The Refuge (15 page)

Her voice, low-pitched and very clear, became dreamy as she looked into a future I myself could only envisage as indescribably terrible. She seemed to see it, like a play already played, a tale told. Had I but realized it, her vision was the measure both of her potential danger to the Party she had so recklessly quitted, and of the danger she herself was in. She had, in fact, that sort of fanaticism which fellow-fanatics do not dare to tolerate, even if they would, in a young woman who is also beautiful. All her life her physical quality must have been her worst enemy. Men put their real treasures into unprepossessing steel safes, dark and soulless, not into the frail and springing delicacy of a porcelain vase. Had I known it, she was in even more danger than she herself could have realized.

‘You talk of war,’ I said, ‘as though it were easy, desirable.’

She shook her head, but not impatiently; again she was talking to a child.

‘It is not easy. It is terrible. All that killing and dying for a few men who do not kill or die, all that hatred and fear. But, my friend, it is inevitable. You know it. There will always be these men . . . You are a Christian?’

‘Yes,’ I said.

‘Your Jesus was just such a man,’ she said, with the unemotional simplicity of a child who has learned by heart a lesson far beyond its powers of thought or reason. The argument was not new to me, and I had given it much earnest thought. I was not going to waste time on it now, here.

‘What do you want me to do?’ I said.

‘You?’

She had been deep in her dream again, as though caught away from the present by some profoundly absorbing memory of the incredible past. Even as she breathed the one word, her momentary bewilderment vanished. She performed that boyish trick with the smouldering cigarette-end again.

‘Yes,’ she said, looking up straight into my face with such an unexpected look that to my surprise I felt my heart leap like a lad’s when he sees his girl in the distance. That delighted leap of recognition should have warned me, but did not; she was too close for me to see how far I had gone to meet her.

‘I thought—if you could tell me how to hide?’ she said. ‘I must disappear, you see. This is why I come to you, but when we talk so honestly together about the bigger things I forget, see? It will not be for long, I think, but I must get away. Do not worry—I have thought to leave the country, but there is nowhere else I could go, now . . . America is too hard, also too dangerous. And—you know—you got to have money and visas and all that. And a job. No.’ She shook her head quickly. ‘I must stay here, and I must hide. Other States are no different. They have agents all over, and all your laws are the same. Anyhow, I am too tired of this running.’

She looked at that moment too young to be tired of anything. Later I realized that what really tired her, intellectually, was her own youthfulness. She always tried to look older than she was; that explained the extreme sophistication and excellence of her dress, and in part the deliberate air of authority she often assumed towards people who did not know her real age, and even towards me, who did. As I was to find out for myself, she was driven by passions of a tempestuousness almost beyond belief or reason, or decency. That is why she had done whatever she had undertaken so well, with a sort of precocious genius, one might say ‘perfectly’ without misusing the word.

‘You must let me think,’ I said.

‘Think,’ she said quietly; and she subsided into that old chair in such a way, effacing herself so completely by means of some mysterious withdrawal of her consciousness of me, that I could have believed—save for my eyes’ irresistible evidence—that I was alone in that small cold room with the silent wireless receiver and the steady beating of my own heart.

I am not a rapid thinker as a rule. Looking at my watch, I saw that some twenty minutes remained before the wireless monitor would be coming to listen to and transcribe the four o’clock B.B.C. news broadcast. There were several things to be considered.

First, the question whether this young woman really was in danger of being attacked in some way, perhaps killed, as she said. It seemed to me, even without knowing then that she had, by direction, been for a time a Nazi Party member in Berlin, that her danger was quite credible enough to give her cause to be afraid. Already since the first stream of refugees had become so to speak a flood, we had had more than a few extremely mystifying crimes of a sort we could only think of as ‘unAustralian’. The character of a crime depends, of course, not upon the method by which it is committed but upon the original motive. At the back of every major crime of violence is someone’s conscious or subconscious self-fulfilment, which is why the
cui bono
approach in attempting to solve such crimes is often a heartbreakingly difficult one; for only too often the answer to the question
who benefits?
concerns gratifications not material but emotional, spiritual or even—as in the case of a crime arising out of a conflict of political ideologies—intellectual. So, at any rate, my friends in the C.I.B. had learned, as I in turn had learned from them. Thus it had been found that the ‘unAustralian’ crimes, from common assault to murder, demanded a deal of new thought based on new knowledge of a sort seldom called for during the previous century and a half of this community’s existence.

Looking at Irma absent, as it were, in the dark depths of the leather armchair, I had to admit that more than one crime still unsolved even during my own short experience had had about it many of the obscure but unmistakable characteristics of ideologically-inspired violence; and by no means all had stopped short of murder and the victim’s absolute silence thereafter. More difficult in fact were those where the criminals (there were usually at least two) had refrained from actually taking life, leaving the victim capable, sooner or later, of helping the police, but so badly terrified by his experiences and the threat of further persecution that he would literally rather die than speak. I wondered which of these two methods her mysterious ‘three men’ might have had in mind for Irma. My guess was murder. Women do not react to torture and other methods of terrorism as profoundly as do men, chiefly because their nervous system is not nearly so cerebral and complex.

On the whole, it was safest to assume that she was in serious danger of her life from now on; and my immediate suggestion, which I made to the armchair in which she had effaced herself, was that she seek police protection—what is known as protective custody, which the police are not eager to give unless there has been some actual threat or attempt against the safety of the individual, but which I thought I could arrange through my newly-promoted friend, Detective-Sergeant Harry Hubble of the C.I.B., for whose intelligence in his most difficult profession I had admiration and respect. He would see to it for me, I said. But, emerging from her voluntary self-effacement, she showed such scarcely-controlled alarm at the mere suggestion of involving the police at this time that I was compelled to question her further.

It was thus I found out at last, with mixed feelings, that she had been a passive but genuine member of the Nazi Party during her Berlin operations for the Communists; and for the first time I realized—knowing the dreadful persistence of those people, of both parties—that her danger was indeed real and probably immediate.

For the first time, too, I felt a sudden deep pity for her, in her youth, her unorthodox beauty, and her unconsciously pathetic alienation, wherever she might find herself, anywhere in the world. She had no country now. Australia itself was for her no more than a refuge. As she herself had said, so recently that the tones of her voice seemed still to hang upon the musty air in all their sad dispassionate sincerity, ‘there is nowhere else I could go, now . . .’ That ‘now’ summed up, in one evanescent breath like a sigh, her whole life.

‘Well then,’ I said, ‘you must move from where you live now, for a start.’

‘That I have done, of course,’ she told me calmly, surprised.

‘Where are you living, then?’ I said, and she laughed, a true laugh at last such as I had not heard in her voice before; and for all my gloomy state of mind at that moment I was charmed by it.

‘At Wynyard station.’

‘Good lord,’ I said, ‘how silly. You mean you have nowhere to sleep?’

She gave me a very curious look, almost as though to assure herself I was in earnest; then, seeing I was, she sighed shortly, and once more reverted to that air of patient gentleness that hid god knew what thoughts.

‘My friend, look at me . . . Now tell me if you think I shall ever be in want of a place to sleep.’

It was said with such gentle irony that if I was shocked it was only with a new thrill of pity and understanding. She was quite right, of course. With that face, and a form which the fitted black jacket and skirt by their very severity revealed quite frankly to any imagination not utterly moribund, she would, if she chose, never lack a bed.

‘You say you have friends,’ I said. ‘Could they not help?’

‘You must understand,’ she told me, as though it were an instruction I should already have learned, ‘that I am in danger. Yes, I have friends—and I would not go to them to save my life. They are not such friends as that. And it would not be fair. Do you see that?’

‘Yet you come to me,’ I could not help saying, ‘because you think of me as a friend.’

‘Ah—see, though, the difference!’ she put in quickly with sudden animation, as though I were at last showing some real sense. ‘Who are you? A decent respectable gentleman who writes for a sort of proper paper like the
Gazette
, non-political and not very interesting. You must forgive me. It is so it seems to my friends.’

‘And to you?’

She waved that aside with a small gesture, smiling.

‘I read all your newspapers in Sydney. To me they are all interesting. But do you see? No one knows that I know you, no one who matters. The place where I have been living, at Kings Cross, that has been under surveillance of a sort. I tell you, there are more things going on in this city than you and your policemen will ever know. How could you? For you, there is not time to study all these passions, these ideas, these ambitions and all things in the refugees’ world here. But I tell you, I am watched. So I take my luggage, all my luggage, and it is not much, to the Central station and then I go by train to Wynard station and leave it there, and come to see you. At Wynard is a man waiting for me to go back for my luggage. Let him wait, eh?’

She was quite amused at the thought.

‘You are earning your living?’ It was a silly question, perhaps, but I did not know if a straight inquiry as to how she lived would force her into unnecessary evasions or equally unnecessary and detailed truths.

She answered readily enough.

‘I am a model—in a dress salon. Also sometimes I design for Madame.’

‘And there is no help there?’

‘No—they do not like me very much. I do not talk enough. There is too much I cannot say. Also I do not have boy friends’—she made a wry mouth, giving me a sidelong look out of the corners of her eyes, a look that was not challenging but baffling—‘and this they do not understand. I will not tell them lies, so I tell them nothing. I have no past.’

That seemed to amuse her, too.

‘All I can see for it is to leave Sydney,’ I said. ‘You will never lose them here, if they mean trouble. I know the comrades.’

‘They will never lose me,’ she said, nodding her head. ‘And—forgive me—I do not think you do know the comrades. You in Australia do not know them. I have lived in Europe. These three men come from Europe. There are some others here like them already when they come. Already in one year these men have done much trouble. Australia is so hospitable to the poor refugees, and the vision of the Party is very far—I tell you. It remains a few details. I am one—and, my friend, not a very important one. But I want to live. For them, you see, there is no hurry. Here, no one feels the alarm in advance. A kind but foolish country. No one is afraid—only the refugees, yes? Refugees like me. So, you understand, I must disappear.’

She concluded with smiling resignation, watching me. The talking had done her good; the fear was gone from her flesh. I suspected also that for some reason of her own she now had no hope of aid from me—she had talked away her own blinding urgency, she saw me more clearly. I had been too unmoved, it would seem to her, when what she wanted was a spontaneous impulse to meet her half-way, to share her fear. Nothing she could say had made me show excitement, once I had mastered my first concern over what she had told me of Russia and Germany.

Nevertheless, even while we spoke so quietly of such fantastic matters, an idea had been forming on the edge of conscious thought, waiting like a newly-engaged player to walk the stage of consciousness and submit to appraisal. I would have scorned the suggestion that this idea arose from any personal interest I felt in Irma then. To me, she was still a young woman unfamiliar and so to be dealt with cautiously. For all her physical attraction and the young, cool swiftness of her mind, she was a stranger, remote, speaking rather good English with a light, agreeable foreign accent that suggested not any one country but Europe itself, a fair part of which she might be said to represent in her moody self-control, her quick alarms and discontents and eagerness to be moving on, always moving on.

She was a stranger still, and so she remained to the end; and I seek comfort in the possibility that, since I never had a profound and complete understanding of her, so she too may have been aware to the end of some few mysteries, some final reserves in me. It would be obscurely comforting to believe this.

Anyhow, my idea turned out to be not so absurd as it might have seemed to anyone else who knew me as little as she did.

‘I have a place in the Blue Mountains,’ I told her. ‘There is some land and a cottage with no one living in it. An old fellow I have there farms part of the land and keeps an eye on the whole place for me. I suggest you go there for a time. I suggest you take a friend and go there,’ I added more firmly, not only because I thought for a moment she was looking doubtful and I had nothing else to offer, but also because the idea, once it had been put into words, seemed to me curiously attractive.