The Grass Catcher Page 9

  Still, our mother, with characteristic no-bother determination, pushed herself through what I now believe was both a depression and a period of physical weakness, and emerged into the life she would lead with enjoyment, esprit and courage – though perhaps not the one she’d first envisaged when her embarkation photograph was taken next to the DC6 in Christchurch. This was the optimistic picture of a complete family, the Blenheim and Sounds unit about to be lifted into the air and put down somewhere else, intact, but inside an envelope of liberation, romance and adventure. After the ‘I feel sick!’ incident, she absolved herself of some responsibility for us, and at the same time committed herself to what she could make of the place and the future that opened from it.

  Though she never talked about it when, later, we reminisced about those years, I think her depression and the realignment of her hopes were connected to her old disappointment at being made to leave school early. Having finally, in a vehicle of romantic hope and opportunity, got out of the place in which that disappointment had nagged at her, she confronted her responsibility for the fact that she might be depriving her own children of education – not just because she’d taken us out of school, but also because she didn’t feel up to teaching us. And it was always a tender point with Chick, who’d narrowly missed defaulting on his schoolteacher father’s intellectual ambitions.

  Four things became inevitable then. A teacher was hired for the gang of management kids who’d accumulated at the mill. The likelihood that Dave and I would sooner or later be sent to boarding school was established. Our mother and father would increasingly turn to each other and sustain their lifelong adventure together in homes without their children. And their children would live in provisional homes until they grew up and made their own.

  When I look back I can see how these trajectories are prefigured in the image of my mother’s misery on the banks of the Karnaphuli River. I don’t believe she wanted to ‘go home’. She wanted to find a way to go on. Her air of thoughtful misery doesn’t appear in photographs after that brief time, and that suggests she found the way.

  ‘Penthouse-like’

  A couple of years after arriving in Chandraghona we moved into a simple, four-room, brick-and-plaster house in a cluster of four or five others, on a scraped-bare hilltop across the valley from our first home. Establishing this ‘compound’, as such clusters were called, had involved building an access road on the inland side of the ridge above the river. Before concrete paving and storm culverts were added, the road was prone to monsoon flooding and became an exciting quagmire through which slithered the company’s clapped-out army surplus 4WD Willys jeeps.

  In the valley near a cinema, there was a brickworks like those I saw again in 2005. It was here that the concrete-mix aggregate for the roading was produced. A steep road was cut up the side of the hill to the houses, skirting a large tree – about the only one left standing. It was still there when I went back, and was the landmark that guided me to the hilltop house we’d moved to between the end of 1955 and early 1956.

  Through a blur of unexpected tears, the first thing I noticed was the ancient plum tree, heavy with small tart fruit, that Linda had planted, along with many other varieties, fifty years earlier. The next thing that jolted a specific memory awake was the house’s monsoon and cyclone protection. The house sat on a crumbling concrete pad with a splash-rim high enough to stop rain from reaching the bottoms of the doors. There were deep storm-water drains all around it, and a slightly tilted roof designed to shed water directly to the drains, without guttering. I remembered the sheets of runoff that used to roar down from the roof when storms struck, and the driven water that used to get under the doors despite the flood-sill outside. Once, during a big cyclone, we’d crouched scared but thrilled by a window, watching the lightning flash and crash between the houses, and seen a pile of bricks lifted one by one and flipped into the road by the wind.

  But the aspect of storm protection that affected me the most that day I went back was the protective concrete cowling jutting from the water-stained wall above the double window to Dave’s and my bedroom. It was there to prevent water from the roof, or wind-driven at the wall, from hitting the windows directly. I remember that it mostly failed when the rainstorms were at their heaviest. By 2005, the crumbling, exposed brickwork around the windows, and above the flood-sill of the ground-level concrete plate, suggested these protective features had been failing for a long time.

  What affected me, though, wasn’t the memory of storms or the dispiriting state of our old house, but a quote, ‘with your hat penthouse-like o’er the shop of your eyes,’ from Act III, Scene 1, of Shakespeare’s Love’s Labour’s Lost and a speech by Armado’s witty page, Moth:

  No, my complete master: but to jig off a tune at the tongue’s end, canary to it with your feet, humour it with turning up your eyelids, sigh a note and sing a note, sometime through the throat, as if you swallowed love with singing love, sometime through the nose, as if you snuffed up love by smelling love; with your hat penthouse-like o’er the shop of your eyes; with your arms crossed on your thin-belly doublet like a rabbit on a spit; or your hands in your pocket like a man after the old painting; and keep not too long in one tune, but a snip and away. These are complements, these are humours; these betray nice wenches, that would be betrayed without these; and make them men of note – do you note me? – that most are affected to these.

  Of course I didn’t remember much of this as I stood covertly weeping in front of Dave’s and my old bedroom window. What I thought I remembered was in fact some kind of mashed-up quote with the metaphor ‘penthouse lids’ in it – which did, however, guide me to what Robert Lübker had been talking to us about in the hot schoolroom with its sun-glare bamboo blinds down in 1956. I remembered that, in his gently pedantic way, he’d taken his half-dozen heat-dazed kids through the cognitive philology of metaphors.

  Herr Professor (Professor Professor) Lübker was the second teacher to come up the Karnaphuli River to the paper mill at Chandraghona. The first, a youngish Swiss man called Herzig (I think that was his surname), is to be thanked sincerely for teaching his motley class pretty good French and German by immersion, but nothing else. I have a photograph of him shinning up a coconut palm in his skimpy shorts, and another of him up a big tree with Dave, me and another kid wedged precariously in the forks of branches. A liking for climbing trees wasn’t his only eccentricity. Towards the end of his increasingly erratic classes, which took place in a stifling schoolroom set up with the teacher’s desk and chair on a slightly raised platform in front of the kids, our lower vantage point allowed us to see him slipping his cock out the leg of his shorts and jerking off. This was, coincidentally, and owing nothing to the poor man’s example, about the time Dave and I discovered how to do it ourselves. I think he was just going crazy with loneliness, but even so his ability to keep a straight face while he got himself off under the desk may have been why he was sent down the river. We were told that he’d gone mad, and was last seen wandering around Calcutta with his cardboard suitcase.

  Robert Lübker and his wife Magdalena were never in any danger of going crazy in remote foreign places. Ever since retiring from academic life (he published on the syntax of English verbs in their finite forms, among other things), he and Magdalena had regularly set off to travel, live and work in hard-to-get-to places. They wore frugal clothes with amazing sandals, ate all local food, and had bleached-out knapsacks that I knew were somehow rebellious, though they would both have been in their late fifties and were very correct in their manners. They were also punctilious in their politics (though their son, who I think was called Hans, and who taught us the rudiments of Latin when he visited, expressed ideas about discipline that made us uneasy). They refused to have a cook or ‘bearer’, though Magdalena relented to the extent of employing a young woman to help with the cleaning.

  In 1995, while travelling in Germany for Te Papa, I visited Robert in Hamburg. His beloved Magdalena had recently died, h
e was ninety years old, but we walked steadily around the city, he in yet another pair of amazing sandals, while he expounded on the city’s mercantile history and architecture, delivered a shrewd critique of Walter Abish’s 1980 novel How German Is It (Wie deutsch ist es), and ate a lunch of fresh asparagus with a glass or two each of Riesling. We knew we’d never see each other again. He stood waving to me as my train left the station – I could see that he was weeping, as was I, but in his case he’d had his carefully folded handkerchief ready in advance.

  As I remembered from my childhood time with him, he managed to be at once kind and formally remote. He was very fond of Linda, and asked me to send him a photograph of her. I suspect that he and Magdalena contributed to her exhaustion and subsequent death after she made her last visit to them in Hamburg in 1986 – they took her on long, arduous car trips with many pedagogic visits to interesting sites, and long, bracing walks along the sea-dykes in Baltic gales; her letters home recorded these with mixed affection and dismay.

  For years I’d received his yearly ‘reports’, which were scrupulous accounts of his and Magdalena’s travel around remote parts of Africa or the Middle East, combined with his reading or, more often, re-reading programme, a critical review of the German idealist philosopher Fichte or something else, and his latest philological thoughts. That some of the books had been lugged around in a bleached knapsack, and that the careful pages of his reports typed back in Germany were intangibly infused with dust or tropical storms, was what made them special if, sometimes, barely readable. They were weirdly complicated, mostly as a result of Robert’s obsession with clarity and scholarly objectivity, which played stubbornly against his chin-jutting appetite for extreme excursions and the unreliable narrative points of view they afforded him.

  If the Swiss teacher’s method was involuntary language immersion, Robert’s was deliberate immersion in textual analysis. He liked to do this with Shakespeare most of all. On the day he explained how metaphors worked, he took us all outside to look at the windows of the house he and Magdalena lived in, where our schoolroom was. The windows were storm-protected by the same rectangular concrete cowlings as ours – the ones that made me burst into tears fifty years later.

  Carefully, pedantically, he explained the magical mechanics of the word ‘like’: how the word ‘penthouse’ combined an architectural feature (a jutting-out Elizabethan window-roof) with an item of human apparel (a hat jutting out over the eyes), but cunningly did so while transforming the eyes under the hat into shop windows – which, however, weren’t quite, or just, shop windows. They were now something else, at once windows and eyes, and yet not just a combination of the two. And what did it mean to make the human head like a building and the eyes in it like windows? What was in the house? What kind of life was being lived there? Were the windows full of things people might want to buy? Were these things thoughts? Were the eye-windows display spaces? What was there to see in them? Were they the eyes of the text looking into our reading eyes?

  Dry and exact to the point of obstinacy, it was Robert Lübker’s explanation of what was going on in ‘penthouse-like o’er the shop of your eyes’ that, in an almost frightening way, expanded the imaginative home in which I lived – where what was out there in the world, and what was in my head as stories, both merged and exaggerated each other. What I understood as magic was the possibility that the process Herr Lübker had unlocked could produce effects and objects that ordinary things and their names could never match.

  What I now saw, and was hypnotised by, as if by the great python Kaa’s hunger dance, was the existence of another plane of reality – not the porously adjacent domains of story and real world, but a third one, in which special arrangements of words could bring into being things that had never existed before. These things were entirely real to me, even if barely perceived and fragmentary, and at the same time they were like ghosts or monsters. They began to haunt the home I lived in – both the house and the other one in my head.

  Creature from the Black Lagoon

  Soon after we moved to the new house on the hill, we went on a family trip to what I remember was called Chimbuk, a hilltop village in the Hill Tracts inhabited by tribal Mru people. We crossed the Karnaphuli River on a vehicle barge, and then drove some distance in one of the mill’s Willys jeeps up into the steep hills. After that we had to get out and walk a long way on a track that went sometimes through forest and at other times up the sides of slash-and-burn hillsides. It was incredibly hot, and we’d been told we had to ration our water because the streams weren’t to be trusted. At the village there was a bamboo guest house on stilts, and Dave and I played underneath it with some of the Mru kids.

  This was where I finally saw Mowgli in the flesh and understood that he could be real at the same time as in Kipling’s Jungle Book, but that neither of these was quite the same as the Mowgli in my head, who was also me – that ‘like’ magic.

  The hill-tribe Mowgli was one of the lean, muscular, top-knotted Mru men in loincloths that didn’t cover their bums. The women wore little woven aprons and were bare breasted. At evening, some of the men played elaborate bamboo pipes that stuck up above their heads in clusters. Dave and I took snaps of them and their tall pipes silhouetted against a spectacular sunset thickened with burn-off smoke. Later, they drank what we were told was rice beer out of long straws poked into calabashes, and sang and laughed. There were lots of flea-bitten, curly-tailed pi-dogs, which howled and yipped during the night. We slept in the guest house on hard bamboo stretchers like the one I’d have near Bandarban above the Sangu River in 2005.

  Though we were curious visitors to this strange place, I don’t remember feeling different or scared. My inner Mowgli was alive and well, and I was protected by the belief that in some way this was recognised both by the kids we played with on the Mru hilltop and by the tough, stringy men with their long scrub-clearing machetes.

  Walking back down to the jeep the next day, I got so hot and thirsty that I gulped huge swallows of forbidden water from the stream we stopped to cool off in. I also got too close to the edge of a waterfall and fell down it, skinning my arse on rocks and landing in a deep pool at the bottom. This was the first time I’d felt real terror in our East Pakistan home territory – much worse than the time the madman came into our bedroom to avenge our clod-chucking.

  The pool was deep and dark, and full of floating leaves on which huge, viciously biting red ants were swarming. I fought my way up through the black water that immediately seethed with pythons, slimy gnashing fish and an unknown horror; I broke the surface, screaming loudly, and began to get bitten all over by the red ants. I’d torn a decent amount of skin off my arse, lost some fingernails on the way down and was covered in ant bites; but it was the horror of the deep pool and its imagined monsters that stayed with me. For days afterwards I’d wake up with a sensation like choking, unable to remember the dream I’d been having, but in a cold sweat of dread.

  It was around this time that I wrote my first poem. All I remember about the poem is that it had biting red ants in it and some kind of refrain about the ruins of a lost city being overgrown by bitter vines.

  And the bitter Rangoon Creeper covers it all!

  I have a very dim memory of ‘Rangoon Creeper’, possibly because it was something our mother tried to cultivate, along with profuse bougainvillea and swarming jasmines that became overrun with munching beetles, and flowering shrubs that Dave thinks were hibiscus from which we collected jars full of the ravenous insects for a bounty; they gave off an acrid stink when squashed.

  Down in the valley below the management bungalows on the hill where we lived, there was a settlement of paper-mill houses with a transport hub, a bazaar and the newly built cinema near the brickworks. Though we went there several times, the only film I remember is Creature from the Black Lagoon, the 1954 monster horror film directed by Jack Arnold. The Creature was the Gill-man, so obviously a human in a fish-suit that I knew there was no reason to be scared of h
im. But I was – and not just scared to the point of clutching and shrieking like the rest of the audience, but terrified to the point of trauma. The film’s lurid effects spilled out into the night’s monsoon deluge – rain crashing on the roof, explosions of thunder.

  That frightening effect explained so unfrighteningly by Robert Lübker, whereby something that had never existed before could become a real neither-one-thing-nor-the-other, and my horrifying immersion in the squirmy pool under the Chimbuk waterfall, somehow combined with the Gill-man to send me running in an icy chill of fear and panic into the makeshift cinema lobby, where my father found me with my teeth chattering, refusing to go back in. He finally persuaded me to watch bits of the film from up in the projection box, where I could catch glimpses of the action through the holes in the wall and avoid seeing anything by moving my head just a little.

  Dave watched the whole movie with enjoyment and told me bits of the complete story later, after which he went soundly to sleep – though he says he still gets gooseflesh thinking about the scene where the clawed webbed hand rises out of the river, clutches at the bank and scrapes back into the water, leaving deep scratches.

  But I couldn’t sleep, or was too scared to, because there was something under the bed. It had escaped from the Black Lagoon which was also the Chimbuk pool, and stayed under my bed for months, even compressing itself into one of my shoes. A couple of years later it migrated to the spiderwebby darkness around the back of the Markwells’ house where we spent school holidays in England. Going around there at night to fill up the coal scuttle, I knew that never seeing the thing in the darkness – even when I whipped my head around really quickly to look behind me – proved only that it was fiendishly clever, and therefore that it existed.