Four Fires

by Bryce Courtenay

  We look up at him, though we’re not that friendly. He’s only about my size but he’s got this heavy black-wool overcoat on that comes down to his ankles and is buttoned all the way up to show only his collar and tie and a bit of white shirt. The collar is shiny and made of celluloid and his tie is black wool and very old and frayed. You can see the gold collar-stud above the knot and just below his Adam’s apple. On his head he wears a sort of round fur cap. It’s the middle of bloody summer and it must be hot as hades inside his heavy coat. We’re both on our haunches crouched over the inner tube. ‘Gidday, ’ow yer goin’?’ Bozo grunts, squinting up at him. ‘Sand, no?’

  ‘What’s he saying?’ Bozo asks me. I can see, like me, he’s getting jack of the little bloke just standing and looking down on us, shaking his head and going ‘titch-titch’, like we’re imbeciles or something.

  ‘Sand!’ he repeats. We are right next to a dry creek bed and now he goes over and takes up a handful of river sand and with his other hand points to the inner tube, ‘Sand funeral.’And then he lets the sand run out of his hand. ‘Sand?’ I ask, not knowing what he’s talking about.

  ‘I think he said “funeral”,’ Bozo adds. ‘What the fuck’s a sand funeral?’

  ‘Funeral za wheel!’ The little bloke is getting quite excited by this time. He turns suddenly, goes over to the creek, gets down on his knees and starts to dig a big shallow hole in the fine sand. ‘Funeral!’ he says, pointing to the tube. ‘Find pffftt!’

  ‘Eh? Bloke’s mad, should be up top with the twin aunties,’ Bozo whispers and I can’t help giggling. Dot and Gwen, Nancy’s twin sisters in the loony bin, we always just call them ‘the twin aunties’ when we’re talking about them.

  ‘Funeral! Sand funeral, pffft!’ the little bloke keeps saying, furiously digging like one of Bozo’s Bitzers burying a bone.

  ‘Crikey, I think he means “bury”,’ I exclaim. ‘He wants us to bury the tube in the sand.’ ‘Whaffor?’ Bozo asks, scratching his forehead. The little bloke has now dug this big wide hole about the circumference of the inner tube, about ten inches deep. He stands up and walks over to Bozo, dusting sand from his coat with both hands. ‘Funeral!’ he says again and indicates that Bozo must give him the tyre at once. He’s only a little bloke, but he’s got a lot of authority about him that makes you want to do what he says.

  Bozo shrugs, ‘Why does he want to bury it, Mole?’ ‘Buggered if I know,’ I say, but Bozo lets him have the tube anyway. Poor bugger is in a lather of sweat, it’s running down his neck and his starched collar and, where his shirt shows on either side of his tie, it’s sopping wet and you can see the hair on his chest through it.

  Well, this reffo bloke walks over to the hole he’s made and we follow him and squat down on our haunches to watch. He places the blown-up inner tube in the hole and starts to cover it in dry sand. Just a very light dressing. But nothing happens. Bozo looks at me and shakes his head. I know what he means, we’ve got ourselves a real loony. The reffo does another ‘titch-titch’ and removes the inner tube and turns it about-face. Then he covers it again with a second dusting of sand. And suddenly there it is, the air escaping from the leak is blowing the sand away from the surface of the inner tube. He’s discovered the location of the puncture.

  ‘Jesus!’ Bozo says, ‘Why didn’t I think of that? Bloody clever, eh?’ He gets up and shakes the little bloke’s hand. And I do the same. And we all laugh.

  ‘Bozo Maloney,’ Bozo says, ‘Pleased ta meetcha, sir.’

  ‘Mole Maloney,’ I say, grinning.

  ‘Moshe Zukfizzleski,’ the little bloke says, laughing and mighty pleased with himself. He points to the inner tube, ‘Okey-dokey, very goet, no?’

  Sarah is standing with his wife a few yards back and they both clap, like he’s a hero or something. Suddenly everyone’s laughing and his wife is hugging little Colleen.

  Well, it turns out this little bloke’s a professor. Only, like I said before, he can’t be one here in Australia because he’s not good enough.

  ‘Where you from then?’ Bozo asks, as we set about repairing the puncture.

  ‘From?’

  ‘You know, what place in Europe?’ I say.

  ‘Ah, Europe.’ He taps his chest, ‘Poland me.’

  ‘Pooland?’ I say. ‘Where they’ve got concentration camps?’ Just like Anna Dumb-cow-ski told us. ‘Ja!’ he says, surprised, ‘Poland, Auschwitz.’ That must be the name of the town he comes from, I think.

  ‘It’s not Pooland, Mole, it’s Poland,’ Sarah corrects.

  ‘No, Pooland!’ I protest, looking to Bozo for confirmation.

  ‘Professor Zukfizzleski comes from Poland and he’s Jewish,’ Sarah says and the little bloke nods his head, smiling, like he’s telling her she’s got it right. So much for Bozo’s theory about Anna Dumb-cow-ski’s family being in the poo in Pooland. But it doesn’t clear up the bit about them not concentrating and being sent to a camp. I should have known better than to trust Bozo. But he’s busy with the tyre iron, feeding the tyre back into the rim, and he pretends he isn’t listening. ‘Looks like offal month coming up,’ he says, running his hand along the canvas strips on the tyre. It’s him trying to change the subject.

  Professor Zukwhatzizname has unbuttoned his overcoat and I see he’s got another heavy suit on underneath, poor bugger must be practically melting. I forgot to say he has this great big moustache that has sharp points sticking out at the end which curl up nearly to touch his ears. Then he takes off his fur cap and he’s bald except for these two tufts of hair in front, like an extra set of very large eyebrows only higher up. All I can think of is that he looks exactly like a picture I once saw of an African wart-hog.

  The professor’s wife’s name is Zofia and she seems to be quite a lot younger than him. She speaks English a lot better too, which wouldn’t be hard, and she and Sarah are soon getting on like a house on fire. You can see she loves little Colleen to bits, she can’t stop hugging and kissing her and once or twice Zofia wipes tears from her eyes with the back of her hand. ‘I am very heppy to know you,’she keeps saying.

  They ask us if we’ll stay for a cuppa and that’s when we get the black sandwich with see-through cucumber and mushy white sour cheese on it. Zofia makes a bit of a fire from twigs and boils this little pot and makes black tea and puts a lot of sugar in it, like four heaped tablespoons. They’ve only got two tin mugs because I suppose they weren’t expecting us. But Bozo and me and Sarah say no thanks to the tea. We can’t come at the black tea. The heavy sour black bread with weird stuff on it was bad enough but tea without milk is definitely a no-goer. Though I don’t suppose they could help it, not being civilised like us.

  After the bread and tea, Tommy comes back and we introduce him and then we take them back to Bonegilla and drop them off at the camp gate. Zofia’s crying and hugging little Colleen and Sarah and the professor is bowing and taking off his fur cap and showing his extra eyebrows and grinning. It’s not hard to tell they’ve had a good time. It’s like we’re royalty and not Maloneys and you can see they really like us and want us to be their friends. It’s quite nice knowing there’s people lower than you that you can be nice to because you know what it feels like to be a nobody yourself. Even Tommy says the professor is a good bloke, he’s sat in the front of the Diamond T and they must have had some sort of a conversation, though I can’t think what they could’ve said to each other.

  ‘Jewish? What’s that when it’s got booties on?’ I ask Sarah later when we’re going home in the truck. Colleen’s tired and doesn’t want to go in the back and so we’re all squashed in the front of the Diamond T.

  Sarah sort of shrugs her shoulders and I can tell from the sound of her voice, she doesn’t really know. ‘He’s . . . you know ...ah...a Jew.’She thinks for a moment, ‘Like Jesus in the Bible.’

  ‘Oh,’ I say, though I’m none the wiser. I always thought Jesus was a Cathol
ic.

  Then Sarah tells us more about the professor and Zofia.

  She’s had a proper chinwag with his wife, the way women have of getting all the latest goss even if they’ve only met for the first time. She tells Bozo and me how they’ve had a terrible time. He’s been in Auschwitz and she’s been in another concentration camp and then three years in a refugee camp in Germany before Moshe became the medical officer of a refugee agency in Germany and at the same time worked as a doctor in a hospital for the survivors of the concentration camps.

  I’m still not sure what a concentration camp is, but I sense that it’s not what we thought with Anna-dumb-cowski, that it’s something much, much worse.

  Sarah then says that Moshe and Zofia spent almost seven years in Germany after the war, but still they could not get used to the faces. Zofia said that the fear never left her, she would look into the face of a railway guard or a doorman and the cap he wore would turn into an SS officer’s cap with the death’s head badge and she would start to tremble, even sometimes to wet her pants. ‘Za faces, zey are in mine brain, I can’t forget it,’ she tells Sarah. So, when Moshe felt he had done as much as he could to make up for what he was forced as a doctor to do in the concentration camps, they decided to get away from Germany. ‘Away from za faces!’ Zophia said, ‘In my sleep also, I see za Nazi faces.’

  Sarah explains how Hitler hated the Jews, of whom there were a whole lot in Europe, mostly in Germany and Poland, but also other places. I mean a whole lot like millions and he decides to exterminate them.

  ‘All of them?’ I ask Sarah.

  ‘Six million!’ Sarah says.

  ‘Six million! We’re only eight million in Australia! What for?’Bozo asks. ‘They must have done something really bad?’ ‘It was their religion, Jewish is a religion and Hitler hated the religion and he didn’t want them mixing their blood with Germans.’

  ‘Like Catholics and Protestants?’ I say.

  ‘Yes, but he wanted to kill all the Jews, not just hate them. He decided to kill every single one.’

  ‘Shit, hey? How’d he do that? I mean, there’s six million of them!’ Bozo exclaims.

  ‘That’s it, he took them from everywhere and put them in cattle trains and sent them to these extermination camps called concentration camps. There were lots of them scattered around Germany and Poland mostly.’

  I shoot an accusing glance at Bozo now that the concentration-camp question has finally been cleared up.

  Sarah continues. ‘Those he didn’t want to work to death first before he killed them, like for instance the old people and children and pregnant mothers and small babies, he told them they were going to have a nice shower. They were dirty and bedraggled from the days in the cattle trains and this was the first nice thing that happened to them. They were instructed to take off their clothes and go into these big sheds. They were even given a bar of soap among six of them. Women, babies and girls were told to go into one shower shed, old men and young boys in another. Only, it turned out, they weren’t showers at all, they were gas chambers. Instead of water coming out of the showers, Zyklon-B came out and they all died a horrible, terrible, suffering death.’

  ‘What about the others he didn’t send to the showers?’ I ask her.

  ‘Those who had skills or could be made into slave labourers in Hitler’s factories, he worked and starved to death. He didn’t care, there were plenty more where they came from. Cattle trains crammed with Jews, and some of them dying before they arrived, were coming from every direction in Europe. And them having to shit and urinate right there, jammed into the trucks closer than sardines in a tin and given no water or food.

  ‘When the concentration camps became so full and Hitler couldn’t bury the ones he’d killed fast enough because there were so many, he built these giant ovens and shoved them in there and you could smell the burning flesh for miles around. The smoke darkened the sky.’

  This was a picture I would keep in my head for the remainder of my life. Long grey endless tin sheds and hundreds of ovens with tall red-brick chimneys coming from them. The sky, as far as you could see, was a cumulus of dark smoke rolling and billowing upwards, blocking out the sun itself, and everywhere the silent scream of death clawing its way up to heaven where God sat too stunned to weep.

  Sarah went on. ‘Before he put them in the ovens or buried them, Hitler cut off their hair and used it to make blankets and the linings for his army coats. Then he took the gold out of the corpses’ teeth and melted it down and kept it for himself. There were millions of pounds worth of gold, and also mountains of shoes and eyeglasses and practically a mountain range of clothes. Nothing was wasted. Sometimes Hitler even made lampshades out of human skin!’

  Sarah didn’t tell us all this that day going home. I’m telling it all together as if she told us in one go, but it came out over a long period of time as we got to know the professor and Zofia when their English had improved.

  It turned out the professor was the Professor of Surgery at the University of Kraków before the war and when he was sent to the concentration camp he was useful as a doctor so he survived in Auschwitz.

  Zofia, who wasn’t married to him then, went to another camp called Buchenwald and she worked as a servant in the home of the Kommandant and managed to stay out of the showers and the ovens. But both of them still starved and had lice in their hair and you could see their bones sticking out under their skin and their toes nearly rotted off and they looked like walking corpses when they were finally released. When the Americans liberated the camps they used DDT to get rid of the lice and the bugs and the fleas, because, it seems, no matter what happens vermin stay alive. I’ve seen a flea, but I’ve never seen a louse or a bedbug. The concentration camp was also where the professor went completely bald, keeping only those two high-up ‘eyebrow’ bits.

  Well, that was the effect the migrant camp at Bonegilla had on the Maloney family.

  What’s more, for people who weren’t supposed to be as clever as us Australians, I tell you what, the professor and Zofia learned English amazingly quickly. The professor got a job as a lab assistant up top at the mental asylum with the twin aunties and Zofia worked in the soft-drink bottling plant stacking the filled bottles into wooden crates. After work most days they’d visit us, and Sarah and sometimes Mike, or even Nancy, would give them English lessons. Zofia turned out to be very useful at smocking and broderie anglaise and she’d work with Mike, Nancy and Sarah as she absorbed her lessons. I think it made them feel that they were paying their way and not sponging on us.

  Eventually Zofia and the professor found this small corrugated-iron shed behind the Golden Fleece petrol station and they moved into town. They were soon spelling and writing and reading everything they could lay their hands on in English. You weren’t surprised that Moshe had become a professor in Poland because he was really brainy and you only had to tell him something once and he never forgot it.

  One afternoon, after the professor had read the whole front page of the Gazette out loud without making a mistake, he turns to Sarah. ‘Zofia and me also, we want we should have English name, English surname for us and first name also.’ Then he hands Sarah a slip of paper, ‘Wot you sink, Sarah?’

  Sarah looks down at the scrap of paper, ‘Sophie? That’s nice.’ She smiles up at Zofia. ‘Though I don’t see too much wrong with Zofia, it’s a very pretty name.’

  ‘You like!’ The professor claps his hands together and turns to Zofia, ‘Now, my dear, you are a Sophie okey-dokey, very nice, zank you very much!’ Then he hands Sarah a second bit of paper and when she reads it she starts to giggle and brings her hand over her mouth to stop herself laughing, but she can’t.

  ‘You don’t like?’ the little bloke asks, concern written over his face.

  ‘Professor Zukfizzleski, you can’t call yourself Suckfizzle!’

  ‘Is not goet, Suckfizzle?’

 
‘Well, it’s . . . ah,’ Sarah bursts into laughter again and now we all break up.

  ‘This is joke, no?’ The professor, clearly puzzled, asks again.

  ‘Well, people won’t forget it in a hurry, that’s for sure,’ Nancy chortles.

  Sarah explains, ‘They’re two action words, to suck and to fizzle, and they end up being funny when you join them together in English, Professor.’

  ‘Two action words?’ He thinks for a moment. ‘Ja, this I like, to suck and to fizzle, very nice, my dear.’

  ‘People will laugh at your name, Professor,’Mike warns, laughing himself.

  ‘Tch! Better to laugh and remember, zen Zukfizzleski and always to forget. Now they will remember my English name. “Two action words, to suck and to fizzle,” I say to them ven zey ask, “suck and fizzle, now you remember, madam, okey-dokey?” ’ He holds his hand above his head, forefinger pointed to the roof. ‘Zukfizzleski no more! Suckfizzle, yes! One more! I am not Moshe. Moshe is now finish. I am Morrie. Morrie now begins!’ He stands to attention, sticking his chest out. ‘Mr Morrie Suckfizzle and Mrs Sophie Suckfizzle, congratulations, she’ll be right, mate! No worries! Just a moment I go to kitchen.’ He’s said it all in one breath and now turns sharply and marches from where we are on the back verandah towards the kitchen. He stops and turns at the door. ‘You wait, please.’

  ‘What’s all that about?’ Nancy asks and Zofia, who is now Sophie, giggles but says nothing.

  In a couple of minutes the professor returns, but he’s walking backwards toward us. ‘What the –?’ Bozo says.