Stories/Essays

The greengrocer’s son

He came out of brief stops at the intersection when the car engine idled and there was a moment to stare at the hovel house out the window. Crates, string, pieces of cardboard filled the narrow gap between the fence and house wall. Hoarders, they seemed to have built half the house out of those odds and ends. I don’t remember who answered when I asked why the greengrocer lived in such a beggarly place, my mother at the wheel, or my father beside her. Maybe the answer only came after I got to know the girl across the road, and it was her or her mother who told me that the greengrocer and his wife weren’t paupers really, but put all their money into their children’s education.

I don’t know how many children they had. I never saw them, but there’d be a son at least. The Chinese always wanted a son. He grew solid in my thoughts and troubled me because I wasn’t convinced he could be guaranteed to grow up diligent, obedient, and sufficiently clever to achieve the academic success of which his parents dreamed.

And what if he was a rebel? True, the Chinese had a long culture of filial obedience and did their parents’ bidding even with stifled, grumbling heart. But that was in China, not in Wellington, where the wind could snatch from shallow furrows the seeds of custom and tradition people tried to plant there. Just being Chinese wasn’t always enough.

The greengrocer and his wife had imagination. Beyond the tomato red, leafy greens and celery stalks they saw the brick hues of hallowed halls, rolling lawns and rising spires of places like Oxford and Cambridge, maybe Yale or Harvard, somewhere venerable, expensive and famous anyway. But maybe the greengrocer’s son just wanted a bit of sky in the window.

In the old China windows were covered, made of paper not glass, let in softened light but kept forms and colours out. Like in the old China, the boy sat amongst his books amidst the shadows, sounds of passing cars, trolleybuses, planes, seagulls in between it all. If it were really the old China, he could have poked a small hole in the window paper’s jailing layer, made himself a tiny escape and become a long daydreaming strand of thread going through the needle’s eye. But here was just a Wellington corner house and shop, crates and cardboard, dirt and dust hid everything away.

The greengrocer had competition from the Indians with their dairy across the road. They ran different businesses, but their assortments overlapped in places. The greengrocer liked to define his goods. Meticulous, he fixed cardboard strips to everything. ‘Crisp and fresh’, ‘crisp and tasty’, were his invariable descriptions. Maybe the Chinese liked things crisp, even bottles of fizzy drink that looked as though they’d been sitting on the shelves for years, gathering dust, labels fading in the shafts of light coming through the open door.

The Indians across the road often had their attention on the little TV in the room just behind the shop. They watched cricket matches there, kept an eye on the counter and the customers. They had several kids. You’d see them sometimes helping out in the shop. The greengrocer’s son would hear their voices at moments when they escaped into the street with calls and games. If he were the dairy owner’s son he’d have ordinary windows with sky, trees, and other people’s windows beyond, he’d join a school cricket team, and eventually going to a local university would suffice to make his parents proud.

The shop sounds were muffled. The greengrocer ran a quiet place, didn’t watch cricket in the room beyond the counter. He’d appear silent, polite small smile on his face, weigh the fruit and vegetables and put them in brown paper bags. His wife was the same. Somewhere in the depths behind, clocks ticked and the books grew heavy. Stale, faded, musty, no matter what the diligent parents wrote on cardboard strips and what their eyes saw behind all the skimping, crate-hoarding, trimmed-down life they lived. It was hard to sit tied down by homework in the cluttered dimness. The boy wilted, not crisp like the produce on display, closed his eyes.

Barely a minute’s run down the road and there was the sea, long stretch of shining sand, surfers chasing the waves. Across the bay the planes copied the seagulls’ coming and going, but straight and purposeful, in and out of the airport. Ferries passed, left the harbour and set off across Cook Strait. Other ships headed for the open ocean and disappeared from view.

The boy’s stowaway thoughts followed the ships. The clocks were just the wall-mounted kind, plastic and had no mystery in their tick. Clocks with pendulums were better, simple swinging movement that grabbed the gaze. The departing ships were heading back to Asia. The ancestors had all come from around the southern Chinese coast. Little towns a bit like the pendulum clocks, they emptied out and somehow filled up again with new supplies of people to go roaming and trading. Thus it had been for centuries. The ancestors spread out to Singapore, Java, the Philippines, scattered themselves across all the archipelagos, took root in the towns, put out new shoots that spread further still in a big vine tangle across the splotches on the map.

All the way back to the old China, the one kids might ask about now and then at school, saying, “do you speak Chinese?” And what was it to speak ‘Chinese’? They didn’t guess a little town might have its own way of speaking that no one else would really understand. It made the little town almost a whole country in its own right, with its food, language and all, its people gone off across the seas, washed up on all these other shores.

Washed up in this southern bay, the boy’s parents came to rest in a quiet suburban street with a bus stop, corner shops, and the sea smell close. Over the hill lay the city centre and the harbour where cranes were busy hoisting all those containers off the ships and loading them up again. Then came more hills until the land flattened out between the ranges and that was where the market gardeners were bent over their vegetable rows. They were mostly Chinese, so it was only natural that the greengrocers would be too, continuing the production chain.

The boy was lucky. Others would bend over the carrots and lettuce heads. He only had to bend over books. His parents in the shop all day filled bags and placed them in the customers’ hands. He only had to fill himself on facts and pages swallowed.

Schoolbooks mentioned Greeks, the ancient kind, philosophers and so on, Socrates drinking hemlock, Athens and democracy. Further along the bay there was a Greek fish and chip shop. The books never suggested why Greeks might often run fish and chip shops. In Wellington they did, them and the Italians, and the Chinese of course, fried up British tradition along with the wontons and what not.

The Maoris made the whole North Island a gigantic fish hauled from the sea. Just a legend, though small on the map it did look rather like a fish. And it still flapped and fought, tried to flick the people from it with gales and earthquakes. But the people were too tenacious to give up so easily, rode the fish and settled on its scales. Like the greengrocer and his wife in their hovel house, walls shook when the storms rose and the wind would snatch the sand from the beach and toss it stinging into passing eyes, stopped the gulls in mid-flight and made the planes circle overhead, manoeuvring a safe landing on the short runway strip between harbour and sea.

The Chinese had a ton of legends too. They were full of dutiful, filial spirit. A girl’s father got condemned to painful death, but she went to the emperor and begged him to allow her to receive the punishment in her father’s place. And the emperor was moved of course, not only freed the hapless father but realised the cruelty of his laws. Then there was the boy whose mother fell ill. Too poor to buy the nourishing things she needed, so the boy cut from his thigh a piece of his own flesh and made it into soup for her ailing lips to sip. Naturally, the son’s sacrifice saved her life.

The greengrocer and his wife kept only misty outlines of those tales. They had a pot of soup of their own, big vat full of vague lumps and random things collected over the generations and stirred together. Everyone knew its general taste, though not everyone could name the specific ingredients. Every little Chinese town once had a Confucius temple. It was the place where culture lived. You could go and bow to it, give it a small offering of respect, and otherwise be busy in the fields or preparing the boats for another journey.

The greengrocer and his wife didn’t need a boat. The ramshackle house sufficed as a patched-up vessel to carry them through the years. At the shop counter they journeyed, followed their son as he donned black robe and funny hat. Far across the world, his eyes wet with grateful tears at the memory of modest home and all his parents had poured into preparing his future and stamping it with excellence. Maybe he’d never come back, but it would be worth it if someday his was one of the names that shone in sudden global flare, won the Nobel Prize or became a Silicon Valley miracle or something. It did happen after all.

But maybe the boy never dreamed of Nobel Prizes. Reluctant fingers dropped the pen upon the paper. His hand knew the heavy feel of the cricket ball from school. They all had to play sports, no matter how much greater weight parents gave books on the scales of school time pursuits. That was the British tradition too. He could fling that reddened ball no worse than the dairy owner’s son, give it a solid whack with the bat. He hadn’t the build for rugby, but his agile feet would gladly kick a soccer ball. They all had their favourite British teams and it didn’t matter that they were on the other side of the world.

Or maybe his fingers wanted to play an electric guitar, or the drums, hair hanging down over his face, fingers gone into focused frenzy. He’d make enough cutting, pounding sound to drown out all the muffled, faded years and the plastic clock’s cheerless tick. And then it would be off to America to try to break into the big time, or Sydney at least for a start.

But that wasn’t the journey his parents had in mind. Where were the brick and ivy, the three exquisite letters and dot that earned one the right to be called ‘doctor’? In the old China they revered such titles. They revered titles in general, squeezed names out of sight beneath the finer labels that spoke one’s progression and achievement.

The boy didn’t care. He had a Chinese name at home and an ordinary one elsewhere, the one on the roll the teacher called each morning. The Chinese had a penchant for the more old-fashioned British names. Perhaps it went with that whole thing of looking back to the classics and the sages, or in this case, looking back to Victorians and the days of a haughty empire on which the sun never set.

There’d never been a shortage of empire-dreaming people from afar turning up along that southern Chinese coast. Portuguese, Dutch, later the British, greedy-fingered land-grabbing peoples with a love of planting flags and claiming places for distant sovereigns. The boy knew more about it all than his parents or their forebears who’d simply gone with the tides and currents and knew seasons and crops, that sort of thing.

He didn’t have drums or a guitar though, only the planes to put some roar into the air now and then, the bigger ones flying to Australia. That was about as far as they ever went from Wellington. You had to go to Auckland if you wanted to go further. His parents would bid him farewell there one day, sending him off on their dream.

The boy left his books behind. The dairy across the road was quiet, the ice cream sign shuddering a little in the wind. The bus stop was empty too. Surfers were out down towards the airport, in their wet suits, perched a while on their colourful boards and vanished in the foam. The boy headed that way.

A fence separated the runway from the road along the bays. Rocks were piled in steep wall at one end and signs warned people to keep off them for fear of jet blast. The plane to Australia would be leaving soon. The boy ignored the signs, went up onto the narrow path atop the rocks. The plane took its position on the runway and the boy lined himself on the rocks behind it. The engines roared. The signs didn’t lie. The blast knocked the boy backwards, forced him to fling himself forwards towards the path rather than the sea and sharp edges below. The blast kept trying to push him back and he made himself low, nearly clutching the ground as the plane sped off down the runway and lifted slowly into the sky.

All dusty and wind-rumpled the boy straightened up and went back down to the road. The warning signs seemed to laugh at him with an “I told you so” look. And the boy smiled back. He’d long wanted to go up there and try, ignore the warning, break the rules, see if the jet blast was really such a threat.

Back to the books and silence, and maybe that would be enough, smiling later at the thought of how he’d sneaked onto the rocks and tasted the jet blast from the plane to Sydney. Maybe that would be his tiny hole in the window, his little piece of sky he’d take out and contemplate when the dimness pressed too heavy. It would be enough to think of the surfers swallowed in the froth, the seagulls stopping and starting in the wind, and he dusty and shaken, slowly getting to his feet again, the plane a silver pinpoint about to vanish in the clouds.

I never knew if he went to Auckland and boarded a plane with even bigger engines and more powerful blast. Did he ever don the academic robes and earn his prestigious degree? I never saw him at all and only imagined him tasting the jet blast as I’d done myself up on that out-of-bounds bank. I saw only the greengrocer and his wife and their shop with its ‘crisp and fresh’ array, saw the curtained, covered windows, sat in the bus stop across the road and stared at the hovel house walls, the peeling fence and piles of crates.

The house still looked just as forlorn when I returned years later from long journeys of my own. Unchanged, as if the greengrocer never saw his dreams bear fruit, kept on setting out his produce piles and hopeful descriptions on the cardboard strips even when he’d long since withered and turned bitter and dry inside. I didn’t go in to see if it was the same couple running the business, maybe didn’t want to glimpse the black felt pen words stuck to things and see the same old fizzy drinks in a dusty row on the shelf. I was only passing through and would soon head across the bay to the airport and fly to Auckland, and from there leave it all behind.

Just a passing bus or grain of sand or random seagull, no reason for me to see them come out from the dimness, polite small smiles on their faces, ready to attend to the customer’s needs. I’d only feel the urge to ask them where the boy was, and was it worth it, the sacrifice and saving, and did he manage to sit still and be a filial son in the end? Or was he more like me, took his piece of sky and slipped away, silver pinpoint swallowed by the oceans and heavens, the separating gulf that wasn’t real distance but miles inside. Those inner miles, made me return to old roads in nostalgic recollection and then hesitate to lift my eyes. I’d not try to peer through the windows, picture the greengrocer’s son, pour myself into his thoughts whatever they were, wherever they were. I bought an ice cream from the Indians. They were still there, same ones, just older, none of their children in sight either.

The Manchurian Man      

The bell jingled on the door. First the cold wind entered, and then an old man. They went with the second-hand book I held in my hands. It was about the last tsar of Russia, who ended up in Siberia after the revolution toppled him from his throne. The old man looked the sort of person you might see in Siberia, hunched over as he slipped in from the street, his collar turned up against the chill. I could imagine him on a snow-heaped road, head bent and patient. He vanished into the back room, where the shop’s owner was pottering about amongst piles of junk.

I heard their talk begin. The rain squalls hitting the window panes made their voices faint. I closed the book about the tsar. I had no money to buy it and already knew the story, even if not in as much detail as what this author had spread across the pages of his solid tome. It was too dark to read now anyway. The sky turned low and grim and filled the shop with shadow. The owner didn’t care or didn’t notice, didn’t switch the lights on. He and the old man were dim figures in the murky room beyond. They leaned against the counter, chatting.

The book’s cover made a white frame around the portrait faces of the tsar and his wife. Nothing of particular depth or portent in their expressions, the tsar mild and peaceful, his wife a bit more focused, something earnest and searching in her look. She was a German. When the revolution came, Russia and Germany were still at war. All of Europe was at war. I wondered if she still dreamed in German at night, even if she spoke Russian all day long, and if she still saw the German places of her childhood.

“It’s very dark here. I’ll tell him to turn the lights on”

The old man stood behind me. I’d not heard him approach with the all the storm noise out the window, drumming rain and howls of wind rattling the signs in the street. He gave a nod towards the back room where the shop owner had vanished from sight. A faint glow came from a room even further back. The owner had turned the lights on there at least.

I shrugged at the old man’s suggestion, fingered the book’s cover. We didn’t need light. The shop was just the first door of temporary shelter before me when whipping rain came rushing through. I glimpsed the boxes of books through the window and entered. The rain wouldn’t last long. Minutes before it all looked so different. The wind cold and clean, made knife-like sudden gusts, but the sky was blue and shining. Then it tipped so that the golden colour ran away and the clouds poured in.

“You can’t see to read in this shadow”, the old man spoke again.

It seemed he just wanted to be helpful. I didn’t want to read. The old man’s gaze strayed to the book in my hand and stayed there, thoughtful.

“Are you interested in Russia?” he asked.

He had dark eyes that looked rather Asian in form, though the rest of his face was more the European type. It was easy to imagine things in the shadow. I was fifteen, interested, and all sorts of pictures rippled my thoughts. Those eyes could turn cruel. I saw him come out of the snow and icy winter, a gun in his hand as the war sputtered on. Choked-up crowds finally retched forth anger and revolution, saw a tyrant and not the mild face on the book’s cover. I pictured the man a guard perhaps, a patient soldier on the snow-heaped edges of secret places, witness to a fallen ruler led down into a basement, all the family in tow, shot, bayoneted to check they were properly dead.

Not snow he saw but the new spring blooms. It was 1918 and the forests turned green. In Europe they still fought across the continent, final killing seasons before the year rolled towards another winter and grey-faced men would put their signatures to a piece of paper ending it all. While in Russia they’d already negotiated their way out of the general fight so as to let the country go to war with itself instead. They left no tsar for the loyalists to raise as banner, went into the woods and dumped the bodies down abandoned mine shafts. I read books in well-lit libraries and knew my history lessons.

“It’s where I come from”.

The old man’s voice was quiet and casual, as if he was trying to measure the right dose of bait, not hook me into conversation, but cast a hopeful line that I’d perhaps take of my own accord. The shop owner still hadn’t reappeared in the back room. It didn’t seem to me that the old man came with purpose, more likely that the sudden change in weather caught him out too, and he knew the owner, figured he’d take the opportunity to wait out the rain and chat a few minutes.

It was better with the lights off. We had the bric-a-brac all around us, random surplus or relics of other people’s lives. Someone once bought and cherished those things. Someone once read the books in the boxes too. I wasn’t sure how much stuff the owner ever managed to sell. The shop was always there in my memory. My mother had sometimes gone in to take a look. She liked that kind of place, second-hand and junk shops. Most of the time the shop looked dark and empty.

The old man stayed in the shadows and I could see him clearer that way. He wasn’t really from Russia, his parents were, fled the revolution and civil war, settled in Harbin. Harbin was in Manchuria. The old man said there were a lot of Russians there then. I wondered what it looked like, half Russia, half China. The rain smeared the windows thick and blurred the buildings opposite. The buildings up this end of the street were plainer and wooden. Further down they turned stone and fancy, had ornament on their facades. The builders’ hands must have been trying to recreate a bit of the countries they still held fresh in their hearts. Maybe Harbin looked like that too, little Europe pebbles tossed into the distant East.

The old man kept talking, and I watched the street stripe beyond, smudged with a handful of people and lights. I was waiting for my friend. She’d gone off with her activist companions to some event nearby. They were older than she, socialists, talked of exploitation, revolution, that sort of thing. It didn’t sound like the old man’s words of course, people fleeing civil war and chaos. The skies’ sudden shift and bout of winter-gripped fury fitted the old man’s talk. Revolution seemed all the more cruel in a land with snow and frozen miles. I always felt the cold, and shivered in the shop at the thought of the fleeing Russians making their way to Harbin.

And Harbin itself was cold. The Japanese came, brought occupation then war. The old man spoke of how they fled again, made their way to Shanghai. From Shanghai they scattered across the world. Some ended up in South America, others got to the USA, Australia, and the old man kept going south until he came to a stop in Wellington.

His voice was quiet, plain, as if his words were ordinary fare and not the tale of a century that kicked people so unceremoniously from one place to another, hardly letting them settle and collect their strength before events burst in again. Here the land itself might mock us, the fault lines beneath the city always there to bring crashing down our sense of solid things. While over there in Russia, Harbin, Shanghai, people made themselves the fault lines, the howling wrenching wind and hurling waves. And others like the old man and his family became the odds and ends the waves tossed up and dragged away again, back out into the heaving sea.

Harbin probably had a shop like this one. The fleeing Russians must have brought their possessions with them, what they managed to transport at least. There’d have been families selling things off as times became tight. Someone would have collected it all and put it out on shelves for others to buy, filled back rooms with dusty, unsorted piles.

The old man’s eyes weren’t old. They were dark and lively, even in this dimness. I imagined Harbin’s imitation Europe street, like ours, fancier at one end, trailed off into dilapidation at the other. Down at the seedy end the bric-a-brac shop, like this one too, with a grey owner half gone into the shadows, didn’t turn the lights on, saved energy and there weren’t many customers anyway.

The Russians would have brought books with them. They had all those writers and poets after all, gave the world fat novels that sometimes got turned into movies. Doctor Zhivago, my mother liked that one, with Omar Sharif. Probably that was where my mind plucked pictures, revolution and snow-swept scenes. And the old man when young maybe came like me for a moment’s shelter, flicked through the books in boxes and browsed a bit, even if he had no money in his pocket.

He’d have had old men of his own, heard them chatting at the counter. And he’d not have guessed then where the years and journeys would take him. Maybe Shanghai seemed possible at least. Shanghai had all kinds of people jumbled through its international streets. But Wellington, he probably didn’t even know such a place existed back then.

Now he knew the shop owner and spoke English with scarcely any trace of foreign accent. The rain slowed and stopped and the street took on firmer form once more. The sky began to lift and the wind tugged and tore so that rifts of blue soon reappeared. I had to go down to the water buckets. My friend would meet me there. We had better statues, more than just those coloured buckets spilling water from one into the other, but they were a humble landmark everyone knew. The old man would have had his landmarks too, friends to meet, and probably some of them also got caught up in earnest slogan talk and urges to ‘do something’.

I put the book back with the others. The shop owner emerged once more and put on the lights. He’d need them now anyway because the afternoon was waning and though the sky was clearing fast the sun would soon head towards the hills. The old man tossed his friend a few casual farewell words and left. The bell jangled and then the shop was silent.

“We fled one war and then another”, his words echoed in my mind.

It was one thing to read it in books and another to hear it from his quiet voice, those dark eyes shining in the shadows. He was hunched again as if he felt the cold too, though surely in Harbin he’d learned to wear its steeling touch. They had real winters. We never even got snow, just this wind-stirred rawness. I saw him cross the street and vanish round the corner. The shop owner hardly looked my way at all, probably knew I’d not buy any of his stuff. All those objects too had stories seeped into their surfaces and parts, but they were silent. I’d already taken the most precious thing in the shop, and I got it for free. It wasn’t there anymore and I left too, headed towards town. The crowds grew denser and the lights brighter. My friend waited. I had pockets full of years and a strangely journeyed heart.

Speaking Turkish

They were really just local fishermen and their wives. A bit more dressed up than usual, stiffened in guest pose. My grandfather poured the drinks, sherry for the women and whisky for the men. The bottles stood arrayed on a small table with wheels, lots of exotic-looking things, liqueurs and spirits. And there was soda, ice in cubes, bowls with snacks, biscuits laid out on plates.

My grandmother was ‘holding court’. I once heard her say we were descended from Norwegian kings. “More likely Norwegian peasants”, we laughed behind her back. And my real grandfather, her first husband, was a British gentleman of the upper classes, she assured me. He was dead and I never knew him, so I couldn’t say for sure.

Holding court with the fishermen and their wives was as close as my grandmother would get to royal audiences. She made herself the queen and centrepiece of the room, ensconced on her throne while the rest of us formed a row to each side and my grandfather, not the British gentleman but her second husband, came and went, filling glasses and playing servant.

My grandmother knew quite a lot about fish. They could all talk about that together, the sea, the weather, the catch. My place was at the edge of the row. I was still enough of a kid to be expected to do the Victorian “be seen and not heard” thing, perch quietly on my chair and listen to the elders talk. But I was old enough to have my grandfather pour me something from the array of gleaming bottles.

The glass sparkled in the light. I turned it the way I’d seen wine connoisseurs on TV turn their goblets. The honey-coloured liquid changed hues with the light and motion. It was from Cuba, that’s what my grandfather said anyway. Cuba, Havana, cigars, sugarcane fields, I’d never seen sugarcane, or anyone actually smoking a cigar. We had a street in Wellington called Cuba Street. It was near my school and I wandered up and down it all the time and knew its every shop, though I had no idea what it had to do with Cuba.

Out the window you could see the two cabbage trees and the front lawn. Beyond the road the land dipped down to the mudflats. The tide was up now and made a wide swathe of blue water. I’d rather have been free to go and wander. The little town only had a few streets, but you could follow the coast road to empty miles of sand and sea, or clamber down onto the old railway bridge across the mud flats and walk the tracks, now half-swallowed by a weed and grass tangle. The old bridge was full of nesting ducks.

The guests talked fish, weather, repairs to boats and houses, and I was bored. I had Cuba inside me now, hot, tingling, spicy-sweet, made my head a bit light.

“I can speak Turkish”, I announced, made them all stop and stare.

“Oh, really?” one of the sherry-sipping ladies looked rather impressed. “That’s very exotic. Can you say something for us in Turkish?”

“Gobble-gobble-gobble”, I did a Turkey imitation and started laughing.

My grandmother was not amused, but didn’t let me ruin her ‘court’, just threw me a pursed-lipped look that was supposed to shove me back into silence. My grandfather refilled their glasses and they continued talking as before. I wasn’t entitled to a refill. They probably thought I’d try speaking the South African language with the clicking sounds next.

I thought of the signpost at Bluff. We drove there a couple of days before, part of my grandparents’ efforts to take me sightseeing. Bright yellow signs atop the post told you how far it was to London, Los Angeles or Sydney. Bluff was the end of the world really. The southernmost town on the South Island, there wasn’t much beyond that, just a lot of empty sea. Tourists came and posed by the signpost.

I didn’t know how far it was to Turkey. The signpost didn’t say. What did Turkish really sound like? I’d never heard it. Languages were like colours and rain, their sound streams making pictures and mood, but I had no idea of Turkish’s feel or hues.

Ottoman Empire, I knew that, bygone days of sultans, viziers, harems, Arabian Nights stories, or conquering Eastern hordes trying to capture Vienna. Like the sherry-sipping woman said, exotic. After that were World War One and Gallipoli. Gallipoli sounded more Italian than Turkish. I knew it was a beach somewhere. Anzac soldiers landed down below, Turkish troops up on the hills blocked their way forward. They all dug in and fought for a long, long time over the sands and slopes. The Turks held fast to their summits and won.

It made a lot of names for the war memorials all around New Zealand. There was one in my grandmother’s little town too. Every place had one, even the tiniest one-street names on the map. Maybe some past fisherman’s son left the talk of cod and southern storms here and found himself jumping out of a boat into shallow waters not so far from Istanbul.

They probably called it Constantinople then, with that colonial, olden-day tinge, got told they needed to capture the Dardanelle Straits and open the Bosporus, narrow bit of water where the ships could get through to the Black Sea and up to Russia.

I had little idea what all of that really looked like. There were other straits and channels here. Driftwood, kelp and shellfish lay strewn across the sands and only prickly tussock or gorse guarded the slopes. Up on top the trees grew bent and stunted in the winds roaring in.

The Turkish beaches maybe looked not so different, though war would have filled them with men and trenches, tents, equipment, people trying to cook, others tending the wounded, removing bodies, planning operations, getting supply lines, communications into place. Storms wouldn’t matter so much when guns were churning up the ground, and no one would notice strewn shellfish when men lay dead or bleeding.

Those Anzac soldiers must have heard Turkish anyway, even if only as ragged shouts carried down on gusts of wind. Maybe some of them got captured and heard it close and in a whole variety of tones. It maybe sounded daunting, harsh, barking orders, curt clipped syllables that maybe promised execution and maybe another snippet of life.

The thought stirred my imagination. I didn’t see the empty glass in my hands with its last shining drops of Cuban liqueur. I saw myself a captured soldier on the hills, the Turks coming and going, talking to each other. I’d sharpen my ears and pick out the patterns in the words, match them to contexts, wrap them quiet round my own tongue in practice and stock them up inside. I’d learn their water, sky, sun and rain, their wind, their guns and trenches, watchmen and scouts, their sea, their private small talk of women unseen, home, past, small lamp flame of future hopes.

I pictured them at night. The soldier from these southern coasts remembered fish smell, sea swell, puttering back up the long inlet and guiding the boat over the shifting sandbars to the jetties. With the Turkish guards he named the world anew with stumbling step, and for a moment they were just men and had more curiosity than anything.

Who knew if there weren’t seeds planted that way, a soldier landed on the beaches with orders to seize the slopes, the edge of an unknown country beyond, but it seized him instead and planted itself inside him, made him dig and delve and drink it up. He went on through the years a scholar of the Turks and knower of their lands. Sultans toppled, viziers and harems gone, like all across Europe, fallen monarchs and empires split apart. Ataturk proclaimed the republic, the same Ataturk who led the troops up on the hills, watched the stubborn Anzacs down below. Made for a kind of closeness, as if he was a little bit ‘our’ Ataturk, and we a little bit of his path and rise in life.

“We” – that was me imagining myself the captured soldier who drank the enemy’s words until they lost their harsh-tipped unfamiliarity and turned into ordinary things like beds, bowls, buckets, and do you have kids back home, a wife, mother and father waiting. He drank their songs, sighs, bits of memory and idle talk, all the layers pasted onto places that maybe he’d once encountered in distant schoolbooks. Troy, the cunning wooden horse, a lot of that ancient Greek stuff was right here on these shores. Byzantium, Constantinople the old name Europe didn’t want to cast aside. Like the liqueur bottles on display, it would mix a fragrant, dizzying brew.

Imagine putting all of that on the signpost at Bluff, all those layers of time, peoples and place. There was so much more than just the actual miles between countries and cities after all. He could have made his way back home eventually and stood at that southern point where maybe no signpost had been raised yet, thinking of the distance to Istanbul. He could have walked the beaches, alone with the seabirds, remembered Gallipoli as it sounded the way the Turks said it. And maybe it didn’t sound Italian at all the way the Turks said it. He could have watched the tide come in and cover the mudflats and let those ‘enemy’ words rise in his heart. To anyone who didn’t know where he’d been it would have seemed a curious thing.

But from the little bit I knew about those battles it seemed that very few ever did come home. Most of them stayed in Turkey, buried there, chance adopted sons of distant soil. Here they only left names on monuments. My glass was empty and the lightheaded warmth from the Cuban drink had worn off now.

The woman who’d said my knowing Turkish was exotic was talking now about hunting mutton birds. That was something you could only do if you were part of the local Maori tribe, and it was strictly controlled by the conservation people. Otherwise there might be no mutton birds left, like there were long since no moas.

I’d never seen a mutton bird. At least I’d seen the stuffed moa in the Wellington museum and therefore knew what a moa looked like even if the species was extinct. Hunting mutton birds, that was exotic. My glass still caught the light, small sparkles, repeated in the sun’s rays flitting between the cabbage trees and across the ripples on the water beyond. A motorboat skimmed by. My grandmother suggested it was time for tea and cake. None of us knew where swells and storms would really rise or fall, and where the flows would really take us. We couldn’t always choose our liqueur. Who thought they’d ever know Gallipoli. And who knew that one day I really would speak Turkish.

The Museum

We took the proper way up the steps. That way the view opened the full sternness of its carefully planned design. Pohutakawas made a dark green ribbon to each side. They’d lost their summer red and grew humbler, a framing line without the bright dabs to make them stand out against the rest. The building beyond swallowed them like it swallowed everything on the hill, great grey edifice that drew the gaze up to its columns and solemn façade.

I was used to coming from the other side. My old school was tucked around the back of the slope and we’d go to the museum all the time. It was free and right next door to us. If you came from the back you never really saw the pomp and grandeur, just the high grey walls. The buses waited there after school, but all packed tight together inside you could never snatch the proper view going down the hill. You had to do like I was doing now, start at the bottom and walk up the flights of concrete steps.

I stole a glance at the travel writer. He seemed more interested in the pohutakawas. I’d thought for a moment the stern perspective might impress him as it had always impressed me, the steps, the war memorial’s tall tower, and the museum building making a monumental line of stone up the slope, up to the sky, and spreading on the summit.

Things like these he’d seen before of course. He was from Europe after all. They had more than enough war memorials and columned buildings, whereas the pohutakawas were something he’d never seen before.

The museum felt like museums were supposed to feel, grand, soaring, echoing, a kind of secular cathedral. Even though I’d been in it so many times I still always felt its solemn pinch and the sudden urge to hush my voice and calm my step. Maybe that was all an old-fashioned thing now, maybe it was just the building that tugged such invisible strings in me.

The travel writer didn’t swivel his eyes about at the entrance like I did. I always did that even at the railway station. It had columns and echoes too and a lofty grandeur that floated across even the rush hour crowds. The travel writer’s gaze hurried off into the halls beyond.

In the main hall his eyes seized the marae. We took our shoes off and went in. The travel writer studied the carvings, the sculpted wood figures, flax and paua, colours and design. I remembered how my brother and I lost our solemnity when we were little kids and climbed onto the wooden figures’ shoulders, clung to the carved posts and laughed away until we got told off for our disrespectful behaviour.

I’d always liked the marae. The light came close in there and narrowed to a warm glow. Paua shell eyes glinted and wood shone smooth. When I was little it had seemed a lot bigger of course. Now I’d grown up and it struck me as suddenly curious that there we were sitting in one building within another, the tiny marae swallowed by the grand shell of a Europe later architects had tried to replicate atop our hills.

The writer was ready to move onwards. He wanted to see the halls where all the objects of Maori and Pacific Island culture were on display. The European shell stretched over it all seemed to disappoint him a little. Too much the classic colonial thing perhaps, ‘native’ culture reduced to exhibits under glass with a few explanatory notes, a dead array of ‘exotic’ things that the white man came to catalogue and insert into his neatly-ordered world. Hangovers of nineteenth-century belief in progress, science, and the civilising mission, even echoes of the grimmer years from which the museum building came, the 1930s, when around the world the state stamped itself in stone and columns had something of the sound of marching boots.

Down by the harbour’s edge they were pounding the land, dropped huge weights on it from a height and made the city shake. They were going to build a new museum there. That would be a different place of course, modern, probably hands-on and interactive. It wouldn’t awe with crushing size and sternness. The land by the water’s edge would never hold such a mass anyway.

This old museum building, I didn’t know what they were going to do with it. I couldn’t imagine it with any other purpose. The filtered light and dimmer corners were made for something lofty. Up the stairs there was the art gallery, and we’d gone there too in the past on school trips to study the visiting exhibitions.

The travel writer didn’t care about the art gallery. He hadn’t come all this way to see crumbs of scattered Europe. We passed the big cooking pot that my brother and I tried to climb into when we were little. It came from one of the Pacific islands.

I didn’t need the art gallery either. I had this walking, talking exhibit beside me. He examined Polynesian and Melanesian ritual costumes and artefacts, and I studied him. I spoke to him in French and that alone was enough to inject a sense of journey in the afternoon.

He came from Geneva and talked to us in a university classroom earlier that day, told us about his books and travels. There was similarity in the things he said. As the boy grew up the nearby shores pressed close and the water that once seemed broad grew small, the streets, sky and city shrinking around him and pinching him in its well-like narrow feel. So steeped thick in routine and all the mundane ordinariness of life. Only the books piled high on the shelves offered countless windows of escape and he jumped through their pages, dreaming of the time when his feet would follow his roaming eyes.

I knew that feeling well. The university library had a big, illustrated French encyclopedia and I’d take a volume and let the pages fall open at random onto a photo of some sight or city. Antananarivo was one of the chance finds I often returned to. A tumbling hillside town, it had Europe in its forms but its colours came from elsewhere. I thought perhaps it was a South American place from the mingled look it wore, but it was the capital of Madagascar, a bit of France dressed in African surrounds.

The travel writer said that Wellington made him think of San Francisco with its sea, steep hillsides and distinctive wooden houses. I’d only ever glimpsed San Francisco in TV images and never been beyond New Zealand’s shores to find things for comparison. And what did Geneva look like? And how could it grow shrunken and stale when it was in the midst of a continent and surely more closely woven into wider life than we were on the edge of our distant island?

Jean-Jacques Rousseau was from Geneva too. I liked his works and ploughed my way through his eighteenth century pages. He wandered off one evening when he was busy being a restless teenager and found the city gates locked when he returned. So he turned around again and wandered all the way to France, to Paris and fame. If I were to do like him I’d only get to Auckland. And then would come the ocean, though listening to the writer talking earlier of his voyaging urge, it seemed the ocean was something more in hearts than on maps.

The writer talked of India. It was the kind of place people went when searching for the exotic and different, the contrasts in life, unless they were from India itself of course, in which case they’d probably be like me now, pestering the writer with questions about prospering Swiss towns full of bankers, watchmakers and rich people.

He sat in a hut somewhere in India and was all alone except for a huge scarab beetle that lived in the room too. The thought of such companionship made me shudder and as his words continued in the classroom my thoughts came here to the museum, to the hall I liked the least, the one with all the insects in it. That hall wasn’t dim. The insects were brightly lit so you could contemplate their glossy sheen and the fierce biting look of their large mandibles. I noticed when I was little that the biggest ones of all came from Africa and India and knew I’d surely never want to see such fearful lands. But that was before I found the picture of Antananarivo.

He sat in a spare hut on a dirt floor, watching the scarab beetle scuttle about. It became pages in a book, him and the beetle. Not that sitting in a hut with a beetle was anything special to most of the world’s population, but to the boy from comfortable Geneva it must have had a different look and feel. Like insect eyes. Up in the insect hall they explained how flies and suchlike had eyes that were actually a huge collection of tinier eyes bound into one. We were the same, millions of little eyes in a huge fly eye of humanity, and the hut and beetle told by a man from Geneva wouldn’t be the same as if told by an Indian villager for whom they were the ordinary stuff of life.

In the museum marae the writer saw echoes of colours and designs he’d glimpsed elsewhere on his travels around the globe. I saw only a typical marae with the usual carvings and look. The writer let his gaze linger on greenstone tikis, feather cloaks, staffs, adzes, that kind of thing. When I was a kid, apart from the marae, my favourite place was the hall where you could look into a sailing ship’s cabin and into a nineteenth century room with frozen figures and everyday objects lying about. The old room took me off into the past and the ship’s cabin ferried me across the seas. But we’d skip that hall now. There wasn’t time for everything and we didn’t have the same eyes.

I supposed he’d probably never been so far across the world. Wellington was just a brief stop between bigger plans and destinations, a chance place he’d been able to fit in. And he wanted to go to the museum. It was the only specific sightseeing desire he expressed.

I nudged him back to Geneva and asked him too about Paris, imagining him a bit like Rousseau, gone on that same wandering trek to a city that I myself was hoping soon to see, not just in a random encyclopaedia picture or one of the French movies they showed at the annual film festival, but for real, with my Wellington eyes.

We came out into the fading day. From the top of the steps you could look down across the dark pohutakawa line and the roofs and buildings to higher hills now sucking light out of the sky. They ringed the harbour and you couldn’t see where the ships entered. Winter sometimes dusted the farther ranges with snow and made the city a dressed-up lady with a big sparkling blue brooch, coloured beads of houses strung across her fabrics, and a white fur wrap draped around her shoulders. Geneva probably wasn’t so different, except that its mountains would be higher and its waters had no escape behind the hills, where ships could slip out to sea and leave it all behind.

I glanced back. The museum building’s bulk still held us in its gaze, one of the stone lions preferred for monumental sculpture, proud symbol, we the small things standing by its big stone paws. I wondered if Wellington might end up too a page in one of the writer’s travel books. Probably not, he seemed happy to leave the Europe shell behind. The objects it held gave him but a watered-down taste of things first filtered and packaged, like when they made soup or juice out of adulterated concentrate in which you could hardly recognise the original ingredients.

Perhaps he’d have smiled too to see us when we were kids, poi-pois in our hands, or the sticks one tossed to each other in accompanying song. Kids like me, nothing Maori in my look. All of us had become an adulterated concentrate. The people of this land, he didn’t know the Maori words for that expression, but I did, knew a few other words too, meanings of the Picton ferries’ names, colours, numbers, the government ministries’ bureaucratic titles.

It wasn’t much. To the writer it maybe looked like just a bit of local flavouring stirred into a transplanted Europe mix. But it was already more than Wellington kids got back when they built the museum building’s European sigh. And it would grow more still as the years went on and the waves lapping in our hearts were those of our own shores rather than distant waters from where ancestors’ ships once set sail. That was why they were pounding the land down by the harbour, preparing the ground for a new museum that better reflected today, even if today too was just a fleeting moment and temporary layer in the whole of things.

I remembered my mother saying once that when she was a kid the movie theatres played ‘God Save the Queen’ before showing the film. I couldn’t imagine it at all, had never sung that song and didn’t know its words. It was a distant country’s national anthem, and that queen was just a silhouette stamped on coins.

Geneva had changed too no doubt from the small Calvinist republic described in Rousseau’s books. There’d not be city gates to close at night and keep a tardy teenager from returning to his dull and disliked home in any case. They must have pulled them down to make way for life’s never-ceasing spread. Here, the museum building would stay. I just wasn’t sure what they were going to put in it.

Of course, the travel writer couldn’t really gulp in whole oceans of past and all the strands and streams that made it, not even in a young country like ours. Even if he wanted to, he couldn’t be at once my mother, me, the men who built the museum, and the men who built the marae. He wrote books like the museum displays of things pinned down or set out and lit from this side or that, scenes stilled, snatched, little different to me and the encyclopaedia with its chance view of Antananarivo or old French towns. I could only tell him that in summer the pohutakawas flowered red, and that from the other side, where I’d gone to school, the museum felt different and we forgot about it.

Feijoas

Farida’s eyes fell on the fruit in the ice cream container sitting on my table.

“Feijoas!” she cried. “You’ve got feijoas! Where did you get them from?”

Her exclamation flew out in Russian. Up until then she’d been speaking French. She forgot whatever banal request brought her down the corridor to my door and stared at the dark green ovals. Neither of us knew how to say ‘feijoa’ in French.

Farida was from Baku, the capital of Azerbaijan. She spoke Russian because she’d grown up in the Soviet Union. Then Azerbaijan became an independent country and Farida came to France. She lived on the same floor as me in the student residence.

We were hundreds of students living in a big park in the south of Paris. It was a monument in itself. The different countries’ residences echoed the students’ distant homelands. You could guess from the architecture which nation had built this or that edifice. There were some strange coincidences. The Cambodian house on the other side of the park was closed. It was supposed to remind one of Angkor Wat, and it did, locked and abandoned and with weeds creeping in around. I never knew exactly why they’d closed it. The rumour was that someone got a gun once and started shooting. People got killed.

New Zealand didn’t have a house of its own. People from former British colonies got put in the British house along with hordes of British students in Paris for their compulsory year abroad, French students, who were spread throughout the different houses, and people like Farida, who were slotted at random into wherever there was room. The British house looked the part. Whoever built it must have been thinking of gloomy manors perched high on lonely peaks, with something bleak and overbearing in their brooding lines.

We had a couple of Australians at the house, and a girl from Vanuatu who was studying Japanese. There were two other New Zealanders, but one had finished his studies and moved out now. That left Pippa at the end of the corridor. It was she who’d brought me the feijoas.

We never went home like the others when holiday time came round. It was too far and too expensive. The students from far-flung corners of the world pooled resources for Christmas and New Year dinners together, ate the French traditional fare as the common ground between us all, in the same way that we made French our common language.

We stayed on over the long summer break too, when the people who ran the whole place raised the price and rented out the empty rooms to short-term visitors. The previous summer, we’d had a bunch of schoolteachers from Rome staying on our floor. They were a bit aghast at the way we cooked pasta. My birthday was in summer and the Roman schoolteachers contributed to the occasion with an enormous mound of pasta cooked the proper way.

Pippa tried to make a pavlova for the event. The process aroused a lot of interest, as none of the others had heard of such a dessert, but the French ingredients weren’t quite up to the task. The cream wouldn’t whip properly. You still got some idea of what it was though. We laid our Italian-New Zealand culinary efforts out on tables in the courtyard, the ivy-covered walls of our British building rising up around us.

Farida was there that evening. She was one of the students who always stayed. Baku was only three or four hours away by plane, but she never went there. She seemed to have arrived in Paris for good and never talked about Baku.

But the sight of the feijoas jolted something in her and lit her eyes with a sudden flicker of nostalgia and home.

“We had them in Azerbaijan”, she said. “I’ve looked for them here but no one knows what they are”.

I took one from the container and put it in her hand. She cradled its oval form, raised it to her nose and smiled at the memory fragrance. I’d looked for them too. The ordinary French shops didn’t have them. I didn’t find them either amongst the jumble of African, Arab and Indian shops in the east of the city. Not so far from us we had a big Chinese supermarket. It sold all kinds of strange fruits that I’d never seen before, but not feijoas.

Farida recalled Baku, or rather, she recalled an aunt who lived outside the city and grew feijoas in her garden. They diced them up into a pulp and mixed them with sugar or made them into jam. I couldn’t see into her head and heart of course, and had never been to Baku to give it clear outline in my mind’s eye. The sea would be there somewhere in her memory pictures, and the hot press of summer months, lush colours, grapes, pomegranates. And now I knew there were feijoas too stirred into her recollections.

Such a small thing, just a piece of fruit, but Farida looked at that moment like a birthday child with an unexpected treasure in her hands. Pippa laughed when I asked for a feijoa. She went back to New Zealand for a job interview, asked if there was anything I’d like her to bring from home. She couldn’t bring me the things I really wanted, the view from Wellington’s hills, the southerly rocking me to sleep, the constantly changing sea and skies, the cheerful threads that Wellington houses cast in long lines snaking up and down the steep slopes. She couldn’t bring me the seagulls’ cries and brisk salt-tinged air, the ferries bobbing their way across Cook Strait, or the sun dappling and mottling the office blocks’ glass facades.

Feijoas weren’t a Wellington fruit and I’d seldom eaten them there. They weren’t a fruit you bought in the shops. They just grew in people’s gardens, but not in Wellington gardens. Little of any sort grew in Wellington gardens except for sour apples. One school friend of mine lived in a sheltered place and had small pears and plums. That was as fertile as I ever saw it. Blackberries grew wild on some of the banks until council workers came and sprayed them. My mother tried growing fruit, but only the Cape gooseberry vines gave some tart-tasting results, and we had a lemon tree that once produced a single lemon. We probably lived too high on the hills and the wind came in too strong.

We ate apples that my mother bought by the sackful at the wholesale market in town. In the summer months we got a bit of variety when the local greengrocer put out boxes of spoiled fruit for a couple of dollars. You got plums, peaches, nectarines with spots to cut out, bruised kiwifruit and treetomatoes, and it was in those boxes that I’d found the occasional feijoa.

It was a taste people either liked or didn’t. I was one of those who did. Pippa bought me back not just one feijoa but filled a whole ice cream container. The container alone set off a rush of memories. It was Tip-Top, the kind we always had at home if my mother bought ice cream. They had flavours you never saw in France, Hokey-Pokey, orange chocolate chip, mint chocolate chip, boysenberry…

Just a small thing too, and I’d not gone through these years in Paris missing ice cream flavours or even thinking of their absence or existence. But the white plastic container opened sudden windows. There I was at the beach on one of those school-holiday special days when my mother would give us a treat. We always went to the dairies that filled the cones with big scoops of ice cream. Sand blew everywhere, tussock bushes, grey sea wall with the sand banked up along its edge, wind and waves, and these huge scoops of ice cream that warmed a child’s greedy eyes.

Perhaps my attachment to feijoas also came from the fact that they’d already been more than just a fruit and had already given me a pinch of sudden happiness in a foreign-feeling place. I was sixteen then. We moved to the countryside, not so far from Wellington really, but between us was a mountain range and it felt much farther than it really was.

We were on the edge of a small town. The land formed a broad valley with mountains rising in marching line on one side, and creased hills that ran in roll after roll towards the distant coast on the other. There was no sea, just a muddied river that offered a fleeting water view from the school bus window. The wind came seldom. More often the rain fell, strangely straight and stubborn, or the skies hung clear and still, frosty and crisp in winter, hot and parching in summer.

All kinds of fruit grew there. The trees were taller and fuller than the hardy diagonal things I’d always known. We didn’t just eat apples now, had a big walnut tree in our garden, and my mother told us to eat nuts if we were hungry.

I hated the place. Being sixteen and resentful at this unexpected ‘rural exile’, I hated my mother for making me move, hated the flat land and dark nights with no city glow, the country school and stinky sheep trucks that rumbled by. I too was sour and small inside and thought only of getting back over the hills to Wellington.

The neighbour across the road had a big garden, but he had diabetes and they’d amputated one of his legs. His kids were just little still. He said he’d pay me to mow his lawns. In Wellington we didn’t have a lawn to mow and the banks in front of our house had been covered in gorse and fennel. My brother decided to share that bit of Wellington with our new home, which seemed unplagued by such pest plants, and he sprinkled fennel seeds all along the roadside from the car window.

I liked mowing lawns. You just went back and forth between the green and blue, thinking of everything and nothing. It was work suited to my nature. The neighbour had a feijoa tree. I didn’t know which trees were which, but the feijoas lay scattered all over the grass. I gathered them up into a big pile and took them to the neighbour and his wife when I’d finished. They said no one really ate them and they just lay on the ground and rotted.

“Take them home if you want”, the neighbour said.

I took them. Everyone had gone out somewhere. I stood in the kitchen with my huge bag of feijoas and began to eat them one after the other in a fit of glee and greed. I glanced again now at Farida’s happy face and remembered that sunny afternoon. I made myself sick eating so many feijoas all at once, but it was worth it. The neighbour never wanted his feijoas. He only wanted his lawns mowed, and sometimes he asked me to stay a while and play trivial pursuit and chat. His kids ran about, busy with their own games. I saw him stick his insulin injections into his thigh and he did it in such routine fashion, didn’t seem to make a big issue either out of having lost a leg.

I had feijoas, and both legs, and didn’t need to jab myself with needles every day. A lot in life was just small things, a glimpse from one angle or another and sudden bit of understanding that shone through. I soon went back to Wellington and the neighbour soon lost his other leg and died not much later. He was still quite young really. Feijoas always reminded me of him after that.

I’d never really thought about the fact that you didn’t actually buy them usually until I was in Paris and reminiscing with Pippa about things we missed from home. They were like the ones in my neighbour’s garden, chance abundance scattered on the ground. Maybe if I’d always had them like Wellington gorse and fennel all around me I’d not have cared for them at all and would have left them to rot too.

Farida was still drifting in her own distant summers. She saw gardens too, the family gathering the fallen fruit and chopping it all up, stirring the sugar in to make a sweetened dish they ate as they sipped their tea on warm and fading evenings. The fruit itself would have come originally from somewhere else, South America perhaps, where it fell in other gardens and got eaten in other ways again.

Like with my brother strewing fennel seeds from the car window in the hope of seeing our hometown weed spring up in distant fields, the feijoas too had somehow scattered wide and here in this Paris student residence room could suddenly bring together Wellington and Baku, me and Farida, people and places at opposite ends of the Earth.

Not just bring us together but also take us far apart, transporting us across the miles to our small and private scenes and shreds of ordinary life that Paris and its splendours had dulled and squashed into a back corner. Piled in the container, they shed the distinctive perfume that had made Farida lift the little fruit so eagerly to her nostrils. It was the smell of New Zealand, the smell of Azerbaijan, the smell of things lost, half-forgotten, found again and recalled in sudden thanks and fondness. Just a feijoa, nothing really, but it could become a lot.

Farida took her fruit and left, came back later with her sister, who didn’t live at the student residence but rented a tiny flat in the city. She wanted to see the feijoas too and remember home.

Flying kites

I had them posed on the roof with the minarets in the background, four kids, two boys and two girls. The boys were the older pair and made an instinctively protective frame around the little sisters. They were dressed in their Sunday best, their ‘Friday best’, rather, since they were Muslims and had just come back from the same mosque that made the backdrop to my camera scene. The minarets had a pearly tinge that caught the changing light and gave them a faintly pinkish, purplish hue. They went with the dress and scarf the older girl wore. The girls left their long hair uncovered and draped their scarves around their shoulders. The boys had scarves hanging around their necks too. It lent a solemn, more elegant touch to their attire, like the part a tie played in Western dress.

I got the older girl to pose on her own. She rested an elbow on the edge of the roof in contemplative pose and turned a slightly shy gaze my way. Her dress was white with flowers in shades that matched the colours beyond, the blue wash across the buildings pressed close on the slopes and the pearly minarets reaching up into the early evening sky. The afternoon gold slipped off with the sun behind the ridges and gave the sky a duller, smaller look. The flowers on the girl’s dress were repeated in the broader scene too. The sky was full of dots that swooped and swirled and performed a complicated dance across the entire town. If you looked out across the roofs, you saw that there were people up on every single one, whole clusters of them with eyes to the heavens.

They were flying kites. The streets down below were empty now. Everyone was on the roofs. Cries rose and fell, kites battled in their air, soared and plunged, made me think of pilots fighting aerial duels in war movies I’d seen. I took photos of my sister with the strings in her hands, trying to guide the hesitant kite upwards to some safer spot where it might roam and glide a while in the cloudless day. The father of the family watched on with an approving look on his face. He was a miller, a bearded fellow. He was in his good clothes too. That was because of the mosque, because it was Friday, but also because it was the kite festival and not an ordinary day in any case.

I didn’t know about the kite festival but guessed that something was happening the evening before when I went out for a walk. Bundi was a small town that climbed its way up steep hills topped with the remains of an old fort. Most of the commerce was concentrated along one rising road and a handful of alleys that led to the market. The setting sun poked long golden fingers between the buildings, slid through archways and tossed brief sparkles on puddles and motor scooters. The jostling crowd pressed in between the rows of shops and the gutters into which all the rubbish flowed. Cooking smells, steam, calls and shouts rose from the people mass. The shopkeepers were all outside, perched above the crowd at hastily set-up tables. All the kids were out too, tugging at sleeves, pushing and peering, yelling to each other.

The men at the stalls were busy cutting and clipping, piles of paper and string arrayed before them. It was stuff for making kites. Kids would suddenly emerge from the mass, coveted materials under their arms and gleeful looks on their faces. The crowd carried me along and nudged me from one stall to the next. I knew they liked flying kites here, but not with such frenzied enthusiasm. The whole town seemed to be packed into that long narrow street with all the shops now tumbled out of the buildings and making it even narrower. Kites and food, cutting, frying, night grew chill as the sun sank, though it was warm amidst the throng.

Even the noisy alleys leading to the market square had lost their usual bustle. The produce sellers watched the shadows fatten and push out the last of the light. The street with the kites glowed and pulsed. Beyond, the lanes soon grew small and quiet, and light was flickers and glimmers here and there in dark squares of windows or doorways.

I hadn’t come out to buy anything. I was only a tourist. Back in Udaipur a man on the souvenir-filled road leading up to the Maharajah’s palace sold countless tiny bottles of fragrant oils, the essence of various flowers. And that was all I was doing, dabbing corners of India on myself, a sample touch on the wrist or back of the hand, enough to raise to the nostrils and catch the distinctive whiff.

I went back to the kite street. I doubted this was an everyday thing, the shopkeepers under siege from the heaving crowds. It looked more like Christmas, my childhood kind when you had the Christmas parade through Wellington’s streets, decorations everywhere, crowds, lemonade popsicle to lick, paper flag to wave, and if I was lucky I’d get a balloon too. The look on my face back then was what I saw on the kids’ faces now. It was a special moment and not just an ordinary evening.

My sister got the kite flying, though not for long. She had a Christmas face too, flushed and happy. It was she who’d first told me about the kite thing. That was back in Varanasi at the start of our trip. She saw the boys flying kites down on the ghats by the Ganges and came to a halt, watched their battles with sudden interest in her eyes.

“I never thought I’d see this for myself”, she said, as if before a rare and precious scene.

She taught ‘The Kite Runner’ to her students in English class. New Zealand kids reading about Afghanistan. I’d never read the book, just knew it was an international bestseller that everyone got into because Afghanistan was in the news when the book was published. That was often how it was, wait until a conflict or disaster happened somewhere and then put out a touching, life-affirming tale of some kind. Obviously the book really was about kites and my sister must have learned something from it because she proceeded to analyse what the boys on the ghats were doing and why.

Now she stood on the Bundi rooftop and sent a kite into the air once more, tugged the strings, spied her approaching foes and got into the spirit of it all. I’d never had much to do with kites. Wellington was a windy city, and when I was little we lived right on the top of a ridge, exposed to the howls and blasts. We did try once, my brother and I, read of kites in books and made our own, went out into the street to fly them, but the wind snatched them from our hands, ripped them, flung them about like crazy things. Like with umbrellas, no one ever had one and if anyone tried it soon ended up broken, bent and thrown in the rubbish bin. Maybe Wellington was too much for kites.

My sister hadn’t seen much of Bundi. She went up to the old maharajah’s palace with me the first day, listened to me speak some clumsy Hindi with the guys who worked there, and stared at the scenes painted across the walls and ceilings of the rambling building’s now empty and increasingly dilapidated rooms. The colours were still incredibly bright even as everything else crumbled and faded. Then she left me, felt sick and spent the rest of the time at our hotel, lying in bed and reading.

I went on up to the fort at the top of the hill that first day. It was a lot more dilapidated than the palace down below. Made me feel like I’d walked into the Indiana Jones movies I loved when I was a kid, ruins, trees that looked like jungle, monkeys, no one around, sense of adventure ahead. When I was a kid I said I’d never go to India because it was full of snakes and large insects, but I didn’t think of those things up at the fort, strode off through the scrub and long grass, pushed the drooping tree branches aside and roamed the ruins. There were frescoes on the walls there too, just like in the palace below, lots of them, but half-destroyed, shone in patches, some complete enough to give the overall picture, and others just fragments still clinging to the crumbling stone.

The ruins were full of hissing, chattering monkeys. Their eyes massed in the dark, glinting, insolent, crept closer, crowd of furry forms, sharp teeth, a vicious look on their ugly little faces. I had a big stick that I’d borrowed from the guy at the palace gate. He had one too and a pair of enormous moustaches like people in the movies my mother used to watch about British Empire-era India. It probably went with his job guarding the maharajah’s palace. I used the stick to beat back the monkeys. They got reinforcements from deeper inside the old fort and I soon had a whole army of them hissing at me. I left them and went back out into the winter sun. From the hill you could look down onto the palace’s impressive spread, the town’s tumbling roofs, and across all the surrounding peaks. It was strange to think that this was India before me, Rajasthan, names from books and films, places I never thought I’d see for real, but here I was with the light breeze and the sun’s mild warmth on my skin and the useful stick smooth against my fingers.

My sister was doing the same thing, the kite strings in her hands more than just a toy but a brief embrace of this country and its endless fresco of life. She let her gaze circle with the dancing spots in the sky, from ridge to ridge of the surrounding hills and up and down across the town. The kids urged her on. Hollers came from neighbouring rooftops and hands waved in greeting. My sister’s kite got cut again and fell. Tourists, catchers of impressions, we were more the kites than the ones who knew how to guide and work the strings.

But they were catchers too, and it was hard to say really who was catching who. The miller tossed his net across me the night before. I turned off the bustling main street into the alleys that led off up the hillsides, away from the market square and the flatter land. It was easier to roam these labyrinths after evening fell. “At night all cats are grey” – I first read that phrase in The Three Musketeers when I was a kid, liked the image and rolled the meaning around in my mind. It was true. During the day I had eyes already watching from afar, curious gazes that followed me as I drew close and passed by. Anyone with anything to sell sprang from their waiting places, hawking tongues and gesturing fingers eager to grab my potential custom. But nightfall muted the shades of skin and eyes and made us look that much more the same, so that I could wander the alleys in unwatched freedom. Only when they were right level with me and saw clearer through the shadows would passing faces suddenly flicker in realisation and toss a surprised glance back my way.

The lane rose and turned. The mosque on the corner was silent. The alley was quiet too. Food smells and muffled voices trickled down from houses. Across from the mosque the miller sat at the front of his shop. In the dim depths beyond I glimpsed the grinding stone, scales, sacks of flour stacked along the walls. The miller sat still and watched the night come in. The mosque shone and a dog barked.

I passed the shop, thinking of what it might be like to work that grindstone all day long and fill sacks with flour. You’d never get it out of you. All the cracks around held its dust, and it would get in the hair, eyes, down into the lungs, fill the nose. When the days had a chill touch, it was easier perhaps to work up some warmth and then sit like the miller was now, sipping tea and the last of the sunset colours. But the summer heat would make the sweat run and the flour cling and stick.

I turned my face away slightly and hurried onwards. It was just another dab of someone else’s place and life on the back of my hand, the faintest hint of scent that would quickly fade.

“A European! There goes a European!”

The miller’s voice leapt out into the lane after me and the rest of the darkened building suddenly stirred with unseen eyes and faces peering down. I stopped. The miller used the Persian word for European. He had a smile on his face. Another man came at the sound of his call and they both sat at the shop front, watching me. They thought I was French. I joined them, dredged half-forgotten Persian words from my mind’s storehouse depths and mixed them with my paltry smattering of Hindi.

That was how my sister and I ended up on the rooftop, flying kites. The miller’s oldest son was up in his room above the shop the night before and came down at his father’s call to inspect the catch. It was for him that the miller tossed his net over passing strangers. The son hoped I was French too, because he’d procured himself a textbook and was trying to teach himself a bit of that language. I wasn’t French, but I’d lived in Paris and he was happy at my offer to check the sentences he’d written out.

His name was Chirag. That was a short version of a longer name. The full name sounded Muslim but ‘chirag’ in Hindi meant ‘lamp’. The boy suited such a name. He said he was studying physics at a university in the nearest city. He had a serious, earnest manner and reminded me of myself when I was a teenager and widened my narrow world with books borrowed from the library, tried to teach myself Russian and kept my eyes peeled in the Wellington streets for visiting Russian sailors who I could approach and grab hold of for a moment of real life practice.

He and the miller watched the street in the same way. Just as I’d collected souvenirs, postcards and letters from the Russians I used to catch, so Chirag did the same. When I came back next day with my sister, he showed us his small bundle of treasures from around the world. That we were from New Zealand gladdened him now because he already had a connection with our distant land. He took a letter from the little pile and put it in my sister’s hands. Some New Zealand backpacker came through Bundi once and got snared as he passed the miller’s shop. The letter’s words gave you an approximate picture of the guy, a bit eccentric, probably had that bearded hippyish unkempt look that a lot of the backpackers in India went in for, sandals and baggy pants, that sort of thing. But he was sincere and well-wishing enough to write a letter once back home, went to the post office and sent it to the chance boy he’d met on an Indian holiday. Chirag treasured the letter, and I could understand that. I’d been the same with my tiny snippets of Russia. I kept everything, addresses people wrote for me, saying if I ever came to Russia I must come and visit them, a chocolate wrapper from a block of dark chocolate they gave me, postcards with pictures of drab urban scenes that I cherished nonetheless as tiny threads between me and the world beyond.

Chirag asked too if we perhaps knew a way to help his mother. She was thin and frail, lay in bed most of the time, her fingers curled up and deformed by severe arthritis. They had a TV in the room where the mother lay, their little piece of pride. There wasn’t much else in the house, bare concrete rooms with the minimum of furniture, though considering how many lived in India, it wasn’t bad, and the children were getting an education and had hope for their future.

Chirag’s talk was like his name, shining and bright. We spent several hours up there on the roof. The light trickled away and the sky was still full of kites. The kite flyers’ shouts and calls bounced and echoed off the darkening slopes. My brother and I used to holler at the waning day too from up on our hilltop, send our voices across the valley to the empty brown summits on the other side and hear the echo come back. There were no kites in our sky, often a pale moon, a lot smaller than the one that rose here, sometimes the silver streak of a plane passing overhead.

There was Guy Fawkes though, not so different to this kite flying festival, only we filled the sky with sparkling lights and colours and lit matches rather than pulled strings. It always put the same kind of faces on us as the kids in the street had the previous evening, anticipation smiles and hopeful eyes. We didn’t care a thing about English plotters hundreds of years before, only wanted to watch the night fragment into rocket trails and whirls and shout our thrill together in holiday mood. My father grumbled about the fireworks’ cost and said we couldn’t afford them. But we always got them anyway, if not our own than shared the neighbours’ show. I could still remember myself little and excited, wrapped in a blanket against the night time chill, pressed into the crowd of kids from our street as the firecrackers whizzed and danced. It was the same across all the city’s hills, rockets shooting upwards in red and green trail, bangs and jewel showers. And at the end we got sparklers, clasped them in our little hands and drew brief pictures in the air.

That was what I thought of up there on the roof. The minarets were silent, took on a deeper shade. The houses lost the blue sheen they wore in daytime light and turned into duller concrete blocks as the shadows slipped in. We had no forts atop our peaks in Wellington. The radar turned in ceaseless lonely movement on the ridge across the valley and some of the summits had surveyors’ trigs on top. Mt Victoria was best because it had the cannon and I’d perch astride its cold metal barrel and wonder who had put it there and what enemy they’d feared. It all seemed far removed from here, where every self-respecting town had walls, gates, palaces and forts, or their crumbling remains at least. You could see their outlines in the approaching night, see too the other minarets that studded the rooftop spread.

But I thought of Guy Fawkes, of how much the same we all were really, and of how close things were, even when seemingly so far apart. The perfume seller in Udaipur sold little bits of India, but amongst his rows of tiny bottles kept fragrances he never even suspected existed. I came to fly the kites in Bundi and dabbed myself instead with Island Bay, with hills and kids and holidays now distilled into a memory concentrate and bottled up for travel. Chirag too, only took me back to my own past years, curiosity sharp in his eyes even as his face stayed solemn for the photo moments. Who held the string, who was the kite, and where did the skies in which we flew really begin or end? It was hard to say.

Summer, 1991

“They were killed in the blast”. Dmitry’s words made a dull thud. He looked like the saints on the icons, not surprising, because they were Orthodox icons and Dmitry was from Bulgaria. The icons and Dmitry had come a long way across the world. It was January and midsummer, but the wind squeezed its way under the doors in bursts of cold current. Dmitry’s talk was the same. He spoke of dissidents, communist persecution, plots and secret police. The Bulgarians – at least he suspected it was them – blew up his wife and daughter. It was him they wanted to blow up, but he went out at the wrong moment. That was in Brussels, where he’d sought political asylum. Officially it was a gas explosion, but Dmitry knew that it was murder.

I had my back to the door and the draughts and I shivered. Dmitry fingered his teacup. The Bulgarian secret services were known for pursuing their targets around the world. It was them who once used a poisoned umbrella in London, an unobtrusive murder plan designed especially for a British decor. I’d read a lot about spies and knew that stuff.

I’d never seen Dmitry before. He didn’t come to the church service but arrived in time for the food afterwards. The church was an old house that had been turned into a church. It gave a cosy, homely feel to the Sunday lunch, Russian food on the tables, mostly elderly Russian women clucking away over their teacups and buns and jam.

Dmitry didn’t look at me as he spoke or at any fixed point. His dark eyes mirrored the icon faces on the walls, streaked with broad, detached sorrow. The saints had to stretch their gazes over generations of sinners, and Dmitry had to curl his vision across the whole globe and up into that Europe I’d never seen, up to Brussels and his temporary shelter blown apart and his family dead. I pictured Brussels with a low grey sky, cold rooms in shadow, the little blue gas flame perhaps a warming touch, like here the candle stubs flickering in the lamps before the icons softened the ragged day beyond.

The wind tugged at the window panes in the lulls between voices and talk. I fingered my teacup too and wondered if Marie was alright. She was down at the port, on board a Russian ship. I took her there the night before and she got drunk on the sailors’ vodka, wouldn’t eat the greasy potatoes and meat heaped before her, stomach-lining foods that kept one sober. The sailors lifted her onto a top bunk and closed the curtains around her. I never stayed on the ships at night but didn’t want to leave Marie alone. The men slept. I had a snoring sailor beside me too as dawn rose. One of the men got up to make coffee. The fragrant smell tickled my nostrils. I gave Marie a gentle shake but she didn’t respond, still too deep in slumber. I persuaded the sailor to leave his coffee pot and get me off the ship. He thought I was crazy running off when the night had barely lifted, but it was normal for me. I’d spent the last two years getting up before dawn to peel potatoes, do dishes and set out food for the day at the Dutch café, walked the road to work every morning with the moon, the wind, even more restless at that time, and the first streaks of light out over the empty hills on the other side of the harbour entrance.

The sailor lowered the ship’s stairs and let me go. Seagulls circled and called but otherwise everything was quiet. These ships where I’d learned Russian were my private measure of what was going on on the other side of the world. On one the summer before, the ‘commissar’ – the nickname the sailors gave the guy responsible for keeping them all under surveillance – kept the third mate locked up until the ship left Wellington, for having brought a girl on board at night. The ‘commissars’ used to take it all very seriously and everyone really was under surveillance, swiftly punished if they broke the rules. But things had changed fast over this last year. All those East bloc revolutions, the Berlin Wall came down, Romanian dictator shot, euphoric crowds in Prague, regimes toppling one after the other, and even the ‘commissars’ on the Soviet ships suddenly mellowed a lot, so that the early-rising sailor could brew his coffee without worrying about two local girls stretched out on the narrow bunks.

Of course, you couldn’t compare newly mellowed ‘commissars’ on the Russian ships and Dmitry’s tale of persecution. He was vague and left the dates out, so I didn’t know exactly when the gas blew up and when he even fled to Belgium in the first place, or how he got from Belgium to New Zealand and why. I didn’t really believe his story. The elderly Russian immigrants did but that wasn’t surprising because distant memory or parents’ talk had embedded prisons, purges, firing squads and midnight arrests deep inside them. They felt sorry for Dmitry. He was a fighter and victim in their eyes, and they knew too his solitude in a new city at the bottom of the world, his émigré loneliness and nostalgia for home.

It was his loneliness that made them seat us opposite each other. Dmitry looked about forty at least, and I wasn’t even twenty yet, but the others were all old and probably figured that my youthful presence would give Dmitry’s despondent Sunday a brighter dab of hope and cheer than they could. The only other person close to Dmitry’s age was the priest. He looked like a Russian Orthodox priest should, black-robed, long hair tied back, long beard, big silver cross around his neck. Sometimes I saw him out and about in the city streets, where he made an exotic picture. He chatted now with the elderly Russian women, in English. He knew the Church Slavonic language of the liturgy, but didn’t know much modern Russian. That was because he was Irish, studied Russian literature once, read writers like Dostoyevsky and became an Orthodox priest.

I wasn’t Russian either and hadn’t the slightest link to Russia, not even religious. One of the old émigré women, hearing that I had Norwegian roots, put it all down to Russian men slipping over the border and having their way with Norwegian girls up on the Arctic coast, all the more so in the old days, when no one really knew about things like borders. That supposedly planted the seed in my genes that would make me later hang out on Russian ships and even lend my voice to the church’s creaky choir of quavering old biddies, all for the sake of interest in a distant land.

If anyone had their way with my Norwegian forebears it was more likely neighbouring Swedes. The sailors on the ship the night before laughed at me when I said I wanted to go to Russia. They drank vodka and mocked wide-eyed foreigners with naïve hearts, who, like the priest, read Dostoyevsky and got carried away in visions of soul and spiritual searching, beauty and suffering coming together in that vast spread of land and its mournful sighs. Really it was just money and the usual down-to-earth quests for possessions, status and privilege that mattered. Really, if you weren’t thick-skinned, selfish and not too concerned with things like principles and morals, Russia would only disappoint, make you suffer and come to hate it, make you leave.

That was what the sailors said and there was a lot of truth in their words. In any case, Dostoyevsky’s mix of muck and marvels could be anywhere, the sordid and sublime never far apart no matter where you looked, even here in Wellington. Dmitry couldn’t see that I’d spent a restless snatch of night in a stuffy, smoke-hazed ship’s cabin. More and more of those sailors were jumping ship these days. They used to secure themselves a privileged life by buying up electronic goods, jeans and so on in places like Hong Kong or Singapore and then selling them to their consumer goods-starved compatriots back home. But things were changing too fast now, looked too uncertain, and so they’d melt away into chance New Zealand ports. They often turned up at the church. The elderly Russians thought them cynical, exploitative and hopelessly ‘Soviet’, but the priest kept his door open to everyone and his smile warm, tried to help where he could.

None of them were there today and Dmitry could spill his sad story to sympathetic ears. He too saw in me a wide-eyed foreigner with a conscience and heart that would ache in all the right places, side with dissidents, victims of political repression and noble fighters persecuted for their cause. He didn’t need to wear sorrow in his gaze. It crystallised around him like the haloes on the icon saints. A film maker, he hadn’t spun casual tales but made documentaries about real people and their lives, spoke grit and truth. That had taken courage and he’d paid for it.

The spark of envy in his dark eyes didn’t match the icons. The saints weren’t jealous but Dmitry was. He asked me about Milena. The elderly Russians had already told him that I lived at her place. I guessed from his look and few questions that he’d be keen to live there too. Milena was his countrywoman, a Bulgarian who’d emigrated to New Zealand years earlier. She knew Russian, taught it at the university. That was how I knew her. She came to class with her two large dogs. They were useful, carried her books in their mouths.

There was always someone sheltering at her house. I wasn’t in the house but in the shed, which had been turned into a room inside with bed and table, Bulgarian carpet hanging on the wall and shelves full of Bulgarian books. Milena gave me the shed for free, in exchange for doing her housework. The immigrants she helped stayed in the house itself. True, Marie was living there when I first moved in, and Marie didn’t qualify as an immigrant, but her flatmates got drunk, accidentally set their house on fire and left her without a place to live, and her mother was from Paris. That was why Marie drank vodka with no restraint at times, because she’d come and gone between Wellington and Paris and couldn’t decide where she really belonged.

She moved out and her place got taken by Rossen, a young Bulgarian who was about to be deported as an illegal immigrant, but then happened to witness a murderer fleeing the scene of his crime, and now had to stay to testify at the trial. The case was a headline-grabbing story, a teenager who stabbed a young woman to death in her home one afternoon. The investigation was set to take a while, and so Rossen got an unexpected reprieve. I knew the street where the murder happened, pictured Rossen wandering along in the sunny quiet of a working day, not guessing that the boy who came racing past was about to change his life.

Dmitry asked me to speak to Milena about him, gave me a phone number and told me to pass it on. He wanted my shed. It was a quiet, private little place. Milena’s house was perched on a hillside below the university, amidst the pine trees, reached by a narrow zigzag path. Possums scampered back and forth across the corrugated iron roof at night. Their screams and howls sounded like people getting their throats cut, as if amongst the night-draped rustling trees lurked ever so many assassins. The possums set Milena’s dogs barking, and occasional footsteps went by along the path, but otherwise it felt more like some hermit’s retreat than the central city.

Dmitry’s look suggested it was unfair that I, a local, should live in the shed and benefit from Milena’s generosity. I was stealing what belonged to the truly needy and alone, people like him who’d suffered and been washed up by life’s events, battered, exhausted and sorrow-laden, on these far-off shores. I did as he asked. Milena was interested, took the number and said she’d already heard of this man from the other Bulgarians. She got in touch with him and went to see him. He rented a room somewhere.

I pictured it like Marie’s room at the big boarding house behind the fancy apartment blocks at Oriental Bay. Paul lived there first and Marie inherited the room from him. Paul wasn’t his real name. He was Cambodian and spoke Russian because the Cambodian communists had sent him to the Soviet Union to study. He didn’t go back to Cambodia afterwards but found a way to escape and, like Dmitry and Rossen and all those elderly Russians at the church, crossed the whole world and ended up in New Zealand. He probably hadn’t had much to return to in Cambodia anyway. His father wore glasses and so the Khmer Rouge killed him and sent the rest of the family off to the countryside for ‘re-education’. Wearing glasses made one an intellectual and automatically suspect, probably a lackey of imperialists, capitalists and what not.

Paul liked Marie. We wandered the esplanade at Oriental Bay and he spoke his heart’s troubles and sighs. Oriental Bay in summer looked a trouble-free place. People lay on the beach and swam, sat in the cafes, sun flashed bright in the apartment block windows and the harbour spread in sparkling blue before us, the hemmed-in cityscape, docks and ships and cranes just across the water.

Paul used to have a much better room at the Catholic monastery atop the hill jutting out into the bay, but it closed down and everyone had to leave. His room at the big boarding house never made one want to linger. Others had exhaled too much of themselves into the ugly patterned wallpaper, all the cigarettes and hangovers of stale hopes and dreary days. The rooms were small, lined the long corridors, and down below were the communal bathrooms, kitchen and TV room. The old wooden building sat on prime land in the richest part of the city, and when you first turned off between the fancy houses and glimpsed it up the driveway you could almost think it was some fine estate with tree-dotted grounds. But that was just an illusion. The place was worn, sour and grey. Mostly men lived there, long-term unemployed, alcoholics, drifting and lost. If Dostoyevsky were to reappear in a Wellington variant, he’d come to this scruffy, faded little world behind the esplanade’s smug string of status homes and carefree life.

I pictured Dmitry in a room like Paul’s. The flower pattern on the wallpaper would come alive if you looked at it too long and would reach out mocking tendrils to trap you in its smoke-yellowed hold. I pictured Dmitry that way, motionless on the creaky bed, cigarette in his mouth, tiny flame, blue glow of the gas, the Brussels room before he left it, the faces whole and close, and scattered afterwards, countless spearing, slapping fragments like these petals and leaves on the wall, not wallpaper but memory stains.

Though I still didn’t really believe Dmitry’s story. I wasn’t sure Milena did either. She did say he told her the whole tale. I caught a hesitant note in her eyes when she mentioned it.

Paul had tales of his own to tell. He wasn’t in danger of having the cheerless room sap his strength because he was never there much, hurried from job to job at restaurants around town, or wandered the city streets with me and Marie. I only made friends with Marie at the start of that summer when she was still at Milena’s place. Paul dropped by often to see me and that was how they met. I tried to help Paul in his romantic pursuit and thought of ways to get them into situations where they’d be alone with each other, but the only thing that came of it was that Marie said she’d like to take his room when he decided to move out.

The Gulf War faded Marie’s sting in his feelings. It was going to be a TV war with media build-up and the countdown to when they’d go in to drive Saddam Hussein back out of Kuwait and rescue the oil. The Iranians I was teaching English to told me all about Saddam Hussein, nothing good of course. One of the Iranians was from the embassy and the other was a medical student. Milena found them for me. I didn’t have a clue how to teach English and just got them to talk about their part of the world, listened to their stories, corrected their mistakes, and made them happy that I was so eager to learn about Iran and Islam.

Paul came to my little shed to talk about war. The TV talk triggered memories he must have kept buried in deeper corners of himself. He recalled kindergarten in Phnom Penh and American bombs falling. That was only the beginning. It never ended, bombs falling, people dying. New Zealand was suddenly too peaceful and strange, not a real place but an illusion. It was a chance bay in which to shelter from passing storms, but the real world was beyond and Paul carried it inside him, felt it pricking and scratching him now. He’d have enlisted in an army at that moment and gone to fight. The army and the cause weren’t the main issue. It was more about no longer fleeing but going instead to confront the grit and marrow of life, the bombs and blood, flames and intensity. Our summer sky dressed life in complacency and the dancing wind blew a tranquillising breeze that Paul seemed to fear would dull his heart. The only flames and fierce heat he’d know now would be standing at the grill at the Mongolian barbecue restaurant where he worked.

Marie was friendly towards Paul and grateful for the opportunity to get hold of a cheap room, but that was as far as it went. She laughed at me for worrying about her on the Russian ship. Nothing happened to her. She slept late into the morning and drank the sailors’ coffee when she woke. That she’d lived in Paris didn’t stop her from being happy enough with her new surroundings at the big boarding house. She befriended the other occupants and introduced me to them too, drank beer with them and only remarked in private that they didn’t have much drive in life and were an apathetic lot contented to drift along on their benefit money.

Sometimes we spoke French. I was studying that language and was keen to practice. The port made Russian easy because the ships came and went throughout the year, but there were no French ships, just the occasional movie with subtitles. Now there was Marie too, but she was always musing about whether her Frenchness wasn’t just an imagined thing, and if identity in general wasn’t just something we made up, a haphazard blanket we draped about ourselves. When I tried to talk of Paris she looked at me rather as Dmitry and the Russian sailors had done, saw the same un-travelled innocence. Russia was Dostoyevsky and melancholy songs, and Paris was a city seen in films and black and white photos that gave it a special charm. She laughed the same kind of slightly disillusioned laugh of someone who’d seen the real thing and knew that a lot of it looked no more appealing than that depressing room at the boarding house.

Only Paul never looked at me that way. He always managed to keep dawn and hope in him. It was the kind of dawn I got to know when I worked at the Dutch café, the silent streets jumpy and shuddering in the wind, the skittish moon playing hide and seek in the clouds, but that first gleam of light still always broke over the distant ridge and cut the night threads holding sea and sky together. Sometimes the dawn came grey and left the horizon blurred with mist. On such days Paul took his little Catholic candle and followed its flickering tip into more constant skies. That was maybe what the stained glass windows in churches were for, their strong colours standing in for the real thing we sometimes couldn’t see.

The Russians’ church, which was really just a house, had ordinary windows and only the icons as a bit of heaven-snaring décor on the walls. Milena didn’t go to the church but she had icons in her house, in the corners of the rooms, as was custom, a small lamp holder suspended before each one. I didn’t know much about her and she kept herself private. Sometimes I drank a cup of coffee with her after I’d finished the housework. Sometimes she knocked on my door to say she’d left a bit of Bulgarian food for me.

She knocked on my door one evening and told me that Dmitry was dead. They found his corpse in the room he rented and figured it was a heart attack. Milena shared the news with the same hesitant note in her eyes that I’d glimpsed on the past occasions when she’d spoken of him.

A while later she came to my room again to talk about Dmitry. She reckoned he’d killed himself and she knew why he’d done so. The secret service murderers, the gas explosion in Brussels and the wife and daughter killed, maybe those were all just sympathy-drawing embellishments picked up along the way. But the persecuted film maker had been a real man who’d faced the usual catalogue of intimidation tactics and repression that the so-called ‘people’s democratic’ governments used, a real man who’d paid for his convictions and was dead now. Dmitry was part of his film crew at one time. His own past didn’t qualify him for political asylum and wasn’t all so fine and noble, and so he decided to remake himself and live his life anew on other shores.

Who in a place as far away as New Zealand would know anything about dissident Bulgarians anyway? All that mattered was that he had a face like the icon saints and a story that went with it and made the perfect frame for his sorrow-burdened eyes. Seemingly so lightweight, a name, a smattering of biographical information, and yet it must have made a heavy cover. Up at the church with the solicitous old Russians and the kind-hearted Irish priest it was maybe a bearable load, but alone in his room at night or talking with Milena, caught before her searching gaze, it became crushing and cut into the skin.

Milena had no judgement in her voice. She spoke in plain tone with gentle sadness creeping in at the corners and the exile’s common understanding of how painful distance and memory could be. Midsummer here was a deceitful season. The sky had sudden shifts and the wind would get up, race in at night, shake the houses and muffle the scampering possums’ cries. For me it was my childhood lullaby but for Dmitry no doubt a wild sound that only added to his despair. Wellington’s marvellously sheltered harbour was what first brought the ships here, but it was only a luring façade and the land hid savage depths, was never quite the calming idyll that it seemed.

They stuck with the heart attack story. That way Dmitry got a proper religious burial. The Orthodox religion forbade suicide. The saints were supposed to drink their cup of sorrows to the end, not smoke a last cigarette and decide to flee the world and its tricks and traps. No one ever mentioned Dmitry again. The Gulf War began and people watched the TV news. Milena prepared for the murder trial, where she was going to interpret for Rossen, who only spoke Bulgarian. The Russians got a new church downtown, a real one, red brick and looked like a proper church, only of the Anglican variety. That’s because it was, but the Russians put their icons up inside and the elderly choir filled its hall with shaky chants in the Church Slavonic language. I saw the priest more often in the city streets now. He was often with a monk, equally exotic in his long black robe, though he never got as thick and long a beard as the priest. The monk was a New Zealander. I don’t know how he became a monk and if he ever read Dostoyevsky or not, but he said there was a monastery up in the Coromandel. It wasn’t the kind of place where you’d expect to find a monastery. I’d never been there, knew it only as somewhere where hippies lived and people went for beach holidays.

Painting the Pacific

The art gallery was just a small place and looked empty. It was late afternoon on a workday, people still at their offices and not out contemplating art. The weekend would bring them. This area of Paris was always full of people out strolling in the weekend, wandering the boutiques that lined the narrow streets. It was one of the oldest parts of the city and one of the most colourful too. The buildings wore a mediaeval look, while elsewhere so much of Paris had been straightened, widened and standardised during nineteenth-century urban development frenzies. The roofs stayed stuck in a turreted, steep-sloped, pressed-together past, while at street level life flowed onwards in strangely merging streams.

The old Jewish quarter was tucked into these streets. You still saw the Orthodox Jews, bearded, dressed in black, characteristic locks of hair framing their faces. A long string of Jewish businesses offered everything from bakery goods to religious supplies. Some of the proprietors had obviously come from Eastern Europe and sold the same kind of cakes and buns you’d find in Poland or Russia. Others came from North Africa or Lebanon and sold sticky sweet pastries and falafels.

The area was a centre of gay life too. Gays and Orthodox Jews weren’t perhaps the most natural neighbours, but that was one of the charms of Paris, that you found all sorts of unexpected combinations, like the Pakistanis in the old passages near the Gare du Nord or the Chinese mixed among the Arabs and arty types at Belleville.

History popped up between the Jews, gays and upmarket boutiques and sprinkled itself through the squares, museums and galleries. Tourists roamed the district and added their language jumble to the general flow of noise. On a weekday it was all quite quiet though, mild sun cut triangles on walls, slipped between the buildings and lit the old stone in suddenly more varied hue.

The art gallery seemed very dim after the sunshine outside. They were back somewhere in the shadows beyond, I could hear them speaking Japanese, Alan and the artist anyway. The artist was from Japan. He painted abstract stuff. At least the paintings hanging on the walls didn’t look like anything recognisable, just a lot of whirls and swirls, dashes and splashes of colour.

It was Alan who invited me to come over to the gallery that afternoon. He was tall, blond and blue-eyed and looked like the American he was. We studied together at the interpreters’ school. I didn’t really think of him as American, only on the outside, but outsides could be deceiving. You couldn’t always tell what people were underneath their surface packaging. You couldn’t tell from looking at Alan, for example, that he had grown up in Japan and was as much Japanese as anything, even if he didn’t look it.

I’d heard him speak Japanese plenty of times at the interpreting school. Sometimes I read speeches for them in English, pretended to be a politician or whatever. I’d read a portion and the teacher, a prim and proper Japanese woman, would choose someone to translate, Alan or one of the two Japanese girls who studied with him. Whoever was chosen always said “Hai” in a tone of firm obedience and set to. “Hai” was the only Japanese word I knew, an army kind of word, like the World War II Germans’ “jawohl”.

Alan liked Paris. We lived in the same place, the big park full of student residences, except that I lived in the brooding British ‘manor’, while he lived in the nearby American house. We often took the metro home together and I’d ask him about Japan. He liked Paris more than I did, or at least seemed quite settled there. We wandered the Parc Montsouris in the lengthening spring evening. It was a typical Paris park, trimmed and clipped, neat and orderly. Once a couple of New Zealand friends came to visit and we bought some food and sat down on the grass, thinking to have a little picnic, but the park wardens promptly came and chased us away. The park had a pond with ducks. Joggers did their morning and evening circuits, old ladies sat on benches, mothers pushed prams. The city wasn’t flat in this district but full of small slopes that gave a little bit of changing perspective. The trees grew tall and the buildings closed in around, but they were more varied and up-and-down here than the stern grey lines that framed so many other Paris streets.

Sometimes it all seemed not quite real. We drifted in the hazy light in a city that was more of a chance dream than anything. Maybe that was why Alan liked it. He had an American look and American passport but didn’t really know America, not the way that I knew Wellington anyway, born in it, grew up in it, had it plastered in layer after layer all through me. And yet in the Japan which had been his home, the outer packaging of European features made it impossible to ever blend in and just join them in their routine current, not have to surprise, explain and be a curiosity when in his head were the same scenes, words and passing river of life as they all had. But they couldn’t see that, couldn’t guess that behind the white skin and blue eyes was a tongue that spoke their same language and a heart layered with their same land.

In Paris we were freer in a sense. The French tended to assume that one could and would become like them, speak their language and adopt their ways. They’d seen so many years of people coming from all around the world to Paris like moths to a candle, ready to burn their old selves in the flame if it could give them the chance to gain new wings of more chic and polished make. It was easier here anyway to fuzz distinction and not draw a second glance. Perhaps that was what put Alan at ease in this city. He didn’t have to be anything specific and no one cared if his Japanese inside didn’t match his American outside or vice versa.

The artist must have been one of those moths once, like in classic tales of poor students come to Paris, living in attics on sheer enthusiasm and crusts of dry bread, budding painters, poets and novelists. I remembered then a newspaper tale about one of those students, another Japanese as it happened, and a painter too. He killed a French girl and ate her, had some kind of distorted artistic theory to explain his actions. Life was full of things like that, people who blurred the lines so far as to make the whole world abstract and then go floating off through its dismembered forms.

This artist didn’t look like he was going to kill and eat anyone. He bustled about with the gallery owner, a Frenchman, working out where to hang the remaining paintings. The exhibition wasn’t entirely ready yet. I ran my gaze over the works already up on the walls. Nothing caught my fancy. I wasn’t much good at coming up with polite praise for what didn’t grab me and so I stayed silent.

I started flicking through the catalogues and reviews from the artist’s past exhibitions. The art critics were good at finding words, whole buckets full of them to pour in fancy verbal flow. They saw so much in what to me just looked like a bunch of stripes and squiggles. It was impressive really, made me imagine they must have become a very learned lot and waded through tomes of scholarly research to be able to weave such confident assessments out of such seemingly subjective and hard-to-grasp material.

“Do you agree with what the critics see in your work”? I asked the artist.

I’d always wondered if the vision really matched, or if the painters weren’t just secretly laughing at the professor types with their fancy talk.

The artist smiled at my question. But he wasn’t laughing at the art critics. He too was impressed at how they could draw so much out of his brush strokes. It wasn’t his head that painted, but his heart, his fingers pumping feeling into the brush, choosing colour and shape on an unconscious whim, and he didn’t know at that moment what he was doing and where he was going, just squeezed out of himself lumps that he’d had no time to analyse. The critics then took them and knitted around them their own frame of theories and meaning. That was a work in itself. The artist picked up their threads and followed them back to his own paintings, and so it went, back and forth, each side tossing more small stars into the sky, tacking them on to this or that constellation, and you couldn’t really say where the vision began and ended, and who even made it, the painter or the viewer.

I listened to the artist and sensed my own mind like that night sky in which yet another point of light suddenly burned. I glanced again over the paintings on the walls. Now they showed that sky, one little burst after another. They showed ponds too, stones tossed in and sending out ripples, or rivers interrupted by rocks and rapids.

I wasn’t sure how the artist knew Alan. Perhaps it was just word of mouth amongst the Japanese, the same way that the Russians usually found me. We were both curiosities with a piece of ourselves stuck in what others thought of as ‘rare’ and ‘exotic’. Russians wanting to get something translated into English often tracked me down, and I assumed it worked the same for Alan. He hadn’t ever struck me as someone much interested in art, but he seemed rather absorbed in the paintings now, appeared to like them.

The artist had brought only some of his more recent works. They were all similar in colour and style, probably made a series, easier to market and promote no doubt. The catalogues gave samples of his older works. I flicked through them again, my eyes more open now. They were all still abstract on the surface, but some of them suddenly shone fat with concrete subject, obvious and clear.

“I know these hills”, I said. “They’re Pacific hills”.

I probably wouldn’t have noticed they were hills when I first arrived. Perhaps because I’d come in from the sunny street and the gallery was dim then and I needed time for my vision to adjust. Now I didn’t think twice and blurted out my comment. They were the headlands beyond Wellington, the harbour entrance with its hills that made lines against the sky, sometimes merging with the cloud, sometimes looking like not really hills at all but just a continuation of the sea, the waves risen high and stuck like that in skyward stretch.

They had a different shape to hills in France or anywhere else I’d seen in Europe. It was a hard thing to explain in words, the shape and feel of hills. So many times I’d tried as a child to seize their forms with my pencil and put it on the paper before me. The ridge beyond our house, the marching row of summits across the valley, they always stayed evasive to my hand and yet stamped so clear in my heart. This artist had no such trouble. His works had an effortless look, as if he really had forgotten his fingers altogether and just turned his gaze inside, closed his eyes and let the brush follow the wind. There they were, the hills, the sweep of sea, land and sky running together and coming apart, hugging each other close or pushing each other away.

“Yes, they’re Pacific hills”, the artist nodded. “These are places in Japan”.

He’d painted his distant home. I’d never been to Japan, but it was one of the countries I was aware of as a kid, a distinct bit of the world in the murkiness of my not yet geographically enlightened mind. My father said he’d been there. I was about six years old and stared at him in wide-eyed admiration. He said he’d been to Japan on a business trip, just a very short trip. I didn’t believe him. My father often travelled around New Zealand on business trips. We’d go and see him off at the airport and I was always wishing it was me about to board a plane and fly away. He usually brought us back a little souvenir from the towns he visited. He hadn’t left Wellington lately at all, but he pressed a coin into my hand and said it was from Japan. It was a small silver coin with a flower on it and Chinese writing. I took the coin as proof that maybe he wasn’t lying after all, and maybe really had been to Japan at some earlier moment, flown so far across the world, done in a big hurry whatever it was he did on business trips, and promptly left again.

I didn’t know how much the coin was worth, but it was precious to me and I slept with it at night. I felt a connection with Japan as it was, though a strange one. I was born on August sixth, and my curiosity about life soon pulled from history book pages the coincidence of my birthday date with the atom bomb exploding over Hiroshima. The Japanese could remake the whole world in origami, even lived in paper houses, ate seaweed and rice, and during the war they got so far south across the ocean that there was even a place in the Wairarapa where their soldiers got held in a POW camp. Some of them escaped once and got shot. Then the Americans dropped the bomb on Hiroshima, right on my birthday, though I wasn’t born yet of course. The city burned and the people melted. Every year on that day people stopped a moment to think of peace. It was all in the coin I clutched in my small hand.

Japan had an emperor. I’d read plenty of ‘tales from around the world’ and knew that he’d have silver riches, flowers growing in his palace gardens, and strange rocks and pine trees like the ones on the bits of smashed Chinese cups or bowls that washed up on Island Bay beach. The waves wore those porcelain fragments smooth and rounded the edges, but you could still see the blue and white patterns, crumbs of Chinese landscape. I saw all that in the coin too and imagined it a tiny token of that far-off ruler and his land, brought back by my father so as to surprise me on an otherwise ordinary night.

But the artist just painted his hills, grabbed the land’s edges with his brush and swiftly pinned them to the paper. That was his Japan. I’d produce the same if I knew how to paint Wellington, like the photos I took the day I learned from the mailbox that I’d really made it through and would be going to Paris to study. Tattered sky trailing ragged strings of cloud across the hilltops, up and down lines of dark green and grey, the wind messing it all up, running it all together, that was what I captured in the camera lens that day, and what the artist pulled from his brush. I didn’t see at all then the Japan of my long-ago coin, but just another kind of Island Bay, hills bold on a clear day or half-dissolved in banks of mist, green in winter, brown and dry in summer.

I remembered the Russian sailors from Vladivostok. We sat amidst rustling trees on the hillside, the garden like an island drifting above the city below. The sailors drank wine, picked at the food laid on the table outside in the breeze and sun. Russia was a whole three weeks away by boat. They ran their eyes over the rickety wooden fence and the houses shining amongst the pines, flash of glass, painted corrugated iron roof, colour of eaves and window frames.

“It looks like home”, one of them said suddenly, waved a hand at the scene, “looks like Vladivostok, like the places out of town where people go to spend the weekends”.

It was strange to think that a place so far across the world could look like Wellington. The sailor said it was the hills. They said it often; the hills were the same, Pacific hills.

You could see it in the postcard sets they gave me. Most of the buildings in the postcard scenes were the same dull concrete things that seemed to cover the entire former Soviet Union. It amused me that people thought those drab constructions a source of pride, sign of ‘modernity and progress’, and worthy of photographic record. You’d get whole sets of these uninspiring vistas, one ugly edifice after another, but the ones from Far East cities had hills in the background, summits rising beyond the building lines, slopes and ridges of Pacific ports such as Vladivostok and Nakhodka, or towns on the island of Sakhalin or Kamchatka Peninsula. The Kamchatka ones were best of all. They not only had Pacific hills but also volcanoes, bigger mountains like the ones we passed on the Desert Road, small cones too, like the one behind my aunt’s house in Auckland. And they had geysers bubbling away, like up around Rotorua. It was all on the postcards, along with the rows of concrete-box apartment blocks and communist-style statues of stern men with square jaws and big muscles.

They lived on a long and narrow piece of land like we did. True, they were joined to the continent, but in a rather useless location right up in the Arctic reaches. They may as well have been an island. Ships from Kamchatka came to Wellington too, and they also spoke about the similarity of hills. I remembered the ‘rim of fire’ from school, earthquake preparedness talks, and TV programmes about disasters, the line of cracks that circled the Pacific and gave us the shaky, bubbling, mountain-sliced slivers of land on which we lived.

I shared my thoughts about Pacific hills with the artist and he agreed. He’d probably be like the Vladivostok sailors and feel suddenly at home if he came to Wellington. I wasn’t sure what the ‘rim’ was like on the other side of the Pacific, the western side, which Alan was supposed to call home. I wasn’t even sure which part of America he came from. The Pacific was too huge an expanse if you looked that way. I stood on the squeaky sands on a Stewart Island beach once and watched the waves roll in one after another from the west. It was thousands of miles from me to the next bit of land and contemplative figure somewhere on the Chilean coast. Going north, I at least knew from history that people had made their way down from one strip of land to another long ago, crossed straits, sailed from one island to the next and finally rounded the headlands to see our harbour in its great sheltered bay before them, hills leaning in around them in welcoming embrace.

We didn’t need to be explorers in the literal sense anymore, following the currents and stars. A small Paris gallery held huge journeys and hung them on the wall, just abstract lines and swirls of colour to the unfamiliar eye, but to my gaze that day a sudden piece of home and closeness. Alan knew the hills too, not possible American ones, but the Japanese ones of his childhood, and the artist ran his eye along their forms as he surveyed the walls, choosing the best arrangement for his works. There we were, three completely different people with memory scenes sparking in our minds, while outside, the sun sank behind the steep roofs and dappled the stone in sunset. The streets reached back to their mediaeval origins, old Paris slipping out from between the modern bustle as the shadows lengthened and the light melted. Alan and I joined it too. The artist continued putting the finishing touches on his exhibition, the gallery owner at his side, making suggestions. The next day was Saturday and the strollers would be out, eyes running over all the slices of the world and its life behind shop window glass. Japan was quite fashionable, and so was modern art. Some of them would enter the little gallery and take a look at the paintings on display, perhaps even buy some big skies and Pacific hills.

Francesca’s Seal

Francesca’s seal had vanished. The mutters clanged loud, weighed my small ears down with words the grownups exchanged in brief snatches on the telephone or in the street. One chance mention would have blown past in the wind and gone. The seal simply got misplaced perhaps, as often happened in life. But the talk didn’t stop. The words swelled and hung.

I made myself inconspicuous and unconcerned. The seal was in my bed. It was a small object made of plaster and covered with fur. Francesca kept it on a cabinet in her lounge. Countless times I’d picked it up and held it in my hand while waiting with my brother for Francesca’s older son to get his school things ready and join us on the road down the hill. I plotted how best to make it mine. If I stole it, I’d have to do it quick. Francesca was always flitting in and out, bustling about, throwing words and glances here and there.

I stole it one morning when her boys were especially slow and complaining and the house didn’t have quite its usual orderly look. She hurried off downstairs to get them moving. My brother stared out the window and the lounge was quiet. The seal slid easily into my jacket pocket and I carried it away down the steps to school.

I had the same happy feeling of a job well done as the day I stole the plane from the toy shop in Newtown. That was the shop that had the words “Clarkes Gifts Toys” written on the awning. I learned to read very young and threw my eyes over everything around. ‘Gifts’ and ‘toys’ were obvious, but I didn’t know what ‘Clarkes’ were and wanted to find out. Sadly, my mother never seemed to share my curiosity and we seldom entered that shop.

My luck changed though one wet, blustery day. We went in and my mother got talking with the saleswoman. She often did that in shops, especially the Newtown ones. Worst of all was the fabric shop, where she spent hours picking through material samples and chatting with the women behind the counter. My brother and I were usually dressed in clothes made with material from that same shop, and we passed the time as ‘models’, took our places amongst the bolts of cloth in the display windows, one on each side of the entrance door, and froze. We’d stand like that, motionless, until someone outside in the street raised a glance our way and we’d suddenly come alive, stick out our tongues and go cross-eyed, make the hapless person jump in fright, and we’d laugh and laugh.

Next worse was the Catholic charity shop. If we weren’t dressed in the fabric shop’s transformed wares, we were modelling whatever the charity shop hung out for sale on its dusty, mothball-smelling racks. One of the women who worked there was called Doris and my mother could talk to her for ages while going through the piles of junk. Doris’ shop – that was what we called the place, easier to say than Society of St Vincent de Paul, which was what was written on the window. At least there we could run upstairs and search through the tattered paperbacks for something to read or unearth the odd treasure amongst the castoff toys. That was how we got our guns.

The model plane from ‘Clarkes Gifts Toys’ also slipped easily into my pocket. My mother and the saleswoman were too engrossed in conversation to notice, but I didn’t get to keep it for long. I got sick the next day and my mother found it hiding under my pillow, lectured me on the sin of theft and took it back to the shop.

Really, I hoped to do like with the teacher’s shell at school and not actually have to steal Francesca’s seal. The teacher kept the shell in her cupboard. It was a polished tropical shell, smooth and cool to the touch, and just by holding it your hand you could go on long journeys across seas and islands. If you put it to your ear you could still hear the distant waves crashing down on unseen shores. The teacher caught me putting the shell into my pocket, but she was the understanding kind and agreed on a compromise with me. I’d not steal the shell, but she’d let me borrow it now and then for a while.

I dropped hints to Francesca about the seal, hoping she’d maybe just give it to me, seeing how much I liked it, or come to a sharing arrangement like the teacher at school, but she didn’t respond and so I had to take the thieving option. I hadn’t expected they’d make so much fuss about it, search for it and not let it go. I was six and the world was full of things I wanted, while Francesca was an adult and I thought she’d be like adults usually where, dull round the edges and quick to forget what was surely just a minor matter amidst her daily concerns.

I took it out from under my pillow and contemplated its small grey form. The fur was soft to my touch, silvery with white flecks. It was nothing like any real seal I’d seen. The seals at Red Rocks further along the coast were greyish-brown and kind of bristly, enormous stinking things that basked in the sun on the rocks at the headland. They came every winter, but they were the Antarctic kind, while Francesca’s seal was no doubt a northern one and different.

Francesca herself was northern and different. Her name made me think of Italy and Catholic saints, but she was German. She had blonde hair and looked pretty much as I imagined Germans ought to. I didn’t know when and how she arrived in New Zealand, but her English speech was like her cooking, seemed the same as everyone else’s on the surface, and yet if you tasted it or listened closer, it wasn’t the same at all. She spoke German with her children. We had another neighbour down the road, who was Samoan, and I often heard the Samoan women chatting away in their language, or the Chinese or the Indians, but those were ordinary sounds that washed over my ears and melted in the general landscape of life. Unlike Francesca’s German, which resonated with exotic chime.

My fingers clasped the seal tight. Francesca’s German words wrapped the world in other names. The oldest boy taught me some. Sky, sun, flowers, I repeated it all after him, naming things anew. It was curious to think that these were strange-tasting words for me, but for others far across the world they were the natural names of life and its surrounds. There were really only one sky and one sun, but our tongues were so many, so different in their music, even if we were all talking about the same thing.

Or was it really the same? I’d seen photos of old European paintings in books, saw their faded light that came as if filtered through a smoky haze. Our sky wasn’t like that. Its colour was strong and pure and the light came intense, lit the hills, roofs and windows in contrast. That German word, ‘Himmel’, sounded softer, not a big blue spread but a sort of yellowed curtain in the background, patterned through with sunset cloud or tinged with mist, something like the sky in the framed print on my parents’ bedroom wall, the one with marshes, reeds and wild ducks. There was something faintly melancholy in that painting and it wasn’t any place I’d even seen.

We had a jigsaw puzzle of a German scene, a Bavarian castle with pointy stone turrets, set against a backdrop of forest-clad mountains. Francesca took her children back home for the holidays once and I imagined them heading into that jigsaw puzzle scene. Even here in Wellington, if she closed her eyes she’d still be able to journey, like I could with the teacher’s tropical shell, only she’d visit not as yet unknown islands but would return to her childhood places and streets, recall her sky, sun and flowers before they ever acquired new names or different feel. The thought struck me then that maybe the seal in my hand came from those times and was not just a random object but a piece of Germany, a piece of the past that she’d carried with her all these years.

From there my thoughts went to my father’s bookcases with their forbidden things. It was my job to do the dusting every morning, and I always put that time to use, sneaked coins from my father’s spare change jar, or took his books from the shelves and flicked through their pages in search of whatever it was that got my mother putting on her stern tone and raising the ‘woe betide you’ finger. My surreptitious searches turned up lots of sex and swear words. My father also had a lot of books about Nazis. Hitler, Goebbels, Goering, World War II and its horrors were spread out through fat tomes that sometimes even came with pictures to look at.

That was another kind of Germany, a place where the sky got threaded through with not just sunset glow but ash and flame. The smoke haze was real then, smoke from ruins and fires, bombed buildings, blackened, smouldering scenes. I reckoned Francesca was probably as old as my father was. He was born the year the war began and never knew his father until the war ended and the soldiers came home from the battlegrounds on the other side of the world. If Francesca were as old as my father, she’d have been about the same as me now when the war ended, and who could say what kind of skies and scenes she’d known over that time?

She could have been a small girl peering into the local toy shop’s windows with longing eyes and maybe even a plotting mind like I had. Perhaps the small grey seal had sat on a shelf in that long ago shop and she’d stroked its fur and thought too of how to slip it into her pocket. Perhaps she’d only had to tug her mother’s arm and ask, and the seal became hers in the usual, proper way. Or maybe it was a gift from some relative, perhaps a Christmas or birthday smile moment, and when she took it in her hand now she didn’t really see it at all but felt herself drift away instead into the lights, food smells and German chatter of distant home. Perhaps that home was gone now and the relatives were dead. Those were so many things I couldn’t know. Perhaps they too had had to flee, like in movie scenes, weary people laden down with hastily grabbed possessions, trudging along muddied roads. And the seal was the little piece of normal life she took with her, the bit of softness and quiet shine, a comforting weight of hope in her small hand.

I covered it completely with my fingers. My mind wavered between the Bavarian jigsaw puzzle castle and the uniformed men in my father’s books, Hitler with the stupid moustache. The seal didn’t take me anywhere. It wasn’t like the shell, didn’t keep waves inside it that could reach my ears too. Francesca’s son said they were all looking for it, confided that his mother was upset that it had gone. I opened up my hand again. The fur had such a delicate feel against my skin. I’d thought I’d have more use for it than Francesca. She just left it on the cabinet and I figured scarcely gave it a glance, busy as she was with other things. I hadn’t meant to steal Germany though, steal her memories and past, slip her childhood into my pocket and run blithely off to school.

There was my mother in the doorway now, getting into her morning whirl of hurrying voice and flapping tongue. Soon my brother and I headed to Francesca’s house. Their house was strange, not technically in our street at all, but joined to it by a path that led through a garage and up a driveway. You went through the garage dimness and came out on the other side into greenery and flowers, and then came the house stuck to the slope and the steep path that continued on down to the winding road to school.

I waited for a quiet moment. The lounge was orderly that morning, shining in the fresh light. All the objects on the cabinet, shelves and coffee table sparkled clean and bright. The seal came back out of my pocket as easily as it had gone in, took its old place among the things on display. Francesca’s son came in with his school bag and newly combed, scrubbed look, and off we went down the steps in the sun.

My Italy

The train rattled and chugged along, stopped at every tiny station. The sun’s rays sharpened their slant and poured in through the windows, filling the carriage with stuffy heat. The train’s motion made only a faint breeze that skipped across the window tops and didn’t reach the sweating passengers. People sat languid, chatted, stared at the passing string of hills and small towns, flicked through newspapers, or rested with their eyes closed and the sun dancing on their skin.

The sticky heat made me languid too. My head was still heavy from Rome. We hurried to the station with our bags. It wasn’t too far from the hotel our friend had booked us into, a cheap place run by Ethiopians, cheap by Rome standards anyway, and we walked with our stuff through the late afternoon streets. The broad square before the railway station was full of rushing traffic. I felt my head spin as we crossed. The cars caught the sun and turned into shining streams that merged with the blinding ribbons of light tossed across buildings and the dazzling sky above. I started to sag and faint, right there in the middle of all that traffic. But my feet kept going and I sank to the railway station floor in a shaded corner, felt sick, grabbed the water bottle and drank and drank.

Simon went to buy our train tickets. I sat in my corner and watched legs hurry by. The summer had only just begun but was already fierce. I recalled the fish and chip shop. The men who worked there were Italians and stood all day at their sizzling steaming pots of oil, never seemed to care about the heat. They didn’t really fit with the Rome railway station and its scurrying mass of office workers and usual range of urban types that you saw in any big city, mishmash of faces mingled together, Arabs, Somalis, Ethiopians, Albanians. The scene was less like my long ago Italians and more like the random mix of things they tossed into their boiling pots.

Our fish and chip shop Italians had big noses and a sort of rough-hewn look. They had loud voices too and even though they were getting grey and wrinkly by then and must have been in Wellington for years, their tongues were still heavy with accent and wove a sing-song melody through their words. My brother and I copied their accent when we memorised lists of Italian terms for our music theory exams. We weren’t sure why it was that composers had settled on Italian as the language in which to leave instructions for playing the pieces they composed, but the music scores were full of these words of expression, like the commuter legs going by at the station, faster, slower, heavy and solemn, light and playful…

We read the words out to each other and tried to give our voices the same booming resonance the Italians flung at our ears when they warned us not to be cheeky and said they’d fry us up with the fish and chips if we didn’t behave ourselves and show them due respect. Sometimes they looked at us as though they weren’t just going to toss warning words at our ears but would grab them with their strong fingers and give them a good twist. They had such big noses and it always made us want to laugh.

Simon let his eyes close. It was hard to stay alert in the pressing heat. He was another New Zealander abroad, a friend of a friend. I met him on this northern side of the world. He was from Auckland and so was the mutual friend who was about to get married in a couple of days’ time. We’d come for his wedding. The girl was from a Tuscany village, one of the small stops near the end of this stuffy train’s route.

Names like ‘Tuscany village’ filled my mind with scenes culled from tourism posters and works of art, standard images that swelled and stuck. Rome lived up to its set. We only had a day there, got up when dawn trailed faint coolness and dabbed the city pink around the edges, roamed miles and swallowed as many sights as we could in our short time. It was a rare thing that a city really did match the pictures in my head, but Rome was just that rare example, even more so when the train rattled slowly out of the denser city districts and gave me fleeting glimpses of villas, columns and tree-filled gardens draped across the hillsides. It was intermingled with countless later layers of course, but you could imagine guys in togas, sipping wine and strolling amongst the olive groves.

The carriage was a random mix of workday faces. Some of them would have fitted in with our Island Bay Italians. The sun used to come slanting in through the fish and chip windows too on Friday afternoons. There was nearly always a queue. We didn’t buy fish, only chips, a big bulging packet for all us kids, and then we’d hurry back up the hill and it was my job to fry up some eggs and some Watties canned spaghetti and divide it up with the chips on the plates.

Later, the Italians saw my father arrive. The bus stop was just outside their shop. They knew my father, he came every Friday and ordered pretty much the same thing each time, one lot for himself, one lot for my mother, fish, chips, paua fritters, pineapple rings… It would all go into his briefcase and he’d hurry along the shortcuts up the hill like us lot earlier, knowing that my mother was hungry and impatient by then. My father’s briefcase always smelt like fish and chips and vinegar. I wondered what his colleagues at work thought.

The sun’s rays in the shop fell across our faces and mingled with the bustle and noise. Sometimes they lit the fish on the posters showing New Zealand’s export species tacked up on the wall. We’d stare at the different fish and wonder what they tasted like. People said the fish in the fish and chip shops was shark. We didn’t care what it was. We watched the Italians toss hot battered chunks of fish and streams of chips onto the paper, sprinkle them with salt, wrap them up and put them into other customers’ waiting hands. Some of the fish on the posters looked really strange. I came across people too with those same expressions.

There wasn’t much else to do while waiting for our chips to fry. A curious machine stood in the corner. It told fortunes. A two-cent coin dropped in the slot set an arrow spinning and pointing at future omens and warnings. We never saw anyone try it. It was enough to just read the ‘fortunes’. Our favourite was ‘beware of six-foot caterpillars’, but you didn’t need to waste two cents for that. We wondered where the Italians got that machine and if they ever made any money out of it.

The train ran in and out of tunnels through the hills and the sun played hide and seek. The sea burst through in abrupt flash, a brief-seized triangle of blue soon gone as the train headed into blackness again. Then the flashes grew longer, enough to look across the bays and slopes and scattered clusters of houses. They were Romans’ weekend getaways, seaside escapes from the big city, especially in the fume-clogged summer heat.

Our Italians were the seaside kind. On the wall opposite the fish posters hung a painting of a village. Boats, houses, hills rose up behind, sea sparkled bright, and it did look a bit like these fleeting scenes that flashed between the tunnels. I assumed the Italians came from that painting village, or their fathers did at least, and they hung it in memory act on the wall as a small tribute to their origins. Maybe they’d all come from different villages really, and the painting was just a generic scene that didn’t necessarily capture one specific place, but rather reproduced a general look and feeling. I’d heard that they came mostly from the south, from around Naples, and the painting was perhaps just an attempt to seize that ‘south’ and package it for homesick moments in a faraway land.

Not that our Italians seemed homesick. I wasn’t sure when exactly they came, or why they chose Island Bay, but Island Bay had more Italians than anywhere else in the whole of New Zealand. They continued their old occupation and went fishing in Cook Strait. Their little boats bobbed about in the bay, just a short way from the shore, but the water was deep and cold there. I watched them chugging out to sea, off past the island, and always marvelled at their courage. The heaving swells beyond swallowed even the Picton ferries from view at times and the Italians’ tiny craft seemed too flimsy to last for long, but they came and went, came and went, kept the fish and chip shops running.

In some ways they seemed to keep themselves apart. Their kids went to private Catholic schools. One of them was on my road home up the hill and I’d see the kids in their uniforms, looking posh and disciplined. That school got closed down and they built a new one next door to the Catholic church, took over the field where we used to roll down the slope and lie in the grass at the bottom, watching the sky spin round above us. The old school stayed locked and abandoned. My friend and I sneaked in one day, climbed through a window and wandered the old classrooms full of dust and scattered books. I chose some musty, yellowed volumes and took them home.

But even though I never really knew the Italians, it was they who gave me lessons in what ‘community’ meant. I only had to remember Silvio’s Hall. The old stone building with a round window up high on the façade always caught my eye as I passed it at the bottom of the hill. It had a crumbling, long since empty look and curious ornamentation that seemed to hold mysterious significance. I asked my father if he knew what the building was and who it belonged to.

“It’s a masonic lodge”, he said, “a place where the masons meet”.

“What kind of masons? What do they do there?” I asked, imagining craftsmen gathering after a day of working the stone and discussing how to protect their dying skills in an age when everything was done by machines and on industrial scale.

“They’re a secret society”, my father said, and he waggled his little finger at me and told me that was a sign the masons made to each other to identify themselves. They had all kinds of secret rituals and ceremonies, but you had to join them to find out what exactly they did.

There seemed to be no masons left in Island Bay because the building looked like it hadn’t been used for years. I waggled my little finger at my friends at school. None of them knew anything about masons, but they thought the secret sign amusing.

Then Silvio bought the building and turned it into a community venue. I didn’t know Silvio, just knew he was one of the local Italians. When our school staged a musical, Silvio gave us the hall as a venue and I got to perform on the masons’ old stage. When the summer holidays came, Silvio and the other Italians organised activity days at the hall, with games, competitions and prizes, open to whoever wanted to come along. We went too and I thought of the fish and chip shop, the boats in the bay, the hard work the fishermen did. Silvio was generous, and I liked the way he brought people together and gave them a place where they could make ideas come to life.

The men at the fish and chip shop were generous too, even if they did threaten us when we got too cheeky. They took us out the back and showed us where the chips lay in pale cold heaps, waiting to be tossed into the oil pots.

“That’s where you’ll go”, they said. “We’ll keep you here with the chips, and then fry you up”.

We only laughed and asked if they could fry up some extra with our order, but they were always businessmen when it came to that and fried up only what we paid for.

One night though, my father came home with a whole lot of fish, not the battered ‘shark’ that you got in the packets of fish and chips, but real fish of the kind that lay displayed in the shop window and decorated the export species posters on the wall. The fishermen caught all sorts of fish after all, not just what went with chips on Friday nights.

I tried to sell a fish to the Italians once, hoping they might put it in their display window with the other expensive samples. I found it washed up on the sand at Island Bay beach after a storm. It was a big puffy thing covered with spikes and looked pretty hideous, but some of the export species fish looked equally unappealing, and yet the Japanese bought them and gave New Zealand lots of money. The strait was still rough and the fishermen hadn’t gone to sea that day. They were out in their yards and garages with their pots, nets and dinghies, mending, patching, painting. I went from one house to the next with my big spiky fish, asking the men if they wanted to buy it. They all laughed and shook their heads. Finally, one of them said that you couldn’t eat this fish, so I took it back to the beach and returned it to where I’d found it.

Apart from the Friday night ‘shark’ my parents ate, or sometimes canned pilchards or tuna mixed in with the dinner, we never had fish at home. As we knew from the posters in the shop, fish was an export product and cost a lot. But then my father took a paper package from his briefcase and unwrapped whole strips of yellowish flesh.

“Smoked fish”, he said, mimicking the Italians’ accent. “They gave it to me in the shop, told me to take it home for you all”.

They were strict with us kids and never gave into our begging, but my father earned their sudden generosity.

“It’s because of you lot”, he said. “Those Italians, they like big families. They said, ‘We know you’ve got all those kids at home. Here, take them some smoked fish’, and they gave me all this fish”.

He was better at imitating the Italians’ accent than we were. As he spoke I pictured the men with their big noses and rough voices, gazing out into the street now dark and splotched by orange lights. The busiest night of the week was nearly at an end and they were probably looking forward to closing time and the chance to be with their own families and relax. My father came in and ordered his usual. We’d been in much earlier, when the sun was still out, bought our scoops of chips and played our teasing games with the men as they worked.

We ate the smoked fish. I remembered its colour, smell and taste for years after that. It felt like I’d eaten a bit of Italy, a tiny piece of villages near Naples and communities with boats and big families, feasts and saints, and cured strips of fish hanging in the shop windows. It came back to me now as the train hugged the coast and the sun started going down over the shimmering sea. Conversation came and went in ripples around me, sounded like those long-ago Island Bay voices, only here there was no accent. Here it would be me who’d have an accent if I were to try to speak their words.

If I took the train south instead, searched the bays around Naples, maybe I’d find the village that hung on the fish and chip shop wall. I hardly felt like I was in Italy at all. It seemed an accident or a dream, and I was only floating through chance scenes, more aware of the draining heat than anything else. That was because my Italy was far away on the other side of the world, scattered through the sandy streets by the beach at Island Bay.