Small Holes in the Silence Read online

  But no, they weren’t hard. When Great-grandmother went off and hid they took that as a rejection of their whispered proposals, and when visitors had gone kept on with trying to raise a few thin sheep on stony land, grow gardens when summers were without rain, and generally scratch around to find enough food to eat. Also, what they had to admit among themselves was that in the aftermath of a world war there wasn’t much choice left when it came to men for their daughter.

  In fact, they could look back and feel quite ashamed of some of the suggestions they had made. Their daughter was the youngest of a family of six and had been born several years after her older brothers and sisters had married and gone away to live. Times had been better then. She grew to be a good-looking woman, hard-working and strong, one who had to bend to go in any doorway – doorways were smaller then – and who became the mainstay of both the household and the land. This was not the kind of woman who should be pushed off on to anyone.

  Once Great-grandmother realised that her elders had given up on her, she began to think for herself about how she would go about finding someone to be a suitable father to her children. She did like the idea of having a husband but just didn’t want to insult her future children by allowing them to be fathered by old men, ugly men, stupid men, mangled men, blind men, shell-shocked men or drunks.

  She decided she would find her own husband even though there was so little opportunity to do this because she was just too busy. Her parents and others of the family left her for months at a time to look after the land while they set up camp some distance away to cut and cart flax for sale to traders. With the money they earned they were able to buy flour, sugar, tea, kerosene and sometimes a few nails. Remaining at home with Great-grandmother were two old aunts who were too feeble to do heavy work, but they fed the hens and the orphaned lambs, lit the fire out under the cooking shelter, kept it going and made bread if there was flour to make it with. If there was flour they sometimes made porridge with it in the mornings too.

  Great-grandmother milked the house cow early in the morning, then spent the rest of the day moving sheep in search of grass, finding feed for the cow, fixing teetering fences, assisting the ewes at lambing time, trimming their backsides so that they wouldn’t get blown by flies, trying to set them on their feet if their legs were wobbly, and burying the ones that died. Near evening she would carry water from creek to garden and do whatever needed doing there. At dark she would go home for her first meal since the tea and bread, or tea and flour-porridge of the morning.

  So, though Great-grandmother had made up her mind that she would look for a husband herself, she didn’t have time to do much about it.

  The land they lived on was about half a mile from the sea. On the coast was a scattering of houses and a small jetty. Each afternoon a boy would come from there on horseback for milk, bringing fish, crayfish or karengo in exchange. Apart from the boy she saw no one except for the old aunts.

  One morning while she was out in the paddocks, she noticed there was a summer storm coming. Purple clouds, lumbering in from the coast, were lit up by distant straps of lightning. She began moving sheep to the house paddock where, though they would be almost on top of each other, there was better shelter for them. Heavy rain had begun by the time she finished. The wind was hurling in from the sea. Thunder and lightning were blowing up the skies.

  Back at the house the old women had put tins under the leaks in the roof, pots and buckets outside to catch water, brought wood in and lit a fire on the inside hearth.

  By mid-afternoon the storm had passed and Great-grandmother, who had changed out of her wet clothes into her going-out dress, which was all she had to change into, thought this would be a good opportunity to go and find herself a husband. In stormy weather there were likely to be boats – scows, traders and fishing boats – which had come into the bay to shelter.

  She set out along the tracks to the sea, and once she arrived on the beach, looking across to the opposite side of the bay, she could see that there were indeed small boats tied up at the jetty. She could see also that a larger boat had been wrecked on the rocks and that people were out searching the rocks and shore.

  Great-grandmother was so engrossed in watching what was happening that she didn’t see the wave which delivered her husband right to her feet.

  Ka mau te wehi!

  There he was, a blue-tinged little man in a tangle of weed and without even a splutter. She leaned down, grabbed him by the ankles and dragged him higher onto the shore.

  It was when she let go of his feet that she saw the other one of him, rising up, standing tall and naked and glistening. This other one began stepping backwards on high-stepping feet, tipping his head from side to side, widening his eyes at her, eyes which gleamed like shells. His arms moved alternately from chest to side, chest to side, in rhythm with his high, backward stepping. His fingers quivered. His long, black hair lifted and fell. Back, back, he went, further into the tide. But Great-grandmother wasn’t going to let him get away.

  ‘Come back. Get back here,’ she called, and stepping on the chest of the man lying on the beach she reached out and grabbed this other one by the arm. The man stopped his back-stepping, smiled, and slid himself back into the man on the beach who then coughed and sneezed. Great-grandmother picked this one up off the sand, put him over her shoulder and carried him home where she stripped him, dried him and wrapped him in a blanket, put him by the fire and gave him warm milk to drink.

  It wasn’t until the man fell asleep that Great-grandmother and the aunts were able to examine him, or at least to examine the head of him lolling out of the blanket. It was a distinctive head, mainly because of a bundle of springing black curls and an outsized jaw.

  One of the aunts became curious about the size of the bottom half of the man’s face, and lighting a candle pulled his chin down to see if she could discover the reason for it.

  Ka mau te wehi!

  The old woman dropped the candle on the hearth and took herself to the other side of the room, calling to Great-grandmother to take this creature back to where she found him, back to his shark relations where he belonged.

  Both of the old women were so frightened that Great-grandmother had to drag the sleeping man, palliasse and all, out under the cooking shelter before they would go to sleep. She was determined not to lose what she had found.

  But by the time Great-grandmother had finished her early-morning work the next day, much to her disappointment the man had gone, she thought for good.

  However, she was just finishing her tea and bread when she saw him returning along the track, carrying planks from the wrecked ship on his shoulder. He spent the rest of the day retrieving timber from the rocks and shore.

  On the second day he used some of the timber to patch and weatherproof the house and straighten up the cooking shelter, using lashings plaited from flax. The aunties began to smile on him, at first from a distance.

  On the third day, while he was helping her carry water from the creek to the garden, Great-grandfather said to Great-grandmother, ‘I want to marry the woman who trod on me, called out to me and saved me from drowning.’

  At the garden the two worked up and down hoeing furrows, sewing corn, watering the seed and covering it.

  ‘The trouble is …’ Great-grandmother said.

  As they went from row to row Great-grandfather waited for her to continue her sentence, tell him what the trouble was. Maybe the problem was that she knew nothing about him, but at least she hadn’t refused him.

  Encouraged by this he decided to speak. They had finished their work and the sun had almost gone by this time.

  ‘There’s not much to know about me,’ he said. ‘I have one name, Solomon. My birth was never registered and I don’t know who my parents are. I have been at sea since I was a boy and, later, though I applied to go to the Great War I was turned down because of having too many teeth. Instead of becoming a soldier I became a crewman on troopships and that’s how I came to see the
world. I have no home, no land, but I can work. Land or sea I can work. Sometimes the teeth are useful.’

  The sun had truly gone.

  ‘The trouble is,’ Great-grandmother said, ‘the trouble is, I fell in love with the other one.’ And she explained what had happened when he was washed ashore. ‘I trod on you by accident,’ she admitted. ‘And when I called out it was to the other one. When he stepped right back inside you he took my heart along.’

  They walked home in silence, but Great-grandmother knew she couldn’t have one without the other, couldn’t lose one without losing the other. She decided that it would not be insulting to her future children to accept what had been delivered to her. The man was strong and able-bodied and kind, and though not as handsome as the other one of him, his great jaw did not make him ugly.

  ‘All right then,’ she said.

  By the time her parents and family returned from flax trading, the house and cooking shelter had been weatherproofed and the gates and fences had all been mended and strengthened. The man had begun the task of shifting the stones off the land, using them to build stone walls which would eventually replace the old fences, and which allowed more grass to grow. The paddocks became greener, the sheep became healthier and life was not so harsh.

  ‘We’ll build our house with the stones too,’ he said. ‘It’s what they do in other countries.’

  Though Great-grandmother still had a dream from time to time of the high-stepping man in the tide, she came to love the one she had carried home. It was true that the teeth were often useful.

  Before we ever met Great-grandfather we were told how he had used his teeth for hauling nets, gripping rope, carrying a line of fish up into a tree to hang for drying, tightening wire, climbing ships’ masts and killing chickens. We were told that he once used his teeth to cut down a man who had hanged himself from a chimney, also that he had used them to cut three umbilicals. These cords were of his and Great-grandmother’s three children, the youngest of them being my grandfather.

  Great-grandfather was seventy-nine by the time my brothers and I first met him. The teeth were a disappointment. They were brown, crooked, broken like old rock and many of them were missing, but Great-grandfather was obliging when it came to displaying the remainder to us. He and Great-grandmother, in their stone house, were the only ones living on the land by then and the purpose of our visit was so that our father could persuade them to move closer to the family. Subsequent visits, every year or two, were mainly for the same reason, but Great-grandfather and Great-grandmother never agreed to leave.

  The last time I saw Great-grandfather he had no teeth at all and he was sitting up in bed dying.

  Great-grandmother was by his bedside and would not move from there. We took it in turns to sit with her, which is how I happened to be in the room during the last moments of Great-grandfather’s life.

  That was when I saw the other one of him – naked and shining and young and strong, just as he had been described to us – stepping back, quivering his fingers, widening his glinting eyes, his long hair floating as though picked up by the wind. I thought Great-grandmother would call out to him, ‘Come back. Get back here.’ I thought she would stand and reach out for him, but she sat quiet and watching, lifting a hand to him as he danced away.

  doll woman

  My mind is nagged by the doll woman, just as a scrap of melody, a verse, a phrase hitches to the brain, snagging like a fish-hook caught in rock clefts that cannot be freed.

  In the Moscow airport, where guards bearing long guns roamed with dogs on heavy chains, I was moved along among signs, sounds and faces that rendered me illiterate, grateful that the official at the barrier had nothing to say to me, waving me on without a glance at my passport.

  Through security I inched along with my trolley in a crowd denser than any I had ever been in, thinking it must be like being in water so deep that direction can only be guessed. But I was discovered at last by the friend who had come to meet me.

  Alina, who had worked with me during her five-year appointment in New Zealand, drove out into fast heavy traffic.

  ‘A far cry from Wellington,’ she said, whipping along roads that were without lane markings and overseen by more armed men.

  ‘Will they shoot us?’ I asked.

  ‘Tyres,’ she said. ‘If you don’t stop when signalled they’ll shoot out your tyres.’

  ‘It’s like being in a movie.’

  ‘But if for some reason anyone decides to get out and make a run for it, well …’

  At Alina’s address two men opened two gates to let us through, after which there were two keys to open two doors and two flights of stairs to climb. At last, groggy from flying and the crossing of time zones, I began recuperating in her quiet apartment.

  The first thing to do on waking on the first morning in a new place is to go to a window and look out. Down there was the paved yard where the two gate attendants were already posted, waiting to do the next unlocking for the next car coming through. On the far side of the gates were the patched footpaths, the drab road and the high brick walls of buildings opposite.

  And just at that moment as I looked down, there was a woman coming out of a dusty alley, looking to left and right, squeezing her hands in front of her, crushing these tight hands to the base of her throat.

  It was nearing winter. There was no dry, bared earth to make dust, but something was dusting the scene, hazing the woman. Or it could have been my maladjusted eyes. I needed time perhaps to walk the streets of Moscow, absorb something of history and of architecture, of crowds, of faces, of language, of weather – time to become part of grey light.

  The woman had a round head, a rounded body, all foreshortened by my looking down at her from a second storey. Though others on the street wore head coverings, jackets and solid footwear, the woman was bareheaded. She wore an apron over a thin frock and her shoes were frail. I watched as she hurried along the street and turned the corner at the end of the block.

  Later that morning when Alina and I went out onto the street to walk to the metro, rushing towards us, now wearing a long cardigan over the dress and a headscarf knotted under her chin, was the woman. Her arms were stretched out towards us and words fell in torrents from her flapping mouth. Her puckered skin was as translucent as fish flesh, but her eyes, as blue as flags, as bright as sequins, revealed that she was younger than what was told by dingy skin, uncoloured hair poking from under her scarf, stooping shoulders, mottled legs and aged clothing. On each lower eyelid balanced a globe of clear water that wobbled but did not break or spill.

  No doubt it was my blank expression as well as all that marked me out as alien that turned her from me to my companion. There was an exchange between the two in which the woman, as she spoke, clutched her hands against her heart, stretched an arm to indicate a far place and stroked the air beside her in long, low sweeps. Alina, in return, exclaimed and frowned, spoke to her in sympathetic tones and touched her shoulder in a reassuring way.

  ‘The woman has lost her dog,’ Alina said to me as we walked on, ‘her “little son”. Little Son has only three legs and because of this the woman believes he would be prized by beggars as an enhancement to their begging. Her dog is black and long-haired, comes to the height of her knee and it is the left hind leg that is missing. “My little son,” she kept saying, “has been stolen by beggars,” and she pleaded with me to look out for him when we reach the market. I told her that we would look for her dog when we reached the market. I didn’t want to tell her we weren’t visiting the market but only going to the nearby churches today.’

  ‘We can look out for him as we go,’ I said.

  But the only dogs we saw as we made our way along were those on leashes out with their owners, and once reaching the underground the woman and the dog were soon forgotten, at least by me, because despite the semi-darkness, the strange cold air, the grime and the black oily scour where the train-lines ran, it seemed to me that we had entered a crowded, subterra
nean palace. We had come down into a gallery of pink marble, of many-coloured mosaics, of statues and sculpted wall plaques and crystal chandeliers.

  ‘Art for everybody,’ Alina said, shouting to be heard above the noise of the train as it pulled in. I felt myself being propelled forward by the crowd as the train doors opened. ‘Art from Stalin days,’ she said. ‘We’ll come and see it properly another time.’ The train moved off, shuttling us along – caged ghosts – to the place of temples.

  It was at the end of the day when turning into Alina’s street that we saw the three-legged dog limping along ahead of us. As we came nearer we could see that his coat was clotted with muck and that there was a long, dark gash above one eye. But in spite of injury and the filthy state of Little Son we could see that he was hobbling towards the final part of a story that was to have a happy ending.

  Running towards him, reaching out her arms, globes of water now popping and spilling from her eyes, was the woman. She swooped the dog up into her arms and turned, pouring words over him, staggering under the weight of him while moving as fast as she could towards the alley.

  There are icons of gold, gold-domed cathedrals and palaces built for queens and lovers gathered into a collection of postcards. There are stories of war and treachery, arcades of fountains and underground galleries that stand as memorials in the mind. But it is the doll woman who can never be forgotten, because it is she who stands for all that is unfathomable, all that we cannot know of each other.

  If she could be broken apart and an outer layer removed, all that could be discovered would be a more diminutive replica of her – one equally as unknowable. Pulling open each image, she would become always smaller with nothing more to be revealed. Instead the mystery of her would only deepen with the removal of each new sheath, because finally there would be just the littlest, solid one, which cannot be taken apart even though there must be a small, red, beating heart inside.