bird looked Archie brazenly in the eye, then plunged its beak into a steaming
pile of horse shit. ‘You cheeky fellow!’ Archie said as it flew off with its tidbit.
Introduced birds—sparrows, starlings, blackbirds and rock pigeons—were everywhere.
But hardly a native was to be seen.
Archie stepped over the threshold and strode the black-and-white tiles of the great
hall. Slanting beams of light from a roof lantern caught the dust and transformed
it into a glittering fog. The galleries were not yet open to the public. The high,
empty space echoed with his footfalls.
The day was setting itself up to be a scorcher and the hall was filled with the scent
of what most would gloss as eau de museum . Archie savoured the old preserving alcohol
with its fruitiness, aliquot of cloying formaldehyde, and fishy high note given off
by the pickled sea creatures immersed therein. The tang of lacquer from the stuffed
Murray cod registered on his palate, while the dun dustiness of old bones coated
his throat. But what was that other smell? The smoky, sweaty aroma of the inside
of a stone-age hut coming from the New Guinean artefacts was so familiar that it
went almost undetected.
He passed under the skeleton of a great whale suspended from the roof, its vertebrae
strung on a straight iron rod. On hot days the oil that mottled its bones liquefied.
Sometimes a splash would materialise—like a drop of blood from a holy statue—on what
was claimed to be the skeleton of the last Tasmanian. The remains hung beside the
bones of a gorilla and a chimpanzee, each suspended from a wire that passed through
a hole in the top of its cranium. Their arms hung limply by their sides, their toes
pointed earthwards. They looked like gibbeted criminals.
In the middle of the hall was a cylindrical glass bottle refulgent in a shaft of
light. It contained the cigar-sized egg-case of a giant Gippsland earthworm. Archie
could see the solitary embryo floating in its exquisitely translucent, golden case.
Unborn, it was already twice the size of a common worm. Nearby stood a glass cabinet
that lacked the accumulated grime of ages. It had not been there when he’d left.
Inside were minerals, one of which formed a white, silken sheet that resembled the
décolletage of a young woman, across which were scattered a soupçon of pea-sized,
rose-red crystals. Its beauty held him spellbound. Surely the display was the work
of that indefatigable curator, Dr Elizabeth Doughty. Her looks and energy had frightened
him when he was a cadet. But then he heard her rhapsodising in the tea room about
the beauty of tourmaline and the intricacies of malachite, and she became in his
eyes the paragon of what he hoped one day to become—a museum curator.
He had once thought the exhibition the grandest thing in the world. But now it seemed
forlorn. Bull roarers, bones, barnacles, butterflies and boomerangs all in random
proximity—objects enough to make the tremendous space look cluttered. What, he wondered
for the first time in his life, was it all for?
Then he remembered Cecil Polkinghorne’s words when giving his new cadet a tour of
the institution. ‘Here,’ he had spluttered, gesturing grandly towards the collection,
‘lies the collective memory of our people. Objects may languish unstudied or forgotten
for a century or more. But rest assured that one day, in response to the needs of
the times, a curator will take up an object, and in it trace indisputable proof of
the way things once were. Here, history finds its physical testimony.’
Archie arrived at the director’s office before he was fully prepared. He hesitated,
trying to recall the speech he’d practised on the boat. Just as he raised his arm
to knock, the door swung open. Dryandra Stritchley, the director’s secretary, flinched,
seemingly horrified by the nut-brown stranger with his right arm elevated as if holding
a knobkerrie. Her bearing was as upright as a sergeant-major’s, and she was as slender
as
Translated from the Bulgarian by Angela Rodel Georgi Gospodinov