David Malouf: Fly Away Peter

Occasionally these shadows took on shape. A white-capped sister, a man in a butcher’s apron all sopped with blood. Jim looked and there was a block where the man was working. He could smell it, and the eyes of the others, cowed as they were, took life as they fell upon it.

To his left, on the other side from the men who waited, who were mostly whole, lay the parts of men, the limbs. A jumbled pile.

I am in the wrong place , Jim thought. I don’t belong here. I never asked to be here. I should get going.

He thought this, but knew that the look on his face must be the same look these other faces wore, anxious, submissive. They were a brotherhood. They had spent their whole life thus, a foot from the block and waiting, even in safe city streets and country yards, even at home in Australia. Is that it ? Jim wondered. Is that how it must always be ?

He turned to regard the man on his right, who was also laid out on a palliasse, and saw who it was.

How did he get here ?

He closed his eyes. This was the place before the butcher’s block. He did not want to be lifted up.

‘Jim?’

He knew the voice.

‘Jim Saddler?’

He was being called for the second time.

It was Ashley Crowther. He was there, just to the right, also in the shambles. Jim blinked. It was Ashley alright. He was wearing a luggage-label like all the rest, tied with string to one of the buttons of his tunic.

He had seen Ashley twice since they came to France. Far back in the early days, when things were still quiet, their battalions had been in the same line, and they had stood together one day on a patch of waste-ground, on the same level, just as they might have stood at home, and had a smoke. It was a Sunday afternoon. Cold and still.

‘Listen,’ Ashley had said, ‘band music.’ And Jim, whose ears were keen enough to catch any birdcall but hadn’t been aware of the music, heard it blowing faintly towards them from the enemy lines. Had it been there a moment before, or had Ashley somehow conjured it up?

‘Von Suppé,’ Ashley said, raising a ringer to conduct the odd wavering sounds of Sunday afternoon brass.

‘Listen’ he said now, and his voice came closer. ‘Can you hear me, Jim?’

The second occasion had been less than a month ago. They were way to the north, resting, and on the last night, after a whole day’s drilling — for rest was just the name of another sort of activity, less dangerous but no less fatiguing than life in the lines — they were marched up the road to an abandoned château where several fellows were sitting about in the late light under trees and others were lining up at a makeshift estaminet.

A piano had been brought down from the château, a big iron-framed upright with bronze candle-holders. It sat under the trees with a tarpaulin over it in case of rain. Several fellows, one after the other, sang popular songs and they all joined in and a redheaded sergeant from one of the English regiments played a solo on the mouth-organ. Later, a boy whose voice had still to break sang ‘O for the wings of a Dove’; it was a sound of such purity, so high, so clear, that the whole orchard was stilled, a voice, neither male nor female, that was, when you lay back and closed your eyes, like the voice of an angel, though when you opened them again and looked, was climbing from the mouth of a child in a patched and ragged uniform no different from the rest, who stood bare-headed in the flickering light from the piano-sconces and when he had finished and unclasped his big hands seemed embarrassed by the emotion he had created, humbled by his own gift.

The concert went on in the dark. Jim heard a nightingale, then another, and tuned his ears, beyond the music, to that — though the music pleased him too; it was good to have both. He thought of Mrs McNamara’s contention, so long ago, that it was the most beautiful of all birdsongs, and the other girl’s regret that she had never heard it. Well, he had heard it. He was hearing it now. The trees, though they had been badly blasted, were in full leaf, and would in time, even with no one to tend them, bear fruit. It was their nature. Overhead, all upside down as was proper in these parts, were the stars. The guns sounded very far off. It was like summer thunder that you didn’t have to concern yourself with: someone else’s weather. Jim dozed off.

When he woke it was quite late and the crowd of men had thinned. Someone was playing the piano. Notes, he thought, that might have been taken over from the nightingale’s song and elaborated, all tender trills. The strangeness of the place, the open air, or the keying up of his nerves in these last hours before going back, worked strangely upon him and he found himself powerfully affected. He sat up on one elbow and listened.

The music was neither gay nor sad, it didn’t need to be either one or the other; it was like the language, beyond known speech, that birds use, which he felt painfully that he might reach out for now and comprehend; and if he did, however briefly, much would become clear to him that would otherwise stay hidden. He looked towards the square wooden frame like an altar with its flickering candles, and immediately recognised the man who was playing. It was Ashley Crowther.

He looked different, changed; Jim was astonished by him. It was as if the music drew him physically together. In the intensity of its occurrence at his finger-ends, his whole body — shoulders, neck, head — came to a kind of attention Jim had not seen there on previous occasions.

Now, still dressed in that new firmness of line, Ashley Crowther was here. His voice once again came close.

‘Can you hear me, Jim?’

‘Yes.’

He had in the middle of his forehead a small cross. A wound? The mark of Cain? Jim was puzzled. He had seen a man wounded like that, the body quite unmarked and just a small star-shaped hole in the middle of the forehead. Only this was a cross.

‘Jim we’ve got to get out of here. I know the way. Are you strong enough to get up? I’ll help you.’

‘Yes,’ Jim said, deciding to take the risk, and was aware in the darkness of a sudden hiss of breath that was his father’s impatience.

He raised himself on his elbows. Ashley leaned down and put a hand under his arm. He was raised, but not towards the block. He stood and Ashley supported him. The relief he felt had something to do with the strength of Ashley’s arm — who would ever have expected it? — but also with his own capacity, once more, to accept and trust.

‘This way. No one will stop us.’

The nurses were too busy or too tired to observe what they were about, and the man in the bloody apron, all brilliant and deeply shadowed in the light of the flare, was fully engaged at the block. They walked right past them and out under the tent-flap into the night. Jim heaved a great sigh of relief. He too wore a label, its string twisted round one of his tunic buttons. He tore it roughly away now, button and all, and cast it into the mud. He wouldn’t need an address label. Though Ashley, he saw, still wore his.

‘This way,’ Ashley said, and they walked quickly across the field towards a patch of wood. It was clear moonlight.

Difficult to say how long they walked. It became light, and off in the woods the birds started up.

‘Here,’ Ashley said, ‘here it is.’

It was a clearing, quite large, and Jim thought he had been here before. And he had, he had! It was the place where he had gone with the others to collect firewood and seen the old man digging. No, not graves, but planting something. He had often thought of the man but the place itself he had forgotten, and he was surprised now to see how thick the woods were, how the blasted trees had renewed themselves with summer growth, covering their wounds, and were turning colour, now that the autumn had come, and stripping. There were thick drifts underfoot. They crackled. A few last birds were singing: two thrushes, and further off somewhere, a chaffinch. Jim moved on out of the softly slanting light. There was a garden in the clearing, neat rows of what looked like potatoes, and figures, dark-backed and slowly moving, were on their knees between the plants, digging.