Metro Winds (9 page)

If he was honest, it was his father he missed most, that quiet presence. You never got the feeling he was just waiting for you to finish talking so he could offer advice or an opinion. In fact, he said very little and seldom offered solutions or even suggestions. Mostly he asked mild questions and listened. It seemed little enough, and yet at one time or another practically every one of the neighbours had come to him for advice. People would invariably go away feeling less angry, less desperate, or just plain cheerful. Daniel had consciously modelled himself on his father. He had striven to be patient, gentle, courteous and honest. He was not and never would be his father, yet he believed that he had grown into a man his father would have at least respected.

How many times had he imagined telling his father about seeing the smoke and then the overturned silver Mercedes crumpled against the stand of eucalypts? How many times had he described kneeling beside the big foreigner in his supple steel-dust suit and the strange conversation that followed? The gradual realisation the man was going to die. In his imaginings, as in life, Daniel's father never once interrupted his tale. Nor, when Daniel stopped, had he offered opinions or advice.

Yet Daniel had come to understand he must go to Paris. And so he had flown across the world, violating time. Was it possible to return after coming so far, he suddenly wondered. The thought was like a kidney punch and he stumbled mentally into a vivid memory of the way the dying man's eyes had grown more and more pale.

‘It was so hard to trust anyone back then,' the man had said. ‘You never knew who would repeat your words, or how they might be used. You could never be high enough to feel safe. That was what made it so extraordinary, that she trusted me. She told me it was because I had offered her an ultimate truth. I do not think you can imagine how rare truth was in that time. I answered that truth was what I wanted from her and she laughed at me. She knew it was a lie. All I told her were lies, but she said that when we met again, she would show me the truth I had shown to her.

‘You must go in my place and tell her she was right when she said I would need her . . .' He stifled a groan.

There had been something almost military in that iron control, Daniel thought. The man would have been in considerable pain, the ambulance people had told him after they came, explicit because he was a stranger to the dead man. It was a wonder he had been able to talk at all. Even if they had arrived in time, they could not have saved him, they said, except to administer a mind-obliterating dose of morphine, a little death to ease the bigger death that was looming.

It was the police, when he gave his report several days later, who told him the man's name was Tibor Esterhazy and that he was Hungarian and eighty-five.

Daniel could hardly credit it. He would have taken him for sixty-five at most. The man had been a permanent resident in Australia for over fifty years, and had not once left since his arrival. He had probably been a dissident, given the date of his arrival, a political exile, or so one of the younger police had observed.

Later that same night it had occurred to Daniel that if the man had made an appointment to meet the woman when they had been in Paris, that agreement had to have been made more than fifty years ago; the man would only have been thirty-five. That was the moment when it struck him that the woman might be dead. After all, if she had been thirty when the meeting had been agreed to, she would be eighty now.

The following week, when he had gone into town to sign his deposition, a policeman told him of the ticket found in the man's coat. The destination was Paris, and the date of departure was July 5, two days before the date upon which the dead man had claimed he was to meet the woman. The ticket was proof that his story had not been delirium.

He had asked the man if the woman he was to meet was German too, assuming that was the man's nationality, but instead of answering, the man closed his eyes and died. It seemed to Daniel that he had witnessed that death a thousand times since it happened. It had affected him profoundly, though he did not truly grieve for the dead man. It was the fact that the man had been a stranger, yet witnessing his death had felt so intimate. Perhaps that was why he contacted the police to find out when and where the funeral would take place, wondering if a friend or acquaintance would attend to whom he might confide the dead man's last wish. But no one came other than a policeman who was there for the same reason. The policeman told him the man had left money enough for his funeral. The remainder of his property was bequeathed to a charity that cared for children. It seemed that he had not worked at all, having come to Australia with a collection of antique family jewellery he had sold, investing and living off the proceeds.

‘It seems impossible that a man could have lived so long without making any sort of connections,' Daniel had murmured.

‘You would be surprised how many people live that way,' the policeman had responded.

It was as he stood and watched the earth shovelled onto the coffin that Daniel had pictured a woman coming to a café to sit and wait for a man who would never arrive. In the imagining, she was very frail, a female version of his father, emanating patience and gentleness. She was a woman who you could see would wait out the day, hope slowly fading, until she understood that the man she was expecting would not come.

Another thing that the dying man had muttered floated though his mind. ‘There is no greater intimacy than truth, boy. Remember that.'

He woke to broad daylight and showered again, thinking of Mick, who was the stocky Irish owner of the small boxing gym which Daniel had joined when he was fifteen. His father had not understood that the attraction was not the violence or the fact that one man triumphed over another. Daniel had liked the gallantry of a sport where two men could drink and slap one another on the back between bouts. Mick symbolised all that was best about boxing, and their relationship, which had begun with respect and admiration, had become, though the word would never be spoken between them, love. Daniel knew he had disappointed Mick when he decided not to go professional, and it was love for Mick that had kept him sparring with young newcomers, trying to teach aggressive young cocks the need to be smart fighters rather than street sluggers. But few of them had the deep gallantry that Daniel considered to be the secret of greatness.

After Daniel's parents died, Mick tried to talk him into working for the gym, but Daniel refused and started drifting from one seasonal job to the next and from property to property. He hadn't seen much of Mick the last couple of years, but he had told the older man of his decision to go to Paris, and why, and asked if he would take care of his quarter horse, Snowy.

‘It's like . . . like I picked up a stone when that man died, Mick, and I have to find the place to put it down,' he'd said.

‘It's a deep thing to watch a person die,' Mick had murmured, a stern, distant look in his brown eyes. And Daniel had remembered that once, earlier in Mick's career, one of his fighters had died in the ring from a ruptured aneurism. Mick still sent Christmas cards to the widow, though twenty years had passed.

‘How will you know who she is?' Mick had asked in the car, having insisted on driving Daniel to the airport.

‘She'll be alone and she'll be looking for someone.'

‘She might not be alone,' Mick had said. ‘And everyone is looking for someone.'

Prophetic words, Daniel thought, walking through the streets, again struck by the age of the city.

Many of the buildings had obviously been sandblasted or repainted in recent times, and though most buildings were crumbling at the edges and grey with filth, on every street there was at least one building undergoing a facelift surrounded by a carapace of scaffolding and billowing plastic. He was startled when asphalt suddenly gave way to smooth, oyster-grey cobbles, but he made no effort to orientate himself using the map. He was beginning to become aware of a flow along the streets, like a hidden current.

He turned a corner and collided with a couple kissing languidly. They seemed oblivious to the impact. You didn't see kissing like that back home, other than at the movies. Young people kissed in the street, but with defiant self-consciousness rather than passion. Not that Daniel knew too much about kissing or passion. He had kissed exactly three women in his life, and one of them had been a whore who had taken pity on his mortification over his youthful inadequacy.

The other boys had not believed his tale, claiming that prostitutes never kiss. Even now he did not know what to make of the fact that a prostitute had broken what seemed to be some sort of cardinal rule and kissed him, or what he had done to deserve it.

He passed through a square and there was a group of black men talking, dressed in expensive suits. They began laughing, flashing confident white teeth, and Daniel found himself wondering what it would be like at home if the Aboriginal men who drifted into town to drink and socialise in the park or the malls dressed in suits like that. There was something so crushed and battered about the old derelicts you saw drinking in the streets, no matter how aggressive or strident they might be about native title and the disputes it had caused in some Aboriginal communities.

Daniel walked for hours, his mind flicking back and forth between life on his parents' farm and his current errand, as if it was trying to weave a tapestry connecting the two. It was only when he entered a street that showed him the sun low in the sky that he looked for his watch and realised he had left it in his room. Twice he asked the time of passersby before someone lifted a wrist to show him their watch face.

It was just past five, so Daniel reached for his map. It was gone; he must have dropped it. Fortunately he had noticed maps under glass at bus stops and busy intersections, but it was six o'clock before he found one that was readable and traced out a path from where he was to Grey Street, near the Sacré-Coeur Basilica. The sky had clouded over, and it seemed as if dusk would come sooner than seven. He walked swiftly, thinking there was something primitive about arranging a meeting at dusk.

The roads had grown busier than before, and people walked purposefully, their faces abstracted by end-of-day thoughts. Daniel found that no matter which way he walked or which side of the pavement he chose, he was moving against the flow of human traffic. Several times he had to step into a doorway to let a group of people pass before he could continue.

When he found that one of the doorways belonged to a small café, he realised he had not eaten for the entire day, though he felt no hunger.

He came to a great square pool of water in a mall. Several mechanical devices were spitting, stirring, ploughing or slashing the water.

‘You see that one?' a woman told another woman in English. ‘I call it the jealousy machine. See how stupidly it threshes at the water; how ferociously it moves. Yet it goes nowhere.'

The words provoked the memory of a fight Daniel had seen between two Murri men in a camp far from towns and police. He had met them on walkabout during a boundary ride and had been invited to join them. The men had begun by talking but had ended up almost killing one another over a woman they both wanted. They had fought with a ferocity that Daniel had never witnessed between two white men, in the boxing ring or out of it. There had been no sense of display or competition. They had fought almost silently and for nothing, since the woman had chosen another man.

A derelict tapped at his arm, startling him into the present, and he gave the old man the coins in his pocket. His feet were burning and he was thinking he would have to find another illuminated map when he saw a metal sign that read Rue de Gris.

As he entered the street, he noticed two men standing on the corner watching him. Both wore their hair cut so short he could see their scalps shining pinkly through the black stubble and one had HATE tattooed on his upper arm. He nodded to Daniel, a half smile curving thin, soft-looking lips, as if they shared a secret. Daniel's neck prickled as he passed the pair, and he had the sudden absurd notion that they were watching to see where he went.