Short story: A New Zealand Elegy, by CK Stead

Towards the end of the war, when the German death camps were one by one being overrun by the advancing Allies, our newspapers had been full of photographs of the dead and the nearly dead: piles of corpses, their stick-like arms and legs pointing in all directions; or living skin-covered skeletons crawling to the barbed wire, their eyes huge like lamps. I was twelve at the time and those photographs, together with the accounts of gas chambers, sadism, torture and mass death, were a daily horror to which was soon to be added the details of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs. We had grown up, my friends, my sister and I, with the idea that death in war – in tank battles, infantry and machine gun attacks, artillery bombardments, and in air raids on cities – was not heroic exactly, but exciting. Now death took on a new and horrible look; so horrible we shied away from it, buried it. And it was all happening somewhere else. At home there had been no death more real than that of a domestic pet, an elderly neighbour, one or two distant relatives.
Later the death camps and the bombed cities, those real but in the end manageable horrors, were gathered into our politics. The piles of dead, the living corpses with their headlamp eyes, still sent shivers down the spine. But we remembered them only when we wanted to put them to use in some argument about fascism, anti-Semitism, the atomic bomb, the continuing arguments ofl left and right.
When I think again of the family together at the table, my grandmother interrupting our argument about freedom to announce that Ian was at the door, I realise that all of them are dead. If that scattering had happened to us in a single moment, as at the blast of a bomb, it would have been the kind of thing that gets described as a tragedy. But a tragedy – even the kind you get in the theatre, like the end of Hamlet when the stage is littered with corpses – is only a speeding up of what time in any case brings about. Ian, my grandmother, my father, my mother, and recently my sister – one by one they have died, and because of that I now know that what I believed then was untrue. I believed that no other death could have moved me to such grief as I was feeling at Ian’s. It was a new experience, and I was almost frightened at how deep into myself the pain burned. And as well as pain there was frustration. I wanted to give vent to my feeling, to let it out, to share it around, even maybe to show it off, and there was no way I could find to do it.
I remember lying at night face-down on the lawn where Ian and I had wrestled after the pictures, holding the grass in both hands and feeling that if I didn’t hold tight I would fly off the world into the spaces between the stars. I thought of Laertes, then Hamlet, leaping into Ophelia’s open grave to insist on their love, arguing and clawing at one another over her dead body, each asserting greater love and greater loss. What bad form, and how satisfying!
That Saturday morning the clouds were very white, sailing high and fast in a clear sky, and the Waitakeres were ink-blue beyond the green-grey slopes of Mt Albert. I was walking slowly to Ian’s place, my eyes cast up there watching the clouds that were so white and satisfying, aloof and laundered.
Ian’s sister Jan answered the door. “Don’t look like that,” she said. “Come in.”
I felt rebuked. I had prepared a funeral face, and it was false. But how could you find an appearance to match your feeling, short of throwing yourself in the dry earth of the garden and rolling in it, howling?
Jan took me into the kitchen where her boyfriend, Len, was making toast. Ian’s mother was receiving adult relatives and callers in another part of the house.
“Bad business,” Len said, buttering the burned slices.
“I’ll say,” I said. “Terrible.”
We ate the toast and talked about the national tennis championships. I loved Jan, I wanted to kiss her, but of course I didn’t. At the door when she was showing me out, I half turned and reached towards her. My hand closed around the ends of her fingers in an awkward clasp.
“Sorry,” I said and bolted away down the steps as the tears sprang into my eyes.
That was Saturday and by the end of the day the suburb was buzzing; you could almost hear the phones ringing up and down the street. Ian had run into the back of a parked truck. Our neighbour Marion and her boyfriend had been parked in the shadow outside the primary school where there were no lights. Ian had come around the corner on the Norton, accelerated into the shadow and run into the tray of the truck. His smashed ribs had punctured his lungs and he had died on the road before the ambulance arrived. Now the police were enquiring. Marion’s husband Gavin had learned the truth, so had the truck driver’s wife – it was all out in the open. So there was more to talk about than just Ian’s death. There was the scandal as well, everyone agreeing it was a shocking business. Already there had been a big blow-up next door, and Gavin in his army uniform had left in a taxi taking his kitbag and his golf clubs.
That night I couldn’t keep still. I walked to the dance at Valley Road, but I felt it wouldn’t be right to go in even if I’d wanted to. I walked to Mt Eden, climbed the hill and looked down on the lights of the city and the dark of the two harbours. Hours later when the dance was ending I was back in Valley Road. I saw the two girls Ian and I had taken to Blockhouse Bay leaving with their partners. I stayed out of sight. The crowd dispersed, and again I was walking – along Dominion Road, through the park, past Ian’s house, through the tennis club. I went on and on until I was shuffling in a stupor of exhaustion.
The funeral was to be on Monday afternoon. I’d been told Ian could be seen in his coffin that morning. I took a tram to the undertaker’s. I walked past the door, turned and walked past it again, but the third time I got up the courage to walk in. I gave the receptionist Ian’s name.
“You wish to view the deceased?” he said.
“Yes please.”
“Are you a relative?”
“A friend.”
“Come this way please.”
I followed him over carpets, through doors, over further carpets. Ian’s face and head were quite unmarked. His brow and cheeks were smooth and tranquil, artificially coloured over the pallor of death that showed through. I noticed his long dark eyelashes. His hair was parted and brushed. His lips were firmly closed. I looked for a hint of his old humour, but there was none, he was sunk in so deep a stillness and silence. He was dead.
The receptionist had left me alone. I reached out, forcing myself, and put my hand over his brow. It was cold. It was not living flesh. The skin was dead under my hand.
I walked out into the street and again I had the sense of cloud high and white and travelling fast.
At the end of the service that afternoon, concertina curtains slid apart and the coffin was rolled slowly, mechanically, into the gap. No grave for a Laertes to leap into, no earth to crumble in the hand and rattle on the lid, no proximity of ancient companion bones, no breath of wind or flutter of blown leaf, just the whirr of a motor and of well-oiled rollers. What was on the far side of the eternal curtain? A team of stokers removing silverware from caskets before consigning them in batches to an oil-fired oven?
I was young and puritanical and unappeased. In the crowd, among all the murmuring, through the movement of gloves and hats and waistcoats, I caught sight of another face bitter and unsatisfied. She was a strange, wild-looking girl, and I decided it must be Meg, the one who had told Ian she wanted him to ‘do her over’. I don’t know whether it was, and I never saw her again.
For what remained of the day, I went walking again. It seemed to me something had to happen. It couldn’t be allowed to pass so casually. At university I had been reading Antony and Cleopatra, and I kept thinking of Caesar hearing of Antony’s death and protesting:
The breaking of so great a thing should make
A greater crack: the round world
Should have shook lions into civil streets,
And citizens to their dens:

I walked through our civil streets, conjuring lions. The thought of visiting Marion didn’t come suddenly. It was forming all the time I was walking, and I knew I would keep going until I had worked up the courage to do it. I kept imagining Ian’s voice saying, “Get on in there, boyo. Go on. Do it! She’s waiting for you.”
I thought out pretty exactly how I thought it would go. Marion would invite me in, pretending she didn’t know what I had come for. We would talk about Ian. She would recognise how sad I was and feel sorry for me. She would probably make some tea or coffee. Then she would drop a hint – she might ask why I had come and if she did I would say, “Because you invited me.” Probably she would pretend she’d forgotten but I would be able to tell by the way she smiled that she remembered and that she was glad. And then …
The rest was a blur, a hot flush of anticipation, a pressure inside the head of white skin and dark hair, and the old awkwardness of walking through the streets with your cock bulging upward against the cloth of your trousers.
It was dark when I walked up Marion’s drive and knocked. When she answered, the light was behind her – I couldn’t see her face clearly. She just stood there, leaning slightly.
“Can I come in for a moment?” I said.
She nodded and moved aside to let me pass.
I walked down the passage and into the sitting room. I was glad the blinds were drawn. I turned to look at her. She was staring at me aggressively. She didn’t look beautiful any more. There was a shadow under one eye and her lips were swollen. Behind her I saw the head was broken off one of the three china ducks, and the picture of the two horses in a storm was hanging crooked. There was the stain of something spilled over the rosy wallpaper. The clock’s silver balls had stopped inside their glass dome.
“I’m sorry about your friend,” she said.
She didn’t sound sorry. She sounded angry. I didn’t know what to say.
“Well, don’t just stand there staring at me, Mister Smarty-pants,” she said. “If you’ve got something to say, out with it. I know what they’re saying out there – all the nosy parkers. Well, that’s too bad, and I’m sorry about the kid. But it wasn’t our fault. It’s a free country, and if you can’t park a truck in a dark street without having some young hooligan on a bike run up your backside it’s a pretty poor show. Nobody cares about the kid anyway. All they care about is that it was us in the truck, and that’s given them a lot to chat about, hasn’t it? Don’t think I haven’t seen you all craning your necks to see what’s going on on this side of the fence. Busybody lot you are, you’d think you’d have something better to do …”
She sniffed. It was almost a sob, choked back and full of resentment. I wondered whether she was drunk. I wondered how I could get out of that room, away from her.
“I didn’t come about that,” I said.
“Well, what did you come for?”
“What I mean is,” I said, “I didn’t come because I thought it was your fault. I didn’t think about that. I just wanted to ask …”
I couldn’t think what I could say I had come for. But her hard face had softened a little.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “I mean – I know how you must be feeling. He was your friend, wasn’t he? Poor kid, he couldn’t breathe. Roger ran to phone for an ambulance, but there was nothing we could do. I just held onto him. He couldn’t talk. I think he tried to say something. I don’t think he was conscious for more than a minute or two.”
I could feel the tears pushing into my own eyes now. There was such a sense of ugliness, of defeat.
“I’m selling the house,” she said.
I pushed past her, choking, shaking my head. “Sorry,” I said. “Thanks, Marion. Sorry.”
“Sorry,” she called after me from the doorway.
Sorry. Sorry. Sorry. Thanks. Sorry. Jesus, shit, wasn’t there anything more to be said? And what was I to do with the image I carried with me now of Ian, unable to breathe, maybe trying to say something, dying on the dark road, held in Marion’s arms.
I stumbled through the dark towards the school, walking fast, then jogging. On the football field I ran hard, sucking in the cool air that Ian hadn’t been able to breathe. By the clump of native trees at the far side of the ground I stopped, panting, and stared up at the hulking darkness of Mt Eden brooding over the suburb. Everything was dark and ugly, there was nothing to be said or done and nowhere to go.
Taken with kind permission from the lively new collection of essays, fiction, reviews and assorted writings, Talk: Opinions, stories, and a play by CK Stead (Quentin Wilson Publishing, $35), available in bookstores nationwide. Earlier versions of the classic short story ‘A New Zealand Elegy’ appeared in the Literary Review (1979), and CK Stead’s collection Five for the Symbol (1981.)