The band was called Gearchange: Angus Mac on bass guitar, Col Fast on fiddle, his two sons on drums and steel guitar. Tom had nailed together a stage of untreated pine in the middle of the backyard with the idea of bringing them on in the early evening. But for a hundred bucks Col was willing to commit his boys to eight hours of performance, and the music started while the roast meats were being carved. Jenny Kitson, channelling Patsy Cline in a black sequined dress, threw herself into ‘The Wayward Wind’ with a plangency that won Bev’s deep approval, tears in her blue eyes as she bustled about the kitchen with a Turf between her lips and a meat fork in her hand.
In the absence of a father or mother on either side, Patty took the role of senior relative. At five in the afternoon, with a flock of white cockies forming a rowdy gallery in the thistle gums, she called for attention with the traditional tap of a fork against a champagne glass.
‘If I could have your attention!’
Children by this time were running wild. Mothers called them to order: ‘Kevin! Georgina! Get yerselves over here! Now!’
‘If I could have your attention!’
Patty offered a compact speech in which she did not refrain from informing Hannah she was a bloody big improvement on Trudy. Tom, unexpectedly asked to say a few words, and with no bridesmaids to thank, simply said that he was a happy man. He mentioned briefly that he was ‘learning the classics’ under his wife’s tutelage.
Hannah declined to speak at first, then bowed to the pressure of the crowd. ‘Very well. Very well.’ She kissed Tom on the cheek before standing, and spread her arms in an embracing gesture towards the very large number of people who’d made the trip from town to the farm.
‘Thank you for coming here,’ she said. She always had a natural huskiness to her voice, more exaggerated today with emotion.
She had come to Hometown, she said, because she was sick of Europe. ‘They wanted to murder me. I wasn’t so special. They wanted to murder all the Jews. Even after the war. Here, nobody wants to murder me. I love the Australians.’ And then: ‘Eat! Drink!’
When she sat down, she whispered to Tom, ‘I shouldn’t have told them that, do you think?’
‘It’s okay, darling. And it’s true.’
‘Australians, they don’t want to hear about murder. I don’t know why I said it. But I am sick of Europe, Tom, yes. Budapest I love, but I’m sick of it. I want only to be with you. That’s okay?’
‘That’s okay. That’s good.’
Hannah’s only European friend in Australia had made the trip up from St Kilda, George Cantor, dapper in old age, a superb head of silky white hair, kippah pinned at the back of his head. He shuffled up behind Hannah and whispered in her ear, ‘You are very beautiful, my love. But stupid. No murder at the wedding.’
Then Kay Collins asked if she could say something. ‘I love this fellow, this Tommy, our Tom. I love Hannah. I want to sing a song.’
A gaudy sunset extended itself over the western hills. Rupe Stevens and his wife had undertaken to milk the cows and Tom was free to dance with his bride while the colours in the sky deepened and disappeared. He shuffled competently through Jenny’s rendition of ‘Tennessee Waltz’ and ‘He’ll Have to Go’, but it was a trial. The more Hannah drank, the friskier she became. She wanted Tom to take her to the bedroom, and had to be persuaded to consider how that would look.
Past eight in the evening, under a sky teeming with stars, the guests started to wend their way to the line of cars parked along the driveway. The diehards sat in small groups on the verandah holding their glasses with defiant resolve. The women among them were not yet ready to resume the ordeal of the household, while the men were closing in on that teary stage of lost love and loneliness. The food was gone, except for what remained of the salads. The trifles? Not a morsel left. The Hutchinson kids from the Catholic ghetto on the wrong side of the tracks, appetites adapted for unrationed banqueting, had licked the big glass bowls clean.
Tom was called away to chase a gang of kids out of the highway paddock. Hannah said, ‘No, stay here,’ but the matter was urgent: Stubby would go crazy and run into a fence.
Hannah stared at the patch of darkness into which Tom had disappeared, accepted in a distracted way the good wishes of more people departing. A distress had grown in her that she’d hoped to fix in bed with Tom. She left the last of the guests and walked all the way up to the boulders in her high heels; she spread her hands against the gritty face of the tallest one. The big moon coming up in the east turned the stone the white of bone.
She said, ‘Forgive me. I am not even on the continent where you died. Forgive me. I couldn’t stay there anymore. One day they smile at you in the street, the next day they hang you from a lamppost. I couldn’t stay, my darling boy.’
Chapter 16
THE RUSSIANS were cheerful. They had won the war. Not quite, but any time now. The Germans were retreating and would soon be trapped in the cities of their homeland, blown to blazes by Allied bombers. The soldiers, all from the east and not in fact Russians but Siberian Mongols, were ignorant and happy and hoped to hunt the Germans to their final refuge and slaughter every one of them. It was carnival time, a happy time, and thank God for the senior Russian commanders—sophisticated and astute—who knew how to restrain their gleeful Siberians. The Russian commanders allowed the Siberians to rape ethnic German women but not women who had escaped from the Nazis, particularly not Jewish women who’d suffered in the camps. They did, of course, but they were not supposed to.
The women in Hannah’s care, their number reduced to eight by illness and death and departures, were not raped. Those who were ill were sent to a Russian field hospital for treatment. The senior officer commanding the Siberians in this small corner of Poland saw to that. He was a Moscow Jew by the name of Zalman: an educated man, committed, austere. He’d seen the camps that his Siberians had liberated. He told Hannah (their common language was German) that it would eventually be revealed that the Nazis had murdered not hundreds of thousands of Jews, but millions. He was not sentimental about those millions; he was merely stating facts. His great mission was not to show how vile the Germans had been, but to uphold the authority of the Party. He wasn’t a political officer, yet he behaved like one. He said to Hannah, ‘If you were in our army, I would watch you like a hawk.’
There were quite a number of women among the personnel of the rifle division commanded by Lieutenant Colonel Zalman. They were not armed. They worked as typists, as secretaries, in food preparation. They were from the east, like the field soldiers, and had an Asiatic look, but were not Mongolians.
Zalman was austere in his demeanour, yes, but he had a taste for informed discussion. He came to the farmhouse every second evening for dinner with Hannah. They avoided politics. Hannah, as Zalman saw, was likely to say things that were too satirical for his taste. Instead they discussed literature and philosophy. His learning exceeded hers but she didn’t embarrass herself. She intended to ask him for a safe-conduct pass before he moved on with his Siberians—something that would permit her to move at will in the Soviet-liberated lands and return to Budapest. She studied Zalman’s serious face over the superb meals prepared by the women from the east, and asked herself if he had ever known laughter.
He poured out Plato with such sincerity that it made her smile. She said one night, ‘Plato wanted to get rid of people he didn’t approve of—isn’t that right? Actors, writers. He wanted them shot.’
Zalman held up a censuring finger. ‘There were no firearms in ancient Greece.’ He had the most beautiful eyebrows Hannah had ever seen on a man—perfectly shaped, and with the lustre of some gorgeous animal’s coveted pelt. His lips were red, but not in the way that the lips of the malnourished can redden. No, Shmuel Zalman’s lips were red as wine in betrayal of some hidden complement of the sensual running in his blood. Hannah was sure he wanted to sleep with her but couldn’t admit it. These humourless discussions over the best food anywhere in Poland were actually feasts o
f unconscious seduction. She didn’t want the seduction to go any further.
In early February of 1945, Zalman and his Siberians were ready to press on towards Berlin. Tanks had arrived, many of them. The soldiers climbed onto the tanks, ten or more holding on to the structure, even straddling the cannons. They shouted out war cries as they departed.
Zalman watched with Hannah. ‘They are very bloodthirsty people,’ he said. ‘They fought us for years. We Russians are their natural enemies. Now they want to kill Germans. If I told them that the French were our enemies, they would kill Frenchmen.’
Zalman intended to say farewell to Hannah the following morning. It was arranged. He had been encouraging her to live in Russia, even as he was writing her a pass for safe travel in Russian-controlled territories. He said he could fix it. But he didn’t appear at the farmhouse the next morning. Hannah feared something bad had happened, and it had. She learned from one of the cooks from the east that Lieutenant Colonel Zalman had been arrested and was being taken back to Russia. The cook spoke Russian at the same barely competent level as Hannah. For what reason had Lieutenant Colonel Zalman been arrested? The cook said: ‘Political.’
Hannah, having heard that the Russians were now in Toruń, to the south, persuaded two of the remaining women in the farmhouse to attempt the journey to the city. The prospect was that they could catch a train once in Toruń and find their way back to Hungary, which was also under the control of the Russians. It was a dangerous thing to do. Zalman had gone, and with him the protection he gave them. Even at the farmhouse, they might be raped any day. They might be raped every day. Most of the Siberians had gone away on the tanks to kill Germans, but more Soviet soldiers would come, maybe as bad as the Siberians, maybe worse.
Out on the open road, the danger would be even greater. The Russians had advanced so rapidly that some Germans had been caught behind the leading units of the push to Berlin—Zalman had told Hannah this. Some were still to the east, on this side of the Vistula. And not only Germans: also units made up of Soviet soldiers who had deserted two years earlier to fight with the Germans—Kazakhs, Tajiks, true barbarians. These deserters were effectively already dead—they wouldn’t allow themselves to be taken prisoner. To fall into their hands would be a catastrophe.
But Hannah and her two friends—Lette and Eva—took to the road with enough food for a week in hand-stitched fabric bags. They feared the deserters, they feared the Germans, they feared the Soviet soldiers. But staying put was worse. If they walked down the roads of Poland to Toruń, they were at least facing their fate. Captivity, rather than making them timid, had emboldened them. They had seen their fellow prisoners selected for the gas chamber in Auschwitz; they’d seen women they had lived with as intimately as family fall to their knees on the road, seen them shot by the SS. Now they marched down the road to Toruń . Ready to accept whatever the absurd world sent their way, and yet hoping above all to live, to prevail, to walk the streets of Budapest.
But a week’s food would not see them to Budapest. The farmhouses they came upon on their journey south had been stripped bare by the Soviet soldiers, who were well in advance of the supply corps and had to feed themselves. Hannah, Lette and Eva muddied their faces and hair, hoping to appear too wretched to rape, and approached the camps of the soldiers to beg for food. They were lucky on occasion; at other times they had to run like Olympic sprinters, hoisting their dresses to free their legs. They at least had reasonable footwear, taken from the corpses of refugees along the roadsides. They’d learnt quickly to undress the corpses because some of these once-desperate people had edible stuff concealed close to their skin—fragments of wheat biscuits, bones, potato skins—preserved by the winter chill. Most of the dead had been shot by retreating German troops or by the units of deserters, but some had succumbed to illness. Hannah counselled restraint—better not eat anything from someone who’d died maybe of typhus.
They left behind a piece of animal hoof discovered in the rags worn by a girl who seemed to have been stricken by some disease or other. After about twenty paces the three of them turned as one, ran back to the girl and chewed on the hoof by turns.
In Toruń Hannah found the main hospital, now run by the Soviets. She offered her services, in Russian, and those of Lette and Eva, as bandage folders and cleaners to a harried doctor. He said, ‘Yes, yes,’ thrust them towards an appalled nurse and rushed away. The nurse was one of the Asiatics. She told the three women that they must shower and disinfect themselves, and provided them with coarsely woven underwear and ugly grey dresses. The three women didn’t say so, but they were not about to stand under shower outlets. Not after Auschwitz. They scrubbed themselves with warm water and washed the grime from their hair in a bucket. The disinfectant they ignored.
And so began the three months, March until the start of June, that they spoke of as their Polish vacation. The work dried up within a week of their arrival at the hospital. As the Soviet troops raced through Germany towards the Berlin prize, Toruń quickly became too far from the fighting for casualties to be sent back to the hospital. Hannah, Lette and Eva mopped floors at a slow pace, bathed the bodies and brushed the teeth of soldiers who either were unable to use their hands or no longer had any, and helped out in the canteen.
The food came up from Georgia and Azerbaijan. An administrative error had resulted in an allocation of food for three hundred patients and three hundred staff. In fact there were ninety on the staff, including doctors, and seventy patients. Hannah ate herself into a stupor on Georgian raspberries. Breakfast, lunch and dinner each comprised three courses for staff and patients. In six years of war, nobody had eaten this well. The great hope was that it would take a year to capture Berlin.
The three women were assigned an apartment in a building dating from the seventeen hundreds; it was said to have been the property of a wealthy German family up until a few months back. The Germans had filled this part of Poland with their own nationals over the past century, but they were all gone now. The apartment was equipped with modern plumbing and a magnificent kitchen tiled in blue and white. If it had been known that the apartment was so attractive, it would have been assigned to far less lowly folk than Hannah and her friends.
All sorts of things had been left behind by the fleeing Germans—wardrobes filled with garments, ornaments, pictures. Even the larder was well stocked, not that Hannah could be bothered with opening cans of walnuts in red wine; she was too well fed. But she did try on the garments. Before a tall mirror supported by carved porphyry figures of nymphs, she stood admiring herself in a long coat and hat of black fur. The shoes were too big for her—the mistress of the house must have had feet like pontoons—but the dresses were about right. She went walking in the streets of Toruń dressed in fine clothing, even the fur coat, not actually required in late April. Her hair had resumed its massy form, shining from the application of the German family’s shampoo.
The city had barely suffered any damage from the German occupation; there were many buildings from as early as the fifteen hundreds, also a castle built by the Nazis of their age, the Teutonic knights. Fine city walls still standing. Hannah hummed tunes as she strolled, accepted the surprised glances of Soviet soldiers as approving.
But it’s not a life, filling your stomach with food three times a day, wandering a foreign city in the clothes of your enemies. It’s not a life, but something vacant going on in perpetual dusk. Hannah did not feel confident that there was anything you’d call a life waiting for her in Budapest, where Leon would not be, where Michael would never bring her a picture book and plead with her to read him the words. As he once had. Once.
Nonetheless, she told Lette and Eva one morning that she would be taking the train to Berlin, then another to Budapest. Lette said, ‘God help us, we will go with you. We have only the one travel pass.’
Eva agreed at first, then changed her mind. She was having an affair with a Russian anaesthetist three times older than her twenty-one years. He wanted to take h
er back to Moscow, divorce his wife and marry her. Eva said, ‘I love him.’
Hannah and Lette shrugged. The anaesthetist was an attractive man and full of Russian nonsense. No sense arguing.
Chapter 17
APART FROM Bev and Kay, almost everyone thought of the marriage of Tom and Hannah as mad. But people enjoyed seeing them together in the shop, as they were a few times a week. They came to enjoy Hannah in particular. She told them stories about the storytellers, also her personal theories concerning the private lives of writers: that Agatha Christie had been a nymphomaniac as a younger woman and that William Shakespeare had kept a Jewish mistress. Many other theories. As the weather grew warmer she kept a chamois under the counter to pat her face dry without ruining her make-up and offered each customer a glass of lemon squash with ice.
Seventy books a week she sold, sometimes eighty, ninety, including the five-dollar romances and the Lone Wolf westerns she stocked for Juicy Collins’ brother Aubie. All of Hannah’s money had been invested in the stock—thirty-five thousand dollars. At seventy books a week—Hannah was too vague to do the sums, so Tom did—she would be bankrupt in about a year. Hannah nodded when Tom, with the figures in front of him at the kitchen table, told her the bad news. She said, ‘I’ll sell the Fragonard drawing to Victor in Prahran, and the De Chirico. They are worth more than the whole shop.’
‘But Han, you can’t run a business like that. You’ve got to have more coming in than you’re spending, not the other way around.’
‘So you think I should close the shop? I won’t. And Maggie. This is the best thing in her life. I can’t.’
Maggie looked after the bookshop from 3.30 onwards while Hannah was teaching her students. Fifteen, crossed in love, she came recommended by Joan Swan, the high school English teacher: ‘Take her mind off things.’ She shone in her role as shop girl and was besotted with love for Hannah.
The Bookshop of the Broken Hearted Page 13