The Bookshop of the Broken Hearted

by Robert Hillman

  Among the mourners, the two Henty daughters, Bea and Pip, tall, fair girls with their mother’s good looks, back from teachers’ college at short notice. Bea was bleached white by grief; Pip, the elder daughter, cool, composed. Later, at the reception (the mechanics’ institute rather than the farm, which after all was a murder site) Pip spoke to Tom of her father’s three thousand sheep, what was to be done, did he know, did anyone know?

  Tom said he’d tend them for the short term. Pip nodded. ‘Do you want to buy them? Do you want to buy the farm? It’s no use to us. I never liked it here. I like Glenferrie. Not here. That man, he’s mad, is he? Who shot Mum?’ After a pause, she said, ‘And Dad.’

  Tom said, yes, Bernie Shaw was mad. And he told her he didn’t want to buy the farm.

  =

  Or maybe he did. Over the weeks looking out for Henty’s sheep, he thought, ‘It’s not impossible.’ The paddocks that stretched back to the base of the pasture hills were underlaid with a rich, humid soil that had washed down the slopes over the ages. That soil threw up moist grasses all year round. Henty, who hated sheep, had run only the minimum he needed to make them pay, but it was clear to Tom that the back paddocks could feed twice the number.

  Henty’s five thousand trees—apples and pears, ill-tended, rarely pruned—perhaps. With the canneries paying high. Also, down by the billabongs, Juliet had recently prepared a half acre for strawberries—an experiment that she’d not been fated to see through. So that, too—the strawberries.

  Hannah said, ‘Tom, you want it, buy it.’

  They were looking about Henty’s place one evening in late spring. The magistrate who would sit as coroner, Ted Beach, had called by earlier in his old red Riley to take a quick look at the scene of the murders. It was Ted who’d given Tom’s idea of buying a nudge along. With Henty’s sheep and his own, Tom would have enough hoof to give guarantee of supply, which would get him preferred status from Garland’s. Same with the fruit: preferred status at the canneries.

  Ted had land of his own down the valley and knew what he was talking about. ‘Look to it, Tom. You’ll thrive.’ Then added, ‘Unless someone shoots you. Ha! Unless someone shoots you, Tom.’

  Set back from Henty’s house and sheds stood a two-storey barn built by the Germans who’d farmed the spread in the decade after the Great War. A superb piece of work on foundations of hewn granite so solid that every upright, every spar, remained dead square against a spirit level. In 1928, the Germans, the Baughmans, sold up and moved to South Australia to join a bigger Lutheran community; crazy, because the farm was thriving.

  The barn was too big and too peculiar for the Sullivans, who succeeded the Germans. Or for Henty, who’d bought out the Sullivans in 1950. It had been built to cater to farming practices a little alien to local husbandry.

  At ground level, it was divided into stalls and enclosures for the horses, but with offset entrances, so that the neddies needed to negotiate a turn before they were free. The idea was that if the swing door of the stall had been left open, the horse would still stay inside rather than make the turn, until urged. The roost for the chickens was attached to a pulley and hook, and a rope over the hook lifted the roost clear of the barn floor, out of reach of foxes. A device had been fitted, also dependent on pulleys and hooks, that made sure the roost rose evenly.

  On the interior, the walls of the barn were panelled in pine planks of a quality that would, in this day and age (so Tom told Hannah), be reserved for furniture. Hay was stored on the second storey—not a loft, but a fully built second floor with three trapdoors, the biggest for the hay; another for—probably—clean grain; another for silage, as Tom guessed.

  And look at this. Grooves chiselled in the granite-slab floor ran down to a gutter that emptied into a pit outside the barn, overgrown now.

  ‘For what?’ said Hannah.

  ‘Slaughtering,’ said Tom. ‘Pigs, sheep; bullocks, could be. To let the blood run away. Good lord. Thought of everything.’

  Stairs instead of a ladder led to the upper storey. Hannah wanted to see. The ceiling above was of pine planks, the same as the walls. The space between the ceiling and the tiles was big enough to act as a storage area with room to stand. Dust-covered, open-topped ply boxes, like tea chests but square, were filled with German magazines, German books. Left behind by the Baughmans for some reason.

  Hannah hovered over them in a chirruping rapture, using her handkerchief to clean the dust from the magazine covers. Jugend, Simplicissimus, Pan, Puck.

  ‘Tom, how can this be? These are art magazines, and satire. For a German farmer? Whose taste was this?’

  ‘Don’t know. I only know what Uncle Frank heard. Germans, four kids. Don’t know.’

  ‘And the books, the books.’

  Carpentered into the front of this attic area, below the shallow gable, a mullioned window with a latch and hinges. The glass was crusted with grit. Tom worked through the rust of the latch with his pocket knife, forced the window open. He and Hannah stood with their upper bodies in the air looking out over the farm all the way to the river, the hills, the billabongs, the sheep in the lush north paddocks.

  Hannah said, ‘We’ll sell the shop. The new shop will be here.’

  ‘What?’ Tom stared. ‘Will we?’

  ‘Do you see?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Don’t you see?’

  ‘A bit. Do I?’

  She was laughing. ‘Don’t you see? The books.’ She gestured at the plywood boxes. ‘Tom my darling, it’s a sign.’

  ‘A sign.’

  Hannah famously did not believe in signs.

  ‘Why not? My mind is changed. Signs are good. Signs are everywhere. The sign of the Germans. “Hannah, you pretty Jewish girl, use our barn for your books, please do.”’

  Tom reached up under Hannah’s loose red blouse and placed his hand on the small of her back. A ripple ran through her flesh. In Hannah, the world; in him, apples and pears, the sheep, the points that needed resetting on the ute. But between them, a living current.

  He wanted her to gaze at him in the way she had, as if she were too crazy for ordinary love, as if in sheer excess she might take his hand and bite it. She did, sometimes. He wanted it this way—that she had more power, more anger, more glee, greater ambition.

  ‘Han,’ he said, ‘people won’t come here.’

  ‘You think?’

  ‘It’s a farm. People won’t come way out here to buy a book.’

  Hannah smiled. ‘I will make them.’

  Chapter 24

  THE PEOPLE of Budapest, including Hannah Babel, came to understand that the Russians had the final word. Usually the Russians made their wishes so well known behind the scenes that it wasn’t necessary to say anything publicly. They were discreet even in such matters as murder. Bodies were never thrown out on the street but were buried quietly. So far as possible, the impression should prevail that the Hungarians were deciding their own future. The Hungarian Communists of 1919, who’d hoped for so much, had been allowed to return from exile in Moscow; resume their careers. The Russians said, ‘Don’t go crazy,’ and the grey-haired men and women accepted the suggestion, but with a certain amount of heartburn.

  A democratic election was held in November 1945. It was not unrealistic to think that the people of Hungary would appreciate what the Russians had done for them in the months since the end of the war—broken up the big estates and redistributed the land to the poor—and so vote for the Communist Party of Hungary. But no.

  The Hungarians voted in a party of conservative, church-going peasants who approved of the land reforms but spurned the architects. Feelings were hurt. The Russians, from 1946 onwards, dispensed with niceties and strove to establish a one-party socialist state. They succeeded. Of course.

  Hannah, back in Budapest early in 1946, walked straight into the apartment on Nagymezo that had been her marital home up until 1944. No reason to imagine that the apartment would still be unoccupied, but it was. A beautiful pl
ace, nouveau, richly coloured windows in the two bathrooms and the living room. Beautiful, except for the memories. Michael, Leon.

  Some of the household bits and pieces she’d left behind when the family fled to the countryside were there when she returned. Most, in fact. Only the two blue sofas were gone; the rugs, the wooden table from the larder. Even the paintings remained, until she sold three of them at bargain-basement prices in order to eat.

  When she tried to imagine some sort of plan, a future, all she could think was, Futile. The ambitions of obstinate, hateful men had picked her up and hurled her across borders, and now a new set of ambitious men had taken over the task.

  But at least she knew the Russians, understood them. They would not give Hungary back to the Hungarians. She would have to find ways to exploit them. An advantage was that she now spoke their language fairly well. Only don’t reveal it too quickly. Choose your moment. They would be suspicious, and in a Russian, suspicion rouses the remedy of a prison term. She must handle it carefully.

  She came to know that a certain captain in the military contingent attached to the political wing was a little less adamant than his comrades; had been seen to smile. It was his task to go about with a 35mm Leica taking pictures of anti-Russian graffiti on walls, but he also enjoyed snapping pretty girls. Looking out through the window of a shop in Lipótváros, she’d seen him with his ruddy boy’s face and wet pink lips hailing women in horrible Hungarian: ‘Russia! Ivan! Take nice pictures!’ The younger girls hurried away, but the women allowed him to do what he wanted. They were looking for an opening, an opportunity to ask a favour; maybe Ivan could find them some stockings or a butter ration.

  One of the lanes off Deák Ferenc Utca attracted patriots every night and the Russian captain came to the lane each morning to record the infamies. Hannah dawdled in the lane at the right time, applying lipstick (from Toruń; also the beautifully modelled compact mirror) and dressed in a way that showed off her figure. The youthful captain appeared on cue, caught sight of Hannah and jogged up the lane, beaming all over his chubby face. She allowed him to blunder along in Hungarian for a minute or two before revealing that she spoke his native language.

  He stomped about on the cobblestones in a fit of delight. He wanted to take her to a café. Yes? Did she agree? She did. Tea and cakes, photographs of his wife and three-year-old daughter. And of an icon he’d rescued from the ruins of a church in Łódź, kept as a curiosity. Ha ha! Would Hannah pose for him? Not in the street, in an apartment he shared with another officer in Belváros. She would.

  The apartment was surprisingly bright. Hannah had expected something squalid—a place away from the barracks where the captain and his comrade enjoyed the women they picked up. It was swept clean and dusted; dishes were drying on the sink. The floors were bare, but not raw. A portrait of Comrade Stalin hung above the varnished mantelpiece in the place that a crucified Jesus would once have occupied. Two neat rooms at the back, a narrow bed with clean white linen in each. The windows of the sitting room opened onto a street of shops and traffic below.

  This housewifely tidiness was the taste of the captain’s comrade, Vasily Vasilovich, a shy, dark-haired lieutenant from a suburb of Leningrad. Hannah saw in him immediately the type of boy who endures painful thoughts of naked girls day and night, replete with declarations of love. She saw, too, that her cheerful captain would want to photograph her naked. She would decline, but would lounge about for him, perhaps pout. And when the time came, ask him to find a job for her in the Szabó Ervin Central Library. Her university qualifications would commend her, up to a point.

  The captain accepted in good grace Hannah’s refusal to undress for his camera. He photographed her in what he termed his ‘classic’ style, but now and again asked her to look more ‘casual’—smoke a cigarette, gaze into the lens with her chin resting in one hand, a teasing smile. Vasily Vasilovich brought her perfume—purchased or informally acquired—and cooked for the three of them.

  The fact that Hannah could speak Russian endeared her to the captain and the lieutenant so completely that force was never a threat. The Russians were permitted to kiss her on the cheek, fondle her hand, but further than that—no.

  She heard everything there was to hear about Vanya’s family, about Vasily’s parents and his lame sister, consoled them when they wept (all the time), toasted Comrade Stalin with beer, brandy, vodka. They danced polkas and waltzes to records obtained almost legally when Ivan Ivanovich tipped off a tobacco merchant about the coming state monopoly on cigarettes: the gramophone and records were the merchant’s expression of gratitude for being given time enough to unload his stock.

  A position at the library. What could be done? Budapest was governed by a municipal authority, itself governed by a Russian general. At the level of minor municipal appointments—librarians, for instance—the Hungarians could please themselves. No one-time fascists, no anti-Communists; otherwise, go ahead. The Russian administrators were more concerned with hyperinflation.

  Vanya spoke to a political officer who kept watch on the general’s staff and on the general himself. The political officer was indebted to Ivan Ivanovich for procuring high quality black-market coffee and Crimean cheeses. He told Ivan Ivanovich to send Hannah to the library on such and such a day and ask for such and such a person, who would put her on the payroll. She would be paid in roubles. Not very many, but better than the Hungarian rubbish. As for actually finding some way to occupy herself at the library—well, if she wished.

  She did wish. Of the twenty library personnel, most held sinecures and had no competence with books. A few were passionately mad about the collection. Hannah aligned herself with the passionately mad while contriving to keep her wits.

  The chief of the library, an anxious, exhausted man in his seventies with a habit of sighing at the start of a sentence, told Hannah it would be her task to check the volumes for signs of wear once they were returned from the thirteen reading rooms. And to check, twice daily, that the books had been reshelved in their correct place, which they never were.

  The library collection was superb, books in seven major languages and also in minority languages of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. The building itself was a neo-Baroque monstrosity, once a palace: glitter and gilt and mirrors and varnished teak everywhere. But surprisingly easy to get used to. Best of all, the books. She was happy to discover that the library had never been subject to a purge of Jewish authors. Hannah in white gloves turned the pages of pre-Renaissance manuscripts, some with finely carved pear-wood covers, the illuminated vellum heavy in the lifting.

  Lette came to Budapest to make her home after two years in Debrecen. The mourning for her husband was over and a new husband had taken his place, Isaiah, an architect. Almost impossibly, he’d survived the labour squads of Jews that the Hungarians and Germans had worked to death in the last year of the war.

  Wife and husband moved in with Hannah, and in this way Hannah came to meet Stefan, Isaiah’s nephew, twenty-seven years old, one of the few Jewish men of his age left alive in Hungary. He’d lived a feral life on the streets from April 1944 until the arrival of the Russians in early 1945. Handsome, confident, full of a violent, nihilist energy, he came to dinner at the apartment and sat humming songs from Hollywood movies. He shrugged when asked to speak, but then without warning began to babble.

  Isaiah had asked a question about the intentions of the Russians when it came to the Jews.

  ‘Oh, the Jews, the Jews, I met one the other day, the most elaborate fairy story he told me in his tallit and tefillin and his lovely little kippah. Even the Nazis had a more plausible yarn to tell. Even the Russians. I had to strangle him.’

  Isaiah smiled. ‘Nobody takes you seriously.’

  ‘No, no—don’t take me seriously. Don’t take what comes out of my arse seriously. Don’t take my piss seriously. Nothing, please! Except this.’

  He picked up a banana from the fruit bowl—Lette had found two of them in the Armenian market.


  ‘Please take my banana seriously. Of course! This is a very serious banana.’

  He was attracted to Hannah. He said he would marry her, take her on a honeymoon to Niagara Falls and throw her off. He was studying at the drama and film academy, but fitfully. ‘You know the best film you will ever make?’ he said to Hannah. ‘The film you don’t make. Plan everything first. Write the script. Find the actors. On the first day of filming, fire the actors and burn the script.’

  But in bed, he clung to her like a child. A gang had cut his back with razor blades to make him admit he was a Jew. He’d escaped, but the scars remained. Hannah soothed him. It was only in the dark that he could endure tenderness. She grew exasperated in the light; his scorn for her insistence on better and worse in people. And especially his mimicking of her words of love and concern.

  ‘I am Stefan Sweetheart,’ he said, ‘I am Hannah’s sweetheart. Call me sweetheart, and I’ll call you my darling. I am the darling sweetheart, and you are the darling sweetheart. But Lette is not the darling sweetheart. Lette is the dearest dumpling. Lette is the dearest dumpling of Isaiah. Plump and content.’

  Nevertheless, she married him. He said, ‘Well, we choose our fantasy, don’t we? This is a nice fantasy, a marriage, a chuppah, a little old rabbi from Kecskemét with long grey whiskers. Bad teeth, but who can be fussy after the Nazis?’

  He was a drunk, but not of the worst sort. He didn’t lash out. Instead, he sat with his bottle and amused himself by dreaming up schemes of the sort that appeal to teenage boys: building underground ant colonies for humans and melting the polar caps with atomic explosions so that Budapest could have a beach. Other ideas he chose for their offensiveness. Auschwitz could be turned into an amusement park. Lemonade would fall from the shower heads. Cakes would be baked in the ovens.