Hannah & Emil (44 page)

We turned a corner and all was quiet, the streets wide and empty, a lone slow elderly lady hauling shopping baskets over a crossroads in such a stretched-out instant that it seemed one had to be part of a different order of time to see her move, like watching a sunflower open in the morning or turn its head in a field with a thousand others through the day. We stopped at the corner for a moment, deciding where to head next, and as we did I experienced one of those alterations in sense that one has with little sleep in a new place—just as I felt when I stepped out of the station in a new city: Cologne, Stockholm, Lyon—where the world was a performance playing out in front of me against a painted set. The sandstone offices and the town hall, the stray figures on the street, etched in light and shade, delivering some meaning that I could not grasp, forcing me against myself, to be still, to wait, and then we were off again, the streetscape moving by, and I at last felt dizzy with tiredness and hunger.

Somehow, eventually, we had passed our first day on Australian soil. Finally, we collapsed into a taxi, collected our cases and made our way to the train station. Hauling my luggage up onto the train, the sky at last losing its blinding colour, I gazed out at the fan of train tracks, the long shelters, the sober faces on the platforms. I had the strength left only to notice that there was still salt on my lips, as though I stood at the prow of the
Largs Bay
, spray wetting my face. It took a moment to realise that it was not sea water but the salt of my own skin, gathered there from my first day in the Australian heat.

On the reddish-brown horizon, a road shimmering into eternity, there appeared a line of trees like a city skyline, how one imagined New York or Chicago, such a vision incompatible with this wild place. We passed farm buildings, ancient and mysterious open rusting barns with roofs set upon iron poles so that, beyond the silhouette of farming machinery, one could see yet more of the red plain. Then we were passing a tiny town and its single broad baking street, awnings covering shade that would swallow you whole. A couple of sombre men in dark hats emerged from the shade, slowly crossing the road as though to the reading of a will. A farm lorry passed by after them, children on the back waving from the flatbed, a dog barking, dust flying. They were all freckles and pale red hair. I thought of Steinbeck novels and bone-crushing poverty, though the children were plump and laughing, as well-fed and lively as any I had seen.

I leaned back against the hot seat and closed my eyes. My coolest memory drank me up: the plunge into the millrace on the morning he went away. I dwelled for as long as possible in the cool water, his arm across my back, the warmth of our bodies where they pressed against one another. I was drawing ever closer to his face, his body, his strong square hands.

There was yet more though of the plains, the vast upside-down bowl of the sky. And then we came at last past the town with its silver rod of briefly metalled road, the dreary grid of clapboard houses on short stilts, whole dusty blocks of empty lots.

We eased our stiff bodies out of the train and onto the platform. Beyond the station, out where the road disintegrated to red earth once more, at the hazy, liquid edge of vision, high guard towers loomed. A barrier fell like a guillotine between the road and the buildings: a wall of barbed wire. We stopped where we were on the empty platform. ‘That's it, isn't it?' Jill said quietly.

For once I could not speak.

Jill and the children, a mother and her ducks, made for the cool gloom of the waiting room. She was asking the stationmaster about a hotel. I interrupted her. ‘What are you doing?' I said. I would have shouted it, but for the children.

‘Finding a bed, and then lying down on it.'

‘But, Jill, they're right there! We could walk it in minutes. We have come so far.'

‘Hannah dear, you should see yourself.'

‘Good grief! Who on earth cares? After all this time, we are
here
.' I took a breath. I was close to tears with tiredness and confusion. ‘But of course—the children. You're right. We'll get settled first.'

The stationmaster made a telephone call and a few minutes later a van came down the desolate street and threw up dust outside the station. The proprietor of the Commercial Hotel drove us into town, and I tried not to look behind me at the guard towers above the roofs.

Jill was conciliatory in the room. ‘You may use the bathroom first, Hannah. We shall take all day.'

I stood in the bath letting brown water pummel my shoulders from a wide metal showerhead, grinding my teeth. Startling, that my body could do this ugly thing of its own volition. As I turned off the shower I heard from the next room the insistent rhythmic squeak of the children jumping on the bed, mad with freedom and sugar, having bolted down a powdery-looking chocolate bar thrust on them by the landlord's wife.

My skin was shining in the heat before I had even left the bathroom. One might as well not bother bathing. No matter, I thought. If Jill still does not consider herself presentable I shall walk across town. If I arrive wearing a coating of dust so be it.

Emil

HAY, 1940

Emil sat at the small desk he had made from milk crates beneath the window of the hut, which blasted heat like the open door of a bread oven. The window gave on to a square of corrugated tin, the wall of the hut next door. He was filling in yet another form. They had, it seemed, found a category for men like him, unionists and social democrats, those known to have opposed the Nazis. It was an agony, all these forms—for compensation for their things, of qualifications and experience that might be put to use—with nothing ever to show for it but a stone-cold bureaucratic silence. Hopes raised, hopes dashed. And the talk all the time of what might be possible, rumours that sprang up in the camp like the willy-willies in the dust, whipping around the place, stirring everything up. He couldn't bear it. He went for walks around the perimeter, scratching his ankles in the scrub, hearing the sounds of the town as he put some distance between himself and the huts: church bells, the daily train. Every now and then the breeze brought him schoolchildren in a yard somewhere amid the houses near the station, the gentle clamour of them speaking all at once. He could not walk for long. The journey had weakened his leg and his chest.

He had taken to seeking out a game of chess in a dormitory hut or in the mess. It was understood you did not talk while your opponent was thinking. He had become much better at chess than he ever had been before. Solomon would no longer play him, preferring the odds with the younger men, whom Emil tried to avoid. They could not hold more than a move or two at a time in their heads for dreaming about girls, sporting triumphs and escape to the British army. At night they talked of Mother's
pfeffernüsse
, a childhood dive into the Danube, the smell of German trains. ‘You are too young to be this nostalgic,' he told them. Really, he just wanted them to stop, to let him be quiet, and save themselves the disturbance of those hours and hours of wanting.

His pencil hovered above the form. His father's voice came to him, as clearly as if he stood behind him in the hut:
One foot after
the other, Emil. That's the only way to get where you are going.
Yes, he thought, what else is there to be done? He wrote down what he could, tried to find the English in his memory for the names: brown shirts, rallies, secret police, murder. He had written these things before, exposed himself to the bureaucracy, put down the words assigned the job of describing what was perpetrated, what was lost. He could do it quickly and then think of other matters, like the chess game he had left in train last night at curfew. He wrote what he needed to write:
SA and SS occupied the building and beat and shot the union
secretaries.
Wrote quickly, and did not think. Signed the thing, walked it over to the administration block, the men crammed into the strips of shade along the sides of the huts, smoking, arguing about Hegel, betting camp currency on a game of cards.

When he returned to the hut, hoping to sleep away the hottest hours while the others were driven out from beneath the tin roofs, he found Solomon lying on his palliasse, next to Emil's, hands behind his head, gazing up at a pair of lizards scurrying across the ceiling.

‘Not too hot for you in here?'

‘Thinking cool thoughts, Emil. I am remembering the Wannsee frozen over and a girl I used to take skating. Her scarf used to fly out behind her very fetchingly. I think she knew it too. I could never get her off the ice once she started.'

‘I filled out the form.'

Solomon turned on his side, leaning on his elbow. ‘Good for you. Perhaps you'll be back in time to see some snow.'

‘I try not to get my hopes up, but you know how it is.'

‘Well, you do have some very useful friends. They'll put in a word for you.'

He lay down on his own bed and felt the sweat begin immediately between his body and the woollen blanket. ‘Tell me again about these cool thoughts.'

‘When you fell over on the ice, you didn't feel it at first, as you skated about, keeping warm. But then walking home your trousers would be wet and cold against your leg, and you felt your skin was beginning to freeze.'

‘Then, when you thawed yourself out, your feet ached,' Emil added.

‘What I wouldn't give now for chilblains.'

Emil closed his eyes. After helping to build the hydro-electric station in Ireland he had been sent to Finland to supervise the construction of a water power plant to run sawmills and plywood and pulp factories. Before they could begin they had to transport the pieces of the vast machines across thirty miles of ice and snow without cranes or snow trucks. He had sat in the freezing hut at the port drawing sketches of sledges, floats and hoists in the dim light of early afternoon. Then every day for a month he and the men stood out on the dock in the dark mornings sawing and hammering until they were ready. They sent for the dogs and the drivers and carted the pieces of machinery across the white country to the pine forests, the air freezing his beard. The dogs barked at first, ready to run. They moved off and there was nothing, just the sound of the snow beneath the treads, a black smudge of trees coming into view in the midst of the snowy land and sky.

He was amazed to find that it worked. For a moment before he slept he felt cold, reached for his blanket to pull it up, felt droplets of ice in his beard, a stinging wind slice into his slitted eyes. Then he slept and saw the dogs squabbling over fish, growling in their throats, jumping straight into the air, barking madly.

After dinner, a fine lamb stew from the internee-run camp kitchen, one of the diggers caught his eye across the mess, held a piece of paper in the air. ‘Telegram,' he mouthed, an encouraging look on his face. The men at his table watched him as he read it. Meckel, opposite, one of those who never seemed to have absorbed the concept of privacy, stared at the piece of paper with open-mouthed lust.

‘Good news?' Solomon asked above the scraping of plates with hungry spoons, the din of insects.

‘It's my release. The tribunal accepted me onto their list.'

‘And yet you are still here among us,' Meckel leered.

Emil looked at his face, a little slipped on one side. ‘Yes, Meckel. Still here with you.'

‘Will they return you to England?' Solomon said.

‘It says I'm free to apply for a transport.'

Solomon laid a hand on his shoulder. ‘My God, that's wonderful news. You must get word to Hannah.'

Emil nodded, looking at the telegram, saw himself in her mother's garden, throwing a stone at her window like a boy.

All around them chairs were scraping, and the men, having got their morsel of news, were sighing and picking up plates to take to the kitchen.

‘Come, Emil,' Solomon said. ‘Let's go and blow our wages on a Viennese coffee. We'll hunt down Schiff. I hear he has cigars.'