Orphaned Leaves

by Christopher Holt

  When he reaches the top once more, Phantom is wheezing like a stalled locomotive. He needs a minute to replenish his lungs with the better air of the higher ground, as does Brandt himself, who is coughing up soot. Phantom whinnies when the first sparks catch the dry tussocks of the ridge, which blacken and wilt away.

  The fire is encroaching upwards. In ten minutes, the ridge will be ablaze. He catches a last view of his chalet across the valley. Cavorting flames three storeys higher than the building frame it in an eerie silhouette against the yellow smoke swirling over the copper orbs making them look like onion domes. These, along with the steep roof and pointed windows, become a Gothic rendition of something familiar, more familiar still as the wooden beams collapse and the whole top storey, including the balcony slowly tilt forwards and hang at a slanting angle over the paving below.

  He gasps as he realises that, all these months, his subconscious has been modelling that hideous dwelling in the Galicean forest. The air shimmers, a stark-red sun glowers out of the smoke. Still no rain, yet the thunder cracks and rolls overhead, and the mesmerised Brandt recalls an American report he’d once read that stated, while he was standing on the scaffold, Hans Frank had mumbled to the hangman something about ‘the angry laughter of God’.

  27

  Brandt stares with clenched fists and smarting eyes at the blazing chalet.

  Behold your creation.

  He feels her near. “My horse…” he mumbles. “I need to get him away…” His voice becomes a whisper, “I have to go… Aubergine and the children… they’ll be burnt to death.”

  The first blue smoke reaches the ridge. All about him the higher leaves of the trees are beginning to curl. He hears the crackling and snapping of blazing branches from the valley, and he can feel his lungs straining for oxygen.

  Brandt guides Phantom through the smoke to the cliff path, then spurs the horse into a canter, but, as they veer towards the ridge’s edge, it becomes too much for the acrophobic Phantom, who begins a jittery sidestep and, despite Brandt’s impeccable horsemanship, the terrified animal now starts rearing and pitching. Brandt slows Phantom to a walk and finds a gentler route down the shifting scree. When they reach the bottom, he spurs him straight up the dry creek bed to the dam.

  At the sluice, he dismounts briefly, using both hands to lever the lock wheel, then leaps clear as the liberated water surges down the valley in a silver flood of roaring turbulence to reach the school yard in minutes, replenish the rock pools and flood the advancing flames. The thunderous passage of the water drowns, for a time, the snarling of the fire wind and the spitting cracking timber.

  Now to the store cattle. Thankfully, Phantom keeps his footing on the flint stones and crumbly clay. Through the smoke Brandt hears thundering hooves coming in his direction: brumbies. Despite their terror, the wild horses clear a way as Brandt spurs Phantom towards the stock yards where the store cattle are bellowing, snorting and shaking their heads, their eyes rolling white and red and moist.

  Brandt dismounts and, while holding the reins, lifts the gate latch and pulls the slip rail. The crazed bovines jostle their way out of the stockyard, break into a run and stampede up the hillside, pounding the earth and kicking up the dry dust to escape from the blazing trees and the engulfing smoke.

  While Brandt’s attention is drawn to his departing cattle, the reins are ripped from his grasp as the distraught Phantom now heads inside the stock yard, realises his mistake and gallops back to the open gate.

  Brandt is about to seize the reins again, but stops, transfixed at the appearance of the spectre woman, now standing erect, her one eye glaring and her arm extended towards her murderer like an accusing Valkyrie.

  Just at that moment, sensing his chance of escape from the oncoming inferno, Phantom rears high, one of his hooves strikes Brandt’s forehead and he falls stunned to the ground.

  *

  The breeze doesn’t revive him, it is hot full of smoke; in fact, if Brandt’s constitution were weaker, it would choke him to death. Would that it could, for what brings him back to consciousness are stabs of pulsating agony. The half of his body that is not prostrate on the earth is sheathed in layers of torment. The cinders are still smoking and the smell of burning flesh is his own.

  He cannot tell how long he has lain there. He has a partial glimpse of a woad, mottled sky. Through one eye he thinks he sees an eagle, then he slides once more into blessed unconsciousness.

  No, not blessed.

  *

  Most of the old gang are there at the Führer’s art academy. Goebbels is so intent on his canvas that his cigar goes out. Goebbels is silent for once, absorbed with his brushwork. So is Himmler – and oh, dear God, there’s Heydrich, Kaltenbrunner and Bormann too – even Krüger. But where’s Trummler? He can’t see Trummler anywhere.

  Hitler is hobbling around the gallery, one shaking hand tucked behind his back as he pauses at each easel in turn. Sometimes he takes the brush from a student’s hand and adds a master-stroke of his own.

  I’m the new arrival and mustn’t be idle. I haven’t even touched my canvas yet.

  What’s this? I see my painting is already finished, but I didn’t do this. And yet I know this painting, I’ve seen it before. It’s Renoir’s Moulin de la Gallette, I even recognise the dappled light on the men’s straw hats and the girls’ dresses, and everyone is dancing, eating galettes and looking so happy.

  But why is it on my easel? Where are the colours on my palette? What, just field grey? It’s not even a colour, and I’ve only one brush – flat and sharp, like a chisel. What am I meant to do with this?

  I smell someone’s sour breath. Heaven help me, Hitler is at my shoulder. He takes my brush ever so gently, applies just a modicum of the non-colour and paints out the figure of the young man and his little clay pipe. Then, like a loving father, Hitler puts the brush back in my hand and guides my fingers towards a girl under a tree. When I blot her out, the Führer pats my shoulder and hobbles away. I keep painting out the human figures until, the picture looks like a cemetery of grey tombstones.

  *

  New surges of excruciation bring him back. At one stage, he hears human voices. Aboriginal people are laying a soaking cloth over one of his legs. He screams in pain. He remembers from his boyhood some poor lobster being boiled alive. He falls unconscious, but the respite is brief. His tortured body awakens him; he’s sure it’s worse than being boiled alive and he cries out to die. He asks too much.

  I’m sealed in a lead coffin and the lead is melting hot; I can’t move my shoulders. And the darkness, God, the darkness – infinite in its blackest intensity.

  *

  He’s wet, the cold rain is pouring down on him, but the agony is lessened. He can smell the rain, he can hear the currawongs.

  He thinks of Hans Frank and how he said that, when he was a little boy, his mother always made the sign of the cross on his forehead before he went to sleep. It was reported that, when the American executioners came for him in his cell at Nuremburg, he asked the chaplain to do the same. Frank just wanted to be a little boy again, and now Brandt understands.

  The tribesmen stand silent around him, the women bring the smoke, not of the bushfire but of the Dreaming, and the fragrance of the sacred leaves. His eyes flicker, there are snatches of pearl-grey sky and always the circling eagle, then he drifts into blackness once more.

  28

  He’s in some hospital in North Sydney; its name doesn’t interest him, it’s an adequate hospital. He’s been there for how many weeks? Six, seven? The days are like living entities; they are born and they die, but the nights do not die. They insinuate themselves into the grand scheme of retribution and are able to stretch time; his torment has an eternal quality at night.

  Early mornings bring the cacophony of laughing kookaburras outside his window and the Italian nurse who comes to change his dressing. Later it’s the Scott
ish doctor and the daily medical report. Brandt has been blinded in one eye and it will have to be removed. They will match the glass eye to the other one and the colour will be perfect. No one will know he is wearing a glass eye.

  It’s made in Germany, you know. The Germans know about glass eyes. They have had lots of experience.

  In the afternoons, he is allowed visitors, but he wishes Milo and Peggy wouldn’t bring Alan; it is wrong for Alan to see him like this. The boy’s face is contorted with sadness and concern. It is hard for a child to pretend and Brandt doesn’t want him to.

  Yet, on second thoughts, Alan should be here after all; it is important. He must know that Brandt will never look the same again, and it will be some months, perhaps even a year before he can drive a ute, saw logs or descend the tunnels of the Snowy Mountains Scheme.

  But Alan must never know that Brandt secretly wishes he hadn’t survived the fire. He doesn’t want to meet people in the street, on the farm or anywhere else for that matter. His scars are permanent, red ripples down one side of his whole face and much of his hair will never grow back.

  But, if there is one perverse advantage for Brandt in all this, it is that he is finally spared the danger of ever being recognised as Ernst Frick, the murderer of innocents.

  *

  Another month in hospital and the pain is just a hellish itch. The doctor is pleased. “You’re healing well, Mr Brandt. You’ll be home – back to normal – in three weeks.”

  ‘Normal?” Brandt can only whisper the word. “Did I hear you say ‘normal’, Doctor?”

  “Yes, Mr Brandt, but what I mean is, well, you’ll be out of hospital and you’ll able to go home and…”

  Brandt knows damn well what the doctor means: he is talking about a different kind of normality altogether. He means the normality of strangers desperately trying not to stare at his face, the normality of not being able to walk without a stick, the alien normality of no longer being a well-proportioned, attractive man.

  *

  And now he is finally back home at Garigo, keeping away from the window, sitting in the shadows and unwilling to look in Milo’s direction.

  “Come out and get a bit of sunshine, Otto. You’ve been cooped up too long.”

  “I won’t have people staring at my face.”

  “What, kookaburras and magpies? Enough of that,” says Milo, “It’s beginning to sound like self-pity!”

  “True,” says Brandt. “I have to admit to a bit of self-pity, and a hefty degree of male pride as well.”

  “You need to get back to work,” says Milo. “The land’s good, we’ve had five inches of rain in less than a week. When things dry out, you’ll need to ride again. I’ll sell you another horse, if you like. I know you’ll miss riding old Phantom, but he’ll be happy running free with the brumbies, and we’ve got work to do. We’ve got to bloody well ride up there and rebuild that chalet of ours.”

  The thought of recreating that hated image is unconscionable, but Brandt has a solution. “We should change the design,” he says. “We should go for something less European. This is Australia, after all.”

  “Well you surprise me, but I hoped you’d say that. I think it’s a pretty good idea. But, in any case, they’ll be no more copper domes – the insurance inspectors have confirmed that one of them was to blame for the lightning strike. How could we have been so stupid, Otto?”

  “And I’m supposed to be an engineer.”

  “You said it, not me. Anyway, as I told you, we’ll still be getting our insurance payment.”

  “That’s a relief. But, changing the subject, there’s something I need to ask you, Milo. The hospital hasn’t sent me any bills. I didn’t want to mention it; it’s embarrassing, but have you been paying for my treatment?”

  “No, it was your wife.”

  Brandt’s body stiffens. “You told her about what happened to me? For Christ sake, Milo. Why did you do that?”

  “Calm down, Otto. Remember I got to know her a bit when she was in that Canberra Hospital? We got on well, so, of course, I wrote to her in America. I told her all about the fire and she took it from there. I also know that she wrote to you several times, but you wouldn’t answer, so what does the poor girl do? She writes to me – she asks how you are – and I tell her. What else would you expect me to do?”

  Brandt’s voice is bitter. “Has she ever told you that in America she makes atomic bombs?”

  “What? Bloody nonsense. Where did you get that from? Didn’t you know she’s been doing research at the Mayo Clinic on something called D-20. I think they call it heavy water. They’re trying to find a vaccine for polio.”

  “What?”

  “You heard me, she’s out to do a bit of good in this world. Atom bombs? Christ Almighty.” Milo reaches into his jacket and thrusts a letter into Brandt’s hand. “She told me she’d be writing to you one last time and that she’d post it to me to give to you personally. I suppose this is it, so the ball’s in your court.”

  Brandt holds the envelope up to the light and is about to say something when they hear a throaty engine and a terrible crash of gears. Alan’s just driven back in the Land Rover. He’s been down to the creek where Tom is releasing trout fingerlings.

  “Hey, what have you got there, Otto?” he says when he comes inside and sees the Par Avian label on the envelope. Something from overseas? Can I have the stamps?”

  “Of course, Alan. Help yourself, but open the envelope first and hand me what’s inside.” Alan gives the folded pages to Brandt, then he takes the envelope to the kitchen to soak off the stamps. As soon as he leaves the room, Brandt stares at the folded pages in silence.

  “For God’s sake, Otto, at least be man enough to read it,” say Milo trying to keep his voice down so Alan won’t hear him.

  Instead, Brandt scrunches the letter into a ball and tosses it into the empty fireplace. “I don’t want anything to do with her. How can I when I look like this? I’m a freak, Milo, a useless freak.”

  Milo is seething through his teeth. “You bloody self-pitying, selfish bastard. If it hadn’t been for the Abos, you would have died out there. Too bad you didn’t, if you ask me. You get a second chance at life, mate, and now you chuck it away.” He points to the crumbled ball in the fireplace. “That bonzer girl, she’d do anything for you, Otto Brandt.” He pauses, lights a cigarette and, as he makes for the door, he turns to him again. “But you’re right, Otto. No, she definitely can’t see you like this. And it’s got nothing to do with your face. You just don’t deserve a sheila like that. I’m going home to find a bit of sanity.”

  *

  It’s night, and he struggles to make out the time on his luminous clock. Does it say half past twelve or six o’clock, and does it matter anyway? He sways down the hall to the lavatory and afterwards to the front steps. His sight is strengthening in his one eye, possibly to compensate for the loss of the other. There is no moon, but the glow of distant worlds illuminates the mulberry tree on the lawn. He recalls how much he liked that tree when he first arrived at Garigo. After careful tending and pruning, it stands stark and majestic.

  And now he sees someone standing on the front lawn. Her visit is not really such a surprise. Yes, his heart is pounding, but he will not flinch from those green eyes, and she has two eyes now, beautiful eyes, not staring, just gazing at him, just as he gazes upon her. , Brandt feels strangely calm as they contemplate each other, until his tears well up within him and he finds himself sobbing, as he falls to his knees.

  “I’m sorry; I’m sorry, so sorry. Sorry for what I did, to all the people and so many children…” He cannot get the words out, for there are no words. He straightens up. “So sorry,” he whispers as she turns and walks away, her elegant figure melting into an impenetrable haze.

  Back in bed, he tries to balance his past and Alan’s future on the scales of a flawed humanity. The slim
volume of his life that he presents to the world must forever be sufficient, for he can never allow the orphaned leaves to be reassembled and read by others; this is not for his benefit but for theirs, for Alan, Milo, Peggy, and, yes, even Magdalena. For not one of them would ever be able to take the burden of those lost pages. He must carry it alone for the rest of his life.

  He gets up again and goes to where the old photo of the Fuller family still lies face down on the hall table. He turns it over and holds it directly under his torch, straining his one eye to read once more the words.

  ‘We too can love.’

  *

  It’s morning, and he’s already bathed and dressed, and his boots are still ready for him at the door. Alan is cooking bacon and eggs for breakfast, and he asks about Milo. “What’s wrong with him, Otto? Yesterday when he left, he just gave me a wave and then he drove off, like a bat out of hell. Is everything OK?”

  “He’s fine; I expect he’ll be back later today, bringing Peggy with him,” says Brandt gazing out the window. He is looking towards Fuller’s Ridge, where grey clouds are dragging veils of rain over its long spine. Milo had told him that for weeks since the fire the ridge had lain seared and black, but, now, as far as he can make out, it shows the green hue of green shoots thrusting upwards from the ashes.

  Brandt smiles at the boy. “Alan, I’m still a bit stiff and can’t stoop properly, so please be a good son. Do you see that crumpled letter in the grate? Fish it out for me, will you.”

  The End

  Acknowledgements

  To Dawn for her patience and tireless commitment to editing numerous drafts of the manuscript.

  To the London Library for providing me with the quiet inspiration of their Reading Room for research and giving me the idea of a title as I watched their curators finding homes for the ‘orphaned leaves’ – pages adrift from rare books.