Slow Man Read online

  ‘As for the original, your precious Fauchery print, who knows where it is? Perhaps it is still lying under Drago’s bed. Or perhaps he and Shaun flogged it to a dealer. Be comforted, however. You may feel you have become the butt of a joke, and indeed you may be right. But there was no malevolence behind it. No affection, perhaps, but no malevolence either. Just a joke, an unthinking, juvenile joke.’

  No affection. Is it as plain as that, plain for all to see? It is as though the heart in his breast has suddenly grown too tired to beat. Tears come to his eyes again, but with no force behind them, just a watery exudation.

  ‘Is that who they are then?’ he whispers. ‘Gypsies? What else of mine have they stolen, these Croatian gypsies?’

  ‘Don’t be melodramatic, Paul. There are Croatians and Croatians. Surely you know that. A handful of good Croatians and a handful of bad Croatians and millions of Croatians in between. The Jokićs are not particularly bad Croatians, just a little callous, a little rough on the heart. Drago included. Drago is not a bad boy, you know that. Let me remind you: you did tell him, rather loftily I thought, that the pictures were not yours, you were merely guarding them for the sake of the nation’s history. Well, Drago is part of that history too, remember. What harm is there, thinks Drago, in inserting a Jokić into the national memory, even if somewhat prematurely – grandpa Jokić, for instance? Just a lark, whose consequences he may not have thought through; but then, among the unruly young, how many think through the consequences of their acts?’

  ‘Grandpa Jokić?’

  ‘Yes. Miroslav’s father. You didn’t think it was Miroslav himself in the picture, did you? But bear up, all is not lost. In fact, if you are lucky, nothing is lost. Ten to one your beloved Fauchery is still in Drago’s hands. Tell him you will call the police if it is not returned at once.’

  He shakes his head. ‘No. He will just take fright and burn it.’

  ‘Then speak to his mother. Speak to Marijana. She will be embarrassed. She will do anything to protect her first-born.’

  ‘Anything?’

  ‘She will take the blame on herself. She is, after all, the picture-restorer in the family.’

  ‘And then?’

  ‘I don’t know. What happens after that is up to you. If you want to go on and make a scene, you can make a scene. If not, not.’

  ‘I don’t want a scene. I just want to hear the truth. Whose idea was this, Drago’s or what’s-his-name’s, Shaun’s, or Marijana’s?’

  ‘I would call that a fairly modest circumscription of the truth. Would you not like to hear more?’

  ‘No, I don’t want to hear more.’

  ‘Would you not like to hear why you were chosen as the victim, the dummy?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Poor Paul. You flinch away even before the blow can fall. But perhaps there will be no blow. Perhaps Marijana will prostrate herself before you. Mea culpa. Do with me as you wish. And so forth. You will never be sure unless you have a scene with her. Can’t I persuade you? Otherwise what will you be left with? An inconsequential story about being taken for a ride by the gypsies, the high-coloured gypsy woman and the handsome gypsy youth. Not the main thing at all, the distinguished thing.’

  ‘No. Absolutely not. I refuse. No scenes. No threats. If you knew, Elizabeth, how sick and tired I am of being nudged by you this way and that to further these crazy stories in your head! I can see what you want. You would like me to – what is the word? – exploit Marijana. Then you hope the husband will find out and shoot me or beat me up. That is the kind of main thing you are hoping I will produce, isn’t it? – sex, jealousy, violence, action of the most vulgar kind.’

  ‘Don’t be ridiculous, Paul. You don’t resolve a crisis like the present one, whose essence is moral, by beating someone up or shooting him dead. Even you must recognise that. But if my suggestion offends you, I withdraw it. Don’t speak to Drago. Don’t speak to his mother. If I can’t persuade you, I certainly can’t force you. If you are happy to lose your precious picture, so be it.’

  Speak to Marijana, the Costello woman tells him. But what can he say? Marijana? Hello, how are you? I want to apologise for what I said the other night, the night I tripped in the shower, I don’t know what came over me. I must have lost my head. By the way, I notice that one of the photographs in my collection is missing. Do you think you could ask Drago to look in his rucksack and see if he hasn’t packed it by mistake?

  Above all he must not accuse. If he accuses, the Jokićs will deny, and that will be the end of whatever tenuous status he still holds among them – patienthood, clientship.

  Rather than telephone Marijana, perhaps he should write another of his letters, suppressing the lability this time, taking the utmost care with the wording, giving a cool, sensible exposition of his situation vis-à-vis her, vis-à-vis Drago, vis-à-vis the missing photograph. But who writes letters nowadays? Who reads them? Did Marijana read his first letter? Did she even receive it? She gave no sign.

  A memory comes back: a childhood visit to Paris, to the Galeries Lafayette; watching scraps of paper being screwed into cartouches and shot from one department to another along pneumatic tubes. When the hatch in the tube was opened, he remembers, there came from the bowels of the apparatus a subdued roar of air. A vanished system of communication. A vanished world, rationalised out of existence. What happened to them, all those silvery cartouches? Melted down, probably, for shell casings or guided missiles.

  But perhaps with Croatians it is different. Perhaps back in the old country there are still aunts and grandmothers who write letters to their far-flung family in Canada, in Brazil, in Australia, and put stamps on them, and drop them in the mailbox: Ivanka has won the class prize for recitation, the brindled cow has calved, how are you, when will we see you again? So perhaps the Jokićs will not find it so odd to be addressed through the mails.

  Dear Miroslav, he writes.

  I tried to break up your home, so no doubt you feel I ought to shut up and accept whatever punishment the gods visit on me. Well, I will not shut up. A rare photograph belonging to me has disappeared and I would like it back. (Let me add that Drago will not be able to sell it, it is too well known in the trade.)

  If you don’t know what I am talking about, ask your son, ask your wife.

  But that is not why I am writing. I am writing to make a proposal.

  You suspect me of having designs upon your wife. You are right. But do not jump to conclusions about what kind of designs they are.

  It is not just money that I offer. I offer certain intangibles too, human intangibles, by which I mean principally love. I employed the word godfather, if not to you then to Marijana. Or perhaps I did not utter the word, merely thought it. My proposal is as follows. In return for a substantial loan of indefinite term, to cover the education of Drago and perhaps other of your children, can you find a place in your hearth and in your home, in your heart and home, for a godfather?

  I do not know whether in Catholic Croatia you have the institution of the godfather. Perhaps yes, perhaps no. The books I have consulted do not say. But you must be familiar with the concept. The godfather is the man who stands by the side of the father at the baptismal font, or hovers over his head, giving his blessing to the child and swearing his lifelong support. As the priest in the ritual of baptism is the personification of the Son and intercessor, and the father is of course the Father, so the godfather is the personification of the Holy Ghost. At least that is how I conceive of it. A figure without substance, ghostly, beyond anger and desire.

  You live in Munno Para, some distance from the city. It is no easy matter for me, in my present reduced state, to come visiting. Nevertheless, will you in principle open your home to me? I want nothing in return, nothing tangible, beyond perhaps a key to the back door. I certainly harbour no plan to take your wife and children away from you. I ask merely to hover, to open my breast,
at times when you are elsewhere occupied, and pour out my heart’s blessings upon your family.

  Drago should have no trouble, by now, in comprehending what place I aspire to in the household. The younger children may find it more difficult. If you choose to say nothing to them for the present, I will understand.

  I know a proposal of this kind was not what you expected when you began to read this letter. I mentioned to an acquaintance of mine what has been going on in my flat – the disappearance of the item from my photograph collection and so forth – and she suggested that I call in the police. But nothing could be further from my mind. No, I am just using the opening created by this unpleasant incident to let my pen run and my heart speak (besides, how many letters does one have a chance to write nowadays?).

  I don’t know how you yourself feel about letters. Given that you come from an older and in some respects better world, perhaps you will not find it strange to take up the pen in turn. If on the other hand letters are alien to you, there is always the telephone (8332 1445). Or Marijana can bear a message, or Drago. (I have not turned my back on Drago, far from it: tell him that.) Or Blanka. And finally there is always silence. Silence can be full of meaning.

  I am going to seal and stamp this missive now, and before I have second thoughts make the trek to the nearest mailbox. I used to have lots of second thoughts, I had second thoughts all the time, but now I abhor them.

  Yours most sincerely,

  Paul Rayment.

  Twenty-eight

  ‘Don’t you think you should see a doctor?’ he says to the Costello woman.

  She shakes her head. ‘It’s nothing, just a chill. It will pass.’

  It does not sound like a chill at all. It is a cough, and it has a soggy quality, as if the lungs are trying to expel, a fistful at a time, a layer of deeply settled mucus.

  ‘You must have picked it up under the bushes,’ he says. She looks back uncomprehendingly.

  ‘Didn’t you say you were sleeping under the bushes in the park?’

  ‘Ah yes.’

  ‘I can recommend eucalyptus oil,’ he says. ‘A teaspoon of eucalyptus oil in a pan of boiling water. You inhale the steam. It does wonders for the bronchial passages.’

  ‘Eucalyptus oil!’ she says. ‘I haven’t heard of eucalyptus oil in ages. People use inhalers nowadays. I have one in my bag. Quite useless. My standby used to be Friar’s Balsam, but I can’t find it in the shops any more.’

  ‘You can get it in country stores. You can get it in Adelaide.’

  ‘Can you. As our American friends say, that figures.’

  He will get the eucalyptus oil out for her. He will boil a pan of water. He will even hunt in the medicine cabinet to see whether he has Friar’s Balsam. She has only to ask. But she does not ask.

  They are sitting on the balcony with a bottle of wine between them. It is dark, there is a strong breeze blowing. If she really is ill she would be better off indoors. But she does nothing to hide her distaste for the flat – ‘your Bavarian funeral parlour,’ she called it yesterday – and he is not her keeper.

  ‘No word from Drago? No news from the Jokićs?’ she inquires.

  ‘No word. I have written a letter, which I have yet to mail.’

  ‘A letter! Another letter! What is this, a game of postal chess? Two days for your word to reach Marijana, two days for her word to come back: we will all expire of boredom before we have a resolution. This is not the age of the epistolary novel, Paul. Go and see her! Confront her! Have a proper scene! Stamp your foot (I speak metaphorically)! Shout! Say, “I will not be treated like this!” That is how normal people behave, people like Marijana and Miroslav. Life is not an exchange of diplomatic notes. Au contraire, life is drama, life is action, action and passion! Surely you, with your French background, know that. Be polite if you wish, no harm in politeness, but not at the expense of the passions. Think of French theatre. Think of Racine. You can’t be more French than Racine. Racine is not about people sitting hunched up in corners plotting and calculating. Racine is about confrontation, one huge tirade pitted against another.’

  Is she feverish? What has brought on this outburst?

  ‘If there is a place in the world for Friar’s Balsam,’ he says, ‘there is a place for old-fashioned letters. At least, if a letter does not sound right, you can tear it up and start again. Unlike speeches. Unlike outbursts of passion, which are irrevocable. You of all people ought to appreciate that.’

  ‘I?’

  ‘Yes, you. Surely you don’t scribble down the first thing that comes into your head and mail it off to your publisher. Surely you wait for second thoughts. Surely you revise. Isn’t the whole of writing a matter of second thoughts – second thoughts and third thoughts and further thoughts?’

  ‘Indeed it is. That is what writing is: second thoughts to the power of n. But who are you to preach second thoughts to me? If you had only been true to your tortoise character, if you had waited for the coming of second thoughts, if you had not so foolishly and irrevocably declared your passion to your cleaning lady, we would not be in our present pickle, you and I. You could be happily set up in your nice flat, waiting for visits from the lady with the dark glasses, and I could be back in Melbourne. But it is too late for that now. Nothing left for us but to hold on tight and see where the black horse takes us.’

  ‘Why do you call me a tortoise?’

  ‘Because you sniff the air for ages before you stick your head out. Because every blessed step costs such an effort. I am not asking you to become a hare, Paul. I merely plead that you look into your heart and see whether you cannot find means within your tortoise character, within your tortoise variety of passion, of accelerating your wooing of Marijana – if it is indeed your intention to go on wooing her.

  ‘Remember, Paul, it is passion that makes the world go round. You are not analphabete, you must know that. In the absence of passion the world would still be void and without form. Think of Don Quixote. Don Quixote is not about a man sitting in a rocking chair bemoaning the dullness of La Mancha. It is about a man who claps a basin on his head and clambers onto the back of his faithful old plough-horse and sallies forth to do great deeds. Emma Rouault, Emma Bovary, goes out and buys fancy clothes even though she has no idea of how she is going to pay for them. We only live once, says Alonso, says Emma, so let’s give it a whirl! Give it a whirl, Paul. See what you can come up with.’

  ‘See what I can come up with so that you can put me in a book.’

  ‘So that someone, somewhere might put you in a book. So that someone might want to put you in a book. Someone, anyone – not just me. So that you may be worth putting in a book. Alongside Alonso and Emma. Become major, Paul. Live like a hero. That is what the classics teach us. Be a main character. Otherwise what is life for?

  ‘Come on. Do something. Do anything. Surprise me. Has it occurred to you that if your life seems repetitive and circumscribed and duller by the day, it may be because you hardly ever leave this accursed flat? Consider: somewhere in a jungle in Maharashtra State a tiger is at this very moment opening its amber eyes, and it is not thinking of you at all! It could not care less about you or any other of the denizens of Coniston Terrace. When did you last go for a walk under the starry sky? You have lost a leg, I know, and ambulating is no fun; but after a certain age we have all lost a leg, more or less. Your missing leg is just a sign or symbol or symptom, I can never remember which is which, of growing old, old and uninteresting. So what is the point of complaining? Hark!

  I am, yet what I am none cares or knows.

  My friends forsake me like a memory lost.

  I am the self-consumer of my woes.

  ‘Do you know the lines? John Clare. Be warned, Paul: that is how you will end up, like John Clare, sole consumer of your own woes. Because no one else, you can be sure, will give a damn.’

  He never knows, with the Cos
tello woman, when he is being treated seriously and when he is being taken for a ride. He can cope with the English, that is to say the Anglo-Australians. It is the Irish who have always given him trouble, and the Irish strain in Australia. He can see that someone might want to turn him and Marijana, the man with the stump and the mobile Balkan lady, into comedy. But despite all her gibing comedy is not quite what Costello seems to have in mind for him, and that is what baffles him, that is what he calls the Irish element.

  ‘We should move indoors,’ he says.

  ‘Not yet. O starry sky . . . How does it go on?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘O starry sky, o something something. How has it come about, do you think, that I am stuck with so incurious, so unadventurous a man as you? Can you explain? Does it all come down to the English language, to your not being confident enough to act in a language that is not your own?

  ‘Ever since you reminded me of your French past, you know, I have been listening with pricked ears. And yes, you are right: you speak English, you probably think in English, you may even dream in English, yet English is not your true language. I would even say that English is a disguise for you, or a mask, part of your tortoiseshell armour. As you speak I swear I can hear words being selected, one after the other, from the word-box you carry around with you, and slotted into place. That is not how a true native speaks, one who is born into the language.’

  ‘How does a native speak?’

  ‘From the heart. Words well up within and he sings them, sings along with them. So to speak.’

  ‘I see. Are you suggesting I return to French? Are you suggesting I sing Frère Jacques?’

  ‘Don’t mock me, Paul. I said nothing about returning to French. You lost touch with French long ago. All I say is, you speak English like a foreigner.’

  ‘I speak English like a foreigner because I am a foreigner. I am a foreigner by nature and have been a foreigner all my life. And I don’t see why I should apologise. If there were no foreigners there would be no natives.’