by Gee, Maurice
‘No, we’re getting married,’ I said.
Mrs Brisbois leaned at her husband. She broke in the middle like a stick. ‘Brian, tell them no,’ she cried.
‘You don’t marry a German,’ he said.
‘Dad, I marry who I want. Can’t you be nice about it? Can’t you just say congratulations?’
Mrs Brisbois hissed. ‘I knew that music would get you in trouble.’ (‘That’ is demonstrative here.)
Brisbois – Brisboy – sat back in his chair, making it creak. ‘I’ll have you deported, son.’
‘I don’t think you can.’
‘If you deport him, I’ll go too,’ Nancy said.
‘We’d want you out of the country, married to a Jerry,’ he said.
‘In that case we’ll go now. Don’t try and stop me, Dad. I’m more than twenty-one.’
‘If you go out that door you’re gone for good.’
‘He’s not even a Christian,’ Mrs Brisbois cried.
‘Then nor am I. Come on, Josef.’
‘Goodbye,’ I said.
‘Hitler did a good job on you lot,’ Brisbois said. ‘It’s a pity he didn’t get round to you.’
I wanted to hit him and it wasn’t fear that stopped me – he would crush me in one hand – but Nancy standing in the door. If I don’t get her out of here she’ll die, I thought. I took her arm and pulled her down the hall, out into the front yard, out the gate into the road; and Brisbois, on the porch, with his wife held in one hand, yelled, ‘Take this German muck with you.’
He heaved the loaf of bread overarm. I thought it would hit Nancy, and pulled her out of the way. It struck the footpath where she had been standing and made a crooked bounce into the street.
‘I’ve got other kids. I don’t need you.’
‘Run,’ Nancy said, ‘he’ll follow us.’
‘Walk,’ I said. ‘Walk with me. Just hold my arm.’
Nancy wobbled. Tears ran down her cheeks. ‘I’m never going back there,’ she said.
‘No, you can’t. You can’t have people like that in your life.’
‘They’re Mum and Dad,’ she wept.
‘Now we’re round the corner. Now we’re out of sight.’
‘How can they be like that?’
‘Sit here, love. Here’s a bus stop. Sit.’ I gave her my handkerchief to wipe her face.
‘I love you. I should have told them that,’ she said.
‘They don’t know love.’
‘Can he? Can he deport you?’
‘No, he can’t.’
‘He knows all sorts of people.’
‘Nancy, he can’t.’
‘I feel so empty. I feel torn. He was so good once. He loved me once.’
‘Maybe.’
‘I want to go now, Josef. I want to go away from here.’
We walked through strange streets – strange to her now as well as me – into the town. We ate food, such bad food, in a cafe. Then we caught a train that stopped and started, and made our journey back to Wellington. Nancy, exhausted, slept on my shoulder for most of the way.
This is more than anecdote. And I make Nancy do more than pirouette. When I started I did not think I could write it down. Now it’s done. We married in a registry office, not common in those days, and had our reception at Mrs Steiner’s house. Aunt Alma came. Moira Williams came – and I wasn’t much fonder of her than of Nancy’s parents, who did not come. Not invited. Wilf White, in hospital although it was summer, sent a telegram wishing us a long and happy married life.
I didn’t invite Willi. To tell the truth I wasn’t sure where he was. A letter I wrote to him had come back marked ‘Gone no address’. As well as that I thought, I don’t need Willi to tell me it’s all right to get married. So I left him out.
Franz sent a letter. He said he was glad the Mandl name would carry on.
Mrs Steiner’s lawn was filled with light. The sky was deep blue. There was no wind. From our Brooklyn hillside we looked across the harbour. Somes Island, shining there, was not invited here but was not unimportant all the same. I would not have stayed in Wellington if I had not been locked up there. I grinned at it, then turned my back and ate from the tables with my wife. The Austrian cooks of Wellington had come to life. We had Florentiners, Marillenstrudel and Lebzelt Bäckerei – too sweet for me but I smiled and pretended to eat, for Mrs Steiner had smuggled Nancy and me into the kitchen and given us a meal of meat dumplings and soup all to ourselves. The Ascher Trio played. Elinor Cleghorn, the Wunderkind, sat at her piano inside the french doors while Benjamin and Mrs Steiner stood like gypsies on the patio, and Nancy, teaching me, whispered what was well played and what was simply amazing. The music ran down the hill into Wellington, and I thought, We belong here, this will be our place. Then Nancy played, and said she was sorry for her mistakes, and Benjamin replied that there could be no mistakes on a day like this.
And now I am back where I began, talking over with Nancy whether we should sit still and be comfortable or set off again and climb the hill. She was no longer Nancy, my bride, but Nancy Mandl with a daughter five months old dozing in my office in her pram while I jigged the handle with my thumb to keep her from waking up. They had walked down from our rented house in the Aro Valley so Nancy could eat her lunch with me.
‘How big?’ she said.
‘There’s a limit to bread unless I start baking white.’
We had, by that time, raisin bread and almond bread, honey bread, oatmeal bread and three sorts of rye, all selling to the market called niche today. Unless I went into cakes and sticky buns there seemed nowhere to go.
‘You don’t want to do white pap, do you?’ she said.
‘No. But listen, Nancy, I don’t have to stay a baker. We’ll keep this place for our bread and butter,’ I joked, and gave her a pencil and a piece of paper – ‘but here, do this. Write down all the things you haven’t tasted.’
‘Like what?’
‘Coffee. Proper coffee.’
‘I’ve tasted that.’
‘All right. All the food you’ve ever read about that you can’t buy. And I’ll write all the things I’d like you to taste.’
‘Do I get a prize?’
‘You might get rich.’
She wrote ‘Dutch cheese’. She wrote ‘Salami sausages, all sorts’. Then it grew harder and she had to joke: ‘Frogs’ legs, Snails, Bird’s nest soup’. Meanwhile I filled half a page.
‘Swap,’ I said, and laughed at hers.
‘All these?’ she said, reading. ‘You want to start importing them, don’t you?’
‘Some of them we can get made here. Sour cream. Cottage cheese. Why not?’
‘Do you really think New Zealanders will eat yoghurt?’
‘Some do already.’
‘And sauerkraut?’
‘Of course they will. We don’t have to import that. Cabbages grow here. Nancy, would you like to own a delicatessen?’
‘Yes.’
‘Or two or three? And a restaurant selling proper food?’
‘What do you want to be, an importer or a restaurant owner?’
‘Both of them. And be a coffee-brewer. And make salamis.’
‘Choose.’
‘We’ll start with importing. Only food. And open a delicatessen for you.’
‘Can you get import licences?’
‘We’ll see.’
‘Swiss chocolates?’
‘We’ll see.’
‘You’ll never get New Zealanders using olive oil. I’ll make a bet.’
‘But shall we do it? Will you help?’
‘Of course I’ll help.’
Elizabeth woke and Nancy fed her. I took them out to the yard and commandeered a van to drive them home, but turned away from the Aro Valley and drove through Thorndon and up the Wadestown road. At the top of the hill I turned into the upper road and coasted down until I reached the spot.
‘That’s the house we’ll live in when we’re rich,’ I said.
Nancy smi
led. ‘I like it.’ She held Elizabeth up. ‘See, baby. That’s where you’re going to grow into a great big girl.’
TWELVE
I did not become a restaurateur. Nor did I become a coffee-brewer, alas. But we had, in our time, three delicatessens, and Nancy managed them – even with three children she managed them, working late into the night. It was not until the sixties that they started doing well. But our real success did not lie there. The food importing business was where we prospered. We called it Mandl and Ascher, not because Benjamin took an active part, he did not, but because he helped us with another loan at the start.
I do not want to write a history of the firm: how it grew and grew and how I sold it in the end; or how I sold Ascher’s Bread to a big company, a giant. Many people think I was merely clever – a Jew – and do not know how hard I worked, how hard we worked. I am not interested in proving them wrong. I say, as a Kiwi, to hell with them.
If I can untangle it, I’ll tell our story, not the firm’s.
Benjamin died. That is first. Or perhaps it is second, for Wilf White was dead too, in Wellington Hospital. Neither of them was as old as I am now. I went to the garden, which had run to seed, asked permission of the woman in the house – the men in the lean-to didn’t give a damn – and found a few tender little self-sown potatoes, which I took to the hospital and showed Wilf on the palm of my hand. He was too far gone to know what they were, but managed to whisper, ‘I need a beer.’ I gave him water, which he sipped; then he tried to wink at me. ‘Thanks, Joey. That’s a good drop.’
There were five of us at his funeral: two bookmakers and a jockey and his drinking mate and me.
Benjamin had several happy years before he died, watching, listening to, Elinor Cleghorn. He stayed on in his Berhampore house when I left and took her as his boarder at seventeen, which raised a few eyebrows round town – but no, she was his marvellous child, only that. He put a piano in the living room and she practised all day long – a sweet girl, too sweet for the hard life of the concert halls, I thought, which shows how little I know about music, and perhaps about character.
I visited him in hospital, in the ward where Wilf had died.
‘Settembrini, Benjamin.’
‘It is Elinor who proves him wrong.’
‘He’s a character in a novel by Thomas Mann.’
I had not known Benjamin could be angry. Two red spots showed on his cheeks.
‘You should not cheat, Josef. From a book of lies.’
I asked him to forgive me; then Elinor came and his cheeks flushed with happiness, diffusing the red, and I went away. Neither of us mentioned Settembrini again.
We had no service for Benjamin, no eulogies, no memorialising. A few of us went to the cemetery, then we drove to Mrs Steiner’s house, where the crowd filled all the rooms and spilled out to the patio and lawns. Moser was down from Auckland. He was doing well, working hard like me: ‘You fill their bellies,’ he said, ‘I will build them sofas to park their bottoms on.’ I asked if he had seen or heard of Willi and he made a sound of disgust.
‘I hear. I don’t see. I make sure of that.’
‘Where did he go? He seemed to vanish.’
‘He is still vanished. He went up north to live on beaches. He has a little house, it is a shack with broken walls, and he lives in the sun without his shirt. I hear all this and read it in the Truth. They say without his trousers too. Doctors’ wives and lawyers’ wives visit him there and everyone swims naked in the sea.’
Oh yes, Willi. He grew a beard, he grew his hair – but we had seen him long-haired on the island. It was for Truth a deadly crime. They wanted the government to ship him away. We must get rid of this man’s evil politics, they said. Not communism now but being friends with Maoris and telling them to make a republic in the north.
‘It is hot air,’ Moser said. ‘Everything with Willi is hot air. Always he is out for what he can get.’
‘He believed in communism.’
‘Communism now and free sex later, but me first with Willi every time. It was King Willi on Somes Island. You remember that. Or commissar.’
I walked away. I did not want to quarrel on this day, but it seemed to me that Willi would never get a fair hearing anywhere.
Nancy found me at the bottom of the section, muttering in a corner to myself.
‘Come on,’ she said. ‘It’s our turn to talk to Elinor.’
‘What’s wrong with her?’
Nancy looked at me with disgust. ‘Oh. Yes,’ I said, and followed her to Mrs Steiner’s bedroom, where Elinor Cleghorn lay on the bed, weeping and weeping, unable to stop. Her parents, from a mining settlement deep in the bush, sat on chairs and watched her, waited for her. They were sad, silent people who loved their brilliant daughter but could not have her any more. Proud of her, so proud – and frightened now that her music would all go away, and then perhaps she would die. They leaned forward and patted her from time to time.
Nancy and I could do nothing. Elinor did not hear us, and what could we say to bring a halt to weeping like this? Then Mrs Steiner took her by the shoulders and sat her up.
‘Elinor,’ she said, ‘it is time for you to play a concert for Benjamin.’
Nancy and I went out and I said, ‘She’s mad. That girl can’t play today.’
But in half an hour there she was, professional: clear-eyed, strong-fingered, straight in her back, playing as she would play in later years in concert halls in London and Vienna and New York. She went on longer than her teachers would have allowed – and I don’t know the pieces. Nancy would tell me if she was here.
Nancy said, ‘Won’t it be wonderful when Elizabeth can play like that.’
Four years passed before we were able to buy our house. We had stopped driving past it because our insistence had begun to seem foolish and our longing neurotic perhaps. But when I bought a house in Karori I said to the agent, ‘Wadestown is where I want to live. But not just any house. This one.’ I gave him the address and made him promise to let me know if it ever came on the market. Did not say, They are old (which I knew from spying), they’re bound to die. I stopped myself from even thinking it, from a superstition that someone I loved would be taken from me in punishment. This fear came with marriage, which put me into life in a way I had not been since Vienna, and made me observant, attentive, practical, but allowed demons and harpies a place in the night. For each thing given there is something taken away? No, I don’t believe it, for it implies that Someone tots up an account. Or plays a game. But for each cruelty committed, for each failure in sympathy, for every sneer something taken away? Oh yes, that is true, and we are responsible for the process; but in the night, and when good sense is low, harpies come and tear away parts of you that are the ones you love.
I lay beside Nancy and heard her sleep, and I breathed stupidly, ‘Be safe, my love.’ I crept to the children’s rooms, crept in like a murderer, and laid my hand on each warm brow: ‘Be safe.’ Afraid for them, afraid of myself who, in the daytime, busy, busy, was an admirable provider of love and cash.
I was, by temperament, a daytime man, and not in the least bit then afraid of myself. My fears were of a different kind. In 1951 the waterfront troubles – strike or lockout, according to your view – almost brought my new-fledged business to an end. I was angry about it, but not afraid. Fear came when I saw in this land I had believed innocent – primitive yes, but innocent – movements, stirrings that had the shape and colour of fascism here and Stalinism (without Stalin) there. It was the fascist stirrings that frightened me more, for I had grown up in Vienna and this man Sid Holland was making sounds like Dollfuss – and I’m frightened today, for aren’t there fascist stirrings to be seen and sounds to be heard, with a new dictator, Market, standing in for The Man? And my poor Kenny is a follower.
This is not to my purpose, which is story. I must go back. The land agent rang me in 1954 and said, ‘The owner of that house you want is dead.’ (Refreshing language. I had learned to say ‘passe
d away’.) ‘The Public Trust has got it so it’s going to take some time, but I know my way around there. It’s a matter of being ready with the cash.’
We gave him our Karori house to sell the same day. We were ready with the cash. Early in 1955 we moved in. I sat down with a Ha! – the Ha! of arrival – in the room I’m sitting in now. Nancy came and plumped down on my knees, a lovely weight. Then the children piled on: five of us tangled in one chair. Across Nancy’s shoulder, over their heads, I saw Somes Island, green, black, three-levelled, in the sun. ‘We made it,’ I said.
I’ve been living here for forty years. Our children grew up. Nancy died. I will die. I hope to say Ha! as I depart.
What can one say about a house? It encloses one as naturally as the air. But there’s a daily magic about doors that lead to other rooms, where your books sit on shelves, your food bakes in the oven, your wife, in steam, towels herself dry, and your bed is turned down for love and sleep. Time is the air you breathe in rooms that branch, unfold and welcome you. Open another door. A girl with her hair in a plait plays ‘Für Elise’. She is the one who, yesterday, in another house, was sitting in a highchair gnawing a piece of twice-baked bread. And the boy squatting on the floor making his pet snail retract its eyes was dozing on his mother’s breast at 2 a.m., while she breathed softly for fear that he would wake with his colic again.
House and family and time intertwine. And earlier houses are swallowed by this one and smaller times are subsumed.
Elizabeth, Kenneth, Susan were our children. Nancy was determined that each should have the chance to be a great musician. Her mildness, which was a form of laziness (and which I loved), gave way to ruthlessness as each practice hour began. ‘Nancy, you’ll make them hate it,’ I said. I am non-musical but years before she would recognise it I saw that none of them would make music a career. Elizabeth enjoyed her piano – still does, she’s playing now – and Nancy never had to bully her. But there was a curious looping turn, a kind of back somersault, at some place between Elizabeth’s brain and hands; and her music, even when she was a five-year-old, gave a bounce, which pleased Nancy at first and then began to worry her. She tried to see it as lyrical, but I think it came from a neural tic, or a connection not made, which the child overcame by enthusiasm – and the woman today by dreaming as she plays. Nancy shifted her from teacher to teacher and in the end took over herself.