Hannah & Emil (50 page)

Emil

They would not let him stay with her the night before they married. The Harts conjured him up a room at one of the colleges and in the morning their brother, Max, came with a suit and tie. He stood in the corridor holding it aloft. ‘It's not exactly a morning suit,' he said. ‘But I hope it will be all right for you.'

Emil nodded and closed the door, took in the suit. Old but not worn bare. It smelled very clean. He had lost the capacity for casual conversation in the last quiet months at Tatura. The world seemed unpredictably noisy, and he had no wish to add to it. And he must learn again that habit of responding in English without long reflection first. Solomon would come soon, he was due at any moment. They would talk for a while, he would be at ease, be himself.

He liked the park near the flat and he and Hannah went for quiet walks during which he had to still the flutter in his heart when she withdrew her hand to look for her glasses in her bag, or get the matches for him. The roar of the factory had been a shock. He had not been able to sleep the first night for the headache. But after a week of it he found it restful to be at work, to smoke a cigarette when the break bell went, standing in the sunlight of the dusty street with all the others, beginning to recognise the faces, watching women take their small children up the road to the market. The rhythm of it, rising early to catch the right tram, pouring onto the street with the others as the sun was sinking, this was the correct shape to a day. These movements helped him back into his body.

When Max had knocked he had expected trouble of some kind. He had learned to keep his hopes small and not far distant and now he must learn again to make them large and confident, to become himself again, the man who had hopes for himself and the world, who made his plans and followed them through. The boy without shoes who becomes an engineer.
The one who comes back
.

‘I will marry today,' he said quietly into the room, looking out at the chapel, covered in ivy, and there were Edith and Dorothy and old Mrs Hart in their pale dresses and gloves and hats, waiting for Max beside a glossy black car. They're going to fetch her, he thought. He felt light, like laughing, but carried the echo of that knock at the door: that at any moment there would be a telegram saying that his release was a mistake, that the wedding banns were not really posted, that he was the wrong Emil Becker and must go back to his place in the camp. He closed his hand on a piece of paper in his pocket, his landing permit, which gave him the right to live, work, marry.

He did his tie in the mirror and combed out his curls. One of the Harts' refugees had cut his hair for him the day before in their garden and there were strips of white skin in front of his ears and at his neck where the skin was still young and naked-looking. The lines in his forehead were deep and no longer went away when he made himself stop frowning. It is still you, Becker, he told his reflection. Tonight you will take your wife dancing. Your feet will remember what to do.

The knock came and his breathing remained slow. It was his friend, come to take him to his wedding.

Hannah

MELBOURNE, 1945

We married on a beautiful, cold, sunny day in the Harts' garden, surrounded by refugees and kind Australians. I spoke German all day, and swished around the lawn in Edith's lovely grey silk, never letting go of Emil's arm, thin but still strong. As a young woman I had never intended to be a woman who married. It felt that day that these exact circumstances, this man, were the only ones that could have led me here, laughing in the winter sun among these wonderful people. I was very, very happy.

Eighteen months after he was released we had our first child, a boy, Geoffrey, and then fourteen months after that another, Benjamin. And so the second half of the war was not nearly so grim for us as the first. Our flat (the tutor never returned, having married in Darwin), so spacious and serene on that summer night in 1942 when Edith plucked me from my grim cupboard at the Australia, was now cramped, disordered and perennially filled with drying nappies. The babies had curly black hair and were deliciously plump. They clearly didn't know there was a war on. I believe they would have eaten the poor old cat if he hadn't taken to hiding in the airing cupboard for most of the day. Being very close in age they pinched and pulled hair but we put them in the same crib to save space in our bedroom, and that was how they liked to sleep, a little box of fat, pink baby skin, dark curls, long, thick eyelashes that rested on their cheeks when they finally relinquished their sturdy grip on the world and dropped off to sleep.

Overnight I became a housewife. I was astonished in those first few years how much of the day is given over to the care of children and a very small household. The alarm went at six for Emil's shift. I got up, made porridge, and bacon when we could get it, fed them all, found clothes for everyone, saw Emil off to his tram, took the babies out in the pram in Fitzroy Gardens if the weather was fine and let them play on a rug on the grass while I attempted to read a book or at least a portion of the previous day's newspaper. If I stayed in the flat I became mournful and dreary, and so I dreaded bad weather. The rest of the day was washing at the tub at the back door while preventing the boys from pulling the cat's tail when he emerged for food (I recall he got an outraged Geoffrey across the eyeball, leaving a thin red line. That cat was very precise, he knew how not to take an eye out while still having his case heard), preparing the boys to go to market, going to market, bringing them back for a nap. Then I tried to read again but usually fell asleep myself, and then got up and tried to do something with the awful cuts of meat we were allowed to buy with our ration books.

It was a short period, that chaotic blur of tiredness and mess, and we were always glad to be together, slipping exhausted into bed at night and curling up in the heat of one another's bodies, the boys making their little noises in their crib, but I felt a little bewildered too, without time to read, or listen to music, or talk to my friends, or write letters. One had to make the most of the quiet sunlit moments when the little ones played quietly on the floor, and magpies sang at the window, and one caught the lovely smells of the flowers and trees of that city.

I had a job for a while at the ABC on a program called ‘Talks', recording short segments in which I spoke to ordinary people about how they managed during wartime. It was a delightful job, a real gift. It fed my curiosity about people, and I loved being on the radio, going into the studio and approaching the big microphone at the centre of the room. It is a particular feeling that I enjoy, of entering a secret professional world, like the translators' booths of the big international conferences, later, after the war. It's something to do with all that specialised equipment and an air of arcane knowledge, worn lightly by a steady stream of clever, friendly people going about their business.

I remember, though, that I worried about leaving the boys; I had not done it before. That first evening, as I pulled on my gloves and adjusted my hat, I went into the sitting room to say goodbye. The boys had colonised Emil's lap as he read the newspaper. They were hiding on his side of it, giggling, and yet he managed to be as absorbed in his article as if he were in a gentlemen's club listening to Mozart. (If that is what they do in gentlemen's clubs. Who of us would know? It's what
I'd
have done then if I got a moment to myself.)

‘Well then,' I said to the newspaper, trembling with fat little boys. ‘Do you know where everything is? They must be in bed by half past seven or they make life a complete misery in the morning.'

He let the paper dip at the top, revealing the boys tucked into his armpits, curled like ammonites. They were unwilling to look at me, in case I removed them from their father so he could read in peace. ‘We are all perfectly happy,' Emil said. ‘Go and be on the radio.'

‘Is there anything else you need?'

‘You will miss your tram, Hannah. Go, I want to read them terrifying stories and feed them jam sandwiches.'

I shook my head, the newspaper becoming once more a tent, and I went off to catch my tram, my chest aching to leave them, and then, by the time I was stepping up onto the tram to town in my smart dress and polished shoes, hands free of small boys, wet nappies, half-eaten sandwiches, beaming with freedom and movement.

I also got a very interesting position on Saturdays at the Council to Combat Fascism and Anti-Semitism. I wrote to radio presenters and news editors to remind them of the need not to aid Hitler's efforts with unthinking denigration of the Jewish people. It was surprising how necessary it was. I had some lovely spats with an announcer in Perth who had been brought to my attention. You should have seen the way I went at that typewriter.

Emil and the boys liked to come and collect me at the end of the day. He had to get permission at East Melbourne police station every time they came across town because he only had a regular permit to go to his work in South Melbourne. Anywhere else beyond a two-mile radius of our flat needed a signature on a slip of paper for him to show if stopped. Though Geoffrey loved visiting the police station and had even come to know some of the constables by name and worn their hats, Emil did it grudgingly, and I wonder whether on this particular day someone had said something that got under his skin.

My heart lifted when I saw them at the glass doors, which my desk at reception faced, but then as Geoffrey rushed in I saw that Emil was scowling. He handed Ben to me without speaking. I could not ask him what had happened, or whether his leg was troubling him, because immediately behind them came two old dears from the refugee council who liked to drop in and gossip from time to time. They had got it into their heads that I was German, in spite of my British accent. And many of those who worked in the office were Jewish. When they saw the boys on my lap playing with the typewriter, one of the ladies said, ‘Oh my dear, you must be so relieved that you and your children are far from Europe. It is not safe at all for your people over there!'

Then Emil said loudly and without preamble, ‘We are not Jews. You are mistaken.'

There was a profound silence among the adults while Geoffrey clattered at the keys. I saw the breath rise and fall in Emil's chest. The ladies looked at me, waiting for me to smooth it over. I was staring at him, waiting too for him to explain his outburst. When it became clear that no one was going to speak before I did, I said, ‘Emil left Germany because of his anti-fascist views. I am a British citizen, as are the children.'

‘Well, yes, of course,' said the woman. ‘We are just—we thought we might find Mr Stern here today? He wanted to discuss something with us . . .' And they were backing out the door into the corridor, Emil peering out after them, stony-faced, as their heels clacked on the hard stairs down to the street.

I spoke to him in German. (Geoffrey was already rather inquisitive.) ‘What was that all about?' I asked. ‘What does it matter if they assume we are all Jews?'

‘I don't wish to explain my entire family history every time some old beetle needs someone to feel sorry for. And you should not have to either. We are not anything to anybody. We are British, for Christ's sake.'

The way he said those last words,
We are British
, in German, made the whole thing seem unreal. I did not know what had just happened, but he was already walking out to the street, so I gathered my things, extracted the boys' fingers from the typewriter so I could put on its cover, and waited while they did all the locks on the door. We were never again publicly referred to as Jews, or Germans, in my hearing, so long as he was alive.

In the winter of 1945 the streets of Melbourne filled with GIs and the AIF, returning home. There were those terrible bombs in Japan, that have set me against war forever, and then everyone was out of the buildings, rushing into town, flooding across Fitzroy Gardens, compelled to be where everyone else was, to be certain, to be among the others who had lived through it too. To ask one another whether all those that were unaccounted for might really come home now. As I rushed out of the house with the boys, I thought of Benjamin and Geoffrey—my brothers, that is—and of dear mother who would not now be bombed to smithereens, although of course I had been able to relax about them since VE Day, and had had a letter from Mother since that she had seen both my brothers, that they had been in her house, and were
really
all right.