Hannah & Emil (51 page)

I caught the eye of my neighbour as I hitched Ben on my hip. She was watering her lovely magnolia tree, on which the first pale buds were showing. I looked away, hurrying Geoffrey on. My upstairs neighbour had told me this young woman had lost her sweetheart in a bloody landing in the Pacific.

I pushed through the waves of people, clutching Ben and gripping Geoffrey's hand so tightly that he tried to pull free, lifting him up onto the tram just as the bell rang. It was filled with people drinking from hipflasks and even straight from beer bottles and the boys pressed against me, turning their serious and huge brown eyes upon the strange crowd. I held onto the leather hoop with my free hand and they hung onto me as we lurched and the people gave out delighted cheers.

We got off amid the warehouses in South Melbourne and saw that already the men were coming out of his factory. I feared we had missed him but he was leaning on the brick wall, smoking, watching them go by. He smiled when he saw the boys and Geoffrey pulled at his hand, trying to get Emil to take him inside. ‘I cannot take you in there,' he said, bending down. ‘The furnaces require little boys for fuel. Someone is bound to throw you in. I cannot take such a grave risk.'

We took them for lemonade across the street. ‘I think it will be perhaps a week or two and they will lay off the refugees.'

‘Do you think they'll do it that quickly?'

‘Already today they announced we are de-protected. This was a small company before the war.'

I studied his face across the booth in the diner. There was no one but us, everyone was out in the road. The young girl looking after the place was standing on the sunny step, waving at people as they passed. ‘Well,' I said, smiling, ‘do you want to stick it out here, or should we try and get a passage home? The youth hostel people will take us whenever we say the word. We have the fares, just.'

He nodded. ‘Not Winchester. We can ask them for something new?'

‘Yes, of course.' I put my hand on his. ‘You know, if you wanted to go to Germany—' He shook his head. Geoffrey made a loud sucking noise through his straw as he finished his lemonade. ‘I will write straightaway. I will see what they can find us.'

I had to support us during the last months. I worked very hard so as not to let the housekeeping eat into our fares home, but Emil's job had indeed disappeared quickly, and we could not get a passage until the English spring of 1946. I lost the ‘Talks' position at the ABC to a returning serviceman and found a position as a full-time subeditor at the
Age
. It was hard work but suited my skills. I could look up after a long shift and only then realise my eyes were tired.

I came home in the bright afternoon of an October day to perfect silence. I thought that they must be out. But then, when I had kicked off my shoes in the bedroom and gone through to the sitting room at the front of the house, I saw them in the chair under the window. Emil was absolutely frozen, a boy on each of his knees gripped tightly about the chest. In one hand was a letter. I saw that it was handwritten, in German. After I had been in the room for several seconds he lifted his gaze to me. The rims of his eyes were indistinct and red and his mouth was not quite the right shape. The boys strained against his hold for a moment and then clambered down to get at me. I took them off for a glass of milk at the kitchen table, found each of them a chocolate, and went back in. I kneeled before him and he sobbed on my shoulder, trying to hold in the sounds so that the boys would not be frightened. It was difficult to hold him upright, but he stilled himself and we stayed there for a few moments until there was a crash in the kitchen and Ben began to wail.

That night I woke in the dark and heard a brief sound, a stifled cry, from somewhere hidden, as though there was a sealed chamber at the centre of the building. I lay in blackness and waited for him to return. I slept and stirred, grey light in the room, as he climbed back into bed behind me. His cold legs lay against mine, warming themselves, and I slept again.

Emil

FREETOWN, APRIL 1946

This time he would walk about the streets. He knew he would never be in Africa again. He was no longer in the part of his life where everything was still possible. He left them at a café on the dock saying that he wanted tobacco and would see them back at the ship. He could hear behind him the little one start up that sound like an air-raid siren but he would be all right as soon as Hannah put something sweet and sticky into his hand.

Everything was wonderful in its degeneration back into the too-warm, too-ripe land. From piles of rubbish between little huts burst colourful flowers. The thick orange mud tracks, churned and slippery, went up into the hills behind the houses. The milky sea was lined with coconut palms. The people's teeth when they smiled and murmured at you were large and white in dark mouths. Someone somewhere cooked corn on an outdoor grill. He might never feel such heat again, heat with weight, like a blanket over his skin.

He had not had a moment to himself for weeks with the packing and organising and settling of small boys who must be forced to say goodbye to all their mother's friends and continually be kissed and swept up into the air for squeezes and whispered farewells. Now he was alone with himself at last. His mother had told him in the letter of everyone that they had lost. It was many, too many for one letter. His sister's husband, who on his way home from work was pulled off his bicycle and beaten by a Russian slave worker in the days after Germany's defeat. A number of family friends and relatives crushed beneath their houses by Allied bombs. Ava was among these. He only hoped it was quick and unknown to her, that one moment she was dreaming of the bright hair of her child and the next she was not. He didn't believe she would want to make a life without her boy. Only his new Australian children made it imaginable that there could be a world without him.

All that had come back from the army, his mother wrote, was that he was killed in fighting south of Vienna in May 1945. That May, not a year past, Emil had taken the tram to the factory each morning, autumn colours blazing in the gardens of the cottages. In the afternoons Hannah and the boys had waited for him in their own courtyard, Geoffrey breaking free from Hannah as Emil turned the corner onto their street. He and Hannah had gone to bed early as the nights drew in, sinking against each other in their warm bed. In which of these moments had it happened?

He remembered every day their pale heads leaning towards one another on an English train, murmuring, nodding, the fields blurring past the window; that time, in which they were safe, that he could not keep from passing.

Soon, he would be able to visit his mother. He had no desire to go to Germany and see his town separated to individual bricks in the road, but she would not leave, and neither would his sister. A woman in bright clothes smiled as she passed, carrying a dead chicken by its neck.

Solomon had said before he left, ‘On a journey, you must think of all the things that you look forward to about your destination.'

‘You did this on the
Dunera
?' Emil laughed.

‘I did. I spent a lot of time thinking about the absence of British officers and the plentiful nature of lamb.'

He had reached the back of the houses and not seen a store so he turned and walked down through the streets towards the sea. They had been sent a photograph of the hostel. An old manor on the edge of a village in Kent, standing on enormous grounds. The boys could roam in secret places among the hedgerows without ever leaving the garden. They could build little huts and hiding places, squirrel away the secret objects belonging to boys. Hannah could go to London on the train and see her mother and brothers who, thank God, were still here, and go to the theatre, and to Europe to work. She was talking about teaching herself Swedish. The Youth Hostel Association seemed to like to give him places that needed a substantial amount of maintenance. He would have a garden and many sheds. Perhaps he could build a car or a motorcycle, if he could get his hands on the parts in battered old Britain.

There was a store down a side street that he had missed on the way up. He was paying the shopkeeper for his tobacco as the ship sounded its horn. The man smiled and gestured for him to hurry. He walked quickly down to the dock, slipping in the red clay. As he came out of the streets near the ship he was not sure what he was seeing at first, but then it was clear that it was their three little dark shapes against the bright dock. Hannah, hair wild, holding their suitcases, flanked by the boys, who ran to him as soon as they set eyes on him and buried their faces against his legs. ‘What is this?' he asked Hannah. ‘Why do you have the luggage?'

‘The ship is about to leave.' She set down the cases, laid a small hand on his chest, seemed to catch her breath for a moment. ‘We thought you would not make it back in time. We did not want to sail without you. I'm afraid the boys rather caught my fear.'

‘Come, come.' He shooed the boys onto the gangway where a sailor beckoned them along. He took the cases and they hurried onto the bridge between the land and the ship, stumbling quickly inside the boat as the sailor pulled up the gangway after them.

Part V

Hannah

KENT, 1958

The boys grew older, and so of course did we. They ran around the grounds, finding sheds for their exhibitions and projects. Emil walked and mended things and spoke German, finally, to those groups when they came. I travelled, of course, and became one of the first of the simultaneous interpreters. There were very few of us then who could perform this task, though everyone is used to seeing it on the television now. A delegate speaks and the translator's voice comes over the top in English, as though it is the easiest thing in the world. Well, it was not, and there was as much work as those of us who could manage it could take on. For myself, I was happy enough to miss the large groups of guests at the hostel. They became a bit much for me. I remember in those years that I was always trying to find a quiet corner of the house in which to study some specialist language before a conference or simply to write letters or read a book.

One afternoon, after returning from a few days' work in London, I had met the boys from the bus stop after school. They were too old to need collecting by then but my bus arrived shortly before theirs, and I was eager to see them. As we approached the warden's quarters, I heard music playing. It was Sutherland, singing Rossini, a gift sent us by the Harts, who have never in all these years forgotten the boys on their birthdays or at Christmas. Music seemed to me a good sign. When we went in we found Emil sitting at the big table dressing a hare and talking in German to his friend Solomon Lek, who was growing old very dashingly, with streaks of grey in his thick hair and lovely gold-rimmed glasses on his delicate nose. He was a professor of philosophy at Goldsmiths now but when he came to see us he talked mostly of his old love, literature, asking me every time when I would write my memoirs and dazzle the world.

Solomon stood at once as we entered and the boys shook his hand. His eyes twinkled behind his glasses. ‘The unstoppable Hannah Becker,' he sighed, as he always did, and we embraced. Why did you never marry, Solomon? I wondered. Any young woman would fall over herself. But he was one of those with a private life that was just that. He made it his job to ask about you, and so one never probed. When he kissed me he smelled of rosemary and tobacco. They have been smoking, I thought. The doctor had forbidden it, but Emil took less and less notice of what such people—indeed, anyone—had to say on the matter.

The boys went off to their project, a wheelbarrow with a lawnmower engine on it that they were attempting to turn into some sort of vehicle. I had seen no evidence of brakes. Emil had given them a shed and left them to it, having built them a thousand such things during their childhood, but they were big now, and he insisted they be left to manage their projects themselves, occasionally offering advice or a brief comment over the top of the newspaper.

Emil too stood and embraced me. ‘What is this?' I said. ‘My birthday?'

‘My
Wiedergutmachung
cheque has arrived from the Germans.'

What a phrase.
Making good again
. ‘Really? Is that really true?' I glanced at Solomon, who was smiling. ‘I thought it would never happen.'

‘I have learned this from you. I make their lives difficult until they move the world to get rid of me.' He took the cheque from his pocket to show me. It was a good sum of money, enough to put something down on our own little place. He was sixty-one, and had some money in his hand. We stood in a little triangle, close together, like refugees again, peering at the cheque.

The boys came over too to take a look. ‘My sainted aunt,' said Geoffrey. ‘Have we done someone in?'

‘Where
do
you get such turns of phrase?' I asked.