ROSES FOR THE RADIANT DAY
An old Turkish man breeds a special rose.
On those rare and perpendicular occasions, stacked against otherwise ordinary and dirt-scented torpor, Long John would sometimes - some mornings flushed with riverland sunshine - encounter the immigrant in the green-trimmed hardware store.
“What ho, immigrant!” he would say, winking.
The immigrant stayed grim. He was, besides which, a Turkish man, officially Mr Evrahim. Everybody knew it. He had bought the depleted Reynold’s farm on the back road into the blatant picturesqueness of Banning Flats. But he was devoid of the jocular disposition, which is why Long John went winking. The immigrant was quite short and his dark folds had gone fair with age; even his eyes had faded. He only ever wore over-alls and a linen shirt. He was increasingly humble on his feet.
“Good morning,” he would say, flat, thin-lipped, in Anatolian English.
“How’s things out on the back road?” Long John did inquire, smiling vapid.
Mr Evrahim remained more concentrated upon his necessities. He would usually be buying plumbing parts or brassy garden ware.
“It’s an evil patch of land, that,” Long John would say. He was teasing, but it was true. The Reynolds thrashed it with mobs of fly-blown ewes until all the magnesium departed in the dust storms of rank November. Locals described it as ‘hungry’. Mr Evrahim took it cheap. It consisted of a low-hanging quince orchard on the rise and a white weatherboard house, double-fronted, in the hollow, with a large yard defined. It was a landmark inasmuch as mad Irish prisoners, at the convenience of Her Majesty, had built a tall stone wall, rustic and tawdry, against the stifling wind in the crazy swelter of wild colonial imposition.
“It’s fine,” the immigrant would say.
“Still waiting for the radiant day?” asked the Long John, simple. He thought himself clever.
The old Turk smiled to his self. Long John wasn’t being kind. For years, that is, Mr Evrahim had presaged the coming. He himself had arrived in the middle of a drought. The green verdure had been reduced to a dusty bowl. The cows sucked straw. It was entirely uncertain how he maintained himself, but when anyone did inquire of his distant ambitions he looked concentrated and resolute and said his beloved would soon be there - Ceylan was her name - and she would join him in the great southern nothingness and he said it would be a radiant day.
Long John enjoyed poking at the fun. In his opinion, Mr Evrahim was slightly heavy. Long John talked about him whenever he succumbed to ale. “He says,” he says, “that this woman - Ceylan - is sailing out from Turkey-land, but he’s been saying that for twenty years!” Long John was sceptical. “The most beautiful woman in the world, of course. It’s all he talks about.” He said the immigrant was a borderline coot.
The Turk would nod, yes, affirmations of certitude, he was still waiting for the radiant day.
“Might have been quicker if she’d walked,” laughed Long John, winking again. “Or maybe her ship is lost in the briny sea?”
Which would elicit no reaction.
Mr Evrahim attended to his hose fittings.
Long John considered hardware stores emporiums of manly conversation. Once done with the Turk, who retired into an unfunny silence, he looked around for someone else to bother.
Such lustral mornings, however, only happened to Long Johnny. The immigrant was unassuagedly reticent with almost everyone else. He kept to his Turkoid demeanor. He never caused trouble. He paid his rates. He never received suspicious mail. He was widely denounced as “shy”. Long John’s brash hooplah beset his usual manner. For reasons unexplained, the two men almost got along.
It was thus to Long John that Ted ‘Shed’ Hudson noted, one great morning of a burgeoning springtide, that the immigrant had gone missing in the awkward nowheres.
“Haven’t seen him for ages,” he said, unavowed.
Shed travelled the back road. He drove by the tawdry walls almost every Tuesday.
Just checking, Long John took this cue and asked some notables: “Has anyone seen the immigrant of late?”
Everyone said he was polite but unforthcoming, and they hadn’t seen him for a lengthy stretch.
“You should go out and have a look,” suggested the Shed to just as lengthy John. “He might be dead of black snake out there on his own.”
As well as hating magnesium, the noxious soil made the black snakes frisky. In the olden foray the settlers Reynolds lost three children and several sheep dogs to black snake in the bitter harvest of their days. Times were very tough.
So Long John agreed to drive out upon the sundry morrow.
* * *
The sundry morrow was a luscious day. The sunshine was full of merit and the sky was meticulously blue. Fat kurrojongs baubled in the tree tops. Koalas munched on the minty gums, delirious. There had been young rains and the earth smelt dark and wholesome.
Long John drove up and parked out the front. As real estate, it was undistinguished. There was a bland wire fence at the immediate door, then the surrounding stone wall with historic pretensions, obscuring all within. The house, thought Long John, needed an extensive coat of paint.
He knocked. No answer. The weatherboard hermitage was silent. There was no access to the rear. The tawdry wall was eight foot tall. He called out. No answer. Then he tried the handle and to his surprise found it yielding.
Inside, the entryway was neat and handsome in a rectilinear and Turkish sort of way. Long John remarked to himself in his mischief that what it needed was a woman’s touch and it had waited far too long. It was a plain interior, the walls only marked by meandering calligraphies in Middle Eastern squiggle and old pictures of the Hellespont. But it was a well-kept private domain. There was no sign of any living caper. Long John called out again, but there was still no reply. No life in the kitchen. No recent coffee swill.
It was when he rendered open the back entrance, that the Long John commenced his real visitation. In all the sturdy years none had ventured forth. There was not actually any vantage whereby idle eyes could ever look upon the olden yard. The slope fell away. The Reynolds clan had purchased the whole packet. Their division ran along the contour. There was a miserable excuse for a creek at the far behind. The yard was topologically concealed, in any case, and where it wasn’t there was an outhouse and a garden shed and a square-angled trellis thus erected. This is where the ageing Turkoman toiled lamenting the fall of the Ottomans and expecting some southwards beloved.
The luscious ambiance, with the blue sky continuous and birds fresh from the egg, engulfed Long Johnny into its swooning abundance. He stepped down the step, wooden and rickety, into the garden awaiting. The gardener was nowhere but the garden was everywhere, glowing with green and shot across with a uniform pink splendour. There was suddenly a vast and consuming waft of rosy fragrance. A haze of delight. The long one called out “Hey immigrant! Are you around?” just before being wonder-struck in his nostrils. He walked into a wall of rose-powered fruitiness and fumbled with the intoxicating mist. “Whoa!” he surmised. It wasn’t a lonesome rural yard - it was a wonderland of green-packed exuberance that even a carnal sensibility such as his could barely understate. It made him want to mutter country clichés. He momentarily forgot Mr Evrahim. He was amazed, instead, by the blooming effusion all about. He knew the immigrant was keen for horticulture - in a rectilinear and Turkish sort of way - but he never supposed it was edenic! Random bumps in the hardware store did not speak of flowery cascades, merely some onions and climbing beans and slimy okras.
A red-brick path wound among the straight-edged beds replete with a great profusion. There were bulbs and dark-eyed belladonnas. Tulip-faced anemones danced with marigolds of plenty. In the midst was a fountain, oozing with silver water in defiance of the Australian sun. O idyll of botanical loveliness! It showed a tender hand. It showed a man of sensitive fingers. It revealed a choreographer of living things. There were huge boulders being structural. How on earth, wondered John being long, did the immigrant ever move that alone? It deflated gravity. The boulders were granite of rare magnitude. Tons. It was close-grained and majestic rock. There were nooks and grottoes shaped thus, like a coastline of Asia Minor, and a net of sure symmetry thrown across an ordered and sap-filled beauty. Arcadian presence. It sat among dreary paddocks. Long John was taken anon.
The question arose, how did the cunning Turk transform a wretched quadrangle into a fertile reality? What was his secret? Where did the magnesium come from? There was a vast magnolia, gorgeous and sacred. There were miniature clementines in terracotta pots bursting with solar juices. But the more pressing question was, what is the flower - pink and tender - fumigating the entire performance with her soul-melting attar? It suddenly dawned on John Longly that she was a rose - yes, a rose - and in fact the only rose in view. It was a garden as rosy as the fair Hesperides but - a curious development - only one rose in a dozen incarnations. It was a blush pink centifolia - not that Long John knew his roses entirely - with the voluptuous habits of the rosa damascene, the rose that seduced the Crusaders, and blessed with an intense perfume, as sweet as the beads of perspiration swollen on the Prophet’s brow. There was one by the door. There was one by the outhouse wall. There were four marking the angles of the fountain in a classical array. They were everywhere.
Perhaps he was susceptible to rolling visions that spring day, but when Long John cupped a flower-top, one hundred petalled, into his boof-headed hand and bent over to smell it he was transported into the spicy harems of yore. It was as though he walked, barefooted, on a corridor of cool marble flooring with white veils of suggestion either side. It was as though he hunted through a thousand rooms until he found a swarthy maiden. She was reclining naked on silk cushions, a creature of the subtle night. He lifted his face and smelt the air and the centifolia crumbled submissive in his fingertips. It was as though the fragrance of paradise soothed his dull repose and, for a long instant, he became lost in a metaphysical nostalgia. His soul was tough and puny but it was suddenly soaked in rose water and giddy on rose wine. It was as though he had once been a bronze worker in a far away bazaar. It was as though he had snuffled golden hashish moist with the oils of the snow thaw.
“Whoa!” he reiterated. He had never nosed a rose like that.
For a few minutes, Mr Evrahim’s rose possessed him. She was a deep green with serrated leaves. She stood upright, clean. The darkness of her foliage hid the solid frame. The darkness marked her blossoms, underlining the pink generosity of petals. Long John was not completely and corporeally clueless about roses. His mum had kept a few, but of the salmon-red and mainly smelless kind. He wondered what this beauty might be called? It was indeed all about. There was not a single rose besides her - a dozen bushes, plump with blossom, all the same. There were crocuses and daffodils, foxgloves and those red things with yellow edges, but where there were roses there was only this rose, and she fumed with a visionary aroma. It was only by fluffing blank air through his nose holes that Long John eventually came to his senses and escaped the heathen magic of the spring. Eventually he remembered the immigrant and called out again.
* * *
No one at the hardware store ever guessed that Mr Evrahim was a breeder of sumptuous roses. Or rather, of one kind of rose - the rose replete in the Reynold’s ruined run. Over years, it was supposed, he convinced the land to be more understanding, and perhaps deploying foreign skills, stocked up on a humus full of bursting goodness. Who knows the prowess of the Turkish rural class? With such a base, therefore, he created a single instance. The gorgeousness was manifest. Long John had imagined that the immigrant was solid and boring. But here was a blue-skied wonderment, a vast garden of loving care. He often said, Long John, “I wonder what he does out there on his own?” People in town suspected he was fruity. How many quinces can one man eat? People supposed he sat on his verandah smoking Camels and having foreign thoughts in Turkish. No man in his right calculations would buy the Reynolds farm. Even at a minor price it was a retarded victory. But look at what he had done! Earthy redemption! The stale clay announced young dainties. Where had he gone?
It was only after the plush fullness of sunshine, stunned, that the terrible inconsistency became apparent. At the rear of the garden Long John, inquiring, noticed a mine shaft broken open. Were there diggings at the back of Reynold’s yard? So there were. Long time ago. It was obscure in the thicket. The desperadoes had eeked every morsel from the stubborn land by sheep and tractor and drill. The immigrant had made it well again. But as Long John now supposed the Turkey - as he sometimes called him - never reckoned on hidden depletions. It wasn’t marked on any maps. It must have been dug in the great rush of ’84. Mine shafts pock the weary fortitude. Often, but not always, they were marked with peppercorns from sultry Peru. Long John admired the florid majesty and called out again.
Eventually, he found the old Turk at the bottom of a hundred foot pit with his head on sideways and his arms and legs in a fracture of sudden doom. He had his garden fork beside him to the end. Poor old Mr Evrahim, everyone said. He had forked, it was decided, beyond the makeshift seal. The sides had given way. He was deceived by the leaves. He tumbled down the sharp quartz walls into the hard core of terra australis. Alas. The land was evil after all, if not in its coverings then in its subterranean yearnings.
When they took him away rosarians arrived. Primarily, Dame Elizabeth Mayfair-Rooney, from Ballarat, who came up in an entourage, for Long John had told everyone, “You ought to see his roses!” She was totally smack-ranked with vivid appreciation. But neither she, nor any of her worthies, could identify the pink beauty. There were signs of original breeding. Among Mr Evrahim’s neatly folded papers were notes and calculations and his amblings on desirable genetics, mostly in Turkish shorthand but here and there in English designations. The rose in question looked a bit like the Parvifolia but without the pomposity, Dame Elizabeth observed. Others detected the autumn damask amidst the much-favoured Blush Provence. But how had he bred that perfume? The entire rose fraternity came over for a smell.
“Extraordinary!” gasped Dame Elizabeth.
“He lived here in his stand-alone presence,” Long John was there to inform her. He showed her the fountain and the foursquare array.
“Extraordinary,” she said again.
What was extraordinary was that this reticent arrival, who mostly kept to his own, might craft a rose of potent arrest. Rose breeders, Dame Elizabeth asserted - and she’d met a few - are beings of deep-hearted longing. It takes great humility to capture the pink essence. “No amount of science and fiddling with chromosomes can replicate a bold inspiration,” she insisted. Old school.
“He was waiting for his darling,” said John after too long, explaining.
Dame Elizabeth said she thought that would do it.
“He talked about her,” said the long one, sadly. “She was on a boat from Turkey-land. But she never arrived, of course.”
“A double tragedy,” the Dame concluded.
“He said her name was Ceylan and she was going to join him in the great southern nothingness. But she never arrived.”
The Dame held a rose to her fine snozzle. She breathed the elixir and then admired the wanton pinkness with her eyes.
“I’m not so sure,” she said, and for poetry’s sake she insisted that this rosy wastrel be named Mademoiselle Ceylan, emblem of the ever-patient heart.
* * *
Most gardeners - even emerald-thumbed savants - do not know the story behind Mademoiselle Ceylan, a flossy throwback popular among the modern cottage staples, profuse in gardens from Daylesford to Ugly Reef, and how a Turk in his cheap weatherboard tekke fell face first into Australia. Whisker-bound Clive Blazey promoted it through his Diggers Club to devoted diggers far and wide but never mentioned the missing ship. It came to adorn a lamp post in the gardens at Government House. Rosarians rated it in immense regard. They compared it to a multi-tasking Alister Clarke. Gardeners in bleak-hearted Canberra, toiling at a national level, thought it positively noble.
It came to pass, though, that Longsome John mentioned it one reckless ale to a scribbler from Immigration - the ‘Department’ - and the nosy scribbler considered Mr Evrahim in the records. It was a mysterious thing. As far as he could find there was no such immigrant to the back road amid the blatant and picturesque lay of Banning Flats. Further, he would need to go to the land transfer records. He rang Long John one sober eve.
“Do you know who he bought the land from?” he was inquiring.
Long John said the Reynolds. The Reynolds were local leg-ends. There were streets and tennis courts named after them. They had crossed the Great Divide. They had chased away the blackfellas and flogged the soil to death. A dynasty ended when the immigrant bought what was left of the Reynolds land, its fallow dearth and empty shafts.
Mr Evrahim’s grave was unadorned in the Banning Flats cemetery. It was fresh-dug, pointing - not without southern incongruity - with new orientation towards the black stone of Mecca. Long John insisted. He organised a rag-headed imam. Long John drove out the next morning and stood at the graveside asking questions. He had peered down the mine and seen the familiar shades of shirt and over-alls and muttered fatalistically, “You old borderline coot!” Now he wondered, “Who are you Mr Turkey who grows the roses of a miraculous abode?”
Once, in the hardware store, he had encountered the random immigrant - they were both that day replacing taps and washers. He was always grand to tease.
“Maybe tomorrow?” Long John proposed, winking. “I notice today wasn’t the glorious day!”
“No,” the Turk agreed. “Not today.” And, once again, he insisted that the radiant day was coming.
“How long since you kissed her?” asked Long John.
The immigrant flinched. He didn’t care to recall.
“I left Turkey when I was twenty-nine,” he pleaded.
It was a detail that turned out to be true.
Weeks later the nosy scribbler rang Long John with several items of intrigue.
“His real name was Ahmed,” he said. The scribbler’s detective work had taken him to strange files. “And he made menace for the Turkish Secret Service. One day he had to disappear. The trial was over. He was a newly married man.”
“Was there anyone named Ceylan?” wondered John.
There are few places as unconvincing as the back road to Banning Flats in the dusty reach of a long-winded drought. The black snakes populated the outhouse. Mr Evrahim - his official name - came hidden in the secret garden of his heart. Australia is a long, long way and a perfect place to be nothing.
“Didn’t come across that name,” the scribbler admitted.