I glance back up to the cottage and am relieved to see that Ellie is no longer watching me. I replant the rosebush, and press down the soil around its base with numb hands. Seagulls cry above me, heading out to sea after dining at the Hobart rubbish dump. The flock scatters and reconfigures.
9
Back inside the cottage, Ellie has resumed her place on the couch and is singing along to a nursery rhyme on television.
Three blind mice, three blind mice,
See how they run, see how they run …
I turn on the kitchen tap, drowning out the song while I scrub at my hands before going to her. Ellie’s stung hand is sandwiched between two patchwork cushions. She takes it out and shows me the swelling, but my thoughts are still on the contents of the crate. Questions chase one another like blind mice in my head.
‘Let’s go for a walk,’ I say, desperate to get out of the house. I squeeze her hand without thinking.
‘Ow!’ She pulls away from me.
Kissing her fingers, I tell her that a walk on the mountain will fix her nasty sting.
‘The mountain has its very own, special magic,’ I say, repeating what Nina used to tell me, except she used to say it in Russian and lace it with poetry from an old fable I’ve now forgotten. ‘But we’ll have to leave now, so we’re back before it gets dark.’
Through the lounge window, the bedraggled rosebush appears abandoned. Several branches have been bent, some broken, from being so unceremoniously uprooted just to be replanted in the same place. It looks almost as shocked as I feel. I inspect the scratches on my arms.
Ellie follows my frozen gaze. ‘Why did you put the rose back?’
‘It was too hard to move.’
‘But you got it out of the hole.’
‘It was too heavy to drag anywhere. And spiky.’ I point to my arms. ‘How about baked beans for dinner?’
‘Okay, but why –’
‘Pop this on and we’ll get on our way.’ I hold out Ellie’s jacket.
She backs into the clothing, wincing as she feeds her sore hand through the sleeve. At the back steps we put on our boots, already heavy with Tasmanian mud. I fasten Ellie’s jacket, but when I get to the top I see I have missed a button at the bottom. I go to fix it, but my hands are shaking. The jacket can stay as it is. I bring Ellie close and feel the warmth of her breath on my cheek.
We head towards the broken back gate and the rivulet, the memory of walking carrying me forwards although my legs feel useless. Ellie leaps over the fallen white gate like a filly released from a cramped yard. She jumps across the rocks of the frolicking rivulet and, halfway across, slips and lands ankle-deep in water but continues without acknowledging the small fall.
‘We might have to build a little bridge for you.’
‘But you used to cross it when you were little,’ Ellie says from the other side.
I can’t argue with her. I cross the stream and we head up the dirt path. A blackberry bush, ripe with thorns, catches on Ellie’s calf as she passes, drawing blood. She cries out and I press a tissue from my pocket against the scratch.
‘You’re in the wars today, aren’t you?’
I remember once cutting my leg during a walk here and being surprised when Nina arrived at my side. She said she had been picking fiddleheads, those tiny coils of new growth that ferns offer up, and which she used as vegetables, but I now suspect she had been following me all along. Ellie continues ahead of me, her wet boots sliding on the exposed roots that protrude through the path like distended veins. If I put my ear to the soil I suspect I would hear the pulse of the forest coursing rapidly underneath.
Helena told me once that Nina had overprotected her, and that this was part of the reason she had to get away. Perhaps it was true.
We brush past the waratahs, their fiery blossoms extinguished now for another year. Instead it is the occasional mountain rocket that paints red into the landscape with its bright fruit. Ellie pulls a handmade brick from the side of the track, a remnant of early settlement. A snail is varnishing the brick’s surface. I notice a tell-tale dip.
‘That’s a special find.’
Ellie frowns, not understanding how a brick could be special. With two hands she holds it out to me. ‘Why?’
I take the brick and fit my thumb over the print in the side.
‘It was made by convicts,’ I explain. ‘See? That’s where his thumb was.’ The idea causes the hairs to rise on the back of my neck. I return the brick to Ellie and she puts her small thumb over the large print.
‘Can we take it home?’ she asks.
‘Let’s leave it here, for someone else to discover.’
‘Were the convicts alive when Nina was a girl?’
‘No. Way before that. And Nina grew up in Russia, remember? She came here on a boat with your great-grandfather.’ I think of the cruelty of fleeing a war-torn country only to have what was left of her innocence taken from her right here.
Baked beans spit and hiss in the saucepan on the still-shiny electric stove. I serve half to Ellie and she devours them, looking up and grinning her satisfaction only after she has chased and caught the last one.
How often did I thank Nina for her wholesome home-cooked meals, none of them out of a tin? She would have pre-soaked the beans for hours before cooking them with fresh herbs, tomatoes and whatever else her garden was producing. I can almost feel her frowning at me for my laziness.
Helena isn’t a cook. In a feature article devoted to her in The Australian magazine, she answered questions not only about her life-saving surgical breakthroughs and about being the daughter of Russian post-war refugees, but also on domestic life. I’ve committed her answers to memory.
Q. How did you manage to do it all as a woman – to juggle the competing demands?
A. I don’t do it all. I’m a terrible cook. The idea of ‘superwomen’ is just that, an idea. A myth. Would you ask a man that question?
Q. You have a daughter though?
A. Yes, but I didn’t raise her. It is one of the great sadnesses of my life.
The article was published five years ago, and Helena texted me to tell me about it. I think she wanted me to see that last line. ‘But don’t tell Nina,’ Helena messaged me, and once I read the article I thought I knew why. In answer to a question about her mother, Helena replied: ‘She is very strong and has endured a great deal, but she is not a saint. Being from a minority group does not necessarily prevent people from being bigots themselves.’
I didn’t write back to Helena. How could she publicly say such a thing about her own mother, the woman who raised me?
Once Ellie is bathed and in bed, I find Helena’s home telephone number in Nina’s pocket-sized address book. It’s not in my phone contacts, and my own address book is packed away. Helena’s name is written in Nina’s book in straight capital letters, unevenly spaced, as though my grandmother had needed to pause partway through to catch her breath: HEL E NA. I dial, knowing that if I delay, I’ll lose my nerve.
My mother announces herself, her voice characteristically professional.
‘Helena Barsova.’
‘It’s Sara. You knew about Nina’s rape, didn’t you?’ I ask, so fast that the words blur into one another.
There’s a pause on the other end of the line, and I imagine her standing by the phone, her body wavering slightly. The pause extends, and I hear Helena breathe out a vast sigh before she speaks.
‘Why are you asking me this now?’
‘I found some old newspaper clippings.’
‘Oh?’ She sounds worried and surprised.
‘Just tell me.’
‘Yes.’ I can hear a tapping sound near the phone, as though my mother is striking the receiver with a finger, trying to think what to say next. ‘It was the middle of winter. I was sixteen …’
‘Did you see it?’
‘I’d been out visiting my boyfriend. I should have been home.’
‘Your boyfriend?’
‘I l
oved him. We were very close.’
‘My father?’
‘Sara …’
I want desperately to know more, but it is not the time. ‘And there was no conviction against Nina’s attacker?’
‘No there wasn’t.’
‘It was Mr Forster from across the road?’
Helena hesitates. ‘Yes …’ Her voice sounds small.
‘Why didn’t anyone tell me?’
‘It’s complicated, Sara. Let it go now, please. I don’t want to talk about it.’
‘But I do!’
‘Well I don’t! Why do you think I moved away? I have to go.’
‘Am I Nina’s daughter, after all?’
Helena catches her breath. ‘No! No, Sara, that’s not it.’ The call ends and I am taken aback that my mother hung up on me.
I look out through the window and into the night. The sensor light comes on, catching a striped bandicoot in its glare. It is digging for worms in the newly turned soil of the vegetable garden. On the mainland the species is extinct, and yet here it is in Nina’s back garden, just metres from the door, staring me in the face.
In Nina’s bed, I rest my hands across my stomach, following my breath and calling upon sleep to whisk me away. But I am awake for hours, wondering where the assault happened and how much of it Helena witnessed. Was it in this very bed? How did Nina sleep here, night after night, afterwards? No wonder Helena never returned to the house. I think over the dates. Mr Forster died within a year of the assault. Perhaps that is what made it possible for Nina to stay, knowing that he got what he deserved – a fiery death. No wonder Nina kept the photograph of the burnt-out house. It was a reminder that Reginald Forster had as good as burned in hell.
10
‘Don’t forget you have to speak quietly in here,’ I whisper to Ellie as a tight-lipped middle-aged woman narrows her eyes at us. I lower my voice further and tell Ellie to find herself a place among the cushions and read a book. ‘And if you’re good, we’ll get an ice cream afterwards.’ I cringe at the bribe.
‘My choice?’
‘Yep.’
Ellie strides out towards the cushions, already triumphant. I turn back to the microfilms, and scan through the front pages of The Mercury newspaper for the week of 21 June 1966.
A headline catches my eye: ‘Call for Immigrants to be Welcomed as Citizens’. The article quotes a spokesperson from the Good Neighbour Council. Alongside it are advertisements for locally made Blundstone boots, and letters to the editor about apple prices. In the far-right column, there is a ‘woman’s piece’ on good housekeeping and a picture announcing the latest beauty queen. The white-sashed girl is all teeth, lipstick and curled hair. I search on, growing dizzy as the pages scroll through.
Finally, I find what I am looking for. Nina is pictured, demurely dressed in black, her beautiful face blurred as she turns away from the camera, obscuring her identity, at least for people who don’t know her well. In the right of the shot, Evelyn Forster is speaking with journalists, one of whom is looking instead at a passing group of young women in short skirts.
‘Wife of Accused Defends Husband Over Russian Widow Rape Allegation,’ the headline reads. I place my finger on the cold microfilm screen.
Mrs Evelyn Forster, wife of the accused, said she had seen the alleged victim walking the streets the night in question and that she was most likely drunk as she was addicted to drink, mostly spirits.
Mrs Forster said her husband was innocent, and that it was likely one of the migrant woman’s ‘male, communist visitors’ who had assaulted her.
‘A woman who goes for midnight walks and invites men into her house has to expect to attract the wrong kind of attention,’ she said.
‘I have even known her to leave her child at home alone at night. Maybe that happens in Russia, but we don’t do that here. Not the Australians. Some women shouldn’t be mothers.’
She said the Russian woman ‘sets a bad example to her daughter (16), who would make up to any boy she liked the look of.’
‘What?’ I must have said it out loud, for the woman across from me is shaking her head again. I breathe out, long and slow, trawling through my childhood memories of Evelyn Forster, an aged, unsmiling woman. Michael, by then in his twenties but appearing older, still lived at home. I wasn’t allowed to ride my bike on the Forsters’ footpath and Nina once received in her mailbox a hand-delivered letter that falsely accused me of stealing flowers from their garden.
I read back over the article, the accusation about ‘male, communist visitors’. I remember men visiting, it is true, but they were some of the kindest men I knew, my grandfather’s friends from his Hydro days. They brought home-cooked treats their wives had made for Nina and fixed things around her house: broken taps, lights. Often their wives and grandchildren came and I played with the kids. Sometimes, Nina took in boarders to help bring in money. That was how she paid for the cottage when Helena was small, that and sewing. To my knowledge, none of the visitors were communists. Communism was why they were here. Like Nina and my grandfather, they had fled eastern Europe to escape all that. They had given up jobs as engineers and doctors and teachers to do manual labour in Tasmania, an island at the end of the Earth.
I print out two copies of the newspaper article and hold Nina’s photograph to my chest.
No doubt her neighbours were challenged by her refusal to conform. She didn’t dress in the fashion of the day, yet she outshone them all with her natural beauty and her tailored handmade clothes, which still hang in her wardrobe. I imagine the born and bred Australian men walking past her cottage and inhaling tantalising wafts of pelmeni from her kitchen, so different from 1960s Australian standard fare.
She made pelmeni once for Ian and he asked why I never made it for him. I remember Nina smiling proudly before ladling another spoonful of the dumpling-like pasta into his bowl. I picture Reginald Forster arriving home from work, salivating over the offerings just metres from his door. ‘You can tell a man is bad from his eyes, Sara,’ Nina said. ‘And the feeling you get around him. Trust that feeling. I learned it young.’ Nina said I should also pay attention to other signs. ‘The Forsters’ house was always quiet and dark, even early at night. They rarely had people visit for meals,’ she told me. ‘Those things are warnings.’ And then she would talk again about Reginald Forster’s eyes, as if he were looking at her still. ‘They were the coldest eyes I have seen, but worse than cold. Cruel. As though he wanted something from you and would get it no matter what it took. There are men like that, Sara. Trust me. Men who look right through you, under your clothes and right into your soul. Then, once they have that in their hands, they spit on it.’
I had never understood what she meant by that and assumed she was talking about the run-of-the-mill racism and sexism she endured in her own street. I should have asked more questions. I can see now that, deep down, she wanted to tell.
Did Nina take night-time walks? If so, perhaps, she thought she would finally be invisible in the dark. How wrong she had been. Come nightfall, her neighbours were watching her even more closely. I imagine Evelyn Forster peering through her flimsy, stuffy curtains, her jealous expression camouflaged by the shadows of lace flowers.
I search newspapers from the subsequent three months but find only the short article reporting that ‘The case against Mr Reginald Forster would not be proceeding.’
I’m about to finish my search, my eyes watery from staring too long at the screen, when something else catches my eye: an image I’ve seen before, in a newspaper cutting Nina kept in a scrapbook in her sewing room. The heading reads:
LOCALLY MADE WEDDING DRESS FIT FOR THE GOVERNOR’S DAUGHTER
I read the article carefully, but, just as I remember, it doesn’t credit the seamstress. ‘The Governor was afraid I would be asked to make another one just like it for someone else,’ Nina explained when she showed me the original article. Although I suspect she knew the truth: immigrants were supposed to be happy for the opportun
ity to work in this country for little money and no recognition. Only a handful of years earlier, during the war, Russians had been banned from working in Australia yet forbidden from returning home.
But Nina didn’t always suffer in silence. Once, when I was a young girl and we were on our way to school, one of the mothers had used a Myer-store bag to pack her daughter’s lunch and was holding it in full view of Nina.
‘Do you know which man started the first Myer store in Australia, the shop everyone here loves to think is purely Australian?’ Nina asked. ‘A Russian! Simcha Myer Baevski. Maybe you know him as Sidney Myer?’
The woman raised her eyebrows and attempted a smile. She looked at the bag in her hand and then at the other mothers, as though asking them for an explanation of her crime.
Nina continued, ‘When the Depression hit, he cut his own wages and those of his staff instead of retrenching his employees. And for Christmas, he fed ten thousand unemployed people their dinners and gave a present to every child.’ She cast her hands around her at children piling through the schoolground gates and at some who had stopped to listen to her outburst. ‘Now that’s community spirit!’
I was embarrassed at the time, but I now suppose that Helena dealt with more unwanted attention than this, especially given that the rape had been reported in the newspapers.
‘Finished!’ Ellie startles me from behind.
‘Shit!’ I shout, forgetting where I am. A young boy at a nearby table giggles. I whisper to Ellie, ‘You gave me a heart attack!’
‘Can we go now?’
‘I suppose so.’ I stand, and gather the pages I’ve printed out. My mouth is dry, and I look around the library for a water fountain.
‘Who’s that, Mummy?’ Ellie asks, pointing to the picture in the first article.
‘That’s Nina, sweetheart. When she was a lot younger. It’s a bit hard to tell …’
‘No.’ Ellie studies the picture more closely. ‘I can tell. She looks sad.’ Ellie turns her lips down and drops her eyes, copying my grandmother’s expression.
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