The Sound of One Hand Clapping Read online

  But Sonja only remembered what she heard that night after she had realised it was possible to be an angel and to rise above sin, only remembered their voices.

  The Italian woman saying, ‘So now you’ve got her, Maritza.’

  And Mrs Maritza Michnik replying, ‘Someone has to. Her father can’t. Working in those camps in the bush, that’s no place for a child.’

  ‘Not with the amount he drinks,’ the Italian woman snorted.

  Perhaps then Mrs Maritza Michnik and the Italian woman smiled knowingly. Perhaps then the third woman, who like Mrs Maritza Michnik was also a Pole, looked a little confused. Certainly it was her voice, gravelly like an old dog’s, that the child Sonja then heard say, ‘The mother? What sort of mother is she? What woman could treat her child so bad?’

  Sonja remembered looking at her hands, at her left hand in particular, focusing upon nothing, hearing it all.

  ‘You know the story,’ Mrs Maritza Michnik said.

  ‘It was a mortal sin,’ the Italian woman said.

  As she listened to them talk about her mother, she slowly turned the back of her left hand over, revealing her open palm. Then she ran the index finger of her right hand around her palm.

  ‘Ach!—people talk about what they cannot know,’ said Mrs Maritza Michnik. ‘The mother is gone, the father is a drunk. But he pays us what we ask so the girl has a home. A good Cat-er-lic home. What does the past matter? The mother is long gone, and the girl wouldn’t remember her. She was too small, and nobody talks about it. He pays well and she never speaks, that’s all that matters.’

  Then with her right hand Sonja took the four fingers of her open left hand and very slowly folded them shut over her palm.

  So: a dress, an angel, and playing games with her fingers. That’s all she remembered of five years. Stupid things, dumb things.

  Not the things that matter.

  Chapter 17

  1959

  IF SONJA COULD REMEMBER more she might have been able to call to mind how it all began. But really, she recalled only broken pieces, fragments of lucidity that emerged sharp and hard only to disappear back into meaninglessness, the moment she tried to focus upon them. As if she were once more chanting the decades of the rosary that bitter winter’s night long ago, all kneeling in a circle in Mrs Maritza Michnik’s lounge room holding rosary beads, her, the nine-year-old Sonja, dressed in a nightie, and the three sour women—the Polish woman, the Italian woman, and Mrs Maritza Michnik—in their work aprons. The women’s rosary beads were elaborate stained wooden affairs, while Sonja’s rosary was a small girl’s cheap model, made of pink plastic beads. All their eyes looked at the ground, focused upon nothing in particular, as they chanted:

  ‘HailMaryfullofgracetheLordiswiththee…’

  From outside the sound of a car coming up a drive, switching off, and a car door opening and shutting. The particular dying rumble of the motor, the slight squeak in the door closing, Sonja knew as real, as belonging to her, as being the sounds of the Holden FJ her father had bought the year before and of which they were both so proud. There had been a few rare weekends when he had come to visit in the new car and they would spend all Saturday cleaning and washing and polishing the car until it shone like a precious jewel in the sun, and on the Sunday, much to Mrs Maritza Michnik’s chagrin, they would drive down the Huon to pick mushrooms or to the beaches for a swim.

  The FJ had been almost new when Bojan had purchased it, and the object of envy on the part of many who knew him. It was a lovely car at first, and at first Bojan possibly saw it as the future into which he could escape from an ever more unsatisfactory present. After all, it was what no-one he knew had had in Slovenia: a car like in the American movies. And it was proof to both those in Slovenia and Australia that he had become what he had set out to be: Australian.

  ‘This,’ he one day announced to Sonja, momentarily stopping rubbing cutting compound into the FJ, and holding his hand out toward the FJ as if it were a divine apparition, ‘this why we come.’ Later the FJ was to become the reduced circumstances of his present—his home and companion, lover and hearth and promise and solace all conveniently wrapped up in steel in one mobile bundle. And in the end, it was to become his past, of which he knew no way of dealing with, beyond a certain destructive contempt.

  So when in Mrs Maritza Michnik’s lounge room Sonja had heard the rumble of the FJ she momentarily forgot both her prayers and Mrs Maritza Michnik’s fervent faith, and had dared to look up, only for Mrs Maritza Michnik to push Sonja’s recalcitrant head firmly back toward the ground, hissing: ‘Concentrate.’

  And they continued: ‘…blessedisthefruitofthywomb…’

  Sonja’s eyes rising back up slightly at the sound of the back door opening—

  ‘…JesusHolyMary…’

  —and closing—

  ‘…MotherofGodprayforussinnersnow…’

  —and then her heart was racing fit to blow up as she listened to the sound of the lounge-room door opening followed by two—three—four footsteps. Sonja summoned the courage once more to look up, and as she did so, she realised that the chanting had stopped, and that the others had also raised their heads. Standing in front of them was her father, Bojan Buloh.

  He stood still, but his eyes roamed around the circle of those kneeling. There was beer on his breath and something akin to a great sadness in his gaze. This time Mrs Maritza Michnik did not push Sonja’s head back down.

  Finally Bojan walked up to his daughter and held out his hand which she took. ‘Come,’ he said to Sonja, ‘you are leaving.’

  They walked out of the lounge room to her bedroom where he quickly and uncharacteristically threw her few clothes and possessions in a messy tangle into her old cardboard suitcase. Neither spoke, not in the bedroom, not walking out of the house and through the women who tried to stand in front of them, not when Bojan threw the suitcase in the back of the FJ, not when Sonja, now in her dressing gown, climbed in the front seat. Mrs Maritza Michnik clasped her cardigan closed against the chill night air with one hand, and with the other began gesticulating wildly.

  ‘How can you take her away?’ she demanded.

  Bojan was silently adamant, and, moreover, angry, burning with a rage that Mrs Maritza Michnik only dimly apprehended. For if she had, it is doubtful she would have had the courage to continue her harangue.

  ‘You have nowhere to take her,’ Mrs Maritza Michnik continued. ‘And her first communion, it is this Sunday…’

  Bojan, already hunkering down to get into the FJ, drew himself back fully erect, and leant across the car roof, fixing Mrs Maritza Michnik with such a chill look of fury that even she flinched.

  ‘I don’t want her near the bloody Church. I tell you that,’ Bojan said in a voice, hard, clenched. ‘At the beginning I bloody tell you. And then I come here and find you have her on her knees praying.’ Mrs Maritza Michnik swallowed. ‘I gave you good money.’ Bojan rummaged in his trouser pocket for his keys, but finding there only a bundle of change left from his visit to the pub, pulled it out. ‘Fucken money,’ said Bojan Buloh and threw the pennies and shillings and sixpences down on the car roof with sufficient ferocity that they shot back up at Mrs Maritza Michnik as if they were shrapnel. ‘Fucken church.’

  He lowered himself into the driver’s seat and slammed the car door. From the far side of the car Mrs Maritza Michnik, in an attempt to regain both dignity and strategic advantage, shouted back through Sonja’s side window at what she saw as blasphemy—‘What do you know of God?’

  ‘I know what I see,’ said Bojan, now visibly upset. As he continued fumbling in his pocket for his keys, Sonja wound down her window a third or so of the way. ‘What I bloody see in Slovenia when the Germans march in,’ Bojan was yelling, ‘and the bloody Church back the bloody Fascists.’

  Bojan finally found his key, and rammed it in the ignition. ‘They were all there,’ he continued haranguing Mrs Maritza Michnik, ‘cheering the Domobran on, giving lists of our names to the SS.
’ He fired the FJ up, and shouted even louder to be heard over the engine. ‘The SS! I know your God.’

  With all the strength she had in her, Sonja threw her pink plastic rosary beads into Mrs Maritza Michnik’s face, then quickly began winding the window back up. Bojan turned to see framed in the front passenger window the ludicrous sight of Mrs Maritza Michnik’s face momentarily festooned with pink plastic rosary beads before gravity tumbled them earthwards, and burst out laughing.

  Sonja though dared not smile, or even to look at the woman she had lived with for five years of what had not been her life, but sat up straight on the seat, staring without expression directly out of the windscreen. She focused only upon the darkness in front of her, ignoring the ferocious Mrs Maritza Michnik to her side, now waving about in a clenched fist the pink plastic rosary beads she had caught as they fell from her face. Above the roar of the revving 138 motor, she trained her anger on Sonja.

  ‘You ungrateful little bitch. Just like your mother. Leaving the ones who love you. At least we never hit you.’

  But Mrs Maritza Michnik’s face, contorted with righteous rage, was already sliding into darkness as the car reversed into the black night, her abuse fading away.

  ‘And don’t think you can come back,’ she was shouting at Sonja. ‘You can never come back. You…’

  But they were already fleeing out of that tired town, along the empty and lonely road heading toward Hobart, driving into the forest that the frost was already riming that clear, chill night. Sonja wiped the side window with her hand, and the moment before it misted back over she was reassured to see precisely nothing in the blackness to her side.

  Inside the immensity of her father’s bluey coat Sonja huddled upon the FJ’s front seat, next to Bojan, his expressionless face illuminated in the dull nicotine glow of the speedo, hers cast in darkness. Sonja knew not where they were bound, only that it was away from the Michniks, that they were in flight, and that it was through the night and that was enough: any more might lead back to the reality of tomorrow, and in her eight years she had learned that tomorrow only ever brought worse things.

  She looked up beyond the coat’s coarse black wool flaps at the vast eucalypts that formed illuminated columns on all sides of the car, left, right, and to the front, rushing at her and Bojan. Through the gaps in those advancing trees she could make out the moon and stars. Where it led, this threatening and frightening corridor, to her past or to her future, she did not know. The trees, of course, gave no answer, did not call back to her, did not bring forth phantom voices that might somehow explain it all. They were only a question. But they would not go away.

  After some time that seemed a very long time to Sonja, she looked away from the trees and up at her father. He lifted a hand from the steering wheel and knuckled his gritty eyes forcing them to focus better upon the dark empty road along which they travelled.

  ‘I am not going back, am I, Artie?’ she asked.

  Bojan said nothing. Sonja continued to push.

  ‘I can live with you now? In a home, our home?’

  Bojan looked down at her, his eyes like discarded, rusty dog spikes, and looked troubled, for the truth was otherwise.

  ‘I’m sorry, Sonja,’ he said. He drew breath, and when he next spoke the tone of his voice had grown bleak. ‘You know it is not possible. I must work at the hydro camp in the mountains and you … you must live elsewhere.’

  Again Sonja looked up at the trees flying away from her, pierced and divided by the FJ’s onward journey. She no longer knew if she and Bojan were in flight from the trees or the trees in flight from them. Then Sonja was struck by the thought that perhaps it was not the FJ moving at all, but rather the forest, pouring like a river around the boulder of the car.

  At first this thought comforted her, then frightened her, for to stay with her father forever was her most heart-felt desire, but all that stood between their present serenity and the trees washing them away into oblivion was her father’s will and she did not know if that was strong enough to withstand such a forest and still hold them together.

  Bojan looked down again to see Sonja asleep, her damp head on his lap. He drove on further into the forest, until the car spluttered and coughed a few times, then cut out completely, and he realised that the FJ had run out of petrol. Cursing inwardly, he rolled the car to a stop on the side of the road. With the action of one who works with their body and hands and knows how to move with gentle yet deft and strong purpose, he very slowly slid his legs out from under Sonja. He took his jumper off, rolled it up, carefully lifted Sonja’s head, put the jumper as a pillow under her, and then rearranged the bluey coat over Sonja’s body as a blanket.

  He closed the front door and stood in only his shirt and pants in the crackling cold of that night upon a forlorn roadside in a forest. He felt the brown gravel beneath his shoes, sensed with trembling flesh the cold rising up from the blasted earth of that roadside cutting, looked up at the vast southern night sky forever so slowly moving.

  Then foetally curled he found strange sleep shivering on the FJ’s back seat, curious and awestruck that such a fragile moment of serenity might exist at such a place at such a time.

  Chapter 18

  1959

  WHERE THE MORNING that was seeping into the FJ was leading, neither Bojan nor Sonja could know.

  Bojan knuckled his eyes and remembering the unfortunate fact of being out of petrol, swore in Italian rather than profane his native tongue. Sitting up, he saw that Sonja was still asleep on the front seat.

  After she woke they hitched a lift with a passing log truck to the nearest town. The log-truck driver spoke plenty and Bojan nodded and smiled and swore often enough that the driver felt relaxed.

  The log-truck driver’s stories mostly came back to the day his son, who was working in a skidder on the same logging gang, was squashed beneath a big tree.

  ‘It’s not the windy days to be frightened of,’ he said. ‘It’s the quiet days after the storm. When the tree’s been weakening through the storm and the night after and then it dries. That’s when them big bloody branches drop like rain, that’s when stags fall, that’s when no-one should go anywhere near those rotten big bastards. Such a beautiful day when Kenny went, such a day, such a grand day to die.

  ‘Mum took it bad, real bad. I’m alright. Have to be. Got over it, I have, I say to myself, I have to.’ He stopped, put a cigarette in his mouth, pushed the truck’s lighter in.

  ‘But Mum, no Mum never did.’

  The driver never looked across at them, only down that road, as though perhaps beyond the road in the forest there might lurk ghosts that were too terrifying to acknowledge.

  ‘No,’ he said, ‘Mum never could.’

  Once they had the FJ back on the road they drove through to Hobart in heavier and heavier rain that was blowing in with a fresh westerly front. Sonja was silent, Bojan, for once, out of guilt and sadness, uncharacteristically talkative, his tone determinedly upbeat.

  ‘Don’t worry about nothing, Sonja,’ he said. ‘A few months and I find a job in Hobart, I leave the hydro camp, find a place for us, and we live together.’

  Sonja said nothing.

  ‘Until then you go live with Picottis, they look after you good.’

  Sonja said nothing.

  ‘I talk to Bertie, he good fella, he make sure nothing happen to you. No religion either. What you say, eh?’

  ‘Will they take me to my first communion?’

  Bojan looked at his daughter. He leered conspiratorially, hoping to evoke the same mocking contempt from Sonja. But she did not smile back.

  ‘Eh!’ he said, still smiling. ‘Bloody communion—what good is that?’ But she was serious. He stopped smiling. ‘Eh—you get to go to better things.’

  ‘Artie—my dress—my dress—I want to wear my communion dress.’

  ‘I buy new dress, Sonja, a bloody beautiful bloody new dress.’

  ‘But, Artie, can’t we go together to my first communion?
Like other families?’

  Bojan nervously lighted a cigarette with a fuel lighter, puffed, took the cigarette out of his mouth and flicked what little ash there was out the window. He didn’t know what to say in reply. Instead of looking at Sonja as he had done before, he ran his hand through his hair and kept his eyes resolutely fixed on the road ahead. She too looked ahead. Bojan slipped a furtive sideways glance at Sonja, and with a small gesture of great torment, put the cigarette back between his lips, then almost immediately took it out again.

  ‘Sonja … I … Jesus Christ…’

  ‘My communion,’ Sonja said. ‘You come and watch me.’

  Bojan tried to speak, but finding no proper words put the cigarette back into his mouth. They both continued looking out past the swishing arcs cut into the windscreen by the wipers. A cat ran out in front of the car. Bojan swerved to miss it, but failed. The car jolted slightly and there was a dull thud. Bojan’s eyes flicked up to the rear-view mirror. He took the cigarette from his mouth, shook his head.

  ‘Did we miss him?’ Sonja asked.

  ‘No,’ Bojan said dully. ‘Stupid bloody cat.’

  Smoke fell out of his mouth in blue rolls. Sonja felt scared. She said, ‘Mrs Michnik says that if I pray to God he will make things alright. If I pray the cat will be alright.’ With a rising note of panic and fear in her voice, she said, ‘That’s right isn’t it, Artie? If you pray, Artie, if you pray it’s alright.’

  ‘No,’ Bojan said. ‘It’s dead, don’t you see. Dead.’

  In his anguish Bojan brought his right hand across his forehead and wiped it down his face, squeezing his hollow cheeks together as he did so. And he turned and looked at her, with a look of a suffering so great that the child instinctively recoiled from it and leant back into the door.