ONE WHALE, SINGING --- by KERI HULME

Keri Hulme

One Whale, Singing

The ship drifted on the summer night sea.

‘It is a pity,’ she thought, ‘that one must come on deck to see the stars. Perhaps a boat of glass, to see the sea streaming past, to watch the nightly splendour of stars...’ Something small jumped from the water, away to the left. A flash of phosphorescence after the sound, and then all was quiet and starlit again.

They had passed through krillswarms all day. Large areas of the sea were reddishbrown, as though an enormous creature had wallowed ahead of the boat, streaming blood.

‘Whale-feed,’ she had said, laughing and hugging herself at the thought of seeing whales again. ‘Lobster-krill,’ he had corrected, pedantically.

The crustaceans had swum in their frightened jerking shoals, mile upon mile of them, harried by fish that were in turn pursued and torn by larger fish.

She thought, it was probably a fish after krill that had leaped then. She sighed, stroking her belly. It was the lesser of the two evils to go below now, so he didn’t have an opportunity to come on deck and suggest it was better for the coming baby’s health, and hers, of course, that she came down. The cramped cabin held no attraction: all that was there was boneless talk, and one couldn’t see stars, or really hear the waters moving.

Far below, deep under the keel of the ship, a humpback whale sported and fed. Occasionally, she yodelled to herself, a long undulating call of content. When she found a series of sounds that pleased, she repeated them, wove them into a band of harmonious pulses.

Periodically she reared to the surface, blew, and slid smoothly back under the sea in a wheel-like motion. Because she was pregnant, and at the tailend of the southward migration, she had no reason now to leap and display on the surface.

She was not feeding seriously; the krill was there, and she swam amongst them, forcing water through her lips with her large tongue, stranding food amongst the baleen. When her mouth was full, she swallowed. It was leisurely, lazy eating. Time enough for recovering her full weight when she reached the cold seas, and she could gorge on a ton and a half of plankton daily.

Along this coast, there was life and noise in plenty. Shallow grunting from a herd of fish, gingerly feeding on the fringes of the krill shoal. The krill themselves, a thin hiss and crackle through the water. The interminable background clicking of shrimps. At times, a wayward band of sound like bass organ-notes sang through the chatter, and to this the whale listened attentively, and sometimes replied.

The krill thinned: she tested, tasted the water. Dolphins had passed recently. She heard their brief commenting chatter, but did not spend time on it. The school swept round ahead of her, and vanished into the vibrant dark.

He had the annoying habit of reading what he’d written out loud. ‘We can conclusively demonstrate that to man alone belong true intelligence and self-knowledge.’

He coughs.

Taps his pen against his lips. He has soft, wet lips, and the sound is a fleshy slop! slop!

She thinks:

Man indeed! How arrogant! How ignorant! Woman would be as correct, but I’ll settle for humanity. And it strikes me that the quality humanity stands in need of most is true intelligence and self-knowledge.

‘For instance, Man alone as a species, makes significant artefacts, and transmits knowledge in permanent and durable form.’

He grunts happily.

‘In this lecture, I propose to ….’

But how do they know? she asks herself. About the passing on of knowledge among other species? They may do it in ways beyond our capacity to understand… that we are the only ones to make artefacts I’ll grant you, but that’s because us needy little adapts have such pathetic bodies, and no especial ecological niche. So hooks and hoes, and steel things that gouge and slay, we produce in plenty. And build a wasteland of drear ungainly hovels to shelter our vulnerable hides.

She remembers her glass boat, and sighs. The things one could create if one made technology servant to a humble and creative imagination …. He’s booming on, getting into full lectureroom style and stride.

‘…thus we will show that no other species, lacking as they do artefacts, an organised society, or even semblances of culture…’

What would a whale do with an artefact, who is so perfectly adapted to the sea? Their conception of culture, of civilisation, must be so alien that we’d never recognise it, even if we were to stumble on its traces daily.

She snorts.

He looks at her, eyes unglazing, and smiles

‘Criticism, my dear? Or you like that bit?’

‘I was just thinking...’

Thinking, as for us passing on our knowledge, hah! We rarely learn from the past or the present, and what we pass on for future humanity is a mere jumble of momentarily true facts, and odd snippets of surprised self-discoveries. That’s not knowledge...

She folds her hands over her belly. You in there, you won’t learn much. What I can teach you is limited by what we are. Splotch goes the pen against his lips.

‘You had better heat up that fortified drink, dear. We can’t have either of you wasting from lack of proper nourishment.’

Unspoken haw haw haw.

Don’t refer to it as a person! It is a canker in me, a parasite. It is nothing to me. I feel it squirm and kick, and sicken at the movement.

He says he’s worried by her pale face. ‘You shouldn’t have gone up on deck so late. You could have slipped, or something, and climbing tires you now, you know.’

She doesn’t argue any longer. The arguments follow well-worn tracks and go in circles.

‘Yes,’ she answers, but I should wither without that release, that solitude, that keep away from you.

She stirs the powder into the milk and begins to mix it rhythmically.

I wonder what a whale thinks of its calf? So large a creature, so proven peaceful a beast, must be motherly, protective, a shielding benevolence against all wildness. It would be a sweet and milky love, magnified and sustained by the encompassing purity of water...

A swarm of insectlike creatures, sparkling like a galaxy, each a pulsing lightform in blue and silver and gold. The whale sang for them, a ripple of delicate notes, spaced in a timeless curve. It stole through the lightswarm, and the luminescence increased brilliantly.

Deep within her, the other spark of light also grew. It was the third calf she had borne; it delighted her still, that the swift airy copulation should spring so opportunely to this new life. She feeds it love and music, and her body’s bounty. Already it responds to her crooning tenderness, and the dark pictures she sends it. It absorbs both, as part of the life to come, as it nests securely in the waters within.

She remembers the nautilids in the warm oceans to the north, snapping at one another in a cannibalistic frenzy.

She remembers the oil-bedraggled albatross, resting with patient finality on the water-top, waiting for death.

She remembers her flight, not long past, from killer whales, and the terrible end of the other female who had companied her south, tongue eaten from her mouth, flukes and genitals ripped, bleeding to a slow fought-against end.

And all the memories are part of the growing calf.

More krill appeared. She opened her mouth, and glided through the shoal. Sudden darkness for the krill. The whale hummed meanwhile.

He folded his papers contentedly.

‘Sam was going on about his blasted dolphins the other night dear.’

‘Yes?’

He laughed deprecatingly. ‘But it wouldn’t interest you. All dull scientific chatter, eh?’

‘What was he saying about, umm, his dolphins?’

‘O, insisted that his latest series of tests demonstrated their high intelligence. No, that’s misquoting him, potentially high intelligence. Of course, I brought him down to earth smartly. Results are as you make them, I said. Nobody has proved that the animals have intelligence to a degree above that of a dog. But it made me think of the rot that’s setting in lately. Inspiration for this lecture indeed.’

‘Lilley?’ she asked, still thinking of the dolphins, ‘Lilley demonstrated evidence of dolphinese.’

‘Lilley? That mystical crackpot? Can you imagine anyone ever duplicating his work? Hah! Nobody has, of course. It was all in the man’s mind.’

‘Dolphins and whales are still largely unknown entities,’ she murmured, more to herself than to him.

‘Nonsense, my sweet. They’ve been thoroughly studied and dissected for the last century and more.’ She shuddered. ‘Rather dumb animals, all told, and probably of bovine origin. Look at the incredibly stupid way they persist in migrating straight into the hands of whalers, year after year. If they were smart, they’d have organised an attacking force and protected themselves!’

He chuckled at the thought, and lit his pipe.

‘It would be nice to communicate with another species,’ she said, more softly still.

‘That’s the trouble with you poets,’ he said fondly. ‘Dream marvels are to be found from every half-baked piece of pseudo-science that drifts around. That’s not seeing the world as it is. We scientists rely on reliably ascertained facts for a true picture of the world.’

She sat silently by the pot on the galley stove.

An echo from the world around, a deep throbbing from miles away. It was both message and invitation to contribute. She mused on it for minutes, absorbing, storing, correlating, winding her song meanwhile experimentally through its interstices-then dropped her voice to the lowest frequencies. She sent the message along first, and then added another strength to the cold wave that travelled after the message. An oceanaway, someone would collect the cold wave, and store it, while it coiled and built to uncontrollable strength. Then, just enough would be released to generate a superwave, a gigantic wall of water on the surface of the sea. It was a new thing the sea-people were experimenting with. A protection. In case.

She began to swim further out from the coast. The water flowed like warm silk over her flanks, an occasional interjectory current swept her, cold and bracing, a touch from the sea to the south. It became quieter, a calm freed from the fights of crabs and the bickerings of small fish. There was less noise too, from the strange turgid craft that buzzed and clattered across the ocean-ceiling, dropping down wastes that stank and sickened.

A great ocean-going shark prudently shifted course and flicked away to the side of her. It measured twenty feet from shovel-nose to crescentic tailfin, but she was twice as long and would grow a little yet. Her broad deep body was still wellfleshed and strong, in spite of the vicissitudes of the northward breeding trek: there were barnacles encrusting her fins and lips and head, but she was unhampered by other parasites. She blew a raspberry at the fleeing shark and beat her flukes against the ocean’s pull in an ecstasy of strength.

‘This lecture,’ he says, sipping his drink, ‘this lecture should cause quite a stir. They’ll probably label it conservative, or even reactionary, but of course it isn’t. It merely urges us to keep our feet on the ground, not go hunting off down worthless blind sidetrails. To consolidate data we already have, not, for example, to speculate about so-called ESP phenomena. There is far too much mysticism and airy-fairy folderol in science these days. I don’t wholly agree with the Victorians’ attitude, that science could explain all, and very shortly would, but it’s high time we got things back to a solid factual basis.’

‘The Russians,’ she says, after a long moment of non-committal silence, ‘the Russians have discovered a form of photography that shows all living things to be sources of a strange and beautiful energy. Lights flare from finger tips. Leaves coruscate. All is living effulgence.’

He chuckles again.

‘I can always tell when you’re waxing poetic.’ Then he taps out the bowl of his pipe against the side of the bunk, and leans forward in a fatherly way.

‘My dear, if they have, and that’s a big if, what difference could that possibly make. Another form of energy? So what?’

‘Not just another form of energy,’ she says sombrely. ‘It makes for a whole new view of the world. If all things are repositories of related energy, then humanity is not alone...’

‘Why this of solitariness, of being alone. Communication with other species, man is not alone, for God’s sake! One would think you’re becoming tired of us all!’

He’s joking.

She is getting very tired. She speaks tiredly.

‘It would mean that the things you think you are demonstrating in your paper ….’

‘Lecture.’

‘Work... those things are totally irrelevant. That we may be on the bottom of the pile, not the top. It may be that other creatures are aware of their place and purpose in the world, have no need to delve and paw a meaning out. Justify themselves. That they accept all that happens, the beautiful, the terrible, the sickening, as part of the dance, as the joy or pain of the joke. Other species may somehow be equipped to know fully and consciously what truth is, whereas we humans must struggle, must struggle blindly to the end.’

He frowns, a concerned benevolent frown.

‘Listen dear, has this trip been too much. Are you feeling at the end of your tether, tell us truly? I know the boat is old, and not much of a sailer, but it’s the best I could do for the weekend. And I thought it would be a nice break for us, to get away from the university and home. Has there been too much work involved? The boat’s got an engine after all... would you like me to start it and head back for the coast?’

She is shaking her head numbly.

He stands up and swallows what is left of his drink in one gulp.

‘It won’t take a minute to start the engine, and then I’ll set that pilot thing, and we’ll be back in sight of land before the morning. You’ll feel happier then.’

She grips the small table.

Don’t scream, she tells herself, don’t scream.

Diatoms of phantom light, stray single brilliances. A high burst of dolphin sonics. The school was returning. A muted rasp from shoalfish hurrying past. A thing that curled and coiled in a drifting aureole of green light. She slows, buoyant in the water.

Green light: it brings up the memories that are bone deep in her, written in her very cells. Green light of land.

She had once gone within yards of shore, without stranding. Curiosity had impelled her up a long narrow bay. She had edged carefully along, until her long flippers touched the rocky bottom. Sculling with her tail, she had slid forward a little further, and then lifted her head out of the water. The light was bent, the sounds that came to her were thin and distorted, but she could see colours known only from dreams and hear a music that was both alien and familiar.

(Christlookitthat!)

(Fuckinghellgetoutahereitscomingin)

The sound waves pooped and spattered through the air, and things scrambled away, as she moved herself back smoothly into deeper water.

A strange visit, but it enabled her to put images of her own to the calling dream. Follow the line to the hard and aching airswept land, lie upon solidity never before known until strained ribs collapse from weight of body never before felt. And then, the second beginning of joy...

She dreams a moment, recalling other ends, other beginnings. And because of the web that streamed between all members of her kind, she was ready for the softly insistent pulsation that wound itself into her dreaming. Mourning for a male of the species, up in the cold southern seas where the greenbellied krill swarm in unending abundance. Where the killing ships of the harpooners lurk. A barb sliced through the air in an arc and embedded itself in the lungs, so the whale blew red in his threshing agony. Another that sunk into his flesh by the heart. Long minutes later, his slow exhalation of death. Then the gathering of light from all parts of the drifting corpse. It condensed, vanished… streamers of sound from the dolphins who shoot past her, somersaulting in their strange joy.

The long siren call urges her south. She begins to surge upward to the sweet night air.

She says, ‘I must go on deck for a minute.’

They had finished the quarrel, but still had not come together. He grunts, fondles his notes a last time, and rolls over in his sleeping bag, drawing the neck of it tightly close.

She says wistfully, ‘Goodnight then,’ and climbs the stairs heavily up to the hatchway.

‘You’re slightly offskew,’ she says to the Southern Cross, and feels the repressed tears begin to flow down her cheeks. The stars blur.

Have I changed so much?

Or is it this interminable deadening pregnancy?

But his stolid, sullen, stupidity!

He won’t see, he won’t see, he won’t see anything.

She walks to the bow, and settles herself down, uncomfortably aware of her protuberant belly, and begins to croon a song of comfort to herself.

And at that moment the humpback hit the ship, smashing through her old and weakened hull, collapsing the cabin, rending timbers. A mighty chaos ….

Somehow she found herself in the water, crying for him, swimming in a circle as though among the small debris she might find a floating sleeping bag. The stern of the ship is sinking, poised a moment a moment dark against the stars, and then it slides silently under.

She strikes out for a shape in the water, the liferaft? the dinghy?

And the shape moves.

The humpback, full of her dreams and her song, had beat blindly upward, and was shocked by the unexpected fouling. She lies, waiting on the water-top.

The woman stays where she is, motionless except for her paddling hands. She has no fear of the whale, but thinks, ‘It may not know I am here, may hit me accidentally as it goes down.’

She can see the whale more clearly now, an immense zeppelin shape, bigger by far than their flimsy craft had been, but it lies there, very still…

She hopes it hasn’t been hurt by the impact, and chokes on the hope.

There is a long moaning call then, that reverberates through her. She is physically swept, shaken by an intensity of feeling, as though the whale has sensed her being and predicament, and has offered it all it can, a sorrowing compassion.

Again the whale makes the moaning noise, and the woman calls, as loudly as she can, ‘Thank you, thank you’ knowing that it is meaningless, and probably unheard. Tears stream down her face once more.

The whale sounded so gently she didn’t realise it was going at all.

‘I am now alone in the dark,’ she thinks, and the salt water laps round her mouth. ‘How strange, if this is to be the summation of my life.’

In her womb the child kicked. Buoyed by the sea, she feels the movement as something gentle and familiar, dear to her for the first time.

But she begins to laugh.

The sea is warm and confiding, and it is a long long way to shore.

(1986)