Читать книгу Moon Dance - Brooke Biaz - Страница 14

3 Freeing the School

And now, with the wind gusting to thirty knots from the sou’east and the rain in whorls and twists about our parapets, a knock at Maxim’s door. Who could it be this late in the evening?

- - - - -

O sweet babaloos! What’s wrong? Wow! you shouldn’t be out with this storm going on! What? Bad dreams? Of Manticora, no doubt. Come in. Come in. Ummmm, dry yourselves. Sure thing, it does that to me too. Man, all those crazy sub-titles on True Crimes: MOTORPSYCHO NIGHTMARE, and CONTRACTS SIGN AWAY FROZEN EMBRYOS. Puts us in a mind here to do away with the spoken word completely. But how did you manage . . .

Ho! Ho! Don’t you realize: vigilance is your mamas’ strong point? Unless? Perhaps a little methaqualone dropped into their . . .

Well, sure, all drugs is dodgy, but some is more dodgy than others.

. . . Nevertheless, warm yourselves. Gather round. I’m nearly up to the part where I reveal who is your . . .

O, you know?

Then something tells me you weren’t afraid at all.

I thought not! So I suppose now you’d like to hear what happened after . . .

Arrrhh! so that’s what’s going on! Yes, it’s true: the kites were very popular. But before we fly kites . . . Well sure, kites were the beginning. Aren’t we all somehow related here to the famous engineer Kungshu Phan who mentioned them in 400 BCE? Yes read—it’s a start! (‘How long ago is that?’) Before you were born! Giambattista della Porta describes a flying sayle in his fairytale Magiae Naturalis but . . . Sure, sure Isaac Newton also. The very same. Discovered the law of gravity, created calculus, discovered white light is made up, as everyone knows, of infinite colors. All that—and kites also. Alexander Graham Bell who had Ho! Ho! wind bags of another sort in mind. (Babaloos long in the womb wondering: “Bags?” “Wind?”) And B. F. S. Baden-Powell whose brother, Lord, gave yours truly something to do on a Friday night dressed, as Sgt Atherton showed me, in woggle, lanyard and badges of proficiency and, of course, surely to tell you about Lawrence Hargrave. But let me just mention . . . because while we’ve been talking Daffodil Rosa has been hurrying home in the dark. She doesn’t realize five hundred million tiny tadpoles have been sent swimming. Fast swimmers and slow. Offering now, two degrees of magnification: one in which a labyrinthine interior of Daffodil herself leads to dead ends and dark uninhabitable recesses; another in which a luminous halo of nutrient floats in suspended inner space. Fatherly tail strokes propel, while Daffodil Rosa, propelled by imagined threats of her impresario mother, passes the harbor in which fishing boats carrying refugee doctors, lawyers and journalists are floating, passes under the branches of the corkwood tree from which hyoscine, the native drug for seasickness, is produced, passes the Victorian mansion of the never-smiling bushman Philosopher Smith, built on the discovery of a massive lode of tin at Mt Bischoff. Incipient forests of cilia. And now a mere pool full of swimmers are left—carrying twenty-three chromosomal formulations (mathematics casting another line into my life). Babaloos paternal genotype looking way ahead by being shaped not so much like kites but like the rocket train of Konstantin Tsiolkovsky. Admirable like the prototypes of Alamogordo physicists who came forward on V-E Day. Guided as if by gyroscopes and leveling pendulums. Like A-4s, V-2s whizzing out from Peenemönde in the direction of Piccadilly Cervix with the hopes of the Wehrmacht attached to them. They jostle and jive on the strength of mitochondria until finally they toss off their enzymic acrosomes, curl streamers of X or Y in celebration of the high times ahead, and so . . . Corona radiata. Two nuclei. Morula. Blastocyst. Zona pellucida. Endometrium. These things matter.



“Hee hee hee,” cries my eldest son from his wheelchair, “but is it true, pop—that for nearly twelve months no one noticed you at all?”

Well, sure . . . but let me tell you: right from the start I was as hopeful as Pandora and as jolly as a sandboy. The world at that time was no more and no less than the film 2001 by Kubrick. The lodgers moved in, making the place their own. My mother took me with her wherever she went, beaming up high. (No less, I repeat, than a secret flickering filmic Odyssey whose director liked to shout “Do Your Own Thing!” No less than the fields of Tyuratam where a boy from Klushino—Have you heard of Gagarin?—was about to be put into elliptical orbit)

My mother and I went swimming together below the cliffs of Columbia, riding the sea wash like a brown manta, shimmering and round and bathing to silence. During the long evenings of 1961 Maxim lay awake inside her while she streamed silver tulle along the corridors and a bay named after that least loquacious animals, the pig, became famous. At certain times of each month she deemed to set the tides of the South Steyne Oceanarium rising, swirling currents into still waters, and sand also, creating littoral drift and strong rips, tubular swells and tsunamis and, in doing so, unknowingly whipping up my briny amniotic sea too and . . . and I was secretly with her when she sprang up wild and impassioned into her dormer window.

Record this: I did not cry out! I (who had been instantaneously endowed with a seemingly unfathomable equation of algebraic paternity) did not flinch. I did not even call her attention to the wiggling shoots of a glittering and ductile umbilical which grew in tiny spiraling motions in the nucleic fluid around me.

Summer lengthened and became autumn, autumn became winter and winter . . . so that before I was entirely aware of myself the bitumen of South Steyne had begun to bubble and ooze again and the sand became so hot that surf lifesavers had to put pink thongs on their soles. Maxim’s grokking grandmother, large as she’d become, took this spring heatwave to mean that she must unburden herself of some of the weight of the widowhood that had befallen her. So she began to let loose into the atmosphere all manner of ancient history. Beneath mosquito net, wearing only a brocade brassiere and great flapping lace bloomers, she sat in her tropical garden and told cool sea stories:

“Recall the inquisitive navigators who plotted sea routes between Goa and Timor, Cook who sailed south to observe the solitary Transit of Venus, leaving the sheviks in Murmansk with clouds in their instruments, and Columbus who died alone, haunted by a faux pas in Cuba.”

She repeated the generally unknown story of Chief Rocket Designer Korolev (because she was fascinated by anonymity and she liked the bit where Korolev, the anonymous genius, freezes the air and carries it around in his pocket like a square of crusty koklaten he’s saving for lunch). She reminded everyone that she herself had once driven solely by compass and she pointed to an Austin A40 and said, “There’s life in the old girl yet!”

“Adventure!” she cried out, and also: “Three cheers for the pioneering spirit!” She let fly a guffaw Ho ho! and announced that as well as being newly appointed to the Standing Committee on Seaside Development and the Association of Beachfront Landowners she also, after all, belonged to the auxiliary of the Returned Servicemen’s League, and though she could not deny that Simpson’s donkey was a remarkable beast, she sure was hearing some crazy reports about the GIs in Dong Hoi.

The fact was: she’d become much wealthier and had her quaint ways and she liked to entertain. She was large and her hair was magnificent and she’d begun already to acknowledge new sights and new sounds.

“That,” she said, hearing music in the wind, “is a note sung in the head register, legato.”

twannnnngggg

“Do you hear, sounds like the kid’s almost got that old Gretsch licked?”

twannngggg tawang now as through this world I ramble/I zee lots of funny men/Some will rob you with a six-gun/And some with a fountain pen . . . twunnnggg

“Gees, too bad. Least he’s not singing ‘Never On Sunday.’ Maybe this Zimmerman kid’ll make us proud.”

Sure thing, because my widowed grandmother provided a Columbia in which he was welcome, her first act of widowhood being to advertise:

*ROOMS AVAILABLE*

(Applicants Encouraged to Apply)

and to rent out bedrooms to three lodgers who arrived in the first weeks of 1962, as if on the sea-breeze.

“Blow, huh, blow!”

“Fill this monstrous old so-n-so house with—persons!”

. . . Because the Widow Creamcheese had a brand new idea of her own and this was it: “The universe is a kind of big house, (Howtosay?) a homeland, in which some stars maybe die but many more are born.” . . . Which means, Mrs. Zimmerman (who was secretly, we all knew, Astolpho the Fun Pier Seer) once explained, that we Columbians were right in tune with all twelve homes of the astrological heavens, those six in descendency to the south and those six in ascendancy to the north: the home of life, the home of fortune and riches; the home of brethren; the home of parents and relatives; the home of health; the home of marriage; the home of death; the home of religion; the home of dignities; the home of friends and benefactors and the home of mystery and uncertainty . . .

But which one of us hadn’t noticed there was a new flicker in a widow’s eyes? Dare I say, fantastic new constellations forming in the gaseous thoughts of an impresario—twenty-five years of raising grey eyes to galactic stages, Starlight Room, The Orbit Bar and Galaxy Grill, the black holes of dressing rooms (by definition unable to be seen!); two and a half decades of nebulous driving between two-bit towns and South Steyne shimmy shimmy joints, suffering the occultations of bigger names eclipsing Bibbidi Boo, meteors and comets, the rocketing to stardom of the Fontane Sisters and that man’s man, Frank Sinatra.

To paraphrase: after her husband’s death, Maxim’s grandmother was soon on the look-out for rising talent, casting her net into the sea of South Steyne, dangling the glittering hooks of conversation and the lines of inquiry into Magdalen’s Five-O salon and Arnhold’s butchery, into Leacon’s News Agency with its paperboy’s barrows and signwriting CURRENT AFFAIRS, into the pure white bakery of Mr. Tsvoklovsky until, trolling the late hours of her widowhood, floating through gardens tangled with impossibly fine rain and the screeches of fruit bats overhead, she turned toward Columbia and observed through the windows talent swimming in the futures of her three new lodgers.



“How like Stevin Roszak he looks!” I thought, as craggy young Rosz marched down our Carborundum topped steps on the morning of his appointment as Graduate Teaching Assistant.

“How fine,” said my grandmother, who rushed to the front fence to watch him leave, standing with my mother and I under our pink frangipani in green velveteen skirts and several layers of floral bodice.

In his father’s suit, no less, with a tie and pin from the City University and cuff-links printed with the gears and pinion of the Royal College of Mechanical Engineers and even his long and nodular fingers seemed to smooth out and point forward, their nails being cut uncharacteristically short and his nose had been trimmed of its stiff inner hair and his shoulders were curved over Sure! but also pointed with a milliner’s fold (and no visible sign on his fingers of the glue with which he had been pasting together certain defamatory letters).

Man! Maxim could see from his recondite position that Siemens Roszak was carrying a heavyweight of expectation and family tradition because, after twelve months of unsupervised reading, it was on the good word of his father, the local councilor, that he had been appointed to the Vale School while he studied for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy which entailed certain research on which no unsung embryo could comment but which, it seemed, concerned the roles and applications of the mystic lyrics of one “William Blake,” a town unearthed in Greenwich that cognoscenti were calling “Moloch” or “Millbrook” on alternate days, and the changing emphases of teaching, quadrivium falling as it was to trivium, and that we would somehow all benefit greatly from this and trusting this to be true I encouraged him, wiggling what would one day be pointed ears and bunting ragged chorionic villi in fervent support, and even Bobby Zimmerman, who was so often torn up with rivalry that he turned entirely to vapor, sang: “He’s Einstein disguised as Robin Hood.” And everyone knew exactly what he was talking about.

Out our gate, up along the Vale escarpment, past the red box in which he’d conducted one-sided conversations, past the black sandstone overhang from which the effect of letters had been judged and along whose trail an undergraduate had made discoveries de le espirit and formed opinions unchallengeable, past a spring bunya bunya pine, a tree that was leathery, needled and grey, and in which had been read The Puberty Rites of Savages by Reik, Gates of the Dream by Roheim, Catch 22 by Heller, The Power Elite by C. Wright Mills, Burning Water by Sejourne, The Tin Drum by Grass and Wells’s The Present Crisis in Human Affairs to name just a few, library tickets stuck like blossoms between pineapple-shaped cones; finally to begin his descent into the world of many colored earthmovers, competitively moving dirt from high spots to low while the Federal Treasurer is saying “What a boom we’re having this year!” and the provision of the narrow, tar-smelling pipes of Metropolitan Water, Sewage and Drainage into which Mr. Beckett’s own future was going to be channeled, along soon-to-be-kerbed streets where unborns were being conceived nightly by senior clerks of the Bank of South Steyne and junior partners of the soliciting firm of Oppenheimer und Oppenheimer—embryos like seeds sown for some groovy crop of Iochief sweet corn! And . . . and then down to school, to park a navy blue DeSoto beside the red Speedwell bicycle of the Principal . . . and there, to cast his mind back to a night on a beach when a bright, diaphanous light shone down on him, leading him blindly to a kikuyu verge and covering him like dew. Salt-laden. Sweet. Toppling him into whitewater and flipping with him like a porpoise. Taking from him one thing while (though he could not be sure any of it had happened) simultaneously giving him another. . . .



So, you’re wondering, did young Siemens Roszak have diaphanous Daffodil Trymelow on his mind when he looked up at the bright tin roof of South Steyne’s tropical schoolhouse and said out loud: “Self-sufficiency will be found to belong in an exceptional degree to the exercise of the speculative intellect”?

He was not thinking, after all, of six year old Alice Bull, sweet sweet carrot-top, who was inside the schoolhouse watching the Principal draw a detailed map of the ancient conquests of Julius Caesar.

Was it Daffodil Trymelow’s perfectly round face he was imagining when he opened the DeSoto’s door and smelt the leather of government issued pommel horses and continued: “Unhappiness consists in the excess of desire over power. A conscious being whose powers equal his desires is absolutely happy”?

And it isn’t over yet because it seems that, after having spent twelve months stoking the bibliophilic fires of his undergraduate desire, he was overcome with generally desirous emotions and unable to prevent himself running off at the mouth . . .

“Supreme good is not authority but freedom. With the many restrictions imposed on children by their own weakness it is barbarous for us to add subjection to our caprices toward the natural selection, and take from them such limited liberty as they possess.”

Fighting words to my freaking ears and . . . Man look! these words are having another effect. Down below. In his corduroys!

(‘Disgusting!’)

No no! sweet babaloos, you’ve heard of the seven wonders of the world, well the eighth is the power of words and images to bring about physical changes. After all, the following phenomenon owed a great deal to the National Defense Education Act of 1958. Remember, too, that it was DeSoto (the man rather than the automobile, but nevertheless . . . ), Hernando deSoto who believed in the poetry of action, dressed in hidalgo steel and carrying lances and that he followed the example of Ponce de Leon who named Cape Canaveral and thus was in some way responsible for the formation of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration; and that, led by the fictions of a Carib girl, he set out to discover a fountain famed for renovating old age. Recall at that time: the speeches of the National Student Association, the Students for a Democratic Society, SNCC, CORE, and the letters of the Education Senator McCaughley who would shortly forward a request to Mrs. Lucille Trymelow, dictated on paper with a lion crest rampant, asking that she “Desist!” in her plans to subvert the education of minors. Using words in an ascending order of erudition: “Wicked!” “Unprincipled! “Iniquitous!” and “Nefarious!”

But first, the story of a doctor who wasn’t a doctor, and then . . .

“In my school there will be no theory of morals, there will be no such subject, and there will be no one appointed to teach this theory or obliged to communicate it to the children according to a given Program. Ummmm, because the basis of discipline is exactingness without theory.”

So what Daffodil Rosa was causing to happen in Siemens Roszak’s underwear was spontaneous and purposeful. Nothing could have led him to propose what he did without the addition of substantial physical change. There was a need—trust an eyewitness—a need for adjustment to the extraordinary conditions. No virginal outlook could have sustained us through those times, from the first sound of Mr. Barry Goldwater marching before the shiny brass band of the Birch Society to Sergeant Pepper floating before the mantra of the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, (Goldwater, that is, who wore glasses without lenses and thus had a metaphysical understanding of the character of politics); from Floyd Patterson, heavy-weight Champion of the Whole World, taking the title in the fifth, to a champion who refused to fight, holistically, at all: the butterfly, the bee, our man Muhammad Ali. The moment was pendulous. What was needed for the growth of all concerned was simultaneous, passionate alteration. . . .

“Because education can have no means beyond itself. Its value derives from the principles and standards implicit in it. What is required is not feverish preparation for something that lies ahead, but to work with precision, passion and taste at worthwhile things that lie at hand.”