by Toni Jordan
That was weeks ago. Now Inga’s paying the price for all that relentless energy because the closer the book comes to publication, the more exhausted she becomes, as if this new work continues to sap her even as it comes to life without her. The champagne cocktail months are over: Inga dozes and eats buttered toast and eggs and drinks milky tea with too much sugar.
Rachel’s work, on the other hand, is energising her. Inga’s filing system, it turns out, was a waist-high stack of coffee tins hidden in a cupboard, stuffed with sheets of paper folded tight and wedged together. Rachel finds quiet peace in extracting these and smoothing the creases, in making files and labelling them in block letters, in copying out Inga’s standard replies to correspondence in her own hand and signing them because Inga never wants to be disturbed.
This worried Rachel at the beginning, but now she sees it as a necessary evil. Better this, she believes, than readers thinking that Inga is too stuck up to acknowledge them.
Only three other people have seen the manuscript—Inga herself, Charles and Samuel Fischer, when he was typesetting it.
Finally Rachel turns the last page on the floor beside her. When she began, she felt the weight of how she should react. Now that she’s finished, the air has a different texture. Her heart feels different. She doesn’t have to analyse her own response. She can’t. She’s in the thick of Inga’s story, feeling the world she has made, and it is a fragile thing and everyone is connected and there is space in her heart for everyone, even people who do terrible things and must be opposed.
‘Well?’ says Inga, without opening her eyes. She is lying on her side, knees tucked up to her waist, her hands in a prayer pillow under her cheek.
‘Did I wake you?’ Rachel says.
‘If you thought I could sleep while you read my book, you’ve hugely misjudged me.’
‘I thought you didn’t care what anyone thought of it.’
Inga flicks her eyes open. ‘You’re not anyone.’
And all Rachel can think is: Isn’t it strange? This vast city with its skyscraper canyons is famous across the seas yet everything important in it can fit inside this one room. Her heart feels lanced by a needle.
Perhaps when all this is over she and Inga can take a holiday. A week in Charles’s cabin near Woodstock. It has its own dock onto the Esopus Creek, he says, where the water is wide and still, and a canoe and a stone fireplace. There are egrets and cranes and swans. Maybe she can find a rod and show Inga how to catch a trout.
‘I think it’s the most sad and glorious thing I’ve ever read,’ she says. ‘I think it’ll change everyone who reads it. I think it’ll change the world.’
Inga laughs, low and tinkling. ‘You darling child. You don’t really think books have that kind of power?’
‘Of course,’ Rachel says. ‘You’re only doubting it because this is a book that’s on the side of good. If someone were to write an evil book, you’d believe in the damage that could do. And this…it’s better than All Has an End, if that’s possible. It’ll make the world a better place.’
Inga smiles and stretches on the bed like a cat. ‘Not everyone will agree,’ she says.
Rachel knows that’s true. She hasn’t seen them all because they’ve been sent to Charles, but lately Inga’s received some disturbing letters. Not just the usual crazy stuff: serious threats designed to stop publication of the book. She’s part of the worldwide Jewish conspiracy. She’s a traitor to her own people and part of the government’s plot to drag America into Europe’s troubles. One letter, milder than some, was written in rust-coloured ink that uncannily blobbed and thickened. The books will never go on sale, another letter said.
Inga’s worried, though she tries not to show it. Charles has had advice and will lock the plates away in his private warehouse with the books as soon as they’re back from the printers. He’s the only one with the key. The books and the plates will be safe there. Charles has given Inga his word. Rachel doesn’t doubt him exactly, but suspects that he is moved by commercial nous more than realistic fear. The excitement about this new book is so great he fears a copy will be stolen before publication day and leaked to a disreputable paper, or even printed illegally and sold on the streets. All kinds of journalists and two-bit private detectives and assorted types have been nosing around. These pages, the galleys Rachel is reading, are the only ones outside of Charles’s control. Inga told him they’d already burnt them: stuffed them in the wood stove on a particularly cold December night.
‘This is the book you were born to write,’ Rachel says.
‘Let’s see if it makes that revolting man Fischer see the error of his ways. I still can’t believe I gave in to Charles and let him touch it. I feel sad for my poor words, to have had his eyeballs on them.’
Rachel shuffles across the floor to bring her face in line with Inga’s.
‘But you had to let him work on it, don’t you see? That’s exactly what your book is about. Oppose these people, yes, by all means. Do anything you can to stop them, and protect everyone else from them. But you can do all these things while pitying them at the same time. Kindness and opposition, they’re not mutually exclusive. He has a family. They have to eat.’
‘Your gorgeous heart. These Nazis—Fischer and his Bund boys. People seem to think it’s all flag-waving and nicely pressed uniforms and a little playful thuggery. But these people really believe there are whole categories of humans who don’t deserve to exist.’ She shudders and forces a laugh. ‘Now if they thought my book had world-changing power I would really be worried.’ Inga kisses her, saucy and quick. ‘You’re a doll, you know that?’
Rachel knows all of Inga’s kisses by now: the one that means I care for you and the one that means Make love with me and this one, which means Let’s talk about something else.
‘Maybe we should move some of the plants over to your place,’ Rachel says.
‘Not a chance. They’d never make it—it’s a botanical graveyard over there. When are you going to tell me the secret of your green thumb?’
With what seems like no effort, Rachel’s collection of plants has grown. Inga bought her some, along with a red enamelled watering can, and others she has plucked as cuttings from the park while still others were donated by Charles as hospital cases from his house. Somehow she understands which ones need more sunlight and which ones less, which like wet feet as opposed to draining on pebbles.
‘I don’t know,’ Rachel says. ‘The plants tell me what they want. That’s all.’
Inga hugs a pillow to her chest. ‘Spurned again. I’ll have to keep hanging around until you spill. Tell you what, when all this fuss is over I’ll buy you a farm, what do you say about that? And we’ll live together like a couple of old maids and you can grow anything you like.’
‘You, a farmer?’
‘And why not? I grew up on a farm.’
‘You love this city. You’d never leave it.’
‘I do love it here. But I come from across the seas.’ She shrugs. ‘Everywhere is temporary—who knows where we’ll end up?’
‘I’d love to live in another country some day.’
‘Would you? Where?’
‘Anywhere.’ Rachel laughs. ‘No, not anywhere. Somewhere with no tall buildings. I like them, I do, but it’s hard to relax in a city like this. If I had a place of my own, it’d be somewhere sleepy. Somewhere warm; no snow. I come from a long line of people who’ve never been outside of Pennsylvania. Well, that’s not quite true. My mother came from here, originally. And my father once went to a funeral in West Virginia.’
‘All right, forget the farm. How about I make you this promise: one day, I’ll take you to another country. A faraway place, as far as you like. Whirl a globe and stab a pin and we’ll go. How would you like that?’
Later that night, Rachel can’t sleep. Inga lies beside her, breathing in and out through her soft mouth. Rachel gets up, gently. The galleys are on the coffee table where she left them last night. Tomorrow they’ll go
in the fire and she can’t bear it, this beautiful thing of Inga’s heart and mind turning to ash like yesterday’s peelings. She wraps the pages in a scrap of oilskin, a piece of the flowery tablecloth that was in the apartment when she arrived, and then conceals the package inside the Ransbottom planter, curved around the outside of the coffee tin that holds the aspidistra.
The next day, alone at Inga’s, Rachel is cleaning an ink stain from the bedside table when she spots yet another pile of papers poking out from underneath the bed. She’s been trying to coax Inga out of her habit of folding papers into tiny accordions and squirrelling them away, but contracts and letters and files keep appearing in unlikely places. Inga also keeps money, substantial sums, in both their apartments, wedged between books and in washed-out vanishing-cream containers in the bathroom. Rachel doesn’t consider this strange. It’s sensible behaviour for anyone who lived through the hard times of the last ten years, particularly someone who’s known the uncertainty of life as an immigrant. She herself hid Inga’s manuscript yesterday, a small example among many of the ways that being with Inga has changed her. Dropping documents on the floor and, no doubt, kicking them under the bed was an improvement.
Rachel wipes her fingers on a cleaning rag then drops to her knees to pick the papers up. So she can file them.
She reads the first page, and the next, before she even registers what it says. Last will and testament, that’s what it says. Before she can stop herself, she sees her name there. She sits back on her heels.
I give and bequeath to Rachel Hannah Lehrer.
I give and bequeath to Rachel Hannah Lehrer, it says, all of my copyright of my work and all of my personal property, same to be sold by my executor herein named. I give and bequeath to Rachel Hannah Lehrer. In witness thereof, I, the said Inga Eva Karlson, do herewith set my hand and seal this the ninth day of November, 1938.
Rachel turns each page and when she’s read every one, drops the papers as if she’s scorched. She has known Inga for less than four months. Should she say something to her? Perhaps she should. Inga never talks about relatives or friends back in Austria, or of the villagers who famously pooled everything they had to send her to school. She should ask Inga to reconsider. Or is that too rude and ungrateful? Would it ruin this delicate thing they have between them? She decides: she will speak to Inga. Yes, definitely. Tell her that this is a mistake.
But not this minute. Inga is exhausted, with the preparations for the release of the book still underway and the publicity yet to come. So Rachel puts the papers back where she found them in the same state of disarray, and says nothing about the will, or the copy of The Days, the Minutes she’s hidden away.
And Christmas morning comes, and Inga gives her a necklace to match her own: Lalique glass, with yellow wasps. Rachel gives her a box of chocolate-coated cherries, which delights Inga, and a pair of kid gloves, cherry red. And New Year comes and goes, and they pass it in Inga’s apartment sharing a bottle of champagne. Days pass, and the weeks pass, and the printing is finished, and Inga’s new book, The Days, the Minutes, is safe in Charles’s warehouse. Before Rachel knows, it’s February.
February, 1939. And still Rachel says nothing about Inga’s will.
27
Brisbane, Queensland, 1986
Philip made a start when he was in America: the Benjamin R. Tucker papers, held by the New York Public Library, mention Karlson, and Philip went through every page; the Dos Passos collection has more, and for that he went all the way to the University of Virginia. She skim-reads dozens of books from academic libraries around the country, including biographies of every 1930s literary figure who might have run into Karlson. Or read her, or thought of her. You can’t trust indexes, Philip says. Check them yourself. And she loves this sharp-eyed fossicking. She’s been away from academia so long and now, with the work before her, she can’t imagine why. She could have picked a topic any time and just begun. She never needed anyone’s permission.
It’s just after dawn. As her eyes open, she hauls a book from the pile on the unslept half of her bed and reads for an hour before she rises. She fills notepads with references and cross-references, and she finds plenty that’s fascinating but nothing that’s new. It’s not surprising. Karlson’s life has been picked over for decades. She finds no mention of a Rachel or anyone named Lehrer.
She doesn’t give notice to Pretty and Terese about moving out, and Philip doesn’t mention it again.
Philip leaves the arson project to Caddie while he focuses on the bigger picture of how to unveil Rachel, when they find her. How to maximise the media impact? The crowning glory, of course, will be whatever they can reconstitute of The Days, the Minutes: but what if Rachel Lehrer can remember nothing? Caddie pleads with him. Perhaps we shouldn’t be organising things just yet. She’s old, after all.
Philip sees her point. The woman’s probably doddery. But a few sentences would be enough, particularly if they recast the story as his, Philip’s, quest for truth: a literary detective story. Meta’s big right now. It’s the kind of audacious thinking most academics don’t have the flair and confidence to pull off. No, they continue as planned. Philip finds a corkboard on wheels and sits in his office, playing with titles. The Karlson Detective: The true story of the greatest literary mystery of all time is his favourite, though he also has a soft spot for Revealed: The Days and Minutes of Inga Karlson.
She’s thinking about these things—Philip, Rachel, her labyrinthine research—solely and precisely so she doesn’t have to think about Jamie. It’s been building for the past few weeks and, whenever she thinks about him she feels a wave of such intensity that she has to stop and close her eyes and fight to regain her focus. She can’t think about Jamie now or she’ll have no rational brain at all. She can’t even say his name. Jamie. Jamie. Ten times, twenty times, Caddie has her hand on the phone. Twenty times, fifty times, she thinks of jumping on the bus straight to his shop. But what would she say? Her only hope is to bring everything to a conclusion. It’s not just Rachel’s future that’s resting on her shoulders—it’s her own.
‘Lunch?’ Philip says late one morning as she’s filing.
At his place, they spread their research over the Herman Miller Eames table. Philip makes a salad. He eats a lot of salad. He owns taupe linen napkins. The table is covered by protective vinyl cut to size and it feels to Caddie like they’re working on a shower curtain. Philip’s art—big, textural splashes of colour on unframed canvases, vaguely Japanese—looks down at her. She’s had so much on her mind she’s forgotten to wonder what they’re supposed to be. He pours her a glass of nice rosé.
‘Just a drop,’ she says. ‘I want to keep my mind on what I’m doing.’
He twists the bottle as he finishes the pour. ‘I’m not entirely oblivious to subtext. As much as I find it personally disappointing—it’s for the best, I agree. I don’t want anything to distract you.’
She keeps at what she’s doing, doesn’t even look up.
‘Look, I’ve been thinking,’ he says. ‘The exhibition of the fragments closes in a couple of weeks. A small gathering to announce our discovery of Rachel and drop a few teasers about your project, on the fire—where better to hold it than at the exhibition itself?’
‘But we haven’t found her.’
Finding Rachel. The most important part of Philip’s strategy was the first thing they talked about. How to approach Rachel, and when. How to get her to speak to them. From the day Caddie started working for Philip, they’ve been sending letters to Rachel’s post-office box. Official-looking ones from the university, promising attention—all old people want attention, Philip said. And almost straight away a reply came addressed to Philip, with Rachel’s PO box as a return address.
Professor Carmichael,
Kindly leave me alone.
Regards
Rachel Lehrer
So they began sending friendlier, more personal ones on feminine stationery, handwritten by Caddie. Eventually, another reply cam
e.
Ms Walker,
Now is not the time.
Regards
Rachel Lehrer
Now Philip wants to escalate.
‘Look, this wasn’t an easy decision to make. What if other people get wind of her? I have rivals. The timing, on the other hand. It’s too good an opportunity to pass up.’
‘I’m worried it’ll be anti-climactic. If she can’t remember anything, or if we’ve got it wrong.’
‘Unlikely. We already have enough to make it interesting: the heir to the Karlson estate, living right here in Brisbane. That angle alone, as a beginning. An announcement, made in front of the fragments themselves: it’s a delectable entrée for the whole story.
Caddie begs him, she pleads against it. He won’t listen. And that’s not all. From now on, Philip will wait in front of the post office for Rachel, for however long it takes. It’s time he took charge.
‘I feel responsible,’ says Caddie. ‘She’s an old woman. Why don’t I go instead? I’m sure I’ll have a better chance with her. You are…well. You’re a bit intimidating, professor.’
‘Tough,’ he says. ‘I’m annoyed now. Now I like the idea of surprising her as she collects her mail. In fact, you know what? We could film it. Me, microphone in hand. Get a cameraman. The whole bit.’
Caddie suggests, gently, that to surprise her like that, with lights and strangers, could damage their chances of getting what they want. Besides, she might not even collect her own mail. A friend, a neighbour might go instead.
‘Let me go alone. If she’s there, I’ll talk her around. That’s why you hired me, because I know what she looks like. She knows me.’