Live Bodies

by Gee, Maurice

  Moser grinned. He had learned to grin. ‘Willi was a big friend. The rest of us were little friends.’

  ‘Willi was the man who got way?’ Benjamin Ascher asked.

  ‘Josef too. Josef got away. He was the one who dug the tunnel.’

  ‘But did not escape that time?’

  ‘No, someone wrote a note …’

  Moser gave another grin as I trailed off. ‘Willi said I wrote it. But I have worked out who. It was Willi Gauss.’

  ‘That’s a lie,’ I said, then paused and was silent for a time while Moser and Benjamin looked away. It is not pleasant, perhaps, to see a man understand the truth. But they were mistaken: it caused me no pain. It turned Willi – turned him like a vase, revealing a part I had not known. How shall I put it? Willi became more dear to me.

  ‘Well,’ I said, ‘he hated it down there. That pump of Steinitz’s didn’t give enough air for him.’

  It did not give enough for me, and on my last night at the tunnel face the hose got a twist in it and no air came through. When Willi worked the bellows the nozzle blew out. He jerked the rope tied around my ankle, calling me back. I was close to fainting by the time I reached the pit. Willi pulled me upright and stood me on the ladder with my head in the cold air under the hut, breathing deep. ‘I can’t do it all, Willi. You’ll have to help.’ ‘We will widen the tunnel for me,’ he said. I worked on that the next night and got half a yard in from the mouth – easier work, plenty of air, with Willi lying flat among the piles, spreading the bags of earth I heaved up to him. Later, as we slept, Dowden and his men burst into the hut.

  I smiled at Moser. Willi should have found a Nazi to blame. ‘It wasn’t a very good tunnel,’ I said.

  ‘I would like to meet this Willi Gauss,’ Benjamin said.

  ‘He’s going to Auckland when he’s finished in Kaingaroa.’

  ‘Then Samuel will meet him. They will shake hands, perhaps, like New Zealanders after they are fighting in the pub.’

  I smiled at his joke. ‘So you’re heading for Auckland?’ I asked Moser.

  He was going to join a friend, he said, who had a little factory for making furniture. I was jealous.

  ‘I could do that.’

  ‘You will not steal my job? Start a factory in Wellington.’

  ‘I didn’t know we were allowed to leave the jobs we’ve got.’

  ‘Ask,’ he said. ‘Perhaps not Willi Gauss, the dangerous one. But you and me …’ He shrugged. ‘Do not wait, Josef. Anyone can be rich in this God’s Own land. A little bit of comfort, sell them that.’

  ‘Their god forgot to order it,’ Benjamin said. ‘Just as he forgot the bread.’

  Perhaps because I smiled at his jokes (although his cheerfulness pleased me more) he said to Moser, ‘Samuel, we will give him some. Will you bring my bag?’

  ‘It’s for Mrs Steiner,’ Moser said.

  ‘Mrs Steiner will do without. A piece off the end. Shall I go?’

  ‘Sit, Benjamin,’ Moser said and stumped away as though detailed to scrub out cattle troughs; fetched a bag hanging with the coats and brought it back. Benjamin put it on his knee and lifted something out. I knew the smell: new-baked bread. He put it on the table and unwrapped its cloth, revealing a loaf eight inches long, four inches high. (I knew the size exactly from my timber-measuring eye.) It was brown and firm, elastic a little when I pressed. Using the cloth, I weighed it in my hand.

  ‘German bread.’

  ‘Rye bread,’ Benjamin said.

  ‘It is his hobby,’ Moser said. ‘He has a big oven and he bakes. He plays his violin to make it rise.’

  Benjamin smiled at him, then raised his finger for the waitress.

  ‘My dear, can we have a knife to cut this loaf?’

  ‘You can’t have that in here,’ she said, and looked around alarmed. ‘Wait a bit.’

  In a moment she came back with a bread knife in her apron. ‘Do it quick. Don’t let the manager see.’

  Benjamin sawed the loaf in half.

  ‘Which is the piece off the end?’ Moser said.

  ‘Half for Josef and half for the young lady here. Eat it in the kitchen, dear, and give the chef a piece for his excellent shepherd’s pie.’

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘Bread.’

  ‘You could have fooled me. All right. Ta.’

  She carried her half away and Benjamin wrapped mine in the cloth. Then we had treacle tart.

  In the street, huddled in our coats, we said goodbye. I wished Moser luck and he told me not to stay too long in my job.

  ‘Now we go to tell Mrs Steiner that her loaf of bread grew some wings and flew away.’ He pointed at Benjamin. ‘Visit him. He will be lonely when I’m gone.’

  I carried my half loaf home in the leather schoolbag I used for my lunch and library books. I walked down the Quay and up Molesworth Street, past the building where parliament sat – and this, with its steps and columns, this little low place, pretending there, told me more clearly than it ever had before that I lived in a land without a history. Against my wish to be at home in this town, I yearned for Vienna – where Marcus Aurelius had died, where the Turks had laid siege before turning back from Europe, where an empire lasting five hundred years had built its parks and palaces. Where, I thought, you can go into a cafe at midnight and find the coffee-brewer at work, smell the scents of mocca and sausage and brandy, sit at a table for three hours playing cards or reading the papers from Zurich and Milan, while a continent talks outside the door in a dozen tongues, and murmurs for a thousand miles away in every direction. Then I thought, No, Vienna does not exist any more. All that remains of it I carry in my bag. And anyway, he is a German, it is German bread.

  The weight of it in my satchel helped keep me in place. In Vienna I had lived in a bowl, with two thousand years pressing down and holding me firm; but in Wellington I was on the outside curve of a ball, even when I walked in gullies underneath the hills; I was clinging on and might be swept off. This wind, this rain, were certainly enough to sweep me off.

  I ran into the garden and saw the light shining from Wilf’s window – and thought, He’s the history of this place, Wilf and all those soldiers home from the war. They go far enough back.

  I took off my raincoat and changed my wet shoes. Then I knocked on Wilf’s door and offered him a piece of rye bread. He liked the look of it and liked the taste, but apologised for not eating more than a bite. It hurt his teeth.

  ELEVEN

  I shifted into Benjamin Ascher’s house at the end of winter. Wilf was home from hospital and watching over Tinakori hill for the spring. He gave me some seeds to make a garden in my new place. There had been a time when I had thought I would stay with him, live in the lean-to, work as a joiner if I could train, and take over the garden when he died; but Moser, it was Moser, elbowed me past that; and Benjamin with his loaf of bread. Now there were things I must think out, and things that I must work at hard.

  I visited Benjamin shortly after meeting him, inspected his house, which was no more than a two-bedroomed cottage: tiny bedrooms up a flight of stairs where the walls made you clamp your elbows to your sides, and a living room and kitchen downstairs. The kitchen was the largest room in the house. It had a long wooden table and an iron stove in a brick alcove, and it was there that Benjamin spent most of his time. Baking was not the hobby Moser had said. Benjamin enjoyed eating his bread but did not enjoy making it. His wife had been the baker, had baked all day long in the kitchen, four loaves at a time in the oven, and had sold them for eightpence each to refugees about Wellington who could not stand the local bread – ‘white pap’ she had called it. Benjamin made the deliveries on a bicycle. He sold a dozen loaves a week to a health shop in Cuba Street. When Mrs Ascher died he let that contract go and gave her recipe to her private customers, trying to get them to make their own bread, but felt he must keep baking for those who could not manage it. He made four loaves three days a week and still rode about on his bike delivering them.


  Benjamin wanted me to move straight into Moser’s room. I told him I had grown used to Thorndon. It was handier than Berhampore for catching my train. The truth is I could not leave Wilf until he was well again and busy in his garden. I’ve learned in this country not to talk about loving friends, especially men, but in my notebook I’ll say what I like. I loved that old man, perhaps even more than I came to love Benjamin. (Was it because he came from ‘here’ and Benjamin from ‘there’?) I had to make sure he knew that I had found a job that I might do to make a life. I said, ‘I’m going to bake some more of that bread you can’t eat. I’ll build a factory for baking bread.’

  ‘Come and we’ll drink a beer to it,’ Wilf said. He took me to his pub for the only time, and the next day I packed my bags and shifted by tram to Berhampore.

  I found Benjamin kneading dough in a wooden trough on the kitchen table. He wiped his hands, rolled down his sleeves and took me to my room, eager to show how he had made it ready – a hand-made quilt on the bed (payment for her weekly loaf from a Viennese lady) and a bunch of freesias in a vase on the chest of drawers. Their scent reminded me of the Woods, which moved me in a way I did not want, but I said, ‘It is nice, Benjamin. Behaglich, my friend.’ He went back to his kneading and I unpacked, thinking, I am here and I will work. I get my house in Wadestown or the dump. Now I will not think of ‘there’ any more.

  I went downstairs and said to Benjamin, ‘Let me do that.’

  ‘Wash your hands, Josef,’ he said.

  ‘Lesson one.’

  ‘Then put on Maria’s apron and roll up your sleeves. Do you have plenty of …’

  ‘Elbow grease?’

  Benjamin sighed. ‘You will be the New Zealander, not me.’

  We agreed that I would speak English, and he use German only when he was tired – which turned out to be almost never. He kept running upstairs to find words in my dictionary. I told him to bring it down and leave it on the table. Before long though he used me as his Wörterbuch and we rarely opened Avis Greenough. It became a game with us to hunt for words – but the language I was after was the language of bread. Benjamin saw soon enough what my purpose was. I kept on at Barton’s Joinery but spent more and more time, my weekends and whole evenings, baking and delivering. Sometimes I worked until two or three in the morning. I wanted the skills and I wanted the base. I picked up sacks of flour – rye flour, hard to get – from a mill in Petone and carried it home on the train and tram. I bought timber at the joinery and built larger troughs – three feet long and eighteen inches deep – and carried them home in the same way. Benjamin kept his old customers. I found new, starting with the Cuba Street health shop, bringing in another in Kilbirnie, and then trying dairies and suburban grocer shops. Only one in ten was interested but one in ten was enough while I stayed small.

  Benjamin came down one night at two o’clock. ‘Josef, this is no good. You will burst a pipe.’

  ‘Burst a gasket,’ I said.

  ‘Whatever it is, you will soon go bang.’

  ‘No I won’t. I’m getting ready to stop.’

  ‘Stop?’

  ‘Finish at Barton’s. Benjamin, I’m going to need your help.’

  I meant that I would need whatever money he had. I would need him as a partner, sleeping partner, I said, and I think it was his pleasure in the term as much as his faith in me that made him say yes. So I sent him out on his bike hunting for a building where I might install an oven, and he did better than that: found a little bakery in Newtown with a shop in front. The owner made white bread and brown – which as far as I could tell was white dyed brown – and sponges and seed cake and lamingtons. There were two ovens and a mechanical mixer and all the utensils and furnishings I would need – and it cost too much; but Benjamin bought it with the help of small investments from his friends. He never doubted that I would make money, and he make some, and when I told him there was a man in Auckland baking bread just like ours, and that I had seen it for sale in a Wellington shop, he said, ‘Leave your job, Josef. Leave it now. We cannot let someone else …’

  ‘Beat us to the punch?’

  ‘Is he a refugee?’

  ‘He’s got a Jewish name.’

  ‘Leave tomorrow. Quit.’

  I told the clerk at the National Service Department that I had been offered a job in a little business started by a friend, and that I hoped to own a share of it myself – thinking it better not to lie. What sort of business?, he wanted to know. Would I be competing with returned servicemen? I told him I meant to bake pumpernickel bread (not exactly true, but I wanted a word he could look down on), mainly for refugees, and he made a spitting sound, adjusted his teeth and signed a paper releasing me. So I left Barton’s Joinery and became a baker. I hired a man to help me, one of the Dutch immigrants who were starting to arrive. They would be making bread themselves before long. I told Benjamin we were lucky to ‘get the drop on them’, and he practised the idiom, adding it to others I brought home. He was happy in those several years before his death: baking no more, teaching violin, which he loved.

  We called our bread Ascher’s Bread. There was no secret recipe, no hocus pocus like that. It was plain bread, made with yeast and flour. It weighed like bread and looked like bread and tasted like bread, but it would never outsell ‘white pap’ on the market. I worked hard to get it known and liked. I did the marketing and advertising – and I baked it too, with my Dutch helper, working from 3 a.m. to 11 a.m., and again, alone, from 5 p.m. to eleven at night. I made some smaller doughs, kneading by hand in my wooden troughs, but most of the mixing was done in the old cast-iron machine I had bought, five feet long and five feet high, with a long horizontal mixing arm that had to be wiped every ten minutes or oil dropped into the dough. Its noise sent me home deafened and I slept my three hours, half past eleven to half past two in the afternoon, without being able to hear Benjamin taking violin lessons in the living room. He had one of his lady friends make me some ear muffs, and I wore them to block out the Dutchman’s cheerfulness. I was not cheerful at that time; I was obsessed. Wilf’s seeds lay on a shelf in my bedroom and lost their life there. I would not make my place in my new land by planting things but by making people eat my bread.

  Selling from the shop did not succeed so I let it to a radio repairman and bought a little van on time payment; then a larger one able to climb hills and get Ascher’s Bread to the towns of the Wairarapa and the Manawatu. Inside a year I was employing three bakers and a driver, and selling in Taranaki and Hawke’s Bay; and I was still in debt. I thought, Either I grow bigger or I go back to baking bread for Benjamin’s friends.

  I woke in my room, shook paint flakes from the ceiling off my quilt, and heard, far away, a child scraping dolefully on a violin. My future seemed no brighter than hers. Then Benjamin struck with his bow, and the sound, full of light and life and authority, made me sit up in my bed and swing my feet on to the floor and stand up and stretch and fill my room. It was as though he had goosed me, to use an Americanism, and I thought, I’ll either be a bankrupt or a millionaire. So I gulped some food and rode my bicycle back to work and mixed a new dough in my wooden trough, with whole-meal flour and cracked wheat and honey, while Henk watched cheerfully and wanted to try it too, and Ron and Fred shook their heads and said it would never sell. It sold, never as much as my rye bread, but it sold; and so did my almond bread and my pumpernickel, and I was a little less in debt. I started shipping Ascher’s Bread across the strait – it was like exporting to another country – and I sent Henk to Auckland to set up a bakery there, and soon (is four years soon?) I was able to pay off Benjamin and his friends. I moved to more modern premises and I put another van on the road. Ascher’s Bread had found its place. I had climbed the dangerous mountainside and reached a ledge where I might stop a while. And now – I could choose: stay and be safe and comfortable or set off again and climb the rest of the way.

  I talked it over with Nancy – but who is Nancy? I must step back into that narrow house in Berham
pore and to an afternoon when I sat at the kitchen table drinking tea before riding over the hill to Newtown. I heard Benjamin playing a little concert for a pupil, a practice frowned upon by most teachers, he said, but without it how could he convince these children of music while they still struggled to make sounds? I pushed away my cup and rested my head on my arms, giving myself a moment. When this pupil left at the end of her half hour, it would be time for me to go. I went to sleep, and woke with my arms numb and my face pushed out of shape – dribbling on the table too. Benjamin’s pupil was gone and he had been creeping about for over an hour trying not to wake me.

  ‘Do not be cross, Josef,’ he said as I jumped up. ‘I sent a note to Henk with my poor girl.’ (All his pupils, except for one boy, were his ‘poor girls’.) ‘I told him you are sleeping and you will be along when you wake up.’

  I went to the bathroom to wash my face and he followed me.

  ‘I told him that tomorrow afternoon he works overtime – and I will pay,’ he added, seeing my astonishment. ‘You will come with me and see that there are people in the world, it is not all bread. I am playing a concert, and you will sit in a chair and be quiet or else I will go to the beginning and start again. Josef,’ he pleaded, ‘you must have a rest –’ I saw with even greater astonishment that his eyes were wet ‘– or you will curl up in a corner and die.’

  I told him I would come, even though music was wasted on me. I told him that my view was Settembrini’s, that music made for inertia and stagnation; and he grew angry, as I had known he would: who was this Settembrini? He had never heard of the man but plainly he was an imbecile.

  ‘I’ll tell you one day,’ I said, and put on my trouser clips and rode off to work.

  The next afternoon, a Saturday, I went with Benjamin to a house in Brooklyn owned by that Mrs Steiner who had lost her bread to me. I sat on a hard chair in her living room and listened to Benjamin on his violin, Mrs Steiner on viola and Nancy Brisbois on the piano. ‘We are, today, the Steiner Trio,’ Benjamin said, and everyone laughed – a room full of Jewish refugees – so I guessed that I had heard a joke. (Which was that they were usually the Ascher Trio. ‘Steiner’ meant that she had won an argument over the order in which the pieces would be played.)