Palace of Tears

by Julian Leatherdale

  The same day Freddie was notified in a one-line telegram that his naturalisation had been revoked and he was on the official deportee list. He would be assigned a ship and departure date in due course. He told Freya and Angie this news on their next visit to the camp. He appeared resigned to his fate. ‘So, it is decided.’

  He lowered his voice to a whisper. ‘I don’t want you to come with me to Germany. Some of the naval officers here have been getting letters. It’s chaos over there. With the Kaiser gone, there’s violence everywhere, revolution brewing on the streets. And it’s not your home. Go back to the cottage. Talk to Mr Fox. He is a good man. He will look after you.’

  Freya bit her lip. She was sorely tempted to tell him how that ‘good man’ had cheated her over her father’s painting, how she had been forced in desperation to sign over her land title to him in an agreement she knew he never intended to honour. His lawyer would find ways to make sure she never returned to her cottage. It was her punishment and Angie’s for what had happened to Robbie and all the pain they had caused Adam and Adelina.

  ‘We will talk about this more next time,’ said Freya.

  They both knew what lay behind Freddie’s words. His concerns about their future in Germany were justified. But there was history behind this too. Freddie knew it was Fox she had loved in the beginning and it was Fox she would always love. Freddie was a broken man, an outcast, and no use to her now. It was time for Fox to step in and protect her. He had a duty to do so.

  But Freddie didn’t know Fox like she did – and he underestimated his wife. She wrote to the Aliens Board and to the minister, begging for her husband’s release, but for weeks on end she heard nothing. Still, she was determined. She would not abandon Freddie, the man who had never abandoned her.

  The first three deaths from pneumonic flu in Liverpool were reported that April. The disease had been carried by returning soldiers coming off troopships in Melbourne and crossing the border from Victoria into New South Wales. It had then swept through Sydney, suburb by suburb, and started picking off country towns in New South Wales one by one. It moved with a stealth and rapidity that reminded Angie of a bushfire. Each day the papers reported new outbreaks. These were small at first, no more than tiny spot fires here and there, and the papers tried to reassure readers that the disease had peaked. But the fire storm of infection was just starting to build to its full strength.

  It was all very well for the government to urge people to stay calm, thought Angie, but it was hard to pretend everything was under control when Liverpool had turned into a ghost town. Under the new quarantine regulations, schools, libraries, theatres, public halls and picture theatres had closed. Unlike most people, Angie didn’t grumble about the gauze mask she was forced to wear by law out on the street; it helped her feel anonymous and safe from the hostile stares of strangers.

  The death toll climbed quickly in May and June. By July it was over four thousand in New South Wales and the epidemic showed no signs of slowing. The state borders were closed and guarded by troops. Angie and Freya lined up twice a week to take a deep whiff of zinc sulphate in the public inhaling chamber. The smell was disgusting and there was no proof it worked but Freya was not prepared to take any chances, especially with baby Greta in the house.

  Angie sat in the front parlour and stared out the window. If she’d thought life was hard before, it was unbearable now. She waited for the Red Cross workers on their ‘S.O.S’ patrols as they drove down each street seeking out families in need of help. They would pass by her window in their knee-length white gowns, long white gloves, white caps, veils, masks and goggles like a cavalcade of ghosts. She listened out for the tinkling of their handbells as they laid out trays of hot food on the front paths and doorsteps of infected houses, each one signposted with a white or yellow flag. These had blossomed, one by one, like flowers of death, along Rose Street. The disease, which could kill within forty-eight hours, mostly took fit young men and pregnant women. Angie of course worried about Oskar, whose recent letter confessing his passionate love for her remained tucked under her pillow, heavily creased from repeated rereading. How ironic it would be if, just as their romance bloomed, her lover would be struck down by illness. Fate seem to favour such cruel timing, she thought.

  Only that afternoon she had discovered to her horror that not everyone she loved would be spared this illness. She’d been carrying home rations of bread, fruit and buckets of warm soup covered with a towel from the town hall – all the bakeries and shops were closed – when she had seen the dreaded flag fluttering outside 36 Rose Street. She had knocked at the door which was answered by Mrs Eyl.

  She was shaking from head to toe when she arrived home to tell the news, her chest heaving with sobs. ‘I saw a flag out at number thirty-six. It’s Astrid! Mrs Eyl said she’s been sick since yesterday. She wouldn’t let me in to see her.’

  ‘You spoke to Mrs Eyl?’ Freya demanded. ‘At her front door – even though the flag was out?’

  ‘Astrid’s my best friend!’ shouted Angie. ‘I just wanted to know if she was alright.’

  Freya was furious. ‘This is not just about what you want. What about Greta? What about Eveline? Did you think about them? That’s it: you are not to leave this house again. I’ll go for the rations myself.’

  Freya continued to rant as Angie trembled before her in a silent rage. She couldn’t believe Freya could be so hard and unfeeling. All Angie had done was show loyalty to a friend. For years Angie had endured her mother’s intemperate moods and rages. She loved her mother, but recently Angie was becoming more and more convinced that Freya’s mind was unhinged. It was all too much, too much to bear!

  Over the last few months, Angie had begun forming a plan of escape. She would turn seventeen this year and she was sick of being treated like a child. It was time for her to start her own life. If by some stroke of madness – for anything was possible in her mother’s deluded world – Freya decided not to go to Germany with Freddie, then perhaps that was a sign for Angie. She would accompany Freddie instead. She would ask Oskar to go with her. Together, they would find a way to survive. They would build a new life.

  Without Freya.

  Two days later, Freya fell ill.

  It began with a shiver and a chill accompanied by an intense headache. When Freya woke up that morning, her eyes were watering and the pains in the small of her back radiated throughout her body, making her feel tender all over. There was no doubt that it was the flu. Freya summoned Angie to her bedside and told her to go to Mrs Menzel’s to fetch some aspirin; she always had a supply handy.

  The following day, the sneezing and coughing began. Her nose ran and her throat burned. The skin all over her body was hot and dry and took on a strange blue tinge. Most alarming of all, Freya grew weak and dispirited, barely speaking a word and then only in a hoarse, quiet voice. This was so unlike her mother that Angie began to feel truly afraid.

  There were no public beds available at the hospital so Angie got one of the S.O.S patrols to call a nurse to the house. The nurse advised keeping Freya isolated in the sleep-out with only Angie to attend to her care. She was instructed to keep her mother well-wrapped in blankets. She must not be allowed near draughts or cold air to avoid the complication of pneumonia. It was also vital that Angie keep an eye out for any signs of delirium, which was a very serious symptom. Angie had to keep a face mask on the whole time, and change her clothes and wash her hands regularly. The nurse or one of the other volunteers would come by at night to see how she was doing.

  Angie had to make sure that whenever her mother sneezed, coughed or spat it must be into clean rags, which had to be collected and burned straight away with kerosene in the big steel bin out in the backyard. Eveline sat on her bed and cut up some of their old clothes to make a heap of such rags. Forbidden any physical contact with Angie, her aunt left these scraps outside her closed bedroom door. ‘Don’t lose hope, Angie, my love,’ she said as her niece collected them.

  Angie’s c
onstant round of nursing duties was a welcome distraction from the grief and panic that threatened to overwhelm her. She had never seen her mother as vulnerable as this. It shook her to her core. Whatever resentments she harboured against Freya, she realised now how much she had always relied on her mother’s righteous anger to protect her from the cruelties of the world.

  On the third day, the vomiting began. Angie held her mother’s head tenderly as she coughed up streams of frothy white sputum stained with blood into the nests of rags by the bedside. Freya’s silver-flecked copper hair clung damply to her skull. Angie cried as she felt her mother’s body convulse with each bout of retching. In that small, darkened room, with its odours of sweat and sick and the stink of burning zinc sulphate, Angie and her mother had swapped roles. The daughter was now the anxious, attentive mother while Freya was the frightened, helpless child.

  When she wasn’t in the sickroom, Angie sat in the half-light of the front parlour and stared out the window, listening to her mother’s moans and weeping. Aunty Eveline whispered soothing words to Angie through the keyhole of her closed door whenever Greta was napping. She slipped letters under the door too, full of kind, reassuring words, praising Angie for being so brave and devoted.

  One morning Angie stopped in front of the mirror in the hallway. She was not in the habit of studying herself for very long in its surface except to adjust the sleeve of a dress or the angle of a hat before leaving the house. But today she paused a moment longer, struck by the startling pallor of her own face. Suffering had sculpted her features with a refined, even ethereal, quality that many would call beautiful. But the thought that arose in Angie on seeing her own pale reflection was how much life had changed her, inside and out, these last few years. Where was the girl who had left Meadow Springs? Vanished. This new Angie was so much taller and her figure and face more womanly, but it was in the outward expression of her soul she saw the greatest change. Thirteen-year-old Angie had been sad but still hopeful that she would one day resume her old life. The woman in the glass now was an altogether altered creature, burdened with the knowledge of life’s disappointments.

  Angie thought she had cried out all her tears the first two days of her mother’s illness. With those tears she had reproached herself bitterly for exposing her mother to the flu. She knew she was to blame. She had gone to the Eyls’ house without thinking. But her self-recrimination was not over and there were plenty more tears to come. Angie told herself she was also being punished for wanting to abandon Freya. She had imagined a new life without her mother. Now fate would deliver just such a life. With an appalling certainty, Angie knew it would be her fault if her mother died.

  Four days later, the flu lifted. Her mother’s temperature dropped, the sweats disappeared and the vomiting stopped. Freya rested for another week in bed and felt weak and tired for weeks after that. But she had survived.

  Angie cried yet again, but this time with relief and joy as she held her mother tightly in her arms. ‘I will never let you go,’ she whispered. Eveline was overjoyed at her sister’s recovery and relieved to be released from the back room. The white flag was taken down from the front porch.

  The next day, there was a knock at the door. It was Oskar. His face was pale as milk and his eyes rimmed red. He had come to tell Angie the terrible news: Astrid had not survived. She’d died after only two days of illness.

  Angie was still nursing her own mother when the cart came down Rose Street, ringing its mournful bell, to collect Astrid’s corpse. Angie was still locked away inside the white-flagged cottage when the funeral procession passed on its way to the synagogue for Astrid’s burial.

  Mrs Eyl burned all her daughter’s clothes and her violin. She told Oskar that when her husband was released from Holsworthy they would return to Germany. They hoped they would be safer there than in Australia.

  Angie and Oskar hugged awkwardly and he left. Their love seemed tainted now, almost a betrayal. Angie cried for her dead friend. But she confessed to no one her gratitude that God had chosen to take Astrid rather than Freya or Freddie or Oskar.

  Two weeks later Oskar called around again to tell them that his father was being deported to Germany at the end of the month. Oskar and his mother would be joining him.

  Angie was lost for words. She had opened her heart once more, and once more the object of that love had been snatched away.

  Oskar could not look her squarely in the face as he delivered his news. His voice trembled. As he left, he kissed her on the left cheek right there in the parlour in front of Freya and Aunty Eveline, and tucked a small note into her hand.

  It read: ‘Wo gehen Sie, mein Herr? Weit von meiner Liebe.’ Where are you going, sir? Far from the girl I love.

  In January 1920, a letter finally arrived from the Aliens Board. Freya read it in the privacy of her bedroom. She waited until Eveline and Greta had gone out for their daily excursion to the park and then summoned Angie into the front parlour, sat her down and read her the contents of the letter out loud.

  Without stating any specific reasons, the letter rejected the appeal against repatriation that had been lodged on behalf of Frederick Octavius Wood. He remained on the government’s official list of deportees. On 3 June he would embark on the S.S Maine from Darling Harbour bound for the German port of Bremen. He would be allowed to take some luggage and a small sum of money but would surrender his Australian passport. Furthermore, the camp at Holsworthy was still locked down and all visiting rights were suspended. It was possible they might not see Freddie again before he embarked.

  Angie broke down and wept. Freya held her daughter in her arms, rocking her like she had when Angie was small and frightened, stroking her long black hair and crooning in her ear, ‘My poor little liebchen.’

  When Angie’s sobs finally subsided, her mother soothed her brow with her warm hands. ‘Please don’t be heartbroken, my angel girl. There is still hope. Listen.’

  Freya had another letter to share with Angie. It was from Karl von Gettner, Freya’s paternal cousin in Dusseldorf, the son of Uncle Horst and nephew of Freya’s own father, Wolfgang. Assuming the worst, Freya had written months ago to Karl at the printing works in Dusseldorf which had been in the von Gettner family for over a hundred years. Her letter had explained their terrible situation in Australia.

  Karl was an honourable man, a pillar of the community and devoted father. Now in his early sixties, he still worked every day at his beloved printing house with the support of the eldest of his three sons, Franz. Shocked to hear Freya’s news, this good-hearted patriarch had replied that he and his family would do everything they could to save the Australian branch of the von Gettner tree.

  ‘Freddie will go to Dusseldorf,’ explained Freya. ‘Karl and his family will look after him.’

  Angie felt her breathing steady. How could she ever have doubted her mother? Freya always knew the right thing to do.

  ‘As you know, our government has kindly agreed to pay our passage to Germany to join him when we choose to do so,’ Freya continued. A grim smile made plain her sarcasm. ‘Which we will do as soon as we’ve taken care of everything here.’

  A wave of relief flooded through Angie: her father would be taken care of and they would see him again. Then it struck her . . .

  ‘What about the cottage?’

  The question burst from Angie’s lips before she could stop herself. She had refrained from raising this subject ever since the letter had come from Adam Fox’s solicitor nearly two years ago, though it had continued to torment her all that time.

  To Angie’s surprise, Freya did not scowl at her. Instead, a smile spread across her face and she kissed her daughter on the forehead. ‘Ah, my sweet. You miss that place as much as I do. I do not blame you.’ She sighed deeply and cupped her daughter’s face in her hands. ‘There are things I must tell you,’ she said. ‘Painful things that I have kept hidden for far too long. But no more!’

  Freya was now looking steadily into her daughter’s eyes. ‘A
s you are learning, my love, the world is a deeply unfair place. Good men like Freddie suffer while cruel men like Adam Fox prosper. It is hard to see God’s plan in any of this. Except that He has given me a second chance. A chance to make things right.’

  A monumental stillness had descended on the house. Dust motes floated slowly in the molten morning light. Angie knew she would never forget this slice of time. Every mundane detail of this room was engraved on her memory: the worn chairs, the threadbare rug, Aunty Eveline’s Delft china dog on the mantel, and above the fireplace Freya’s delicate pencil and watercolour sketch of a pink callistemon.

  ‘To think I might have died and left you . . .’ Freya’s voice cracked a little. ‘Listen to me. I must tell you the truth now. We are being punished. Punished unfairly by Adam and Adelina for what happened to Robbie all those years ago. That is the real reason why Adam sacked your father. Why he pressured us to leave. Why, despite my efforts to stop him, he has forced me to sell our cottage. He told me that all he wanted was to hold it in trust, that the agreement we had was only temporary. To help us, he said. He lied.

  ‘The agreement expired this month and Saul, my father’s lawyer, sent Adam a letter to reclaim our title. It arrived too late. Adam’s solicitor sprang his trap. A sub-clause in the agreement meant I had no choice but to sell the cottage and land to Adam. To be honest, I was not in the least surprised. It has been Adam’s intention all along to have that land. My father would not sell it to him so he picked on me instead. Never forget: what Adam Fox wants, he gets. And above all, he wanted everything to be perfect. After Robbie’s death, my living in that cottage with you and Freddie spoiled Adam’s perfect life. Which is why, in the end, we had to go.’

  Her voice quavered at this point but did not become shrill. ‘I even sold Adam my father’s last painting in order to avoid signing this poisonous agreement to give up my land. The painting was a gift to me and should never have been sold. But even that was not enough for him. He lied about it being a forgery and stopped his payments. But he never gave it back. His greed is endless. He is, in every way, a thief and liar.’