‘I’ll book to come back in three weeks. I never wanted to move to Brisbane though. You know that. Not forever! And, maybe later … I’ve been thinking it might make financial sense to take up Nina’s offer.’
‘You’ll do very well out of the move, for Christ’s sake. You’ll get half of everything. You and Ellie. And child support. I’m doing my bit. Legally, you can’t just take her.’
‘You’re leaving us!’
‘No, Sara. I’m leaving you. I’m sorry.’
There are dark rings under Ellie’s eyes, and I feel heavy with guilt for putting her through the anguish of the breakup. A high-pitched pulsing sound fills my ears. I look at the faces of the other passengers, none of whom register alarm. The noise keeps pace with my heart, and I realise it’s coming from within my head, near my ear. I take a deep yoga breath to the count of seven and feel my belly expand. I do it three times. When I open my eyes, we are off the ground and the sound inside my head has gone.
‘We’re fine now,’ the woman beside me offers. She taps my forearm. ‘No problems at all.’
‘I wasn’t afraid …’
‘It’s okay.’ She changes the subject. ‘Are you visiting family for Christmas?’
I do feel guilty for taking Ellie away from her father, especially now, but remind myself that he is the one who drove me away.
‘We’re staying in my grandmother’s house,’ I say.
‘Lovely.’
I don’t want to keep talking and instead look down at my mobile phone and the Facebook friends list, the page frozen since I’d switched the phone over to aeroplane mode. I’ve stayed in touch intermittently with a few high-school friends but only one, Rebekkah, still lives in Tasmania. Rebekkah has a son who is two years older than Ellie and when we were last in contact she lived on the eastern shore, half an hour’s drive from Nina’s. We haven’t communicated for several months and I vow to contact her as soon as we arrive.
Through the window, square, sunburned paddocks roll out beneath us with treeless monotony. The only vegetation exists along meandering paths that follow dismal, underfed watercourses that carry mostly dirt. Vast muddy puddles pool at river mouths, dumping farmland into the sea. How completely and devastatingly this ancient continent has been murdered – skinned alive of its thin crust of fragile soil. Ellie is doing a happy drawing of people at the beach, with a plane flying overhead. I stroke her leg and shut my eyes.
Someone is prodding me. It’s Ellie. ‘Look!’ she says, pointing out the window. ‘We’re here. The captain said through the speaker.’
I am astonished to have slept for so long, and lean across her to see Tasmania’s north coast born freshly beneath us. My heart sings as, within minutes, mountains, dark with trees, rise to form vast plateaus veiled in mist and dotted with lakes. On the highest peaks, cloud hangs over the summits like soft icing and I think of Nina’s story of the Snow Maiden surrendering herself to the sky as mist. Branches of light pierce the cloud, painting the landscape silver.
‘Beautiful,’ I hear the man in front of me say, his big, bullish head in profile gazing out through the window. ‘Bloody beautiful.’
If I’d had to guess which of the passengers would have been so moved by the landscape, it wouldn’t have been this man.
I squeeze Ellie’s hand and see myself at her age: Nina waving me goodbye from the back door as I set off up the mountain, my stomach full from a breakfast of boiled eggs and homemade jam on fresh bread. Through Nina’s eyes, I see a determined, excited school girl, plaits poking merrily from under a hand-knitted beanie, heading out on her own for the first time along the mossy gravel path that led past our vegetable patch, through the white wrought-iron gate and up the slippery slopes of the mountain. At that age, I didn’t go far. I could always see the house, but each year I’d go a little further. Sometimes Nina would catch up with me on the track and we would walk together for a while.
It is not long before the wheels of the plane click out, ready for touchdown. Ellie lets go of my hand and holds the edge of her seat.
I exhale a shaky breath. Deep within me, that strong and courageous child must still exist. I can feel the handspun shawl of my grandmother’s love around my shoulders.
I want Ellie to feel that love wrapped around her like the layers of the matryoshka Nina gave to me. I want her to experience the same magical childhood that I enjoyed, bejewelled in natural treasures and spectacle. More than once, Nina woke me in the dead of night so I could witness the miracle of a storm that seemed to come from nowhere. I would hold my breath as monstrous eucalypts cast their rotten appendages into our tidy garden. Through the back window I watched as each sheet of lightning froze the rain into lustrous threads and transformed the bush outside into a series of still images, as if the gods were taking photographs. I saw possums, bandicoots and the occasional wallaby flee the mayhem. On occasion, they seemed to be flying. ‘Mat’ Syra Zemlya gets angry if she is betrayed,’ Nina whispered into my ear, and I knew she was talking about the Earth Mother, her favourite Russian god.
Her tales terrified and thrilled me, both. She would take me to the beach in winter to show me how big the waves could grow, turning them into raging, rearing monsters sent by Koliada, the Winter God, to chase princesses. I can still hear myself squealing with excitement as the waves rose and chased the princesses’ frilly white skirts up the beach before dragging them back out to sea. I must write them all down, those stories, before I forget them.
I wish Nina had told me more of her life in Russia, a place she said, under Stalin, she had to flee. I am left to put the pieces together like a tattered patchwork. Her earliest memories were of her mother’s singing, of hunger and then of her father, a university professor, being taken away to the gulag. That was before the war, and Nina never saw her father again. Her teenage brother died fighting for the Red Army against the Nazi invaders, it was that or face the same fate as his father. Nina, her sister and their mother were therefore alone when the Nazi soldiers came to their village, a day Nina said was the worst in her life. ‘Do not ask me, Sara,’ she said. ‘My sister died, and my mother stopped singing. That is the end of it.’ Much of their village was destroyed, including their house, so Nina and her mother moved in with Nina’s uncle. ‘It was very sad what happened,’ Nina said. ‘But it did not end when the war ended. I’d met your dear grandfather by then and like other anti-communists he was in danger of also being sent to the gulag.’
‘They were still operating?’ I naively asked.
‘Worse than ever. Many of those who had fled to the West had already been forced back home and imprisoned. We had been lucky to escape capture, but it could not last. It is why we came to Australia. We were not alone. Other Russians got work building roads on Bruny Island. I wish your grandfather had got work there instead of at the Hydro.’ That is what Nina said, her accent still strong. My grandfather remains there, buried on the Hydro site, up in the clouds.
There were also days when Nina woke me early in the morning to show me glistening sunrises after a night of rain. ‘Each day is a fresh start,’ she would say with a smile as she set the breakfast table and poured herself a cup of tea with lemon. ‘A chance to be even better.’
On the inflight news, there is a report of another boat of asylum seekers entering Australian waters. According to the reporter, they are mostly Afghani men who had fled first to Pakistan but claim to have been targeted there also. The news story cuts to a gathering of local residents outside the Pontville detention centre, protesting about the release of detainees into the Hobart community, and I am struck by how little has changed since Nina and my grandfather arrived.
The news and the fasten seatbelt sign switch off simultaneously and I reach for Ellie’s hand again but she is holding her phone up to the window, taking photographs.
‘They’re for Daddy,’ she says. ‘He told me to take lots of pictures.’ She snaps a photograph of herself smiling and then, unexpectedly, one of me, no doubt looking glum, or sad,
or annoyed.
‘He won’t want that last one.’ I reach for the phone.
‘Yes, he will.’ She pulls the mobile away, but the space is small and the device is still within my grasp.
‘No, Ellie,’ I say, too loudly. ‘Give me the phone, please.’
‘It’s my phone! Daddy gave it to me.’
‘Yes, but …’ I snatch the phone away and delete the last image.
5
The solicitor’s receptionist hands over the key to Nina’s cottage – dangling it by the end as if it were a mouse. The office is quiet and I suspect she has come in specially to meet me.
‘They don’t make them like that anymore,’ she says, laughing as she looks at the brass key.
It’s a small remark, but it annoys me for its undertone that everything old is not only quaint but ridiculous. I take the key and turn to go.
‘Just a moment,’ the woman calls out as I tow Ellie towards the door. ‘You need to sign this, so we know you’re who you say you are.’ Her bright-red nails wave a form. She smiles and the muscles in my jaw clench.
‘Right.’ I turn on my heel.
The woman points to a pen chained to the granite reception desk. I sign the form, slapping the biro back on the bench in front of her.
The receptionist continues, ‘And please don’t remove any of the contents of the house yet. I seem to recall that Mrs …’ She goes to check her file.
‘Barsova.’
‘That’s it. Mrs Barsova also left a few items to other people, even though she left the house to you.’
‘I won’t be removing anything.’ My back is already to her as I shepherd Ellie outside. I turn around in the doorway. ‘But you would do well to remember that this is a will you are administering. Someone I love has died.’
Shaking, I hope imperceptibly, I draw a deep breath as I reach the hire car, which I’ve booked just for the day. I look up at the sky.
‘Why were you so cross with that pretty lady, Mummy?’
I remember Nina talking sternly to Michael Forster when he crossed the road to spray the weeds along the edge of her footpath and contaminated her blackberries.
‘If people do the wrong thing by you, it’s okay to tell them,’ I say.
‘You always tell me to be nice.’
It’s true. I do, but now I’m not sure it’s the best advice.
‘Yes, well, that’s right, but you must still stand up for yourself.’
The next hour is one I have been anticipating for days: the seesawing creak of the front gate, Ellie rattling the brass key in the lock. We are standing on Nina’s sandstone landing, under a wisteria plump with summer foliage. A bag of groceries from the corner store is in my hand, cutting into my fingers. I place my free hand over Ellie’s and the key turns. I am home.
The heavy wooden door opens inwards and strips of light, tinted blue from stained-glass panels, cut across the oiled floorboards of the hallway.
‘It’s dark,’ Ellie whispers behind me.
‘Yes, someone has closed the curtains.’ I go into the modest lounge room to the left of the central hallway.
Ellie takes my hand and we make our way around the room like two lost children in a graveyard. I was in a daze when I was last here for the funeral, before I knew the house would be mine. I push open the heavy drapes, noting Nina’s embroidery around their edges. My thumb traces the delicate stitching, and I instinctively hold the fabric to my face. The cottage has always had a distinctive oniony-cottony smell: an amalgam of all the food my grandmother cooked, all the fabric she sewed. She carried on her skin the same scent.
I inhale deeply before letting the curtain go, and focus instead out the window where a lemon verbena is in flower. The delicate white and mauve blossoms remind me of bridal garlands. Nina used to make tea from the leaves. I try to smile, but Ellie isn’t easily fooled. She comes up behind me, hugging my legs. I hold her in return then clap my hands twice, as Nina used to do when she was making it clear that we were drawing a line behind us to start something new. Two claps like two full stops at the end of a sentence. When she did that I knew there was no going back: Obratnoi dorogi net.
‘Can you remember which room we slept in last time we were here?’ I ask. It was a year ago, shortly after Ian left.
Ellie skips ahead to the hall and crosses diagonally to my old bedroom. I follow her as she runs to the window and pushes back the yellow curtain. Late-afternoon light rushes in, bathing her in a storm of golden dust and casting a tall, girlish shadow across the worn carpet, accelerating time before my eyes. The walls are papered with long chains of painted flowers that climb to the low ceilings, the wallpaper peeling away in places and giving the appearance of a room dripping in blossom. My old bed extends from the back wall, the same quilted bedspread neatly covering it and the rarely used trundle pushed underneath. There is my wooden desk and lamp, a well-stocked bookshelf and a basket of my old dolls, some of which first belonged to Helena.
Ellie sits on the floor beside the basket and drags a doll out by the leg, splitting what appears to be repaired stitching along the crotch.
‘Be gentle!’ I snap without meaning to as I rescue the doll. Ellie is taken aback by my outburst. ‘Sorry, darling, but they’re very old and precious,’ I say, softening my voice. I show Ellie that the doll is dressed as a bride, complete with pearl-beaded gown. ‘Nina made it,’ I tell her, handing it back.
‘How can you make toys?’ She carefully inspects the doll’s fine bridal wear, disbelieving.
‘Well, Nina was very clever at things like that. She made the quilt on your bed, too, and the curtains.’
‘You don’t make my things.’
‘No. Not many people have time these days.’
‘Why?’
‘Because we’re busy with jobs, and taking our children to school and ballet classes … Anyway, are you happy to play in here while I check through the rest of the house?’ There is a small transistor radio on the dresser, and I turn on some music.
‘Yep.’ Ellie gives me back the doll. ‘She looks like you at yours and Daddy’s wedding.’
The wedding gown is indeed a smaller version of the one Nina made for me. How can I not have noticed this before?
‘So she does.’ I take a deep breath and cross the hall to Nina’s old bedroom, where I’ll sleep tonight. After the funeral, I slept in my old bed.
My grandmother’s comforting scent is still here, embedded in the heavy fabrics. There is also the smell of naphthalene. I open the curtains and stare back towards the neatly made bed. Was it my mother who remade the bed after Nina’s body was taken away? Did she see Nina after she died? Did she look upon her with the remove of a doctor, or the grief of a daughter? I do not know my mother and wonder who she spoke to about her loss – a colleague, a friend? I have never known her to have had a partner.
My pulse quickens at the thought of my grandmother lying here, having closed her eyes on the world for the last time. I suspect she knew that death would come for her that night. She’d always had a sixth sense. When I was young, she knew which track I’d taken on the mountain, well before I told her where I had been. And, at the end of Ian’s and my honeymoon in Tasmania, Nina told me I was pregnant with Ellie, a week before the doctor confirmed it with a test. Nina even knew my baby would be a girl. I imagine my grandmother preparing herself with a dusting of perfumed powder, donning her nightgown, filing her nails and brushing her hair for the last time, before carefully lifting back the blankets and climbing into her bed, as if into her coffin. I see her placing her hands on her chest and closing her dark eyes. Was that how it was? Or did her death surprise her, too?
I shut the door behind me and lie on the single bed, still holding the bride doll to my chest. I ache knowing my grandmother has gone from this place. With Nina’s pillow over my head, I finally allow myself to properly cry.
It is some minutes before I come up for air. In the corner of the room is the chair where Nina used to sit to tie her leather l
ace-up shoes, still neatly tucked at the chair’s side and loyal to the shape of her bunioned feet. At the end of the bed is a dresser my grandfather built from a piece of Huon pine he salvaged from the side of a river that was about to be dammed. He had saved a month’s wages to have the timber carted to Hobart where he fashioned it into this fine piece of furniture, Nina boasted, and gave it to her as a wedding-anniversary gift before returning to the Hydro camp. ‘He even made the mirrors,’ she said.
I climb out of the bed and make my way to the dresser, noticing the decorative wooden hairpin box that still has pride of place on a central lace doily. The box’s red and black floral pattern is startlingly beautiful. Just last year, I had watched Nina readying herself for bed here, seated on the dresser’s matching bench, facing the mirror as she methodically undid her coiled and pinned braid and brushed out her long grey hair, telling me again what she wanted me to know of her childhood in Russia, and of motherhood.
‘My mother raised us on very little and, after the accident that took your grandfather from us, I did the same with Helena.’ Her reflection spoke to me. ‘The authorities were watching me very closely, to see if I was managing. If they found me lacking, your mother would have been made a ward of the state.’ This was her fear but I can hardly believe it was the reality she faced.
The dresser has three mirrors, arranged so that I see myself front on, and in left and right profile. I lack my grandmother’s long, straight nose. There is also a silver hand-held mirror, still face down, ready to greet my grandmother’s face. I turn the small mirror over and my eyes loom, magnified, back at me, blurred through tears.
I open one of the drawers and see Nina’s hairbrush, neatly placed on top of embroidered handkerchiefs and silk scarves. There are still strands of white hair wound around the bristles.
‘Nina,’ I say out loud. I hold the brush against my cheek, imagining Nina close.
Ellie is at the door, an arm full of toy rabbits, each in handmade clothes. ‘Can you take a picture of me with these for Daddy?’ She hands me her phone.
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