by JH Fletcher
They put out the fire, they took bread and tomatoes and cheese, they walked high in the mountains. There was a stream gushing between grey rocks. The way lay up one bank, climbing steeply in the bright sunlight, while the fall boiled in a rainbow of spray far beneath them. At the top, the two banks were no more than a metre apart. They leapt the stream and went on, still climbing. They reached a ridge from which for the first time they could see the bones of the mountains, the scree slopes and coombs, black with shadow, that supported the upper ramparts of ice.
Helena said: ‘I would like to go there.’ Into the realm of ice.
Ted held her hand, shaking his head as he stared upwards at what, to a less prosaic man, might have been a source of wonder.
‘Bloody different from the place I come from, let me tell you.’
8
That night she asked him about the desert land from which he had come. He did his inarticulate best, telling her of vastness and heat, of a landscape whose principal feature was its lack of features.
‘It’s pretty flat. No mountains. Nothing like here.’
She frowned; she had lived her life surrounded by mountains and found it hard to imagine a country without them.
‘Maybe in Victoria. Or so they say. I’ve never been there. It’s a long way, eh. Big place, Oz. Deserts. They’ve even got jungles, up the Top End.’
Communication remained difficult. Every day she was growing more familiar with the new language but much of it still eluded her.
‘Deserto?’ Yes, that she understood. But jungles, what were they?
‘Albero. Albero grande,’ he said. Big trees … Ted, too, had learned one or two words of the language of her country, but a bloke could feel a dill, with sounds like that in his mouth.
Helena’s forehead creased, then cleared as hand signs proved more helpful than words. ‘Ah yes. Giungla …’ Yet she found it hard to sort out the confusion of such images.
‘After the war, you say you no go back to your desert?’
For a moment he sat staring with absent eyes into the stove, at the thrusting fingers of flame.
‘There’s talk the government’s gunna hand out land to Diggers. Along the Murray, that’s what I heard.’
‘Murray?’ She shaped the word in her mouth, feeling it as fragile as glass.
‘A river. Pretty big, people tell me. At least there’ll be plenty of water, eh?’
There was so much about his own country he did not know. Still, if it was as big as he said …
And you? She asked herself. What do you know about Calabria?
‘What will you grow on this farm of yours?’
‘Dunno.’
She saw he was not a man for detail. Yet she was a farmer’s daughter and knew how important details were. Perhaps it’s the war, she thought. Perhaps he doesn’t want to think about what’ll happen when it’s over. Just in case.
9
There were three days, then two. She would not think of time, of the minutes falling one by one, taking away what they had here together; that would have been too heavy a burden. Instead she concentrated on the diminishing stocks of food. There had been six cans, then four, now two. The potatoes and tomatoes were almost gone, the cheese down to about a third. She stared not so much at what remained but what had gone, as though at an enemy.
We shall finish it. Then we shall go. All this …
Would seem as though it had never been.
No, she thought. That was not true. Because what she had brought with her she would not be taking back. And was unsure whether she meant her virginity or the expectations of delight and fulfilment that, like the stocks of food, were now much reduced.
10
On the last day Ted went for a walk by himself. She watched him on the far side of the lake, a lean man whom she knew better than she had but still did not know, the signposts to his nature as confusing as the descriptions of desert and jungle that he had used to describe his country, the source of everything he was.
She watched him pacing, head bent forward as though to harangue the ground as she had observed him that morning haranguing the sun-shiny waters of the lake.
Why? and How? and When? The words as clear as though he had really spoken them.
So for him, too, the time here has changed things.
He came back. She saw the set mouth, the eyes focused and determined, and knew he had made up his mind, although to what end she did not know. He came straight to her, walking into her and crushing her in his arms, looking down at her so that she stared up at him in amazement.
‘You thought what’s gunna happen next?’
‘I think maybe I cook something to eat, afterwards we maybe go for a walk —’
‘Not that. What happens when we get back?’
‘Why we need think of that?’ Knowing that he thought she meant why should anything be different? But what she was really saying was that she had not thought about it and refused to do so. She would abandon herself to the future as she had since the day, seemingly so long ago, when she had ridden away from her aunt’s house.
It made her realise how unlike her he was. He wanted to see the future set out tidily in front of him, whereas she thought that was foolish. You could make all the plans you liked and things would happen just the same.
‘We gunna have to work out how we want things to be. Between us, I mean. We’re not gunna end, you know. This wasn’t just a few days in the sack, not for me.’
She heard his meaning clearly through the miasma of half-comprehensible sounds.
‘You think it was for me?’
‘That’s why we gotta sort things out.’ He spoke crossly. Perhaps the only way to survive as an airman was to plan ahead. But how could you plan for times when the enemy did something new? He was thinking like a husband, she thought. Telling her, and himself, how things were going to be and losing his temper when they turned out differently. Perhaps, if he really had been her husband, she would have liked him to organise her life, however foolish it was to try. As it was it made her feel vulnerable. The need to plan was to deny faith in the future. It made her wonder how he felt about her, about everything.
‘What you want should happen?’
He did not answer. Instead he removed his hands from her shoulders. He took two steps away from her and she saw that in his mind he had gone further away from her than that. He squinted across the lake, the moss, the sedges shrilling in the constant wind, at the snow-clad mountain peaks.
‘When this lot’s over I’m going home. To Australia.’
She thought that he, who had raised the issue, was now trying to avoid it.
‘Before that. What you want to happen tomorrow?’
Still he did not look at her but stood with eyes fixed upon the mountains as though only there could he read his own thoughts.
‘I reckon that’s up to you. We’ve had this time together. It’s been great. But I dunno. Your family’s rich. You told me your mother wanted a grand marriage for you. The war won’t last for ever. It could still happen.’
She watched his back. ‘My parents are dead. The farmhouse is burned. There’s nothing there —’
He talked through her. ‘A house can be rebuilt. The land’s still there. There’ll still be some bloke, some count or earl or baron or whatever you call them,’ speaking with mounting savagery as though determined to cut them both to the heart, ‘who’ll be happy as Larry to have you —’
Her fury matched his own. ‘And my land? That what you think? That I should sell myself to a man willing to take me and my land? Take me because of my land?’
‘If it wasn’t for the war —’
‘The war is fact! You could say, if my parents not die … But they did die. My mother, the soldiers they rape her before she die,’ the images so long denied rising like filth to the surface of her thoughts, the blood and screams, the wide-flung legs, ‘and the house it burn —’
He took two swift steps towards her. He held her tight while
she wept in rage and horror, wanting both to cling to him and pound him with clenched fists at what he had said and made her see.
‘If I want to marry count, like you say, live in palazzo,’ once again the English word escaping her in her rage, ‘with car, children, fine clothes, you think I would come into the mountains with you?’
Still he held her close and she knew that her anger had not reached him. ‘You still gotta make up your mind what you want.’
She felt the length of his body against hers, the stalwart beating of his heart. ‘I must think of Marija, too.’ Now it was her turn to avoid the issue but she knew that the child was indeed a problem that would have to be resolved.
‘Is she important to you?’
‘I would not abandon her.’
‘That wasn’t what I said. You’ll have to take her back to the village after the war. She must have relations.’ Her body jerked, instinctively rejecting the idea of ever going back. With his arms still about her he felt the movement at once. He said: ‘You gotta go back. Even if it’s only for one day. Forget the kid. You gotta do something about the farm, either run it yourself or put in a manager or sell it. You can’t just walk away.’
At that moment she could have walked away from it very easily but knew he was right. All the same …
‘The war may go on for years.’
‘I don’t think so. Everyone’s sick of it. I’m tired to death most of the time. It’s gotta be just as bad for the Jerries.’
‘What difference it make, people being tired?’
‘Because sooner or later they’ll just stop. Maybe it’s the only way it ever will stop. God knows it should never have started in the first place.’
‘And afterwards?’
‘That’s what I’m saying. What happens afterwards? What happens to us?’
Again she found herself avoiding the issue.
‘Better we wait till then.’
‘No. We gotta make up our minds. If you’re gunna marry some count, we’ll just have to pretend none of this happened —’
‘Too late for that. Everyone in the village will know by now.’
‘That won’t matter. Counts never hear village gossip. I dunno much about counts but I know that much.’
She felt her breath and her heart, her thoughts a whirling confusion of no and yes and it’s impossible and why not.
‘I think we may forget about the count.’
‘Okay. Then things will be different.’
‘How different?’
‘Because I’ll want to marry you and take you back to Oz with me.’
She had suspected that he was about to say something of the sort. She had even tried to deflect him from what she found so astounding: that this Australian airman should have asked her, an Italian farmer’s daughter, to marry him.
She felt her will rise to meet the challenge. Yes, she would go with him, if that was what it took to fashion a new life for herself in place of all that was gone. And later would abandon it, too, should that prove necessary.
There had been no mention of love.
‘Why you want marry me?’
He looked blank. ‘Reckon I just do.’
Eloquence would not be part of the package but she could manage without eloquence. Yet still she would not give him her answer.
‘Tomorrow. I tell you then.’
She was not troubled by doubts about whether she was ready to marry or how their lives would work out when they were so different from each other. She didn’t care about the language or how far away Australia was. What mattered was strength. She knew she was strong enough but wasn’t so sure about Ted. He was kind and caring. As an air gunner, he was presumably brave, too, but a farmer needed courage of a different kind. She thought that an air battle would call for speed and heat: the speed of reflex, the heat of temperament. A farmer did not need bravery so much as the courage to endure. The evening passed. She opened the last can of meat to make the last supper they would eat in this place, she washed the dishes meticulously. Careless of mosquitoes, she stood outside the cabin and stared at the lake, silver under the moon, and beyond it the hint of distant snows against a black and star-spangled sky.
This was her land, her place. Could she leave it, and be content? Could she use her own strength and courage to carve from the unknown land the fulfilment that her life required?
She would never be able to manage it alone. She would need support; Ted would have to play his part, too.
He knows the land, she thought. He will come to terms with it, do what must be done.
Yet doubt remained.
She went back into the cottage and closed the door behind her. The glimmer of the oil lamp showed that Ted was already in bed. Outside in the moonlight she had not known what she was going to do but now she did not hesitate. She took off her clothes and got into bed. She clung close, caressing him, seeking not his flesh alone but the confidence she needed in them both and in the future. For some minutes he did not respond, as though he, too, had doubts, but she persisted and eventually he turned to her. Afterwards, feeling for the first time the release of fulfilment, she lay at peace. She felt the slow seeping of her body, the easing of nerves and muscles, an end to doubt. She said: ‘Yes.’
He turned on his elbow, banging her thigh with his knee and not caring.
‘What was that?’
‘I say yes.’ Speaking from the midst of the dream that was welling like smoke to swallow her.
‘You mean …?’
‘I say yes.’
CHAPTER SEVEN
1
For a few months nothing changed: not, at least, in the externals of life. Helena continued to live in the village with Marija. Every day they walked to the aerodrome. Every day the child amused herself as best she could while Helena went through the motions of sweeping, cleaning, washing up, helping in the kitchen. Within herself, however, things had indeed changed. Time, even light, became more concentrated. Every part of her awareness acquired an added intensity because now she had something of herself tied up in the war, and who could say what the future might bring?
Every day she watched the skies, her mind troubled by chimeras of flame.
The priest, long nose and black soutane, came to interrogate her. Accusations had been made, immorality alleged. The devil was loose, or so it was claimed.
Helena seethed but would not give him the satisfaction of showing it.
‘The devil? You do me too much honour, Father.’
Now faces turned away when she walked through the village. It might have been awkward had Signora Gambetta been one of them but her landlady was no church-goer. As long as Helena paid her rent she would remain an ally, perhaps more stalwart even than before.
‘Priests? Busybodies, the lot of them.’
Until one day in November Helena leaned on her broom and watched as one of the pilots came running and stumbling towards her, his face bright with news.
‘The war …’
Between one moment and the next, or so it seemed, the war was over.
2
It left a silence: no more sorties or killing, no more fear that this would be the day when Ted would take off never to return. But silence and an end to fighting were not true peace. Instead there came an emptiness peopled by a new form of apprehension. After the blood and battles, change would surely come. No-one knew what form it would take, although Helena and Ted, lying side by side on her bed in Signora Gambetta’s house, were already aware, instinctively, of one aspect of it. The Armistice was three days old and the world that until now had seemed to be dragging itself like a wounded beast towards death was still. They lay within a vortex not of their own devising that had come upon them with the ending of the war. The outrage of some of the villagers at the blatant behaviour of the two foreigners might have meant trouble for them at one time, but not now. Now it could neither reach nor harm them because, with the silence of the guns, the old world and its values were gone. Now was different from all
the nows there had ever been, present and future distinct from what had been the past.
Into this new existence Ted said: ‘I’ve fixed up for a car to take you back to your village.’
She thought she could not have understood him correctly. ‘A car? To take me back?’
‘And Marija. You can find her rellies, decide what you want to do with the farm, whether you want to keep it or get a manager in or —’
Incredulity rose in a wave within her.
‘No!’ She erupted in a froth of words, gesticulating with outraged hands as she turned and seized him, shaking him out of the contemplation with which he was regarding the ceiling above them. ‘What you say, eh? Now the war is over you want to be rid of me, is that it?’
She could not sustain her English in her fury. Mortified, tears bursting from her scalded eyes, she ranted at him in Italian mixed with the Slovene dialect of her childhood, outrage needing neither language nor even coherence to express itself. Her clenched fists pounded his naked chest, her tears and words assailed him until he took her fists and held them while she bucked and fought against him and at length lay still.
He spoke patiently, as to a child: ‘What’s all that about?’
Screams and abuse gave way to silent tears. She would not answer. He held her and gentled her, very slowly and quietly. At last, in a voice rusty with tears, she said: ‘I not want to go alone. I want you come with me.’
‘That’s im—’
Again, in the face of his denial, her voice began to rise. ‘No! You no understand? We one person, now. Is that not right? It not right for you to turn your back, send me off to arrange these things alone …’
Her strength lay in her determination to deny strength, to tell both him and herself that without his support she would be lost, while all the time she was bludgeoning him with an outpouring of emotion that she sensed was a source of embarrassment to him. Do it, because I am weaker than you.