The ship passed tiny islands in the distance, as anonymous as clouds. During the three-week journey, Lucky felt as if he moved inside a huge diorama of the world. He often fell asleep by thinking about the pleasing scenarios that awaited: his wedding to Valia. Watching Valia step into a steaming bath. He and Valia on a beach in Sydney sharing a bottle of wine. From his cabin, inside of which swung his coats and shirts, he felt able to picture her at any time of the day, working or eating or sitting in the closed cafe at night, her hand flicking up to distance a fly. In Australia, things would be simple, things were arranged: they’d marry in December and afterwards, for a few months, Lucky would work with Valia’s father. Then the couple might see about starting their own business. If the economy improved. On the boat he had two gold rings hidden inside a flap he’d cut into the lining of his suitcase.

Circular Quay came into view, heavy with activity, the harbour’s northern shore in repose. Little homes lay as if stamped over the bays. Lucky came down the steamship ramp into the frame of a camera shooting for a newsreel. He smiled, waved, and stepped onto the docks. Crates of imported goods, unloaded from another ship, all appeared cheap and humbled, as if their real value did not yet apply. Lucky walked down the branch, his hair recently cut by the ship’s barber, his suit wide in the shoulders, narrow in the hip, brown shoes shining; he walked along the quay’s avenue of turpentine, merbau, marble, grain, leather, rubber, cambric from Bengal. Crates stamped andiroba. Valia waited on the south side of Customs House and Lucky came to her in long strides.

‘We have—’ said Valia, kissing him fast ‘—much to do.’

He’d kept all her letters since the week they met at the Collins Hotel, and Valia, too, had held on to his correspondence, hiding the notes underneath a set of drawers, since she didn’t want her sister or father reading long pornographic stories. It was naked, their writing, like another world on the other side of a mirror, where the future could be planned, where they climbed out of the day’s structure and consumed each other.

2.