The Bookshop of the Broken Hearted

by Robert Hillman

  At times the marriage disappeared. Stefan would go missing for weeks. Hannah searched for him all over Budapest. She found him living in a shack on the riverfront; in an abandoned biscuit factory; in the ruins of a Jewish nursery. He was attracted to sites of dereliction, any place that breathed squalor, hopelessness. It made him happy in some way only he understood to have his feet in a puddle of mud with scraps of windswept rubbish forming heaps against broken walls. And Hannah thought: Why did I marry him? I’m a nursemaid. What was the point?

  Maybe she thought he could be made new. Maybe he could be persuaded to wear a clean suit, attend the academy each day, set aside his bottle, feel love or at least a little warmth stirring in his heart. Hannah wrote his assignments, those that had to be completed on paper, wrote his scripts, but the filming she couldn’t master. He was thrown out of the academy, a day of triumph for Stefan. He took up painting again for a few months—his first love. He painted Hannah naked three or four times a week. And girls he met on the street.

  Hannah found him a position at the library; invented a position. He was to fashion a new catalogue in Latin. (He spoke Latin, of course he did, in its desuetude the perfect language for him to have mastered.) No such catalogue would benefit anyone, but at the pace that Stefan worked it would take him a hundred years anyway.

  By good fortune, the work suited him. He immersed himself in past ages in the way he gave himself to dereliction, and Hannah realised for the first time that squalor was for Stefan an escape. Such relish of buildings in ruins, empty lots full of debris; and the past was an endless expanse of waste, of dead time where nothing could happen ever again.

  Hannah was right about the pace of his labours: he spent months creating entries for the ten volumes of a fifteenth-century study of the soul’s anatomy.

  She added water to everything he drank, tiny amounts, secretly, and in this way, by slow degrees, reduced the quantity of alcohol that entered his system. It surprised but did not bother her how readily she adopted deceit as a tactic.

  An odd effect of Stefan’s being more conscious at any given time was that he became involved with a gang of desperados from the university and the arts academy, old friends who had staked everything on getting rid of the Communists. The apartment became the meeting place of these boisterous people. Lette and Isaiah, who saw trouble ahead, moved out.

  Isaiah told the students they were mad if they’d thought the death of Stalin would change anything in Eastern Europe. ‘Do you know who comes after Stalin? More Stalins!’ Hannah was sure that Isaiah was right, but she lent herself to the moment, permitted herself to soak up the glee of Stefan’s friends, prepared meals for ten and fifteen people at a time, let her waist be encircled by the arms of exuberant young men who relished the idea of taking her to bed (this she did not permit) before they went out to murder their enemies.

  But why did it matter to Stefan, the revolution? Democracy, this is what he wanted? When Hannah questioned him, he became uncharacteristically coy. ‘Well, you know, a little liberty, who can complain?’ The high delight in his eyes when he hurried out the door with his friends carrying hessian sacks full of bottles that would become Molotov cocktails.

  November 4th, 5th, 6th, 1956—that was his life. Three days. And when he came back to the apartment on each of those nights he made love to Hannah like a crazy person, after many months of barely touching her. He’d climbed onto a Soviet tank with Milan from the academy and helped him spike the muzzle of the cannon. Heady days!

  And then he was dead, carried back to the apartment and stretched out on the kitchen table, a hole the size of a billiard ball in the white flesh of his breast.

  Hannah closed his blue eyes, kissed his lips, walked through the maelstrom of the battling streets to find a rabbi.

  After Kaddish, Paul, the leader of Stefan’s cohort, honoured him with an epilogue. ‘The bravest of us. Nothing stopped him. A warrior for freedom.’

  Hannah, watching, listening, said to herself, ‘That’s it for me. No more husbands. All they want to do is die.’

  The Russians had their victory. A puppet government was installed. Within a month, the furnace of revolution had cooled. People said, ‘This is our lot, then. Live with it.’ Those who couldn’t live with it were shot or imprisoned.

  The library reopened after a short interval. When Hannah returned, she spent more and more time reading in the stacks. She thought, ‘Life, I don’t care. Books, so much better.’ She read through everything from the Renaissance, and later: eschatology, the exploration of the New World, manuscripts on bird life. By some quirk of administration, she continued to be paid roubles, both her own salary and Stefan’s.

  After several more years of indulging her sinecure, she made up her mind to migrate. To somewhere. America, it could be. England. France. Australia? Now there was a coincidence. She’d been reading an article in the TLS about the fiction of Patrick White. Was this a sign? No. But then she decided it was, and began enquiries. With her languages and her qualifications in music, she could teach high school children in Australia, so it was revealed.

  Australia. Really? All she knew of it was Patrick White. Oh, and kangaroos.

  Chapter 25

  HANNAH BOUGHT a used FB panel van in February of the new year and drove it about the state gathering boxes of books, sometimes five hundred volumes at a time. She was aiming for a stock of thirty thousand, which the new shop would easily accommodate. When had she been happier?

  The bookshop in Hometown was sold to Ron Coombes, the dentist, who intended to set up a fishing emporium with a complement of books about trout and cod. Maybe a couple of copies of The Compleat Angler to give the collection a bit of class. All this for his retirement, still ten years off; the shop would be tended by Kerry O’Connell in the meantime, famous in the shire as the man who landed a five-pound rainbow with a Twistie on a three-barbed hook.

  Bigger than any vehicle she’d driven, the FB. It thrilled her. Her little Austin was gone, traded in, she didn’t miss it. In Templestowe she purchased the entire library of an Italian scholar who’d died six months earlier and carried it back in the FB in two trips. His grown-up children said, ‘Take the books. You want to pay something, one hundred dollars.’ He’d been a professor at Milan University before his kids brought him to Australia on retirement. Everything was in English, his teaching language. His ex libris plate read, in English: Emmanuel Vittorio del Pierro owns this book. In Italian, too, and a woodcut of a skull, but with long hair.

  She went everywhere, the countryside vivid after the autumn rains even in the far north-west. Tom came with her just the once, to a deceased estate in Nagambie. He was insanely busy on the Henty farm and with all the carpentry at Hannah’s new bookshop. Hector and Sharon took over the running of Uncle Frank’s property in a shared profit arrangement. They lived in the Henty house. The two girls, Sylvie and Sue, went off to high school each day, singing together in their sweet, soft sopranos as they waited for the bus on the highway: ‘These Boots Are Made for Walkin”; ‘Yellow Submarine’; ‘Raindrops Keep Fallin’ on My Head’.

  The new bookshop, the German barn, would stock on the upper floor the secondhand books that Hannah had fetched from far and wide. The new books from the Hometown bookshop would be stocked on the ground floor. Tom built the shelves from the store of cedar timbers he’d used for the old shop. These shelves were taller than the first lot; Tom had to install running ladders on both the ground floor and the upstairs. He set Hannah to work polishing with beeswax the aged pine timber of the wall and floor, all of it free of knots, good clean bright planks nine inches wide.

  One afternoon, dripping wet after dealing with a suicide pact by twenty sheep to drown themselves in the river, he found Hannah sitting on a saw bench lost in a novel. She looked up and smiled. ‘Tom, you’ve been swimming?’

  He lost his temper with her for the first time. Did she think this was a holiday camp? Did she think that the shop would ever open if she sat on her behind while the f
loor waited for her to finish a chapter? She recoiled from his anger, as if she’d been about to spread her arms but now had to take two steps back.

  ‘Tom, I’m sorry.’

  ‘Well I’m sorry too, Han. I’m sorry I can’t rely on you to hold up your end. That’s all I’m asking. For you to hold up your end while I hold up mine. We’re not in Budapest with your arty friends. This is bloody Australia!’

  She had to laugh. ‘“In Budapest with your arty friends”?’ The laughter came bubbling up and spilled out almost in Tom’s face. ‘Tom, dear Tom, I’m sorry, sorry, sorry. Oh goodness!’ And the laughter came bubbling up again. Tom stopped himself hurtling forward in his anger, and smiled. He saw what she meant.

  Hannah jumped up and kissed him.

  ‘My arty friends,’ she said. ‘Madame Babel and her arty friends.’ ‘It makes me sound like a yokel, doesn’t it?’

  She held him close. ‘Madame Babel and her arty friends invite you to the opening of her arty bookshop. Her bookshop and Tom’s—Tom the cocky. He’ll wear his work boots for the occasion and say, “Gorblimey!”’

  ‘Australians don’t say gorblimey. Cockneys say that. You ignoramus.’

  ‘Oh, so you’re a cocky but not a cockney! Silly Madame Babel. You should make love to me. You know? Why don’t you take me inside and make love to me, Cocky?’

  He did. Despite everything. Then returned to work on the bookshop in dry clothes.

  As gorgeous as the Hometown shop had been, the barn surpassed it. Hannah fixed her Hebrew signs to the glass door that Tom had installed, so this was still the bookshop of the broken hearted. Hannah took out ads in the literary quarterlies, Meanjin, Overland; in the Age book section and in Rupert Murdoch’s Australian. The CWA ladies remained as busy as ever on the bookshop’s behalf. Hannah gave lyrical talks at all the schools of the shire on the benefit to the soul of reading. The students listened alertly, because the lady was possibly mad and might do something interesting.

  She kept the ads in the Age running for three months, all she could afford. Readers of the ads were made aware that the experience of browsing in the barn on the idyllic Henty spread would act as a gladdening agent on their hearts—words to that effect. A little excessive; but this was advertising, so.

  The new bookshop of the broken hearted opened without fanfare in the spring of 1971, just in time for the first visitors to go gaga over the antics of the new lambs. And astonishingly, they came. Better still, they bought books. The trip from the city had to be justified. There was a new taste for Australian literature, and books by locals were emphasised in Hannah’s ads. ‘Your country. Read it.’ Bring Larks and Heroes and Picnic at Hanging Rock were both popular. And, by a happy coincidence, the bookshop was conveniently close to such established tourist attractions as the granite bridges and the goldmining sites at Mississippi Hole. Worth a look.

  Maggie came to work full-time at the shop. As if to announce her commitment, she took up her gorgeous black tresses and bunched them on top of her head. And she wore her spectacles, set aside while she’d waited for her absconding boyfriend to repent and return to her embrace. The boyfriend and his absence no longer tormented her. Hannah had to wonder whether Maggie had modelled her new self on librarians in Hollywood movies, and was maybe destined one day to loosen her hair, discard her spectacles and win the heart of a handsome stranger.

  And then on a day of sunshine and bird chorus came the letter from Tennyson and Moore, and the thriving structures of happiness and plenty that Hannah and Tom had laboured to set in place faltered and fell.

  Chapter 26

  PASTOR SENT Trudy’s mother Monique and sister Tilly to talk sense to her. She had been saying that her son must go to live with Tom. She said this was what Peter wanted, too, as he’d told Pastor.

  Pastor said to Trudy, ‘Do you consider yourself incompetent? You’re saying you can’t raise your own son?’ And Trudy said, ‘Yes, I’m incompetent and I can’t raise my own son.’ Trudy’s mother and sister knew that it would do no good to tell Trudy what Jesus had to say about obedience and families; Trudy didn’t like Jesus these days. She was insistent: Peter must go to Tom. She had done a bad, bad thing in taking him away from Tom to start with. And the punishment must stop. It must.

  What Trudy meant was the thrashing. Peter was thrashed weekly now. No other child had ever been punished so regularly. Compelled to watch, Trudy believed that she would do anything to stop the punishment, the strap. She didn’t know what she would do to stop it, but she was getting desperate. Her entire life seemed to her a blunder—one long blunder. Away from the punishment room, nursing her distress in bed while her son was locked in another room with a bolt on the door, she whispered to herself: That man loved you. Didn’t you see?

  Peter also whispered. In his own narrow bed, he said, I don’t care. But he did. On punishment days, he had to put himself into a trance: stop believing that anything was real, even pain. It was easy to ignore Judy Susan when she twisted his ears and pulled his hair. He didn’t care about her. He saved himself for his sessions with Pastor on the front pew of the church. Pastor sat sideways on the pew, his head turned towards Peter, legs crossed, his elbow resting on the upright part of the seat, chin in his hand. He smiled in a kindly way throughout each interview. Peter didn’t respond to any question put to him. Remaining silent was the one pleasure in his life.

  ‘Peter, do you know what it means to live in the love of Our Saviour?’

  ‘Peter, do you know how dark Hell is?’

  ‘Peter, do you understand that Judy Susan punishes you out of love?’

  It was Pastor’s practice to set a piece of paper on the pew between him and Peter. His questions were written on the paper, also arrows pointing to notes on the side of the page. Peter read what he could of the notes in brief glances. Does he know that he is being cruel to God? The comfort of J— remind him. And on this day the word Guardian in a circle.

  ‘Do you know what the word guardian means, Peter? It means I will be in charge of you. I will be your father.’

  What Peter would have said if he’d lowered his dignity and addressed Pastor was this: ‘You can’t be my father because Tom is my father.’

  Pastor said, ‘There will be punishment. I know your backside is still sore from last Monday. It hurts more when your backside is still sore, doesn’t it?’

  Peter didn’t reply.

  ‘And Peter, not ten but twenty. I won’t tell Mister Bosk to stop. It will be twenty.’

  Peter shrugged. At seven years old, he was intuitive enough to see that he was the winner every time Pastor gave him punishment. But this was no more than any torture victim grasped: there was no sense of triumph in it. And it didn’t stop it hurting. It hurt a lot.

  Pastor shifted on the seat. Peter noticed that he raised one finger on the hand resting on his knee. It was a sign of impatience, so Peter guessed. Good.

  ‘I want to tell you a story,’ said Pastor, ‘about the days before I found my brother in Jesus Christ.’ Pastor shifted on his seat again. ‘I was an engine driver for many years, Peter. Many years. I drove locomotives all over this state. Freight trains, passenger trains. Judy Susan was not my wife in those days. My wife was Margaret. She gave me two sons, Walter and Carlisle, from Margaret’s maiden name. You know what a maiden name is, Peter?’

  Peter might have shaken his head without breaking his vow of silence. He didn’t.

  ‘That’s the woman’s family name before she marries and takes her husband’s family name. Margaret Carlisle. She gave me my two sons, Walter and Carlisle, as I said. My two boys were killed in their teenage years, Peter. They drowned in the rip at Kilcunda, one trying to save the other. Strong, handsome boys, clever boys. But they drowned in the rip at Kilcunda. Peter, do you know what is meant by a broken heart? Probably not. It is an ache in your heart that won’t give you any peace. A broken heart. My heart was broken, Peter. Margaret’s heart was broken in half. Then the nosebleeds came and Doctor Smithers down in M
oorooduc sent my wife to a specialist. Do you know what a specialist is Peter? An expert. He found a brain disorder. My wife Margaret lost her wits and was placed in an institution. Jesus Christ came to my aid. Strong love, Peter. Strong love. When Margaret lost her battle, I took Judy Susan as my wife. But Jesus Christ I took as my brother. And Peter, I will lead you to Jesus if it costs me my life. I will.’ Pastor prodded Peter’s chest with his finger. ‘You can go.’

  The story meant little to Peter. It wasn’t even true. Margaret was still alive. She worked in the kitchen, old and frail with only a few tasks to occupy her. And silent, except when she spoke to Peter. Not many words at a time but always gentle. There was nothing wrong with her brain.

  What troubled Peter was the ‘guardian’ thing. If Pastor became his father, Peter would kill him. Exactly how, he didn’t know. But he would kill him.

  The punishment went ahead as scheduled. Twenty cuts with the strap. Mister Bosk paused at fifteen but Pastor nodded instead of stopping the thrashing. Peter bled. Trudy shrieked. Tilly seemed about to object, but in the end kept quiet. Peter, for the first time, cried out as the final blows landed.

  Chapter 27

  EYRE HEATH Moore of Tennyson and Moore advised Tom in writing that his former wife, Gertrude Christina Hope, presently of Jesus Camp, Phillip Island, had expressed a wish to place her son, Peter Carson, presently of Jesus Camp, Phillip Island, in his, Tom Hope’s, permanent care. Would Tom be further advised that Pastor Gordon Bligh, presently of Jesus Camp, Phillip Island, had made application to the Department of Child Welfare of the State of Victoria to be appointed legal guardian of Peter Carson on the grounds of the mental incompetence of the mother, Gertrude Hope, herself presently in the care of Pastor Bligh at Jesus Camp, Phillip Island. No application for custody would be made by the child’s father, Barrett Carson, who had died in Brisbane in October 1969. If Tom wished to exercise his legal rights in this matter, Eyre Moore urged him to seek professional representation. Tom would find enclosed four letters written to him by Gertrude Hope over the past six months. The letters had been confiscated by Pastor Bligh, but had now been released on the advice of Eyre Moore. A total of sixteen letters written to Tom by Peter Carson, also confiscated by Pastor Bligh, had been sighted by Eyre Moore but had not been forwarded to Tom since they included unsubstantiated claims of a problematical nature.