‘If you make me a promise, you can keep it,’ Nina told me.
‘Okay,’ I said.
‘You must promise me to always protect the memory of the women who came before you, and the futures of the children who will follow.’
Her face was dark and serious and her hand shook.
‘I promise,’ I said, taking the matryoshka. It seemed too easy. I took the doll apart and stood the pieces in a row.
‘The littlest one is missing, sadly,’ Nina informed me. ‘Helena lost it.’
I still have the nesting doll, which I’ve brought with me to the cottage. I’ve put it high on the bookshelf, out of Ellie’s reach, for now. Every so often, since Ellie was small, I take it apart to show her the little dolls that fit inside. ‘It’s a doll with a secret,’ I tell her. One day, when she is old enough to look after it, I’ll give the matryoshka to her. But I will not make her promise me anything.
Ellie comes and gives me her licked-clean wooden ice-cream stick, and I put my arm around her, drawing her closer.
‘Where would I go to school here?’ she asks.
‘How about my old school? It’s just down the hill.’ I point across the path and off to my right.
‘Did you like it there?’
‘It was fine,’ I lie, thinking back to those days of not fitting in in my homemade uniform. I didn’t have a young, jeans-wearing Australian mum and was judged for it. My classmates used to stare at Nina’s long hair, knotted into that old-fashioned bun, as if it were a swirl of cow dung pasted onto the back of her head. I was rarely invited back to other children’s houses to play, and whenever I brought friends home, they would joke the next day at school about the strange meals Nina had served up to them for afternoon tea. I suppose Helena endured the same thing, if not worse.
The other girl in the park starts to play with the helicopter seeds, and Ellie joins her, showing her how best to throw the seeds to maximise their flight. The two of them laugh, even as they compete, running to claim the best ‘helicopters’ for themselves. The girl’s mother and I meet eyes and smile but remain where we are, enjoying the peace of our own company for the time being.
In one of Helena’s and my rare and brief phone conversations during my school years, she told me that Nina was too strict with her, unwilling to trust her to the community who had in so many ways failed to live up to her expectations. She asked if I was finding that, too, and warned against sneaking out behind Nina’s back, as tempting as it might be. ‘She didn’t like my friends. Said their skirts were too short, didn’t approve of the boy I was seeing. It was bloody impossible to be normal. If you need me to talk to Nina, if she’s not “getting it”, please ask,’ my mother told me.
The girl Ellie has been playing with is told it’s time to leave and she and her mother give Ellie a wave as they depart. The mother and I raise our hands to each other. Ellie returns to my side and clenches her lips, trying to hide her sadness as her playmate goes through the gate, the picnic blanket wrapped around the girl’s shoulders like an enormous cape.
‘We could invite some of your new friends to have ice creams with us here after school. Sound good?’ I ask her.
She nods, then turns her attention to collecting more helicopters from the ground and hurling them high into the air. They spin about us in dizzying spirals of flight.
If we moved here, how long would it be before this place became my home again; before I made friends and had people to call on if I needed, if Ellie or I were sick; other adults I could share my concerns with and expose my vulnerabilities to? How long would it take me to find work?
Ian is right. We do need to sell the house. My four weeks of annual leave runs out soon and I don’t want to ask him for more money, above the child support he is already paying. I take out my iPhone and search for jobs for geneticists at the university, or at the Menzies Medical Research Centre.
The university’s Department of Health Sciences is advertising a research assistant position. It would be a step down, although the work would be a good fit.
The idea of re-establishing myself professionally is exhausting and, out of habit, I scroll instead down the ABC newsfeed. I read of another suicide bombing in Kabul, where at least twenty-one people were killed. It is a world away, I tell myself again. Almost another planet.
AUTUMN
8
After almost three months of packing up the Brisbane house and a second-round of teary farewells, Ellie and I turned off the glaring gaze of summer like a light switch. I am on Nina’s back steps in the afternoon sun, sipping lemon verbena tea while Ellie picks silver birch leaves turned orange and yellow. Chickens are counted in autumn, Nina used to say, and I look towards the empty coop and wonder what happened to her chickens.
A letter from Helena was waiting for me in Nina’s mailbox when we arrived. ‘I’m pleased you’ve taken up Nina’s offer,’ she wrote. ‘The cottage belongs in the family.’
It strikes me as audacious that my mother still sees herself as part of a family that she left of her own accord. Does she think Nina’s death will provide an opening for her to step back into my life?
‘Can I post these leaves to Daddy?’ Ellie asks.
‘Sure,’ I say, knowing that quarantine is less strict for plant matter leaving the disease-free island of Tasmania than it is for that entering. I still get nervous when the beagles at Hobart airport sniff at my bags, although I never carry anything suspect. Nina was the same: afraid of being accused of a crime she didn’t commit. Whenever she saw a police officer, she’d stand unnaturally tall as if she were hiding something.
Ellie lines up the leaves she has collected for Ian, and I picture him appreciating them for a moment before throwing them in the bin so they don’t clutter his organised world.
‘I don’t think Daddy would have ever seen such pretty leaves, do you?’ Ellie puts the leaves in her pocket.
‘Not for a long time.’
Ian has changed. On our holidays to Hobart he would smile for days after seeing the surprise alchemy of trees turned gold in autumn, or fur seals at play in the Derwent. He unfurled himself during our walks on the mountain, often going to the extent of stretching his arms out at his sides to breathe in the magic of the Tasmanian wilderness and let it fill every cell of his lungs. His face had been boyishly responsive to the dance of sunlight on the skins of peppermint gums after rain, or to edible snowberries shining like polished pearls at the sides of the track.
Flicking back through my mental album, I find the moment Ian lost sight of what was around him, including me. He was holding a glass of Champagne, celebrating his new job as a senior lawyer at one of Brisbane’s best firms. I am in the background, not drinking the Bollinger. My stomach is round with Ellie. But I do not blame her arrival as my mother resented mine. And perhaps I should not blame Ian. Perhaps I have changed, too.
‘I’ll put one in for Sylvia and one for Ben,’ Ellie announces cheerfully, slotting two more leaves into the pocket of her shorts.
The dishevelled vegetable patch catches my eye and I force my thinking towards the practical challenges that lie ahead. I must stay busy.
Ellie follows my gaze; reads my mind. ‘Can we start the new garden this afternoon?’
We have unpacking and uniform shopping to do before Ellie begins at her new school next week, but I decide that the priority is getting her settled and happy in our new home. That is something Ian seemed to appreciate less and less in our time together: the need to attend to feelings. For him, if it couldn’t be ticked off his ‘busy’ list, it was not of consequence. Ellie is staring at me and I hate to think how bitter I look.
‘Yes,’ I say, tickling her stomach. ‘Yes, yes, yes.’
The pavers are uneven on the way to the garden shed, and I wonder how Nina never fell and injured herself. Or perhaps she did and didn’t tell anyone.
‘We’ll need Nina’s tools,’ I say, rattling the handle of the garden shed.
‘The key’s up there,’ Ellie t
ells me, pointing at the roof gutter. ‘Remember?’
I feel around in the gutter and locate the key, tucked into a tunnel of corrugated iron just above the leaf-filled gutter.
‘Da-da!’ Ellie says proudly when I show her she was right.
I use my shirt to rub the key clean of rust before slotting it into the padlock and sliding back the latch. My fingers meet the stickiness of spider webs as I find and flick on the torch that Nina kept just inside the door.
‘Can I have a go?’ Ellie wields the torch, illuminating the fringe of garlic strings hanging from a rafter, an old meat safe and mincer, a pasta press, rocking chair and crib. There is a collection of gardening tools propped neatly in a far corner, gloves and paper packets of seeds. Warily, Ellie goes inside and picks up a hand shovel.
‘But first, we have to make a garden plan,’ I tell her. Nina never rushed, but took her time and planned meticulously.
In the kitchen drawer, I find a notepad and a sharpened pencil inside the pad’s spiral binding. There is also a ball of string, kitchen scissors and an address book, which I open at my own name: my Brisbane address and telephone number written in Nina’s tidy hand. Ian’s name has been scratched out, which makes me laugh. Nina would have crossed out his name after the separation. I return the address book to its place, making a silent promise to maintain Nina’s sense of order and simplicity.
I head outside to where Ellie has already pulled out two old bean vines and tied their stems around the bottom end of a garden rake to form reins. She sees me coming, giggles, straddles the rake and whinnies, before galloping around the garden. I laugh along with her.
‘Imagine this is the garden bed,’ I say, calling Ellie to me when she’s run out of steam. I draw a rectangle on a blank page of the notebook. ‘We could plant the silverbeet and spinach in rows down here …’ I shade out two sections. ‘And then carrots, beans and …’
I look at the rosebush at the edge of the garden, and the bare spot several metres from the vegetable patch, out of sight of the kitchen.
I look to the fence where a blackberry plant has strayed into the native vegetation, and then back to the rosebush.
‘Do you think she’d forgive us if we moved it? It’s in the way there, and you might spike yourself.’
Ellie looks at me vaguely.
‘That rosebush,’ I say, pointing. ‘I think we need to put it back where it came from. Do you think Nina would mind?’
Ellie stares at me like I’m mad. ‘Nina is dead.’ She rearranges the reins on her horse. ‘You can do what you like.’ She gallops off again.
The statement stings me with its brutal honesty, but it provides an unexpected sense of release too. I take a shovel from the shed and go to the rosebush.
‘Right, little plant, time to move house,’ I say, tapping its uppermost branches. With my foot on the back of the shovel, I stab at the ground and feel it give way.
A pile of rich black earth fills the shovel and I empty it off to one side. I do it again, enjoying the simple physicality of digging. Ellie grabs at the shovel for a turn and I hand it over, although I want to keep digging forever, to feel the muscles of my arms and back working, instead of the constant rush of thoughts in my head. Ellie turns a sod and hands me back the tool. I work the shovel hard into the ground again, quarrying around the bush until there is a moat a foot and a half deep. I stop and stretch out my lower back.
‘Right. We can dig it out now, Elliekins. Do you want to help me? Carefully.’
‘No. I’m going to pick some more berries.’
The shovel strikes something hard, and I reposition the blade to avoid the obstacle, but strike it a second time. I push my foot on the back of the garden tool, slide it under the rosebush, and manage to lever the plant out of its hole. I balance the heavy mass on the garden bed and, with the edge of the shovel, scrape back the dirt from the hard surface, an old apple crate. In the kitchen cupboard there’s a similar box, also bearing the ‘Star Brand’, but which now contains several forgotten potatoes, their pale shoots searching in vain for the light. I have been meaning to throw them out. Ellie is singing as she gathers berries from bushes near the apple tree.
The lid of the box is secured with rusty nails. Perhaps Nina buried something valuable here, away from the house and safe from burglars. That was something else she learned in the war: that what is precious must be hidden. She once told me that her family lost its meagre amount of silverware to the invading Nazis. ‘But we lost so much more than that.’
I stare at the box. If she hid something of value, why didn’t she tell me? Why didn’t she at least note it in her will? I walk quickly to the garden shed and find a screwdriver, despite Nina’s voice in my head warning me away.
‘Ow!’ Ellie shouts. ‘Oweee, Mummy!’
‘What?’ I rush to her, in time to see a bee tumble from her hand, its sting fat and white, pulsing its venom into her palm.
‘It hurts!’
‘I know it does. Shhh.’ I scratch the sting away. ‘Let’s go and put something cold on it.’
I gather her up into my arms, secretly enjoying the opportunity to hold her again like this, to be taken back to when she was a baby and Ian and I were happy, or thought we were.
How much she has grown. A momentary pride swells as I think of all the meals I’ve prepared for her over the years, all the care I have given.
When I was in high school, we learned in sex ed classes that motherhood was a thing to be avoided. It was the thing that meant contraception had failed and that careers would be cut short. It was something anyone could do, and that the less smart girls did before anyone else.
What rubbish. But it is what I believed at the time, and I had proof. Pregnancy was not something my mother had wanted. It was a mistake. I was a mistake. Unlike Ellie.
Ian and I held off trying for a baby for years, and then, when it was almost too late, there was nothing I wanted more. Like a lot of the thirty- and forty-something women crowding IVF waiting rooms, I felt I’d been duped. In the end, Ian and I conceived naturally soon after the wedding, but not without a great deal of luck and, I suspect, a lot of Nina’s prayers.
Inside, I wet a tea towel to hold against Ellie’s hand, making a mental note to fill the ice trays in the freezer. Helena must have emptied everything out after the funeral, before turning off the power.
Ellie does that quick succession of little sniffs that follows a cry, and snuggles into my side. Through the window, I see the hole in the ground and am impatient to know what is inside the crate.
‘I don’t want to do any more gardening,’ Ellie whimpers.
‘You don’t have to.’ I look at my watch. It’s 3.30 pm. Thank God for children’s television. ‘Play School’s on. Do you feel like watching it while I move that rosebush? It won’t take long.’
Ellie sniffs and nods as I flick on the television. Her body relaxes into the couch.
Back outside, a light rain begins to fall. A gentle wind picks up in the eucalypts across the rivulet. With my knees at the edge of the hole, I lean down to work the screwdriver under the nails of the box’s lid, lifting them up one by one, tiny toy soldiers, relieved of bowing so reverently. Some of the nails, weak from age, snap off at the soldiers’ hips. As the last nail releases, I hook the screwdriver under the wooden lid and prise it back. Inside is a sealed plastic bag containing several newspaper clippings and a stack of black-and-white photographs. I pick up the first clipping, dated 2 July 1966 and headlined ‘Charges Laid’. The news photograph is of a familiar-looking, middle-aged man holding up his hand to the camera as he turns to go inside a small weatherboard house.
The caption reads:
The accused refused to speak with the media outside his South Hobart home.
I scan the first paragraph:
Mr Reginald Forster of South Hobart was charged yesterday in Hobart’s Magistrates’ Court of raping a Russian widow and single mother, the alleged victim having migrated to Tasmania in 1949.
&n
bsp; I hear myself gasp and look up at the swirling trees around me. I turn back to the cottage and the muted sound of the television, the article still in my hand. Through the window I can see the back of Ellie’s head swaying from side to side as she moves to the music. I read on:
The migrant woman accused Mr Reginald Forster of breaking into her home and raping her on the night of 21 June, a claim Mr Forster has denied.
‘She claims someone followed her home, but who is to say that she didn’t invite them inside,’ he told the court. ‘I don’t have reason to go out at night.’
‘Nina,’ I whisper. Pinned to the back of the article is a sheet of notepaper with a line written in Nina’s hand: ‘Not the first time. 1946. Prior conviction. Rape. Jailed.’
Also in the crate are photographs of the man coming and going from his house at various times of the day and night. In the corner of one of the pictures I recognise a strip of Nina’s curtain fabric. I remember her old camera. Why did she keep this secret from me? And if she didn’t want me to know, why had she chosen to bury the crate instead of burning its contents?
I find another newspaper clipping, dated 17 September 1966.
JUDGE ABANDONS RUSSIAN WIDOW ‘RAPE’ CASE
The Russian widow who accused South Hobart man Mr Reginald Forster of rape was deemed an unreliable witness in court yesterday. She said she was no longer certain of the man’s identity.
‘It was dark,’ she said. ‘I am not certain it was him.’
The article goes on to retell the earlier story. Helena would have been sixteen at the time, I calculate. She must have known.
Ellie is watching me through the window. I drag a layer of dirt from the sides of the hole, re-burying the box. My hands shake with horror at the news my grandmother was raped and that her attacker wasn’t prosecuted. Had Helena witnessed the assault? I think again of the dates on the news clippings. Another thought comes to me and, as much as I try to push it away, it won’t leave.
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