Joan Makes History (4 page)
There were no real uncles in my childhood, to ask me what I was going to be when I grew up, and give me threepences. But there was Uncle Laszlo from the flat downstairs, who was not a real uncle but who did these things, and there were his many sisters, who spent long hours with my mother in the kitchen producing slippery food in crockery pots. Uncle Laszlo was fond of asking me what I was going to be, never tiring of my answer and never failing in his response.
I will make history,
I told Uncle Laszlo each time, and each time he and Father would laugh and slap their thighs, and exclaim
Good luck on you, then, Joan,
trying to sound like the men they heard on the streets. Then the many sisters of Laszlo would come from the kitchen to find out what so much mirth and thigh-slapping was all about, and the whole thing would be translated for them so they could all laugh too, and exclaim in foreign syllables, and remind themselves they had come to a country nude of any history to speak of, so little Joan had the right idea, planning to make some.
No history is to be made in the dull wastes of childhood. I spent mine set apart from all the others in the playground, being ashamed of the thick dark bread made by my mother, of which my sandwiches were constructed, and the olives in my lunch-box,
and the reek of garlic from our kitchen. I was embarrassed too, by the way my skin was always brown, even in winter: all the other girls were pale puddings of people who made sure sunlight never darkened their skins, and they would not have wanted to be me.
Even more than all this, I was shamed by my foreign gold-toothed mother, with her smiling helpless inability to make herself understood, so that I had to stand twisting one foot behind the other, mulishly translating for her at the butcher's and the greengrocer's, and having those large red-fisted men shouting at me as if I, too, was stupid and foreign.
My poor bemused mother was baffled by most things in this country, where the birds frightened her with their mirth, and the sun threatened to fry her where she stood. The shapeless folk of this land did not bother to conceal that they thought she must be an imbecile not to be able to say
Fine weather for ducks
when they said
Wet enough for you?
as they wrapped a parcel of best neck on the marble counter, while the savage antipodean rain poured down outside the shop. She was baffled, and did not ask her stranger daughter much, because her daughter was impatient at her own clumsiness with the language they shared. She had not grown into a slant-eyed, catlike smooth young girl, such as the mother had been back in the suave old country, but was becoming a tall, loud, bold-eyed girl who laughed too loudly and too knowingly.
Even my father, although able at least to exchange an approximation of those phrases with the other fathers, held his cigarette in a way none of them did, and could not be relied on to react in the proper way to small remarks on the weather or the price of wool (being likely, to my humiliation, to embark on a long
guttural speech about the climates of nations and the price of freedom): even he could not make me feel anything but an alien. How lucky they were, Phyllis and Gladys and all the rest, whose fathers knew how to get the fire going at a picnic, and could deal with a puncture on their bikes without, as my father did, becoming flushed and manic, turning the nuts the wrong way!
Those lucky girls went home to solid houses with front lawns, not muddled buildings cut up into many small flats. There they did their homework at one end of the worn table in the kitchen, licking the tips of their pencils until their tongues were purple, labouring over arithmetic and parsing. At the other end of the table their mother peeled potatoes comfortably, and out on the verandah their father sat in his singlet with a long glass of beer perspiring in his hand. Those fathers were made uneasy by all the foreign philosophising of my father, and despised such incompetence with fires and nuts, and were wary of so much accent, that meant you could never be a hundred per cent sure the bloke was not having a bit of a go at you, with his long words. So they mocked me, all those classmates, taunting me in the playground for the way my father was bald as well as foreign, and the way my mother looked funny with a scarf on her head. Was she bald as well, they wanted to know?
When we arrived at a certain age, all those tidy girls with their neat sultana sandwiches put out large matronly busts under their tunics. I, still as flat of chest as a wall, watched and hankered after them with hankies down my own front. I loved their melting flesh when I saw them changing after rounders: I could barely resist running a palm over those rolls of biscuit-coloured flesh above their petticoat elastic, and I longed to touch the gleaming shoulders under the straps that cut into them.
They were shy, though, these flawless women, and their mouths became prim as they dressed in the chilly change room. They turned away from me and put their elbows up like bats to do up their blouses at the back, or writhed under their robes, becoming red in the face, and did not emerge from underneath until they were fully dressed, so I missed the moistness of thighs where suspenders snapped against soft hairless flesh, and the shadows between breast and underarm.
I joked and cavorted, clowning at my own expense, because to make them laugh would have been a kind of acceptance, but their faces never showed much besides distaste. I even learned rounders to win their approval, and enjoyed the galloping, and the yelling, and although I found the game absurd, ridiculous, there was a pleasure in belting away at the ball, and in seeing those smug faces distort and go crooked when, by accident of course, I struck their smooth shins with my bat. In my desire to please, and in a sort of rage of contempt, I even ran fiercely around the oval, pretending I cared enough about their absurd game to want to train for it, like some silly seal.
When that failed too, I tried to make a good story out of it all.
My grandmother was a vampire,
I told them.
She was from Transylvania, where all the vampires come from.
This was the truth, for my long-dead grandmother really had lived in Transylvania, although on the tinted picture we had of the place, it seemed to be grass and sky like anywhere else. Because it was the truth, I had to try to make it more interesting, so I looked shifty, askance, as if I was inventing this tale which was in fact the truth. The girls became confused then, and fell to thinking with satisfaction about their own grandmothers from Dural or Woy Woy, who
knitted matinee jackets and bootees, and had nothing foreign or peculiar about them.
As my youth progressed, Uncle Laszlo and Father spent longer and longer talking gravely in the old language, and there seemed more and more for them to be grave about. Out on the streets, Mother began to be the victim of scowls and things muttered behind hands. In the playground the girls explained with satisfaction that they could not speak to me any more because I was a
filthy Hun,
and Australians were at war with
filthy Huns.
The more I tried to explain, with my feeble grasp of geography, that being from Transylvania was not the same as being a
filthy Hun,
the more their faces closed against me.
Mother wept one night: Father had come home pale, his baldness leaving his face exposed under the blast of emotion, and spread out a piece of paper on the table where the light rained down on it. With a finger under the words, he read, so loudly it made my ears hurt:
To Whom All Persons Shall Come.
I could see Mother was already lost, but Father's moving finger moved on:
Am desirous of abandoning and renouncing the use of the name Victor Radulescu.
His finger shook, as his voice did, as he caressed the sounds of his own name:
I hereby absolutely renounce and abandon the said name of Victor Radulescu.
Then, paler than ever, with the points of his cheekbones making the skin of his face tight, he used his thick-nibbed fountain pen to cross out
Joan Radulescu
in all my books and replace it with
Joan Redman.
Finally he brought out the
Atlas of Australia
over which he pored from time to time, memorising Australian towns and rivers.
Here, Joan,
he said.
We are loyal Australians, and must put the map right.
From his briefcase he took out a newspaper and peered at it, then at the map of South Australia, scratching out
and rewriting:
Hahndorf
into
Ambleside, Blumberg
into
Birdwood, Rosenthal
into
Rosedale.
When he had finished, the colour had returned to his face.
There, Joan. No one can accuse us now.
Those Abercrombies and Smiths were not fooled, though, by Miss Gibbs crossing out
Joan Radulescu
in the roll book and inking in
Joan Redman. It is not your real name,
they pointed out at wearisome length in the playground.
It can never really be your real name.
As we all grew older, and the others grew more and more womanly of form, they gathered in clusters and whispered about their boys and their prospects and their possessions. They all wanted the same kinds of prospects and possessions, and even wanted the same boy, the son of a doctor, who was a particularly good prospect. I had seen this boy, who seemed to me no kind of prospect at all, but a lad overextended and puny of limb like a potato sprouting in the dark.
They clustered and giggled, those silly girls, and pretended to each other that their stockings and frocks mattered to them for their own sakes, and that the hours they spent with mirrors, trying their hair parting on the other side, or a pair of combs or a daring red ribbon, were for themselves alone. They could not admit that they were biding their time and preparing themselves for their dream. But what a secondhand dream theirs was! It was to marry a prospect, to be the colourless wife of an ambition, to wash the socks and underpants of a destiny.
None of them would ever burst into any flame more dramatic than their one day in white. Even then, their faces would be cross with anxiety until afterwards, when the confetti would catch in their eyelashes and they would kindle for a few moments, so the photographs would catch them laughing into the teeth of
their grooms. But they would not blaze later that night in the honeymoon suite at the Royal with their large knuckled boy: he might have had prospects, but he would have no more idea of a good time in passion than would a silly dog humping on your leg.
Such were my uncharitable scathing thoughts on the subject of these women I could never resemble, and whom I envied while I despised. I knew things would always be very different for me: I knew I wished not to marry history, but to make it.
I took consolation in planning many histories for myself, each one larger than the last.
I will be a great writer,
I told myself, staring at a cloud in a soulful sort of way. Or
I will be Prime Minister,
and I thought with pleasure of how the girls would not sniff in that dismissive way then, but admire me at last. Unlike these feeble creatures I was forced to spend my days with, I was not blind to the beckoning finger of history, or deaf to the clarion calls of destiny. I wished to make the earth shiver on its axis with some large action or other, whose precise shape would be revealed to me in due course.
I, Joan, longed to make my mark. How to make it I did not know, but I tried: something in me drove me on to make something that had not been made before, and leave something to show where I had been. I made my mark in secret on the roofs of the caves that had not been singled out by the men as theirs: I would slip away from the shrill women with their digging sticks and daub with ochre, rubbing and smearing, trying to say something on a bit of flat rock.
Those silly women! They knew that I, Joan, was set apart from them: they knew out of the corners of their eyes when I went, and when I returned, and the children spied on me, so there was no concealing what I was doing. What tomfoolery, what a silly waste of time it seemed to them, when there were roots to dig, and seeds to grind, and hilarity to share under a tree!
The women did not envy me or admire me for wanting to mess about with bits of coloured mud, but thought that I was to be pitied for my unexpected ideas. Warra was the destiny that others thought was awaiting me: Warra by my side, his children coming out of my body, my hands wrapping his bones in bark at the end. I knew Warra too well already: my betrothed was a dull young man who listened hard to the uncles and was a fine
person. Stolid Warra, who never lost patience with the children when they became tiresome about things! Amiable Warra, never less than intelligently deferential, even to old Kulurra who had a tendency to dribble and dodder by afternoon: good, kind Warra, for whom I was envied by those mild gigglers with their blameless hearts! Warra would be my man, would be joined flesh of my flesh when I was of age, Warra's hands would finger my skin in the nights, Warra would exclaim as he shot and pulsed into me.
But although he was such a worthy and had eyes for no one but me, Warra was not a person who made me laugh. Although no one else doubted my future, I did: a restlessness, the same itch that drove me to dab with ochre in caves, told me that I must have a larger destiny than Warra, digging sticks and children. Somewhere another destiny waited its moment.
So I waited for life to blossom, and at last it did. A vessel careened into the thunderous beach by the lagoon, a long vessel that threatened to tip at every swell of the sea behind it, and spill the three strangers out into the cold Wattamolla water. The vessel came to rest at last in the shallows where the lagoon ran into the surf, and I saw that my chance had come.
There were three strangers: a tall one, a short puny one, and a boy in the back of the boat, so young as to be beardless. But it was the tall one I watched: he was the first ashore, plainly the leader. He was bulky in the coverings that clung to his body and thick in the legs and trunk. His skin was a nasty clay colour, and his hair was as straight as grass, and hung down over his forehead in a way that made him look low of brow. He was a dreadful man to look at, and he set the other girls giggling behind their hands so their breasts shook, and even the older women stared and tittered as he tried to stride from his boat, and stumbled on
a wave so he nearly fell. He was a tall man, but a little weak of ankle, it could be seen, and perhaps that unnatural hair weakened him, for he tottered for a moment in the wash as if his balance was gone.
Here was a man from an unknown world, where living men looked the colour of the dead, a man to be pitied for his shabby skin and his clumsiness with a wave, but he would be the vehicle whereby I, Joan, would make history, although I could not say yet exactly what form that history would take.
The uncles walked slowly down the beach towards the strangers, but to my indignation the women chivvied us girls up the beach towards the lagoon, where we could see nothing, and hear only the muted roar and hiss of the waves.
The girls snickered and screeched and became shrill and birdlike on the subject of what the tall one was hiding under his coverings. Would it be pale like a witchetty grub, drooping out of a nest of lifeless strands like those on his head? Or was it all different under the coverings, as brown as any other man's? They became incoherent, trying to imagine how it would be to have such a man lie on top of you and somehow extract his grub from its coverings, how it might be to see that earthy flesh close up, and what kind of slippery strangeness that lank hair might be.
I did not titter, but sat hugging my knees and trying to shut out the silliness of the girls so I could plan something magnificent, and at last we all became tired of the lagoon and the gigglers ran out of lewd imaginings. Finally the older women levered themselves up off the grass one by one and wandered as if absent-mindedly back down towards the beach. We followed quietly, in case the women remembered and sent us back again away from the fun.
If I had not been different, a cut above those other flighty girls, I too would have squealed and pointed and rocked all over again with laughing at what we saw on the beach. But I, in all my times and places, have been different, and was concerned not with entertainment, but with planning the use to which I would put the strangers.
And what were they doing? The tall one had a shiny thing in his hands that glittered in the sun, and had reassured our cautious men folk of his friendly intentions by cutting their beards and hair. The men sat gravely along the dune waiting their turn, and were becoming huge of eye, seeing their familiar friends transforming before their eyes into bald strangers.
The tall man did not look around, not for the longest time, although his small companion and the boy with his pale mouth ajar could not seem to stop staring at us girls. The small one spoke in a voice strangled by something, as if a skein of lust was tangled in his throat, and he could not keep his eyes off our breasts in the sun, for all the world as if he had never before seen a breast in sunlight. He spoke, and the lad opened his mouth wider in a laugh that showed brown and broken teeth, and that made the tall one straighten up from snipping the curls of an uncle. When the tall one replied to the short one, he was abashed, and even the lad closed his mouth on his bad teeth. The sun seemed to fade for a moment as solemnity hung over all of us. The tall one bent again to the uncle on his dune, but there were few curls left to snip on that head now, and it was time for the next.
Who was the next man sitting along the dune fingering the hair on his head? It was none other than Warra my betrothed, standing to receive the silver thing on his hair, standing nearly
as tall as the stranger, though not as wide. Knowing him as I did, I saw that Warra was afraid, although so many brave uncles had survived the cutting, and he hid his fear behind a scowl that took the smile from the face of the stranger, who glanced around as if uncertain, wobbling again on his weak ankles in the face of such a frown.
Then it was that I made history, bounding down from my dune, sand spurting between my toes, until I stood before him, and held out my own curls. He watched as if unsure what I meant, but I knew he was not stupid, but merely being cautious. At last he did what I wanted: I stood so close I could snuff up nosefuls of his musty smell, and he snipped the curls from my head one by one.
He stood over me snipping until there was little left to snip, while the uncles watched gravely as if waiting for me to turn into a goanna, or sprout a penis from my ear, and Warra's frown wore itself so deeply into his face it seemed like a crease in a rockfold. He shifted from foot to unhappy foot until the sand was weary: I knew he itched to push me away from where I stood so close and bold to the man of the coloured eyes. When the snipping was over, and the women had wearied of their exclamations and screeches at the sight of my hair falling around my feet, it was time for me to make more history.
They gasped, even that ugly boy gasped, for I took the silver thing from the hand of the tall one, feeling fire between our two fleshes, and held between my unthinkably bold fingers a strand of the limp hair on his head. The sun reeled in its place and the uncles got to their feet on the dune behind me, but the tall man obligingly bent his head down so I could have chewed on his large nose.
The thing did not work in my hands at first, and after a few false starts he took my hand in his to show me how it could be made to cut. Then, amid the cries and sighs, the clucking tongues and snorts and giggles of the uncles, aunts, sisters, brothers and Warra, I snipped at the hair of the stranger until there were patches on his head where the pink scalp showed through. Then he ran a hand over his head, revealed now to be more or less the shape of all other heads, and straightened up: he was still tall, but not as imposing in the sun now that his hair lay around his feet. I had taken his thing in my own hand, turned it against him, and stolen a little of his power.
There it was, history made on a dune. But my moment was brief: I had only just begun to relish it when Warra cut it short. There he is, striding between the pale stranger and the woman who had been so bold, and he is snatching from between them the shining thing, and flinging it with his powerful spear-throwing arm far into the deep roiling waters of the Wattamolla.
There was a sigh then like the first breath of a storm through treetops, and all of us stood blankly. The tall one stood like a plucked bird, his large hands empty by his sides, and I stood feeling gooseflesh on my skin. Even Warra was abashed after his moment of glory, and stood as ungainly as a few snapped sticks.
It was the ugly boy who moved first to mutter something slyly to the small one. He nodded and spoke to the tall one, who sighed and spoke back gloomily. The sound of his voice made Warra bold again, and he seized me by the shoulderâit would have been by the hair if there had been enough left on my headâand forced me away from the strangers. I could manage only one backward glance before he grasped my chin and turned my head away: I struggled, as any woman of destiny would struggle
against being thrown off the stage of history, but I knew Warra would always be too strong for me. I shrieked farewell to the witnesses of my moment, but heard no answer, only the unsteady roar of waves against sand, and the whistle of wind in dry dune grass.