The Bride of Almond Tree

by Robert Hillman

  ‘She’s ready for it. The Russian version can be translated into English. If she becomes well known in the West, it will be harder for the authorities to victimise her.’

  Wes told her of Bill’s warning. ‘And if the poems are found in my luggage at the airport, I will never be allowed back into Russia.’

  Bessie said, ‘Not in your luggage. Sewn into the lining of your overcoat. We have someone who will do an excellent job.’

  Beth read aloud three of Joy’s poems, translating into English as she went. They were terrible. There was no joy in them, and no poetry. She wrote about the leaders of Russia as ravening wolves who fed on the flesh of newborn babies.

  Wes could see disaster. ‘I know you have to do something. Your country is ruled by tyrants. But is the tiny influence you’ll have worth jail? I’ll help, but I hate the risk you’re taking. Also the poems are not good.’

  ‘She’s taking a chance. It’s a statement.’

  ‘Yes, but Beth, a statement is not a poem. Wolves eating babies. It’s not Pushkin.’

  ‘You have read Pushkin?’ said Bessie.

  They slept together at Oleg and Bessie’s apartment on his last night in Moscow; talking, not sleeping. ‘I know the poems are not good, Wes. But they might publish them as politics. I have to help her. It’s all she’s got.’

  ‘It’s okay. Only don’t get caught. Please, Beth.’

  ‘And be without you? Never.’

  He picked up the overcoat on the day of his departure and it rustled like a Guy Fawkes bonfire. He couldn’t imagine how the noise would go unnoticed. He carried the coat. Beth was not given leave to visit the airport, but Bessie and Oleg were. They farewelled him before he entered the departure lounge. Russian security waved him through, no interest in his luggage or his person. On the aeroplane, when he stowed his coat in the baggage locker, it crackled again. But the stitching survived to Vienna, to London and, ultimately, to Almond Tree.

  Chapter 23

  SOMETHING WAS wrong. Five months into her second pregnancy, Patty had developed a sense of foreboding. Kado said everything was fine, but it wasn’t. She went with Shinsa and Francis to see the master again, making the long hike over the dirt road.

  He was not in the stable this time, but sitting cross-legged in a garden with a fountain, among a strange type of orange bamboo. He remembered both of them perfectly, even their names. He was smiling.

  ‘No more bombs, so far,’ he said. ‘Good fortune.’

  Patty and her mother-in-law sat before him on fine gravel, not cross-legged.

  ‘Master, I have a feeling that something is wrong with the baby in my womb.’

  The master roused himself and lifted Francis from the pram, bared his tummy and rubbed his nose against it until the baby squealed with laughter.

  ‘A happy baby,’ he said. ‘In the world, nothing is so happy as a baby. Nothing with such love. When the baby takes milk from you, that is love. Come with me.’

  He led them out of the formal garden into an orchard, where apples hung from the branches of the trees, bright red. ‘Tomorrow the novices pick them. Today, take one apple each for Hero.’

  Each carrying an apple, the master led them back to the stable. The master held the apple out to Hero and he took huge bites from it avidly. To his guests he said, ‘Drop them on the ground, or he might bite your fingers.’ Patty and Shinsa dropped the apples at Hero’s feet and he fell to them with gluttonous delight.

  ‘Pat him,’ said the master, in his singing voice. And so Patty and her mother-in-law patted Hero’s neck while he munched. ‘He has been waiting for you. He said to me, “When will our guests return with a million dollars?” I said, “On March the tenth.”’

  He had Patty stretch out on the straw of the stable and knelt beside her. He felt not the bulge of her baby, but her feet, after removing her shoes. He rubbed his cheeks against her bare soles. Then sat up. ‘Some trouble,’ he said. ‘Some trouble for you and your baby. It is a daughter. She will live, but some trouble.’

  ‘What trouble?’

  ‘This I cannot say. Some trouble. The baby will count on you. The daughter already loves you. She will count on you.’

  This time, the master asked for ten million dollars, and laughed with a giggle like a young girl when told it was much more than Patty could afford.

  ‘Do not give me ten million US dollars,’ he said. ‘But only love your daughter, whatever the trouble. I will give you some apples to take with you for your table.’

  Patty’s worry was unrelenting. She told Kado, repeating it over and over, ‘Whatever the trouble is, we will overcome it. Anything, we will overcome it. Okay?’

  ‘Yes, Patty. Anything.’

  She went to work until the eighth month. A special hospital had been built in Hiroshima to cater to people suffering from radiation poisoning, and to Hiroshima women giving birth. That was where she worked. She saw, and had already seen, frightful deformities. The worst was a baby born with its brain exposed. Any—all—of these deformities could be in her baby. She said: ‘We will overcome it.’

  When her baby daughter was born—Esther, a biblical rather than a Catholic name, but acceptable to everyone—the ‘trouble’ the master had spoken of was immediately evident. The baby’s fingers were tightly joined by a type of webbing. It was a condition Patty had seen a number of times before, and she didn’t despair. The procedure was to surgically separate the fingers at six months, then break them and reset them. When the fingers were reset and healed, the baby could require a type of therapy to restore independent movement in the fingers. It would all take a year.

  Francis’s cardiac problem was not necessarily caused by radiation poisoning, but the deformity of Esther’s fingers was. It made Patty’s heart ache to see the baby’s clumps of fingers unable to grip. Esther howled in exasperation, as if she knew what her hands should do, but couldn’t. Patty and Kado took the risk. The consequences had to be accepted. Patty stroked the baby’s head and said, ‘It will be okay. Wait, just wait.’

  Haru operated on the baby at six months, separated the fingers, broke them, reset them. When the baby recovered from the anaesthetic, she screamed with pain for two weeks. Haru gave her painkillers, a little too powerful for a baby, but not dangerously so. Her hands were bandaged for a month. When the bandages were removed, it took a further two months of manipulation for the fingers to move independently, and without pain. They looked ugly, with scars on both sides of each finger and the thumbs. But they were functional. Haru said to Kado and Patty: ‘No more babies.’

  ∼

  The bomb and its poison had not prevented Patty and Kado from having children. This was, in its way, a victory, and when Esther’s fingers were fixed—so far as they could be—Patty exulted. She stood one day with a child in each arm and wept for joy.

  ‘Take your bombs to hell,’ she called to the Hiroshima sky, ‘and never come back, you bastards!’

  Chapter 24

  TWO MORE letters came from Moscow to Almond Tree, full of affection and enquiries about the fate of the poems Wes had posted to Paris. The address was not, after all, that of a publisher but that of a comrade in Paris who would forward them to a publisher then notify Wes of the outcome. He heard nothing from Paris in two months. A letter came for Wes from Bill, to say that he had business to transact in Melbourne during a short stay; would be driving down from Canberra and hoped to call in at Almond Tree to visit Wes for an hour or two on the way back.

  Bill (his name had been Bill for so long now that it was accepted) arrived at Wes’s house in the middle of a Wednesday morning, driving a polished red Cadillac convertible. He hopped out and spread his hands towards the car. ‘A monster, isn’t it, Wes. But something magnificent about it. Do you want a drive?’

  ‘No. Do you want a cup of tea? I don’t have any Earl Grey. Bushells.’

  They stood before the house, Bill admiring the workmanship.

  ‘I’m hoping you’ll have some news for me.’

&nb
sp; ‘If I were you, my dear Wesley, I’d be hoping I don’t. Your girlfriend is risking her neck copying out these verses. I would assume that these poems, like the majority, are frightful. You’ve read them? You told me you carried them back in the lining of your overcoat. Lining overcoats is the best possible use they could be turned to. Your contact in Paris sent them to a colleague in Paris, who advised me. I didn’t read them but he said they were shockers.’

  ‘Yes, I read them. Shockers, as you say. What brings you to Melbourne?’

  ‘The Labor Party split, Wes. A chap by the name of McManus who’s gone berserk. Those of us keeping a watchful eye on the wide brown land don’t like it. We want the anti-communists all in one place, under the one umbrella. And we don’t like rabid anti-communists at all, Wes. We prefer our anti-communists to behave like gentlemen. Far easier to get on with. So I went along to a meeting with Frank Mac, a Catholic. Dear God, defend me from the Catholics. They’re still attracted to burning heretics at the stake. No reasoning with them. The kindling, the crackling of the fire—it excites them.’

  Bill wanted to know where the original almond tree of Almond Tree was located, and had to be told that it no longer existed. ‘Almond trees only last for thirty years, Bill. But I can show you an almond orchard that started from the original almond tree. It’s two miles away over those pasture paddocks. Want to see? We can take your Cadillac. Down the dirt road.’

  The orchard, Perce and Lotte Cornwallis’s, lay below them as they rolled to a halt in a cloud of dust, spread over five acres and all in vivid white bloom. Further away to the west stood Carl Braun’s pears—Carl, a German immigrant before the war used to wander up and down in the shopping centre giving out leaflets. The Nazis are the enemies of all civilised people, especially my mother-in-law who is Jewish. Please my wish don’t be for blaming me!!! No one did. To the north, the hills began and reared to a fair height without stupefying anyone with their elevation, a regal blue under the brilliant sun. Somewhere in the side of the biggest hill, called, without much imagination, Big Hill, the Champagne Falls descended for eighty feet.

  Outside the car, sitting on a stump, Bill said he found it hard to conceive how a girl like Beth, hemmed in by beauty on each side, had developed such a gaunt vision of life. ‘If you hail from some fetid hell-hole on a Russian estate, perhaps you have an argument. But here, Wes?’

  ‘Beth wanted justice, that was all. But you’re not going to squeeze much justice out of the Soviet Union.’

  Bill left in the afternoon, with a wave from his shiny Cadillac and Wes went back to rebuilding Chinese Town.

  When Hoong Li died in the horse trough on the day of the spur fire, nearly all of his houses in Chinese Town went up in the flames. They were insured by Hoong Li with canny care for more than they had been worth. John Li, his eldest son, who inherited the insurance bonanza and the land on which Chinese Town stood, intended to rebuild everything. All the houses on the forest side—the charred forest—would be brick. All of those further from the forest would be timber. Altogether, twenty-three houses; and Wes Cunningham would, by agreement, oversee the entire project, which would take three years. Migrant workers would be brought in, mostly from Italy, to work on the project but they would take all their directions from Wes. The migrants, mostly from Italy, would be boarded with families and in vacant houses all over the shire. The attraction of the project to Wes was the money he would make, and the attraction of money was that he would be able to afford another airfare to Moscow in nine months. It cost a fortune and he couldn’t borrow again from the community fund.

  He informed Beth of all this. He also told her that the Paris publishers, according to Bill, said that they would publish the poems as a political statement, even though they had misgivings about the quality. ‘At least they’ve got guts,’ she wrote. ‘But it will make big, big trouble here, and I’ll have to be especially cautious. Oh God, nine months Wes. Nine months. It will kill me.’

  Wes had Clarrie Carpenter draft the plans for the first three houses and went to work on the foundations, carting everything he needed down the spur road with a couple of Italians, Luca and Antonio, driving the trucks: stocky workmen from Naples who barely spoke English but could be made to understand what was required. He worked faster than normal to be sure that he had the money he needed by December. But his commitment to craft was so ingrained that he hardly made much of an impression on his schedule. The foundations still had to be a foot deeper than average; the uprights still had to be no more than eleven inches apart; all the gables had to be reinforced with lengths of hardwood. These were the timber houses; the brick houses had to wait on four brickies from a village in Umbria. The discipline he needed to keep his occupational life separate from his emotional life was taxing. He stopped work a dozen times a day to think of the animation in Beth’s face when she spoke of ‘striking a blow’ against the Soviet state with the same vehemence that she’d spoken of striking a blow of the same sort for the Soviet state. Completely mad.

  At the same time that Wes was rebuilding Chinese Town, the Victorian Government was building an entire township to house the athletes who would attend the Melbourne Olympics of 1956. Wes included news of the preparations for the Olympics in his letters to Beth and was told in her reply not to waste space. Instead, tell her about politics. Did Menzies still reign supreme? (Yes.) Had the Petrov fiasco hurt party membership in Australia? (Yes.) When he came to Moscow again, could they stay in bed all day and all night? Could they make love until they collapsed and had to be taken to hospital? Say yes! (Yes.) And she said that Joy had been arrested. This turned out to be the most significant piece of news in any of Beth’s letters, according to a note from Bill.

  They will torture this Joy for the sake of her poetry-cum-political statement. There is a rather unyielding faction in the KGB, as state security is now known, that wants to hang anyone found guilty of samizdat. The faction won’t get its way just for the moment. But the torture will go ahead. We have to depend on this Joy woman’s wherewithal. If she implicates Beth, nothing will save her.

  This division between the emotional and occupational was no longer possible. Wes worked all day with a heart suffering blow after blow, like a hammer striking an anvil. One of the four new Umbrian bricklayers looked him in the eye one day and placed his hand over Wes’s heart. ‘Pain,’ he said. ‘Sorry to you.’

  ∼

  In October, Hungarian students in Budapest marched in the streets to protest the Soviet Union’s dominance in Hungarian politics. In the manner of student protests, no one was in charge and there was no agreed program of reform. Just frustration with the Russians, and with the doormat status of the Russian-approved Hungarian Government. Once the protests gathered momentum, attacks on the police escalated, the throwing of projectiles ranging from smashed cobblestones, bricks and, finally, Molotov cocktails. Workers joined in and all at once there were leaders, a number of them, and the clashes were now with the military. Initially, the Russians left it to the Hungarian regime to restore order by shooting protestors, but when not enough were shot, the Russians took over the shooting themselves. Also, the protestors had begun to call what they were up to a ‘revolution’, and this the Russians would not abide. The Russians considered that they had copyright on the term, at least in the twentieth century. They crushed the uprising in a week and appointed a new government and ordered the Hungarian Olympic team to swallow its grievances and keep its collective arse down in Australia. The first the Hungarian team knew of the Russian invasion was what they read in Australian newspapers.

  Bill telephoned Wes in early December of 1956 and said he was in Melbourne, without the Cadillac, and urgently needed to see him. He would meet him at a big restaurant known as the Russell Collins, unsurprisingly located downstairs on the corner of Russell Street and Collins Street, at midday on the Wednesday. ‘I was supposed to get a letter in late November from Beth. Is this to do with that?’

  ‘This is a face-to-face matter, Wes. On Wedn
esday.’

  Wes got a lift to the city with Lenny Chapman, who drove the smallgoods van all over the shire and was off to Victoria Market to restock. No need to think of what to talk to Lenny about; he had the conversation covered: football, cricket, fishing for trout in Jewel Creek. Wes was dropped off right on the corner of Russell and Collins. The restaurant was stunning; so many booths, so many customers. Where he would find Bill was a puzzle, until a tubby man in shirtsleeves approached him, introduced himself as Georgio, and asked if he was looking for Bill. ‘Bill is what you call him,’ said Georgio. ‘A mysterious man, yes? He saved my life in Cyprus in the war. From a firing squad. You think I don’t love this man?’

  Georgio led him to the back of the restaurant and through a swinging door to a private room, with a beautiful frieze of mermaids and dolphins. Bill, sitting in a booth, stood to thank Georgio and shake Wes’s hand.

  ‘A drink?’ said Georgio. ‘Macallan for you, my friend, of course. And for your guest?’

  ‘Nothing,’ said Wes.

  ‘No, a Scotch for Wes, too. You’ll need it.’

  Georgio said: ‘The two most handsome men in Melbourne, hidden away. You should be out there where the customers can see you.’

  When Georgio departed, Wes and Bill sat facing each other on either side of the booth.

  ‘Wonderful place, isn’t it, Wes. Art deco. Only a few in the world like this. I’m here in Melbourne fairly often, you know; vetting the defectors from the Hungarian team this time. Lots of them. You saw they played a water polo match against the Russians the other day? A bloodbath. Usually I come here to train spies and dear God, do they need training. Your people’s idea of a subtle, probing question to the Hungarians is “Are you a secret Russian agent?” There would be one or two or three, but it seems unlikely that they would confess on the spot.’

  ‘You didn’t ask me here to talk about spies and Hungarians, Bill. I haven’t heard from Beth for seven months.’