Now the orchard: five hundred trees, pears, nectarines, apples, grey-green lichen on the side of the boughs away from the northerlies. Hannah put her hand to the crusty bark of one of the older apple trees as gently as if she were touching flesh.
‘Tom, all this, such work you do.’
She wanted him to stretch out with her on the grass under the apple trees but open-air love-making was beyond anything that Tom could contemplate. They went indoors.
For Tom, daylight meant labour, and he betrayed a certain eagerness to be up and about once Hannah had signalled her satisfaction in a torrent of Hungarian. She said, ‘Lie still.’ He did, but he thought of the old ram needing tick treatment and of the cows impatient to be let into the broad paddock with the wattles. He had to be told a second time, ‘Lie still.’
Tom had to admit that he was capable of enjoying Hannah’s languid caresses and her endearments and it was only that it was wrong to lounge about in the middle of the morning that prevented him from melting into a pool of butter under the warmth of her hands.
She said, ‘Tom, I was unhappy, so unhappy, Tom, I can’t tell you. And now I love you. This is how I like to be.’
Such candour unsettled him but in some part of him newly made, he grasped that Hannah was someone he must listen to. Phrases came to life in him from he knew not where; words that he had never employed. He said them aloud to himself during the day: ‘Bless you’ and ‘My dearest one’.
As much as anything, he enjoyed her teasing. She said, ‘You are so polite, Tom. Somebody trips over. What do you say? “I’m sorry.” Not your fault, but you are sorry. And you blush like a boy. Will I whisper something? Listen to me. Listen to what I whisper.’
Only, there was the sorrow.
She looked away from him at strange times, and he was nothing to her; insignificant. He said, ‘Hannah, tell me.’ Then she recovered and was gay and loving. But not a thing was shared.
‘Darling,’ he said now, as Hannah caressed his body, pausing at his chest. Flattening her hand against his heart. ‘Darling, tell me.’
Her hands stopped drawing him to her.
‘Tell you what?’
‘Why you were unhappy.’
‘I lost two husbands. Do you know? Two husbands.’
She threw back the covers and swung her legs out; paused naked beside the bed. She was about to speak, but whatever she might have said she caught before it came out, smiled at Tom fleetingly and went out to the bathroom with her clothes clutched in her hand. He heard her washing. Then nothing. She appeared again, sat on the bed and pulled on one boot, drew the laces tight.
‘Drive me home,’ she said. Every trace of tenderness had left her.
=
She came back to him the next day. Tom was at the shop tinkering with the cash register when she walked in. She kissed him with feeling, and this time something was said. ‘I’m not right in my head for a few minutes. Is that awful, Tom?’
No, said Tom, it wasn’t awful.
‘Listen, Tom. This is Nietzsche. Have you heard maybe of Nietzsche? No no no. Impossible. In university if you went, you would hear.’
‘Hannah, I haven’t been to university.’
‘Okay. Rubbish. It doesn’t matter. Plenty went to university who became fat Nazis. But listen. This is Nietzsche. If you look over the edge, you see nothing, nothing. But if you stare at nothing, it looks back at you. Do you see?’
‘Nothing looks back at you?’
‘Do you see?’
‘Hannah, I don’t. I’m sorry.’
‘It’s okay. It’s rubbish. Will you fix my machine? My cash register?’
She was miserable. Tom put down his screwdriver and took her in his arms. He could feel the clenched distress of her body.
She said as he held her, her face against his chest, ‘Tom, this is something I don’t say. To Leon, never, to Stefan, never. My husbands, you understand?’
‘Yes, I understand, Hannah.’
She stepped back and looked up into his eyes.
‘Don’t leave me. Okay, I’m a little bit mad. But don’t leave me. Please.’
She was holding his face with both hands. He hadn’t shaved and she pushed against the pale stubble. The gaze of her green eyes was so intense that he would have found it painful if he’d been forced to lie to her.
‘Hannah, I’ll never leave you. I promise you.’
‘But can you say “never”? Do you promise me?’
‘I promise. Never.’
‘But you don’t say, “Hannah, marry me.” If you say “never” why can we not be married? Why, Tom?’
Before he could answer her—maybe ‘But we can be married’—she flung herself away from him and buried her hands in her hair.
‘Over forty, Tom! That’s what I mean. Tom with his mother! Ha ha ha!’ I might slap someone maybe. Okay, we don’t get married. But you stay with me. When I’m too old throw me on the rubbish heap, I don’t care.’
‘Hannah,’ said Tom, ‘I want to marry you. That’s what I want.’
‘Are you saying?’
‘I want to marry you.’
Hannah looked down and nodded her head. Her mood had changed.
‘Tom,’ she said quietly. ‘No babies. You see?’
Tom nodded. He didn’t have to be told that there would be no babies.
Hannah cast her gaze here and there about the shop. She walked over to the tapestry.
‘Do you know where I got this, Tom? Will I tell you? Okay. In Budapest. I came back in February, 1945. A few friends were still alive. They stayed in the Swiss embassy. Most of the Jews were dead, but a few left alive in the Swiss embassy. And these friends had captured a Nazi. A stupid Nazi from the SS. Somehow they caught him before all the SS ran away, back to Germany. They wanted to shoot him, Tom. Execute him. But nobody wanted to pull the trigger. He showed them treasures he had stolen from Jews. This tapestry. It is two hundred years old. He wanted to buy his life. So I took it. I said I would shoot him, the stupid Nazi. He was in a cellar. I pointed the gun at his head. He said to me in German, “Madam, please don’t delay.” But I couldn’t shoot him. We gave him to the Russians to stand trial. They shot him in front of us. I took the tapestry to my apartment. I put it on the wall. I never knew what Jewish family it was stolen from.’
She had pointed a gun at a German. She’d wanted to shoot him. Hannah? He had no stories like this. He had once baulked at shooting a tiger snake because it seemed wrong for it to be dead. He’d watched it wriggle into a hole in the earth. What could he tell her? ‘Listen to my story. I saw a tiger snake. I didn’t kill it.’ His uneventful life.
Trudy had shown him that replacing iron on a roof, soldering up a gap in the spouting, dipping woollies could make a woman feel as if she were drinking poison, each day a few drops, enough to kill her.
All he knew was that day followed day. If the sheep weren’t dipped, they’d be full of lice and ticks and fungus. If he didn’t solder the spouting, the water would drip onto the window ledge and lift the paint and rot the wood. What could he say to his wife? ‘Trudy, it’s a farm, it’s not Luna Park.’
She’d once asked him to tell her something amazing. ‘Anything that’s not usual. Nothing usual.’ She was already willing him to fail. The one thing he’d thought of was a kookaburra years ago that used to sit with him on the back verandah while he sipped his tea. Then one day a blue tongue had squeezed under the back door and into a pile of kindling. He’d heard a tapping, and when he’d opened the door the kooka stalked in, threw the kindling aside, picked up the lizard in its beak and strutted out. That wasn’t what she meant.
‘But you will, won’t you? Marry me,’ said Tom.
He thought they’d agreed, but something he’d noticed: Hannah could go about beating a drum, then put down the sticks and shrug as if the matter had suddenly lost all its importance.
She said, ‘We must open, Tom. We must sell some books. Tom, make the cash register work.’
Chapter
10
THIS TIME Hannah stayed the night at the farm. It appeared that she wished to show contrition. While Tom prepared dinner, she looked around at the pictures: the work of Uncle Frank, who had taken up oil painting in the last few years of his life with a death-or-glory abandon. All the canvases had been grandly framed in gilt with an aged look and all were the same size: eighteen inches by twenty inches. Three of the pictures were of waterfalls: long curtains of blue running down the middle of the canvas, hemmed in by fat clumps of greenery. One was a portrait of a sheep’s face. By the looks of it, Uncle Frank had found the nose very difficult to render but he had tried, and the nose achieved the status of a separate portrait within the portrait. The two landscapes looking uphill towards the big boulders on the hillside above the farm gave the viewer the impression that a breath of wind would knock the stones down the slope, so slightly were they anchored to the earth. Hannah adored them all. In particular, a self-portrait in a hat with corks suspended from the brim.
Tom was keeping an eye on the leg of lamb, on the roasting potatoes, the pumpkin. For greens, he was providing string beans. And as a special touch, because he knew how to do them, dumplings: his mum had taught him. In answer to Hannah’s comment, he said, ‘I wouldn’t want to take them down. Old Frank was proud of them.’ Then he added, ‘They’re probably rubbish.’
‘I like them,’ said Hannah. ‘Are there others? We could hang one up at the shop, what do you think?’
Tom had the door of the wood stove open and was peering in. Hannah bent beside him.
‘Ready?’ she said.
‘Fifteen minutes.’
He put the beans on the hotplate. He wore a tea towel around his waist, tucked into his belt. He seemed especially cheerful.
He went to the big old murmuring Kelvinator and fetched out a bottle of wine. ‘Red with meat?’ he said. ‘Is that right? Moyston Claret.’
Hannah raised her eyebrows. In the refrigerator? She said, ‘Beautiful,’ as Tom placed the bottle on the table. A search high and low had turned up a white linen tablecloth donated to the household by Tom’s sisters. Without a steam iron, he perhaps could not be expected to have smoothed the creases out, and so ridges ran north to south, east to west on the cloth.
Hannah sat at the table to forestall the intervention she might not be able to resist. It gave her pleasure to follow Tom’s determined movements, even the awkward ones. He attempted to withdraw the baking tray from the oven with too little of the tea towel, burned his fingers, tried again and was forced to stride quickly to the bench and crash the tray down. Meanwhile, the gravy was curdling. But by persistence, he was finally able to fill two big unmatched plates with roast lamb and vegies.
He sat down, then jumped to his feet to fetch the cloth serviettes, again the gift of his sisters, and the salt and pepper.
‘I should’ve made mint sauce,’ he said. ‘And cheese sauce for the cauli.’
‘Tom. It’s perfect. Enjoy it.’
In fact, this was the first time that a husband or lover had prepared a meal for Hannah. It was surprising that she hadn’t insisted on it over the years. She’d been raised in an Orthodox household, not over-strict but strict enough. She’d turned angrily away from the harping of her mother on stitching and baking. Her four sisters? Obedient girls in their very souls.
Hannah’s father was her champion. ‘You want five of a kind? Have one blessed with a mind of her own.’ He’d sent her to university when it was impossible for Jews to enrol—he’d managed it.
But his ambitions for her had not quite extended to the neglect of the oven and the ironing board. And since she’d loved him very much, she’d made mottoes of his priorities: keep a kosher kitchen, feed the husband, study, practise. And when, in her first year, she became pregnant and married, it was to a man incapable of opening an oven door.
Leon, an intellectual giant, apparently believed an invisible spirit kept his household running smoothly. When Hannah spent three weeks in Pavdac Hospital with pneumonia, Leon had come to look increasingly homeless and unloved, his shirts more rumpled than if he’d slept in them. She’d kept house for two husbands without any resentment; wrote her thesis on the Hungarian Baroque while nursing a baby and baking challah.
Leon would sit at the table lost in a volume of Proudhon while she followed a furious choreography of provision all around the kitchen, Michael in a sling on her hip. After Auschwitz, when Leon was dead, she married Stefan, who sat at the table lost in a volume of Berenson while she slid one plate then another under his poised fork, this time without the baby, without the child. In 1956, Soviet tanks in the streets of Budapest, she slid plates under the raised forks of ten or more firebrands from the Council of Workers who’d piled into the apartment after throwing house bricks at Russians, and was rewarded (if that was the word) with a kiss on the cheek, a squeeze around the middle.
Nothing in her life had prepared her for Tom. She’d understood all there was to know about him at a glance that day in the shop, and was wrong. She came to Australia, understood everything in ten minutes, then didn’t. The same experience.
It was not the sort of heart, Tom’s heart, that she’d known in the past. Not the same anything, not even his mannerisms. He pushed his fair hair off his forehead with his upper arm. When he wished to tell her something difficult, he looked to his left, then at his feet, then raised his head and met her gaze. A little catalogue of these ways he had was added to each day. The detail of love. And something she particularly enjoyed—his long, clean limbs.
Why did his limbs matter? She stroked him all along his legs, his arms, and thought—this was ludicrous, of course—Mine, all mine. Over forty-five and suddenly sick with the jealous need to lock a man away from other women? It had always been beneath her. Now—God knows. This country. It brought unfamiliar things to the surface in her. At first she’d thought, Australians, children, they know nothing. It was what she’d thought of Tom.
But there was more to be said—she knew that now.
She asked him as they ate if he’d read more of Great Expectations. He had. He’d carried it about the farm in his big back pocket and had read from it leaning against the wall of the dairy, of the hayshed; as he doled out pellets to the chooks. He could get through thirty pages in an hour. Miss Havisham—she was mad, right?
‘Do you think she was mad?’ asked Hannah, recognising in her manner, regrettably, the demeanour of the tutor.
‘Well, yeah. Yeah. All the stuff going mouldy on the table. That’s mad, don’t you think?’
Hannah said (thinking, Dear God, will you listen to yourself), ‘Disappointment can be a passion.’
‘Pardon?’
‘Her feelings of betrayal—she lives for the passion of disappointment. She is faithful to it forever. It means more to her than marriage ever could. Do you see?’
Tom thought about it. ‘She wanted to be jilted?’
‘No, Tom. Not that. But look at the purpose it gives her. For her whole life.’
‘I think you’ve lost me.’
They enjoyed the steamed pudding, golden syrup, new to Hannah. Finished not one but two bottles of the chilled claret, then washed and dried the dishes side by side. Hannah thought: If he says marry me again, be less stupid, be less bloody stupid, say, ‘Tom, yes, with all my heart.’
They made tipsy love.
Before she could sleep, she had Tom open the curtains of the bedroom to let the moonlight in. ‘It’s the war, Tom,’ she said. ‘We hid in dark places days and days. Now I have to see outside all the time.’
He kissed her on her shoulders, her breasts.
‘Tell me,’ he said.
She thought about it for a few minutes. Then she said: ‘No, I don’t think so.’
He rose for the cows at 4.30 but left her asleep. So he thought. She lay in bed turning her gaze from the dresser to the cupboard and into all the shadowy places, raised her head to listen to the cows impatient for Tom. He milked by hand, as she knew. Just the twelve cows
, the hundred-pint yield per day destined for the elderly Swiss couple on Brown Dog Creek who made Tilsit and exported it to their native Basel. She’d asked Tom once about the smoothness of his cheeks. He told her that he milked with a cheek against the cow’s flank, turn-and-turn about. A milkmaid’s complexion. She heard the sheep in the paddocks, bleating because the dawn was coming into the sky. Tom said that sheep woke hopeful each new day. Optimistic beasts, not quite as stupid as they looked. Hannah thought, If he goes away, I’ll die. Then she caught herself. No, I won’t. Less melodrama! But what she really believed was that she would die. She hoped so.
She threw back the covers, wrapped herself in the spare blanket Tom had left beside the bed, shuffled about the house studying items on ledges and shelves. She switched on the light in the living room, its ugly green sofa and armchairs made shapeless by collapsed springs. This is what she was looking for—a picture of the boy Peter. It was propped on the mantelpiece, the embers of last night’s fire still vivid between the andirons below. She stood holding the blanket closed with one hand while in the other she held the photograph.
‘So,’ she said, ‘the child.’
The picture showed a boy of five or so in a school uniform, a bag hanging by a strap from his shoulder. The boy’s dark hair was neatly cut, neatly parted. His smile was as wide as he could possibly make it, so it seemed. Hannah recognised the corrugated iron wall of the workshop behind him, the bushy cotoneaster with its clustered pomes rising to the roof. Sitting at the boy’s feet was the dog, Beau, head on the side in the puzzled manner of a pet who’d been told to stay, stay. The sun was in his face, in Peter’s face, and he was squinting at the camera. The shadow of the person with the camera was thrown forward into the scope of the picture. It was Tom; she knew his shadow shape.
Hannah let her gaze rest on the boy in the picture for minute after minute. The golden-red light of the embers reached up to her face. She replaced the picture on the mantelpiece and walked with her head bowed into the kitchen and sat. The Saxa salt packet, with a hole for pouring punched in it near the top, still sat on the centre of the table.
The Bookshop of the Broken Hearted Page 9