Silence Read online

  Yet it is true that his thoughts did wander when a drift of spray tingled against his tough old cheek. He did find himself recollecting his previous visit, three years earlier, a visit he had not mentioned to his wife because she must suspect nothing of the secret undeviating meetings held there, nor those friends and comrades dedicated to ‘full political, civil and social rights for black Americans’. He had wanted to. But he was afraid the Niagara Movement might be her sticking point. Afraid she was only all right about his colour so long as he did not call attention to it. He had no wish to alarm her. He needed to protect his marriage and the peace he enjoyed at home. Truth to tell, as they stood together in the prickling spray, transfixed by the falls, there came a moment of lapse when the din which enveloped this unfrightenable man frightened him: the vast flow so hurtled over the precipice, as impenetrably intent as a malevolent being with the hypnotic power to draw all creation in its vortex and plunge it down into that boiling canyon of destruction. Caught in the fascination of a suicidal spasm, mid-stride, he might well have jumped … had it not been that her warm gloved hand reached for his as if she knew.

  Not long after William Donnegan returned home to Springfield, Illinois, he was amazed to hear again the unremitting noise of that great river sliding over its precipice—right there in the dreary, landlocked, peeling heart of his very own birthplace. What fantastical delusion was this? Out for his daily constitutional, the usual stroll through suburban streets, a stroll noteworthy only for the new homburg he chose to parade on this occasion (he still retained a touch of the peacock and why not?), he found himself distracted from such simple vanity by an echo of the impossible. A faint roar at first, the sound of it seeming to come slow and terrific, forever and forever, the swell that cumulatively followed announcing a catastrophe ahead. And what he soon caught sight of amounted to no less than the separation of hearing and seeing. In disbelief he found himself confronted not by a river, but by a rabble: a rabble of monotonous, self-repeating and fiercely purposeful thousands. Although several blocks away still, faces could be seen red with fury under the shadow of hats. Open mouths uttered a shameless, pent, baffled, murderous roar. And, manifested as terrifying sound, the torrent of their hatred surged his way. He recognized the rush of it as reaching back to the headwaters of the first guilty days of the slave trade.

  Next thing they surrounded and jostled him, carrying him some distance before he could catch breath. It was upon them, of them, the shameless savagery. His homburg bowled into the gutter. Forced up against a shopfront by the same continuing surge he discovered the door to the place unlatched. He huddled there to wait his opportunity. So when, momentarily, the mob turned on another victim, their faces seeming to glare with bodiless suspension as if he would keep till later, his nerve did not fail; as the surge flooded back across the road and on, he twisted the handle and staggered in. The cloistral dimness a comfort, he had the presence of mind to slam the door after him and, leaning against it, shot the bolts and pulled down the blind. Only then did he realize his trespass was observed, not knowing yet how gruesome his face looked, wide-eyed and streaked with blood.

  A young woman with fair hair, hardly more than a girl, cowered behind the counter. Did she think he might assault her? Would she betray him? Without a word she stood her ground with that serene, unearthly luminousness of a hospital patient under the knife. He watched her weigh the matter up. She knew what was what. Well, everyone did, after all. Then one hand rose like an automaton to check her hair with swift, trembling, practised movements. With the other she opened the door behind her and stood aside for him to go through first, even while the mob outside went howling past the shop window with the power and senselessness of an avalanche, glittering thickets of flame dancing above their heads. They dragged poor Scott Burton along with them. That’s what he witnessed, too late, in the very instant of accepting her protection. Scott, his barber for twenty years, was flung down and flung up and sent staggering among a forest of legs, mob outrage booming, clear and young and too vigorous to withstand. He witnessed it, as seen past a display of jam in glass jars. This and a sudden, tremendous lick of light towering into the dusky sky. With the cry of an unassuagable fury the mob swarmed in a vortex to crowd round a tree right outside the shop. He did not need a second look. Poor Scott, nothing could save him now.

  Next day the copper light still hung in the sky. Someone was said to have counted twelve thousand rioters. The violence, triggered by nothing more substantial than rumour, had needed only a trumped-up story—of some black supposed rapist being protected by a jail, any jail, where he was held—to unleash its frenzy. This he learned by the time he found his way back to his family.

  Despite and still, old as he was, he survived.

  So William Donnegan, cobbler, self-made man, in his way an example to his kind, reached home to be enfolded by that aged white flesh he so desired and so cherished. Her arms around him, he rested against his wife’s breast, shaking with exhaustion till his anger subsided. Even then, in thick darkness, the night sky glowered with proliferating fires and bruised smoke—the whole district ablaze. Man and wife, they could not sleep for fear. Though to some degree protected by their prosperous house and its orderly garden’s forbidding message to intruders, this felt like little enough. Late into the night the hubbub of too many voices did eventually dwindle and peter out to a draggle-tail of parting oaths and a residual scatter of sobs and cries. And then these were mingled with the waking call to action of those who had slept and for whom the crusade was only just beginning: a future newly opening the way ahead.

  Already, in the early light, women and children posed beside the barber’s dangling body for photographs as keepsakes. White families nailed fluttering handkerchiefs to their doors, like signs during an outbreak of plague, the white of exemption. For the rest … well, too bad. Houses went up in smoke and by the time the firefighters arrived, their draught-horses clattering down echoey streets, it was too late. The entire neighbourhood burned beyond saving and the crowds moved on. But not until the second night of rioting, 15 August 1908, did the Springfield lynch mob break into William Donnegan’s house. They dragged him out, clubbed him and slashed at him, cutting his throat, to teach him a lesson.

  &

  Nature—slow at her task, but swifter by far than the governments of men—did eventually achieve a seeming impossibility. It took another year, but in 1909 Niagara Falls froze. The roaring stopped. A vast cliff of icicles, a wall of arrested moments, towered above mounding domes and hills of snow-covered ice on which, half-blinded by sheer whiteness, enchanted sightseers in black homburg hats and black overcoats posed for the camera.

  Babak

  Whatever else she may have expected on arrival at this detention camp in the far north of South Australia the journalist did not expect Babak. Babak was thirteen years old. An asylum seeker from Afghanistan, his lips were sewn together. Crude thread zigzagged from needle-hole to bloodied needle-hole. Listening to what she had to say, he sat slumped in the dust among sixteen others, enduring a temperature upwards of forty degrees. All of them had inflamed lips bruised around the stitches. Politely they listened. Once she had finished she was told none spoke English.

  An Afghan doctor, also incarcerated there, volunteered to be her interpreter.

  Babak wrote down his first question for the doctor to translate: ‘Do you have a city in your desert?’ ‘Yes,’ she told him, ‘but not exactly in the desert.’ ‘What is your city like?’ And then, of course, she came up against the impossibility of describing Sydney—the heart-stopping beauty of the harbour on a sparkling day. So she invited another question instead. And it was written out for the translator: ‘Who put us here?’

  She thought of the Prime Minister’s harbourside mansion.

  Men and women edged close to hear, despite the guards in the employ of the private company administering the camp for profit. In place of an answer she invited these others to tell stories on behalf of the hunger-strikers who
could not speak. The doctor did his best, listening, nodding, interpreting, finding the right words in hesitant English, bringing life to fragments of what had happened during the desperate journey to reach safety: stories of humble gatherers of wild pistachio nuts who had found the courage to defy the army—and then the insurgents—to set out on the journey. Stories of horror and repression, torture and murder, a gruelling struggle across the mountains and a long, long journey by train. Stories of the first terrifying sight of an ocean, stories of hunger and heroism and sinking vessels. And then came the account of a catastrophe of bad weather and an approaching ship, high on the horizon, headed to the rescue—men in uniform—angels, for sure.

  Her interpreter produced a tattered news clipping from his pocket and unfolded it with surgeon’s fingers. He gave it to her to read. Prime Minister Howard was quoted as having said: Children in the proper, positive care of their parents don’t sew their lips together, do they? Speaking now for himself, the doctor asked what this meant. He had underlined the words: They are trying to morally intimidate Australians.

  She had no way of explaining. Shame overcame any attempt. Her own country out there, unendingly flat beyond the razor wire, struck her as a place so strange and barren she didn’t recognise it. Well, because Howard was not alone. An inescapable disgrace was already embedded in the complicit tone of the article. Babak’s father, with one arm across his son’s shoulders, constantly dabbed antiseptic on the boy’s lips and hummed a chant. His own lips sewn and sore. There was grief in his exhausted eyes. The doctor explained that Babak had volunteered to take part in the hunger strike because he knew he would need to learn courage for when he grew to be a man with his own children to protect and feed.

  From there the visitor moved on around the compound under a blazing weight of sunshine. The prison guard accompanying her explained that each detainee had been allocated a number and must be addressed by that number. This, he explained, assured them of equality. And failure to comply? He illustrated the consequences with the tale of a nursing sister who had refused to use the numbers. She had objected that such a system was tried out once before in her lifetime … by the Nazis. So, she had set about learning the patients’ names. Well, naturally, the manager carpeted her and dismissed her. The guard sniffed, ‘And anyway, she could never pronounce them right, from what I understand.’

  Once they had completed the circuit, the journalist bid goodbye to her friend the doctor. Meanwhile Babak had written a new message: ‘My mother says,’ the doctor translated, ‘we must be proud of our beautiful Hazara language.’ She assured the boy that she had no doubt of it and that Hazaran would be beautiful again on his own lips when next he was free to speak.

  ‘Makes you wonder,’ said the guard supervising her departure, ‘who they think gives a damn.’

  The flame priest

  Oft the old man check that flame He step outside Of death unmindful Yonden the sacred cave And still asleep Asleep he make his duty Feed with oil the clear flame think Gods thought The ritual respect We know this pride us boys One asleep boy mutter some sad thing Man voice from boy mouth Sad if woken sad with dreams With exile words his own Old asleep man greet the dawn Fox fur save him colden Priest of this day risen Some new thing here Lake-remembered fog a crust on each one twig I change me to a bat Fly big and bold out Right at that elder head While he standfast feed the flame Up then across the world The world hang top to tail whenall I stop The wintercarish priest ask who am I Who you are he shout while still asleep I answer I am fire That fire that get away Him tricked he turn back in His spirit find his body dead And friendless on the floor He cannot breathe nor speak Back from the lake I fly athwart his head And laugh and threat to sell him The price of seven oxes He dead enough but wield his staff Frost melted on his deadman hand Old deadman hot with fury His watching lamp still drunk on oil Flamelight spirit count us boys Me not missed nor none Growled words of grief from one that talk Red sunspear on the old mans chest That flame burn up So now I change me to a fish Lakesafe underwater hearen nothing When my friend cry out in broken voice

  Winter campaign

  The colossal din of an army coming to rest congests the sky above the tundra, the crackling frosted air chock full of noisy confusion right up to a ceiling of cloud, everywhere boots are tramping, shuffling, stamping, the marching mud-clogged boots of foot soldiers and a few shiny well-heeled boots among them, everywhere boots coming to attention belong to one category or the other, and everywhere hands and heads, and everywhere mouths shaped for drinking, for swearing, agape while they issue orders or clamp tight in submission, many gulping, others blaspheming. Detachments of assault pioneers wield picks and shovels, hardened hands tinker with weapons provisionally theirs to hold as long as the campaign advances from success to success and indeed runners already deliver messages pre-empting victory and all the sounds of this methodical bustle accumulate as a symphonic crescendo. Amid the hubbub of settling in, of scourings and the assemblage of mechanisms, amid preparations and repairs, with mallets tapping away at tent pegs for officers’ tents behind the lines, field kitchens spouting pungent smoke, the towed artillery is trundled to new positions ready for the morning. Horses whinny as they trample their own dung. The left-right left-right of arriving rearguardsmen swells the cacophony of multitudes perpetually converging and crisscrossing the vast encampment to hold together a complex rhythm punctuated by instructions in the form of bugle calls. Eighty squadrons, comprising nine thousand four hundred and seventy-three men under arms, sort themselves out according to allotted billets. They are to bivouac in the open in groups, each group with its magazine of supplies, each with its small campfire so that, upon waking, the soldiers—having warmed their feet and slept on dried-out ground—may instantly be ready for battle. And stamped into every face (ineradicable and unmistakable, whether etched there for life or moulded of the softer stuff of momentary inspiration) is the vice that unites them, the crude bloodlust of certain victory. Preoccupied with settling their kit, cartridge box, knapsack, provisions for four days, pioneer hatchet, musket and bayonet, some among them erect straw shelters against the wind, others chance it and simply roll themselves in blankets, all with the prescient solemnity, the prescient heartbeat, the prescient tremor of unexpended adrenalin, called into being by danger, the solemn clash of arms soon to come and the expected spillage of enemy blood in combat violent enough to burn off the last reserves of energy. Meanwhile, sleep is the order of the day. Bivouacs are laid out in three lines to disguise their number by reducing the visible fires. The mood wells, bubbles up and soars: as invaders they know they are invincible and feel within them the spring wound tight, lethal energy ready to be unleashed as action, the explosive energy to tear down walls and bastions if need be, an energy uniting them with the cosmos, the striving atoms of the universe, no less, and the principle of order which holds the solar system stable in space. Tomorrow, beyond doubt, they will strike a decisive blow. Convoys of food magazines, essential apparatus of warfare, lumber up behind the army, lumber along separate roads from grain depots secured at three nearby villages, and already the first sacks of wheat for distribution have been broached and handmills begin grinding as the sun goes down, field ovens being stoked give out the mouthwatering aroma of fresh-baked bread, sutlers knock spiggots from casks hoisted on trestles for the bottling of brandy and beer. Harnesses jingle, beasts stamp the ground and drays deliver siege frames and bridge-building components. To the roar of furnaces and the wheeze of bellows armourers get busy with grindstones till an intense squealing hiss of sharpening steel escalates to mingle with the clank of heavy equipment and repairs. Metal slides against metal, timbers clock on timber, small hammers driving nails into horse hooves clunk, big hammers chime at anvils and sledge-hammers join in where the pallisades are being put up. Each pallisade surrounds an armoury of swords for the foot soldiers, carbines and bayonets, three hundred charges of powder per artillery piece, plus crates packed with ammunition and cannonballs. This is an
army no nation on earth could withstand. Out at either wing of the encampment creaking carts deliver forage for the cavalry horses while, way to the rear, the groans of accident victims and those who have fallen prey to an unidentified contagion billow against the sides of a marquee hospital. Squads of mounted hussars patrol the camp, cantering out to the fringe of forest to prevent any deserters escaping. The brigadier’s wolfhounds, whose food has not yet been brought, set up a frenzied barking as the setting sun finally descends into view from under a solid bank of cloud, suspended in a gash of sky, only to bloodily dissolve. Vast daggers of shadow point ahead to where, five kilometres distant, at the eastern edge of the plain, the enemy army, drawn up in ranks, camps ready to confront them at dawn, presenting itself in the distance as a strange, knotted spiderweb that extends the full width of the horizon—a smoke blanket and the sparkle of fires clearly seen to mark the contours of a ridge which is to be the defenders’ sole advantage. Then the hood of night draws down on the din and a long day’s march at the climax of months of preparation ends in sleep.

  Sometime after dark the glass falls and keeps falling.

  Cold stars thrust their way through the ceiling of cloud, fall fine as powder, and settle on the epaulettes of duty guards who shiver cheerfully. Then, quite suddenly, the massing sky crumbles altogether. Snow, in earnest, spins and spirals from a strange immeasurable remoteness, confused icy needles scratching out the last dim relics of countryside. Snow settles on blanketed bodies, on bales of straw set ready for the horses, on pointed canvas peaks of officers’ tents, on the rough bark of pallisades and the smooth horizontals of cannon barrels until, densely tumbling down, it pours as a weightless cataract from the infinity of darkness, nestling softly in the manes of apprehensive horses, softly on an awning above the blacksmith’s forge, softly and softer on sleeping faces, caught in moustaches and eyebrows, stealthily in the ravishing calm, settling as the embodiment of stillness. The slumbering men slumber, communing with bright secret dreams of home and sex, their collective savagery a species of innocence, while above and around them snow drifts across the tundra, impalpable as smoke, snuffing embers, erasing the dark cartridge box and knapsack at each man’s head, cancelling his issue of four days’ provisions, shrouding his musket, burying his hatchet, till the bivouacs, burrowed in sleep, pursue their dream under a vast white sheet. The smell of snow clots the dogs’ throats. Soft flakes now sheath the metal surfaces, cushioning wood and leather, blanking out all senses, muffling touch, freezing ambition, burying the smoke and the aromas of cooking, the stench of shit and even the freshness of trodden earth, to silk ugly facts in fixity. The guns seize up, those house-sized magazines on wheels no longer stand against the sky, nor the siege-frames behind. Useless and abandoned, all are simplified, like covered furniture in a closed house where no one is expected back. With the horror-hounded lust of men sunk in the loneliness of their desires, the mineral soldiers lie scattered like sediment in a stratum of rock compacted under the glimmering mica of snowflakes innumerable beyond description. Two forty-five by the clock. Beneath the low-hanging and impenetrable sky Earth itself is luminous with a dim chill ghostly glow. Sleepwalking guards stagger at their posts, disoriented, like miners emerging from deep underground, rubbing their eyes with mittened hands, and at each blundering step their boots disappear into holes of snow. Thickening gusts of snow spinning chaotically around the sleepers mock all notion of military order, of grand strategy, of territory awaiting conquest, to diminish the land itself and swallow it in the vastness of a teeming sky, the hurtling scribble of meaninglessness. So strange and airless is the effect that the vortex sometimes seems to operate in reverse: as if the dazzle of flakes is being sucked up into the cloud cover. The snowstorm produces and reproduces itself, abating only in its own good time when a voice from the second dream whispers into this one a mysterious wordless whisper, language beyond language, to flurry, to die away, to float as an airy residue, the visible transmuted to invisibility while the drift left behind embraces, delicately, everything. And peace cradles two armies in her arms, her plumage, on her breath, mysteriously fulfilled. The sleepers sleep on, surrendered to the populated silence of dreams, dreams connecting the soul with its source, with marvels and terrors rebuilt afresh from bright untarnished child-fresh images planted long ago in each man’s mind by his first encounter with rooms and family around him. Beyond the bitter end the storm passes, having expunged the last vestiges of life, the last remaining cap and shoulder. Particles still hang in a scintillant nowhere without border between earth and sky. Hours later, when the air assumes its own colour to stand motionless on the horizon, a vast smooth sickle of darkness lingers like the shadow of an approaching planet and a few belated crystals still twirl down, each one tracing its own individual helix, a stray drifting particle detached from the sky, now and then gently floating to nestle where it belongs. So destiny adds the finishing touch and the creaky light of dawn spills wonderingly to explore cloaked ground, the smooth plain, the moon-luminous earth.