Hill of Grace (2 page)

Different thing all together, Bluma would console. Hitler's war had been longer, brewing in an atmosphere of anti-kraut hysteria that had its epicentre (again) in Adelaide. Just the same, it had been six years since it all ended, maybe it was time for William to return to Wilhelm, for Miller to restore the Muller honour.

The photos of Loveday Internment Camp were still in his mind, set out proudly on the front page of Adelaide's daily
Advertiser
. And although he'd narrowly avoided a visit, the headline was still clear in his mind: Who Can Tell A Nazi Spy? Taking him even further back to a stinking hot day in March 1918, when he watched his father almost come to blows with a train conductor who wouldn't accept his pass.

Bluma sat down opposite them and William looked at Nathan, who cleared his exercise books and maths text and bowed his head.

‘Jesus Christ, Saviour,' William began, laying aside his half-eaten cucumber as they joined hands. ‘Guide our devotion, as we're inspired by the words of your companion Matthew.'

As they did every night at this time, Nathan's thoughts drifted off across the school oval to assignations more Janet Leigh than Luther, to landscapes more Picasso than Barossa. And in remembering his odd, occasional romantic embrace (mostly imagined), he contemplated a world full of more fire and excitement than anything in the Bible. As his father's voice drifted into his ears it wasn't Jesus he described as much as the possibility of underwear; it wasn't the Gospels as much as a stray page of D.H. Lawrence. Not so much the tribes of Israel as tribes of atheistic Commie hordes over-running Asia.

If Bluma was not entirely with William, it was because she knew the Gospel of Matthew better than her very own brother. She sat with her head bowed, breathing shallow breaths of smoked meat and the riddle of seventy times seven.

William started reading. ‘“The Pharisees also came unto him . . .”' Droning on until the bells of Langmeil Lutheran tolled nine and he closed his gigantic Bible to mixed feelings of relief and immolation.

The next morning William and Nathan set off, as they did every Saturday, in search of papers and yeast. Passing by the dry stone walls near Seppelt's, William stopped to pick a bunch of belladonna lilies for Bluma. He sniffed them but there was nothing there, only the hot, pink flowers of a hundred Tanunda roadsides. Off in the distance the colour faded to the monotony of blue gums and sugar gums and the odd river red clinging desperately to life beside Jacob's dried-up creek.

Beyond the Kaiserstuhl the Flaxman Valley floated olive and treeless above the horizon. The High Eden Ridge stretched east towards Cambrai, taking with it endless grasslands which were destined for the vine. So far it was just a few Angus cows, and paddocks eaten clean by merino sheep and rabbits. Dams full of brown water spotted the landscape like crater holes. Granite outcrops erupted like pimples from far below the earth, making otherwise arable land unworkable.

As they passed the Langmeil Lutheran Church, William jumped up the few crumbling steps (another working-bee for him to organise) to the notice board. Tomorrow would be an easy day. Ian Doms was usher and Bruno Hermann, William's blutwurst neighbour, welcomer. William could sit back and enjoy listening to the pastor, Henry Hoffmann, a Tanunda treasure, whose sermons linked the Bible to the daily lives of his parishioners in ways William could only marvel at. The way in which Adelaide became Babylon, Rundle Street the temple of money-changers and the twin towns of Tanunda-Nuriootpa themselves, a new Jerusalem. The way in which Emperor Wilhelm Friedrich became Satan (not in so many words) and Sir Robert Menzies a glowing saint on a holy card, stepping out the red devils surging down from the North. Even Premier Playford got a mention, praised for speaking out against the Asiatic hordes who'd like nothing more than to re-populate the Barossa with gin stills and opium farms.

There were immigrants and there were immigrants. Some bringing the vine, others the rice paddy. The Greeks, maybe, could be tolerated, spreading their souvlaki song-lines down the already cast-over Hell that was Hindley Street. But hot on their heels would be the Serbs and Croats and Bulgarians with their body odour. Mandolins and the Commie manifesto in Tanunda's Goat Square. This was the miracle of Pastor Henry, warning them against foreigners. Amongst all this cultural baggage (although Hitler was never mentioned) Pastor Henry's thoughts were never more than a step away from Loveday Internment Camp.

William and Nathan passed Jenke's winery, the heavy smell of grape-must blowing over through canopies of coppiced carob. ‘Too soon,' William whispered, watching workers in singlets unloading grapes.

‘Maybe they ripened earlier,' Nathan offered.

William didn't answer, smoothing his chin whiskers and contemplating the A-bomb. One of the reasons he bought newspapers: to gather evidence of the End. Every Saturday, every local and national paper. Taking them home, spreading them out on his dining-table, scissors at the ready. Every time there was something about the Koreans or Russians, snip snip, laying them out on the table as Bluma took a pot of home-made glue and stuck them in his scrap-book, writing the date and source, wiping off the excess and smoothing them down. A Saturday ritual, sipping coffee and eating Streuselkuchen as Nathan sat in the corner with a book and just wondered.

William believed if he gathered enough evidence about the bomb and its keepers with their belief in evolution and the need to share capital, then others would see what he could see. Man as a product of apes? The forsaking of farms for factories. People who didn't make their own cheese or grow their own gherkins. It was all there, cross-referenced in an index: A-bomb, Automat, Barrymore, Chaplin, China, Communism, Durkheim, Einstein . . .

William and Nathan entered the Apex bakery, William with his papers, Nathan with his tennis racket. William smiled at Bruno's and Edna's grand-daughter, whose name he could never remember, and ordered honey cakes for his whole family. Nathan, not much younger than the girl, rolled his eyes for her benefit and started kicking the strings of the racket against his tennis shoes. ‘Don't do that,' William scolded, reminding him how they couldn't afford a press.

‘Have you heard, Mr Miller,' the girl began, smiling, baiting him, ‘the British are going to test a bomb next year?'

William shook his head. ‘In Australia?'

Nathan smiled. ‘The Barossa?'

Lilli looked at William. ‘Place up north. Middle of the desert. Maralinga.'

As she wrapped his honey cakes and put them in a bag beside a half pound of the bakery's yeast, William watched her fingers become the legs of a spider, crawling down from China towards South Australia, consuming everything and everyone in its path. ‘The British are too quick to be with the Americans,' he observed, to which she replied, ‘It took both of them to stop the Fascists.'

‘
He
was the least of our concerns,' Miller continued.

She smiled one last time and gave him his change. ‘We're all quick to change our tune.'

‘Not me,' he trailed off, as he dropped the coins in his pocket and exited the shop.

William sat under a pencil pine and ate his cake as he watched Nathan lose again. Bluma had warned him to keep his comments to himself: Nathan had threatened to stop playing if William kept coaching him from the sidelines. ‘Backhand, Nathan, both hands . . . watch your footing!' A shop-keeper's son from Gawler demolished him in straight sets and they were soon walking home across paddocks overgrown with freesias and wood sorrel.

As they went, William's landscape smelt more of sulphur than must, was lit more by atomic flashes than the dusty summer light over the Pewsey Vale Peak. Nathan, meanwhile, had other thoughts on his mind: Lilli Fechner's green, translucent eyes, her Shirley Temple dimples and her uncanny ability to say something without saying it. Lilli, his hero, the only girl he knew who could publicly humiliate his father without him knowing.

William Miller passed along the creek which formed the bottom boundary of his property. Wild olive trees, their fruit only of interest to the crows, clung to the banks where floods had washed away the silt and exposed their roots. A white flowering iris crept down from a fallow paddock but mostly the creek was just rocks and the murky water they shared with the Seppelts.

Harlequin flowers ranged yellow to orange as they followed the path up toward the showground. Off amongst his carnations, Arthur Blessitt, the Miller's other neighbour, worked on his knees debudding stems as straight as a Cartesian plane. ‘Coming?' William called, across a paddock Arthur had turned over to roses.

‘Of course,' he replied, standing and shaking his head. ‘Go on without me, I've finished the new pins.'

Arthur watched William continue on toward the showgrounds then made for his lean-to laundry to wash up. After cleaning his face and the back of his neck he grabbed a few bottles of homebrewed beer, his three new kegel pins and set off in a scurry along a path of wild oats William had laid flat.

Arthur had turned over his property, not entirely forsaking his vines, to cut flowers: lisianthus, carnations, wallflowers, calendulas and in summer, endless fields of sunflowers. Everybody thought he was loopy, although William knew he was making money packing them off to Adelaide twice a week. Department stores, florists and the odd fruit shop had come over to his way of thinking: where others had started making plastic azaleas, he would make a killing with the real thing.

Arthur was a confirmed bachelor, the only child of parents who'd smothered him with love then demanded he go out to find a bride. He'd brought a few girls home to meet them and they'd quickly sized them up, dismissing them as entirely inadequate. Arthur, who was more interested in his woodwork and flowers anyway, was happy to let a future of nagging and baby vomit pass him by.

He called after William but saw that his friend was caught up in the cries of a flock of sulphur-crested cockatoos come to feed on the soft female cones of a native pine.

William arrived at the Kegelbahn and put his jacket on the back of a chair. He deposited his few drinks and wurst and said to Julius Rechner, Nathan's history teacher at the Lutheran school, ‘Arthur is on his way.'

The kegel club was a single-lane bowling alley built in the form of a long shed. Wives took it in turn to stand at the far end of the alley, re-setting the wooden pins and returning the balls down an angled gutter lined with white cotton. The men stood about in the shed proper, drinking, telling lies about their working weeks and wishing there was another kegel club for them to compete against.

But there wasn't. They only had each other, week after week, taking turns to tabulate the same pitiful scores on the same commandeered blackboard, courtesy of Julius.

‘What sort of history are you teaching these kids?' William joked to Julius. ‘Too much of the Austrian. Not enough of the Prussian.' Referring to Hitler, the upstart who'd been responsible for the demise of their social club and the Goethe Institute.

Arthur entered, dropping the new pins on the wooden floor. ‘Let's look at these,' began Trevor Streim, president of the club, as he picked them up and ran his hands over the oak Arthur had sanded smooth.

‘An exact copy,' Arthur smiled, putting down his beers and producing the original he'd used as a model.

‘Good.' Trevor smiled, holding up a copy against the original.

‘But how will they perform?'

‘The same properties,' Arthur defended.

‘Still,' Trevor half-sung, motioning for Rechner's son to run them up to the ladies.

‘Oak develops a ripeness with age,' Arthur continued, trying to bring perspective, seeing how Trevor Streim was intent on stacking his pins up against others which had been used since the club opened in 1858.

Mrs Trevor Streim, the first and best matriarch of the Tanunda Kegelbahn, replaced three of the nine pins with Arthur's and stood back. The room fell quiet as Trevor took a ball and launched it down the lane. It was a strike, of course. As the pins tumbled Arthur pretended to listen but only Trevor could actually hear the dead lignin in the very heart of the pin. As they clattered and settled all eyes turned to the president. ‘Close,' he said, ‘but I can still tell the difference.'

Rubbish, Arthur thought, having spent endless hours choosing the right wood and turning it on a lathe in his workshop. ‘You must have the ears of a bat,' he said, lifting his eyebrows – and for a moment everyone sensed an insurrection.

‘It takes a Weidemann hand,' William said, to break the silence and lighten the mood, referring to Arthur Blessitt as Artur Weidemann, another of the valley's name-changers who wasn't yet comfortable changing back.

‘Of course,' Trevor said, retreating. ‘Only Arthur could make such a precise copy. Prosit, Arthur.'

And with this they all toasted Arthur, although Arthur himself was unhappy with his work being thought of as a copy, compared to its true status as
a thing unto itself
. In the same way his crucified Christs and scale-model Rx 93 steam were things unto themselves, representing the familiar but in a style which was distinctly Arthur's. This is what the Streims of the world couldn't understand.

The carpet of wood-shavings and saw-dust on his workshop floor attested to this – the finely sharpened chisels and his grandfather's well-oiled lathe. Precise, razor-sharp pencil marks which were followed to the thousandth of an inch, his leather tool-belt and half moon bifocals – these were the signs of a true artisan.

Arthur and William walked home through the showgrounds, set up for Angus cattle the size of elephants and the dill cucumber championship which Trevor's wife regularly won. Passing through the Langmeil graveyard Arthur stopped to show William his grandfather's headstone, cracked neatly down the middle but refusing to yield. The vineleaf-entwined anchor still sung of Hessen and Posen, the town's founding father, August Kavel, and the promise of thirty-five bushels to the acre. As they made their way back along the familiar creek, William stopped to pick up a tin can he saw reflected in the moonlight. And said, ‘This is the future, if we don't watch ourselves.'