Eloquent Silence (8 page)

Both girls in their own way were extremely protective of their mother. Ruth would defend Annie verbally, going in to bat for her at each and every opportunity. Sarah, of a quieter disposition, would cry in the mornings, refusing to go to school if her parents were to be left alone in the house together.

And lastly, her thin, ill son, her loving, sick little man. He would suffer physical violence by being thrown across the room as he tried to drag his father off his mother while Conrad had Annie down on the lounge room floor, throttling her. This was one of the last bricks in the wall. Someone is going to die here, Annie had thought. And it will be either me or the children. All or any of us except Conrad who values his own life above all else.

Gazing steadily at their young faces, no decision came readily to mind. She loved them fiercely, passionately and would eternally. But what, she wondered distractedly, would she do with another? A baby, of necessity, took up so much of a mother’s time and energy. Could she spread herself any thinner than she already had?

With a hellish marriage barely hanging together by a few tortured threads, Annie had often longed for escape, fantasizing about ways to escape along with her children, into a world of peace and serenity. There had to be a solution to this dilemma, a relatively painless solution, but what? Her earlier attempts to strike out on her own had failed. She could not afford to keep trying and failing as this would end in a disaster of greater of lesser proportions.

Pregnancy caused her great difficulty from conception to delivery. She spent the intervening months between conception and birth in a perpetual state of nausea and discomfort. Each pregnancy had been progressively worse and more complicated than the last, each labor more of a nightmare.

But fear was no excuse to look for a way out, no excuse to shrink from further motherhood.

Careful contraception had proved ineffective previously. Sarah and David were living proof of that. With Ruth, the purchase of contraception had already been too late, as Annie had fallen pregnant on her first sexual encounter with Conrad. Each time she found she was pregnant Annie had experienced an enormous amount of expectation and happiness, despite her contrary circumstances, awaiting the greeting of the new life within her. Her babies had been her reason for living, the very marrow in her bones.

But this time was different and she couldn’t comprehend how and when her meticulous preventative measures had failed her on this particular occasion, but fail they almost surely had and each passing day reinforced her certainty.

Her GP had told her only that morning that it was too soon to be positive. Annie’s body kept informing her that pregnancy was an undoubted fact. Pregnant and still so very far from thirty! How many children would she and Conrad produce at this rate, she wondered disconsolately? How could an increasing number of children improve his attitude towards her? And the children? How much could they all endure?

When would he forgive her for an act for which she asked no forgiveness,  an attempt to free herself of the heavy chains around her heart. She sought a chance to avoid the train wreck towards which she was hurtling and from which she could escape if only he would let her go. Never in all the intervening years had she told him she was sorry for her crime. She was sorry for having hurt him but that was different from being sorry for trying to flee.

Annie was only too aware by the time she had spent some ten years married to Conrad, that he was an insane control freak and that no amount of reasoning or pleading could change this. As well, he was selfish and cold, unloving and uncaring. She could only change herself- not her disposition, nor her reactions to him but the best possible outcome would probably be to change her geography. Not only was he selfish and cold, he was selfish and hot, bursting forth with a stream of vindictiveness that flowed like molten lava from his lips.

As she did each day, Annie considered her options, such as they were. The laws of the state opposed abortion, as did her faith. She was unsure of how she felt about rules and regulations, aware only of her own disappointments and difficulties, her fears for the future of all who shared Conrad’s roof.

How could she continue to be a good church-going member of the congregation if she flouted this law of the church. How to front up and teach Sunday School? How far beyond the Pale would her conscience force her to feel?

With her marriage to Conrad little more than a shambles, with communication between them inadequate more often than not, while at other times impossible, resentment and bitterness were the order of the day.

Annie had lost something essential but didn’t quite know what it was. Finally she figured it was an essential part of her soul that had drifted off into the ether along with her self-confidence and self-respect. How could one feel confident when the person who was supposed to love you above all others told you what a hopeless cretin you were? How could you respect your hopeless cretin of a self? It was all too difficult for Annie, bowed down by helpless fear and profound anger.

Conrad was adamant that he did not want her to go and take the children with her. Annie would not consider going without her children, nor, on the other hand, did she think she could stay.

Tired of walking on eggshells and of the way he abused each of them in turn verbally and herself or any of the children when he lost his tenuous hold on his temper and turned on them physically, Annie was afraid to stay and equally afraid to go. Perhaps even more afraid, she thought, when her vivid imagination played games with the consequences of their leaving.

To her it seemed as though he was eternally waiting for something to happen so that he could go off the deep end and relieve his tension. Strong spirits magnified his emotions when he drank but being drunk was not always the root cause of his temper tantrums. It seemed they arose of their own volition and took over his mind like a thing with a mind of its own.

She thought of the rifle he kept in his wardrobe and wondered whether it was loaded at present. Certainly during the many times when he had sat late at night with it aimed at her head, it had been loaded, always, over the eleven years they had been married. Did he keep it that way all the time? A man with maniacal intentions can wipe out a whole family in little more than the blink of an eye.

Was he plotting to annihilate the family or just her? In the early days of their marriage he had intended to take his own life when deep in one of his fits of rage but that had not lasted long. It was her life that was threatened and held to ransom to get some form of behavior that he was seeking. But more often than not he could not explain to her what he was ordering her to be, what he wanted her to change about herself and her ways. The exercise was purely to terrify her into mindlessness.

Was the gun loaded when she hung his trousers up beside it in the wardrobe after he had been to town?  What if one of the children went to his wardrobe and out of curiosity pulled the trigger? Would that be her fault as well as everything else? Stupid, incompetent Annie, a danger to her children and society as a whole.

She would take the rifle to his father and ask him to keep it safely away from Conrad. That would be one less thing to worry about. She was as afraid of him as ever, of his sudden mood changes, his unaccountable silences, his abrupt questions about the most intimate of matters, his fantasies that he forced her to be a part of whether she liked it or not.

Her deliberations were getting her nowhere, she decided, raising herself from the chair to go for her shower. She was still lost in meditation when she heard the Holden pickup draw to a halt outside their neat, three bedroom weatherboard Housing Commission house in Bergen Street, their home for the past seven years.

Some houses are cursed, Annie thought as she drove into the yard one afternoon. She knew that for a fact when she had looked at the crumbling house where her uncle had taken his life by his own hand some years previously. Even the white-washed bricks collapsing around the letterbox cried out that the house was in the agony of disintegration, begging for relief by dismantling. Who would want to live in it? How could a person sleep soundly at night knowing a sad, confused man had blown his brains out under that roof?

Annie’s mother had always said she had known a tragedy would some day take place in that house where her sister Merle and husband Derek lived a sad and torrid life until he blew his brains out. Unfortunately Annie’s mother had the same eerie feeling about the house where her daughter and family resided. Annie thought about the conversation she and her mother had regarding the mournful house where Uncle Derek had died. A chill ran down Annie’s spine. If someone should die here in Bergen Street, Belsen, who would it be? Anyone except Conrad Himmlar, Annie ventured to wager in her mind.

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C
onrad had undergone a dreadful amount of effort to get himself going that morning after his previous big day of bowls. He had emerged from the bedroom gummy-eyed and ready to fire up at the slightest cause. She knew that tonight would not be the night to broach the subject of another baby in the house. Another child, a lifetime commitment for fiery Conrad to assimilate his mind about.

A lovely little infant for Annie to bury her nose against, to cuddle and cosset, to teach its first words, how to hold a spoon, how to stand and toddle. Another baby to shelter from its father’s anger, to quieten at night so that it would not disturb its father’s rest, to make excuses for when it cried with its teeth cutting through sore gums.

Can I live with the consequences of being pregnant either way, whatever I choose, whatever my strength is to face this dilemma? Will my soul remain intact if I forgo this chance at further motherhood or will this fourth pregnancy bring our lives into an inevitable train wreck from which only some of us will remain together?

Perhaps the wisest choice would be to wait until he was in a good mood sometime—but then his mood would automatically and instantaneously be ruined when she presented him with her news. And the decision she was almost certain she would have to come to.

Perhaps it would be easiest to blurt out the facts and hope for the best? She felt a ripple of apprehension tingle up her spine as she thought ahead to the evening meal. Would this be a life-changing event when she told him she was carrying another child? Would this widen the ever-growing rift between them?

Would he find rissoles acceptable tonight or would he fling the plateful of meat and vegetables at the wall as a form of protest against an evening meal that was not steak or roast meat?

Would the evening simply end up to be another demonstration of the battleground that was their marriage, beginning with an argument of differing proportions that degenerated into a session of screaming and confusion? Annie was afraid there was something manic in him, something that would cause him to totally lose control and commit an act with disastrous consequences sooner rather than later. Daily she faced that fear, terrified that an action of her own would bring crushing chaos down upon their heads.

Postponing her intention to shower, she went instead to the kitchen just as cold-faced Conrad arrived up the back stairs and crossed the porch he’d had so much trouble negotiating the previous night. One look at his surly, porous and glowering face was enough to warn her to keep her gloomy story to herself.

She thought of the tale that she had heard was doing the rounds of the town, how he had told a bar full of drinkers that he was married to a woman in her twenties who looked like a woman in her forties.

How much of that is thanks to you, she wondered as she watched him struggle to remove his riding boots.

Anyway, what makes you think you’re such a great looking dude, Bozo? Bad mouthing me in the hotel. Pompous Pilate, aren’t you? You won’t always get away with betraying me.

Konrad was the first of his family born in Australia to German migrant parents who had named him as they would have if he were born in the Fatherland. A strict couple with narrow, beady eyes who lived by pointless, sterile rules and expected their children to follow suit. Either of them could easily give you a look that would shrivel you in your tracks, should they so choose.

At school he had been ribbed and teased until a teacher with a kind streak took pity on him and anglicized his name to Conrad. Soon after, the other children began to call him Con and he felt more at ease with his German background although he never invited other children to his home.

Thankfully, Conrad and Con had stuck and saved him from standing out in the crowd. Combined with the surname, Himmlar, he could even so pass more easily as an Australian during the time he was growing up and losing his heavy German accent. This was no doubt brought about by living with parents who spoke only German in the home.

He wore his hair cut short in a severe crew cut style, bristling a muddy brown color against his ruddy hairline. A bad bout of acne during his teens and early twenties had left him with a seriously pock-marked face and neck. Although in his late twenties by this time, he was already beginning to show signs of the portliness that would catch up with him in a few years when he no longer had to work so hard physically. By then his body would cry out, his knees giving in thoroughly and early, causing him to seek sympathy from any who would give it.

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A
nnie, troubled as she was by what changes were going on inside her body, was intensely nervous, inclined to cry pitifully at the insults and slurs he flung at her in his rages. This reaction, as it always had over the years, angered him even more, causing him to threaten to have her committed to an asylum for the insane where her children would never be brought to visit her under any circumstances. While he, once having signed her in, would never sign her out, he reminded her constantly.

Such were the games he indulged in, as was his custom with unrelenting regularity. Mind games which he usually won just as Annie lost them by default. She knew he was trying to eliminate her individuality by forcing her to obey him mindlessly—or trying to but never quite succeeding to his satisfaction.