‘And when you don’t have any paintings to sell? What then?’
‘Then is then. Tom, we can’t close the shop. Do you see? We can’t.’
She had paid out the lease on the house in Harp Road; Tom had hitched up the tandem trailer to the ute and moved her furniture to the farm. Everything except the Steinway: a professional piano handler came up from the city with two helpers and coddled the instrument all the way to its new billet. The big living room of the farmhouse had a smaller room off it that served no purpose at all—a sofa and armchairs that were never used, an oak secretaire, more of Uncle Frank’s paintings. This space would become the living room, and Hannah would teach in the big room.
Tom watched her sometimes with students. Their parents drove them out to the farm then accepted a cup of tea while they waited, or Hannah would pick them up from Hometown. At the Steinway, she stayed on her feet while the students played. She intervened by bending over and reaching around the child. She never lost patience, never said a harsh word. She might rest her hands lightly on a child’s shoulders and speak softly, encouraging a slower tempo. ‘You see what we need? Friendship. You and Henry Steinway. Perfect friendship. Later, you can say rude words if you wish, in ten years. For now, “Pleased to see you, Herr Steinway. I hope your sons are well. Pleased to be sharing this time with you.”’
Under the one roof and wed, what had delighted Tom in Hannah delighted him more. He looked down the hallway and saw his wife reading the Age on the kitchen bench—she read newspapers standing up. As she read, her feet played out tiny dance steps, her body unwilling to remain still. It stirred him to see her.
One afternoon after her students had gone, she called to him from where she was reading: ‘Tom! Mister Whitlam! An intelligent man!’ The federal election of 1969 was just past: a close-run thing, but not quite a victory for Hannah’s favourite. ‘I voted for him! Clever Hannah!’
She kept up her commentary of gleeful disdain in front of the big AWA television Tom had picked out at great expense from Vealls in the city. She groaned and covered her face with her hands during the ABC news and This Day Tonight, implored Bill Peach to cut loose in interviews. It was all personal. She watched Pick a Box without complaint but Bonanza, a favourite of Tom’s, she scorned utterly. Pa Cartwright and all of his sons were plainly homosexual, she said, and should be allowed to say so.
Earlier, the moon landing had enthralled her. She closed the bookshop on the day of the landing and invited everyone she knew who didn’t own a television to come to the house—thirty people, including kids. She was too excited to sit. Tom’s enjoyment came more from Hannah’s childlike excitement than from the fuzzy stuff on the screen. Why did it mean so much to her? When he asked, she said that it was an adventure that did not end in murder, a good and uncommon thing. ‘Vietnam, horrible, but the moon, Tom, the moon!’
Yet a part of her he couldn’t reach. She turned her eyes to him sometimes and she was a thousand miles away. He was nothing to her then, a stick figure. She would look away, raising one hand in a tired gesture. Once she said, ‘Tom, go somewhere else.’ He knew she meant for an hour, only an hour, but it was as if she’d struck his face. Nothing in him could take this calmly; he looked at the slump of her shoulders and wanted to shake the mood out of her. He’d go outdoors to the store shed with his stomach knotted. Shuffle up and down in the darkness where nail holes and rust holes let in fine rods of golden light. He thought of leaving, just in the clothes he wore. Came almost to the point of it. Knew it wasn’t possible. If he walked away, it seemed the flesh of his body would unwind from his bones.
After the mood, she would sleep close to him, grappled to him. This was her apology. No words, just the holding. Her body still remote, even as she clutched him. When she came back her desire made her violent and clumsy and she hurt him physically: seized the flesh of his neck and wrenched at it; took his hair in handfuls. He never uttered a sound. He forgave everything—but held back. He didn’t stroke her shoulders, didn’t kiss her. She would pull away, and he would be on the rack again.
Then he was left for a day or more—until her tenderness truly returned, and her humour—to ask himself if she really loved him as she said. He knew she did; he only had to think back to Trudy to be sure. Trudy, who for a time had said, ‘You’re beautiful when you fuck me, Tom-Tom’; who’d sometimes let him take her beyond herself. But she’d lost interest. He’d once tried to kiss her neck as he stood behind her on the verandah. He could recall the expression on her face when she whipped her head around: the surprise and anger.
Hannah didn’t look at him like that. Only it made his stomach knot, made him think of walking away when she withdrew to the place he couldn’t reach. He said, ‘I’ll get better at it. I won’t worry so much.’ But he would.
So they were together, properly together, except when they weren’t. And Tom knew, as if he was altering inside his skin, that certain things he’d once said to Hannah could never be said again. ‘How was it for you inside the camp?’—he couldn’t ask a question like that again. Nor anything about her boy. He had drawn too close to her to imagine that he could learn anything by asking her to speak of Michael, of Auschwitz. He saw that silence must be allowed its dominion.
Hannah’s episodes of absence were balanced by other occasions when she spoke happily of her life in Budapest, of her mother and father and sisters and brother; cousins, in-laws. She had to be in the mood, but once she got started and spoke of her family (never of Michael, however) she was everywhere: with her Uncle Arkady for a minute or so, then in her early childhood being taught by a governess how to appliqué fabric shapes to a bedspread with tiny stitches.
‘Governess, okay, but not really, she was expected to do everything, kitchen maid, laundry maid. She was only twenty, maybe twenty, younger it could be, black hair that reached half down her back, and her father was supposed to be a Greek, of that I doubt, she was not Greek by looks. My mother found her selling pogácsa at the railway station, biscuits made with yeast, on top some cheese, a baby in her arms. My mother, Magda—soft-hearted, Tom, she questioned the girl, who had nothing and lived nowhere, her father was in Romania, her mother had died running away to Hungary. The baby was not hers but her mother’s, so she said. But a Greek? No, no, the Greeks are not like Helena, she was Kalderash, Romany people, Gypsies, but at that time Hungary didn’t want any Gypsies so she said she was Greek. After two years she disappeared, for me tears and tears, she was kind to us, my sisters, me. I think my father paid her to go away. My Uncle Lem was maybe doing things with her. You know?’
And Shabbat, the Sunday of the Jews, the family gathered at the table on a Friday night, special bread, prayers, her father’s hand on the crown of her sister Judith’s head with an invocation and a blessing, all the food prepared in advance because after a certain hour the Jews could not cook. ‘A craziness,’ said Hannah, ‘but my father George Babel honoured Shabbat. My mother didn’t worry so much.’
Other uncles and aunts, more than Tom could keep in order. A certain Uncle Viktor with a birthmark on his cheek in the shape of Czechoslovakia, a vivid spot exactly where Prague would be found; Abigail, Hannah’s father’s eldest sister, who took on the role of wife for both her husband and her brother-in-law Aaron, two children to each, all very amicable. Cousins popped up to perform in Hannah’s tales: Daniel the eight-year-old maths prodigy; Susan, lame with polio, taken in her wheelchair to the top of a hill and allowed to accelerate down; Noah the movie fan, who wrote love letters in English to Hollywood actresses and received polite replies.
When Hannah talked of her family members she quarantined them from the Holocaust. She told Tom, just the one time, that all of her family had perished: all of her in-laws, everyone, thirty-two of them. She had in-laws from her second marriage still living in Hungary, yes. She wrote letters. But when in her gay mood she told of Noah with a note from Norma Shearer beneath his pillow, or of Susan, exultant as her wheelchair bounced down the hill, she kept them on thi
s side of a thick black line. And Tom was happy with that. He didn’t know what to do with mass murder.
He didn’t know, either, what to think about the money Hannah sent to her in-laws in Budapest—Stefan’s sister Antoinette, who’d crawled out of a cellar on the day the Russians came, not a word heard from her between 1944 and 1945. ‘Her mind is gone, poor thing,’ said Hannah. She was filling out an international money order in the post office; a second money order for Stefan’s grandmother, Golda, now eighty-five, cared for by the family of her former maid during the Nazi occupation.
‘Stefan was the one who was crazy?’ Tom asked. ‘That was him?’
Hannah said, ‘Crazy, yes.’
‘But you loved him?’
‘Of course. Very much.’
Tom nodded. ‘Do you miss him?’
‘I miss him. Yes, that’s true.’
And the question that he’d wanted to ask at the time Hannah had first told him of Stefan, but hadn’t: ‘Maybe you wish I was a bit crazy, like Stefan? Do you?’
Hannah looked up from the money orders and gave her husband fuller attention. ‘Tom, you are reliable. It’s a good thing to be reliable.’
‘But better if I was a bit crazy.’
‘No, no, no,’ said Hannah. Meaning, of course, yes.
Hannah’s thriving tribe, her family of geniuses and loons—Tom was fascinated. His growing up in Mordialloc had been…modest, he supposed; matter-of-fact. His father Gus, out in the backyard mowing the lawn, would pause and stand with his gaze fixed just above the rooftops, taking in the furthest part of the sky. As if his dreams were a kite, wrenched free from his controlling hand and now no more than a speck in the remote blue. His mother Liz puzzled out the Sun crossword each day, sitting on the back step, if the sun was out, with a cup of tea and a Craven A. She had a welt on her right calf from a burn she’d suffered one Guy Fawkes night as a kid and in her concentration she’d reach down and scratch it lightly with the end of her pencil. ‘Come and give me a hand here, Claudie love.’ Claudie, the clever one. ‘Six-letter word, third letter n, last letter y, means conceit.’
A modest family. Self-contained, apart from the outlier Uncle Frank. Tom had never known ritual gatherings around a table except at Christmas.
He hadn’t realised that there was no Christmas for Jews. He said: ‘What?’
‘Tom, we are not Christians. No, no. It’s okay. I can make a good Christmas for us. In Budapest sometimes we had a little Christmas. Sure. Presents, Christmas cake. One time a tree with lights. Mostly Hanukkah—that’s for Jews, Hanukkah. Cakes at Hanukkah, too. Games. About the same time, Christmas, Hanukkah.’
‘Jews don’t have Christmas?’
‘Tom, it’s for Jesus, Christmas. Who is Jesus to the Jews? A nobody.’
‘Truly?’
‘Tom. Listen to me. This Christmas, we will have Hanukkah at the same time, in the same house. We had rabbis in my family. I have the power to declare that we can have Hanukkah and Christmas in the one house.’
In the spirit of the coming season, Hannah urged on Tom a new book, A Christmas Carol, the novel that his uncle had read to him—a few passages of it at least. Tom finished it in three days. He enjoyed it more than any of the other novels Hannah had foisted on him. He was a man who approved of happy endings. In life itself, you didn’t get the chance to choose an ending. But if a writer could give Bob Cratchit a merry Christmas, then that’s what the writer should do.
Chapter 18
THE VALLEY and the river took in one of everything: a swamp below the overflow where the mudeyes bred and black swans battered their way through the rushes; a cataract that ran over fluted basalt by the Tennessee diggings; a seventy-yard breadth of deep current named the Mississippi Hole by an American who’d mined at the diggings; miles of fast, narrow-flow water where the spinning gums on one bank and the self-seeded walnuts from Tony Croft’s old stand arched over the stream close enough to touch.
The river feature nearest Tom’s place was what was known as the granite bridges. Not really bridges but a place where the water ran shallow over ribs of granite that lay beneath the skin of the flood plain. Upstream lay the Mississippi Hole; downstream the fast water below the spinning gums.
Some hours after midnight, two weeks before the Jewish–Christian celebration being prepared in Tom Hope’s household, the figure of a small boy stood by the granite shallows on the west bank of the river. He wore torn clothes, shirt and shorts, and carried a single leather sandal in one hand. He stared out across the flow of water, his body slack with the weariness that comes over children with a powerful fixed purpose, unheeding of the need to rest before the point of complete exhaustion.
After two days of travel by train and on foot, this was the site he’d been seeking—the crossing below the farm. Over those two days, no sleep, no food and, before he’d reached the river and scooped up some water, nothing to drink. When he’d commenced his journey, food and drink hadn’t been a consideration. It was the same now. The tension in his expression, his eyelids barely flickering, was far too mature for his small stature. He had the look of a fully grown madman.
The boy plunged into the river and waded forward, holding his one sandal above the water. He seemed to disdain the caution that would have better served the fording of a river in the dead of night. When the flow rose to his waist, he pushed on, striving for balance. He kept his gaze fixed on the bushy mirror plants on the eastern bank that glistened in the moonlight. By steady degrees he passed the halfway point, and further, until he was close enough to the overhanging branches of the mirror plants to lunge and seize hold with his free hand. He allowed the current to swing his body into the bank, transferring his grip from the branch to the rushes, and crawled to safety. Free of the current, he sat down in the water and rushes and gulped in air. He’d barely breathed while crossing, as if he’d been swimming underwater, lips sealed, cheeks puffed.
He’d torn his shirt and shorts climbing through barbed wire fences as he sought the course of the river, and he’d torn them again in Henty’s paddocks. He’d torn his skin, too. Trickles of blood, some hardened, some fresh, ran down his arms and legs, one on his neck. He crossed the highway, then walked along on its left verge until he came to the gate of Tom’s farm. Barely a dozen steps along the driveway, he heard Beau bark and his face relaxed in a smile. Within seconds, Beau emerged out of the darkness, his body shaking in a fit of delight. The boy fell to his knees to hug the dog. ‘I’m bloody not going away,’ he said to Beau, keeping his voice down. ‘I’m staying here, bloody well. I’m not going away.’
Hannah, with her phobia of darkened, concealed places, must always sleep with the curtains open. The windows faced west and at this time of night—after three, by Tom’s bedside alarm clock, the milking clock—the bedroom was lit by the moon. Tom made out a small shape shaking his bare shoulder. A moment or two of bafflement, then: ‘Petey?’
Hannah’s body stirred against his.
‘Petey?’
The boy stood still, arms straight at his sides, the single sandal clutched in his hand.
Hannah had now come to consciousness and was blinking at Peter in confusion.
‘Who?’ she said.
‘It’s just Peter,’ said Tom. ‘I’ll take care of it.’ And to Peter, ‘Petey, pass my under-junders from the chair.’
He lifted his legs and pulled on his underpants beneath the blanket. Then climbed out, knelt down and embraced the boy, who remained stiff.
‘What’s the story, old fellow? Come out to the kitchen. Let me see you in the light.’
Tom drew on his trousers and singlet. With a hand on the boy’s shoulder, he went down the hallway to the kitchen and switched on the overhead light.
‘Strewth! You’re a bit of a mess for a fancy bloke like yourself. Been climbing through fences?’
Peter nodded. In his expression there was a bleak patience, as if a certain amount of this and that would have to be endured.
Tom ran the ki
tchen tap onto a tea towel.
‘It’s come to this, has it, old fellow? Reduced to one shoe.’
He knelt and took the sandal from Peter’s hand, then dabbed at the scratches. The freshest scratch he patched up with a Band-Aid from the medicine box. He washed out the tea towel, wrung the water from it, cleaned up Peter’s face.
‘Don’t imagine your mum knows where you are?’
Peter didn’t respond.
‘Didn’t think so. What do you reckon? Something to eat? Some brekky? Toast and eggs? You sit at the table and I’ll see what we’ve got. Be a catastrophe if we were out of eggs, eh? Chooks laying twenty a day, shouldn’t run out, you’d think.’
Peter sat at the table, maybe a fraction less overwrought. Tom first served him a tall glass of cold milk. As he sipped it, he glanced around at the familiar and unfamiliar features of the kitchen. What he thought of the various new ornaments here and there he didn’t betray.
Tom said, ‘You want to tell me how you got here, old fellow? Give me a few clues?’
Peter said, ‘Train.’
‘What, you came by train? From Newhaven?’
‘Three trains.’
‘Three? Bloody hell! What, up to the South Gippy line then into the city? To Spencer Street?’
‘Yep,’ said Peter.
‘Then what? Train from Spencer Street to Cornford? Is that it?’ ‘Yep.’
‘Came into some money, did you? Cost you three or four dollars, all that travel.’
Peter said nothing. Then when Tom gave him more space for an explanation he said, ‘I didn’t pay.’
‘Well, I didn’t think you did, old fellow. And you walked from Cornford?’ Did he? Twenty miles?
‘Walked,’ said Peter.
Tom let the boy eat his eggs and toast without questioning him any further. He sat at the table, leaning back with his arms folded, his gaze on Peter. More questions would come shortly, of course, and Peter would know this. He understood, surely, that Tom was providing a decent sort of pause before he had to reveal difficult things. But then Peter called a premature end to the pause. His eggs and toast were only half-eaten.
The Bookshop of the Broken Hearted Page 14