Gatherers and Hunters Read online

  No, don’t be cynical. Juliet’s eyes were impaired but that is not to say she was totally sightless. Her other senses provided a wealth of ‘seeing’ if you like. In my mind, I was the eyes, the observation, the explainer. Everything, everything I tell you, was as if through her eyes, and it was as if I were giving her sight to see and be part of it.

  What happened?

  Twenty four hours before I was due to return to London I was filled with this great sense of joy. I was not really in Paris in those last twenty four hours. Simple as that.

  On the last morning I had a fight with the ticket officer in the Gare du Nord. It strained my resources and my language. And I battled through in trimph, simply because I became terribly aware that Juliet was the point at the end of my line of communication. I would not let anyone or anything – and a ticket collector in France is a formidable anything – get in the way of my return journey. I phoned the minute I reached London. She was quietly cold.

  She had as it were thrown herself into the relationship but because it had a finite term she could allow herself an infinity of warmth and heat to pour into it. I can say that now.

  At the time I was puzzled, then angry, then confused. I returned to Qantas.

  Suddenly, it seemed all over.

  Gwen

  It doesn’t need for me to say it. You’ve interviewed Kester, you know him I guess, from the horse’s mouth. Or from the Ass’s anus. Sorry. That was intended as a sort of joke.

  Juliet is dead now anyway, am I right? Let’s not dwell on what happened back then, the world has turned right over three times since 1972.

  Besides, Kester romanticises things. You have got that much. I once thought that enthusiasm appealing. Now it is such a bore. Not that Kester and I exchange more than pleasantries at family birthdays.

  Juliet did betray me. It took me a long time to forgive that, but I have, there’s an end and we do not have to drag out skeletons.

  Well no, it was not really England. When Kester returned to Australia I sensed right away there had been someone. I thought at the time it did him good. Eased him, as it were. He was more liveable-with. For a while.

  I saw it as a bonus, and I did not have to ask who or where or when; England and travel is always a free time, a time out not counted in the real world or in the world of real relationships.

  No. It was 1974. That is the hurtful year. That is the year Juliet betrayed me.

  You did not know? But of course she returned to Australia in 1974. She was a guest of the Adelaide Festival that year. They were in their stage of reclaiming old local celebrities who had disappeaed into the distance abroad: Rolf Harris, Alan Seymour, Peter Porter, Lorna Sydney; they scoured the minor opera houses and the remainder bookshops for ancient Aussie exports. Not all returned, thank goodness. But Juliet Klein did, yes our Juliet did.

  No, I don’t know if her concert in the Adelaide Town Hall was a success, I arrived in Adelaide two days later, there was my Forum Club Conference and I was not going to miss that, and certainly not for cousin Juliet who had not bothered to write to me for over two years. I know why now but I did not know then.

  And, let me be frank about it, my own singing career – I was a contralto – had been withered by childbearing and kitchen routine. At exactly the time Juliet was being famous. Of course I was jealous – though I couldn’t admit it then!

  Juliet’s correspondence, at any time, was something like a postcard from Exotica written at her dictation by some Post Office clerk or gigilo or hotel menial. No, I am unjust to Juliet but who wouldn’t be, no who wouldn’t be, she was so damned, damned exasperating and so self-absorbed.

  All those years during our adolesence when I carried for, when I cared for her, when I did everything for her – so that she could swan around as if everything she did was so easy and spontaneous and elegant. Why, she practiced for hours just to walk across the intersection as if she could see a thing.

  I’m sorry, Denzel. Can you wipe that bit out? Just rewind and we’ll go over it.

  Juliet sang to a packed hall in Adelaide. Her voice was small but still pure. That’s what the reviews said. You should check them out in, say, the Barr Smith Library. She did not sing the Skye Boat Song. In fact I’m told it was an almost insulting program, ending with Schoenberg’s Book of the Hanging Gardens. Juliet always had an instinct for self-mutilation.

  I came down on the Friday after, and when I arrived at the hotel I was shown the room Kester and I had booked. Kester of course came down earlier. The smell of Juliet was in that room. It was pervasive. I arrived at 11 am and they had not done up the room. The double bed was still a tangle of sheets.

  Of course I recognised Juliet’s smell. I even remember becoming first aware of it, it was strong but, well I can’t explain. It was musky but somehow fragrant. I sound like a smell fetishist and perhaps I am. I was always scrupulous, myself, especially in those Queensland days. I was a compulsive bather.

  There is a world of difference between imagining something and having to confront it.

  What had happened in that hotel bedroom was irrefutably physical. And then the insult, later, of Kester trying to ‘include me in’. I believe he was trying to suggest something like a threesome! As if he could please himself with both of us!

  I cannot understand to this day how I remained calm and polite to the pair of them, how I even sat down with them to meals in the hotel dining room. We went as a threesome to two further concerts.

  It was not until later. If you want to know I think it was twelve months, but I had a lot of thinking to do. And, thank God, I did my thinking. I worked out my own destiny and it did not include either Kester or – if you even thought it possible – Juliet Klein.

  We were only cousins, though in a place like south-east Queensland we were family, of course I admit that. Perhaps in the end I only feel pity for her.

  I don’t have to feel anything for Kester. He scurried down to Melbourne. A good riddance. You say you have interviewed him already?

  Yes, of course you did.

  No, I don’t know when Juliet died. Do you? You’re a bit of a dark horse aren’t you, Denzel?

  I did receive a letter from some legal firm in Belfast, oh nearly a decade later, and it said Juliet Klein wanted me to have the enclosed pearl brooch, it was a family heirloom and they were acting on her instructions as per a codicil to her will made before her departure.

  Yes, I thought that at the time, too. ‘Departure’. On the other hand, I thought Belfast lawyers might be old fashioned and not want to call a death a death. Of course I heard nothing more.

  It is all ended.

  All of it.

  Denzel

  My mother is not dead. I could not say that to Gwen, though for her, let it be properly ended.

  Sometimes I think my mother might as well be dead. She has given up talk just as she gave up sight. I think the giving up of sight was willed, by the way. It was a way of escaping.

  Just as I was a sort of escape, but one that could not be disposed of easily. It is amusing, I suppose, that in the end she was a victim of her genes like everyone else, except that I was the consequence of her mid-thirties crisis and the desperation of the empty womb.

  Didn’t I fill it up! Didn’t my old man, too.

  To seek him out, though, all these years later: perhaps I am also a victim of genetic fixations and an incurable nostalgia. Daddy dear where are you?

  And what did I expect?

  I had a friend in Bristol who went on a daddy search and ended up claiming a manor and three well-paying tenant cottages that the tourists line up for in the spring and summer, Americans mostly.

  My daddy was a – is a – minor radio personality in Melbourne. It is a regional Australian environment. I like that word, environment. I like my daddy too, as a matter of fact. Is that a disappointment?

  I do not like my mummy, but whoever does? Tell the truth, it is the old dependency, I had to break free, I really did have to get away from the cla
w-like hand and the lovely oh so lovely voice always begging me just to help a little here or maneouvre this there, or that somewhere else, mainly friends or enemies but sometimes simply groceries or the light bulb.

  I am cruel, I am ruthless. I have to be.

  And her voice, it is a man-trap, all steel teeth. The strange thing is that my daddy, my new found daddy has actually convinced me (I think) that Juliet Klein in her prime was just the goods.

  As a kid, I adored her.

  The goods.

  Just helping her I felt so important. Now, helping her, I feel used, a chattel, she hardly acknowledges my existence.

  Do you know when it was in that first interview I realised my daddy was still hooked? Yes yes, he was still hooked and that made him more truly my daddy, poor idiot poor old lover-man, yes, that’s my poor ol’ daddy.

  I brought along a CD. The Voice. And after he had finished slobbering and remembering and thanking me for showing an interest I gave it to him. I played it. It was put down only last year, a recording made in Brno, on a minute label trying to cash in on the capitalist market. The Voice Herself, yes you could tell who it was, though the range is now about two inches and the emotional depth just as narrow.

  At least to me. But perhaps I am not exactly impartial.

  I did hear her sing wonders, I think nobody else but I heard my mother try out everything from Paul Simon to Gorecki. I did even pride myself I was her best accompanist, but when the shutters fall from your eyes, well the shutters fall.

  Her only late triumph was to catch onto this Eastern European pastiche stuff, you know, Schnittke and Pärt and Górecki, ecclesiastical imitations with a bit of folksy rhythm, a dab of Stravinsky and lots of monotony.

  My mother was hypnotic at the monotony, endlessly repeated slow phrases, she wove them like a cat’s-cradle, she used that narrow voice like a really profound incantation, she held a note forever and made you think it was the soul of music.

  There I go again. She remains The Singer.

  I nearly wept when my father grew so passionate, listening to that CD. Wept for him, not me, for music, for my mother too, yes, for my mother.

  I did not tell him a thing. You learn tactics.

  But of course I dreamed, again, the old impossible dream. You know, you must know. The one where my parents get together again.

  Gwen, his ex-wife, like my own mother, she is implacable, she is unforgiving. I know her.

  I wish to know my father.

  All I know is that sons in the end confront and destroy their fathers, and hasn’t he given me ammunition! I know I’ll use it.

  Still, that would be better than sons destroying their mothers and I think I have done that.

  But then I think: without our life together, without me kicking out and kicking back and simply declaring that I am alive, I am me, I have to have my space too – without all those things, would my mother really have been able to add the quality of pain and purity and joy into her voice and that is what really gives her voice the magic depth in these new incantatory pieces that she has made her own. Even the composers of these pieces are almost servants to her voice. She has made them.

  You see how it is? To have been made by her?

  Kester, my father, is like me. He is on the edges of that. For the first time, with him, to be on the edge is to be ­somewhere. Fancy coming so far, so far back, to here, to her birthplace, to be somewhere.

  I still cannot tell if Kester will be surprised. Or glad. Or desperate. What a bucket of guilt I’m about to unload all over him. What a little Game of Consequences. On the other hand, I sort of like him. I have all the cards.

  Ljubljana

  In the days when Slovenia had taken the first steps to independence from Yugoslavia by creating its own ‘national airline’ – I am thinking of the late summer of 1989 – in those times, if you walked through the markets or inner streets of Ljubljana with its old Austrian colours and sturdy wooden decorations, there was already a fine notation of difference. ‘That man selling leather jackets, he is a Serb’, my host remarked to me. ‘And that other one is an Albanian, the one at the flowerstall’. To me, they all looked Balkan and my sight, like my listening ear, was still far too superficial, stuffed with novelty and a willingness to focus on the exotic. It was a place that was consciously the most westernised of the Yugoslav regions, Roman Catholic and scorning the cyrillic alphabet. The famous Austrian composer Hugo Wolf was a Slovene.

  But back then there was another frisson for those such as me, visitors, people in transit who had no commitment to anything other than curiosity or some inner catalogue of contrasts – a sort of home movie mentality without the cameras or the equipment. There was the still dangerous thought that ‘this is an iron curtain country’. Your passport was evidence: what if you wanted to return to Australia via America? By America, of course I mean the United States, that segment of the American continent. Do not smile, I am lifting you back to a time that was. To the time before. To the Olden Days.

  And in a very real sense, travelling to Ljubljana was like travelling into places where the darker fairy tales might well have been located. The clothes people wore: imagine seeing them in Melbourne? Oh yes, some of them would be wondrous in Sydney, at the right party. The Indian decade and the Greek decade had been and gone but there was still room for Central European chic, in fact it was only just beginning. I bought myself, from the Serb vendor, a leather jacket which I wore for several years in Sydney. It was styled with an aim for international consumers who might have broad shoulders and universal poppers. It could have hung in a stall in North Sydney.

  When I was in Belgrade, the week before, I was told that city had been razed by invaders twenty-seven times. That was survival. It was also mutilation and revenge and a tenacious collective memory, armed to the teeth forever, unforgiving.

  Ljubljana, for all its solidity and the provincial heaviness of its buildings, looked both venerable (to Australian eyes) and like some of those nineteenth century Australian towns planned in two or three storey brick on imperial models and believing they were facing the New Future, not the played-out past.

  In the once-upon-a-time I was innocent, that is true. In Ljubljana I was open to everything. I was easy bait.

  Andor was one of those people whose faces you forget easily, and then feel guilty. He had been scheduled to meet me when I flew in from Belgrade (on the Slovenian Airlines flight) and I have even forgotten how the connection was initially made. Was it the Embassy? Was it that helpful girl at the Airlines booking office? Was it a phone number someone had passed on to me, saying Andor spoke excellent English and his charming sister had once been to Adelaide with a group that had accompanied the famous (Serbian) poet Desanka Maksimovic to the Festival in, was it 1976? I had phoned him before making my bookings and he offered me everything. He would put himself out for me. He would be honoured. He would be proud to show me his city, his country, his people. I bought myself an extra reel of colour film.

  It was the fag end of summer, really autumn but the weather was still and the sun seemed hot, it was as if every­thing – each leaf on each tree – was hanging motionless, stilled by the perfection of the season and the wish to hold on to it forever. It was the prelude to the Fall.

  ‘My friend. You will see our town tomorrow, but I have taken the advantage of you and your arrival and I have arranged for you a special visit. Now. This very afternoon. Leave your baggage at your hotel, we are off this instant. I have a wonderful plan for you. You have arrived at the very moment. You must have planned it. It could not have happened otherwise. We have the special week of the mushrooms out in the country, it is our best kept secret. These mushrooms are magical. They grow only in one place and for one week only. I will provide for you a feast of our mushrooms, to translate their name you would say they are false toenails but perhaps I do not have the subtleties: fanciful delectables, perhaps, like little toes of young girls, very young girls with tender pale flesh you could take into your mout
h and suck gently, each toe separately, till they squirm with delight.’ His English was not perfect, but I laughed out loud at his jovial fantasy, and counted myself fortunate to arrive in the Week of the Mushrooms, no matter what they were called and in what language.

  He had a small modern car and he drove fast. ‘Slovenia is the industrial centre of Yugoslavia’ he called out to me as we left the city outskirts behind. ‘When we have our independence, we will take all the wealth with us. The rest of Yugoslavia is for peasants.’

  We drove through green fields, clumps of woodland, and increasingly into the area of rising mountains. The sky was almost cloudless, except for a tablecloth of white over the peaks that we approached.

  Suddenly he stopped. We pulled into a dusty patch off the narrow road. ‘Let me show you something’ he said. He drew out a knife. It must have been affixed to his belt but I had not noticed anything under his convincing imitation of a Scottish tweed jacket.

  ‘That looks sharp’ I said, for politeness.

  ‘Yes’.

  He pulled out into the road again and we said nothing more about the weapon.

  I did not see it again. It was not a portent – why should I think that?

  ‘I will take you to one of our famous National Parks’ he said, after some minutes of silence as we began climbing higher and higher. ‘I will take you to Slap Savica, the waterfall that is the great source of the Sava river. You will have seen the Sava in full flood if you were in Belgrade. Did you see the Sava in Belgrade, where it joins the Danube?’

  I nodded. Somehow, once having seen his knife, it had begun for no good reason to intrude itself into my thoughts. I tried to rationalise to myself that in these country areas, where antlers were displayed above portals and on condominium porches, there must be a long tradition of hunters and scoutsmen. I imagined wolves and bears in the overhanging forests we had begun to have shouldering over the little car.

  ‘Here. In this forest, they have released lynxes back into the wild’, Andor said. ‘They have gone back to their wild nature, after three generations, four generations in captivity.’