‘His last resting place?’
‘His ashes spread there.’
‘HIS ASHES.’
‘So in the past few weeks, the neighbours and other peoples, they see the man come at night with the shovel. I never seen him, until tonight. And bop, I hit you on head, thinking is you. Is it you?’
‘No, it’s not.’
‘That’s what my friend Bruce say. He here before, take a good look at you, and says — no, Igor, is not the man with the shovel.’
With the shouting from Manya and a lump the size of half a cricket ball on the back of my head and Igor’s lurching Russo-English, I was completely disoriented.
‘You’re telling me that for the last month a man has been coming to Fairweather’s park late at night with a shovel, digging around for something, and he’s been observed by neighbours and passers-by. You thought I was that man. So you tried to kill me with your walking stick.’
‘It was small spade actually.’
‘SMALL SPADE,’ Manya shouted to the imitation walnut kitchen cabinets as she chopped vegetables. She chopped loudly as well. Every blade-strike into the bread board tapped at my bruised cranium.
‘He was my good friend, EE-arn. I had only taxi on the island for a long time and he have no car, so I drove him everywhere he want to go. Not many places to go on Bribie, you understand. But I run him around and do errands for him, and he was very good to me. I take some of Manya’s cooking to his huts sometime, just so he have a hot meal in him. Sometimes he ate and sometimes no. He was strange man, but good man, EE-arn.’
From my seat on the crinkly vinyl couch I could not see the old man’s face across the room, just the occasional reflection of the overhead light in his enormous, black-rimmed spectacles.
‘This man, the one with the shovel, what would he be looking for?’
The old man retrieved his cane and toyed with what looked like a cast-iron wolfs head handle. He shrugged his shoulders.
‘What all the others been looking for.’
‘And what’s that.’
‘Money. Paintings. Ever since he die — 1974 — the strangers coming to pick over poor EE-arn. They think he rich, you see. That he bury the treasure. They think, how can such a great man, famous man, live like pauper? You know pauper?’
‘PAUPER.’
‘Paw-paw?’
‘PAUPER!’
‘They think, his name in paper and his pictures so they get a lot of money, so where the money? Is the way they think in capitalist society. They always seek the money. If is not visible to the eye, is buried. Money, money, money. But EE-arn, he don’t care about the money. He a rich man inside, not on outside, you understand?’
‘I think so.’
‘For year after year they come to me, the bigwigs from the city. You got EE-arn’s money? Where the money? How about the pictures, you must have the pictures? When he die — the pictures, they just disappear, whoof. Like that. Whoof. His place picked clean overnight. Whoof. All gone.’
Manya startled sizzling onions in a pan. The smell filled the small house. I felt nauseous.
‘You think the man with the shovel was looking for some lost Fairweathers?’
‘Maybe. But what’s lost to some people is not lost to others. You see?’
‘I’m not sure I do.’
‘Sometime EE-arn, he drunk, you know. We sit around the fire at the huts. He say, Igor, here, you have this picture, I know you like. Igor, take this one for Manya, she like. When he get drunk he don’t care, he like good communist, everything that his belong to everyone. He would be national treasure in Russia, but not in Australia, with the mosquitoes and toad fishes. He would have been a great man.’
He thumped the cane on the floor. The statue of Lenin stared in on us. I gently touched the new foothill on the back of my head.
He continued. ‘Before the man with the spade, there was other man. At least he not come in the night time, like a thief.’
‘The other man?’
‘I tell him, there nothing. But he insist. He say I must have seen them, I must have seen them.’
‘Seen what, exactly?’
‘The great pictures of the lepers.’
‘The lepers?’
‘The lepers.’
‘THE LEPERS.’
I was about to be sick. The onion aroma swirled around the room. Something else joined them in the pan. I recognised it from my childhood. Liver.
Then the old man rose and went to a small cane basket on the kitchen bench. He retrieved a business card and came back and handed it to me.
‘Here,’ he said. ‘The man who wanted the lepers.’
It was a business card, all right. For James Fenton Browne.
~ * ~
9
I woke the next morning with a headache that could drop a herd of wildebeest. I felt it before I’d even opened my eyes. When I did, my problems were only compounded.
I had slept on a small fold-out mattress with its net of lumpy, rusted springs imprinted across my back and buttocks, despite a wafer-thin mattress and sheets thick with patterns of African violets provided by my hosts, Igor and Manya. On the wall opposite me was a photograph from what looked like the fifties of Russian peasants stacking sheaves of wheat.
And standing at the door, with his Lenin-esque shaved head, ratty grey goatee and wolf s head cane was Igor.
‘You sleep good?’
‘Good,’ I said. I was too weary to debate.
‘Good. Come eat.’
The house still smelled of the liver and onions, and when I stumbled out to the kitchenette there was a huge plate of it waiting for me.
‘Excuse me,’ I said. I found the bathroom at the end of the hall and threw up.
I returned to the kitchen. The offensive plate had been removed.
‘CUP OF TEA?’ Manya asked.
‘Yes, thank you.’
I took the chipped enamel mug full of sweet, steaming tea and nursed it in my hands. I wondered how Peg was going with the packing in Sydney. I wondered if, in her wildest dreams, she would have believed I was sipping tea in a fibro bungalow with two Bribie Island pensioners, with a bruise on the back of my head the size of a halved breakfast grapefruit, and being stared at by an effigy of the leader of the Russian Revolution, dust caught in the lines of his face and the folds of his suit collar.
‘You come,’ Igor said, and I followed him out to the front of the house, down the side to a bleached timber garage with a corrugated iron roof the colour of faded ox blood.
There was an ancient Humber parked inside the shed. It was partially covered in a grey tarpaulin. Past a bench covered in curlings of wood and a lathe and a wall of haphazardly arranged tools hanging on nails, we entered a separate room at the back.
‘You look,’ said Igor. He was panting a little from the effort of the walk from the house. He pulled back a curtain of cloth and revealed several shelves of junk.