Punctuated Air

I don’t know if he ever began to cough up blood. By the time a man starts doing that, there might be no way back for him. My father didn’t talk about the men he saw dying in hospital beds from tuberculosis—the same disease in his lungs.

He was sixteen and would be in that Belgrade sanatorium until he was nineteen. He read men like Joyce, Zola and Dostoyevsky to pass the time. He never talked about them either. He continued to read into his seventies, authors like Stefan Zweig and Victor Hugo, writers he’d discovered when he was dying.

Coughing up blood is how I imagined it when I was the same age, in my late teens. Handkerchiefs wet—red bundles of them beside his bed. Droplets across the pages, the punctuation of chaos, in books that would later be burned to keep the disease from spreading.

Those other dying men coughing up their lives as they passed away at different times of the day or night. Conversational patients, in anonymous hospital pyjamas, who had nothing on them but the stories they could tell about their lives while they waited for the outcome of an invisible war being waged within the mystery of their chemical bodies.

For a sixteen-year-old who would celebrate three birthdays with them, there wasn’t much more to do but read and drift in and out of those long meandering tales, punctuated with fits of coughing. He hadn’t lived long enough to have tales of his own, so he learned to be quiet and to listen.

Did they allow family to visit those TB sanatoriums? How many friends, brothers or sisters braved a lethal disease to visit, even for birthdays? I don’t know. Perhaps only his mother.

I wonder what the sound of coughing meant to him on a weekend in suburban Melbourne—lying in his bed, listening to me or my brother coughing from a cold we’d caught at school. Picking up one of those books by a European writer again and reading for the whole of a Sunday morning. Hearing us cough from our beds into the silence of his memories.

The library in St Albans was what you might expect to find in the western suburbs of Melbourne. Dreary. Limited hours. One and a half rooms and a three-book limit. The librarians weren’t particularly helpful. They stamped the little slips inside the front covers and slid the three books over the counter, never making a comment or a recommendation. They let me wander the aisles looking for books with Saturn on their spines. The one and a half rooms were enough. They weren’t insignificant when I was a kid and the librarians didn’t need to do anything more for me. They were noiseless and tended to a calm place.

The Sea of Tranquillity was an idea of paradise. I looked at images of the moon and saw a place that registered billions of collisions, impact upon impact, yet there was an immense area that was smooth and undamaged. A blue tinge to the otherwise grey-black expanse. That’s how the idea first appeared in my mind, because I’d never heard anyone use tranquillity in a sentence. A dictionary in the St Albans library told me what it meant—it didn’t close the door on its meaning. The Sea of Tranquillity was a place where you couldn’t drown, and from there the world was a perfect blue and white sphere turning in an endless, silent flow of sunlight.

Saturday morning would come and there’d be a pile of books on the carpet beside my bed. I didn’t have bookshelves because I didn’t own many books. As soon as I could clear my eyes of sleep I began reading and didn’t stop until I came reeling out of my room for food and water. I went back to bed and let the bright light outside my windows resolve into evening darkness. I did the same thing Sunday and wished Monday morning wouldn’t have to be such a colossal interruption. A whole week of school would follow and disassemble all my time and thoughts and I would register a billion impacts like a surface that can never be smoothed over with a calm hand. I don’t remember most of the books I read in those years but lying on my belly in bed, with words moving along in a silent flow, was another view from the Sea of Tranquillity.

None of the kids I played cricket or soccer or tennis with in my neighbourhood ever mentioned prose or poetry. They didn’t own any more books than I did. My friends read what was required at school and those were the books I didn’t want to read. We threw, kicked or hit balls up driveways, across courts and over fields. We played in a place where prose and poetry didn’t really exist. Art was transmitted into our lives only via the radio and television. What literature made it through was diminished and trivialised, altering little in the lives we were learning to inhabit. I have heard it said that a child needs just one literary experience to devote themselves to reading—and that has been described as a feeling of their lives being changed by a book. Every time I walked into St Albans library, wandering along the quiet aisles, all I was looking for was the Saturn sticker. I returned my books to the librarians dutifully, and I’m sure I appeared as untroubled by art as any of the other children in my neighbourhood.

The writers of those Saturn books were outcasts, half-insane dreamers, scientists from diverse fields, and many were hacks who had failed to find success with legitimate literature. They never wrote about the world as it was. Instead they insisted on other visions, speculating on possible futures. They projected their fears and hopes into vast space operas or focused them into claustrophobically demented psychological shapes. Often, paranoid and broken worlds emerged from their pages. Radical philosophies and politics were cast out with thinly veiled narratives. They specialised in generating ‘a sense of wonder’—a term that many of them used as though they had invented the experience. Where everything I was told to read at school seemed to be trapped in history or the suffocating minutia of suburban lives much like mine, the books with the sticker of Saturn depicted breaks with reality, in society and the individual. Every one of them had an irony at its heart, because all those books assured me that the future is unwritten. One of the librarians must have been a true believer, a person convinced of the value of science fiction, because the library of St Albans might have been small, but its collection of those novels was comprehensive.

I forgot the Sea of Tranquillity. I now look up at the moon as rarely as anyone else and it’s been years since I’ve even thought about one of those Saturn books. There are other names for places on the moon. The Sea of Cold and The Sea of Nectar, The Sea of Crises and the Marsh of Dreams. Hundreds of craters and mountains have been named on that lifeless satellite caught in an orbit by the weight of our planet. The golden era of science fiction culminated in the landing of two men on the moon, and it was from that smooth, calm place that they gazed back at our bubble. A planet where everything was named to the last speck of dust and there was an endless generation of stories. It was a moment in which the future seemed to open up and allow each of us daydreams of infinite possibility.

We played among the bricks. A rubble of homes that were waiting for the foundation concrete to dry. Many of the houses rose up around us with two storeys of ambition. They spread out over their plots with little space left over for more than a vegie patch out the back. Paddocks between new houses were filled in year after year. Before that, they had been the unbroken spaces of a useless and forgotten frontier.

No family had a pool in their backyard and it seemed natural to walk to the public pool in summer with a towel over the shoulder, wearing nothing more than bathers and thongs. We had the opportunity to scrawl our initials into wet concrete almost any day of the week. We walked along footpaths that led over rocky ground where even weeds struggled to survive, and moved across the paddocks of neighbourhood blocks, cutting through from street to street. Within the cyclone fencing of the local swimming pools, the grass was thick and a vibrant green. We unrolled our bath towels as we arrayed ourselves around the pools.

A deep pool for diving—the springboard three metres high. The circle of water for toddlers to splash around in and the fifty-metre pool they called Olympic-sized. The lane ropes were rarely used and there was no-one in that neighbourhood who would ever swim for gold.

Children, wet from the pool, would luxuriate on the hot concrete paths that cut through the grass. After a few minutes we would stand up and watch our water shadows quickly evaporate from the concrete.

Coasts and oceans existed for us in the same way that deserts did in the imaginations of children in England. For us, it was glimpses of the ocean from verdant hills in commercial breaks and the myth was that we belonged to the same country.

There were no rivers or creeks running through our neighbourhood. Melbourne had been developing for little more than a hundred years and its waterways and coastal areas were the first to be turned into real estate.

Immigrants of the seventies generated a suburban sprawl pushing out over land that was worthless for farming. These ad-hoc neighbourhoods were supervised by local government only so far as streets, plumbing and electricity were concerned.

There was no town hall and local government was invisible. There were no sports grounds or arenas, parks or playgrounds. Public works didn’t extend beyond a few cheaply constructed primary schools and high schools for the children of these immigrant families. A library or a public swimming pool was an extravagance.

Sea voyages were rare for the families who built their houses in our neighbourhood. These were jet immigrants, who only had a matter of hours for their transition from ancestral lands to the Australian scrub.

On a ship, land didn’t simply drop away. It receded to a broad horizon. The world grew into a vast sphere. For these earlier immigrants there were storms and the threat of drowning—nightmares, as they rocked on cots at night, of being lost at sea. Months passed and friendships were created. They learned a few words of English. They got a clear idea that this would be the great barrier, but that there were ways of getting through.

There was no time on an airliner for much more than murmuring quiet. Not enough liquid hours to drift along, to ponder while suspended below deck, listening to the stretched and riveted metal groan at the pressure of the passing fathoms, the loneliness of those who had left their homes for years on end. No stories about how seafaring people of previous generations had glimpsed women in the breaking water below the prow or dancing on fishtails in the endless wake of their departure. There was a tormented desperation that could be felt, even if in diminished forms, of those lonely sailors throwing themselves out to the mirage embraces of the mermaids.

For the immigrants who came here by sea, the first experience was of an Australian coast extending beyond what they could conceive. The New World emerged from the horizon, large enough for them and their history.

For the jet immigrant, there was a squeal of wheels and a rumbling touchdown. Their first experience of Australia was from above, a patchwork of land cut up by rivers and roads, sewn back together after deserts had revealed a landscape worn down to the bone. The New World for those descending into it was something equally vast, yet it was a place where histories fell to the ground—thousands of broken fragments spinning away across the scrub.

The jet immigrants saw Australia through windows the size of mini televisions from the seventies. A telecast from a world of air, as lifeless as heaven, unreachable even to birds. It was a perspective many of them would keep for the rest of their lives.

For a previous generation, a fireplace might have been the centre of a home, and a family could gather around it and listen to a wireless transmission of stories from people around the continent who resembled themselves. Someone in the family would read from a book or a letter by candlelight until everyone was ready for sleep.

Television was the central point of every home in the New World of the jet immigrant, and it reflected almost nothing of the places they had known or their current neighbourhoods. Their new cultural landscape was revealed as a different kind of patchwork, made in America and Britain. The Australia they saw broadcast to them mimicked her parent cultures. It wasn’t any longer clear what Australian culture was. There was no doubt that an Australian society did exist, but it was evidently somewhere far from where they were living now.

On faith, the new immigrants bought rectangular parcels of Australia. They built houses as replacements for their forfeited countries and believed this was all they would ever need. They reminded each other, and themselves in private moments, that this was ‘the dream’—Great American, Australian, or otherwise.

They had children and watched as this new life trickled away into a world observed from small airline windows. Waved them on—sons and daughters becoming indistinguishable from the other faces of the televised and advertised New World.

Letters with par avion stickers in the corner of the envelope read: Mother has died. Grandfather is now so old he can’t put his shoes on by himself yet he still enjoys taking the long walk by the lake. Sister got married and had a baby. Another sister had a miscarriage and a nervous breakdown; addicted to the medication ever since. Brothers who had lost their way and hadn’t been heard from in years sometimes turned up unexpectedly—over there. No-one ever turned up unexpectedly in Australia.

A woman might put away a letter from overseas, burying it beneath clothes in a wardrobe, not opening the message for years. A man might receive a letter, and even when it contained nothing more than the mundane details of life lived in places his memory struggled to clearly recall, he might yet be found by his children in the kitchen, crying over the envelope. We sometimes gazed at pictures released from these envelopes and saw faces that resembled our own, before discarding them and the handwritten pages and returning to the television in the lounge room.

We went outside and built our own houses with bricks that were dropped off by trucks on the empty paddocks—spinning their wheels in the mud on rainy days. We created warrens of corridors and rooms as we crawled through these forts of our imagination. They only ever lasted for a few days. We would return in the morning after a weekend of building our secret kingdoms and find everything had moved—construction of another new house already underway. There would be other blocks of bricks in other paddocks. When the workers had finished for the day we moved through the skeletal wooden frames of homes that would soon be filled with families. We were silent as we picked our way across the beams in the floor, as though we were the child ghosts of these families revisiting another reversed history.

We wandered across a landscape that was ours, even if it was never the same from month to month. At school they taught us that there was a race of people that had once lived here, and that their civilisation had been an ancient dreaming in which every feature of the country was sacred—that it was a vast shared soul, unfolded and open to them and their future, until we came and built our houses. This was what could be understood from the fragments of information we were given in our classes. The vast silence of that erasure was ever present as we watched new houses spread out across the ground. There is a way in which that kind of erasure works in the minds of children. It suggests they will also one day be erased to make way for new construction and other populations.

The paddocks were all filled in—teeth in an old skull, fitted into every gapping space like an ancient face growing younger and taking to the make-up of these new lives, seeming youthful in a way it hadn’t for thousands of years. Each summer showed everyone living in that neighbourhood how thin that make-up was.

During the Australian heat out on Melbourne’s drab frontier, concrete shone white, scribbled in shadow here and there with the worn initials of the neighbourhood’s children. Steel or glass glinted in blinding sparks of light, yet sunglasses were rarely worn. The black bitumen of the roads went soft, threatening to turn into a free-floating moat of shimmering oil. Lawns had unrolled from the houses and jumped the footpath—went yellow-white quickly at the height of the season. Men stood out in their yards playing water back and forth from hoses every evening to fight back the heat that for weeks kept rising from the ground and fell from the sky in waves.

These men would grow old and move along streets named after people and places that had never been familiar to them. They were men renamed in their places of employment—spur of the moment and without ritual. They used these anglicised names for decades. Often there was merely an initial letter left from the birth names of the many Johns, Michaels, Sams and Jims who lived in the neighbourhood. They carried these names for decades. When doctors and principals gave them news about their children, these immigrants were addressed by the Australian names they had been given. Their children would bear similar makeshift names if theirs were not easily pronounceable, or were not remembered by their teachers.

The heat would drive everyone from their homes. Air-conditioning wouldn’t be seen in that neighbourhood for many years after the houses were built. Mattresses were carried out onto the lawn or flopped onto a balcony. Many roamed the streets and congregated beneath the occasional streetlight, waving away moths and slapping at mosquitos.

On long summer Sunday afternoons the local pool became a necessity, no longer the luxury it often seemed. The grassy hills rolling away from the water to the cyclone fences were covered with thin towels, filled out by a community that, aside from these sweltering days, never saw itself whole.

Children picked their way between the patchwork of bath towels to get to the blue water. Heads bobbed across it as bodies flew through the air and splashed down among them. Laughter, chatter, exuberant voices welcoming everyone who came near. The noise rising up from the pool reverberated as if there was a liquid soul at the centre of our lives.

At the high diving board a competition might begin, though there were no judges, scores or prizes. Someone would stand up on that three-metre diving board and his birth name would be used and we would tell each whose brother he was, and whose son. The streetlights would flick on without anyone noticing as the day’s heat began to ease off. Families would make a start on the short walk to their streets and houses. A small crowd would remain for a final man standing on the edge of the long board. Some of these inland divers could spin and turn and break the water with barely a splash.

I was born in Belgrade, Serbia, in a part of the city called Zemun—right at the confluence of the rivers Danube and Sava. There was one small room for the three of us to sleep in. My mother, father and I watched the world turn white. Winter got in through the windows, past the heating, and penetrated the blankets. My parents were still driven by new love and talked for months about a long journey that would take us far from our two rivers. Their voices were the only sounds in the room some evenings. I dozed within an old wooden cot beside their bed. Australia was one of the first words I heard, whispered in the darkness of that cold bedroom. A word which was like a balloon that couldn’t be seen in the icy air above the cot, but that I knew was filled with the warmth of their love for me and their hopes for the future.

I do not know these details as facts. Memories from that baby’s life are resonances that my imagination evokes and puts to paper. The two rivers don’t need names to be remembered. For generations, watercourses like these have cut grooves through the landscapes we were born in. They have worked their way through the lives of those that are part of that land. At the time I was born there, the Danube and the Sava met within a federation of loosely related cultures, divided by history and divergent dialects—a country called Yugoslavia.

I was always very ill in Zemun. The hospitals of Belgrade became familiar places. The voices within these buildings were as harsh as the winter outside. Words filled with pain and the cold disregard of those who learned to live with suffering as a profession. My illnesses fell away to nothing as soon as I began breathing Australian air. If my memories of infancy were of a white city and its two rivers, then those of growing up in this country were of vast blue-white skies, endlessly opening up. It was as if the dream of that balloon made by the word Australia had floated down into my cot and became my world.

My family was living in Melbourne by the time we celebrated my second birthday. I began learning English in primary school, so I suppose I would have been five when I began speaking it, though I don’t remember a pre-English history. If Serbian is my first language, in my mouth it is now the language of a child. Serviceable for greetings and household chores. There are odd gaps and strange inclusions. I’m able to distinguish the word for wind from air, to separate the very similar words for breath and soul, but I am unable to tell you how to say cloud or name the days of the week in Serbian.

It’s a strange circumstance when you devote yourself to a language that does not belong to your parents. Because a writer does not simply use the language; a writer becomes the language. There’s a devotion to a literary legacy. Dedicating your life to a history in which your ancestors have never belonged creates a separation within your mind and seems to say: before you, there is nothing.

The first vocal rhythms most of us feel are the words that rise and fall on our mother’s breath. What we hear are the same sounds over and again, and we will continue to listen out for them while we explore our lives through this veil of language. The first words for sleep and hunger, for beauty and pain and love, come from our mother’s tongue. We feel them cover our faces with kisses—sometimes with tears.

For me, those whispered words of the cradle were Serbian. They were hushed murmurs, warm against my neck, as the windows went white with the ice of a Belgrade winter. I do not remember that image. It’s a reconstructed history. A sequence of words put together to represent the disconnection of verified personal experience with the desolate white wasteland of everything forgotten.

My father had gone ahead to Australia, to find a job and a home for us. My mother and I were set to follow nine months later. In 1974 there wasn’t a jet bridge connecting our airplane to the departure lounge. She carried me from the terminal to the plane that would take us across the oceans to my father. Aircraft lifted into the sky with roars so loud I could only feel the drowned-out sobs heaving through her chest. She crumpled to the ground with me in her arms. She sat me there beside her for a moment and lowered her face to the ground. She breathed over that rough black tarmac while I watched, and placed her lips to the ground.

As a writer I wonder about those of us who have been removed from our places of birth, who leave language, history and ancestry to begin anew somewhere else. We become proud owners of words inherited from parents that are not our own. Our first sentences are composed within a literary history that has given us so few pages we barely exist.

Above me there is a balloon. It used to float across my cot in that cold room in Zemun while Belgrade froze. It is filled with the history of those two rivers, the Danube and the Sava, and the people who lived at that confluence like my mother and father. It is incidental that in the Serbian language my place of birth, Beograd, translates as “white city”, though that’s how I remember it. When I put my ear to that white balloon I can still hear the lullaby of a vanished world.