Story for performance #838
webcast from Sydney at 06:01PM, 06 Oct 07

That day, seven years ago, we were in the hospital waiting room. Time warping under the pressure of stress. Adam searched the magazines. Who Weekly—someone whose breasts had gone wrong. He shifted in his chair—no newspapers, flicked glumly through Equine Monthly, horse flanks gleaming like thighs in Cleo. Beside me, a young woman started weeping quietly.

She’d already been inside the next room. We all pretended not to look as each patient filed out, ashen-faced. From the door, light rippling in green ribbons. All of us transported toward something unforgettable.

‘Lie still in the chamber. Try not to blink.’

The weeping woman sat alone, unreading. I had an urge to hand her my baby. But was too afraid of what might happen if I let go.

The door opened. My turn.

Outside, the sunlight was an affliction. Gum trees looking peeled in the hot wind. Three students doing strange things with their bodies by a stone gate. Then I realised, they were laughing.

Inside the machine—the whirr and click. I was used to that after the MRI, the CT. Something aeronautical about it. When I got dressed, I avoided the technician’s eyes.

‘It was like being in a coffin.’
‘How would you know?’

Zooey started crying. I couldn’t hold her. I was still radioactive from the scan.

At home, all the radios were turned on because Adam liked the noise, the flow of event and fact. I shot him a look. The baby. Zooey asleep, one knee kinked in the air.
‘It helps me forget myself.’
‘Why would you want to?’

He doused his tea with milk. He drew the scans out slowly. The king of information.
‘Not your most flattering portrait.’
He gently touched my shoulder.

Pictures of my skeleton, like a premonition of myself worm-eaten. Femur, tibia, humerus, ulna. Important—the words for each part; a ritual to ward something off. I squinted, so I couldn’t see where the tumour was, or notice any others.

I pumped milk from my breasts and poured it down the sink. I didn’t trust my body anymore.

‘Experts will determine what happened when the boy was killed.’
The radio said a child hit in Gaza crossfire. Mohammed al-Dura. Twelve years old.

‘But who are The Experts?’

Something began that day that would never end. I’m not talking about the tumour, which made me mourn my own creatureliness. Something about the way that woman wept alone while another came in, wheeling her IV as if she was bringing a friend. Something about evidence, or the lack of it.

That night we saw the footage—the boy gets shot, his father weeps. Adam picked a hangnail. They keep replaying it, the boy falling. In his father’s arms. The camera and its false memory.
‘The Israelis say it was staged.’
‘Either way the boy is dead.’

Zooey catches dust motes, comes to me with closed palms. I open mine to receive invisible things. We’re still here, in the unforgiving light of another summer. My hand feels the hole where they cut the tumour out.

I was put in a steel-doored room where they treated the end cases with high dose radiation. They gave me the bed for privacy; I was pumping milk every three hours. I was mostly alone, except for the TV. My sister watched the scene in Gaza as she clamped the pump to my breast.
‘Do they want us to remember, or forget?’

The boy falling, his blood congealing on the dusty road. I could hardly lift my head on the morphine. The TV images like something my own eyes were inventing. Ana pumped my breast, which was probably funny, but I can’t remember.

‘No one believes in actual footage anymore!’
She looked at me, bit her lip. She’s a lawyer, truth is achievable or the world falls apart.

Somewhere in the hospital, in some lab, they were sectioning my tumour, wiping the samples onto glass.

The reporter signed off. Ana turned away. Her boy is twelve too, plays dead in yard games with neighbours. Mohammed doesn’t look like that, lying bleeding in his father’s arms.


Years later, my grandmother begins doling out her possessions. Photos of dead family members. Aunt Ilse, in Israel. Uncle Karl with his accordion at Potsdamer Platz. Ana and I are the new custodians of memories about people we’ve never met.

‘But she won’t throw the rubbish away. A paper cup from Westmead Sports Club. And, look…swizzle sticks from the RSL. I had to sneak them out just to chuck them.’

Ana puts them on the table, light shines through the lozengey plastic. I picture the old house, like something from Weimar Germany, the furniture sent from Berlin before my great-grandparents were deported.

Adam opens the paper at foreign news. TRUTH: TRAPPED IN THE CROSSFIRE. The Palestinian policeman dead in his car. Father and son behind a barrel. An ambulance, its driver killed. We have all the details, but nothing’s getting clearer.

‘She wanted you to have this.’
Ana digs out a picture of my infant grandmother in her mother’s arms.
Remembering’s supposed to stop the trauma recurring. Another redemption myth. When you’re forced to remember everything, it’s easier to forget. Ritual violence. Lethal force. Stones, live bullets.

The aunt who suffered under Mengele, the grandparents without graves.

The Palestinian boy with a bullet in his body.

The journalist asks the witness: ‘But, how do these events fit together?’ They’re leaving it to the experts. The new custodians of memory and truth. The father says, exhume the body. The bones will hold the evidence.

Zooey spies the swizzle sticks. Selects one, runs. She’s building something in the back room with dolls, paperclips and a cardboard box.

Adam folds the paper so the boy’s small, pale foot is all you can see, buried somewhere on page 9.

Adapted for performance by Barbara Campbell from a story by Mireille Juchau.