He had taken to seeking out a game of chess in a dormitory hut or in the mess. It was understood you did not talk while your opponent was thinking. He had become much better at chess than he ever had been before. Solomon would no longer play him, preferring the odds with the younger men, whom Emil tried to avoid. They could not hold more than a move or two at a time in their heads for dreaming about girls, sporting triumphs and escape to the British army. At night they talked of Mother’s pfeffernüsse, a childhood dive into the Danube, the smell of German trains. ‘You are too young to be this nostalgic,’ he told them. Really, he just wanted them to stop, to let him be quiet, and save themselves the disturbance of those hours and hours of wanting.
His pencil hovered above the form. His father’s voice came to him, as clearly as if he stood behind him in the hut: One foot after the other, Emil. That’s the only way to get where you are going. Yes, he thought, what else is there to be done? He wrote down what he could, tried to find the English in his memory for the names: brown shirts, rallies, secret police, murder. He had written these things before, exposed himself to the bureaucracy, put down the words assigned the job of describing what was perpetrated, what was lost. He could do it quickly and then think of other matters, like the chess game he had left in train last night at curfew. He wrote what he needed to write: SA and SS occupied the building and beat and shot the union secretaries. Wrote quickly, and did not think. Signed the thing, walked it over to the administration block, the men crammed into the strips of shade along the sides of the huts, smoking, arguing about Hegel, betting camp currency on a game of cards.
When he returned to the hut, hoping to sleep away the hottest hours while the others were driven out from beneath the tin roofs, he found Solomon lying on his palliasse, next to Emil’s, hands behind his head, gazing up at a pair of lizards scurrying across the ceiling.
‘Not too hot for you in here?’
‘Thinking cool thoughts, Emil. I am remembering the Wannsee frozen over and a girl I used to take skating. Her scarf used to fly out behind her very fetchingly. I think she knew it too. I could never get her off the ice once she started.’
‘I filled out the form.’
Solomon turned on his side, leaning on his elbow. ‘Good for you. Perhaps you’ll be back in time to see some snow.’
‘I try not to get my hopes up, but you know how it is.’
‘Well, you do have some very useful friends. They’ll put in a word for you.’
He lay down on his own bed and felt the sweat begin immediately between his body and the woollen blanket. ‘Tell me again about these cool thoughts.’
‘When you fell over on the ice, you didn’t feel it at first, as you skated about, keeping warm. But then walking home your trousers would be wet and cold against your leg, and you felt your skin was beginning to freeze.’
‘Then, when you thawed yourself out, your feet ached,’ Emil added.
‘What I wouldn’t give now for chilblains.’
Emil closed his eyes. After helping to build the hydro-electric station in Ireland he had been sent to Finland to supervise the construction of a water power plant to run sawmills and plywood and pulp factories. Before they could begin they had to transport the pieces of the vast machines across thirty miles of ice and snow without cranes or snow trucks. He had sat in the freezing hut at the port drawing sketches of sledges, floats and hoists in the dim light of early afternoon. Then every day for a month he and the men stood out on the dock in the dark mornings sawing and hammering until they were ready. They sent for the dogs and the drivers and carted the pieces of machinery across the white country to the pine forests, the air freezing his beard. The dogs barked at first, ready to run. They moved off and there was nothing, just the sound of the snow beneath the treads, a black smudge of trees coming into view in the midst of the snowy land and sky.
He was amazed to find that it worked. For a moment before he slept he felt cold, reached for his blanket to pull it up, felt droplets of ice in his beard, a stinging wind slice into his slitted eyes. Then he slept and saw the dogs squabbling over fish, growling in their throats, jumping straight into the air, barking madly.
After dinner, a fine lamb stew from the internee-run camp kitchen, one of the diggers caught his eye across the mess, held a piece of paper in the air. ‘Telegram,’ he mouthed, an encouraging look on his face. The men at his table watched him as he read it. Meckel, opposite, one of those who never seemed to have absorbed the concept of privacy, stared at the piece of paper with open-mouthed lust.
‘Good news?’ Solomon asked above the scraping of plates with hungry spoons, the din of insects.
‘It’s my release. The tribunal accepted me onto their list.’
‘And yet you are still here among us,’ Meckel leered.
Emil looked at his face, a little slipped on one side. ‘Yes, Meckel. Still here with you.’
‘Will they return you to England?’ Solomon said.
‘It says I’m free to apply for a transport.’
Solomon laid a hand on his shoulder. ‘My God, that’s wonderful news. You must get word to Hannah.’
Emil nodded, looking at the telegram, saw himself in her mother’s garden, throwing a stone at her window like a boy.
All around them chairs were scraping, and the men, having got their morsel of news, were sighing and picking up plates to take to the kitchen.
‘Come, Emil,’ Solomon said. ‘Let’s go and blow our wages on a Viennese coffee. We’ll hunt down Schiff. I hear he has cigars.’
‘I can’t help thinking, I asked her to follow me.’
‘But you have had no word that she has.’
‘I have had no word of anything.’
‘But haven’t you said it all along? They would never have let her near a ship with all those U-boats infesting the waters.’
‘Of course. I become too used to gloomy thoughts.’
When the others were asleep, or at least lying still, existing inside themselves as they had learned to do, he slipped out of the hut and went over to the parade ground. The floodlights shone over the camp. He raised a hand to his friend O’Mara in the guard tower. Not a bad chess player, for a beginner. The digger raised a hand in return. All right, he told himself. I will go back to England. We’ll forget this stupidity. I will work in a munitions factory. Make the bombs they need.
He imagined his body into an office above a factory floor, the great riveted cylinders of bombs suspended before him. They will see me, how I make them work, and think of the thousands of us, German engineers above factory floors all over Germany. It will be all they need to build their bombs as hard and fast as their minds and fingers can go.
Hannah
In the end, I waited for Jill. It was just too fiercely hot to walk across town, and she had arranged to borrow the proprietor’s van. The children strained away from their mother on the verandah as she tugged at Polly’s hem to straighten it and passed a licked finger over Henry’s fringe, sorely in need of a trim. I feared for Polly’s white dress in the dust. Henry scratched his leg beneath his woollen shorts. Their faces were bright with scrubbing, mine I imagine dark and murderous with the wait. Finally, we reinterred ourselves in the stifling heat of the van and drove the five minutes out beyond the back blocks towards the guard towers, drawing quickly closer to the high rows of barbed wire, the long rows of military huts. Dark figures moved among them, shadows long in the late afternoon sun. Jill looked ghastly for once, absolutely sick beneath her powder and lipstick.
As we approached the high wire gates of the compound a soldier with a rifle slung across his shoulder emerged from the small wooden building on stilts that presided over the road. Here was a famous Australian digger in the road before us. We in England had always been enamoured of the pictures of them in Turkey and North Africa with their suntanned skin and slouch hats. They seemed to be of a larger, more physically able race than we Europeans, somehow. I wondered if this one here, not quite what I had previously im
agined, with his ruddy cheeks and paunch, knew Emil, was decent to him. I sprang out of the car, feeling Jill’s consternation at my back as she bundled the children out. ‘Sir,’ I shouted as the man stared and I arrived at his shadow. ‘We have come all the way from England to see our men. Please, we must be allowed to visit.’
It took a long time for him to speak. These people were rich with time, they were dripping with it. He considered at unendurable length what manner of object had fetched up before him. ‘Visits have to be arranged in advance, ma’am. Camp rules.’
‘We arrived in Sydney yesterday after eight weeks at sea. We have since travelled overnight on the train with small children. How long would you have us wait?’
Again, the pause, the endless bovine consideration. He leaned his gun against the doorway and scratched his stomach. ‘Take your names now. Come back in the morning.’
‘Pah!’
I heard Polly whisper a long ‘Oooh’ and then Jill spoke from behind me. There was something in her hand, which she offered up to the soldier. ‘Here,’ she said. ‘Take your young lady out somewhere nice.’
He looked at her hand now, as did I. There was a pound note rolled up in it. ‘This is the Australian army, love.’ He drew out his words, as though we were foreigners. ‘We don’t take backhanders. Now what’s your name? We’ll find your men. Bring ’em at eleven tomorrow. And we’ll pretend I didn’t see the other thing.’
We sheepishly gave him our names, and those of the men, and climbed back into the hot car in silence. After the short drive back to the hotel, Jill announced that she would lie down before dinner while the children had ice creams. I could not face the thought of trying to sleep myself, Emil so close, and told Jill that I would explore the town, though I held out little hope for places of interest.
I walked away from the high street towards the shimmering plains beyond the river, tiny cows and black trees blurring in the haze. The space here was like nothing I’d experienced. The sky seemed infinite. The heat blasted off the earth, late as it was in the day, a rush of it up my legs. My hair clung to my neck.
As I traipsed forlornly back along the main street towards the hotel I noticed a fairly grand old building with its door ajar. I thought I would step out of the sun for a moment and so I pulled back the large creaking door and found myself in a dusty, cavernous room with only small, high windows casting squares of light on the wooden floor. I could see no inhabitants but the relief of shade was so intense I was not willing to leave straightaway. Along the opposite wall I saw in the gloom a few low shelves of books. I wandered over to them and found a selection of school readers, bibles, trade manuals and some novels: Dickens, Austen, Hardy. I was surprised to find some books about Hitler and the European situation among the others.
I picked one up to leaf through it, wondering vaguely what it might make of things from this distance, but then I saw that in any case it was printed in London. I did not take in many of the words on the page before me, only the strangeness of standing still, of letting time pass, my shoes planted on wooden boards an inch or two above the solid, dry earth, which I could smell, continually. I realised then that there were voices, women’s voices, conversing gently within the walls of this dour, dark building. But of course they were not within the walls, the women. The slightly echoing timbre suggested to me that they were in a kitchen somewhere. The past opened up in my head and I thought for a moment that if I could open a hatch into that kitchen I would see Mother at the bench making tea.
I waited, eyes smarting, for the owners of the voices to appear and eject me into the furnace of the day. They went on, murmuring, and I studied the book intently—the descriptions of the SS and the brown shirts flooding the towns, the talk of the brainwashing of the ordinary German people—and began to feel as though I were teetering on some slippery ledge.
I coughed at last and the voices ceased suddenly. Polite, quick footsteps on tiles, more than one pair of feet. Then I saw from the corner of my eye that they were emerging from a door that I had not noticed at the far end of the long hall. Two women in loose floral-print dresses. Deeply tanned faces and arms, the creases at their elbows white inside. Tall women, one stick thin with strong shoulders, the other doughy and pretty in a well-worn, motherly way. I forced myself to look up as they approached. It seemed that I was swaying, that they were walking the length of a ballroom on a ship towards me, that they had their sea legs and I did not.
‘Hello, miss?’ said the thin woman. Her friend smiled, an openhearted smile without reserve. ‘Can we help you with something?’
‘Well,’ I began, my English accent seeming overdone suddenly, ‘I wanted to step out of the sun for a moment. And then I became interested in your library.’
‘Library!’ The larger one laughed. ‘Well I doubt it’s been called that before. Are you staying at the hotel?’
I nodded, catching my voice. ‘My fiancé is in the camp. I have not been allowed to see him yet.’
‘Oh, Mrs Stuart, he’s one of those poor souls.’
Mrs Stuart eyed me seriously. ‘When did your ship arrive, dear?’
‘Yesterday,’ I said. The vastness of my journey seemed to yawn at the heel of my shoes. ‘Could I trouble you for a glass of water?’ The one who was not Mrs Stuart disappeared through the door from which she had emerged at speed.
Mrs Stuart leaned down towards me. ‘They’re good people at the hotel but you’ll run up a shocking bill.’
There are people who seem to intuit your deepest worries at a glance. I had reached the end of my journey with my pockets all but empty, had been skipping meals wherever possible, counting my pennies while Jill was busy with the children. Now I feared that my stomach would rumble and expose me.
‘If you like, you may stay with me. I run the store in town, and my boys are in Africa. You can have their room.’
‘Oh, no. We have only just met and here you are rearranging your home for me.’
‘It’s not much, dear, but you’re welcome.’ She did not smile. I found later that her smiles were rare bursts of sunshine breaking through the clouds of a serious existence, her husband long dead, the business of the store and of worrying about her sons, away in Egypt, hers alone to manage.
I accepted her offer, leaving Jill a note at the hotel for when she woke, thanking her for everything and asking her whether she would mind coming to fetch me in the morning for the drive to the camp. She was a wealthy woman, in spite of the circumstances, and I was not concerned about her shouldering the bill alone. I insisted Mrs Stuart must not take the trouble to clear out the boys’ room, which was filled with boxes and baffling bits of machinery. So she and Mrs Kelly, her friend, made me up a bed in the sleep-out, Mrs Kelly fussing over my decision to sleep ‘in the wilds’. ‘But this is perfect!’ I said and meant it. For all my travelling, sleeping on a verandah with only an insect screen between myself and the elements was something quite new.
That night, I lay on a comfortable ticking mattress, between freshly laundered sheets that gave up a eucalyptus smell as I sank into them. Stars were visible through the insect meshing and the crickets emitted their astonishing synchronised thrumming. On one side of us was the ugly red Anglican church and in front were the empty blocks stretching towards the camp and the plains. The land was lit by an eerie glow from the floodlights at the camp and so Mrs Stuart had pegged a sheet across the wire mesh for me to pull across when I wanted to sleep.
I lay in serendipitous luxury, wondering if the soldiers had, truly, told him I was here. I allowed myself to believe it, that he was awake in his bed among the beds of the other men, a mile left of the twelve thousand, thinking of me.
I slept more soundly that night than I expected to after my months of sharing confined spaces with Jill and her snuffling children. My body enjoyed the luxury of being alone, even as I slept. I woke on the long verandah to a cacophony of excitable birds. The racket of the creatures here was fantastic. I pulled back the curtain and lay back in bed, took i
n the pale blue dawn, the pepper trees in the yard, the shape of Mrs Stuart’s mangy black dog lying next to the outhouse. Let the certainty fill and warm me that this morning, in a very few hours’ time, that my hand, this one here, would touch Emil’s. I allowed myself one short moment to marvel at myself, that I had accomplished this feat of following him to Australia.
I smelled bacon cooking while I washed at the outhouse sink alongside the house, made barely private by a corrugated tin wall that did not reach to the ground, and wondered how Mrs Stuart remained so thin. Dinner the night before had been immense, and followed by cake. My journey had hollowed me out beneath my ribs, skimmed off the softness of my limbs, but Mrs Stuart’s cooking would soon put paid to that.
After washing I ventured into the kitchen, well slept, briefly cool and clean, tidy and contained. My host was serving up a stack of bacon, eggs, mushrooms, tomatoes and potatoes left over from dinner the night before at the enormous table. Her kitchen was on a larger scale than any you would see in England, and was furnished with all sorts of delightful curiosities, like wooden cupboards with mesh sides for keeping meat from the flies and an enamel teapot large enough for at least ten visitors. All the benches in this kitchen for giants appeared to have been fitted to suit her impressive height. As she served up breakfast on an enormous dinner plate I felt like a small pampered child, my feet swinging above the floor beneath my chair.
Afterwards, I attempted to help her with the dishes, to fill the time, but she would have none of it. The set of her shoulders at the sink warned me against insisting. Soon she had to open the store, which was at the other end of her lot, facing the high street. She let me sit on the high stool behind the counter while she measured out flour expertly into ten-pound bags and filled sweet jars. It was like being allowed to sit behind Father’s counter again.
Hannah & Emil Page 30