Question 7, page 12
And if you were foolish enough not to do so immediately, or simply weren’t paying attention, then it was felt you had it coming.
Once, running a stick along the railings of a wrought-iron fence in Macquarie Street after visiting the ear specialist, I almost fell to the pavement when my mother slapped my head hard from behind. ‘Don’t show off,’ was all she said as I regained my footing and tried not to cry. I thought there had been a misunderstanding. I said I wasn’t showing off. I couldn’t explain that the rhythm, the vibration passing from stick to body, the creation of all that syncopated noise, were interesting and pleasurable.
‘What do you call that nonsense with the stick then?’ she said. ‘Don’t show off.’
And I understood something fundamental: never draw attention to yourself. It was the lesson she had absorbed and lived by. But it was no law, just a formula for survival when you are one of the weak. And she, the strongest of women, had subjugated herself to this oppressive lie that only served to keep her among the weak.
One day, as an old woman, she broke down in her kitchen while talking with me.
‘I am so sorry,’ she kept saying; I had no idea what she meant. I took her hand, once so strong and sometimes so frightening, now arthritic and affectionate.
‘I used to hit you,’ she finally sobbed.
She was overcome with remorse. Tears in the old do not roll, they catch and stall in the lines and furrows of the face, spot-glossing the price paid for time. She could not understand why she had ever done such a thing. Nor did she believe what I said: that it never worried me, that I never thought of those acts as violent. In the context of those times when I had friends who were thrashed with jug cords and belts it seemed to be of no note. We were many, and we lived together, and she ran the house for us all, her six kids, her demanding mother, her sick husband. She loved us fiercely. And that is what I remembered as we sat together that morning, her love, her hand in mine.
7
When I found my childhood home in Rosebery with the BBC crew, the small wooden bungalow was enshrouded in rainforest plants, and beginning, as everything did and does in that world, to give itself over to the undertow of the natural world. Behind a manfern’s fronds I found the window of what had been the children’s bedroom, and to the left of that window my head had once lain on a pillow as our mother read to us. Sometimes she would have to stop because she couldn’t be heard over the rain. We would wait until the squall abated, wondering what happened next to Moley, who had discovered the joys of leaving his subterranean home and living on a river, or Peter the Pirate who in his toy boat made his way down the river to the wide-open sea. Both, I see now, are children’s versions of a road novel, full of joy, fleeting encounters, underpinned by the liberating necessity of departure. Peter’s journey is really a picture-book Odyssey, the wide-open sea his Ithaca, while Moley learns that you can never return.
Yet sometimes we do.
And now it is not Ratty or Peter, nor Cisco and Pancho, but me and my sister and most of all my mother and father who briefly shape out of the static and rain only to recede back into vaporous memory when I reach out for them. It remains for me to invent what has happened in order to hold them close a little longer. But almost immediately everything starts crumbling into confusions that muddle sweet, salted roast mutton scraps on buttery toast we ate for Sunday breakfast with a spoon of foul-tasting grenadine-coloured medicine for worms that our mother chased us around the house trying to get us to swallow; the joys of childhood with the growing pain and bewilderment of those years as my deafness grew worse, as people became harder to comprehend, and I struggled to be understood with my increasingly poor language. Only when we moved to Hobart was my condition correctly diagnosed and my hearing rectified with a series of minor operations. Without Rosebery, without its alcoholic doctor who failed to diagnose my condition leading to compounding complications, I would never have known that strange nether world of isolation and pain I did in those years of deafness, when slowly I gathered that people thought I was simple.
As you learn that you are written upon you learn to read people. My hearing difficulties took me away from the spoken word where to this day I stumble and mispronounce and cover and panic and suffer, in consequence, attacks of shyness, and took me into the world of the written word where I found ease and joy. I found myself on the page, not as one but as many.
I learnt to draw on myself and invent other worlds in which I increasingly lived, creating friends, places, stories in which it was possible to live fully as the many people and things I might be rather than the incomprehensible child the world increasingly dismissed.
Nor would I have learnt to pay close attention to the small, the insignificant and the seemingly obvious: the smell of rain, the levitational power of light; the comfort of touching moss and the way water sometimes moves in circles. Nor would I have understood that the world exists even when we cannot communicate any of it; that it has its own worth and truth that is not less for not being noticed, that an embarrassment of words does not make something special, far less real, to say nothing of the extraordinary power of small kindnesses. Freed from the opinions and orthodoxies imposed by the language of others, the world came to me as irreducible revelations that stayed with me ever after.
8
Nearing the end in her little room in the nursing home, I would often take my mother’s hand, pushing its leathery, crusty skin folds back and forth. I later wrote in a novel of a character who, similarly sitting next to their dying mother, finds some hand cream and rubs it into the back of her mother’s hand. I never did that. I made it up. I made it up regretting that so much of my thought had gone into my writing a novel about loving people around you and so little into loving the people around me. Maybe that’s what the past is. Making it up so we can keep moving along. Perhaps the past is where we are going and have never been.
My mother had asked me if she and my father might come and live with me. Begged me. It was when, in her nineties, she understood they would soon have to move into a home unless some other arrangement could be made. And I, who had always thought I would say yes, said no. I had my reasons. I could not have worked and been the full-time carer my parents needed. I could have been that carer and forsaken work. But was that even possible? Perhaps, perhaps not. There is no memory without shame.
9
My mother was three days dying. Her nursing home bedroom and the corridor outside it filled with relatives and friends. She was ninety-five, had had several strokes, was very weak, and her mind was sometimes confused. Her body had shrivelled away, her face had lost its softer features and reduced to something elemental if not immediately familiar. Yet dying became her.
Each visitor would bend down close to her head, which she could no longer lift, and they would lean in close to her lips, close to her mouth, which could no longer speak in more than short whispers. There was a strange energy about the darkened room full of people that was also a feeling outside of time, as there is also sometimes with rooms in which babies are being born. She wanted a priest and a priest was found. He read the last rites. The rites were her way of saying in front of us whom she loved more than life itself that she was leaving it, and she was able to convey that most terrible news both to herself and to us, that she was now going and that it was all right, that it was her time and her choice.
She grew weaker, yet each new arrival delighted her. She had always loved what she called a hooley, a gathering of family and friends, and her dying was to be her last, greatest hooley. More people came, making their way around those who were sitting squashed up next to each other on the floor, squeezing past those standing with their backs to the wall, whispering apologies, exchanging smiles, greetings, even jokes, until they found themselves next to where her shrunken, drawn face lay on what seemed an overly large pillow. Her face was transfigured into something smaller, stronger, almost raptor-like in its dignity and ferocious pride. Only her hands remained as they were. Now, though, they seemed oversized and too overtly strong when attached to her frail, emaciated, dying body.
She would gesture with her right index finger, so very slowly hooking it back and forth, a signal for the next visitor to come to her. She was too exhausted to even move her head by this stage, but as each newcomer leant down her face would open into a smile that was unbearable to witness in its love and gratitude.
The strokes had left her mind often addled and confused. Yet in her final days she found some unexpected new clarity and, with it, a grace. Each new arrival would introduce themselves and wait for the blessing of her ever-quieter voice. After a moment or two she would somehow find it within herself to say something meaningful to each person who came to say farewell. It was always apposite, a strange and unexpected blessing, and after, each person would step away consoled, comforted and not a little astonished.
Since the Franklin I had been terrified of death but here was her gift to us: that dying, as well as sometimes being terrifying, can, if you were lucky and if you knew grace, also be serene. It is a cliché but in this case true: her dying over those three days was one of the most beautiful things I ever saw.
Finally, after a long coughing jag, she struggled to clear her throat. It was clear that she wanted to say something to everyone.
The room quietened. She smiled.
‘Thank you all for coming,’ she said. ‘I have had a lovely time.’
Her hands, which is what I for some reason remember above all of her, had grown cold. She never spoke again. That evening she died.
10
My mother and my father—
11
My mother and my father, different as they were, he with his reserve, she with her passion; he with his distance, she with her engagement. My mother and father, born to poverty and grateful to the point of astonishment that their children had all lived, that they did not want for food and knew pain only rarely, fully accepted the unequal terms on which the world had come to them. For they were alive and lived. On only one matter would they not budge: the inviolability of their souls that they somehow kept beyond corruption.
My illiterate grandfather understood something fundamental. ‘If you don’t have principles,’ he once told my father, ‘you may as well jump off the end of the jetty.’ Inscribe that above every parliament and board room entrance. ‘Crayfish to no man,’ Tom, my father’s brother and a labourer all his life, once said. Tattoo that on every politician and journalist’s forehead.
Tom died playing darts in the St Leonards Hotel. Great-uncle Babes used to play piano at the St Leonards Hotel as well as at Ma Dwyer’s. One night there was a brawl and his songbook was torn in the melee and scattered over the floor. Babes—Babes because he was the thirteenth of thirteen children—well-primed himself, grabbed random pages off the floor and continued playing seamlessly, passing from ‘Home on the Range’ on the ripped left-hand page to ‘Beautiful Dreamer’ on the torn right without missing a note.
My mother and father had a similar gift, of stitching together torn fragments into some harmony amidst the melee of daily life. My mother and my father in their stories and jokes, in their generosity and kindness to others, asserted the necessary illusion their lives might mean something in the endless tumult of this meaningless universe. For them to live, love had to exist, the love they valued above all things; they lived that love and they fought for that love and defended that love. With the passing of time this illusion became their hard-won truth. It was a form of magic and they the magicians.
In my vanity, I had always thought of them as naïve. Only now writing these words do I finally see the naïveté was all mine.
12
And so I stood, an adult outside my childhood bedroom, manfern fronds in hand, as though I could see inside, as if I were listening to her once more, teaching me the word hospital, which like so many other words I could not pronounce, making me sound it out syllable by syllable, patiently and kindly repeating the sounds for days on end until I could master them. Ho—spit—al, ho—spit—al, and me, a six-year-old boy, struggling to repeat it, unable to say it, but knowing somehow we would make it to the next sound together. And all that love, and all the enduring power of that love, I was at that moment so many years later unable to express, and I was once more without words as the fern fronds swept back and resumed the perpetual unravelling that is their particular wisdom. I walked back to where the crew had set up the camera and set about pretending to answer questions that had no meaning to me, making sounds that made no sense, as it is and was and will forever be, lost again in the river of time.
Eight
1
‘You see now,’ Einstein said over iced tea to his former student and old friend when Leo Szilard visited after Hiroshima, ‘that the ancient Chinese were right. It is not possible to foresee the results of what you do. The only wise thing to do is to take no action—to take absolutely no action.’
But Szilard, although a corpulent man who loathed physical labour, was incapable of inaction. Having been pivotal in creating a new world founded on terror he would now seek to dismantle it, his seeming model once more The World Set Free, in which Szilard had read of how Leblanc sought to bring together ‘all the rulers of the world and unify them. He wrote innumerable letters, he sent messages, he went on desperate journeys, he enlisted whatever support he could find . . . through the terrible autumn of the last [nuclear] wars this persistent little visionary in spectacles must have seemed rather like a hopeful canary twittering during a thunderstorm.’
If by nature more a volatile owl than a hopeful canary, Szilard nevertheless now found a new destiny echoing that of Leblanc. Believing that nuclear war could be prevented if the world’s scientists banded together and wrested control of the bomb away from states, politicians and generals, he became a protean figure in the post-war, reshaping variously as an agitator, writer, biologist, inventor, and high-level lobbyist. Selfless and unflagging, Szilard launched movements, councils and societies, many of which were to play a significant role in alerting the world to the dangers of nuclear warfare, seeking arms control and civilian control of nuclear weaponry.
His activism made him famous, and though he never won the Nobel Prize for physics, many eminent scientists and Nobel laureates believed he deserved it, while others argued he should win the Nobel Peace Prize for his attempts to stop nuclear war. For his part, Szilard joked he deserved the Nobel Peace Prize for failing to discover nuclear fission in the 1930s, which he believed, not without good reason, would have inevitably led to a nuclear-armed Nazi Germany. Yet, in a torment worthy of the ancient Greeks, as his fame grew his influence paradoxically waned, his ideas and influence fell out of favour, and his hope for a Wellsian world government faded. Where Leblanc succeeded, Szilard failed.
He continued to live out of hotel rooms, using the foyers and lobbies as his office for waging his ever more quixotic campaign that seemed only slightly less preposterous than a reality that saw the world edging closer to nuclear destruction. Caught in the cruel vortex of his own creation, Szilard, unlike Leblanc, could not stop the terrifying dynamic of post-war nuclear proliferation and brinkmanship. As the years passed, there were only more and more bombs and more countries with them, while Leo Szilard grew fatter and the bombs bigger.
2
In his final years, he returned to the form that had first led him to the bomb: fiction. He wrote a story in the manner of Wells’s great works. Presented as a dry history written in the future, it told of a pod of dolphins kept in a tank in a Viennese research institute. Discovered to be more intelligent than humans, the dolphins suggest experiments for the institute’s scientists that win their human handlers successive Nobel Prizes. The dolphins next reshape world affairs by using their growing influence with the scientists to end the risk from nuclear war and bring about world peace.
The story cannot help but seem a counterfactual autobiography, the dolphins a cetacean reimagining of Szilard’s Bund thirty years on, a Wellsian elite of scientists reconceived. Szilard, who had seen his rational ideas constantly defeated by an irrational world remade the irrational world as one in which rational dolphins triumphed. With this reverse alchemy, an aspect of Wells’s fiction that failed to transform into a reality transformed back into fiction.
The story was published in The Voice of the Dolphins in April 1961, a book that included several other stories by Leo Szilard. Six months later, on 30 October 1961, as if to mock him and all who thought nuclear weapons could be brought under rational control, the USSR detonated the Tsar Bomba in the Russian Arctic. It was the largest nuclear explosion in history.
3
The flash of light was visible more than 2500 kilometres away, its pressure wave blowing windows out as far away as Norway and Finland. Everything within a hundred kilometres was severely damaged and everything within a sixty-kilometre radius was destroyed. The equivalent of fifty-seven million tons of TNT, the Tsar Bomba was 3300 times more powerful than the Hiroshima bomb and ten times more powerful than all the munitions expended during the Second World War. Tellingly, terrifyingly, Tsar Bomba was detonated at only half the blast power of which it was capable.
By this time Szilard’s naïve ideal of a Wellsian elite of scientists had thinned to little more than a hollow vanity, Szilard believing that ‘besides being cleverer than congressmen, scientists . . . have integrity and purity’. And yet because of their complicity with the bomb, scientists were now seen in the public’s eye as hopelessly corrupted, more questionable than deranged generals, more dangerous than unprincipled politicians. And this too was, in no small part, Leo Szilard’s unintended legacy.
