The Bookshop of the Broken Hearted

by Robert Hillman

  Something else. Tom didn’t think of himself as observant, astute. He didn’t notice things. He more failed to notice. But when he pictured Mrs Babel’s—sorry, Hannah’s—face, as he did now, her eyes, her green eyes, he grasped that she was suffering.

  That huge smile, all of her teeth on show, one at the side a bit discoloured; but she was suffering.

  He had suffered. In the same way? He didn’t know.

  Chapter 6

  THE TRAIN had stopped twenty times or more over the three-day journey, sometimes for hours. It was different this time.

  The small window high in one wall of the wagon was not showing any light. Hannah’s guess was that it was well past midnight, not yet dawn. All wristwatches, pocket watches had been surrendered at the start of the journey. The only timepiece in the wagon, an alarm clock with a black enamelled housing and a white face, belonged to an old woman with oversized dentures from a town outside Budapest. She took it from her leather suitcase every so often to wind it. Others called to her, ‘Madam, the time!’ She held the clock up above her head so that everyone could see. But her winding hadn’t been vigorous enough and the clock had stopped. Hannah attempted to keep track of the time in her head but there had been lapses into unconsciousness when she knew she was asleep while remaining aware of everything. She’d even said to Leon, ‘Take Michael, I’m asleep.’ And Leon had relieved her arms of the child and left his wife standing, the shoulders of those packed against her supporting her weight.

  Destinations have a way of announcing themselves. Hannah and the other adults in the wagon, all but a few with children in their care, sensed in the silence that this was as far as the train would carry them. At other stops you would hear nothing for five minutes, then a grating sound followed by a sharp jolt, the great iron mass of the train coming to rest with reluctance. And you might hear a voice and a response. The train would begin moving again, slower than walking pace, gradually gathering speed, the regular thud as the wheels hit the cross-ties, the journey continuing. You enjoyed a few minutes’ relief to know that you had not yet arrived, succeeded by dread that arrival was still ahead. On the first day of the journey, Hannah had turned to a man who kept a bakery in her neighbourhood in Budapest and asked in a whisper: ‘What will happen?’

  Jacob Cahn the baker had lifted his eyebrows, turned the corners of his mouth down. ‘They will kill us,’ he said.

  For a further hour by Hannah’s count, nothing. Her arms ached so badly that she thought she would simply drop Michael to the floor, without apology. And yet she knew that she could hold on for another hour if she had to; for longer, two, three hours. Leon said quietly, ‘Let me take him.’ Hannah shook her head. The boy’s hand reached for her face. He said, ‘Mama.’ She told him to shush.

  In a wagon of ninety human beings, Hannah knew maybe fifteen, some from the Dohány Street synagogue, a few, like Jacob Cahn, from daily contact. All were Jews, but how much did that mean? Thrust together in this way, after the first day watching others relieve themselves in buckets, listening to each other weep from exhaustion, still no intimacy beyond a shared sense of injustice. Hannah felt the reluctance of her heart to embrace the whole complement of the wagon as a failure. She wished she were more a Jew who rejoiced in the bond of the faith.

  Instead, she thought, If we die, let me hold Michael, the rest I don’t care about. About Leon? Yes, let her care for Leon as she died, but Michael above all. Also, let her care for Jacob Cahn, who had flirted with her in the bakery in such a clever way, speaking the English he’d mastered over a twenty-year sojourn in London, in Spitalfields. ‘Radiant maiden, how may I serve you?’

  She kissed the crown of her son’s head: a mistake. For the boy had drifted into a dazed state that gave him relief from hunger, and now the pressure of his mother’s lips, perhaps more forceful than she’d intended, woke him with a roar. She told him to be quiet, first in Hungarian then in English. She’d been teaching him English and for some reason the child was more inclined to take instruction in that language. Other children in the wagon, inspired by Michael’s rebellion, raised their voices in solidarity.

  Leon said, ‘Give him to me.’ Hannah allowed him to take the child, but then seized him back. She didn’t want to be scrambling wildly for her son when the door opened.

  And the door was opened, a sliding door that crashed against the frame with great force. Dogs began barking in a barnyard frenzy, as if they’d picked up the scent of foxes among the chickens. Torch beams played over the faces of those huddled in the wagon. In the glare, Hannah could make out the shapes of the dogs striving against the leashes that held them. Commands were being shouted, not a single voice but a number. German was one of Hannah’s languages and she understood the orders: Get down on the ground! Get on the fucking ground! But those who didn’t speak any German knew exactly what was being said. Hannah had to hold Leon’s jacket to stay upright, such was the crush behind her. She slid to the ground with Michael in one arm, and was immediately shoved towards a group formed by others from the wagon. Suitcases and bags were wrenched from hands and flung into a heap. Twenty other wagons were emptying at the same time, eighteen hundred men, women and children.

  =

  It was May of the year 1944. Dawn would come early. Hannah judged it to be maybe five in the morning. She had a great need to see where she was. Now and again a torch beam swung towards the locomotive end of the train and she glimpsed the rails stretching ahead, dead straight. Jostled in the melee, she reached again and again for Leon, never able to grasp him. The command now was for men and older male children to move into a separate group. To demonstrate, the soldiers—they were SS—seized one man after another and pushed each into the group that was forming. The dogs reared on their leashes in their excitement.

  Hannah called, ‘Leon! Husband!’ She caught sight of his face for no more than a second at a time in the sweep of the torch beams. He looked helpless; no suggestion of defiance.

  Michael, with maddening insistence, was attempting to turn his mother’s face towards him. ‘I don’t like the dogs.’

  Hannah, still struggling for a sight of Leon, at last glared into Michael’s face. ‘Shut up!’ Then, of course, he howled.

  Hannah called in German to the nearest SS officer. ‘Ist das Auschwitz?’ Even in the din of pleading voices, her voice carried. The officer looked directly at her with an amused curiosity.

  ‘Ist das Auschwitz? Ja, das ist Auschwitz. So können Sie Deutsch?’

  ‘Herr, ja, ich spreche Deutsch, ja.’

  ‘Ja?’

  ‘Herr, ja.’

  ‘Sie sind Ungarisch, nicht wahr?’

  Yes, she was Hungarian.

  The officer beckoned her, instructed her to follow him. He placed her at a distance from where another SS officer, apparently the most senior, was directing the new arrivals into two lines. One of the lines received many more of the inductees than the other. The men were sent to a third line, further away. Hannah was told to remain exactly where she was. The officer then left her. In the thin light she could now make out buildings at some remove.

  Auschwitz. It had been the task of Leon’s monitoring group in Budapest to impress on the Soviet Foreign Office that Jews were being held in great numbers at Auschwitz, and at dozens of other camps. And the Russians had accepted the claim, had conveyed their sincere regret. It was unfortunate that nothing could be done.

  Hannah did not know if she and her son could evade death. It was not possible to say what she would have to do to keep first Michael alive, then herself. But she would not disobey the order of the SS officer that she stay put with Michael—she knew that much, at least.

  What was taking place before her eyes she couldn’t properly grasp, but it seemed that the distinction between the two lines of women was that one received those with small children in their care, and also the aged—the grandmothers. The other line, nearer to her, comprised younger women, mothers with daughters of about ten or older. The light—it could not
yet be called dawn—was just clear enough to see what was unfolding, a great bewildered crush of humanity taking orders from soldiers who intervened to push people in one direction or the other, always shouting, like human bullhorns.

  The senior SS officer stood in the midst of the shouting and shoving in a state, so it seemed, of profound self-approval. He was tall, good-looking, intent on showing a bright set of teeth. His gesture of assignment was a brief wave of his gloved hand—you there, you there. The soldiers kept glancing at him to see which line he was indicating and everything they did, everything they said, was impatient, insulting and terse with authority:

  ‘Bewegen Sie, Sie, Arschloch!’

  ‘Sind Sie verdammt taub?’

  Hannah had to put her hand to her mouth to stifle protests when the SS soldiers flung people about who were slow to comprehend. She thought: Listen to me, keep your mouth shut.

  It went on for an hour or more. The senior officer never once lost his composure. It was as if he were on stage, full of relish for the role he was playing. He twice gave a short, rather feminine laugh, but even as he laughed he kept up his flawless routine—you there, you there.

  Nobody in Leon’s Budapest monitoring group could say for certain that the Jews who were sent to the camps were being murdered. Two Bohemian Jews, men in their twenties, had been interviewed by the group—it was their claim that they’d escaped from Auschwitz and made their way to Budapest. They said that the Jews in the camp were shot and buried; also Russian POWs, Poles, others. But their stories were full of holes—differing versions of how they’d escaped and of the number of Jews in the camp; one said tens of thousands, the other said about a thousand all up. Also, both were plainly mad. Their testimony was disregarded.

  But it was accepted all the same that a program of extermination was underway. Jews had been murdered in large numbers in the towns and villages of their birth all over Europe, in front of many witnesses, some with cameras. If the Lithuanians were murdering Jews in the open, the Poles bludgeoning Jews in town squares, the Ukrainians, the Romanians, the Germans themselves in every town, it must be true that the SS were killing Jews in the camps.

  Leon, scrupulous about evidence, said: ‘Probably.’ But he wouldn’t insist to his Russian friends that camps like Auschwitz were made for murder.

  Hannah, her child at her feet barely awake, knew she should give up any doubts of her own. She believed that the women with small children were destined for some killing ground, allowed to keep their children to avoid outbreaks of hysteria. The other women with older children—maybe they were to be made to work somewhere, perhaps in the camp, perhaps elsewhere. She grasped it. But better to believe that she was wrong. And why was she here, set aside with Michael? Because she spoke German. Surely. Would it save her and her son? She would speak German without ceasing for a year if she had to. She would grovel as she recited Goethe. Leon had whispered to her on the train, ‘If we are to die, don’t plead.’ She wanted to hit his face, bite him. Don’t plead? Of course she would plead.

  A soldier strode angrily towards her. When he was close enough to hit her if he chose to, he shrieked: ‘Was machst du denn hier, du Fotze?’ What are you doing here, you cunt?

  Hannah said quickly that his colleague had ordered her to stand where she was.

  The officer in charge had seen the exchange. He called in a musical voice that carried above the noise, ‘Lass sie zu sein, Trotell!’

  The soldier, chastised, turned back to the officer, executed a quick bow and hurried off. The officer called to a subordinate to take over his role, then strolled across the bare open ground to Hannah. She thought as he approached: Such vanity, for that was the most obvious thing about him. He stood before her smiling, not too close, much taller than her. The small gap between his front teeth gave him just a hint of incongruous boyishness.

  ‘Ich bin darüber informiert, gnädige Frau, dass Sie Deutsch sprechen.’

  Yes, she said, she did speak German; she went on a little to demonstrate how well. She had learnt German from her flute teacher, who’d lived in Berlin for a decade and spoke an inflected Weimar version of the language, every phrase carrying a freight of mild irony.

  The officer was not as impressed as she’d hoped. He nodded without emphasis, then bent down to look more closely at Michael. He took the boy’s face in his two white-gloved hands, studied the eyes, a brilliant green like Hannah’s own. Then he stood and held Hannah’s face in the same way as the boy’s. He kept up a commentary in a sing-song Bavarian German. ‘Ja, das interessiert mich, ich muss sagen…’ He asked Hannah if she was Hungarian, if she was from Budapest, whether her parents were also from Budapest. Strange, certainly, but also fascinating, he said.

  Hannah wished to ask what was strange but also fascinating, but didn’t dare.

  Then the officer said abruptly, ‘Gut, hier bleiben,’—stay here—and he strode back to his post: directing the Jews from the train this way, that way.

  She let Michael sit at her feet. He was by now too tired to complain, too tired to think of hunger and thirst. He rested his head against Hannah’s leg and said nothing at all.

  Nearby, workmen had commenced erecting a new fence: galvanised metal poles driven into holes dug with a pick. The workmen weren’t wearing uniforms, only overalls or baggy twill trousers. They paid no attention at all to the inductees being pushed around, the shrieks and curses. Three were smoking, the cigarettes clamped in their lips while they shovelled out the yellow clay. They might have been anywhere. Two rolls of wire mesh and two of barbed wire were waiting to be stretched between the poles.

  Hannah woke.

  She didn’t understand that she’d been unconscious where she stood, but was aware, for a second, that some different state had intervened between her last sight of the workmen and the present moment. And then Michael was not at her feet and panic like a torrent surged through her.

  She ran towards the inductees, stopped, searched in the melee for the boy. One of the SS guards charged at her, smacked her on the side of her head with his open hand, grabbed the shoulder of her coat. She escaped his grasp and ran to the workmen. She asked in German if they had seen Michael, a boy, three, a grey jacket, grey pants. They looked at her with flat expressions that offered her nothing.

  ‘Bitte, ein kleiner Junge im grauen Hosen! Bitte!’ A guard seized a handful of her hair and hauled her back towards the inductees. When she resisted, he pulled harder.

  Chapter 7

  THE CEDAR in Tom Hope’s workshop had once been the rafters, floorboards and architraves of Tony Croft’s place down on the river. A spring flood in the late fifties lifted the river above the level of Salt’s Flat and took the house off its stumps. Rather than repair the house, Tony and Leanne rebuilt in brick fifty yards further up an incline and the old place was offered about for a song. Tom Hope in his second year at the farm bought it with the idea of dressing the timbers and selling them off. The hard work of running the farm by himself and then the catastrophe of Trudy got in the way of Tom’s project, but the cedar was of the highest quality, branded on the non-facing side of each plank with the heat-etched Black Goanna trademark of a specialist timber mill in the Atherton Tablelands. Building shelves in Hannah Babel’s shop seemed like a good use for it.

  Hannah had already purchased ten ill-sorted sets of shelves but she accepted Tom’s suggestion that they dispense with all of them except for the glass-fronted bookcases with their lozenges of crystal.

  Tom said, ‘Rows of divided cedar along three walls, all the way up to the ceiling, and a row down the centre. I can fit a brass rail for a sliding ladder so you can get up to the top shelves. Maybe keep books up the top nobody wants.’

  Hannah said, ‘Nobody? Tom Hope, for every book, someone loves it.’

  ‘Is that right?’

  ‘You think maybe someone writes a book for two years, three years, it could be ten years and nobody loves it? Okay, I’ll climb up the ladder. Make the shelves.’

  Tom unb
olted his bench saw and buzzer from the workshop floor at the farm and set them up in the back room at the shop. He fetched in all of his tools, also jars and boxes of bolts and coach screws and self-tappers and sturdy brass Phillips heads. A workbench was required, and he put something together from ash and red gum from the farm, bolted into the wooden floor of the shop. He rose at four to get the milking out of the way, checked on the woollies, then started work at the shop at eight in the morning before Hannah was even on deck. He brought Beau along to give the animal a change and the dog sat among the curls of cedar shavings with a fixed expression of gratitude, tongue lolling, tail swaying.

  By the time Hannah arrived, Tom’s face was a terrain of wood dust traversed by shallow valleys carved by sweat. It was Hannah’s habit to greet him with a kiss on his dusty cheek, so strange to Tom that he would tense at first sight of his employer. Yet the moment of contact of lips and flesh was quickly becoming something to live for. He thought: Remember, she’s mad. But of course he was in love with Hannah, besotted, and would bear anything.

  Later, seven days into the job, Hannah found it suited her better to kiss Tom on the lips.

  =

  She prepared him proper tea, Bushells, and at lunchtime brought him sandwiches made with a dense, dark bread Tom had never come across before, and hated. Hungarian salami and Jarlsberg, mustard pickle, tomato and cabbage fried in olive oil. The first of these sandwiches he thought would kill him, but he persisted.

  Hannah watched him eating. She said, ‘Tasty?’ and Tom said, ‘Mmm!’

  She wore a different dress each day; different shoes, not always high heels. And she appeared to own a treasure-house of jewelled brooches and necklaces, bangles and bracelets of gold and silver and enamelled brass. She came to work each day groomed like a queen. Her massy curls were sometimes taken up and worn as a great furry bun on the top of her head, held in place by coloured plastic combs. Since the days were growing cooler with the approach of winter, she sometimes wore pleated woollen skirts and a finely woven jumper with an artful scarf.