Paris Savages

Hilda held Bonny’s naked forearm steady as the plaster-soaked bandage was pressed tight around his bicep, turning his dark skin alabaster. Her hands in their white silk gloves looked ridiculous against him, she thought. She tried to meet his eyes, to silently reassure him, for he seemed uncharacteristically nervous.

‘It is already half done,’ she said. ‘Remember the impressions we made of our hands and feet on K’gari?’

Hilda could feel her father’s gaze, the weight of expectation, but she didn’t turn towards him. Today it was only Bonny to whom she owed her loyalty.

‘I promise it will be alright, Bonny,’ she said. ‘After the cast is done, we will make sure the Queen receives a copy.’ Bonny was still not looking at her.

Soaked in gypsum plaster, the cloth dressings were transforming him into the strangest of beings: part black, part the whitest white. A technician from the Lyon museum had begun the process several hours before, starting at Bonny’s feet. Moulds had been made of Bonny’s legs up to his hips. They had been done in two halves, front and back. Hilda had not been present for any of that because Bonny had needed to be naked from the waist down so that his loins could also be imprinted on the plaster. ‘You can come in,’ her father had instructed when those first moulds had been removed. Bonny was in cut-off trousers, but otherwise bare of clothing. ‘He is being difficult. Says he wants to move around, but we must continue,’ Louis said. He smiled at Hilda quite desperately.

Now, the plaster shells were lying separately in the sun, facing the window, as if Bonny had been dismembered.

Hilda watched as the plaster-soaked bandages were placed along the topside of her friend’s arm. Bonny’s chest, head and shoulders were still bare of dressings and Hilda thought of the many people who would look upon his handsome form for years to come.

Bonny did not look pleased, but Hilda told herself that the cast-making was for a good cause. To educate people here about the Badtjala, just as her mother had wished. And the measuring, the shows, they were all nearly over.

The technician paused to stir the bucket of plaster, and Hilda’s eyes skimmed the vast square room, normally reserved for taxidermy. She imagined giraffe and elephant here, their dead bodies stuffed and arranged. Against the rear wall, a specimen cabinet was draped with a dust cloth. A wooden table had been positioned in the centre of the room for the technician’s tools and the bucket of plaster. On a separate round table was a pitcher of water and several glasses for the small audience. Bonny bent his arm slightly and straightened it.

‘Just do whatever you need to keep him still, please,’ Louis said, leaning close to Hilda and whispering in German.

‘After this,’ she told Bonny, also in German, so that all the men in the room would hear her, ‘no one will ever measure you again.’

She was relieved that the comment saw Bonny grow calmer, more acquiescent – important considerations for the making of a full body cast, yes, but also a sign that he had not given up all faith in her. It had been her idea to hold Bonny’s arm, and her father hadn’t protested. She let it go only briefly to make way for the falling tide of plaster. Hilda was alarmed to feel the weight of the mould. She had not anticipated this and felt foolish for not having considered it. Was there no other way? The taut muscles in Bonny’s arm twitched. Hilda studied, once again, the rows of ceremonial scars on Bonny’s chest and told herself he had endured worse than this.

‘Tell him to hold his hand like so,’ a visiting doctor from Paris’s Musée d’Ethnographie said, slowly and with hand gestures in case she didn’t understand. He held his hand so that the tips of his fingers and thumb almost met. ‘So we can fit a boomerang. And tell him to stand strong. Angry. His arm up, like this.’ He demonstrated, unconvincingly given his short stature. ‘Like a real savage.’

Hilda glared at her father. There was no point arguing. She turned again to Bonny. Despite losing weight in recent months, he still cut an impressive figure – a head taller than the ten invited anthropologists and doctors of medicine in attendance, and more muscular. The audience failed to fill the large room. Four Germans sat bunched along two wooden benches, and six Frenchmen stood in knee-length black jackets, silk scarves tied under raised chins. The museum’s director was due back late in the evening from a journey to Paris; by then, the moulds would be finished.

Bonny was spotlit in the long rectangle of sunshine cast by a single window with a view over the Parc de la Tête d’Or’s Jardin Zoologique. It was late afternoon. In the park just yesterday, Bonny had thrown a boomerang many times for a military man who specialised in ballistics and who wrote in today’s newspaper that he planned to design a new bullet based on what he had learned of the boomerang’s flight. He had commented that it seemed unfathomable that a man, ‘barely more than an ape’, had been able to make the carved piece of wood fly when no one else in the crowd had managed to do so, apart from one Englishman, although his efforts too had paled beside the Aborigine. The newspaper piece concluded with a quote from the army scientist:

I am still working through my calculations for how such a flight is possible, but I am certain that the theories that arise will soon be of benefit to the French military. I look forward to the day when the enemy will be surprised by bullets that are fired from men in front of them yet strike them in their backs.

Hilda’s father had seated himself once again in the front row, perched slightly forwards and apart from the other men, his clasped hands covering a missing vest button. Hilda watched as he drew out the fob watch that was squeezed inside his waistcoat pocket and tapped its face with his fingernail. It was the third time in less than half an hour he’d done so. He frowned and ran a gloved hand through his rapidly greying hair and quickly affected a smile for the men around him.

Bonny, however, seemed oblivious of his audience. He stared straight ahead, through the long window, to where a great elm stood. His eyes traced the bones of the branches. The sky behind the tree was a deep blood red from a volcanic eruption on the island of Krakatoa on the twenty-seventh of August, just three days ago. It struck Hilda as incredible that the sky in France could be coloured by an event in the western Pacific. The newspapers reported that, in the aftermath, vast waves had rolled through the Pacific killing thousands, and enormous pieces of pumice were washing up on distant beaches, some containing the skeletal remains of animals and even people. She looked at Bonny within his own layer of stone.

‘Bonny,’ she said in Badtjala, ‘I will come with you to England without Papa if he delays again.’

Where did he get his strength from when promise after promise had been broken? All week, despite Manouvrier’s protestations, he had not just thrown boomerangs in the grounds of the zoological gardens but had again scaled a climbing pole erected for him. Another pole had been raised at the Place Perrache, pinched between Lyon’s converging rivers, the Rhône and the Saône, for the Sunday show. How many people had seen him since their time in Europe? Tens of thousands certainly. Perhaps more.

Bonny confided in Hilda just this morning that perhaps the people who paid to see him perform hoped he would fall from the slippery pole, so different to the giant hoop pines that grew straight out of sand on his island home. Perhaps these fine Europeans in their heavy, layered clothes wanted him split open, as this mould would later be.

Wet plaster splashed onto Hilda’s glove, seeping through the lace decoration and onto the back of her hand. Within minutes her skin became warm. She took the glove’s fingertips between her teeth and started to peel off the garment.

‘No, Hilda, bitte,’ her father instructed, appealing for modesty. Her skin felt tight now where the plaster was, as if her father’s hand were holding firm the glove. She listened to him arguing the limitations of phrenology with the German doctor, Haeckel, who had been invited to assist with the casting process, something he apparently had experience in. Her father’s continued engagement with such a man appalled Hilda, and she looked back at Bonny, concerned to see sweat building on his brow. He coughed, and the pipe smoke and plaster dust choking the air swirled. As the scientists moved about the room, the smoke and dust rose towards the buttressed ceiling like campfire smoke in a forest.

Without uttering a word to Bonny, Haeckel placed a stethoscope against the young man’s chest. He then dragged across a low footstool and stood upon it before reaching up and taking hold of Bonny’s chin. Haeckel covered his own mouth with his sleeve and forced Bonny’s lower jaw down, so he could look inside his mouth as one may examine a horse.

‘Doctor!’ Hilda snapped. But her voice was silenced by Bonny’s shout.

‘Go away!’ he roared in German, raising his half-plastered arm.

‘Be still,’ the doctor demanded. ‘You’ll damage the mould!’

‘I think it is better if you stay seated, mein Herr,’ Louis said, waiting for the doctor to do as he had asked. ‘It is better for us all if this procedure is without event.’

‘Can we rest for a moment?’ Hilda asked the technician in French. ‘It’s getting very heavy. And my hand … It must be difficult for Bonny. Isn’t there something we can lean his arms on?’

‘Here,’ one of the younger French scientists said, hauling towards them a coat rack and a chair. He took the weight of Bonny’s arm and rested it on the rack, then arranged the other under Bonny’s left arm, which was also now being plastered. The left arm was positioned mostly against Bonny’s body, but raised and bent at the elbow. The technician rested it carefully on the back of the chair.

‘Merci.’ Hilda shook her own arms with relief and scratched at the back of her hand where the plaster was drying. ‘I’ll get some cushioning.’

‘I should have thought to suspend some slings,’ the technician said, looking at the ceiling.

Hilda went to the cabinet behind them and removed two dust cloths to use as padding over the rack and the chair. One of the covers caught on a drawer handle, revealing a tidy but cramped collection of bones, each bearing a paper label tied with a piece of string. Hilda caught sight of the repeated word: Tibia. Each tag was a crammed collection of words and numbers. Dates. As she closed the drawer she read on one d’Indien d’Amérique. The hairs rose along her forearms. How many bones were kept here? How many people? She carefully folded the cotton sheets into two thick wads and slid them under Bonny’s arms.

‘How much longer before you are finished and it is all dry?’ she asked the technician, trying to shut out the image of the tibias lined up like a white picket fence in the colony of Queensland. She scratched at the back of her hand.

‘The best part of the evening,’ the technician answered plainly. ‘Normally we would do it in more sections, but given the time, and the size of the cast … It’s my first attempt at the whole body.’

Hilda turned to her father and spoke to him quickly in German. ‘You never said it would take so long.’

Bonny read her distress and asked what was being spoken about. At Hilda’s answer, he winced and looked down. He spoke again in Badtjala, but his voice was strained.

‘Where,’ she asked. ‘Where is it hurting?’

‘My skin.’

Hilda tore off her glove and saw that her own skin had grown red. She showed her hand to her father.

‘The plaster burns,’ she said, her voice wavering. ‘I thought it was just me.’ She turned to the technician. ‘Take it off him,’ she ordered in French. She pointed at Bonny’s arms.

Her father moistened a handkerchief with water from the glass pitcher and reached out for his daughter’s hand.

‘I am fine!’ she said, withdrawing her fist. She turned to the technician, who appeared to be awaiting instruction from the Parisian doctor.

‘Help him!’ she cried, again in French, stepping closer to Bonny and easing her finger between the plaster and his skin. It was uncomfortably hot. Hilda’s eyes fell on a handsaw amongst the technician’s kit.

The doctor from Paris deferred to Haeckel.

‘It’s normal,’ Haeckel intervened, pulling Hilda’s hand away from Bonny. ‘Plaster releases heat as it sets. It’s an exothermic reaction.’ He laboured the word exothermic as if giving a lecture to a struggling student. ‘I have done many of these.’

‘You knew?’ She looked at the German doctor and then at her father. The plaster they had used on K’gari had felt warm against her skin, but not hot.

‘It can irritate …’ her father said. ‘It won’t be serious.’

Hilda looked at Bonny’s bare legs and saw that the skin there was irritated.

‘Do your legs hurt, too?’ she asked.

‘No. But my arms …’

‘Enough,’ Hilda said in German. ‘Take it all off!’ she shouted at the technician. She could not look at her father. He knew, she thought again, trying to make sense of the betrayal. Blood rushed to her face. ‘Now!’

Haeckel, taken aback by the vehemence of her reaction, laughed.

‘It didn’t hurt like this before,’ Bonny said, also in German, eyeing Haeckel.

‘You mean on your legs?’ Hilda asked. ‘Or on K’gari?’

‘No. In Dresden,’ Bonny said, looking at her now. ‘Half my body was covered. Dorondera and Jurano also. Dorondera hated it.’

Hilda knew it immediately to be true. It explained the sudden change that came over her friends in Dresden. She glared at her father. No wonder he had sent her away to Leipzig. It wasn’t for Clara’s recital at all; it was so she did not witness something horrid that he knew she would object to. She thought of Dorondera enduring this, stripping naked and being covered with wet plaster. Her father pinched the bridge of his nose.

‘Perhaps you should leave now, Hilda. We must persist,’ he said.

‘But you’re hurting him!’ She met her father’s eyes, her legs weak as if she were ill. ‘How could you?’

‘He will be fine,’ her father said. ‘Look. His legs aren’t burnt! The slightest irritation only.’

Hilda looked at the technician, switching again to French. ‘And you intend to cover his face also?’

‘Oui.’

She worried about the delicate skin on Bonny’s lips and eyelids. She addressed the doctor Haeckel. ‘How will you be sure he can even breathe? He could suffocate!’ She had trusted these men when she shouldn’t have. She thought of Old Jack pulling Little Bonny’s face back from the dish of plaster.

Haeckel walked across the room to a small wooden box, which he opened theatrically as a magician might. He carried the box to Hilda and showed her two metal tubes.

‘These will be placed into his nostrils,’ he said. Hilda was horrified.

‘If there’s a problem, we’ll stop,’ her father added. He stepped towards Hilda and rested his hand on the middle of her back, but she pushed his hand away.

‘The breathing can be faint,’ Haeckel conceded. ‘And we won’t be able to see his chest move. But, as I say, I have done casts of the head many times …’

‘So he could suffocate? He could die?’ she asked.

‘I’m sure the worst is over, Hilda,’ her father said.

‘Is there a problem?’ the doctor from the museum in Paris interjected. ‘You keep speaking in German. Can I remind you, Monsieur Müller, I’ve paid for a copy of this cast?’ Several other audience members said that they had also ordered copies.

Louis shook his head. ‘There is no problem.’

Hilda met Bonny’s eyes again.

‘I’m sorry,’ she said in his language. It sickened her how many times she had already apologised, and she blamed her father for again keeping her in the dark. She glowered at Louis before resting her hand on Bonny’s shoulder, then reached with her free hand for a glass of water, which she held to his dry lips.

‘I do this for my nephew,’ Bonny said, managing a small smile, but she could tell he was in discomfort. ‘He will laugh when I tell him this story.’ His eyes went to his plastered arms. ‘They are turning me into a monster.’

‘Hilda …’ Her father extended his arm to the door. ‘Bitte …’

‘I am staying.’ She thought of Little Bonny looking out to sea from K’gari’s white sand beaches, awaiting his brave uncle’s return. She pictured him clutching the plaster impression of Bonny’s hand.

‘These men do not care about me,’ Bonny told Hilda in Badtjala. ‘They think if they make a copy, this shell,’ he said, looking at the moulds drying by the window, ‘that they will know me. They will not. Tell them I want two more pieces of bread each day and meat every night.’ His voice was steady. ‘Dessert.’ He looked at Louis. ‘And after this, you must take me immediately back to see the Queen.’

‘Yes,’ Hilda said. ‘One day, I hope you will forget all of this,’ she added in Badtjala.

Forget was a word Bonny taught her only recently. He had done so by drawing pictures of tall eucalypts, banksias and the grasses with black spears growing up through the middle. He drew kangaroos and fish, lakes and the sea. He drew fires and people – his extended family – who Hilda knew so well. Then he dipped his finger into the ink well and smudged it all out.