Chaconne. Diana BlackwoodЧитать онлайн книгу.
“Do you know what Mavis keeps under her bed? Just in case we’re nuked or supplies are cut to Wollongong, she has enough skim milk powder to last two years, cans of fish and tomatoes, and bags of dried beans and rice that she has to replace when the weevils attack them. Oh, and iodine. That woman is a deputy matron in a public hospital!”
“Iodine in what form?”
“I don’t know, brown pharmaceutical bottles.”
“Lugol’s solution. Good idea. Iodine blocks the uptake of radioactive …”
“Ruth!”
“Okay, calm down. Look, she’s not so strange. I know a Jewish family in Melbourne who had a hiding place and secret exit built into their house when a fallout shelter might have been more to the point.”
They walked on until they reached a rock platform that extended beyond a small cliff. The sea had eroded the pink and yellow sandstone into an overhang and nibbled holes in its surface. Ruth wandered from rockpool to rockpool, avoiding the clusters of periwinkles, until she found a pool that pleased her, whereupon she squatted like a child beside it and peered into the scooped-out shallows. She would be imagining herself a creature in a tidal pool, Eleanor was certain. She would be looking up at our world of sunlight and air from her muffled world of Neptune’s necklace, anemones and sea urchins.
“Did you know,” Ruth said in a dreamy voice, “that sea urchins have an amazing jaw structure – five jaws that meet, in fact – called Aristotle’s lantern?”
“Ruth, look!” A brownish grey octopus, too large to be the lethal blue-ringed species, had heaved itself out of a nearby pool and was slithering and contracting its way across the rock platform. When it reached a tiny inlet, it dropped into the foaming, sucking sea.
“It must have seen our shadows,” said Ruth.
“It won’t be dashed against the rocks, will it? It looked a bit squashy and fragile.” The endless struggle that was the lot of so many creatures was sometimes sad to contemplate.
“It’s tougher than it looks. It swam in with the tide, after all.”
Now Ruth was taking cautious steps towards the slippery edge of the rock platform. The spray wet her sandshoes, but she seemed not to notice. For a minute or so she stared at the sea. Then she turned and walked back, eyes downwards, like a person travelling a sober line of thought.
“Eleanor … Your father didn’t really die when you were four, did he?”
“What makes you say that?” Her voice faltered and she looked away, as if she had been caught in a shameful lie. Yet the untruth about her father had never felt like falsehood: it lacked a lie’s glinting edge, a lie’s poisonous tip. It was just an old habit, something she wore to protect herself from prying and supposition. There wasn’t much anyone could say – so young, how sad! – about the prosaic finality of a heart attack.
“Oh, I don’t know. I was just wondering how octopuses mate and suddenly I thought … I mean, Mavis hasn’t mentioned him, there are no photos of him around the house, you never talk about him. In my family we talk about the dead. Too much, I sometimes think.”
“He might as well be dead.” But that was not quite true either. Death she could defer to, but the thought that her father could still be alive somewhere and had never, so far as she knew, sought news of her was a canker. “And he very likely is.”
Ruth sighed. “I understand that it’s painful to talk about. And I’m trying to accept that you don’t want to discuss it. I’m not even saying you should. Well, maybe I am. It’s just that I don’t see … I simply cannot see what’s in it for you to be so … For heaven’s sake, if you can’t trust me, who the hell can you trust?”
They were back on the sand now, walking south in the direction of the Port Kembla steelworks in whose foul interior Eleanor’s father had passed his working week. There was no dodging Ruth’s plaintive logic, or no way that Eleanor could see without causing hurt.
“He did leave when I was four – went to work one morning and didn’t come home. Mavis drove him away, if you ask me. She said he drank, but if he did, I wonder why. Don’t forget, she made him change his name to hers, and then she went and named me after Eleanor bloody Roosevelt.”
“What was his name again?”
“Jesukevičius.”
Ruth hooted. “She did him a favour. But do you remember him at all?”
“I’m not sure. I think I remember a man’s voice with a foreign accent, a male presence.” She did not say that the voice that came to her in memory and in dreams sang swirling, fathomless lullabies. She had once asked her grandmother if she had ever heard him sing. She had not, though she seemed to remember Mavis mentioning, in the early days, something about Jonas having a bit of a voice.
“Do you look like him? You don’t look like Mavis. Maybe your great-great-great-great-grandmother was raped by a Tartar.”
“Not enough greats. I’ve got a few photos I’ll show you later.”
Just as Eleanor had begun to feel calm again, panic struck like sudden vertigo. She gripped Ruth’s arm. “Ruth, there’s another thing. How do I know who he was? How do I know he wasn’t one of those Lithuanians who joined the … you know, the Einsatzgruppen.”
“Actually they had their own death squads. They didn’t need German orders or encouragement.”
“He would have been nineteen at the end of the war. How do I know he didn’t take part …”
Ruth replied in her most reasonable voice, which sealed off any struggle with her feelings. “I thought about that when you told me your father was Lithuanian. You can’t know for certain. You’ll probably never know. Even if there was ever such a thing as a war crimes trial in this country and they decided to charge him – and they’d have to find him first – you probably wouldn’t be sure even then. He may have participated, or he may have seen or only heard about what went on – he would have been very young, after all – but you can be pretty damn sure he would have known something about the massacres. And supposing you did discover the truth, and it turned out to be what you most feared? What difference would it make, really? You’d still be you, we’d still be friends, you’d still be just as secretive, if not more so. It’s not as if you’ve been brought up by some rabid anti-Semite. You’re so ridiculously philo-Semitic that you can’t see what a pain in the bum my mother is, and you won’t listen when I try to tell you what’s wrong with Israel. Eleanor, seriously, you can’t be held responsible or pardoned for someone else’s crimes, real or hypothetical.”
Ruth’s father, a lawyer whose principles had survived legal practice, had schooled his clever daughter in a scrupulous moral reasoning. Her daunting ability to stay faithful to it was the measure of his gift.
“Hey, look at the time! I’m feeding the chooks, remember?”
Ruth knew how to keep out of dark places in the daylight hours, but sometimes at night she cried out in her sleep. Once, Eleanor had gone to her room to find her sitting up in bed, weeping. She would not recount her nightmare. How could she describe the chaos of screaming children, the crush of terror and despair? Now she took off in a run along the beach. Eleanor, who was lean and lithe like her mother, gave her a head start. There was more to be said, but it could wait. One Saturday morning they would have a conversation about inherited guilt (a bit of an indulgence, Ruth might say, unless it led to action) and forgiveness (Christianity’s one beautiful but unenforceable idea). Ruth might steer her away from the Shoah – “you’re like a moth to a menorah!” – towards the here and now of Aboriginal dispossession and South African apartheid. Without knowing how she had come to such a view, Eleanor might venture that perhaps what the victims of past wrongs wanted above all else was for their suffering to be acknowledged. Perhaps more than anything, they just needed to be heard – regardless of whether it brought an immediate change