garden with bowls of porridge cooling on wooden benches, lemons cut in segments, a deep resonance as of bees in the honey-coloured light of a hexagonal dome; his thought fluttering with hers in a scent of pennyroyal, but no longer knowing, as she does, what it refers to, and if he did know, or thought he knew, finding no one now to believe him.

Her second recollection, which has perhaps crystallized the first and given it coherence, is of a garden that descends via a tunnel and steps to a wide and dazzling harbour.

It is Sydney, 1920. She is thirteen. She has come to Australia, and this she remembers perfectly, from India, having been spirited south out of Poland into Transylvania, and from there, with the remains of their party, to Turkey; then south again on the caravan routes. Weeks of swaying across a landscape of blinding light, with nothing to break the horizon but an occasional outcrop or the bristling gun barrels of a band of brigands. Then, one cool morning, India, valley on valley falling among threads of smoky water, long sighs of relief after the desert-places, and a ridge of mist-shrouded deodars. On narrow paths among the rhododendrons, pilgrims approach to the sound of bells.

What happened there is another story. After negotiations carried on between her own women and some local dignitary she was gathered into the rich, precocious life of a palace, betrothed, in a ceremony she recalls only as involving elephants and a great many fireworks, to a minor prince.

But destiny acted yet again to push her on. At barely twelve she bore a child, a son. He was snatched away at the very moment of his birth by a rival faction at court, and when she woke after a drugged sleep it was to find in his place a little rag doll. The doll too she has by her still. I knew that immediately, from the look in her eyes when she spoke of it, a little gesture of her head towards the door of the bedroom; but she did not produce it. It is, I know, the deepest of all her secrets. I imagine her sitting alone in the house, behind the lattice, in the evening cool, nursing it, crooning to it, speaking its name. After so long the lost child still comes to her in dreams that leave her whole body racked and torn. A small mouth tugs at her breast. She recalls a pain that for long hours fills the room, beats against the walls, then breaks and falls away, to become in the long years afterwards the same pain but no longer physical, a heart-wrenching emptiness. That child, if it survived, would be a man of sixty. They are almost contemporaries, she, her brother, and the child. He is, perhaps, living the life of a common peasant, quite unaware of his origins, working, hard-handed, hollow-thighed, in the mud of a paddy-field, always at the edge of starvation; another part of her, like the twin brother, that she has lost contact with but which moves in a separate and parallel existence in her mind.

Once again she was spirited away. And in Bombay, far to the south, no longer a wife or mother, was called one warm evening, lugging her rag doll, to a room in one of the great hotels on the waterfront, where a lady wearing a great many jewels shed tears, drew the child to her spiky breast, and claimed her as her own child recovered.

One sees how the scene might have gone. The Diva in fact had played it before. In Lucrezia. Finding in herself, to her own surprise and the delight of her admirers, the lineaments of a new and unexpected passion: beyond carnality and the lust for power or vengeance, the great emotion — maternal love. It was one of her triumphs.

She must herself have felt the oddness of it, that meeting in Bombay: of life's coming at last to imitate art — or had the fictive scene already had the real child in view? granting that there was a child; drawing on that as the source of its extraordinary power — of the emotion created to fill a role being required now, and in some ampler and more convincing form, to take on life itself. Clearly, in the Diva's case, it could not. When the great scene was played out and they came down to dusty daily existence, the child must have been just another traveller in the Vale circus, that rag-bag of managers, dressers, advisers, lovers, gambling cronies, and other hangers-on that moved with her from capital to capital for as long as she was on the road. The child might have been with her for a season or two (no need to specify on what basis) and then she was not.

So now, in the smoky light of a summer afternoon in Sydney, she is lying in a hammock slung between thick, flowering trees. A voice drifts through the open window of the house above. Batti, batti, it is singing while someone plays the piano, the unseen hands fluttering up and down the keyboard on effortless wings, and the voice also disembodied, of the air ungraspable. She is a child again. And found.