The Prosperous Thief (44 page)

As he and Laura headed off in a hire car to the volcano park headquarters, he told her about the lava fountain he had seen on a previous visit, a huge jet of brilliant fire spurting a couple of hundred metres into the night sky.At its core was a blazing orange-red radiance framed by a cloud of darker, cooler fragments; like a vision from Blake, he said. He shaped its brilliant fall, he told of the flying globules of molten fire spitting onto the blackening earth and collecting in a flow down the slopes.

She listened mesmerised, as if in the presence of the volcano itself. ‘The path we walk is both beautiful and dangerous,’ she said finally.

Again she caught him up short. It was one or other in his sort of life: beauty or danger. In fact his entire life was rent by polar opposites: real Laura or imagined Laura, ideal fantasies or unpredictable reality, and given his grandfather had been silent since Laura’s arrival, his grandfather’s demands or Laura Lewin. He tried to understand as she did: beauty
and
danger, but it was an unnerving experience, like free-falling without a parachute, and he was quick to return to familiar territory.

‘I’m afraid you’ll see no lava fountains this trip.’

‘No dangers at all?’ Laura asked.

‘Different dangers,’ he said as he turned into the car park.

• • •

An hour later they are flying over Kilauea towards a remote area of the park where the current activity is occurring.

‘Pele’s been a busy girl since you were last here,’ the pilot, an old acquaintance of Raphe’s, says. ‘New vents, new flows, new breakouts. Nothing too explosive, more her subtle, subversive side.’

Raphe tells Laura about Pele, the volcano goddess who lives beneath Kilauea.‘We’ll see the exact site, her home and hearth so to speak, tomorrow at the Halemaumau crater,’ he says. ‘She’s one tough and angry gal this one. Hasn’t had a moment’s rest since 1983 when the volcano started erupting.’

He has always liked the stories of Pele, the uncompromising, high-spirited woman who every now and then wakes up and bursts out of her home. Pele the volcano goddess who caused the volcanic eruptions on the ocean floor which formed the Hawaiian islands in the first place, and ever since has exacted a Faustian price. Pele gave Hawaii life, but in one of the most volatile places in the world, she can also take it away. It’s a type of justice, Raphe is now thinking as he looks at the glorious panorama below. A type of justice.

The first glimpse of Kilauea is awesome. All those years ago when he first came here, he had expected a symmetrical, cone-shaped mountain with its peak neatly chiselled off, a puff of smoke at the top plus a bit of fire if he were lucky. But Kilauea is a vast volcanic landscape of multiple craters and solid black lava flows which actually form the hills and plateaus of the south-east section of the island.

‘It’s not human-sized,’ Laura is saying. ‘It makes you want to burst out of your skin.’

Raphe smiles in spite of himself. When he least expects it, and often when he least wants it, she shows herself as not so different from him.

He tells her about the lava tubes which flow like giant arteries a few metres beneath the earth, and points to a brilliant pool of liquid fire where the roof of the main tube has collapsed. Laura is transfixed, the great gaping orange pool beneath the black blisters of cold
pahoehoe
lava.

Raphe, too, is looking.‘This always reminds me of a crematorium,’ he says.

Her response is sharp. ‘Don’t bring your Holocaust here.’ And quieter,‘I want to see this place as it is.’

Immediately his fury rises. Who is she to be angry? Who is she to tell him what to do? For unlike her he doesn’t have the luxury of choice when and where to think of the Holocaust, no choice at all since he found out about her father and his grandfather, no choice since he learned justice doesn’t have a use-by date. Indeed if not for her father, the haunting of his entire life might never have occurred. And he’s back in his familiar groove, even here flying over Kilauea he’s counting out his wrongs. And if he were to avenge Martin Lewin’s murder, avenge it in this place – ‘She slipped,’ he would tell the authorities.‘Didn’t listen to my warnings.’ – would he feel any better? Would he feel liberated? Righteous? Relieved? Would he feel he had done the right thing? As he gazes at the terrors of this landscape, he senses more strongly than ever the two people who comprise him. His Martin side might for the first time be calmed if Laura were made to pay for her father’s sins, but the Raphe side would be horrified. And again the familiar resentment, again the desire to live his life without the righteous clamouring of the dead.

They are flying over the main tube towards the sea where the lava empties in a furious cloud of white steam and a scattering of rock. Raphe shakes off his thoughts. He wants today off. He’s flying over his favourite volcano and he wants it simple, just for today.

‘That’s much bigger than when I was last here,’ Raphe now says, referring to the lava bench formed where the molten lava discharges into the sea.

Although not as big as it was, according to the pilot.A month or so earlier a parcel of the cliff had broken off and disappeared into the ocean.

‘I wouldn’t want to be standing on that,’ says Laura. And yet that’s exactly what Raphe is imagining. Laura Lewin standing on the lava bench, and suddenly it breaks off and she disappears into the turbulence.

‘What’s wrong?’ Her hand is on his arm, she’s staring into his face.‘I wouldn’t return to those thoughts,’ she says.‘They’re clearly not good for you.’

The helicopter is heading inland again towards Kupaianaha shield, the second eruption site but quiet now for many years.

‘It’s like huge billowing black blisters,’ Laura says of the smooth bulges of cold
pahoehoe
lava in the treeless landscape. ‘And a sense of devastation and creation all at the same time.’

Raphe hears the wonder in her voice. It is exactly how he feels. Life and destruction side by side, and an energy that swells and enters you like a magical, life-giving elixir. He is always seized by the marvel that is this place.

And perhaps that might explain the mood of the evening.You simply cannot gaze at a volcano and be untouched by either the volcano or your companion. Back at the bungalow, they prepare dinner together. They linger over the meal, plenty of good food and wine with old blues crackling in the background. And he doesn’t know quite how it happens, but one moment they are talking together, and the next she is turning up the volume and moving to the music, her eyes closed, her head flung back. And he, too, is on his feet, and the beat is billowing through him and the heat is flushing his skin, his feet tripple like piano keys, he sways with her, he mirrors her movements, their hands are entwined, her breath hits his face, the hot flicker of touch, the two of them turning and turning and turning again on and on until the music finishes. And in the sudden silence they remain clasped together, still moving gently to the beating in their bodies and the echoing music.

She pulls away first. ‘What a great partnership we make,’ she says with a smile.

He quickly collects himself, returns her smile without, he hopes, revealing the embarrassment he feels, and applies himself to the cleaning up.

With the room tidy, the glasses washed and put away, it is time for bed.

‘Don’t be silly,’ she says when he starts to move bedding into the living room.‘We’re both grown-ups.’

He decides to accord her a commonsense he does not himself feel and they prepare for bed quickly. She chooses her side, which fortunately is not his side, they say goodnight before hopping into bed and the lamps are immediately extinguished. He lies as far from her as possible. She falls asleep within minutes – so much for her tales of being an insomniac – while he lies awake trying to shut his mind to the sinewy music and the slow synchrony of their dancing bodies. He tells himself to ignore her presence, doesn’t want to feel her so close, stuffs his mind with diversions: a list of currently active volcanoes, a list of students in his classes last semester, a list of the students in his college graduation class. Finally, irritated beyond belief and no closer to sleep, he lets his thoughts settle, not with Laura, but with the man who brought him here, his long-dead grandfather who seems more in control of Raphe’s actions than is Raphe himself.

So, Grandfather, I’m here, and the girl’s with me. Death in a myriad of costumes is in easy reach. I hear the bell tolling, it’s pay-up time and I don’t know what to do.

And for his pains? No clear direction, just the ever-present squeezing of his guts and a voice of conscience Raphe cannot locate. It’s times like this, he is thinking, that God would be useful, an authoritative voice from the dark with a prescription for action. But there’s no one to help him, the quest is his alone. Who is he fighting though? And what is he defending? He seems locked into his old thoughts, his old beliefs, in a way, it suddenly occurs to him, not dissimilar to a religious fundamentalist. It is not a happy thought: Raphe Carter, fundamentalist Holocaust survivor once removed. Yet it seems inescapable. He walks the same groove over and over, and the groove becomes deeper, and the walls, the walls he creates himself, grow higher. He imagines only what he has imagined numerous times before, and his imaginings, although so clear and certain, take him nowhere. And beyond these walls of his making? It hardly bears thinking about. He’s set firmly within the concrete of his mind.

If he stretches his arm across the bed, he can touch her. He is as close to Laura Lewin as was her father to his grandfather, and soundly sleeping, she is just as vulnerable. He looks at her, this woman who cut her teeth on her mother’s grief, and touches her lightly. She shuffles in her sleep and he withdraws his hand. With the feel of her on his fingers, it occurs to him that far from being his enemy, she might actually be his providence. But the thought is so alien, that in the same way the immune system gathers itself against foreign microbes, so too his old thoughts against this frail new possibility.

The night hours slog on with Raphe wandering through his conflicts until he has completely lost his way. He fears he will hold on to his pain until the last drop in the glass. Again he reaches across and touches Laura on the warm sleepy skin of her shoulder, again she shuffles, but this time he does not withdraw his hand.

In the morning when he awakes, she is curled against him, her head resting on his shoulder. She is gently snoring. He rolls her out of his arms and she opens her eyes.

‘You purr,’ he says.

She smiles, ‘That’s what Nell used to say when she still loved me.’And leans across – he wishes she wouldn’t – and pecks him on the cheek.‘And you,’ she says, ‘talk in your sleep.’

He is frantic, what on earth could he have said?

‘Everyone has their secrets,’ she says, smiling. ‘And you’re entitled to yours.’

Later in the morning they are standing at the rim of Halemaumau crater, a huge quarry-shaped pit at the top end of the caldera, with steep, sulphur-stained slopes. And everywhere are steaming fumaroles puffing their heat and energy into the air. There is a rim, like a watermark, high on the sides marking the level of the boiling lava lake which once filled the crater. Here is the heart of the vast Kilauea volcano, this is Pele’s home. And this year, next year, in ten years time the lava will again ooze out of the ground and fill this vast pit.

Laura stares into the huge gaping space: it is marvellous, quite
marvellous, with a wild singing energy; it makes her feel strange and wonderful. There are some people, she finds herself thinking, who derive a sense of belonging, of continuity, by reminding themselves of the familiar. They touch the gate each time they arrive home, and the doorframe, they run their fingers across a bench or over a banister, a range of actions to remind themselves that things are as they ought to be. And when they travel they return to the same places to tread familiar pavements, visit familiar shops, stay in the same hotels. As she gazes down into the vast, other-world of the Halemaumau crater, it occurs to her she used to be that sort of person. But no more. Life is fragmented, no point in denying it. Life is uncertain and that is that. And nothing, nothing is forever. The thought fills her with a quiet exuberance. She glances across at Raphe; he keeps coming back here, so he too must feel the power of this place. Yet with his furrowed brow and the gloomy set of his mouth, it is hard to know what he is experiencing.

All those months ago when they shared a picnic together on a wintry beach he had described himself as saturnine. I could teach you happiness, she had thought then, and in her gratitude for all he has done, she would still like to, although it occurs to her that happiness may not be on his agenda.

His hand is on her arm: if they are to make it across the caldera and back, he says, they had better begin. She turns to him, startles him with a hug, and the two of them set off.

A couple of hundred metres from the rim of Halemaumau crater they begin their descent into the Kilauea caldera. There is a sign:‘Thin crust – keep to trail’.

‘How thin?’ she asks Raphe.

He turns to her and he’s not smiling.‘Best not to test it,’ he says.

As it happens, the trail is nonexistent, just a way marked by stone cairns through the lava-clad landscape. The paradox strikes immediately. Cairns, which she has always associated with death, are marking a safe passage through one of the most lethal landscapes on earth. She treads carefully, the solid
pahoehoe
flow, like smooth interlocking carapaces from a distance, is far rougher, far more organic up close. Some parts are like solid black slabs of liver, others like hard ropy swirls of intestine, and all of it is curved and sensual and infused with a silvery, oily sheen. Carefully she climbs and descends the bulging ground.

The wind is furious across the caldera floor and the sun very hot. There is no shelter whatsoever. She walks this blackened cracked landscape, this volatile not-quite-comprehensible landscape, and despite being racked through with its marvels, it is Laura who is now reminded of the devastations of the Holocaust.