Hannah & Emil

by Belinda Castles

  He did his tie in the mirror and combed out his curls. One of the Harts’ refugees had cut his hair for him the day before in their garden and there were strips of white skin in front of his ears and at his neck where the skin was still young and naked-looking. The lines in his forehead were deep and no longer went away when he made himself stop frowning. It is still you, Becker, he told his reflection. Tonight you will take your wife dancing. Your feet will remember what to do.

  The knock came and his breathing remained slow. It was his friend, come to take him to his wedding.

  Hannah

  MELBOURNE, 1945

  We married on a beautiful, cold, sunny day in the Harts’ garden, surrounded by refugees and kind Australians. I spoke German all day, and swished around the lawn in Edith’s lovely grey silk, never letting go of Emil’s arm, thin but still strong. As a young woman I had never intended to be a woman who married. It felt that day that these exact circumstances, this man, were the only ones that could have led me here, laughing in the winter sun among these wonderful people. I was very, very happy.

  Eighteen months after he was released we had our first child, a boy, Geoffrey, and then fourteen months after that another, Benjamin. And so the second half of the war was not nearly so grim for us as the first. Our flat (the tutor never returned, having married in Darwin), so spacious and serene on that summer night in 1942 when Edith plucked me from my grim cupboard at the Australia, was now cramped, disordered and perennially filled with drying nappies. The babies had curly black hair and were deliciously plump. They clearly didn’t know there was a war on. I believe they would have eaten the poor old cat if he hadn’t taken to hiding in the airing cupboard for most of the day. Being very close in age they pinched and pulled hair but we put them in the same crib to save space in our bedroom, and that was how they liked to sleep, a little box of fat, pink baby skin, dark curls, long, thick eyelashes that rested on their cheeks when they finally relinquished their sturdy grip on the world and dropped off to sleep.

  Overnight I became a housewife. I was astonished in those first few years how much of the day is given over to the care of children and a very small household. The alarm went at six for Emil’s shift. I got up, made porridge, and bacon when we could get it, fed them all, found clothes for everyone, saw Emil off to his tram, took the babies out in the pram in Fitzroy Gardens if the weather was fine and let them play on a rug on the grass while I attempted to read a book or at least a portion of the previous day’s newspaper. If I stayed in the flat I became mournful and dreary, and so I dreaded bad weather. The rest of the day was washing at the tub at the back door while preventing the boys from pulling the cat’s tail when he emerged for food (I recall he got an outraged Geoffrey across the eyeball, leaving a thin red line. That cat was very precise, he knew how not to take an eye out while still having his case heard), preparing the boys to go to market, going to market, bringing them back for a nap. Then I tried to read again but usually fell asleep myself, and then got up and tried to do something with the awful cuts of meat we were allowed to buy with our ration books.

  It was a short period, that chaotic blur of tiredness and mess, and we were always glad to be together, slipping exhausted into bed at night and curling up in the heat of one another’s bodies, the boys making their little noises in their crib, but I felt a little bewildered too, without time to read, or listen to music, or talk to my friends, or write letters. One had to make the most of the quiet sunlit moments when the little ones played quietly on the floor, and magpies sang at the window, and one caught the lovely smells of the flowers and trees of that city.

  I had a job for a while at the ABC on a program called ‘Talks’, recording short segments in which I spoke to ordinary people about how they managed during wartime. It was a delightful job, a real gift. It fed my curiosity about people, and I loved being on the radio, going into the studio and approaching the big microphone at the centre of the room. It is a particular feeling that I enjoy, of entering a secret professional world, like the translators’ booths of the big international conferences, later, after the war. It’s something to do with all that specialised equipment and an air of arcane knowledge, worn lightly by a steady stream of clever, friendly people going about their business.

  I remember, though, that I worried about leaving the boys; I had not done it before. That first evening, as I pulled on my gloves and adjusted my hat, I went into the sitting room to say goodbye. The boys had colonised Emil’s lap as he read the newspaper. They were hiding on his side of it, giggling, and yet he managed to be as absorbed in his article as if he were in a gentlemen’s club listening to Mozart. (If that is what they do in gentlemen’s clubs. Who of us would know? It’s what I’d have done then if I got a moment to myself.)

  ‘Well then,’ I said to the newspaper, trembling with fat little boys. ‘Do you know where everything is? They must be in bed by half past seven or they make life a complete misery in the morning.’

  He let the paper dip at the top, revealing the boys tucked into his armpits, curled like ammonites. They were unwilling to look at me, in case I removed them from their father so he could read in peace. ‘We are all perfectly happy,’ Emil said. ‘Go and be on the radio.’

  ‘Is there anything else you need?’

  ‘You will miss your tram, Hannah. Go, I want to read them terrifying stories and feed them jam sandwiches.’

  I shook my head, the newspaper becoming once more a tent, and I went off to catch my tram, my chest aching to leave them, and then, by the time I was stepping up onto the tram to town in my smart dress and polished shoes, hands free of small boys, wet nappies, half-eaten sandwiches, beaming with freedom and movement.

  I also got a very interesting position on Saturdays at the Council to Combat Fascism and Anti-Semitism. I wrote to radio presenters and news editors to remind them of the need not to aid Hitler’s efforts with unthinking denigration of the Jewish people. It was surprising how necessary it was. I had some lovely spats with an announcer in Perth who had been brought to my attention. You should have seen the way I went at that typewriter.

  Emil and the boys liked to come and collect me at the end of the day. He had to get permission at East Melbourne police station every time they came across town because he only had a regular permit to go to his work in South Melbourne. Anywhere else beyond a two-mile radius of our flat needed a signature on a slip of paper for him to show if stopped. Though Geoffrey loved visiting the police station and had even come to know some of the constables by name and worn their hats, Emil did it grudgingly, and I wonder whether on this particular day someone had said something that got under his skin.

  My heart lifted when I saw them at the glass doors, which my desk at reception faced, but then as Geoffrey rushed in I saw that Emil was scowling. He handed Ben to me without speaking. I could not ask him what had happened, or whether his leg was troubling him, because immediately behind them came two old dears from the refugee council who liked to drop in and gossip from time to time. They had got it into their heads that I was German, in spite of my British accent. And many of those who worked in the office were Jewish. When they saw the boys on my lap playing with the typewriter, one of the ladies said, ‘Oh my dear, you must be so relieved that you and your children are far from Europe. It is not safe at all for your people over there!’

  Then Emil said loudly and without preamble, ‘We are not Jews. You are mistaken.’

  There was a profound silence among the adults while Geoffrey clattered at the keys. I saw the breath rise and fall in Emil’s chest. The ladies looked at me, waiting for me to smooth it over. I was staring at him, waiting too for him to explain his outburst. When it became clear that no one was going to speak before I did, I said, ‘Emil left Germany because of his anti-fascist views. I am a British citizen, as are the children.’

  ‘Well, yes, of course,’ said the woman. ‘We are just—we thought we might find Mr Stern here today? He wanted to discuss something with us . . .’ And
they were backing out the door into the corridor, Emil peering out after them, stony-faced, as their heels clacked on the hard stairs down to the street.

  I spoke to him in German. (Geoffrey was already rather inquisitive.) ‘What was that all about?’ I asked. ‘What does it matter if they assume we are all Jews?’

  ‘I don’t wish to explain my entire family history every time some old beetle needs someone to feel sorry for. And you should not have to either. We are not anything to anybody. We are British, for Christ’s sake.’

  The way he said those last words, We are British, in German, made the whole thing seem unreal. I did not know what had just happened, but he was already walking out to the street, so I gathered my things, extracted the boys’ fingers from the typewriter so I could put on its cover, and waited while they did all the locks on the door. We were never again publicly referred to as Jews, or Germans, in my hearing, so long as he was alive.

  In the winter of 1945 the streets of Melbourne filled with GIs and the AIF, returning home. There were those terrible bombs in Japan, that have set me against war forever, and then everyone was out of the buildings, rushing into town, flooding across Fitzroy Gardens, compelled to be where everyone else was, to be certain, to be among the others who had lived through it too. To ask one another whether all those that were unaccounted for might really come home now. As I rushed out of the house with the boys, I thought of Benjamin and Geoffrey—my brothers, that is—and of dear mother who would not now be bombed to smithereens, although of course I had been able to relax about them since VE Day, and had had a letter from Mother since that she had seen both my brothers, that they had been in her house, and were really all right.

  I caught the eye of my neighbour as I hitched Ben on my hip. She was watering her lovely magnolia tree, on which the first pale buds were showing. I looked away, hurrying Geoffrey on. My upstairs neighbour had told me this young woman had lost her sweetheart in a bloody landing in the Pacific.

  I pushed through the waves of people, clutching Ben and gripping Geoffrey’s hand so tightly that he tried to pull free, lifting him up onto the tram just as the bell rang. It was filled with people drinking from hipflasks and even straight from beer bottles and the boys pressed against me, turning their serious and huge brown eyes upon the strange crowd. I held onto the leather hoop with my free hand and they hung onto me as we lurched and the people gave out delighted cheers.

  We got off amid the warehouses in South Melbourne and saw that already the men were coming out of his factory. I feared we had missed him but he was leaning on the brick wall, smoking, watching them go by. He smiled when he saw the boys and Geoffrey pulled at his hand, trying to get Emil to take him inside. ‘I cannot take you in there,’ he said, bending down. ‘The furnaces require little boys for fuel. Someone is bound to throw you in. I cannot take such a grave risk.’

  We took them for lemonade across the street. ‘I think it will be perhaps a week or two and they will lay off the refugees.’

  ‘Do you think they’ll do it that quickly?’

  ‘Already today they announced we are de-protected. This was a small company before the war.’

  I studied his face across the booth in the diner. There was no one but us, everyone was out in the road. The young girl looking after the place was standing on the sunny step, waving at people as they passed. ‘Well,’ I said, smiling, ‘do you want to stick it out here, or should we try and get a passage home? The youth hostel people will take us whenever we say the word. We have the fares, just.’

  He nodded. ‘Not Winchester. We can ask them for something new?’

  ‘Yes, of course.’ I put my hand on his. ‘You know, if you wanted to go to Germany—’ He shook his head. Geoffrey made a loud sucking noise through his straw as he finished his lemonade. ‘I will write straightaway. I will see what they can find us.’

  I had to support us during the last months. I worked very hard so as not to let the housekeeping eat into our fares home, but Emil’s job had indeed disappeared quickly, and we could not get a passage until the English spring of 1946. I lost the ‘Talks’ position at the ABC to a returning serviceman and found a position as a full-time subeditor at the Age. It was hard work but suited my skills. I could look up after a long shift and only then realise my eyes were tired.

  I came home in the bright afternoon of an October day to perfect silence. I thought that they must be out. But then, when I had kicked off my shoes in the bedroom and gone through to the sitting room at the front of the house, I saw them in the chair under the window. Emil was absolutely frozen, a boy on each of his knees gripped tightly about the chest. In one hand was a letter. I saw that it was handwritten, in German. After I had been in the room for several seconds he lifted his gaze to me. The rims of his eyes were indistinct and red and his mouth was not quite the right shape. The boys strained against his hold for a moment and then clambered down to get at me. I took them off for a glass of milk at the kitchen table, found each of them a chocolate, and went back in. I kneeled before him and he sobbed on my shoulder, trying to hold in the sounds so that the boys would not be frightened. It was difficult to hold him upright, but he stilled himself and we stayed there for a few moments until there was a crash in the kitchen and Ben began to wail.

  That night I woke in the dark and heard a brief sound, a stifled cry, from somewhere hidden, as though there was a sealed chamber at the centre of the building. I lay in blackness and waited for him to return. I slept and stirred, grey light in the room, as he climbed back into bed behind me. His cold legs lay against mine, warming themselves, and I slept again.

  Emil

  FREETOWN, APRIL 1946

  This time he would walk about the streets. He knew he would never be in Africa again. He was no longer in the part of his life where everything was still possible. He left them at a café on the dock saying that he wanted tobacco and would see them back at the ship. He could hear behind him the little one start up that sound like an air-raid siren but he would be all right as soon as Hannah put something sweet and sticky into his hand.

  Everything was wonderful in its degeneration back into the too-warm, too-ripe land. From piles of rubbish between little huts burst colourful flowers. The thick orange mud tracks, churned and slippery, went up into the hills behind the houses. The milky sea was lined with coconut palms. The people’s teeth when they smiled and murmured at you were large and white in dark mouths. Someone somewhere cooked corn on an outdoor grill. He might never feel such heat again, heat with weight, like a blanket over his skin.

  He had not had a moment to himself for weeks with the packing and organising and settling of small boys who must be forced to say goodbye to all their mother’s friends and continually be kissed and swept up into the air for squeezes and whispered farewells. Now he was alone with himself at last. His mother had told him in the letter of everyone that they had lost. It was many, too many for one letter. His sister’s husband, who on his way home from work was pulled off his bicycle and beaten by a Russian slave worker in the days after Germany’s defeat. A number of family friends and relatives crushed beneath their houses by Allied bombs. Ava was among these. He only hoped it was quick and unknown to her, that one moment she was dreaming of the bright hair of her child and the next she was not. He didn’t believe she would want to make a life without her boy. Only his new Australian children made it imaginable that there could be a world without him.

  All that had come back from the army, his mother wrote, was that he was killed in fighting south of Vienna in May 1945. That May, not a year past, Emil had taken the tram to the factory each morning, autumn colours blazing in the gardens of the cottages. In the afternoons Hannah and the boys had waited for him in their own courtyard, Geoffrey breaking free from Hannah as Emil turned the corner onto their street. He and Hannah had gone to bed early as the nights drew in, sinking against each other in their warm bed. In which of these moments had it happened?

  He remembered every day their pale heads l
eaning towards one another on an English train, murmuring, nodding, the fields blurring past the window; that time, in which they were safe, that he could not keep from passing.

  Soon, he would be able to visit his mother. He had no desire to go to Germany and see his town separated to individual bricks in the road, but she would not leave, and neither would his sister. A woman in bright clothes smiled as she passed, carrying a dead chicken by its neck.

  Solomon had said before he left, ‘On a journey, you must think of all the things that you look forward to about your destination.’

  ‘You did this on the Dunera?’ Emil laughed.

  ‘I did. I spent a lot of time thinking about the absence of British officers and the plentiful nature of lamb.’

  He had reached the back of the houses and not seen a store so he turned and walked down through the streets towards the sea. They had been sent a photograph of the hostel. An old manor on the edge of a village in Kent, standing on enormous grounds. The boys could roam in secret places among the hedgerows without ever leaving the garden. They could build little huts and hiding places, squirrel away the secret objects belonging to boys. Hannah could go to London on the train and see her mother and brothers who, thank God, were still here, and go to the theatre, and to Europe to work. She was talking about teaching herself Swedish. The Youth Hostel Association seemed to like to give him places that needed a substantial amount of maintenance. He would have a garden and many sheds. Perhaps he could build a car or a motorcycle, if he could get his hands on the parts in battered old Britain.