The Bookshop of the Broken Hearted

by Robert Hillman

  It was to do with the lady, so Peter deduced. With Tom’s wife, who was gone. He didn’t think that Tom needed the lady, but he grasped that strange forces were at work in the world around him. In his mother, when she’d stabbed Pastor. And Judy Susan, who’d chopped off all her hair. Mister Bosk, plunging his hands into boiling water to show he was sorry for the thrashings. The old lady, Pastor’s first wife, standing at the door of the kitchen when Pastor’s body was carried from the church on a stretcher, calling, ‘Fare thee well! Fare thee well!’

  The fixed purpose of his life had been to get back to Tom. It had come about. And now, the flopping hands, the bowed head—he hoped it would pass.

  A morning in May. George Cantor, not seen since the day of Tom’s wedding to Hannah, stood in the doorway of Tom’s workshop casting a shadow over the oil-stained floor. Tom, heart-sore as he so often was but finding solace in the painstaking, looked up from his workbench. He stared at George, with his eighty-two years, silver hair and tweed jacket, and felt moved by a premonition of welcome news to smile.

  ‘George.’

  ‘Mister Tom Hope. May I enter?’

  ‘Of course. Of course.’

  George wore his kippah further back on his scalp than was usual among Jews, as he had at the wedding—an affectation of his synagogue in Budapest, according to Hannah. Also, he liked people to notice his silky locks. Such was his vanity.

  ‘You’re looking well, George, I must say.’

  George had approached the workbench, curious about the task he’d interrupted. He shrugged at the compliment; leaned over the latches that Tom was cleaning with Penetrene and emery cloth.

  ‘I’d shake hands,’ said Tom, ‘but mine are dirty.’

  George snorted, lifted a hand and shook. ‘I’m an engineer. Dirty hands, who cares?’ Then, ‘These latches, Tom. Antiques.’

  ‘From the barn. The bookshop. I thought I’d give them a bit of a birthday.’

  George nodded his head in approval at the care Tom was taking. He’d brought the latches back to shiny steel, scraped out every pinpoint of rust.

  ‘The shop,’ said George. ‘I’d like to see it.’

  Tom gave George a more probing look. He was no longer sure he was about to hear good news. ‘You came all this way to see the bookshop?’

  ‘Maybe. Can I?’

  Tom cleaned his hands on the old blue towel kept on a nail above the workbench. ‘You won’t want to walk,’ he said. ‘It’s on the other property. A good half mile.’

  George smiled ruefully and gestured at his legs with both hands. ‘At my most optimistic, I’d say I could manage it. You know what? I’m optimistic today, Mister Tom. Let’s walk. My car is parked outside. Leave it there.’

  On the right, the highway paddock, where Stubby and Jo lived in what amounted to a boutique hospice, since both were dying, at a lazy pace, from being too old to go on living. To the left, the rehab paddock for sheep that had torn themselves on barbed wire, the wounds becoming infected, and others who’d been bruised all over by attacks from hoodlum sheep—mysterious motives, these sheep who battered their brethren. For the torn sheep, antibiotics, and for the battered sheep, verbal consolation from Tom, a scratch between the ears.

  The sky was vastly extended in its autumn stillness; the oaks along the driveway turning gold, but gradually. Tom couldn’t match himself to the serenity of the season. George would not have come all this way from the city without news of Hannah. Why would it be wrong to stop and say, ‘George, for the love of God!’

  But, what? Appear avid? No. Happiness, for Tom, was a fugitive; when it appeared, it had to be roused to confidence, encouraged. Anything too gaudy and it might slip back into the shadows, perhaps forever. He said, ‘I wrote to you. I found your address in the telephone book.’

  ‘You did,’ said George.

  ‘I called your number. Three times. You kept hanging up on me.’ George nodded, slowly, to emphasise that he accepted the blame. He shuffled along in his two-toned shoes, cream and brown, for another ten minutes, pausing every so often to admire something close by (the sheep in the sanctuary) or far off (the stands of myrtle beech up on the pasture hills, more vivid than the surrounding eucalypts) before finally speaking of his mission. He did not look at Tom, but kept his smiling gaze on the myrtle beech.

  ‘Hannah,’ he said.

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘What is she doing?’

  ‘Doing?’

  ‘What is she doing, Tom?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘She is taking her revenge on God.’

  ‘What?’

  George had stopped in his shuffle and was now facing Tom, looking up from his—well, what was it? Five and a half feet?

  ‘You understand?’

  ‘No, George, I don’t. Where is she?’

  George resumed his shuffle.

  ‘Her boy is taken from her in Auschwitz. You know this?’

  ‘I do.’

  ‘She says, “never again”. To God, she says this. “Never again.” So.’

  They reached the front gate. George had closed it on his way in. He wanted Tom to appreciate this. ‘Farmers, they like you to close the gate.’

  ‘Thank you, George. Where’s Hannah?’

  ‘God lets her love. Then he takes the boy. Never again.’

  Tom ushered George across the highway with caution. The accepted, as opposed to the legal, speed limit on this stretch was whatever you liked. George attempted to stop in the middle of the highway to make a further point, but was not indulged. He spoke up once they were over the highway and through the gate of the Henty farm.

  ‘You hear what I said, Tom? God lets us love. This is all we can ask. If it becomes a catastrophe, that’s a horrible thing. But God lets us love.’

  ‘Where is Hannah, George? Can you tell me?’

  ‘The boy, you have him? Where is he?’

  ‘He’s at school. Peter. Where’s Hannah?’

  George lifted his shoulders and let them fall. ‘Everyone wanted her, Tom. You know? She was very fussy. No to this one, no to that one. Then yes to Stefan. Yes to Tom. All of her family died. All of my family, Tom. I shouldn’t speak of happiness. But I will. No to everyone. No to me. Yes to Tom.’

  A green Valley Tours bus stood in the parking area beside the barn, passengers boarding with their bookshop carry bags. This was one of Maggie’s innovations. She’d petitioned the company that ran twice-weekly tours up the valley to make the bookshop one of the agreed stops. The tourists ventured into a couple of old goldmines led by Teddy Rich, a local history fanatic; studied the river at the cataracts and the marvel of the Mississippi Hole; purchased conscientiously prepared meat pies and Cornish pasties from Stella at the Hometown Bakery; gazed in fascination at the granite bridge upstream from Uncle Frank’s farm; alighted one final time at the bookshop before returning to the city. The finest remaining German Lutheran barn in Australia, now Australia’s most beautiful bookshop. An extensive range of new and secondhand titles. Maggie’s copy.

  He saw Hannah through the window before she saw him. She was farewelling the last of the customers from the bus. George put a hand on the small of Tom’s back. ‘She told me to drop her off at the bookshop. She said, “Find him, George. If he is bitter, don’t say anything.” So I found you. In my judgment, you are not bitter. Forgive her, Tom. She has been six weeks at my apartment. Not a word. A zombie.’

  Tom stood stock-still. It was as if she’d never been away. Smiling, saying something pleasant to a woman with a haystack of yellow hair and a big woollen scarf, unnecessary on a warm day. What came back to Tom first was an intense, painful, splintery pang of love. Then anger. George must have felt it in Tom’s body, his hand pressed where it was. He stepped in front of Tom and seized his hand, squeezed it tightly in both of his. Tom’s gaze was fixed beyond George to Hannah, who had yet to notice him.

  ‘Tom, hear these words. Please. This folly of hers—forgive her. You turn your back on her, she is fin
ished.’

  Hannah had seen him now. She held her chin high, her gaze fixed on her husband. Then she faltered, dropped her head. When she lifted her face to Tom again, the despair was plain. She made a beckoning gesture to him with one hand. Tom remained rooted to the spot for a minute, more, then stepped into the shop. Maggie hurried out to allow them privacy.

  The bus, departing, tooted twice. Hannah raised her hand and waved. The hand descended slowly.

  ‘Tom.’

  David the canary, on top of the cash register, had recovered from his torpor and was twittering away in what must have been gibberish even in birdsong.

  ‘What the hell, Hannah?’

  In a summer dress of pale gold that Tom hadn’t seen before, Hannah nodded slowly. ‘I should go?’

  The past exerts itself to influence what follows it—a bid for immortality. In that room of books, of glowing timber polished with beeswax, Auschwitz loomed, the dead child, a dead husband, the shorn, the doomed, shoes piled outside the door of an underground chamber.

  But with equal insistence, miraculously, happiness: patches of it, some quite expansive. Creases in a white dress smoothed out with a flat iron, slipped over the head, the smell of the starch, the warmth of the fabric. In the cheval mirror, turning this way and that, a promise of what might follow. Hannah still owned that dress when she met Tom many years later, wore it for him, lifted it above her head while he lay waiting in bed one Sunday afternoon. He’d tried to say something, but it had caught in his throat. She’d said, ‘We love each other,’ and ten seconds later was in his arms.

  Now, on this day of her return, he took three steps and drew her to him, held her with a fierceness that might have hurt her. With his mouth against her ear, he said, ‘Never again, never, never.’ Then his anger had to have its way. He stepped back and with his hands on her shoulders, glared at her in warning. ‘Do you think everyone feels this? Do you think it’s just ordinary? Hannah, it’s not. And you can’t go running off like that.’

  Hannah looked away, on her face an expression that hadn’t quite settled into penitence. She shook her head, tears gathering. It was only at this moment that Tom realised she’d had her curls cut shorter. He wanted to say, ‘Let them grow back,’ but couldn’t, in the situation.

  She managed to speak at last. ‘Tom, I had to go. And I had to come back.’

  This is what Tom had feared, if she returned, when she returned: words that leaked from the muddle within her when all she had to say was what George had said: she’d made a mistake.

  ‘Hannah, you make your mind up now if you’re staying. “I had to go and I had to come back.” What next? “And then I had to go again.” Enough, Hannah. You stay. You care for Peter. And if you can’t, we have to go our separate ways. Hannah, I can’t go through this again, waking sick with worry every morning. One thing I learned from Trudy, if your wife doesn’t want you there’s no hope. It’s just pretend.’

  Hannah let out a wail, brief, truncated. Maggie and George watching through the pane of the front door shared a murmur of alarm.

  ‘You think I wanted to go? Are you mad? Tom, he sat at my feet. He thought I would protect him, his mother. In seconds he was gone. And where? Into a nightmare.’

  ‘And this is the answer? Another nightmare?’

  Hannah paused. Her gaze settled on David. She smiled at him, exciting the bird into an even more extravagant outburst of song. This temporising might have been designed to keep her from saying something about equivalence. The nightmare that Tom was speaking of could not be compared to a child carried away to be murdered.

  For her to say so could lead to nothing good.

  ‘Tom, I want to come back.’

  Nothing was said for a short time.

  ‘I want to come back. I want to stay. Peter, I will care for him. He doesn’t like me, but no matter. I will care for him.’

  Tom looked away. His arms were crossed, giving the impression of a more obdurate state of mind than was actually the case. He uncrossed them. ‘Yes, come back, Hannah.’

  She smiled. ‘That’s what you want?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I am to come back?’

  ‘Yes. Please.’

  The grief of Poland coiled itself in corners, banished for the moment by books and beeswax. And by this homecoming. A woman in rags who watched the camp diminish in the distance as she walked away, a woman who lived long enough to love, to marry, recall the warmth of an ironed dress, had enjoyed a type of victory. We might say. Not to waste it, surely.

  On the counter lay the green, cloth-covered ledger in which was recorded the tally of books sold over a period of three years. Sales had not yet reached the magical figure of twenty-five thousand. But it was easy to imagine that in a few more years that figure would be eclipsed.

  Chapter 34

  THE CHARGE was murder, not manslaughter. The best efforts of Bunny Gorman, Trudy’s barrister, to persuade the DPP to see reason had failed. But what the judge told Gorman, in private, was: ‘Harp away at mitigation.’

  Peter was not required to give evidence, and needn’t have attended the trial at the Supreme Court at all. But Tom said he must, and Hannah agreed. The three of them were permitted to take seats in the courtroom, given precedence over mere stickybeaks. Trudy sat calmly through the preliminaries, nicely dressed, her hair at its most attractive length. She glanced at Peter every few minutes, smiled, lifted her hand once to offer a little wave.

  Trudy’s mother and sister were also in attendance, distressed, sobbing. And Judy Susan, now as thin as a matchstick, her hair slow to grow back. The voices in the courtroom were subdued. Gorman and the judge appeared to enjoy a genial relationship, and the barrister was once addressed by the judge as ‘Bunny’. It was as if everything that would transpire had already been adjudicated and all that remained to do was follow a script: Bunny murmuring his lines, the judge accepting his cue, the Crown happy to accommodate the mellow flow. Trudy pleaded not guilty, and the judge murmured, ‘Of course, of course.’

  Peter listened to everything. He smiled at his mother when she smiled at him. He knew that she cared for him; he knew that she had stabbed Pastor to stop the thrashing. But he didn’t love her, and when he smiled, it was only to be kind. He remembered Trudy in the first few months of Jesus Camp screaming at him about obedience, saying he was stupid, calling him a country bumpkin.

  She had changed: instead of country bumpkin she called him ‘poor child’, but the harm was done. She had taken him away from Tom, and kindness was as far as he could go. Or a bit further. Perhaps pity. He knew his mother was mad.

  Hannah was mad, too, in a different way. In the four months since she’d returned, Peter had sensed her drawing close, only to back away. Then she didn’t back away. Often she couldn’t keep herself from putting a hand on his shoulder and letting it run down his back. He saw her catching her lower lip between her teeth. At dinnertime, she would sometimes sit with a fork raised a few inches from her plate to watch him as he ate.

  Peter had changed over the two and a half years of Jesus Camp. Many of the people he’d known at the camp were out of their minds (not in the same way as Hannah). In the midst of the madness, he became calm. Pastor had to be fought, yes, and he would never give up returning to where he belonged with Tom, but otherwise he kept calm.

  It was like a pool of clear water within. He could go to the pool, drop to his knees and drink. Trudy said, ‘Country bumpkin,’ and he shrugged. Judy Susan said, ‘You’ll cook in hell in a big pot!’ and he smiled. He was not the mad one. He was sure of that.

  He could see what was happening to Hannah. Her boy had died, and now she loved him. He was glad Tom had told him about Hannah’s boy, otherwise he might have backed away. It did no harm to let Hannah love him. Whenever her eyes filled with tears, he said quietly, ‘Don’t worry.’

  His boy’s soul was filling out, so it seemed. It did no harm. He had Tom.

  Peter raised no objection when Hannah said she wanted him
to take the Tuesday off school so that she could drive him to the city and have him fitted for a suit. Just the two of them.

  Hannah said, ‘Will you?’ and Peter said, ‘If you like.’

  ‘I want you to look nice for court.’

  She was talking about the sentencing, expected a week after the verdict. Bunny Gorman had told Tom, who was paying him, that the verdict would be guilty and that the sentence could be as little as eight and a half years, with a non-parole period of four.

  ‘Jenny’—this was Judge Jacob Jennifer—‘wants to steer her back to the streets and byways, but he has to give her a smack, alas. Good result.’

  Tom was made uncomfortable by the suit expedition. ‘Australians don’t dress their kids in suits, Han.’

  ‘No? They should. Does every Australian have to look like the Salvation Army is in charge of fashion?’

  ‘We’re easygoing, sweetheart. He can wear his school uniform.’

  Peter said, ‘It’s okay, Tom.’ Tom shrugged and gave it away.

  The tailor was to be Isaac Glick, in Collins Street, next to Job’s Warehouse. The dingy entrance and unlit stone stairs let into three bright, spacious rooms panelled in shining teak. Hannah had no acquaintance with Glick but George Cantor knew him well and had recommended him. Glick was used to dealing with men who put themselves entirely in his hands to be bossed, pushed and prodded, insulted in their suggestions, and told to be quiet whenever they spoke. But with Peter, he was gentle. Something of the spell Peter cast over Hannah exercised itself on Glick.

  ‘This is a handsome boy,’ he said as he measured Peter up, lifting an arm to take the circumference of the chest. ‘This is a specimen.’ He showed Hannah and Peter catalogues of cloth samples, broad squares of fabric pinked at the bottom. The two of them stood side by side at the long varnished counter while Glick turned the samples. Glick was impressed anew with Peter’s comments. ‘Too much green. No, that’s for an old man. No, the pattern is too big.’

  What Peter did like was a herringbone worsted from the English Midlands. One of the delights of the boy was his surprises. Hannah hadn’t expected him to take the least interest in cloth samples, imitating Tom, who would rather have drunk hemlock than taken himself off to a tailor’s.