Slow Man Read online

  ‘Because.’ And she will say no more.

  A screw in his leg. Perhaps in the past Marijana nursed a man with screws in his leg, screws and bolts and pins and struts and braces, all made of gold or titanium – a man with a reconstructed leg of the kind that was not awarded to him because he was too old for it, not worth the trouble and expense. Perhaps that is the explanation.

  As a child, he remembers, he was told the story of a woman who in a moment of absent-mindedness stuck a tiny sewing-needle into the palm of her hand. Unnoticed, the needle climbed up the woman’s veins and in the fullness of time pierced her heart and killed her. The story was presented to him as a caution against treating needles carelessly, but in retrospect it reads more like a fairytale. Is steel really antipathetic to life? Can needles really enter the bloodstream? How could the woman in the story have been unaware of the tiny metallic weapon cruising up her arm towards her armpit, rounding the axillar curve, and heading south towards its helpless, thudding prey? Should he be re-telling the story to Ljuba, passing on its cryptic wisdom, whatever that may be?

  ‘No,’ he repeats, ‘I have no screws in me. If I had screws I would be a mechanical man. Which I am not.’

  But Ljuba has lost interest in the leg that is not a mechanical leg. With a smack of the lips she finishes off the yoghurt and draws the sleeve of her jumper across her mouth. He reaches for a tissue and wipes her lips, which she allows him to do. After that he wipes her sleeve clean too.

  It is the first time he has laid a finger on the child. For a moment her wrist lies limp in his hand. Perfect: no other word will do. They arrive from the womb with everything new, everything in perfect order. Even in the ones who arrive damaged, with funny limbs or a brain that sends out sparks, each cell is as fresh, as clean, as new as on creation day. Each new birth a new miracle.

  Nine

  Margaret pays a second visit, this time unannounced. It is a Sunday, he is alone in the flat. He offers her tea, which she declines. She circles the room, comes up behind him where he sits, strokes his hair. He is still as a stone.

  ‘So is this the end of it, Paul?’ she asks.

  ‘The end of what?’

  ‘You know what I mean. Have you decided this is the end of your sexual life? Tell me straight so that I will know how to conduct myself in future.’

  Not someone to beat about the bush, Margaret. He has always liked that about her. But how should he respond? Yes, I have come to the end of my sexual life, from now on treat me like a eunuch? How can he say that when it may not even be true? Yet what if it is indeed true? What if the snorting black steed of passion has given up the ghost? The twilight of his manhood. What a let-down; but what a relief too!

  ‘Margaret,’ he says, ‘give me time.’

  ‘And your day help?’ says Margaret, going for the weak spot. ‘How are you and your day help getting on?’

  ‘My day help and I get on well, thank you. But for her I might not bother to get out of bed in the mornings. But for her I might end up as one of those cases one reads about, where the neighbours smell a bad smell and call in the police to break down the door.’

  ‘Don’t be melodramatic, Paul. Nobody dies of an amputated leg.’

  ‘No, but people do die of indifference to the future.’

  ‘So your day help has saved your life. That’s good. She deserves a medal. She deserves a bonus. When am I going to meet her?’

  ‘Don’t take it personally, Margaret. You asked me a question, I am trying to give a truthful answer.’

  But Margaret does take it personally. ‘I’ll be on my way now,’ she says. ‘Don’t get up, I’ll let myself out. Give me a call when you are ready for human society again.’

  In his sessions with the physiotherapist he was warned about the tendency of the severed thigh muscles to retract, pulling the hip and pelvis backward. He props himself on the frame and with a free hand explores his lower back. Can he feel the beginnings of a backward jut? Is this ugly half-limb becoming even uglier?

  If he were to give in and accept a prosthesis there would be a stronger reason for exercising the stump. As it is, the stump is of no use to him at all. All he can do with it is carry it around like an unwanted child. No wonder it wants to shrink, retract, withdraw.

  But if this fleshly object is repulsive, how much more so a leg moulded out of pink plastic with a hinge at the top and a shoe at the bottom, an apparatus that you strap yourself to in the morning and unstrap yourself from at night and drop on the floor, shoe and all! He shudders at the thought of it; he wants nothing to do with it. Crutches are better. Crutches are at least honest.

  Nevertheless, once a week he allows a ferry vehicle to call for him and convey him to George Street in Norwood, to a rehabilitation class run by a woman named Madeleine Martin. There are half a dozen other amputees in the class, all of them on the wrong side of sixty. He is not the only one without a prosthesis, but he is the only one to have refused one.

  Madeleine cannot understand what she calls his attitude. ‘There are people all around in the street,’ she says, ‘who you could not even tell they are wearing prostheses, it’s so natural the way they walk.’

  ‘I don’t want to look natural,’ he says. ‘I prefer to feel natural.’

  She shakes her head in smiling incredulity. ‘It’s a new chapter in your life,’ she says. ‘The old chapter is closed, you must say goodbye to it and accept the new one. Accept: that’s all you need to do. Then all the doors that you think are closed will open. You’ll see.’

  He does not reply.

  Does he really want to feel natural? Did he feel natural before the occurrence on Magill Road? He has no idea. But perhaps that is what it means to feel natural: to have no idea. Does the Venus of Milo feel natural? Despite having no arms the Venus of Milo is held up as an ideal of feminine beauty. Once she had arms, the story goes, then her arms were broken off; their loss only makes her beauty more poignant. Yet if it were discovered tomorrow that the Venus was in fact modelled on an amputee, she would be removed at once to a basement store. Why? Why can the fragmentary image of a woman be admired but not the image of a fragmentary woman, no matter how neatly sewn up the stumps?

  He would give a great deal to be pedalling his bicycle down Magill Road again, with the wind on his face. He would give a great deal for the chapter that is now closed to be opened again. He wishes Wayne Blight had never been born. That is all. Easy enough to say. But he keeps his mouth shut.

  Limbs have memories, Madeleine tells the class, and she is right. When he takes a step on his crutches his right side still swings through the arc that the old leg would have swung through; at night his cold foot still seeks its cold ghostly brother.

  Her job, Madeleine tells them, is to re-program old and now obsolete memory systems that dictate to us how we balance, how we walk, how we run. ‘Of course we want to hold on to our old memory systems,’ she says. ‘Otherwise we would not be human. But we must not hold on to them when they hinder our progress. Not when they get in our way. Are you with me? Of course you are.’

  Like all the health professionals he has met of late, Madeleine treats the old people consigned to her care as if they were children – not very clever, somewhat morose, somewhat sluggish children in need of being bucked up. Madeleine herself is the right side of sixty, the right side of fifty, even the right side of forty-five; she runs no doubt like a gazelle.

  To re-program the body’s memories, Madeleine uses dance. She shows them videotapes of ice-skaters in skin-tight scarlet or golden suits gliding in loops and circles, first the left foot, then the right; in the background, Delibes. ‘Listen, and let the rhythm take charge of you,’ says Madeleine. ‘Let the music run through your body, let it dance inside you.’ Around him those of his team mates who have already acquired their artificial limbs imitate as best they can the movements of the skaters. Since he cannot do that – cannot skat
e, cannot dance, cannot walk, cannot even stand up straight unaided – he closes his eyes, clings to the rails, and sways in time with the music. Somewhere, in an ideal world, he glides around the ice hand in hand with his attractive instructress. Hypnotism, that’s all it is! he thinks to himself. How quaint; how old-fashioned!

  His personal programme (they each have a personal programme) consists largely of balancing exercises. ‘We will have to learn to balance all over again,’ Madeleine explains, ‘with our new body.’ That is what she calls it: our new body, not our truncated old body.

  There is also what in the hospital was called hydrotherapy and what Madeleine calls water-work. In the narrow pool in the back room he grips the rails and walks in the water. ‘Keep the legs straight,’ says Madeleine. ‘Both of them. Like scissors. Snip snip snip.’

  In the old days he would have been sceptical of people like Madeleine Martin. But, for the time being, Madeleine Martin is all that is offered him to believe in. So at home, sometimes under the eye of Marijana, sometimes not, he goes through his personal exercise programme, even the swaying-to-music part of it.

  ‘Is good, is good for you,’ says Marijana, nodding. ‘Is good you get some rhythm.’ But she does not bother to hide the note of professional derision in her voice.

  Good?, he would like to say to her. Really? I am not so sure it is good for me. How can it be, when I find it humiliating, all of it, the whole business from beginning to end? But he does not speak the words. He holds himself back. He has entered the zone of humiliation; it is his new home; he will never leave it; best to shut up, best to accept.

  Marijana collects all his trousers and takes them home with her. She brings them back two days later with the right legs neatly folded and sewn. ‘I don’t cut them,’ she says. ‘Maybe you change your mind and wear, you know, prosthese. We see.’

  Prosthese: she pronounces it as if it were a German word. Thesis, antithesis, then prosthesis.

  The surgical wound, which has given no trouble hitherto and which he thought had healed for good, starts to itch. Marijana dusts it with antibiotic powder and winds it in fresh bandages, but the itching continues. It is worst at night. He has to stay awake to keep himself from scratching. The wound feels to him like a great inflamed jewel glowing in the dark; both guard and prisoner, he is condemned to crouch over it, protecting it.

  The itching abates, but Marijana continues to wash the stump with particular care, powder it, tend it.

  ‘You think your leg grow again, Mr Rayment?’ she asks one day, out of the blue.

  ‘No, I have never thought so.’

  ‘Still, maybe you think so sometimes. Like baby. Baby think, you cut it off, it grow again. Know what I mean? But you are not baby, Mr Rayment. So why don’t you want this prosthese? Maybe you shy like a girl, eh? Maybe you think, you walk in street, everybody look at you. That Mr Rayment, he got only one leg! Isn’t true. Isn’t true. Nobody look at you. You wear prosthese, nobody look at you. Nobody know. Nobody care.’

  ‘I’ll think about it,’ he says. ‘There’s lots of time. All the time in the world.’

  After six weeks of water-work and swaying and being reprogrammed he gives up on Madeleine Martin. He telephones her studio after hours and leaves a message on the answer machine. He telephones the ferry service and tells them not to come again. He even thinks of telephoning Mrs Putts. But what would he say to Mrs Putts? For six weeks he was prepared to believe in Madeleine Martin and the cure she offered, the cure for old memory systems. Now he has stopped believing in her. That is all, there is no more to it than that. If there is any residue of belief left in him, it has been shifted to Marijana Jokić, who has no studio and promises no cure, just care.

  Perching on his bedside, pressing down on his groin with her left hand, Marijana watches, nodding, as he flexes, extends, and rotates the stump. With the lightest of pressure she helps him extend the flexion. She massages the aching muscle; she turns him over and massages his lower back.

  From the touch of her hand he learns all he needs to know: that Marijana does not find this wasted and increasingly flabby body distasteful; that she is prepared, if she can, and if he will permit it, to transmit to him through her fingertips a fair quantum of her own ruddy good health.

  It is not a cure, it is not done with love, it is probably no more than orthodox nursing practice, but it is enough. What love there is is all on his side.

  ‘Thank you,’ he says when their time is over, speaking with such feeling that she gives him a quizzical look.

  ‘No worries,’ she replies.

  One evening after Marijana has left he rings for a taxi, then embarks alone on the slow sideways descent of the stairs, holding tight to the banister, sweating with fear that a crutch will slip. By the time the taxi arrives he has reached the street.

  In the public library – where thankfully he does not have to leave ground level – he finds two books on Croatia: a guidebook to Illyria and the Dalmatian coast and a guidebook to Zagreb and its churches; also a number of books on the Yugoslav Federation and on the recent Balkan wars. On what he has come to enlighten himself about, however – the character of Croatia and its people – there is nothing.

  He checks out a book called Peoples of the Balkans. When the taxi returns he is ready and waiting.

  Peoples of the Balkans: Between East and West, so runs the full title. Is that how the Jokićs felt back home: caught between Orthodox East and Catholic West? If so, how do they feel in Australia, where east and west have quite new meanings? The book has pages of black-and-white photographs. In one of them, a pair of peasant girls in head-scarves conduct a donkey laden with firewood along a rocky mountain path. The younger girl smiles shyly at the camera, revealing a gap in her teeth. Peoples of the Balkans dates from 1962, before Marijana was even conceived. The pictures date from who knows when. The two girls could be grandmothers by now, they could be dead and buried. The donkey too. Was this the world Marijana was born into, an immemorial world of donkeys and goats and chickens and water-buckets sheeted in ice in the mornings, or was she a child of the workers’ paradise?

  More than likely the Jokićs brought with them from the old country their own picture collection: baptisms, confirmations, weddings, family get-togethers. A pity he will not get to see it. He tends to trust pictures more than he trusts words. Not because pictures cannot lie but because, once they leave the darkroom, they are fixed, immutable. Whereas stories – the story of the needle in the bloodstream, for instance, or the story of how he and Wayne Blight came to meet on Magill Road – seem to change shape all the time.

  The camera, with its power of taking in light and turning it into substance, has always seemed to him more a metaphysical than a mechanical device. His first real job was as a darkroom technician; his greatest pleasure was always in darkroom work. As the ghostly image emerged beneath the surface of the liquid, as veins of darkness on the paper began to knit together and grow visible, he would sometimes experience a little shiver of ecstasy, as though he were present at the day of creation.

  That was why, later on, he began to lose interest in photography: first when colour took over, then when it became plain that the old magic of light-sensitive emulsions was waning, that to the rising generation the enchantment lay in a techne of images without substance, images that could flash through the ether without residing anywhere, that could be sucked into a machine and emerge from it doctored, untrue. He gave up recording the world in photographs then, and transferred his energies to saving the past.

  Does it say something about him, that native preference for black and white and shades of grey, that lack of interest in the new? Is that what women missed in him, his wife in particular: colour, openness?

  The story he told Marijana was that he saved old pictures out of fidelity to their subjects, the men and women and children who offered their bodies up to the stranger’s lens. But that is not the whol
e truth. He saves them too out of fidelity to the photographs themselves, the photographic prints, most of them last survivors, unique. He gives them a good home and sees to it, as far as he is able, as far as anyone is able, that they will have a good home after he is gone. Perhaps, in turn, some as yet unborn stranger will reach back and save a picture of him, of the extinct Rayment of the Rayment Bequest.

  As for the politics of the Jokić family, as for what niche they might have occupied in the mosaic of Balkan loyalties and enmities, he has never quizzed Marijana and he has no intention of doing so. As with most immigrants, their feelings towards the old country are probably mixed. The Dutchman who married his mother and brought her and her children from Lourdes to Ballarat kept a framed photograph of Queen Wilhelmina side by side with a plaster statuette of the Virgin Mary in the living-room. On the monarch’s birthday he lit a candle before her image as if she were a saint. Infidèle Europe, he used to say of Europe; the queen’s picture bore the motto Trouw, faith, fidelity. In the evenings he would huddle over the short-wave radio trying to catch through the crackle a word here and a word there from Radio Hilversum. At the same time he was desperate for the country of his new allegiance to live up to the idea of it he had formed from afar. In the face of a dubious wife and two unhappy stepchildren, Australia had to be the sunny land of opportunity. If the natives were unwelcoming, if they fell silent in their presence or mocked their faltering English, no matter: time and hard work would wear down that hostility. A faith the man still held to when he last saw him, aged ninety, pale as a mushroom, shuffling among the pot-plants in his ramshackle greenhouse. The Jokićs, man and wife, must hold to some variant of the Dutchman’s faith. Whereas their children, Drago and Ljuba and the other one, will have formed their own picture of Australia, clearer and cooler.

  Ten

  One morning Marijana turns up in the company of a tall youth. It is the boy in the picture, unmistakably: Drago.