Hannah
& Emil
BELINDA CASTLES
First published in 2012
Copyright © Belinda Castles 2012
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher. The Australian Copyright Act 1968 (the Act) allows a maximum of one chapter or 10 per cent of this book, whichever is the greater, to be photocopied by any educational institution for its educational purposes provided that the educational institution (or body that administers it) has given a remuneration notice to Copyright Agency Limited (CAL) under the Act.
Allen & Unwin
Sydney, Melbourne, Auckland, London
83 Alexander Street
Crows Nest NSW 2065
Australia
Phone: (61 2) 8425 0100
Email: [email protected]
Web: www.allenandunwin.com
Cataloguing-in-Publication details are available
from the National Library of Australia
www.trove.nla.gov.au
ISBN 978 1 74175 516 9
Internal design by Lisa White
Set in 11.5/17.3 pt Minion Pro by Bookhouse, Sydney
Printed and bound in Australia by Griffin Press
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Author's note
While this novel is based on the events of my grandparents’ lives, it should be considered fiction. The main episodes of this novel happened, but almost all of the detail is imagined, and some elements of the narrative have been deliberately altered for the author’s purposes. None of the characters in the book, beyond the protagonists, are intended to bear resemblance to specific individuals.
For my father and all the descendants
of Heinz and Fay,
in memory
Contents
Prologue
Flora Sydney, 2005
Part I
Emil Duisburg, 1902
Hannah London, 1915
Emil Gallipoli peninsula, May 1915
Hannah London, 1917
Emil Munich, 1918
Hannah Hampstead, 1924
Part II
Emil The North Sea, 1929
Hannah Paris, 1930
Emil Duisburg, 1932
Part III
Hannah Brussels, 1933
Emil Hampstead, 1936
Part IV
Hannah Winchester, 1940
Emil The Isle of Man, 1940
Hannah Liverpool, 1940
Emil Hay, 1940
Hannah
Emil
Hannah
Emil Tatura, 1941
Hannah Melbourne, 1942
Emil
Hannah
Emil
Hannah Melbourne, 1945
Emil Freetown, April 1946
Part V
Hannah Kent, 1958
Brighton, 1963
West Hampstead, 1972
Acknowledgements
Prologue
Flora
SYDNEY, 2005
It was the humid heart of summer and Flora had been wading through thick, wet air for days, dreaming of a cool change. She was newly, invisibly pregnant and sometimes found herself kneeling on the floor of the Customs House library, head on the cool metal stacks, waiting for this light-headed exhaustion to pass. Even the air conditioning did not seem to lessen the weight of the air.
When her day ended she walked downstairs to the huge entrance hall, where the model of the city lay beneath the glass floor. She had begun to take a later train home so that she had time to study the model, which took up the floor space of a large living room. She walked above the fanning train tracks of Central Station and along the length of the city centre to Circular Quay, and the Customs House. I am in there, she thought. There’s a little Flora, standing on the ground floor of that building, looking down past her feet at an even tinier Customs House, imagining an even tinier Flora. But it was like the concept of infinity, too mind-bending to sustain.
Perhaps she should have been an architect. She would love to make these miniature buildings, to hold a form of her imagined structure in her hands, to shape every detail: to angle the roof carefully between forefinger and thumb, to mould the trees that would be placed around it. Then put it out into the world of other people, let it grow into something thousands of times the size. But she felt her own part in such a process every time she placed exactly the right book in the hands of a visitor. She sent its recipient off with it out into the city and they took it home into their lives, sat down in a quiet place, opened it up and stepped through into a room, a house, a world they had never known.
She trailed her memory along the streets beneath her feet and through the little buildings. She had arrived at Central Station from the airport with her backpack, her excitement spreading and rising, filling the noisy high-ceilinged hall. I am in Australia, she thought. What sort of life will this be?
There was the block at the edge of Kings Cross where she had found her bedsit. From the window she could see the tallest of the gleaming curved points of the Opera House from behind, poking out above the trees.
The Flora she imagined, her miniature, walked down the cool, damp-smelling steps from the Cross down into Woolloomooloo, the city soaring up out of the Domain ahead of her. At first she had walked to a café in the dark windswept tunnel of Kent Street, where she made coffee and counted change, and in quiet moments had spread open the paper on the back counter to look at the jobs section. She was a librarian by training. Surely every city needed librarians? After several months she had seen the ad lift off the page of the Sydney Morning Herald like a banner, cracking in the breeze. They were moving the city library to the Customs House and needed new staff.
And so began her new routine, her new life. Joining the morning flow down into the trains, burrowing beneath the city, emerging above the Quay and disappearing into her own allotted building, like everyone else. Emerging later into the fading day, tired and light, part of the great movement of the city.
The most wonderful thing about this model beneath her feet was that it was always changing. A building had gone up at Darling Harbour and no sooner had it been completed than the workmen came in early and inserted into the model city the building’s replica. The city changed while Flora slept.
Two years now of this place. She had come from England, just for a look, because of her family history. She was, after all, half Australian. And she had loved the endless sky, the salty harbour breezes and the hard reflective surfaces of the city’s buildings. The lightness of not really knowing anyone, of not being at home. She felt so free it made her dizzy. But now there was David, and this new being inside her. She looked beyond the edges of the model buildings to where the tracks ran out from Central and imagined herself on one of the little trains, carrying the dot inside her home to their house in Newtown.
The light in the hall dimmed and she looked behind her, out to the street. People were hurrying by, bent over. It must be raining. She walked out over the northern tip of the model city, across the void where the harbour would be, if the model didn’t end, and through the door towards the real harbour. She stepped into an instant drenching as she crossed the road between buses towards the Quay, the ferries a yellow and green blur in the grey air beyond the station.
Flora let herself into the cottage, knowing at once that David was not home yet. She was glad. She liked to be in an empty house before anyone came home, just long enough for a cup of tea, a space between the sound of voices, then company and warmth.
She dropped her bag on the horrible vinyl sofa that cr
eaked when you sat down and made for the kettle. There was a note on the bench. Picked up a parcel for you. It’s huge! In the spare room. Don’t try and move it on your own. Stupid dinner tonight. Late.
It would be the last of her books and photo albums from England. Her mother was moving out of her lovely, messy old house in the country, into a flat. If all my stuff is here, Flora thought, then I suppose it’s home. She imagined her mother’s new flat as a depressing place on a bland estate and felt briefly bereft. She took her hot mug down the dark hallway to the room where they stuffed their folders of bills, David’s toolbox and boogie board, those of her books that wouldn’t fit on the shelves in the living room. On the single bed was a parcel the size of a suitcase, wrapped in brown paper and string like something from another age. She found some scissors in the desk drawer and cut her way in to expose a patch of worn brown leather. It was a suitcase.
She sat down on the bed next to the ruptured parcel and touched the leather, left her hand there for a moment, and she was small suddenly, eight perhaps, lying between clean-smelling, striped flannel sheets looking at the old brown suitcase next to her pillow. There was a lamp on it, and her book—the Brothers Grimm or Hans Christian Andersen or some old English thing about fairies. Her grandmother Hannah was reading it to her, had just laid it down, the page marked for the following night. It was the moment before sleep, in Hannah’s flat in London. This was Hannah’s case.
Home, her memories, all that made her, burst into this light new life. Hannah had died a few years before Flora left England. They had all been relieved, in the end. Dementia had eaten away her body and her mind. She asked strange things you could not think how to answer. Now, with this square of leather beneath her fingers, Flora recalled the earlier times: her visits to Hannah in Hampstead, going together to the British Museum, riding backwards on the little fold-down seat in a hackney cab. Playing with the babushka dolls or reading fairy tales while Hannah sat at her desk by the bay window amid her dictionaries. ‘Do you know, Flora,’ she might say, ‘translation is a sort of writing. You are making something quite new.’ Hannah still travelled then, but it was a newer, smarter suitcase that stood in the hall, always ready; this old thing with a loose clasp had been relegated to the spare room to serve as a bedside table.
She pulled back the string, tore off the paper. The suitcase filled the little room with a musty leather smell, and she opened the window, let in the hot, wet night, ozone and tarmac drifting up from the alley. The catch was tied shut with yet more string. She cut through it and opened the lid carefully, a breath escaping, a puff of aged paper, ink and unsmoked tobacco. This new sensitivity to smell was overwhelming.
Inside the case was a mess of loose, crumpled papers, photographs, a sliding stack of little black notebooks, a plastic bag with a man’s old tweed jacket inside, patches at the elbows. On top of the heap was an envelope with her name on it. Inside was a note from her father. Hannah left you this case, it’s only just arrived from her solicitor. Been sitting in customs for months, apparently. Not sure what to make of it but some of it might be interesting.
Under the plastic bag was a carved wooden box. Flora opened the lid to find a green enamel plate with flowers painted on it in a child’s hand; on top of it, rolling around, a lovely little globe. Beneath these, a couple of medals, an old key, a compass and a tape, and at the bottom of the box a German children’s book: Grimm. She picked up the globe for a moment, turned it in her hands. It was the size of an orange but barely the weight of a sheet of cardboard. At its base were marked the initials SL—not the initials of any of Flora’s relatives.
Gazing at the jumble of odds and ends in the case, Flora had a vision of her grandmother in her Hampstead flat, rifling through the case in the dead of night, curly hair mad and white, looking for objects, photographs, casting aside papers, gripped by the need to find something lost in her memory, to lay her hands on something, some icon that would return it to her.
Flora pulled loose a photograph. Two dark-haired boys with naughty grins hugged Hannah’s legs on the deck of a ship: Dad and Uncle Ben, going to England for the first time. They had been born in Australia during the war and they both lived here now. Two more photos. Hannah in one of them, so young: dark, curly-haired, standing beside Flora’s German grandfather Emil. They were in one of those lanes of Flora’s English childhood, a tunnel of trees, a lit path. If the picture were in colour it would be a corridor of glowing green. On Emil’s shoulders sat a thin blond boy, shirtless, a piece of cloth tied about his neck like a cape. One of Emil’s hands held the boy’s, and also a cigarette. In the other photo, Hannah had been replaced by a tall, very fair woman who looked like the boy. No one but the boy was smiling.
Flora began to gather the papers together, smoothing out the crumpled sheets on the bed beside her. She lifted one and saw that it looked strange. If she held the page just far enough away not to be able to make out the words, there was something odd about the pattern of print on the page. Not on every page, perhaps on one in three or four, there was a space that did not belong. When she looked closer, she saw that these were spaces in the sentences, the size of a word. And when she read the sentences, she saw that Hannah had recorded her memories. Flora heard her voice the instant she began to read, and yet every few pages there were these gaps in otherwise perfectly structured sentences. As she looked through more and more of these sheets, and found that they could be clustered, ordered, she realised with a start that the spaces were gaps in Hannah’s memory of language, marking the beginning of her words failing her. Did she see these for herself? Did she write faster against the spreading of the gaps?
But as Flora started to read the pages she stopped noticing them, inserting suitable words as she read, without effort. She found fragments of Hannah’s childhood in the West End with her brothers, of her travels in Paris and Berlin, the boat to Australia. The moments of a life, retrieved from the dark. Flora put a cushion between her back and the cold wall and began to make piles. After a while she went to the kitchen for a bowl of cereal and brought it back to the spare room, her mind still working over the ordering of the pages. When the type began to blur she picked up a notebook from the pile and examined it. These too could be ordered. They were diaries, she realised—the source material for many of the typed pages.
Late into the night, the rain lashing the window as though someone stood in the side alley emptying endless buckets against it, Flora tidied the pages into two piles. One she had sorted into order: the early part of Hannah’s manuscript. The other was still a puzzle to be worked through. She laid both piles in the lid of the open case next to her, unable to take in any more tonight. She lay back on the narrow bed and closed her eyes. Her mind, sliding down towards sleep, was reaching towards something. The things in the wooden box, she thought. The medals, the compass . . . But the thought she was grasping towards evaporated and a memory came in its place. When Hannah was very old, she sat with Flora at the round table in the corner of the sitting room. They were surrounded by the piles of papers that Hannah continued to generate somehow but never now cleared away. Hannah was reading to her from a Russian dictionary. I knew all this once, she told Flora. Where has it gone? It had seemed as Hannah spoke that she was lost in the layers of time, that all her dead were in the room with them, and that it was to them that she was speaking.
For a moment as Flora lay, close to sleep, she was with Hannah again at the table. She saw her face: teeth missing, lips gathering elastically over her gums. She had stopped dying her curly hair red and it was wild and white, like Einstein’s. She leaned over her dictionary. Her finger, arthritically curled, nail bitten, pointed at the Cyrillic script as she read out the words. As soon as her lips formed around them, all those soft, low sounds, made for her old, soft mouth, Hannah was transformed into an ancient Russian woman.
She looked at Flora. ‘You have his forehead,’ she announced. ‘Whose?’ Flora asked, frowning, sure that Hannah would say her father’s, as everyone
always did. ‘Oh yes. There, dear, when you scowl. Emil’s. Do you know my friend Emil? You’re very like him.’
Flora was twenty then. She knew that Hannah’s mind was failing, and yet she felt a sudden shift inside her, looking into Hannah’s face.
She does not know me. How can she not know me? She fought the urge to shout, ‘It’s me, Flora—your granddaughter. It’s me, Hannah.’
When Flora woke there was a cup of tea steaming on the bedside table. She could hear the shower, David singing badly. That boy in the photograph, the fair boy on Emil’s shoulders. He didn’t look only like the woman. She reached into the case, which David had lifted onto the floor while she slept, and found the photograph, still at the top of its pile. Yes. He had Emil’s long nose, and something around the eyes.
She eased herself onto the floor into a patch of morning light next to the suitcase. She took out the wooden box and placed its contents on the carpet next to her, along with the jacket. She felt in the pockets of the jacket and found the source of the tobacco smell, lifted the packet to her face, opened the flap briefly so as not to let it all out at once, breathed it in. A half-packet of tobacco. The one Emil had never finished, had not had time to finish. She tucked the tobacco back inside the pocket and laid the jacket across her lap, put the green plate on top of it and on that the tape, the key, the medals, the compass. She rolled the little globe lightly on her palm. She was not the only one, then, to love small things. It was the most perfect, exquisite little object, its tininess reminding her of what a globe was: a gorgeously intricate miniature of the whole world of people and places and life. And it brought a new knowledge of herself, of her habits and loves having old precedents, that made her skin prickle.
The thought she had lost the night before returned, complete. The tobacco, half-finished, these few silent objects. Somehow, every moment of their lives might be here, in her hands, in her lap. Not just in Hannah’s pages, but in these medals that rattled on the enamel plate, this globe with its fading colours.
Hannah & Emil Page 1