Five Bells Page 4

  There were shoppers speeding into department stores and broad-spectrum hubbub. The buses sounded like thunder hurtling towards the Quay. Cars glowed in the morning glare and were burning and purposeful. Aware of the tenacity of crowds intent on a summertime bargain, James saw how they moved in urgent surges and breaking waves, the hiding place they offered, the self’s liquefaction, the mad sense of being sucked inside a flexible organism. He walked without direction but was not really there. He was somewhere in the Belgium he had invented as a child from a book, somewhere in silvery light, by the grim river Sambre. Being René, the strong one. Being the dutiful son, the reliable good boy.

  Lives of Modern Artists: James’s mother gave it to him for his fourteenth birthday. He had been shocked to realise that the boy René standing on the riverbank was exactly his age and that René’s father, Leopold, was employed as a tailor. James’s father had been a tailor in the Old Country, his mother said, before they came to Australia and he found himself labouring on building sites, steering wheelbarrows of wet cement along angled planks, shovelling, hauling, crippling his frail tailor’s back. It was no surprise he had left them. He was lost here, his mother said. There was no work for a tailor when everyone was building houses.

  James heard a tone of forgiveness in her steady voice. She met his gaze. Her face across the kitchen table was alight with this rare disclosure. She had been beautiful, he realised. His mother had been beautiful. And there was no taint of bitterness, or recrimination. She might still love him, James vaguely thought. Perhaps feelings of this kind do not conclude.

  In the city of Naples beautiful Giovanna had fallen in love with handsome Matheus, the tailor. They had gone on an adventure together, floating across the ocean on the good ship Oriana, and found themselves in Fremantle, Western Australia, feeling stranded. They knew almost immediately that something in their marriage was wrong; but in those days couples endured, sometimes to despair. As if in resistance to migrancy, Giovanna learned almost no English and maintained a prideful and fierce isolation. Matheus joined his paisano for drinks and local advice. He worked hard, learnt English, took his wife to the south-west following an Italian building team. He demolished himself in physical labour. In this country in which men need not talk at all, except of workaday details over a beer or two, Matheus gradually grew silent and then he was gone. Giovanna had seen him retreating for years, becoming thin and stretched as a Giacometti sculpture. One day he stretched into nothingness and slipped over the horizon.

  James was almost three years old when Matheus disappeared. He had a recollection only of being swung upwards onto his father’s shoulders, and the terror of such height, the sheer demented panic, that made him clutch to save his life at handfuls of black curly hair. There was no face, or clear memory, just this swoop upwards into the sky and the feel of large hands surrounding his body. Matheus was a name and a legend, the man he was told he resembled. And who had lifted him like that, the better to see the world. Only recently he had learned of Matheus’s brother, Leo, living somewhere in Melbourne, with his own life and family. But it was too late for all that. It was too late for that version of Italian happy-families, arrayed with identical faces at a long sun-speckled table piled high with pasta and wine, raising glasses, as in an advertisement, to the appreciation of olive oil. A man with a moustache, a plump mama, the family commercially jolly. Above them the leaf-light of grape-vines, like a net of open hands.

  Lives of Modern Artists taught James how calamitous artists’ lives were – and how interesting, compared to his own. He had stored the book under his bed as if shameful knowledge was held there, but knew essentially that it was the art-life he secretly daydreamed, this promise of making meaning without needing a single word. The promise of Europe and of shadowy spaces, of a life grievous but endurable, the record of which might exist in a gallery somewhere, detached and valuable, impersonal and illustrious, stylish, pure. He flicked through the pages of the book until they were worn. He knew all the artists’ portraits, and self-portraits, and their most famous images. Even when he discovered he had no aptitude for drawing or painting, he still held onto this desire for an artistic life. As a teenager James developed an ambition to be hired as an extra in a movie. He knew now that this was a symbol of his accurate sense of mediocrity, that he would never exist at the centre of anything.

  Beneath all, beneath all the sound and fury, lay the sensation of being swung into the air as a human helicopter, to rest perched there, at an absurd height, his hands deep in his father’s hair. This heft and turn in space, profoundly remembered, lay at the base of all that James was and of his dangerous imbalance. Memory was not in the prefrontal cortex, or the hippocampus, or the cerebellum, or the amygdala – how he loved this vocabulary saved from his days as a medical student – but in the space into which an infant might be lifted and turned. All he retained of his father was enclosed in that curve.

  Ellie too was stuck fast in movements of James’s body and her own invisibly encircling presence. There had been others since, of course, the usual one-night stands, casually without meaning, and a few of them serious, possibly life-partners. But only Ellie persisted as his father did, in this deeper-level recollection, deposited like radium in the substrata of his cells.

  They had been fourteen years old when they first made love. It astonished and moved him to think of it now. It was not audacity or expertise but lustful curiosity; kids, they were just kids. They flung themselves uninhibited into each other’s bodies because each knew so little of what they should do. It was a collision of vague intentions and truly naive. They had laughed, played around. They had tumbled creaturely, like kittens. They had relished a kind of delinquency they knew implicitly to be occurring. And now, as he approached Ellie after all these years, James hesitated before the traces of her persistence. Even in distracted moments he was recovering memories of her body and her words.

  The mystery of their pact was contained in the derelict building where they met, the fusty brick office of what once, years before, must have been an iron foundry. Their hideout they called it, as if they were sexual criminals. There was an upturned paint-can on which they set a candle, a few sticks of furniture strewn about, and a single exploded chair, its horsehair stuffing gaping. This chair returned in dreams, oversized and with menace. It was the kind of anachronistic, lumpish object that theatre students might have adopted to symbolise East German deprivation. There was a panel of almost intact glass sheets through which the boss must once have surveyed the men in the workshop, but each pane had become dingy and opaque with dust. Ellie and James had resisted writing their names; both understood the need for secrecy. They laid a blanket on the floor and hid out together, too happy to bother with the inlaid dirt or heart-enclosed initials, too far gone in their junior hunger to be merely boyfriend and girlfriend.

  James thought of René Magritte’s painting called The Lovers. It was a portrait of two enshrouded heads, both swathed in grey cloth. The obliteration of detail was surely all the artist could bear. Adeline, a milliner, used to sew well into the night, and her son no doubt remembered her fingers in lamplight on a curved rim of felt, or pressing the dome of a head-shape onto a faceless wooden mould. He no doubt remembered the precise arc of the needle looping into wool and the angle of her back as she leant forward, to gather more light.

  There were many, many hats in Magritte’s paintings. And there were huge apples in living rooms, pipes that were not pipes, trains emerging from fireplaces, reflections not where they should be, day and night coexisting. His images were of displacement and his figures were all verging on erasure. Particularity would have killed him. Realism would have killed him. The buckle. The maternal ring. The circular stain of river mud, the thumbprint of death, that lay in the shallow dip just beneath Adeline’s bottom lip. It was because James understood this that he could contemplate seeing Ellie again. For all that she was an intangible sequence of gestures and moves, it was specificity he yearned for, the tiny detail
s he had known of her, the beloved face uncovered. In his case, he knew, the details would save him. The ideas were too large. The space a drowning might make, the milky-green water closing over a face, was a tremendous, vile and unassimilable thing.

  In downtown George Street a car alarm sounded. There was the rumble of a plane in the far distance, slowly descending, and James noticed, all at once, the traffic’s strident roar. In the petrochemical haze he glanced upwards at the ugly mixture of geometric steel, the plate-glass of sparkling skyscrapers, the rude banners of retail. The whole of central Sydney seemed to be bearing down on him, the way slapstick buildings collapse – phoof! – around a smiling fool. James considered sliding into the aisle of a store or an alley. But instead, instinctively decisive, he turned and walked in the other direction.

  The train, he decided. He would catch the train to Circular Quay.

  In his jumpy discomposure, the short walk uphill to Central Station was easier to negotiate. Magritte fell away. The River Sambre. The drowned mother. The shadows of what he had been. James was fixed upon Ellie as he recommenced his walk, heading westwards.

  He saw posters in Chinese and the large diagram of a foot, its pressure points outlined in fine script with a remarkable degree of complication, then a shop selling Buddhist artefacts in which most items appeared to be red. That a store for objects of religious devotion might exist in the inner city seemed hopeful, if anomalous. Peering in he saw altars, incense, a row of cross-legged Buddhas, all made of what appeared to be crimson plastic, and various dangling embroideries, the purpose of which he assumed to be prayer, released wavering into the spiritually receptive air. James would never have entered such a store, but found himself glancing in with interest. A shop assistant looked up and smiled at him; James blushed and turned away. Further along two men’s faces leered at him through the window of a pub; he found himself blushing once again. Then there was a string of cheap frock shops, all staffed by petite Asian women with swaying hair; and beyond were food stores – Thai, Chinese, Indian, Vietnamese – more than could possibly be sustained on a single street. Worlds were converging, he thought. Australia was Asian. He saw how various it all was, the zeal of many nations, the emporia of many merchants, the international energy that pulsed between languages and countries. The translations were less of words than of these perplexing combinations: shops, peoples, signs and wonders.

  In another life he might have loved it. But James was disintegrating, he knew. He was becoming fissures and gaps, as if something in his body had torn. Time past was leaking in, and shame, and regret, and too much irksome reality. He continued his walk through the city, hearing her name in his mind: Ellie, Ellie; Ellie, Ellie. The name he sighed in his sleep. As though she was a Buddhic chant, or a compass alignment, or the talismanic code to a forgotten world. As though the sound of her name was a kind of inward music.

  Pei Xing had woken that morning thinking of Boris Pasternak’s Doctor Zhivago. Yuri Andreyevich Zhivago, the poet-doctor. Apart from her father, the first man, though unreal, she had ever loved.

  Before she opened her eyes she had felt him in the bed beside her. It was as if he had flown through the window from the Russian cold to find warmth beside her body, to nestle his dark head between her small breasts. He appeared as he did in the famous film version – played by Omar Sharif – those enormous brown eyes, that air of sexual distraction. The first seconds were snowy, image-confounded and fabulously arousing; and she might have been holding his face in her hands, so sure was his incarnation.

  When Pei Xing realised she was awake she found that her cheeks were moist with tears. Doctor Zhivago had been her father’s favourite novel and his most famous and prestigious translation. Though dangerous and counter-revolutionary, a target for the Red Guards and the Mao Tse Tung Thought Propaganda Teams, he had cherished it, with tortured obstinacy, until his very last breath. He liked to quote a section from the opening about ‘inward music: the irresistible power of unarmed truth, the powerful attraction of its example’; and even now she remembered the whole paragraph, though she had once striven to forget it.

  ‘We all possess an inward music,’ he had told her, sounding like a teacher. ‘Every person on the planet. Every single one of us.’

  Inward music. What was that? she had often wondered.

  Her father was prone to announcements. Every now and then he dispensed an aphoristic sentence, or felt obliged to comment, in italics, on literature or politics. What others might have derided, Pei Xing found endearing.

  Her father owned a Feltrinelli first edition, in Russian, from 1957. And then one in English, Harvill, from which he wrote his translation. She had watched him work night after night at his desk, in the glow of a brass lamp, with English-Chinese and Russian-Chinese dictionaries by his side, and a Great China brand cigarette dangling from two fingers. She imagined the trade in meanings as a kind of game, in which tokens shaped like mahjong tiles were exchanged and switched. Signs moved from one world to another, clacked together, made new sequences. A man in Bolshevik Russia became virtually Chinese; a world unfolded from a paper envelope. This game existed in the borderless continent of her father’s head. She could see how he concentrated: ‘cher’ in Russian, ‘neve’ in Italian, ‘snow’ in English, until he arrived at the sound ‘xue’, and then the character: the radical symbol for rain, the strokes for frozen, the little block of marks that revealed the transition from alphabets to ideograms. As he removed his glasses and rubbed the bridge of his nose, Pei Xing felt a pure, focused pang of love.

  She considered her father the most intelligent man in the world. She competed with her brother for his attention, but somehow knew that her bookishness gave her a clear advantage.

  ‘There are many words for snow,’ her father announced. And he tilted his head back and chuckled, as if he had just told her a joke.

  In the bonfire the Red Guards lit in their lane in 1967 Doctor Zhivago was aflame in the pile of books deemed ideologically treacherous. Pei Xing watched the book-burning with her parents, who were forced to kneel in mute witness. Her father’s face was bruised and her mother looked absent.

  The immolation of books took longer than expected. Sometimes a book would flip open page by page, each separately blackening, curling, igniting, disappearing, and still there were more pages rising softly underneath. The pyramid of paper seemed for a time to resist its own fire, so that a Guard poked at the smouldering mess and called for kerosene. When at last it flared up, with a kind of fierce luminosity, everyone was relieved that the event was at last consuming itself. And because she could not look at her parents’ faces, and because she was afraid, and because history had become this incredible will to erase, Pei Xing watched the bonfire with devoted attention. It was impressively bright.

  The past never left her. Her parents were always there, always kneeling, the last time she saw them alive. The pile of books was perpetually burning.

  And the seductive Yuri Andreyevich Zhivago seemed almost more real to her than her own parents, since he lived on robustly in cinema and words, and since his own life story had a definite, well-described conclusion. This was something her father believed in, that fiction might eclipse life. It pained her to think of it now, how distant he had become, how vague and how replaced. Her mother was more present: the ministrations of food and comfort, the Guangdong folk-tales, the sound of her piano as she practised a Brahms piece, or a Bach. These memories greeted her more frequently, and more often in moments of happiness.

  It had rained during the night but the sun was now shining. The day was fast heating up. Pei Xing rose, splashed her face, and went immediately to the kitchen to prepare her Dragon Well tea. There was some cold sticky rice left over in a bowl in the fridge; she covered it with condensed milk and slices of mango and ate her breakfast standing up, as she always did, looking as though searching into the far distance.

  Beyond the window above the sink lay the broad sprawl of Bankstown and the outer western suburbs. Mighty
trucks were rumbling along the freeways with homicidal speed; there were houses of dubious design, with utes on the front lawns and chunky letterboxes made of bricks; there were factories and steelworks and a huge hardware store, the size of a jumbo-jet hangar, spread over an entire block. A mattress factory and a glass factory stood absurdly side by side. Aussie Mattresses. Down Under Glass.

  In the shopping centre beside the train station there were dozens of small businesses with signs above the doorways in Vietnamese and Arabic; these Pei Xing found particularly enchanting. She loved to look directly into the faces of people on the street: men with powerful forearms and forthright eyes, and women in hijabs and scarves walking together in friendly clusters. Their children all looked plump and smiling and for some reason reminded Pei Xing of nutmeg. Then there were Vietnamese at the fishmongers on the corner, a meeting place of sorts, and casual groups at the Pho shop, who all seemed to know each other. This version of Australia was Asian and Arab. These people moved in an aura of their own, not afraid to claim space; and among them were other populations, migrant as she, each pulled from another history and cast up at the bottom of the world. On the street Pei Xing always felt cosmopolitan. She felt she was moving among friends in a spacious new world. She thought people from the Middle East, especially, were very exotic. She tried not to stare.

  Conspicuous beneath a sun umbrella, Pei Xing walked the streets of Bankstown to catch an early train. She looked at the signs above the stores and saw again how beautiful a script Arabic was, how different from Chinese characters, and from English translations. There were cursive waves and dots and ultra-precise dashes, like flags. There were suggestions of Mecca and arched windows and the spaces a mosque might contain. How might ‘snow’, she wondered, appear in an Arabic script? How might desert peoples write the word ‘snow’? Would it be imagined as flying sand?