Chapter 50
Deep in thought, Sala was walking towards Dr Feldman’s place, when she saw his elderly neighbour weeding her garden.
Straightening her back with a groan and pushing her big straw sunhat back from her eyes, the woman said, ‘Nice day for a stroll.’
Sala stopped by the white picket fence and looked at the floral kaleidoscope of petunias, dahlias and snapdragons. Behind the familiar flowers were bushes she had never seen before. Some of their flowers were shaped like long brushes, with fine crimson filaments, while others resembled furled scraps of apricot-coloured tissue paper with long yellow stamens.
The woman followed Sala’s gaze. ‘The red ones are Callistemon. “Bottlebrush”, we call them, and you can see why,’ she said. ‘And that bush over there is a hibiscus. Do you have those where you come from?’
A light breeze stirred the leaves and petals, and Sala breathed in a perfume that made her close her eyes with pleasure. ‘It’s that bush over there.’ The woman was pointing to a dense bush covered with violet, blue and white flowerets. ‘Bet you’ve never seen one like that before,’ she said. ‘Three colours on one bush. Yesterday, today and tomorrow.’
Seeing Sala’s puzzled look she added, ‘That’s its name. Because of the three colours.’
‘Yesterday, today and tomorrow,’ Sala repeated.
As she looked at the flowers, she felt calmer than she’d felt in a long time. The garden was a haven of tranquillity where no dark thoughts intruded and no words were necessary.
‘You are a very good gardener,’ she said.
‘I do my best, but it’s a never-ending race between me, the snails and the weeds, and they usually win,’ the woman laughed. ‘You do any gardening yourself?’
In the city apartment where Sala had lived as a child there had been no garden, but her mother had kept small pots of scarlet geraniums near the window. In spring their housekeeper often came home with sheaves of lilac or little bunches of lilies-of-the-valley she’d bought from the peasant women at the market. Sala would press her nose against the sprigs of lilac or the tiny white bells of the lily-of-the-valley until she felt dizzy with their perfume. She’d never thought of having a garden, but the idea of growing her own flowers suddenly filled her with joy. Not just the plants she knew, but these strange Australian ones, with their exotic flowers and peculiar names.
‘I would like to have a garden like yours one day,’ she said.
‘Well, when you do, come over and I’ll give you some cuttings to get you started,’ the woman said.
Sala pushed open the gate to the Feldmans’ home and rang the bell, pressing her face against the glass panels of the front door to see if Dr Feldman was coming. Although she hadn’t gained any insights or resolved any problems over the past two weeks, she was looking forward to seeing him again. Perhaps Mrs Feldman was right and talking to someone who listened and tried to understand did ease some of the burden.
She pressed the bell again, and a moment later she heard Dr Feldman hurrying down the hall, talking to Felix.
‘I was tidying the back garden,’ Zenek panted. ‘I’m not much of a gardener, but I don’t want to let the neighbourhood down.’
Sala nodded. ‘I was just talking to your next-door neighbour about gardening.’
They were standing in the hallway, and he seemed about to usher her into the front room when he said, ‘It’s such a beautiful day, why don’t we sit outside?’
The Feldmans’ back garden was a rectangle of yellowish grass surrounded by spindly hydrangea bushes whose mauve clusters rose above crinkly brown-edged leaves.
‘I think my secateurs are too blunt,’ Zenek said ruefully, surveying the result. Pushing aside the heap of woody twigs he’d snapped off, he wiped sticky cobwebs and dead leaves off two wooden chairs and invited her to sit down while he went inside to make tea.
A light breeze ruffled her hair and carried the scent of yesterday, today and tomorrow from the garden next door. When she had a garden, she decided, she would plant that bush.
Zenek returned with a tray and placed it on a wobbly table. ‘No biscuits today,’ he said. ‘But we do have cake.’
As Sala nibbled Franka’s homemade poppyseed cake and laughed as Felix pounced on beetles crawling across the grass, she wished she could prolong this pleasant interlude, but the conversation stopped and she was aware that Dr Feldman was watching her and waiting for her to speak.
She put her plate down. ‘I’ve been thinking about what you asked me last time,’ she said slowly. ‘About having so much trouble deciding what to do about that letter.’
He nodded.
She looked down at her hands and he watched her twisting her wedding ring around her finger. ‘I didn’t tell you what happened in the cellar,’ she said.
‘Would you like to tell me now?’
She took a deep breath, and for the next hour she described her stay in Ernst Hauptmann’s cellar.
‘Do you think you fell in love with him?’ Dr Feldman asked.
She blushed, and he added, ‘That would be quite normal, under the circumstances.’
‘Nothing that happened to me feels normal,’ she said.
‘How does it feel?’ he asked.
She looked up at the cloudless sky, then down at her hands again. ‘It feels as if there’s something wrong with me.’
He nodded. ‘You’re blaming yourself, but anyone in your situation would have done exactly the same. You did it to survive. What happened wasn’t your fault.’
His words were comforting but she sensed that he’d sidestepped the issue.
‘So what happened to personal responsibility?’ she asked, more sharply than she’d intended. ‘Is it all right to do whatever we like just because it’s not our fault?’
He was studying her. ‘What do you want me to say?’ he asked at last. ‘That it was your fault? Will that solve the problem?’
Suddenly she was sobbing. ‘I’m the problem,’ she whispered hoarsely. ‘It’s me. I’m no good. A decent man loves me but I only want men who are bad for me. First Ernst, and now …’ She stopped, not wanting to reveal her recent infatuation with Alex.
‘Perhaps you fell in love — or thought you were in love — with the man who saved you because it validated your sexual relationship. Perhaps being in love gave you permission to be intimate and to enjoy it.’
She reddened again.
‘Don’t forget that you were completely at his mercy. He had the power of life and death over you, and that relationship kept you safe. Perhaps you still don’t feel safe, so you’re falling into another relationship with someone who has more power than you. Love is a very strange phenomenon,’ he continued. ‘On one hand we want to replicate the delights of a past love affair, but at the same time we don’t want to repeat its mistakes.’
She was still silent.
‘I want to ask you something,’ he said. ‘If it hadn’t been for the war, and the fact that your life was in danger, would you have had a sexual relationship with this man?’
This time she had no trouble replying. ‘Of course not! I was seventeen. And we lived in different worlds. My parents were doctors, and he was a farmer.’
‘So the only reason you did it was because you were in his power. Because he forced himself on you.’
‘It wasn’t like that!’ she exclaimed. She wished she hadn’t come, that she hadn’t started delving into this snake pit of tangled emotions. Dr Feldman could never understand, and she could never explain how it had happened, or how she had felt. It was impossible to re-create those circumstances and the powerful emotions she and Ernst had both felt.
‘You’re still making excuses for him,’ Dr Feldman observed. ‘Don’t forget that you were all alone, totally isolated from everything and everyone. You were craving human contact, and he took advantage of that.’
‘You don’t understand,’ she said. ‘I don’t suppose anyone can.’
‘I understand one thing,’ he said, and his eye
s were half closed, whether against the sun or to conceal his thoughts, she couldn’t tell. ‘You’ve been struggling with yourself for a long time over that letter. If he was as good as you say, then why haven’t you written back to support him?’
‘It’s Szymon,’ she stammered. ‘He got so angry …’
‘So Szymon stopped you?’
She looked longingly at the door leading to the house, and he followed her gaze.
Leaning forward, he said, ‘I know this is very hard for you. You’re very brave to try and deal with it. You can come back and talk about this another time if you prefer.’
He was making it easy for her to leave but she didn’t move. ‘It wasn’t just because of Szymon,’ she said slowly.
For a few moments they sat in silence. Then he looked straight into her eyes. ‘Sala, you need to face the fact that this man took advantage of you. Maybe he was sorry for what he did, and maybe he won you over, but the fact is, he forced himself on you knowing you couldn’t do anything to resist. So in that sense, he is a rapist.’
Tears sprang to her eyes. ‘I just can’t think about him like that. I can’t,’ she whispered.
‘He obviously had some redeeming qualities and you can choose to forgive him if you want to. But you can only forgive someone after you’ve confronted what they’ve done. You need to stop deluding yourself about the nature of your relationship in the cellar, because as long as you do, you won’t be free to love anyone who is your equal.’
‘I’m still confused about that letter,’ she said and she couldn’t keep the reproachful tone out of her voice. ‘I still don’t know what to do about it.’
‘When you’re ready, you’ll know what to do.’
Zenek walked with Sala to the front gate, and as he watched her walk away he felt the familiar pain in his chest. He knew what it was. Although the cardiologist he’d consulted at Franka’s insistence had diagnosed angina pectoris, Zenek knew it wasn’t a physical problem. It amazed him that so many doctors still resisted the fact that powerful emotions could produce muscle spasm.
He stood at the gate for a long time after Sala had disappeared from view, and thought about guilt, responsibility and forgiveness. With a sigh he turned to go inside. It was far easier to forgive others than to forgive yourself.
Sala walked slowly along Wattle Street, still unsettled by her conversation with Dr Feldman. Her Latvian neighbour was on her verandah holding a metal watering can, and for the first time Sala noticed that she had scarlet geraniums in window boxes.
‘Your geraniums are beautiful,’ she said.
The woman looked up. ‘Geraniums grows good everywhere,’ she said. ‘In my home, big garden with trees and flowers, but here is not space. So geraniums only.’
As Sala listened, she realised that it wasn’t just the window boxes she hadn’t noticed before. Although the woman lived only a few doors away, she had never really looked at her, or said anything other than a perfunctory hello while walking past. Her reticence had something to do with the fact that this woman came from a country that had been allied with Germany. But looking at her now, Sala saw a displaced woman like herself who had lost everything and was trying to rebuild her life in a country where she had no roots.
Putting out her hand, Sala introduced herself.
Her neighbour placed her watering can on the ground, wiped her wet hands on her apron and shook her hand.
‘Marija Olmanis,’ she said. ‘You like, I give you geranium.’ She snipped off a small piece of stem and handed it to her. ‘You put in soil, in pot, in warm place. Will grow.’
Back in her room, Sala looked at the cutting dubiously. Could such a short piece of stalk, severed from its parent plant, put down roots in new soil, and bloom? It didn’t seem likely, but she decided to take a chance and plant it anyway.
Chapter 51
Summer had finally ended. Gone was the relentless heat with its steamy days and sultry nights, and by mid-March the mornings were crisp and the air was invigorating. Sala’s life had become easier as well. One of the office girls in the Jewish Welfare Society had left to have a baby, and now that Sala’s English had improved, Franka Feldman had recommended her for the job, which involved four hours’ office work a day. Sala was overjoyed. Not only would she earn more money and have easier and more interesting work, but she’d be able to fit her hours around her lectures. As long as she filed the papers and articles in the correct folders, and typed the letters by the end of the day, it didn’t matter whether she did it in the morning or the afternoon.
‘You’re so good to me,’ she said when Franka told her the news. ‘You’re like a fairy godmother.’
Franka looked at her searchingly. ‘Have you decided about your course yet?’ she asked. ‘You’ll have to enrol soon.’
‘I have decided,’ Sala said.
‘So what will you be — doctor or medical technician?’
Sala shook her head. ‘I will learn about flowers and plants.’
Franka couldn’t conceal her astonishment. ‘How come? Where do you do a course like that? What kind of job will you get when you’ve finished?’
Sala laughed. ‘That’s just what my mother would have said. With the same look on her face. I’ve made some inquiries and there’s a course in horticulture starting soon at Sydney Technical College. Who knows, when I finish I might get a job designing gardens.’
Franka sat back in her chair and took off her glasses.
‘How did this come about?’
‘Funnily enough, it was my last visit to your husband that got me thinking about gardens,’ Sala said.
She thought back to the day that had led to her decision, starting with the conversation she’d had with the Feldmans’ neighbour, and ending with her own neighbour giving her the geranium cutting. She had liked the earthy smell of the soil and its crumbly moist feel as she’d pushed the cutting into it. She’d left the pot on the windowsill to catch the sun, as Mrs Olmanis had suggested, and watched it every day, wondering whether it would take root and thrive or wither and die.
While looking through the newspaper on the tram one morning on her way to work, she had seen a notice about a certificate course in gardening and horticulture at Sydney Technical College. Instead of going home after work, she’d gone straight there. From the moment she’d seen the imposing brick building decorated with stone reliefs of lizards, wombats, echidnas and kangaroos on its rounded arches, and the waratahs, banksias and flannel flowers in the doorways, she knew she’d made the right decision.
The registrar had explained that she didn’t need any prior qualifications to enroll in the gardening and horticulture course, which involved a total of four hours a week, but to do garden design she’d have to wait until she’d gained the gardening and horticulture certificate. The lecture fee was one pound five shillings per term or three guineas for the year.
‘It’s perfect,’ she told Franka. ‘I can afford the fees, and the hours will fit in with my office work. For the first time since I’ve been here I’ve made a decision without struggling. I know this sounds odd, but it feels as if gardening is going to be my anchor.’
Franka blinked several times and wiped her eyes. ‘I think you’ve made a wise decision,’ she said. ‘It’s wonderful to watch things grow. And maybe one day you’ll be able to teach Zenek something about gardening.’
That evening, Sala was surprised when she heard Szymon’s key turn in the door earlier than usual. Now that she had decided on her course, the anger she had felt towards him had melted away. She was glad he was home early so that she could tell him her news.
She waited while he hung up his hat and flung the newspaper on the table, but before she had time to say anything, he said, ‘Sit down, Sala. I want to talk to you.’
There was something about his tone that made her sit on the edge of her chair.
‘I’ve decided to move out, but you can stay here as long as you like,’ he said. ‘I’ll keep paying the rent.’
Her
heart was pounding. She must have misheard. He couldn’t be leaving her now that she’d started sorting out her life.
‘But Szymon,’ she said in a tight voice. ‘I wanted to tell you about my new job, and the course I’ve enrolled in.’
He looked at her, but there was no warmth in his glance.
‘That’s good,’ he said. He didn’t ask about the course. ‘I hope it works out for you. Did you hear what I just said? I’m moving out.’
She sprang from her chair and started pummelling his chest. ‘You can’t do that to me! I suppose you’ve met someone. Don’t tell me you’re leaving for some flirt who’s turned your head.’
He held her flailing wrists. ‘As it happens, I’ve met a woman who enjoys my company and doesn’t think I’m crass and vulgar. And how come it’s all right for you to carry on with a married man, but it’s not all right for me to meet someone?’
The blood rushed to her cheeks and she wondered how he knew about Alex.
‘No, it’s not all right!’ she shouted. ‘I’m not carrying on with anyone. And you’re married to me!’
‘But not for much longer,’ he said coldly. ‘I don’t know what’s the matter with you, Sala. You’ve made it very clear that you don’t want me, and now you’re making a scene because I’m moving out. I thought you’d be relieved so you can be with your boyfriend. You don’t know what the bloody hell you want.’
She sank down on the chair, her chin on her chest. It had never occurred to her that it would come to this. Even when he’d said several weeks before that they should separate, she hadn’t really believed him. She was panic-stricken, and didn’t know why. Although she often criticised his lack of sensitivity, and resented him for not being the suave, polished man of her dreams, she had never seriously contemplated life without him. In some corner of her psyche, she knew she needed him and she had assumed that he needed her too.
Empire Day Page 34