‘Perhaps I was depressed. But not for the reasons you might be thinking. Not because of “you”. It was much more than that, and I don’t want to use it as an excuse.’ She snaps off the piece of old thread and winds it around her little finger until the fingertip turns white.
‘I know I failed you, Sara,’ Helena says, but her words catch in her throat. She looks at me, finally. ‘And I don’t want you coming up with your own reasons for why. There are things you must know. You’ve asked me about what you read in those old newspapers …’
‘The rape.’
‘Yes. It has brought it all back, and clearly has upset you, too. Now that you know what you do, I have to set you straight. You’ve got the wrong idea.’
There is such sadness and regret in her eyes that I can no longer keep my distance. I drag my chair closer and put my hand on hers. I think how much Abdhul would love to see his own mother again. To see his wife and children. His family. I have shut my mother out for too long.
Helena coughs and holds a tissue against her mouth with a shaking hand. Her shoulders start to shudder and more tears come.
‘I haven’t told anyone what really happened. Ever. Nina didn’t want me to.’
‘It’s okay,’ I say, rubbing my free hand on my mother’s upper arm, feeling the softness there.
‘Your grandmother failed me in ways I haven’t explained.’ Helena squints against the blame that has invaded her face.
I loosen my grip on her hand. Just when we were making ground, Helena disappoints me again and I feel myself withdrawing, wrapping around myself a protective shell. Nina was a single mother, trying to do her best. She ensured Helena got a good education. The best. She worked hard. She raised me. How dare my mother criticise her? I move my hand away from hers and rest it in my lap.
‘Please, just hear me out, Sara. You don’t understand. You only saw one side of Nina. The best side. She had a second chance at motherhood with you.’ Helena puts her hand on her chest. Draws breath. ‘I told you I was in love with a boy who lived down the street …’
‘You said you had a boyfriend, yes.’
‘He was the son of a German immigrant. Nina wouldn’t have it. She just wouldn’t have it.’ My mother shakes her head bitterly. ‘When she found out we were dating, she refused to let me go to see him. She said I would have to live somewhere else if I was going to fraternise with a Nazi. That it was bad enough to have had Germans living amongst them up at the Hydro camp. She did not come to Australia for that. My father did not die for that, nor my grandfather, or aunt and uncle back in Russia. She said my surviving grandmother would die, too, if she heard.’ My mother spits the words with a tight mouth, as if emulating how Nina might have said them.
I could not be more surprised.
‘I had to sneak out at night. Sometimes I wore Nina’s coat, so that people would think it was her on one of her night-time walks, although it was later at night than she ever went out.’
I get a sick feeling in my stomach.
‘The night of the rape … I’d gone walking then, too. I felt ashamed going behind Nina’s back, but I was also so angry with her for stopping me from seeing Uli. He and I were very close. Afterwards, I crept back here. I was almost at the house when a man attacked me from behind.’
‘Oh God.’ I cover my mouth, then my whole face, with my hands.
‘It was Reginald Forster, the one who was always watching Nina, taking her underwear from the line. Once he took one of my rabbit dolls and removed the eyes and put it back on the front path for us to find. I saw him returning it.’
I look at my mother, tears in my eyes. ‘Nina told me he’d done that.’
‘She knew it was him?’ My mother looks surprised and pauses for a moment, shaking her head before persisting with the story, as hard as it is for her to tell and for me to hear. ‘I never told Nina, but he got hold of another of my dolls and unstitched her crotch. He was vile. Wrong in the head. He said Nina encouraged him, teased him, played hard to get.’ Helena sucks in air.
‘What happened?’ My voice is shaky and quiet, but my mother needs to tell me this now. She cannot stop here.
‘He pushed me down the laneway, where the apple tree is,’ Helena says, pointing to the place where the tree still stands. ‘He covered my mouth with his hand.’ She puts her hand over her face for a few moments to demonstrate and shuts her eyes against what she is about to say. She drops her hand. ‘He had already forced himself on me, done what he wanted, violently, my face pressed up against the stone wall, his hand still over my mouth, when he finally turned me around and pulled back the hood of Nina’s jacket …’
I feel faint. ‘Oh God.’
My mother opens her eyes but doesn’t look at me. She is reliving the ordeal, her eyes flitting back and forth with the memory. It is devastatingly painful to watch.
She continues, ‘When he saw that it was me, I think he must have gasped, or said something, or maybe I cried out, because suddenly Nina was outside, shining a torch. She saw what was going on, what had happened, and came at him, hitting him hard and shouting, “Net, net, net!” But it was too late.’
Helena’s voice is shaking, and she stops to dab her mouth and nose again. She looks at me, but briefly. I put my arms around her, remembering Nina crying those same words when she was ill with pneumonia. I remember her striking out in vain.
My mother shakes her head, the saddest, smallest cry coming from deep inside her, the side of her head pressed against mine as we embrace.
‘It was me who was raped. But it was meant to be her.’
I close my eyes, trying to take it all in. I hold her, still.
She lets me go and rubs her hand hard across the armrest, then hits it twice. ‘He always fancied Nina in his sick way. I remember once, early on, before she realised what he was like, he came to the house to fix some wiring, he was an electrician or called himself one, maybe it was an excuse, and I caught him holding her against a wall, his hand up her dress. She spat at him and called him a pig and he let go when he saw me looking. I’d never seen such hatred in Nina’s eyes. Afterwards, he stood at his front door, gawping across the street at us while he petted his cat as if nothing had happened. The bastard. Nina wouldn’t have a bar of his attentions, but he just wouldn’t let up. Whenever she walked past his house, he would do suggestive, lurid things with his hands and even left notes in our letterbox, notes I found, but didn’t tell her about.’
‘Notes?’
I try to meet her eyes but her attention is lost in the worn, floral fabric of the furniture. Her fingernails try to neaten the rough edges of the binding, and to straighten the threads that make up each flower design.
‘Horrid things, like: “I notice you, your legs, your breasts. I see your nipples harden when you see me. I know you want me. I know you need the money.” I remember thinking he was like a butcher, his descriptions carving her up into bits of meat to buy. I tore up the letters and burned them in Nina’s incinerator. And when she kept ignoring him, because she didn’t see most of the letters, the messages became nastier. I remember finding one note that said: “You are nothing but a communist whore.” I have no idea why he targeted her so fiercely. Why he hated her so much. Her rejection, I suppose, had bruised his ego, but what turns a man into such a misogynistic, racist pig?’
My mother blows her nose and takes a few moments to run her hands across her forehead and settle herself. I go to stand, to move my body and shed some of the weight, but she asks me to stay seated for a moment longer. My legs start to shake. I know what is coming, but I don’t want to hear it. She looks me directly in the eyes again.
‘So, this is what I want to say.’ She rubs her throat repeatedly downwards, as if trying to lower her voice or ease its passage. ‘I have never known …’ She pauses and catches her breath. ‘I have never known if you are the product of my time with Uli …’ she says, exhaling forcefully and drawing in another sudden breath, ‘or the rape.’ Quietly, she lets the tears come and
sighs out a lifetime of withholding. ‘That’s …’ She places her hand on my knee. ‘That’s what I felt I should tell you.’
Both my hands are over my mouth now. It is as if I have been physically struck. Panic is whirling through my skull.
‘I’m sorry.’ My mother grasps my hands, hard, as if I am her patient and she is trying to stop me falling unconscious, away from her.
‘It’s why I couldn’t raise you. I was too young, yes. Nina told me so. But, in all honesty, I couldn’t face you either. And I didn’t know how to tell you.’ My mother is crying and I hear Ellie coming along the hall.
‘Shh. It’s okay,’ I whisper to my mother, although it is far from what I am feeling. ‘Just a moment.’
I cut Ellie off at the door. ‘Ellie, I’ll get you some ice cream. You can watch something on television. We’ll be out shortly.’
I steer her towards the kitchen, although she is turning back to look at Helena, curious about our conversation and the ongoing tears. I put an unusually large amount of ice cream in a bowl and tuck Ellie into the seat in front of the television, which I turn up extra loud.
Back in the lounge room, Helena has somewhat recomposed herself. She is leaning back in her chair, a book from Nina’s shelf open in her hand.
‘Why did Nina lie about it?’ I ask. ‘I don’t get it.’
‘She was trying to protect me, I suppose. But at the same time, she wanted the bastard to pay. Her family had been denied justice in Russia and she didn’t come here to have that happen again.’ My mother is speaking clearly, almost clinically. It is disconcerting but I understand it now, this cool veneer. It’s her way of shielding herself from the horror of what happened. To my knowledge, she has always lived alone. Her work is her life. Healing people. She has written newspaper pieces on women’s reproductive rights, and women in the workplace. She’s even written on misogyny, and still I didn’t click.
‘But, in the end, lying didn’t help,’ she continues. ‘If anything, it made it worse. I still had to deal with all the talking at school. About my mother being raped. People would confide to me, “How horrible for her. Where was it? Did you see?” Teenage girls are curious, I suppose. They gossip. Some even asked, “Was it on her bed? What did he do … exactly?” They even asked that. She was in the papers …’ She pauses. ‘You saw the articles?’
I explain to her about the crate and my trip to the library.
‘I see …’ she says.
Deep in my guts there is a growing regret that I started digging at all. I am afraid of what all of this means. To know I am possibly descended from a rapist. That I may carry his genes, that I may be half that man, capable of so much evil. I am afraid also for Ellie, if I tell her. This is why no one told me.
Helena looks at me, her eyes softening. ‘Nina knew if people found out it was me who had been raped, they would judge me badly. And people tried. Evelyn bloody Forster had it in for me because of Nina. She’d seen the way her husband looked at my mother. Her son, Michael, said she called Nina a “slut” behind closed doors.’ Helena mouths ‘bitch’ under her breath. ‘Then, when Nina found out I was pregnant, she didn’t want the case to go ahead. She started to perform badly in court. The opposite of credible. And the judge abandoned the case. No one believed the rape story after that. No justice. No punishment. Just rumours, and then a baby that Nina claimed was hers.’
Helena flicks her head backwards with anger and stares at the ceiling before continuing. I don’t know what to think or feel and am reminded of the day Ian announced he wanted to get a divorce and the world deconstructed around me under the blue sky and bougainvillea blossom. I don’t want any of this. I don’t want to know the truth. I want my mother to leave.
‘Still, I longed for the day that she’d tell them all it was my fault,’ my mother says, flooring me. ‘It happened because I went to visit Uli. It wasn’t her out walking that night. Instead, I’ve felt guilty my whole life.’
‘It was not your fault. How can you say that?’
‘If I hadn’t gone out …’
‘You were raped!’ I can’t believe what I’m hearing. My mother, an educated, independent woman blaming herself for being assaulted. ‘Listen to yourself! You’re contradicting everything I thought you stood for. You were in no way to blame. Neither was Nina. He should never have got off,’ I say.
‘He didn’t. Not entirely.’
I hear the sting in my mother’s words as she looks up at the picture of the Forsters’ burnt-out house.
‘Do you think his family knew the truth? There was a previous conviction, wasn’t there? Nina had made a note of it. I don’t know how she knew.’
‘I’m not sure either. The lawyer, I guess. Or the police. It’s how the case got to court in the first place. Without that there wouldn’t have been enough to charge him.’
‘So his wife must have known what he was like.’
Helena shrugs. ‘Maybe she didn’t believe that case either.’
‘But she must have heard him leaving the house the night he attacked you. She must have heard Nina shouting.’
‘It came out in court that the Forsters slept in separate rooms, so his wife mightn’t have heard him leave. They always kept their windows shut. She certainly didn’t let on if she did know. Just wanted to sully our names. Some women are women’s worst enemies.’
Helena is quiet for a time. She continues, ‘When Nina came to Sydney and stayed with me for the last months of the pregnancy she didn’t know there was a chance Uli was the father.’
I shake my head. ‘Why didn’t you tell her?’
‘She had forbidden me from seeing him, Sara. You have no idea. She was so incredibly against it. How could I have told her we were sleeping together? How could I have said I might be carrying a half-German baby?’
Helena hangs her head for a moment before continuing. ‘She just wanted the best for you, the most innocent party in all of this.’ She looks at me. Reads my mind. ‘Yes, okay. I was innocent, too.’ She sighs out. ‘But Nina wouldn’t be beaten. She wouldn’t let us be derailed from the path she had worked so very hard to lay for us. She told me to keep studying and adopted you formally, then just kept making those stupid, frilly wedding dresses as if nothing had happened.’ With her free hand, Helena pulls hard at another loose embroidery thread and breaks it away from the armchair with a snap. ‘Granted, she did a better job of raising you than I would have.’
‘And she did tell me you were my mother. As soon as she thought I was old enough to hear it.’
‘She couldn’t lie to you any longer. I wouldn’t have let her. It was a kind of torture, pretending to be your half-sister.’
‘But Nina was happy about it? You giving me to her?’ I have that shifting feeling again, like my anchor is giving way. It is as if I cannot be certain of anything anymore.
‘Honestly, I’m not sure if I gave you away or she took you … I just don’t know.’
I feel a surge of anger again at my mother, even after what she endured. Can’t she see what I need to hear? I take a cushion from the couch and put it over my lap, kneading it as I swim against the tide of memories of my upbringing with Nina, my guide in life. Everything I knew about my mother’s abandonment of me was false, and Nina had done nothing to set that right. My mother takes my shaking hand, and I think of the photo she sent of me on her lap as a baby.
‘She loved you though, Sara. Very, very much. As do I. Please don’t doubt that. And she did a wonderful job of raising you. You’re a beautiful woman.’ She puts her arms around me and, for the first time, I feel the love in her embrace.
‘Is your German boyfriend still alive?’
She lets me go. ‘Uli?’ She looks at me. ‘Yes, Sara.’
I hold the cushion to my chest.
Ellie skips back into the lounge room. ‘Are you coming to my birthday?’ she asks her grandmother. ‘It’s on December the second.’
Helena chuckles. ‘Yes, I know. That’s still a while away.’ She pats me
twice on the back before again meeting my eyes.
‘I’m sure Helena would love to come,’ I say.
‘Yes, I would,’ my mother says and Ellie jumps excitedly. ‘I can’t wait.’
‘Why hasn’t Mummy asked you before?’
‘It’s been tricky,’ Helena says. ‘You’ve got a wonderful mother, Ellie. Has anyone ever told you that?’
‘Yes.’ Ellie smiles. ‘Nina did.’
I take in what my daughter has said and extend my arms to her. For all Nina’s failings, she was loving and attentive, and prided herself on being a good ‘mother’. I have judged my own mothering harshly by comparison and had assumed Nina did, too, although she did not often articulate her feelings. To learn this from Ellie now is all I need to hear.
There is a knock on the front door and I go to answer it, looking first through the glass panelling at the entrance. Abdhul is standing on the top step with a bunch of flowers. Under his arm is an empty picture frame. I open the door.
‘Abdhul!’ Surely he hasn’t brought me flowers. Surely I haven’t encouraged this sort of attention. I press my hands together in a kind of universal prayer sign and rest my lips to them, searching for words and wondering how I will explain this to my mother and Ellie.
‘Is she here? In our culture, we give gifts to the parents of our friends when we meet them.’
‘Oh!’ I drop my hands. ‘Yes! Thank you.’ I lead him in, and see Helena turn around, surprised. She dabs her face.
‘Ah, you are Sara’s mummy,’ Abdhul says. ‘These are for you.’
‘Goodness. Thank you,’ my mother says, clearly touched.
‘And this is for you, sister,’ Abdhul says, handing me the picture frame. ‘It’s for the school picture of Ellie.’ He points to the kitchen. ‘You said you liked the frame I made for my wedding photograph.’
‘That is so thoughtful,’ I say, and I see Helena smiling. I go to the kitchen and bring the photograph of Ellie back with me. Abdhul unfastens the back of the frame from the glass and feeds the photograph inside. It’s a perfect fit.
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