Charades (15 page)

Fully fixed? Who fixes fate? Who's the racketeer? Can a bad fate be fixed?

The wanderer stirs up the rime-cold sea with his hands.
Katherine scribbles across the tangent routes and circles of her life, a rough draft. She grimaces over the literal translation, feeling for smoothness, reaching for the old mellow lilt of the noisome pestilence and the wings of the Almighty in the feathers of whose cadences she trusts. She writes in her notebook: … 
though, troubled in heart, he rows through the rime-cold sea. How unbending is fate!

And then, on the scrap paper, adds a question mark:
How unbending is fate?

To the serried ranks of books, she murmurs sardonically: “How unbending
is
fate?”

Can it be outwitted? Does it lie in wait, gloating, like the will of God?

When Katherine, translation of
The Wanderer
in hand, taps on Verity's office door for her tutorial, there is no answer. Strange. She checks her watch.

Ah well, there is still so much to be done, how does anyone keep up with all the reading? She hears of students who go to parties, to college banquets, on hikes and trips. When do they study? She decides to sit in the grassy quadrangle, soaking up sun, working on her French. When Verity walks along the cloisters — she will be, surely, coming from the library where she must have been detained — Katherine will see her. But what makes Katherine glance up from the quad to Verity's office window? What sixth sense?

In any case, Verity is there, standing still as a question in the spotlight of Queensland sun.

Puzzled, Katherine splays her hands open in the warm grass, pushes them into earth, testing for something. Laying her cheek between her hands, she smells not just couch grass and mud, a sweet mix, but chlorine, the school swimming pool, the concrete steps, the musty Mondays in the old school library.
No,
she says,
no.
Meaning: not here, no; that has gone, the old stink of Wilston school. Gone like Kay. I can do what I like with the past; it is easy as plasticene; it only exists now and then.

She is sprawled full length, her
Oxford Book of French Verse
lying open in front of her, the working sheets of a Verlaine translation fluttering, threatening to dart off toward the refectory with a passing cluster of students. Uncertain, Katherine stares up at the window again. Did she pass Verity on the stairs? It's just possible. She has become aware of an alarming tendency within herself to be lost, literally lost, in thought. Concentrating, she folds the rough drafts of Verlaine and closes her book, her eyes on the students: the way they laugh, the way they bump into each other comfortably as they walk, the way their eyes scan the quad, expecting pleasure. What would that be like: ordinariness? the yearned-for unattainable gift of being like everyone else?

Under an archway of the cloisters, she pauses and leans against a column. Golden sandstone: the very words, somehow, speak to her of a new heaven and a new earth, far from the grubby brick church with its steam of worshippers. The golden sandstone is warm and grainy; as comfortable as the lost shadow of the Almighty. No, not that. As comfortable as the shoulder of Nicholas if she can lean far enough into that horseback memory, that state of bliss, that dream.

Katherine shades her eyes, and yes, Verity is still at her window, seemingly propped there, fixed. Verity, who fixes fate with raisins. (Do Nicholas and Verity still ride together? Did they ever? Where now the horses and riders? And what is Bea doing at this moment? And where is Nicholas? And what now, at the Duke ofWellington?)

Concentrate, Katherine orders herself sarcastically. Can you pass this test? Can you get yourself up the stairs and down the hallway to room 205, can you slip into the first sentence of a tutorial for which you are running late, can you make it without sliding down a tangent of thought?

She knocks at Verity's door.

No answer.

(“Snap out of it, Verity,” she hears Miss Warren say in the Wilston school library.)

But is this the same Verity? Katherine considers the lectures and seminars, the crackle of Verity's mind: Verity alert, Verity ascendant, Verity Scholastica Regina. No sign has ever been given to Katherine, unless … On the first day, when the selection list was read aloud, did Katherine imagine a hesitation after her name? She had raised her hand in answer to the roll call, had waited for something. What? Verity's eyes, meeting hers,
were neutral.

In the beginning, Katherine thought, we are frightened children. Later, we invent protectors, magic, our whole childhood. It is possible that she looked at me once, accidentally, in the old school library, how many years ago now? Ten years ago. Nothing more than that, perhaps, except for a moment with horses at the edge of the rainforest, a mere five years ago, that; a moment, however, that I may have wished into being.

Katherine knocks on the door again, and when there is no answer, opens it slightly, leans inside and says: “Miss Ashkenazy?” Very shy and formal. Since there is no rebuke, nothing to suggest that she has been brash or intrusive, she sidles in, closes the door quietly behind her, and moves to the familiar chair at the side of the desk. Soft academic noises, these will do the trick, she feels: the scuffle of her briefcase placed beneath the chair, the velvet thud of the books, papers rustled.

Verity is wearing jodhpurs and a white silk blouse and riding boots. Tossed across the armchair by the window are her black academic gown and a riding whip and her briefcase — as though she had finished with teaching obligations for the day (the afternoon tutorial session forgotten?) and was about to drive out to the country where a horse might be stabled. Out beyond Indooroopilly, perhaps; or out through The Gap to
Mt Glorious.

Katherine says awkwardly: “I could come back tomorrow.”

Verity turns from the window It seems now as though she has simply been waiting for her student, as though nothing unusual has happened, although, Katherine notes, Verity's eyes seem unnaturally bright and her right hand is deep in the pocket of her jodhpurs.

“The Wanderer,” Verity says calmly enough in her low voice. Her accent is Australian, but espaliered Australian. There is nothing of the scrubby sound of Wilston school to it, no bush or back garden notes. “I'd like you to read it aloud in Anglo-Saxon first. I think we can touch the wayfarer in the sound of that lost tongue more than in the most thorough translation. Don't you agree?”

Yes, Katherine thinks with a prickle of excitement, and a sense that she has always agreed, has always been waiting for this thought to be offered up for her agreement. With only a slight self-consciousness, she pushes out hesitantly into the ancient words, guttural, teutonic, thick with the spume of the cold North Sea.
Oft him anhaga,
she begins. She rows jerkily, and the wide dangerous emptiness of the ocean washes over them.

At
Nis nu cwicra nan
 … she falters. It seems that a cramp, or some sort of pinching of nerves, has fastened on Verity. Wincing, she has placed a hand on Katherine's wrist, an involuntary act, and then returned the hand to her pocket. Katherine watches the pocket, the way the fingers inside it twist and turn.

As though the reading were a psalm, Verity takes up an antiphonal refrain:

Nis nu cwicra nan

pe ic him modsefan minne durre

sweotule asecgan.

Not one is now living to whom the wanderer dares to express himself openly
 — though Katherine, holding her breath, has a sense of impending revelation.

“It's the anniversary,” Verity says in a low voice, “of the last time I saw my parents. May 15, 1943.”

Katherine thinks with a slight shock: And I was a few months old, knowing nothing. Safe.

She waits.

“I was at school,” Verity says. “We lived outside Le Raincy, I'd just started that year.” She goes to the window again and speaks so softly that Katherine has to stand close behind her to hear, and even then she has to strain and at times only the tips of phrases reach her. She has the impression that the words insist on being spoken aloud, that they push up with seismic force through a fault line in the thin crust of Verity's present, but that Verity does not wish the words to be heard. She has, too, a fleeting vision of Verity standing at the curved prow of an ancient boat, a boat without a crew, a boat that has left a ruined city behind it; and it seems to her that Verity sings her lament in the alliterative lines of a language that cannot be translated.

“I was six years old,” Verity says. “I can smell the head­master's tobacco. He has yellow teeth.” She is speaking very fast now, very low and fast. “He comes to the kindergarten classroom.
V
é
rit
é
! Vite, vite! you have to hurry!
The others think I'm in trouble again.” She turns slightly toward Katherine, explaining: “I wear the star.” She turns away again. “Other
children 
… do
things.”

Katherine waits.

“That morning I hid, but Maman gave me a handful of raisins and made me go.”

Katherine senses, more than hears, the rest: the headmaster perhaps pushing, perhaps dragging a little girl down the hallway, soldiers in the grounds, the headmaster
hurry
down the back stairs, the tradesmen's entrance …

“He pushes me. I can't move. It's so far to the fence and the trees, the pine trees.
Run!
he says
Run!
So I run.”

There is a long long silence. Verity's hand is convulsive in her pocket. At one point she half turns and says distractedly in a flat voice only just barely inflected into a question: “Pine needles?” But Katherine is afraid to answer.

“It's dark and I'm frightened,” Verity says. “I rip off my star and walk out from the trees and go home. There's nobody there.”

She turns around suddenly and demands of Katherine, astonished: “I was six years old. How did I know to do that, to rip off the star?” Her cheeks are feverish, her eyes glitter, and Katherine does not answer. Verity turns back to the window and looks out at nothing.

The silence goes on and on. “In the convent,” Verity says, but never finishes the sentence.
“Je ne parle jamais fran
ç
ais,”
she says at another point.
“Jamais, jamais. Je l'ai perdu absolument, une langue morte
.” (Is it true? Katherine wonders. Does she never speak French any more? Or is she never aware when she speaks it?) Verity begins to shiver, at first slightly, hugging herself, and then more and more violently. An ague, Katherine thinks; the lost word is the only one that comes to her. Helpless, she picks up the academic gown and drapes it over Verity's
shoulders.

It is as though a curtain has been dropped and raised. New scene. Abruptly the shivering stops.

“There is a certain cultural milieu,” Verity says in a clear professorial voice, as if someone has wound her up, or pushed a button, “that the student of Anglo-Saxon must make an effort to enter. For instance, in 781 when Alcuin went from Britain to the court of Charlemagne, the Christianised Anglo-Saxons touched their own past again.” She says suddenly, arrested by a thought, “There must have been Jews in Aachen even then” — but it is as though a rogue radio wave, or stray shortwave static, has pushed through her larynx without her knowledge. For a moment she looks at Katherine vaguely, frowning, her head cocked, listening for something. Then she pulls books down from her shelves and resumes her clipped impersonal lecture. “The Anglo-Saxons from Canterbury fanned back into darkest Europe. We have Alcuin's homilies; and Aelfric's, much later.” She is looking for something, but can't find it. She sits at her desk again, and indicates the chair for Katherine.

“Well,” she says, “anyway, there was a British bishop who was about to baptise a pagan chieftain somewhere east of Aachen. His own contemporary ancestor, you might say. The chief made profession of faith, but then, on the very brink of the river, one foot in the baptismal water, he paused to ask: ‘My ancestors? Will I meet them again in Heaven?'

“ ‘Ah no,' the bishop said. ‘They cannot enter heaven, they died without Christ.'

“And the pagan chief withdrew his foot from the water. ‘Then neither shall I enter heaven,' he said, and not all the threats of hellfire or eternal damnation could sway him. He died heroically, without Christ, believing himself to be damned, rather than set a rift between himself and those he honoured.

“That is the tragic sense at the heart of the
Wanderer
poem,” Verity says. “Was the poet Christian or pagan?” Her eyes, this time, require an answer: from student to professor. But Katherine cannot speak. Verity gives a small smile, approving, as though her student has come up with the only proper response. “He was both,” she says. “Both.” And then, her voice suddenly dropping so low again that Katherine has to strain to hear, “I was brought up Catholic. In a convent. The nuns saved me.”

Saved, are you saved?
comes a ghostly echo. If ever, Katherine thinks, dizzy, falling into the terrifying well of Verity's eyes, if ever I should see a lost soul, this is she. But
Nicholas,
she thinks. Since it has such power to restore order, to right all wrongs, she blurts it out. “Nicholas,” she says.

Verity stares vaguely at the word that floats between them. She frowns a little. The word has a meaning she should know but she cannot remember it. She looks blankly at Katherine.

Katherine knows that the gaps in this story will never be filled out. Not by Verity.

She will never know how long they sat there. It was dark, she thinks, when she found herself on the university bus, alone, riding into the city. She can replay the smell of grass in the quad, the sight of Verity from the cloisters, the sound of Anglo-Saxon intoned, but not the moment of leaving that room.