On Lust and Longing Page 3

  At last L decided to leave his wife, or she threw him out—I don’t know which. He and I would catch a train to Melbourne and start afresh in a new city. Blithe fatalism took hold of me. One thing seemed to connect to the next in a chain which I had not forged, which I could not control and which pulled me along, according to its own will. I was fascinated by the thought that somehow, as ‘the other woman’ in L’s marriage, I was recompensing my mother for being an unwanted wife.

  The day we were to leave I waited outside the house in Ultimo. God knows what sort of waif I was by then, far from the comforts of home and the smart clothes my mother made for me. L had a suit of dowdy blue that he wore sometimes without a tie, his shirt unbuttoned at the neck. I hated the colour of the fabric and thought that without a tie the suit looked worse than common: it looked oppressed. When he appeared at the top of the narrow street he was wearing the horrible suit and no tie. His head was down and his dark fine hair, caught by the breeze, hung over his forehead. He looked chastened and dispirited.

  I suddenly realised I did not love him. I did not want to marry him. I did not want to run away to Melbourne with him. I did not want to have children and grandchildren with him. I didn’t want to do any of the things we had planned to do together. I realised we were doomed: we had risked everything for love, and lost it all.

  In that moment, I felt the void of despair fill with a tenderness far deeper than erotic love; it was a bond of brother/sisterhood. For a moment, I cared for him without desire. In the instant of realising I no longer lusted for him, and that I yearned for all this to end, yearned to live normally again, I knew also I could not reject him. To be doomed is to keep on walking forward, eyes open, towards disaster.

  I went to Melbourne with L. By now the recession of 1961 was beginning to bite and jobs were hard to find. L answered an advertisement for labourers. More than two hundred men turned up: the foreman hired the ones with experience. We stayed in boarding houses in St Kilda, moving every couple of days because, by now, we were sure the police were looking for me. In Victoria, the age of consent was eighteen; I was ‘a child in moral danger’ from L. I now weighed seven stone, more than fourteen pounds less than when I had left home four weeks earlier. It was already winter. In the street I wore no makeup, trousers and bulky sweaters and covered my hair with a cap, hoping to pass as a boy. A couple of the landladies seemed fooled into believing I was a boy—at least they were cunning enough to pretend. L told them I did not understand English.

  We were waiting for passports, the faking of which L had in train through Poles in Melbourne who had learnt their skills during World War II. Our new plan was to skip to New Zealand. Adrift, strangers in a strange city, we clung to each other. I began to believe I was in love with L again, and that everything would work out, somehow. Nothing urgent claimed the time, so we spent our days and nights drinking from each other’s lips. In one three-day stretch, we made love twenty-one times, stopping only to bathe and eat rye bread, csabai and cucumbers. Time and the world became irrelevant. In the bare, cold rooms we vibrated like butterflies.

  I had written to one of my teachers asking for a reference that would help me, I hoped, get a job. L had arranged a post office box somewhere in the business district—maybe it was the Melbourne GPO—so that we did not have to reveal any of our addresses. He would not let me collect mail from it in case the police saw me, but would go himself, having checked the coast was clear. One morning when we calculated there should be a reply from my teacher, we went into the city to the post office. I waited outside. Suddenly L reappeared, but he had died inside the post office. His corpse walking towards me. Its face was grey. I stared in terror at the change that had overtaken him. Then I realised that two burly men were on either side of him, and that L was handcuffed. A moment later my mother and father appeared. They had agreed to see each other again for this one purpose, of finding me.

  Two police cars pulled up. I watched as dumb as a pole-axed calf as L was pushed into one black car. The other took me and my parents to the airport.

  I went to live with my mother in a flat in Neutral Bay and learned to type at Miss Hale’s Business College. My parents divorced. My Great Aunt died without speaking to me. For thirty years I have wondered what happened to L.

  Sydney, 1993

  What indeed happened to L? The Bible had warned: ‘the wages of sin is death.’

  Once returned to Sydney, to the care of my mother, my father set out to smash the princess who had flung herself into the gutter. There were no more physical beatings; instead they were psychological. It’s worth recording that up until 1936 obstetricians in the US performed cliterectomies on libidinous females to save them from hysteria, masturbation, madness and death.* Second-wave feminism was not yet a cloud on the horizon. I was forced into interrogations about my sexual history: had L sold me as a prostitute? Had I sold myself as a prostitute? Had I taken money from him in exchange for sex? My father knew L was unemployed: Where had our money come from? (Actually, from the Polish community in Melbourne, but I did not tell him this, in case the police harassed them.) The interrogations could last for hours. According to Papa, an unmarried, underaged woman who had more than three sexual partners could legally be declared a prostitute. Dubious, I thought. But I certainly could be declared an uncontrollable child and incarcerated in the notorious Parramatta Girls’ Home. That was where he was sending me, he said. Did I have venereal diseases? No. Perhaps L was diseased. I was frogmarched to the rooms of a greying, dyspeptic specialist who regarded me with unflinching disdain and tested me for various STDs. I was humiliated but unchastened. I was furious. Scorn for arrogant male physicians entered my soul; to this day I seek either female doctors or alternative medicine. The VD exercise was intended to torment me. What better torturer than a condescending patriarch brimming with self-importance and contempt for an immoral female? And only seventeen! I withstood the weeks of terrorising because I knew when it came to the crunch my father would not be so heartless or foolish as to have me locked up in Parramatta, for that really would bring contumely on the proud family name. But I was terrified for the wellbeing of L. I feared he was dead.

  My father was a great raconteur, brilliant with his flourishes of invented detail. However, the account he gave of what had happened to my demon lover rang with the sound of ghastly truth. A police escort had taken L from the post office back to Sydney for questioning.

  The Sydney cops, some of whom had been my father’s buddies in the Bondi Surf Life Saving Club, or like him had served in the Royal Australian Navy, had taken L to a police cell. There they showed him a handgun. ‘This was used in an armed robbery,’ they said. ‘If you go near that girl again we’ll find you and this gun will be in your possession, with your fingerprints on it.’ I was in despair. I began to think of suicide. I thought so much about L that one day I saw him standing in front of me. He ignored me and continued discussing something with a group of men. I was dumbfounded. He looked right through me as if I were invisible. He had rejected me.

  It took years to realise I had hallucinated.

  But youth and health are wonderful elixirs: I got on with enjoying mine.

  More than four decades after we had run away together, a bulky parcel arrived addressed to ‘Miss Blanche d’Alpuget, Sydney, Australia.’ Some genius of a clerk in the post office had sent it on to me. It was L’s most recent book. He was living in California, had re-married but divorced, had a son and a PhD. Email now existed. With trepidation, I wrote to him, bringing him up to date on my own life. He filled in the gap after his interview with the police: he had fled Sydney for Queensland, where he cut cane until he could travel to the US. In the 1980s President Reagan had awarded him a medal for his work against the Soviet Union. He sent me a photograph: two tall, urbane, dark-haired men, both with widow’s peaks. It seemed L was some sort of public intellectual, at least among émigré Poles on the west coast of the US. His field was Polish history and patriots, subjects both academic and r
espectable.

  Our exchanges were formal, uncomfortable and infrequent. Then something happened. L began to email more often with details of his latest essay/monograph/book each one seeming more dull, abstruse and pointless than the next. I replied I was writing a series of historical novels. He greeted this news with thunderous disapproval: historical novels? It felt as if he imagined crinolines and fainting ladies.

  I had never felt at ease with our renewed contact; now it became oppressive. He emailed rants against my father, with whom I had lovingly reconciled. He recalled details of insults from him; he found he had much to criticise about Australians of the 1960s, and now. His tone was increasingly sarcastic. I asked him not to contact me again. A few months later his son wrote, more or less begging me to resume contact with L, but a chilling suspicion had insinuated itself. Here I was, a woman of seventy-two, with an adorable and adoring husband. There he was, a man of eighty-three on the other side of the world, without a partner, remembering a girl of seventeen whom he had initiated into the arts of love-making. Once upon a time he and she had lusted for each other to the edge of an abyss of destruction. My suspicion was that as the light faded, as night drew near, in L’s mind a radiance now shone around what I had become for him: ‘the lost love of my life’.

  I stopped opening his emails.

  One day in 2017 I had an energy healing for a minor physical problem I’d suffered on and off since the age of twenty, something nobody had been able to diagnose but that had suddenly grown worse. At the end of the session the practitioner said, ‘A figure stands on your left side, looking at you.’ The problem I had was on my left, just above the hip. ‘Is it benevolent or malevolent?’ ‘Neither,’ she said. ‘It is attached to you. It watches you.’ She described it: a tall, slender man with slicked back dark hair. As she spoke I saw brown eyes above high cheekbones and ivory-toned skin. It’s odd what physical aspect of a lover enthrals one most deeply: in L, it was that his armpits were the colour of gold. In a bright, airy room in an expensive Sydney suburb more than half a century later, I suddenly saw him stretched on his back on a bed, arms above his head, armpits spread open, as inviting to my tongue as honeycomb ice cream.

  I went home, deleted all his and his son’s unread emails and marked their addresses ‘Junk’.

  Sin had guzzled its wage.

  Sydney, 2017

  *Sex at Dawn, Christopher Ryan and Cacilda Jethá, Harper Perennial, 2010, p. 251.

  ON LONGING

  I have immortal longings in me.

  Shakespeare, Antony and Cleopatra, Act V,

  Scene 2

  One fine day a horseman dressed in white, a man whose bulk made him look too heavy to ride, cantered away from a group of other men on horses. Abruptly his rhythm in the saddle broke—as if the ground were shaking, or maybe he was about to collide with something massive but invisible. Heart racing, he rushed on. The unseen thing grabbed him, surged over him, its shadow eclipsing all that was known.

  Darkness engulfed the rider.

  His mount slowed, stopped, and stood still. It seemed concerned not to disturb the human-equine being into which it had transformed, its man-half slumped, lifeless arms still clasped around its neck.

  Across the field all hell broke loose. People screaming; horses galloping, riders shouting and frantic; an ambulance careening towards the stricken centaur.

  But for the man who had collided with Death there was neither sound nor silence, light nor dark, no hope and no despair. There was Nothing.

  For six minutes (or seven, since accounts of that day vary) he was ‘clinically dead’. He had suffered pain like a javelin thrust through his chest and iron bands wound so tight round his ribs his lungs could not move. His heart had stopped beating and lay in its pulmonary sack, shaking, quivering, useless.

  But some weeks later, after expert repairs at St Vincent’s Hospital in Sydney, he was as large as life again—larger, actually—and back in charge. Appearing on national television, introduced to the audience as He Who Has Come Back From The Dead, brandishing the authority to talk about what it was like, he said, ‘The good news is there’s no hell. The bad news is there’s no heaven either’. To friends he was more forthright. ‘There’s nothing fucking there.’

  He had always been the All Or Nothing type (daring, a gambler), his report a frank account of his experience. But his words that day and in the days and years that followed were repeated and repeated, magnified by millions of television sets, radios and newspapers, broadcast into every house, car, office, bus, aeroplane and pub in the country, until they took on the status of a dogma. And this dogma crushed the longings of thousands, even millions, of his fellow citizens—no less so if they were unvoiced, often furtive, and felt vulnerable and shy, like little creatures that dare to venture out only at night, in dreams.

  Pascal said that people despise religion, and fear it may be true. Nevertheless, here, from the horseman’s mouth, was The Word: an eternal soul, life after death, heaven and hell—all bunkum. One had better get on with living. The purpose of everything was to strive for and reap life’s earthly delights.

  My father was typical of non-religious, middle-class Australia, of that age group now known as The Great Generation. He was the scion of a family that had lost money in the depression of the 1890s, and its most talented son, an industrial chemist, in World War I. Shaped first by those people and events, he lived through other crippling years: the Great Depression of the 1930s, then World War II. He served as a naval officer; close friends were maimed, destroyed, one suicided. He himself was a deep-chested, physically brave man, the kind to charge into a river in flood to rescue a stranger, but he was to suffocate in slow motion from emphysema over a decade in his old age. Throughout the process he refused to discuss death. One afternoon I began to broach The Big Tabu. He turned on me a look of fear and disgust. ‘Kerry Packer died,’ he murmured. ‘He said there was Nothing.’ For a man who had protected his weaknesses, as many of his generation did, with ferocious alertness, it was a final confession of dashed hopes. Agnostic or atheist (I never really knew which), he had secretly longed, I realised, that he might be mistaken—had hoped to discover a thread running through the knot of his life, continuing on.

  I wanted to comfort him but his thoughts and opinions had constructed a stony, protective barricade—and the world of spirit which, by that time, I knew well does not blast in like a SWAT team.

  I had first encountered this other world, which is also the world of the dead, one summer day in 1951, when I was seven years old, lying on my back on a bench in a garden in Pittwater, north of Sydney. My family was on holiday there, and we were visiting the cool, dark house of the local ranger. The grounds were large, with a lawn and flower beds, and beyond clipped hedges, a vegetable garden, an orchard and a chook yard with a lordly, high-stepping rooster and a harem of red hens.

  Without any sensation to warn me of what was coming I seemed to rise out of my body and enter a place of measureless bliss. I was astonished, but not frightened. After some time—seconds? minutes? half an hour?—I returned to my body and was still lying in the sun, on the bench. At the time I had no religious or spiritual concepts but I had the feeling I had encountered lively presences. Years later I read that Freud asserted many children have what he termed the Oceanic Experience, and then forget it. I never did, although I was not a particularly sensitive, imaginative or highly strung child. That journey out of my body had convinced me, however, that there was another world—about which, I decided, I would not speak. If I did, my parents would ask lots of questions and then, because in our family we didn’t believe in ghosts or angels or mumbo-jumbo, they would laugh at me.

  I hoped it would happen again, but it didn’t.

  It was another twenty years before I felt contact with the invisible world, and by then I was in the grip of yearning for a child. ‘Give me children, else shall I die’ Rachel said to Jacob. Women in this need can fling themselves into madness.

  I was in
Jakarta with my husband, enjoying a life of pleasure and ease: friends and parties, horse riding in the early mornings, swimming in the afternoons, trips to various islands in the archipelago. I was chatelaine of a white, air-conditioned bungalow with five servants for the housework and gardening, and a chauffeur to drive the car. I’d loved Jakarta even more when we’d first lived there in the 1960s, when we’d rented a pavilion with palm-leaf walls, no fridge, ice-box or air-con, with an outdoor kitchen and, in the bathroom, a tiled cistern from which we scooped water with a half-coconut shell for bathing. We had married young and were boon companions. Children were not part of our picture. But from one dawn to the next, as I turned twenty-eight, it was as if an unseen hand had wrenched me awake. I had to have a baby. I’d die if I didn’t.

  We were of that cohort of adventurous, idealistic young Australians who were fascinated by Asian cultures. We wanted a new, more civilised, more sophisticated Australia, one that embraced its location in Asia, one that was racially tolerant, broad-minded and humane. In 1966 we had stepped out together from under the heavy, soft, white hand of Menzies’ conservatism into the colourful, disorderly heat and violence of Indonesia in the final days of President Sukarno. The Cold War sidled through the country in whispers, conspiracies, arrests, denunciations, murders and assassinations, but we were unafraid of political turmoil, seeing ourselves as cultural pioneers, avid to understand Indonesian and nanyang societies. Comparing ourselves to the peer group back home, we felt we possessed a certain rebellious glamour. The peer group back home couldn’t have cared less.

  Indonesia, having defeated its Dutch colonial master and overthrown its mostly quisling kings, had an elite of western-educated intellectuals and the third-largest Communist Party in the world: it was, in those days, a pre-modern country. This was especially true of Java. If one needed a single word to describe what was essential to Javanese character and culture, it was mysticism. The portals of the metaphysical and mystic worlds were open to thousands, if not millions back then—from the most humble and saintly, around whom disciples gathered, to ordinary householders who were mantic and could ‘see things’, to base deceivers who practised magic and preyed on the ignorant and the greedy. I found myself in a fascination of riddles. What did the all-night shadow puppet dramas really mean? Why was the most important character not a prince or a warrior, but a servant? Why did aficionados sit, not on the shadow side with the audience, but on the puppeteer’s side, where the play seemed to be all mechanics and no enchantment? (I had not yet read Plato.) On hot, still mornings I visited the palaces of the sultans of Solo and Jogja and almost swooned from the music of the gamelan to which the court dancers stepped in slow mesmerising rhythm. I sensed that, like the puppet masters, they were demonstrating something about the invisible world and its power over human life. It was tantalising.