Charades Read online

  Charade pads about like a cat in her stockinged feet.

  It is interesting that she has noted the presence of Rachel, of Alison, of his son, domestic humidity, though she has mistaken their trails. It is interesting that she has noticed the drawings in the kitchen, the drawings of his housekeeper’s children, since, as a matter of fact, he stuck them on the refrigerator door himself. Pulled them out of the waste paper basket and bought the little magnets (coated with vinyl apples, bananas, watermelon slices) at the A&P, and put them there. Joanna, a widow, had laughed and then looked at him sharply. But Charade thinks Joey’s green teddy bears invite analysis, and Sara’s drawings are ominously neat.

  “People like me,” he says suddenly, and the insight propels itself explosively from behind some interior dam, “we’re like trained monkeys really. Brilliant in limited spheres. But mess up our lines, put a spoke in our wheels, and we don’t know what to do.”

  Charade stops, startled, in front of him.

  He notices that a filament of cobweb, drifting down from the ceiling and crusted with motes of dust and light, sways back and forth across her breasts like a pendulum. And then he notices the small black spider, at first invisible against her pantyhose, climbing into view, ascending, ascending, like a mole against her midriff, her chest, her cheek, riding on the heft of some unseen pulley. Of course it means something, but all signs have become to him temporarily unreadable.

  “Sorry,” Charade says, knotting the tails of her shirt together. “You’re afraid you’ve been saddled with a nut, right?”

  No, no, he shakes his head vehemently. God, where do her ideas come from? “It’s just that I have no idea what to do,”

  he says. “No idea.”

  She sighs. “The messiness doesn’t touch you scientists, does it? Everything’s clean, everything runs on grooves.”

  Behind her head, battalions of green teddy bears, drawn in crayon by the son of his cleaning lady, march across his refrigerator door. They all face the same direction, they are all going to the same place, full of green energy that splashes beyond the edges of their limbs. But Joanna’s daughter Sara keeps all colour neatly within its boundaries, and this is ominous.

  “I’m sure,” Charade is saying, “that people like me, crammed full of literature and history but more or less illiterate in science … I’m sure I might as well be mute as far as you’re concerned. I’m sure I might as well be speaking Swahili.”

  “No,” he says emphatically. “No, no, absolutely not. Not at all. Keep talking.”

  “Well,” she says, “anyway. It’s morning.”

  “Weren’t you going to tell me a story? The Tale of Yesterday and Tomorrow, you said.”

  “But it’s morning. And you have a nine o’clock class.”

  6

  The Tale of Yesterday

  and Tomorrow

  When the Great Walls were being built, Charade begins, wrapping herself loosely in a sheet and huddling into the armchair in Koenig’s bedroom …

  And the walls are everywhere, everywhere, she says. They run down the middle of subway cars, have you noticed? I’ll tell you a tale of this morning’s subway:

  “You still can’t step into the same river twice,” says the tow-headed boy. He leans against the wall of the car which branches and flowers with graffiti. He must be all of twelve or thirteen years old, and is wedged beneath Charade’s left armpit. “For day-to-day in Harvard Square,” he says, “Heraclitus is more helpful than Senator Kennedy. Anyway, that’s what I’m going to argue. That you still can’t step into the same river twice.”

  “You can’t step into the Charles River once,” his companion answers, “unless you want to pick up an infection. We know where Kennedy stands on Pollution Probe, and that’s what counts.”

  Then a station flashes into view, brakes, sucks out a hundred people, crams another hundred in. The boys in their crested school blazers have disappeared, and in their place is a woman with paperclips dangling from her ears. She nudges Charade and whispers fiercely: “Finally finally finally finally.” Charade cannot avoid seeing into the woman’s bag, where two dead birds lie rigid in crumpled newsprint. A ritual? Breakfast? The woman is thin as bird bones under seamed skin. “Finally finally finally,” she whispers, eyes glittering.

  Park Street station reaches in and whirls her up its funnel to the spinning streets.

  “Yes?” Koenig prompts, when her silent orbit brings her back through his bedroom.

  “Yes, what?”

  He gestures, mildly agitated, pulling back her words from the air. “Whirls her up its funnel to the spinning streets.”

  “End of my subway story. She climbed into someone else’s tale.”

  “You sound … different.”

  “Different?”

  “Yes. Your voice changes.”

  “So does yours behind your lectern.”

  “Yes, but …”

  “I can’t help it, stories have their own voices, they speak me. You want me to leave after all?”

  No, no, he shakes his head vehemently. “Keep talking.”

  Once upon a time, Charade says, before Copernicus, this city lay still on its pontoons between the Charles River and the Atlantic. Back then, a person could climb out of the subway and step into the same city twice; a person could journey more or less straightforwardly from birth to death, which used to be the last stop on the line; one used to be able to count on that.

  Once upon a time, geography was stable. More than that — I am almost certain — there was once a time when days followed one another in orderly fashion like huge beads on a rope. You pulled your way along, hand over hand. You could stop and look behind you and say: There’s the past. You could touch what was beneath your fingers, you could smell it, lick it, taste it. This is today, you could say. And you could reach forward and sense the beads stretching on and on. That is the future, you could say; the things that will arrive tomorrow, that have not yet happened, though they do exist and lie in waiting.

  But probably even then — if there was a then — the beads just out of reach curled back to touch the past. Probably time has always been a necklace. Probably it has always been possible to begin the circuit at any point.

  And when the Great Walls were being built — in ancient China, in Berlin, in Warsaw and Lodz, in Sydney and Brisbane, in the Punjab, in Fiji, in Toronto and New York and Boston — there were always clusters of law-abiding and curious folk who stood watching the progress of division.

  And there was always a lunatic or two to shout: Beware! Beware! to the embarrassment of ordinary folks.

  On both sides the watchers could see the indestructible present, sweet and straight as a line. Everyman — a chatty fellow — was forever waving to his neighbour across the workers and the rubble. What is this nonsense? he called, and both of them laughed.

  Only yesterday, he said in awe to his little son as the wall grew higher, only yesterday we could see the apple tree in our neighbour’s yard. His tree was heavy with blossoms, he always gave us a bushel of apples. Remember how you played in the rain barrels under the trees?

  The little boy thought he could remember. Into his mind fell a white flock of petals, and the taste of crisp inaccessible apples became a craving on his tongue. He saw a girl in a muslin pinafore whom he chased between the rain barrels. The girl smelled of tree-sap and new mown grass and he pined for her in his dreams.

  Daddy, he wept, I want to see her again, I miss her, I want the apple blossom girl.

  What? his father said. What girl? I can’t remember a girl. Our neighbour never had any children, it was a constant source of grief to him.

  But as his son described her — the hair that fell pale and heavy to her shoulders, her little brown hands, her white pinafore — he recalled that he and his neighbour had always intended a match.

  I can remember a time, he said
to the grandson on his knee, when your father played in the rain barrels underneath our neighbour’s trees on the other side of the wall. I can remember when your father was in love with a beautiful girl who lived on the other side. That was before the wall was built.

  I don’t believe you, grandpa, the child said. It’s just another one of your stories. There’s always been a wall.

  Grandfather and father stared at each other.

  Out of the mouths of babes, the father laughed. Why don’t you admit it, Dad? There’s always been a wall.

  But … the grandfather said, bewildered. You yourself remember the girl.

  Ah, that’s different, the son said. That was part of my wild and reckless youth when I made dangerous forays beyond the wall. That was how I met the girl. The girl is real.

  Of course the girl is real, the grandfather blustered. (He was a stubborn fellow, old and contentious.) Before the wall was built, he said, you used to play with her under the trees. Even God cannot change the past, he stormed.

  No one is trying to change the past, his son placated. It’s just that your memory is playing tricks. Don’t you remember that first time I smuggled her across the wall? How you begged me not to get involved because of the danger?

  It’s true, the grandfather conceded. There was never a time when the wall was not there. But the girl was real. What became of her?

  Who knows? the son sighed. She worried about her own father, she insisted on going back.

  I always hoped I’d meet her father, the old man said. I always thought we’d have a lot in common. I used to picture his back yard, I used to imagine how we’d stand and chat if the wall had never been there.

  I don’t know, the son said. Sometimes I thought he was just an excuse she used. She must have had a father, of course, but I’m not at all sure he lived beyond the wall.

  She had a vivid imagination, the old man recalled. And such an unforgettable face. You used to call her the apple blossom girl.

  Yes, the son sighed. I still dream of her.

  “Do you see what I mean?” Charade asks.

  Of course, for me — she might have said — it’s an intense and personal issue, with my father’s past and present being such elusive constructions.

  But many other examples could be adduced.

  In Toronto — not a city that rides high in the Book of the World’s Awareness — a certain Zundel snapped his fingers and made the 1940s disappear. He coughed brimstone and a staggering amount of documentation wisped away like smoke from an oven: eyewitness accounts, photographs, videotapes of the bodies going under the bulldozers.

  “Of course, you know about this, Koenig,” she sighs. “You know all about the trial in Toronto. And in Europe there are academics who solemnly delineate a mass hallucination. There is proof that the Second World War was a hoax.

  “And so Verity Ashkenazy and Nicholas Truman,” she says, “both were and weren’t. That’s my honest opinion.”

  “Perhaps,” Koenig says, “if you could start at the beginning.”

  But Charade sees the approach of morning and falls silent.

  7

  One Way of Beginning

  “Tonight,” Koenig says, “if you could begin at the beginning perhaps …”

  But where, Charade wonders, is the beginning? And how does she cut her own story free from the middle of the history of so many others? In a sense, she is the epilogue to several lives.

  Well then …

  Here’s one beginning, she suggests, in the rainforest, where time comes and goes like a bird.

  The birds. To the tag end of trillions of years of decay and growth come the birds: bellbirds, lyrebirds, lorikeets, parakeets. Shadow and rotting sweetnesses lure them. On their wings is such a weight of colour that they float dazed on the green air, slowly losing height, drifting down to where Charade sits crushing the mosses and ferns. Oh, she gasps. Oh.

  She is five, perhaps six years old, rapt, knees hugged up under her chin. The fallen tree trunk behind her back, given over to creepers, is collapsing softly, and along its jellied spine where a flock of new saplings has a toehold — there is walnut, silky oak, mahogany — the jostling and clamouring for light is constant and silent and deadly earnest. If she sits still long enough, the philodendron will loop itself around her ankles and kingfishers will nest in her hair.

  That is my earliest memory, Charade says.

  When I was six or seven, she says, I found a dead man in the rainforest and I kept him as a pet. He was my secret. I suppose he was a swaggie — he might have been someone who had walked from Cairns to Melbourne and was on his way back, or he might have been just a local drunk. He could have been one of my mother’s lovers, it’s certainly likely. One night when the sky was bloody with the sun (which never went quietly; which was always dragged, kicking, screaming orange and purple, down below the Tropic of Capricorn) … on such a night, I suppose, the man drank until he saw lightning, and then he went thundering off to some shack on the side of the Tamborine Mountain. One foot after another, he stepped precisely, he kept his starshot eyes on his shoes, he placed them down gently as eggs on the red clay road, but the rainforest reached out and got him.

  It was the lawyer-cane probably; those wait-a-whiles had their hooks deep in his shirt and trousers when I found him. And his smell had its hooks into me. That was what reeled me in, gasping and fascinated. What I thought I saw, down against the curtained roots of the strangler fig, was a balloon man, slowly inflating. Every day he was bigger. Every day I held a handkerchief over my nose and mouth and watched the ants: the way they embroidered him and covered him with soft brown bunting. Birds spoke to him, and perhaps it was their beaks that punctured his purple balloon-skin.

  I heard him sigh.

  And then he began to deflate, at first quickly with little shudders and farts, but after that slowly, silkily, peacefully, like a glove as a hand withdraws. Each day he was thinner and flatter. I liked him better then, because his smell had escaped from him, bubbling away between the ferns. When he was clean and white inside his muddy clothes, when he smelled as sweet and yeasty as moss, I put flowers in his eyes. You can be my father, I told him. Jimmy Armstrong and Michael Donovan and Diane Stolley, they’ve all got fathers, but we’ve gone and lost mine.

  Do you see how relevant this beginning is? Charade asks. It’s a habit that set in early for me, these interminable discussions with profound but inarticulate men.

  Or here’s another beginning, at school.

  Diane Stolley whispers to a circle of girls: Charade Ryan has a dirty mother, Charade Ryan smells. And out by the swings there’s a chant: Charade Ryan smells!

  It’s true. Tree bark and leaves can be found in my hair, matted in, part of the growth. There is always mud under my fingernails, my bare legs are crisscrossed with scratches, mosquito bites, bruises.

  Michael Donovan taunts me: You stink as bad as your mother’s snatch.

  I guess you’d know, I call back … Your dad looks at it every night. He’s always hanging around our place.

  “It’s astonishing, isn’t it?” Charade asks Koenig, “how early we have that kind of knowledge? At seven and eight, we know how to draw blood quickest and deepest. Maybe later we just lose energy and lapse into kindness by default.”

  When I was fourteen, she says, and being shipped off to high school in Brisbane, Michael Donovan, without any warning, swung down out of our mango tree and whispered “Big shot, eh? Bush high school’s not good enough.”

  “I don’t want to go,” I said (a polite lie, in one sense, and absolute truth in another). “Mr Bobart says I have to, he arranged it.”

  “Teacher’s pet,” sniffed Michael Donovan, but he had his hands behind his back, and he scratched one calf with the other bare foot. “Brought something for you,” he said. Two things, in fact. An orchid — everyone knew how much I loved white orch
ids — and a Penguin book of Australian poetry. He held out his gifts as though they were dead fish caught at the culvert where the road smashed through our shrinking forest.

  I was dumbfounded.

  Only a month ago he had filled my schoolbag with mud. Michael Donovan himself had no plans whatsoever for high school. Already he was in business with his father, collecting the garbage bins from the school, trucking them to the pig farmers. Already, people said, he’d got a girl in trouble and would have been a father if things hadn’t been taken care of down in Brisbane.

  I could not imagine him at Wentworth’s General Store and Post Office, where the cars came in off the south coast road, asking for a Penguin poetry book. I knew where the orchid came from; it was a prize bloom, Tamborine Stella, stolen from the trellis over Mrs Tierney’s front gate. Very likely the Penguin book was stolen too.

  “I’m sorry you’re gonna go away,” he said. And because for once I was struck speechless, because I kept standing there, staring, tasting sexual power for the very first time, he added roughly: “Just don’t come back talking with a plum in your mouth. Can’t stand sheilas talk that way.”

  Still not a word would come to me, not one, so I stood on tiptoes and kissed him on the cheek. And then — after he dropped his gifts and grabbed me — on the lips.

  But on that other day, back near the beginning of things, back on the day when he said I smelled as bad as my mother’s snatch, on that day they had to pull us apart, and I did the most damage. I came away with a chunk of his hair and with long crimped ribbons of his skin underneath my nails.