The Bride of Almond Tree

by Robert Hillman

  ‘No.’

  ‘No matter. And this gentleman is Vasily.’

  Vasily, not a portrait but a living man the size of a bear with a massive black beard, first kissed Anna on the mouth, then threw his arms around Wes. He stood back and held out his open hands to Wes, as if asking Anna, ‘What gives?’ She told him, five minutes of chatter, Vasily shaking his head, slapping his forehead, letting out howls of what seemed indignation. Everyone in the place was alert to what Anna was explaining—she was talking loudly, as if to include all listeners—and when she was done, one person after another, men and women, came to Wes and hugged him, kissed his cheeks. Some had a few words of English to offer. ‘Your sweetheart in Butyrka, bad for you.’ One young woman kissed him on the lips and was lightly slapped by Anna and chastised. A record was playing, the soundtrack of High Society, somehow, Frank Sinatra and Celeste Holm singing ‘Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?’—‘A friend from England gave it to him. Vasily loves Frank Sinatra.’

  ‘Okay,’ said Anna, ‘we will have pelmeni, and then for pudding—you say pudding in Australia, yes?—for pudding, pirozhki. And some Odessa red wine.’

  She asked about being a Quaker, and how he reconciled drinking alcohol with his faith, and about Almond Tree, which she knew was where Beth came from. He told her of the river and the lake and the orchards, the sheep, the dairying, and of his rebuilding of Chinese Town after the bushfire, and she told him of Maxim. ‘Two marriages after Maxim. They lasted two years each. I seem to be attractive to men with bad taste in women. But God knows, I cooked, I cleaned, I’m said to be good at sex. But two years, and they packed their suitcases and wandered off. I’m a suitcase widow. I think it was the poetry. Neither of them read my poetry, or anyone else’s. Konstantin said, “All you do is write, what’s the use of it?” I told him it had no use. I think they felt the poetry was more important to me than they were. And then, they didn’t get along with Andre. They sensed that he was more important to me, too. So he was. Love, Wes. It gives you no relief.’

  The next day was Saturday, and the weather, the snow, was murder. Only half the usual number of visitors showed up, including the tiny woman of about eighty who hoped to see her grandson. She came draped in a blue blanket and shivered for the whole of her futile wait. Wes brought bread for her because he’d never seen her eating. Anna told him she’d been coming for five years. It was only when the old woman parted the blanket to accept the bread that Wes saw she was carrying a wooden cross, not small. She demonstrated something she wanted him to do, which was to kiss the cross. And so he did. Anna explained. ‘Her grandson is in prison for life. He’s a devout Orthodox Christian and he was arrested putting up posters that called Comrade Stalin the anti-Christ and said he would go to hell. Beria wanted to hang him but Stalin apparently liked the poster. Now that Khrushchev has denounced Comrade Stalin, there’s some hope he will be released.’

  Mid-morning, when visitors were leaving the line in some numbers to save their lives, the guard Anna knew came stumbling through the blizzard and gestured to Wes to follow him. He was wearing two overcoats, so that it was impossible for him to wear his rifle slung over his shoulder. He carried it pointing at the ground. Wes was led under the stone arch of the older part of the building, when it was a castle, and into a more modern section, along one corridor after another all painted a moribund green with countless heavy metal doors. From over a distance, he heard screams, not those of prisoners being tortured, as he judged, but the screams of madmen. Two yellow lines were painted along each corridor and Yevgeny made Wes understand that he was to keep between the lines. Everything was clean, the floors mopped, the brass doorhandles shining, as if, like sailors, the prisoners spent half of each day swabbing. From a window, Wes saw down to a small courtyard where a scaffold stood. Yevgeny allowed him to stop and look, then acted out a noose around his neck being pulled taut and laughed.

  They reached a corridor on the left that led into a part of the prison with ancient stone walls and cobble-stoned floors. At the end of the corridor, they reached a cell closed with thick wire mesh. Yevgeny rapped with his knuckles on the timber division between the broad areas of mesh and called a name loudly and waited. On the wall hung a portrait of Khrushchev, smiling. He made Wes think of Elmer Fudd. The portrait left an area around its perimeter fresher in its green than the rest of the wall, and Wes guessed that the portrait of the new leader had replaced a slightly larger portrait of Stalin.

  Yevgeny called again and a door at the back swung open and a beefy woman, far from young, shuffled in and shouted something in Russian that must have been along the lines of, ‘Hold your horses.’ She wore an opaque plastic patch over her left eye and had a cane to support herself in an upright position. She called something over her shoulder and Beth entered. Wes inhaled deeply. His joy at seeing her was overwhelmed by the appalling look of her. She was wearing a pale blue uniform with long sleeves, mere cotton, okay for hot summer days but absurd for winter, and a brown cardigan from which all the buttons were missing. On her feet, slippers no more substantial than ballet shoes, black. She was shivering with her full body. Her hair had been cropped shorter than a boy’s. Her face was bruised all over, and some stitches had been used to close a split in her upper lip. She was as thin as a pencil. She didn’t look at him, but at the floor. She called to him after a minute of silence, ‘Don’t look at me. I’m ugly.’

  Wes took two fifty-dollar notes from his pocket, handed one to Yevgeny and gestured for the woman guard to come and take the other one. She moved to the small locked window in the mesh more rapidly than would be thought possible, unlocked the window and quickly pocketed the banknote. Wes used hand signals to indicate that he wanted her to open the heavy iron-and-timber door to the cell and let him in. After a minute of what seemed casual conversation between the woman and Yevgeny, she produced a huge ring of keys and opened the door. Yevgeny, resting on his rifle, shrugged.

  Wes put his arms around Beth, but gently; he was afraid she would break. He kissed her dry, stitched lips, stroked the stubble of her hair. Both were weeping.

  She said: ‘I shouldn’t be here. This is insane.’

  ‘I know, darling, I know. I’ll do everything I can. But it will be six months before I can come back, you have to hold on.’

  ‘Pardon my lips,’ she said, and kissed him all over his face.

  The woman guard separated them and pointed at her wristwatch. An argument broke out between her and Yevgeny. Beth translated. ‘He says I should give us five more minutes. He says you’ve been waiting four days in the snow. Is that true?’

  ‘Yes.’

  Beth again kissed his whole face. ‘We love each other. We have to be together. Pray for us to your silly old God.’

  ‘I pray all day. The whole gathering prays for us.’

  ‘God bless the Quaker God.’

  Then it was over. The woman guard led Beth away, and Yevgeny took Wes back to the line. He told Anna he’d seen Beth and Anna relayed the news to the hopefuls, who cheered and applauded. Wes had been staying at the Gorki, in the same room he’d first occupied, but that night Anna persuaded him to stay at her apartment. He slept on the sofa. In the morning, they exchanged addresses. She came with him by taxi to the Gorki, where he picked up his suitcase and paid his bill. His ticket was good for all the days of his visa, and since visits were restricted to once a month, there was no point in him staying in Moscow. When they parted, he kissed Anna on the cheek.

  ‘Lips,’ she said, and he kissed her again, on the lips.

  Chapter 26

  KADO DIED in March of 1958. A type of brain tumour that revealed no symptoms until it killed him in ten seconds. In May, Patty went to see the master again, by train and on foot, as ever, taking the two children because the master enjoyed them, but not her mother-in-law; she was too demoralised by the death of her one remaining child. It was a long walk for Francis but he skipped along without complaint. A novice showed Patty to the master in a room she hadn’t seen be
fore, at the side of the monastery, very small with split bamboo walls and plaited rush flooring and ceiling. He was sleeping, his head on his chest. In the five years since she’d first seen him, he had aged ten. He was snoring and had to be woken by the novice. But once his eyes were open, he was instantly alert.

  ‘Missus Patty, Francis, and this baby one is—don’t tell me—Esther? Yes, Esther. Let me hold her.’

  Patty lowered the child into his arms and he cradled her expertly. ‘Are you having another baby?’

  ‘No, but I need your advice.’

  ‘Do you mind if we speak in English? I need the practice.’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘Advice,’ said the master. ‘My best advice is sleep. But since I am awake now, what can I say that might help you?’

  Her husband had died suddenly, said Patty. Together they had made a commitment to remain in Hiroshima and help those who were suffering from radiation sickness—many thousands. Now she was thinking of returning to her home in Australia, Almond Tree. Other mothers and children in Hiroshima looked aghast at Esther’s hands. They thought it was the punishment of heaven for something Patty had done wrong, a superstition. If she stayed in Hiroshima, Esther would have to endure being tormented at school, indeed all through her life. No such superstition existed in Australia. Compared to Hiroshima, Almond Tree was paradise.

  The master listened as he rocked the baby and smiled. Still smiling at the baby, he said, ‘Paradise is nothing.’

  ‘Nothing?’

  ‘Nothing. Your town of Almond Tree is paradise, you say. I heard on my radio that the Americans have three thousand atomic bombs on rockets. The Russians have one thousand. Together they could destroy the whole world. They could destroy your paradise. Any paradise that can be destroyed is nothing.’

  ‘You listen to the radio? I am surprised. I thought you would disdain the world.’

  ‘I live in one small part of Honshu. I want to know the world. Zen is the world, Missus Patty. Your great poet, Blake, said one can see the world in a grain of sand. No. In a grain of sand, what you see is a grain of sand. Unless you have Mister Blake’s imagination, which none of us do. Paradise? Here.’

  He took an apple from a basket beside him and bit out a mouthful. ‘Now you.’

  Patty took a bite from the apple.

  ‘That is paradise. An apple. The tree made the apple from earth and air. The apple tree is God. Come.’

  The master, still holding the baby, led Patty to the stable, where Hero the horse was enclosed. He opened the gate and beckoned Patty in. Then he lifted Hero’s tale, rubbed his rump, and Hero produced three clumps of dung.

  ‘That is paradise,’ said the master. ‘What do you call this in English?’

  ‘Dung. Or more crudely, shit.’

  ‘What we turn away from is closer to paradise than what we study closely. Dung is Zen. The apple is Zen. You cannot leave Hiroshima.’

  She didn’t know. It was possible that the master was mad. Dung was Zen? At the train station, a woman came up to her and looked at Esther waving her ugly hands about in her pram and whispered into Patty’s ear: ‘Accursed.’ In the mood she was in, it was too much. She reached out and grabbed the woman’s throat and squeezed until the woman fell to her knees. ‘Apologise, you bitch!’ She spoke in Japanese. The woman couldn’t speak because she was being strangled. Patty relaxed her grip on the woman’s throat. ‘Apologise!’

  The woman coughed out, ‘Sorry! Sorry, madam!’

  By the time she reached home, Patty’s mind was made up. She would stay. The children would stay. Esther would suffer, but she would survive. Patty would continue to run the hospital, which was now hers.

  Chapter 27

  THE NAZARETH channel ran south-east from the lake and irrigated orchards all the way to Tom Kennedy’s apricot spread twenty-seven miles away. Tom had recently acquired Sammy Limerick’s neglected spread down by the Hutchinson billabong and wanted to plant it with apricots, which were making him a fortune, but needed a channel running due south. Tom was an intelligent man and drew up a proposal for the shire that proved that it would recoup the cost of the channel in rates in five years. He argued his case to the council and won approval. The issue was, who would grade a channel eighteen miles long? Tom had the answer to that, too: Wes Cunningham. Well, not Wes himself, who was rebuilding Chinese Town, but Wes could oversee it. Tom had run into Wes in town a week after he got back from Moscow, where he was visiting his nutcase girlfriend in the clink, and Wes had told him that he hoped to go back in six months if he could find the dough. So Tom had a pretty fair idea that Wes would accept the channel job. The whole thing was supposed to go out to tender, but the shire said Wes could do it if he agreed with the oversight fee of eight thousand pounds—after all, nobody better in the shire or the state to get a job done properly. Tom drove over to Chinese Town and found Wes at work on the frames of the wooden dwellings further from the forest, while his brothers and the Italians were erecting the brick houses closer to the timber. He put the proposition to him, told him the fee, and Wes accepted immediately. It was a different Wes these days—all the mirth was gone from him, never a smile. Tom said he’d bring him the contract from the shire the next day, and the specs, and arrange for the dozers. Flat land all the way, no big problems.

  It was true that Wes had become a stranger to cheer. All he could think of was Beth and her suffering. He found some relief in concentrating on his craft, in problem-solving. Beth had been beaten, and would likely be beaten again. Whatever information they wanted from her, he prayed she would give them. But he thought it likely she was being beaten for the sake of it. Even prayer seemed futile. Had prayer helped any of those in the war at the gates of Auschwitz? Had it helped those in New Guinea, Australian soldiers, Japanese soldiers, their torsos ripped open, him praying over them while the surgeons, cursing, laboured to stitch them closed? Not once. God watched on, sorrowing, in the same way he sorrowed, and could not save a man for all his power if a wound had let too much blood flow away or had destroyed a body’s physical integrity.

  He spent each day, seven days a week, racing between the starting point of the channel, at the orchard site, to Chinese Town. He had to arrange a powder monkey to blast out some of the stumps, and didn’t always take the care he should. The backdraft of one blast tore his shirt off. People worried, his parents especially, even Franny who came to the Chinese Town site with a couple of doorstopper sandwiches and hot tea in a thermos. She had a baby now, and was all goodwill and affection, without any further strategies.

  He was way too busy, and he knew he was pushing towards madness. He hired a blaster who was willing to work on Sundays, Bobby Burton, whose competence was questionable. When Wes drove over from Chinese Town, he found Bobby fifty yards from the stump being blasted but his son, Roy, right beside the stump setting the explosive. Wes looked down at the case of explosive that Bobby was using. It was out-dated dynamite.

  ‘You’re using this?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘It’s fifty years old. The fuse will burn through in thirty seconds. Get that kid out of there!’

  Wes didn’t wait for the fool of a man to act but ran to the boy himself. The fuse was burning. Wes grabbed the boy and dragged him ten yards, then covered him with his own body. The explosion lifted the stump and sent it flying over them. A rain of earth fell, but at least they were alive. Wes brushed himself down, and the boy, who could only have been fifteen or sixteen.

  ‘Are you completely insane?’ he said to Bobby. ‘Nobody uses this stuff anymore. Don’t you know the older it is, the quicker the fuse burns? You should be using jelly. This stuff is suicide, you fool. Send in your invoice to the shire, but you’ll never work for me again.’ The boy looked distressed.

  ‘It’s not your fault, son,’ said Wes. ‘Don’t be upset. You’re alive when you should be dead.’

  John Li was not rebuilding Chinese Town for the Chinese. No Chinese would come to live in the town again. It was co
nsidered unlucky, not unreasonably, after so many people died there. John was building the new houses for the immigrant workers from Italy, Greece, Lithuania, who had come to work on the huge Eildon Weir hydro project. Now that the project was finished, John had won a concession from the Victorian Government to clear-fell a thousand acres of timber in the hills twenty miles from Chinese Town, and would lease the houses to workers. Chinese Town would no longer be an appropriate name for the town.

  He asked Wes’s advice on a new name. ‘Working People Town? You think?’

  ‘‘No, John. Too awkward.’

  ‘Italian Town?’

  ‘What about all the people who are not Italian? The Balts, the Greeks? They might feel insulted.’

  ‘Do you think “Europe Town”?’

  ‘No, John. That’s awful. Do you know the story of the mythical bird called the phoenix? Who rose from the ashes and was reborn?

  ‘Yes! In Scotch College. The phoenix!’

  ‘Call the town Phoenix.’

  ‘Yes! Yes! Phoenix Town! This is genius!’

  ‘No, just Phoenix.’

  ‘Just Phoenix. Yes! I thank you with my heart, Wesley. But with f. Easier for people.’

  Three days later, a billboard had been erected at the exit of the spur road into what had been Chinese Town: FEENIX. SAFE!