Dissonance (30 page)

As Madge took a bite of her apple she happened to look at one of them and he greeted her.

‘Good day,' she replied.

Then the soldiers kept talking. Eventually another one of them looked across at Erwin and said, ‘Let me guess … the navy?'

‘No,' he replied.

Then another soldier said, ‘See, I told you … he's an
aviator
.'

They all looked at Erwin.

‘My son is not in the armed forces,' Madge explained, biting into her apple.

‘Why not?' another one asked.

‘He is a student.'

‘Of what?' the fourth, with the dressing, asked.

‘Music.'

The soldier with the eye dressing stood up, moved his chair to the Hergert's table and sat down. ‘See this,' he said, pointing to his eye. ‘Do you know how I got it?'

‘No,' Erwin replied.

‘A fragment from a French mine. Isn't that great?' he smiled.

Luise stood up. ‘We must be off.'

‘But you haven't finished your drinks,' the soldier said.

‘Come on Erwin, Madge.'

Then the soldier said, ‘You could study music after the war.'

Erwin stood up. The soldier jumped out of his chair and came across to him. ‘People are getting killed,' he said.

Erwin didn't reply.

‘While you drink coffee.'

The Hergerts made their way through the clutter of tables and chairs. A few people looked at them, nodding their heads, as the soldier returned to his friends.

They headed home, skirting rubble from broken buildings. The air was filled with a nutty smell from a pair of pines on Tragerstrasse. Further along there was aniseed, and dry-cleaning vapours, and the yellow must of second-hand books from Ochs' paper stall. Luise breathed deeply, and she knew where she was. She could navigate her city by smell, if need be. Every brick warmed, and cracked, and opened itself to the air in its own way. There was nothing new. The city was so old it must have existed forever.

Madge tripped on a noticeboard. She looked at a shopkeeper, filling a paper bag with walnuts, and said, ‘I could've broken my neck.'

‘It's not mine,' he scowled.

Then she looked at Luise. ‘War,' she said, in a loud whisper. ‘It's all you people … Germans go on about.'

‘Ignore them,' Luise replied.

‘How can you?'

‘Bluff.'

Madge looked at her, and then at Erwin. ‘Perhaps we should have left,' she said.

No reply.

Luise stopped to rest, leaning against a shopfront. ‘Wait, please.'

Madge turned to face her. ‘I have to get tea on.'

‘She's pregnant,' Erwin protested.

Madge sighed. She turned, waiting, her hands on her hips. ‘This will get worse before it gets better,' she said.

‘Bluff,' Luise repeated.

‘What do you mean?' Madge asked.

‘Make a show of … helping.'

‘The war?'

‘Yes. Madge, you're in Germany.'

‘But I'm not a German.'

‘You're in Germany!' Luise repeated, slowly. ‘Erwin could join the Order Police.' She turned to her husband. ‘Direct some traffic. Issue a few parking fines. As long as you're in uniform.'

Madge's elbows jutted out from her hips. ‘How could he do that?'

‘They're old men and cripples, Madge. They hand out flags at processions.'

Madge shook her head. ‘He came here to study.'

‘Before the war. It's a small compromise. Otherwise, if things start going bad …'

Erwin looked at his mother. ‘Maybe … if it would help.'

‘Never!' She looked at Luise. ‘You're a wife now, and soon a mother. That's your priority.'

A crowd was gathering further up the street. Mothers were hurrying their children, fruiterers and butchers were leaving their shops unattended and office girls were hanging out of second- and third-storey windows to see what was going on.

Madge was off first, followed by her children. When they arrived they made their way through the crowd. There was cheering, and whistling, and some applause, and calls of encouragement for the soldiers from the café who were gathered around an old Jewish man kneeling on the ground. The soldier with the eye dressing kicked the old Jew in the stomach and he fell flat, curling up into an awkward ball, his arms outstretched, his hands clawing at the cobblestones.

‘Is that enough?' the soldier asked the crowd, and the reply came back. So he kicked him again, and again, until he stopped moving. A man in an old, loose-fitting suit stepped forward and asked, ‘What did he do?'

‘He stole that loaf of bread,' one of the other soldiers replied, indicating a loaf sitting crushed in the gutter. ‘What, are you his lawyer?'

Before she could think it through, Madge stepped forward. ‘Cowards,' she said to the soldiers, slowly lowering herself to see the old man's face.

Mum, no, Erwin thought, stepping back into the crowd.

‘Are you the Jew's wife?' one of the soldiers asked.

‘For goodness sake, someone fetch the police,' Madge said, and everyone laughed.

‘Well, go on, kiss your husband,' the soldier with the dressing said, taking her head and pushing it towards the old man's lips.

Madge swung at him and he jumped back, laughing. Everyone laughed.

Mum, Erwin thought, please …

‘Maybe the Jews are frisky,' the same soldier said, tapping his boot on Madge's rear.

Then another soldier, a tall man, stepped forward and kicked the old man in the face. Blood flowed from his nose, over the cobblestones and in a splatter across Madge's white blouse, up her arm and over her hands. As the crowd hushed, and then cheered, she looked at her hands. She wiped the warm blood and it smeared. Then she looked at the old man's face, covered with healed cuts, sunspots and freckles; she saw how his nose was crushed and twisted and how his hazel eyes were bloodshot. One of his earlobes was split and blood had already matted in his hair.

She took his head in her hand and said, ‘Wait, we'll get some help,' but he wasn't responding. He opened his mouth, struggling for air, and Madge could see blood in his throat.

‘You're going to kill him,' she said, looking up.

‘Then you'll be a Jew widow,' the tall soldier replied.

‘I am not Jewish!' Madge insisted.

‘But you married a Jew.'

‘He is not my husband.'

‘Why are you helping him?'

Madge stopped to think. ‘I will pay for his bread,' she managed. She bowed her head and closed her eyes. She could hear the old man struggling to breathe. Then there were more cheers, and applause, and when the noise quietened she couldn't hear him.

Silence – as she held Jo in her arms – and wondered if she hadn't got everything wrong. Dead weight growing heavier by the second – her arms aching, her head full of the things she should've said, or done. But then, some time after, a reckoning as she double-checked her reasoning and found it to be sound, as she opened small windows to let a breeze pass through, to clean out the stink of emotion.

Luise stepped forward. She knelt down, put her arms around her mother-in-law's shoulders and said, ‘Come on.'

Madge was still looking at her hands.

Luise looked at the tall soldier. ‘Her husband has just died,' she said.

‘So?' he replied. Then he remembered the café. ‘And where's the music student?'

He looked at the crowd. He saw Erwin, smiled, stepped forward, grabbed his arm and pulled him forward. ‘Here is our brave soldier,' he announced to the crowd. ‘He wears a bow tie!'

There was some laughter, but people were drifting back to their occupations.

The tall soldier leaned over the old man's body, took some blood on the top of his finger and smeared it on Erwin's cheek.

‘There,' he said, although he didn't have much of an audience. ‘Ready for battle.'

Luise led Madge back to the footpath. Erwin followed them. They walked slowly in the direction of Sülldorf, following a small, caramel sun that seemed stuck in the branches of a linden tree.

‘Hip hip hooray,' the soldier called after them, three times, although there was no chorus.

Except for a few people staring at the body, as the tall soldier prodded it one last time with his foot.

Chapter Five

It had been two months since Madge bloodied her blouse. She'd rinsed it, and soaked it in bleach, but you could still tell. So she'd ripped it precisely down the middle and put it in the ragbag.

Snow had settled on Sülldorf. Two feet thick. Swept away by a team of workers with fags hanging perpetually from the corner of their mouth.

Once, snow had been a novelty. When Madge was a teenager there was news of snow on the top of Mount Lofty. Sam and Grace had taken her to town, and they'd caught a bus to the summit of the purple hill. There were a hundred people, maybe more, walking around looking down at the icy ground, at the melted, muddy frost that looked more like (Sam said) something left over from a hernia operation. And then the queue for the bus home, and the train back to the Valley.

Everyone determined not to bother about snow again.

Now there was plenty of it – enough for children to make thousands of snowmen. Novelty turning to nuisance. The locals trudging to work, or rugging up to go buy a few apples, or dart to the air raid shelter – all the time dreaming of their brown, sun-warmed street.

Madge was busy at work in the cellar of the Verlag Publishing Company. A pot-bellied coal fire warmed the room. Snow melted on the outside of high, street-level windows, taped up and sandbagged. The walls were stone, rendered and painted brown, but damp had come through and mould and moss flourished where the wall met the ceiling and floor. Three large workbenches were set out under bare yellow globes. One woman sat on the side of each table, in front of piles of coloured photos lined up in the order they were to be stuck into the books, themselves sitting in neat piles beside each woman.

Madge picked up a photo of a group of Hitler Youth marching under the Brandenburg Gate. Turning it over, she dipped her brush in the glue bottle and wiped off the excess. She painted a square and a cross on the photo and placed it within its square. She took a rag and pressed the photo flat. A pinhead of glue seeped out and she wiped it.

The boys' faces were strong, defiant and brown. She looked up at the fat, white hollow faces around her and wondered. One woman wiped her nose along the length of her arm, and snorted, and Madge could see her swallow.

Just as Madge had descended into a sticking trance, Luise came down the wooden steps into the basement.

‘Morning all,' she called, steadying herself on the loose handrail, supporting her soccer ball stomach as if the half-done foetus might drop at any moment.

A few of the women replied, and others kept working. Someone asked, ‘How's the baby?'

‘She says she's hungry.'

‘He,' Madge corrected.

Luise took off her coat and scarf and draped them across the back of her chair. Then she sat down, blowing into her hands, warming her fingers.

‘How was your lesson?' Madge asked, looking across the table at her.

‘Good. Although the breathing gets harder.' She patted the baby.

Madge tried to smile, picking up a photo of yet another castle, this time in Saarbrücken. ‘Maybe it's time to stop,' she suggested.

Luise looked back at her. ‘I can still sing,' she said.

Madge shrugged. She wasn't going to have it out again. One of the other ladies looked at Luise and said, ‘I didn't realise you sang.'

‘I've been learning since I was four.'

‘How wonderful.'

Then Luise turned to Madge and, still smiling, said, ‘Thirteen years. That's how long Erwin's been learning, isn't it?'

‘Yes,' Madge agreed, picking up another castle.

‘Give us a song then,' the woman asked, pushing wire-framed spectacles back up her nose.

‘No, I couldn't.'

‘Go on.' And then a few more voices joined in, urging her.

Luise looked at Madge again. ‘What do you think?'

Madge shrugged. ‘Give them your
Wanderer
.'

Luise cleared her throat. She sat up. She took a photo of a Berlin road-gang and turned it over. Then she took her glue brush, held it in the air and began.

I come from regions high and free

To humid vales and moaning sea …

Madge listened, but she refused to watch. As she lost herself in a series of Austrian landscapes she started to wonder why she'd allowed Luise to work. The money, of course, but picture sticking had become her few hours of peace every morning. Now it was just more of the same: breathy Schubert, the girl's whining voice always complaining about something, her fat gut, her toilet stops, her face.

It was Luise's choice. She couldn't stop her. When Luise had asked if she could join her she'd just shrugged and said, ‘Perhaps.'

But Luise was determined. She found the number in her mum's old address book and a few days later she was there, gluing, smoothing, telling them all about Erwin, her mother-in-law, and the way she cleaned the toilet three times a day.

As everyone laughed; and Madge ground her teeth and tried to smile.

I wander on in calm despair

My constant sighs demanding where?

Luise glued with a lighter motion than Madge. She put the photo down, adjusted it with five fingers and held on to the last note until she was out of breath.

There was some applause, and the tapping of glue brushes on the edges of tables, and then the woman with the ­spec­tacles said, ‘You have a real talent.'

‘I don't know about that,' Luise replied, turning to Madge.

‘She does,' Madge conceded.

‘You're very lucky,' the woman explained. ‘Two geniuses in the family.'

‘And I'm the dummy,' Madge joked.

The woman looked back at Luise. ‘Make sure you don't give up,' she said.

‘The baby may complicate things,' Madge explained, staring at the thin, wiry woman with her eyes too far apart, her nose too small and her chin dented.

‘Nonsense,' the woman replied. ‘That's why you have in-laws, to babysit!'

‘She's made a commitment, to be a mother.'

‘Doesn't mean she can't sing. And what about Erwin?'

‘I saw him the other day,' the fourth woman at the table said. She was the woman with the giblet arms, old, and Polish looking, Madge thought. ‘He was standing outside some government office. I said, You're Madge's son, and he said, Yes. What are you doing? I asked. I was told to stand here, he said. Why? I replied. It's part of my training, he said.'

‘He was guarding it,' Luise explained.

‘From whom?'

Luise smoothed down a pair of fire-bronzed stokers. ‘I don't know … spies.'

‘Oh … but he didn't have a gun.'

Madge almost laughed. ‘Erwin, with a gun … you think they'd trust him with a gun?'

‘He's done his training,' Luise snarled.

Madge rubbed her nose with the back of her hand. ‘With the rest of the geriatrics.'

‘He looked so smart, in his uniform,' the fourth woman said. ‘You must be so proud, Luise?'

‘Of course,' she said.

‘Madge?'

‘I'm sure he's doing a good job,' she managed. ‘Although, I'd prefer to see him in a tuxedo, sitting in front of a Steinway.'

‘You will. Another twelve months and things will settle down.'

Madge stopped her brush halfway through a squiggle. ‘We've come a long way from our valley, and our shop, and God's Hill Road.'

‘Where's that?' the woman asked.

‘Home,' Madge said quietly. ‘Home.'

‘Tuxedos, Steinways, that's no way to talk,' another woman, from another table said. ‘Some of our boys are in the Army. We never know, from day to day.'

‘I know,' Madge apologised, pretending to care.

‘At least your husband, or son, won't come home in a pine box.'

Madge sat up. ‘My husband is dead.'

Luise looked at her. Funny, the times you choose to care, she thought.

The woman on the other table met Madge's eyes. ‘Just the same. No one needs talk like that. Not if you don't want to end up in trouble.'

They stared at each other. Madge knew it was her.
She
was the one who'd telephoned the security police.
She
was the one who'd told them she worked with an alien, an Australian who was always going on about how it wasn't her war, and how she'd only come to Germany for her boy to study. A boy? No, a man. A man who'd married a German girl, but did that make him a German? Yes, they were happy to live in Germany, but not to contribute.
She
was the one who was always asking why Germany picked fights with peaceful nations, like Australia, happy to mind their own business.

So there they were – two men in suits, standing at the door one cold October morning. She invited them in and made coffee and they explained why they'd come. Because of a phone call.

‘Only one?' Madge had asked.

‘Yes, only one.'

And she knew right away. She could see the woman's hard face. ‘She is a troublemaker,' Madge explained. ‘She looks for a reason to pick fights. And it's not just me, it's everyone, you go and ask. Someone's husband has shares, and she tells her off, because that's profiteering.'

The two men seemed unconcerned. ‘You don't know it's her.'

‘I know,' Madge replied.

And then, as Erwin and Luise sat in their pyjamas listening, she explained. When we came to Germany it was a different place. There was no talk of war. We couldn't have guessed what would happen, and how quickly. But we've decided to stay. Why? Because it's a beautiful country, and the people are decent and hardworking. Because of your culture, your music, your Herr Professor Schaedel (as they took his name for future reference). Because we believe in the future. My wonderful new daughter-in-law (as she reached for the wedding photos). Or should I say daughter? Since her mother was killed, and we took her in. Because of my new German grandson.

‘Granddaughter,' Luise said, sticking out her stomach, and rubbing it.

Yes, she replied to another question, I did say it wasn't our war, but that was before I felt
German
, before I made myself useful teaching piano and working for the Verlag Publishing Company (as she handed them a copy of
Germany, Between Night and Day
, purchased to send to Sam and Grace, to show them how silly the Germans had become).

The men in suits sat studying the book.

‘These are wonderful photos,' one of them said. ‘Where can I get a copy?'

‘You can have that,' Madge replied. ‘It didn't cost me ­anything.'

‘Are you sure?'

‘Yes.'

As she hoped and prayed that the photos would become part of her testament. That the policemen would see her in them, flying kites, saluting the flag and practising eurhythmics in local parks.

‘Very good then,' the man said, resting the book in his lap. He looked at his offsider. ‘I can't see any problem here.'

‘No,' the other man agreed. ‘As far as I can tell, you're doing your best to fit in.'

‘Of course,' Madge agreed. ‘Germany's our future now.'

‘You've no desire to return to Australia?'

‘Perhaps one day, to visit. When there's peace.'

(As Madge sat at her gluing table, smelling mock orange from the front garden of God's Hill Road …)

‘The only thing is,' the shorter of the two men said, ‘people will see your son and think, what is he contributing to the war?'

‘Of course,' Madge harped, placing her hands in her lap.

‘People have brothers, sons, husbands fighting. So it's not unreasonable that they might expect him to contribute.'

Madge shook her head. ‘Yes, I can see that now.'

The man looked at Erwin. ‘What can you do?'

He shrugged. ‘Play piano?'

‘Yes … no … even if you could play in a band. A brass instrument?'

‘I could learn.'

‘What about the Order Police?' Luise asked.

‘Yes, yes, an excellent idea,' the shorter man said.

‘My uncle's a section leader,' his partner added. ‘I could pass on your name, and tell him you'll be in touch.'

Madge smiled. ‘Perfect.' She looked at Luise. ‘Don't you think?'

‘Of course.'

Back at her gluing table, Madge looked up at the spy and said, ‘What I meant was, it would be nice if there was
no
war, for him to be in a tuxedo.'

‘Well, there is a war,' the woman barked. ‘And you should think about what you say.'

‘Stop the bickering,' the woman in the wire-framed ­spectacles said. ‘It must be hard for you, Madge.'

‘Ha,' the other woman replied, shaking her head.

‘What I mean is, it's not clear cut for her. She's torn between two countries.'

‘Rubbish. She's made her choice.'

‘It was made for me,' Madge defended.

‘You could've left.'

Madge stopped herself. ‘We are doing everything we can to fit in,' she said. ‘To help out.' She looked down at a picture of a Nuremberg rally, tens of thousands of freshly shaved heads fitting together like Meccano. ‘What more could we do?'

Meanwhile, Erwin was sitting at the piano in his teacher's apartment trying to justify himself in an entirely different way.

‘You stood there all day?' Schaedel asked.

‘Six hours,' Erwin replied. ‘I needed to go the toilet, but couldn't.'

‘So what did you do?'

Erwin pulled a face to demonstrate. ‘I swear, ten more minutes and I would've pissed all over their marble steps.'

He was still in uniform, from a morning spent learning to direct traffic along the Sülldorf Highway. He'd taken off his jacket and put it across the back of a chair, and slipped his braces off his shoulders. He'd undone his top button and untucked his shirt from his grey pants.

Herr Professor: wearing nothing but a singlet and sarong; inhaling and holding in deep breaths of smoke from his filter-tipped fag; kicking off his slippers as he settled in beside Erwin; rubbing the thick, metallic stubble on his face and smiling at his favourite student. ‘So, what do you do with these people … line up, march about?' he asked, reclining, allowing his sarong to fall between his thighs.