The Shadows of Silence

Tanya Geles

Acknowledgements

To my mother: I thank you for your unfaltering support throughout my university degree.

My thanks to my supervisor, Peter Wise: without your encouragement and guidance, this project would not be what it is.

To Pat Wise whose lectures in my first year of university led to a change in my degree and the path I now follow.

And to my extended family for their willingness to share their experiences with me.

I dedicate the following to my Dedo, Peter Geles.

The Shadows of Silence

‘It is as though I have fallen into a fold in time, stumbled across a sharp punctuation in the narrative, as my presence, which once apparently flowed effortlessly across the map, is brought up short, diverted, disrupted, dispersed.’[1]

From the centre,

From the nothing,

Of not seen,

Of not heard,

There comes

A shifting,

A stirring,

And a creeping forward[2]

A house stands at the top of a cliff marking the end of the world. The darkness falls away from the edge; it tumbles down the mountainside and into silence. No sound could echo back from those depths. And nothing moves here, not even the air moves. At first there is only stillness. Then I begin, walking towards the house, my feet heavy with trepidation. I am afraid and yet I know that I am safe. Safe in the knowledge that we are never truly alone. Safe in being guided by the footsteps that have gone before me. I tread the path of my ancestors, feeling their spirit within me, surrounding me.

I saw this house in a dream. It was shrouded in mist, the air heavy and wet … oppressive. My great-aunt took me by the hand and led me through the trees into a clearing. I stood and looked at the house for the longest time, lulled by the darkness and the silence until the present ceased to exist. I felt a hand on my shoulder and turned to face my great-aunt who gestured for me to sit. Instinctively I closed my eyes. She spoke softly.

‘This house rests on the sacred land of the Mountain of Light – it has been touched by the gods. We stand in the ancient sanctuary of Epirus, where the Oracle of Dodona once spoke. The Oracle gives answers to all questions, even those you do not ask.’

‘What must I do?’

‘Go forth with an open mind and a true heart. You must seek a room whose door opens to your touch. Then you must wait.’

Then she stepped into the trees, leaving me alone. I watched until the red of her dress disappeared into the dark green, until the pale light of the moon swallowed her form. I rose and walked the path to the house. I stood outside the huge dark brown oak door, hesitant to knock, as it seemed an all too earthly thing to do. Surely it should have just opened, as if by magic, on my approach. But it didn’t. I reached out and turned the handle. The door opened to reveal a wide hallway. A row of closed doors lined the passage; the walls and floor were solid rock, rough to my touch, uneven beneath my feet. Something like the hollowness in the air around me, its feel and sound as I moved, gave the impression that it stretched much further than perception could ever allow me to guess. I turned the knob on the door closest to me. Nothing happened. I tried the next one and the next, but it was the same. All the doors were locked. I looked more closely. There seemed to be no way of locking them – no latches of any kind, not even a keyhole. The sounds of my efforts with the door echoed behind it, as hollow as the sound on this side…

I walked a length I could not have measured along the corridor. Still no door had opened to my touch but I suddenly came upon a sharp turn. I stopped, turned, and looked back at where I had come. The doors had disappeared; allthat was left was darkness. I turned and peered down the new corridor. It was filled with a luminous light, pale yet somehow bright as well, giving it an ethereal quality. I walked forward, with a certainty, which I had no evidence for, that I was close. Without warning I found myself surrounded by a heat, warmth emanated from the air itself and from the stone. I stood before a door, shiny and black as obsidian. I reached out and pressed tentatively against it. The door swung open. There was no light behind it … only darkness and another silence.

Invisible hands pulled me inside. Intuitively I knew that I must not speak. I waited patiently as time and movement became one … until I ceased to exist and became absorbed by the silence, became part of it. I was no longer separate from it, from everything here. It was at this moment the message reached me. It was exact and deliberate, full of surety and purpose.

‘You seek something that cannot be found,’ a voice spoke cold and careful. ‘For it has not been lost. The past does not cease to exist as time moves on. It continues on through memory and myth, in legend and thought. History seeps into the earth, it is heavy in the air. History, as embodied emotion, all that has been experienced, exists in you, in the fibres of who you are. It flows through your veins.’

The words echoed in my head, solid and tangible sounds, drowning out conscious thought.

Time passed.

I slowly became aware of myself again.

•••

The mind flickers with memory, images and thoughts become one with the pain that moves at the edges of consciousness. I sit in this room surrounded by the past – photographs and documents, passports and books – which breathe life into the history of my family. I sit in this room and I am acutely aware of myself, of myself as surface … of surfaces themselves: your surface and those around and between us, the surfaces beneath me, on me, of me. Surfaces reach beyond us, stretch beyond perception yet still remain within our grasp. The surfaces of thought, my body, this pen, this paper – all intersecting and becoming one. I do not exist in a third space, as if all these surfaces settled into place. I am a third space … their shifting contacts and crossings. The lines of history, myth and legend intersect within me. I am a rhizome – a site of deterritorialisation. Who I am is taken up in lines of flight that shoot off into space and return to me; lines that run through my body, that cross within me, as me. I am both surface and depth. I am the past and the present.

How can I tell where I truly end and someone else begins, since surfaces go beyond temporality and spatiality. They carry beyond, and return, like the lines of a rhizome … since a line is already a surface anyway. The nib of the pen is not the end of its surface, the pen carries beyond itself, leaving its contact, its self on the page. There are things attached, always. Are these attachments, these contacts, the surface’s history? History cannot be erased, cannot be forgotten, it is always there, attached. But does this make history a surface itself, or what happens to what is attached to and leaves its mark on a surface? Perhaps it is another kind of surface, especially when the moment of taking place, of contact, its temporality no longer applies. But what kind of strain does this put on things, just to think with surfaces? How can history exist independent of time when its very definition necessitates time – that which has gone before. Should we redefine history to mean a continuation, a stretching beyond itself?

Or do I think of it in some other metaphor, the winds of history sweeping over us, scattering remnants. And so, whatever is left gets lost in space and time. We dissipate, dissolve into nothing. We become white sound… empty sound. History, then, is a vacuum, a void. An empty space in which whatever enters will remain forever lost. All history is silence. Histories are silenced when they are written; the void is covered over by words. It is the historian’s history that is being written ... not whoever lived that history. To look to the past is to enter into silence. Sound becomes stone. The living word remains trapped in the earth. If I follow its trace down and down will I come at last to the hidden voice?[3] I enter the silence and strain my ears. I close my eyes … stretch my hearing. My consciousness grasps for movement, the movement of sound…

***

These stories are a part of me. These stories are part of the land. I stand with my feet firmly planted on the ground and I can feel the earth rise up into my body. I can feel its energy, pulsating with history, with stories, with meaning. I heard once that the Aborigines of Australia get their stories from the land. Their spirituality is bound to the earth so that the land speaks directly to their minds.

•••

I looked at some photographs, ran my finger over the smooth, faded surfaces, wanting to reach into the picture and touch the fabrics, ground, flesh and feel the wind that made the trees bend. I wanted to inhale the scents, feel them making their way into my pores. The black and white disappeared in an imagined haze of colour and vibrancy. I heard the music drumming in my ears, the beat moving in time with my breath. But the smiles seemed distant, as if they had faded over time despite being captured in this frame. A frozen moment. A pocket of air, of history and time … of unknown memory. Or is it forgotten? I cannot name you. The faces do not display a familiarity that extends beyond the surface and reaches into knowledge. They do not look back at me with recognition. My imagination is unable to fill in the gaps – it cannot give me themissing pieces of the puzzle. I look at these photographs and I am filled with the utter despair that comes with the knowledge that what has been lost cannot be uncovered … will not be recovered.

Until now … perhaps. The fear rises in my chest, clawing at me, trying to get a firm grip. It is time to move forward, to travel to my people’s country. I have left the security of dreams, tumbled out of the safety of this world, this time and moved toward the mirage. But in time it will no longer be a mirage. It will be real, with sounds and aromas and sights and structure. It is a terrifying thing to enter an imagined place and give it tangibility. To throw light on dreams and hope to see if they disappear, proven to be illusions. How can they be anything but illusions, fallacy, imagined realities? I grow more concerned, the fear intensifying with each thought. I visualise these imaginings being buried under the weight of real places, actual time.

I stand on the land of Macedon. It is not earth beneath my feet but concrete. Skopje is buildings and streets, people and food. They mingle together in the usual atmosphere of corporate economies and industry, of suppressions, expressions, urban movements and noises. I knew this, though, that Skopje was no longer a village. I had no romantic illusions about what the capital would be like; there has been no deception. The years that have passed since my Dedo left this country has brought so much change – as it was bound to do by its duty to progress. But there is still history here, in this city, folded into the history of the land, into geography, people, my family … and the beginnings of a new history, one that is yet to be written. I leave the structure and routine of the city, intent on finding a small village where I can sit quietly and think and experience. My Piscean-writer-romantic self takes over in some – almost embarrassing – attempt to be as one with this place, Macedonia.

I sit down and wait; waiting, waiting to feel something, to feel anything. I sit for the longest time, my eyes closed against whatever is around me, forcing my other senses to make contact. I feel the earth beneath my hands, hot and dry despite being hidden in shadow. I am inhaling aromas that have never entered my body before. I remember the story of the Aborigines and try to emulate that way of knowing, listening for a story. But the earth remains quiet and closed off from me. It will not speak.

•••

The words swim through the air till they fall softly at our feet, brought to ground by a lack of understanding, dying a quiet death. The silence hangs, suspended, unable to move or penetrate. Meaning is absent. Words go on falling. They are crushed, trampled upon. They are dust. We face each other, the earth and I, both of us alone in our insulated worlds.

***

Christina

There is only hollow sound here. These walls contain nothing but emptiness, the feeling compressed into a small bundle and held close to my chest. I lie, listening to you sleep – your breathing slow and even with the occasional moan, soft mewing sounds that make me love you even more. It is at this time you are most vulnerable. The harshness of the day slips off you. You become soft and placid, almost child-like. The innocence of dreams.

I listen to you sleep and realise how much I am going to miss your scent – the smell of earth, warmth and red wine that envelops you. But most of all I am going to miss your presence, the knowledge that you are near and the comfort that this thought gives me.

I lie here and try not to think of tomorrow and the heartache the morning will bring.

Petros

I left them standing by the doorway. Ilinka held Mary’s hand in an effort to keep her still. Christina clutched her apron with both hands, so tight her knuckles turned white. Her face remained rigid in a Stoic effort to maintain composure. She helped pack my belongings and pressed a small jar of turshija od piperki into my hand for the long walk. ‘Put them in your pack and don’t eat them all at once’, she had said but her eyes betrayed what she truly wanted to say. There would be no farewells or promises. I was doing what had to be done. I was doing what was best for my family.

I left them in Lerin, standing by the doorway, and I immediately regretted not looking back – not having one last look at my family, my home. I must look ahead. One hand rested on the money Christina sewed into the waistline of my pants. The other clutched the letter from my brother and the ticket for the Vi Mi Nali. The feel of the paper brought comfort to me. It was something to focus on, something tangible and real to hold in my hand; not the imaginings of what might lie ahead. Thoughts of a new beginning were not a dream I held close to my heart. I did not go forth into the world wanting something more … I went forth needing something more for my family. Bill had written, with grand words, of the abundance of land in Australia, the opportunities. He had been there nearly three years when his request came for me to join him. Together, he said, we can make enough money to secure a future for our families. Together, my brother.

The sky was clear and the heat beat down on us as we stood on the dock in Athens. Hundreds of us huddled together in the sticky humidity, trying to get enough air. The ship was late. It had been moored there last night but passengers were not allowed to board. Now the ship had gone – to where, nobody knew. So we waited. Eventually news spread through the crowd that it had gone to offload more cargo on one of the islands to make room for an extra shipment. It would be back within the hour.

When it arrived, a ripple of excitement, fear and anxiety flowed through the crowd. Many people were waiting with loved ones. They were trying to spend every moment with them before they boarded, uncertain of when they would see them again, afraid that that moment would never come. This unspoken fear disrupted every movement, every word. You could feel it in the air. You could see it in people’s eyes. I did not allow myself to dwell upon it. It was not my way. I thought of Christina’s staunchness and how she refused to pity herself for the circumstances that would leave her alone for an unknown length of time. Slowly the crowd thinned out and we filed onto the ship, making our way to the tiny quarters where we would spend the next three months.

•••

Theo came to tell me that the ship approached land. ‘You can see it’, he said, ‘on the horizon. The men upstairs said it’s called Fremantle.’ And so it happened that I was in Australian waters. Theo and I had become familiar, cramped as we were in the small room with two cots. It reminded me of my time in the Greek army: the food, the living quarters, and the solitude. It was more than that, though. The Greeks are all the same … they have the same attitude. For two years I had endured the humiliation of being denied my heritage. I was trained to fight for a country that was not mine; a country that sought to obliterate my nationhood – stealing our lands, refusing our names. The enlisting officer gave me a Greek surname. ‘It’s for the best’, he had said, ‘for everyone.’ He thought it would avoid disharmony among the troops. Not that he was concerned for my safety. But I was. And now, on this ship, it is the same. My Greek is fluent – I can both read and write the script –but my name. They look down on me. Theo and I stayed away from most of the Greeks on the ship. We told ourselves it was our choice, that we didn’t want to socialise with them. Neither of us would admit that we were avoiding the cold shoulder we could expect from them. Theo was more withdrawn. I refused to allow their attitude complete control. I am Macedonian and not ashamed to say so.