June Kant, "Kangaroo Feathers"
June Kant
KANGAROO FEATHERS
My rocky outcrop soars above reality - but the savage bite of a bright axe
in wood resonates from the valley below, connecting earth to ether. He is
chopping firewood for our last dinner. The sound of his anger searches
me out, nails me to the camp I came here to escape. I sought composure
but Palestine's heat incubates in my body and the dust of its foreign hills
suffocates my mind, leaving me with no defence against the tumult of
these emotions. We have survived. We are the victors. I should be floating
weightless with release from fear yet squirm in the grip of a torture more
terrible than I could ever have imagined.
I anticipated death at Gallipoli. We lived in its arms and those few who survived
were scarred forever by that embrace. Death's long shadow followed us here
to Beersheba - wild and breathless it galloped with us at the charge, sullen
and dark it invaded our trenches. Death's agent was a savage Turk, its stink
the rotting carcasses of fallen horses. Death became familiar - we learned
to recognise its promise of release, the escape it afforded from hell on earth. I
should not be surprised to find it is survival that brings such anguish.
The Light Horse Brigade is leaving. They're folding the tents - ours are the
last. With them will go purpose, our brave horses, mates - also malaria and
the maimed. They're moving to Egypt for embarkation, abandoning this
gritty heat and rockscape for the balm of Alexandria's sea breezes, palms, and
purple shadowed alleyways. They will exchange the silence of these callous
hills for the light-hearted clatter of their mounts over cobblestones, the eager
bartering for souvenirs to take home to loved ones, all the rowdy exuberance of
departure. I see them line the deck, the toss of their hats' proud ostrich feathers,
can almost hear their laughter and the siren as their ship casts off its hawsers
and sets course for Australia. They'll return to the serenity of southern skies
where our cross isn't fixed on Calvary but creeps nightly upward through the
ghost gums' silver canopy. I am hardly able to bear the knowledge that I will
not go with them.
Will Nan be angry also? Will she tear my letter, screw its single page of sorrow
and finally consign me with it to the dustbin? Or will her sweet nature forgive
again my peccadilloes. This time, Nan dearest, will be the last. You have stood
by me since childhood - now, in the name of honesty or perhaps a surfeit of
deceit, I relieve you of the encumbrance I have been. You, above all, should
understand - you whose generosity led you to leave love enough alone.
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Despite this war's trials, I am no different from the sham I was when I enlisted. I
had constructed a self out of books, paintings, shreds of overheard conversations,
a fabric of existence with which to clothe a lie. I saw my country's call to arms
as an escape, thought I could leave myself behind, be free of the impediments
and inconveniences my nature imposed. And yet, despite my hopes, I changed
only my sky, not my being, when I crossed the sea. Nan, knowing em better
than myself, anticipated my failure. You could stay here, with honour, Duncan. In
wartime the country needs farmers as well as heroes. A uniform will change nothing.
And she was right.
God, how I yearn for the red soil, the lush damp shadows of our cane fields by
the bay. My dream of bathing in bay waters made satin by moonlight has faded
in Palestine's sandblasted sun more mornings than I can remember. I crave the
nepenthe of tropical nights, the yammering of flying foxes in the mango trees. I
long to leave this cruel glare that red-rims my eyes, return to the hero's welcome
awaiting my division - but know I would lose more than I have found.
Was it only a year ago that I met Selwyn at Moascar's remount depot? As
the sergeant in charge, I watched him handling horses - a lean boy, shaved
down and focussed, his voice a croon but case in iron persuasion. His intensity
mesmerised me. Every evening, when the lingering notes of the bugler's
Last Post had faded, Selwyn would come to report on our mounts' progress
- laconic, confident, as tragically dispensable as the horses he was training in
death's service.
I found myself waiting for the end of each day and his appearance. Something
subterranean formed in me, a literal dream that came out of daydreams. It
was too deep to be attributed to clear sources and I had no wish to analyse my
feelings but, for the first time in my life, it seemed I had no need of subterfuge.
Of irreconcilably different origins, we were running on parallel realities.
My pent emotions fired extravagant imaginings, which are more memorable
now than our advance north to Jericho against the Turks. Aware only of an
agony of concern for him, I endured the action in the Jordan Valley and for his
sake feared the malaria rife in the crowded camps. Immune to pity I watched
others die but suffered to see his fair skin burnt to rags under the searing
summer sky. My war had found a focus.
It was much later when I seconded him on an intelligence sortie down to
Magdhaba by camel, along the bed of the Wadi el Arish, that I took the step so
natural that only now it seems to have been a choice. I laid bare my lie, opened
my arms and dared crucifixion, having found at last someone for whom I would
risk all. Miracles do happen, and for the acceptance in his eyes I will always be
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June Kant, "Kangaroo Feathers"
grateful. I discovered how simple and frugal a thing happiness is - a laugh, a
shared tin of bully beef, the sound of night birds in the wadi at the moment of
sleep. My wonder carried with it the excitement not simply of the unknown but
of the unknowable. I had never expected to have an exchange of such infinite
reward, or a mate as splendid as Selwyn.
We have lived through hell together and known it to have moments of sheer
joy. We killed and maimed under the sun but as the desert twilight faded away
the sky would fill with stars as invisible by day as our conspiracy. By their light
we rejoiced to find each other alive and within reach. The greater crime of war
condoned our love.
Fearing passion in others as I do in myself, I waited until this morning to tell
him, anticipating his anger, doubting my strength to resist his will. He sat palely
naked on his palliasse. The tent flaps, looped back, framed him like the drapings
of a catafalque. The early morning sunlight trembled through the opening,
catching wisps of blue smoke from his first cigarette of the day. I handed him his
pannikin of tea - and my decision.
His wild larrikin laugh was slowly smothered by the sorrow he observed
enshrouding me. Puzzlement followed and then the pleading I had so dreaded.
You're mad Duncan. The flaming war is over! You're insane to re-enlist. Why? Come
home! Home. He knew the word would wrench me. We'll start again, together.
We're mates for life, aren't we?
And then, convinced of my irreversible resolve, he unleashed his anger. I stood
firm, blocking his sunlight as he scowled up at me. Stolidly, fighting down my
desire to console, I repeated my reasons. He wouldn't listen when I said I've had
enough. He thinks I mean enough of him. It is his doubt that has undone me
- but for his sake I must stand by my decision.
This foreign sky stretches taut like a membrane across the earth's periphery,
encapsulating, desiccating. Vapour puffs of cloud float over the parched hills
but never bring relief. The Holy Land. How to reconcile its pocked and bitter
plains of carnage with the pastel scenes of Sunday school? Wasn't the sky above
Jerusalem painted in a gentle wash? Wasn't the cross depicted standing on a
green mound? Delusions abound - and no wonder when reality is so terrible
to endure.
The carcasses of men and horses lie prostrate on the plain at Tel el Saba and
when our tents here are folded the corpses will rot senselessly alone. Our work
is done. We came with feathers in our hats to kill without anger or cause. The
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charge here at Beersheba was fearfully heroic. Victorious. Futile. In the name
of duty, at the bidding of a sovereign power, we rushed to kill their enemy
whose face we'd never seen - and now prepare to leave as politically reshuffled
alliances allow new insurgents to arrive. Jews will dispossess Palestinians of that
very same ground we wrested from the Turks. Expedience rules. And fear - fear
that arouses passionate hatred and precedes the acts of hatred. I know now
that the bayonet that runs a chest through is only a substitute for the battle yell
that temporarily erases fear yet does nothing to remedy the cause. Victory we're
shouting, but dare not question over what.
This war was not ours. Our presence here is as artificial as our hat's plumage.
Kangaroo feathers we call them. An artifice. Another lie.
Selwyn doesn't understand - doesn't realise that this war's ending changes
nothing. In victory he feels he is invincible but his arrival home will prove that
we have lived a separate reality from those who stayed behind. Their superficial
manners and morals will prevail over the bare-boned truths we have uncovered
and, to survive, we would be driven into subterfuge. More lies and deceit. He
cannot know the destructive qualities of deception. His naïve honesty would
chafe under the restrictions and inevitably, by his very hature, he would come to
despise me.
I exist only in terms of his contemplation of me and his eyes when I left the
camp were as and as this landscape. Not a splash of tears to ameliorate the
pain. Fearing most what he does not understand he has already begun to
hate me.
Do it then! he'd shouted. Attend your own cremation, you selfish bastard.
No sacrifice is too extravagant in love's name and yet Selwyn is right when he
shouts "selfish" because at last, this one time, I am determined. It is my will that
insists on separation. Will he one day understand that I chose to enshrine our
happiness in my memory rather than witness together its decline? Alone I will
polish it, cherish it, grieve for it I will live with less, rather than lose all to .deceit.
I am swamped by the turmoil of these warring emotions. My legs tremble and
I sink to the stony ground, snatch my hat from my head, stifle my anguish in
its plumes. In their caressing softness I hear his laughing voice only last night,
our last night, begging Keep your hat on, Duncan, please. You look delicious,
dressed in nothing but a flight of fancy. It adds a frisson and god knows we deserve
it. His voice could be so gentle, his words as elegant as feathers. His hands
but now his angry axe is biting wood and I cringe up here and mourn our
coming separation.
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June Kant, "Kangaroo Feathers"
Like a mirage I see the tents ranked below on the hard plain, their troop of
shadows marching with the sun. Tomorrow they will be gone.
Does life consist only of contradictions and illusion? In the midst of terror I found
solutions, planned what to do to escape the physical danger that so terribly
threatened - and yet I was mistaken. Another disaster, one I never dreamed
of, has suddenly overcome me and, unprepared, surfeited with duplicity, I am
destroyed. The resolution is not as I expected when I left Australia.
I had anticipated dying. I had not foreseen the cruel alternative - this penance
of survival.
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