The Swan Book Read online

  These birds crowded the lake too. They were the guardian angels roosting on every rooftop of the shanty shacks to watch over families – all of their kinfolk living inside. These homeland brolgas casually walked into any house without fear, gently prancing off the ground with spread wings, and stealing food they plucked straight from the kitchen table in a casual leap. No one cared less about what brolgas did as creatures that belonged there, with every right to have a bit of food – and who would harm a brolga anyway?

  The girl fed the swans. She ran through the water with the fledging cygnets. She started to believe that by helping them to survive on the polluted swamp, she might learn how to escape as freely as they had been able to take flight. She wanted to fly. Dreams of stick wings attached to her arms that possibly grew feathers filled her mind with flights to escape. A great space in her mind played with words – disappearance, and invisible. She never thought that escaping a life of living with Bella Donna of the Champions was impossible. She was often flying like a swan. She watched the old woman obsessively, and decided to learn how to talk to swans too. Yes, she would be fluent in swan talk. She could feel the miracle of leaving every time swans lifted themselves off the water, the lightness of being airborne, in watching them fly until they disappeared through the dusty haze, and leaving her to dream about all of those invisible places she had heard the old woman talking about, that lay outside the swamp.

  She watched the swans growing fatter and heavier, each a little battleship, that could still run in a rush across the water to take off, and fly back in to grab food thrown into the air. They swarmed in packs of hundreds for the food that the old woman threw at them. Other people’s food! Piles of it in plastic bags and buckets, dumped like daily offerings to spirits on her floating platform. Old Bella Donna even had the audacity to swan around, humpy to humpy, counselling the greedy, and then collecting all the food scraps that anyone could have eaten themselves. She took everything: a pile of finely chopped yellowing cabbage, egg shells, old bread, wilting lettuce leaves, potato peels, fish bones, orange skins, a shrivelled apple core. She poured the lot onto the water and watched the frenzy of swans and brolgas devour every piece of scrap in moments. Then the swans drifted off, and resumed an endless activity of sifting waters stuffed with algal blooms, scum on the surface, and slime-covered waterweeds.

  As time passed, the swamp people grew skinnier than any normal person sweating it out in the Tropics, while the swans became fatter on their food. The old woman, ancient now, did not have a guilty thought in her head. She prowled about on moonless nights to steal food right from the arms of children. Little things sound asleep from the exhaustion of clinging to their own special watermelon, from watermelon day, army fruit, good fruit given to them to treasure by the protecting armed forces. Such hot summer nights. Very easy being dead to the world. Deaf to the feral cat jumping out of the way when the door creaked, the breeze tinkling chime bells, or a thousand things moving, banging and clapping, while the ghostly old woman with thieving household brolgas walked straight in to snatch food right out of their little fingers.

  The girl followed the old woman wading amongst the swans floating on their fat bellies, their red beaks preening themselves right next to their old benefactor’s bright floral-patterned dress billowing in the water. Silently, the girl was a shadow that listened to the stories and secrets whispered into swan ears, and whatever she remembered, it was mostly poetry for swans.

  Swamp people said the swans were frightening them. They accused the swans of looking right into their souls and stealing the traditional culture. Bella Donna said she did not know why a swan would want to look into somebody’s empty soul. Just an insult a minute. She had already looked inside their souls herself and said that she had found nothing there. Just thin bits of weak weeds lying on the bottom of your guts trying to stay alive. Perhaps swamp people had empty souls, but they did have pride. They jumped around a lot and told her, Enough’s enough now, don’t you go talking like that. Anyway, she retaliated: What could there possibly be for a swan to see except these little bits of weeds lying on a tin plate in a tiny pile at the bottom of your soul?

  Guess there was no answer for that.

  But red-ringed, black-eye swans dipping their beaks like fortune-tellers swilling and swirling old tea dregs around while swimming by the girl could create beautiful thoughts, staring straight into her eyes. The girl in turn thought she might read their fortunes in the language nature had written in the blackish-grey-tipped curled tail feathers scalloped across their backs. It was how swans read each other when choosing a mate. She was determined to solve the mystery of why they had left the most beautiful lakes in the country – a vision created in her head by the old woman’s stories of other places. Her existence revolved around learning the route they took, how they had crossed the interior country, the old woman’s geography of featureless sand dunes stretching to kingdom come, just to reach a North country polluted swamp. It was the love stories, the old woman chuckled to herself. She was amused at the girl’s addiction to bolt holes. In the muddy waters the old woman went on feeding squads of cygnets volumes of a tangled, twisted love story about the Gods only knew what, which they soaked up like pieces of wet bread.

  All children wanted were answers to universal questions about how people should live, and strangely, the girl thought she would find these answers by tossing herself in the old woman’s madness of singing to swans. Just as she believed there was a secret route back to the tree – she believed there had to be a secret route that had brought the swans up to the top of the country. The mysteries were running away from her. Her mind too tied up in a jungle of tracks to run. Another way. Hidden passages. Places to hide. Always running. She had to become Aunty Bella Donna of the Champions who knew how to call swans, and time became desperate. But Oblivia remained out of kilter with the old lady’s shadow, never quite fitting the cast of the sun, while the old woman sung her stories slowly, moving more and more slowly those days.

  This story that began across the ocean, in a far-away land of a country which had already lost its name. In this place people were often telling common stories about themselves as they looked out at the awfulness of their land. The stories were never about history, or science, or technology. They talked about a useless landscape that grew nothing and which most of them could not see anyhow because of their blindness. These people spent ages comparing better times before who can tell what happened, except saying: We were already late when the God of the world said Git.

  Ice-covered lakes dried up where the swans once lived. Beautiful creatures of snow-white feathers with yellow beaks had flown half-dead, half-way around the globe to reach extraordinary destinations in faraway lands.

  Here, dead clumps of grasses by the sea billowed until whisked from the earth and into highways of dry wind crossing the continent that went round the world and back again. Trees stopped measuring the season and died slowly in ground bone dry several metres deep. Finches had been the first to swarm into jerking clouds hightailing it out of their hemisphere. In winter or summer, only the old-fashion homely birds scratched the ground for moisture from long ago.

  You could see the white eyes of the old fishermen watching the flowing rivers in their memories, listening to them go on and on, it was like listening to the poetry of a canary’s song dancing in those minds to sweeten the drought…

  Draw breath, Aunty. Frequently the girl would interrupt her by laying her hand on the old woman’s arm. Life was short. The old woman spoke faster, and was short of breath. The girl was greedy to know exactly what the old woman had to say and nodded repeatedly at her, asking Bella Donna the questions about what makes the world go around. Oblivia needed explanations quickly, not blind fishermen. How do you fly solo? Which way should you run to escape this world? Where do the swans go? No one else knew how to tell her how to shuffle the cards, so what harm was there in believing a mad person? The old woman finally leant forward and whispered into the girl’s ea
r that the best journey she had taken in all of her travels in the world was with a swan in a sampan. The girl convinced herself that only the mad people in the world would tell you the truth when madness was the truth, when the truth itself was mad. Then the old woman began a new love story, All rivers flow to the sea, and its breath finished when Aunty Bella Donna of the Champions of the earth, who might have been an angel, died.

  The Dust Ends

  The night Bella Donna of the Champions died, boobooks called at her passing spirit, and when a swift wind swept through the distant woodlands of eucalypts, the rattling gumnuts could be heard as she travelled away. All night long, butcher-birds flew in circles and sung through the swamp. That was the parish! Traditional. Even first class. The country, finishing off the dead woman’s broken serenade to the swans while the humidity wrapped itself in a heavy haze over the swamp and caught all of the leaves falling from the trees.

  Around the swamp, the air was charged up like an electrified cat, always stifling and crowded. Oblivia dreamt the old woman was in the kitchen talking about her life, but her voice was jumping simultaneously between stories about times and places in the world that no longer existed. All dead, just like me now. Extinct. Uninhabitable. She was breathless with excitement. It was as though the old woman still wanted to breathe life into the stories of all those people in her life that she had seen escaping from their lost countries, taken to sea by a swan.

  But then, what of her life in the swamp? Our life here, the girl uttered in her sleep. And the reply came out of nowhere. Existence! Just a word echoed from faraway by old Bella Donna – a woman who was too worldly, too immersed; too spread everywhere, and she cried to the girl, I don’t know what is happening to me.

  Only the girl felt the sadness of losing the old woman forever, whose voice became less afflicted the more distant she became, Well! Can you believe this? Old Bella Donna had just been to the cloud house of a white swan in a Zhongguo city glowing with stars shining like antique lanterns, where the swan was still writing about itself with a quill in its beak, the same poem of missing its home, that it had been writing many centuries ago.

  I feel so light now. It was the feeling of sunlight falling through dark stormy clouds embracing the giant granite swans placed all about the Indonesian village of stone carvers. And off she goes again, but instantly returns and tells of falling down through the dusty rays of light that form a sea around the ceiling of an ancient temple. It was where the golden swan boat of an Indian Goddess swings from waves stirred by thousands of chanting devotees.

  Finally, the old woman’s home was in sight, the country that was once covered with fir trees, where wild deer with bells in their antlers had run through fog snaking over the snow-covered floor of forests.

  The white swans dipping for weeds in the river.

  A crescent moon moved so low across the swamp that its reflection over rippling water looked like the wings of a magnificent white swan. It looked like the type of swan from other parts of the world where it might be called Hong, or Cigne, Kugui, Svane, Zwaan, Svanr, Svan, or Schwan. Its light glowed over the houses in the slum. Waterlily leaves shone in the moonlight. The light rode silver saddles on the back of hundreds of black swans huddling around the hull with necks tucked under their wings, where they dream their own names, Goolyen, Connewerre, Kungorong, Muru-kutchi, Kuluin, Mulgoa, Kungari, Koonwaarra, Byahmul, and the recital continues, collecting all of the country’s swans. Then waterlily leaves were blown over the water. Swarming insects backed away.

  While circling in the skies, the swans dived endlessly through invisible crevices to other worlds. They were still searching for the old lady, always catching sight of her spirit, not letting her go. It seemed that the entire flock would not stop mourning for her. Everywhere, all over the swamp, there were swans behaving strangely, continuously sifting the water with agitated beaks, as though they were trying to find a way to reach the old woman’s spirit, sepulchred beneath.

  Then one day their behaviour changed. The entire population emerged from the reeds where it usually built its nests to join bevies of others swimming in from distant reaches of the swamp, until they eventually formed one massive flotilla that skirted around the floating dumps. The formation moved in a tight huddle with curled wing feathers that rose aggressively, an armada of thousands that floated slowly, around the swamp, to follow a threat that was visible only to their eyes.

  Suddenly, on necks held high, and feathers vertically angled like black fins reaching for the sky, a sea of hissing red beaks pointed towards what threatened it from above the swamp. It was all action after that. In a spear-like dash across the water, the shadow was pursued until the long drawn-out choreography of swans finished with downward pointing beaks nestled into their necks. The flotilla often changed directions in this pursuit without the slightest hint of any confusion in its vast numbers. They turned as one living presence that shared the same vein of nervousness. At any moment, just like a sudden change in the direction of the wind, the mass would retreat then, just as rapidly, swing back across the water into another attack, always watching whatever was menacing the swamp through the single eye of the flotilla, gauging its movement, so that their mass would slow down, speed up, or turn sharply, to match the wings hovering above and create gusts of wind rippling across the swamp.

  Oblivia slept so soundly, she missed the dawn spectacle: the sand went berserk and smothered the whole swamp before shifting, and flying off. The Harbour Master was about, saying his farewells. He said he was heading northeast, maybe riding on the cloud of sand somewhere out into the sea first, flying to where winds build ferociously. That was the story. Then, just like that, the mother of all sand mountains disappeared.

  The official people of the local Aboriginal Government came and tore the hull apart. Books, papers, the lot were tossed all over the floor as though they did not want their hands contaminated by the devil, while the girl huddled in a corner. They were searching for the crystal balls because they might be worth something – you never know.

  They had rolled away in the dust storm. She stared into the direction to where the sand mountain had flown.

  The officials thought the girl was a liar – were convinced of it, but there was no point in arguing with her so they took the old woman’s body away to be buried. Oblivia freaked, with the question burning in her mind: What if they come back? With the old woman’s body gone, she felt unprotected and alone. She waited for something else to happen, something bad, expecting more people to barge into the hull at any moment. At nightfall, she felt as though her body had disappeared into the slate-grey wall of the hull and she was drowning, gasping for air under the surface, then she heard Bella Donna walking around in the hull and reciting poetry about a slate-grey lake lit by the earthed lightning of a flock of swans…Oblivia felt her life slipping away with the words, as though the old woman was lulling her away. It would have been easy. But suddenly the mood changed to storm winds spun in the darkness, and Oblivia left so fast it was as though she had been picked up and thrown head first out of the hull, and was already rowing away from it. She ran off into the wasteland at the end of the swamp to search for the tree that she now doubted ever existed.

  The swamp people watched her searching among the dead reeds from their homes. Who’s that down there? They couldn’t believe it. Don’t look. Can this madness ever end? I want to look. She scratched the ground with her fingers, searching for some evidence that would prove the tree had once existed. She needed to confirm what was in her head, of having lived inside the darkened hollow. She was digging holes like a mad dog. Don’t look. I want to look. There was nothing but dirt where she scratched more and more frantically, with her head screaming, over and over, I want to know, as though she was asking the ground to ask the people she knew were watching, but nobody went over to the park to tell the girl what had happened to the trees, whether the wood had been chopped up for firewood, or sawn for timber.

  Nobody said: See child, t
he timber of the trees was used in that house over there. Nobody said: Look here is a chiselled digging stick whittled from the last slither of wood of the trees that had grown here. Either the tree never existed as far as anyone knew, or it was a sacred tree in a story only remembered through the ages by people who had earned the right to hold the story. Who speaks for the ancestors? Who speaks for a child wandering around alone? What was the problem?

  There was a story about a sacred tree where all the stories of the swamp were stored like doctrines of Law left by the spiritual ancestors, of a place so sacred, it was unthinkable that it should be violated. Old people said that tree was like all of the holiest places in the world rolled into one for us, no wonder she went straight to it. Funny thing that. The tree watching everything, calling out to her when it saw some people had broken the Law. Something will happen to them. This ancestor was our oldest living relative for looking after the memories, so it had to take her. When the girl was found though, the tree was destroyed by the Army on the premise that this nexus of dangerous beliefs had to be broken, to close the gap between Aboriginal people and white people. Those stories scattered into the winds were still about, but where, that was the problem now. It made us strong and gave us hope that tree. The kinspeople of the tree had believed this since time immemorial. Really all that was left behind of the story were elders and their families whose ancestors had once cared for the old dried and withered, bush-fire burnt-out trunk of a giant eucalyptus tree through the eons of their existence. They were too speechless to talk about a loss that was so great, it made them feel unhinged from their own bodies, unmoored, vulnerable, separated from eternity. They had been cut off. They called themselves damned people who felt like strangers walking around on their country. The reciprocal bond of responsibility that existed between themselves and the ancestors had always strengthened them. This was what held all times together. Now we are sick of it. Sick of that girl bringing up that memory to make us feel bad. All these people could think about while watching Oblivia dig the bare earth that day, was being reminded of the tree exploding in front of their eyes and there was not a thing anyone could do about it. Nothing at all. Couldn’t bring any of it back. That girl is doing this to keep reminding us. Something must be wrong in her head if she can’t even think straight. Watching the girl was one thing. They could not go out there and explain to this child what it meant to lose that ancestral tree.