Four Fires

by Bryce Courtenay

  ‘It will be all right,’ I say, but it’s just words and she knows it and I know it and we know we don’t know what’s going to happen and that talk is cheap.

  For the first three days nothing happens except I can see Sarah doesn’t feel well and is very pale but she carries on. However, she doesn’t eat at tea and tells Nancy she’s feeling unwell but ate something earlier at dinner. Nancy thinks it’s just the baby and tells Sarah it’s still morning sickness, which you can get at night sometimes, that she did with little Colleen, and to take two aspirin and have a lie down.

  Then on the fourth afternoon when I get back from school to drop my books in before setting out to get Sarah’s jar of medicine from the old lady, I can’t find Sarah. The Diamond T isn’t out the front so Nancy’s out. Little Colleen isn’t home, so Nancy must have taken her with her and, I think, Sarah must be with them. But the old lady said she mustn’t leave the house because the medicine might work at any time if it’s going to work at all. Mike will be back soon but Bozo will go straight from school to boxing.

  Anyway, I have to take my school clothes off and change into my old clothes and then take my school things up to the copper in the washhouse so they can be put in like we have to do every day. I walk into the washhouse and there is Sarah on the floor and I think she’s dead. There’s vomit all around her and she’s lying sprawled with her cheek against the cement floor with her eyes closed. Her tummy and shoulders start to heave and she dry retches and I know she’s alive.

  ‘Sarah, Sarah! What’s the matter?’ I shout.

  Sarah tries to lift her head but she can’t. ‘Mole,’ she whispers and falls back.

  I can’t think what to do. Then she retches again and this green stuff comes out her mouth. ‘I’m going to call Morrie!’ I scream.

  Sarah manages to lift her head, ‘No, Mole, don’t.’ But there’s no strength in her voice and she retches again and falls back, her eyes closed.

  I don’t wait a second longer, Sarah’s dying is all I can think and I’m off up the hill. Even running, it takes me half an hour to get to the Mental Asylum where Morrie works in the lab. I know where it is right at the back of the grounds, a little army Nissen hut they’ve erected. I burst in, almost collapsing, unable to talk. Thank God, Morrie is there. I’m gulping for air and all I can say is ‘Sarah, you’ve-got-tocome . . . Quick!’ I’ve got my hands on my knees, bending over trying to get some air, my words gasping out.

  Morrie doesn’t waste time asking questions and in a few moments we’re in the Austin 7 which he had to crank start, and we’re off. He drives like a maniac and someone yells ‘Mug lair!’ out at us. I tell him how I’ve found Sarah and about the vomiting.

  ‘Poison maybe. You eat the tinned fish last night?’ He’s hunched over the Austin steering wheel like a racing-car driver, trying to get the maximum out of it. ‘Cholera yasna!’ he keeps shouting at the car, like he’s trying to push it into going faster, shaking the steering wheel and banging it with his fist and swearing in Polish. But when he talks to me his voice is calm, because now that I’ve got my breath back, I’m crying.

  ‘No, it’s not Friday,’ I choke. ‘It’s only fish on Friday.’

  ‘Never mind, Mole, we get there soon.’ We brake outside the house and I jump out and Morrie comes after me carrying his doctor’s Gladstone bag.

  We take Sarah down to the verandah and lie her on Nancy’s wicker couch. Morrie sends me to fetch a glass of water and a damp kitchen cloth and he cleans up Sarah, who is whimpering. Then he goes into the kitchen and looks around the cupboards and finds some Mylanta which Nancy has to have when she’s got her indigestion. He gives Sarah a tablespoon full and then says, ‘I think she must go to the hospital.’

  Sarah is weak from all the vomiting, but she manages to get her head up. ‘No! No!’ she says, but she isn’t retching any more and a bit of colour has crept back into her cheeks.

  Morrie turns to me, ‘Mole, please you go into kitchen, I call you again ven I need you, I must talk also to Sarah.’ It’s quite a long time before he calls me because I think he’s forgotten. Sarah’s crying and he’s holding her against his chest and she’s been talking in between the crying and I think she’s told him about her being up the duff and going to the old lady. Morrie is nodding his head and stroking her hair like a proper father and Sarah is gulping a bit but now she’s stopped crying. Morrie makes her sit up so she’s facing him, he has a hand on each shoulder to steady her and he looks directly into her eyes. ‘Sarah, do you have some of the mixture this woman gave you?’ Morrie asks.

  ‘No, I had the last lot after dinner and then washed the jar so Mole could take it back,’ she stammers.

  ‘Do you know what maybe is these herbs she gives you?’ Morrie asks again.

  ‘One of them’s blue cohosh root, that’s what she said,’ I answer right off, ‘but I couldn’t read what the others were.’

  ‘Such a clever boy!’ Morrie exclaims, clapping his hands together. ‘Abortifacient! She’s given you an emmenagogue combination. He shakes his head and turns to Sarah, ‘For your kidneys and your liver this is not goet, but it is not such poison you will die.’

  ‘She said maybe it wouldn’t work,’ I now say.

  ‘She is right,’ Morrie says, ‘Sarah is in her second trimester, it is too late for herbs.’ He turns to Sarah, ‘You must have a regular examination, my dear. In Poland herbal abortifacients is very common, it can cause the placenta to implant very low.’

  ‘Please, Morrie, can’t you do it? Can’t you examine me? You’re a doctor!’ Sarah cries.

  Morrie feels her pulse, ‘I listen to your chest and your stomach then we will see if you go to the hospital.’ He’s got his stethoscope around his neck and he instructs me to turn my back. ‘You are very strong and healthy, Sarah. We will put you to bed and when Nancy comes we will talk.

  Now I go to the chemist to get some medicine for you to stop the nausea and headache and some other things also. You must drink a glass of water every fifteen minutes to wash your kidneys from the poison. Mole, you bring the water every fifteen minutes, tomorrow the same.’ Then he turns and he’s off at top speed and a few moments later I can hear the little Austin 7 backfire as he cranks the engine to life.

  A short time later Mike walks in. ‘What’s Morrie Suckfizzle doing here? I saw him going down the road.’ Then he looks at Sarah and sees her eyes are all red from crying. ‘What’s happened?’ he says, dead concerned.

  When Sarah and me tell him the story, he goes spare. ‘Jesus! How could you do this!’ he shouts and lets one go and catches me behind the head with the back of his hand and sits me on the seat of my pants. I jump up because I’m sure I can take on Mike. Sarah screams at both of us but we can’t stand her screaming and calm down. ‘You’re going to have to tell Nancy,’ Mike says. He’s angry and concerned and a bit panicky, all of it together.

  ‘Morrie said she has to lie down and have lots of water,’

  I say.

  We both go to take an arm to get Sarah up. ‘I’m not an invalid!’ she protests, but she agrees to lie down in her and Nancy’s bedroom and I follow her with a mug of water like Morrie said I must.

  It’s nearly five o’clock and Sarah is asleep when Morrie arrives back and, shortly after, Nancy and little Colleen. Bozo doesn’t get back from boxing until tea time, which is half-past six.

  Well, Nancy is none too pleased as you would expect but she can’t make too much of a fuss because Morrie is there. Mike draws me aside and tells me he ought to give me a bloody good hiding for not telling him. ‘Oh, yeah, you and whose army?’I say, still a bit cheesed off from the backhand he give me.

  ‘We’re a family, Mole, we have to stick together through thick and thin, you should’ve told me and Bozo.’ It’s no good telling him Sarah said not to, because he’s right, I should’ve.

  Nancy tells Morrie she’d prefer it if he examine
d Sarah, if that’s a safe thing to do, but if he says she has to go to hospital, we’ll take her to Wangaratta, she doesn’t want her going to the bush-nursing hospital to be examined by old Dr Hughes, who’s a secret drunk and that’s why he doesn’t do house calls at night. He’s also a butcher who practically tore her open when little Colleen was born and she doesn’t trust him as far as she can throw him, which would probably be quite a distance. But I think it’s really her last attempt to keep the lid on Sarah’s pregnancy as long as she can because she could just as easy go to young Dr Wallis.

  Morrie comes out of the bedroom about half an hour later and says there’s no bleeding and everything seems to be in the right place. But if she starts vomiting again or feels nauseous, he is to be called at once. ‘Sarah is a very strong, healthy girl,’ he says again. ‘I come tomorrow night if you don’t call me before. Water, Mole, lots of water!’

  Well, I won’t tell you what happens after Morrie leaves, but none of it is good and I’m in deep shit with all concerned. Yet after I’ve copped a right earful, Nancy says I did the right thing calling Morrie Suckfizzle, and Mike and Bozo agree. Nancy makes tea that night, which is tripe and onions, and by eight o’clock I’m that bushed I’m dead to the world.

  Three o’clock the Wesclock’s alarm goes and it’s work as usual. Nancy says she isn’t coming. Sarah’s slept right through but Nancy wants to be there when she wakes up. So it’s Bozo driving and Mike and me on the cans with Bozo hopping down to help. But we’re half an hour late for school and Crocodile Brown gives me two hundred lines to do after school and it’s a quarter to five before I get home.

  Sarah’s up and working away in the kitchen and I don’t know what to expect. I’ve gone and let her down by calling Morrie and everything’s a proper cock-up. But she gives me a kiss and a cup of tea and makes me a bacon and egg sandwich which is my favourite and I didn’t even know we had any bacon, it being an offal week. ‘Thank you, Mole,’ is all she says. Though of course I want to ask her what’s going to happen next. But I can see she doesn’t want to talk. Poor Sarah, she’s in more shit than the night Fred Bellows died with the nightsoil can stuck over his head.

  There’s a couple of backfires outside and it’s Morrie and Sophie Suckfizzle. Sophie’s lugging a big basket and it turns out she’s got a bottle of milk stout for Nancy and a big bottle of creaming soda she’d bought from the soft-drink factory and these juicy steaks, each one as big as my two hands which must have cost a fortune, and potatoes and some onions. ‘Tonight I am the cook!’ she announces, ‘We cook Australian food, steak and sheeps!’

  If you’re wondering what’s happened to Tommy in all this, he’s gone bush again. He came home drunk two nights ago and in the morning he was gone. He’d left a note for Sarah with only two words, ‘Gone bush’. It was enough to make us happy until, of course, later the same day when the Sarah-vomiting thing happened.

  We sit down to tea and it’s great. Sophie’s cooked the steak just perfect and made these great chips and we have the creaming soda (my favourite) and Nancy has a glass of milk stout and does a burp and says ‘Excuse moi’, which Mike taught her, and touches her two fingers to her lips. We all reckon Sophie’s turned into a proper Australian, and Morrie says, ‘Me also, I am proper Australian, ’ow yer goin’, no worries, mate!’

  But then after tea while we’re sitting around the table, Morrie clears this throat. ‘Nancy, we are friends. Goet friends. For Sophie and me you are our family in Australia.’ We all grin because it’s a nice compliment. ‘Sophie and me also, we would like to tell you something what happened to us in the war. Is this okay?’

  We’ve all gone quiet and then Nancy nods, ‘Nothing you can’t say in front of us, Morrie.’

  ‘It is very difficult for us,’ Morrie says, ‘because we don’t like to talk. It is over what happened in Europe. Australia, this is our new country. But now we find out about Sarah and Sophie says we must talk to you uzzerwise we are not your friends if we don’t want to help you.’

  We’re all looking down at our cups of tea because we don’t know what’s coming next.

  ‘Not a lot anyone can do,’ Nancy says. ‘’Cept see it through, cop it sweet, the scandal and all.’ I hear Sarah gasp and know that it’s not all over yet between Nancy and her.

  ‘I want to tell you a story,’Morrie says. ‘Please, excuse, it takes maybe long time?’

  ‘Go ahead, Morrie,’Nancy says, ‘we ain’t goin’nowhere.’ You can see from her expression, her lips are pulled a bit tight, that she doesn’t know what’s coming and I can tell she’s a bit nervous. Deep down, Morrie and Sophie are still foreigners who come from a world she doesn’t understand. It’s easier for us, I suppose, because we’re younger. Morrie begins, ‘Before the war I am already a married man with a family, two girls and a boy, my wife is Zara and I am a professor and also a doctor in Kraków. Then come the Nazis and after a while we go in the cattle trains to Auschwitz.

  ‘When we are coming to Auschwitz the loud speaker it is saying “Doktor austreten!” This means doctors must step out of za line. I don’t know what to do. I want to be with my wife and my children but then I think if they are wanting doctors maybe it will be better for us all, so I am step out the line. Then,’ Morrie looks up, ‘I have told already this, my wife and children they are taken to have a shower, you know what means this. I don’t see them again.’ Morrie shrugs, ‘It is not a new story and my tears are the same as others, to lose your wife and children is to lose your life.

  ‘The SS they look at my papers and they see I am a doctor and a surgeon and they tell me I must be a hospital orderly in the camp, in Auschwitz. I am a lucky one, there is soup and bread, not much, but also much more than the others in the camp. Then there is coming in the camp SS Herr Doktor Josef Mengele. He is a younk man and always he is dressing very smart and wearing za iron cross and uzzer medal also. He is like movie star Rudolph Valentino, very handsome and everything perfect, how you say, not vun hair is not missing.’

  ‘Not a hair out of place,’ Sarah corrects.

  ‘Ja, thank you, and also his fingernails is polished. One morning I am getting told I must go and see this doctor. I go to his office and he calls out “Komme!” I go to stand there by his desk. “You wanted me, Herr Doktor Mengele?” I say, but I am not looking at him because it is verboten, forbidden to look at an SS officer.

  ‘He is looking at this paper. “Herr Doktor Zukfizzleski, I see here you were a noted surgeon and a professor of medicine before you came to us?” I don’t speak, I don’t say nutsing. “Well?” he say to me, “Is this true?”

  ‘“Ja, Herr Doktor, it is true.”

  ‘“And you are an orderly here?”

  ‘“Ja, Herr Doktor.”

  ‘He shakes his head, “That is not goet. To use a man of your qualifications to pick up swabs and clean the floor, that is a bad waste. You and me, we are men of science, we must work for the glory of scientific study. You will be my assistant in the operating theatre.” Then he smiles, “We have many interesting experiments we must do to help the cause of science. I was wounded on the Russian front and now medical science will benefit, we cannot waste such an opportunity.”’

  Morrie stops and looks at us. ‘At this time I do not know what will happen. Here is only a doctor, a young man, maybe in all this death will come some good. “I am a physician,” I say to him, “I must help to save life.” “Goet!” he replies. “That is wunderbar! You may go now.” He smiles at me and with his hand he waves I should go. Then when I am going out the door he shouts out, “We will start with the children!”

  ‘I turn around, “Children?” In the camp the small children are always first to be killed.

  ‘“Twins, I am very interested in twins, Dr Zukfizzleski.”

  ‘“Those who are sick, Herr Doktor?” I ask him.

  ‘“Sick!” he shout to me. He jumps up from the desk and bangs his fist down.
“Nein! The healthy ones! The sick must go to the showers for racial hygiene!”’

  Morrie stops and shrugs. ‘What can I do? Maybe I should kill myself then, but to hold on to life is a very deep instinct. All around me is death, to die is nutsing, it is easy. I would be just one more.

  ‘Always Mengele himself comes to the Auschwitz railhead. He is not a big man, but he stands straight with his chin up like so, his dark-green tunic is very clean and his SS cap with the death’s head badge he wears a little to one side,’ Morrie tilts his head, ‘what you call it?’ ‘Rakish,’ Mike says. It’s a word I’ve never heard before. Morrie sighs deeply, ‘When he finds twins from the cattle trains there is excitement in Josef Mengele, he jumps from the one foot to the next and claps his hands, “A treasure, we have found another treasure!” In his pocket he has sweeties and always he gives to the twins, he has a tender touch in his hands as he touches them, then in his own car or in the Red Cross ambulance he takes them to the hospital. When we are coming to Auschwitz we are seeing za Red Cross ambulance and everyone they are thinking it’s all right, za Red Cross is in this place. But of course, it is not so, this is not za Red Cross it is . . .’ he struggles for the word.

  ‘Deception?’ Sarah asks.

  ‘Ja, a deception, so za people will not know what is happening, sometimes they use this ambulance to put people in who are very sick, then they are driving away and the Jews who have just come think they are going to za hospital, but inside the ambulance is a gas chamber.

  ‘In two years with his cane Mengele is sending four hundred thousand people to the right, to the gas chambers. One time in the children’s block we are going to select some children for experiments. So he draws a line on the wall, 156 centimetres.’ Morrie stops and works it out for us, ‘Is about five feet. Then the children come to stand against that wall. If their heads don’t come to the line or maybe higher, they are sent to the gas chamber.’

  Morrie stops and puts his head in his hands and his shoulders begin to shake.