3

A pigeon struts, shimmery feathered, at the window outside the porter’s flat, and Bonny leaves the meal table to stare at it closely. He speaks to it. ‘Has Beeral sent you, wanting news?’ The bird pecks at the glass, and Bonny catches its eye.

‘Listen,’ Bonny whispers. ‘Tell Beeral that we are eating well. Look. The meal is good tonight. Meat and bread and potatoes. I would prefer fish, it is true, but …’

Before Bonny can continue, Castan bursts into the room, trailed by a group of men with notebooks and a photographer wrestling a camera and tripod. Bonny is asked to resume his seat at the table, which has been covered with a white cloth and laid with knives and forks. At the table’s centre is a plate of roast meat and fresh bread. Behind the men, a young German servant enters and fills Jurano’s and Bonny’s steins with beer. He begins to carve the pork. Jurano reaches across for a piece and offers it to Dorondera.

‘I don’t like to be watched eating. None of us does,’ Bonny says in his own tongue, but he is told the men must stay. Bonny releases a long sigh and looks at the bird pecking at the window, all grey and blue and mauve like the inside of a mussel shell, and tells it that, ‘The men here like to watch us do the simplest things. Sometimes even the most boring things fascinate them.’

Bonny looks at the men and licks his lips before continuing. He speaks in Badtjala, as is required of him.

‘You are hungry, too, aren’t you? I can see that. I can see you salivating. Well, you can stay hungry. Here, watch me eat.’ He puts another piece into his mouth and chews slowly, watching out of the corner of his eye as Dorondera and Hilda both try not to laugh.

Jurano carries his meal and stein of beer into the neighbouring room. When he has finished eating, he takes to carving a piece of birch into a new boomerang. For the delicate work, he uses the serrated dinner knife, but even this activity seems too bothersome. Jurano lies on his bed, where he begins to cough, a long rattly cough that leaves him breathless and groaning.

Bonny looks towards the window, but the pigeon has gone. Outside, rain falls and clouds cover the sky. Jurano’s cough starts up again, and Bonny calls the bird back, asking it to tell Beeral that Jurano’s sickness is worsening.

Bonny stands to go to Jurano, but Louis tells him to stay seated at the table.

‘They have come to see you,’ Louis says.

‘If I cannot go to him, then you must. You must do exactly what I say if you want him to become well again. First you must find his Jun Jaree …’

The journalists talk amongst themselves and ask how long the Aboriginal man has been sick, but Louis appears not to hear. Instead he is frowning intently and searching Jurano’s jacket pockets as if a life depended on it.

I have observed that Bonny has ways of keeping himself strong. He has his cowrie shell of course and, inside it, his own Jun Jaree. He speaks to the great spirit Beeral and reminds himself of the Badtjala laws. Now, he stares up at the moon, and I wish Bonny knew that Little Bonny is also looking up at it.

After the reporters have left, Jurano drinks too much of the firewater, and Bonny tells Beeral that he wants to strike his friend.

‘You are poisoning yourself,’ Bonny says to Jurano. ‘Have you forgotten that we are here to see the Queen? To argue for our families? You must stay well.’

I watch all of this and am sad to see the young man’s hopes unravelling. Is a ghost permitted sadness? What function does such an emotion serve if I cannot act on what I see and hear?

The next morning, before opening time, Bonny, Jurano and Dorondera are taken to the waxworks museum and see Professor Virchow again, although this time it is a strange wax version of the man. Bonny stares into the glass eyes and uses his fingernail to scrape an inch-long strip of luminous wax from the figure’s cheek.

‘Don’t touch!’ Castan yells. All around them are other silent figures, wax men and women of different colours and creeds. In the nearby Kaiser-Saal, kings have not escaped being immortalised.

‘If you behave well, one day you will be here, too,’ Castan says. ‘Perhaps over there with the Africans, certainly before Chang. I wish to reflect the evolutionary order.’

The wax giant is even bigger than Chang in real life.

I see Bonny look out through a window to the sky. I imagine he is looking to Beeral and hoping for a sign that will make sense of what is being proposed.

The wax from Virchow’s statue is still under Bonny’s fingernail, and he picks at it.

‘He will not do that to me,’ he says. He rolls the wax into a small ball, which he then appears to stow deep in the pocket of his cut-off trousers.

The following day, even more scientists arrive to conduct even more measurements. Bonny stands as tall and straight as a satinay that has been standing since well before the Last Time and the time before that. When the white men test the strength of his hands by telling him to squeeze tight an instrument designed to determine such things, he squeezes as hard as he can. He hands the instrument back to the scientists and tells them to do the same test, although they do not. Instead, they scribble their slithery marks into their books, as if they do not know how easily their pages might turn to smoke. This is what I see now.

When the doctor named Haeckel approaches, Bonny takes the small piece of wax he took from Virchow’s statue and presses it with all his strength between his finger and thumb while he stares into the man’s eyes. When the Doktor leaves, Bonny balls up the wax again and returns it to his pocket. For the next time?

To me, it seems that the piece of wax represents the flesh of all the white men here, a small piece of them that Bonny can press flat until it would be transparent if held up to the light.

I imagine him speaking of this to Little Bonny when he returns: ‘When someone treats you badly, you too could carry something with you like this, a piece of wax from the beehives, perhaps. Something flexible that you can shape. Press it flat and smile on the inside, knowing that you are so much stronger than they.’

The German women, I have noticed, think Bonny handsome and parade before him in their finery. He studies their ornate hats and long dresses with the hard bones that do not let them breathe and the big bustles that do not let them sit down and asks Jurano how a man could love that. Bonny and Jurano talk together about never having seen such women do any work.

Bonny tells Beeral, ‘They walk around in front of me so that I may see them. Are they wanting me to choose?’ He laughs.

Sometimes the women touch him too much. I suppose it is because

he is so much stronger than their own men, and handsome. When that happens, Bonny again puts his hand into his pocket, and I picture him pressing the ball of wax until it is barely there at all.