The House of Breathing Read online

  GAIL JONES

  THE HOUSE OF

  BREATHING

  About Untapped

  Most Australian books ever written have fallen out of print and become unavailable for purchase or loan from libraries. This includes important local and national histories, biographies and memoirs, beloved children’s titles, and even winners of glittering literary prizes such as the Miles Franklin Literary Award.

  Supported by funding from state and territory libraries, philanthropists and the Australian Research Council, Untapped is identifying Australia’s culturally important lost books, digitising them, and promoting them to new generations of readers. As well as providing access to lost books and a new source of revenue for their writers, the Untapped collaboration is supporting new research into the economic value of authors’ reversion rights and book promotion by libraries, and the relationship between library lending and digital book sales. The results will feed into public policy discussions about how we can better support Australian authors, readers and culture.

  See untapped.org.au for more information, including a full list of project partners and rediscovered books.

  Readers are reminded that these books are products of their time. Some may contain language or reflect views that might now be found offensive or inappropriate.

  for Kyra

  Contents

  Modernity

  The Astronomer Tells of Her Love

  Other Places

  The Precision of Angels

  Dark Times

  The Word ‘Ruby’

  ‘Life Probably Saved by Imbecile Dwarf’

  Veronica

  Babies

  On The Piteous Death of Mary Wollstonecraft

  Knowledge

  Touching Tiananmen

  These Eyes

  The House of Breathing

  Bibliographical Acknowledgements

  Acknowledgements

  Copyright

  Modernity

  I

  In the history of film there is this poignant tale. A young girl, visiting Moscow from her home in Siberia, goes to the cinema to see her very first movie. She is absolutely terror-stricken. Human beings are visually torn to pieces, the heads thrown one way, the bodies another. Faces loom large or contract to tiny circles. There are severed heads, multiple dismemberments, and horrible discontinuities. The girl flees from the cinema, and as an incidental service to the history of representation writes a letter to her father describing in detail the shocking phenomenon she has witnessed.

  The movie showing in that terror-causing Moscow cinema, in, let us say, the bleak winter of 1920, was a comedy.

  Imagine this girl. Imagine Siberia.

  II

  Integrity

  In Siberia one knows one’s body to be whole because the elements assail it with a totalising force. The air is scintillatingly cold and algebraically precise; there is a mathematical quality to its cutting of angles, its calculable degrees of effect upon the skin, its common-denominative power, its below-zero vital-statistics. In the Siberian cold one feels every extremity, is equated instantaneously to the exactitude of each limb. Even in her favourite bearskin hat, her sealskin coat and her fluffy muff of mink (a gift from the requisite doting Babushka who, in order to buy it, pawned an old grandfather clock from the time of the Tsars), the girl is still rudely recalled to her body. Decked in dead animals she remains feelingly human.

  Space

  She will push, this girl, through the virgin snow. She will push with her snowboots and her inadequate animal vestments through the all new hectares of still-astonishing white, hectares which, with the sun, will surely bedazzle. She will pass large larch trees hung ornamentally with serrations of ice. Wolf prints sprinkle a pocked track to somewhere. And, looking backwards, she confirms absolutely her own foot-printing pathway.

  Space is the lack of conclusion to her horizons. It is the perspectival extensiveness of the trans-Siberian railway, metallically trailing. It is the ample dimensions of snow on snow, so emphatically brilliant that she must squint to discern her journey through every single step of its immaculate empire.

  Time

  She knows, as we think we all do, time’s unamenable incessancy. The clock that used to stand in her grandmother’s bedroom ticked in totalitarian and purposive circles. Its hands were definitive, its face as indisputable and blandly commanding as a uniformed apparatchik.

  Her grandmother’s voice is another aspect of time. Since the death of her mother (a premature extinction in an unromantic snowstorm), this voice is to the girl a regular and reliable instatement of order. Next summer, says Babushka. Last winter, says Babushka. When I was a child of six or seven … She manages the continuum. There is never any doubting the steady progress to next summer. The larch trees await. The very landscape is bound to perpetual and carefully demarcated mobility. And history itself—by government decree—will later submit to subsections of Five Year Plans.

  Setting

  Of her home nothing is left to the risks of fiction. It is completely actual and labelled everywhere. The town the girl lives in is called Turukhansk and it sits, in a smug and geographical certainty, at the fork of the Yenisey and Nizhnyaya rivers.

  The girl knows this place as she knows her own body; that is to say, with coy particularity. There are parts of the town intimate as her hands, the cobbled alleyway to school, a handsome bowed bridge, the cavities of the market place; specifically a small bakery that, apart from the usual and all-too-familiar black bread, sells light and dainty pastries displayed with memorable panache in its gas-luminous window. There are also unmentionable places and habitations, but she knows these exist as surely as she knows of her own definite but impossibly unregardable heart.

  Density

  Solid, so solid, is the world of Turukhansk. Once, just once, the girl rode on a speeding troika right out of the town and to the furthest, ice-burdened limits of the world.

  There were three snorting horses of massive rotundity—flanks, bellies, the head’s bulbous cheeks—and they strove through snow that stirred up in wild eddies and stung incisively. She could feel the muscular energy and rhythm of their gallop; she could see the long heads bobbing and the rim of broad rumps shifting and moving in concert. The breath of the horses was powerfully visible, their odour profound. Bells were atinkle on leather harnesses.

  And her father, who seemed himself suddenly newly substantial and corporeal, expanded, upholstered, assuming the impressiveness of horse-flesh, reached over and clasped her in an exhilarated embrace.

  Narrative

  Do not think that this girl from Siberia is uneducated. Each winter-starless night she follows Cyrillic intricacies stretching in long lines into the mythological soul-land of her Mother Russia. There is the omnipresent bible (Russian in tone), there are the national novels of great solemnity, and there are numerous folktales, all enchanting and instructive. Hers is a country both—contradictorily—filled up with stories and sensationally material. And from her Babushka comes the knowledge of other realms: that she is superintended by the unquiet ghost of her mother, by the never-ending story of family melodramas, by plots of kin.

  Sometimes this girl will weep in the dark, not for the banal complications of adolescence, but for the burden of narratives she is compelled to bear, for inner insurgencies clashing with no less force than the Red Armies with the White.

  Identity

  You will have seen the wooden dolls for which Siberia is famous, dolls which sit, one inside the other, in a series of smaller and smaller otherwise identical versions. These dolls give the girl an image of self: she
may be different with, say, Babushka and father, but these selves are all uniform, and neatly composed and contained. She has the conservative’s assurance of inner conformity. She knows her self-sameness. Symmetries abound. In the mirror, unquestionably, is her exact adequation.

  As she lies awake in the early morning, watching the crystals of snowflakes alight and dispose themselves dawn-lit and lace-wise upon the glass of her window, the girl thinks often of the dolls, one inside the other. She likes to imagine that her absent mother was also, in some way, a kind of replica of herself, that she is constant in image and form even through the passage of generations. By this means she staves off the fracturing power of grief.

  Voices

  Apart from the management of time and the deployment of story the girl loves the act of voice for its invisible tendernesses.

  As Babushka rakes charcoal beneath the samovar she sings in sweet inflections so sonorous and pathetic that her granddaughter, enthralled, feels brimful of emotions. The songs seem to invade her; she swells at their presence. There are neatly rhymed couplets and poetic descriptions of perfect Romances and yearning Love. Language carries within it an irresistible tangibility.

  Occasionally, by yellow candlelight, her father takes up a book and reads aloud from the works in translation of his favourite English poet. Once he read of a mad king caught foolishly in a storm and the girl realised, in a moment of vision, that the entire world was Russian, that its rhetorics and its extremity had somehow mysteriously extended to the four corners of the globe. From her father’s voice came universality. From the movements of his tongue world-wide concordance.

  Bodies

  There is a man in Turukhansk so large in circumference that he is reputed to have cut a semi-circle in his mahogany dining table, simply to accommodate his ungainly girth. Babushka loves this story. She is interested in bodies and talks of them continuously. Illnesses. Births. Deaths. Copulations.

  The girl touches her own shape with concupiscent affection. She enjoys her baby-fat and her enlargening breasts. She imagines kisses on the bowed bridge and embraces beneath the larch trees. And once every year, when she has a chance to partake of dainty pastries, she recalls the man so large that he must cut out the world in the pattern of his belly.

  When the girl leaves to go outside her grandmother offers, customarily, an ancient folk saying: Rug yourself well or the wind will enter your body and blow away your soul. This is a disturbing thought. The girl steps into the cold, into its white-blue squalls, hugging her own garments as if they could provide an adhesive to hold her together. In the cold she knows her body better than anywhere else.

  Faces

  These are indubitable. She studies faces. To see them together you would say that the girl was in love with her father. She gazes up at his face as he reads the latest broadsheet on the trouble in the Stanovoy and Ozhugdzhur mountains. She regards with lover-propinquity his Semitic nose and his brown hooded eyes. She dwells on the crinkles of his balding hair, is captivated by the peaked configuration of his lips. The grandmother, nearby, is of distinctly unSemitic and peasantish visage, but as utterly intimate.

  One can kiss these faces. These faces can be clasped between two cradling hands. These faces come with the ponderous and heavy-weighted import of presence.

  III

  In the especially harsh winter of 1920 our heroine visited for the first time her father’s family in Moscow. She descended from the world-famous trans-Siberian railway and fell into the arms of a second, unknown and much wealthier Babushka, a woman who wore about the neck an entire flattened fox, depending sadly nose-downwards.

  There was the speed of a slow car, unfathomable chatter, and then the girl realised, incontrovertibly, that she was surrounded by the city. It was a place in which a palpable post-revolutionary unease was contested, again palpably, by a more inveterate aura of historical stolidity. It was a place, that is, in which one might expect dissimilarities and dissimulations.

  Faces blurred past. Tall buildings loomed. Red flags, in their hundreds, gestured and stirred.

  The visit to the cinema came in the second week. This is what happened. The new grandmother unwisely sent her charge in alone. She equipped her with a handful of roubles and kopeks and left her there at the entrance, a mere babe, as it were, in technological woods.

  The girl entered a little late and was perplexed by the darkness. There were straight rows of people—somewhat like those assembled for the pantomime at home—but ahead, inexplicably, was not the space for dramatic action but a rectangle of snowy screen. It stretched across the wall, pure and auspicious. The girl took her modest place among the rows of spectators, of whom she knew not one, and patiently waited. Somewhere to the left a man began slowly playing an inconspicuous piano. Then there was a soft whirring sound behind, like the wind in the eaves, or the wing beat of cabbage-moths, and a long cone of white light shot instantly above her head. This was a bright enlightenment, newfangled, stunning, a distillation of incandescence too shiningly imperious to appear in any way artificial. It might almost have been some kind of Divine Revelation, the trajectory, perhaps, of a passing angel, a signal through space, the pointing finger of God. The girl felt her girl’s body tense up intolerably. There was a sensation in her chest of flight and flutter. And then, before another single second had a chance to pass by, there were Russian-letter titles (mysteriously writ), displayed broadly and boldly upon the screen. So that was it. A type of large book. A system of pages. Communal reading.

  The piano player pounded a crass fortissimo.

  What followed was devastating. The titles gave way to a regime at once human and strikingly inhuman. By some dreadful magic the players appeared to have been robbed of both colour and regularity. Their faces and clothes were crepuscular grey, and their sizes expanded and diminished with awful elasticity. Moreover they moved wholly within the frame of the rectangle; they did not seem to inhabit any ordinary space. It was some condition of suspension within which bodies were dangled upon the screen in a peculiar coalition of living-semblance and deathly, wraithlike abstraction. Thus transfixed these victims were rendered mute; they cavorted in dumbshow, mouthed words ineffectually, produced verbal nothings.

  (And rising above the piano was the almost deafening sound of a battering heart-beat.)

  It was at the point when the very first close-up occurred, presenting, in the blink of an eye, a gargantuan decapitation, that the girl suddenly comprehended what it was that she saw. It was her mother’s death. As the cruel Siberian wind cuts and slices, so too this dissection of the human body. This was how, in her imaginings, she had figured the long-ago maternal dissolution; that a woman, snow-bleached and lacking in the gust-resisting weight of the living, lacking the heaviness of fat men who create the world in their own shape, lacking the cosy enclosure of animal garments, the density of horses, the authority of Babushka, the accessible face, had submitted to execution by the Tundra winds. Bits of her body had exploded into the tempest, disassembled, sundered. Bits of her body had become indivisible from the blurring snow; her inner warmth was ransacked and replaced by cold, her face obliterated, her cry silenced, her soul blown away. In the terrible pelting of the pitiless storm her houseless head was blasted, rendered hollow and windowed as the carcass of a doll. Wracked. Wrecked. Breathtakingly undone.

  The girl from Siberia sitting, bolt upright, in the fourth row from the front was completely terror-stricken. There, caught uncannily on the unreal screen, with its distortions of scale and time, its slow dissolves, its clever montage, she had faced in chimerical vision her own perilous vulnerability.

  She fled from the cinema, her screams piano-accompanied.

  IV

  This was a moment of modernity. All that had been solid melted into air. Not electricity or the revolution, not plane travel or radio, but the cinema had inaugurated a new order of perception. The girl of the story was not, as it happened, ca
lled Anna Akhmatova or Marina Tsvetaeva, but like the poets she had experienced the metaphysics of fragments. She ran screaming into the winter light of the city of Moscow carrying in her head an unprecedented multiplicity.

  Yet when the girl returned home, when she arrived in the arms of her real Babushka—expecting at last to retell the dreadful vision, to collapse, to cry, to blubberingly divulge—it was not cinematic disintegration she described. She did not tell of the deranged and incoherent bodies of the players, nor of how these recalled to her a personal haunting. Instead she dwelled, in concentration, on single detail: there had been a cone of bright light, a white passageway of floating motes, delicate, enchanting, apparently transcendental, which might, after all, have somehow mystically signified the transit of angels.

  The Astronomer Tells of Her Love

  I

  I recall you now with importunate precision. You lay on the bed, languid after love, your body angled to catch the tiger light falling brightly and goldenly from bamboo slats at my window. Remade as animal, ideographed into jungle life, you were suddenly light-lit, embraced by stripes. As you rolled onto your back, the stripes rolled over you; I saw your buttocks disappear, your chest arise, your face orientate. A more careful inspection (bracketing, that is, the new-made animal of such shifting, such amazing, such special integument) showed your face still human. On its illumined side lay a lively eye not quite caught in its net of fine wrinkles, at the temple the beginnings of human grey hair, at the mouth with full lips the human possibility of intimate words.

  I bent down above you, almost bridally blushing, and fixed upon your lips an impeccable kiss.

  Tell me, you said, tell me about the sun.

  The sun, I said, is large and volatile. Its diameter is over one hundred times that of earth, its volume thus something in the order of one and one-third million times. The surface temperature has been estimated at about thirteen million degrees Centigrade. The centre is where nuclear reactions take place, producing the energy that keeps the sun shining.