Silence Read online

  The beehived courses, stone on stone, narrow as a chimney, hug his knees as he works. Hair, overalls and shirt plastered to his skull and bones. Plagued by memories: sea-sickness once, and the falling dream, being stranded on stage at school with his lines forgotten and the fourth-form audience tittering, his failed romances at the boatshed formal, crashing a glider, his travels and the hardships of smalltalk in tourist coaches at ancient Borsippa, himself on the eroded knoll where Nabu once stood and the biblical tower E-ur-iminan-ki so famously doomed because the labourers slaved amid too great a cataract of smalltalk in jumbled languages to put together a decent lawless mutiny.

  No, no, Hartmund Eischlbeck does not neglect the family religion.

  So, with his cold chisel he chips the last stone for a perfect fit. Even, at the final stroke, the finishing touch, blinded by rain. Gashes his hand. The chisel falls inside a long way down. Clink. A gift for some archaeologist a thousand years hence. Balanced on the coping he slides the slab in place. Perfect. Pauses. He stands tall against a glassbead sky. Rainwater rills and froths, cascading down the courses of stone.

  Hartmund has thought it out. The legacy will stand, untouched, untouchable, on private land, safe in family hands, willed to an unsuspecting nephew in Koblenz—on condition the contents remain shut away in perpetuity. Scion of the house of Eischlbeck, Hartmund has the strength and the ready cash. The crown stone weighing not much less than himself now snugly seated. Trowel scraping the excess from the last of the mortar. He faces about and blesses gravely thrice the tower, the surrounding country and the awaking mountains (all but erased from the skyline) as rain and more rain rains and thunder crashes stupendously. He does not hear the Mental Institute ambulance arrive, nor paramedics slamming doors. Nor sodden boots plod in through his gate.

  James Cook

  The wind off the land has droppd alltogether, Resolution’s rigging steady as compass-bearings ruled upon the sky. The stillness is intense, tho, for myself, memories of yesterday’s shots spoil all peace of mind. We can guess who fired them—but at whom? Why did they stop? Why has Mr Cook not yet returnd? In our hearts we suspect he has met his death. This is our tremendous reason for idleness, unable to decide what might be done. Moreover, any false action could be construed by the natives as incivility if, in fact, he is yet alive. Having taken a powder-horn from my pouch to be ready, prudently I slip it back out of sight of the crew.

  Captn Clerke objects that Mr Cook could surely have come to no harm, it being barely two weeks since he was ceremoniously welcomd here. Indeed, the islanders robed him then in a cape of feathers plucked from rare parrots—little orange and yellow chaps—to receive him off our ship like a god. Notwithstanding which, something is unquestionably gone wrong, something which we fear to speak of. Neither I, nor any man aboard, can doubt it & a sullen silence locks down, the cosmos fixd around us on this glassy lagoon.

  No sign of natives, tho yesterday we purchased from them two hogs and ten chicken, besides divers fruits and edible berrys. Doubtless they understand some thing we English, being outlandish visitors, cannot guess. Our men, allthough instructed to remain calm, must feel, as do I myself, a tremor through the soles of their feet and throughout their very bones, skeleton & skull: the after-shocks from Saturday’s volcano when lava gushed in molten cliffs to explode upon contact with the sea, water being tossd high above the roaring rocks, banks of steam thrown up to billow back across the island with the choking stench of sulphur. Myself sick all day the next two days. Captn Clerke and I put our heads together in the account of it for the ship’s log and spent much diligence on an accurate description in the cause of science.

  Small bright birds dart across the warm, placid water, screeching as they go, and disappear into the jungle leaving behind them the empty arch of sky. The customary chanting voices from villages among the trees have ceased. Our men stand ready on deck, their musquets being an article seldom far from reach.

  We are accustomd to the sun sinking of a sudden toward the horizon in these latitudes, today being no different. Tho in the last moments of setting light the company’s attention is diverted by seeing a canoe set out from the shore. Two islanders paddle our way. This much seems clear: their purpose is solemn. Paddles dip in sinister clear water. The swift progres of that tiny craft, across an underwater gulph, furnishes a sight inscribed in the mind like etching on a crystal dish. Drawing near, the paddlers may be seen as wellmade & strong, tho not presenting themselves groomed the way we are accustomed to see them—I have spoke of this elsewhere—these having matted locks and bowed heads. They shine with sweat as the canoe manoeuvres, broadside on, to bring them beneath Resolution’s rail where they share the task of holding up a parcel bound in cloath. Captn Clerke reaches down for it, appearing to find it more awkward than expected so the bosun must needs steady his elbow.

  A native boy on the shore emerges from concealment, dresst in a red kind of jacket seeming gay and warlike. I am reminded of the dancing women wearing this very colour who once put pebbles on their tongues while their fingers inticed us with lascivious gestures. He throws a rock in our direction. Immediatly following the tiny splash comes the close bang of a musquet inconsiderately fir’d by one of our company. The boy, on the instant, vanishes back among the leaves from whence he came. Thus does our situation alter. The paddlers look up in alarm, tho why at me in particular? We are a far cry from the goodhumourd trade we thought so well established, with bargaining and laughter and an exchange of goods. The parcel is laid on deck.

  The canoe slips off from our side to head back across the lagoon: every inscription of the disturbd water in its wake rememberd. As duty demands, I give orders that the men stay calm, even knowing (as who does not?) they have been led where they had no mind to go in the first place. They glower, but none repeats the blunderer’s gunshot.

  The world attends. Captn Clerke peels the flap of cloath wrapping, so as it should seem to be sticky with blood, to disclose a haunch of meat. The meat, having white skin and coarse black hairs, is a human thigh rarely exposd to the sun, the thickness being carved to remove the bone before delivry. Such, then, is their heathen ritual, to the best of my understanding—this would seem to be due portion of our commander for eating, accordingly explaind elsewhere by missionaries—as with a will of its own, the thigh, sliced lengthwise, gapes open and unfolds like the calyx of a grossly fleshy flower.

  A conservationist

  Silence is the rock where I shall stand.

  The silence between this and the next breath,

  that might be—is not yet—death;

  the silence between lover and lover

  that neither flesh nor mind bridge over;

  the silence between word and word,

  in which the truth waits to be heard …

  Deafness crept up on the poet out of the shadows of her garden and the shadows of the engulfing bush and even the shadows of the city too, when she went there. Trees tossed by the gale, lightning-lit thunder clouds and swirling creeks, traffic on rutted gravel and potholes, dark gutters, office blocks, wharves, towers and pointed roofs, all mounted about her and collapsed into black prisms of silence, so she must live in a wilderness within the wider wilderness, isolated from friends and alone among enemies. She must make do with her own company and feminine self-sufficiency, practical in the face of declining faculties, for besides the deafness she was seriously shortsighted too, through days on the cusp of decay when the sun set in an explosion of rosy light and the heavy marble moon hung poised above her head. She sought comfort in what remained to her, the scent of earth, the feel of damp loam. Touched by bridal veils of mist and the frog-spawn dew, she walked around her property ‘Edge’, singing within herself by way of prayer, though whether any sound escaped her throat she had no means of knowing. Dusk brought the sweetness of busy insects and the whisk of an owl’s wing—for she glimpsed its old demanding face among the leaves—the high night of her land wheeling and filled with a harmony of symbols. Even
in her sleep she was known to wander through the threat of the unheard till the sun rose, she tasted a new morning and, with a glint of superiority in her eye, placed hands on things for the blessing of texture, on tree bark and grass, on fur and stone. The rocks and vegetation were her neighbours. Those others, relatives and strangers alike, shuttled around in the same belljar as the many who thought her mad and dangerous. Shunned by some and admired by others for having defied a rapacious government and stood up to multinationals in the fight to save the Great Barrier Reef from drilling, she shopped for weekly supplies at the local store where she was known with a neutral kind of familiarity.

  Her contempt for her enemies took the form of fierce pity that they had no choice but to live as prisoners of their own greed. Yet her reputation worried at her heels because, the world’s vice being persistence, she was not left in peace. A clutch of small-scale goldmines staked their claim right outside her gate. She challenged their permits, she harrassed them in court and in the press. If any of the businessmen involved thought they were dealing with a dotty old lady who could be shut up or bought off they soon learnt otherwise. She would not be browbeaten but she paid the price. That rare and precious private time when, under her eyelids, she caught sickles of the mystery, when the unheard whispers of antecedents, whose suffering through a thousand years of courageous resilience gave her strength, dwindled. She spent what time she could marvelling at the day, luxurious spaces of light and cloud, open, all breathless, immense and clearer than glass, and her feet became distant messengers, attentive to the land, wallaby tracks guiding her in solitude to her own door, where she must shake the radiance from her hair before she could recognise herself in the characteristic oddities shown her by the mirror. I am old, she told it, old and lonely. However, she added, I have been loved and I do love.

  She accepted the desk’s invitation to sit at it while enormous shadows comforted her with words for writing down and words to be contemplated as creatures, each one with unique habits and habitat: burrowing words and hopping words, words that flew and words that clung to walls weathering storms. Sometimes she need only switch on the lamp to know what needed saying. Words greater than governments. And then followed the days of quiet committed work, all space filled with the ballooning universe, trees signalling and a serpent of light from along the creek curling at her feet, warm and attentive as a dog. And down in the waterhole platypuses paddled sleekly among bent reflections. Flocks of parrots settled in the eucalyptus leaves, swaying voluptuously, brilliant as tropical flowers, only to take flight with an unheard protest of voiceless open beaks when she stood up.

  She could not be persuaded, nor could she be corrupted. And if ever she needed reassurance, the deafness itself taught her the bitter injustice of the way things are: she cared nothing for money or fame. She would simply have her say, when meetings were held in the shabby dimness of a local hall, raising her arm to be counted and then sipping afternoon tea among the faithful. Amused by the moth-eaten grandeur of plush stage curtains and timber walls leaking light, she could watch the whole interior open around her as a continent of ramshackle distances, a fantastic Promised Land, malleable, the light buttery enough to be shaped by hand. She signed her name and this was good enough.

  She took for granted that there were probably rural bumblings and committee heroics going on, relieved not to know the details. The fact of the matter was that decision remained individual, she disliked crusades and reform movements and pressure groups dedicated to preventing any change at all. Still, respecting the dependability of steps and stages—as the undeaf could hardly be expected to appreciate while distracted from clear thinking by minds filled with a jumble of noise—she played her part and spoke of endangered species to visiting forest rangers, though at all times ready to rise to her feet without preamble, eloquent as a fighting prophet, to let fly till the meeting around her broke out in a frantic activity of mute clapping. A little shamefaced at such times, because she recognised certainty as thinner than paper and as fragile, she consulted a jury of dignified ancestors who’d had the courage to do what needed to be done in times gone by, to say what had needed to be said, however uncomfortable. But the trouble was that all of them, with their direct gaze and a flash of villainy in their seriousness, were well and thoroughly buried in the graveyard under fallen crosses and noseless angels.

  Often at night the funny side of her affliction would strike her, recollecting, for instance, a very different afternoon tea, this one with the president of India at his palace in New Delhi, when she took up what she thought he had said and complimented his nation on its agricultural traditions and the maintenance of fertility over millennia of cultivation—‘soil so cared for looks good enough to eat!’ which clearly stopped him in his tracks. She later learnt that he had asked her a question about poetry. But her memory of twinkling baffled unrufflable goodwill in his eyes was enough for her to smile now, as she fell asleep, at ease with the absurd blunders of guesswork. Until, next morning, she stepped fresh from the shower. The sight of her own living room shocked her. Unbelievably—and all around—evidence leapt to the eye. As if time escaped the tyranny of sequence chairs were in the wrong place, a vase where she never put it, books and papers rearranged. Everything neat and nothing missing. Her house had been broken into: a warning eloquent enough, even without the fax machine delivering a message. So you’re up. Good morning. You can’t hear us. And nobody can hear you … that is to say, apart from us.

  She did swing round, then, this fearless woman. To. To see. To see who might be lurking … and, in doing so, took her first giddy step into the corrupted Terra Incognita of her antagonists.

  Talkad

  Jottings, impressions and (I suppose) speculations. Here goes: 5 May. Hot. This place was quite a project with stone-lined streets etc embedded in the jungle. The temple. Built two days’ pilgrimage from Mysore. Stifling heat. In Karnatakan forest. Treetops bunched globes of leaves more solid than solid black cloud blanketing the earth. Pilgrims filing beneath along gloomy paths. Ecstasy of arrival no doubt. For the first thousand years anyway. Light that crept in across the floor around squat columns. Low ceiling very characteristic. Old old and heavy. Once were craftsmen peeling lengths of sandalwood. Aromatic. Images in dark corners. Panoply and stuff accumulated from countless annual processions. All left standing propped at odd angles. Glowering masks included, with shadowy brows and peacock plumes. Human skulls. Garlands of skulls strung across the third eye. Ropes of dessicated marigolds. Great heads sprouting matted locks worn-out like old hemp. Obscure whispers of neglect. Too deep for birdsong. No verses on ritual days. Barefoot worshippers padding across the flagstones. Flagstones waxed with human oil lustre round the shrine to Shiva. Massive lingam. Carved cleft. The god’s own phallus to be anointed with liquid ghee. Their devotions. Shiva as World-destroyer, from whom nothing hidden. Stale, moist, opaque. Ritual: the priest handing a tiny silver ladle of water to each arrival. Precious liquid to be cast over their heads. The god witnessing in person. Not like Christianity. No notion of symbols as objects of worship. Hindu gods inhabit their statues. Birth and decorum, sex and death.

  Talkad the place is called.

  Flourished give-or-take a thousand years while change of climate got to work killing the forest. The dark cloud of leaves soon gone. Dead trees toppled. Foot up. Salt on the surface and ground plants shrivelled. Wind stirred parched soil to rise up as dust storms. Seen for miles around. Until just one last copse of trees sheltered the temple. Water sacred and more than ever precious. Few remaining faithful would still bathe and refresh their bodies with rancid sludgy tailings in the ghat outside. Solemnity of refused farewell. Rinsing, wringing out their thousand-year-old clothes. They came to pray to the most ancient manifestation of Shiva: Rudra, the Roarer, the Outsider, who —so tradition has it—rejected the familiar world for remote and dangerous places. Inevitably thought to build a wall enclosing the temple courtyard. Sand encroachment promptly drifted up against it. Beleague
red. Sand veiled naked copulating statues. Cups of the eyes. Dry stone eyeballs. Locks of stone hair. Carved ears sand-filled. Soft chalky look. Dulled lips’ curve. Tier upon tier the swarming figures. Fretted. Stone hands open to receive divine energy, pranha, given whispering grit instead.

  So, centuries came and went. Winds died down and gusted afresh bringing tonnes of sand to be shovelled into baskets, carted out through the gate and dumped back on the gathering dunes. Ready to come again. Endlessly hot, of course, as previously reported. Even the ghat itself dried up. In time filled with sand. Sand and more sand mounted. Restless hills rose around the temple. Hills mounded by the wind and beginning to slide down their own slopes, the unresisting and impressionable purity of silk sheets. Dry, fluid. Ungoverned beauty. Envelopment. Sand banking up against the wall began to billow over the top. The stillness of centuries and the whole courtyard buried. Stone steps obliterated. Thus worshippers trod a soft warm carpet as they stepped in.

  Down there, within the stone cave of the building, priest after priest grew old. Bones sleeved in flesh. Generations of ancientness. Beads glossy with use, the white mark (e.g. on this or that forehead) the only fresh thing in the lightless windowless sanctuary. Carvings smudged and softened. The last priest-haunted shadows. Old man true to the sacred member of the god but scarcely more alive than the masks. Dwarfed wizened and exhausted. Perched on the beam of a wooden juggernaut. In bygone days young workers would drag this juggernaut out into the open. Complete with its community of minor divinities waggling at the casements and perilously perched on its squealing tower of compartments. Once were festivals of ecstasy when the same boys cast their bodies in the stone-lined street to be trampled to death. The street also gone. Enveloping forest gone, all without trace.