Question 7

by Richard Flanagan

Is it because we see our world only darkly that we surround ourselves with lies we call time, history, reality, memory, detail, facts?

Every old sock, as my father would sometimes say about odd couples, finds an old boot.

I wasn’t sure what my book was about. I may have said something about love, which had the virtue of not being untrue and being so broad as to be meaningless.

One of Chekhov’s earliest stories was a parody of mental arithmetic questions asked of schoolchildren, of which Chekhov’s question 7 is typical: Wednesday, June 17, 1881, a train had to leave station A at 3 a.m. in order to reach station B at 11 p.m.; just as the train was about to depart, however, an order came that the train had to reach station B by 7 p.m. Who loves longer, a man or a woman?3

Chekhov’s genius lay in never presuming to give the answer.

All that is known is this: in front of his bookcase, while talking about matters of literary style, they kissed.

They both took what they wanted. Perhaps it was her. Perhaps it was him. Perhaps it is what remains when memory and obliteration collide: imagination. Perhaps it just was: inexplicable to both. Perhaps it was question 7.

When someone was down you helped, not out of altruism, but an enlightened selfishness: this way we all have a chance. The measure of the strongest was also the only guarantee of ongoing strength: their capacity to help the weakest. Mateship wasn’t a code of friendship. It was a code of survivors.

‘Money,’ my father would say, ‘is like shit. Pile it up and it stinks. Spread it around and you can grow things.’

My parents were frugal not simply because they had to be careful, but because they saw little reason for making life about money.

mental illness. Along with money, ambition was seen to be dangerous.

War, my father told me decades later, is the ultimate obscenity.

They should never have met, they were destined for each other, he would make her life and destroy her life and she would make her life in spite of his life, he would be an inexhaustible source of love and friendship for her for the next thirty-five years, he would madden her, he would win her and lose her and win her, she would be the one person he cared to see to the end, and to her immense surprise only after his death would she discover within herself the one thing she had never expected: a crack in the cup of life that opened into a desolation that was utter and inconsolable.

Wells imagined the atomic bomb as an infinitely more destructive force than conventional explosives, a weapon so powerful that a man ‘could carry about in a handbag an amount of latent energy sufficient to wreck half a city’. The idea had been vaguely mooted by a few scientists but it was Wells who first foresaw the monstrous reality and consequences clearly and in detail.

Fiction may be only fancy yet reality is often no more than the enthusiastic answer we give to our dreams and nightmares.

The dying, possessed of similar feelings towards their parents as the captain of the Enola Gay, were frequently heard to call one word over and over in their final agony, as they wandered lost and blind through the burning ruins of Hiroshima. Mother, they kept saying as charred skin fell like long strands of kelp off their bodies and heads, mother.

Though I tried to be honest, it was still happening and so it was dishonest. That’s what I couldn’t see then that I see now, that though it happened then it’s still happening now and it won’t ever stop happening, and that writing about it, that writing about anything, can’t be an opinion about what happened as if it had already happened when it is still happening, still unintelligible, still mysterious, and all writing is trapped in tenses when life isn’t.

M— knew of literature: she had been to Cambridge in the 1950s where she knew Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath. This was deeply impressive in 1980s Tasmania. Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath may as well have been Count Vronsky and Anna Karenina.

‘Well, they do say there are only six stories in the world and a dying man is one of them.’

The sounds weren’t exactly Mmm, the sounds were lots of vowels and consonants stacked up, Jenga-like, in growing towers of complex sentences, but at the end of it all they can be summed up as one tall Mmmmm that kept collapsing.

Don’t be a crawler, son, my mother would admonish me as a child. A fear, deeply buried, that kept surfacing. Meaning, don’t give in, stand up, be your own person.

What remained was either silence or lies. Such as: the convicts and their children had all fled to the mainland during the gold rushes. Such as: the Tasmanian Aboriginal people were extinct, long gone, not one left on the island. Such as: everyone was descended from free settlers, not a touch of the tar brush or the convict stain on any of us.

It never occurred to them that they might escape the fate life had decreed for them because destiny was unavoidable; what mattered to them was meeting fate looking it squarely in the eye. My father would quote his brother, my uncle Tom, the possum snarer and later railway yard labourer: ‘You can sit on me but you can’t shit on me.’

It was a time of wonder and all things had the shape of miracles. And like a miracle, no evidence that it ever happened remains.

And when he explains conscription I too become frightened because I understand this much: that our family can now be pulled apart, that the war can take all my brothers, tear them away from us. That they can die.

And then he is talking of the ancient snowing world so many decades before, white-mantled manferns bowing, myrtle leaves shining, a beauty that as an old man he understands as the goodness of this world welcoming him safely home.

His favoured method of scientific research had at its apex the habit of long walks and longer baths, baths necessarily replete with daydreaming reveries, baths so long that a chambermaid once thought he had drowned.

In his fictions Leo Szilard’s great influence was his favourite novelist, H. G. Wells, who bowed not before the dark and irrational but looked towards the hope of science and the light of reason to liberate the world.

George Orwell believed that up until 1914 Wells was ‘a true prophet’. ‘Thinking people who were born at the beginning of the century are in some sense Wells’ own creation,’ he wrote in a 1941 essay on Wells’s legacy that could just as well have been written about Leo Szilard’s destiny.

Einstein and Szilard were friends, and together invented a refrigerator without mechanical parts to help the poor. They first met in 1920 when Szilard moved to Germany after being thrown down a set of steps leading to the Budapest University by anti-Semites and realising that it was time to leave Hungary. An outstanding student, Szilard had trained as an engineer, but in Berlin, the epicentre of modern physics, he pursued the new science.

As he lay back in his tub that autumnal London morning, Leo Szilard wondered why the forecasts of writers sometimes prove to be more accurate than those of scientists.

As he crossed the street he continued staring at the lights. If there were an element which when split by one neutron emitted two neutrons, it would only need massing enough of that element together to sustain more of the same as more atoms were split by more neutrons, creating new, unlimited energy as they continued multiplying. No one before had ever thought of the idea of a nuclear chain reaction.

Less than a mile from where Thomas Flanagan arrived as a convict slave and 110 years later, in the short time between the publication of The Voice of the Dolphins and the detonation of Tsar Bomba, I was born on a misty winter’s morning. My mother, already dealing with four children, her demanding mother and her sick husband, wept on learning she was pregnant with me, while my father dreamt of watching from inside his coffin the streets of Longford and its staring people pass by him.

Contemporary observers often commented on the way convictism was another name for slavery. The Tasmanian Aboriginal people understood the social distinction perhaps better than the slaves themselves: they liked to point out that even defeated in war they remained a free people and of a status above that of the convicts, whom they looked down upon as the unfree. That manumission was the likely but not necessary end of a Van Diemonian convict’s sentence did not mean it was any less a slave system than that of Rome. That a freed slave might rise did not mean the society was any less unfree.

On manumission the emancipated convicts were not allowed to return to their homelands but had to stay in the colonies. It was widely observed that they evaded the cities where the authorities ruled, preferring to find a new life in the bush where their ways often came to resemble that of the Aboriginal people with whom they sometimes had children, and these too were hidden from the authorities, their origins obscured and kept secret from the broader world. Some began to eat and live and even dress like Tasmanian Aboriginal people. A 40,000-year-old culture proved itself not so easily destroyed, nor was its ongoing influence restricted only to Aboriginal people.

It was as if it were all finally a matter of question 7, of who loves longer, for white people had begun in some ways to think like black people. Despite themselves, they had begun living in the circles of time with which the Tasmanian Aboriginal people had once marked their island. They were not Aboriginal. Over time many became racist. But nor were they any longer European.

By the time he died at the age of ninety-eight my father had few material possessions left other than an armchair, chair and desk in which he had collected various writings precious to him over the years: poems, sayings, quotes, a few pieces he had written, some correspondence. Among these papers my elder sister found a letter from a now-dead cousin on his mother’s side written years before about how when they were growing up they were told over and over never to mention outside of the home that their family had black blood. The implication was that our grandmother was of Aboriginal descent.

The story of covering up Aboriginal pasts was a common one in Tasmania where such behaviour was for some a form of survival. There is no documentation to prove my father’s cousin’s story is true, but that doesn’t make it untrue. It leaves the story as an unanswerable question mark over my family.

We, like many other Tasmanian families, have Aboriginal relatives. But even if our cousin’s story were true we would not be Aboriginal. We were not brought up in the Aboriginal culture or an Aboriginal community, far less known the profound racism Aboriginal people endure. But who, then, are we? Why are we? For we, like so many other Tasmanian families, live in the shade of old stories that remain with us along with the new ones that accrue.

And of Michael Howe’s fabled lost book of dreams and garden plans that he wrote in kangaroo blood and neatly bound with kangaroo gut? We are that too. He wrote, is writing, will write, waiting for us to become a new, better story.

Chekhov’s line that ‘both the strong and the weak fall victim to their own relationships with one another’ has the ring of forbidden truth. Who would dare write such a line like that today? Who would dare even think it?

Without Rebecca West’s kiss H. G. Wells would not have run off to Switzerland to write a book in which everything burns, and without H. G. Wells’s book Leo Szilard would never have conceived of a nuclear chain reaction and without conceiving of a nuclear chain reaction he would never have grown terrified and without growing terrified Leo Szilard would never have persuaded Einstein to lobby Roosevelt and without Einstein lobbying Roosevelt there would have been no Manhattan Project and without the Manhattan Project there is no lever at 8.15 am on 6 August 1945 for Thomas Ferebee to release 31,000 feet over Hiroshima, there is no bomb on Hiroshima and no bomb on Nagasaki and 100,000 people or 160,000 people or 200,000 people live and my father dies. Poetry may make nothing happen, but a novel destroyed Hiroshima and without Hiroshima there is no me and these words erase themselves and me with them.

I used the weight of existence to return. The crushing, punitive gravity of living, the impossible heaviness of reality, I used the all-consuming pain that I had somehow left to come back and hold me to the wet black rocks inside the roar of the rapid, the heightened, alive smell of heavily oxygenated air to try to stop that something that was not me and was me from rising and leaving. It had an inescapable lightness and my heaviness, the heaviness of the world and the heaviness of my pain, seemed ugly and stupid in comparison. It kept rising and rising and why should it and me with it not rise? The lightness of death seemed an irrefutable reproach to such weight.

No comma no commas ever a world without punctuation fences gates trespassing signs for a time that’s where I lived there a borderless world there with stunned gratitude there After a time these feelings faded. I fell from the sky. Commas returned, full stops. And with them fences, partitions, borders, the razor wire of relationships. But the memory stayed. The memory never left. Life thrills to life.