The Life to Come. Michelle De Kretser

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      All the bottles within sight were empty. The Lawson specialist began to drain the contents of abandoned glasses, believing he was the only person present who remembered that the minister had once left children seeking asylum to drown off the Australian coast. As often happened, the Lawson specialist was quite wrong. The minister himself recalled the incident perfectly: the children were foreigners and Muslims, and the pressure of public office had not permitted their rescue. “As Shakespeare reminds us,” improvised the minister, “the child is father to the man.” Shakespeare, while unfortunately not Australian literature, was universal and, like the minister, beyond reproach.

      Cassie’s mouth was full when a man she didn’t know asked if the pastry she was eating contained meat. A girl came out of nowhere to confide, “I often think about going veggo. But I just really love a good steak!” Smiling, she shook all her curls at the dilemma, extravagant in a rose-colored dress. She turned her rosy shoulder in such a way that she was addressing only the man and said, “And bacon!”

      “Yes, it’s the kind of thing that must have once taken up many a conversational hour in Rome,” he replied. “You know: the injustice of slavery versus the inconvenience of life without slaves.”

      The girl’s enthusiastic body went still. Then she went away.

      “Hi,” said Ash. “I’m Ash.”

      Cassie was a little shocked. But she saw a knight: brutal in a just cause.

      A bunch of people ended up at a Lebanese restaurant later that evening. Cassie found herself sitting next to Ash. They asked each other questions that had nothing to do with what they really wanted to know, while their bodies conducted a separate, unambiguous conversation. Ash learned that Cassie was writing a thesis on Australian expatriate novelists. He was at the dinner because he knew Leanne from a library committee, he explained. It had rained earlier, and drops clung to the cars parked outside the window by which they sat—Cassie thought of fish with rivers still slipping off their fins.

      Menus were brought. By means of urgent gestures, the Lawson specialist indicated that he needed a drink.

      Someone asked, “Shall we share?”

      Ash said that he was a vegetarian. “But the rest of you, please go ahead. I’ll order for myself.”

      “Why don’t we all get vegetarian?” said Leanne, glancing around. “I can’t remember the last time I ate meat anyway.”

      Her research assistant said helpfully, “When Baniti took us to that halal restaurant in Auburn last week. We had camel.”

      “Well, obviously I didn’t want to be culturally insensitive,” said Leanne.

      Ash told a story of getting lost between his apartment and the university. It was a ten-minute walk, but he had found himself on the Princes Highway. It had been plain to Ash from day one that the natives adored an idiot Pom. “I’ve no idea how it happened, but I wound up on a bus heading to Kogarah,” he concluded. He gave the suburb three syllables, ko-ga-ra, transforming it into an Italian resort.

      “Kog-rah! Kog-rah!” the Australians shouted, and split their sides.

      Ash told Cassie softly, appealing to her alone, “When you’re still finding your way around, you make mistakes.”

      At the Spice Mart, which stood across the road from Ashfield Station, rice was heaped on the floor in stitched cloth bags as well as in giant plastic packs. The man behind the counter was as elongated and flat as if he had passed under a roller. Wrapped in the dusty smell of lentils, he was anomalous among the spices and Bollywood DVDs, having clad his two dimensions in a bureaucrat’s pressed trousers and pin-striped shirt.

      When she discovered that he came from Sri Lanka, Cassie inquired after his “ethnic group.” It was an excuse to speak about Ash. “My partner has Sinhalese ancestry,” she explained, “although he identifies as British.” She realized that she had almost said “husband” when even “partner” was a stretch for someone she had known barely a month. The shopkeeper continued to examine her through the heavy glasses that turned his eyes into aspic set with beetles. He was a Jaffna Tamil, he said. “But here no one knows who we are. What to do?”

      Cassie was familiar with this kind of thing. Her grandmother had grown up in Vienna, and laments about Australian ignorance circulated readily with the torte.

      The shopkeeper asked if she had seen an Indian grocery. “That side, on Liverpool Road?”

      “No.”

      “I have been here three years. They came last month. You didn’t see them?”

      Iron-spined, he came out from behind his counter to show her the chutneys and pickles, and was revealed as a darkly varnished plank. On his advice, Cassie came away with onion sambol and a little curry-leaf plant in a pot. Ash was pleased with the sambol, which he said went tremendously well with grilled cheese. Cassie told him about the Ashfield Tamil, concluding, “He used to be a postmaster in Sri Lanka.” As soon as he had said that, his clothes had made sense: Cassie saw that he was dressed for the past.

      “Tamils do very well for themselves,” said Ash. “They’re hardworking, intelligent people. Terrifically good at maths.” He knew no Tamils but was repeating the kind of thing his father said. The only other person who had offered Cassie fixed pictures of this or that race was her grandmother. When Cassie’s grandmother was young, her politics had landed her in a camp. She emerged from it at the end of the war despising everyone she had once loved: the poor, the oppressed, Communists, Jews. The other prisoners had spat at her and threatened her and taught her to steal. She had gone into the camp trusting in goodness and come out knowing there was none. By the time Cassie knew her, she lived in Cremorne with a view of Sydney Harbour and hated Australians. Her daughter had betrayed her by marrying one. The flaxen grandchild—a throwback to her girlhood—was forgiven. As time went on, the harbor became a casual blue insult hurled at the grandmother’s life. To thwart it, the curtains in her flat were kept shut. In aquarium-like gloom, the grandchild listened to ravishing lieder and a voice that said Italians were liars, Slavs were animals, and Gypsies spread disease. Between the girl’s visits, the grandmother lived for dumplings and strudel, for childhood recovered spoon by spoon. Merciful childhood turned her arteries to concrete and killed her before the blond sprite grew tall enough to say, “You are a bitter, crazy old woman, Oma, and your hair has fallen out.”

      Ash’s mother was Scottish; he had been born in London, and educated at universities in England and the States. For five years in the 1970s, well before the civil war, the Fernandos had lived in Sri Lanka. Ash went to an international school in Colombo where the little girls wore pale pink or pale green or pale blue dresses. “International” meant an Egyptian boy, four Taiwanese sisters, and Ash. Everyone else was white. The only language Ash had ever spoken fluently was English, although he had enough French to deploy, in a respectable accent, various phrases made essential by Derrida and Foucault.

      When Ash was born, the British had been gone twenty years from the subcontinent. Empire was a concept, deplorable of course, but nothing to do with Ash. He was a political scientist, and had written incisively, and at times intelligently, on the “global subaltern” in his book Mobility and Modernity in a Transnational Age. Ash’s father was a GP, his mother a gynecologist. Their professional disparity engendered a tension that must have informed Ash’s childhood, although he had not been aware of it. Yet it might have been at the root of the mild rebellion that turned him from medicine, which was so plainly his destiny, to politics. As soon as Ash left school his parents divorced, and he realized СКАЧАТЬ