The Complete Stories (69 page)

So Mrs. Judge's story, improbable as it might be, was not irreconcilable
with the known facts. No story could be. Nor was it too wild to be believed. I listened in a dream. When she had finished, and we heard the man's step on the verandah, it was already dark. She gave a great sigh and leaned back, exhausted by the telling or the living of it—her own life, and seemed so touched for a moment with the grandeur and remoteness of tragedy, that I felt that if I so much as addressed her she might disintegrate like a being from another world. Better to get up and leave as one leaves a theatre, with the illusion still glowingly intact.

“You haven’ lit the lamp,” the man said, looming in the doorway, surprised to find us in the dark.

She started then, and made a move.

“No, I'll do it,” he said. “You sit and finish your talk.”

“We're finished,” she said, staring trancelike before her. “We're almost finished.”

He moved about, pumping and lighting the lamp, and by the time he was done, and had set it on the table, she was once again the small, tired woman who had begun her story all those hours ago. She looked at her gnarled hands, then upwards and met his gaze. She gave a soft smile.

“Don't worry, I'm oright. I'll see about gettin’ yer tea in a minute. There's some corned beef.”

She got up heavily and went to the meat safe.

I declined her invitation to stay. The moment of communion between us had passed. The man's presence, and the sound of him washing now in a tin basin at the back, snuffling noisily as he splashed, put a kind of restraint upon her. She no longer belonged entirely to herself. She saw me out to the verandah steps.

It was still light outside. Palm-tops and bananas stood in silhouette against the sky and high overhead was a fast-moving cloud, a flock of what I took to be birds. It was the flying foxes, making their way from the rainforests further north to their feeding place on the other side of town. Millions of them. Having unfolded themselves out of the darkness under the boughs of trees, they were flying, now that the light was almost gone, in a dense and flickering cloud that might have been the coming of the dark itself. The sky was black with them.

On the top step of the verandah, set out like an offering, was a covered saucer, with beside it a frangipani; on the second step another. She leaned down and took them up, one in each hand, the rival offerings.

“My Indians,” she said smiling, and stood holding them up for me to
see. More visible proof. There was a moment's pause while she let it sink in. “So then,” she said, "what will it mean?”

I didn't know. What could it mean, sixty years after the event, thirty years after the main character was dead?—No, that was wrong.
She
was the main character.

“I don't know,” I told her, a little alarmed by the possibilities, and not only for her. “We'll have to see.”

She nodded.

“You know,” she said, "I'm trusting you with me life. ‘is as well.”

She jerked her head towards the lighted hallway.

I went on down the steps.

“I wouldn’ dawdle if I was you,” she called after me, suddenly practical. “From the looks a’ that sky I'd say we was in for a storm. It'll be a thumper.”

The woman's life
.
Incredible. But the details of it demand to be believed, and so, now that I have looked into her eyes, does she. She has a kind of grandeur, our Mrs. Judge, and for all her lack of education, an intelligence that immediately imposes itself. But she
is
uneducated, and much of what she has told me, if it is not her own experience, can only have come to her through the most painstaking research. She has at her fingertips dates, cast-lists, the names of even the most obscure of the Diva's colleagues and friends. The local chemist, who knows all the history of Karingai, assures me that she has spent the whole of her life here, or the whole of his life anyway, and he is a man of fifty. She and her husband keep to themselves. They are visited only by her Indian neighbours and one or two related Indians from towns close by. For years now the other whites have avoided them. The rumour is that she is herself part-Indian and the man part-Aboriginal. After listening to her story I have come to the conclusion that the fairy-tale childhood she describes can only be her own.

Two of her memories especially impress me.

One is the story of her flight from St. Petersburg to the Polish border in 1917, when she would have been ten.

She and her brother had been taken in their earliest infancy to Russia and were brought up there on the fringes of the court, the offspring,
officially unrecognised, of a Grand Duke; so that as well as being the daughter of the Diva she is also, by her own account, a cousin of the Romanov children murdered at Ekaterinburg, and for that reason, she believes, still on the Bolshevik murder list. It was to escape their local agents that she took refuge, fifty years ago, at Karingai.

Of that earlier period she remembers almost nothing till the night of their flight over the snow: herself, her twin, and two ladies of high rank from the palace, all packed into a single sleigh.

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.

Lying alone here, half dozing in her white party dress, she gazes through flickering lids and an archway of stone to where the harbour, in a film of blue, gently rises and falls like the skin of some strange and beautiful animal that has come to sprawl at her feet, and whose breath she feels tugging the silk of her sleeves. The garden is full of scents: bruised gardenia, cypress, the ooze of gum. Insects are brooding over a damp place in the bushes where something is coming into existence, or has just left it. Clouds are building to a storm. Suddenly, up the long steps from the water, through the light of the archway, disguised now as a sailor and with his eyes burning in a wilderness of hair, his beard electrically alive, comes the monk Rasputin with a finger to his lips.

She knows him immediately. He reassures her of who she is and of where they have both come from. He too has escaped, lived through seven bullet-wounds in a frozen courtyard, after the murderers, terrified of his advance towards them—a mad dog dancing in the snow, that had already eaten poison and taken seven rounds of lead into his body—had turned on their heels and fled. Now he too is moving unrecognised through the world, waiting only to declare himself.

He has enemies and is pursued. He stays only long enough to warn her that she too has pursuers. When a voice calls from the house above he is startled, kisses the child's brow, raises his rough hand over her in a last blessing, and slips away in his sailor's garb down the long stairs to the water, where he pauses a moment and is framed against the stormy light, then descends to a waiting dinghy. Only the dark smell of his beard, which stirs her memory and is unmistakable, still remains with
her. And it is this that she uses to evoke him, her one protector: his gnarled feet—the feet of a monk—retreating over the stone flags. And the water rhythmically lifting and falling, the breath of a drowsing beast …