Two days later she called for him and they drove to Henderson, taking the new (or new to him) north-western motorway that ran out from Point Chevalier to North Te Atatu across some of the inner harbour’s shallow tidal bays. There were horizontal striations of colour – olive-green mangroves, white sand, yellow mud, blue water – and such skimming, water-level views, long and clear down the miles of the harbour, it was as if the eye was drawn over it, fast, with the graph of the city skyline showing up on one side, and on the other the summit of Rangitoto, an inquisitive neighbour, looking over the fence the low-lying land made between Mt Victoria and North Head.
Seen from sea level, or equally from above, Auckland had a way of simplifying itself into patterns of land and water; and Mike was reminded of those paintings in Marica’s house that had surprised him with their fresh abstractions of form and colour. That it was a beautiful location seemed to him true beyond question, and it was only a pity it had been inhabited, not by a race of gods, but by fallible mortals, first the Maori, who had called it the Place of a Thousand Lovers but made of it an intertribal killing field, then the Pakeha, who seemed hell-bent on turning it into a thoroughfare.
Everywhere now they were invaded, Mike especially, because he’d been away so long, but Marica too, by the recollections that are hidden, like traps waiting to be sprung, in the places of childhood and youth. They turned off the motorway at Te Atatu Road and stopped at Bridge Avenue where he’d so often ‘doubled’ her on his bike for a swim. The water flowed there still, under the motorway – in with the tide, out with the flow of the Whau River – and there was a marina, and many yachts moored to poles.
They went on up Te Atatu Road, identifying old houses, trying to remember what had been there before the new ones had been built. Everywhere orchards, vineyards and farmland had been subdivided and sold, to be replaced by suburban houses and gardens. They parked where once there had been the gate with the sign LICENSED TO SELL TWO GALS, and walked down the hill to stand silent, side by side, looking into the grounds of the school he and Frano had gone to. The buildings Mike had known, one in concrete, the other in white weatherboard, both with high-pitched ceilings and sash windows, were gone, replaced by undistinguished prefabs. But the setting, blue hills in the background, stream running past the lower grounds and under the road, was unchanged, and he was overwhelmed by its familiarity, as if he had come around a corner and run headlong into his long-dead mother.
Back in the car they drove to Waikumete, through the main gates, Marica following the path she knew would take them to the place where her family had their graves. The cemetery stretched away over rolling land, a city of the dead whose urban sprawl, Mike reflected, should make its inhabitants feel at home. They passed the crematorium building where a caretaker, enacting a haiku, was sweeping up rose petals from the front courtyard with a brush and pan. Everywhere the graves were adorned with fresh flowers and coloured plastic windmills, making him think of le jour des morts, the day of the year in France when everyone remembers and visits the graves of their dead. But in fact, Marica explained, Waikumete was like this every day, since the flowers left at the crematorium after each service were gathered up before the next and distributed around the graves.
They went over a hill, down into a hollow, and then climbed the other side where tombs, strange to Mike, were built on either side of the narrow roadway – square or oblong box structures in marble or stone or plastered concrete, each like an infant-school drawing of a house, with a heavy iron door right in the middle, and two ‘windows’ of black marble, one on either side of the door. In large letters over the door was the name of the family to whom the tomb belonged – Marsich, Boracich, Frankovic, Dragicovic, Nobilo, Radich, Stipe, Marinkovic – some of them decorated with patterns of vines or of interlocking oak leaves. The names of the internees were inscribed on the black windows over the words ‘Pocivali (or Pocivala, or Pocivao) u miru’ – the Croatian form, Marica explained, of Rest in Peace. Among them was a tomb with the name Selenich over its door.
‘I don’t remember these,’ Mike said as he got out of the car and walked along what seemed like a street of pretend houses, reinforcing his earlier thought about a city of the dead.
‘They weren’t here then,’ she said. ‘That’s prosperity for you, Mike. It brings on the pharaoh syndrome.’
‘Will you be put in there?’
‘Oh no. I’ll be cremated. I don’t think the dead should take up space. Of course if you could see through black marble, it’s what a real estate agent would call a prime position. We’re like the Maori. We like a view of the sea for our dead.’
He turned and looked where she was looking, and there, sure enough, was a long view to the harbour and all the way down it to the city skyline ten kilometres away, the business towers and the hump of the harbour bridge standing out clear in morning light. And then, as his eye ranged about, near and far, he looked down the slope they were on, beyond the houselike tombs, over an area of lawn cemetery, all plaques inset flat into mown grass, to a neglected hollow where weeds and rank grass had grown up around older tombstones. He turned to her. ‘Frano’s down there.’
She smiled. ‘So you remember.’
‘And over there was where …’ He didn’t go on, but pointed away to the left. Most of the pines were gone, but there was a grove still standing.
She half nodded and turned away. It was just an acknowledgement, no more than that, but it was enough.
Back at the car she opened the boot and took out a trowel, a rake, a small shovel, a scrubbing brush, some plants in plastic pots. ‘Help me, Mikie,’ she said, and together they carried all this down into the shadowy hollow and walked about there, swishing through weeds and grasses, scraping at headstones, calling out dates to one another, until they found a line of graves dated 1952, and among them, Frano’s.
‘Frano Heta Panapa,’ Mike read. ‘1933–1952. Dearly Loved and Always Remembered Son of Ljuba Maria Panapa (née Selenich) and the late Joseph Parata Panapa. Pocivao u miru.’ There was a photograph of Frano, faded now, water-stained, inset under perspex in the concrete headstone. A passage from the Psalms, ‘O God, thou art my God, early will I seek thee’, was repeated in Maori, ‘E te Atua, noku koa Atua; ka moata taku rapu i a koe’, and in Croatian, ‘O Boze, ti si Bog moj; gorljivo tebe trazim.’
To Marica, who was standing at his shoulder, Mike intoned, ‘O Dog thou art my Dog, early will I seek thee.’
She smiled and put a hand on his arm. ‘You two were such silly boys.’
The small plot in front of the headstone had been neglected, and for half an hour or more they worked on it, weeding, loosening the soil inside the concrete perimeter, putting in the shrubs and ferns and flowers Marica had brought, scrubbing dirt and moss from the stone, clearing the long grass from round about that might close in and engulf it again. They were pleased with their work, it looked very good, and they took photographs, he of her, she of him, standing beside the grave.
‘Ljuba will be pleased,’ Mike said.
‘Imagine if Frano could see us. What would he say?’
‘He’d say fuck off, wouldn’t he?’
‘Yes, I suppose he would. But he wouldn’t mean it. He’d be pleased.’
‘You used to be scared of him.’
‘Frano? No, never.’
‘That’s how it seemed.’
‘I was scared of hurting him. Hurting his feelings. You didn’t understand that, Mike, and I never felt as if I could explain it to you.’
As she said that she looked puzzled, and young. Her youthful face showed through for a moment, like a face at a window, and then the curtain of the present came down. Mike stared at her.
‘What is it?’ she asked.
‘What’s what?’
‘You were looking at me as if …’
‘I was remembering.’
‘Oh.’ She waved him away. ‘Don’t do that.’
‘Knocked down by a speeding memory in the city of the dead.’
He turned and looked towards what remained of the pines. He would have liked to go there, hunting for the place where they’d first made love, but he didn’t suggest it.
That evening they went together to a restaurant in Parnell and then drove along the waterfront to sit in the car looking out across the water where Rangitoto appeared and faded as the moon moved fast and purposeful as a sheep dog through flocks of cloud. They held hands.
‘Life’s a bitch,’ he said, after a silence that had lasted so long he wasn’t sure what he meant.
‘Only if you think it is,’ she said; and he silently rebuked himself for a lapse in his Zen discipline.
‘Are you still a Catholic?’ he asked.
‘Are you still a New Zealander?’
‘It’s like that, is it?’
‘It’s not a question of believing.’
‘Of loyalty?’
‘Not even that.’
‘Identity?’
She laughed at his persistence. ‘I suppose … Yes. Identity will do.’
From Talking About O’Dwyer.