Ordinary Matter, page 4
I tied the cloth to my wrists and lay on the floor. When I turned my head, I saw a plastic toy boat upright beside the dishwasher. I started to cry. Frederic would be home soon, and the confluence of him returning and the cold bandages would surely calm me. One of us would know what to do.
Frederic could tell as soon as he saw my face. When I enlisted him to help, he came with me from room to room, watching as I turned over the doona and threw aside toiletries under the bathroom sink. He observed me carefully, like I was explosive. He told me that everything would work out. The dog was in a fit, running circles around Frederic’s feet. ‘Sit!’ I cried. ‘Dumb dog.’
She was barking at something, out beyond the front door. I opened it and watched the rain fall. ‘See? Nothing.’
Frederic reached for my hand.
A voice came from the darkness. ‘Hello?’
It was a man, his face streaked with rain, coming tentatively up the path to our door.
‘Who is it?’ I noticed the swell in my voice, my panic accelerating.
‘I’m from the department,’ he yelled out. ‘Though they don’t know I’m here. We spoke on the phone the night you found her.’
The bureaucrat. The poet.
‘Do you know where she is?’ Frederic asked. He gathered the dog in his arms. She was soggy and cold, but I understood my husband’s need for her shivering, confused comfort.
‘I can’t tell you,’ the poet replied.
‘Yes, you can,’ I said, striding out beyond the patio roof. The rain splattered my head, but I felt myself growing, like a plant. ‘We won’t say how we found out.’
‘No, ma’am.’
‘You told us we were in the clear.’ I sobbed. I’d sobbed before, in moments of loss like this, but that hadn’t been for months.
He smiled. ‘Ah. But, you see, you told me you’d keep her safe.’ The water had drenched his shirt, which was white and turned up at the cuffs. His tie hung loose. I suspected he’d ditched a jacket somewhere. In my head went the thud: Lillian Lillian Lillian. Her name was a sound drawn through trees, a bow across a violin.
‘Perhaps,’ he said, ‘they have reclassified the definition of wilderness.’
‘Wilderness?’ Frederic said. Maybe he had not given this word a second thought. But I’d kept it as close as my spine.
‘It used to include beaches. Babies found on beaches. Now perhaps it doesn’t.’
‘How can they change it like that?’ I shrieked. But of course they could do what they liked. The tide came in and the tide went out. And our Lillian, she was pure alchemy, washing up on the sand. ‘That’s beyond cruel.’
He wiped away what I was saying with his hand. ‘It’s not for me to assess. These decisions come from high up. We get no warning. She’ll be safe with the department.’
The floodlight above the path cast a shadow over the bureaucrat’s face like clouds on a flat, pale ocean.
‘She is ours,’ I said.
‘Sir, please,’ Frederic added. He grappled with the dog, held her as tightly as he could, while her eyes sharpened from one of us to the other. If we let the dog go now, could she put her snout to the sodden ground before the clues washed away? Or had the dog already lost the scent?
The bureaucrat-poet seemed to be backing away. The day was turning. Darkness thickened, and with it all this heavy rain and unknown strangers’ hands upon my baby who was out in the naked night. Something in me unfastened. Not strange at all how that orca kept her calf with her while she churned through the Pacific: two points, nose to nose. As if you’d ever let go.
‘Why did you come?’ I yelled.
He stopped and took a handkerchief from his pocket, wiped his face, ran it through his hands. ‘You wanted a baby,’ he said softly. ‘Something must have gone wrong. A loss like this is usually the cause of an internal investigation. But that’s classified. I don’t know why she was taken. I know …’
‘Yes?’ Frederic said.
The poet had said too much. He shut up like a clam. Then: ‘Did you know that Ben Jonson lost his daughter, then his first son, then his next son, too. He wrote: “Farewell, thou child of my right hand, and joy.”’
I felt an enormous slink of fear. ‘We’ll do anything,’ I said. I had forgotten how to exist and who I was before Lillian. I hated the house behind me. I would never go back inside. Frederic and I had done this together. We shared Lillian and, for the first time properly, we shared each other. It was alchemy, too, how we had gone from one thing to another. I needed to appeal to the poet in this man. ‘We ... Do you know why we named her Lillian?’
He shook his head, and I saw sympathy there. I saw that he himself was probably a father. He certainly looked weary.
‘It was the name of the boat,’ I told him. ‘Lillian. Painted on the side. And it was under her.’
‘Under her?’
I nodded. ‘She was sort of on a piece of wood. The one that had her name on it. Frederic went back to find it, but it was gone.’
‘Wait.’ The poet moved closer up the path, one of his hands held up in query. ‘She was on the water?’
‘On the piece of wood,’ Frederic said, sounding strange. ‘Right at the water’s edge.’ Something in Frederic’s voice was seeking something in the man.
Under the surface a tide was changing. The bureaucrat glanced towards the street behind him. ‘I spy a little bit of hope.’
I couldn’t breathe. ‘Yes?’
‘Would you like me to drive you?’
His car was a ten-year-old sedan, a dull silver with half-a-dozen faded bumper stickers on the back window. The Beach Boys were playing. The windscreen wipers thudded a contrary rhythm to the song. Frederic, usually so talkative and animated as a passenger, was silent.
We drove without stopping. The man took roundabouts gently as we headed north out of our estate and up along the coast. All the traffic lights were green. To our right, the ocean shattered on the dark beach.
Finally, Frederic asked, ‘Where are you taking us?’
The poet cleared his throat. ‘You see, our department is small. We are overworked. We make judgements based on the information given. You must understand, a beach is a wilderness,’ he said, lifting a hand off the steering wheel and pointing towards the coast, ‘but a vessel is thalassic. That the child arrived by boat – that comes under the purview of a different department. Someone must have worked out she was not a Wilderness Find and passed it on. I know where we’ll find her.’
He turned the car into a road – we’d been the only vehicle for kilometres – that became a complicated network of roundabouts and dead ends in a commercial estate I’d never been to. I thought of returning to our empty house, empty-handed. The horror prowled inside me. The poet slowed when he reached the end of the street, pulled a card from the glovebox and swiped it on a reader out the window. He turned off the engine, and I saw that we were in the car park of a three-storey building lit by the floodlights we had triggered.
‘They’ll be pleased you’re here.’
Whatever was inside that building was invisible to me in the night-time behind two glass doors, and I felt myself start to shiver, and then I couldn’t stop. Frederic put his arm around me. My arms ached to hold her.
We went inside. A modest foyer, a sign, a woman, a desk – almost empty, just a single folder and pen. The woman stood and came round to us. She was petite, elegant in a grey dress and heels. She had black eyes and she smiled when she spoke, her eyes crinkling at the edges. She introduced herself as a retired ship’s captain, now a senior public servant in the Department of Maritime Affairs. ‘So, you are responsible for the child?’
‘Yes,’ Frederic and I said together. We hadn’t let each other go.
‘Come with me.’ She led the poet first, then the two of us, down a corridor that smelt like a hospital, with lights along the skirting boards. Her heels clicked as our bureaucrat loped beside her, one step to her two.
‘Here,’ the captain said, stopping before a doorway. ‘But I must warn you.’ And she explained the shipwreck, how Lillian had been its sole survivor. I must have gotten a look in my eyes because Frederic put his face close to mine and gave me a gentle shake, and I understood that to faint right now would be a bad idea. It was a room where the bodies were laid out on tables. Six long mounds covered in plastic. Frederic reached for my hand. One of those bodies had held Lillian in the ocean of her belly. Cells dividing and dividing, that alchemy again in a quiet and unknown space.
I paused to stare at the bodies for only as long as it took to remind myself that in this department I would take what was mine. For years I had been friendless because I was selfish. Here, I would do it again. Here, my selfishness had grown – my world was three people now. Into that sorrowful room I sent a prayer and a promise. I would put their baby above everything else. My heart quickened. I was learning all sorts of things about myself.
We came to the next room. I stood longer, waiting to see what the objects from the boat spelt out for me in a way I’d never allow the bodies to. A table stood inside the door with things arranged on it – lovingly, I thought, watching the woman’s back as she trotted off ahead, wondering if this curating, too, was part of her job. There was a diamond-shaped plate as white as bone; shards of glass and also one perfect tumbler, waiting for a refill; gold and silver coins; yellow rubber thongs; a backpack pummelled thin; a hat shaped, curiously, like a boat. And at the centre was the piece of timber that had delivered Lillian to us, her name curled across it in ribbon blue.
I heard footsteps. I turned. And then, there she was, quite suddenly, in the arms of the captain.
Our Lillian, a round and bright creature, fighting to liberate a hand from the white cloth that bound her. Half a day older. Mere hours after the silly dog hadn’t warned me there was a retired captain roaming our house. Somehow more like me, looking even more like she was ours.
The captain motioned to the rooms that held the bodies and the dinner plates picked clean by salt and sand. ‘You’ve seen that the child’s parents have perished. We have processed her, and the orphan is yours.’ Then she handed her to us.
The poet and the captain grinned, but I felt far away from them both.
I found Lillian’s eyes and brushed her brow with my fingers. She wriggled against my chest.
‘Lillian,’ I said.
Frederic covered his eyes, beginning to cry.
When he lifted his hands, we watched each other as the joy poured over us like steam.
Night Blindness
1947 | Gerty Theresa Cori | Physiology or Medicine
Prize motivation: ‘for their discovery of the course of the catalytic conversion of glycogen’
at sunset gerty steadied herself on the deck and gazed out to the Atlantic. She wondered what she would miss from home. America had mountains to climb and ski – a professor at the institute in Buffalo had posted them photographs in a blue envelope. Pictures of meadows and mountains to compensate for the ones they’d grown to love in Vienna and in Prague. It was nice to know there were people who wanted them to be happy in their new home.
A tremendous wind found her and battered at her neck and wrists. She pulled her coat around her, walking the length of the great ship and smoking. She’d packed enough cigarettes for the trip. She wrote letters to Carl, not knowing which ones would reach him before they’d see each other again. In one of his letters – for six months he’d been a beautiful and diligent letter writer – Carl said he’d seen a girl at the institute who reminded him of her, a comment she tried to recall cheerily. It was good that her new husband was settling in. Good that dozens more were getting to know his calmness, his gentleness, his curiosity. The girl smoked Lucky Strikes, like all the American girls did.
Ten days on a ship. The same faces. Gerty had never before been this still so she led her brain in experiments to pass the time. She carried a notebook and a pen to the aft part of the saloon promenade deck where they were permitted. Girls, little twins, ran laps when they escaped from their parents. Some days, Gerty gathered objects and laid them out on the sisters’ usual route to see which objects tempted them to slow, and for how long. A cup, an empty can, a red pencil from the dining room. She observed which girl stopped first, before both squatted using their fat, solid knees, their bottoms almost touching the deck. Boarding in Rotterdam, a young man had brought an exotic parrot coloured green, yellow and blue, which he kept in his cabin during the day only to take out at night in a cage that he held up like a lantern. One evening Gerty watched one of its feathers fall from the cage to the deck and she held her breath to see who else would notice. She moved as quickly as she could till she was standing right beside the feather, and then bent down to seize it. In her cabin she laid it on her iron bed and twisted it in her fingers. The gold and green shimmered.
The next afternoon at dusk Gerty pinned the feather down at its most delicate end with a stone. She chose a bench where she sat alone. Somewhere beneath her, beside her, all around, the steam turbines pulsed and shook the body of the ship. Teenage boys in shirts and ties kicked a ball. Finally the two girls came into sight, huddled against the wind in the arms of an old man, their faces turned to each other across the expanse of his broad chest. After a long time, the man set the sisters down and they spied the feather. One removed the stone, which she brought close to her face to inspect. The other picked up the feather. The stone was dropped, the feather reached for, not handed over. Screeching till the man came to bundle them both up. It was the only object they ever stole from the deck. Gerty made a note in her book.
Each night she sat in the dining saloon with her new friends, Mrs Novy and her sixteen-year-old niece, Minnie. They were her cabinmates in their third-class stateroom. ‘I was named after a warship,’ Gerty told Minnie, when they first met. Two tables across, Gerty saw the twin sisters squashing pieces of bread on their plates with the full force of their chubby hands, then posting them daintily into their mouths.
Gerty pressed open her notebook on the white linen next to her place setting. She liked to sketch and caption the dishes of food they were served. Boiled striped bass with creamed horseradish. Salmi of duckling with green peas. Calf’s sweetbread à la Maréchale. Mrs Novy watched her, sometimes pointing out when Gerty got the spelling wrong, or made a mistake with the shading of the blueberries.
For Carl, was what Gerty mostly thought. To show him, to compare notes in case he did the same thing six months ago. But also to record the ingredients and dishes she might try to make, where her future self could go to a market and search for green peas in their shells. To see if, in New York, you could buy a pound of calf’s liver and then cook it for your husband.
A waiter came to their side, and Mrs Novy and Minnie shifted their spoons to make room. The three women nodded at the tall blond man. One could never be sure if the waiters onboard spoke Dutch or Danish or French. Gerty gave the waiter a hearty, ‘Dank u wel.’
He set a bowl in her place. His cap of soft golden hair reminded her of Carl’s.
‘Tak!’ she said, slipping her pen between her fingers, eyeing the dessert.
Orange ice cream and gooseberry tart.
In anatomy class she had been the only woman, the only Jew. On her first day her instinct was to keep quiet. But her mother’s voice, and the voices of her mother’s rowdy, bookish friends rang in her ears: Speak up, girl! She pictured them lounging while a record played, holding drinks like bulbs of light in their hands, urging her on as they dropped ash onto the carpet.
Carotid artery, subclavian artery, cranial neural crest, the medulla oblongata. Muscle and bone. Her own innervation when she and Carl met, when she spoke up, when she made herself known to him across a table in the laboratory. Drawing him out. Speaking up. Making him laugh. The vibration in her larynx followed by deliberate touches of her lips, teeth, tongue.
Later, there were the notches of his vertebrae as he banked beneath the sheet. Later still, the war in which the babies, the mothers, the farmers, the school teachers, the aldermen, the painters, the postmen, the soldiers and the sergeants all went hungry. After none of them had enough to eat, there was – for malnourished Gerty – an anatomical interest in her eye. She took notes. She learnt about keratomalacia, xerophthalmia, night blindness.
The ship crashed through the ocean. It followed a line on a map that was taking her away from Vienna and its pencilled-in, light-filled sky. In Vienna there were trams and horses, cars and trains. Couples stepped into the street. Wrinkled, bronzed women sold flowers in baskets outside Café de l’Europe. She and Carl had gone to Wurstelprater and waved at the families crammed into the miniature train before it ducked under the bridge. They bought tickets for the Ferris wheel and the roller coaster. A sign at the very top said: Sitzen bleiben! Hüte festhalten! right before the carriage plunged them down into the water. Children crowded around the mini puppet theatre, and Gerty tried to remember the names of the puppets, and their agony and arguments, what their cottony thrashes were all about, so that she could tell her little patients at the children’s hospital when she returned to them the next day.
At breakfast Mrs Novy slid her bowl to one side and took Gerty’s hands in hers. Mrs Novy smelt floury, like bread. She bent her large, plaited head towards Gerty. Mrs Novy had made this journey before. This time she was taking Minnie to New York, where they would both stay for good. There would be plenty of jobs for her niece in a year or two when she was ready, in a factory in Brooklyn or as a cook in one of the fancy hotels. Big sugar refineries lined the rivers; busy dockyards were filled with men. Her niece would make a fine seamstress. Because Mrs Novy had been onboard before, she spoke about the ship as though it had been her design. She knew the shortest routes from deck to deck; she knew what each clanging pipe meant, and whether the soup Gerty was about to eat was the worst on the menu, or the best.
