Читать книгу The Thorn in the Flesh - Paul Wenz - Страница 7

A coolie in Canton to begin with, later on a boatman and pirate on the Pearl River, a miner in Australia, and then a gardener: now Ah Sin was the cook for John Iredale, owner of Tilfara Station. As looks go, he was likeable, he was even clean; cleaner and more likeable than many of his Caucasian confreres. Without any pretensions to being a “chef”, he could serve up mutton, with inexhaustible variety, twenty-one times a week. Leg of mutton would appear on the table roasted, boiled, stuffed or smoked; the meat would be cut up into steaks or minced into rissoles; the chops would be done in breadcrumbs, grilled, served in an Irish stew, an Indian curry, or fried in batter.

Ah Sin had kept his pigtail, which he wore in a roll around his shaven skull; he had not abandoned the nimble chop-sticks with which he adroitly gripped the small morsels he had fished out of his rice bowl. He had maintained that love for his country, that attachment to the soil which brings a Chinaman back to China, from the four corners of the world, whether he is living or embalmed. He would dream of the solid coffins adorned with scarlet inscriptions which brought good fortune in the other world; he could see again the tombs scattered through the countryside, shaded by trees which, in spring, were smothered in a pink snow. He would yearn for the hills, topped with temples and pagodas, from which you could see the bat-winged junks gliding away, their big painted eyes fixed in the direction of the sea.

Ah Sin admitted to only sixty years; but his pupils seemed to be as old as the world, and his yellow face was crackled like Ming porcelain.

From his ten years working as a cook, he had saved up what a coolie from Canton would have considered a fortune: the export of crows had helped him swell the number of pounds sterling lying idle at low interest in an Adelaide bank. Dried crow, and its gall, actually occupy an important place in the Chinese pharmacopoeia, if we are to believe in the cures from multiple ills which are attributed to them. A large trap built by the cook near the Tilfara abattoir supplied him with a quantity of birds which he cut up, dried in the shade, and sent off to a compatriot in town who paid him so much per head for them.

That evening, while he was sprinkling cloves on an apple pie, Ah Sin reflected for the hundredth time that he still had one duty to fulfil: to go and die in China and be buried in the land of his ancestors.

Half an hour later, his voice trembling with emotion, he gave his notice to the boss.

It had been a hard day for John Iredale and his manager; they had put three thousand ewes into the yards. The peppery dust had burned their eyes, their hands were scratched by the goosegrass, and the handling of the recalcitrant animals had given them a dull, throbbing ache which persisted still. The evening bath and Ah Sin’s dinner having made them forget their fatigue, the two men had sunk back into the smoking-room armchairs with a sigh of satisfaction that a millionaire would have envied.

A fire of black oak was blazing in the fireplace, the pipes had been lit with deep puffs sounding like rough, greedy kisses: it was the hour of absolute bliss when the body and mind let themselves go without any resistance.

Sam, the storeman and book-keeper, was not even noticed when he came in; the infernal noise he made, cutting his stick of tobacco with the help of a small home-made guillotine, left the other two smokers silent and still. It was only when Sam had installed himself in the third armchair, and had disappeared behind a two-week-old newspaper, that the boss said, without letting go of his pipe: “Ah Sin is going away; Jack, the stockmens cook, will replace him for the time being. I’m going to write to Adelaide for a housekeeper to be sent out to look after the house: the old Chinaman’s beginning to neglect the housework; our mattresses are as soft and as thick as linoleum, our socks are no longer in pairs, there are so many of them that need darning. We are old bachelors, it’s true, not too particular and not at all cranky; but there’s no need, either, to put up too soon with all the privations of the simple life.”

Tom, the manager, and Sam received this piece of news behind a barrage of smoke, doubtless to better hide their surprise. A woman in the house! That hadn’t been seen for years, since John Iredale had succeeded his father at the station. Tom was thinking that you could sleep very well on thin mattresses, and Sam would have preferred to buy two pairs of socks a week rather than have a housekeeper in the house.

The book-keeper and storeman took up his newspaper again and plunged with bitter eagerness into the “Sample Case Mystery”, a first-rate murder which resembled an horrific puzzle, with the Sydney police having found only three portions of the corpse so far.

Sam remained an enigma to those around him: they felt that he hadn’t come to bury himself away in this isolated station in New South Wales merely to earn £150 a year. It was, in fact, the short-sightedness with which he was afflicted, and his almost antisocial shyness, that had made him choose the solitude and calm of the bush. Iredale had become attached to him, for he kept his books and his store in perfect order. Besides, Sam’s job was no sinecure: each year Tilfara consumed tons of flour, spent £1,200 to feed its men, and paid out £5,200 to them in wages. Just six months earlier, they had been forced to order nearly two hundredweight of arsenic for the rabbits; the dingoes hadn’t been forgotten, either: they had got in five pounds of strychnine for them.

By a strange contrast, this man of solid common sense and careful calculation pursued the vain fancy of race-horses, and had kept for some years a betting notebook showing, in the left-hand column, sums which would have paid for two round trips to London. Sam placed bets by mail in Broken Hill and Adelaide, purchasing hope in small portions. His wages flew lightly off, less to improve the equine race than to encourage the bookmakers’ luxurious appetites.

One of the smoking-room walls was adorned with a large picture, which at a distance seemed to represent a fan, but which was nothing other than the pedigree, the genealogical tree of Mael Gwyn, a favourite stallion of Sam’s. For the sum of fifteen guineas, a calligrapher had written out finely, in Indian ink, the 6,203 names of the ancestors of the famous horse, among which figured Bill of Portland, St. Simon, Runner Boy, Pocahontas and other aristocrats. This picture was the most precious thing Sam possessed: he wouldn’t have exchanged it for a Streeton.

Tom, the manager, admired a good horse; but everything connected with the turf left him disdainfully cold. His interest was focussed on the sheep amongst which he had spent his whole existence. His father had inculcated in him from childhood an admiration for the merino, for that breed which can trace the purity of its bloodline back to the Arab conquest of Spain, when the Moor Merin Abdallah crossed the strait to fight the Christians.

Tom was still young; but in spite of that, he had already taken on the physiognomy of his trade: in fact, his hooked nose, his abundant hair, short and almost frizzy, and his powerful neck gave him a ram-like profile that everyone at Tilfara knew and joked about.

He displayed towards animals a natural kindness which showed entirely in his eyes; the rest of his person, his heavy chin and his square shoulders, gave the impression of brute strength. His powerful, gnarled hands could seize a ram by the horns and, with some effort, sit it on its hind-quarters in order to examine its fleece. His fingers, with a gentle, rapid movement, could firstly separate the animal’s lips so as to tell its age, feel the ears to find the band bearing its number, and then pull back the fleece on the shoulder, the neck, the belly and the back in order to appreciate the quality of the wool, its length and whiteness. His gestures then were those of a woman feeling some precious fabric or caressing a length of silk whose mere touch is a pleasure.

He would go out each year to certain well known stations to select rams for the Tilfara stud. He knew them individually as if they were a family to him. 119 had the finest fleece; 003 wore leather blinkers which prevented him from challenging his fellows to risky jousts; 208 was an almost perfect creature.

Tom, too, had appropriated one of the smoking-room walls, and had decorated it with photographs of famous merinos which were worth, he had often told Sam, as much as race-horses. Imperator, who held the place of honour, had been bought for five thousand guineas at Sydney.

Arguments were frequent between the two men, and the impossibility of reaching an accord allowed them to begin over again indefinitely the struggle between the horse and the sheep. On only one point were they in agreement: mankind’s efforts tended constantly to improve the breed of Dutch canaries and Chinese goldfish; but everywhere there reigned a supreme indifference towards anything to do with the human race: only the Ancients and the Americans of the previous century had thought of selectively breeding their slaves.

Sam and Tom were nevertheless good mates, and with Iredale they formed the triumvirate which governed a small kingdom of almost a million acres.

The next morning, the boss sat himself down in his office and wrote to an agency in Adelaide, asking them to find him as quickly as possible a housekeeper who could take charge of the running of the household.

What Iredale called his office was a lumber-room which was as much a sort of museum and pharmacy as a study stacked full of papers. Stone axe-heads, sharpening stones, grindstones for nardoo seeds, and samples of minerals cluttered the mantelpiece. On the walls hung carbines, rifles, a whip with a long lash of kangaroo leather, and branding irons for cattle. On a shelf a battleline of bottles seemed to be commanded by a large jar of permanganate which bore the following legend in large letters: Snake Bites.

One of the walls of the room disappeared almost entirely beneath a large chart which looked like the map of a whole province: it was a map of Tilfara.

The station had the shape of a rectangle, with a surface of about a million acres; it was bordered on the south by the Darling River. Different-sized patches represented lakes, seven in number. The draughtsman had coloured them pale blue; in truth, these lakes contained water only during the good seasons: at times they were shimmering surfaces upon which ducks and black swans swam in their hundreds, at other times they were expanses of hardened, cracked mud over which sheep roamed. Creeks crossed the station diagonally, dry beds which waited a long time for an overflow from the river. Lines in red ink marked the wire fences which separated the paddocks: each paddock had its name; the biggest one, Eagle Paddock, measured 55 miles all around. The twenty-seven dams and the seventeen deep bores were carefully marked, like so many small forts intended to protect an army of 70,000 animals against thirst.

Water, in Australia, had ever been an obsession; and among the tribes of the inland many mysterious ceremonies were still celebrated in order to attract rain. Strange to tell, it had happened many times that the heavens had complied with the incantations of the wise men daubed with red ochre and emu grease.

Old Ben Iredale had spent his life drilling these bores, digging out these dams and building weirs across the creeks; by dint of money, hard work and patience, he had managed to endow Tilfara with what nature had withheld: enough water to satisfy the thirst of the bleating multitudes.

John never ceased to admire the achievement of the conqueror his father had been: this man had cut down whole forests to provide enough posts to carry the wire for some 500 miles of fencing. The isolation, the enormous distances which practically doubled the price of every commodity, the struggle against droughts, against rabbits, against the very wind which could bury the fences under sand, would have discouraged even the most valiant.

For all that, Ben Iredale had not neglected the comfort of the home he had built for his wife. The house, constructed in 1868 on the bank of the river, had the faults of its generation: the doors were too low and too narrow for the athletic build of the pioneers, and the bedrooms were too small, as if these men could not forget the tent under which they had lived for so long. But the broad veranda which surrounded the house maintained a precious coolness even at the height of summer.

Ben and his wife had planted a garden, a thick grove of orange trees, clumps of rose bushes and long trails of bougainvillea. Water pumped from the river had turned this patch taken from the blinding plain into a leafy oasis, an orgy of greenery and flowers which the birds of the bush came to visit without any fear.