The Sound of One Hand Clapping Read online

  ‘Eh, Earl! Get your arse up here. We can pan around the entire works from here.’

  How the hell, thought Earl Kane. How the hell. But ultimately he knew it didn’t matter. The Commission was just another big body that wanted it all recorded—on paper, on photographs, in film. No-one would ever watch it in a cinema. It was just archival material. By the time anyone got around to looking at it, he’d be long gone.

  When they got the rushes back the week following the visit, Earl’s boss, a one time Party man, was more than happy with the results.

  ‘Look at it!’ he said, American-style cigarette replete with a modern cork filter tip. ‘You got the right feel this time, Earl. It’s…’ Earl’s boss thought for the right word for a time, then said, ‘heroic, that’s what it is, Earl, fucking heroic.’

  He waved the cigarette at the editing screen where the black-and-white footage flickered back and forth.

  ‘It could be some vast Soviet hydro scheme in Siberia or the Urals. Could be the Hoover dam.’

  The footage, in its jerky sweeps and occasional over-exposure, suggested the inability to describe the enormity of what was taking place, of man finally, violently, and seemingly forever asserting himself over the natural world.

  ‘But it’s us, Earl. Fucking us. We’re doing it, Earl,’ he said, ‘at long fucking last this country’s finally doing it.’

  The camera panned through the bottom of the dam works. Various men at work at various strange elevations, but whether they were excavating some exotic archaeological site, some wonder of the ancient world, or creating a wonder of the new world was not immediately clear. It looked monumental, half completed, half destroyed. The camera moved across the river to where steam shovels gnawed like rodents into the rock, then slowly up a new cliff hewn out of a rainforest-clad river valley. Above, roads, as if slash-marked by a mugger’s knife, cut across at fierce angles. A slow tilt up the dam face, culminating in its half-finished top, upon which men scurried to and fro like ants on the face of a shovel. A large concrete bucket descended from an elaborate flying fox to the top of the dam face, its load released by men hanging in mid-air from its vast lever, like puppies hanging by their teeth from a trouser leg. Other men, ankle deep in cement, laboriously puddled the concrete into its reinforcing, ensuring there were no gaps or holes. Cut to a single man wielding a pounding sledge hammer, framed by rocks all around. The man lifted and dropped the hammer with such ferocity that it impressed even the men in the dark editing room. At the end of each blow the sledge hammer bounced up as if it were rubber rather than rock being hit.

  ‘Look at that bugger go, Earl,’ said Earl’s boss. ‘You’d wonder what would drive a man to work like such a demon.’

  And they watched Bojan’s hammer swing.

  Cut to a steel frame being lowered down the inside of the dam into its place as a debris snare at the entrance to the water tunnel. A man waiting at the bottom for the debris snare. Earl suddenly froze the frame, rewound and played it again.

  ‘Look,’ said Earl. ‘It’s that same crazy reffo.’

  Earl let the film roll some more. The debris snare came to rest a foot or so above the concrete floor. They watched Bojan Buloh fitting the frame into position.

  ‘Looks,’ said Earl, ‘as if he is being imprisoned behind them bars forever.’

  Chapter 14

  1989

  LIKE AN ARMY of phantoms intent on malice, the bodiless coats and gowns swept through the air, hurtling down toward her. Without meaning to, Sonja braced, the reflex of one always ready for a blow, twisting sideways to offer only the smallest edge of her body for the swooping spectres to strike. And then her body uncoiled, though slowly, for her mind could not sufficiently reassure her body that there was nothing to fear where she stood. She felt embarrassed at being afraid in such a place, for behaving childishly. After a time that seemed long but was not, she realised that there was no cause for worry. As she gathered her wits and looked about, she could see that her foolish fear had passed unobserved. In the great noise and overwhelming activity of the vast sewing room of that Hobart textile factory, everyone was too intently focused on meeting their daily quotas, to notice, far less care about the behaviour of a passing stranger.

  Sonja looked up at the cavernous ceiling, at the dust ascending in shafts of light that tapered away into small windows far above, as if containing all the escaping hopes and dreams of those who drudged for a living below. Through those millions of motes garments flew along motorised gantries from one worker to another, each intent on their separate tasks of cutting, sewing, embroidering, buttoning, and packaging.

  As she resumed walking down the length of the enormous room, Sonja listened to the way the clatter of the overlockers and the rising and dipping hum of the sewing machines combined to place a strange powerful roar upon the room that was in some way comforting. She walked along row after row of women machinists, brushing past the occasional male supervisor, walking through garments as they swished past—the clothes draping over her to briefly describe a half-spectral, half-human form. She searched each lowered head for a face she was no longer sure she would even recognise. It was difficult enough to distinguish one woman from the next, far less remember one face from a muddied long ago past.

  Near the end of the room Sonja noticed an operator’s hands. She halted. All Sonja could see of the seated woman was a bowed, scarfed head and her hands. But there was about the movement of the hands something Sonja recalled, a flow in the way those hands were moving the material quickly and deftly under the needle that caught Sonja’s attention. She stood there, watching. The hands finished a hem, and then the scarfed head rose slowly.

  A small, strong face peered upwards at the stranger staring down at her.

  Each searched the other’s unchanging expression, without moving, letting their eyes roam quizzically around faces that had both long ago learnt to betray nothing.

  And then the old woman’s lips moved.

  ‘My God. My God.’

  It was not any of her particular features that Sonja initially recognised because time had changed her face, but a quirkiness at the edges, a mouth that seemed to be smiling even when it wasn’t, an inviting generosity in the eyes that upon closer examination proved to be what at first no-one ever believed they were—one blue, one brown—those remarkable piebald eyes that Sonja had once found so entrancing.

  Sonja found herself telling the old woman the truth in a tumble of words.

  ‘I came back because I felt I had to see him, because…’

  ‘I don’t hear,’ said the old woman, tapping her earlobe. ‘My hearing here—’ She lifted her head and cast her hands about at the rows of machinists, machinery, gantries, the whole industrial catastrophe that was her livelihood, in a gesture of helplessness ‘—my hearing cactus.’

  Sonja got a grip back on herself. This was, in any case, hardly a confessional and the old woman certainly no priest.

  ‘I came back for a holiday,’ said Sonja, pretending to repeat herself, speaking in a much louder voice. ‘It’s good Tasmania. For a holiday. Lots of trees. And things. For a holiday.’

  ‘I think so,’ said the old woman. ‘And I think, I don’t blame that girl. Who would after all that?’

  But then the old woman realised with a shock that she had misheard Sonja, that they were talking about entirely different matters, and that Sonja had no idea to what the old woman was referring.

  The old woman’s fingers rose to her eyes which were filling with tears. With her fingers, with movements no longer assured but rather shaky and awkward, with first one finger, and as that proved inadequate, a second and then a third, the old woman flicked the tears from her extraordinary eyes as if with this gesture her emotion might be similarly disposed of. Then she lowered her head so that all Sonja could see once more was her scarf softly shuddering and Sonja realised that the old woman was silently sobbing.

  Sonja said the name she had not said for over twenty years.

&n
bsp; ‘Helvi.’

  And the old woman, though not hearing and without looking up, reached out and took hold of Sonja’s hand.

  Chapter 15

  1989

  PERHAPS IT WAS THEN that Sonja lost her resolve, though it didn’t seem that way at the time. When Helvi’s shift finished they had gone to a cafe down at Salamanca. They sat outside, at a small round table, a penny of a table really, beneath which they continued clasping their hands together like schoolgirls. But these hands will part, thought Sonja, this time forever—her hands soon to pass a boarding card to an airline steward, Helvi’s hands to resume running a million more metres of fabric beneath the prancing point of her sewing machine.

  At that late hour of the afternoon Salamanca was oddly empty of people and of movement. Where behind the venerable sandstone warehouses there ought to have been the architectural accumulation of centuries, there was only the cold wilderness of the mountain. Sonja was momentarily distracted by this thought, by the incongruity of this place that failed at being cosmopolitan but succeeded at being something altogether rarer: itself. It was a world at once skewed and strange and beautiful, and Sonja suddenly saw that Helvi was actually a bird from a foreign land that had accidentally alighted here—heard Helvi’s English speech with its Finnish warble as a finch-like twitter, saw Helvi’s small, lithe movements as those of a sparrow darting from branch to twig to branch.

  Sonja asked Helvi of names from their past, about Helvi’s various children, all of whom had now left home, and some even Tasmania, leaving her and Jiri alone. Helvi talked of them and of others, and they laughed at the old stories they shared, and the new stories that Sonja did not know. Sonja was less animated when Helvi asked her of her life, for that was a subject that Sonja found of least interest. Other people—their histories, their stories, their evasions—always struck her as so much more interesting, somehow more real than what she had known. To wonder unduly about yourself seemed to her not only indulgent, but also—though of course she could hardly bring herself to think it, far less say it—dangerous. It was in any case—in the best of cases, and Sonja certainly wasn’t one of those—it was in any case less than easy to explain her life, a life peculiar and mysterious, elusive even to her who lived within it.

  Sonja looked at her life as a day-by-day proposition and on that basis it was, as she told Helvi, a good life and she was not lying when she said such a thing. Her job was not like those she had watched her father and his friends spend a lifetime ruining their bodies in. She had progressed from typist to secretary to a minor administrative position in an insurance company, then acquired a job as a production assistant in a television company that made game shows. It was not glamorous, and her pay was that of a clerk’s. But it could not break backs or tear off fingers or ruin hearing, nor did it condemn you to life in the diaspora of desperate desires that were the construction camps and Hobart suburbs of her childhood. The unit Sonja rented was not in a fashionable area, but it had been the only place she had ever lived in longer than five years. Not the good life, but as good as, actually far better than she felt she had a right ever to expect. She could afford things she had never known as a child—good clothes, jewellery, occasionally eating out at a mid-priced restaurant.

  ‘A good life, Helvi,’ said Sonja. ‘Not grand, but good.’

  ‘And television too!’ Helvi said, unable to imagine television as anything other than the most glamorous and wonderful of lives.

  Sonja laughed. She reminded Helvi of the smallgoods factory they had once worked in out at Derwent Park, Helvi full-time, Sonja after school and in the holidays, making salamis and sausages out of cheap meat.

  ‘TV’s no different, Helvi. Repackaging everything that is about to go off.’

  Sonja knew although Helvi was wrong to think that any of what Sonja had done could be equated to success, there was in her story some small triumph that she had never before recognised about herself. But then Helvi had always made Sonja feel as if she were worth something.

  ‘Not bad for a scrubber from Moonah, though,’ said Sonja.

  ‘You must go back soon?’ Helvi asked.

  Sonja nodded, then smiled, for she had to smile, because she had to believe every day turned out as well as one could ever hope, that every decision taken was the only and best decision to make. Sydney was the certainties of work and the person she had created as Sonja Buloh. Tasmania was the wind, and she could see it slowly sweeping along the pavement toward them tentatively jogging parking tickets and discarded food wrappers, could feel its first stirrings now beneath their table. And she spoke firmly into the wind, though she felt anything but resolved, felt a cud of fear deep within begin to slowly journey upwards, spoke slowly and definitely in the hope that then the wind might know her resolve and desist and leave her alone to return to her brittle certainties.

  ‘Back to work, Helvi.’ She paused. ‘You know how it is.’

  Sensing that this seemingly innocuous subject was somehow forbidden territory, Helvi alighted upon a new branch of conversation.

  ‘Where you stay?’

  ‘The Sundowner Motel,’ Sonja said. ‘Out Warrane.’

  A waiter placed a short black and a cup of tea on the table.

  ‘No, my child,’ Helvi said, squeezing Sonja’s hand. Sonja felt the calloused hardness, the way years of labour had worn the skin of Helvi’s hand into a most exquisite leathery suppleness. ‘No,’ Helvi said, and her hold relaxed and her head shook. ‘You stay with me and Jiri.’

  Sonja protested, of course, said that it was impractical and unfair and unnecessary and anyway what would Jiri say?—went to withdraw her hand from Helvi’s to gesticulate, to emphasise that she could not and how could she anyway?—but Helvi’s grip tightened a second leathery time like a belt being pulled in on a belly girding itself for a fight and Helvi insisted and the wind was rustling cold, and Helvi said it was time to go, and Sonja, in spite of her misgivings, gave in.

  So Sonja came to find herself where and as she had never intended to be, in the middle of the night screwing her eyes up in Helvi’s bathroom, out of a weariness that was more than a lack of sleep, out of a feeling of helplessness at being unable to control her nausea, at being unable to adjust her vision to the glaring brightness of the harsh electric light bouncing off the white porcelain. Her hair she knew to be bedraggled, her face a sickly, waxy colour. Here, thought Sonja, to be here of all places, producing such strange, putrid odours, such violent sounds, to end up vomiting here.

  Sonja raised her head up from the toilet bowl and turned around, realising as she did so that she had not closed the door behind her. At the far end of the darkened hallway she saw Helvi in her dressing gown, presumably having observed the whole sorry spectacle with her strange all-seeing eyes.

  Helvi came into the bathroom, and without saying a word, placed her hand on Sonja’s forearm, and looked up into Sonja’s eyes.

  She is so small, thought Sonja, and was struck at both how she had never before realised what a little woman Helvi really was, and how this was of all things the last thing she ought really to be thinking. So Sonja turned away and Helvi’s grip loosened and Helvi left the bathroom to return with a bucket and mop. She spoke only to usher Sonja to bed. Then Helvi silently cleaned the bathroom and bowl.

  Outside the weather had swung around. Lying in her bed Sonja could hear the westerly wind rattling hard the windows in their aluminium frames, like prisoners shaking their bars in rising anger.

  Chapter 16

  1959

  FIVE YEARS PASSED.

  Being five years, Sonja ought have remembered more things than she did. She was three when Bojan Buloh left her there and eight when he took her away for good. Being five years, she ought have remembered a great deal, but she didn’t. Sonja remembered this—sitting on that crumbling concrete fence outside the house concentrating on cutting the blood off to her legs—just by concentrating, making them go all numb and tingly and trying to do the same to her heart but feeling
nothing and wondering whether you could, wondering whether it had worked and whether her heart was as numb as her legs.

  Foolish things, Sonja would later tell Helvi, dumb things—that’s all she remembered. Not the important things you should remember.

  She did remember her first communion dress, and herself standing flushing within it, feeling like the strawberries her father would later grow and serve covered with yoghurt—standing so upon an old wooden kitchen table recently refurbished with a linoleum top and red plastic edging; did remember slowly turning a circle, smiling, lifting the dress with her hands so proud in a flourish, and doing a little theatrical swirl, giggling, the three European women who stood around the table with pins and needles and cotton smiling back. The dress was beautiful, she remembered how beautiful it was and how much she loved it, pre-war in its design, length, and extravagance of lace. There in the middle of that small kitchen she twirled for a second time in her first communion dress, and despite a few pin tucks and unfinished edges, it was the most wonderful thing she had ever worn, a dress from another world that suggested life might be something other than what she knew it as, and for a brief glorious moment she thought she might begin to rise into the air like an angel and fly away.

  Then it was evening. In a darkened bedroom lit only by the small light that fell from the kitchen through the partly opened door, she sat up in her bed, dressed in an old nightie. She looked intently at the back of her left hand. From the kitchen came the sound of the women talking.

  Maybe they were sitting around the table she had danced upon, the linoleum-topped table upon which she had briefly known such grace. Maybe those women—their bodies, large and hard from labour and history, their faces bitter and narrow from being unable to escape or transcend either—maybe they were trying to reduce the wonder of that table to the smallness of their own lives, using it only as an insignificant platform for their tales of escape and retribution, of those who transgressed the agreed order and were invariably punished most terribly. Maybe they were drinking coffee.