Paris Savages

Hilda started her search in the park. In her haste, she slipped and fell, muddying her skirt and boots. She asked the attendants at the neighbouring zoo if they had seen Bonny, the Aborigène who used to climb the tall pole and who sometimes wore a beret. They said they hadn’t. Not since the performances.

‘Try the hotel on the Saône side of the Cours du Midi,’ one of them called, pointing south and regarding Hilda’s dirty clothes curiously. ‘It has been known to welcome strangers. There’s a caravan of Samoyeds stationed nearby at the Place Perrache or sometimes down by the river. I think they’re due to start another round of shows somewhere else in the city.’

‘On foot?’ The younger attendant repeated. He looked at Hilda’s shoes and shook his head. ‘An hour? It’s near the confluence of the rivers. You know the place?’

Hilda went as quickly as she could, passing smiling couples promenading arm in arm under autumn trees. The staff at the hotel had not seen Bonny and seemed irritated by Hilda’s many questions. They, too, eyed her dishevelled hair, her muddied boots and skirt. They ignored her request for water and would not allow her to use their bathroom, instead giving their attention to a Parisian couple seeking accommodation for themselves and their two small dogs. Lightheaded, Hilda continued her search. Panic sped her heart. At the nearby square, she located the caravan of Samoyeds, who were dissassembling their tents in readiness to depart, the crowds still thick about the group and their reindeer. Children tried to feed crepes into the animals’ steaming, soft mouths. Hilda started for the group, looking though gaps in the crowd for any sign of Bonny. She tried to push through to the front but was shouted at by a French woman for dirtying her white coat with mud.

‘Bonny,’ Hilda called, hoping he might hear her if he were there, but there was no reply. She climbed the steps of a nearby statue featuring Napoleon on horseback but could not see her friend.

‘Get off that!’ shouted a woman the age Hilda’s mother would have been if she were alive.

Hilda climbed down. She had had enough of audiences and knew that, even if she made it to the front, to the red-cheeked Samoyeds, she lacked the language necessary to establish if they had seen Bonny, and, if so, where.

Where would he go in just his trousers and shirtsleeves, no warm jacket, and without money? Hilda leaned her weight against a great elm and looked up into its branches and the sky beyond.

‘Can you see me, Beeral?’ she wept. ‘Can you help, or do you hate me, too?’ She spoke the words in Badtjala and didn’t care who heard or stared. She longed for the expanse of K’gari’s beaches and the scouring sea wind, which she had shouted into unobserved after her mother’s death until she had no voice left and no thoughts at all. If she didn’t find Bonny, where would she go? Might Bonny have returned to the hotel where her father was staying? No. She dismissed the thought. She would not go there either and vowed to Beeral to never speak with her father again, to turn from him if she saw him in the street. Clara’s family back in Germany had as good as disowned her. If only Christel’s parents were alive. Hilda thought of Dorondera and Eric Perouse but could not face them after what had happened to Jurano. She held herself, watching small birds dart overhead. She thought of the Dutchman, Hans, but did not have his address.

She started out again for the park and the attendant who had sent her in the direction of the hotel.

‘I am sorry to bother you again,’ she said, ‘but I have lost him.’ The attendant looked at her, his expression communicating his thoughts: What more can I do? What was she to him, after all? A young foreign woman. The daughter of a showman, for that was surely what her father was. A greedy showman who had fooled them all. Hilda brushed her glove across her eyes.

‘And I have no funds,’ she said, looking now at her feet and thinking that her boots would soon need replacing. ‘I’ve fought with my father and I have nowhere to go.’

The attendant’s expression softened. ‘You have no other family here? They are all in Germany, I suppose.’

The man studied her and finally took a wad of tickets from his shoulder satchel and turned one over. On it he wrote an address.

‘My sister’s house,’ he said. ‘She is very kind.’ He drew a basic map and took from his pocket some money, which he gave to her. ‘For a tram … and new shoes.’

‘My sister is always looking for helpers,’ the man said. ‘Can you paint?’ ‘Paint?’

She followed the map west, crossing first the Rhône, then the Saône. The address the park attendant had given her was in the old part of the city, which she had first seen from the carriage window, Bonny beside her on the bench seat, the airy silk scarf that she had bought for Dorondera floating in the air between them. She had still not given Dorondera that scarf and now never would. Any gift would look like an attempt to buy back friendship. Hilda looked at the piece of paper in her hand, checking it again as she stood in front of a deep red–coloured building. A sign outside advertised marionettes, and several of the hand-painted puppets hung on a stand by the door. Hilda knocked, and a gentle-faced woman appeared, a young boy of about ten years old at her side. With paint-speckled hands he showed her a puppet, which he made dance and run. The puppet’s hands moved quickly back and forth at its sides.

‘Your brother sent me,’ Hilda told the woman. ‘I’m sorry. It’s a very strange story. He said that perhaps I might stay with you.’

The woman led Hilda to a table and chair, and the young boy followed. The boy stood beside Hilda and sat the puppet on her knee, then, seeing she was upset, leaned it forwards to kiss her. Hilda started to cry.

‘You are hungry,’ the woman said, a statement not a question. Hilda wondered what she must look like, her hair largely unfastened, her muddy clothes. She smelled of sweat. The woman left the small room for what Hilda assumed was the kitchen, and Hilda looked about her, trying to still her mind and anchor herself. The table was strewn with puppets in various stages of completion. Arms and legs lay separate to bodies. There were blank-faced heads, sitting apart from their necks. Hilda thought of the casts of her friends. How many copies had been made? Would that soon be all that was left of Bonny? That and the written accounts by the doctors and scientists who had studied him? The sensationalised newspaper articles? What accounts did Christel record in her journal? Had the book ever been taken out of the crate of artefacts, or had it also travelled to the bone collector in Hamburg? No, worse, given to Haeckel? The thought was horrifying, as if Christel, too, had been robbed.

‘Here you are,’ the puppet maker said, putting a meal of cold sausage and potato in front of Hilda. ‘Tell me what has brought you here.’

Hilda told her the story, as best she could. She explained who Bonny was, where he had come from, why he had come here and that he was now missing. She said that he had hoped to meet the English Queen to plead the case for his people, but that she herself and her father had failed him. She told the puppet maker that Jurano had died and that Dorondera had married, so Bonny was now alone. Speaking it aloud like this, it was, indeed, a strange, sad story.

‘It must have been very painful for him,’ the woman said, listening to the account with an open mind and a warm heart. ‘Losing his friends and not achieving what he came for.’

‘Yes,’ Hilda agreed. ‘I think it was.’ She looked the woman in the eye. ‘I loved him.’ It was a relief to finally tell someone, even a stranger.

‘He knew,’ she said and smiled. ‘People always know. Rest for a while.’ The puppet maker showed Hilda to a small side room with a bed. She pulled back the blankets, and Hilda thought of her mother.

For hours, Hilda walked the streets and bridges of Lyon looking for Bonny and asking people if they had seen him. She stood on a bridge overlooking the Rhône. For a long time, she stared into the water.

‘Why don’t you make a puppet of him?’ the woman asked when Hilda returned to the house late in the afternoon. She handed Hilda a blank-faced male doll and a set of paints. She passed across a box of dyed silk squares for clothing and coloured thread. ‘To show people what he looks like. It might help them remember.’

Hilda thought the idea ridiculous but took the puppet. She began to darken the skin, the pupils. She drew scars on its chest and used small curls of dark thread for hair.

The boy’s mouth opened in awe.

Hilda shook her head and put down the puppet. ‘It doesn’t look a thing like him,’ she said. She gave the puppet to the boy and looked at her host. ‘I’m sorry. I’ve ruined that one.’

‘Not at all,’ the woman said, pointing at her young son.

The boy made faces at the toy in his hand and raised its arms fiercely.

Hilda searched all the next day, returning late to the puppet maker’s house, where the young boy greeted her with news. He said that his uncle had heard from another park attendant that there had been a dark-skinned man who had come to the zoo with the reindeer people, the ones who had been camped at the Place Perrache.

Hilda looked to the boy’s mother, who nodded.

‘They went to the park looking for work, but the director turned them away,’ the woman said. ‘The park attendant told my brother that he had not seen them since and that he thought they were planning to leave the city.’

Hilda kissed the boy and his mother and thanked them both, snatching her shawl as she rushed from the house. She ran for a tram back to the Place Perrache, but all that remained of the Samoyed camp was a patch of coals from their fire.

She caught another tram back to the zoo, where the attendant who had seen Bonny told her what he could.

‘I thought he was one of them at first, although darker skinned,’ the man said. ‘From the way he was dressed, in their furs and things …’ He looked at her shoes. She still had not purchased new ones.

‘Do you have some paper, perhaps a small book?’ Hilda asked the puppet maker. ‘I have lost my journal, and I feel the need to write. It is a habit. I had a journal my father gave me, but I think I will begin a new story.’ She looked at the puppet maker’s son. ‘There is a boy your age back on K’gari. Bonny’s nephew. I want him to know something of his brave uncle’s time here.’

The boy nodded, and Hilda started to cry again.

‘One day I will take the story to him,’ Hilda said.

14 October 1883

So, Little Bonny, I will start at the end and then perhaps go back to the beginning to tell you of your brave uncle’s travels here.

I have heard that your uncle is performing again. He is a fine actor, like the chameleons he saw at the zoo, strange lizards that change their colour to suit their surrounds, camouflaging themselves so they cannot be found.

He is with a group of other travellers. I think perhaps he feels at home with this group from the far north, although it is a place the polar opposite of K’gari. Can you imagine your uncle with reindeer and tents of skin? It is difficult for me, too. Perhaps I saw him at their camp. There was a tall man who looked up from the fire when I was searching for your uncle, and his face was dark, but he was in the shadows, and when he saw me he quickly looked away. It had not occurred to me that he was Bonny.

Your uncle tried everything he could to earn money to see the Queen to plead your case and that of all the people of K’gari, but we, I am sorry to say, failed him. Don’t give up, Little Bonny. That was something your uncle wanted you to learn. Never give up. I suspect he is earning money with the Samoyeds so that he might find his own way to the Queen, and then he will return home to you. Can you hear him calling? Whispering to his Jun Jaree?

I just remembered something important, Little Bonny. When I first looked for your uncle at the Samoyed’s camp, I saw a clothes line that had been strung up in the trees behind their tents. On it was a torn white shirt. I think that was your uncle’s shirt, although not actually his. He took a shirt by mistake from a scientist we met here. It would not have fitted him, because your uncle was tall and strong and many of the men here are not. It pains me to realise it, but I was so close to him, and now he is gone. I do not think he wanted to be found.

Is my mother’s wire clothes line hanging still on K’gari? I can see it in my mind’s eye, my white dress alongside my mother’s and father’s clothing, all dancing in my memory. They are like ghosts now, those shirts and dresses. Empty white man’s clothes staking their claim to souls that weren’t ours to save.

How very foolish we have been. How monstrous. Can you forgive me? This was not the way. My mother would not have given her blessing to what we have done.

I never had the chance to read Mama’s diary but wonder, sometimes, if Mama had been able to see these last eighteen months in ways that I was not, what story might she have told. What stories would the other ghosts describe, for I hear their whisperings, too, whether I want to or not, and know they will continue to play on in my ears just as surely as the ocean wind will forever blow in on the beaches of K’gari.