had lingered three days, though he had never become conscious.
Daniel had been glad it had happened so suddenly and unexpectedly, and that they had died together. But missing them was a deep ache that had never eased. Memories kept jumping at him, forcing him to remind himself that his parents were gone and that he would never see them again, never feel his father’s gentleness or watch him tamp down the tobacco in his pipe, never see his mother’s ferocious energy or taste her golden-syrup dumplings. He had left the city, for the house had been sold up to pay their debts, and so had begun his long drift from job to job, looking for some indefinable thing that would make him feel that same sense of rightness and belonging that he had felt on the old farm. The smell of eggs and bacon on dark winter mornings and the bitter aftertaste of strong sweet tea in the bunkhouse kitchens brought the home breakfasts back to him with such clarity that the present had sometimes seemed a thin, sour dream.
If he was honest, it was his father he missed most, that quiet presence. You never got the feeling he was just waiting for you to finish talking so he could offer advice or an opinion. In fact, he said very little and seldom offered solutions or even suggestions. Mostly he asked mild questions and listened. It seemed little enough, and yet at one time or another practically every one of the neighbours had come to him for advice. People would invariably go away feeling less angry, less desperate, or just plain cheerful. Daniel had consciously modelled himself on his father. He had striven to be patient, gentle, courteous and honest. He was not and never would be his father, yet he believed that he had grown into a man his father would have at least respected.
How many times had he imagined telling his father about seeing the smoke and then the overturned silver Mercedes crumpled against the stand of eucalypts? How many times had he described kneeling beside the big foreigner in his supple steel-dust suit and the strange conversation that followed? The gradual realisation the man was going to die. In his imaginings, as in life, Daniel’s father never once interrupted his tale. Nor, when Daniel stopped, had he offered opinions or advice.
Yet Daniel had come to understand he must go to Paris. And so he had flown across the world, violating time. Was it possible to return after coming so far, he suddenly wondered. The thought was like a kidney punch and he stumbled mentally into a vivid memory of the way the dying man’s eyes had grown more and more pale.
‘It was so hard to trust anyone back then,’ the man had said. ‘You never knew who would repeat your words, or how they might be used. You could never be high enough to feel safe. That was what made it so extraordinary, that she trusted me. She told me it was because I had offered her an ultimate truth. I do not think you can imagine how rare truth was in that time. I answered that truth was what I wanted from her and she laughed at me. She knew it was a lie. All I told her were lies, but she said that when we met again, she would show me the truth I had shown to her.
‘You must go in my place and tell her she was right when she said I would need her . . .’ He stifled a groan.
There had been something almost military in that iron control, Daniel thought. The man would have been in considerable pain, the ambulance people had told him after they came, explicit because he was a stranger to the dead man. It was a wonder he had been able to talk at all. Even if they had arrived in time, they could not have saved him, they said, except to administer a mind-obliterating dose of morphine, a little death to ease the bigger death that was looming.
It was the police, when he gave his report several days later, who told him the man’s name was Tibor Esterhazy and that he was Hungarian and eighty-five.
Daniel could hardly credit it. He would have taken him for sixty-five at most. The man had been a permanent resident in Australia for over fifty years, and had not once left since his arrival. He had probably been a dissident, given