People of the Book (38 page)

But in the end, the one who looked like a soldier understood me. He smiled at me, very kindly. Then he turned to the others and said, Well, why not,
kinderlach
? The entire story of this book, its survival until today, has been a series of miracles. So why not just one more?

Arnhem Land, Gunumeleng, 2002

I
WAS IN A CAVE
six hundred meters up a rock escarpment and a hundred clicks from the nearest landline when they finally got ahold of me.

The message, brought by one of the Aboriginal kids, was odd, and I didn’t know what to make of it. He was a bright kid, and a bit of a prankster, so at first I thought it was some kind of joke.

“No, missus. No gammon this time. Fella from that Canberra mob, he bin call all day. We bin tell ’im, you mob’s bush all week, but ’im call and ’im call, even after Butcher growled ’im.”

Butcher was the boy’s uncle and the manager of Jabiru Station, the cattle property where we stayed when we weren’t doing field-work.

“Did he say what he wanted?”

The boy tilted his head to the side, the ambiguous gesture that might mean “no,” or “I don’t know,” or maybe “I don’t have the right to tell you.”

“You better come, missus, or Butcher’ll growl me, too.”

I stepped out of the cave and blinked in the bright daylight. The sun was a big disk of brilliant madder, reddening the stripes of ore that ran through the sheer black-and-ocher rock face. Down below, the first shoots of new spear grass washed the plain in vivid green. Light silvered the sheets of water left behind by the previous night’s downpour. We’d moved into Gunumeleng—one of six seasons the Aborigines identified in a year that whites divided simply into Wet and Dry. Gunumeleng brought the first storms. In another month, the entire plain would be flooded. The so-called road, which was actually a really marginal dirt track, would be impassable. I was hoping to get this section of caves documented and at least minimally conserved before another big Wet set in. The last thing I needed was a two-and-a-half-hour, bone-jarring drive back to the station to talk to some clown in Canberra. But in the distance, where the track ended, I could just make out the glint on the windshield of Butcher’s beloved Toyota. Butcher wouldn’t have let the boy drive it unless the message really was important.

“OK, then, Lofty. You go on ahead and tell Uncle that Jim and I’ll be along by teatime. I’ll just finish up a few silicone lines here, then we’ll follow you.”

The boy turned and scrambled down the escarpment. He was a skinny kid, and small for a sixteen-year-old (which was why everyone called him Lofty). But he could get up and down a rock face about twenty times more quickly than I could. I returned to the cave where Jim Bardayal, the archeologist I worked with, was waiting for me.

“At least we’ll get to sleep in a bed tonight, then,” he said, handing me the silicone cartridge.

“Ah, listen to you. What a softie. Back in Sydney you were always banging on about your country, how you missed it. Now, we get one night’s drizzle, and someone dangles a hot and a cot in front of you, you can’t get there quick enough.”

Jim grinned. “Bloody balanda,” he said. The storm the night before had actually been a lashing. Strobes of lightning had lit up the twisted white gum trees, and gusts of wind had just about blown the tarps right off our shelter.

“It’s not the rain,” Jim said. “It’s the bloody mozzies.”

I couldn’t argue with that. There was no such thing as peacefully contemplating the gorgeous sunsets out here. Dusk was a dinner bell for millions of mosquitoes, and we were the catch of the day. Just thinking about them made me itch all over. I shot a line of silicone, like a ridge of sticky chewing gum, across the rock face where we’d determined the rainwater would be likely to flow. The idea was to divert the water away from the soluble ochers of the paintings. This part of the escarpment was rich with art: Mimi paintings, the wonderful, energetic pictures of lithe figures hunting. Jim’s people, the Mirarr, believed they’d been painted by spirits. His other people, the archeological community, had established that the earliest of the paintings had been done thirty thousand years ago. All through those ages, certain knowledgeable elders had been charged with ceremonially restoring them when necessary. But after Europeans came, the Mirarr had gradually stopped inhabiting the caves of the stone country. They’d moved off to work for the balanda—the white settlers—on cattle stations, or gone to live in the towns. Our job now was to protect what they had left behind.

It wasn’t work I’d ever imagined myself doing. But Sarajevo had destroyed my confidence. While part of me continued to believe that it was Ozren and Heinrich who were wrong, the larger part—the coward in me—had swamped that conviction in a toxic sea of self-doubt. I’d come home feeling humiliated and unworthy and suddenly unsure of my own expertise. For a month, I moped around my Sydney lab, turning down any assignment that sounded the least bit challenging. If I’d made such an embarrassing mistake in Sarajevo, who was I to be passing judgment on anything?

Then I got a call from Jonah Sharansky. He had two things to tell me. One was that Delilah had left me a substantial inheritance. The other was that the family wanted me to take over my mother’s role in Aaron’s foundation. The other board members had already voted on it, apparently. I felt like I needed to get away from the lab for a while, so I decided to use the inheritance money and take some time to go and see what the foundation’s work was all about, and if there was something I might be able to contribute to it.

My mother went spare when she found out she’d been given the shove. At first, I felt bad. I assumed she saw the foundation as a last link with Aaron, and I could imagine how painful it would be, to have his family reject her like that.

She’d returned to Sydney a few weeks after I had. After she got out of the hospital, she’d taken herself off to some fancy spa in California to recuperate. “I’ve got to be in good shape when I get back to Sydney,” she told me on the phone. “Those vultures at the hospital will be circling.” When I met her at the airport, she looked amazing, fit for anything. But when I got her home, I noticed there were lines of strain around her mouth and shadows under her eyes and that she really was holding it together by force of will.

“You could take some more time off, Mum. Make sure you’re really, you know, ready to go back to work.”

She was sitting on the bed, letting me unpack for her. She kicked off her Manolos or Jimmy Choos or whatever they were—why she subjected herself to such torturing shoes I have no idea—and leaned back against the pillows. “I’ve got an eighth-nerve tumor on the schedule the day after tomorrow. Do you know what that’s like? No, how would you. Well, it’s like picking bits of wet Kleenex out of a bowl of tofu….”

“Mum, please…” I felt nauseated. “I’ll never be able to eat tofu again.”

“Oh, for goodness’ sake, Hanna. Can you stop being solipsistic for five minutes? I’m just trying to explain it to you in a way you can grasp.” (Dear old Mum. Never let a chance go by to make me feel like the dimmest bulb in the chandelier.) “It’s difficult surgery, takes hours. And I skedded it on purpose, to show those vultures that I’m not a corpse yet.” She closed her eyes. “I’ll just take a nap now; pass me that throw, will you? Leave the rest of the unpacking. And you needn’t stay…. I can manage quite well with the housekeeper.”

It was just a few days later that she heard from the Sharanskys that they wanted me to replace her on the board. She summoned me to Bellevue Hill. She was sitting on the veranda when I arrived, with a bottle of Hill of Grace open and breathing on the table. With Mum, the quality of the wine was an indicator of the gravity of the talk. This one, I could tell, was going to be mega.

She had already told me, from her hospital bed in Boston, that she wanted me to keep my paternity a secret. I thought she was nuts. I mean, who cared who she’d slept with all those years ago. But she asked me to think about her position, and I considered it. I considered her position. I really did. I was still considering it when the foundation thing came up.

“If you join that board, Hanna, it will raise all kinds of questions.” The sun filtered through blooming tibouchinas and gave the light a violet shimmer. Fallen frangipani blossoms littered the manicured lawn, releasing a spicy scent. I sipped the glorious wine and didn’t say anything. “Awkward questions. For me. The accident has already put me in a precarious position at the hospital. Davis and Harrington couldn’t
wait
to raise the infection issue, and there are others who’ve never reconciled themselves to my appointment as chair. I’ve had to work twice as hard as usual to make it clear to them that I’m not going anywhere. It would be unfortunate timing if the other matter…” She left the sentence hanging.

“Well, but I might actually have some skills that would be useful, you know, to the Sharansky Foundation.”

“Skills? What skills could you possibly have, darling? I mean, you know nothing about the management of nonprofits, and I hadn’t noticed that you are a particular wizard in the investment field.”

I gripped the stem of my glass and stared into the shiraz. I sipped the wine and let the flavors billow in my mouth. I was determined not to let her set me off.

“Art skills, Mum. I thought I might possibly be able to help in the field, with the conservation program.”

She put her wineglass down on the marble table so hard I was surprised it didn’t shatter.

“It’s bad enough, Hanna, that you’ve spent all these years playing with paste and scraps of paper. But at least books have something to do with culture. Now you are proposing to go out to the middle of absolutely nowhere, to save meaningless, muddy daubs of primitives?”

I looked at her. I imagine my jaw might’ve actually dropped.

“How is it,” I blurted, “that a man like Aaron Sharansky could have loved someone like you?”

It went on from there. One last, god-awful, no-holds-barred blue; one of those fights where you pour out every poisonous thought you’ve ever had, the dregs of every grievance, and you set the cup in front of the other person and force them to drink it. I had to hear again what a disappointment I’d always been; a self-pitying pygmy of a personality who’d thought my scraped knees were more worthy of attention than her critically ill patients. I’d been an insufferable brat as a kid, and a delinquent slut as an adolescent. I’d glommed on to the Sharanskys in desperation because I was so busy nursing childish resentments that I couldn’t form adult attachments of my own. And then the familiar kicker: I’d squandered my opportunity to enter a real profession and wasted my life as “a tradeswoman.”

When you’ve fought with someone all your life, you know where the weaknesses are. By this point I was casting around for a weapon I could use to retaliate, so I went for her where I knew it would wound. “So, what good was it, all your precious medical expertise, when you couldn’t even save the bloke you loved?”

She suddenly looked stricken. I felt exultant, and pressed my advantage. “That’s what this is all about, isn’t it? I have to pay, all my life. No father, not even a name, all because you feel you fucked up your most important case.”

“Hanna, you don’t know what you are talking about.”

“That’s it, isn’t it? You referred him to the great almighty Andersen, and Andersen blew it. You would have done better. That’s what you think, isn’t it? You’re so arrogant, and then the one time when you should have trusted your own expertise—”

“Hanna. Shut up. You have no idea—”

“You could have saved him, that’s what you think, right? You would have picked up the bleed, if he’d been your patient.”

“I did pick up the bleed.”

Because I was still ranting, right over the top of her, it took me a second to process what she’d said.

“You…what?”

“Of course I picked it up. I monitored him all that night. I knew he was hemorrhaging. I let it happen. I knew he wouldn’t want to wake up blind.”

For several minutes, I was too stunned to say anything. A flock of rainbow lorikeets swooped and screeched through the garden then, on their way to their nighttime roost. I let my eyes follow them, until their colors—the royal blue, the emerald green, the scarlet—became suddenly blurred by my tears. I’m not going to go into what I said to her. I’m not sure I recall it all that accurately. But at the end of it, I told her I was going to change my name to Sharansky.

I don’t see her anymore. We don’t even go through the motions. Ozren had been right about one thing: some stories just don’t have happy endings.

I expected to feel more adrift than I did, being entirely on my own. But if there was an empty place in my life, it wasn’t very much bigger than it always had been. She had never understood me, or why what I did mattered, and why I loved it. And those were the important things. Without that, our conversations had just been noise.

Leaving Sydney helped. Clean break and all that. The Sharansky Foundation’s projects were in places I’d barely heard of, like Oenepelli and Burrup, where mining companies wanted to turn incredible natural landscapes and ancient cultural sites into giant holes in the ground. The foundation funded research and then, if there was enough to sustain a case, they’d assist the traditional Aboriginal owners of the land to bring a lawsuit against the companies.

It didn’t take me long out there, in the landscapes my father had painted, to realize that as much as I loved my country, I barely knew it. I’d spent so many years studying the art of our immigrant cultures, and barely any time at all on the one that had been here all along. I’d gone cross-eyed swotting classical Arabic and biblical Hebrew but could barely name even five out of the five hundred Aboriginal languages spoken here. So I set myself a crash course and became a pioneer in a new field: desperation conservation. My job became the documentation and preservation of ancient Aboriginal rock art, before the uranium or bauxite companies had a chance to blast it into rubble.

It was hard physical work, getting to remote sites, often on foot, usually in tremendous heat, backpacking kilos of equipment. Sometimes, the best thing you could do to conserve a piece of rock art was to take a mattock and hack away invading tree roots. Not exactly fine-motor-skill stuff. To my surprise, I found I loved it. For the first time in my life, I was tanned and sinewy. I traded in my cashmeres and silks for serviceable khakis, and one day, because I was hot and sweaty and my French twist kept falling down, I hacked off my long hair. New name, new look, new life. And a very long way from anything that reminded me of extinct Spanish sheep and pore-scatter patterns on parchment.