The Voyage (15 page)

begin. “There are irritable people everywhere,” Delage leaned into Elisabeth, “even in Melbourne.” Whenever the driver from Riga described the faults of another city his sloping shoulders shook with what could only be satisfaction. At least Melbourne had a river. In the darkness it wandered like a sunken road, lights reflected and stretched on the surface. Government House was behind the bushes. There was the Olympic swimming pool, the Melbourne Cricket Ground in silhouette. Unfortunately the taxi was fogging up. The rain had almost stopped. On the way back, they passed the concert hall and the art gallery, one an enormous gray horizontal box, the other a circular shape, more or less brought together by an Eiffel Tower structure of welded pipes, painted glossy white. With the six-hour turnaround they would not be flying to Sydney, Delage’s idea, it would take just a few days more by ship, following the east coast of Australia. These were among their happiest days. They now had the small deck to themselves, Elisabeth reclining in her large sunglasses, as if there were no sunlight back in Austria, or anywhere else in Europe, her breast, Delage noted, slightly rounder than her mother’s, filling his hand, Delage flipping through the newspaper he’d bought in Melbourne, without knowing why, Australian newspapers are amongst the worst in the world, certainly the worst in the English-speaking world, Australian journalists practice a violent simplicity which has been successfully exported to the rest of the English-speaking world, others who are called broadsheet or quality journalists, said to be the level-headed ones, are hardly better with their embarrassing self-importance,
making pronouncements concerning the world with the self-assurance of the airport taxi driver—before long they’ll be on television making their pronouncements, replacing the actual newsmakers, it would eventually infect the thinking capacity of those who consume Australian newspapers. Delage wondered why he had bought the newspaper, he was complaining to Elisabeth about them, about the general situation of his country, who was listening, but Elisabeth never read newspapers, which explained her untroubled appearance, her smooth skin tone, still talking, an audience at least of one, he turned to the inside of the national daily, Saturday edition, a paper he didn’t normally read. Elisabeth opened her eyes, he had stopped talking. The pianist was a young woman with long black hair, on stage naked, playing the piano while it was burning in different places, it had been set alight, while an accompanist in a tuxedo swinging an axe, a sledgehammer and rubber mallet set about destroying it, at rhythmic intervals to a score, the only Delage concert grand in Europe smashed into little pieces, until it was not a piano at all, and there was no music possible, nothing left to go on, only the beginning of silence, before an audience in formal evening wear, the premiere performance of what was an avant-garde work by the Austrian composer, Paul Hildebrand, in Vienna last week.

Pleased to introduce Elisabeth to Sydney, Delage talking over his shoulder, making the best of his situation, of his many difficulties, deploying here the salesman’s expansive manner, he was on home turf, near enough, Botany Bay being a suburb of Sydney, Elisabeth had dressed for serious walking, silk
scarf, brown flat shoes, still on his sea-legs, he slipped on the last step of the gangway where there was a gap to the wharf, fell headfirst onto the concrete. There had been no sign of the Dutchman, he must have disembarked, Delage wrote a note giving his Sydney address, Elisabeth slid it under the cabin door. As Delage lay on the wharf, his first thought was the pianos, the storage room between the office and the factory floor could be used to display the pianos under bright lights, instead of having them under wraps in a corner waiting for delivery, an idea worth putting to the Slovakian bookkeeper. Only a few people are interested in many different ideas. It is natural that a person’s most attractive qualities appeal only to a narrow range of others. Delage was left wondering if Elisabeth von Schalla now saw him as a weakened man, not to be relied upon, all too ordinary once seen in his own surroundings. From now on he was going to concentrate on the home market. One day he might go back to Vienna, just for a visit. Elisabeth was bending over, repeating his name. “The world changes slowly, too slowly,” from behind his minuscule desk, von Schalla hardly moved his lips, a man of experience, if ever there was, to Delage the world was slowly changing before him, he slowly thought it. He was happy to remain face down for a moment to gather his wits, before clearing his throat and getting to his feet, he grabbed at Elisabeth’s shoulder, aware of the German captain and some of the officers looking down at him. “I don’t know what went wrong there,” sensing he had become a slightly different person, now standing on firm ground, though still holding her shoulder.

MURRAY
BAIL
was born in Adelaide in 1941 and now lives in Sydney. His fiction, which includes
Eucalyptus
,
Holden’s Performance
,
Homesickness
and
The Drover’s Wife and Other Stories
, has been translated into more than twenty-five languages.
Eucalyptus
was the winner of the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize and the Miles Franklin Literary Award.