WHEN I came down from Tol he had gone. The boat had sailed the day before and
he had left a note with Paul and all it said was, "So long, Martin, I'll write you from home."
I went up to the Red Shield hut and spread out some paper and dipped my pen in the ink. Outside the sun was already bright and the hut shot a long sharp shadow towards the sea. The bay was blue, but on the far side it paled to silver under the brightness. Two men were playing table tennis at the end of the hut and the ball had the monotonous sound of a metronome.
I wrote "Hello, Steve", and then I stopped. I sat and listened to the hollow sound of the ball on the table and one of the men shouted an obscenity when he missed a shot. The ball went plop-plop-plop and the shadow slowly shortened across the glary earth. My hand balled round the paper, screwing it so that creases went across the words "Hello, Steve" and the smoothness of the surface disappeared and it was no good for writing on. It didn't matter. It didn't matter at all because you can't say good-bye on paper. He had gone home and I knew he would write, but he lived in another State and when I finally went home we would still only be able to write. No matter which way you looked at it, it was finished. Finished, and we hadn't said goodbye.
Funny thing, I can't remember him those first weeks, though I know he came in the same day as I did. But you didn't notice much at all early in the
piece - you were still wondering if you had made a mistake leaving the old life. The first clear memory I have of him was the night we stood on the deck of the transport. We were due to pull out the next morning but tonight we leaned on the rail and looked at it all for the last time. "The
lights of home," be said, and the way he said it was as if I had beard it coming down the wind in a lonely tall forest.
The ferries, cat-silent, yellow eyes blinking, went across the water carrying the people who as yet didn't pay much attention to the foreign pages in
the newspapers. Over on our left a car came down to the foreshore, turned around,
the lights went out and there was only the red spot of its tail-light in the darkness.
I suddenly wished I was the man in the car kissing the woman in the car, any woman, just to know warm lips and soft body once more. "Let's go down," he said. "I can't stand much more of this." We vent down into the
blue-white light of the passage-way and from there into the white light of our cabin and soon after we went to bed and from then on I knew him. We gambled all the way across.
He always lost and I always won and I lent him money and he lost that too and I would lend him more. Money didn't mean anything now. It was something you used to buy time when time didn't mean anything either. The ship ploughed and rolled across the Bight and then there was Perth where we went wild and did things we'd have never done back home and we did them because we had left home and we didn't know if we'd be back.
The shadow shortened on the earth and the silver glare came slowly across the blue of the water out in the bay. The bats tap-tapped the ball and there was obscenity again as a shot was muffed.
Joe walked past the door and without halting he said, "The mail's in," but I knew it was too soon for a letter to arrive from him.
I thought of the mail-plane coming in over the Sea of Galilee and how far away home seemed and how lonely I was that first leave in Jerusalem. That was the time we were down in the Old City and the buck nigger, big and the light striking on the black smoothness of his muscles, had shouted foul-mouthed insults at us and Steve had hit him hard, right in the face so that there was red blood on the black skin, but be didn't go down, just shook his head and made a noise like an animal and came boring in, swinging those long
deadly arms that could have pole-axed Steve.
I hit the nigger just below the knees in the best tackle I had ever done and he came down over me and I could smell the filth of him
and the swell that dark-skinned people have and then his head hit the smooth cobbles and then we ran away and went up to a bar and had a drink of the sweet Arab beer which we didn't like but which was a drink and that was what we needed. That was one of the things we could have talked about, but it was too late now. There would have been the words on paper, telling it all exactly as it happened but there would be no feeling to it and it was the feeling that counted.
Through the doorway of the hut, looking across the bay I could see the C.C.S. on the hill, the Red Cross flag hanging limp on the pole, and the red gash of the road winding up the green hillside. Over there they were tending the men we had brought down yesterday from Tol.
There was the time outside Retimo, on the hill overlooking the airstrip. At eight o'clock in the morning the Junkers went over
headed for Suda Bay and someone said, "The swine are here. It's our turn next." They came late in the afternoon, flying low and massive against the sun going down behind the mountains, and then there were the red and white and green flowers in the sky and from that moment the bell started. Some of them landed among us and we cut them
down with all the hate that had been bottled up all through the retreat down through Greece, but many more landed all around us and they drove us down into the re-entrant where we lay among the rocks and prayed that the enemy on the hill above us couldn't see us.
And then at dawn the next morning we went in and took the hill again and we stayed there on that hill till it was no use staying any longer. Then we went down and surrendered and that was the part that hurt more than the hunger or the thirst or the wounds that some of us had. I had a bullet in my arm and that night Steve took me up to the German doctor and stood there and talked to me, ignoring the Germans, while the doctor took out the bullet and then be took me by the good arm and
walked me hack to the compound on the airstrip with the guard walking along beside me. He didn't speak to the Germans all the time we were in the little schoolhouse, just ignored them as if they didn't exist and that was a bigger insult than if he had sneered at them.
That was another of the things we could have talked about. We could have talked about other things too; of our escape from Crete in the little fishing boat and bow the Turks handed us down their line of army camps and put us across the border into
British-occupied Syria. And then months afterwards we went to the
skiing school up among the green cedars in the white snow of the Lebanon. That was a wonderful time: the cold clear air and the singing sound of skis on snow and the wind that was solid against your face as you went down through the trees, bending the knee and leaning in to take the turns then straightening up for the long swoop down to the end of the run.
It was then too, on a Sunday when the sun bounced back from the snow, that we went climbing. From eight thousand feet up we looked across the lower mountains right out across the plain of Homs to , the mountains of Turkey, climbing the bottom of the sky in the far blue distance. Then we turned to climb again and I slipped and I went down, down, down, in a drop that left me no fear only a wonder that this could be happening to me and I knew this was the end and suddenly a giant rock was rushing at me and for a queer moment I seemed to be lying in the air and the rock was failing on ME and then blackness hit me with a blinding pain and then there was no feeling.
I woke to find Steve leaning over me and half an hour later we began the climb down. I was sleepy and wanted to lie down, but he slapped my face and threatened me and cursed me and, when the way down allowed it, he carried me. The blood was crimson in the snow and every so often I had to lie down and roll in the snow to congeal it and then I got up and we went on and by the time we got to the bottom I was delirious. At the hospital I had so much wrong with me they couldn't believe I had come down from such a height, walking on my own two feet. I couldn't tell them that had I been alone up there I couldn't have come down. Steve was standing beside me and you can't tell a man
how much you owe him when others are standing around.
Thinking now, I put my hand on my wrist, the wrist that had been broken in the fall and as sometimes happens in a memory that
is clear the pain came back and when I shut my eyes I could feel all the other pains, in the thigh and the hip and the ribs and the sleepiness in the head.
Joe walked into the hut.
"It ain't right," he said. "Five letters."
He threw the white oblongs on the table and walked past me.
The tennis stopped and there was the question "Any for me? " and the answer "No". There was another obscenity and then the ball began to plop-plop-plop on the table again.
I picked up the envelopes. I knew the hand-writing on all of them. They were the
regulars - the people who had written me week after week all the years I had been away, the people I had left and the people I would go back to, the people whose letters were the
link between farewell and return and not the end of something as Steve's note had been.
There was the time we sat in the tent in Moresby, waiting to go up over the Track. The lantern threw yellow highlights and black shadows on his lean face and be told me about his wife and
how they thought there was a baby coming now and about the land they had bought at Bowral and I sat and listened because I didn't have anything to tell. If you're married you can talk about
your wife and her having a baby and it somehow seems beautiful and as it should he for everyone,
but when you're single you can't talk about the girls you've loved because that is sordid. It may he beautiful to the two of you or it may he just another excitement,
but in any case it cheapens it to talk about it.
We went up over the Track and the rest was jungle
and the silent fighting that wore your nerves. I was wounded again, and again be brought
me out, carrying me with one arm round my shoulders, our feet dragging through the mud
and the rain running cold down my back through the sodden shirt, walking
through the yellow light of a setting sun trying to shine through rain clouds. Damien Parer
photographed that, hut I never saw it on the screen. I hope a lot of other people did. Maybe then they'll understand why
I'm so damned sorry that this is the end of it all now.
It wasn't any use. If I wrote now the letter would be
empty. A three-penny stamp the freight charge on the end of a time in my life that I would always remember but would never regain unless we met at some good place where the beer sparkled amber in the light and the taste of it started your tongue on all these things I had been thinking. But I knew it would never be. There was the home in Bowral and the wife he loved and the baby now nearly three years old and that was his life from now on.
The table tennis had stopped and the men had gone. The hut was silent and the shadow had shortened till it was now only a dark thin line along the edge of the wall. A barge went across the water and even from here the metal of it looked hot.
I stood up, dropped the balled-up paper into the waste-tin, and walked to the door of the hut. I looked at the sign on the wall: "Don't Forget To Write", and then I walked out into the hot empty glare of the day.
"NX15943" |
