She made me see the red-brick barracks of the camp on the edge of Dillingen, and the town gate and its clock, and the poppies and cornflowers growing in the fields by the Danube in the summer; she summoned up the cool scent of lilacs in private gardens at night. She brought out a cracked, sacred, black-and-white photograph that her grandfather kept between the pages of an Estonian Bible — a small girl in plaits, sitting in a field among the poppies. I could smell the summer scents of Dillingen: the field flowers, the dry stalks of grass on her favourite walk by the river. I missed it with all the pangs of loss, as though that past were my own.
‘I liked it in Dillingen,’ she said. ‘For my grandfather and mother it was miserable, but I was happy. I could walk in the town and by the Danube, and there was always another country out of sight. I used to think it was just past the edge of Dillingen, where the road went. The road was long and straight, and the horizon was very low. I could glimpse it in the distance, past the houses: another land. Goethe wrote about it. Have you read Goethe? “Kennst du das Land, wo die Zitronen blühn —?” No; you don’t speak German. How strange, when you have a German grandfather. But you understand what I’m saying, don’t you? You are the first Australian I’ve met who does. I knew you might, when I first came into your room.’
Katrin’s formal education, carried out in the Camp, had ended at sixteen, when they left Dillingen; yet her reading was wide. In the Camp, books had been precious, like those of the Middle Ages; hoarded, lent only to those you could trust not to damage them. She regretted certain lost books even now. Some she and her grandfather still had; torn, dog-eared and treasured, printed on cheap wartime paper.
She didn’t speak of the boy Jaan very much, but when she did it was with tenderness, almost as though he were her own child. Once, when I called early at the flat to take her out, the old man answered the door and beckoned me in, and I found Katrin in the bedroom pulling a sweater over the boy’s head. The practical action was startlingly maternal in its style; she glanced up at me and smiled, and Jaan smiled too. His eyes, unlike Katrin’s, were hazel, but widely spaced in the same way. She spoke to him in Estonian, and I listened in fascination to the liquid flow of this tongue from the North’s utmost edge, a language she had told me was not even Indo-European, but related to Finnish. She was most foreign to me, speaking it.
When we had been going out together for nearly a month, she had still allowed me no more than to kiss her goodnight.
‘It’s so obvious, getting involved when we live side by side. I don’t want to provide you with a convenient affair,’ she said. She was very much a product of the fifties, as I was; it was indecent to rush. But sometimes I wondered if she would become involved with me at all. In a curious way, despite our affinities, I still didn’t really know her. There was a part of herself and her life that she wasn’t showing me, I thought. She seemed very proper; but who was the man I had heard through the wall? And why was she still unmarried, at nearly thirty? Did the old man and the boy keep her tied to them? What was wrong with her?
Outwardly, there was nothing wrong with her. Big-boned, energetic and cheerful, she seemed absolutely normal, her wide, well-trained European smile unfailingly confirming life’s goodness. And yet I asked my questions.
Then, on a hot night early in March, the phase of decorum she insisted on came to an end.
I had taken her to the theatre, and we had said goodnight at her doors as usual. For over an hour, I lay naked and sweating on my bed, kept sleepless not just by the heat, but by that huge, insupportable hunger which seldom comes again, after twenty-five: a hunger not just for sexual homecoming, but for the flowering of some sort of myth, yearned after with every nerve, to which the desired woman is the key.
The night was breathless; a banked-up fire burned in upper levels of blackness. My doors were open; big white stars stood in navy sky, through an arch. Her doors must surely be open too; she lay and breathed not eight feet away, and I knew if I were able to hold her, I would hold strange old Europe and the world. The Harbour and the city were inside me; thwarted yet exultant, I was filled with all its snaking, dark green foreshores, where yellow lights from bungalows spilled down sandstone headlands; I could see the Pacific breakers thundering like trains on all the northern beaches: on the pepper-coloured sands of the Peninsula, with its far, expensive suburbs like California. Uphill in the Cross, crimes were being committed, in rooms smelling of beer and dust — the dust that was everywhere in Sydney, its sterile pollen collecting on the ragged leaves of palms; on window sills and verandahs.
Were her doors open? They must be; her room, like mine, had no window, and it was too hot to close them. Was she asleep, or lying awake? What sort of faint-hearted creature was I, that I let her lie there alone? Truly a cripple? But Katrin, unlike Deirdre Dillon, refused to see me as a cripple.
I got up, pulling on a pair of shorts, and went out on to the arcade. I’d go in to her, I said. Perhaps she’d dismiss me with contempt and sadness; but I no longer cared.
At first, I didn’t approach her doors; I walked to the balustrade and leaned on its warm stucco, my mouth dry, the old ceramic tiles tepid under my feet. A faint coolness rose from the Harbour, and the sky was clear; I could pick out the other Cross, with its cold white pointers.
Her light was out; her doors were open. As I walked towards them, my heart jolting, she materialised in the frame like a figure developing in a photograph, standing straight and still in a pale blue nightdress. Her dark straw hair was down, falling to her shoulders without a wave, giving her a look of serious sexual intent. Long, bare arms of extraordinary smoothness went around my neck as I kissed her, and the tang of perspiration came to me.
I’d never imagined finding such an odour more exciting than scent; it was frank yet haunting as the sour smells in her grandfather’s flat upstairs: that strange, sad capsule of lost Europe. Breathing it in, I was breathing in life; and as we struggled to hold each other closer, I was held by a joy that made me know that all other joys had been a child’s fragile fancies.
There was silence from ABS for over a month. I hadn’t yet been interviewed, and the appointment began to seem somewhat less certain to me. But I had acting engagements from the commercial radio stations to keep me going; and I had Katrin.
On the arcade, coming and going between one another’s rooms in the new cool of autumn, maintaining a fiction of separate lives in front of Bela Beamont, we saw ourselves as comrades, not just lovers; poor yet happy outsiders at the foot of the city’s cliffs, preparing to climb. Hand in hand, we wandered through the underside of the unsleeping Cross at all hours of the day and night, every yard of it as familiar as the objects in our rooms: the red-brick apartment blocks of the prosperous, and the smelly old terraces of the desperate, with their balconies of grimy wrought-iron.
We despised none of it, the tough old Cross. Walking home in the early hours of Sunday from a party, or from one of the migrant clubs where I’d watch Katrin sing, I’d even persuade her to call in for a coffee at the Hasty Tasty, the cavernous, supernaturally ugly hamburger café in one of the Victorian terraces on the junction, where the neon bottle of sherry was poured against hot sky. Open at all hours, the Hasty was the district’s true pivot; legend said that it hadn’t been closed for an hour since 1927.
Familiar spirits of the Cross passed us here. There went the sinister Mr Smith, who dressed always, even in midsummer, in a tweed overcoat, felt hat, woollen gloves and dark glasses; and here came the Duke of Darlinghurst Road, with rat-sharp grey eyes, sharp nose and bald top-knot, in his huge, tent-like, grease-grey coat and multitude of waistcoats, sniffing along the gutter on the lookout for treasures, all to be secreted in his dozens of pockets. And in a closed fruit shop doorway on the corner at night sat Wenceslas Kupka, a skeletal, thinly bearded Czech in a beret, selling books of his own poems and essays, all printed by himself, which expounded monotonous theories of conspiracy, and made lurid accusations against publishers who refused him. He never
spoke, and people never bought; haughty and contemptuous of mocking passers-by, Wenceslas seemed placed in the doorway against his will, and one felt that he would have despised the vulgar act of selling a book. He was there every cold autumn night, his yellow face drawn with enigmatic suffering, his dark, mittel-European eyes pleading, accusing and angry, looking out from his wayside shrine among the books. I called him Saint Sebastian, since he seemed to long for arrows; but I laughed because he troubled me, and Katrin wouldn’t hear him mocked.
‘He has been driven mad,’ she said. ‘He is not able to write in his own language: what hope does he have here? He can only look ridiculous; he is lost, like my grandfather.’
There was a seriousness about her which I put down to her Lutheranism. Her grandfather was very devout, and Katrin only slightly less so. She was a mixture in equal parts of sensuality and old-style propriety, a mixture more common then than it is now. The two parts co-existed in equal balance: a tension that could perhaps only be ended by marriage. She didn’t want her grandfather to know how things were between us, and avoided coming out of my room at compromising times. Her bed next door was seldom slept in now; but early in the morning, before Bela arrived with his breakfast trays, she would slip away to maintain a fiction of ‘respectability’. No doubt Bela made his assumptions, but he contented himself with significant smiles, and small references. (‘Your Katrin sleeps late, this morning — I cannot get her to answer her door.’) He was smugly proprietary, and sure enough, began to make broad hints to me about marriage. (‘This girl is in love with you, Commander.’)
I discouraged these advances firmly. I was not ready for marriage; I didn’t yet know whether I wanted to marry Katrin Vilde, even though I was irrevocably in love. I still wasn’t sure that I knew her. When we weren’t making love, there was a paradoxical maidenly quality which I couldn’t find believable; it was as though her life had been arrested, somewhere; there was a lost section, which perhaps accounted for the fact that at twenty-nine, she looked no more than twenty-two. I had tried to question her about earlier love affairs, but she had closed up. There had been very few, she said; and why should we discuss them? I saw that she was easy and flirtatious with the immigrant men in best Saturday suits who came up and spoke to her in the clubs where she sang; and I wondered then if her lovers had been many. These were shabby thoughts, and only troubled me occasionally; but the mystery of her lost years nagged at my mind.
We seldom closed my doors at night, since no one ever came to this end of the verandah; and the outbreaks of squabbling among the gulls, coming up through the darkness, were a constant accompaniment to our talk and our lovemaking. Those voices, rising and bursting like bubbles from the Harbour, buoyed us up many times to a plateau beyond passion; and hearing them at other times, we would glance at each other and burst out laughing.
Yet sometimes a heart-stopping gulf would yawn beneath the long glide of pleasure, not so much threatening it as giving it a keener edge, accompanied by crude whisperings in corners of my mind; whispers of guilt inseparable from the era. She shouldn’t be here, in this room. What if she gets pregnant? Are you going to marry, or not?
Her taut, strong, long-waisted body had reached that moment in its history which is as near perfection as anything in nature can be: a marvellous white arch between youth and maturity. My instincts warned me that failure to reach its natural goals would be disastrous; it had to be taken seriously, this body, and I was already half-responsible for it.
Her skin had a different grain from an Australian girl’s: a sort of dough-like smoothness which was both exciting and sobering. ‘You’re made to have babies,’ I said; the remark had jumped from me before I knew it, and the effect on her was startling; her smile was extinguished, and her shocked face went blind as her arms wound about me. Yes, there was something still not in focus; her body had an unknown history.
On the day the letter came confirming the ABS job, I asked her to marry me.
We went out into the Cross for supper, and drank champagne to celebrate. I made her laugh a lot, that night. But when we got back to my room, her mood changed.
We had stopped just inside the doors, hand in hand, not turning on the lights. The red beacon on the arch of the Bridge winked and winked like an inflamed eye; and suddenly, she began to speak about Estonia.
Although she had talked often of the camp in Germany, she had seldom mentioned her homeland; now she entered the topic obliquely. ‘You will make me a home Richard, won’t you?’
I laughed, and said I would. Didn’t everyone make a home?
She touched my face with tenderness and amusement. ‘What a sheltered life you’ve led in Australia. Nothing really worries you. But I’ve never had a home; not really. Not since I was nine years old, when we escaped from Tallinn.’ Her voice went dry; she twisted her mouth into a smile, as though to apologise for inappropriate feelings. ‘Estonia was beautiful,’ she said. ‘We had a house then. I loved our house; it had decorations carved on the eaves, like in a storybook. I remember when we ran away in 1944; Grandfather said we must take only what we could carry, and I took my doll.’
The Russians had been bombing Tallinn day after day, she said; the noise never stopped, and she began to scream. Her mother had to calm her. She saw ships burning in the harbour as the Germans retreated; the railways were destroyed, and the roads were crowded with trucks and with people pushing carts and carrying luggage — all running away.
‘We knew we must go too,’ she said. ‘It had been bad enough under the Germans — my father was a patriot, and he had been in trouble with them for opposing the occupation; he wanted our country to be free. The Soviets had occupied us before the Germans, in 1941. Now they were back, and we knew how it would be. There would be no hope for people like my father — people who didn’t know how to be cunning, and fit in. He had been lucky not to be taken before. The Russians had deported people from all along our street, in 1941. Anyone who spoke against the occupation might go. They took wives from husbands, and children from parents; they took them on trains to Siberia. But my father refused to run. He would stay, he said, and fight for a free Estonia. The Americans and British would save Estonia when they won the war, in a few months’ time. That was what he believed.’ She bent her head, and seemed to consider.
‘He was foolish, I suppose,’ she said at last. ‘Not long afterwards, we heard through friends that the Russians had shot him. My mother hadn’t wanted to leave, but Grandfather persuaded her; we would soon be able to go back, Father had said so. We only just got out in time; we caught the last Red Cross ship out of Tallinn, carrying back wounded to Germany. I remember it was fired on by the Soviets, and their planes still went on bombing the harbour. We thought we were lucky: but I knew then I’d never see Father again.’
Cossetted child of a land of safety, where such things never happened, I murmured vague comfort. But Katrin ignored me, looking out over the Harbour; she seemed compelled to speak on, telling me all that she had never told before, making me join that past. Staring into distances I couldn’t plumb, she cleared her throat.
‘I had to leave my rocking horse,’ she said. ‘That was what I hated most. It was beautiful — it had real fur. I wonder what became of that rocking horse?’
Suddenly she was crying, and I knew these were childhood’s tears, released at last. She stood clasping her hands hard, gasping as though in pain, unresponsive to my attempts at calming her. Then she stopped, and raised her head to look at me.
‘I have to tell you something,’ she said. ‘Jaan isn’t my brother.’
9
On that summer night in 1944, when the train drew into the station at Munich, she had just turned ten.
Her mother and her grandfather sat very straight on the padded seats of the compartment, holding badly-wrapped paper packages of possessions that would not fit into their two suitcases, and wearing the grave, stricken expressions that had now become habitual with them. On her mother’s face this expression had
replaced a calm smile; on her grandfather’s it had replaced authority.
It worried Katrin, this gravity without authority; it made Andres Vilde look bewildered, and this frightened her; she would not let herself think about it. She said to herself that it was a temporary thing, like the worn cuffs on his one remaining suit: he was still only fifty-five; not yet an old man. When he had gone to his work at the university, her grandfather’s suits had been perfect; and they would be perfect again, she said. She was tired of being tragically unhappy, and refused to be so any more; she resented it. Kneeling on the well-sprung German seat, she bounced up and down on her knees, looking out the open window.
‘We’re here, we’re here,’ she said. ‘In München, in Germany! Mother? Grandfather? ’
The sad faces showed no response to this; it was almost as though she had shown gaiety and excitement in church. ‘Travel,’ her mother said tonelessly. ‘We have done too much of it, Katrin. Get your things together. Have you got your doll? ’
But Katrin ignored this, and went on bouncing, leaning out of the window as the train slowed. The inexplicable sounds of a great station at night closed around her: hollow hoots and clangs in tall grey-green caverns like entries to forbidden dreams. A porter standing close to the platform’s edge as she went by frowned frighteningly as a high official; but a passing Wehrmacht officer winked with special friendliness at this little foreign girl with her pigtails, Baltic-grey eyes and open smile. He was handsome, in his peaked cap and field-grey uniform; his eyes were of the German cornflower blue, and Katrin would always remember him, because he had welcomed her. And so the Vildes entered Germany of the War.
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