Dissonance (36 page)

‘Mum, it's not that bad.'

‘It is.'

‘Don't be so dramatic,' Luise barked.

Madge stared up and glared at her. ‘Fifteen years, I hope you're happy.' She stood, threw back her chair, stormed into her room and slammed the door.

‘It wasn't my idea,' Luise screamed after her, but there was no reply.

Frans continued sucking his dummy, watching them. Luise folded her arms, bowed her head and looked at him. Erwin knew what she was thinking. ‘You'll be fine,' he said.

No response.

‘Luise?'

‘Yes, I'll be fine,' she shot back.

Schaedel took his pupil's hand. ‘What are you thinking?' he asked.

Erwin looked at his uneaten food. ‘Does it matter?'

It was late, well after midnight, when Madge emerged from her room. She walked around the darkened house and checked that the dishes had been washed and put away correctly. She found the crumpled page behind the lounge, sat down and flattened it out on her knee. Then she heard a noise coming from their room.

She stood up, approached their door, placed her ear against the painted wood and listened.

It was Erwin, sobbing, and her, comforting him. She couldn't hear the words, but she could sense them. After a few disjointed mumbles she heard Erwin saying, ‘I don't want to go. I didn't even want to come to this place.'

Ssh, Luise was saying, and the blur of more words.

‘I would've been happy teaching,' he explained. ‘Picking grapes or running my dad's shop.'

Madge pushed her ear harder against the door. She wanted to open it and say, This can be overcome. You can, you will return, and then things will continue.

Then she heard air being ripped, torn, leather striking flesh and Erwin groaning. Movement. Bed springs. Clothes falling to the floor. More hard, sharp lashes, as though from a practised hand. There was a pause, three, four strokes in succession, and then the girl moaning, and Erwin trying to quieten her.

Eventually it stopped, and she listened to them fucking on the bed, dropping to the ground and continuing, her own boy grunting as he moved his body in rhythm with the floorboards.

Blue sky. And white, like cheese, strained in muslin. Warm, so that everyone had lifted from yesterday's low cloud and drizzle. A line of trucks the length of Lohrerstrasse, and beside each one, soldiers in freshly pressed uniforms – laughing, holding and hugging children, kissing hands and writing last-minute reminder notes.

The last eight trucks of the convoy were to carry the two hundred men of Battalion 101's First Company. The company commander, Julius Wohlauf, stood under a lean-to, sheltering from the sun, with his wife and two sons: eight-year-old twins in identical short shorts, white shirts and bow ties. They kept their distance from their father, and he stood with his hands behind his back, smiling, looking up into the sky in search of some detail he'd missed.

Luise, holding Frans in her arms, looked at the captain suspiciously. ‘Watch him,' she said to Erwin. ‘He seems too …'

‘What?' he asked.

‘Organised,' she replied.

Erwin took Frans from her and made a ring of kisses on the top of his head. ‘You behave for Mum … and Grandma,' he added, looking at Madge.

‘He'll be fine,' Madge replied, turning and smiling at Luise. ‘We have it all sorted, don't we, dear? You'll have enough worries. Don't bother about us.'

As Erwin bounced Frans in his arms, he looked at the two women. They would have to work together, surely. What was the alternative? Madge making her way alone, retreating into a life of cheap meat and picture sticking?

Schaedel took Frans from Erwin. He held him against his body, looked at his best student and said, ‘I'll look after them.' Then he turned to Madge. ‘No funny business, you two.'

Madge almost raised an eyebrow. ‘I'll be too busy for anything,' she said.

The crowd had thickened. Grey tunics brushed against patched frocks and pants two sizes too big or small. There was a smell of hair oil and talc, of fresh haircuts and shaves; an older man with one arm and no family was talking to someone's son.

A sergeant, a short, bald man with a clipboard, squeezed between bodies, going from group to group checking names, becoming involved in conversations but then looking at his watch. He took out a handkerchief and wiped the back of his neck, and then adjusted an over-tight collar that had soaked with sweat.

A few men were buying stamps from a mobile post office, a caravan with a window running its entire length that had been parked on the footpath in front of the bombed out Sülldorf post office. A small flight of Dornier bombers flew low overhead and each of the men looked up. They muttered and smiled to each other, encouraged by the sound of V-12 engines and the sight of vapour trails.

‘Tell your father to write,' Schaedel said to Frans, holding the small boy up in the air in front of him. ‘And tell him, if he can't find a piano, to at least think about music.'

‘I'll find a piano,' Erwin promised. ‘In a church, or school, somewhere.'

Schaedel returned the baby to Luise and reached into his pocket. He produced a small book, no bigger than his hand, and passed it to Erwin.

‘What's this?' Erwin asked.

‘A study score,' Schaedel explained. ‘Mendelssohn's
Dream
.'

Erwin smiled. ‘For me?'

‘Of course.'

Erwin didn't know whether to hug him, or kiss him, or hold his shoulder. Instead, he took his arm and squeezed it lightly. ‘Thank you,' he said.

Schaedel shrugged. ‘See, it's a dream, isn't it?'

‘What?' Erwin asked.

‘All this.' He waved his hand to indicate everything that was going on around them. ‘And then, what's the line, at the end of the play?
Did all this happen while we slumbered?
'

‘No,' Madge replied. ‘It didn't.'

Schaedel looked at her. ‘How can you be so sure?'

Madge shook her head. ‘I need the toilet.'

She turned and walked towards the public toilets in an alley between a bakery and butcher's shop. She waited in line for a few minutes and then managed to secure a booth. She took a giant fist full of toilet paper, wiped a small creek of piss from the seat and then sat down. Someone tried her door and she raised her voice. ‘Engaged!' And then she waited, and waited, for the piss to come. It ran out, and seeped down her leg. It burned. She bit her top lip and clenched both fists. ‘Christ,' she whispered.

She wiped herself but then sat with her head in her hands, thinking, testing and rejecting words and phrases she'd used on Jo and her son, her students and her sticking ladies, old girls that had come into her shop and complained about the freshness of her eggs, gasmen and mechanics, piano teachers and Red Cross blanket collectors.

Everyone. All of them put in their place, for one reason or another.

But not now. This was something she couldn't control. Something she could blame Jo for, of course, but what was the good of that?

There was a knock on the door. ‘The line is growing,' someone said.

‘Pardon me,' Madge shot back, and there was only the sound of pissing and wiping, of feet shuffling and ladies washing their hands in soap-less basins.

Madge opened the door and walked out. She returned to her family and stood looking at them with a smile. ‘You're right, Professor,' she said. ‘It's only a dream, isn't it?' And then she looked at Erwin. ‘I have dreams like this,' she explained. ‘Vivid dreams, so real at the time. Dreams where I travel some place, and sleep in strange beds. Dreams where I have all these … friends, people it seems I've known forever.'

She looked up into the sky. ‘But then of course you wake, don't you?' And back at her son. ‘You wake.'

She put her hand on his shoulder. ‘Look after yourself,' she said, and then embraced him. ‘Don't volunteer for anything … don't stand out in the open. Keep moving, and watch your back, all the time.'

‘Mum,' he mumbled.

‘Listen to me! I've invested too much time.' She tried to smile, and wiped the beginning of a tear. ‘Six hours a day, times seven days a week, that's forty-two hours. Times fifty-two weeks in the year.'

Schaedel looked at her. ‘You had Christmas Day off?'

‘Never.'

‘Never,' Erwin agreed.

‘Forty-two times fifty-two,' Madge mumbled, but knew she couldn't do the maths.

‘Mum,' Erwin whispered.

‘I can't multiply.'

‘Mum.'

She looked up at him.

‘It's a lot,' he said. ‘But I'll be fine, I'm just a policeman.'

And again she clung to him, buried her face in his tunic, and sobbed. Luise looked on uncomfortably. How long did it take to say goodbye? She held Frans in the air, so that his face was beside Erwin's, so that her husband could see him, smell him, hear his breath.

Erwin pulled back from his mother. She straightened her dress and wiped her tears on her sleeve. ‘You'll be fine,' she said to her son. ‘Be strong.'

‘I will,' he agreed. ‘If I can survive fifteen years of piano.'

‘Don't take any lip from those Poles. Show them who's in charge.'

Erwin turned and took the suspended baby under the arms. He drew it into his body and then Luise embraced them both. ‘I love you,' she said, simply, loud enough for the others to hear.

They're just words, Madge thought. What does it mean, I love you? If it has to be said, it's not felt, or understood.

Luise kissed Erwin, and then dropped her head onto his chest. She could smell his skin, and his sweat, his spit, his hair. The old cologne and leather of his watchband; she could hear his heart, and his stomach gurgling, his bowels moving and snot being drawn from his nostrils. She could hear everything, all at once: his singing voice, demonstrating a melody, the air moving in his inner ear and the skin rubbing between his toes, his cock rising silently from its sleep, and the click of his knees. Breathing. His eyes moving as they followed clouds.

And as they stood there, together, beside the trucks that were all starting and warming their engines, her husband turned from flesh to spirit and settled over her body, and her child's. For a few cold, diesel-soaked moments he was more than an accompanist, a boyfriend, a husband, a father.

‘Come on,' Madge said, taking her by the arm.

Some of the men were already climbing onto the trucks. The old man with one arm climbed a stepladder and took his place beside a rifle rack and a box of gas masks. They stood there for another few minutes, silently, as the trucks filled up, as children were lifted to touch their father's hands and wives tried to think of something to say.

The short sergeant blew a whistle and Erwin stepped away from his wife. ‘For now,' he said. Then he remembered his son, and returned, and kissed him on the head. He shook Schaedel's hand, and then hugged him around the neck, and then kissed his mother one last time. He threw his bag into the back of the truck, climbed the small wooden ladder and settled down next to the old, one-armed man.

He smiled and waved at them a few times but eventually it felt corny. In the end he was glad when the column moved off. A hundred yards later he stopped waving and stared at the floor of the truck, although he knew they were all still watching him. In desperation he turned to the old man, offered his hand and said, ‘I'm Australian.'

The old man laughed. He patted his stump. ‘Wouldn't you know,' he said. ‘It was one of your lot did this.'

Chapter Two

Hamburg was gone, and then there was a landscape of green turning summer-yellow. It wasn't much of a time to be leaving. It was a time for new things; short sleeves and long evening walks through the narrow birch-lined streets of Blankenese. As the truck rumbled along, through a landscape of newly-fixed fences and fresh, green leaves, Erwin thought, felt, it was more of an ending than a beginning.

Still, his mum was right, he had to talk himself around this, and would. The landscape would help him: narrow streams clogged with willow trees, terraced hillsides strung with vines, schmaltzy, Straussy swans gliding across mirror-smooth ponds and the towers of medieval castles sprouting from purple forest; children emerging from farmhouses, from barns and creeks, running towards the road, cheering them on and waving singlets in the air.

A Barossa Valley landscape. Golden. Undulating. As their long line of trucks climbed and dropped down a strange God's Hill Road.

Erwin held his rifle tightly as the convoy turned onto an autobahn: a long, grey ribbon that snaked over hills and into valleys; a velvet highway that looked like it had never been driven on. Four lanes disappearing at a point on the horizon.

He closed his eyes and felt the cold breeze on his face. Then he heard the old man saying, ‘He was a wheat farmer.'

Erwin opened his eyes. ‘Who was?' he asked.

‘The fella that took this off,' the fat-cheeked man replied, touching his folded, and pinned sleeve. ‘He came here in 1930. He tracked me down and gave me his bayonet.'

‘And you weren't angry?'

‘No. He was doing his job and I was doing mine. I said to him, Where were you trying to stab me? And he replied, the heart.' He smiled. ‘War is a game.'

‘It's not a game,' a tall, unshaved man interrupted.

‘A job then.'

Erwin introduced himself and discovered the old man's name was Herbert Langaer. He was sixty-two, divorced, and still worked as a tailor.

‘With one arm?' Erwin asked, and Herbert explained some of his tricks: pinning the start of the tape measure to cuffs; holding fabric with his feet as he cut it, and using his stump to guide sewing through the machine. ‘These uniforms,' he explained, feeling Erwin's collar, ‘are rubbish. Like beach towels. Cut out by a machine and sewed by Jews.'

‘And itchy,' Erwin added.

‘Exactly. Done on the cheap.'

As they travelled through a flat patchwork landscape they talked about Hamburg and Tanunda, wives and mothers and children. Erwin described Frans and Herbert said, ‘Yes, I noticed him. And that was your wife?'

‘Yes.'

‘And parents?'

‘My mother, and teacher. And what about you, you have children?'

Herbert shrugged. ‘I did. Two sons.'

Erwin waited.

‘Both killed, on the same day, in France,' he explained.

The truck changed down several gears to tackle a hill.

‘That's a shame,' Erwin said.

‘That's the game, isn't it? You turn over the card, and if it says, you're dead, well, then …'

Erwin stared at the floor of the truck again. He'd discussed it with Luise, the day before he left. He'd taken her to the park and sat her down and said, ‘This is what I want you to do, if I get killed.'

And then he explained how she was to take Frans and go with Madge, and return to God's Hill Road. How she was to bring up their son in the most boring, ordinary, unremarkable way possible; how there were to be no piano lessons until he was ten, and then, no more than an hour a day; how he was to be set free, allowed to roam, to waste hours a day damming creeks and climbing trees, and then he explained how Madge was to be dealt with.

He'd written two letters, and hidden them inside the piano. One was for Frans, for him to read when he turned eighteen, and the other to Madge, outlining his wishes, his demands, in death. How you, Luise, are to be given the final say on all matters relating to Frans, and how Mum is charged with caring for them, feeding them, nourishing and loving them. Not controlling them. No. Not manipulating, steering or even guiding.

‘This is silly,' Luise had said. ‘You didn't have to write any letters.'

He'd shrugged.

‘It's morbid,' she said.

‘Maybe so.'

‘Do you think she'd take notice of a letter?'

He stopped to think. ‘Yes, I do.'

‘You've got to be kidding.'

The column of trucks slowed and pulled through a gate into a paddock. They parked in a domino formation and everyone got out. Four field kitchens were set up, and ready, venting steam and the smell of fresh bread and stew into the cow-pat pockmarked paddock. They lined up for lunch and then sat about in small groups. Some found friends, and there was laughing and back-slapping. Some groups were made up of human off-casts – a short-sighted town planner from Burchardstrasse, a tall seventeen-year-old who'd been kept out of the army with a heart murmur, a Lutheran priest, a one-armed tailor and a confused Australian pianist.

‘I don't know how I ended up here,' Erwin said to Herbert, as he played with the fatty stew. ‘Five years ago I was sitting in a classroom.'

‘Five years is a long time,' Herbert said. ‘My boys were only two years out of school.'

Erwin tipped the rest of his stew into the stubble and rinsed his enamel plate with murky water from his canteen. Then he looked up, breathing the fresh air.

‘They were tall, like you,' Herbert said, retreating into silence and dropping his head.

The next morning they crossed into Poland, heading south along narrow country roads lined with ancient oaks and overgrown hedges. Erwin was looking for evidence of war but the closest thing he saw was a burnt-out Catholic church. By now the patriotic mothers and their sun-bronzed children, the waving and song-singing, had all gone. Now there were just a few curious looks, a finger waved in greeting or a head nodded.

At precisely twelve o'clock the convoy stopped and filled the whole main street of a small town. Each truck was given a box of bread rolls and they passed on. At two o'clock Erwin saw a sign, ‘Bilgoraj, 50 miles'. He looked at Herbert. ‘Nearly there.'

‘Then the fun begins,' Herbert smiled.

‘What's that?'

‘The game.'

The short sergeant, who was travelling with them now, stood up and balanced against the cab of the truck. He took the top off a wooden box and said, ‘One each, in your bags.' He started to pass riding whips, wired tightly into coils, to each man.

Erwin took his and looked at it. Then he looked at Herbert and asked, ‘Why do we need these?'

The sergeant overheard him and shouted, over the noise of the engine, ‘We don't stop to reason with Poles, Hergert.'

Erwin sat staring at it. ‘We use these on … Poles?' he muttered, looking up at the sergeant.

‘What else are you going to do with them?'

There was nothing sacred or profane about these whips. Nothing spiritual. Nothing erotic. He tried to imagine himself using it, but couldn't. Whipping total strangers. Who'd have thought? A dog perhaps, even a wild steer, but a child, an old man, someone's mother?

He quickly placed it in his duffle bag, wiping his hands on his cheap grey tunic and blowing on them.

The tall man sitting opposite motioned for Erwin to move closer. Erwin leaned forward and the man said, ‘It's not for the Poles, you know.'

‘No?' Erwin replied.

‘It's for the Jews.'

‘Jews?'

‘The ones we're going to kill.'

The man smiled and Erwin sat back in his seat. Then he said, ‘We're not soldiers.'

‘So?'

Erwin closed his eyes to think. Another fanatic, of course, but worse, one who's too fat or stupid to join the army. He turned to Herbert. ‘What's he talking about?' he asked.

‘Ignore him. You think this lot's capable of killing?'

And as though in reply, they passed a quartet of bodies hanging from the lowest branch of an oak tree. Erwin turned in his seat and stared, as if he was watching Madge or Luise, or Schaedel blowing in the light summer breeze, their necks broken and their heads twisted at an angle, their bodies ­supported by nothing but tissue.

The trucks slowed and everyone looked. There was a young woman, and three men, all of them dressed in a shirt and tie, jacket and leather shoes. And around each of their necks was a sign: ‘We prevented peaceful Polish workers from doing their jobs'.

Erwin looked at their faces – the men shaved, the woman's eyes open, staring out across the fields – all looking perfectly normal, except for their tongues hanging out like thirsty dogs and their necks stretched like pale blue marzipan.

He turned and looked out across the same paddocks.

Now it wasn't a question of no piano, or missing Frans, or leaving Luise to deal with Madge. It was a question of whips, and bullets, and flesh, of rough rope like the stuff his dad kept coiled in the shed.

He felt cold, and heavy, and sick. Like he'd been struck down with bronchitis. He wanted to lie down, to sleep it off, but couldn't. He wanted to go home and see his wife and mother and son, and deal with all the bullshit that made his life real. He wanted to retreat from the world, to have no part of it – but couldn't.

And then he learned that this was only the beginning.

At four o'clock the trucks pulled through the gates of what looked like a holiday camp. There were two long buildings sitting on the edge of a hill, looking out across a valley littered with small lakes.

The whole battalion dismounted. Major Trapp spoke to his three company commanders and each of them turned and barked orders at their lieutenants. First Company broke into three, seventy-men platoons and each of these formed groups of ten. As they gathered, and came to attention, Erwin watched his lieutenant, Hartwig Gnade, pick up a football he found in the long grass and kick it down the steep slope of the valley.

They were standing on a basketball court. The concrete reflected the sun onto their faces and nearly everyone was sweating, the older men swaying.

‘Too slow,' Trapp called to his company commanders, who in turn approached, stood over and shouted at their lieutenants, who in turn scurried up and down the rows of shop-soiled soldiers, telling them to stand up straight, put their feet together and stop looking at him.

Finally, when Trapp had quiet, he climbed a ladder leading up to the lowest diving board of an empty, leaf-littered swimming pool. He stood on a platform and squinted. ‘Soldiers of Battalion 101, welcome to Bilgoraj. Here is your bunkhouse.' Several hundred heads turned, followed by NCOs screaming: ‘Not now, who told you to look? Who?'

‘As you can see, your accommodation is quite comfortable. But it will need to be, considering the job you are here to do.'

After mutton stew, and roll call, and an hour spent cleaning and mopping his corner of the bunkhouse, Erwin set off into the long valley for a walk.

It wasn't his old nature walk, moving through lemon-scented bush in leather thongs and toweling clothes, stopping to crush and smell gum leaves and pull the flower buds from under-ripe callistemon; to feel inches of decay under his feet and look up through the canopy, at light strained through tree tops.

As he started to walk he thought he could hear children singing nursery rhymes. ‘The flag flies high! The traitors will be shot! The SA marches on …'

He stopped, but there was nothing. He continued, and at last heard Luise's voice.

Father's office was full of Jews, she was saying. No one seemed to care.

He could've got another job, he remembered replying.

Rubbish, a few more years and he would've been safe. They would've thrown the Jews out.

Who?

The Brownshirts. Dad would've had his job, and he'd still be here today.

A long pause.

Maybe.

How would you know?

He continued down into the valley, through thick hedges and over fallen logs, drinking moonlight through a canopy that dripped fruit and rain, listening to the murmur of the forest, thinking how this was much too perfect, or romantic, for his present state. His eyes were fixed on the ground and he walked quickly. ‘I'm just an Australian,' he whispered to himself. ‘A music student, with Professor Schaedel. Maybe I could move to the music school, to teach. I'm just an Australian. My people are German, yes, but a long time ago.'

He continued on, faster, until he arrived at a small stream at the bottom of the valley. By now the air was cold, and vapour was coming from his nose and mouth. He was sweating, red-faced, hot, starting to shiver.

‘I'm an Australian,' he repeated, sitting on a mossy log. ‘I've never even met a Jew. My mother couldn't stomach them.' He tapped his foot on a stick, and thought of direction. He looked up. Which way did the valley go? West? North-west?

I could be back in Germany in three or four days, he thought. And then I could find a train, or better still, hitch a lift …

But then he imagined a firing squad.

I could ask Herbert. Maybe they just lock you up until the war's over. Luise could bring Frans to visit. Mother wouldn't be upset. She'd try and arrange a piano for me.

He wiped his hands on his pants and started to rock from side to side. ‘I'm an Australian, an Australian,' he whispered.

He stood up. He walked towards the stream and prodded the rocks and debris with his foot. The ground was damp. There were small, tepid pools, but there was no flow.

Just like Jacob's Creek, he thought. Dry for eleven months of the year. Full of drink bottles and old carburettors.

‘I'm an Australian,' he whispered, and then he started running up the hill, through wild ivy and stands of tall, slender birch, brushing against old mountain ash and almost twisting his ankle in hidden rivulets that snaked their way down the valley; pushing forward through grass that coated his tunic with burrs and stopping to look around and wonder, Where am I?