“Please, Vati – no.” His father’s flat palm delivered with full force to his face almost knocked him unconscious, then the string was looped over his head in order to hang the placard across his chest, so passers-by would read the words.
‘ICH BIN EIN DIEB’
Hours later, someone sent for a policeman who freed him and then arrested his father for assault on a minor. The judge ruled that the case be abandoned because the defendant was still suffering trauma from his service as a brave soldier of the Kaiser, and that, although the boy was undoubtedly a thief, tying him to a tree to publicly humiliate him was unnecessary, as the good whipping Ernst had already received was quite sufficient.
*
“Why didn’t you tell the police?”
“If I had said that it was I who beat up those Norwegians, it could have got me deported.”
Milo nods. In his occasional role as a justice of the peace, he usually knows what’s going on in Cooma and he’d already heard about the vicious attack on the woman. His surprise today is to learn that it was Otto Brandt who had been her saviour. He stares at his quiet neighbour with a new respect and his response is almost fatherly. “Otto, I think you have to put this behind you now,” he says, “and so will I. Those blokes aren’t in any position to press charges and I can’t see the woman saying anything. She’s already too scared. She’s got enough on her plate right now.”
“I would still like to visit her again.”
“She’s not in Cooma anymore. They’ve taken her by ambulance to a hospital in Canberra. She’s under Federal Police surveillance. As I understand it, as soon as the stitches are out, she’ll be on her way back to Norway. I don’t envy the homecoming she’ll get in Oslo.”
Brandt’s voice rises. “She cannot travel with such wounds. I’ve seen her, Milo, she needs a plastic surgeon.”
“In Norway, they’ll say she needs a bullet; they reckon she’s a traitor.”
“How so?”
“Well, as I understand it, she was carrying on in Oslo with a top German scientist while they were working together on some secret Nazi project. He was killed in 1945 and she fled to Stockholm, changed her name and, after a few years, emigrated here on a false Swedish passport.”
“I’ve heard about women like that,” says Brandt. “She’s what the Norwegians call a Tysketöser, a collaborator. But I still say she shouldn’t have to travel anywhere in that condition.”
“Sorry, Otto, but I’d say the die is cast. You have to look at the facts: she came here illegally, she’s not a British subject and she’s not married to an Aussie, so now, I’m afraid, it’s ‘goodnight nurse’.”
“No woman deserves to be sliced up like a salami.” Brandt closes his eyes, but for once there is no darkness to hide in. Instead, he catches an image of the bullet-ridden face of the woman he murdered in the pit.
Murdered.
If he were by himself, he would say it aloud. No, he had not executed her, he did not exterminate her – he had murdered her.
He opens his eyes once more and starts to shake.
Milo reaches out to steady him. “Are you OK?”
“A bit light-headed, sorry about that. It is nothing.”
“You’d better sit down, Otto. You’re looking a bit crook.”
13
The final set of bandages are off and Magdalena takes the mirror from Brandt as though she has been handed a snake. Her hands tremble. When she sees her forehead, she weeps. The ragged swastika has been replaced by a matrix of angry red scars.
“All that will go, Magdalena,” says Brandt gently. “The surgeon promised us…”
“I’m tired,” she says and closes her eyes.
Brandt leaves his new wife and goes outside to the hospital garden where liquid sunlight spills onto a lawn encircled by banksia shrubs, bluish saplings and stringy-barks – their branches swollen with noisy rosellas. Wagtails wait in the myrtle trees for crumbs from the picnic tables and benches tucked into alcoves among the orange bottlebrushes. He sits down, and from his haversack he takes out a banana, a linen napkin, two cheddar sandwiches wrapped in grease-proof paper and a thermos flask.
Lastly, he spreads out today’s copy of the Canberra Times. The newspaper has published some hitherto unreleased photographs of the survivors of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings. It was more than six years ago, but the skin of these people is flayed by radiation burns. There is raw flesh, fingers crooked like claws, eyelids not closing and birth defects in children that are unbearable to look at, even in black and white. He reads of unremitting pain, cancers and radiation poisoning, and he cannot, for the life of him, understand why the Americans enthrone themselves internationally on the moral high ground. A grim Brandt folds away the paper and turns his attention to the natural world.
Now is the best time to be in Canberra, the hot inland summer is past and autumn has not yet dusted snow on the Brindabella Ranges. Despite this being the national capital, Australia’s ‘Crystal City’, the wild bush is ever present. Grey kangaroos are on the lawn, munching the red clover, and the white feathers of sulphur-crested cockatoos flash in the blue canopy of the scribbly gums. Brandt hears rosellas cracking the hard wattle seeds as they curl their bodies among the branches like feathered monkeys.
As he eats his sandwiches, a little greenish honey-eater is frisking about on the table, barely a yard from his hand. He breaks up one of his crusts and ever so carefully flicks crumbs in the bird’s direction. The bird remains with him even when the food is gone. No doubt it would have stayed longer, but now Milo noisily turns up carrying a droopy-looking bunch of arum lilies and the bird flies off.
“G’day, Otto. They said I’d find you here.” he says.
“G’day, Milo. I never expected to see you in Canberra. What brings you?”
“Political stuff as usual. I’m up here more often than you might think. Today they wanted me to share my thoughts on the Soldier-Settler Scheme, so I took the opportunity to drop in on your Magdalena.”
Milo is dressed up as though he wants to show the whole of Canberra that he is a country landowner, definitely not a city man. He is wearing a broad leather hat; highly polished handcrafted boots; a drover’s belt; a woven, checked shirt; and pale, moleskin trousers. Round his neck is a burgundy-and-navy striped Windsor-knotted tie with a gold pin to keep it in place.
“Sit down,” says Brandt opening his cigarette case.
“I will, but first I’ve got to ditch these; the nurse says the pollen’s no good for their patients.” He leaves the lilies on another table as Brandt lights him a cigarette.
“Milo have you had time to find out?”
“Yes, I certainly did. Providing Magdalena doesn’t sleep under the same roof as you, she can divorce you on the grounds that the marriage hasn’t been consummated. She’s determined she’ll never go back to working on the Snowy Scheme – and I can’t say I blame her. So, when she leaves hospital, you’ll have to put her up somewhere in Sydney or here in Canberra, so she can find another job. Before the divorce she’d be wise to secure Australian citizenship in her own right, so don’t go anywhere near a lawyer for at least a year, maybe two.”
“I don’t know how to thank you, Milo. And for everything else.”
“Such as being your best man, arranging a hospital wedding, rustling up witnesses, even finding you a registrar – and he was a miserable coot, I can tell you. And I managed to get you a pre-nuptial property agreement that deletes the tenants in common clause, so, whatever happens, you’ll always keep your farm. Bugger it, Otto, you owe me!”
“A beer?”
“A barrel no less and best Carlton Draught.” His eyes narrow and now his voice sounds serious. “Otto, it’s not really my business and you might want to shut me up, but you wouldn’t consider taking her on as your proper wife, would you? When she’s healed up, she’ll be a stunner, some blokes
would give their…”
“You know I won’t do that, Milo. As I told you before, Magdalena and I agreed to a ‘marriage of convenience’.”
“If you ask me, I’d call it a marriage of inconvenience. I think you’ve been inconveniently chivalrous.”
“No, Milo you don’t—”
“Don’t interrupt me, now just think,” Milo stares up at the sky with his more familiar, overdramatic, faraway look in his eyes. “First, we have a comely damsel in distress, getting her beautiful countenance sliced up by a couple of mongrels. Suddenly, along comes you, Sir Otto Galahad, who sorts the bastards out, nearly writing one of them off the planet.
“Then Sir Otto escorts the damsel to one of the best private hospitals in the capital, he gets a loan from the bank to pay a fortune for plastic surgery, and then – and this caps it all – he goes and marries her to make her an Australian citizen, so she can’t be deported. I’ve got to take my hat off to you, cobber; in all my days, I’ve never met a bloke like you. You’re a gentleman, Otto Brandt, you’re behaving better than a true-blue Aussie.” He vigorously shakes Brandt’s reluctant hand.
*
Eight months later, Brandt is sitting with his wife on the balcony of the Molonglo River Restaurant in Canberra. Brandt has to look very hard just make out the web of minute scars on Magdalena’s forehead.
“It was good of you to take the day off and come all the way to see me, Otto,” she says and touches his hand. Brandt instinctively withdraws it. It isn’t Magdalena’s fault – Milo is right, she’s a stunner – the problem, as he knows, lies deep within himself. He finds physical contact difficult; even when she takes his arm to cross the road, it makes his stomach tighten. Lust is dead and not only because of the fox woman; it’s everything to do with death; it’s about converting human bodies into road ash and fertiliser; and it’s to do with Treblinka, Janowska, Belsec-Chelmo and Sobibor.
“Otto? Is everything all right?” Brandt hears the warm concern in her voice.
“You are beautiful,” he says, snapping out of his thoughts and looking at her.
“My face? I owe everything – yes, everything – to you, Otto. I am so thankful. I don’t know what to say.” She touches his hand again and this time he steels himself to take it.
“It’s not just your face,” he says, “and, yes, it’s OK not to know what to say.”
“And you want us to proceed with the divorce?”
“It was our agreement.”
“Of course.”
He changes the subject. “Do you enjoy lecturing in chemistry at the university?”
“Actually, it’s chemical engineering. I’ll finish this semester, then I’m planning to go to America. I’ve been offered a job there.” She forces a laugh. “Otto, I have to leave Australia. There’s nothing left for me here is there? I tell everyone that I’m tired of looking at flat houses close to the ground, that I’m suffering from ‘bungalow blues’, but it’s not true; you know, I actually love Australia, especially the bush. Milo told me some more about your farm and how hard you’ve been working on it. What’s it called again?”
“Garigo.”
“Garigo, I do like the sound of that word. You’re so lucky to have your own farm, you know and, from what Milo says, it sounds positively sublime.”
Brandt surprises himself by his mixed feelings about Magdalena leaving Australia. Of course, as a free person she can do what she likes, but Canberra will be an alien place for him when she’s gone, and he’ll never come here again. “But won’t there be a problem for you entering America?” he asks.
“No – that’s because I have your Australian citizenship.” Her eyes gaze across to the far Brindabella Ranges, then they return to meet his. She smiles. “All right, I’ll tell you. After all, you’re legally my husband, so I suppose I can confide in you.”
She pauses while the waiter pours them more claret. Brandt watches two cormorants glide towards an island in the river and settle on a dead tree. He thanks the waiter and Magdalena continues. “In Norway, during the war, I was working on a special project to do with what’s called ‘heavy water’. Anyway it seems the Americans have been going out of their way to find anyone once connected with the project and, well, somehow they found out about me here at the Australian National University. They’ve paid off the debt for my broken contract with the Snowy Authority and so… I’ll be gone before Christmas.”
Brandt is aware that his present falling spirits will later be followed by an incoming wall of despair. Knowing what to expect is half the battle won, but still his voice is forced. “I shall miss you, I…” He hesitates.
“Don’t, Otto, because I shall miss you too. Shall we just pay the bill and go for a walk?”
They stroll along the paved embankment of the river where soberly dressed Canberra people, diplomats or public servants, are promenading like overfed pigeons. A shabby evangelist appears from nowhere holding up a hand-painted placard:
‘Hell’s greatest torment is the pain of loss.’
“Woe to the wicked,” moans the evangelist and he points to each of them in turn. “Woe to the evil ones. Ne’er ye hope to look on heaven.” Other amblers, smile awkwardly and stride past.
Magdalena grasps Brandt’s arm tightly as they hurry by, but the voice carries in the wind. “Ne’er ye hope to look on heaven.”
“I feel sick. Can we stop for a moment?” says Magdalena. They find a bench.
She turns to him. “That man pointed to me and it makes me shudder, but I can face that word now. Evil… We live in the evil century, and I’m just like so many others and you too, Otto; let’s face it, neither of us is innocent. And look what happened when you saved me in Cooma. I can understand why I was attacked. Peoples’ feelings run high and word must have got out that I’d been a collaborator in Norway. That scientist I told you I worked with was German and as I once tried to tell you before, our relationship became more than just professional.”
She gazes at the river. A cold breeze ripples its metal-blue surface. She shivers, then turns her eyes on him with intensity. “You and I, Otto, we’re Hitler’s children – either by choice or circumstance, or a mixture of both. We’re messed up people; you’re messed up – go on admit it. I’m messed up too, half the migrants on the Snowy Scheme have been traumatised by the war; the Europe we all left behind is gouged and despoiled, full of damaged human beings.
“Do you know, Otto, I think in a warped kind of way, Hitler really wanted all this to happen. They say that, towards the end of the war, he gave orders that no bombed castles, churches and national monuments were ever to be repaired?”
“No, I didn’t know that.”
“It’s true. He wanted to preserve them as ruins; ‘a policy of beautiful ruins’ he called it, with the whole of Germany to be a forest of glorious broken architecture to be inhabited by wolves, bears and deer.”
Brandt clicks his tongue; his voice is tight. “And people, what about them?”
“Have you ever seen Hitler’s watercolours?”
“No, I can’t say that I have.”
“I saw some prints of them in an arts magazine at the university,” she says, “fairy-tale castles and Viennese squares – they had quite a few of them. The draughtsmanship was good; he knew how to draw buildings, but guess what? Because of his profound lack of interest in his fellow human beings, there were hardly any people there at all. He must have been a secret misanthrope right from the start. Imagine painting Viennese streets without putting in lots of people.”
“There must have been some.”
“Yes, there were a few – wooden afterthoughts, they were so stiff and lifeless; I don’t think Hitler wanted to paint humans at all.”
She gets up to leave. “You saved my life, Otto. You saved my looks and you saved my sanity. For nearly all my life I had no reason to think that people like you existed. You and
Milo too. On the odd times he came to Canberra, he’d pop in to visit me at the hospital. It was so good to see him, and he always spoke so well of you, Otto.” She pauses. “I suppose there’s not much point in me writing to you from America – except about the divorce.”
His voice sounds flat. “I hope you will tell me how you get on. Please do write to me, it would mean a lot.”
“Really?” She gives him a half smile. “Well, I hope I might be doing a bit of good over there – for the world, I mean. I’d want to do that anyway, but in America I’ll be getting a high salary and I fully intend to repay you for everything I’ve cost you: the hospital and the surgeon…”
“No, definitely not.” He is surprised by his own brusqueness and his tone softens. “What I mean is, it wouldn’t be right – considering that…Well, it would not be right.”
“Considering that?”
“You know what I mean.”
“Yes, but I think I’ll be the judge of what is right in this case, dear Otto.”
“May I drive you back to the university?”
“Yes… No. Thank you anyway. Oh, I can’t do this. Goodbye.” She kisses him lightly and turns away.
“Goodbye, Magdalena; I’m so proud of you,” he says as she rushes off, but now his voice is so quiet that he wonders if she heard him.
And he is proud of her – if he has done one good thing, it was to save the life of a scientist able to heal a few of the maladies of a broken world. Yes, he will always think like this about her, but what does he feel, right at this moment, when she is still barely fifty yards distant? It would be so easy to call her back.
But could they in all seriousness ever have a chance together? She sounded very interested in Garigo. She says there’s nothing for her in Australia, but if she were with him on the farm… It would be one hell of a commitment… And then, of course – and this is the crux of the matter – what of his past? He wouldn’t be able to breathe a word of that to her – for her sake more than his – and so the deception would have to grow until it overwhelmed him. And then what?
Orphaned Leaves Page 13