Blindly (The Margellos World Republic of Letters) (32 page)

But who is that man, why did he throw himself into the sea; what do I have to do with it, I didn’t even know Maria had left him there, asleep. So much the better, I heard Blasich say—his voice came to me from far away, over centuries—otherwise they would have tried him then and there for complicity in your escape or for negligence or maybe not even tried him but certainly shot him. Another reason
why it was better, for now, not to interfere with Maria, even for her sake; if it came out that she had our support it would be worse for her, they would pass her off as a spy or as an agent of ours and who knows how she would end up. Instead this way, conviction, yes, that was inevitable, but then she would get through it, a way would be found, an opportune way, discreet—and then—he nudged me stunned and consenting toward the door, like you’re doing now, Doctor, yes, I’m going to bed, I’m tired, yes, yes, I took all the pills, even a couple more, just for my throat, I like candy drops, and I’m really tired.

Say something, rebel, it’s an abomination, no not Maria, send me back to Goli Otok instead, but I’m shocked, dazed, I don’t understand what he’s telling me, Comrade Blasich, the waves crash onto the deck, spill over me—what a roar, the thud of the waves against the side of the ship, heartbeats of an enormous, monstrous heart breathing heavily out there—once, at the mouth of the Derwent, the sailors caught a shark, hoisted it on board and cut it open, tearing out its heart and leaving it on the deck to beat tumultuously for a good half-hour, a sponge dripping with blood that shrivelled up and died in the sun. The heart of the world beats so loud it muffles the beating of my own heart, the world is a huge whale and I am in its belly, with so many slimy things, under the big heart that flinches and contracts over me and one fine day will end up bursting, a gash that opens in the animal’s chest and spews everything out, even me, a scrap of filth that floats on the water and gets tossed up on the beach.

“
SHE PLUNGED
, poor woman, into the sea, for the / impious death of the children; / she stretched her foot over the seashore / and with her two children she lost her life. / What could be still more awful? / Marriage bed of women / full of pain, how many things you have done to us humans, / all of them bad!”—What did I see ...—Coward, show your face, don’t keep hiding ...

No, I didn’t see anything, I just heard something. I knew and I didn’t know that she was pregnant; it’s so difficult, for a man—it’s moving, it’s embarrassing, you don’t really know how it is, if she is or isn’t, if it’s actually a child or—something, something that—maybe that’s why she, so proud, didn’t want to talk about it—now I know, my son, our son, the rising sun in her belly—You can’t see it, when it’s still inside there, below the horizon, in the dark, but it’s there, a small great sun on its way, to bring daylight to your heart—but instead. They say it was a guard, a Herzegovinian, who kicked her in the stomach during the interrogation, but that she purposely provoked him, daring him to give her those murderous kicks; she put the knife in his hand, so that—So many butchers for just one child. Heroes learn from the gods to devour their own children—me
safe, over here, and Maria, the two of them, over there—how could I have even asked about her, after I—on the Isle of the Dead, opposite Port Arthur, there are only weeds to scrape away.

LIFE IS A JOURNEY
, the preachers say so over and over again. Blunt had a real mania about it and it was a piece of cake for me, at Newgate, all I had to do was trot out Bunyan’s pilgrim, the soul on its way from the City of Destruction to the Celestial City, changing a detail or two just a little, adding or modifying some image, and he had his sermon and I my half shilling.

Displaced persons,
galeotti
, bloody newaustralians, convicts, dagos, wogs, quick, all aboard, we’re leaving for the City of Destruction, Terra Australis Incognita. The Ocean is a river that surrounds the land, an immense Acheron flowing and rushing into Hades. Life is a journey, a cruise and deportation.

Down there, at the last stop, people like Father Callaghan say, it’s not the end but the beginning of true life, a better life, you will not die but be transformed—and how! tell me that exile and the Lager don’t transform you. O death, where is thy sting? The king is dead long live the king, the diploid sits on the throne. The ship sets sail with its cargo of diploids for the unknown austral continent; there the
Internationale’s
future humanity of clones, convicts cloned and immortal, forever in chains, will be reborn. But at the end of the dark corridor of Christiansborg Palace, behind those heavy drapes,
is a window overlooking the great light of the sea—the train too will emerge from the tunnel into the light, the whale will rise to the surface blowing and spewing in the luminous light. Maybe down there, at the port of arrival, the belly of the ship that carries us in its darkness, scores of blind fetuses pressed against one another, will split open. The pregnant belly gives birth, the mice scurry out of the ship.

If true life begins at the journey’s end, on the ship we are still in the recently impregnated belly. Who knows who ejaculated us here, here inside and here below, clinging to the slick walls of the dark hold; it must have been an enormous cetacean, a huge obscene member that, violent and excited, penetrates the hold, rubs against this mossy cavity, discharges a slimy fluid and here we are, all brothers, twins almost, in any case equals, deportees all look alike. Soon this life that is death will end; we’ll disembark and begin the death that is true life, the eternal life of the penitentiary.

The ship rocks, tosses about, occasionally it ends up grounded on a shoal or against a rock, it springs a leak. All you’d have to do is move a few metres, over to the corner where the waves don’t lap, but how can you—how can
they
, I’m up on deck—with those irons on their right ankle, fourteen pounds or more, if you couldn’t pay the guard the unjust tax to lighten them; children, who can’t pay, wear double chains. The suction of waves washing back into the ocean overturns the buckets full of urine and blankets soaking in it to disinfect them of lice; the seawater pouring into the mouth of the convict immobilized by irons returns his piss from the day before. The bora that descends from the Quarnero batters the
Punat
, those bound and handcuffed down below roll around the hold. One of the UDBA men fell on top of Darko, a comrade from Ika, and he, bound hand and foot, finding the agent suddenly close to him, faces glued together, almost bit off an ear, then they broke every bone
in his body, he was strong but I think he died. They say that John Wooley too, on the
Ganymede
that transported him Down the Bay, to the penitentiary, bit off the finger that Quartermaster Gosling stuck in his mouth to remove a pinch of tobacco.

If only the journey were to end, for good—if the
Punat
, the
Woodman
, the
Nelly
were to disappear below in a vortex of no return, with all of us, departed at last, having never existed. How many times, seeing the timbers of my ship—my timbers, my lives—being shattered by the fury of the waves, did I hope that the ship would surrender once and for all. But instead each time the evil carpenter would repair the hulk, replacing a piece of timber, so many pieces, so many timbers, but the frame, the ship, the soul of the ship was always the same, immortal in its repeated shipwrecks and trials.

The ship endures oceans and typhoons, headed decidedly toward the port of misfortune. This Court orders and adjudicates that you be deported overseas, to a place to which His Majesty, on the recommendation of his Private Council, considers it appropriate to assign you, for the remainder of your lives—a remainder without end.

I can’t complain, I make the crossing up on deck and in a cabin, rather than in the hold. And when the
Woodman
, following the course of the Roaring Forties, reaches its destination, the
Hobart Town Gazette
, on May 6, writes, wait, here it is, that among the convicts who disembarked under the supervision of armed soldiers “there is also a native of Denmark, named Jorgen Jorgensen, formerly a dispenser of medicine in Newgate, and well known to most of the prisoners in the Colony. He is a very intelligent man and speaks several languages. He was here at the first formation of the Colony, chief Mate of the
Lady Nelson
, commanded by Lieutenant Simmons.”

It sounds like the announcement for a gala in the society pages. I disembark from the
Woodman
almost smugly, gazing with a critical eye at the changes that have taken place in the city and making some harsh remarks about the placement of the new buildings and the confusion of warehouses on the banks. It’s natural that I be assigned as Collector of Port Dues and Customs, since the office’s director, Mr. Rolla O’Ferrall, newly arrived from England, can’t even do simple arithmetic. Sixpence a day and lodging at the naval bureau. The other convicts, almost all of them, end up breaking their backs transporting stones and rotting in their cells.

THOSE IN CHAINS
, actually in chains, number six thousand, but the convicts, Doctor, add up to a great many more. Pardoned, allotted to settlers or assigned to some office, like me. In all, there are thirteen thousand of us—and in 1804, gentlemen, all of Van Diemen’s Land had just four hundred and thirty-three inhabitants. Now more than five hundred people live in Hobart Town alone. Clean streets, quite a few houses of stone and brick, two beautiful bridges, the spires of St. David’s Cathedral, the governor’s residence, the soldiers’ barracks, the huts of the prisoners who are fortunate enough not to wind up in Port Arthur, a hospital, warehouses and depots, pens for livestock, wharves, taverns. Better than at Bonegilla, the first refugee camp for emigrants to Australia, after the Second World War, with those unlit cubbyholes, that filth—I heard that twelve children died the year before we arrived, I think.

Ah yes, taverns, as I was saying. The Lamb, Jolly Sailor, The Seven Stars, Help’me thro the world and, since I hooked up with Norah, the Waterloo Inn; there was no other place she liked as much when it came to drinking herself under the table. Seamen love port calls, going ashore and heading for a tavern. It gets to be a habit, to the point that when the sea of life becomes stormy, you
go ashore, or rather to the tavern, even though you’re no longer on the ship. I like drinking—even though here you only let me have those syrups and teas—sitting there drinking, I especially like listening to the voices; the buzz that occasionally rises a notch and sometimes culminates in a shout, like the surf rising into the roar of a bigger wave that crashes against a rock. I like watching the faces, the gestures. The world is varied, it keeps you company. You don’t need to have friends; just a crowd, people, a word or two at the bar, a flushed face that says something then vanishes forever in the grey multitude, it doesn’t matter, another one quickly appears and calls for a beer.

Reverend Knopwood, whom I see rosy and well fed again after so many years, also likes beer; he quaffs it down urging others not to do as he does. At the Jolly Sailor one evening there’s a woman for sale for five pounds. Buxom and worn, like the large rose on her breast; a schoolteacher takes her home with him—usually you pay fifty sheep or twelve bottles of rum for a woman. This too is a sign of the city’s prosperity; people are getting rich from pork, timber, whale oil, kangaroo fur and seal pelts, so it makes sense that customs would relax a little. The governor of a few years ago, they say, celebrated the king’s birthday by getting drunk and distributing grog in the street, leaving the convicts to take control and gang up with the blacks in plundering and looting, later going on the rampage against those same blacks and their women.

Now, however, ever since Colonel William Sorell created the hell of Macquarie Harbour, a proper penitentiary, for the most intractable prisoners, and since Sir George Arthur, the current lieutenant-governor, established the Executive Council, the Legislative Council and a court with full and autonomous jurisdiction over all crimes committed in Van Diemen’s Land, there’s greater discipline. Indeed
five days after my arrival, I—like everyone else, it’s Sir George’s order—am obliged to attend the hanging of Matthew Bready and four other desperados, who became bushrangers and turned Hobart Town into a shambles with their looting.

A hanging is always a spectacle. Here in the Antipodes, in the colonies, it’s an entirely different thing than at Tyburn; it doesn’t have those high spirits you find in taverns and at cockfights, with shouting, boozing, hands on women’s breasts, street vendors trumpeting cakes and rum. Here it’s solemn, civilization’s rite of initiation in the Terra Incognita, Nature’s blood becoming part of History. The Catholic Church, the Church of England and the Wesleyan rite perform solemn blessings, the Reverend intones the hymn,
The hour of my departure comes, I hear the voice that calls me home
; even the row of convicts and the throng of townspeople, crowded together by the invitation and order of Sir George, join in the chorus,
In the midst of life we are in death.
The bodies jerk in space and become rigid; death is a blast of wind that fills the sails and shrouds. Even the pecker stands up erect and useless, the ship slips into eternity straight as a flag; beyond that crossing the wind abates, a rag hangs limp between the legs. To tell the truth I spat on the ground seeing those poor wretches dangling in the wind; a huge glob, which almost ended up on the governor’s shoes, and it’s the only time I got a taste of the cat-o’-nine-tails. That should teach me to be more careful.

I witnessed a number of hangings in Hobart Town: one hundred and five. Sir George Arthur views those public executions as akin to washing down muddy streets, a measure of the community’s progress. I take advantage of those hours to collect, as I saw them do in London, the final words of those sentenced to death and publish them, touching them up a little, of course. Partly because in
Hobart Town the market is meagre, so it’s a good idea to satisfy the governor’s wishes; he wants those delinquents, whose acts terrorized the settlers, to appear repentant and frightened by death on the scaffold, so that people will see that even those devils are actually cowards and will no longer be afraid of them.