A History of Silence Read Online Free

outside in the summer under blue sky and white cloud and in the murmuring warmth of the footpaths, and the next I am surrounded by bloody body parts with pleasant-sounding names, decorated with bits of fern and parsley. My mother, on the other hand, looks over the bits of carcass as she does when she picks up something at the beach, with a keen interest tucked inside a thin public smile. The butcher’s apron, I notice, is splattered with blood. So are his hands which he has slapped onto his hips. I look back at the curtain of cheerful red and blue streamers. I am slowly arriving at the idea of deception—that deception is one of the hinges the world swings back and forth on. The tidy world of asphalt and lawn is out there. In here, butchered flesh. As I remember it, I escaped to the blinding sunshine outside and the promise of a lemonade iceblock. And the carnage I saw around this time. A smash up by Waterloo Bridge in the Hutt. Two mangled bits of steel, an amazing amount of broken glass, the smell of petrol, a tide of human blood—and the slow wailing sirens and the pointlessness of the policeman alone at the scene pushing at the air with his hands.
    And then, in a calmer moment, after I’d told the producer I would get back to him and had put the phone down, I sat stone still, struck by something unexpected and heard again, I suppose for the tenth, twentieth or hundredth time—the gun shot. The episode unfolds always in the same way. I look at the clock. And seeing it is 2 a.m. feel a bit sour. I pull on a pair of jeans and a shirt. The apartment is in the Western Addition, one of the dodgier neighbourhoods of San Francisco. I have heard that the cops don’t like to come here at night. But, down on the street, there they are. A police car has driven up onto the footpath. Two cops are shining torches in the window of the Palestinian corner store. A black man is sitting on the edge of the footpath. He looks up at me. His eyes are glassy. Then I notice the red hole in the chest of his white shirt. It occurs to me that I have seen this before, and I have, perhaps a hundred or maybe even a thousand times before, to the point where it ceases to shock, and I have forgotten how to feel. The instinctive horror I felt the first time I entered the butcher shop has exhausted itself. So when the producer said of the earthquake, ‘It’s just like a movie’, I did know what he meant, except this time it was different.

    This was a real disaster. Equally, it was plain to see that it had come out of an unacknowledged past. The old maps clearly spelt out the swamp and wetland history of the city’s foundations. But that had been overlooked or perhaps was thought to have been triumphed over by advances in swamp-draining techniques, then covered up with concrete and bitumen.
    Within days of the earthquake, posters advising drop off points for clothes and food and other supplies went up on walls and lampposts across Wellington.
    One lunch hour I joined a long line of people at the entranceway to Pipitea Marae to drop off a couple of cartons of men’s razors and toiletries that I’d been told were in short supply. The organisation and efficiency of the operation were impressive. Everyone seemed to know instinctively what to do. An older Maori woman came up to me and inquired compassionately, ‘Where are you from, dear?’ A number of people escaping Christchurch, including foreign tourists, had spent the night in the marae on their way north. I think she had confused me with one of them. I was sorry to disappoint her. I was only here to help. Then she asked if she could make me a cup of tea. She too wanted to help—anyone that she could. I politely declined, and she said, ‘God bless you.’
    A few days after the massive Napier earthquake in 1931 my father cycled 385 kilometres to help with the clean up. I had always known this, although like many things that I know I don’t