Eloquent Silence (7 page)

Panic-stricken by the mystery of David’s recurring illness, she and her husband, Conrad (Con for short) Himmlar, had taken the very sick child to Dachautown. There they had consulted a specialist who had told them that the boy was suffering severely from Glandular Fever. The doctor said that his attacks of hallucinations that overcame him when the fever raged and were absolutely terrifying to watch, would eventually pass.

Nothing, he said, but time and rest would cure the illness which continued, even after six long and tense months, to flare up regularly, taking his mother to the brink of Hell.

David was skin and bone, two huge blue eyes dominating a poor, fleshless little face with skin that was so tight it seemed almost translucent. His thin arms and legs with knobbly joints were like those of a third world child. He had no appetite and it was all Annie could do to get him to eat half a can of strained baby food, or, on a good day, a slice of bread and Vegemite. He seemed to exist on Milo with an occasional addition of tomato soup and Annie was grateful when he took any nourishment at all. Sometimes he merely existed on milk.

Pasteurized, of course. Annie had been to Hell and back with regards to unpasteurized milk and it would be a long time before the children would have access to the like again.

There are women who bloom during pregnancy. Their skin glows, their hair shines and they say they have never felt better in their lives. Annie was not one of those. Nausea fluctuated constantly and swept through her body, causing her to pause beside the Simpkins’ back stairs, to lower her head and wait for the rush of giddiness to pass. She stood still then, shoving the long, brown hair back from her face. Sadly, she was watching her boy pedaling his red car home as fast as his little legs could go, his thin face flushed with the pleasure of having played with his friends.

My God, he looks terrible, she thought. When will he be better? I can’t be pregnant again. It’s not true, can’t be! My sickness is psychological because I’ve been so worried about David. Who feels the worst between David and me is a toss-up.

Once he’s better and I’m more relaxed my period will come on, surely, she reassured herself in a vague, distracted manner. She was exhausted and demoralized, all energy zapped from her bony body by the elaborate tirades her husband served up to her on a regular basis.

Conrad? What about Conrad? The thought of him caught in her throat, bringing with it a stifling sensation like a hand grabbing her across the windpipe. How prone he was to sudden variations in mood, swinging unaccountably from happiness to anger. Conrad Himmlar? She was deluged by fresh waves of fear and regret at the thought of her husband and his reaction to the news of a possible pregnancy.

No, she decided. She must be brave. Despair was the killer that would bring her down if she let it. He was not so bad.
Surely
he was not so bad? He could even be kind if the mood took him even though he often wore that dangerous mad-dog look after he had been drinking rum.

But when you are tied to a brash and cock-sure critical man you live your life with that person’s voice forever in your head lecturing you about how you will next fail to live up to their expectations and the ramifications of how badly this latest venture will turn out.

Usually he seemed to be in a rage, this short, red-faced, angry man.  His fury exploded without a source known to her, but forever continued to smolder just under the surface, ready to ignite into flame for little or no reason that Annie could comprehend. She would stare at him, regarding him with blank astonishment as he ranted and raved, pushed items of furniture about and generally caused as much ruckus as he could without having the men in white  coats come and take him away.

At this time Annie was living mostly in her head, aware of forces within her life that could sweep her up and have her reeling out of control if she were to make a mistake of any description within this minefield. All he was lacking to make him a facsimile of Adolf Hitler was the toothbrush mustache.

‘Into the bath with you, my lad,’ she told David gently as she caught up to him on the back stairs of their house. ‘If you hurry you’ll be in time to watch Noddy.’

Cries of, ‘Oh, no, not Noddy!’ issued from the girls’ room to greet this remark. From their superior viewing standpoint David’s sisters felt duty bound to complain about their acute attack of Noddyitis each evening. Even so, there was no end to the lengths to which they would go to pamper and amuse their precious little brother, especially since he had been ill.

The three children, their faces scrubbed and shining, their tummies full, (with the possible exception of David’s), lined up in their plaited plastic saucer chairs to take their daily dose of Noddy, Big Ears and Co.  The girls smiled tolerantly. David viewed the program with a huge amount of interest, being heavily into Noddy’s adventures.

‘I’m going to jump into the TV and play with Noddy, Mum,’ David would often tell Annie during the exciting evening program.

His mother would laugh at her beloved little boy and tell him that wasn’t the way things worked. But David knew better and was aware that if he could manage to get inside the set, he and Noddy could race their pedal-cars all around the village to their hearts’ content.

Annie, in her reclining chair with her eyes closed, her stomach heaving ominously, snatched a quiet moment. Soon Conrad would be home for his dinner. What would have gone wrong during the day? What sort of mood would he be in tonight?

She moaned softly to herself, ‘Dear God, let it be all right. And if it isn’t, let me be able to handle it.’ Eternity seemed to drag by as she awaited her husband’s return for the evening.

This had been her girlhood dream come true or should have been. To have babies and grow flowers and sew clothes for her children. To bake cup cakes for them, go to their school concerts, make their school uniforms, watch them walk down the aisle, hold their babies in her arms with a loving, sensitive man by her side.

She exhaled deeply, trying to rid herself of the tumult in her mind as she waited for the next event of the evening to happen, nauseated and headachy, her life falling into pieces around her, she felt intuitively without knowing what form the disaster would take.

With gritted teeth she remembered the previous evening. That episode had included his bowling pal delivering him to the back door, and Conrad, thoroughly, sloppily drunk, unable to negotiate the steps, had tripped up them and fallen face first onto the landing. That was ten o’clock and he had spent the next hour with his head down the toilet bowl.

Yes, those special lawn bowls days produced a significant attack of illness, especially if he happened to be the trophy winner, as was often the case. Conrad, burly and muscular, was extremely competent at any sport he decided to take up, and mans’ man as he considered himself to be, he enjoyed nothing so much as celebrating after the game.

And the evening before when she had left the kitchen mop leaning against the house after cleaning the floors. Infuriated at the sight of the wet mop leaning on the weatherboard, he had whirled inside and hit her across the face with it. She had cowered away from him as he had slung the mop onto the floor and stalked off on his stumpy legs to open the refrigerator and collect a can of beer.

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nnie forced her drowsy eyes open and looked at her three children lined up at her side—Ruth, her first-born, petite, loving, excitable and busy almost to the point of hyperactivity.

Sarah, her baby girl, blonde and cuddly, outwardly calm and contented, but quietly unsure of herself. She was bullied by her father who preferred to accuse her of being a dopy, useless thing when she failed to answer him, instead of treating her with consideration because of her partial deafness which had been medically diagnosed as the build-up of fluid in the eardrums. The condition was relieved a little by having her eardrums drained annually. Unfortunately, the little girl was forced to live with this unpleasantness brought about, in the main, by reason of her failing to be born a boy.

In the early days of the marriage, when Annie had found she was again pregnant after giving birth to premature Ruth three months previously, Conrad had denied paternity of the child who had turned out to be Sarah. He said it could not possibly be his as they had been using a primitive form of contraception entirely unsuited to fertile young people not yet twenty. The perpetrator of the act, the father of the baby, was never named by Conrad. The supposed perpetrator went incognito all his days for many years until Conrad’s alcohol-soaked brain thought up a solution later.

How the new mother to tiny Ruth, a three-month-old premature baby home from hospital only a matter of weeks, found the opportunity to conceive another baby to another man while living miles out in the prairie country was at that stage a mystery. But was one which Conrad’s vivid imagination would work overtime to explain before their lives were over.

Time and again he accused her of infidelity with a mystery nameless, faceless person until she was so tired of his accusations she decided that the marriage was impossible and was over as far as she was concerned. She recalled how her grandmother used to say about  people ‘having the name of it so they might as well have the game of it.’

Besides, she wanted only to see the tail end of him, her husband Conrad who would grin ferally at her at times before lashing out to slap or push her around.

Annie thought that jealousy was the vilest, meanest of all the emotions and passions on the spectrum. She had never given him cause to doubt her but she was weary of his suspicions and fed up with his tantrums, his violence and his bullying. She wanted to be free. She wanted to be left alone by him to rear her little girls, then aged two and a half and one and a half, in peace and harmony.

So tired of these repeated accusations was she that she decided she might as well follow suggestions and have an affair, effectively ending the marriage. He would not, she knew, leave her under any other circumstances and she was certain he would not want to continue the marriage when he was finally told that she had taken a lover.

To this length she had participated in a short-lived affair three years into the marriage, mainly as a vain attempt to regain her freedom a blundering error made in futility, not wanting to continue any longer in the vindictive mess that was their marriage.

Later, under pressure, she had admitted to him what she had done when he returned from a trip away working and she awaited the affirmation that they would part. It did not eventuate the way she had planned, much to her distress and disgust, as she knew there could be no proper reconciliation, just more years of the same accusations and nagging.

Conrad and his big brother, hulking great Arnold with his red face, large head, his lantern jaw and horsey features, had bombarded her with questions to gain the maximum amount of detail in the minimum possible time. Then they had bullied her into remaining tied to her husband, very much against her will. Her unhappiness was immeasurable and she had no hope of rescuing anything worthwhile from the chaos.

As expected, the whole debacle of the reconciliation did nothing to improve the marriage but as she had not intended for the union to be resumed, the consequences were as devastating as Conrad could possibly have wished for. He wallowed in chaos—it was meat and drink to him. He enjoyed watching her in her misery trying to keep in even temperament while she tended in agony to her little girls.

She resented the outcome of the enforced renewed bond with her husband and the failure of her bid for freedom, but eventually succeeded in putting the episode behind her and tried to make the best of a bad bargain, attempting to be the wife and mother she had wanted to be in her girlhood fantasies, but never getting anything right in the eyes of her husband. Although he claimed to forgive her, the pattern of his daily accusations that he had seen the man near the house, parked nearby in his car or driving away began and continued unceasingly for the rest of their time together.

From time to time he told her how very much he loved her. She believed him and tried to reciprocate, while at the same time wondering how he could possibly love her when she was as stupid, insignificant and incompetent as he was forever telling her she was. Never able to live up to his expectations of her, she was often exhausted mentally and physically while she tried to cope with her children, her demanding husband who was even jealous of her devotion to their children, the pressure put upon her by being forced to drive hundred of miles to help with his machinery business as well her own needs to be part of her extended family and to be a part of the group of the few friends she was allowed to have.

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onrad got much mileage out of the blunder she had made in trying to free herself, using the affair to torture her for the rest of their married life, to hold her down and to nag her through many sleepless nights. He had generally kept her downtrodden with regard to what she had done in an effort to find her own life for herself and her girls, so that many times she wished only for death.

However, they battled on together for several more years, bought a house on the Never-never and Annie found she was expecting again. The girls were growing nicely. Ruth was about to begin her schooling at Belsen Primary School and Sarah was ready to embark on her career at Kindergarten. Annie was quietly excited at the prospect of having another child and Conrad thought a baby could be acceptable if it happened to be a boy, which turned out to be the case. Conrad never ceased to throw the past affair in Annie’s face, dragging it into the present,  but not for one moment did he ever suggest that the baby boy was not his. Here was one of the main triggers—that Sarah had not been the son he had desired, merely another girl, adding insult to the injury of having borne a daughter first.

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ver and over while Sarah was in utero Conrad had denied paternity. This baseless claim would surface again and again during Conrad’s lifetime with disastrous consequences to everyone concerned except Conrad. The damage was mainly to Sarah and Annie, daughter and mother, part of his ruthless desire to spite and malign them and to deny them their acceptance in the world and their peace of mind.