The Life to Come. Michelle De Kretser

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      “That is the way. My wife will make another one.” But Cassie never saw a kolam outside the shop again.

      Cassie claimed that she could read auras. Ash stood against a white wall like a prisoner about to be shot. His aura was orange tinged with red, said Cassie. He was confident, creative, and sexually passionate. Ash smiled. She could also see flickers of gray, she went on. They signified guardedness. “A fear of loss.”

      Her upbringing had left its mark in other ways. First thing every morning, before eating or drinking, Cassie swilled cold-pressed sesame oil around her mouth for twenty minutes. She said, “It’s an ancient ayurvedic practice that draws toxins from the body.” Ash, child of doctors, believed in antibiotics, vaccinations, flossing. Oil-pulling was a harmless eccentricity, like the olive-leaf extract Cassie gravely spooned into him at the first sign of a sore throat. She spoke mistily and reverently of self-sufficiency and sustainable living—what that amounted to, as far as Ash could see, was no heating and a row of potted, yellowing herbs.

      Whenever they left her flat after dinner, to see a film or go for a walk, Cassie would leave the light on in the sunroom. “You’ve forgotten to turn off the light,” Ash’s father said one evening in Ash’s voice.

      Cassie said, “I know I should,” but left the light on anyway. When they had walked some way from the house, she placed her palm on Ash’s spine, urging him to turn around. The house stood near the crest of a hill. Ash saw a long, golden rectangle suspended in the darkness. Cassie said that she liked to see it waiting there for her. “It reminds me of a ship.”

      It clanged with idiocy, even to her ears. It was also only the least part of the truth. Her landlords, elderly Romanians, lived in terror of assassins, informers, vampires, and that shadowy, tentacular, punishing entity, the state. Fifty years earlier, a baby had died of hunger, so now no one was granted access to the ground floor of her parents’ house—they might steal all the food. The Romanians’ tenants had to come and go by means of an external wooden staircase that Cassie called Cockroach Mansions, accessed from the rear of the house. The garden there, once a formal square, had got away from the old people: it was shrubby, bird-haunted, wild. Cassie feared it at night and was ashamed of her fear. When she first moved to Sydney, she had seen the security bars on windows and laughed at the cages in which city people lived. Then a girl she knew was raped by an intruder. Cassie no longer dreamed about it, but she turned her rings so that the stones faced inward and switched on the sunroom light when going out after dark. Why not say all this to Ash as they walked down the hill? She realized that she wanted to appear enameled, unassailable. She held his arm tightly. They had no past, so she was obliged to look to the future. There she had just come face-to-face with an Ash who could harm her—it was as if a steel curtain had descended to divide them.

      Pippa’s e-mail said: “Matt and I are going to Bali for eight days. I’ve finished my first draft: reward! Would you like my car while we’re away?” Cassie scrolled down to the PS, which was where Pippa always buried what she really wanted to say. She read: “Whenever George is asked to name an Australian writer he admires, he says, ‘Christina Stead’ or ‘Patrick White.’ The safely great, the safely dead. Where is his support for his fellow writers? I heard him on Radio National the other day. The interviewer called his novel a masterpiece.”

      The car was an ancient white Peugeot, liable to stall on hills. There was no air-conditioning, so Cassie drove with the windows down. She steered the heavy machine carefully around curves, proud of her thin, strong arms, picturing herself at the helm of a boat if a sea-scented northeasterly was in.

      One afternoon, she was driving through Annandale with Ash when he asked her to pull over. It was a sticky, overcast day, the kind of weather that turned him contemplative, and he hadn’t been saying much. He climbed out and stood with his back to the car. Along that part of Johnston Street the houses were perched high, above a long retaining wall. Ash looked at the big sandstone blocks in the wall, which was inset with an iron gate behind which steps led to the house above. His lips felt wrinkled. He waved vaguely at his surroundings as Cassie came around the car to join him. The shadow of old events lay across him. How was he to explain that the humidity, the massive, grimy stones, and the trees in the gardens overhead had caused time to run backwards? For the rest of his days, Ash would believe that he now said, “I thought I was in a place I visited long ago, a place I dream about.” In fact, he remained silent. Cassie saw that he needed something, so she gave him her hand. It felt as dry and papery as real life to Ash.

      At Cassie’s monthly meeting with her supervisor, Leanne explained that Cassie’s discussion of Shirley Hazzard’s fiction was unsatisfactory. While remaining perfectly still, Leanne could make her face go bigger and her eyes shrink. Since taking up her role as director of the Centre, she had seemed brusquely unimpressed by Cassie’s work. Cassie assumed, humbly, that this was because Leanne now had more glamorous and sweeping responsibilities to Australian literature than the supervision of her thesis. “Admiration is a problematic starting point for analysis,” went on Leanne. “I have to say how surprised I am that you haven’t grasped that by now.” The thing about Leanne was that she had a low, scented voice, excellent for conveying disappointment. It pointed out that one of Hazzard’s stories sinned in implying that a former colony’s efforts to modernize might entail painful consequences for its citizens—Cassie had failed to take the writer to task for this.

      From the edge of her chair, Cassie said, “But what if she was right?” The jacaranda across the quad was in flower. A group of tourists could be seen through the window, photographing one another in front of the tree, giggling and adopting rock-star poses. Cassie, too, found a kind of freedom in the luminous purple blur. She said, “I mean, life in developing countries might have been as awful after independence as before—just differently awful.” What was in her mind was something Ash had told her: that Sri Lanka, in the 1970s, was given over to national socialism. “Small ‘n,’ small ‘s,’” said Ash. “But not too far a stretch.”

      Leanne said, “I expect you to interrogate the colonialist point of view, Cassie, not take it over.” She began to go through Cassie’s bibliography, finding fault. But her face had returned to its normal dimensions, for it was gratifying to have identified an ethical slippage. The previous summer, when Leanne still seemed to have time for Cassie, she had confided that she intended to take up rowing—she even invited Cassie to join her. Nothing came of the invitation, but Cassie noticed that something had sharpened her supervisor’s cheekbones. Leanne’s hair, freshly hennaed, chimed with her statement lipstick—any one of these things by itself could have made Cassie feel small and inept. Her supervisor’s old, kind voice asked, “Is everything all right? It’s easy to get caught up in things that carry you out of your depth.” Cassie took this to mean that she was being informed she wasn’t cut out for academic life. Leanne was staring across the desk very intently, and Cassie looked away with a slight frown. Leanne sighed. “You’re still very young,” she observed. It was the worst thing she could have said.

      Cassie came away with a list of reference works about post-

      colonialism. In the corridor, the Lawson specialist was just coming out of his room. He asked Cassie what she was working on. When she told him, he said, “Hazzard’s no good. Sentimental, women’s magazine fiction. You’re wasting your time.” Cassie’s bright face among all the closed, dark doors was a reminder of the last graduate student he had attracted, several years ago, a porcelain virago who attacked “the symbolic masculinity of the bush ethos” with cold brilliance. What the Lawson specialist really couldn’t forgive was that in order to refute her arguments he had been obliged to dip into, and occasionally even read, Luce Irigaray.

      Cassie went on her way, round-shouldered as if she were protecting her chest. In the quad, she sat on a wall and looked up into the jacaranda. She saw that the short upper lip of each blossom was bent back to display an opaque white tongue. Light striking there СКАЧАТЬ