The Prosperous Thief (45 page)

She looks ahead at Raphe. She is sure he, too, has made the same connection, yet finds it perplexing that with all his miserable fixations, he has arrived at so few understandings. It’s like being caught in the eye of a storm with no awareness of where you are and consequently no desire for escape. How else could it be possible to dwell on the same issues for years and years and not resolve them?

He is waiting for her to catch up. He is standing at a long, smoothly sculptured fissure.‘Look,’ he says as soon as she joins him. ‘Look how deep it is.You can’t see the bottom.’

The jagged edges of the crack run neatly and precisely parallel. She looks down. About a metre below the surface, and clinging greenly to a small barren ledge, is a fern.

Raphe sees the darkness, while she sees the fern.

It’s a small miracle in the devastation of this landscape. She files it in memory, turns away and continues across the hard lava.You see what you want to see, you think what you want to think. How guarded had been her thoughts about her father, how guarded her thoughts about Nell. But even within these limits and despite having just been betrayed by the love of her life, she is happier than Raphe. She feels his undercurrent of misery even here, the earth boiling beneath his feet, a place with so much life but none of it touching him. She is sorry for him, wants to insert herself behind his eyes and show him what there is to be seen.

Later, when they are back at the bungalow Raphe is quiet and withdrawn. Laura makes several attempts at conversation, but he is shut off from her.‘Frozen’ is how he would put it, and nothing he can do about it. He pours them both a glass of wine, is wondering how he will get through the evening, when she leaves the room and returns a moment later with a volume of poetry. It is a collection of the Russian poet, Anna Akhmatova.

Laura begins to read, poem after poem addressed so personally to a series of people Akhmatova had loved and most often lost, and to a country she had similarly loved but refused to give up. Poems written during a time when each day was a struggle for survival. There are moments when her voice wavers and he finds himself envying her. He knows why she is reading these poems, but it isn’t so easy for him to reach for a book and through someone else’s sufferings settle his own pains. He simply cannot see how to use this Russian woman’s poems to still his own demons as Laura clearly has done. So he gives up trying and turns his attention to Laura instead. He listens to the melody of her voice, he studies each of her features, he studies the whole, he engraves her every movement on his mind. Laura reads Akhmatova and Raphe reads Laura.

By the time they go to bed he feels at peace. And as she lies next to him asleep, he makes himself envisage a different set of Laura imaginings than his old revenge narratives. If he would only let her, he tells himself, perhaps she could quieten his storm.

The room is lit by a near-full moon. He shifts to the edge of the bed in order to observe her better. She sleeps in a patch of light from the window, lying on her side and facing him. Her hair is knotted on top of her head, wisps curl about her face and down her neck. There’s a slight sheen to her skin, her eyes flicker behind the lids. He moves closer, runs his forefinger down the fine skin on the side of her face, from her left temple down to her jaw, his fingertip on that utterly soft skin. It’s a caress he hasn’t dared imagine since their walk together in the Australian bush all those months ago, too much a betrayal of his grandfather.

Her eyes open, he snatches his hand away. In the faint light he sees she is smiling. A moment later he startles at the touch of her hand on his neck. The tips of her fingers stir his hair, sparks slither down his spine, and then she is guiding him towards her. It’s like sinking into pillows, her lips soft yet tensed, and moving so surely and taking him with her, like dancing, he is thinking.And he gathers her up, a shudder as he feels her full loose breasts beneath herT-shirt, and is kissing that sweet wet mouth, eking out the moment, not wanting to finish. Finally she draws away, and with a sigh, burrows into his shoulder and falls back asleep.

Raphe is wide awake, he can hardly believe what has happened. But soon the satiety of a moment ago, of that utterly enveloping shut-out-the-rest-of-the-world kiss is replaced with the hungry retrospective gaze of wanting more, of not remembering exactly how it felt, of not attending to this or that – her breath, her taste, her hand as it moved, did it move? – and in his dissatisfaction over that ever-so-fleeting satisfaction, a desire which swarms through him and has him clasping her against him as she sleeps. His hand is in her hair, her body lies loosely against his, he leans into her, breathes in the smell of her and, impossible to explain these things, but suddenly his conflicts melt away and the future emerges with an amazing new narrative. She is his future, and not in the way he had previously thought: Laura Lewin is his salvation.

So many years absorbed by his grandfather, so many years stifling in the same scenes, and all he has to show for it is his own blackened self. It is as if he has been charred by his own imaginings, and no one, not one single person has benefited. But Laura offers another way. She is his salvation, and must realise it too. Her lips told him, her kiss told him. She must realise it too.

Hours later he has worked it out. Hours later he has played and replayed the life they will make together. He has never felt this alive; the old groove of his grandfather’s rights and demands has been filled by this astonishing new story.Through their own lives, Laura and he will make amends for the wrongs of the past, and they’ll do it together.At last he sees the purpose of his grandfather’s haunting, at last he understands why his grandfather is now silent. He knows what do. It makes sense, it makes such perfect sense.

He feels both calm and excited as he lies close to Laura, turning the possibilities in his mind. And when finally he falls asleep, it is a deep and peaceful sleep. He awakes late; the sun is already quite strong and he can hear Laura rustling about in the kitchen. He quickly pulls on some clothes and soon is sitting in the kitchen ready to talk. He has barely begun when the telephone rings. It’s the commission for Laura with an urgent problem only she can solve. It occupies the next four hours and, as soon as it is resolved, Laura is eager to be started. Their plan is to hike over the lava bench to the point where the molten lava enters the ocean.

Raphe tries to hold her back, he is bursting to speak.‘There’s no point in leaving too early,’ he says.‘You won’t be able to see the lava until after dark. And there’s no shade, not a place to be lingering on a warm day.’

He is so excited about his plans,
their
plans, everything else pales in comparison. And at last he can tell her what happened outside Belsen all those years ago, because it doesn’t matter any more.
It doesn’t matter any more
, he can hardly believe it. By being together they will atone for the past in a simultaneous apology and act of forgiveness. It makes sense to him in a way the revenge option never did. But Laura won’t stay still, she wants to be started, a close-up view of flowing lava and she doesn’t care if she can’t see it clearly, she doesn’t care if she gets sunstroke. So an hour earlier than he planned they are in the car and driving the Ring of Craters Road. As for speaking with her, he’s waited so long for his peace, another few hours won’t make any difference.

The Ring of Craters Road curves and winds down towards the sea through a permanent display of the recent eruptions of this mighty volcano. In many places the lava has flowed over the road and has had to be cut away, so they find themselves driving between low bulbous canyons of lava. Eventually the road disappears entirely beneath a huge flow.Now the lava clads the ground ahead of them as far as the eye can see, and in the distance their destination: a cloud of ash and steam where the current lava flow hits the sea.

They park the car and start off immediately. Raphe carries a pack containing water, a light supper, torches, a cellular phone. Laura had watched him with his preparations and wondered whether he wasn’t being just a little too cautious. He assured her they would be going to some of the most dangerous land on the face of the earth. She thought it was probably hyperbole but kept her thoughts to herself. But now as they start walking over the lava bench and she sees signs everywhere warning of a multitude of hazards, and other signs strongly warning against walking over the lava bench at all, she is fast changing her mind. Raphe assures her that as long as you know what you’re doing it is perfectly safe.

From the very beginning the going is rough. The ground is like a solid turbulent sea, huge swells falling to low curving swirls of rippling lava. But before long she gets herself into a pattern, a sort of nimble goat pattern despite her sturdy boots, and although very watchful, feels her feet and legs learning the lie of this terrain. Nell would never have come here, she finds herself thinking. Nell by her own reckoning was not much interested in nature. And it occurs to her that not so long ago a future without Nell was as inconceivable as this volcano. It’s a satisfying thought.

She looks across at Raphe with his clouded desires and his bittersweet sadness, Raphe clinging to his losses for fear of what might happen if he were to let them go, Raphe who seems somehow hobbled to himself. If he could only forgive all the wrongs he feels have been done to him he would be a far happier man. But forgiveness, requiring as it does such an awesome muting of self, a moral victory, in fact, over one’s desires and self-interests, is, she suspects, beyond Raphe’s reach. Forgiveness, Laura has long thought, is really among the most unnatural of acts. Yet she has always known how to forgive, has done so many times over the years. Out of love she would have forgiven her parents anything. And perhaps it is out of love she has managed to forgive a good many of Nell’s actions. But not the theft, she can’t forgive the theft of her mother’s story. That act, so instrumental, so self-serving, so unequivocally cruel, has cast a shade over all their years together. That act was unforgivable.

The sun is sinking, but still so hot. She removes her hat and wipes her brow, and immediately Raphe is by her side offering her the water bottle. They both sit on a huge swell of lava while she drinks, their legs occasionally touching.With him now so close, she recalls the kiss of last night, a long, close kiss, yet oddly chaste, she is now thinking, and a relief after the erotic charges of some of their past meetings. She reaches for his hand. She doesn’t know why, but she has an overwhelming desire to help him. It could be she simply wants to repay her gratitude – for she is grateful, is aware at this very moment of standing at a fulcrum in her life, behind her a weary, depleted landscape and in front unknown dangers and unknown excitements. How different it is for Raphe. You have to grab your understandings wherever you can get them, but you have to desire them first.

He helps her to her feet and they are walking again. Closer and closer to where the boiling lava streams from the tube into the ocean. The fountain of steam is larger now, the crash of waves too. She forges ahead, driven by excitement and a strange sense of recognition. The warning signs are now so numerous they stand like sentries along the cliff edge. At one point where the road reappears briefly, a huge chunk of land has fallen into the sea. Raphe takes her arm and leads her back from the edge, and keeps his hand on her until the rough terrain requires them both to clamber on all fours. The sun is sinking but the wind remains hard. They stop again for water. She wishes the sun would set; at the same time she’s fearful of this place in the dark. Pele is rather like the Old Testament God, she is thinking, protective to those who obey, but angry and vengeful when provoked. From the little she knows of Raphe, he seems to share some of the same qualities. Gods and humans, and both yet to understand the utter futility of revenge.

Night is falling as they approach the end of their journey. The sight is awesome. A huge fountain of shooting steam and sea spray spiked with hydrochloric acid, and beating the air a thunderous noise. And finally, her first glimpse of lava, a stream of black and orange liquid shooting into the spray. And she cannot remove her gaze for a second, stands buffered by the wind as the sky darkens and the lava spilling from the tube into the ocean becomes brighter. Raphe is alongside her and when she steps forward he pulls her back.

‘You don’t know the danger,’ he says.

She smiles at him. ‘I’m not here to be safe. If I wanted safety I’d be back in Melbourne with my job, my house and my cat.’ She leads him forward to gaze into the fiery stream. And the cold ocean fizzes and steams with the molten fire from the centre of the earth.

They are standing close, he puts his arm about her shoulders. Her body is tensed, alert to the breathtaking display, but he’s kept his silence long enough, he’s desperate to speak to her.During the walk over the lava bench his thoughts kept returning to their future, he even tried to engage his grandfather, but his grandfather remained silent.And Raphe so pleased he did, for through the silence he heard Laura and she was saying yes, to his plans, yes, she feels as he does, yes, she will return to America with him.

She’s pulling away from him, wants to go still closer.‘You can’t,’ he shouts over the noise.‘You can’t.’ Just the previous week a young couple were killed here, a storm, the night dark, the steam and lethal spray more violent than usual and they were washed off the bench. He pulls her back.‘You can’t,’ he says again, and she smiles at him, a smile of utter radiance. At him.

‘Wouldn’t it be extraordinary to stay the night here,’ she says.

He tells her it is far too dangerous, and besides – at last, at last – there’s something they need to talk about. And with the crash of the water against the new rock, the fizzle of fire as the molten lava hits the cold sea, and the storm inside him, he pulls her close and begins to talk right into her ear, talk beyond the tumult outside. He simply can’t wait a moment longer.

He tells her he has worked it out. ‘You said how much I’d helped you.We can help each other, we’ll be each other’s strength, our old demons will be silenced together.’