The Bookshop of the Broken Hearted

by Robert Hillman

  It had to be conceded that Hannah exacerbated Pearly’s prejudice, well known in the town. He came into the shop one day looking for a Golden Book (The Little Red Hen was his choice; a grandchild’s birthday) only to have Hannah tell him that she kept a black rooster on the farm that could speak Hebrew.

  The CES sent Tom four pickers, said to be experienced but in reality hopeless: frightened of ladders, flies, doodlebugs, spiders. They were all one family, Assyrians from Turkey, accepted as migrants because they were Christian and spoke English; mum, dad and two daughters. The father, Hector, had altered his name and those of all his family at the suggestion of an immigration officer. He wore a beard that reached his chest and spent lunchtimes and smokos sharpening a knife with a twelve-inch blade; he kept a small black whetstone in his pocket for the purpose. And to demonstrate that any male Assyrian, even an engineer, knew how to use a knife, he skewered an apple on a branch with a throw of fifteen yards.

  The daughters, Sue and Sylvie, fourteen and fifteen, went about the picking languidly, singing along with Herman’s Hermits on a transistor radio tuned to 3UZ. The mother, Sharon, laboured long and hard, but it took her five minutes to climb a ladder. And her picking technique was rubbish. In a day, she might fill a single bin rather than the four expected. At night they slept all four in the spare room. They removed Uncle Frank’s paintings from the walls and pinned up pictures of Turkey, crewelwork embroideries of traditional Assyrian designs, portraits of The Beatles, Mick Jagger, Johnny Farnham. They had to be roused at seven in the morning for breakfast, an entire sliced loaf, a dozen fried eggs.

  The other picker was Bobby Hearst, who worked two weeks each summer for Tom. Up in the boughs of the apple trees he sang and giggled, took a bead on ‘gooks’ with an imaginary M14 and called ribald suggestions to Sue and Sylvie. Tom had to tell him that it was the custom of fathers in the land that Hector came from to cut the throats of young men who flirted with their daughters.

  Although with Hector it was difficult to know exactly what the knife meant to him. He was more philosopher than janissary, leaning on his ladder as Tom checked the quality of the pears in his bin to speak about the inner life of trees. ‘They are creatures, same as you, if you understand. The fruit, this is the children. When I take the fruit from the tree, I say sorry. The tree tells me, “It’s okay. But plant the seeds.” In this world, Mister Tom, how long we have been here? One hundred thousands of years? Trees, millions, millions of years. Millions.’

  A civil engineer in Turkey, Hector had lost his job when the government listed him as a subversive. Tom, smiling, asked if it was true.

  Hector shrugged. ‘Who can say?’

  Hannah picked apples when she could; maybe for an hour from five to six after her last student. Still plenty of heat in the sun when she climbed up into the foliage under a ludicrous straw hat the size of a Mexican sombrero—one of those occasions when she chose comfort over style. She picked by herself in the grove of Gravensteins that Uncle Frank had grown for some Austrians in Melbourne who used them to make Obstler brandy, a big thing in the region of Austria they came from.

  She chose the grove to keep out of earshot of Bobby’s war on gooks. And it soothed her to be up in the foliage. She needed soothing. That thicket of thorns between her and Tom: his love for the boy; his hope that Peter would come to him and stay.

  Hannah’s heart was not a parliament; instead, three or four despots shouting at each other. And the loudest of the despots roared: ‘You will leave him. If the boy comes, you will leave him.’ But what insanity. I’ll run from this man I love so dearly, this Tom? And live a life by myself? I will. I know it. I will. Yet all the while pleading with Tom in words she never uttered: Don’t bring the boy here. Don’t bring him. Don’t bring the boy.

  Up the ladder one afternoon Hannah paused, and in that pause allowed herself to recall another orchard. She might have let her thoughts drift like this on other afternoons, but no. Why more willing this day? Only that she’d been brushing tears from her cheeks up in the apple tree. Only that the soldier had been weeping that day years past when she and Eva and Lette traipsed starving through Poland and found a shack in an orchard where they sheltered themselves from the winter. Eva, who knew, said: ‘It’s a cider hut. In here they put bad apples for cider. With marks on them.’ The hut was bare. Eva and Lette huddled in their scraps of clothing on the earthen floor. Hannah went to look in all the places where food would never be found but against reason might be found, and found nothing. Until—high in one of the trees of the naked orchard—an apple: an apple that could not possibly be an apple because it was November and the harvest was four months past. And yet. Hannah climbed into the boughs and higher and with care plucked the yellow fruit as cold as a snowball, pushed it into her rags.

  Before she could descend, a soldier, German, hobbled into view on the track below, struggling in his progress, capless, one hand held to his neck. A boy, fair-haired, sixteen, seventeen. He carried no rifle.

  He stumbled and fell below Hannah’s tree. She remained still, clasping a bough, barely drawing breath. The soldier, the boy, lay on his back in the blackening leaves gazing up at the clouds, sobbing loudly. Blood ran through the fingers of the hand he held against his wound. The escape of blood from his body kept time with his pulse. It had soaked the shoulder of his uniform jacket all the way down to the Wehrmachtsadler emblem over his breast pocket.

  He saw Hannah above him and let out a scream. He must have thought her the angel of death in rags. His sobbing began again. He surely knew he would soon be dead. It wasn’t the sobbing of a man but of a child, the mouth distorted, tears flowing.

  Hannah could see that his holster was empty and the idea came to her that she might climb down and comfort him. Then another idea, more practical: that she might suffocate him. The sound of his sobbing would maybe attract Russians, because there must be Russians, who else would have shot him? And with Russians, you knew. They saw a woman, they thought of the obvious.

  But no, she stayed where she was and watched the boy relinquish his life, sobbing without abatement until he stopped. She continued to watch even when he was still, his eyelids no longer blinking, his mouth open in a rictus of grief. She climbed down, knelt by the body and thought, So tall for his age. She left his eyes open when she might have closed them, feeling that the final gesture towards the dead shouldn’t be hers because she didn’t know him.

  She went through the pockets of the uniform hoping for food, a biscuit he might have carried, something. But his pockets were empty; not even documents. Someone had already searched him, maybe the person who shot him. She rolled him over and searched his back pockets and found, dear God, squares of chocolate, schokolade, in a dark green wrapper. The German lettering on the wrapper read: Unsere Jungs. Our Boys.

  Hannah forgot the soldier instantly, and hurried back to the cider hut with the yellow apple and the Unsere Jungs chocolate.

  A breeze had come to the orchard, Tom’s orchard. Hannah enjoyed its touch. Her wet cheeks dried. It seemed inconceivable that she would leave Tom if the boy came back. This terrible obstacle to her happiness. The breeze lifted the brim of her big straw hat. This terrible obstacle to her happiness, just as the bookshop of the broken hearted was beginning to make its way.

  Better to think of success than the prospect of catastrophe. Hannah had recruited the CWA women to sell books out in the shire. They visited schools, service clubs, the region’s three libraries, and spruiked at afternoon teas organised for the purpose of unloading books. The women earned half the profit for the CWA. This left Hannah with a skinny margin, but not too skinny. Selling books—it turned out you could make your living. At about the level of a first-year post office clerk, okay. Nonetheless it thrilled Hannah. Look and see—a shop with a stock worth nearly twenty thousand dollars, overheads, Maggie’s pay. You could make your living.

  More than that, the writing of men and women of genius in the bookshelves of houses in the thirty-two towns of the s
hire, maybe Such Is Life sitting next to the folded pink sheets of the Sporting Globe on a bedside table, maybe a bookmark in Middlemarch. Okay, lots of nonsense too, Kisses at Midnight, Kisses for Breakfast, but Hannah considered the nonsense at least in the family: Nina and her bosom in Kisses for Breakfast, her pancake brain smothered in sugar and clotted cream, was the cousin of Dorothea Brooke—you would admit it, if you were not such a snob.

  Hannah had no sense of mission, no desire to convert the masses to art. But she kept count of the books she sold. Her target was twenty-five thousand, the approximate number of books burnt in Berlin on May 10th, 1933. At the moment she was selling around 110 books each week with the help of the CWA. So four years, five years. The delight for her when someone emerged from a house in the town, from a farmhouse twenty miles away, and brought to the counter a book that the students had set ablaze: The Trial, A Farewell to Arms, Women in Love, Anna Karenina, The War of the Worlds, Ulysses.

  Hannah was often surprised by who bought what. Civilization and Its Discontents was purchased by an aged woman with awkwardly applied lipstick who got about with the aid of two cane walking sticks. She was the grandmother of the Hometown GP, Bob Carroll, fetched out in her widowhood from Ireland. As it transpired, one of the first women admitted to Trinity College Dublin, back in 1910. The one copy of Ulysses went to Des Bond, a retired high school principal who’d come to live in Hometown with his wife for the trout fishing. He was reading his way through a list of classics from Punch he’d been holding on to for thirty years.

  This was not Budapest, the big apartment off Andrássy, nor the smaller apartment on Nagymezo where she lived first with Leon then with Stefan. Everyone who came and went had read everything, mad people with mad politics and all of them dead now with all of their appetites. No one postponed reading books until retirement. Yet the Hometown people, the shire people, were to be valued: very far from bohemians, but dear to Hannah. Here, Adolf Hitler would have brayed in vain. Maybe. Days came when she wanted to throw open her arms in the doorway of the bookshop and say—well, what? Something impossible, something offensively patronising, such as ‘God knows what’s going on in your Australian heads, but I like you all the same.’

  The harvest was eighty-seven bins above the previous year; cannery prices were well up because of the flood. Spring lamb was also likely to be boosted; thousands of sheep had drowned. Tom factored the high fruit price into what he paid Hector, his family and Bobby as an end-of-harvest bonus of seventy-five dollars. For the pickers, the bonus came out of the blue. Hector in his gratitude made his daughters dance a sort of Assyrian polka for Tom on the rusty soil of the orchard. He said that he would come back when his papers were recognised by the Australians and build Tom a dam. ‘You think I will forget? Never, Mister Tom. Five metres deep, rammed earth, across the middle an iron bridge. Woo ho!’

  Hannah made a meal with an Assyrian complexion for the final evening. Judging by the too-ready chorus of compliments from Hector and Sharon, with a few subsidiary words of milder praise offered by the daughters, the dishes were a failure. Considering the amount left on each plate.

  But the shared meal and the shared wine gave Hector an opportunity to more fully express his vision of a Turkey running with rivers of blood. It was not enough for the Turks that they’d murdered the Armenians, who may or may not have deserved it, who can say, but then they had to butcher the Assyrians? That was a day of evil; many days of evil. But an army was being built, said Hector, a secret army, men who were shopkeepers by day and assassins by night. And the time would come, God would see to it, when Turks in their thousands died in their beds.

  Sylvie the daughter said, ‘Oh, Dad, nobody cares.’ Sharon said, ‘The beryani, Hannah! Too beautiful. The potatoes a little more time in the frying pan. Next time.’ Hector told stories of massacres. His voice took on a chanting quality, as if something related to the sacred should be invoked for such tales.

  Bobby, who was also at the end-of-harvest dinner, lapped it up. He said, ‘Man, let me at ’em. Fucking Turks. Sorry.’ Sylvie and Susie teased him by pushing their breasts out and inhaling and exhaling deeply.

  Tom looked at Hannah, and Hannah looked back. She had no stories of her own ordeal to offer. Her face was a mask. Tom could only hope that Hector’s tales would not reach a point at which the Jews were added to the Turks as enemies of the Assyrian people.

  But no. Just the Turks. Hector did point out that Assyrians and Australians had a kinship in blood spilled by Turks. Gallipoli.

  Chapter 23

  MURDER IN the bush; murder in the big city—not the same thing. Most murders in the country occur in the afternoon, for one thing; in the city, at night. There’s a greater candour to the country murder, enacted in the broad light of day. And its contemplation is brief and direct, the commitment arrived at casually. No tussle with the devil, and no great to-do when it comes to concealment. The deed and its consequences are grasped together, as if the murderer had muttered, gathering his gear, rifle, blade: ‘Might hang for this.’

  Bernie Shaw was a newcomer to Hometown; eight years at State Rivers in Hydro Road, transferred from somewhere down south. He’d come with his wife, Lou. No kids, but Bernie kept a big, dopey mongrel, Huey, that he and Lou adored.

  After years of comfortable domesticity, Huey was led astray to Henty’s paddocks that winter by a feral from the tip, a genuine outlaw, half Huey’s size but a big enough complement of pure evil in his heart for both of them. They went killing. Huey discovered an aptitude for it—until the day when, his face buried in the hot guts of a spring lamb, he failed to pick up Henty’s scent. A hollow point .303 bullet carried his hind legs away. Henty strode down, cut the dog’s throat, and read the information conscientiously inscribed on its tag.

  He returned the carcass to Bernie and Lou’s house in Commonwealth of Australia Street, but at ten in the morning of a workday, only Lou was home. She screamed, she carried on, maybe not properly grasping that in sheep country a dog that went crazy in the paddocks was wearing a target.

  Later in the day Bernie, in a suit and tie, turned up at Henty’s house with a .22 and shot Henty’s wife through the head at the front door, then shot Henty himself in the workshop, not once but five times, reloading after each discharge.

  He drove the half-mile to Tom’s across the highway to tell him what he’d done. Bernie had picked fruit for Tom during his annual holidays from State Rivers, off and on, paid work, not this year. But why choose Tom? Because he could be counted on to keep calm? Something like that?

  Tom was up in the slough paddock tending a ewe that had gone loco, attacking other sheep without any clear motive. He heard his name called down at the house and raised a shout. A figure appeared at the gate in a suit and hat, what the hell? He watched as the figure negotiated the gate. Bernie Shaw, a rifle in one hand, suitcase in the other. Tom didn’t think Bernie’s rifle anything odd, not in this heavily armed shire. The suitcase, though. That was peculiar. And the hat and tie.

  Bernie said, ‘Tom, I shot Henty and his missus.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Yeah, twenty minutes ago.’

  Bernie waved a hand in the direction of Henty’s place. ‘Twenty minutes ago,’ he said again. ‘Both dead. You’ll want to be letting Kev Egan know.’

  Tom looked at him hard. If Bernie had gone mad, that would explain the shirt and tie and suit coat, the polished black shoes.

  ‘You shot Henty? You shot Juliet?’

  ‘I did, yeah.’

  Tom had been holding the loco ewe by the fleece. It had a maniacal glint in its eyes. He gave it a slap across the nose then let it go.

  ‘Let’s have the gun, Bern.’ He accepted the rifle from Bernie, drew the bolt. It was unloaded.

  ‘Okay, show me,’ he said.

  He strode with Bernie to the ute; left the rifle standing against the wall of the workshop. Bernie climbed in the ute’s passenger side, brushing the seat down first, hoisting the cuffs of his trousers. He placed
the blue suitcase between him and Tom and rested his hand on it.

  ‘Ready for the clink,’ he said.

  Tom said nothing.

  One neat hole between the eyes for Juliet. She had collapsed on her knees in the doorway, the screen door wide open. Juliet had been something of a rural beauty, smooth complexion, dark arched eyebrows. Murder had left an unattractive grimace on her lips. Tom let her remain where she was, after feeling for a pulse, and followed Bernie down to the workshop. Henty was on the floor with his knees up, his head and face a mess.

  No pulse.

  Shells lay scattered on the clean-swept concrete floor. Henty had been a fastidious man in his habits, despite neglecting his sheep. On shelves and racks along the walls of the workshop lengths of timber were stored up off the floor, sorted according to length.

  ‘Dead all right,’ said Tom. He’d been kneeling. Now he stood and put a hand on Bernie’s shoulder. Bernie was on the short side and had to raise his chin to look Tom in the eyes. The tip of his nose was red and shiny, as if an alarm had been activated.

  ‘Bernie, what in the name of Jesus?’

  Bernie raised his shoulders a fraction, then let them slump. ‘He shot Huey.’

  ‘Huey?’

  ‘Our dog. Huey.’ Tears rushed into Bernie’s blue eyes.

  Tom nodded, partly to show Bernie some understanding, partly in confirmation to himself that the man was insane.

  ‘We’re going inside to ring Kev,’ he said.

  Bernie said, ‘Yep. Yep. I’m good and ready.’

  The law took charge of Bernie; Father Costello took charge of the souls of Augustus and Juliet Henty. A long line of cars with headlights on rolled at walking pace from St Benedict’s on Federation Hill, down Alfred Deakin Way to Mercer Street, over Top Bridge and up Old Melbourne Road to the cemetery. Father Costello drove himself from the church to the cemetery in his old blue Fiat at breakneck speed (that was usual) and was waiting at the graveside in the Catholic sector when the mourners arrived.