When Jacob and Clare were sixteen months old, and Benny had just turned three, Jenny and I started to wonder how we were going to pay for our extravagant lifestyle. We looked at a range of options and decided to buy a lottery ticket. It didn’t win. We bought another. Same thing. We gave it one last try. This time our number came up. We won $10. Our worries were over.
So money had nothing whatsoever to do with our decision to move again, to pack our belongings onto the highway that ran not far from our door and to leave the small town where we had brought home our three children from hospital and planted our olives. There was a job going in the big smoke, 630 kilometres to the south, and it looked like it had my name on it. I would be teaching in a large school for boys where they needed someone to help young men learn how to be more still, to uncover something of their contemplative side and, with that, an ability to notice the world in a compassionate way. This wasn’t exactly what the advertisement said but it was what I thought I’d like to try. The idea was so preposterous that I could hardly resist. I thought I could convince energetic teenage boys that we would be spending all eternity doing nothing and that we needed to practise before we got there.
The decision meant a lot of tossing and turning and staring into the bright red eyes of my digital clock at 3.40 in the morning. A new doctor didn’t think this sounded like fun and sent me home with a packet of zolpidem, a substance I’d not yet heard of, and a prescription for five more packets on top of that if I wanted them. She advised me to take the tablet when I was already in bed because, in her experience, zolpidem didn’t waste any time. One of her patients had taken it while sitting on the side of her bed and had woken the next morning with her forehead still resting on her alarm clock. I took three in a week, and I still have the leftovers; at least they were easy to pack.
We left with mixed feelings. There was much to look forward to but also a lot to let go of and a lot to get rid of. I’d just finished a three-year stint as the regular mass-market fiction reviewer for the Sydney Morning Herald, a task which involved reading five books a week and providing in-depth commentary on each one in about two or three paragraphs. This meant that I became very badly read as each week’s batch forced last week’s out of my head and I could seldom remember any of them. Occasionally I’d meet someone who’d ask my opinion of a book and I’d say I was sorry that I’d never heard of it and they’d reply that this was strange seeing as how I’d reviewed it just a few weeks before.
‘Ah yes,’ I’d say, trying to sound knowledgeable. ‘I thought the ending was disappointing.’ They always were, mainly because they didn’t come soon enough.
After three years, the job had left me with a garage full of books. The sheer volume of them was, to me, evidence of a tired culture, one which in large measure was saying the same thing over and over again in more and more words. And this was just books. Add to this a flood of music, film and internet. We were part of a culture which didn’t know how to leave empty spaces, was afraid of them. In its exhaustion, the whole world kept prodding itself with stimulants. The world was talking in its sleep.
We gave all these books to Canberra’s Lifeline Bookfair, a community event which is able to raise money for good causes because every so often people need to clear out their garages in order to make room for more stuff. A van arrived and we filled it to bursting with paperbacks.
‘Are you moving?’ asked the driver.
‘Yes,’ I answered. ‘We need to offload some stuff.’
‘When I left Bosnia ten years ago,’ he said, ‘I took nothing. I left everything behind.’
‘Everything?’
‘Yes, including my mother.’
‘Is she still there?’
‘Yes, she lives in a garage.’
Once the books were gone, we held a garage sale. Benny’s stroller and baby bath went to a girl who lived around the corner in a house where you could see in through the gaps in the walls at night. She was fifteen and expecting her first child. Her own mother had just turned thirty. The generations passed quickly in that family.
‘I hope youse know what youse getin’ inta,’ said the mother.
The girl didn’t know which way to look.
‘Youse have to quit the fags.’
‘I know. I know.’
‘And youse won’t be getin’ much sleep, that’s for sure.’
On the day before we left, Jenny was down at the local park and found a wallet which she brought home, hoping to reunite it with its owner. There was no money inside. Instead there was an American Express Gold Card, as well as a rentpayers card from the Housing Commission of NSW, two cards which would seldom appear in the same place. There was also a membership for the Russian Club in Sydney. All these cards were made out in the name of one Count Alexei Schmidt.
I made enquires to the only person in town I knew who might be able to shed some light. Seraphim Slade, another neighbour, was an Indigenous Australian, the host of ‘Koori Korna’, a weekly three-hour program on a nearby community radio station. Seraphim was also a sub-deacon in the Russian Orthodox Church, probably its only Indigenous member, let alone ordained member. He often drove four hours to church in Cooma. Seraphim had been drawn from what he called a ‘pugnacious lifestyle’ to find a home in the Russian Orthodox community because he found that sacred music and liturgy touched his soul and helped him find belonging and stillness. He told me once there are deep connections between Indigenous and Russian Orthodox spirituality at this level. The deep-water mark for any spirituality is the point at which it stops speaking and falls silent.
At all events, Seraphim had read of Count Alexei Schmidt because of an article that week in the Goulburn Post. It seemed that, in the heat of summer, Count Alexei, by no means a young man, had been pushing a shopping trolley from Sydney to Wagga, a distance of over 400 kilometres, sleeping on the side of the road. He was undertaking this expedition dressed as Napoleon. When the paper asked him why he was pushing a shopping trolley from Sydney to Wagga dressed as Napoleon, Count Alexei replied that it was something he had always wanted to do.
Count Alexei was reunited with his wallet in the Yass Hospital where he was recovering from fatigue before resuming his journey.
We were going to miss this part of the world.