Empire Day

by Diane Armstrong

  ‘The same one. About a trapdoor.’

  ‘And where does the trapdoor lead?’

  ‘To a cellar.’

  They looked at each other like adversaries at the start of a boxing match, dancing around each other as they assessed each other’s strength and weaknesses.

  ‘Dreams often reveal what our mind would prefer to conceal,’ he said. ‘Would you like to tell me about that cellar?’

  Her heart beat so fast that she could feel it thumping against her ribs. She wanted to run from the room and never come back, but she forced herself to tell him about Ernst Hauptmann’s house, the arguments he had with his wife, and the trapdoor which led to the cellar. She told him how good Ernst had been to her but said nothing about the intimate side of their relationship.

  While she talked, he made encouraging sounds without taking his eyes off her. When she’d finished, he rested his chin on his steepled fingers.

  ‘When you wake up from that dream, are you upset because you’re back in that cellar or because you’re not?’

  His question startled her with its unexpected insight, and she looked down without replying.

  ‘Tell me how you feel when you open that trapdoor and see the cellar.’

  She thought for a moment. ‘I feel happy. Relieved.’

  ‘Do you think you are happy because you’ve discovered that the house where you and your husband are living has such a cellar?’

  She nodded and then shook her head. ‘Yes. No. I don’t know. My dream doesn’t have anything to do with Szymon.’

  ‘But you’re happy when you discover that the house you’ve never liked actually contains the refuge you’ve been longing for.’

  She shrugged. His interpretation placed too much emphasis on her relationship with Szymon.

  ‘Do you have any idea why you’re having those dreams at the moment?’ he asked.

  She told him of the notice about Ernst Hauptmann, and the chaos it had caused in her life.

  He looked at her intently. ‘If he was so good to you, why are you having so much trouble deciding whether to write a letter to help him?’

  She stared out of the window.

  ‘I know this is very hard for you,’ he said after a long silence. ‘Tell me, what made you decide to come and talk to me?’

  ‘I had a feeling you’d understand.’

  He nodded. ‘And how do you feel now? Has our conversation helped to clear up some of the confusion?’

  ‘I don’t know. In a way I feel even more confused,’ she said. ‘I need to go home and think.’

  Zenek stood at the window watching as Sala opened the gate, and his throat closed up. Rutka would have been the same age if she’d lived. He sighed and turned back to his textbooks. Transference was something that was supposed to happen to the patient, not the psychiatrist.

  Chapter 47

  Sister Joan Gately planted her large feet in the hallway, placed her bulky travel bag on the floor, unpinned her large black hat and took off her loose black coat with an air that showed she meant business. Refusing Kath’s offer of tea, she asked to see the patient.

  ‘No time to waste,’ she said in a voice that indicated a lifetime of order and discipline.

  Meggsie was sitting in the armchair beside his bed staring into space when Sister Gately came in. She sat on the edge of the bed and pulled back the sheet covering his legs. No matter how often Kath saw his thin, wasted legs, the sight always made her draw in her breath.

  Sister Gately picked up each limb like a housewife feeling a leg of lamb, muttering to herself and shaking her head as she did so. ‘We’ve got a lot of work ahead of us,’ she said in a grim voice.

  Upset by her brusque manner, Kath didn’t know what to say, but the nurse didn’t wait for a response.

  ‘Sister Kenny has proved time and time again that a lot of the damage in polio cases is caused by the treatment and not the disease,’ she said. ‘She kept telling the doctors that immobilising the limbs of polio sufferers does a lot of damage, but they didn’t listen to her, did they?’

  Seeing Kath’s confused expression, she pulled out a sheaf of papers from her travel bag, spread them on the bed and pointed to intricate diagrams of muscles and nerve pathways to illustrate her point.

  Kath didn’t understand the diagrams or the rigmarole about receptors, proprioceptors and subcutaneous tissues, but she was reassured by the fact that Sister Gately was so knowledgeable.

  ‘Pity I didn’t get to see him sooner, but better late than never,’ Sister Gately said. ‘We have to help those muscles recover. We’ll stimulate them and loosen them up so they’ll start working again. I’ll give him hot, moist compresses and show you how to do the exercises and give him warm salt baths. But if you don’t follow my instructions to the letter, I’m wasting my time and you’re wasting your money.’

  As she raised Meggsie’s legs, one at a time, he groaned and shot Kath a beseeching look to rescue him. She bit her lip and looked away while the nurse continued to check the extent of the muscle wastage.

  When she’d finished she gave Meggsie a stern look. ‘I want you to remember two little rhymes,’ she said, wagging her finger at him like a schoolteacher. ‘“No gain without pain”, and “If you don’t use it, you’ll lose it.” I want you to keep saying them over and over in your mind while you’re doing your exercises,’ she said. ‘Will you do that? Good boy.’

  After applying the hot compresses she called foments, she demonstrated the exercises, stressing that they had to be done frequently and with ever-increasing pressure. Then she looked at her watch.

  ‘Time to go,’ she said, ramming on her hat and pulling on her coat. ‘Make sure you do the exercises three times a day.’

  She was at the front door when Kath stopped her. ‘Do you think he’ll walk again?’ she asked in a low voice.

  ‘All I can tell you is what Sister Kenny once said. “Human hands are only the instruments of the great unseen hand which shapes our destiny.”’ She quoted the words as though reciting a holy text. ‘But he’ll have a good chance of regaining some movement if you follow my instructions.’

  ‘Why aren’t there more Kenny clinics in Sydney?’ Kath asked.

  Sister Gately put her bag on the floor, leaned against the wall and folded her arms. Now that they were talking about her favourite subject, she wasn’t in a hurry to get away.

  ‘Professional jealousy, that’s why. The doctors didn’t like a bush nurse showing them up, and the massage association was scared of the competition. Sister Kenny’s in her sixties now, and her methods have been recognised in England and America, but there’s only one Kenny clinic in Sydney. It’s a real disgrace, but you know what they say — you can’t be a prophet in your own country!’

  Kath had never heard that saying but she nodded. She was angry that no one had ever told her that there was another way of treating this horrible disease.

  After Sister Gately had gone, Kath went back to Meggsie’s room. He looked miserable.

  ‘Gee, Mum, I don’t want to do those horrible exercises or have those hot packs. The exercises hurt and they’re boring, and they probably won’t even do anything.’

  ‘Listen to me,’ she said, in a sharper tone than usual. ‘You’re going to do them whether you like it or not, because Sister Gately said they’re going to help.’

  ‘Like fun they will,’ he muttered, and added, ‘I don’t even like the old bat.’

  He turned back to his book, and Kath left the room with a heavy step. What he needed now was courage and confidence, and she didn’t know how she was going to get him out of this defeatist mood.

  Talking to Verna Browning usually cheered her up, but when she knocked on her neighbour’s door half an hour later, she found Verna absorbed in her own troubles.

  ‘I’m worried about Ted,’ Verna said. ‘He hardly eats a thing, and spends most of his time moping around. At night I can hear him pacing up and down in his room like a caged tiger. I’ve never seen him like this, b
ut he won’t tell me what’s going on. And I think he’s spending too much time at the Journalists’ Club. I’m sure he’s pining for that New Australian girl up the street, but he won’t talk about it.’

  ‘That’s love for you,’ Kath said.

  She understood how Ted felt. Her parents had done their best to try and stop her from marrying Jack because she was so young, and he was a Protestant, and irresponsible, but she’d been on fire, and she’d known she couldn’t live without him. Even now, after all he’d done, the memory of their lovemaking still made her body stir with yearning. Sometimes she wondered whether she would make a different choice if she could turn the clock back. And sometimes it crossed her mind that perhaps the choice she’d made had somehow been responsible for Meggsie’s illness.

  No one warned you when you had children that you’d never stop worrying about them, Verna thought as she changed from her house dress into the seersucker frock she’d made for Christmas. She’d intended to cook Ted’s favourite dinner, to tempt him to eat something, but the power was off again, so she picked up her string bag to do a spot of shopping in the Junction instead.

  Closing the gate behind her, she smiled ruefully as an old saying came into her mind. Little children tug at your apron strings, big children tug at your heartstrings. When Ted was little, she’d worried about him getting scalded by boiling water or being lost in a department store. Now it was his state of mind she was worried about. She’d tried several times to get him to talk, but he sounded so irritated that she stopped asking. After all, he was entitled to his privacy.

  Pop Wilson raised his large-knuckled hand in greeting as she walked past, and she wondered, as she often did, what had become of Nola. Behind their polite and pleasant exterior, it seemed that everyone was locked inside their own cocoon of secrecy, and she wondered how it would be if people spoke honestly about their feelings.

  She gave an involuntary shudder. We’d all be swamped by a torrent of self-indulgent waffle, she thought.

  It might suit the New Australians, who were excitable and overemotional, but it certainly wouldn’t do for Aussies.

  Especially not Aussie blokes, who were stoic and reserved to the point of being inarticulate. Ted probably took after his dad. Alf always clammed up whenever something was bothering him. He’d become distant and withdrawn, struggling in silence with his demons, and she’d understood him well enough to leave him alone until he’d solved his problem. They’d lived their life in calm companionship without raised voices or arguments. The only argument she recalled was over his decision to join up.

  Now that she thought about it, there was only one aspect of their married life that disappointed her, although she’d never alluded to it. They hadn’t been intimate since Ted started high school. Although she had always thought that sex was greatly over-rated, she missed the physical closeness when Alf stopped reaching out for her at night. Like the young women whose letters she often read in the Women’s Weekly, she was too embarrassed to talk to him about it. Now that it was too late, she wondered whether he too had been too shy to broach the subject. Perhaps Alf too had had a secret he’d been unable to share. Verna sighed. Why did it take a lifetime to gain some understanding?

  She’d almost reached the end of the street when she glanced at Mr Emil’s place. His white face appeared in the front window and, a moment later, vanished from view. Mr Emil was another of Wattle Street’s mysteries, and as Verna continued on her way to Oxford Street, she wondered whether he’d ever admit he’d left the money under Kath’s door.

  Inside the room where the two coffins lay, Emil lit the candles and paced up and down the room, wondering how to find the words to ask the ghosts of his dead children to absolve him of his promise. It was a sin to break a solemn oath given to a living person, but it seemed even worse to break a covenant made with the dead. Four years had passed since he’d vowed on his children’s souls never to perform magic again. Would they understand and forgive him if he broke that vow? Could he forgive himself?

  Chapter 48

  Anna Vestermanis lived in Coogee on a hilly street that resembled a roller-coaster, and by the time Ted had reached her flat, his heart was thumping in his ears.

  She opened the door cautiously and kept the chain across it while he held up his press card and explained why he’d come.

  ‘You never know,’ she said as she removed the chain to let him in. ‘I live alone, so I have to be careful.’

  Mrs Vestermanis was a small, thin woman and her jerky movements reminded Ted of a wary sparrow. Although she looked quite young, the brown hair brushed back from her forehead was speckled with grey.

  ‘Your English is very good,’ he said.

  She inclined her head at the compliment. ‘I was an English teacher in Riga,’ she said, ushering him into her lounge room.

  A sad atmosphere permeated the room, as though it was in permanent shadow and no sunlight ever warmed its cold walls. From the sparse furniture and lack of any ornaments, it seemed little more than a roof over her head. The only personal item was a small framed photograph on the mantelpiece.

  ‘I’ve come to see you because of the letter you wrote about a man you recognised from Riga,’ Ted said.

  She nodded and clasped her hands, which were trembling. ‘When I saw him I couldn’t believe my eyes. I thought I would vomit in the street. He was in Arajs Kommando. But you Australians don’t know about them.’

  ‘I do,’ he said, and took the photo of Paulis Olmanis from his pocket. ‘This was their uniform, wasn’t it?’

  She took it from him and the colour drained from her face. In a hoarse voice she said, ‘But that’s him. That’s the man I saw in town that day.’

  She stood up and started pacing around the room, clasping and unclasping her hands. She stopped by the window, glanced outside, shook her head several times, mumbled something in a foreign language, and came back to have another look at the photograph.

  In an unsteady voice, Ted asked, ‘Can you tell me anything about him?’

  ‘This man was in charge of a death squad outside Lipaja at the beginning of 1942,’ she said.

  Ted sat forward, trying to control his agitation. ‘Are you sure? Perhaps the man you saw in town just looks like him.’

  She gave a bitter laugh. ‘Mr Browning, you are very young, and thank God you have not seen what I have seen. So you do not know that there are faces you can never forget, even when you try.’

  She jumped up. ‘Before we talk, I make coffee, yes?’

  He heard her moving around in the tiny kitchen, opening drawers, clattering dishes and setting something on a stove. A few moments later the tiny flat was filled with the aroma of brewing coffee.

  She set a cup of black coffee in front of him and apologised for not having any milk. He tasted it, but even after stirring in two heaped spoons of sugar it was too bitter for him. Anna Vestermanis drank hers in quick gulps, and gazed into her empty cup as though she could see scenes from her past in the coffee grounds.

  After placing the cup aside, she jabbed the photograph of Paulis Olmanis with her index finger and shuddered. ‘There were three groups doing the shooting that day. Germans, Latvian police and that bunch of thugs, the Arajs Kommando.’

  She was staring into space as she talked. ‘They’d told us we were being relocated, but as soon as the lorries stopped in the woods behind the beach and we saw that long pit, we knew why they’d brought us there. I’ll never forget the screaming and crying, and the sound of those rifles shooting and shooting, and seeing people crumpling and falling.’

  She paused and looked up. ‘Did you know that in Lipaja they lined people up so they couldn’t see their faces, and shot them from behind?’

  He shook his head and swallowed.

  ‘I had my arm around my little sister. Her face was white and she was shivering, but I told her we’d get away. She was such a pretty little thing, only eleven. I thought surely they would let her go. They started pushing us towards the pit and or
dered us to take off all our clothes, everything, and we stood there naked in front of all those men. I didn’t think I could bear it. But I looked straight into that man’s face and I begged him to let us go, at least to let her go. She was only a child. And he looked straight back at me without any expression at all, and he said, “Today Jewish-Bolshevik blood must flow.” I still hear those words in my sleep.’

  Ted tried to swallow again but there was a rock in his throat and he coughed instead. ‘You were actually there?’ he asked. ‘Then how come …’

  ‘How come I survived? I also ask myself this. I did not want to stay alive in a world like this.’

  Her eyes slid to the photograph on the sideboard. ‘That’s my mother, father and my little sister. See how lovely she was? He killed them all that day.’

  She blinked away the tears, straightened her shoulders and continued. ‘When I fell into that pit, I thought I was dead. Perhaps I fainted. But that night, some villagers came to the forest to see if they could find any gold or diamonds on the dead bodies. One of them noticed a tear in my eye and told his companion that I was still alive. I heard them arguing whether to leave me there or not, but finally they pulled me out of the pit and took me to their hut. I suppose I became their good deed, their passport to heaven,’ she said bitterly. ‘Did you ever hear a story like that? One tear was all that stood between me and being buried alive in a grave full of corpses.’

  Ted had trouble filling his lungs with air and he took several deep breaths before he could speak. ‘But you only saw the man in charge of that squad for a short time. How can you be sure that he’s the one you saw in town the other day?’

  ‘I told you already,’ Anna Vestermanis whispered. ‘Never I will forget that face as long as I live.’

  She looked at Ted. ‘I will tell you something interesting. Before the war, I did not feel anti-Semitism in Latvia. Jews and Latvians got on well. When the Germans came and started their evil propaganda about Jews being Communists and committing atrocities during the Bolshevik occupation, I did not think anyone would believe their lies. But they did. Suddenly they hated us. I would never have believed how easy it is to turn neighbours into enemies, and decent people into killers.’